Sea of Tranquility Read online

  It was all there in logical black and white. The only thing holding them back had been that damn whale-watching thing. Tourism was all over it like flies on shit. For God’s sake. You might think they found gold out there or some friggin’ thing. Assholes driving their families out here from all over North America. If it wasn’t for that, Sim knew they could have closed that island down a long time ago. Close the school, give up on the subsidy to the ferry, the whole shooting match. Save the taxpayer plenty of out-of-pocket expenses. Nice neat package.

  Moses Slaunwhite — all his fault. Couldn’t leave well enough alone. But that was all over now. The Department of Tourism was getting complaints. No whales were being spotted on the Ragged Island tour. Big-ass company in Chicago funnelling all those tree-huggers and fish-loving freaks in; they were ticked off and were bailing out on the whole shebang.

  Not one bloody reason left to defend the cost of the ferry service. All over but the shouting and the stink. So it was a done deal. Sim could tough out the clatter. That’s why Dancy had appointed him to the job to begin with.

  Moses took the call from Chicago with as much dignity as he could muster. Nails in the coffin, he supposed. Boat would have to go back to the bank, he realized. What next? Always something around the corner. If only they could count on a good water-spout once a week, they’d have tons of tourists. Maybe find some dinosaur bones or buried treasure. Jeez, what would it take? Wasn’t like the old days when fish was enough, or cabbages. Had to roll with the swells, take the tide as she turned, what?

  Nobody really knew what went through a mainlander’s mind, especially the mind of some bureaucrat in bloody Halifax. Up to his ear hairs in patronage and piss. Had Moses had a bit of foresight, he’d have rallied the people of the island sooner, but islanders thought they had seen it all — the good times, the bad times, wars, rum running, sea disasters, and the death of the fishery. But this was different.

  It was a damp and mildewy afternoon when Sim Corkum and the Honourable Dancy Moxon stepped off the ferry onto the wharf. Moses saw them sniff the air like a couple of worried Labrador retrievers; he noticed the shoes the men wore — city shoes with a shine. Moxon had a Colwell Brothers suit on. No one wore a suit on the island unless it was funeral. Not even to regular church on Sunday. Only when someone died.

  Dancy went to the Aetna with Sim and they ordered clams and chips, sat at the picnic table outside, and talked to a woman and her two kids from New Jersey who were there eating ice cream cones. Sim realized that Vance’s college kid had probably counted them since they were spending the summer there. Three, he realized, three fewer year-round residents. Island population down to 241. Can’t subsidize a bloody year-round daily ferry service for a mere 241 people. He pointed this out to Dancy after the family left.

  Where to begin? Dancy had built a career in a short span of time out of glad-handing the public and then turning around and dropping to his knees at Province House any time the premier or minster of finance wanted him to chop jobs or service. Not that he liked it, mind you, just the way things were. He referred to it as “the government of the here and now,” as if that meant dick. Not exactly the fat days of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Not that at all. Deficit reduction was the name of the game, the ladder to the top.

  Where to begin? He knew he was brave to even be here at all. Away from Halifax and here in his own riding to put forward the bad news. Public meeting coming up at four o’clock. Had to be out of there on the six-thirty ferry. Home to the wife by ten if he was lucky. Back to civilization. Clayton Park on Bedford Basin suited him much better than where he had once lived in Blue Rocks. Course, there was still the constituency office in Lunenberg. Two afternoons a week. And now here he was. On a bloody offshore island. Legwork. No one would ever accuse him of not trying to face up to the music. He knew he could ignore New Germany, Hebb’s Corner, or Vogler’s Cove. As long as he had Bridgewater and Chester in his pocket. And Mutton Hill Harbour. Mutton Hill would understand, he knew they would. People in the town always believed islanders were backwards. There would be resettlement to consider. Think of Joey Smallwood doing what he knew he had to do for his people in Newfoundland. Come ashore boys and burn the boats. Join the twentieth century.

