Blind. He could walk blind through this place and know the exact pebble he stood upon simply from the smells. There, roasted squid; only Ambrose had dried squid this early in the year. And that sour smell was from the old midwife sloshing dirty dishwater outside her stoop for the past thirty years. And there, the smell of Melita’s chicken coop; never cleaned it, she didn’t— though it was the only thing not spruced to a shine around her. And the wet of Manny’s sawdust heaped beside his wood-house, the seaweed rotting minerals into his mother’s potato beds, the strong trouty smell of the brook water, the freshness of the falls, the sweet smell of grass from the meadow luring him more quickly toward the footbridge, leading home. And if the wind was off the sea, smothering everything with the smell of brine, the sounds would guide him along: the muffled voices behind the doors, each of them distinguishable in their familiarity, the hens clucking, the
baa
from his mother’s goats, the rushing of the brook, the deepening roar of the falls.
He strolled off the beach, crossing over the footbridge. The brook was wild beneath it, and with the escalating roar of the wind, the falls, and the sea, it felt as though he were caught in a full-out storm. He paused before the back wall of his house. Even if there was anybody inside with the fire going and lamp lit, you’d never know it, he thought grimly. From this vantage point, it always looked emptied, abandoned.
Bending into the wind, he veered off the path leading to his door and trekked instead down over the meadow to the beach and up toward the neck. The sea was a dirty grey crashing upon the rocks. Soon, with the failing light, and aside from the sparkles of plankton rippling like stars along the catacomb shoreline, she would be black. But he didn’t need to see her. Like the land, she, too, had been imprinted into his brain. He knew her every fit, her every calm—from her ripples as she stirred with the first breath of morning into wavelets as the breeze taunted her further. Best of all, he knew her laziness beneath an easy wind, how her long, slow swells lent a greater buoyancy to his boat. And he knew, too, how quickly those swells could deepen and be whipped into twenty-foot peaks by squalling winds, and how to get the hell home afore those peaks crested and toppled, toppling him and his boat, too, if he were too heavy with fish. And when she stirred too deeply, when she scraped her floors and hurtled herself forward, and her whole surface darkened beneath the white of her spit, and ships disappeared in the length of her troughs, and her fury reverberated through the rocks of the head as she thundered and crashed against them— well, he felt then the strength of this mother, and he wondered at his fear of overfishing, that mere man could hamper such a powerful, massive thing as an ocean.
He wondered, too, at his resistance to leave the shores of Cooney Arm, when it was the same sea that washed upon all shores, for it was the ocean that mattered, never the land upon which she cascaded. In his grandfather’s day, the hills had no names, for it was toward the sea that they looked, and her shelves and ridges that they named. But, no, not so for him. It was the headlands and harbours that graced her shores that he was just as beholden to, most especially this arm, Cooney Arm, onto whose land he was born. Like a homespun blanket, it was, whose four corners held firmly to the bedpost, despite the ripples, bulges, and protrusions caused by the growing, squirming souls sheltering beneath it.
He had stood, once, amidst the ruins of an abandoned settlement. He had seen the stumps of the homes that had once been; the well, all emptied and dried; window frames and doors flung hither by the wind and rotting into the ground; mounds of dirt and grass covering the floors like graves. And he had felt cold, standing there, listening to the moaning of the trees as though lamenting the loss of the souls they had once sheltered, and the grass bending to and fro with the wind, searching for the children who had once adorned the fields like daisies.
He rose from the rocks upon which he clung, looking back through the darkening settlement of Cooney Arm and the little patches of yellow light stitching her shores. Now she, too, was threatened with death, her homes mutilated to stumps, her wells parched, and the wharves and flakes left to rot. For without the breath of her homesteaders sweeping through her grass, without their blood trumpeting down her hillside, carousing across her meadow, without their hands moulding her seedlings and touching their tongues to her fruit, she, too, would die.
No, he thought. Not him. Maybe others could up and move, but not him. He was as rooted into this strip of land as were the woods around him.
