“You know, I wondered about you from the first—there was something—something in you I couldn't make out.” He peered at her, “Kept reminding myself that any stranger, even one from Ottawa, could turn out to be an angel. Didn't expect the transformation to come so soon, though—or quite that way—'course God's ways are not our ways,” he said solemnly before breaking into a smile as if at some private joke.
Blinking into the light she knew must reveal every line and furrow in her morning face, Lav asked sourly what he found so funny.
“Sorry, I'm no longer a civil servant, so everything seems funny,” he said and kept on grinning. “Nothin' like a couple days in jail to clear the mind. Bein' locked up with a hard cot and a bucket puts a person in touch with their roots—made me realize I never was cut out for a government job. If Wayne Drover hadn't fired me I'da quit anyway.”
“So, he did fire you—what will you do now?”
“Oh he fired me all right, had a snappy official letter waiting at the police desk. Not sure what I'll do—think I might dedicate my life to disruption, start a sabotage movement.”
Lav hoped he was joking, but who could tell? “I'm going down to Davisporte for a few days.” She told him this not to change the subject—though she certainly wants no more of disruption, no more of sabotage—but because she wanted someone to know where she would be for the next few days and it had suddenly occurred to her that Mark was the only person she could give such information to.
“I've got relatives down there who own a motel—but really I'd like to camp, be outdoors for a day or so.” Lav, who has never camped in her life, tried to look healthy and alert, the kind of person for whom camping is as natural as breathing.
Mark had nodded and asked if she wanted to borrow some camping gear. It is he who has provided the lantern, the food cooler, the sleeping bag and the very serviceable light-weight tent now folded into the trunk.
A knapsack, piarchased yesterday, lies on the back seat. It contains an unlikely collection of clothing, everything from a skimpy red bathing suit to a set of thermal underwear. Beside the knapsack rests a thermos of coffee and several tape cassettes, covered by a huge khaki parka from Army Surplus.
The inventory of useful things she has brought along reassures Lav. Here is evidence of efficiency, of thought, of planning. She has even phoned Cat Harbour Inn and made a reservation—just in case it rains, or snows—Mark says it often does in May. But, Lav reminds herself, sane means may be used for mad motives. She considers how certain people (not her mother—perfectly sane people like Alice O'Reilly) might view this trip—searching Bonavista North for some old crone, who might or might not be the Rachel who had written the web-like marginalia into the Ellsworth Journal.
Apart from the wispy trail of a jet that must already be halfway to England, the sky is a deep, consistent blue. The almost empty road curves between hills of dark evergreen spattered with light where sunshine picks out the early green of birch and rowan. On the car radio Dvorak's
New World Symphony
is playing. The music reflects Lav's increasingly hopeful mood, matches the spring hills, blends with the bumps where frost has thrown up a series of humped ridges—as if the ice age still lurks just below the black surface of the road.
To Lav the road seems endless. She drives past miles of burnt-over land where fingers of dead trees point skywards: past bleak schools that might have been lifted from any city slum and dropped carelessly in gravel-pits midway between communities—on through half a dozen outports of neat, well-kept houses, of Legion Halls, Beer Halls and Bingo Halls, past wood frame branches of the Bank of Nova Scotia, Sears mail order outlets, Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, video outlets, car lots and supermarkets, drug marts and beauty marts—and of course churches, any number of churches, Jehovah's Witness, United, Salvation Army, Anglican, Pentecostal.
Each community encircles a deep harbour and is in turn encircled by hills. From a distance each place looks idyllic, remote, beautiful, safe. Then one reaches the outskirts where rusting cars, stoves, refrigerators and rotting furniture lie abandoned in bogs, where broken pop and beer bottles glitter in the grass, where plastic bags flutter, like headless ghosts, from fences, bushes and telephone wires.
Davisporte is larger than most of the other places. It has a bright yellow Society of United Fishermen Hall and a general store which, according to the faded sign, belongs to Alphaeus Hutchings and carries “Rope, Twines and Nettings of all Descriptions.” These buildings raise Lav's spirts. She feels quite cheerful as she manoeuvres the car between boys playing hockey and teenagers sauntering three and four abreast down the street.
