Authors: Bill Rowe
“By the sounds of it, Tommy. We’ll hear in a second if we listen.”
It
could
be her, then. She’d been bragging her head off in school that
they were going canoeing around this time on some wild river up there. A thrill,
the delicious anticipation of a wicked secret hope actually happening, rushed
through me.
“Every week some other idiot ends up drowned,” Brent’s father muttered around
his Lucky Strike while the commercials pattered on. He removed the cigarette and
blew a smoke ring towards us boys. “How do you guys figure it? Nature’s way of
cleaning out the polluted human gene pool?”
“It must be,” I said, grinning so wide my cheeks hurt.
“How about you, Brent?” said his dad. “Do you even know what I’m talking
about?”
“
Yes
,” squeaked Brent, his indignation making his alto ascend into
falsetto, “I know what you’re shaggin’ talking about.”
Mrs. Anstey’s lips fluttered with the force of the air she blew out in
exasperation. “Leave him alone, Dad,” she said. “And you, Brent, stop saying
shaggin’ every second time you open your mouth.”
I didn’t know why, but I’d begun to feel strangely agitated. As the commercial
ended, a mighty urge rose in me to jump up and run outdoors into the perfect day
and just ignore the newscast and everything in it. I suppressed it. I didn’t
want to know, yet I had to know, who’d drowned.
“The victim was a member of a group,” the announcer intoned in tragic mode,
“canoeing on the Main River in White Bay.” The geography bolted me upright. That
was exactly where she’d said she was going. My prayer
had
come true. A
sensation went through me that was not the pure pleasure I’d expected. It
started out bittersweet at best and ended like acid. Then a picture more
horrible than anything I’d ever seen or imagined before in my life rolled
through my brain: strands of her flaming hair streamed out on the current while
her face, with her wide eyes on me, sank deeper and deeper into the black water
till the fading paleness vanished utterly.
My heart gave a sickening leap and my chest constricted so much I could not
breathe. I felt as if I were myself drowning in a deep river of guilt. Over the
roar of blood in my ears I strained to hear the name that would
confirm what I already knew. The radio sounded like it was on the other side
of a torrent: “… withholding the name pending notification of next of
kin.”
“Oh that’s great,” Brent’s dad growled. “Now everyone who knows someone up
there will be worried to death until they finally find out who it was.”
“Tommy, sweetheart, what’s wrong?” Brent’s mother paused in picking up my empty
plate and placed fingertips on my forehead. “Do you feel sick? You’re white as a
sheet.” She turned to her husband with a soft reproach: “Dad, you’re not
supposed to smoke those old cigarettes at the table while the boys are trying to
eat their breakfast.”
“These are good expensive tailor-made fags, missus, not those cheap, sickly
roll-your-owns filled with the next thing to cow dung I had to smoke when I was
their age. The little buggers are lucky.”
“It’s not the smoke, Mrs. Anstey,” I said, dragging her glare off her husband.
“Someone I know is gone canoeing on that river where someone got drowned.”
“Who is it? Someone from school?”
“One of those O’Dell girls.”
“The one in your class?”
“Yes, she’s up there with her father.”
“But why do you think it’s her, Tommy? I’m sure there’s lots of other people up
there it could be.”
“I just do.” Torture wouldn’t have dragged out of me my secret reason. I had
willed it, I had
made
it happen.
“There’s not much chance of it, though,” said Mr. Anstey. “How old are you
now, Tom, thirteen?” Mrs. Anstey swivelled her head in surprise and he said to
her, “I know, I know, he’s eleven like Brent, but he always seems older to me,
with all the smart grown-up stuff he can talk about. Now then, in your eleven
years of life, how many drownings have you heard about?”
“A nice few,” I murmured. I wished he’d go back to listening to the news, but
he seemed to have forgotten all about it.
“A nice few pretty well covers it,” he said. “Small boats capsizing in ponds,
snowmobiles plunging through ice, vessels foundering on the high seas, for God’s
sake, death by drowning is a way of life here in Newfoundland. It’s our sacred
culture. So, that could be anyone, which means there’s very little chance of it
being her.”
