Cold Clear Morning

  Cold Clear Morning

  a novel

  By Lesley Choyce

  Published by Pottersfield Press at Smashwords

  Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Copyright © 2011 Lesley Choyce

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used or stored in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying – or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems shall be directed in writing to the publisher or to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5E 1E5 (www.AccessCopyright.ca). This also applies to classroom use.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951-

  Cold clear morning / Lesley Choyce. -- New rev. ed.

  Originally publ.: Vancouver : Beach Holme Pub., c1992.

  I. Title.

  PS8555.H668C64 2011 C813’.54 C2011-902802-6

  Digital edition: Mary Ann Archibald

  Cover design by Gail LeBlanc

  Cover photo: iStockphoto

  Edited by Julia Swan and Peggy Amirault

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We also thank the Province of Nova Scotia for its support through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.

  Pottersfield Press

  83 Leslie Road

  East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia

  Canada, B2Z 1P8

  Website: www.PottersfieldPress.com

  To order the print edition of Cold Clear Morning, phone 1-800-NIMBUS9 (1-800-646-2879) www.nimbus.ns.ca

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  An Interview With Lesley Choyce

  Prologue

  Laura. Over and over. There was a girl once …

  No.

  There was a girl once, and there was a boy. The two of them lived alone in a very private world of sea and sky and deep forest, and there was sunlight and there came snow and ice and a long, cold winter.

  And then one perfect cold clear morning the two of them stood at the harbour edge just as the ice broke up to signal winter would soon be over. There was the smell of the ice, the sea, the salty, salty air and, along the shoreline, crystalline exaggerations of beauty. They stood like that, alone, watching islands of ice set sail for the sea, watching an armada of blue-white jagged ice pans drifting, drifting. And the sun was warm on their faces as they gazed into the clear dark waters that now had been unlocked from the winter prison.

  It was only the third day of March, but Laura said, “It’s the beginning of summer.”

  I remembered clearly who I was then and dutifully held on to that prototype of me, even as I changed through all the inevitable manifestations to follow. That person standing there with Laura was the core of me, and I could never lose that. I loved being alive. I loved that dangerous, beautiful harbour. I loved being with her. I loved Laura. And I even loved myself. It was all quite extraordinary and simple, and I locked those moments into my heart forever.

  Laura went from being taller than I was and skinny to something else. Her freckles all but disappeared. She grew her hair longer and longer. Flowing down her back, it was a rich, lustrous brown waterfall of hair. She lost the tomboy look altogether as her body changed. Older boys and men noticed her beauty as the tomboy girl lost the battle with womanhood and physical maturity triumphed over youth. Soon I was taller than she was, but I still looked very much like a boy while she had blossomed into a goddess. At least that was how I remembered it.

  My father tried to prepare me for disaster. “You two have been together ever since you were little kids. It gets really tough once you get into high school. Something might change that’s beyond the power of either of you. It won’t be anybody’s fault. Just don’t blame her and don’t blame yourself.”

  “I don’t think that’ll happen,” I said with the greatest conviction. “I think we’ll be together for a long time. We’ll live together after we get out of school. I don’t know if we’ll get married.” Laura and I both mistrusted the institution of marriage. I had good reason to do so from my own experience, but she had “philosophical reasons.”

  “Two people who love each other don’t need a piece of paper,” she said.

  When we were sixteen, I walked Laura home one night and entered her kitchen where Jim Dan sat alone in a pool of light, listening to Cape Breton fiddle music on the radio. The mill had closed on him and he had been forced to go back to the mines. He had just arrived home after working a week in the shafts near Stellarton. Now he was drinking. While Laura was out of the room, Jim Dan sat me down. He had an exhausted, almost angry look, and I thought he was going to tear into me for keeping her out too late or seeing too much of her, but it wasn’t that. “Taylor,” he said, “the world’s a dangerous place. A girl like Laura needs someone there for her all the time.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve known you for a long time, Taylor. Known your father. You and him have one important thing in common. You’re both steady, both have character. You don’t flit from one thing to another. You don’t change your minds like the wind changing directions. You figure out one thing and you stick to it.”

  I wasn’t sure this was all complimentary, but there was truth to it.

  “Promise me you’ll never go down into a mine.”

  That one caught me off guard but, hey, that was no big deal. “I promise I’ll never go down into a mine.”

  “Number two. Promise me you’ll always be there for Laura. If she needs you or not. Even if she says she doesn’t need you at all. Promise me you’ll be there.”

  Number two was almost as easy to go along with as promise number one. “I promise.”

