Dance the Rocks Ashore Read online

  The boat was not to be saved. But Kincaid had enough money laid by to put a payment down on a larger vessel, something close to a real fishing boat. He set out to double, then triple our old catch while I went back to school, where I learned to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets and read books by other dead Englishmen until I dreamed them in my sleep. John Kincaid didn’t speak a word to me for over fifty years.

  And then the year came for all things to die, the year for me to rant against death, to establish eternity once and for all and to quiet forever all losses. November. The months are very important to me. Name a month and it rings inside me like a sound, a colour, a package of emotion and smell. Eleanor gone. November, pulling out the rocks from beneath the foundation of the hill, waves catapulting up the sheer dirt cliff and spiralling pirouettes of spray around to boil with the wind on a wild, grey night. Kincaid, finally dead. The news on the radio. Not one, but three boats from the harbour out at sea in late afternoon on a senseless, stupid ocean, blinded by instinct. Kincaid himself, refusing as usual to give it up, the tides good and high, the catch thick and heavy, no more debts to pay on any man’s boat or mortgage, and his greed thick and running full-stream for a man my own age. Sixty-nine. Sixty-eight, actually. The reporter on the radio said he was sixty-eight. All those years. I could never have believed him to be younger than me. Kincaid. He never really spoke to me again since the hatchet work. He had walked the shore waiting for the boat but found only splinters with the right paint. The hand axe, by some uncommon, messianic whim of the sea, had made its way to the beach, and John Kincaid found it, planted it in the side of our house like any Indian.

  It would have been the right night for John to die. A monster sea, the highest of tides and him a couple of miles out from here, tangled in kelp, a chance for the catch to get back at him. And my bloody trick had probably done nothing more than increase the agony, make it harder to die, which is to say give death more power. How many other blunders had I done in my life? How often had a well-meaning gesture caused a sufferer more pain?

  I switched off the radio and calmed the kettle on the wood stove, then sat in dark silence staring again at completion. The tidiness of it all. Too simple, too easy. And I could at that moment fall on the floor and writhe if I wanted, alone on a sea cliff with my private hell. The loss. Eleanor, then John. The desire so great to wail, to pound my head against a wall or do myself in, to complete it once and for all. Yet I could also do quite the opposite now. And did. I could set it all outside of me and look it dead in the dark face and not be mad and not be terror-struck and not be unhappy at all. And I turned on a light and made room in the warm kitchen for us all.

  It was then that John Kincaid ripped open the door and barged in, wanting blood.

  “I could swim, you bastard. Look at me, MacPherson. The man saved. Twice saved is twice to many.”

  “Get over here by the fire, John. You’re alive, I don’t believe it. Thank God.”

  Instead of thanking God, he tried to kill me. It was perhaps the third time in my life he fully tried to do it. We were both old men now, but it was the same. He grabbed a piece of split hardwood and tried to bash my brains out, and I shielded myself only enough to feel the blunt weapon connect on bone but no meaty grey matter. I let him try to do what he had decided upon, but he was weak, and his own violence finally sent him flat to the floor, where he bunched up a rug and sobbed into its dust.

  He had been in the sea two full hours, pounded by thirty-foot waves and groping from one stick of salvage to another. He had heaved guts into the cold sea three times and gone unconscious twice, only to come around for the last time with water invading his lungs and no feeling in his feet and fingers but his arms continuing to flap on their own as they moved like machines, long after he had wanted them to quit, long after he had schemed a will to drown himself, to end the stupid fight. He would have been happy. But instead he swam, his body worked the waves, not him. And then he felt a hand, something like a fist, pull him up into the air, them smash him down into the terrifying mass of white foam, a shuddering torment of water twisted him around and around until he couldn’t tell up from down. His skull was nearly wrenched from his neck, and his eyes were stuck wide open. “I’ve seen hell, thank you. And it’s white and it’s grey and it moves like cold snakes around your throat and makes you scream inside your head.”

  The grey and white hell had tried to break his back three times, lifting him and dropping him on the rocky stubble at the base of my hill until his dead fingers reached and found red mud. Then he knew he was alive and wanted to be dead.

