by Lori Weber
“Capelins are in,” Jim says, pointing to it. “Or, as my dad would say, ‘Fish are eating the rocks.’”
My father laughs. “Capelin, you say?”
“Yeah, capelin. They’re little fish.”
I move a step closer and see that the black stuff really is fish, a whole heap of them, piled on top of each other.
“They’re late this year. Global warming or something, I guess,” Jim says. “We usually have our capelin weather in June, all that rain and drizzle—that tells us they’re coming. They come close to shore by the thousands to spawn, then the poor suckers get spit up onto the beach by the waves. They’re so exhausted from all the effort of spawning, they can’t resist.”
My parents laugh. Jim looks at me to see if I find him funny. I do kind of find the thought of fish knocking themselves out with reproducing amusing, but I won’t join in the laughter. I’m still too mad.
“Anyway, they’re what bring the whales in,” Jim continues. “But it’s all happening later and later now. People come down and catch the capelin by the bucketful when it comes in. Some smoke it right here, over the rocks. It’s a real delicacy. But that might not last much longer. Stocks are diminishing. Too much over-fishing.”
“No kidding,” responds my mother. “How sad! They’re really quite beautiful, with their silver streaks glinting in the sun.” Whenever my mom talks colour, it can only mean one thing. She’ll be whipping up a capelin quilt next week, if she ever unpacks her stuff. No doubt she’ll pepper the background of this one with the grey-mauve rocks.
“Not to me,” I say. “They look like rotting bananas.”
“Oh, Cheryl. It’s a matter of perspective, I guess,” my mom says. I let it drop, or else she won’t give up.
We continue along the beach until my parents stop and set up our picnic on some low rocks that reach toward the water like a series of dark, bony fingers, cut and bruised from too much hard work. I’m amazed by the way the cuts on the fingers are perfectly straight, like someone took a hedge trimmer and randomly sawed off a piece here and there, leaving flat ridges and deep vertical lines. How could that happen?
“You say the capelin bring in the whales, Jim?” my father asks.
“They used to bring the cod in, too, when we had some,” Jim adds.
“Now, that’s interesting, Jim. I didn’t know that. Was your family affected much by the loss of cod?”
Here we go. The interview has begun. Once my father has finished with Jim, he won’t want to get to know me anyway. I won’t have to keep dodging him. He’ll avoid our house like it contains the plague. My dad thinks his job brings me closer to people, but it’s just the opposite. I should have warned Jim in the car, but what was I supposed to say? Oh, yeah, by the way, my father will want to study you. Just ignore him and go about your daily business. He’s assessing how you cope with losing your job, your home, your heritage—and, in your case, your family. Nice weather we’re having, eh?
I tune out by thinking of the capelin flying out of the water, like some kind of species-wide suicide pact, only it’s more like a mass murder, since they didn’t exactly want to be flung out of their natural habitat like that. I wonder if some of them try harder than others to resist being tossed.
“… government up in Ottawa, the big chiefs, the ones who know what is and isn’t good for us,” Jim is saying. This won’t be what my father wants to hear. He wants to know about Jim’s family, about the personal pain. “Most of them bureaucrats never been out on a fishing boat. Probably turn green after the first five minutes in some of the swells we get.”
“Isn’t this an outstanding view?” my mother asks suddenly. I bet she wants to spare Jim the interview as much as I do, or at least help make it seem more natural. My mom is a huge supporter of my dad’s project. She’ll be indexing his book for him. I wonder if Jim will get an entry, maybe under “Jim’s story.”
Basically, we’re in a cove. On either side, rocky cliffs jut out into the ocean. The one on the left is lower, with a strip of evergreen trees sitting on top, looking like they’re fighting hard not to fall down. The cliff closer to us is pretty high, with perfectly vertical sides where birds perch on the tiniest of footholds, or claw-holds, I suppose. Foamy water is crashing at the foot of the cliffs, and each time the spray comes up, my mother gasps. It’s not even touching her, but she points her chin up as though it is. When she shields her eyes, I notice that her fingers are quite swollen today. She suffers when it’s damp, which, if you asked me, is another good reason for us to have gone home instead of coming to Newfoundland. I mean, it is an island in the middle of a cold ocean.