  The fiddle sang sweetly in the kitchen air. I breathed in the perfume of his rum-laden breath and felt bonded to this good man who was Laura’s father, this man who earned his family’s keep by rummaging for black rocks deep in the bowels of the hard, cold earth.

  Laura’s mother came into the room then and shook her head indulgently. She had on an old flower-print housecoat and her hair was in curlers. She had a soft, round face and wore rimless glasses that always made her look much older than she really was. “Jim Dan, you needs your sleep. Give poor little Taylor here a break. The boy don’t need so much of your nons
ense.”

  “Come here, woman, and give me a kiss,” Jim Dan said. He cracked into a grin and his eyes went a little funny. He pulled his wife to his lap and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  Laura walked back into the kitchen and laughed. “Would you two cut it out? That’s gross. You don’t have to do that in front of Taylor.”

  But there was nothing gross about it. And Laura wasn’t serious. We both enjoyed seeing her parents make happy married fools of themselves. I felt the ache of my own loss of a mother yet again, but before it had a chance to settle into my heart like a cold block of ice, Laura said, “Taylor and I are going for a walk.”

  “Again?” her mother asked.

  “It’s early,” she said.

  We walked out into the dark beneath the canopy of the Milky Way, toward Orion, all the way to my father’s boat shed where we went in and smelled the pure pine shavings from a day’s hard work on a new boat. Without turning the light on, we climbed to the little overhead loft, bumping perilously into razor-sharp saws and woodcutting tools that hung along the wall. When we lay down on the single khaki blanket above, I lit a small kerosene lantern I had strategically placed there two days earlier.

  We lay side by side, kissed, moved our hands up and down the length of each other’s body. Everything looked softly radiant in the light of the kerosene flame. I could see our reflection in the little window and beyond that only darkness. We were alone, the two of us. Safe in our embrace, in love, yes, but not yet obsessed with sex. That would come later. It was a private, shared ecstasy that diminished time to absolute insignificance. The clock stopped here.

  “Remember the time that…” I was sure I said it or she said it and then we repeated tales told to each other ten times apiece or more until the stories were moulded and reshaped in the telling. “Remember the time out on the ice…,” I said at one point.

  “It didn’t happen that way at all,” she said after my telling. “It was your idea to cross the harbour.” The magic was suddenly breached, but I refused to let our tryst be broken.

  “Right,” I said.

  One

  I saw the boat before I even saw the house. It was there in the front yard with a for sale sign on it. My old man’s latest creation was about thirty feet long. I knew she was made of good wood, every inch of her. The cabin was painted glossy red. The boat sat on a cradle of logs, propped on all sides by sturdy spruce poles as if waiting for a really high tide, a Noah’s ark of a flood to come and lift her off her resting place. There was a name painted on the side, my mother’s name – helen. I knew what that meant. My father hadn’t gotten over her yet.

  I pulled the car to a stop in the driveway and got out. I heard the sound of old clamshells cracking underfoot. It was a white driveway, calcium pure from years of dumping shells on it. It didn’t look any different from when I was a kid. I tried to focus clearly on where I was and closed my eyes. Gull shrieks in the distance. Wind in the tops of the spruce trees. Smells. The forest out back of the house. A billion spruce trees, a carpet of moss, bogs, lichen, bugs everywhere. Saltwater sea someplace in the backdrop of it all. Home, Nickerson Harbour. Crunch of clamshells as I took the first few steps and my legs almost gave out.

  The only way I could get those legs moving to get around the house toward the back door was to put one foot after the other, give them directions like a Hollywood director, remove myself to some other safer plane of existence and tell the actor who was inside this body to move it mechanically from point A to point B. Camera pulling away to a safe distance – above and back, a dolly shot. Things were going better than I’d thought possible.

  Then the door opened. My father. So many years it had been without a face-to-face. He looked so old. Add to it shock, surprise, some kind of hopeful excitement. He took a step forward, then had to steady himself on the railing. I knew there were rules to this game of return. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to throw myself into his arms and pretend I was a little boy, I wanted to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but I knew it wouldn’t be what he wanted. Or at least I was afraid to gamble. I’d seen him crack only once. Didn’t want to see it again.

  I nodded toward the boat in the front yard, put on the voice of an up-the-road Halfway Harbour fisherman. “What do you want for ’er?”

  He was smiling now. “Give her away free to a good home. Only a fool would buy a boat to ride around in on an ocean with no fish.”

  “Good-looking boat, though. How many hours went into her?”

  “I gave up counting.”

  Then I dropped the script. “You’re still a damn fine builder, Dad.”

  He stepped forward, put his big bear arms around me, and squeezed hard. “Taylor Colby. I can’t believe you’re finally home.”

  I hugged the old man as tightly as I could. “I can’t quite believe it, either. I guess I had to come back sooner or later.”

