Great Cape Breton Storytelling

by Great Cape Breton Storytelling (epub)

  It was in many ways a good summer. There were few storms and we were out almost every day and we lost a minimum of gear and seemed to land a maximum of fish and I tanned dark and brown after the manner of my uncles.

  My father did not tan — he never tanned — because of his reddish complexion, and the salt water irritated his skin as it had for sixty years. He burned and reburned over and over again and his lips still cracked so that they bled when he smiled, and his arms, especially the left, still broke out into the oozing salt-water boils as they had ever since as a child I had first watched him soaking and bathing them in a variety of ineffectual solutions. The chafe-preventing bracelets of brass linked chain that all the men wore about their wrists in early spring were his the full season and he shaved but painfully and only once a week.

  And I saw then, that summer, many things that I had seen all my life as if for the first time and I thought that perhaps my father had never been intended for a fisherman either physically or mentally. At least not in the manner of my uncles; he had never really loved it. And I remembered that, one evening in his room when we were talking about David Copperfield, he had said that he had always wanted to go to the university and I had dismissed it then in the way one dismisses one’s father’s saying he would like to be a tight-rope walker, and we had gone on to talk about the Peggottys and how they loved the sea.

  And I thought then to myself that there were many things wrong with all of us and all our lives and I wondered why my father, who was himself an only son, had not married before he was forty and then I wondered why he had. I even thought that perhaps he had had to marry my mother and checked the dates on the flyleaf of the Bible where I learned that my oldest sister had been born a prosaic eleven months after the marriage, and I felt myself then very dirty and debased for my lack of faith and for what I had thought and done.

  And then there came into my heart a very great love for my father and I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations. And I knew then that I could never leave him alone to suffer the iron-tipped harpoons which my mother would forever hurl into his soul because he was a failure as a husband and a father who had retained none of his own. And I felt that I had been very small in a little secret place within me and that even the completion of high school was for me a silly shallow selfish dream.

  So I told him one night very resolutely and very powerfully that I would remain with him as long as he lived and we would fish the sea together. And he made no protest but only smiled through the cigarette smoke that wreathed his bed and replied, “I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”

  The room was now so filled with books as to be almost Dickensian, but he would not allow my mother to move or change them and he continued to read them, sometimes two or three a night. They came with great regularity now, and there were more hardcovers, sent by my sisters who had gone so long ago and now seemed so distant and so prosperous, and sent also pictures of small red-haired grandchildren with baseball bats and dolls, which he placed upon his bureau and which my mother gazed at wistfully when she thought no one would see. Red-haired grandchildren with baseball bats and dolls who would never know the sea in hatred or in love.

  And so we fished through the heat of August and into the cooler days of September when the water was so clear we could almost see the bottom and the white mists rose like delicate ghosts in the early morning dawn. And one day my mother said to me, “You have given added years to his life.”

  And we fished on into October when it began to roughen and we could no longer risk night sets but took our gear out each morning and returned at the first sign of the squalls; and on into November when we lost three tubs of trawl and the clear blue water turned to a sullen grey and the trochoidal waves rolled rough and high and washed across our bows and decks as we ran within their troughs. We wore heavy sweaters now and the awkward rubber slickers and the heavy woollen mitts which soaked and froze into masses of ice that hung from our wrists like the limbs of gigantic monsters until we thawed them against the exhaust pipe’s heat. And almost every day we would leave for home before noon, driven by the blasts of the northwest wind coating our eyebrows with ice and freezing our eyelids closed as we leaned into a visibility that was hardly there, charting our course from the compass and the sea, running with the waves and between them but never confronting their towering might.

  And I stood at the tiller now, on these homeward lunges, stood in the place and in the manner of my uncle, turning to look at my father and to shout over the roar of the engine and the slop of the sea to where he stood in the stern, drenched and dripping with the snow and the salt and the spray and his bushy eyebrows caked in ice. But on November twenty-first, when it seemed we might be making the final run of the season, I turned and he was not there and I knew even in that instant that he would never be again.

  On November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very high and the waters are very cold and there are no signposts on the surface of the sea. You cannot tell where you have been five minutes before and in the squalls of snow you cannot see. And it takes longer than you would believe to check a boat that has been running before a gale and turn her ever so carefully in a wide and stupid circle, with timbers creaking and straining, back into the face of storm. And you know that it is useless and that your voice does not carry the length of the boat and that even if you knew the original spot, the relentless waves would carry such a burden perhaps a mile or so by the time you could return. And you know also, the final irony, that your father, like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.

  The lobster beds off the Cape Breton coast are still very rich and now, from May to July, their offerings are packed in crates of ice, and thundered by the gigantic transport trucks, day and night, through New Glasgow, Amherst, Saint John and Bangor and Portland and into Boston where they are tossed still living into boiling pots of water, their final home.

