“That's a long enough list.”
“I see you don't like the thought of Margaret with somebody else, eh?”
“Did Botho August pay for Margaret's Canada-made stockings?”
“Yes, he did. If she told you that, she told you the truth.
What's more, I mentioned that to Enoch and he paid Botho back the cost of the stockings.”
“Margaret never told me that part.”
“Margaret, Margaret. You know, a year before my wife, Annie, passed on, rest her soul, she came home one night from cards. You recall how Annie got together with Dorris Letto, Dara Olden, Edna Forbisher, Mary Kieley, and sometimes younger ones such as Alice Heltasch and Margaret Handle? Hearts and Draw Fives were the most popular games. Or Old Maid, the card game that migrated up from Halifax or down from St. John's. Well, on this particular night, it was Old Maid. The ladies brought bread, tea, and Margaret had her customary flask of spirits in tow. The game was held in the Lettos' kitchen.
“Annie told me what happened.
“The cards were being handed along, you know, how the rules dictate. And suddenly Margaret lets out a whoop and pounds her fist on the table. Then she crumbles up the Old Maid card and pops it directly into her mouth! Chews it. I mean, swallows it right down.
“Margaret then says, âOh, girls, well, I'm sorry. I'll have Romeo order another deck from Halifax at my expense. No, I'll have him order two. One for us, one for me to keep in reserve.' Then she dabbed the corner of her mouth like she'd nibbled a cookie with tea.”
“I'm sure it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment for all of them,” I said.
I watched Romeo weigh nails. I thought of what my parents had told me about his life. He had never intended
to run a store. He had inherited it in the aftermath of his father's heart attack. Actually, Romeo was all set to become a doctor. As a young man he had attended two years of medical college in London. Recognizing a chance to have a permanent doctor in Witless Bay, and because Romeo was so well liked, Reverend Weebe (he had succeeded Clemons, and later on Sillet took his place) put out a local call for funds. Finally, enough money was raised for Romeo's steamer fare and tuition. He was about halfway through his studies when Dalton Gillette was stricken. Once notified, Romeo booked passage to Halifax on the first steamer he could afford, then took the mail boat home, all of which took four months. The only thing he had bought in London was a new suitcase.
At first, Dalton could move only his eyes and feet. He could swallow, too. Romeo said that heart attacks allowed for unpredictable combinations of mobility in the human body, and that things might change day by day. “The mystery of it's way bigger than the science of it,” he said. After a few weeks with his son, however, Dalton rallied to where he could stand up and sit down, piss on his own, chew down forkfuls of meat, and say a few logical sentences, which more or less lurched out of him. Romeo spent hours reading books to his father. At meals he would cut up Dalton's food into small bites, search for fishbones, hoist the spoon or fork to his father's mouth, then wipe it clean with a napkin.
Romeo made over a storeroom into convalescent quarters. He hired Annie Stuyvesant to work the counter, and a year later Annie, a lovely, clear-thinking woman with a mischievous
sense of humor, married Romeo. It was her second marriage; a brief scourge of smallpox had widowed her at age eighteen. By and by, Annie got the store's financial records in order and took over as manager, while Romeo attended to his father, saw to inventories, and was the general stock boy.
Using two years of medical training and a lot of intuition, Romeo thought up ways to try to funnel Dalton's frustrations, his unwieldy temper, into a healing force, part of which worked and part of which did not. He would walk his father back and forth across the room, hundreds of times in a row. He made Dalton read out loud, even if at times he could not get past the first sentence. He made Dalton lift a fork, even if there was no food on it. “We'll get you back to your old self,” Romeo would say. “Or almost.”
Right up until age sixty-one, when he was stricken, Dalton was a rambunctious figure in Witless Bay. He referred to himself as a brigand. I remember later looking that word up in the dictionary that Isaac Sprague had sent me and laughing out loud. Dalton's own wife, Romeo's mother, was named Ethel Kitchener. She had been Helen Twombly's closest friend. Ethel died one night in her sleep, no one knew from what. “Ethel was a private person,” Dalton said. “She died in a private way. I prefer being the widower of Ethel than a husband to anyone else, even in my imagination.” And Dalton never did remarry.
