“Look!” he cried.
Fifty metres behind us, in the angry water beyond the harbour, a humpback whale was breaching. Nearly the size of the fin, he came up with ten times the surge of the minke and roared as he flew into the air. He seemed to look our way and then exploded back into the raging ocean.
But here in Ireland’s Eye we felt protected from the outside world. Without even mentioning the humpback, Dad and I turned and paddled slowly towards Mom. We were in a magical kingdom. The hills went up on all sides of the old harbour like protective walls, green at their bottoms and rock-grey at the top. They seemed to touch the sky. It was as though a giant hand had reached out and sculpted a perfect harbour, a world unto itself, unseen until you came around that corner and into the tiny opening of Ireland’s Eye.
There was absolute silence. We could hear our paddles dipping into the water and see the rings we created going out along the surface from our boats, as if the water hadn’t been disturbed for centuries. Even a slight rustling in our cockpits echoed off the walls.
We saw the town in the distance, looking at first like a perfectly normal place. As we drew closer we could see the houses arranged in no particular order from the bottom of the hills to the top, and though some were broken-down, others looked as though someone could step out of the front door and wave hello. Near the top of the hill straight in front of us, the church looked large and stable, the sun glinting off a steeple that still proudly pointed towards heaven. I looked up into the sky and saw an eagle, a speck in the distance.
None of us spoke. I kept waiting for someone to come running down to the dock, but no one did. In the empty windows of some of the old houses I imagined I saw faces, or along the stone roads, horses and carts taking men to and from their businesses, or children running towards the schoolhouse. But everything was silent, as silent as a funeral.
We glided towards the wharf, a sense of awe still making us gape. We bumped into the boards gently and just sat there, staring up at the world around us. Finally Mom spoke. It wasn’t in her to joke this time.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, “but it almost doesn’t seem real.”
“Oh, it’s real all right,” said Dad quietly. “What do you think of this, Dylan?”
“Awesome.”
“Cool?”
“Way cool.”
We had completely forgotten about the storm. We got out of the boats, pulled them well up onto land, tied them down, and got out our provisions.
“Listen,” said Mom. We all stopped. “I thought I heard something.”
We were quiet again.
“I think it’s the storm, from the ocean,” said Dad.
All three of us instinctively walked out to the end of the wharf and stared back towards the opening to the harbour. Sure enough, in the distance you could hear the waves, but the sound was very faint. Dad grabbed his binoculars.
“The storm looks worse.”
“Should we take some precautions?” asked Mom.
“The storm isn’t coming in here,” I said. It was a strange thing for me to say with such conviction but somehow I knew it was true. Mom and Dad just nodded in agreement.
We were anxious to walk the crude old rock-filled lanes of the town that wound up the sides of the hills like snakes, to explore all the buildings looming above us, and to climb the peaks and admire the view. But only an hour or two of daylight was left, so we hoisted up the tent and cooked and ate our supper. We didn’t talk very much. And we kept hearing noises in the night. They didn’t sound like animals.
I tried to keep myself calm by thinking of what I knew about this wonderful island. Dad, of course, had made us memorize about a mile of historical information. Ireland’s Eye was first occupied more than three hundred years ago by one man, a planter whose origins were likely English (it was his fellow countrymen who frequented these rich waters in their fishing boats, their eyes ever on the alert for pirates and the unfriendly intentions of the French); but Nicholas Quint moved back to the mainland after a year or so, probably overcome by loneliness and hardship. A century passed and the Eye remained uninhabited. But then families slowly started coming in and putting down roots, leaving old homelands in the British Isles and newer ones on the mainland of Newfoundland. By the 1830s there were thirty-two people and seven houses here, and over the next hundred or more years things kept growing: in 1834 they opened a school, at the turn of the century an Anglican church, and by 1911, just before the First World War, nearly two hundred people lived in Ireland’s Eye. And that was just in this village, where we were sleeping tonight. At Black Duck Cove, Ivanhoe, and Traytown, smaller communities had been thriving for some time.
Listening to the eerie sounds in the quiet wilderness outside, it was hard to imagine that so many things had happened on this very ground so long ago. There had been life here but it had vanished, as if gone with the wave of a magician’s hand. After Newfoundland joined Canada in the middle of the twentieth century, good roads and railways, better sanitation, electricity, and all the modern conveniences came to the new province. Ireland’s Eye, the little island where Trinity Bay met the Atlantic, had none or few of these things—all it had was hard-working people and children blessed with a world of their own. So, just as they had come a couple of centuries earlier, the people began to leave for the mainland. By the mid-1950s, government programs encouraged residents of outports to resettle in larger, better-serviced communities. People were actually paid to leave their homes, or in some cases to float them on rafts, the beds inside still made, many kilometres to new towns. But it was required that these little places move all at once or at least in great numbers. So, votes were taken. This, of course, caused all sorts of bitterness: those who wanted to stay began resenting neighbours who wanted to go, brothers came to dislike brothers. And sometimes, if only a small number of people remained in a community, the government took away their basic services—some villages even had their post offices closed. So in the end, many residents had no choice. They were forced to go.