When she has passed all the stores and is wondering if she could have missed the motel, she pulls over beside the door of a white clapboard restauramt. Against a sign that says, “Kosy Kafe—Drink Pepsi” three young girls lounge, gazing trancelike up the road and eating french fries from paper plates. When Lav rolls down the window the smell of salt and hot vinegar reminds her she has not eaten lunch. The girls stare, first at her then at each other, the smallest girl steps forward.
“Can you please tell me where Cat Harbour Inn is?” Lav asks.
The child's eyes widen, she tilts her head to one side as if assessing Lav's sanity. “No such place I knows of,” she turns to the others for confirmation.
“Don't be so stunned, Pam—she's talkin' about the Cat,” one of her friends says and shouts towards the car, “Just keep on goin', missis, ya can't miss it.”
Not fifty yards down the road, in the middle of a parking lot that has been blasted out of a cliff, Lav finds the barracks-like building, over the door another large Pepsi sign identifies it as Cat Harbour Inn. Half of the motel front is covered with aqua-coloured plastic siding, the rest had once been painted deep purple. Mercifully, most of the paint has peeled away, revealing weathered grey wood.
Pushing open the front door, Lav finds herself in a large room, cold and windowless, empty except for ten arborite tables lined up against one wall. Each table holds a glass vase containing two plastic flowers. On the opposite wall, near the ceiling, a huge television screen has been installed. At the far end of the room is a bar and behind the bar a white refrigerator. A small red lamp on top of the refrigerator provides the room's only light.
Lav lets the front door slam noisily, but no one appears from behind the bar. She coughs and waits. Nothing happens.
She walks around the room inspecting a collection of community relics hung on the walls: a set of oarlocks, a brass plaque inscribed “Davisporte Champs 1986” surrounded by yearly pictures of the Davisporte bowling team, an old-fashioned doorlock and key, many horseshoes. One wall is covered with a fishing net. Caught inside the net are bits of driftwood, a set of a false teeth, shells, two plastic sharks and a long harpoon, used, according to a small square of yellowing paper pinned to the net, to hunt the largest beasts on earth, blue whales that sometimes weigh several tons.
Things have been attached to the walls on each side of the net: a collection of sunsets painted in garish orange on black velvet, a pencilled notice: “Piano Lessons—five dollars per hour, six dollars for advanced students,” two calendars, the current one from Hibernia Oil depicts a huge concrete cube rising against a sunrise—“Assurance For Tomorrow!” is written across the sky. The other calendar, dated 1953, is from Pope's Furniture Factory Est. 1860 cind has a picture of a ship under canvas. Further along a lovely hooked mat is hung next to a glossy autographed photo of Brigitte Bardot embracing a fluffy white seal and smiling up at a menacing figure holding a club. There are a dozen or so business cards, a varnished lobster and a large framed map of Newfoundland listing ships lost around the coast, beside many of the ships' names, the names of the men who died have been pencilled in.
Lav studies each artifact, reads every name on the map, the same surnames appear over and over again: Gill, Andrews, Davis, Norris, Vincent, Stokes, Hounsell, Blackwood, Hutchings, Barbour.
There is no air in the room, no daylight, no music, no warmth, no sounds, no smells—nothing. The thought brushes across her mind that time has stopped: that outside, no one is left alive—or that everything has changed, gone backward, or forward in time. Lav is becoming accustomed to such fanciful ideas, and for a minute she gives in to them. Afraid, she turns instinctively towards the door, has almost reached it when it opens and a huge box marked Delsey Tissue slides into the room.
Behind the box, manipulating it through the door, comes a thin, fox-faced girl, dressed all in black. The huge dangling earrings and brassy-green spiked hair, the blackest lips and whitest skin Lav has ever seen are astonishing enough, but there is something else about the girl, an intensity, a concentration of energy in the small white face, in the thin arms holding the pile of clean sheets, in the flat, black-clad hip pushing against the cardboard box.
So intent is the girl on getting through the doorway that she does not see Lav. Once in, she lays the sheets on the box and flicks a switch by the door. Twenty or more fluorescent tubes flash on—so suddenly, so glaringly, that Lav gasps.
“Sweet fuck!” the girls green-tipped fingers go to her throat. “I thought you was a ghost.” Then, in a more business-like voice, “Can I help you?”
Not waiting for an answer the girl crosses the room, goes behind the bar and begins pulling out drawer after drawer, muttering under her breath.
