My Famous Evening

by Howard Norman

  Forerunners, it seems to me, are examples of belief naturally infused with melancholy. If one lives in a village of seafarers, drowning in general is a kind of fait accompli, and in this sense, forerunners, which verbally are equations between alertness to an omen and tragic fate, provide a code of behavior. In their basically utilitarian aesthetic, forerunners honor the seafaring life by not sentimentalizing it. It’s God’s grace that art is born of all of this: Throughout Nova Scotian history, folk songs, poems, short stories, oral histories, and the like have animated the sea and its perils with prodigious dedication.

  I quote from the splendid short story “Devotion,” by Mary McNeill-Travers: “David Cavendish asked his son out in the lobster boat, ‘Do ya think you can mollify her when she’s tossing us about as she now is? Stop asking me such questions and tend to your work that’s right in front of ya. Do ya think, forty years at it, I care a bit to understand just now if she’s joyous or in an angry rage? How should I know? And what’s the difference, anyway, since we’re caught in her treacherous whim and fancy no matter what? I don’t think about it. I ride it out and hope to make a living.’”

  One of the generosities of the Nova Scotian oral tradition is that it can illustrate a kind of magical realism, if that term is defined as a style of storytelling which plaits quotidian life with an indispensable suspension of disbelief, and which offers events of mystical or magical attributes as open secrets. But anyone who has listened to an expert raconteur knows that a passionately well-told tale, or passionately sung song, or passionately embroidered reminiscence, tells us more about la condition humaine than two hundred years of newspapers.

  Then again, why compare? Why not just tell some forerunners? For they are also stark and unusual entertainments. These examples are without birds.

  A woman told her husband that a calendar had just fallen off the wall. The husband said, “Our son’s at sea, you know.” The boy didn’t come home.

  A man had a quarrel with his brother, who worked on a lobster boat, and the brother left his house in a bad way. The brother worked all through the season, until one night, the wife of the brother was woken up and saw something moving about the bedroom. “What are you? What are you?” She ran around and took up a fireplace poker and swung it.

  “What are you—get out!” It wasn’t a dog with a sheet thrown over it, she knew that much. When the thing left the house, she noticed water on the floor and it was sea water, and that night the news came that her husband had drowned.

  When the houses first got electricity, no one used it much, they didn’t use it regularly, still preferring candles and the fireplace. But I enjoyed electric lamps. As a girl my family had three floor lamps. There were three children, me, my little brother, and my older brother. My older brother worked at sea. He fished, and he was out at sea and I got up awake very early and was about to get a fire started. I looked around and saw that two of the lamps were still on, which wasn’t usual because we always made sure to turn them off at night. Two were on and one was dark. And later that morning I heard my mother crying and my father walked in with the minister of the church. I cried all through my older brother’s funeral, who drowned and, what’s more, they never found him.

  After church I had the assignment to stack the Bibles. I was about seven or eight and I looked forward to it every Sunday. After the sermon I’d go around the pews and collect the Bibles and dust their covers and stack them up in fives. Oh, I suppose that went on for a year or more, yes, I’d say two years. They probably didn’t need dusting all that much, but that was my assignment. My mother often worked at the church. She was very active with the church. Then one Sunday I was ill. I don’t remember what it was, a bad cold, I think, and I stayed home from church. “Who’ll stack the Bibles?” I asked my mother, and she said, “Who do you think would be good at it?” I was in bed and looked over at her and said, “I think Thomas.” “Your cousin Thomas?” my mother said. And she was quite surprised, because Thomas was known as a ruffian, and to find him in church would be to find only a boy accidentally stumbled in out of the rain. “Well,” my mother said, “it’s you that are good at stacking books and stacking clothes after the ironing and not Thomas.” “I know, but why not ask Thomas?” “All right, I’ll make that suggestion that Thomas stack the Bibles, then,” my mother said. And what I heard was that Thomas refused and they had to ask a number times, and finally he said all right, he’d stack the Bibles, but not if he had to attend the church service. They struck a bargain and that Sunday I stayed at home and Thomas stacked the Bibles. But he didn’t stack them in fives, he stacked them higher and in a hurry. And early the next morning, the bookkeeper for the church and the minister were at a table going over the books, and suddenly three stacks of Bibles fell over. No one had taken a proper notice of how dangerously Thomas had stacked the Bibles and down they fell quite loudly, it was said. “I don’t like that,” the bookkeeper said, a Mrs.—I don’t remember her name. She said it left a bad feeling. And the next day three fishermen drowned in a gale. It is not easily accountable, how you try to help one person and others suffer from it. There’s probably a rhyme and reason but I can’t tell you what it is. Maybe that minister could have.

