The O'Briens (42 page)

“I guess he's referring to the pattern, Granddaddy. Did you see it on his back?”

“I did.”

“‘Banished
 . . . 
unconquerable
 . . . 
the mark of Cain
 . . . 
'
I suppose Melville means that fin whales are loners. The whalers saw only one at a time, like us. Have you ever seen one before?”

“No, never.”

“Thanks for arranging it.”

“You're welcome.”

Certain young people, like Maddie, had thinner skins. It wasn't that they were delicate so much as
not insulated
. Iseult had never been insulated; neither had he. They had damaged each other, damaged themselves. She'd hated and blamed him for the death of their first baby, and in his worst moments he'd blamed her for Mike's death. But they had collected themselves, kept the family together, sustained. She hadn't left him for the swami after all. And he had eventually pulled himself out of the neck of a bottle. Suffering had brought them together, though at the time it seemed it would tear them apart. Their marriage had been there to save them from drowning.

~

At Shelburne, Nova Scotia, they bent a set of smaller, heavier sails before continuing on for Cape Breton. It was a week of four-hour watches, rugged ocean sailing, easterly winds and fog and never being quite sure where they were on account of a powerful offshore tidal set. Navigating with a compass and a taffrail log, they dropped their hook at Liverpool, Chester, Halifax, Sheet Harbour, and Canso. The RDF picked up weak Morse signals from lighthouses, which they tried to triangulate on the little chart table above the icebox.

Fog did not frighten Maddie the way it did some people. Three or four times while she had the helm they'd caught sudden blowdown gusts, maybe forty-five knots, the
Son
heeling violently, burying her rail in the drink. Maddie had deftly eased the main sheet while keeping one hand on the wheel, face glowing, perfectly calm.

Finally they had slipped through the locks at St. Peter's and come into the Bras d'Or lakes. After the fierce easterlies and ocean swells it had felt like entering a tropical lagoon. The lakes were an inland sea, saline, estuarial, and warm. Madeleine had been diving off the boat and swimming every day since they'd passed the locks. They found easy anchorages near shore and saw no one but herring fishermen, bald eagles, and women who rowed out to offer baskets of oysters. They had come into Baddeck feeling grateful for having made the arduous trip and for its being just about over.

~

Baddeck was lonesome and isolated, a tiny little burg, prim, with its courthouse and churches and Legion Hall and Red Ensigns flapping. The only vessels in the harbour were some stubby Nova Scotia lobster boats and a couple of ancient herring trawlers. They had not met one other cruising sailboat since leaving Bar Harbor.

Mr. Albert MacIsaac seemed to own or control pretty much everything in the town. He owned the IGA and was more or less the harbourmaster. He rented Joe the mooring for fifty cents a day and arranged to have their laundry done by a woman in the village. MacIsaac knew the schedule of Sunday Masses and had quietly offered to sell Joe a quart bottle of clear liquor, apparently some sort of Nova Scotia moonshine.

Eager to stretch their legs, he and Maddie had walked the village. The houses of Baddeck were small and tidy. He felt eyes watching them from inside the little houses and sensed the existence of a larger, rougher world that began at the fringes of town, where the paved streets ran out and there were tarpaper shacks and cinder-block dwellings roofed with tarpaper — the cellars of houses that had been started then abandoned. There were chickens, silent, staring children, noisy dogs, and rotting boats. A muddy Pontiac had rocked by them, three husky young men in the front seat, heads swivelling to stare at Maddie. In her striped pedal-pushers and tiny shoes like ballet slippers she was probably the liveliest girl they'd seen in that fish town for a while.

Maddie had been hoping to find a restaurant or takeout shack, but there was nothing beyond the town but empty road and mountains, so they'd returned to MacIsaac's, picked up their grocery sacks, rowed back out to the
Son
, and made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. Afterwards Maddie stretched out on the pipe berth with her journal and sketchbook and Joe went forward to take a nap in the V-berth. It was a fine afternoon for sleeping, the air soft and grey and both of them still recovering from the rigours of ocean sailing. He felt a sense of accomplishment.

