by Sheree Fitch
“Nana! I’m really good. Dad even said. I’ll wear a life jacket!”
“No!”
I did my stomp dance up the stairs and then slammed the door to my room.
“Oh you can have your little show of hysterics, missy, but it won’t change my mind any.”
“You sour old mountain goat,” I muttered, not quite loud enough for her to hear.
There was my Rigbyism of the week, mocking me as I threw myself down on top of my covers.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. This is an exercise to help calm you and remind you that air really is the breath of life. Learning to be conscious of your breath and breathing techniques, becoming aware of your diaphragm and chest pushing oxygen throughout your body, is essential to an athlete. It can also help you achieve mental clarity. Try taking five deep breaths and be aware of your body as you do this. Gradually increase this conscious breathing time each day until you can do twenty breaths without getting dizzy.
I took a deep breath and held it until I couldn’t any longer. If I hadn’t I would have screamed.
We still weren’t talking to each other when Harv came over for his nightly visit.
“I’d say I need a machete to cut the tension round this place tonight,” he commented. “So what gives?”
“You’re in love with a heartless woman,” I said to him.
“Heartless, am I? Well, Harv, tell your royal highness here that heartless is better than spineless, which is exactly what I’d be if I gave in to her every whim and wish!”
“And what’s that?” asked Harv.
“She wants me to let her go gadding about out on the water with some feller. She’s twelve. He’s fifteen!”
“Whoah? Who’s this now? And why not bring him around?”
I ignored the question.
“Harv, help me out here. Talk some sense into her.”
“Now, Minn, d’ya know how many years I’ve been trying to get this woman to marry me? I’d have better luck at horse shoes than changing her mind once it’s set.”
Maybe she thought we were ganging up on her.
“And furthermore, it’s not me making the rules anyhow,” she sputtered. “Your father said your mother’s death afraid of you going near the water.”
So that was it. My loony mother and her crazy dream. “My mother!” I spit out. “My mother is a lunatic. You’re gonna listen to her?”
“Don’t you dare say any such a thing about your poor mother!”
Two splotches of red appeared on each cheek. Was she shocked at what I’d said? Well, well, just wait, I thought. There’s a whole lot more you should know, old lady.
“Poor mother?” I scoffed. “She’s off her rocker! Poor me’s more like it! You weren’t there last winter and all this spring, Nana! I was! All she did was stare into space, listen to old sad sobby Ladybug records, took to wearing black and beige. My mother, the rainbow goddess, wearing beige? That’s normal? She never talked. I think she lost her tongue, not just that baby! She doesn’t even know I’m alive any more—what difference would it make to her if I drowned out there?”
The words came spraying out like water from a burst fire hydrant. But I was on a roll. I filled in lots of holes in the information she thought she had about my family and then some.
“All I ate for months was macaroni and cheese—K.D. Golden bullets! At the end of the year, after she’d slept for months, she was still too tired to come to our sports banquet. Tired? What a joke. She’s just gaga bonkers.” I spiralled my finger by the side of my head. “Off her jeezluz rocker, okay?”
Nana clomped across the room and shook me by the shoulders. “Stop it! Stop that this minute! Calm down!”
“Don’t you touch me, you sour old vinegar witch!”
“Well, Flin Flon to you too!” she snapped back and gripped me tighter.
“Girls!” Harv was covering his ears.
I squirmed away and flew off the veranda. I ran and ran and ran long after it grew dark. Past Ludlow’s, looping around Poplar Grove, on out to Boutillier’s Point, and finally I found myself stumbling through the dark on the road to the gravesite.
I hesitated only a minute. I found the path and entered the woods.
— SPOOKED —
The moon was bright. Strange as it sounds, I found relief there among the tombstones. In fact, I realized I was more comfortable with the dead these days than with the living. I sat down near the monument, put out my hand, traced the markings with my fingertips. Then I lay down on the ground and watched the stars. It made me think of Corporal Ray. Trying to trace the Big Dipper with his finger. I thought of my mother, holding up a paintbrush, some of the paint on her nose. “Voilà! Moonlight Mist!” I got a very sad throat. I had to swallow five times for it to go away.