“Pretty, eh, Cher?” my mother says.
I just shrug. Jim is smiling over at me. I can tell he wants me to like the view, too, but I’m working on seeing it as a picture on a tacky calendar, the kind you can buy at the drugstore.
“There’s lots more coves like this one all around the Avalon,” Jim says. “If you’re looking.”
“Well, we’ll have lots of time for exploring before school starts,” my father responds. I can feel three pairs of eyes on me now. Thank God, a man walking his dog cuts in.
“Seen some whales here yesterday,” he tells us. “You best come early in the day or in the evening, if you want to see them.” My father thanks him. See, I want to tell him, we do look like tourists.
“What d’ya say we stick our feet in the water before we eat? We can’t live by the ocean and not at least stick our toes in,” my father says. “You gals game?”
“Sounds good to me,” my mother responds. She’s already rolling up her pants and kicking off her sandals. I’d have to take off my black boots and socks. Just to stick a toe in the water? I don’t think so. I watch my parents run to the far end of the beach, where it’s quieter. They’re holding hands, inching their way into the water. Whenever a wave rolls in, they let out a squeal. Jim must think they’re nuts.
“Your parents are fun,” he says to me.
“They’re certainly funny, as in should-be-locked-up funny,” I answer.
“Nah, they’re all right,” Jim says. “I can’t remember the last time I was together with both my parents.”
Jim is building a round tower of rocks as he talks, doing a pretty good job of balancing smaller ones at the top. He keeps going down to the water’s edge to choose more. The rocks are shiny, shaded purple and blue, some with stripes in them, others speckled.
“We used to do this all the time when we were kids, collect the saltwater rocks. We’d make these towers as high as we could, then kick them over, see whose could make the most noise.”
“That sounds like so much fun,” I say.
“We had to amuse ourselves somehow, Cheryl. It’s not like we had a Megaplex in town, with movies and bowling and laser quest, or whatever crap they have inside.”
Jim starts another outside wall to the tower so he can make it even higher.
“Is that when you first started liking rocks?” I ask. I probably shouldn’t, since I said I’d keep my distance, but I am curious, and this seems like a good time, with my parents gone.
“Could be,” he says.
“Didn’t you ever want to fish when you were older, like your dad?”
“No way. I fished with my dad when I was younger, but I never really took to the water, not the way my brothers did. I always knew I’d do something different” Jim says. “When I was in the boat with my dad, my favourite part would be hugging the coast, studying the cliffs. My dad couldn’t get me to focus on the fish at all. And then my mom would catch me digging way down in the ground, trying to chip away into the granite.”
“Wow, you must have been an exciting kid.”
“Sure was,” Jim laughs. “Forget about dragons and wizards, I liked to read about rocks and fossils and stuff. I remember reading a story about these kids, Plinius Moody and Mary Anning. I was dead jealous of the pair of them.”
“How come?”
“They both stumbled on these
great finds when they were really young, like ten or so, same age as me when I read about them.”
“What did they find?”
“Plinius found dinosaur tracks in a cliff near his house, somewhere in Massachusetts, but the girl found tons of stuff, starting with a huge fossilized sea monster on some cliffs in England.”
“Whoa. Did they get rich?”
“No, but Mary got a tongue twister. You know ‘She sells sea shells’? That’s about her.”
“That’s cool. She’s immortal then.”
“Yeah, like all fossils. That’s partly why I like’em. They last forever. They might change a bit over time, but the changes are small, and they take millions of years. Nothing else in life is that solid, and nothing else on earth can be counted on in such a sure way.”
Suddenly, I’m aware that Jim has stopped building his tower and is sitting right next to me. He has this uncanny ability to get close to me and draw me in, without me even noticing. I said I wasn’t going to talk, and here I am, in the middle of a conversation—about rocks, again.
