Legal action was levelled against Phonse Doucette and his junkyard. The place was condemned. Old cars and God knows what seeping into the ground and water table out there. Guns confiscated. Fun sucked wholesale out of this part of the world. Mounties came and issued summonses to anyone driving around the island without a license or with an unregistered, uninspected vehicle. Took all the dangerous kids off the road but a whole whack of their parents as well. Island became quiet for a bit. Health inspectors arrived. Problems
with the hall, the school, the post office, the Aetna accused of serving bad scallops.
Welcome to Hell Island
, Phonse was thinking.
Downsize this, you friggin' Halifax politicians
. How had they swooped down all of a sudden and ruined them? And why? To save the province some money. Try to pressure everyone off the island. Already a dozen families had jumped at the price offered for their houses. Good riddance. Let 'em go. Not true islanders in the blood. Couldn't be.
Phonse, alone in his junkyard office, sipping homemade John Bull bitter in a Big Eight pop bottle. A man's livelihood yanked out from under him. Not a fair thing to do. Curses on the graves of the mother and father of that little do-gooder pissant writer from the
Herald
who came sneaking around to sniff out his little pissy story. Like some kind of mongrel dog, no better. At least a dog would never be quite so vicious. Words had teeth. Phonse hadn't known that before.
Still, something left of value in a man sucking on a warm bottle of home brew, down and out but not dead yet. No sir, not by a long shot. Phonse was fairly unrehearsed at feeling sorry for himself. He walked outside to take a pee and surveyed what he still had. A big acreage of scrap metal still there. Stored in every bloody wreck and rusty hatchback out there were legends, too â lives, tales of what went on in those vehicles. Graveyard for automotive scrap and then some. Good to have them all together like this. Old friends, cousins â kissing cousins â made in Detroit,Windsor, Oshawa. Some straight from Japan, a couple of Ruski cars in there and Yugos, Skodas. Cars that outlived nations as they split asunder or fell apart.
“Everything, every bloody thing has a soul,” Phonse said out loud. A place and purpose to everything in its season, under heaven, or something like that.
Phonse would not move off to the mainland. Not unless he had to do it for his kids. They were gonna close the school for
sure. Fire regulations, health regulations. Arseholes, the lot of them. With arsehole regulations. Something else they came up with about the teacher, young Kit, being unfit. Leave it to mainlanders to screw it all up good, turn it all into lies or whatever it is they teach 'em to do in college and business school.
Nope. Mainland would be a hard scrape for the likes of Phonse. His life was falling apart into little scrap metal pieces around him and still he kept thinking that everything had a soul. And that was worth remembering. The island had a soul and he was part of it, it was part of him. If he moved ashore it'd be like taking your hand out of your pocket and not knowing what to do with it.
Bright guy like Moses should be able to figure something out. Moses always rolled with the punches. Phonse just never even felt the blows, never saw 'em, never felt 'em, and never swung back, always just stood his ground and kept doing what he did. Acadian away. All that good blood of Acadie swirling around in his veins with the alcohol from the beer. That's the ticket. Rely on the cultural tradition. The early Acadians, it was well known, were willing to listen to the Mi'kmaq, and therefore they learned from the land. Whatever was necessary to survive through a cold, hard winter. Eat the roots, store the berries, dry the meat and fish. Build a place that was safe and warm for a good, healthy Acadian family.
Phonse would go for a walk out through his yard and listen to the wrecks speak to him in person, listen to the voice of their many metallic souls. Listen to the sky and the wind and see what the island had to say for itself today.
As he made his way to the top of the hill where those old Ford and Dodge windscreens were splashing sunlight right back up at the sky like a furnace of light, Phonse had a curious feeling that he couldn't put into words. It was a sensation that cut through the beer and the verbal razzmatazz rattling around in his
brain like loose change in a fish bowl. Phonse stopped and looked down at the soil, where old radio wires, lug nuts, and parking lightbulbs were scattered â as if on purpose, as if part of some quirky but honest work of art. This thing that he was feeling was larger than he was, but he didn't have any words to attach to it, although he knew there was beauty in there, and sadness, and it was tied into history and Acadie. Loss and allegiance. Perseverance. Blind purpose in the face of adversity. Cheerful defiance. The full meal deal of something that made him feel small but not unimportant. What was going down was part of a grand scheme of notions, as if it was the very essence of truth, the marrow in the bone of life.