  And though the prices are higher and the competition tighter, the grounds to which the Jenny Lynn once went remain untouched and unfished as they have for the last ten years. For if there are no signposts on the sea in storm, there are certain ones in calm, and the lobster bottoms were distributed in calm before any of us can remember, and the grounds my father fished were those his father fished before him and there were others before and before and before. Twice the big boats have come from forty and fifty miles, lured by the promise of the grounds, and strewn the bottom with their traps, and twice they have returned to find their buoys cut adrift and their gear lost and destroyed. Twice the Fisheries Officer and the Mounted Police have come and asked many long and involved questions, and twice they have received no answers from the men leaning in the doors of their shanties and the women standing at their windows with their children in their arms. Twice they have gone away saying: “There are no legal boundaries in the Marine area”; “No one can own the sea”; “Those grounds don’t wait for anyone.”

  But the men and the women, with my mother dark among them, do not care for what they say, for to them the grounds are sacred and they think they wait for me.

  It is not an easy thing to know that your mother lives alone on an inadequate insurance policy and that she is too proud to accept any other aid. And that she looks through her lonely window onto the ice of winter and the hot flat calm of summer and the rolling waves of fall. And that she lies awake in the early morning’s darkness when the rubber boots of the men scrunch upon the gravel as they pass beside her house on their way down to the wharf. And she knows that the footsteps never stop, because no man goes from her house, and she alone of all the Lynns has neither son nor son-in-law who walks toward the boat that will take him to the sea. And it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks upon the sea with love and on you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue
.

  But neither is it easy to know that your father was found on November twenty-eighth, ten miles to the north and wedged between two boulders at the base of the rock-strewn cliffs where he had been hurled and slammed so many many times. His hands were shredded ribbons, as were his feet which had lost their boots to the suction of the sea, and his shoulders came apart in our hands when we tried to move him from the rocks. And the fish had eaten his testicles and the gulls had pecked out his eyes and the white-green stubble of his whiskers had continued to grow in death, like the grass on graves, upon the purple, bloated mass that was his face. There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair.

  Maureen Hull

  Marigold

  Mary woke to the sound of slams — the light metallic snick of the kitchen door, the hearty thump as Carol forced the trunk lid down on boxes and suitcases piled too high. Mary crawled out of her sleeping bag and across the floor to the window. She looked down over the ledge and into the backyard. It was barely light; the sun was a red half-eye floating beyond the ginkgo tree. The passenger doors of the Jetta stood open but there was no sign of Carol. She must have gone indoors for another load.

  Mary slithered back across the floor and shimmied into her sleeping bag. Warmth still pooled at the bottom and she dipped her chilly toes into it. The floor beneath was a linoleum slab. Like sleeping in a morgue, thought Mary, like sleeping in a dungeon. She curled up, bringing the bag with her, making a quilted comma on the floor.

  Carol’s footsteps click-clacked across the empty kitchen. All the furniture had gone away in a small van the previous afternoon, “Albert’s Moving and Storage, No Load Too Small, No Distance Too Far.” Albert and his buddy, Martin, had emptied the rooms in less than two hours. Now Carol was stuffing miscellaneous bags into the car.

  “I know you’re awake, Mary,” she yelled from the hall. “Get washed and dressed. I want to pack your sleeping bag.”

  It was harder getting herself up the second time. Now she knew how cold the room was, and that the sun, just scraping over the window ledge, was a fraud. Bunches of daisies and blue coneflowers on the wallpaper shivered and knotted their stems. Their leaves pulled closer together and their petals drooped. It looked like summer but it felt like fall.

  “Hurry now.” Carol was shaking the end of the sleeping bag, trying to roll her out. “This is the start of our big adventure. This is the first day of the rest of our lives.”

  “This is stupid,” muttered Mary. She kicked free of the bag and sat up on the cold floor, clutching her magic talisman bag in one hand and holding her pyjama top shut with the other. “Why do we have to leave? We shouldn’t have to leave. Make him leave.”

  “Please don’t be difficult.” Carol was pleading, folding and smoothing. “You know this is how it has to be. I need your help, Mary, I don’t need an argument. This was your idea too, you know. Please.”

  Mary scrambled up, ran to the bathroom and slammed the door. Her clothes lay on the edge of the bathtub. A face cloth and towel were folded beside them. On the vanity her toothbrush, hairbrush and toothpaste were laid out in an open toiletry case. A sliver of soap they would leave behind was wet and gelid in the sink. Everything else was gone, even the curtains. It was a gamble, taking the curtains down; if he came back early and drove by the house he’d see the blank windows and know something was up.

  Carol’s heels went click-click past the door. High heels, stupid shoes for a getaway, thought Mary. She peeled a strip of varnish from the back of the closet door, a long skinny strip like a snake’s cast-off skin. Where the varnish was gone the wood was dull and gave off a musty odour. She brushed and flossed her teeth, flicking small white spots onto the mirror, then washed her face and put on her clothes. Her pyjamas were in tatters, no buttons on the top and a big tear in the bum. She was to leave them behind too, like the soap. Carefully she folded them flat, then rolled them into two tight sausages and put them on the top shelf of the linen closet. She pushed them back as far as she could reach. Maybe the new tenants would be careless and stuff their towels up on the high shelf without looking. Her pyjamas would live quietly, hidden in the dark. Someday she would come back and look for them. When she opened the door to the hall Carol swooped in to snatch up cloth, towel, the toiletry case and its contents.