  I heard near Meat Cove three forerunners alluding to seal-kidnappings—that is, vignettes in which a seal kidnaps a child, or more rarely, an adult. I heard another one near Elmira on Prince Edward Island, two near Advocate Harbour, two near Arichat, and one at Port Joli.

  Thematically, these forerunners no doubt contained echoes of age-old Scottish stories about selkies, or “seal people.” While those may be quite varied in plot, allow me to provide a general blueprint of a selkie story. One day a fisherman—often a grieving widower—catches a seal in a net. The seal begs for her life, offering to change into a human, marry the fisherman, and bear him children. But there is one condition that must be understood: One day she might return to the sea and her own kind. The yearning for happiness (and end of loneliness) outbids the foreshadowing of loss, and the man agrees to the bargain. In certain renditions, these newlyweds attend church, raise families, and live happily ever after. More often than not, however, the seal-wife eventually transforms back into her original form; in a tragic turn of events, the fisherman (or seal hunter), now unable to distinguish his former wife from other seals, accidentally kills her, thus in effect half-orphaning his own children. One such selkie story I heard in Nova Scotia ended with the enigmatic sentence, “Forever after, the children would need be rescued from staring out to sea for a reason they did not know, and in this way, the sea owned them.”

  Near Sydney, Nova Scotia, in November 1977, Mrs. Hattie Gillis told me a story that contained a forerunner and yet offered a happy ending, in that no one drowned.

  “I married an Australian named Devon Anderson in 1927 in Halifax, where I’d been living with my parents. He brought me up to Sydney and later to Cape Breton Island. He was in the service a while. Then he worked in the coal mines. We moved around far too much in our married life. Far too much.

  “One day when we were living near Ingonish—we had a little cottage, our daughter was four years old. My husband became an accident averted. It’s because he believed in forerunners, you see, and hadn’t I, he might’ve drowned at sea. At least that’s what I believe. I don’t really even care for nothin’ else except to take a little credit for it.

  “My neighbor, Mrs. Margaret Sperry, not too very far from Ingonish, had lost her husband. She was a widow. Soon after, or all along some say, she was a sleepwalker of the most expert sort. She had a reputation for it, sleepwalking. Famous for it, you might say. And she wouldn’t simply wander about the house, no sir, she’d wander about the yard and down along the paths or the rocks, along the beach, eh? ‘Oh, look, it’s Margaret Sperry—there she is now! Let’s lead her back to home. Come on, now, Margaret, come along home now.’ You know, she never looked like she’d just jumped from sleep, either. She was dressed just as normal and nice as could be.


  “One morning, still dark out, I saw her out walking, and knew she was asleep. We lived next door. My husband had already gone down and joined the others. He’d found some work on a boat. He’d already gone down to join them, and up walks Mrs. Margaret Sperry. She knocked three times on my door. And I felt it right in the pit of my stomach. You hear three knocks before a death, is what I’d heard. You usually don’t hear or see nothin’ but the three knocks, either—you can rush to the window and not see nothin’.

  “But I knew it was Mrs. Margaret Sperry deliverin’ the knocks. I didn’t answer the door. Instead, I went out the back and rushed down to my husband. I made such a fuss as to nearly put me in the hospital for the mad and insane! I cannot to this day even laugh about it. Not to this day!