They wouldn't be sailing back to Maine, not this summer anyway. His plan had always been to find winter storage in Nova Scotia and fly home from Sydney or Halifax. Albert MacIsaac had offered to haul up the
Son
, store her in his boatshed, and paint her top and bottom, all for three hundred dollars plus the cost of whatever fancy exotic yacht paint Joe might wish him to use, which would have to be special-ordered from Halifax or Chester. Early next summer he would send up a crew to sail her to Maine unless he felt like doing it himself, which he didn't suppose he would. Once was enough.

He had fallen into a deep sleep and a dream set in the twenties, when all the cars were black and high. A bridge was falling down. Grattan, in uniform, was berating him, saying he'd cheated in the construction, used rotten iron, pig iron. They were standing in waist-high grass at Windmill Point watching the bridge crumbling. The grass was whipping in the breeze with a noise like bed sheets tearing and Grattan was about to drive his car out into the current to save the people when a sharp knocking on the hull broke Joe out of the dream.

Sitting up, dazed, he heard voices murmuring on deck. The foredeck hatch was above his head. He pushed it open and stuck his head out.

The fog had thickened or it was drizzling — hard to say which — and the air was coated with wet. He could just make out the government dock barely a hundred yards away, moving in and out of swirling layers of grey fog. MacIsaac had mentioned that the harbour lighthouse on Kidston Island, shown on all the charts, had been down for two days; the Coast Guard were changing the lens. Now the island itself had disappeared. So had the lobster boats and herring trawlers.

Maddie, in a bright yellow slicker, was leaning over the aft rail, talking to someone. Joe stood up. Peering through the foggy dew, he saw a fellow in a dory that kept bumping the
Son
's side gently, despite the fellow's holding it off with one arm.

“Anything the matter?” Joe called. He heard a boat somewhere, the guttural snarl of an old Ford V
8
or a Buick Six, probably on one of the lobster boats. Had MacIsaac directed them to the wrong mooring? It wouldn't be much fun trying to pick up another one in a strange harbour in that depth of fog. Visibility about twenty-five feet, not much of a tide, zero breeze.

“Good day to you, mister,” the young man called. “Is everything all right? Do you have what you need?”

“I think we're all right. Are we all right here?”

“It's a beauty of a sailboat. Beautifully clean.”

“Do you need the mooring?”

“No, no, you're plenty fine here. She'll hold you nice.” The boy had a big jaw, a ridiculous pile of greased hair combed back and tapering into a sort of wedge. Rubber boots, flannel shirt buttoned up at the neck. A real hick, the sort who carried a comb in his breast pocket.

“Do you like to eat lobsters, miss?” he said to Maddie.

“Sure.”

“Here you are then.” He was holding up a paper grocery sack. “Bit heavy now; careful.”

A waft of fog crossed the bow and for a moment Joe lost sight of his granddaughter except for the yellow blare of her slicker. Then he saw that the boy had shipped his oars and was standing up in the dory and Maddie was reaching out and taking the brown paper bag. She peered inside. “Wow.”

“Caught this morning,” he said. “Fresh as can be.”

“How much do you want?” Joe said.

“No, no, mister, there's no charge.”

“Three lobsters, and they're huge! Thank you,” Maddie said. “That's so nice of you.”

“You know how to fix them, do you? Have a pot that'll do? Have any crackers? Pliers and a hammer'll do.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, there you are.”

He sat down and deftly slipped the oars into the locks. The dory was drifting and he dabbled the oars to stay in close.

“Oh, there's something else. Yes. A dance on tonight at the parish hall. A bit of a band, couple of fellows with guitars. Perhaps you'd like to see it.”

“That sounds like a blast,” Madeleine said.

“You like country music?”

“I like music, period. How do I get there?”

She sounded eager. After twelve days on a thirty-six-foot yawl with her seventy-three-year-old grandfather, she'd probably swim ashore if she had to. She had been calling him Captain Ahab ever since their whale sighting.

“I'm Kenneth MacIsaac. My father's the IGA. I'll come out to fetch you, miss. Say at eight o'clock? I warn you, it will be nothing fancy.”

“I'll be here.”

“That's fine,” the boy called, pulling on his oars, already disappearing into the fog. “I'll see you.”

What the hell
, Joe thought.
The young need the young
.

