But many stayed for what was turning out to be a fine, fine September on the island. Cloudless days, very little wind. Kit and Greg held some classes outside, took the kids on hikes. Science lessons by the shore with rocks and living things. Kit was impressed with how much Greg knew and what a good teacher he was. Kit was feeling pretty good about herself, but she had begun to worry about Sylvie. She had not seen hide nor hair of her old friend for five days, and it seemed like she had just upped and left. And that seemed impossible. It was rumoured that she'd just gone ashore to visit some old friends who had moved off already, but no one had actually seen her leave the island. This wasn't like her. But Kit knew Sylvie was okay. The old girl was smart and resourceful and was her own woman. Sylvie had certainly pulled Kit back from the brink of madness before Greg had come along to keep her sane.
Now the two of them taught side by side. Unpaid. Unofficial altogether. As far as the province was concerned, the school was permanently closed. Kit's contract was terminated. Island parents, however, had backed Kit's ideas about keeping on as if nothing had happened. She said she didn't care about money, about pay. Everyone said they'd work something out. Barter, or whatever. Food and firewood could be provided. Phonse and Moses said they'd both work at providing whatever else the pair needed. Greg had told islanders he was really happy to be able to stay on and help. He hadn't graduated from St. Mary's but he was close. He'd be a good teacher, he promised. Hell, after the cave thing, all those who kept their kids on the island trusted Greg. They admired the son of a gun and most even approved of the fact that he'd moved in with Kit Lawson. He was sure to be a better catch than the dope grower.
Most of the kids thought school was very cool. Greg had invented a bunch of games for teaching math. Kit had little kids creating fantastic, goofy poems. There were videos and computer labs and music. The American family had donated VCRs and computer gear. A typical day ran the gamut from nature hikes to Internet research. The old and the new mixed up and shook up like some fancy pedagogical milkshake, and the kids loved it.
Sure, island people were still hurting in any number of ways, most of them financial. Not much money coming into or going out of Ragged Island. But there you had it. Not so different from the old days.
September, September, September. A gift of weather, a long last pull at summer. The hum of bad news always in the background, though. A cold, dark November to come. Blasty weather of December and the ice and snow of the dark months. Days already getting shorter. Nights cool, though â good for sleeping.
Some fishing activity, but hardly worth the price of fuel. Just take one day after the next. Like the old times. Not much sign of anybody from the province since several families sold their houses. Boarded them up like something gone out of business. Sad. Sorry, sorry thing. But it was chin-up for the rest. Bloody stay put and forge on with a life. See how she sails. Weather it out. Or watch it get worse. Not such a bad thing to be cut off from the mainland, really. Cut off from the world.
Moses cut the engine and let the boat thump gently up against the big truck tires nailed onto the dock.“All ashore that's goin' ashore, bud,” Moses said. He hopped off onto the dock and seemed to be walking away.
The quiet settled upon Yoshi until Moses fired up an old, cut-down Chevy Nova parked at the Aetna Café across the road and roared out onto the wharf. Moses set Yoshi's suitcase in the back and said he'd run him out to see Bruce Sanger in this contraption that he referred to as “the truck.” When he dropped Yoshi off at his destination, the Japanese man gave him a small lapel pin, an unlikely gift, with an image of Buddha on it. “For good luck,” he said.
“Right on. Thanks, bud.” Moses had no idea that the pin was solid gold and made by a famous metal sculptor in Kyoto, that Yoshi had bought the pin for something like $300 American. Moses liked it okay, but studying it in the glinting sunlight, decided it was something more for Viddy than him and maybe she'd think it exotic or whatever. Never hurts to come home bearing gifts, even if it was just a little trifling thing like this.
Yoshi had already decided he did not like the island. He loved it. He wanted to give up life in Tokyo and move here. No, he
wouldn't buy it, but he knew that he could probably afford it, backed by some of his friends. If he wanted to, he could own this whole amazing, lovely place, create a world there, bring his wife. Forget about Tokyo and the sewer rats he worked with. But as he sipped English tea and ate zucchini muffins with Bruce and his lovely wife, Elise, he absorbed the sorry tale of what had recently happened to the island and knew that he had not come here just to do something selfish; he had come to do something much larger.
