by Sheree Fitch
I groaned. “I thought I was supposed to be the poetic one.”
“Shut your mouth,” he said. In our house, that expression was worse than cussing.
I did feel some for him. How was a person to ever know when a decision was the right one or the wrong one? Especially if it meant leaving someone you loved?
By that time I knew Thomas had more than an itchy rash.
PERSUASIONS
“I’d trade places with Thomas in a second,” said Michael. “Sure wish I was going.”
“Me, too.” Silence hung between us heavier than a soggy blanket on a line.
“Maybe you could be a stowaway,” I suggested. This was something I had proposed to Thomas—that we could sneak Rebecca onto the ship somehow.
“Are you living on the moon?” he’d snapped. “Cracked in the head? There are rats as big as Dad on a ship like that for one thing.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was only trying to help.” I was also being as sugary nice as I could at every possible moment. “Why don’t you go on over and see her. I don’t mind doing your scrubbing.” He was off like he was on fire. No thank you, of course, but he did give me a playful cuff on the side of my head.
Michael, though? He perked right up at my idea. “A stowaway! Maybe I could,” he said.
“Really? I should tell you about the rats …”
“Rats? My dad’s the rat. I’d go, but I couldn’t leave my mum to be alone with that bugger.” He spit on the ground. “Some day, though, I’ll join you, right?”
“Right.” Even to my own ears, my voice lacked conviction.
We sat on the bank of the canal, skipped some rocks and threw sticks in the river, watching them swirl around and be carried off.
To just get on that train to Liverpool! All the packing and sorting and scrubbing and saying goodbye was exhausting. Even I began to wonder whether sailing to a new life was a good thing or not. I hated the waiting. My mother did too, though she kept telling me to have patience. “It’s a virtue,” she reminded me. Well, I wasn’t very virtuous. Besides, every moment that went by, I felt my chances of getting Thomas to come with us were slipping away. He was still droopy eyed as a cocker spaniel and so silent.
I went to my parents. They were sympathetic but no help, really. They told me it was his business. I noticed, however, that my mother was cooking all his favourite meals.
So I came up with another plan. I decided it was time to use the powers of persuasion my teachers told me I possessed. I waited until we were side by side in our beds a few nights before our leaving date.
“Thomas?”
“What?”
“You coming with us or what?”
“Go to sleep.”
“Tom?”
“What is it?”
“When are you going to know your mind?”
“I know my mind.”
“You’re staying?”
Silence. Almost breathless, I plunged in.
“Thing is, I’ve been thinking this through.”
“You have, have you?”
“I have.”
“And?”
“Here’s what I think I’d do.”
“You never even kissed a girl.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t think. In fact, seems to me my thinking’s not as muddy as yours.”
“Muddy?”
“All dirtied up with the scum of love.”
Thomas laughed. “Where on earth do you get those expressions of yours? But truth of it is, I don’t know what to think.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“You come with us, see? Get work at the tannery with our brother-in-laws. Gareth and Simon would put in a good word for you, right? Save your money, send for Rebecca, get married and live right next door to me.”
Thomas laughed and stifled a yawn. “Live next door to you?”
“Well, figure you’ll need your privacy some.”
“Why would we live next door to you, then?”
“That way,” I continued, “I can watch your wee ones for you.”
The pillow hit me square in the face.
“Go to sleep John.”
“I can’t.”
“Recite me one of them poems from all that learning of yours.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Always puts me to sleep right away.”
I threw the pillow back and cleared my throat.
“A brother’s best friend is his brother,
Indeed he’s his chum for life.
For a man needs to let go his mother,
And a brother’s more fun than a wife.”
Thomas chuckled. “One of yours?”
“Penned especially for the occasion,” I confessed.
“Cut the ruckus, boys,” yelled Dad from below. “Or the Black Knight will get ya!”