“Boss and I were real sorry you couldn’t join us for our walks,” he says.
I can feel Jim’s deep brown eyes on me, and the pressure of his arm leaning against me, heating me up.
“Yeah, well …” I’m trying to think up an excuse for why I’ve been ignoring him, one that doesn’t make me sound insane, when I hear my parents squealing. They’re running toward us, their pants wet up to the knees.
“You have to feel it, Cher,” my mother says. She is holding her hands out like a cup in front of her. “It’s incredible.” There’s a pool of water in her palms.
“Go on, girl. Don’t be scared,” Jim says.
“God, I’m not scared, it’s just stupid,” I say, but I dip my finger into the water anyway. Then I gasp. It is colder than a tub of ice cubes. I can’t believe my mother’s holding such freezing water against her swollen fingers. Is she crazy? I have seen her cry when her pain gets intense.
Jim is laughing. He was probably baptized in water this cold, or else he fell overboard a couple of times, fishing with his dad, reaching out to pluck some rock from the water. He’d be immune to it by now.
“Very funny,” I say. My parents are laughing, too. I look at the three of them. They’re having such a good time, like one big happy family. I know I could be laughing, too—joining in. That’s just what my parents want me to do. I can feel how eager they are, their arms around each other, thinking how smart their little plan was, how well it’s all working.
I have a sudden flash of this game going on forever, my parents moving me around and trying to rope me in, with no end in sight. After all, there are all kinds of dying cultures my father could study. Even next year, he could decide to document some Innu community in Labrador. And he’d insist that we stay in an igloo, to have the real deal. How would I even tack my portable room décor into ice?
“What do you think, Cheryl?” my father asks.
“I think the smell of rotting capelin is making me nauseous,” I say, standing up.
“Oh, Cheryl,” my mom says, studying Jim’s tower, taking in its shape and colours.
“It was nicer before,” Jim says, following her gaze. “The rocks have gone dull in the sun. The water really makes them shine. Take them out and they go a bit flat.”
He’s right. At first the stones were deep purple and blue. Now they’re all murky grey. I walk toward the water, feeling three pairs of eyes following me. I stand there for a minute, until I can hear them starting to unwrap sandwiches and occupy themselves with eating.
Then I bend down and grab the rock that caught my eye moments ago, lying in a shallow pool of water that seems to be part of a small stream coming down from the parking lot. On one side, it’s speckled grey and white—the other is purple as eggplant. A white stripe slices it in half. Jim’s right. Rocks can be pretty amazing.
I slip the rock into my pocket, feeling its cold wetness soak through, onto my skin.
Behind me, my mom’s calling my name. When I turn around, she is holding up a sandwich—egg salad, my favourite. My parents and Jim are sitting around Jim’s rock tower. I have an incredible urge to run over there and kick it down, to see how much noise it would make.
But I don’t. I control myself and take a seat on a rock behind them, letting the wind tear the plastic wrap from my hands and lift it high over the water like a transparent bird.
•
LYING IN BED that night, I keep seeing hordes of capelin leaping out of the water. It’s like the whole ocean is emptying out, layer by layer, giant waves of fish, their silver backs flashing.
Their only purpose, it seems, is to be food for something else. What an incredibly pointless existence.
Jim tried to pull me into a conversation the whole way home, but I couldn’t talk to him, not with my parents listening so hopefully. Jim’s hand kept inching toward mine on the back seat, but I could see my father checking us out in his rear view mirror, so I kept my hands closed in my lap, curled up like crabs in their shells.
Jim must really think I’m a nut case. He probably wouldn’t understand, even if I could explain the effect my parents have on me, and how much I want to be able to go home, to decide what happens to me, for a change, instead of being dragged around. I guess if Jim were in my shoes, he’d just get up and go home, on his own. That’s because things are easier for guys. If I were a guy, I could just hit the road and stick out my thumb. There’s a ferry about an hour from here that could take me over to Nova Scotia. I could hide in the trunk and come out once the boat was moving. What would they do if they found me? Make me walk the plank like Wendy in Peter Pan? Then I could hitchhike from Nova Scotia to Montreal. I’d probably get lifts with truckers who overdose on coffee in all-night truck stops. But try doing that when you’re a sixteen-year-old girl. Even if I dressed in my blackest clothes and wrapped a forty-pound chain around my waist, I’d be asking for trouble.
