Authors: Donna Morrissey
T
HE SCREAMING OF THE SAWMILL
falls blissfully quiet. I sit on the wharf, hunched against the side of the house, listening to the water lap around the pilings. The woods are black now, the sky dusted with stars, the moon silvery on the sea. Gran’s voice sounds softly through the window as she asks Kyle to light her lamp and take it to her room. Since the accident she no longer sleeps without her lamp lit.
“No, no, I’m not scared of ghosts,” she tutted as I teased her once, “it’s just another blanket I wraps up in.” And she drew down amidst her bedding, becoming little more than a ripple with a few greyish-white hairs spread across her pillow.
A light flares through the kitchen window, falling softly around my shoulders as Kyle strikes a match to the wick and fits on the chimney. I hear Mother calling out to him, cautioning him, “Be careful now, careful you don’t drop the lamp, I’ll come and comb your hair, Gran, you get in bed now, I’ll be right there.” More light pours through the kitchen window as Mother switches on the overhead light and calls out, “Sylvanus, go mix your tea, I’ve poured it for you, it’s on the sink, go mix your tea now, I sees to Gran—Gran—” and her voice fades as she goes down the hall to Gran’s room. She spends a lot of time in the room with Gran since the accident, the both of them talking in slow, steady murmurs, like a brook unimpeded by rock and softened with a thick edging of grass. I listened shamelessly once, on my way to the bathroom, caught by something Gran was saying to Mother, about a gun and a promise Mother made to her once, about burying Grandfather Now’s gun with her in her coffin when she dies, for he was never given prayers or a burial, she rambled on to Mother—as she has taken to doing lately—he was never marked with the cross, and that’s why he’s never found peace for she could never let him go, and be sure and say prayers for them both, she begged Mother, and mark the graves with two crosses, one for each them, and to pay no heed to them gawking at the gun in her coffin, for it matters nothing to her what’s said after she’s dead, only that Grandfather finds peace after all this time, because for sure he must be wearied, poor soul, searching all these years for his grave.
The kitchen light switches off, leaving me comforted in darkness again. I hear the scraping of Father’s chair. He’s mixed his tea, and if I had leaned forward before he shut off the light I would’ve seen him through the window, his scruffy black hair uncombed as it always is about the house, his brows dark and heavy as he broods into his tea. Mostly, at night, he sits with the light off—so’s he can see the water and not himself in the damn glass, he argues with Mother. But mostly it’s because he likes sitting alone in the dark. He sits there for hours during most evenings, watching the water. Tonight his boat shimmers in the moonlight. His boat is white, he painted it white, for he says it, too, is a tombstone, a tombstone for fish.
Luckily, he doesn’t spend much time on the water anymore, leastways, not the sea. He was offered a job on the river. His heart isn’t strong, but his body is, and he can go for days without becoming winded. It’s a small job, erecting a salmon fence, then counting the salmon to see how many are spawning each year, and plus, policing the river for poachers. It’s a godsend, the job on the river. Not just for the food it puts on the table but for the long periods of time it gives him away from the house. Sometimes I walk with him for a short ways, up to the falls. It’s not really a falls, just enough of a dip to churn the waters and dampen the air.
The other morning as we walked alongside the river he was notably quiet and glum. We sat for a bit near the little falls, and he told me his favoured brother, Uncle Manny, was laid off from the fish plant, and was leaving for Toronto.
“No fish in the offshore waters, now,” he said sullenly. “All gone the way of the inshore—as we all said it would happen. Gawd-damned arse-up government. Soon there’ll be nothing living in the water. Barren. Imagine that, the ocean barren.” He fell silent, staring at the river rushing past our feet. I studied his face, wearying with time, weathered with salt. He lifted his dark eyes onto mine and I drew back, feeling sickish. All those times I’d seen him coming ashore in his boat with the water foaming like mad dogs beneath him, and setting off into the woods with the winds screaming through trees and blinding his path, and it was now, only now, sitting safe on the river, with the sun warming his face and his feet dry in his boots, that I saw fear in my father’s eyes. Fear for his brother Manny, who had lived his life on the sea and was moving to a factory job in the city; Manny, who had lived his life amongst three dozen people, now moving to a city of three million. Jeezes, and Father shivered in his boots, dipping his hands into the river as though assuring himself it was there and not some illusion he might wake up from and then have to pack his bags like his brother and turn his back to his only salvation.