“And besides,” said Brent’s mother, “she’s too intelligent to
do anything foolish on the water. She’s the one who comes first in your class
all the time, isn’t she?” I felt the chagrin registering hot in my face. Brent
must have told his mother about my humiliation at Rosie’s hands.
Luckily, Mr. Anstey piped up again. “That O’Dell girl, now her mother is your
mother’s friend, I know. But her father, isn’t he the gentleman with the unusual
first name we met at your parents’ cocktail party last Christmastime?”
“Yes.”
“Now, Dad,” said Mrs. Anstey, “Don’t start that again. There’s not a thing in
the world wrong with Mr. O’Dell’s first name.”
“No, not one thing wrong. The first name of ‘Joyce’ on a big hairy-arsed man,
that’s just dandy.”
Even Brent laughed with me and he wasn’t normally amused by his father, however
funny. Mrs. Anstey tried to glower her husband quiet, but a big grin forced its
way onto her face as he continued. “And I suppose there was nothing in the world
wrong with how he carried on at that Christmas party, either, the way he
staggered up to Tom’s father and fired a drink of scotch in his face.”
Mrs. Anstey did her best to use the episode as a teaching experience for me and
Brent. “I heard him apologizing to Tom’s father for that, which is only right
and proper when you do something wrong.”
“Yes, and a good apology too: ‘Sorry, Joe, my mistake, that dirty look you gave
me when I was topping up my glass again made me think you were the wife.’”
Mrs. Anstey squelched her guffaw in mid-squawk and glanced at me. She probably
thought I’d be blabbing all this back to my mother and her friend Nina O’Dell.
“You’re making too much of that, Dad,” she said. “The man had a drop more to
drink at a party than he should have, that’s all, and anyway he’s a writer or
something.”
“Oh a writer, is he? That makes it okay, then. I’m sure Tom’s father is sorry
now he wanted to smack him in the gob.”
I recalled hearing from my bed after that party my father pronouncing to my
mother downstairs, “Gladys, that Joyce O’Dell, that psychotic goddamn drunk, is
never setting foot in this house again. And the same goes for that nasty
arrogant nouveau riche bastard Anstey—thinks because he’s made a few bucks
ripping people off at his used car stand the sun shines out of his hole.” To a
protest from Mom that he was going overboard, Dad
roared in a
whisper, “No. We only invited him and his wife in the first place because Tommy
and Brent are best friends.”
Mrs. Anstey said now in Twillingate, “The tide is out, boys. Why don’t you go
down and pick some snails off the rocks and catch some connors and tomcods from
the wharf?” When neither Brent nor I leapt up at the mention of our favourite
pastime, she said, “It won’t be her, Tommy. She’d have a life jacket on. Not
like the
boys
around here who think it’s too sissy to wear a life
jacket.”
“It’s got nothing to do with sissy, Mom,” said Brent. “When that longliner out
of Fogo Island went down last winter between the Offer Wadhams and the Funks,
the two dead bodies they found had their life jackets on. So, what odds if
you’ve got a life jacket on or not? When your number comes up, that’s it!”
“‘
What odds
?’ and,
‘That’s it
!’” said his father. “Where’d you
hear that old foolishness, Brent?”
“I heard you saying it.”
“Exactly. And when I shoot off foolish, stupid old sayings like that I’m
teaching you what the good old Newfoundland culture used to be. But you
youngsters in the new generation are not supposed to pay any attention to that
old nonsense anymore. For example, here’s some more Newfoundland culture from
the olden days for you. When I was about your age, my dying grandfather told me
that
his
old grandfather boasted to him that when he was a young man he
shot one of the last of those penguins called the Great Auk. And I said, ‘He
shot it, Poppy! My God, what’d he shoot it for? There’s no Great Auks left now!’
And he said, ‘He
had
to shoot it, boy. They were getting so scarce by
then he might never have had another chance.’”
Brent didn’t laugh and I tried not to. We’d learned in school how tragic had
been the extinction of those once countless birds by indiscriminate slaughter,
and we were at the self-righteous age. But I couldn’t help having one little
chuckle, before going sober again.
“Yes, go ahead and laugh, Tommy,” said Mr. Anstey. “How can you not laugh at
the good old Newfoundland culture? It’s so beautiful and insane.”
Brent’s mother said to me, “Phone home to St. John’s, my ducky, and relieve
your mind over who got drowned before you go out.”