There was a rustle in the grass. Footsteps.
I peered around the monument.
He looked as though he was playing some sort of weird leapfrog-over-the-dead game.
He hopped closer. I held my breath. Closer. When he was almost on top of me, I stood up.
“AHHHH!” I swear he jumped ten storeys high.
“What on earth are you doing here? You scared the poo—You spooked me but good!”
I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed so hard I snorted. How romantic.
His eyes twinkled. Even in the dark I could see that glint of fun.
“Why are you here?” he asked again. This time his voice was tender. He touched my face with his index finger. “You’ve been crying. Why?”
“I wasn’t.”
“You’re not a very good liar.”
“I found something the other day. Here.” I reached into my pocket and unfolded John Hindley’s photo. “It made it all so real, Max. Putting a face on things, you know? He lost his folks. His brother. It’s their bones in this gravesite—if they haven’t already been washed out to sea. Look, I want to go out to Elbow Island. I’ve got a plan. Well, an idea, anyhow. I was going ask you to come … but forget it … my Nana …”
Max squinted at the newsprint. After a while he said, “Minn, I’ll do anything I can to help you.”
“Really?”
“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
Then he did it. He lowered his head. He brushed my forehead with his lips.
That spooked both of us. He cleared his throat.
“Want me to walk you back to the road?”
“No, I’m okay,” I croaked out.
He cantered back into the darkness. Flap, flap, flap went his sneakers. Flutter, flutter went my heart.
But I should have gone with him. The cemetery was a graveyard after he left. A place for bones. I shivered. I searched the sky for stars. They had disappeared. I raced back through the tangle of woods, tripping and bumping into tree trunks. A haunted forest. Was it Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz who wrestled with monster trees that came to life? I couldn’t remember. I kept seeing a newspaper headline: “Child Found Dead in Tangled Woods.”
Back on the main road, I picked up my pace. There was a set of headlights behind me. When I slowed down to a walk, it felt as if my lungs would pop. I shook like a jellyfish blob as the car approached and then cruised beside me. For one brave second, I considered striking off into the woods again. Thoughts of bears and child-snatching trees made me change my mind.
The car stopped. A door opened.
“Get in.”
— NOT SO JOLLY —
It was a truck, not a car. It was Harv, not a killer.
“You look like something the cat drug in,” he said.
I started to laugh, but the choked sounds quickly turned to tears.
“Let it out, sweetheart,” he said softly. Then he passed me a rough-torn piece of paper towel, dirty with grease. “Blow,” he said. “And cry till your heart’s stopped aching.”
“I can’t,” I confessed. “I c-c-can’t. You don’t understand … Did you ever have the feeling, Harv, that if you really let it out, like really felt wha
t was inside so deep you didn’t even know what it was that was hurting so bad, that you’d maybe never stop crying? Did you ever feel like that?”
He didn’t answer right away.
“Honey,” he said finally, “I’m an old man. I fought in the Korean War. I think I’ve known exactly how you feel most of my life.”
“I never knew that, Harv—that you were in the war.”
I thought of all those Remembrance Day parades where I watched Corporal Ray. He’d never been in any war, of course. He was just there to be a handsome Mountie, paying respect. All those old men were the real deal, though. Air force, marines, combat soldiers marching by with medals thwacking their chests and funny little berets on their heads. I always thought they looked so old and tired. But proud, too. They always gave me a sad throat. Harv didn’t seem to be like them at all.
“I don’t talk about it often,” he continued.
Try as I might, I couldn’t picture Harv as a young man with a gun, fierce-like, like you had to be in a war. I just couldn’t.
“Did you ever kill anybody?” I asked before I thought about what I was asking. And I wanted to take it back before he answered.