  “And the other men just told Devon to go on back home. And they went out to sea. And do you know what?—one of them fell overboard. I always felt that man replaced my Devon.

  “But that man didn’t drown. He was pulled back in. I’m firm in my belief that had it been Devon I’d of never seen him again. He couldn’t swim a damn. You hear three knocks, a death will follow, but that time death didn’t get who it first wanted. And what’s more, Devon didn’t disagree. We moved away from there. They were good people there and I missed them. Including Mrs. Sperry, who couldn’t help herself from wandering about at night, naturally.”

  The archive of drownings, whether in dirge or novel, poem or tall tale, skip-rope song or ghost story (let alone police files), already seems endless, and will of course expand for as long as there is the sea and Nova Scotians living by it.

  In Dartmouth, after a visit to an elementary school, I heard a skip-rope song in which a little girl drowned. I heard a tale on Prince Edward Island about a kind of sea-witch who threw a lasso of kelp around a man out in a dory, then yanked him into the dark water. At a church social near Cape Split, while telling about a drowning during his childhood, a man used a domestic metaphor to describe the sudden change in the Bay of Fundy’s moods: “It was like my mother after the worst argument with my dad, how she’d pick up the end of the tablecloth and shake it all down its length, and then spend the next little while smoothing it out again.”

  The sea giveth, the sea taketh away. People go to sea; people drown. Then, as Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank, who lives part of each year in Cape Breton, often writes on his photographs, Life dances on …

  DIVINATIONS

  Divinations are an equally provocative category of belief. Most divinations that I collected basically were instructions in how to formalize a sense of possibility in the complicated realm of love. A man or woman seeking love may finally need to toss their fate to the wind, but throughout Nova Scotian history the dialectic between desire and action has obviously engendered a wonderful array of, as Mrs. Carol Moorehead, age seventy-nine, called, divinations, “love potions in words.” She used that phrase while telling me not only about her own courtship, but the courtships of her two daughters and a granddaughter, “all of whom I gave advice.”

  Love Potions in Words

  For a few months after she left for California, I kept in touch with Kristen Heckman through letters—or thought she was receiving my letters, that is—an attempted courtship in absentia. I exclusively wrote my letters in the lobby of the Lord Nelson Hotel on the hotel’s stationery filched in large quantities during my brief residence there. I had early on subscribed to the romance of hotel lobbies, and I suppose that writing love letters in a hotel lobby only intensified it. Thinking back on their content, I recall that these letters were not examples of youthful indiscretion and erotic preoccupation. This was a stupid mistake. They should have illustrated desperate longing, whereas they merely were overly contrived in their suggestiveness. What sort of delusion, I wonder, was I sustaining? Kristen and I had kissed, at the harbor, rather at length, but that was all. What’s more, she never wrote me back, which at the time allowed me to indulge in the vicissitudes of unrequited love, in and of itself an emotionally charged sort of education. I do recall thinking of my letters definitely as “love letters,” though I never actually pledged my love in them. It was more a look-into-my-soul type of thing. These letters, this engagement in an epistolary life, was, along with reading, the closest approximation to a literary apprenticeship as I was liable to obtain. Just sit in a hotel lobby and write and write and write. (Well, one has to write somewhere.)

  To accompany all this dedication to letter writing, I also studied collections of letters in the Dalhousie University Library and in books purchased in used book stores, far fewer and farther between than exist today in Halifax, which, to my mind, has become quite a book town. In fact, I became enamored of the long tradition of letters as a public literary form, and my researches started with the ancient world. I read the philosophical and ethical disquisitions in the prodigious letter writing of Pliny the Younger, Cicero, and Seneca. I read four volumes of James Howell’s letters, published in the mid 1600s, which were referred to as “intimate, chatty letters written to friends, full of observations and reflections on society and its manners”—wonderful project, I thought. In 1656 a man named Richard Flecknoe published A Relation of Ten Years Travel in Europe, Asia, Afrique and America, journeys related entirely in letters; from reading this I conjured up a notion of employment: I would “report back” from remote places in the world in letters to various newspapers. However, despite sending letters (on Lord Nelson Hotel stationery) to at least two hundred newspapers throughout Canada, England, Scotland, and the United States, this only panned out once. I earned $150 for a series of five letters about bird life in Atlantic Canada, published in a newspaper in Amsterdam. I heard later that the translations into Dutch were terrible. The phenomenon of epistolary nonfiction still intrigues me to this day.