He had once been on a ship to South America. When he ran the store, he would often greet a customer with “Buenos morning!” or “Buenos afternoon!” But he said it in a way
that avoided his showing off too much, because he had thought to match one word of Spanish with one of English. On the wall behind his counter was a mottled anaconda skin stretched out in a glass case. “As I was touring the river Amazon,” he was fond of reporting, “it slithered aboard my dugout canoe. But it did not debark!” He would make a chopping motion as if wielding a machete, and laugh boisterously. In fact, Dalton's laugh had its own reputation. It was like an odd musical composition; it began with a tentative humming, then burst forth in donkey brays, sometimes ending up with a coughing fit.
Dalton was of middle height, with fine ink-black hair and bright blue eyes that caught you off guard if you had been too convinced of his character by his long, sad face. He was a world away from dour. And never was there a more direct inheritance, bone structure to steady gait, hearty laugh to love of imported shoes, than between Dalton and Romeo. So strong was their physical resemblance that it was easy to imagine a line of nearly identical faces going centuries back to the heart of England, the country of their ancestors, the place Romeo hated so much.
After months of grueling and loving work, Romeo got his father to where he could take a walk every day, and his favorite place to do that was on the cliff path behind the lighthouse. “My father's a stubborn man,” Romeo had said. “He dares his own sense of balance, just him and his walking cane.” And then of course Margaret ran into Dalton on her bicycle. Word had it that Margaret walked the bicycle all the way to the wharf, down the dock, propped it against
the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
's cabin, told Enoch what had happened. Enoch walked with her up to Gillette's store. Enoch left right away for St. John's and brought back Mitchell Kelb.
Back to the day that my father left for Anticosti. I mentioned it was July 2, Margaret's birthday.
Having left Gillette's store, I bought a sea bass from Peter Traynor, who had just come in from dory fishing in the Bay. I brought the fish home wrapped in straw. Then I went back to the wharf. I sat with my sketchbook, trying to capture how cormorants perched on buoys, fanned out their wings like a closet rack full of black neckties, drying them in the sun. How they held their beaks gaped open.
In his letters Sprague had insisted that I work with birds I did not particularly enjoy looking at, and cormorants were that. “I have one student who at first could not bear the sight of any long-necked waders,” he wrote. “Herons, egrets, and so forth. After two years, she draws them beautifully and the question of likes or dislikes is no longer there.” Yet for some reason I portrayed cormorants as spectres, grim, foreboding out on the buoys. Warning what, I did not know, but I had turned cormorants into superstitions of my own making. In my drawings of this bird Sprague found “an irksome prejudice. Granted, cormorants can look eerily like a fossil bird come alive in your harbor, there. Nonetheless, they are worthy of everything but your poor drawings of them. Yours are indeed poor. I request five pages of cormorants, seen from every possible angle, in
order to get your thinking right about this bird. Bird art must derive its power from emotion, naturally, but emotions have to be tempered and forged by sheer discipline, all for the sake of posterity.”
I was fairly succeeding with ducks, shorebirds, crows, ospreys. I failed miserably with cormorants. No journal accepted a single one. Can a person truly hate a bird? I do not know, but I hated my failure with them. Once I even dreamed of Margaret shooting cormorants from her bedroom window, picking them off one by one from buoys and stanchions. In real life, though, I am sure she never did that; she shot only what she needed.
Anyway, by dusk on July 2, the sky was clear except for stretches of washboard clouds. I walked home. I opened the door. And there was Botho August sitting at our kitchen table. My mother had set three places for supper, though Botho's plate was not at my father's customary spot. Botho had apparently brought a music box, a miniature merry-go-round bedecked with painted ribbons. The salt shaker rode on it. The music box was working a plunky tune, but when I walked in my mother frantically reached to stop it. Botho reached to prevent her hand. Their hands touched and my mother drew hers back as if from a hot skillet.