Phonse chose an old GMC pick-up truck. Opened the creaky door and sat down on the driver's seat. He put two hands on the steering wheel and felt the truck's history, a proud one, and he sensed that it had been a good machine and that the owner had taken good care of it until salt stole all the strength from its steel undercarriage.
The near tragedy of Angeline and the rescue had changed Bruce Sanger. He had a little room now in his head: panic, fear, desperate love for his family were all camped together in that room in close quarters and he'd open the door a peek and study those elements of his life until he could bring them into focus one more time.
While his little daughter had been in that cave, he had been sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned, windowless office in Manhattan. Phones going, computers threshing out numbers. People talking about the Mets and the Yankees somewhere over by the water cooler. He had a coffee in one hand when the phone rang. French roast. He dumped it straight into the keyboard. Sent off a hot, wet, caffeine message that hammered the
hard drive. Oh, that long, agonizing trek by cab to the airport, then on to Nova Scotia. He had sworn to himself he would haul his family back home safe and sound to Upper Montclair, that the whole summer was a fiasco. What had he been thinking?
But then as he arrived and saw Angeline safe and sound, heard the whole incredible tale, he collected what was left of his frazzled self and settled into that little old house where women once made sauerkraut from bushels and bushels of cabbages. And after that, he began to really open up his eyes and ears to things going on there on the island. He heard the language of the rain on the roof, and the soft winds in the trees. He listened to the sea as it settled itself back to normal after Freda was diminished to nothing at all. He smelled the sea everywhere. At night, all four of them in a dark living room with the lights off, with nothing but a candle burning, they sat around on the rag rug on the floor and just talked. Then they'd all tuck into their own sleeping bags and sleep there on the floor. This place, this place, something about this place that Bruce kept trying to formulate into words. But Elise had caught onto it long before. She knew she didn't have to trap the feeling with words. She just knew.
First there had been the relief that Angeline was alive, then the argument. They would all go back to New Jersey tomorrow, then the darn kids, not wanting to leave. His bold statement that he would stay until the end of summer. And Elise talking about the old woman. There were invisible threads tying the whole lot of them together. That goofy but brave college kid, Greg, and all the island people who came out to show support.
By the end of the week, Bruce wasn't sure New York even existed. He thought about his job and wondered why he bothered. What was he, after all, but a kind of truck driver for other people's money, shuttling it here and there over electric wires. Was he really helping the planet or was it just a kind of con job he'd done on himself and his clients? Holy shit. How many wineries
can you buy in Chile and still say you are doing it for the environment and then turn over a yearly profit of 21 percent to your smiling investor? Face it, if the investor wasn't turning a tune of percentages, he'd be out of Chilean grapes and coming up with a good ethical excuse to be strip mining bauxite in Malaysia.
And now here he was, with his family â that's all that mattered. The island had nearly taken his daughter, but the island's people had conspired to bring her back. Elise snuggled into his neck. He felt her breathing upon him, heard his children breathing too and listened to them squirm. All the while, the language of a soft evening rain, like poetry, like music.
Monday morning rolled around and Bruce snapped out of the spell. He decided he had said things he couldn't live up to. He convinced himself that it was safe to leave them here yet again and go back to Wall Street, sort out whatever snarls there were from his absence. How many of his ethical investors would be able to have some empathy for him and his family crisis? He wondered. His boss was relatively sympathetic, but that was his style, after all. He had good people working for him and knew they needed physical hugs and perks and room to sort out personal problems when they arose. He only hired solid performers and then treated them with respect and kindness. The bottom line was that it worked well and his traders remained loyal to the company and the bonus at the end of each year.