No wonder the houses of Cooney Arm are haunted, I thought. Fishermen like my father, his brothers, may have moved on, but, as with the linoleum on the floor, the hinges and locks on the doors they left behind, so too are their spirits still back there, hooked into the generations that lived on the land and in those houses before them. I was reminded of the day spent with Ben and Chris on the pond with the beaver dam, and Chris asking me about the ghosts in the walls of Cooney Arm, and asking me what they wanted, “For they’re of your own making,” he had said, “so you should know what they want.”
I wondered many times about that, whether the ghosts were of my own making. And yes, yes, they are of my own making. And we all carry them, and we all create them. But, as with the sobbing little boy in Ben’s heart, that didn’t make them any less real. And it came to me that day as I sat facing the river with Father, and seeing his fear, that I suddenly knew what they wanted, those ghosts in the walls of Cooney Arm. They wanted to be freed from those walls, freed from the confusion and blindness of times since passed, and brought forward into the mindfulness of the living. Just as those parts of me, those marooned, stifled parts of me snagged on feelings of invisibility around my mother, had been brought forward into my awareness.
“You’ll be happy here, working the river,” I said to Father. “Factories aren’t something you’ll have to worry about.”
He looked to the heavens with a prayer of thanks on his lips, and then ordered me back to the house so’s he could carry out his work in peace. I left him as he’d asked. He had the river now. I remember Chris saying in the cookhouse that last morning how Father liked it best sitting in his boat by himself. A few times I thought to tell Father that, how Chris could see into his mind, for I thought he’d like it, Chris understanding how he felt about things.
But I didn’t. He doesn’t talk about Chris. He doesn’t allow any of us to talk about Chris. Once when Kyle said his name at the supper table, Father threw down his fork and left the table and went to bed. He was drinking. He carried a small mickey in his inside coat pocket. It was his secret, and I didn’t tell. We all have our opiates, and booze was becoming Father’s.
The moon darkens behind a cloud, and I hear Father scraping his chair away from the table, saying something to Mother about bedtime. She must’ve been talking with Gran all this time, for her voice sounds tired as she speaks to Father, chiding him about the lights being out. They flare back on, as they are whenever Mother is about. She had always liked the lights on, flushing darkness along with dust balls out of corners. And as I listen to her voice sounding over the water lapping about the pilings, I am grateful for her need of light. I have learned that my great fear of things changing and rotting around me, my fear of death, came from a darkness that was constantly and poignantly signified by those three little white crosses. And I wonder, in looking back, how it was I’d never seen the fourth, marking the living grave where I had been burying my childhood feelings of invisibility.
I hear Father’s chair scraping away from the table. I hear Kyle trodding back to the kitchen, creaking himself into Gran’s rocker. He’s had a growth spurt these past few months. But he still has those rounded, chubby cheeks, and his squinty eyes always carry a hue of smiles around them, no matter his brow buckling into frowns or his shoulders slumping with dejection. His shoulders look perky this evening as he munches on a ginger snap, they’re always perky when he’s munching cookies, like the cow with its cud, Mother says of the contented look on Kyle’s face as he munches; if he had a tail, he’d be swishing it.
We always smile. Rather him munching cookies than chewing his fingers, a habit he keeps up with a vengeance since the accident. He, like Father, turns from me each time I try to talk, to bring our brother into the space between us. I wonder if he blames me, but I’ve seen him turning from Mother, too, and Gran. Still, I wonder.
A few weeks ago, about midnight, I’d been unable to sleep and had gone for a drive in Father’s truck. I spotted him in my rearview mirror as I slowly drove past the club. It was a cold night, with an easterly wind driving hard. The bar had closed and Kyle was huddling against its back door, his hands jammed inside his pockets, looking lonely and cold. I backed up, and he eagerly climbed aboard.
“What were you waiting for, to be beamed home?” I asked gently.
He grinned, settling into a chew on the side of his thumbnail. We were near home when he said, “I had a dream.”
