Sea of Tranquility Page 11

  “I always thought mainlanders placed too much emphasis on time. When to do this, when to do that. Schedules and such. Did you know this man, McTaggert?”

  “Knew him from his writings. Sometimes that is one’s most intimate relationship. McTaggert had this notion, shared by others, that nothing exists outside of the mind.” He tapped a finger ever so gently against Sylvie’s brow, and studied the sea pools again in her eyes.“What’s up here is all there really is.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  He traced her hairline with his index finger as if reading a road map.“I keep an open mind. I can embrace the idea. It opens up all kinds of possibilities.”

  “Which kinds are they?” Sylvie was falling in love with this wonderfully curious man. She adored his talk, his intellect, his furrowed brow that had horizontal ridges, like the line of distant waves on the sea. But what was she doing with another man in her house? Hadn’t she sworn herself to a solitary life?

  “You and I. Here on this island. It may only exist in our thoughts. This is just theoretical, mind you.”

  Sylvie touched his neck, let her fingers glide over his Adam’s apple. Men, such odd creatures. Comical. Always working away at a thing, never happy to just let it be. She smiled.“I can believe that I created this place, this island. Or that it created me somehow. It’s a connection that I feel very strongly.”

  “Animism. The idea that a thing like the island is alive.”

  “But it is.”

  “Yes.” He kissed her. William Toye let the world of ideas rest for a time. He felt her strong body in his arms. If she existed only in his mind, if neither of them had real physical flesh at all, then this was enough. This moment, this room, this woman. This embrace, not of an idea, but of a woman. It was enough. Was there a category for this experience? Was there a school of thought that already articulated what he had just discovered to be true in this instance? If not, he would lay down the basics of it, by God.

  Neither the Baptist minister nor the Pentecostal one would have anything to do with marrying William Toye who was already living with Sylvie. There was a justice of the peace in Mutton Hill Harbour, a doddering old man whose office contained hundreds of souvenir bells from tourist destinations around the world. He had yellowed newspaper clippings on the wall about the Dionne quintuplets. Toye had noticed other curious things: books, records, and various framed advertisements where the number five was prominent. Hillory Docker, J. P., had some particular affection for the number five but when asked about it, he’d only answer, “A random interest. As a boy, I picked a number and decided I would collect anything involving that number. I selected number five. It’s been a good selection. If I had picked something obvious like seven or something too round, like the number eight, it wouldn’t have been the same.”

  And so they were married, Sylvie to her fourth husband in a room that was a kind of shrine to the number five. It was the first day of a full moon, the second highest tide of the year, and they were the third couple to be married that week by Docker.

  It was Toye’s first marriage to a woman, although he had been married to several fields of scholarly research before and one or two schools of historical analysis. He was of the opinion, after his fifth night of wedded bliss, that this type of marriage was much more satisfying than the others. He worked hard at being a fine husband although he had poor credentials and had not been properly trained for the job. He needed tutoring.

  “You’re going to have to coach me on things. What to do. How to interact with your friends and neighbours, responsibilities around the house, that sort of thing. I’m very bad, I warn you, when it comes to anything financial. I just can’t seem to lather up any interest in money matters.”

  There was a small, begrudged pension from the university for all those years spent lecturing about nonexistent events of history and imaginary heroes of philosophy.“And I should be receiving a small royalty soon from my scholarly book. A trifling thing, really, a slim volume on Immanuel Kant, published by Oxford. I have to make sure they have my new address. Of course, I’ll have to find a bank that can cash a note in pounds Sterling.”

  But something must have gone afoul with the postal delivery system and the forwarding of mail, because the cheque from the publisher never did arrive. Sylvie never suspected that there had not been a book. Nor did William. He remembered writing it. He remembered posting the manuscript and receiving acceptance. All as if it had really happened. Living proof that McTaggert may have been right.

  Other books did arrive, however. A big crate of books from Dalhousie, shipped at the university’s expense. Aristotle, Plato, Heidegger, volumes of world history. The books invaded the house and filled shelves, piled in corners, scattered themselves under beds and lounged on chairs. The books did not seem to quite know what to do with themselves now that they had been kicked out of the university and trundled off to this rustic island home. Sometimes, while her new husband was refreshing his memory on Egyptian kings or inching his way through a biography of Immanuel Kant written in German, Sylvie grazed through a book titled Understandings of Paradox by a long-winded fellow named Lancelot Vertiges.

  Sylvie taught husband number four how to split wood and bake bread and cakes that were sold on the mainland, ferried over and delivered to a couple of small stores there. William tried hiring on with a couple of fishermen but proved to be more in the way than any good and had a poor stomach for choppy days. “He spends most of ’is time feeding the fish,” as Moses Slaunwhite’s father put it. William Toye had never vomited so much in his life.

  So, a hangashore he would be, and do whatever a hangashore was cut out to do on an island. He did not mind the smell of fish or tasks around the wharf so island men, still skeptical of Toye as some kind of mainland gigolo or something, were big-hearted enough to give him the odd piece of work. And odd it was. Toye’s favourite job, it turned out, was untangling massive convolutions of rope and netting. Before he had arrived and proved so adept, some fishermen would just cut the mess and let it drift off in the currents of the sea.