And then Bruce was back in New York. City streets of lower Manhattan on a summer day, a swelter of cabs and men moving merchandise on rolling racks, on trucks, on trading floors at the Exchange. Everything hot and sweaty and being hustled from one place to another unless it was jammed up on the crosstown
streets or backlogged on a mainframe with a fancy virus stuck up its ass. And back in the office, the big trouble with Bruce was that he knew he had lost his edge. He had missed the Icelandic geothermal company going public on the NASDAQ entirely. So little of this mattered to him now. Now that he'd stared down the thought of his daughter drowning in a dark cave with himself sitting here in New York screaming inside his brain â paralyzed by time and distance to do anything. He was a prisoner trapped between two worlds. He would last only a few days before begging the jailer â begging himself â for release.
Bruce Sanger flew into Halifax from Newark yet again that summer, and it felt like he was coming home. This a surprise to a man not easily surprised by much of anything. Plunked himself down in another rental car, a white Taurus like the last one, and drove for two hours, parked her by the harbour, didn't even lock the doors. A few minutes later he was on the ferry. The ferry that would soon be no more.
The wind was clear and dry, even out in the harbour, over the water. North wind, a fair breeze, sky and sea all around like they owned the place. Ragged Island out there on the horizon. He undid his tie and wondered at the fact that he'd left it tight around his neck all the way here. He slipped it off and held it out over the water, noticed how much it looked like the noose of a hangman. He looked left and right to make sure no one was watching and he dropped it in the water. Red stripes on blue, floating and then catching the wake as the ferry cruised seaward. Bruce made a tiny salute. Why did it feel so good to drop a forty-five-dollar tie into the sea? He was overcome by a foolish, teenage desire to strip naked and drop everything into the drink. Instead, he pulled out his wallet. No. Not the whole thing. Just the American Express Executive Card. He had cards aplenty
there in his wallet. He tried tearing it once, but the American Express card was made of tough plastic. He bit into it, though, and left teeth marks, then pitched it like an old baseball card into the wake of the ferry, where the little sucker floated.
A gull dropped down from the sky and poked once at it but, finding it unsavoury, didn't scoop it up.
Moses and Viddy sitting at their kitchen table with hot coffee cups. Talking about selling the boat. If they sold the boat they'd have enough money to stay on the island and not work. Then again, if they sold the boat, they couldn't go ashore for supplies once a week or haul the kids back and forth to the boarding school ashore. But if they kept the boat, they'd have to move ashore so Moses or Viddy could find regular work. A fine fix that was.
“Jesus, I don't want to be separated from the kids each week. We'd be like strangers on weekends.”
“But they're closing the school for sure. Wiring. Mould, they say. Mould in the walls. They're talking of tearing it down.”
“Mould. Mould and dust mites and anything they can use. I'd rather my kids suffered a little mildew in their lives than have to move ashore and suffer all that.”
“We're screwed,Viddy old girl. Funny, I thought you'd be the one to say you didn't mind moving ashore. Stores and such.”
“I know. I'm surprised too. Something about old days and old ways.”
“Tansy and wormwood to cure whatever. Jigging from a dory. Winter haul-up, kraut and summer savoury. Mending nets. How can all that stuff just fade off into the past?”
“You sound like you're a hundred years old.”
“And then some,” Moses said. “I'm my father's son and his father's grandson. I got their stories fixed in my head to
the point that I think I've lived all those lives. I know all the nooks and crannies of the past, but I don't have a clue about the future.”
“Nobody does, I guess.”
“They all laughed at me, you know. With the whale-watching thing and all. When it worked out, they hushed up, but when the tours
didn't
work out, they were all down at the wharf saying they knew it was gonna turn out like this. They thought I was a fool, but a couple of them men quietly thanked me for saving the ferry and the island for a while. But then when it all turned to gull shit, even they started blaming me. They did that you know. All those ones we call our friends and neighbours.”