A burst of flankers poured from his chimney, its fiery orange burning through the evening. She was home. Had she spoken? Had she protested his thought? He paused as a patch of yellow lit up his window. His shoulders sank as he heard his brother’s accusations that he was stuck in the past, still living in his father’s day. Was she accusing him, too? And was he? Was he so embedded that time swept past him? That he was no more than the mute beast in the field? Is that what she, his Addie, saw—one of his mother’s goats, mindlessly chomping back feed all day long whilst the rest of the world grew modern around him?
It was a sickening thought, yet almost immediately his answer was no. Undoubtedly, as a feathered creature shapes and grows into its habitat, so was he woven into the fabric of this land. But it was when he lifted his head at the day’s end that he differed, when he saw the all of what he’d done and what he had become. For he was more than the land and the sea. He was an accumulation of all that had come before him—his father, his grandfather, his greatgreat-grandfathers who had coddled and had been coddled by these waters since time began. A repository, that’s what he was, a casket into which the old put themselves. No, not a casket, a sieve whereby they continued to flow through him, and those others who, God willing, would come from him. An ocean of ancients is what lay behind him, and he, little more than a drop of rain before his immersion into that great sea.
Perhaps she did see him as a mindless galoot covered in gurry. Perhaps the whole damn world saw him as that. But he knew different. And to remove himself from the very thing that sustained him would kill him as it would kill it. Yet that was the very thing being asked of him—no, not asked, told—that he go pour himself over the outgrowth of another. And for some, that ought to be the way of it, to pull their past forward and combine it with the newness of another to make a different thing.
But ought not there be some things that remained the same, as with the trees and rocks around him? Ought not some things stand still for those others caught in the cyclone of change, should they need to return? Even he, this lowly man clinging to a rock, could see in the buildup of the offshore fishing fleets the germ of their own demise. What then? Had it been for a better thing, merely because it was bigger, newer?
The patch of yellow beyond which Addie had sat dimmed. She was standing now, blocking the lamp, her hands cupped against the pane, staring out, looking for him. He should go in; she might be worried, he thought. Since the night she’d led him and his mother off the head, she had become edgy whenever he was a bit late.
She pulled away from the window, and immediately his house vanished into darkness. He half rose. Had the lamp run out of oil? No, no, he could see its flickering now through the bedroom window, a faint flickering, as though she had set it down in the hallway near the bedroom door. She was taking herself to bed. His stomach sank a bit further. He felt cold without the warmth of her light, without her watching out for him. His eyes trailed along the dots of light around the arm. But it was hers he kept coming back to, kept wanting for comfort.
Immediately, his window lit up. She was back, lifting the curtain aside, her light spilling out through, and with it another part of the awful, beautiful truth he’d already learned that evening: that just as those from the past continuously flowed through him, so, too, were those in his midst a grid through which he himself had to pass. And who more than she? Had he not built himself around her as he had the sea? No doubt he could resist a faceless government, tighten his belt and live as he always had, but could he resist her should she start packing? And even if he could persuade her to stay alongside him on a deserted beach with a failing way of life and where never a gadget of modernity could reach her, would he?
He sank back down, shaking his head. No doubt, in true Addie fashion, she probably would stay beside him, alone in Cooney Arm, and never once complain. But, cripes, how long could he continue living alongside such favour without searching her eyes for reproach each time she glanced his way? He’d already persuaded her once to live with him in Cooney Arm, promising her she’d never have to turn another fish. In that, he had failed her. He failed her again in believing that a nice house of her own would bring her joy, despite her telling him on that first day they had sat upon the meadow that it were those within a house that brought it joy. And no doubt the cock crows three times, he thought with a wretched sigh, shifting back on the rock as a rogue wave crashed heavily at his feet, for during her deepest times of need he’d failed her again in not guarding her solitude, in trying to supplant her need with his. But she sure as hell stood guard over his, hadn’t she, turning his fish, protecting him from further intrusion of his collapsing world.