  “I learned more in one week about logic and problem solving,” William told his wife, “than I learned from all those years of reading and research. It’s quite incredible, really.”

  “My father knew all about tangles and knots. Always start with the loose end, he’d say. Follow it. Let the tangle teach you what to do; never force it. Patience wins out.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  William Toye drank his rum, read his books, and wrote in a notebook that he seemed somewhat private about.

  “Can I see what you write?”

  “My handwriting’s bad. Always has been. You can’t make much out.”

  She peered over his shoulder and stared into the puddle of light on the lined page. Bad was not quite an accurate description of his writing. Impossible was more like it. Squiggles, symbols, tangles of letters and lines looking like a mass of very tangled nets and rope piled on a wharf in disgust.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Trifles is all. Things that turn through a man’s head. Ideas and notions. Half thought out patterns of understanding. Just a mind cast loose with words and images. I always have the feeling that if you put enough down on a page, enough jabbering and rambling of intellectual thought, just one day you’ll come up with an idea that will change the world.”

  William Toye did not change the world. Yet he made his wife very happy. He was ill-prepared for much about life on the island but he never complained. He nearly cut his foot off splitting knotty softwood junks. His hands grew a bit tougher from untangling hand-lines and mending rough nets. He piled eelgrass around the bottom of the old house to help keep out the winds of winter, and, in bed on those cold nights, he kept his wife very warm and made love to her with dignity and passion, somehow blended together just right. He would praise her in Latin and console her when she felt sad in a language that he said came from the ancient Celts.

  Those were happy years, an
d Sylvie shared her own understanding of the deeper things of life with her husband, who was an eager student. She always believed that William’s eccentric notions and his wild ideas were somehow rooted in reality. Well, most of them were. She became more convinced he was truly mad when the business came up about Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

  “Moses Slaunwhite’s father told me the story and I can’t quite believe it. Fichte was here.” William gave an alien throaty hiss as he pronounced the cht sound. “Fichte came here himself at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Part of a wave of German immigrations.”

  “Many German families came here. Who was this man?”

  “Student of Immanuel Kant himself. And famous in his own right. Knowledge, Fichte believed, comes from a free, self-determining mind. Within that mind is the moral code of the world… well, the universe.”

  “If you say so.” This one sounded like so much gibberish to her.

  “Fichte was here in the summer of 1801, if I have the story correct. He came here with the intent of establishing a utopian community. A perfect society.”

  “But I’ve never heard anything about this. Usually all the stories about the island filter down to me one way or another.”

  “Fichte didn’t stay. He became disillusioned when no one would pay attention to him. But it was here he formulated some of his most prominent theories.”

  “Here on Ragged Island?”

  “Yes. Isn’t that beautiful. He went back to Germany and he did some of his best work.”

  And to that discovery, they celebrated.

  The next day, while visiting with Viddy Slaunwhite, she mentioned the business about the dead German philosopher and discovered that Noah Slaunwhite had been sick in bed for several days with “a raspy throat and a fever like a kettle aboil.” He’d had no visitors.

  It was the first time that Sylvie had fully doubted her husband on anything. She felt horrible and guilty about sitting down alone in the house and looking for Johann Gottlieb Fichte in the index of one philosophy text after another. And then she breathed a great sight of relief when she found a reference to him and discovered he had lived from 1762 to 1814. She read a chapter in one volume about this man and his ideas but could find no reference concerning his efforts to start a utopian community or a trip to Nova Scotia. She closed her eyes and considered the possibility that her husband was just a bit of a liar, like the men on the wharf who make up great false, entertaining yarns — half true, half fabricated. Maybe that was all there was to it.

  She tried to put the worry out of her mind as if it were a bird that had accidentally flown in through an open window. Chased it out of the house. Gone. But it wasn’t that easy.

  Then William came home one day from his odd jobs on the wharf and he had more to his story. “I talked to old Slaunwhite again. Apparently Fichte got into a fanatical argument with one of the preachers on the island here. It turned into fisticuffs: determinism versus free will. Fichte was a passionate man when it came to the central idea of freedom of the intellect. They fought. He picked up a rock and nearly killed the clergyman. He barely escaped the island with his life. It changed his whole view of the world.”

  Why this foolish tale was important to her husband, Sylvie couldn’t begin to comprehend, but he was very enthusiastic about it all and wrote extensive, incomprehensible notes that evening as he rifled through a pair of books concerning German philosophy.

  So Sylvie decided she could live with what William Toye believed to be true. And she began to understand that her husband’s beliefs had something to do with why he left the university.

  He was a good husband, though, a good man. What exists in the mind, she told herself, may be the only thing that is real after all. Great men and women had lived by such principles before, and an island was a good, safe place for such a high-minded doctrine.

