Dance the Rocks Ashore Read online

  I can still feel the way her hot palms felt against my ears and the way it made me hear my own blood pounding within my skull. I don’t think I had heard my own heartbeat until then and wondered at this incredible magical drum that was beating in my head. Suddenly she relaxed her grip and lay back with a brief smile on her face, her eyes closed.

  “Wait five minutes, then go,” she said, sounding strangely matter-of-fact and certain. A spasm of pain gripped he, and my father grabbed onto her hand. He offered her a wooden spoon with a dish towel wrapped around it to put in her mouth, but my mother shook her head from one side to the other.

  “Better get going, son,” my father said, pointing to the door, unprotected now by the chesterfield and rattling at the hook that held it. It sounded like a madman was outside wanting to get in.

  “Wait!” my mother screamed. My old man looked down at his watch.

  “Your mother knows what she’s saying.”

  The waiting was hard. I’ve never been good at waiting and never will be. Neither is my old man. If a thing needs to be done, better to do it than to stew over it. Still, my mother had an understanding of things. We had an old grandfather clock in the kitchen that ticked away. Five minutes, five years, it was all the same. I was growing older, more frightened, more certain that we would all die in the storm. Why couldn’t I just go outside, get launched into space and be done with it?

  “Four minutes,” my father said. My mother was having more difficulty with her contraptions. Only four more decades to go before I could leave and do my duty. Just then a gust of wind, stronger than anything we’d felt yet, slammed into the house like a runaway truck. I looked out the window just in time to see the entire roof lift off the shed and catapult out into the road. The very house itself, stationed as it was atop loose stone and held to earth only by the basic contract with gravity, lifted up, I believe, ever so slightly. It was enough to wake Mike and make him howl like the living dead.

  “It’s a girl. Her name is Casey,” my mother said. “It’s turning out all right because Mrs. Bernie Todd is here.”

  For a moment my father was stunned. After their many years together he was still having a hard time adjusting to my mother speaking of the future in the present tense. No baby had been born. No miracles performed in righting the position of my little sister. Little sister? God, now the pain had a sex and a name. But there was a big unsaid if in there, and that was Mrs. Bernie Todd. And the if depended on me, my legs and my ability to fend off a hurricane. My father looked at the clock. My mother seemed unable to talk. She tried the spoon in her mouth but spit it out right away and bit hard into my father’s wrist, drawing blood. The time had come for action. “Go!” my old man shouted.

  I was like a cannonball fired out of a cannon. I vaulted for the door, threw it open, gave myself a quarter of a second to survey the nightmare that was once my yard. “Run!” my father shouted at me, as he rushed for the door and shoved it closed behind me. I took a big leap to get off to a good running start, fell headlong into a foot of seawater, lost my bearings and came up sucking for air. I cleared the water from my face and rolled over, only to find that the life jacket made my body float, and I was being carried across the ocean of our yard to who knows where. My old man was halfway out the door to help when I righted myself, got my feet on the ground beneath the water and leaned hard into the wind. The harder I leaned into the wind, the more it held me up. I was momentarily overcome by the exquisitely terrifying and beautiful vision that if I leaned far enough, my feet would simply leave the earth and I would be in flight. I convinced myself that I was about to be turned into a bird and swept away to some distant world, never to be heard from again. I tried to walk and couldn’t. I tried again and again. My father was inside, at the window now, shouting something to me through the glass, but I could hear none of it.

  The roar of the wind and the pounding waves was a sound beyond anything which I had experienced. I found myself stuck, tilting ahead, locked against wind, afraid to lean back, afraid to fall down and float off. My mind wrestled with this impossibility until the wind slapped me with a smack of cold seaweed and turned my head. There, ten feet away, was a gran­ite outcropping. It was behind me but created a ridge against the sea, a jagged buttress of stone that ran an erratic but inevitable course from our house to that of my grandmother. This path had been left here, devised long ago by the glacier, designated for no other purpose than this, so that a small boy in an evil storm could save his mother and his sister from a tortured death.