“I'm not going back to New York,” Bruce told his good friend. It was only his second ever face-to-face encounter with Yoshi, although they had talked on the phone for many years. Once they had crossed flight paths in Honolulu, spent an evening drinking at a bar in Waikiki, become close allies in the crazy world of commerce, then flown off in opposite directions. But here they were on this island. For a reason. Insane as it was. “I'll have to fly down once a month and do the office thing for a few days, then come back. We're renting the house in Montclair. In the end, we let the kids decide.”
Todd was at his laptop in the corner, in a chat room with some kids in Germany and Florida. They were discussing the pictures recently beamed down by the little rover thing creeping around Mars. Angeline was standing behind him trying to read the screen, fanning herself with an exquisite paper fan from Japan that this visitor had just given to her.
“How long can you stay,Yoshi?”
“Five days. Then I must go back. But I will return. Often.”
“Maybe you could bring your wife.”
Yoshi lit up.“Yes, I will bring Taeko.” Twenty hours or so on a plane and three more hours on ground and at sea did not seem so great an inconvenience if it meant coming back to a place like this.
Elise wanted Yoshi to meet Sylvie.
She hadn't even seen Sylvie for a while and wondered why she was keeping to herself. Maybe she was sick. Worth checking to make sure she's okay.
Elise knocked at the door. No answer. Went in and discovered how quiet the house was. Everything in order. Door not locked. Dishes washed and stacked. Floors clean. No note on the table or anything. Nothing felt wrong. Since moving here, Elise had begun to trust her intuition more. That was Sylvie's doing. She'd taught her this. Actually, Elise was relearning something she had once been good at. As a little girl, Elise had believed herself to be psychic, but later she convinced herself she was not. She just wanted it to be so. When she gave up on her metaphysical hopes, she had closed down her female intuitive skills. The island and Sylvie had helped bring them back. Once she was out of the loop of her smartass friends from the glitter sector back in northern New Jersey, it was amazing how much more perceptive she was.
So she sat at Sylvie's table and let her mind work at this. Had Sylvie moved ashore as some believed? It did not seem likely. What then? She felt like she was overstepping her bounds when she went into Sylvie's bedroom and sat down on her bed. Again, nothing felt wrong. Elise plucked three strands of long, grey hair from the pillow and held them in her hand. On the small table by the bed was a glass of water, half full, not much to go on either. Beside the glass was a small guidebook to star constellations. The spine cracked as she opened it to a page with a bookmark made from what was locally called “fish leather.” On the open page were two maps, one of the dark side of the moon, one of the side of the moon that faced earth. With ink, Sylvie, or someone, had circled the designation “The Sea of Tranquility.” And someone had marked an exclamation mark after the name.
Near sunset, Elise, Todd, Angie, and Bruce accompanied Yoshi Kojima to the seaward side of the island, where the sea had indented the land with the large basin known simply as Front Bay.“Front” because it faced out to the open sea. Angie pointed to the place on the headland where the sea cave was. Because the story had a happy ending, the cave was now a proud and exciting part of her personal history. Todd, however, always wished she wouldn't repeat that story. He felt the stinging guilt of his bad judgement that had almost killed his sister, and it sobered him whenever it came up. Sometimes he still cried late at night, but he did it silently so no one would know. Todd reached down and picked up a starfish, still alive, that had been left high and dry by a retreating tide. He hobbled across a few slippery rocks and set the creature back into the waters of the bay.