  There had been three happy years. She always thought of them as thus. And then, suddenly, he woke up one night and said outright,“Sylvie, I don’t know what is real and what isn’t anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I’ve discovered that some things I believed to be empirical fact, are not.”

  “Why should this come as any great surprise to a man who has taught logic and philosophy?”

  “It’s not that. It’s something different. It’s like a big tangled pile of that rope on the wharf. I’ve started with one end and threaded it this way and that, just barely got it free, only to discover that it turns back on itself somehow to lead me to the same free end. And yet the knot is still there, bigger and more tangled than ever.”

  “Just let it go.”

  “I don’t know if I can. I don’t have a clear reference point as to what I know to be true.”

  “I am real, you know that. And I love you.”

  She held him and rocked him back to sleep like he was a little boy, but in the morning, she realized that something had changed.

  Wild frantic birds for eyes. Like the swallow that had darted into the house. Unable to find a way out. Back and forth.

  She walked him to the sea, to the Trough, to sit again and watch kelp sway back and forth in the sweet, salty pools of cold, clean water. She waited for whales to appear. And they did.

  “I believe sometimes that I can hear the voices, the thoughts of those big creatures, in my mind,” she told William.

  He looked at her intently.“Are you serious?”

  “Yes. I am”

  “It’s probably just your imagination,” he told her.

  “It probably is. Because I can’t translate what they are telling me into any language. Yet I learn something new each time I hear them. There are unspoken ideas that cannot be formed into words.”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t even matter to me if those whale voices are real or not. I would continue to believe in them because they are important to me. They are part of who I am. Do you know what I mean?”

  Just then,William Toye began to cry. He hung his head and wept, his wife’s arm around him, until salt tears splashed upon the flat slate rock at his feet. “Yes. I do know what you mean. And I know why you’re saying this to me. I love you all the more for it.”

  William Toye became kinder and softer after that, but a great, ponderous uncertainty had set in like a damp, cold fog in his soul. He drank, but without his previous enthusiasm. He sought refuge in the arms of his wife and began to shy away from interactions with others on the island. He required care, and Sylvie was the one to provide it. They ceased being lovers and became great friends. William Toye lost his fervour for books and knowledge for the most part, although he settled into reading anthologies of old poets.

  He died in his sleep three years into their marriage. Sylvie woke in the cool, thin, grey light of early morning and realized the man beside her was cold. Icy cold. His two hands were upon his face, covering it as if he’d just seen something that he did not care to look at. Sylvie did not pry his hands loose but held him in her arms and rocked him as she had done in recent months. She tried not to swear out loud or blame herself for the pain that would now re-enter her life. But she could not contain herself. She cursed loud and long and then cried until her tears soaked into the nightshirt of her fourth husband. Grief swept over her like a familiar advancing army, crushing everything of her spirit, trampling her and leaving no room for her self. Leaving no oxygen in her lungs, no hope in her thoughts.

  When she could bring herself to move, she walked outside and saw the pale three-quarter moon like a white ghost hanging in the morning sky, fading into invisibility as the sun began to burn off the mist.

  She did not call for any assistance until late that afternoon, and soon after, she asked Moses to arrange for a simple burial, a non-denominational service.

  Chapter Twelve

  The island does not sleep. Not in this century, anyway. Sylvie knows this, feels this in her old bones. Sylvie wakes at five-thirty today. July 15. The summer slipping by so quickly. Wonderin
g how many summers there are left. The brevity of the season makes her love it all that much more. She awakens with the feeling that there are scattered pieces of something she needs to fit back together. She is significant, important. She is the essential connection between the island, the sea, the moon, and the people. Some kind of thread she is: these are an old woman’s thoughts rattling around in her brain. And she knows this is not madness at all, yet words will fail her should she try to explain this to Kit or to Elise, the woman from Upper Montclair.

  Silence and stillness on a grand morning like this. Some would think the whole island at rest, at sleep, but not her. She feels the life of this place beneath her, all around. She knows the island will sleep again someday, will rest when the world changes. Another ice age, or rising tides from the melting ice caps. Then it will sleep until the moon or sun tugs it awake again. She is grateful that this is her home, as always. Love for this place. No one understands the sustenance of geography like she does.

  Sylvie’s feet upon the gravel road leading to the cemetery. Old barns leaning into the earth, swallows shooting like rockets from cracks in the walls. Old, quiet houses with families of young children asleep. Clapboard cocoons. Neat lawns mown with gasoline mowers, the grass smooth and sculpted around hillocks and cosy up to the boulders with flakes of silvery lichen.

  Rotted fenceposts around the old cabbage fields where now wild mustard blooms yellow in the morning sun. Dew on everything like a crystal clear sugar glazing on baked goods. Her own breathing: a sigh, a gulp of clean air. A step forward. Why, on this morning, is she going to visit her dead men? She doesn’t know really. Love, perhaps. Memory and love.

  Death is a small impediment to love, she admits to herself. Love collects. Somehow. Never diminishes. Oh, you can put it like a kettle on the back burner once it comes to a full boil, but there it will simmer. She’s been simmering for a long while.