I saw myself, when my mother or father verified my premonition, bursting into
tears and blurting out how it was all my fault. “I’ll wait and see if they call
here,” I replied. “They’ll let me know if anything’s wrong.”
“And save me two bucks for the long-distance call,” said Mr. Anstey.
“Besides, your father would have called already if there was
anything wrong. No one lets you know faster than him when there’s something
wrong.”
As we got up from the table, Brent’s father said, “Don’t go near the dump
today.”
Brent said, “Why would we go near the dump? I’ve never been near the dump in my
life.”
“Well, just don’t go there today.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m telling you not to. Who’s the father here, you or me?”
“Good effin’ question,” said Brent under his breath before heading out the
door.
On our way down to the landwash with our hooks and lines, Brent said to me,
“After we catch a few connors, let’s go in to the dump.”
“What for?”
“
What for
?” said Brent incredulously. “Because prick-face up there said
don’t go near the dump.”
“You figure something good is going on in there?”
“You can mark that down. I thought you’re supposed to hate that one O’Dell’s
guts.”
“I do. I can’t shagging stand her.”
“Then it can’t be her who drowned then. If you liked her, and definitely if you
were cracked about her, then that would be her who got drowned, guaranteed. But
if you can’t stand somebody, nothing bad ever happens to them.”
For some reason Brent’s excellent logic, no doubt paternal in origin, left me
more uneasy than before. Then I recalled hearing Mom on the phone with Nina
talking about how Pagan and she would be joining Rosie and Joyce in Sop’s Arm a
few days after their start for a driving trip. Maybe, owing to Brent’s logic,
God had deflected my death-prayer onto little Pagan. “Oh Jesus, Brent, Pagan
O’Dell was supposed to be going up there too,” I said.
“Frig,” said Brent before his next paternal cause-and-effect argument came to
him: “But they’re girls, boy. Don’t look so worried.”
“What has being a girl got to do with getting drowned, Brent, for the love of
fuck?”
He jumped ahead and faced me, walking backwards: “Okay, this is how it works.
It’s exactly like Dad said to Mom. He said: ‘You hardly ever hear tell of a
woman getting caught for drunk driving. It’s always men who get
nailed.’ So now he makes Mom drive the car home whenever they go out to the
club and she’s never been stopped by the cops yet, even though, like Dad says,
she always has just as much to drink as him. But before he started making Mom
drive home, he got caught and lost his licence for six months and the judge said
next time it would mean weekends in the clink. And it’s exactly the same with
girls drowning. You never hear tell of a girl getting drowned in a river or a
pond from a boat or canoe. When you hear the name of whoever it was who drowned
on that river, any bets? It won’t be them, it’ll be a man or a boy. Mark it
down.”
I conceded the merit of Brent’s argument, but inside I felt the return of an
intuitive certainty based on my privy prayer which no amount of powerful
reasoning could overcome.
The two of us lay on our stomachs on the warm wood of the wharf in the
delectable morning sun, dangling our baited hooks over the edge into the
placidly swelling sea water below. It was so clear and transparent we could see
the bottom sloping out and precipitously dropping many feet away, and the small
fish and jellyfish suspended in between. The usual three cats weaved over and
between us, purring and rubbing against our legs and shoulders. One animal, a
grey female barn cat, half the size of the other two, would poke her moist nose
into our ears in passing, making us laugh and swear and push her hard little
body gently, vainly, away. I loved her.
Within two minutes Brent pulled up his line to display a connor wriggling at
the end. He got to his feet above the mewling, chittering cats and yanked the
hook out. Then he threw the fish towards the end of the wharf and we watched the
cats race for the prize. The little female beat the two big males and crouched
over the flopping fish and took it into her mouth. One of the males tried to
snatch it from her but she emitted a ferocious guttural growl and cuffed him,
claws out, across the eyes, forcing him to slink back a step. Then she scurried
off the wharf with the fish tail wriggling from her mouth and disappeared behind
a rock. Yesterday, I’d wondered to Brent if the man up the road who “owned” that
great little cat would let me take her home to St. John’s with me when I left
next week. Brent said probably, and we could ask him today. But today, it didn’t
seem very important.