  I pulled off and he held me at arm’s length, looking me straight in the eyes. “Sooner would have been better. But later is just fine if that’s what I have to settle for. Gets pretty lonely around here.”

  “Nothing’s changed much.”

  “Not on this shore. People have kids, the kids move away. Old guys like me stay here and do the only things we know how to do.”

  “Build boats.”

  “Build boats that no one needs and then we sit inside watching Oprah just to see how screwed up the rest of the world is. Don’t know who’s in sadder shape, us or them.”

  “I believe it’s them. But just be sure to include me along with them.”

  “Come in, come in. I’ll get you tea or rum or both if you like.”

  “Both would be just fine.” I couldn’t believe how small the back porch had grown over the years. Once it had been the size of a football field. Now it took two steps to cross. The back door was low and the house itself had diminished in stature during the years of my absence. But in the kitchen an old oil stove still sang its sombre little tune, the kitchen table was still a solid slab of forest oak, and a picture of my mother at twenty years old still hung over the sink. I looked at it and shook my head. “Jesus, Dad, you’re some case.”

  He waved his hand in the air. “Your mother was a good-looking woman. No harm keeping her picture around.”

  “So you stare at it every time you wash the goddamn dishes?”

  “Makes me wish she was still here to do them herself.”

  “She was never partial to housework.”

  “But she had her good points.”

  There we were already into the conversation. I had to ask. “You ever hear from her? She still in Ontario?”

  My father sat at the kitchen table and looked at his hands. He put his right thumb in the palm of his left hand and seemed to trace the crease of his lifeline with his nail. “She’s been gone a long while. Must be me or something. First she goes and then you.”

  “That’s not the same at all.” I suddenly found myself sounding overzealously defensive. My mother had left him – just walked out. Left us, that is, a long time ago when I was a kid. I had to watch my father fall apart and pull himself back together. I had to try not to show how hurt I felt that she had abandoned me, too. So I pretended for a long time that it didn’t matter. But it mattered, all right.

  “Sorry. I know it was different.” He filled a kettle with water and placed it on the stove, then went to the fridge. “I forgot. Not a drop of rum in the house. Keeps me from doing something stupid. But I got a couple of beers here somewhere.” Two bottles appeared in his hands and he smacked them down on the table. He twisted off the caps and offered me one. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” The beer slid down my throat smooth as silk. “You never got over her.”

  “Never did. Some men are like that.”

  One swallow of beer and suddenly I was being escorted into the darkest of dreams. Not his dark dream, however, not the sad melodrama of my old man enduring the near-ancient loss of a wife who ran away on him.

/>   “I guess the Colby men never get over their women,” I said. “A sad pair, the two of us.”

  He studied the look of anguish on my face. “This town has never been able to accept what happened to Laura.”

  “Neither can I. I was afraid to come back here. Afraid her parents would blame me. Afraid they’d all blame me. After all the years of blaming myself, I still can’t accept it. I loved her, Dad.”

  “I know you did, son.” Over four years had passed before we had finally arrived at this conversation. My eyes welled up again, and I slugged back some more beer. Laura, Laura, Laura. Recently, my memory had begun to erase the Laura I knew here when we were kids, growing up on the shorelines of Nickerson Harbour. The sun in the trees, the deep dark clear water. The love. All I’d been able to hang on to was the Laura I knew toward the end. The party freak, the wild one, the daredevil woman she had become in California. The one who overdosed and died. Now that I was back in Nova Scotia, I would have to reacquaint myself with the girl I had fallen in love with a long time ago. And it was going to hurt like hell.

  “I don’t know if I can stay long,” I said. My head was about to explode.

  “That’s your decision. Stay as long as you can. You’re always welcome here. And it’s bloody good to have you back.”

  “Yeah. It’s been a long time. But I guess we both said that already. Have you really heard from her? From Helen?” I didn’t want to use the wordMom. Afraid to. Helen gave it some distance.

  My father had drained his beer and got up for another pair of Mooseheads, which he set down with a thunk on the table. “There wasn’t a word from her for a long time. Then a couple of Christmas cards. Then a couple of mimeographed newsletters from her and that guy Frank. Then some short letters and a phone call. It got quite regular there for a while – weird as all get out. We’d have these polite, meaningless conversations about the weather here and the weather in Toronto – Scarborough or wherever the hell it is she lives. And then nothing again for a while. About a month ago she called and started talking about taking tests.”

  “What do you mean, tests?”

  “I don’t know. She had some health problems, I guess. Doctors had her taking some sort of tests. I haven’t found out anything yet. She thinks they just do it so they can collect their fees.”