A flock of tiny shorebirds appeared and settled on the rocks nearby, picked through the rotting seaweed that smelled like something sacred to Sylvie and David. Beach peas and sea rocket grew between the stones. A few fishing boats found their way across the sea in front of the island â too far from shore to make out who they were. Year-old seals came up on the flat stones of the shoal and lay on their backs, then at length slipped back into the sea.
The day made her love David more for his silence, but it also gave her mixed emotions because she didn't know if she loved him or the island more. She wasn't sure she could love both, and even though she would not be moving away, she felt like she was betraying some intimate, profound relationship. But she did not fight the sonorous current within her that would bring them to marriage in the little Baptist church with the bare walls, hard seats, and the endless drone of old turgid hymns cauterizing everything that seemed alive and chaotic and wonderful.
In Sylvie's eighty-year-old imagination, David Young is still alive. Still sixteen, or maybe eighteen. His was the privilege of not growing older like the rest who remained on the island. Sylvie sees him as being yet another gift that the island gave to her. A gift with tenure. Time and memory have polished David, the first husband, like a beach stone, into something hard and true. Born of chaos, a child of a family who believed the world was ruled by chaos, by chance, David had come to her, grew up with her through childhood as if an invisible other, and then crystallized suddenly one winter day into something that would be the centre of her life.
Sylvie sits alone with a cup of cold tea on a summer afternoon in her backyard carved from the forest, her back to the sea, surrounded by tiny flowers of early summer. Spring beauties, blue violets, Indian cucumbers, and the fluted, spore-laden stems shooting up from the furry green moss. She has the great gift of knowing truly where she belongs. Here. Now. Inside her, time can drift. David is still with her and she can smell burning rubber boots and she can feel the pinch of biting blackflies although there are none out at this time of day.
Their first night of marriage, they talked through the darkness. They touched, yes, but only tentatively, briefly, fingertips brushing hair, tracing the collarbone at the neck, palms resting on the other's elbow, hands cupped on the other's shoulder. Sylvie was amazed at David's love of ideas, notions. “Suppose we have children, good children, healthy children, and they lead good honest lives and grow up and they have children, good children, happy children, well-meaning children who have their own after that. And one of those children, our great-grandchild, becomes an inventor or a scientist or something and discovers something truly, truly wonderful, like a way to feed everybody on earth so no one will starve, right? And this is a great wonderful thing.”
Sylvie wondered at the odd nature of thinking of this man she had married. Here she lay in bed, expecting to be treated to some kind of new experience, some physical thing that both scared her and fascinated her. She had been warned it could be a harsh thing sometimes, but she was prepared, mentally and physically. But this was not the way at all.
“Now suppose this new discovery gets into the wrong hands and is used to create famines and starvation instead of preventing
suffering. Suppose thousands or more die. Just suppose that happened.”
“David, what?”
He let out a long sigh. “I don't know. Does that mean it would be wrong for us to have a child that would lead to such a terrible thing?”
“How would we know?” Sylvie asked.
“We can't know. That's it. Each of us, each married couple like us, has the power to possibly change the world for good or bad. And we can't do a thing about it.”
“Then why concern ourselves with it? What can we do?”
“We can't and I guess that's my point. I'm sorry. It's my grandfather talking here,” David admitted.
“I didn't know I was climbing into bed with your grandfather,” Sylvie said, teasing.
“Don't get me wrong, I want to have children. As many as you want.”
“I want ten,” she joked.
“Ten it is. Why not twelve?”
“Twelve is too many to feed.”
“We'll start with one and see how it goes from there.”
“I want all of our children to stay here on the island.”
“So do I,” David agreed. “But once they outgrow us, we can't make them stay.”
“No, but we can make sure they love the island like we love the island.”
David said nothing.
“Do you love this place?” she asked.
“I do, but not in the same way you do. I could almost be jealous if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to be jealous?”
“No. Let's go to sleep now.”
