Sea of Tranquility Read online

  A cold mackerel of a young man was holding down the baby hotline at the Herald office, an unhappy lad who had been forced to miss all the fun of New Year’s Eve sitting at the newspaper office taking telephone and telegraph reports of babies being born. If another woman called from New Minas or New Glasgow to tell the news of her son or daughter he would have to report the same sorry tale. It was all too late. Too late to win.

  And then this call from a man with a strong South Shore accent, this Noah Slaunwhite on the horn from Mutton Hill Harbour. Said his son was born at 12:01 on the dot at home on Ragged Island, wherever the hell that was.“I’m sorry, sir, but in order to be eligible your child has to be born in a hospital and the official time recorded by a doctor.”

  “But there are no hospitals and no doctors on our island.”

  “Then I’m sorry, but your child is not eligible.”

  Noah Slaunwhite began to curse in German. The young man at the Herald had not heard German cursing before except in black-and-white war movies. The cursing was loud and guttural, offensive but interesting, and he held the receiver a short span from his ear and listened until Noah’s rage had vented itself over the telephone wires stretched like tense violin strings from the South Shore to Halifax on that chilly January morn.

  After the rage was pumped into that thin phone line, probably scaring off any number of birds that had been riding out the windy morning with toes gripped around the wire, Noah slammed the phone back in its socket. It rang, and a phone operator came on the line asking for another fistful of quarters for the long distance phone call. She must have been listening in on the line because she sounded offended.

  So Moses’ arrival in Nova Scotia was not properly heralded with those seemingly infinite prizes that he deserved for his promptness. There would be no full year’s worth of Quaker Oats cereal, no hundred-dollar gift certificate from Mills clothing store, no shopping spree at Simpson Sears, no free baby carriage, no free oil changes for the proud father’s car (if he had a car), no parental handshaking with the Herald editor-in-chief, the mayor of Halifax, and the premier himself. All down the tubes. Ah, hell.

  Noah drank one cup of black hot coffee in Mutton Hill Harbour and then steamed back home with the bad news.

  But none of that was little Moses’ fault. He had arrived on time like his father had wanted him to. And if the Herald could not recognize the bravado of that, oh Gott, what did it matter? Moses’ timing would remain good ever thereafter.

  When he was twelve years old, he happened to be walking down towards the wharf on the mainland for the ferry ride back to the island when young Calvin Whittle fell through thin ice on Scummer’s Pond. Moses was there to hear the scream, grab a rowboat oar, and shinny out on the translucent ice to tug the mainland kid to cold safety. Whittle’s father owned one of those big, overdone houses that sat on a grassy shoreline, offending most island people who had to pass by it on their way home. Calvin Whittle’s father was greedy, ostentatious, and hired many men to manicure his lawn (all of the above offended islanders), but he did like to reward bravery, so he gave Moses Slaunwhite a savings bond worth $500 that would come due when Moses was nineteen. It was a lesson in investment as well as a reward.

  The salvaged son of Calvin Whittle, Senior would grow up to be a sex offender and a murderer. None of which Moses could have foreseen. In later years he would ponder the irony that in having saved one life, he had inadvertently killed three innocent women and cost the provincial purse plenty to keep up with the Whittle estate’s lawyers, who tried in vain to keep a rich man’s son out of prison.

  Nonetheless, Moses had made good with his five hundred dollars. With it he bought a boat when he was nineteen. And as soon as he had a boat, island fishermen had found themselves headed into five good years of profit from cod, cod, and lots more cod. Moses married Viddy Grandy, a beautiful young woman he’d sat alongside of in the island schoolhouse when he had been only nine. Viddy was talented — she played piano and flute. She was smart. She knew the names of all the capitals of all the nations on the earth. She had a good business head — could advise any man about selling his cod whole or in fillets, whether to sell it to the restaurants in Halifax or ship it on ice to Boston. She had a gift for many things that would make a man happy as well as profitable. Her only twin afflictions were an affection for large, stylish, but sloppy and frivolous hats, and tardiness.