  Only now it was nearly the goddamn twenty-first century and a province couldn’t afford to keep people living on islands like this. Health care. Education. Transportation, the worst of it. Consolidate. Pay some compensation if need be, although there would be an easy away around that. No work on the island. What were you compensating people for? Doing them a bloody favour, was the truth to it. All this swimming through Dancy’s head like a school of piranha as he worried his fried clam on a plastic fork.

  He nodded to the old woman with the card table beneath the willow tree. He waved and said hello even though he figured she was probably old and deaf. “Look at the old thing,” Dancy said to Sim, “sitting there with a couple of cakes and a loaf of bread, waiting to sell them to tourists, but there’s no tourists here. Oh hell…”

  Dancy got up and went to the old woman, offered to buy the bread and her cakes. Gave her a twenty and told her to keep the change. She seemed puzzled, didn’t like the feel of the money in her hands, knew it to be charity and wondered what Dancy Moxon was going to do with her baked goods.

  Nothing left to sell, she was off home and Dancy gave the stuff to Corkum, who peered around the area like a bloody vandal, and when he was sure no one was looking, he tossed the stuff into a trash bin. But got seen in the act by Moses Slaunwhite running towards the Aetna.

  Moses tipped his cap and then tried to smile but couldn’t. Saw Dancy Moxon sitting at a picnic table with fried clams and greasy fingers.

  “Sim Corkum, D. O. T.,” Sim said, trying to be civil.

  “The meeting, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “You two aren’t really out here to tell us what I think you want to say, are you?”

  “It’s just an information gathering session. Dancy tries to keep in touch with his constituents. Nothing political about it or anything.”

  “That’s a load off my mind,” Moses said with a fresh coating of sarcasm.

  The old woman sat in the front row at the meeting. Moses and his wife, Viddy, were there. Viddy had a new haircut from the unisex salon in Mutton Hill Harbour. Short, like the women on the TV shows they picked up on their satellite dish with the illegal decoder. Kind of like English schoolboys. Everybody noticed Viddy’s hair. She liked it that way.

  Everyone also noticed Sylvie sitting front and centre. Probably so she could hear, they thought. An old woman probably needed to be close to the action to hear anything.

  About seventy-five people were in the room, in the dusty so-called town hall, which was hardly ever used. Everyone had given up on committees and meetings. Everybody ended up getting mad at one another over nonsense like what to do with the town hall trash — even though there was hardly ever any. Dump it at Phonse’s and pay him a small fee or send it to the mainland or just heave it into the ocean? Another environmental argument that was never resolved. Moses volunteered to haul it to his property and put it in a hole and bury it and some people had found fault with that. So they stopped having meetings. And the hall grew lonely, diminished in esteem, and dust gathered for conventions inside.

  The dust made Elise sneeze. She was allergic to dust mite excrement and here she was among a whole universe of dust mites left to hatch and feast and roam about. She decided she could handle it. Something important was happening here. Canadian politics. Nova Scotian democracy in action. Something she could talk to Bruce about when he came up from Wall Street — or down from Wall Street as they would say on the island. The island was down. Everything else in the world was up. Even South Carolina was “up” from here.

  Kit would have sat next to Sylvie but she didn’t want to be up front. She sat in the back, and not far away from her, leaning against the back wall, was that college kid, Greg Cookson. Came to the island one day counting th
ings and forgot to go home. The Swinnemars said he could have the fish shack on the front point for the summer and he went crazy fixing it up with discarded lumber and bent nails. Only today was Greg beginning to realize that his final report to the province (before he had quit his summer job) was somehow useful to these two assholes from the mainland.

  Everybody in the room knew there was bad news coming. The good news was always no news, when everyone off-island left them alone. But now this.

  Sim Corkum rubbed back his thinning hair three times when he stood up, as if paving the way for what was to follow. “I want to thank you all for coming out tonight and I apologize for intruding into your well-deserved free time. I’m not going to talk too long but I just want to say that we’ve always had good relations with Ragged Islanders ever since the D. O. T. took over the ferry service. I know that Gil Lovelace has done a good job under contract for us to keep your roads in order and plow the snow in the winter, and our department appreciates his work.”