I’m just about to get up and finally flip my mattress when someone knocks at my door. I can hear my parents downstairs, watching television, but I’ve hardly said a word to them since we got home. It’s possible one of them wants to talk to me about what happened today at Middle Cove. Or maybe they want to take me to another beach, to see the waves at night.
“Cheryl?”
Oh, my God! It’s Jim. What the hell is he doing here? I’m not even dressed. I can’t believe my parents let him in.
“What do you want?”
“I want to see what you’ve done with my old buddy’s room.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay, I confess. I want to jump your bones,” he says, laughing.
“Oh, that’s charming,” I answer. I can feel my cheeks burning.
“Seriously, Cheryl, open up. I have something to show you.”
“It’s like ten o’clock at night,” I snap back through the closed door. In the meantime, I grab a sweatshirt and throw it over my old nightgown, a white lacy thing that I’ve had since I was twelve.
“No it’s not. It’s ten thirty,” Jim says, turning the door handle. “Remember? Half an hour later in Newfoundland. Besides, your parents said you were still up.”
“Whoa! Only I open this door,” I cry, turning the handle from the inside. Jim walks in confidently, as though he’s stepped into this room a thousand times.
“Hmm, looks good, very artistic,” he comments, as he scans the walls, taking in my scarves, postcards, and fans. Then he strides straight to the desk.
“Come see,” he says, laying something on the desktop and shining the lamp down on it.
When I look into the circle of light, I see two flat rocks sitting on top of Africa.
“Rocks! You crash into my room at night to show me rocks?”
“Not rocks, Cheryl. You have to look closer, beyond the surface.” Then Jim bends closer to his rocks and stares at them intently, as if to show me how to do it. He’s acting like there’s some action going on down there tha
t I’m too dumb to see.
I bend down closer, staring intently like Jim did, but I don’t really know what I’m supposed to see. There are some lines etched into the rocks, but they don’t resemble anything to me.
“What the hell are they?” I ask.
“They’re fossils, of course.”
“Fossils! Fossils of what?”
“Some kind of spiny sea creatures,” Jim says. I just raise my eyebrows. As usual, I don’t see what Jim is all excited about.
“Do you have any idea how old these are?” he asks me. “And how rare?”
“No, I told you, I don’t know a thing about fossils.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot, you’re a townie, a city girl, right? Well, I’ll tell you. These could be about half a billion years old. I found them myself, on a field trip to Fortune Head last year. Mr. Wells was dead impressed. They’re my best fossils,’cause they’re articulated, which makes them even more special. The grooves in them from the spiny fish are pretty obvious. Fortune Head’s a really special place because it’s one of only three places in the world where these kinds of fossils exist. The other two are in China and Russia,” Jim says, pointing to the last two countries on the desk map, as if I wouldn’t know where they are.
“Wow! You weren’t kidding. You really are a rock expert.”
“I told you, Cheryl. I want to become a geologist. I’ve wanted to since as far back as I can remember, but I’m not sure it’ll ever happen. It costs a lot of money to go as far as I want to go.”
“Your father must make good money in Alberta,” I say.
“Sure he does, but he sends a lot to my mom. Things are expensive where I’m from, and she’s still got my two sisters at home. He sends my aunt money, too, for taking me in. And then he’s still got boat payments. He’d just bought a new one a few years before the fishery shut and, of course, he couldn’t sell it off. What good’s a fishing boat without fish? There’s not much left after all that.”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve always just assumed that one day I’d go to university. I thought everyone else just assumed the same. I can’t imagine worrying if I could afford it or not. My parents have been talking to me about university forever now, and I grew up hanging around anthropology departments. I never really stopped to think that might be an advantage.