Sitting there in the truck, with only the dash lights reflecting on that face of his—so wrinkled at this moment it looked like a design of tartan plaid—Harv Jollymore did what my father had once. He cried. Only differently. One lonely teardrop fell from his right eye, dripped down his face and off his jaw. Guess that was his answer.
He cleared his throat, spit out the window— gross!—and turned on the radio. I was still sorting all this out. Harv, the gentle giant he was, had seen things and done things I guessed he lived with and would rather forget.
My world seemed safe, suddenly, and I was embarrassed. I felt like a spoiled kid who hadn’t got her way. I’d heard Nana tell him that the other night. “She’s just spoiled rotten like so many kids when they’re the only child.” Rub it in, witch.
The man on the radio said that winds were picking up. The coast guard issued a small-craft warning for the following day. Looked like no one would be heading out for Elbow Island any time soon. So much energy I’d wasted. All for nothing.
Nana acted as if nothing had happened when I returned. She brought me in a cup of tea while I was still reading.
“Special blend,” she said. “Calms the nerves.”
“You’re what’s getting on my nerves,” I blurted.
“Here are some recent issues of National Geographic. Fascinating reading.”
“Not to me.”
She sighed. “Thought reading about the world might help get you out of yourself.”
What on earth did that mean?
Who knows what she mixed in that potion of hers. I slept a dreamless sleep.
— BUBBLE BURSTING —
The next morning I woke up and touched my forehead.
Max and that kiss.
But mostly, I was excited about his promise to help me save the grave. I hummed as I got out of bed. I was in an unfamiliar bubble of happiness.
The thing about bubbles is they burst.
First off, Nana was wide-awake and perkier than cayenne pepper.
“Guess what? Guess what? Guess what?”
“I give.”
“Here!” It was a postcard from my mother. “I didn’t read it, though, letters are personal.” Right. Then she wagged a finger at the picture. “This is Tofino, on Vancouver Island. Bee-you-tee-ful, eh?”
I took it to my room. My mother had printed teeny tiny. In purple ink.
Dear Minn:
Auntie Ginny is treating me like royalty. B.C. is breathtakingly beautiful. I took a ferry ride from Horseshoe Bay to Vancouver island. I soaked in a hot tub outside. I saw sea lions sunbathing on rocks. They bark! I met a family who have a pet seal. it visits them every morning at their dock Her name is Lucille. Get it? Loo-Seal’ Someday, Aunt Ginny wants you to visit. Wouldn’t that be great?
Love,
Mom
Not “Love you more than all the stars in the universe.” Not “I miss you over the top of the world and beyond Pluto.” Not even “I miss you more than I missed the bus.” Just, “Love.” I wanted details. Like, was she coming back.
Aunt Ginny was not a real person to me. I’d only seen her in photos and knew her from phone calls. Aunt Ginny in B.C. When I was little this confused me. I pictured her living in the alphabet until I learned about abbreviations. There was no return address on the postcard. Thinking of my mother being out there with her sister instead of back home with her daughter made me furious. And what about Corporal Ray? He was drowning his sorrows in work. When I pictured him trying to yodel, nothing but the sound of his crying came back to me. I tore the stupid postcard up. I tore out all the yellows in her fan deck. Buttercup? Crushed. Sunflower? Smush. Morning Sun? In the garbage.
Another dent in my bubble: Hardly Whynot was being interviewed on TV. He was on tour in Russia. This meant, of course, he was not the man at the Fullerton mansion. So trying to get his help restoring the grave, or his autograph, was useless. I could just forget about sparking his interest or getting his money for the gravesite—unless he was going to take a private jet here right after the tour ended.
Who was I kidding? Even I couldn’t find a scrap of imaginary hope to hang on to. Some little bubble to hide inside when everything is a disaster. I mean, not going your way.
Max didn’t keep his word. I looked for him all day. I ran two entire extra sets of my regular route around Boulder Basin. No luck.
At the end of the day, my legs were so tired I wanted to cry. I studied John’s photo again. Do something, I imagined him saying. “I will, I promise,” I whispered. His eyes smiled at me. Or maybe it was just shadows playing tricks.