  A couple of men with reddish sunburnt faces laughed, someone hooted, and there was one set of hands that applauded. Truth was Gil Lovelace did have the contract but did a bad job, or at least a lackadaisical one. Potholes aplenty in the summer. In the winter, snow had to be a foot or more before he’d start up his damn rig and do anything, but people generally didn’t like to complain. If you did, you’d end up with some asshole like Corkum down here in the town hall trying to change things and make it worse. Lovelace himself cleared his throat heavily and with significant orchestration, wanted to spit but thought better of doing it in the hall and swallowed whatever he’d sucked up from the back of his throat.

  “Now this meeting tonight,” Sim continued,“isn’t going to be easy for me or you or Dancy here but I hope you’ll bear with us because there’s a silver lining to this thing and you just have to let him get around to it.” At that, Sim knew he better just shut up because he was setting everybody on edge, the very thing he was trying not to do. “So I’ll just say it’s good to see all of you here tonight and turn things over to Dancy Moxon, your elected representative.”

  Scattered polite applause, cursory and insincere. Dancy stood up, studied the tips of his fingers, and looked up at the dark space above the exposed rafters.“God, I love this island,” he began.“You know, people in Halifax don’t understand about places like this. They don’t understand the importance of men and women and their families and their honourable traditions of working on the sea, farming the land. They’re too detached from all that now and they live in a different world. But I don’t need to tell you that.”

  Men fidgeted in their seats. Phonse Doucette couldn’t keep his mouth shut so he blurted out, “Jeezus, Dancy, don’t give us none of that sweet shit. Just cut to the chase and save the heavy breathing.” Which was pretty polite considering what Phonse really wanted to say.

  “See. That’s what I mean. You’re a people who won’t stand for all the foolish diddle daddle of bureaucrats and city talk. So I will ‘cut to the chase’ as Mr. Doucette said. I’m here tonight to offer you a challenge and a great opportunity. The world’s changing out there and I can’t stop it. I can’t do a damn thing about what they do in Ottawa, slashing those transfer payments, ripping the heart out of our social safety net and taking your tax money and wasting it on pension plans for Quebec senators. I can’t change that. But what I can do is keep your voice alive in Halifax. I let the premier know at every blessed cabinet meeting who I represent and he hears me loud and clear.

  “So when I hear him tell me that he’s cutting the ferry service for good to Ragged Island, claiming that it’s too expensive, too shamefully expensive amidst all the belt-tightening and squeezing of our financial resources, I stand up and say, ‘Mr. Premier, I’m not going to let you do that to the good people of Ragged Island.’”

  “You’re damn straight on that,” Moses cut in. “You cut the ferry service and you’d cut the lifeline to this island.”

  Sim Corkum began to worry over a bit of a sunburn scab on his nose as Dancy nodded like he understood ever so well what folks were thinking about. “Well, there it is. I know you don’t want me pussy-footing around it. I fought the good fight, friends. But I lost. That decision has already come down and I’m going to tell you what it was. And how it happened. Ottawa cut us back to the bare bones. You’ve all read the papers. We had a choice. We either close down hospitals or we trim the transportation budget. We send people with cancer back home to die or we treat them. And in order to treat them we have to lose three ferry routes in this province along with cutting back in a hundred other places. All of which is gonna hurt, I know.”

  People were on their feet. Men and women were mouthing curses in English, German, and French. Dancy stood his ground, took it all in. Sylvie thought his eyes were beginning to water. Was he feeling hurt at the rage of his constituents or was it well-deserved heartburn from his meal at the Aetna? She dared not guess which. Sylvie sat still as a stone. There was an odd numbness she felt in her toes and fingers, a dizziness in her head and a great hollow sensation in her chest.