  Kincaid drank tea and then drank rum. He refused a trip to the hospital, and for that he later lost the tips of three fingers and two toes. In the morning he cried for over an hour, and I had to leave the house, hovering nearby for fear he’d slice his wrists, but he didn’t. Nor did he go to sea again. He took the insurance money and holed up with a cranky bitch of a woman who kept three other old men. He was obliged to turn over to her all of his savings, and there he sat before a television with the smell of stale urine forever in the air. When I would go to visit him, he would say my name but that was all.

  MURIEL AND THE BAPTIST

  On the other side of Rocky Run there’s a crooked finger of land that stretches into the sea. When the sky is low and grey and knifed clean by north winds, I look over at those dark red palisades of Penchant Point and think of Muriel, alone with her God and three towers. You can almost see the narrow strait of open sky electric with invisible communications. Muriel of the open Gideon Bible, Muriel of the unshadowed kingdom, speaker in tongues, interpreter of dreams, enemy of the Voice of America.

  Once a year she would travel the shore and try to force truth into our souls, to save us from hell, to indoctrinate us with the law of a book. She could only ever half-read, but that was enough. Her eyes burned like hot coals, and there was always fear and mistrust of anything in this world in the flames. In brief flashes you could see love, a love we knew nothing of, a love for a tyrant God, a Giant MacAskill of a being who shouted to her in the wind, instructing her to remind the world of the fire below. It burned beneath her house in a damp secret flame at night, and no one could feel its heat quite like she could. Muriel was one of those women you could take a knife to and she wouldn’t bleed. The flame had dried the blood in her veins and lit the torch in her eyes, and, like so many believers in such power, she was more than capable of murder.

  On a raw spring day, Muriel would show up just when I was finally set to paint the house, and she wouldn’t let me alone until she had preached the full gospel, all pumped up with her own venom. She spit as she talked, not on purpose but because the fire inside wanted to get rid of the dampness and let the flame rule. Eleanor and I would weather her storm and invite her in for tea once she was worn out, which took some doing. It was dangerous to invite her in if she had not worn herself down. Once she kicked the sleeping dog underneath the table so hard that she cracked his rib, and we had to have it set. She apologized, knowing it wasn’t her but the devil who had wrenched the spasm in her leg. The devil, she said, was often the messenger from God sent to let her know white by showing black clear as midnight. Eleanor would always say to me that Muriel was a kind woman, that it took a little to see beneath it all to the loneliness and softness that was barricaded up behind a skin like white bone itself. To me, she was like the lobster, the crab or the sea urchin: she wore her skeleton on the outside. Eleanor insisted that we should be kind to her. And we were.

  Muriel was maybe twenty years above me and a pioneer of sorts, in that she preceded the rest of us who live our lives out alone on this coast of forgotten people, quiet strangers in a world of noisy crowds. Primitives left to live out what’s left on the coastline of a forgotten fringe of a continent gone mad with machinery and power and empty promises. If I live forever, as planned, I will confuse the new generation with my very knowledge of the world of sail, of tide, of wind and wo
od. They will see me as a museum, and the public will pay good money to enter into me and become the past.

  When Muriel’s Baptist came to Penchant Point, we had never heard of Baptists in these parts. He wore work clothes and carried that book, the one she kept for her own. There was no bridge then, and I was the kid, greasing oarlocks by the inlet, who offered him the ride across to Penchant. He spoke the whole way, never thanked me, but said the Lord was to be my anchor, this to a person who then believed in perpetual motion. I would let nothing tether me to a sunken weight but preferred to swim wild with any current handy. The Baptist wore shoes the size of anchors themselves, and he had a curious pallor, a blondness in the skin with a blue-grey and soft tan just underneath. No doubt he was a mix of black and white. I wanted to know more about that, but he wanted to speak only of Guiding Lights and more so about punishment, not skin colour. His voice boomed as if it had been shaped out of rock, and, each time he spoke, he was throwing a hewn boulder at the sky.

  “How did you get here?” I asked him. He seemed to me like someone who had come from a place very far away.