— HERRING CHOKERS —
“So what exactly is a herring choker, Harv?”
Harv was lighting his pipe. He and Nana had just informed me that the Herring Choker Picnic and Folk Festival was happening Saturday.
“Some think the word originally meant the one who deboned the fish before selling it, but over time, it was used more to describe a fisherman and then sometimes a certain kind of person. An unsavoury character, you might say. A scoundrel. You know, like we’d say, ‘That Stubby McIsaac, what a herring choker he is, all right!’”
“Stubby!” I giggled. “How on earth would anyone get a name like that?”
“Take a gander,” puffed Harv.
“Was he short and stubby?”
“No. Tall and thin, matter of fact.”
“Did he smoke stubs of cigarettes?”
“He smoked the whole thing—no filtered kind.”
“Did he have a stubble of whiskers?”
“Full beard.”
“I know! He was stubborn! Stubby’s short for stubborn?”
Nana chimed in, “Maybe that should be your new name!”
“Ha! Ha!” I said, not even looking in her direction.
Harv shook his head at us.
“Girls, girls! What am I going to do with you? Would it hurt you two to be civil to each other for a minute? Guess you’re too much alike.”
Nana laughed at this. Snorted, rather, pig-like. I was too insulted to speak. I knew Harv did not mean to hurt my feelings.
“C’mon, Harv, I give. Why would a man be called Stubby?”
“Stubby’s another name for a low-necked bottle of beer or a bottle that holds other spirits. Stubby was our local bootlegger after he took over a thriving business from his uncle Gordie. Leastways he was until he got spooked out on Elbow Island one night and changed into a God-fearing man and ran a scrap metal business instead.”
My ears quivered. Elbow Island.
“What happened?”
“The story’s never really come out, but according to the Boulder Basin Gospel of Gossip at the time, he rowed out one night to Elbow Island, to where he kept one of his stills. No one knows what happened ’cept a storm came up and he spent the night, came home and went di
rectly to Reverend Hardy’s and asked to be rebaptized. They had a special ceremony that very Sunday, and Stubby never touched a drop again. Some think he had some sort of encounter with spirits drowned out there in the shipwreck.”
“Are there ghosts out there, Harv? Even Nana thinks there are.”
“Do not!” she snapped. Not very convincingly.
“Do too!” I said.
“Don’t get him going with those ghost stories of Elbow Island.” Nana shook her head in warning. “He’s the one who got me half-believing.”
“She should know some local history, Ida,” said Harv as he relit his pipe.
“Harv, it’s hogwash. Well, most of it anyhow.” She started scraping furiously at dirt underneath her fingernail.
“Minn, my very own father said it was so. He spent one April the first out there. He was just a kid, and he took a dare. If he could spend the anniversary of the wreck of the Atlantic out there and survive, his buddies were going to pay him some cash. Even then, there were stories of ghosts out there. It’s not such a long row on a calm night. Ten, maybe twelve minutes if you leave from Boutillier’s Point. Anyhow, he got there and started scouting around for a place to set up camp. He heard footsteps. He stopped. The footsteps stopped. He shrugged it off and kept going. Heard footsteps again. He stopped. The footsteps stopped. He was too scared to look around, he said. Tried to tell himself it was the wind, or his mind playing games. So he went on like this for at least half an hour, getting more and more spooked with each passing minute. Finally he stopped, and this time—the footsteps kept coming. Closer and closer and closer. He almost ran screaming over the cliff, but he held his ground. And then—”
“Harv!” Nana was shrill.
“What happened?” I shrieked. My heart was bouncing around like a tennis ball.
“From out of the mist right up alongside of him, someone brushed right by. A man carrying his head beneath his arm. A headless man, he said. ‘I swear on my life,’ my dear old dad used to say, ‘he passed me by and kept on going, fading back into that mist.’”
“Your father saw that? Really? Harv! No way.”