Dance the Rocks Ashore Read online

  The ice came but no snow. The inlet began to freeze over quicker than any year I had ever seen. While the back yard grass remained green but frozen stiff, the pans of ice heaved and hawed in the inlet, a vast glazed expanse, reshuffled each day as the tides pushed renegade islands of ice right up to the foot of the sandy little beach. On some days Jim would forget to stoke the stove, and the house would go cold. If he caught me carrying in logs or splitting softwood at the chopping block, he would feel terribly bad, beg my forgiveness and say he’d never let it happen again. I told him I didn’t mind. I needed the exercise, and besides, this was better than doing like those ladies in the magazines who lifted weights or jogged around city streets to stay healthy. I didn’t mind the work at all.

  And there were days when Jim was with me and days when he was only half there. He’d lose his shoes or lose his coat or his boots, or wonder where he had left the money in his wallet. He’d try to tell me about a dream he had but lose himself in the middle of a sentence and only in his most desperate moments come right out and say, “I don’t even know who I am,” or, even more frightening to me, admit, “I don’t know where I am.”

  Once or twice I caught him napping outside on his stick furniture, where he had gone to enjoy the view of the all that inlet ice at sunset. I had to keep a close eye on him, all right.

  I won’t try to tell you these were the best of times, but they were not the worst. I just felt the weight of so much responsibility. At first it didn’t bother me at all, but it soon began to wear me down, until one day, feeling exhausted and drained, and secure in the fact that Jim was napping soundly on the chesterfield near a warm wood- stove fire, I lay myself down on the afternoon bed and closed my eyes.

  I opened them when a brazen goldish red beam of light from the west window shone straight into my eyes. I had slept to nearly four-thirty. The sun was going down. The house was cold. I shook myself awake and realized I was alone in the room. In the kitchen, the fire had gone out in the stove. The door was open. Jim was nowhere around. Panic shivered in my limbs and a knot of fear twisted into a tourniquet in my gut.

  Outside, it was still but cold, bitter cold. I walked quickly to the road and slipped on the ice of a frozen puddle. I fell hard and scraped my shin on a jagged rock. I stood back up, steadied myself and made it to the road. Not a car, not a soul in sight. I retreated to the back yard and walked slowly across the frozen green lawn. Before me was Jim’s high-back homemade chair. Each step was painful to me but not nearly as painful as something stabbing at my heart.

  Somebody was in the chair. I advanced toward the dark, silent silhouette of my husband. The red wash of the December sun made the ice of the inlet go blood red, a screaming colour that invaded me with cold and fear that conspired into something hot and awful.

  Jim had positioned himself here to watch the sun go down over the inlet he loved. He had even dressed warmly in the only coat he could probably locate — one of mine, a bulky blue winter affair with a hood. As I kneeled down in front of him, I knew that I was not at all prepared for this. His head was slumped over. I was having a hard time getting air into my lungs, and I could hear my blood pounding in my ears.

  Fear had scissored big holes in my ability to reason and clamped shackles onto my arms and legs. I could not bring myself to pull the hood back off my husband’s head and read the sorry news. Instead, I gave up on everything, my belief in myself, my hopes and my happiness. I put my head upon his knees and wept. No sound could escape from me, but my body quaked with convulsions of despair.

  The next thing I knew I felt the lightest pressure of a hand upon my head. I felt a human hand stroking my hair and I looked up. In the dying winter light, I saw the face of my husband and heard the sweet song of my own name, “Mary, Mary, Mary.”

  I was unable to find a path back to the world of language as he lifted me towards him and wrapped his arms around me, repeating my name again and again, pulling us both back into the realm of the living.

  “I was just sitting here,” he said, “remembering summer. The sun was warm on my face, and I was enjoying it so much. I guess I fell asleep. It felt so much like summer. Remember what it was like?”

  “I remember,” I said. “I could never forget.”

  “Nothing is ever really lost,” he said, and continued to stroke my hair as if I was a little child, as if he was the one whose strength allowed me to cope with living.

  “I know that,” I said, realizing just then that I had come to grips with the eventual loss of my husband. During all our life together he had been building up my own strength, preparing me for the time when the water in the well would be released from the hill, greet the sky, then slip down the cliff of the faltering land and find its way back into the sea. Sooner or later I would be able to accept this absolute fact. But as I led my husband back into the house, I knew that first I would drink deeply from the well and appease the thirst that was in me.

  From The Republic of Nothing

  EYE OF THE HURRICANE

  My sister was born during a full moon in August, at one of the highest tides recorded on Whalebone Island in the very eye of Hurricane Irene. I was five years old, and I think it was the first time that I understood my mother and father were in love. At five, you tend to think of love as something you feel toward favoured pets more than human beings. I had a one-winged seagull that ate cod scraps and a geriatric dog that had moved into the crawl space under our house. Like so many other wounded creatures, the one-winged seagull who my father had named Khrushchev and the flea-pestered dog that I named Mike had found their way to Whalebone Island and the Republic of Nothing for solace and refuge from the outside world.