Sylvie has a swarm of pictures in her head, the tea some strange, exotic drug now that has catapulted her mind into another place. Things that rule her life: fish and cabbage, the backs of whales in sunlight, that mysterious moon pulling the sea slowly in and out every day, the swimming seals. Generations of German and English and French ancestors, for she could trace her roots to all three. The island had lured all three nationalities together.
And she remembers David, standing in oilskins not a hundred yards offshore, hauling up nets with cold, slapping fish, a great steady stance he had in that dory made by his grandfather. She could still see the silhouette, the slanting posture, the wet net in his hand, back bent under the weight. His steady hand with a strong pull. While David stood there, German soldiers on the other side of the sea were slaughtering innocent families, preparing to slaughter the French and the English. In her memory, though, those two brief years of her first marriage, less than two years really, were a tenured stint in paradise.
March of 1936. Bad news for the fishermen. Almost no market at all for the valuable catch. Hope, however, in the fact that big ships would dock soon by the government wharf and look for men to go to the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Good money to be made from seal pelts.
“I'll be gone no more than a month. Hard work, but we need the money. Save some up, spend some to build up the old place here. Plenty of food on the table after this no matter what the fishing does. Do something nice for you when I get back. Don't fancy the thought of staying on a big sloppy metal boat that long with a bunch of mainlanders, but they say the
Allen Grant
is a good solid ship, steady captain and all that.”
And all that. Sylvie did not like the thought of butchering baby seals. The greys, the harbour, the hooded ones. She was
opposed to the idea. Did not want to debate the difference between catching fish and killing baby seals on ice floes near Isle Magdalene on a ship captained by a Lunenburg man and owned by Halifax investors, they said.
“Good chance to maybe set a bit of money by and eventually get my own boat. Fish prices will come back. Here's an opportunity at building a thing up. Maybe something better for our young ones down the road.”
And like that, one morning, he was gone, and Sylvie was waking up alone in her bed. A March morning. Rain. Eight days of it. Walked to the sea every day, the sea of rains. Pelting, icy, cold, drenching. Her own oilskins and high rubber boots to protect her. Seals right up on the island shoreline, one or two with big, round, dark eyes, not even afraid of her.
Even then she still felt the tug of the current. She stopped and stared at the clear little brook, the wet, glowing moss that looked so vital in any weather. Sylvie dropped a twig in the rapids and watched it get swept away, then catch on a shelf of root, then swirl in a little eddy round and round, then disappear down the watercourse.
When the news came back to her about David, it was delivered by his father. David's father â a stout man who carried a hat in his hand almost always, worrying its brim until the brims wore out. He came without his wife, knocked once, walked in. Winter had completely slipped away in the rain and left a damp, warm procession of days. Blackflies, mistaking it for summer, had come alive. They were in the man's hair and he brushed them away, a dozen of them, tiny black gnats. He caught one, however, and pinched it between thumb and forefinger, then stared at the burst of blood, the red stain like a lost thought on his finger.
“On the ice,” he said. “Shift of wind. Up 'til then things'd been going good. Nearly ready to return. Ice so unpredictable at that time of year. David was always one to be cautious, you would know that better than most. But he went in, not much after sun-up. Too far from his companions, I guess. Couldn't get a proper grip on the ice, lost his pick, legs and hands going numb, I suppose.”
Sylvie didn't hear a thing beyond that.
“Guess we'll hear the full story when they come back. It's a sorry thing for all of us.”
He swatted at blackflies again as he put his hat back on his head. “Sorry for ⦠bringing all this in,” he said, waving at the bugs as he walked back out.
So, at eighty, Sylvie still imagines this scene, created from the clever guesswork of her imagination.