Yoshi watched the boy and his sister who followed him and felt a profound happiness for his friend at having a son and daughter. He also felt a searing ache in his heart that he had chosen career over family, as if the two could not coexist. But he would not dwell on anything negative. The bay was beautiful. Broad and deep, unspoiled, untouched. North Americans were virtually unaware of the richness of this place, the resources right beneath their noses. He brought that line of thinking to a dead end. Remembered going to the shrine at Nakamura to pay homage to the Big Buddha there that had survived typhoons and even tidal waves. He had thrown change into the grate for good luck, lit incense for good measure, and added his most sincere request to the prayer wheel. And Buddha had been kind to him, despite the fact that he was never a devoted follower of Buddhism. For he had travelled here, all the way to Nova Scotia, not really because he expected it to be profitable, but because his heart told him to do this thing. Now he was amazed to discover that
he
had
something to offer the people who lived here. It would not be a matter of just taking. Balance would be achieved, yin and yang. Passive and active. And what was to be taken would be put back in some way. It would be restored. In his own way,Yoshi thought, he would become a kind of bodhisattva.
Gulls swooped in the sunset. As they walked onto a small, sandy length of beach along the bay,Yoshi was astonished at the way the washed-up seaweed was splayed out on the delicate sand as if arranged by some artist. Swirls of angel hair, DNA twists of kelp, rockweed, and dulse arranged in some perfect, perfect pattern. The golden lighting of the setting sun gave everything an enhanced colour. Reds, browns, purple and yellow. Greens of sea lettuce almost explosive. If you weren't careful you'd end up stepping on and ruining priceless art. But wasn't that the way of the earth itself? He turned, and Bruce saw the curious, indecipherable expression on the face of his Japanese friend. Yoshi wanted very much to explain, but he discovered that he'd forgotten how to speak English. Perhaps he should at least utter something in Japanese, but even his native tongue failed him just then and so he remained silent as he watched Todd and Angeline remove their shoes and wade carefully into the shallows of the immaculate, darkening sea.
Sylvie rowed the old dory until the sun had set and her arms ached badly. Her breathing was ragged, but all of the elements of her fatigue were pure pleasure. She had allowed the current to pull her far out into the Atlantic on a dropping tide. She watched the sun set over the waters to the west. There was absolutely nothing about being alone at sea this night that brought fear. There was not a whiff of loneliness about this venture. Purpose and pattern and something close to instinct. But it would not be examined deeper. All she knew was that she was
doing a thing that would ultimately be good for the island and good for her. Some kind of pilgrimage. She was alone and would not have to explain to anyone what she was doing this for.
She had supplies. Several gallons of fresh water. Bread. Some tins of herring for bait, a hand line to fish. Blankets for warmth, rain gear for foul weather. There was no life jacket, however. Even Sylvie laughed at the thought of an old woman, alone at sea, after some misadventure, falling into the drink and bobbing around for God knows how long with a floatation device. Like the stubborn fishermen before her on the island, she believed such a slow, malingering death in icy water would not be for her if it came to that. She'd rather go quickly.
In the morning, the sky was grey but not threatening. If there was rain to spill from those pregnant clouds, it would not bring wind or waves. The sky had many soft layers of differing textures tending from palest grey to darker tones near blackness. Sylvie liked the fact that she could not distinguish the line between sea and sky in any direction. No land was in sight. She sat upright, afloat on a calm sea in the middle of a grey world.
A lone gull landed on the bow of her dory before she woke. An old herring gull, large for his breed, with silvery wings and a white torso. A yellowish beak and alert eyes. A gull accustomed to following fishing boats to sea, no doubt. Fewer of those boats in the water these days. The bird made himself comfortable beside an old woman alone with her thoughts in a dory. Sylvie broke a loaf of dark pumpernickel bread that she had made and fed pieces to the gull, who wolfed down the bread with no sign of gratitude whatsoever. Yet the company was welcome, and even when she decided to quit feeding him and save the food for herself, the gull did not seem to mind, but closed one eye, lifted one leg, and appeared to have fallen asleep like that. Sylvie, too, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on the images of whales from her youth. She still believed she was in the current that would
send her in the right direction, but there was no reference point out here and it was sometimes impossible to tell if she was moving anywhere or standing still. She closed her eyes again and waited until she could feel it. Taking the oars into her blistered hands, she began to row very gently in long, smooth strokes and let the wood dip into the water so gracefully that it was as if the surface had been pierced by two very sharp, long knives.