  If it hadn’t been for Viddy’s lack of respect for the clock and Moses’ own good timing, they probably would have never married. One damp, cheerless day in April of Viddy’s twentieth year, she had decided to leave the island and go take a job in a factory she’d heard about in Saint John, New Brunswick that made fashionable women’s hats for the American market. She was packed and rushing to make the three-thirty ferry but missed it by five and a half minutes — according to Moses’ Swiss pocket watch that his father had given him upon graduating from high school.

  So there was Viddy, floppy hat in hand, her head bowed, long braided hair down to the middle of her back, sobbing. Clearly, there must have been more to it than a missed ferry ride. But Moses’ timing as always was good. He had a clean handkerchief that his mother had ironed. He had just had a shower and didn’t reek of cod or lobster. He had to sit down because he had just gotten a cramp in the calf of his right leg. The fog looked like it wanted to lift (but never did fulfill the promise). And the ferry would not return that day due to a bad batch of diesel fuel pumped on at the dock in Mutton Hill Harbour that afternoon by Hennigar’s Marine Fuel Service Limited. The rest would be marital island history.

  Noah and Moses would argue often about Viddy’s tardiness, but never in front of her, and, despite this small canker of family strife, it was a good and happy marriage. Whenever she was ashore, Viddy would drive their mainland automobile to all the Frenchy’s used clothes stores up and down the South Shore and buy umpteen hats. Whenever she returned from the mainland on such a day, everyone on the ferry boats knew what was in all those boxes and bags. Moses built many closets. A hat was never thrown away by Viddy. But he didn’t mind. She was a wonderful woman and gave him twins — Clay and Dawn. When Viddy went hat hunting on the mainland, their good neighbour Sylvie would mind the kids and tell them stories of the island in the old days. When Sylvie would babysit for a day, all the clocks were turned towards the wall and the household schedule went to hell. Neither Moses nor Viddy cared, and once Sylvie was gone, they would not turn the clocks back to face them for well over twenty-four hours.

  Moses was generally healthy, and his only real affliction was the predilection of his body to cramp up in the legs. This was a result somehow of having become soaking wet the time he hauled young Whittle out of Scummer’s Pond. His father made him carry a cramp knot in his pocket to ward off the problem. A cramp knot was an actual knot from a tree, a cat spruce in this case. It was an old German folklore thing and it didn’t work, but he carried it anyway to make his father happy.

  “It doesn’t work because you don’t believe in it. We used to believe in everything when we was young, but not no more,” his father said.

  “I try to believe in it, I really do,” Moses said. And he carried it with him everywhere, even to bed to dispel the damn leg cramps, because Moses would get a leg cramp attack any time, any place. Hauling up lobster pots ten miles at sea or making love to his good wife Viddy late on Friday night after a chowder dinner and several pints of dark, homemade German beer. The cramps would always come, reminding him of the irony of saving Calvin Whittle who killed those poor women.

  Moses was always one step ahead of the fishery, it seemed. Already moving into herring roe or silver hake, red fish, ground-fish, swordfish, or sea urchins when absolutely necessary, and, when it seemed that the whole fishery along Newfoundland and Nova Scotia was ready to go belly up for good, Moses anchored his boat on the edge of the channel at the Trough and he pondered the future. When the whales appeared like long-lost German cousins, he talked to them and, although they didn’t e
xactly talk back, they convinced him they were the future of the island, perhaps his only hope.

  Moses knew that if he was going to stay on his island and remain prosperous, if he wanted Dawn and Clay to grow up with a roof over their heads and a chance to go to Dalhousie University or the Sorbonne or even just business or beautician school in Halifax, he had to time this thing right.

  Whale-watching, it turned out, was already taking off in California,Alaska, Baja, Maine, and Maui. As his left leg began to cramp up and he rubbed a thumb on his shiny cramp knot, he phoned the tourist bureau in Halifax and then a travel agency in New York and told them about his whale-watching cruises that were going to begin in the summer of 1993. In two years, while all the other fishermen were grovelling for government handouts to help them through the death of the Atlantic cod and the decimation of the fishery, Moses Slaunwhite’s boat had a fresh coat of paint, and he had on clean shirt and pants and a kind of one-off captain’s cap designed and hand-sewn by Viddy. He also had a whole load of mainland tourists crossing on the ferry to the island dock to gleefully hand over a fair sum of Yankee doodle to have Cap’n Moses lead them to the blues, the fins, the minke, and the right whales.