  “A man walks,” he answered. “A good man walks upright.” He had such a cold, sure sense of himself. I would like to have untied the knot that held his tongue back, so when we reached the other side, I stood rather stupidly shaking his hand and asked him how far he had come and from where.

  “Today I walked here from North Preston. Before that I walked as a child under the hand of the Lord with my daddy form Virginia. We did some walking in those days. My daddy had walked back and forth in a dirt field working for a sinner, but before him his father walked free in Africa, a pagan who had never spoken the name of the Lord. We are different now.” He said the word we like he was referring to all three of them. Staring into his face, I suddenly realized how much older he was than I first thought and how unlike any man I had seen on the shore before. The Baptist had steel girders for shoulders and poured concrete for a body, so that when he stood up it was as if he pushed the earth down beneath him from his force.

  The Baptist wanted to know about the people out on Penchant Point, and I told him his preaching might be better accepted elsewhere, since the families of Penchant were hard, untrusting creatures, tied down to farms of rock-strewn pasture and thin topsoil for generations. He smiled. “But I’ve come to speak to the people.” So I offered to take him to the first house on the crooked little trail that stretched like a broken-backed snake to the ultimate narrow, steep headland that barely held out against the corrosion of the sea.

  Lincoln MacQuarrie was the unlikeliest of candidates for the Baptist’s kingdom of God. We found him behind his barn in his turnip field trying to pry a rock from the ground with a ten-foot pole, a contrary ox with one bad leg, and more cursing than the Baptist had probably had ever heard in his solemn life. Years later I would remember that rock when my first dentist, a man with stale alcoholic breath and a shaky hand, tried to pull out a tooth he claimed was rotten. “It’s only holdin’ by the nerve root,” he told me and pulled until my jaw would have cracked, but still nothing ever came out. That rock was nerve-rooted deep into the planet with the devil at the other end of the nerve holding on for dear life. A man with an ox can move mountains but not with MacQuarrie’s beast, who looked starved and starry-eyed and better suited for sleep than work.

  “Dirty Jesus, would you look at this?” Lincoln asked the wind as I introduced the Baptist, who held out his hand. MacQuarrie wouldn’t take it, just kept wiping his bruised knuckles on a dirty handkerchief, his lower jaw quivering the way it always did, as if he was chewing air and turning it into something acid, his face all pinched up.

  “Sir, I come in the name of Jesus,” said the Baptist, towering over Lincoln. “Jesus, who showed us the way. Be not aggrieved by your tribulations here below. But cast out the demon within and kneel before the Almighty!”

  No doubt the Baptist meant well in his own heart, but he was a trifle confused, having spent so much time walking, walking alone and making conversation only with the angels, for he appeared to lack the graces of idle shore talk in this land where men spoke at length on wind and tide and foul weather and the revenge of the North. MacQuarrie conceived that the giant mulatto was some sort of crazy lunatic who was asking him to kneel before him as a heathen god. For the Baptist, framed against the bleak, low-slung sky, sucked in his chest, and you could see muscles rippling like living serpents down the length of his almighty neck. Many men before MacQuarrie had confused the images of angel and devil, prophet and Satanist. And Lincoln had thought more than once that the Evil One would one day show his face and own up to the rotten tricks he had so often personally inflicted on this peninsula. So Lincoln grabbed the pole and was about to make good his revenge. There was nothing I could do but seek refuge behind the ox and let philosophers contend.

  The Baptist saw the pole raised above him but stood firm, opened his Gideon, quoted slowly the words of Paul to the Thessalonians: “We are bound to thank God always, for you brethren, as it is meet, because your faith groweth exceedingly and the charity of every one of you all toward each other aboundeth.”

  The pole came earthward, and as if through a miracle or some magic of his huge frame, the Baptist dropped low in a wrestler’s stance, bracing his hands above him in a mighty grip to receive the message of the unbeliever. He caught the pole and held firm while MacQuarrie chewed air and made good the whites of his eyes. And as Lincoln stood frozen, a man with irons locked to a circle of loose pebbles and goose tongue, the Baptist lifted the weapon and advanced to the stone, drove it hard beneath and executed a profound cantilever as the ox moved forward of its own accord. The rock moved up, then slipped back; then an unshaken Baptist heaved again, pulling up the earth for a full foot outside the perimeter of the unwanted inhabitant. With a shoulder he pushed it aside, and you could see the thing lying there. Underneath, it had been like an iceberg which fanned out in horizontal planes that had kept it solid in the earth.