Ireland’s Eye was in the middle of one of these slow deaths by the late 1950s. It must have been sad to see people leaving, one after the other: some family homes actually floated away while others sat defiant in the shrinking community. One day, of course, they would all give up.
When the 1960s began there were only sixty-four people in Ireland’s Eye, in 1966 just thirteen, and a few years later there were none. They disappeared. The word that Dad used was “abandoned”: Ireland’s Eye was abandoned. Most of the houses, the school, and the church still sat here as if waiting for everyone to come home. You could almost hear people now, snoring away or whispering to each other, happy in their beds in the Newfoundland night.
It took me a while to get settled in my sleeping bag. I kept thinking about the way things must have been here long ago and the pain that people must have felt when their world fell apart. It was so strange, so frightening really, that something like that could happen. It sort of seemed like what had happened to Grandpa: he had been born and had lived his life, and we had all treasured him, but now he was gone as if he had never even been here. That’s what happens to all of us, I guess.
I pushed those thoughts aside. But that only made room for others. The raging ocean and my brush with death entered my head at full speed, terrifying moments running through my mind in vivid Technicolor. It seemed that I would never get to sleep. To calm the storm in my head, I tried to focus on the silence outside.
Before long it started to work: slowly a feeling of peace came over me, like a gentle wave from a much kinder ocean. I forgot all the problems that had been racing through my mind and drifted off; the last thing I remember was smiling, enchanted to finally be way out here in the ocean on the magical island that had been filling my imagination for so long. Even though several times I roused a little, thinking I heard footsteps outside the tent, and worrying in those moments that toni
ght would bring the worst nightmare of the whole trip, I faded into the soundest sleep I had had in a very long time.
7
Ghosts
When I awoke, the sun was shining through the unzipped tent door and both Mom and Dad were off investigating. There aren’t many strange places where they would leave me on my own, but here on Ireland’s Eye, other than some small animals and a few friendly caribou (whose ancestors had somehow walked over here on the ice one legendary winter), we were the only living beings within many treacherous kilometres. You could shout at the top of your lungs and no one would hear you. You could take off your clothes and run around naked and no one would say a word. It was a wonderful feeling. The silence was amazing. We were absolutely alone.
Or so it seemed.
I walked out to the end of the dock again with Dad’s binoculars. Looking through them I was shocked to see the storm still raging beyond the harbour’s entrance. Here on the island it was a beautiful day, almost hot, and the sky was cloudless. In the distance I could see another island, not nearly as big as the Eye, but green and friendly looking. Residents had called Anthony Island “the Garden,” because they had planted their vegetables there, unable to grow anything here on these rocks. Every summer day the women would row out there, a couple of kilometres of effort, work in their gardens and come home.
What would the people of Ireland’s Eye do on a day like today? And what would they do on a winter day if for some reason they had a desperate need to get to the mainland?
The rest of the world seemed so far away that I imagined there were sea dragons in the ocean, swirling about in those two-metre waves and snapping their tails. I panned away from the entrance, swinging the binoculars around Ireland’s Eye, past the houses, the school, up to the church and—for an instant—I thought I saw a face! It passed through the lens quickly. I darted the binoculars back to the window in the church steeple. I could have sworn that just a split second ago a man’s face had been staring out at me…but if indeed he had ever been there, he was gone now.
I had to be imagining things.
“Dylan! Dylan! Up here!” I turned in the direction of the voice. It was Mom. She and Dad were almost directly above me, stepping carefully along some tricky rock paths, holding hands to keep each other from falling. (They’re hand-holders, the parental units.) They were way up at the top of a rugged hill and had come to a spot that used to be someone’s backyard. “You can see everything from here! Come on!” yelled Mom. She sounded excited.
Five minutes later, huffing and puffing, I was beside them. I had followed one of those steep village pathways myself, probably used as a road in the old days. It was bedded with huge rocks the men had somehow carried up or down the mountainous hills. And here I was at the top of their cliff, out of breath just from climbing.
But what a reward you got from putting the effort into getting here. Looking out you could see the whole sweep of the little bay, the ocean in the distance, all the homes, the school, and the church.
A big house, probably the biggest in the village, sat silently next to us. Mom and Dad had been into a few homes, but had waited for me to climb up before venturing into this one. We walked around to the front door. Mom knocked.
When we pushed on the door it creaked open like something from a horror show. Inside everything was strangely in place.
“Groovy,” said Dad, and then looked a little apologetically at me.
“All the other ones were empty, but look at this!” said Mom, moving towards the kitchen. “Watch your step, Dylan, some of the boards are rotten.”
The rugs were still on the living room floor, dressers remained in place, couches sat as they had been left and a calendar, turned to December 1959, was pinned to a wall. Up in the ceiling corners, along the window edges and even stretched between furniture and the walls were massive spider webs, traps waiting to entangle their prey. Dust sat on things like snow. There was an overpowering smell of mould and something stale, like the still-lingering smoke from an ancient wood stove.
“This is a defiant house,” said Dad with admiration. “Whoever lived here must have vowed to leave it the way it was.”