  Moses had been kind to the whales. Careful as an Old Testament shepherd to his flock of sea creatures. Never too close, never noisy, always full of respect and caution. How many times had he heard a Brooklyn accent say, “Can’t you take us closer so my kids can pet one?”

  Moses smiled, never let his feathers get ruffled. He pointed out the barnacles on the backs of some whales, the ones he had named Joshua, Rebecca, Naomi, and David. Although he wasn’t particularly religious, there was something about giving whales Biblical names, if they were to have names at all.

  “Where’s Jonah?” someone would ask.

  “Inside one of them, no doubt,” Moses would answer.

  A specialty eco-tourism agency in Chicago got wind of Moses’ operation and made a business proposition that he couldn’t refuse. His excursions were suddenly part of a world circuit of tours that sent nature-starved city dwellers to the seven seas to observe whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and flying fish. Moses even came up with a specialty bonus of taking visitors to sea on calm summer nights to see “devil’s fire,” that brilliant, green, glowing phosphorescence of certain diatoms that turned the Atlantic into something eerie, beautiful, and awe-inspiring.

  Some islanders begrudged Moses’ success. Some spoke of creating competition, but none followed through. Moses bought a second boat, hired on several island men and a couple of women, paid good wages, and was ever careful not to push his visitors too close to the whales. On bright summer days, when he had his boat anchored near the point, he’d see Sylvie sitting there on the shoreline watching the whales. He gave her free rides to sea but she said,“The whales only talk to me when I’m sittin’ ashore. They know me there. I know them.”

  Sylvie baked fresh bread and cookies for the tourists and set up a table by the docks. People paid her well for her creations — the bread, the cakes, the little cinnamon cookies, the homemade ginger snaps. She loved the children the most and gave them freebies when their parents weren’t looking. Sylvie was glad other people came to share the whales with her, glad they came to share the beauty of her island.

  The only glitch was that the new wave of tourism brought a little too much attention to Phonse’s Junkyard, his shoot ‘em up theme park. The travel office in Chicago received some complaints from folks who had returned to Des Moines or Poughkeepsie and told of an environmental time bomb clicking away in Moses’ otherwise picturesque island. They’d seen the wrecked cars, the oil laden-pond, and heard the carwong of bullets hitting things. Only a matter of time, they said, before toxins would leach into the soil and out into the sea or until the rifle-bearing maniacs would start using whales for target practice.

  “We’d like to see if you can bring government pressure on closing that place down,” Chicago told Moses. “You need to protect your investment up there. Eco-tourists don’t want to hear elephant rifles pumping lead into washing machines. They don’t want to see junk cars rusting away in the sun. These people want nature in its purest state. If they wanted junkyards, we’d send them to New Jersey. If they wanted gun fights, we’d send them to Detroit or Washington D. C. They don’t want that. They want nature. They want the real thing.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Moses said, and he felt a new cramp forming in his arm this time, the one he steered the boat with. That night, after sending the kids over to stay at Sylvie’s for the night, after making love for the second time to Viddy, he discussed the problem with her.

  “I can’t tell Phonse to close down his place. It’s his life. He’s not hurting anyone.”

  Lying in bed with his wife, Moses felt a huge responsibility settle upon him like someone lowering a steel-hulled ship on his chest. Phonse had been his friend since childhood. Phonse had been there to throw a coat around him after he’d retrieved Calvin Whittle from Scummer’s Pond. Moses thought his heart was going to cramp up, and Viddy massaged his chest with her hand as if on cue. “The island has to come first,” she said. “You have to do what’s good for the island.”