“My name is Andrews—Lavinia Andrews—I have a reservation, Is Mr. Andrews in?”
“Oh yes,” the girl abandons her search, opens a tattered exercise book of the kind Lav had used in school. “I minds your callin',” she licks her thumb and begins flicking through the lined pages. “Well, love, by the look of it you got your choice of rooms—you want to stay in the new rooms up aloft or go out in one of the little cabins? The cabins got stoves and fridges.”
“Is Mr. Andrews in?” Lav asks again, as if she must see Alf Andrews before committing herself to a room in his motel.
“I don't allow he'll be in—Grandmother Andrews passed on night before last—the funeral's this afternoon.”
“His Grandmother Rachel? She's dead!” Lav feels an immediate and terrible sense of loss. How stupid she had been not to come before.
“Well she was almost a hundred. Nan and Aunt Doss were plannin' a big party for her in July—she'd a got a message from the Queen, even. Aunt Doss says Rachel Andrews were an old woman when she was a girl.”
Lav is sure this is true, despite her elaborate makeup the apparition before her can be no more than sixteen. The child's Aunt Doss is probably younger that I am, she thinks, remembering the childhood envy she had felt for the many aunts her friend Audrey had possessed.
“Are you a relative, then?” the green haired girl really looks at Lav for the first time, appraises the linen slacks, the yellow blouse and sweater and is not impressed.
“I think I might be a distant relative.” During one of her phone calls Alf 's mother, Selina, told Lav that she and Alf were second cousins once removed. While she is pondering what relationship this might be, a door behind the bar opens and a man holding a large glass of whiskey comes into the room.
He knows at once who she is, “I was thinkin' you'd be gettin' in later than this.” He reaches into the fridge, drops ice cubes into his drink.
The girl gives him a sharp, appraising look and pushes the exercise book towards him, “Nan said you wasn't comin' in today. Everyone's checked out and I'm finishin' off the back rooms.” She glances at Lav, “Dad'll take care of ya now,” she says and Vanishes.
“Your Grandmother said to get that stuff out of your hair before the funeral!” the man shouts at the swinging door before turning to ask Lav if she would like a drink.
Lav nods. Alf Andrews is older than she had expected—five or so years older than herself. Tall and broad but not fat. He has straight black hair that falls across his face. It is a closed face, hard even, with high cheek bones and a narrow tight mouth. He wears a dark green shirt and a brown suit jacket. When he comes from behind the bar, she sees that the jacket is too tight across the shoulders and a terrible match for the cord trousers. He looks untidy and slightly dusty all over.
Alf Andrews is studying her, too, not bothering to hide it, sipping his drink, taking his time to look her over. There is no more approval in his eyes than there had been in his daughter's.
Lav tries to imagine what he is seeing—a tall woman, just as tall as he, a woman who can no longer be called young. She knows the slacks draw attention to the thickness of her hips and, unfortunately, hide her long, quite attractive, legs. Her hair, which has never returned to its Ottawa condition, hangs shoulder length, speckled with grey but smooth and shiny.
She cannot imagine what he must think of her face. Lav herself has never made up her mind about her face—it is all right, she supposes—not what she would have chosen perhaps, still, nothing to be ashamed of. She has freckles, a sharply pointed nose and a bottom lip far too big for her narrow chin—but in the right light, with the right makeup, she knows it can be a dignified, even attractive face.
She starts to feel uneasy under the long, silent scrutiny. “I'm very sorry—really sorry, to hear about your grandmother,” she says.
He leads her to one of the arborite tables. “Yes it's too bad—too bad you had to come all this way,” he says when they are seated.
“I didn't mean that. It was a pleasant drive.”
“…there was always a trail of people down here in summertime wantin' to see her. Old codgers workin' on their family trees and the university crowd with their tape recorders.” Alf Andrews gazes into his glass as if it might contain the secret to mankind's strange behaviour.
“I expect if you wanted to know anything about old times along this coast, the best place to look would be in Memorial's Folklore Department. Lord knows they traipsed back and forth here often enough.”
Alf Andrews is right. That is just what she should have done, used the resources of the university. She, of all people, should know that. How crazy she's been—how foolish to imagine some old woman would confide family secrets to her. What would Rachel possibly remember? And if remembered, why would she tell a stranger?