The sun is just barely up, shining bright. A man, her husband, climbs down from the side of a big metal ship that sits like a human grey disgrace in all that white, frozen beauty. Her husband rows with the other sealers across calm water laced with bits of ice stubble, docks besides a solid white sheet, flat as a stove top. She hates that pickaxe in his hand and can see the dried seal blood on the sleeves of his coat. She sees him head off away from the rest. Preferring to be alone at the dirty deeds rather than talking it through with the others.
She hears the crunch of his rubber boots on the hard snow atop the ice. A short hike across the frozen expanse and there's a mother with several seal pups. She sees their dark human eyes. Sylvie cannot help but think of those eyes as the eyes of children. The irony, the terrible irony of her David, so fearful of the future â of inadvertently committing some crime against humanity â doing this. She will never voice her view that her husband is some kind of killer, that they all are. It will be a private condemnation that she can closet away from the world of speech. For she
loves this man deeply, has travelled every twist and turn of thread of thought in his mind that sent him out onto the ice at sunrise.
David is doing this for her, for their children who will never be born. She will forgive him. She hears his ragged breath as he hurries, stepping across one small space between the ice pans, a distance no greater than hopping across the North Brook. She sees the boot land with a hard thwack on the ice. She sees the axe swing free in his hand. She wants to be able to see his face, but she cannot. Perhaps it's better that way. What would she see in his eyes? Determination? Exhaustion, more likely. Eyes fixed on something a million miles away. Thinking of her, perhaps. Thinking of the island.
David stumbles on a small ice ridge, collects himself, walks on towards the mother seal and her several young ones. The ice is bleached pure and white as white can be. A sound can be heard now as the other men drive axe picks into the skulls of young and old seals alike as their mothers howl and try to defend their brood, only to find themselves butchered too. Something so appallingly wrong with this scene that it is inconceivable to Sylvie that she herself is somehow connected to this. But she is connected, inextricably so. This spectacle is part of her life, will never leave her.
David, she knows, is now sick at heart and exhausted beyond anything he has known before. Aches for his island and home, vowing never to sign on for such a thing as this again. The sun is over his shoulder and he turns to feel the slightest tingle of warmth, warm as the breath of his wife asleep beside him on a winter night when he cannot begin to find the proper channel markers that will lead him to sleep. But he is exhausted still on this morning, his feet are like stone weights in the bottom of lobster pots.
He has learned to read the ice, knows that he can trust even small pans if they have the right texture, the right look about
them. He thinks he knows this frozen landscape, but he is wrong. He makes a leap onto a small ice pan, feels it tilt and give. He is amazed as he realizes that his brain had already given him the signal that it was a wrong step. Old instincts working but a split second too slowly, failing him. A steady stance in a dory is not the same as walking on springtime ice. He drops the pick, feels himself sliding, as if he has fallen onto a big kitchen table face first and its wooden legs give. He tries to grab onto something and then realizes the small ice island is upending itself and coming fully over on him.
Cold knives of water fill up his boots and his oilskins and the hard ice comes down above him, shutting out the light and the sky. His hands form into fists and he pounds at it, then tries to push it away, but it has suddenly become a cunning, cruel thing of immense weight.
Sylvie feels the bursting pain in the throat of her husband as he tries to scream, tries to claw his way along the underside of the ice to find the sweet, living air to feed his lungs. She feels the panic, the fear, things completely new and alien to her calm, cerebral husband. Then suffers the immense sadness and regret that comes with his final exhaustion and the knowledge of his foolish error.
Sylvie draws a deep breath and tests her own breathing. With eyes still closed, she can see the surviving seals upon the ice with the morning sun warming their fur. She hears other men shouting in the enthusiasm of their bloody work but she does not turn in that direction. She is looking to the east, towards the rising sun, blooming warm red and yellow over the panorama of the ice field. She makes what peace she can with David's belief that we live or die by chance alone. And envisions what is left of her husband, floating up in the stream between two stolid ice islands, his back to the sky, rubber boots keeping the feet afloat, his face down, as if something is of extraordinary interest on the bottom of the ocean.