  Anyway, I was collecting divinations up to Cape Breton and back to Halifax, up to Prince Edward Island and back to Halifax, over to Advocate Harbour, up to Marshville, Seafoam, Toney River, and back to Halifax. Up to Port Lorne, Morden, Canada Brook, and back. And each time I returned to Halifax, I’d sit in the lobby of the Lord Nelson and write about this, that, and the other thing to Kristen, drop the letter and stamped envelope at Tanny’s house. For a reason unbeknown to me, Tanny refused to give me Kristen’s exact address in Berkeley, though promised to forward them.

  I assumed that Tanny never read my letters. Except for one. There was one letter I asked her to read in advance of sending it to Kristen, because in it I had admitted partaking of divinations directed at Kristen. I phoned ahead, Tanny invited me right over, and we sat down for tea.

  All told, in preparation for writing this letter, I had practised three divinations:

  As soon as you can, buy a mirror, hold it out in front of your face, and walk backward. Stop, close your eyes as tightly as possible, open your eyes, and you will see the face of your beloved. But you have to pay close attention because the face of your beloved will quickly disappear.

  Go down to the sea and wait until you see a pair of sea birds, then name them for you and whomever you want to fall in love with, or want to fall in love with you. Call out that name. If the birds don’t scare and fly off, then you should have a lot of hope that things will work out. But you must do this on your own; don’t bring a friend along, especially a jealous friend, and, above all, don’t bring the object of your affection.

  Go over to someone’s home in which there is a four-poster bed, or even rent a room in an inn, then sleep in that four-poster bed. But before you fall asleep, name the bedposts. Now, either or both of two things might occur. First, you might have a restless night’s sleep, and whichever bedpost your head is closest to when you awake, that is the name of the person you are likely to marry. Second, you might dream of a particular bedpost—that is, the bedpost might show up in your dream, and you’ll know which one it is when you wake up.

  I admitted to Tanny that, in trying out the bedpost divination, I had actually gone to a small hotel. What I didn’t tell Tanny was that I load
ed the dice by naming each of the four bedposts “Kristen.” Anyway, I read the entire letter to Tanny and her response was, “Oh, my niece will split her sides laughing. She’s not cruel, mind you, she just doesn’t suffer fools.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  Tanny then offered a brief disquisition on faith, provenance, and, when it came to Kristen, being realistic.

  “It doesn’t matter if you’re from away,” she said. “Some people born and raised in Nova Scotia never take to divinations or the like. It’s not their way of thinking.

  “My feeling has always been, it’s difficult enough in this life to meet the right one, the right one for ya, and so why not open up your chances any way you can?

  “Now, today, you’ve got young people advertising their qualities in the newspapers, what they call the ‘personals,’ don’t they? When all that started I don’t have the foggiest.

  “Things such as naming bedposts? Well, what’s wrong with that, I ask you? It’s a hopeful tradition. It’s just about hope.

  “I always say to Kristen, dear, with love, don’t cling to your regrets. Just move along. You have to try people out. You’ll find somebody. But a prayer and a divination can’t hurt now, can it?”

  “Why would my letter fall so flat, then?”

  “She’s a modern one—bedposts, birds, mirrors, I don’t think she’ll suffer those. Kristen will split her sides when she reads it. Don’t fret over it. It isn’t everybody that can charm.”

  I do not particularly delight in stories whose plots rely on coincidence, nor do I feel that synchronicity is necessarily a godsend. However, I can subscribe to the Buddhist notion of predestination—surely lives meet up and all things happen for a reason, yet if the reason remains a mystery, so be it.