~

He lay awake in his berth, listening to a buoy clanging somewhere and the creaking of the hull. Maddie was at the dance. There was hardly a stir from the rigging. He liked making things fast once on a mooring: sails covered, halyards snug, tiller secured. There was no breeze in the harbour, just the morose blanket of fog. And every now and then a sharp strain of music drifting across from the village.

Grabbing a flashlight, he looked at his watch. Just after eleven, Atlantic time. He wondered when the party would end and when MacIsaac might bring her back. He was beginning to wish that she hadn't gone, that MacIsaac had never appeared all shined up in his windbreaker, sport shirt, and cowboy boots, hair artfully piled and lacquered with some kind of oil. Fish oil, maybe. No, that wasn't fair. There was nothing really wrong with the boy except that he was a hick. And his lobsters had been fresh, the meat tender and sweet. They'd missed having sweet corn for steaming, but there'd been no produce at the IGA except carrots and a few tasteless-looking apples. Maybe deeper in the countryside the people still kept kitchen gardens. Tomorrow, if he and Maddie walked farther, they might be able to buy beans and sweet corn straight out of the field. And blueberries — there had to be blueberries on Cape Breton.

Maddie, anyway, hadn't seemed too disappointed when the young man reappeared, rowing gently out of the evening fog. “Ahoy the
Sea Son
,” MacIsaac had called. “All aboard for dancing.”

Maddie had kissed Joe on the cheek. “Sure you won't come?”

“No, no. Not for me.”

She had stepped down neatly into the stern of the dory and then sat, the boy had pushed off, and that had been that — they were away, disappearing almost instantly into the silver fog. For a while Joe had heard the oars dipping but he wasn't able to see a goddamn thing. Going below, he had cleaned up the remains of their lobster supper, burned the paper plates in the wood stove, dumped the shells overboard, and gone to bed.

He ought to have been able to sleep. All day he'd felt a little bit sore in his chest, slightly drugged and tired, which he knew was his body fighting back from the strains of the journey. If anything he had underestimated the rigours of coming up the Nova Scotia coast, the constancy of the fog and the heavy force of those easterlies that never blew clear but just packed more fog on top of fog. Bras d'Or had felt like a return to real summer, but now that the ocean fog had caught up with them he was relieved their trip was over. Tomorrow he'd phone TCA and book their tickets on a flight to Montreal. MacIsaac Senior had promised he would arrange a car to take them to the Sydney airport.

He couldn't help remembering what country dances had been like in his day — not that he'd been to all that many outside of the weddings and wakes that everyone living along the river had attended, invited or not — the brawling and beatings, the coarse behaviour. Tonight's dance was at a church, young MacIsaac had said, the Catholic church; and it was
1960
and things weren't the way they had been, even in this lonely, fog-haunted corner of the world. Or were they? The boy's father had offered to sell a bottle of whisky-blanc and it was probably everywhere, part of the life, just as it had been up the Pontiac. Even if they weren't allowed to bring liquor inside the church, the young bucks at the dance would be stepping out to their cars and sucking it back.

He began to feel afraid for his granddaughter. For days he had had no company but Madeleine, the weather, and the sea. He'd been at sea so long, out of sight of land, that he hadn't been thinking straight when he'd let her go off with the boy. Cape Breton made down east Maine seem cosmopolitan. The storekeeper with his dour personality, the boy with his piled hair — these people had a bitter edge; they resented people from away, anyone who came sailing into their little harbour from places where the weather was mostly sunny.

He'd been irresponsible, letting her just go off like that. Maddie was a stranger in this sort of backwater, an innocent. She could handle a boat but she didn't know their ways up here. Cape Breton was like a foreign country. Madeleine had been well protected all her life, unlike his sisters in the clearing, with their stepfather. Maddie had been raised in one of the safest cities in the world. Things could get out of her control before she even knew she was in danger.

What in hell had he been thinking, sending her off to dance with a bunch of howling men, and how was he going to tell Margo if her daughter was lost in the back seat of a car on a back road in Cape Breton Island after her grandfather had seen her off to a Saturday-night dance in the company of the local bootlegger's son? This wasn't Montreal, wasn't even Kennebunk. This was a primitive town, and he knew something about places at the end of the earth.