Thomas snickered. No matter how old we got, our father still thought stories of the Black Knight could scare us. The Black Knight was said to prowl the streets of Ashton after dark ready to snatch naughty children. I had more than my share of nightmares when I was younger. Once I imagined I heard the clang of his suit of armour outside the window. I screamed for Mum. But it was only Thomas, banging on a pot. He got in big trouble for that one. But he was scaring me more with all his silence and indecision.
“And besides … if you stay in Ashton …,” I began.
“What of it?”
“I’ll be all alone.”
And that was my heart’s truth.
He didn’t say a word in reply.
Black Knight? Black night. We turned our backs to each other. It was a long time before either one of us slept.
The day before we left, he handed me a book. Around the World in Eighty Days, by Mr. Jules Verne, I read.
“I figure it’ll keep you company,” Thomas said.
It must have cost him every shilling he ever saved. I’d never owned a real new book before.
“You’re supposed to open it in the middle first,” he said. “That way pages won’t fall out.”
I did. The book cracked with newness. Then I turned to the front.
Thomas was never one for proper writing but I could still make out his message. Only too well.
Happy sailing!
Your big brother—
Always,
Thomas
— TRAVELLING SHOW —
The bus trip was like taking a bath in diesel fuel. It was a five-hour trip on the Acadia Bus Lines, and we stopped at just about every Tim Hortons along the way. I had so many Timbits, my stomach was sugar coated. I popped the Gravol that Corporal Ray had given me just in case. It made me drowsy but I couldn’t seem to get comfortable enough to sleep. Instead, I watched the clouds reflected in the window. It was as if the entire sky had flooded the window and changed it the bright blue of a computer screen. The clouds were chalky. If I were to reach out my hand, I was sure I could rub them away. “Cirrus, cumulus, stratus,” I chanted to myself in a whisper. Cirrus. Cumulus. Stratus. Words that made me feel as if I was talking in another language. Almost like praying. Usually I forgot what kind of cloud was which and it never mattered much to me before, but now it did. Clouds had taken on a whole new meaning for me. Pippa, when she visited, only once—in a dream—was on a cloud.
“The stars at night and the clouds by day,” my father told me that night after the God question. “That’s how I feel close to those I’ve lost. Remember that, too, Minn. When in doubt, or feeling alone or afraid, lift up your eyes to the sky.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt lonelier in my life as I did that whole bus trip. I was being sent away from those I loved. Banished. Exiled. Afraid? Well, my O.I. was kicking in again. Sometimes an overactive imagination can be damaging to your mental health. The man across the aisle from me looked like a newly released convict ready to go back to his hometown to seek revenge. He’d been guzzling liquor out of a brown paper bag the whole time. You could smell it plain as anything. Around Londonderry, he started up
singing to himself. After he nodded off to sleep, his head began bumping against the windowpane, leaving grease smudges all over. Spittle dribbled down his chin like baby drool. I felt sorry for him more than afraid. Still, I wouldn’t look him in the eye when he woke up. I knew better. Corporal Ray had warned me about talking to strangers. This buddy was a strange one for sure.
I plugged into my Walkman. It was a gift from my parents before I left.
“Good for training,” said my father. My mother handed me a boxed set of the Ladybugs’ greatest hits. Not my taste, but better than the hum of the motor.
I was grateful for the noisy three-year-old who had been playing peek-a-boo with me the whole trip. She was wearing a hat with a rubber dinosaur on top. Its jaws snapped open and shut every time she moved her head. A laughing dinosaur. What will they think of next? Just an hour outside of the basin, she worked up enough nerve to come and crawl up in the seat beside me.
“Honey, get down, don’t bother the nice girl,” said her mother, who looked like those women in postcards of the Swiss Alps, a woman someone might call Fraulein. Maybe because she called me a nice girl, I piped up right away.
“She’s no bother,” I said.
“Okay,” shrugged Fraulein, “but I warn you, she’s a talker.”
That turned out to be the understatement of the decade. Her name was Abby. For some reason, this rhyme started up in my head: Gabby Abby talked so much, she talked of this and that and such. That’s all I could get to because she kept interrupting me.
“What’s dat?” she said.