  I leaned left, began to tack towards the rocks. A gust hit me. I fell, as before, onto my back and floated upside down. I scrambled over onto all fours and crawled through the shallow water. At last I made headway, and finally I found my granite shelter. As soon as I tucked in behind the ridge, I felt some semblance of control. I ran, stumbled, slipped and floundered onward, not stopping again to look back.

  I had never felt so fully alive, so fully human before that moment in my life. I could barely breathe, the very wind stealing oxygen away from my lungs. I tore up the rain gear, bloodied my knees and elbows and was sure I was blinded more than once by the salt water and rain. Minutes or hours, who knows? But I made it. I raced across a final open space with the wind at my back, ready to drive me like a spike into the side of the house. I slammed hard into the heavy wooden door of the great stone house, having been lucky enough to aim for the only available wood of an otherwise impregnable wall of stone. Jack Todd heard the encounter and looked out, saw me slumped at the doorstep. Together, he and Bernie shoved open the door against the weight of my body and pulled me in.

  I said nothing. Mrs. Bernie Todd asked her husband to find her medical bag. He ran to another room as I sprawled on the floor, dizzy, possibly delirious. I believed that I was still out racing and fighting the wind, and I felt as if I was looking down at my body contorted on the floor of this place. Bernie did a strange thing. She uncorked a bottle of rum, measured out two tablespoons into a glass, sat me upright against the wall and forced me to drink. “Your grandmother insists that you swallow it hard.” This was the first time that she had ever actually called herself my grandmother. In the other room, rattling through a closet, was my grandfather.

  It was my first encounter with the demon rum, and I assumed that someone had just lit up a fire on my tongue and sent boiling oil down my throat. Had it been anyone else but Bernie, I would have spit it out, but Mrs. Bernie Todd was not a woman to mess around with. She made quick and absolute decisions on her behalf and for others and did not tolerate complainers. As my mind reeled and my stomach burned, I felt the alcohol eventually light fire to my brain, where it burned bright as a summer sun. I stood up, saw before me my grandmother and grandfather. “The baby’s coming out the wrong way,” I said.

  “Breech,” my grandmother said.

  “If you get there in time, it will be a girl. Her name is Casey,” I told her. She immediately understood these to be the words of my mother.

  “Good, let’s attend to your little sister.”

  My grandfather shoved open the door. It flapped back hard against the wall. My grandfather, with a far-away look in his eye, held hard onto my hand, and we followed my grandmother out into the blast, never turning to try to close the door. As Bernie started for her car, I instead pointed to the ridge, for I knew that the road must be even deeper in flood. And it was a longer drive as well. My route was a shortcut. She immediately knew I was right. Jack held on hard to my hand, his eyes fixed firmly on the back of my grandmother.

  Almost the minute we were inside my home, a curious thing happened. The wind abated and a brooding, unnatural quiet began to settle over us. The seas still boomed baritone in the background, of course, but the battle of our house to hold itself together against the blast had subsided. Bernie was not two feet in the house when she saw my father’s desperate face. My mother was screaming and my father was bent over her, be­tween her legs. The
sight of a woman in labour from any angle is a startling vision for anyone, but especially startling for a five-year-old. My father had his arm up between my mother’s legs, which were spread wide. His hand was inserted up to his wrist, and the pain on his face almost equalled that of my mother.

  Bernie went immediately into the room, saw the crisis. At my mother’s instructions, and fearing we would be too late, my father had inserted his hand into the uterus to try to turn the baby around. “Let me take over,” Bernie said in her confident, clinical manner.

  “I can’t,” my father said.

  She nodded. Bernie pulled out the bottle of rum, gave my mother a sip and one to my father. “Everybody just relax,” she said.

  By then we were dead centre in the eye of the hurricane. “Stay or leave the room as you see fit,” my grandmother said to both my grandfather and me. Jack took my hand and we both sat off to one side, not leaving. Bernie put her hand on my mother’s belly and studied the opening that would bring my little sister into the world.