  “Dancy,” Moses said. “We’re not going to let you screw us like this.”

  Other people were less polite. Epithets were hurled. Sim looked with glazed eyes at the back wall. He’d driven down this road before, knew all the twists and turns, knew how to get himself out of a ditch if he had to, knew there would be a smooth patch further ahead to take a deep breath and cool off. All he had to do was keep from getting sucked into a public argument. Put a good face on it like Dancy. Damn, if the man didn’t have the silver tongue of the devil himself. Some truth in what he said, but there was a prize awaiting Dancy if he could cut the budget. Dancy never went out on a limb like this unless there was something in it for him, probably get himself bumped up to a better cabinet posting. That would do it.

  “Look, it’s already done. By October of this year. And as far as I could tell, the province was going to do frig all to help you adjust. But that’s when I put my fist down and said no way. So I fought for you again and now we have a plan.”

  Everyone was talking to each other now. Chewing over this inevitable, impossible news. “Look, we’ve had meetings in Halifax and stared at this thing upside down and sideways until we were cross-eyed. Your ferry was costing us, each year, over a thousand dollars per person. Unless we raise the fare to fifty dollars a head, each way, we still couldn’t make a go of it. There was some hope for the tourism side of things. I argued until I was blue in the face about the spin-off dollars that went into mainland businesses and money coming into the province with the tourists but you and I know that things changed. Who ya gonna blame? Mother Nature?”

  Moses seethed with rage. It was as if Dancy was pointing a finger at him. What the hell could he do if the whales stopped coming? He couldn’t keep his mouth shut.“We’re not going to take this lying down.”

  “S’right,” Phonse said, loud enough to hear the echo in the room from the high ceiling. He was thinking about his arsenal of weapons. A lot of people on the island had become pretty good marksmen thanks to his outdoor arcade (as he was calling it now). And he had a pretty fair loyal following on the mainland, customers who would be cut off from their water taxi ride to his junkyard. Hell, he was about to lose everything he’d worked for all his life.

  Dancy held his hands up in the air and offered up a theatrical glum look.“I know what you’re feeling and I hear you. The bottom line is this. Nobody has to move off the island. But if you are willing to relocate, we’re going to foot the bill. We’re going to offer every bit of assistance we can and we’ll even buy your property at the assessed value.”

  Joe Krauss spoke up now.“You and I know that our homes aren’t assessed at fair market value.”

  Dancy shook his head, acknowledging this point. “Funny, nobody’s ever complained before about their assessment. Nobody’s ever come to the tax office to say they are not paying enough taxes and want us to raise their assessment.”


  It was a cruel blow. Dancy knew he better cut it out. He was right on that point but he had to be more cautious.

  “But what about the older kids who go to school on the mainland?” Kit asked.“How are they going to go back and forth?”

  “They’ll need to find a place to stay on the mainland if the families don’t want to move.”

  “How’s this going to affect my school here on the island?”

  Dancy was up against it again. “Education has decided the island school’s cost is ineffective.”

  “So you want us all to bloody move off the island, don’t you?” Viddy blurted out.“Who are you, Joey Smallwood? What the hell is going on here?”

  “Look. Each of you is going to receive the package of what we can offer. Some will want to stay, some will want to leave. What we’re offering, I repeat, is an opportunity here. I’d suggest you don’t turn it down. It will only happen once. And if it wasn’t for me — I know you don’t want to hear this — but if it wasn’t for me, you’d all have squat. You’d lose the ferry and be on your own. Now you will have a compensation package, moving assistance, a buy-out of your property if you so desire, and back on the mainland you’ll have full services, schools, hospital, the whole shebang.”

  Moses was silently considering the alternative. What if he took up the slack and turned his boat into a shuttle to the mainland? He thought it through right down to fuel costs and knew that it was a losing proposition. He’d have to work his ass off back and forth each day and he’d have to charge twenty bucks, maybe thirty, or even fifty. It wouldn’t work. He wished the numbers added up differently.