  What I am trying to say is, I loved both these creatures, and I think that what I felt towards them — the pity and the compassion and the downright joy of playing with each — think this was the way my parents felt about each other.

  Hurricanes bring out the best in creatures who love each other. At least that’s what I learned during Irene. During a hurricane, however, is not a great time to have a baby. The sea heaves enormous waves pounding with incredible force all over rocky parts of an island like Whalebone. Hurricanes pick up anything that isn’t tied down and devise lethal flying weapons. Boats, the fisherman’s livelihood, become playthings in a maelstrom bathtub where they worry and smash against the wharves until wood gives up its sanity and becomes splinter. Hurricanes shred, suck, spit, stammer, scream, batter, bruise, beat, beleaguer, bend, moan, mangle and molest an island like Whalebone and its usually happy people until they feel they know something of war.

  Maybe it was because the skies of earth were jealous that year (my mother would later say) because of that deadly weap­on, that H-bomb equivalent to ten million tons of TNT that disturbed the Pacific sleep of the world over Namu islet in the Bikini islands back in February. “For the world has a single soul,” my mother argued, “and such an offense might cause her to react — even on the Atlantic thousands of miles away. What is fifteen thousand miles to a soul as complete and round as a planet?”

  For the most part, hurricanes do not batter Nova Scotia with their might. A hurricane is a southern thing, a warm water creature with a supple spine and catty mind that reminds the American east coast it is merely a whim of cities and scum. A hurricane stirs itself to fury in a spiralling soup of skies and crawls like a hungry galaxy toward land to devour houses and businesses and scrape clean the coast, to put it back to normal as best it can. And when the heat runs out, when the bite of the North Atlantic off New England reminds the hurricane that this is far enough, that above here the land is still pure, the glaciers have just barely left, the people are not quite as confounded and corrupt as southerners, then the hurricane usually veers east towards Iceland into a humble retirement of dissolution and repentance.

  But such was not the case with Irene. We had boats on doorsteps by the time the quiet eye found us huddled in the living r
oom. A hurricane like Irene reminded adults that something had been disturbed in the clean order of things. My mother, for all her affinity with the future, later admitted she had been misled by the stars, that she had miscalculated the arrival of the baby, for she had predicted the baby to be a Virgo, and a birth now would mean a Leo.

  I was sitting in my bedroom with Khrushchev and Mike. The gull was on the windowsill eating cod tongues from a plate, and Mike was asleep at the foot of my bed. We had weath­ered the first blast of the storm, and I had almost become used to the sound of raging wind and maniac seas. I can’t say I was scared of Irene. It was too much fun, since it was the first time I was allowed to have both Khrushchev and Mike in my bedroom with me. My father was preoccupied with other things.

  Everett MacQuade was the ultimate disbeliever in weather reports. He saw the weather office as a sort of combined misinformation conspiracy and make-work project for know-nothings. We had listened on the radio about the approach of the storm, how it had ripped through several island communities in New Jersey (“That’ll show ’em,” my father said), and how it had carved a deadly trail right across Long Island and Cape Cod (“People should never have lived there anyway”), but when it was reported that the storm was regrouping its strength and gearing up for a full onslaught on the coast of Nova Scotia, that it was already reducing Sable Island to something less than sand and spit, my old man said that it wouldn’t dare touch the Republic of Nothing.

  So it wasn’t until the winds gusted to sixty miles an hour that my old man started screaming at me to find every god-damn shred of rope I could lay my hands on.

  My mother was sitting in a chair reading a book on phrenology when my old man relented and admitted that it was a lucky guess on the part of the weather service, a damn lucky guess for them know-nothings. “Sure, the wind is up a little. I’ve seen onshore winds much worse than this. It won’t amount to much, though,” he said, looking out at three inches of water in the front yard and a dory slipping by on the road. “Still and all, you better get your creatures inside.”

  That’s when I knew my father was serious. I ran out into the pelting rain and found Khrushchev hunkered down on his roost by the shed. I had to wake up Mike who was still asleep in the water rising beneath the house. Khrushchev was under one arm and Mike, the big old mangy beast, was in tow by the collar as I went back in the front door.

  My old man was headed toward the cove to lash down the boat more tightly when the door — a big square four-foot-by-four-foot contraption of one-by-six spruce all nailed together — flew off the shed. It took off like a flying island and sailed past my old man’s head, within inches of knocking his brains out. Everett stopped dead in his tracks. Next, he saw a twelve-foot wall of water smash up over the granite rock that acted as a breakwater for our tiny dock. The flying door headed straight into the shooting spray and then fell to earth, smashing on the granite. When my dad came back in, drenched and looking shaken for the first time in his life, he said, “Now I get it. Just when the weather office so thoroughly perfected giving wrong predictions, Nature turns around and throws off their entire system by following up with what was predicted.” My father had once again, in his own way, made sense of the world. “There could be a little damage to the republic,” he told my mother. “We’re in for a real blow.”

  My mother put down her phrenology book and looked at her husband. I was there in my bedroom doorway, my gull on my shoulder and Mike still in tow by the collar. What I saw between my mother and father had nothing to do with the weather. I saw worry and I saw understanding and I saw a kind of wonder, but most of all I saw between them love, something almost physically tangible, like a heavy silver thread that was strung out across the room from one to the other.