  Something new hit our front door. Not wind this time but wave. The door held, but water gushed in over the doorstep, and, if that wasn’t enough, the wave rolling under the house forced water up through the floorboards with such intensity that the room was alive with veritable fountains of seawater.

  “That’s not important,” Bernie said, pulling a scalpel from her bag, shoving it into the flame of the kerosene lamp and cleaning it with rum.

  My grandfather saw what was about to happen and tried to distract me with a story. “Sometimes, Ian,” he began in a soft, controlled voice, “in the nineteenth century, ships out to sea for months in the Indian Ocean would be so dry that the boards would begin to separate and the corking would not hold. They would begin to leak at every seam at once. Just like this. And sometimes the ship would simply pull itself apart, board by board, until all her sailors would have to swim for it. Of course, you don’t last long in the Indian Ocean with so many sharks. Not unless you can surround yourself with a pod of dolphins or come upon a sperm whale willing to give you transit home.”

  But the story was not enough. I twisted my head around to see that the scalpel had made a slit and the blood had begun to flow. My mother’s face told the story in greater depth. She was tired now, pale, panting hard. Whereas before she was pushing during her contraption, now she looked weak, defeated. “Keep your hand on the baby,” Bernie insisted, even though she saw later that she had also cut hard into the flesh of my father’s wrist. The blood of my family was everywhere on the bed in pools of red that began to drip down onto the seawater on the floor. Another wave hit the house, this time with amazing force. My grandfather seemed quite calm, or maybe he was faking it, for it was his job to keep panic at bay. “They had storms like this all the time in the nineteenth century. Things were much tougher back then. Men had to be able to rig a mast in a hurricane and single-handedly sail a schooner in a typhoon wind.”

  Bernie was helping my father shift the baby around now. My mother gave one final, feeble push, but then sank back, I’m sure unconscious by now, exhausted. It seemed almost as if they were wrestling little Casey into the world, that she was refusing to come, that nature was against us every step of the way and unwilling to let her waiting soul depart from wherever she was at.

  And then I saw her arrive, bottom-first into the world. “Don’t pull,” Bernie shouted, as my father tried to pick her up, blood still dripping heavily from his cut wrist. “The cord is wrapped around the neck,” Bernie said. “Be very still.”

  The baby was barely out as Bernie began to unwind the umbilical cord that could yet strangle my sister. Bernie then immediately put her fingers inside the mouth of the child and turned her upside down, holding her from the heels, and spanked a gentle but firm smack on the bum. My father sucked in his breath, heard the baby cry and fell backwards into the water on the floor. As Bernie cut the umbilical cord with the scalpel, my grandfather picked up my father, discovered how badly he was bleeding from the wrist and began to wind a bandage tightly. He staggered back to his feet and up to my mother. He kissed her cheek, found it clammy and screamed. “Bernie, I think she’s dying!”

  Bernie handed me the baby, wrapped only in a single, bloody piece of ripped sheet. She was coated with blood and mucous, and, despite that, I held the tiny, bluish face close to my cheek and began to sing, “Old McDonald had a farm.”

  When the next rolling wave, more powerful than the last, slammed into our house, I saw my grandfather trying to stop the bleeding of my father while Bernie was pushing air into my mother’s lungs with her own mouth. My father, at that minute, looked out the window and, with a vision of pure terror in his eyes, pleaded with some unnamed, unseen force to allow his wife to live.

  The eye of a hurricane is an incongruous event in the middle of such turmoil. Even as the next wave, weaker now than the last, made a dull thud into the walls of our house, the sun broke through and sent down a single shaft of light into our yard which was now part of the Atlantic Ocean. The light spilled almost gently into the water of the front yard, and little Casey ceased her crying and fell asleep in my arms, perfectly contented, it would seem, to have been born amidst this holocaust.

  My mother coughed and vomited and began to breathe, and my father sat down beside her and put his arm around her. Bernie pulled out needle and thread and began to stitch my mother back together. I had to turn away. I could not watch, but I held tightly onto the little bundle of flesh and life that was my sister.