  MacQuarrie had fallen flat on his back. He leaned up on an elbow from the weeds to see the vacant hole filling with water from below. The Baptist hauled Lincoln to his feet, brushed off the farmer’s shirt and turned to go.

  But on the road, the Baptist spoke in a slow, trembling voice. “The damned fools.” I encouraged him to think that it might be easier from there on out but felt my own safety was not to be bargained with. I explained to the Baptist about the road and its absurd crooked path. It passed through towns marked on an official map with names as if to believe that a town could be two houses less than a quarter-mile apart. Each town had been labelled with a binding, uncreative name — Upper Penchant, Middle Penchant, Lower East Penchant, Lower West Penchant and Lower Penchant itself.

  The final house at the least habitable mile of the peninsula was where Muriel lived alone, with maybe twelve goats. I had been there once and seen a curious little hill, perfectly round and smooth like a bowl turned upside down, green as if it were a smooth-clipped cemetery and populated by goats and ravens, all perfectly placed so as to create some supreme balance and order. Two other hills, the same as the first but covered in stunted spruce and alders, followed, and, beyond that, a phalanx of stone pointing to the sea. By the first green hill lived Muriel Cree, a large woman herself, a full six feet but bent at the neck and appearing as if she was always looking for something at her feet. I knew almost nothing of her except that she was the daughter of a Portuguese sailor who had washed up here and taken for his wife a dark, brooding Penchant girl who had been out berry-picking. Since the girl had always seemed odd, unexplainably dull-witted and prone to fits of madness and speeches in unaccountable animal languages, the family approved of the sailor. Muriel was their only child, and she grew up alone with rocks and gulls and a few goats. Then, when she was a teenager, her parents disappeared. It was said that a Portuguese ship drew in near shore, and the father flagged it down. The story suggests that they simply embarked, leaving Muriel a
ll alone at the end of the earth to feed the goats, her with a bent neck and club foot.

  I had turned back before reaching Lower East Penchant, but the Baptist found her at last, a woman with ears in the land of the deaf. He thundered away as he had before until she was convinced of his piety, then asked him to stay. The Baptist stayed on after he had washed away her sins in a cold sea and made her memorize all the names in the Old Testament. They would chant them together in late December, when winter braced its feet against a cold northern rock and pushed hard, only to feel itself unready to convince a stalwart ocean. The sea banked up its thick grey clouds to form swirling foothills in the sky, holding onto what heat it had dared to absorb through the warm months and not wanting to relent to the icy pitchfork tongue of the Arctic.

  The few rugged fisherman left who slid their boats past Penchant heard the rattle of ancient names coming from shore: “Obadiah, Malachi, Manaseh, Ephraim, Abraham, Jacob, Isaiah, Zebulun, Helon, Milcah, Noah!”

  It would not be for me to pretend an accurate reconstruction of what sort of passions went into their name-shouting or what it meant. I had heard, though, that the Baptist had stayed, that he had married her in his own way, with himself as the minister, with God his witness. With a vision of beginning a new line of Israel, repopulating the shore with a crowd of Christians carrying the names of Deuteronomy and literate in their hearts with the teaching of Jesus. It would have been a curious mix with the pagans on this coast.

  Toward his end, the Baptist found himself one morning walking a ground of clean white frost that had sculpted blades of grass into a valley of scimitars. He walked to the top of the first hill leading the youngest of the tribe of goats that had populated that point for seven of their generations. It was a goat with a long white coat and one long mark across its neck like a black scar. To the Baptist it seemed like an instruction from the Almighty to cut along the line, to offer up sacrifice to his bloodthirsty God who had found satisfaction in seeing blood, even the blood of His own Son, seep into the earth for renewal and rebirth.