It was the way he said it that drew me. His tone was soft, yet urgent, as though it held something precious. “I was in the shed,” he went on, “stacking wood. And a voice spoke—kinda like it was speaking through me—I could feel it in my ribs. It was Chris. It was Chris’s voice. And he said, ‘You are a king.’” Kyle paused, looking at me. “It felt so real,” he exclaimed. “It felt so real that I touched my head when I woke up, thinking I had a crown.”Then he shrugged, as though it were a nothing dream.
“Did it leave you with something?” I asked him. “Like, when you woke up, did you feel—different?”
He nodded. “Felt good. Like this nicest feeling.” He started back chewing his fingers, saying no more. I tried to think of something to say. I didn’t need to, though; Chris’s dream spoke louder than me at that moment, and carried more significance.
A night breeze ruffles the water. I huddle deeper into my sweater. Mother’s in the kitchen again, chiding Kyle for being up so late, ushering him off to bed. “Sylvie!”she calls. “Kyle, is your sister in?”
“Think so.” Kyle’s door closes softly. I more feel than hear Mother coming across the kitchen and I hunch closer to the house, making myself small so’s not to be seen should she look through the window. Her footsteps fade as she walks back down the hallway, closes her door. She’s like that since the accident, wanting us all inside before she goes to bed, taking several walkabouts sometimes before finally settling into sleep.
Most times I like her fussing. But there are times when I wish to be alone. When I wish to think on dreams. For I dream too, now. Not often—and they’re coming further and further apart. But for now, they are my cookie bag, my father’s whisky. They leave me with something. Like Gran, I want the lights on at night, and lie for long hours on my bed some evenings, watching the quivering flame of Gran’s lamp on the ceiling, unable to sleep yet sensing life ebb away from me on the outside and become two rivers of feeling within me, one flowing towards time and tomorrow, the other flowing backwards, seeking its source. It feels like those times I used to stand by the footbridge in Cooney Arm, looking towards Mother’s house and looking back to Gran’s, always feeling halfways home. Sometimes I have to stave off thought before lowering the wick and turning into my pillow, so’s to clear an empty space in case he should come tonight. For like Grandfather Now, I am his stormy sea that he needs to sit and keep watch over during those nights I flounder amidst dreams of self-damnation, no matter my declarations of innocence during daylight thinking hours.
He doesn’t awaken me. For he understands the way of dreams, that they speak in the language of the netherworld that exists beneath words and clouded thought; he understands that dreams are our truth beneath our language of lies, those lies that we will ourselves to believe but deep, deep down we don’t believe at all. And when finally the waters abate, either from exhaustion or some disturbance, like Kyle coughing in the next room or Mother’s door creaking as she takes another walk through the house, he comes. Like a beacon of light he is with me. The place always changes, but his heart is one with mine.
The first time he came we were in a green room, the colour of my room in Gran’s house, and he was lying on the bed beside me; he was naked and his skin felt like crushed velvet as he held my sobbing body next to his, assuring me, It’s not your fault, Sis, it’s not your fault.
Another time he sat on the edge of the bathtub as I scrubbed my face over the sink, and he asked me how he’d died, that he had no knowing of how it happened, only that it had.
Another time he told me it was fine to grieve because he was grieving, too—it’s like that here, he said, we grieve too, for a while.
Each time he comes I am his troubled sister, searching for peace. Each time he leaves I awaken to a warm heart and a stomach that feels like it’s floating on a sea of love. For hours I walk or simply sit, revelling in such utter tranquility it feels as though I’m drugged, beautifully drugged. By midmorning I’m lying on my bed again, the pain in my belly so deep I’m unable to straighten my legs.
But he’s becoming weary, now. And he’s coming less and less, his precious gifts of tranquility becoming shorter and shorter. Once, I offered him a job, sweeping the school floors, a safe job. He looked at me sadly, no longer able to speak. He is fading, yet I hold on to him. I weigh him like an anchor. I am his ghost, no different from the haunts in Cooney Arm, anchoring him to a life he can no longer live. And in being his ghost, I have imprisoned parts of myself once more. Like Gran, I must learn to let go. I must learn to relinquish him so’s we can both be freed. Else, like Grandfather Now, he will become little more than a restless phantom, a haunt to himself and the life he once lived. And I, a slave once more to split-off parts of me, and perhaps this time with no caring Mother being able to deliver me from the darkness.