Botho had a boot off. He looked at me, then at the other boot, which he then pried off with his toes. “Ah, there, much better,” he said. “I had a stone in there.”
My mother gave a short sigh, then watched the music box wind down to a standstill.
“I'm going to be employed by Mr. August,” she said.
“On a part-time basis, and out of his own pocket,” Botho added, though he spoke only to my mother. Annoyed, he had flattened his voice as if they had rehearsed the moment and my mother could not remember the first simple thing they had agreed to tell me.
“In the lighthouse?” I said.
“That's where Mr. August works, yes,” my mother said. “It'll do me good. I'll feel useful, in a new way. I often go on my morning walk past the lighthouse, when I do go on a morning walk. Now I'll simply change that to an evening stroll, stop in, sit at the wireless. Mr. August has agreed to teach me how to talk to the schooners, by beam and wireless.”
“We'll take it slow at first, then get to the more complicated work,” Botho said, still looking only at my mother. “It's good for the village. What if I drop dead on a foggy night. Who's going to help boats out to sea? I need an apprentice, eh?”
“I'll learn to work the light, the foghorn, all the apparatuses,” my mother said. “It interests me. It would be rare and useful knowledge for a woman, this day and age, even if Mr. August doesn't drop dead.”
Botho wore suspenders over a faded denim shirt tucked into his trousers, better suited, I thought, to colder weather. His hair was neatly combed. His way of dealing with tension was to splay his fingers open, taut against the table, like a man about to play the piano, and press down hard until the tips were white. He held his hands that way, staring at my mother.
“This boy doesn't like me, Alaric,” Botho said.
“He's not a boy,” my mother said.
“He holds a fierce grudge from Thanksgiving at Romeo Gillette's table, when I said a thing to him. I can't remember what I said. I've been told I'm not polite.”
“I told you that,” my mother said.
“I'll eat at Spivey's tonight,” I said.
“Good. All the more fish, potatoesâlet's see, what else?” Botho said. He leaned over and opened the oven door. “Cake. All the more for us. Enough for three's enough for two.”
“I worked to catch that fish,” I said.
“This time of year you can whistle a fish from the harbor,” Botho said. “Besides, I saw you buy it. I was at the wharf. You didn't see me, maybe. But I saw you. I saw you buy the fish.”
“No, you didn't see him, either,” my mother said to Botho. “I
told
you that Fabian bought the fish.”
“I'll eat in the restaurant,” I said.
“This is your house, too,” my mother said. “You don't get exiled to Spivey's. Darling, please sit down. We have a guest you don't care for is all. That happens in a life.”
“Once too often,” I said.
“Fabian, please. Wash up for supper.”
“I've seen you in that dress in church, Mother.” She had on a light blue cotton dress with a white lace shawl. “But just now, I don't recognize you in it.”
Storming from my house, I bypassed Spivey's and went directly to Boas LaCotte's sawmill barn. It had been a favorite
refuge since childhood, a hideout. Whenever Lambert was away from the village, yet not at his trout camp, he left his crippled owl, Matilda, in LaCotte's care. I did not know an owl's life span, but this one seemed very old to me. In the barn, Boas kept it tethered by one scaly leg (the other leg had been mangled in a muskrat trap) to a sawhorse. It was on the sawhorse now. The barn had high rafters. The floor was littered with wood scraps, chips, sawdust, random planks. I loved this barn most early in the mornings, when sawdust in the air suspended sunlight in swirling eddies and traced the sun's slantings from the roof to the ground.
When I stepped into the barn, the owl shuffled excitedly along the sawhorse, its wings ruffling loudly, lifting it up a few inches. It rolled its head in its socket, then tore at a mouse Boas had nailed by the tail to the sawhorse. The owl spread a clipped wing like a magician's cape over the mouse, revealed it, covered it again. The owl usually got worked up when a person came close.