It was the pick of the homes in the town. When we rubbed away some dirt from the big picture windows downstairs and the smaller ones in the upstairs bedrooms, the view was magnificent. I started thinking the mayor must have lived here, or at least the town leader. In fact, “the mayor’s house” struck me as a good name for this home, so from then on that’s what I called it.
There were four rooms upstairs. One was obviously the master bedroom, so it didn’t interest me. I picked out another that had certainly belonged to a kid. The door was slightly ajar and as I put my hand up to it the strangest thing happened: it slowly swung open on its own. I could have sworn I hadn’t touched it, but I must have. I stood back for a second, collected myself, and entered. I think my eyeballs went in first, then my nose, then the rest of me. Looking down to check for bad wood, I saw a small clump of dirt about the size of a dime on the floor near the entrance. It looked dark and wet. That’s odd, I thought, and then pushed it from my mind.
The bed was made. Just above a night table, pinned to the wall with a rusty thumbtack, was a cardboard colour photograph of the bruising Gordie Howe taken from the back of a cereal box. “Mr. Hockey” stood smiling out at the camera, looking innocent of all charges.
Something made me want to sit on the kid’s bed. Slowly I lowered myself, easing down, afraid the frame might suddenly collapse. But it didn’t move an inch. It felt good just to rest here for a minute. I relaxed, swung my legs up and stretched out. Soon I was lying there imagining what it must have been like to grow up on Ireland’s Eye.
Where did they play hockey? Were they able to get NHL games even without electricity? Maybe they had transistor radios.
I closed my eyes and heard the hockey game coming faintly through a little battery-operated radio on a winter’s day in the 1950s, static clouding the reception. Perhaps the boy had it tucked under his pillow so his parents wouldn’t know he was still awake. I thought of Grandpa’s descriptions of those great long-gone players, and of the voice of Foster Hewitt calling the play as he sat in the gondola at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. I thought of the boy lying here, the lights out and the game crackling through the pillow. Outside the wind howls and the waves break against the shore.
Perhaps he’s listening to the Leafs and the Canadiens, hearing Hewitt describe the moves of Rocket Richard and Grandpa’s favourite, Teeder Kennedy, tall and strong, playing for the love of the game, a captain of captains. Perhaps it is April 21, 1951, overtime at the Gardens, fifth game of the Stanley Cup final. Every match in the series has gone into extra periods, the Rocket potting the winner in game two, Teeder burying the Habs the next night at the Forum. But now, the Leafs can win it all. The whole nation is listening and so am I, a boy living on Ireland’s Eye. Bill Barilko, “Billy the Kid,” a young defenceman who was supposed to stay in position at the blueline, decides to take a chance. Out here on this island in the ocean, I’m listening to the shouts of the crowd. My mind is full of images of things I have never seen. What would it look like? Is Teeder out there now? How heroic does he look? Is he tending to his defensive duties? Is he looking up to find the Rocket as he sees young Barilko leave his position? Does he even bother to look behind him? Does Barilko hear the roar of the crowd like I do? He’s spotted a loose puck. He grabs it, swoops past the left faceoff dot and fires a dart, falling as he does. The Montreal goalie, Gerry McNeil, taken by surprise, stumbles as he scrambles to recover and…it’s in! IT’S IN! THE LEAFS HAVE WON THE STANLEY CUP! THEY’VE BEATEN THE CANADIENS AT MAPLE LEAF GARDENS! THE WHOLE NATION IS LISTENING! THE CROWD IS GOING WILD!
“Dylan? What are you shouting about? Are you all right?”
“Fine. It’s nothing.”
I fixed my eyes on the picture of Gordie Howe. When I was little
I actually saw him a few times on TV looking old and friendly, very unlike the big bruiser Grandpa always talked about. But in this picture he looks the part, young and ready, arms bulging through his sweater, legs as thick as pillars. It occurred to me that the boy who lived here and pinned that picture to the wall had aged too; it’s possible that he’s not even alive anymore.
Looking out through his bedroom window I could see the whole harbour and it seemed like a painting. What a place to live!
Mom and Dad were calling again. They wanted to get moving and explore more of the island, but I was reluctant to leave. For some reason it felt like the boy had never left here, as though he were just out trading hockey cards with someone, or down in the schoolyard. But he had gone on in life to adventures and ups and downs I couldn’t even imagine.
That bedroom was a wonderful place.
At least it was until I stood up and began moving towards the hallway. That was when I saw something that chilled me to the bone.
There on the dresser was a cigarette—a burning cigarette! For a minute I just stood there staring at it. A burning cigarette, in here! I walked over to it, picked it up, and put it out. Then, with my heart pounding, I set it down again and descended the stairs. I didn’t say a word to Mom and Dad.
They were still in a happy mood and noticed right away that I wasn’t. I saw worried looks on their faces that I hadn’t seen since before we entered the harbour of Ireland’s Eye. Mom was kind of looking at Dad and he was trying to look away; they both kept glancing at me. But I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t bring myself to be happy. We walked out into the backyard and worked our way into the low-lying marshy area behind the town that led to the schoolhouse.
The Mystery of Ireland's Eye Page 6