  Mary followed her downstairs, hand trailing the banister, over and under, feeling for gum. None. It had been cleaned again.

  “Hurry.” Carol’s voice was tight and urgent; she clickety-ticked in and out of the downstairs rooms for one last check. Outside, the car was running.

  “Where’s my breakfast?” Mary wasn’t ready to go yet.

  “We’ll get some on the road.’’

  “He’s not coming back until Sunday. That’s three days. That’s lots of time for breakfast.”

  Carol faced her daughter. “I can’t eat,” she said. “Not here. We have to go right now.” She jerked Mary by the shoulder and pushed her towards the door. “There’s food in the car if you can’t wait.” Carol’s fingers on Mary’s shoulder were glass bones. It would take nothing to snap them. Mary got in the front on the passenger’s side and buckled her seat belt. When they pulled out of the yard she concentrated on peeling the paper from a cranberry-sunflower seed muffin and did not look at her disappearing street.

  Once they reached the highway Carol began to babble. She speculated about the weather, the road conditions, where they might stop for breakfast. “At least an hour out of town; two would be better. I need a hundred miles between me and this town before I can eat a bite. We’ll find someplace nice to stop, don’t you worry. Do you want another muffin? A banana? My stomach’s just a solid lump!”

  On and on.

  At first it had been Mary who’d wanted to run away. “Why don’t we just hide from the bad man?” She was six and the sight of her mother in tears had become a regular and worrisome occurrence.

  “He’s not a bad man. He’s your daddy; he doesn’t mean to hurt. He just gets angry. Running away doesn’t fix anything.”

  “My daddy’s dead. He’s under the shiny black rock.”

  “Sam is your daddy now. We just need to learn to live together like a family.”

  Finally Carol admitted defeat and one day there was a long bus ride with suitcases and Mary’s two best Barbies — one in a fur coat, the other in a leather jacket and jeans, both wearing red plastic high heels. When they got off the bus Sam was there, blocking their path with flowers for Carol and a stuffed bear for Mary. They drove back in his car, Carol crying a little, Sam talking and Mary eating chocolates in the back seat until she was sick. Presents and bruises — they swung back and forth between those two poles of his attention. One red Barbie shoe was lost and never recovered.

  Sam and Carol divorced when Mary was eight, but it made little difference; he never stayed away for long. Mary began to save her allowance and kept it in her mermaid knapsack in her closet, with extra socks and underwear, ready to go. Carol found it and sat on her heels in the closet wiping her eyes and blowing her nose with bits of Mary’s dirty laundry.

  “We’ll run away together,” she promised. “Just don’t you go without me. I’ll save and we’ll do it properly. We have to have somewhere nice to run to. I got us into this and I can get us out.”

  Carol was nicer to Sam then; she never argued with him, never ever let on. Mary was impressed by how sneaky her mother could be. She tried to be nicer too, to fool him, although she refused to go anywhere with him unless Carol came along. She saved the money he gave her — running money, she called it — dropping it into the glass milk bottle her Aunt Edie had given her to use as a bank. After his visits she played with the coins, stacked the loonies and quarters, nickels and dimes in towers, then knocked them down. When she finished clinking them back into the bottle, Carol put it on the high shelf in the kitchen cupboa
rd. The sleeves of her silk kimono fell like green waterfalls past her elbows. One or the other upper arm was purpled with fingerprints. There was always a mark somewhere on Carol, on her arm, shoulder, buttock, thigh. As one faded he imprinted her anew: a helping hand gripping her a little too tightly, an accidental elbow to her ribs, a clumsy gesture that nicked her shins. Always trying to carve his initials. Always trying to make a permanent mark.

  “He never hits me.” She was annoyed by her sister’s rants. “What bloody good would a peace bond do? What would I say to the judge? Your Honour, he’s a mean little prick? I think he does it on purpose? It’s easy for you to go on, Edie. He never even raises his voice, for Christ’s sake!”

  Mary liked Aunt Edie. She seemed likely to do something, maybe get a policeman to put Sam in jail.

  “Honey, are you sure he hasn’t . . . ?”

  “No.” Mary shook her head stubbornly. She knew what they meant. No. It was more like the way he tormented Carol. Different — and the same. A mean yank of her braid, a nippy little pinch to make her mind her manners, no skin broken, just pain and a bruise. Tickling fingers that grew bony and cruel.

  “Stop! It hurts!”

  “Who’s a whiny little crybaby now?” He jeered at her and gave one last little jab that made a sore place in her belly.

  “He’s a teacher. A so-called respected member of the community,” said Carol.

  “He’s a sadistic bully,” said Aunt Edie.