  Right then, Moses didn’t think that helped at all. What he thought she was saying was that he should listen to Chicago. He knew that if he wanted to get the government involved, he could have Phonse closed down in the blink of an eye. Phonse’s salvage yard broke just about every environmental and safety regulation and statute in existence. And, in truth, to clean up Phonse’s hell-hole would be cleaning up the island. But it was all wrong.

  Sleep came to him like a dull, senseless rain — cold, with pellets of ice collecting on the back porch of his brain.

  In the morning, however, he had an idea. He talked to Phonse about fine-tuning his operation and opening the gun range to some of the eco-tourists.

  “I’m always open to new ideas,” Phonse said. “Innovation has been the key to my success. Acadians were always open to new ideas. We come over here and the Mi’kmaq tell my people to eat this root. We eat it. Prevents scurvy and tastes almost good. They tell us how to hunt the animals, we hunt ’em. We survive good because we always adapt. Now we don’t have to hunt the animals no more. And that’s a good thing, too.”

  “You understand the nature of eco-tourism?” Moses asked. He was never comfortable with that large, floppy, uncomfortable word the people in Chicago used when they spoke to him. But somehow he had heard himself say it out loud to his friend.

  “I understand it if you understand it, I guess.”

  “Good enough. I just wanted to make sure you were with me on this.”

  Phonse probably didn’t have the foggiest notion as to what was going on, but yes, he was in. Phonse was always in on a new idea, ready to adapt just like his ancestors.

  At first Chicago thought the idea was outlandish.“A theme park showing the ravages of cars and industry and neglect?”

  “Yes. And tourists can, if they wish to pay extra, take up firearms and shoot at symbols of environmental offense. Cars. TVs. Absolutely no hunting, though, of course. No shooting at anything living. Only manufactured things worthy of an ecotourist’s anger.”

  “Shouldn’t that stuff all be recycled?”

  “This is a form of recycling. And I’ve already convinced the owner to use only non-lead bullets. Simple iron pellets or bullets will work. Won’t harm the ecosystem. Put a little iron back in the soil is all.”

  “I don’t know,” Chicago said.“This all sounds pretty radical.”

  “Think of it as cutting edge. Our timing will be perfect.” And he was right. The plan turned out to be a hit. Viddy helped design the new brochure. Phonse fine-tuned his junkyard tourist attraction. Pacifists and eco-freaks turned out to love pump-action rifles and guns with infrared scopes. Oickle’s Pond brought satisfactory remarks of haughty disgust and financial donations to clean it up once and for all. Locals sat side by side with tourists from Pennsylvania, all wearing e
ar protection, and together they laid waste to products of the industrial world. Phonse brought in a car crusher on a barge once a month. It smashed up a considerable amount of the metal goods shot to hell and shipped off the steel for proper recycling. He was paid a good fee for the scrap and it allowed room for new targets to arrive by boat from wherever — Blandford, Shelburne, Dartmouth, or Lunenburg.

  Chicago was somewhat shocked and appalled to learn that eco-tourists loved to shoot at things. As a result of word-of-mouth reports, eco-tourism to Ragged Island increased by twenty percent. The premiere package tour included two days of whale-watching at the Trough, a day of eco-revenge at Phonse’s salvage yard, and, for an extra fee, you could operate the car crusher on recycling day, which was the third Wednesday of every month.

  Chapter Six

  Sylvie, alone in the late afternoon, collecting her thoughts. Oh, what a great collection of thoughts. They would fill up some big old South Shore barn, those thoughts, memories. Goes a ways back and then some. But the blackflies in the afternoon, that made her think of her husband, her first husband. David Young.

  It had been March when he’d been away. Two days of warmth all of a sudden, three maybe if you counted that surprising burst of warm wind that came in the middle of the night like a lost Arabian horse running wild with hot breath through the sky. The blackflies came out like it was July, pestered islanders right through the brief freak warm spell, then died right off. It had been the entire great summer swarm of insects — annoying little blood-sucking bastards that some hated much more than mosquitoes. Died off and never returned that whole summer. The blackflies: that’s what made Sylvie think of husband number one.