“My key chain,” I replied.
“What’s dat?” she said.
“A book I’m reading,” I told her.
“What are dose?” she giggled and poked two fingers right in my … “Boobies!” she squealed. “Boobies boobies!”
I wanted to choke her. I was sure every person on the bus must have heard.
“Shh!” I hissed. The way she looked at me then, all pouts and with her eyes as innocent as could be and then whispering “Booby” one more time, cracked me up. “Here,” I said. “Want some chocolate milk?”
I rummaged in my knapsack and found my last carton and a straw. When she got to the bottom she did that straw-sucking thing kids do.
“I sink it’s all gone,” she wailed. “I sink it’s all gone.”
“Was it good?” I asked.
“Dee-licioush! Any more?”
“Sorry, that’s all,” I said. “I like your hat,” I added, hoping to change the topic. She took it off and put it on my head and then snuggled right beside me with her book.
“Read,” she said.
So I did. I sat there on that bus with a dinosaur hat on my head and read Go Dog Go until she fell sound asleep. Her hair smelled of baby shampoo, and her breath, despite the chocolate milk, was more like apple juice and barbecue potato chips.
“Boulder Basin,” the driver announced over his microphone. “Ten-minute stop.”
When I went to get my duffel bag from the luggage compartment, I heard a thumping above my head. There was Gabby Abby squishing her face against the window as if kissing me. I blew her a kiss and turned away. I had what my mother used to call a sad throat. It’s the feeling you get when you watch a really sad movie or just before you are going to cry. Sometimes a sad throat means tears. Other times, you just have to swallow hard and it will pass. I swallowed. Still, it had happened.
For just a second, I couldn’t help wondering what Pippa would have looked like at three.
— THE WELCOME WITCH —
Boulder Basin is not what you could even call a village. It’s just a strip of road that forms a semicircle around the harbour. There’s a wharf, a straggle of houses, a post office, a small fish-and-chips restaurant and Harv’s.
Nana was deep in conversation with Harvey himself. Harv Jollymore of Harvey’s Fuel-Up and General Store must be at least six foot five. That’s a giant around Boulder Basin. For some reason, they seem to make all the men around there old and small. Harvey’s not young himself, his hair the creamy white of vanilla ice cream and his face creased like an old map that’s been folded and unfolded in all the wrong places. The thing about Harv I always remembered from when I was younger was his hands. They were big, all right, like the rest of him, but it was his fingers that amazed me the most. They reminded me of those large fat cigars Corporal Ray smokes at New Year’s, and stained that colour too. They looked like they had been dipped in tar that just wouldn’t come off. Even in church on Sundays, you could tell he’d scrubbed and scrubbed. I guess you just can’t get grease off a mechanic’s hands. Harv saw me before the witch did.
“Well look here, when’d you go and grow up? Makes me feel right old,” he said. And he winked, as if we shared some sort of secret. “Still just a wisp of a thing, though.”
Nana turned around then, in all her splendour. She was dressed in her trademark green rubber boots and khaki trousers, her hair tucked under the same mud-splattered hat she had worn so long I’m sure it was stuck like Velcro to her head.
She hugged me, the kind of hug that says don’t go getting too mushy on me now, eh? Or, let’s just get this over with. She smelled like always, too. It was a strange mixture of Lux soap and oatmeal—not bad smells one at a time but when you mix them together, just a bit sour. Nana Vinegar, like I said. Her chin hair was whiter than ever and longer too. She was a twin of one of those mountain goats in National Geographic, coincidentally her favourite magazine.
She grunted a thank you to Harv for chucking the bags up into the back of the pickup. We eased out onto the main road for about half a minute before turning onto a dirt road heading towards Boutillier’s Point.
When we rounded the bend by the barrel factory and Ludlow’s Lumberyard, the ocean spread out before us, dotted with islands. They looked like giant clusters of broccoli. It was a spectacular view. I had to gulp a bit and catch my breath when I spotted the house.