Another sounder crashed before him, dampening his brow with a cold spray, rattling up over the rock, snatching at his feet. The mother was getting too wanting. Raising his eyes onto that yellowed window of his house, he rose wearily, climbing back over the rocks toward home and a decision he hadn’t been aware he was making.
She was sitting in her chair beside the window when he entered, reading, he noted, from her little red book.
“Next time you’re visiting your mother, pick a spot where you wants to build,” he said upon entering. Without waiting for her response, he went into their bedroom, dropped his clothes and climbed into bed. Strangely, he felt good, as might one who makes a gift out of sacrifice. More strangely, he felt rested, ready to start building another house, another world, anywhere of her choosing. Wonder what God did on the eighth day, he thought idly, punching his pillow for comfort.
PART SIX
Adelaide & Sylvanus
FALL 1960
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A WELL-LAID PLAN
S
YLVANUS HAD FEIGNED SLEEP
the night before as Adelaide crept into bed beside him. She left him alone, simply because she wanted it that way as much as he did. There was much to be said, but she wasn’t sure yet what those words might be. And this morning he was up and out the door before she was awake.
She stepped carefully across the footbridge, nearly slipping on its muddied planks; then, pulling back the hood of her long green raincoat, she studied the sky. It was cold and dreary, with a contrary rain that couldn’t decide whether to pour outright or dry itself out. A sharp breeze cut across her face, reminding her of the frost soon to come. Quickening her step, she neared the garden, spotting Eva already hunched over a bed, uprooting potatoes. A loud thump sounded from the stagehead, and she paused, catching sight of Sylvanus through its open door. Lingering at the gate, she watched, as she had several times this past summer. Black and formless, he stood in his oilskins, fading in and out amidst the shadowy interior of that fisherman’s grotto, his feet moving lightly amongst the rubble around him, his skinning knife flashing glimmers of silver as he slit open and split the meagre catch his morning’s efforts had brought him. Deftly he flicked the gurry down the trunk hole, the tongues into a bucket at his feet, the britches into a pan alongside the cheeks, and that fleshy poundage of fillet into a well-scrubbed puncheon, already partially layered and salted with his morning’s work.
Decisively, she pushed away from the gate, made a rare trek along the path leading to his stage, and stood quietly in the doorway. With the light so dim he didn’t see her at first, busy as he was, laying out fish in brine and noisily lifting and sliding things around. But the murkiness halted nothing of his work, as though his hands and feet knew where each and every thing was strewn, and needed no light to retrieve and place them proper—like her in her kitchen, she thought. Hoisting onto his shoulder a coil of rope with a huge iron anchor attached, he stepped out onto the head of his stage, his eyes squinting into the light, his brow fiercely dark; and yet, curiously, that finely sculpted mouth was all set and calm this morning, as though nothing of the night before had touched him.
Bending at the knees, he lowered the anchor by the rope into his boat, bobbing some four feet below. Stalwart as a frigate, she remembered thinking of him once. And he continued being that, consistently (if not patiently) tied to her landing, waiting. Even his uncertainty around her, his moping, had been a strong mooring, tugging against those times she might’ve strayed too far within that labyrinth of darkened thought.
Guiltily, she noted the tap from which he scrubbed himself before coming home every night, and shivered from the dankness of the air around her—and around him, undoubtedly, as he had stripped on those cold, easterly nights before coming home to her. Perhaps she should put one by the footbridge so’s to scrub her own grimy hands and knees, she thought grimly, glancing at her broken nails and the faded, stained knees of her trousers, and her hair forever scraggly with the wind.
Walking resolutely through the stage, stumbling over things made indistinguishable by the dark, she stepped out on the head, squinting, as he had, into the light.
“It matters not to me where we lives,” she stated clearly. “So you don’t have to worry about moving from Cooney Arm.”
He glanced up, a look of surprise on his face. “Now, aren’t you the prettiest thing to lean against a blubber barrel?”
She stepped aside, and seeing nothing of a blubber barrel, looked to him, catching the ghost of a grin. “Oh, joking this morning, are we?” she said dryly. “Did you hear what I said?”