  “I guess it was supposed to be a Leo after all,” my mother said, suddenly grabbing her belly and sucking in a quick, almost panicky gulp of air. Just then the back door flew open and wet wind and tide sloshed into the living room.

  Another contraction hit, and my mom let out a howl that roused Mike to howl in empathy. My father fought his way to the wooden door, shoved it closed and, realizing that the lock was clean busted off by the brutal wind, shoved the chesterfield up against it. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see that there was a smile on my old man’s face. He loved weather of any sort, and the harsher it got, the more my old man admired the natural forces that were ready to put us in our places.

  “Jesus, did you see that?” he asked me. “That’s no ordinary wind. That’s a wind that wants to be everywhere. It’s not satisfied to stay just outside. You’ve got to admire a wind with such audacity.”

  My mother let out another long, low moan. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  “Not necessarily,” my father said. “It’s just Nature’s way of re-establishing her set of values, testing us to see if we’re strong and ready for the challenge.” My mother was lying flat on her back in the bed, and I could see her grab onto my father’s hand and squeeze hard. Now he clearly understood. The love and concern for his wife cut right through the fascination with the hurricane’s political will. “Hang on,” he said. “We’ll get Mrs. Bernie Todd.”

  I know that he meant that he was going. As I stood there in my bedroom doorway with my gull on my shoulder and my old dog at my feet, it never occurred to me that I was about to head out into the terrible storm. But as my father tried to pull away from my mother, she pulled him back. “You’re not supposed to go. I don’t know why and I wish it was that simple, but you can’t leave.”

  It could be that my mother was just so scared that she was hiding behind her visionary powers, using them as an excuse to keep her husband by her side. And had she thought it through, did she really think it sensible to send a five-year-old boy out into a raging hurricane? Didn’t she care about me? All I wanted was to crawl under my bed with Mike and listen to him snore through the hurricane. I was in love with the sound of my dog snoring. It was all I needed out of life just then. Things had been whittled down to that simple bit of famili­arity.

  Khrushchev was back on my window sill, ducking and bobbing at the flying debris that would have been assaulting him had it not been for the window glass. I crawled under the bed, sneezing several times at the dust and amazed at the lost socks and spare toy parts. I had dragged Mike with me, and I started singing “Old McDonald” when I saw may father’s gumboots before my eyes. “Ian, I need a word with you, son.”

  At five you believe that if you just close your eyes and pretend you’re asleep, nothing bad will happen. At least that was the lesson that I learned from Mike. Since he slept almost all the time, very rarely did anything bad happen to him.

  “Ian, son, your mother needs your help. She says I can’t leave right now.” His face was level with me now, parallel to the rough slate-grey floorboards. Underneath us in the crawl space, small waves crested and broke. As I lay there, face to the floor, I felt as if I was on an old sailing ship, far to sea.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m scared.”

  “You should be. It’s not fit out there for the likes of you. But your mother’s having some problems with her contractions.” My father had become quite a literate man and had read books Bernie had loaned him, books on everything from alchemy to gynecology. My knowledge on these matters as well as my vocabulary was much more limited, so I assumed he said, “trouble with her contraptions,” contraption being a favourite word of my father’s concerning problems created by governments around the world. With a five-year- old’s knowledge of anatomy, I could not begin to imagine what sort of machines were involved, biological or otherwise, in the delivery of a human child. Nonetheless, it revived in me a curiosity that caused me to open my eyes, convincing my father I was fully awake and aware of what he was asking.

  “Your mother thinks the baby is coming out the wrong way. Nature’ll do that to you. I don’t know enough to help her. We can’t go anywhere in this weathe
r. Mrs. Bernie Todd will know what to do.”

  “Right,” I said, crawling out from under my bed, still reluctant to let go of my sleeping dog, who I skidded out on all fours along with me.

  “You’ve got to leave Mike here. He’s too slow.” Slow wasn’t the word. Immobile and unconscious was more accurate. Reluctantly, my hand let go of the dog’s collar, and he slumped to the floor, oblivious to the human drama.

  As my father dressed me up in boots and rain gear, I could see that his hand was shaking. I could feel his ragged breath on my face and saw the worry in every inch of him. It’s funny, but the fear in him somehow had the reverse effect in me. I felt suddenly adult, responsible, important — more important than I’d ever felt before. I was either about to help save my mother and her new baby or I was about to be swept up into the sky, never to return. My father rooted in the closet and found an old life jacket that he tied onto me with a piece of rope, tight under both armpits until I could feel the bite of the rope even through my oilskins.

  My father began to slide the chesterfield away when my mother let out a piercing note of pain. “Wait. Not yet.”

  “What the hell do you mean, not yet?” my old man said.

  But she just held up the flat of her hand and then motioned me to the bed. I went in to her. She held my head between two uplifted hands as if she was praying with my brains sandwiched between her outstretched fingers. And it was more than that. She was pushing back her own pain to use her special skills to determine for certain if I would make it or not.