My father’s house—the homestead, as he calls it—is built on a slab of land that juts out like a hitchhiker’s thumb right into the Atlantic, at the entrance to Boulder Basin. A gingerbread house, some would call it. The trim along the eaves is all loops and dips and swirls like sugar frosting. Behind the house is a small, run-down barn, where Nana used to keep a pony, a pig and a few hens. Behind the barn is the hill. Just a hill too, although when I was little it seemed like a mountain. Walking up it took forever, and the grass was taller than I was. Things really do shrink as you get older. Still, it would be a good hill for training on, and the view from the top was, as Corporal Ray loved to say, a million-dollar view.
“What kind of get-up is that you got on?” Nana sniffed at me. That was it. Not “How was your trip, dear?” or “How are your folks?” First thing, she starts in, as if she’s a fashion plate herself. But I was determined to get off on the right foot.
“Bell-bottoms, Nana.”
“And what’s with the dirt around your belly button?”
“It’s a temporary tattoo. It’s just a stencil, and it washes off.”
“That’s good, because you’ll either be washing it off or making sure you wear something more decent that doesn’t announce to the world you’ve got the ugliest belly button I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of a pollywog.”
That’s when it struck me that maybe she was about as thrilled with our summer arrangement as I was. I don’t know what came over me, but I started to giggle. I couldn’t stop.
“What’s with you?” she snarled. She tried to scowl her fiercest witchy sour vinegar scowl.
I just kept laughing as she swung into the driveway. She braked so hard, if I hadn’t had my seat belt fastened I would have gone clear through the windshield. She slammed out of the truck.
“Supper in an hour. You know where your room is. Get freshened up and don’t be bringing the pollywog to the supper table.”
She started up the steps to the veranda but stopped to rest halfway up, as if she had to catch her breath, something I�
��d never seen her do before. I got my duffel bag and followed.
Try as I might, as I showered that diesel fuel out of my hair, I never figured out how my belly button looked like a pollywog.
— SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT —
Part of me was terrified we’d have tongue of beef for supper. We had herring with new potatoes and fresh garden peas and sour cream and cucumbers. It was delicious. I did the dishes and cleaned up, then made a pot of tea. Nana went into the sunroom and smoked her corncob pipe. Tell me, what kind of grandmother smokes a pipe?
“Hot out the teapot first!” she shouted out. I did as I was told. Poured hot water into the pot, swished it around, poured it away, put the Red Rose tea bags in, then filled the pot with water up to the brim. The bags bobbed to the surface like swimmers with bloated bellies floating on their backs around the pot.
“By the end of the summer, I’ll have you brewing lots more interesting kinds!” she shouted out.
Well, whoopdy-doo. Such fun ahead.
When I took in the tea, the sun was going down and the sky was streaked with fingers of cloud, all fluorescent pinks and golds. The ocean held the reflection, as if the sky had tumbled into the waves. I had been missing a long-lost friend, I thought. The ocean, I mean, not my Nana.
We sat in silence. There was the taste of salt in the breeze that was blowing in through the window. Yep. This place, this smell, that going-on-and-out-forever ocean gave me as much and maybe even more of a feeling of home than the one I’d just left. That was my last thought before I feel asleep that night.
I dreamt of snow. It was a dream of last winter, the day the baby died. My dream was like an Etch A Sketch drawing. I kept erasing the dream as I dreamt it. Then I woke up and remembered what really happened and that I couldn’t erase it. I sat up in the dark and wished I could scrub the truth away and keep the dream I wanted.
I had to go to the bathroom. Too much information? No big deal, you think? Maybe if I were home. But I wasn’t.
There were two things about going to the bathroom at the witch’s house in the middle of the night that terrified me. First off, there were the moths. Big fat-bodied moths with bulgy eyes that came in through the window screen, swivelled around the light and then glued themselves to the baseboards for a good night’s sleep. When you sat on the toilet seat they attacked your toes. For real. My grandmother said that was nothing but foolishness. She said this after I screamed myself silly in the middle of the night at age five.