  And when the hurricane returned and we were all, in vary­ing degrees, alive, I gave my little sister to my father to hold, and he could not stop himself from smiling. He began to tell her that she had been more than a little trouble, but that it’s probably a good sign of a busy, challenging life to come. Bernie and Jack made some tea, poured some more rum and kept vigil as I curled up under my bed, even though the floorboards leaked water, because that’s where Mike was still sleeping through it all, like it was no big deal. I rested my head on Mike’s mangy back and listened to his sad, soft snore and fell asleep through the next blast of wind and wave, wondering if this was the normal way of the world, wondering perhaps if it would be like this every day from here on, if the easy times were behind me.

  From The Republic of Nothing

  DRAGON’S BREATH

  So Delaney O’Neil was alive again. The great gaps in his memory concerning his life as Duke and his life as Grandfather O’Neil seemed insignificant. If he was crazy, then I suppose he was no more or less so than the rest of us. Once school had started up again, I’d swing past Gwen’s house to walk her to the bus, and her grandfather would be standing outside their door, his arms out in a welcoming V toward the sunrise. If I asked him what he was doing, he’d only say he was “embracing the star that feeds us light.” A poet he was. The words were stored up inside him, and the beauty of them leaked out in aphorisms and metaphors, but his true identity was a cocoon inside his heart. When his granddaughter kissed him goodbye, I thought he would take wings and fly into the sun.

  “Step only on the light-coloured rocks,” he would offer for advice. “This is what I call the Lesson of Nova Scotia. They won’t teach you that in school, though.” What he meant, of course, was that if you were walking along the coast at the tide’s retreat, the light-coloured rocks would be dry. The darker stones were likely wet and covered with a film of sea algae that could dance you to your death if you weren’t careful. And, thus far, the dark rocks were all that Duke Delaney O’Neil had found to fear on the island, for he had tumbled twice and tapped his skull on stone as a result. This was when he had learned what he called his Lesson of Nova Scotia.

  Despite my part in the heroic retrieval of her grandfather from the dark realm of nothingness, Gwen and I remained only friends, not that other unspoken thing that should have been. Gwen was taller than me, and her true shape was finding her. The other boys noticed, and I could not shelter her from the at
tentions of the older ones, the landlubber no-goods with hearts like fists who talked of hunting and killing for fun, the ones who lived near the highway and bragged of television in their homes, of frequent family shopping sprees to Dartmouth, the boys with metal-toed boots who carried knives and, on weekends, ran chainsaws to cut cordwood for sheer machismo pleasure.

  Gwen could probably have leaped three grades ahead of me if anyone had ever tested us, but she held back, for me perhaps, and never showed off her great intelligence and hidden wealth of wonderful but seemingly irrelevant knowledge. Only after a gruelling, boring day of school, after the tedium of memorizing math, after the competitions of seeing who could accumulate the most spitballs stuck to the high Victorian ceiling, after the stares of monster boys at Gwen’s beautiful features, after the afternoon lectures on improbable inland provinces like Saskatchewan and Manitoba, after the final spelling quiz with words like “diaper” and “envelope,” then and only then, released from the regimented torture of the classroom, would Gwen walk with and only with me to the bus, point up to the nimbus-covered remnant of the same sun her grandfather had embraced that morning and remind me: “Ninety-three million miles.” I knew precisely what she meant and exactly why she and I had been positioned in a perfect synchronization that far from a medium-strength sun wobbling around somewhere in the suburbs of the Milky Way.

  My father had written two letters, both short, both disturbingly skeletal. The first:

  Dear Dorothy, Ian and Casey,

  Sorry for the silence. Very busy times as I find my footing here. Powerful men all around me who need taming. I haven’t yet found the tools I need here for the job. Coming home soon with a surprise

  Love, Dad

  “He’s bringing home a dragon,” Casey said. Lately she had been having a lot of dreams about friendly, fire-breathing dragons and lonely dinosaurs. She missed her father desperately — the gruff voice, the flaming red hair, the brush of his coarse unshaven cheek against hers like a store-bought rasp file, rough enough to leave her scratched but bubbling with love.