and Scandinavia.
Serve with poultry or pork.
Earle Son’s and Company (1995) Limited
Branches:
Makers of:
And:
CATARACT
Breen’s Island lies in the mouth of Indian Tickle, two rocks hinged by a narrow strand of beach, fused vertebrae in a long spine of water running between two larger islands. He hasn’t laid eyes on the place in fifty years and hoped to this afternoon, but there’s a heavy sea on as they labour through Domino Run and the Skipper won’t chance the passage. Rain, and grey waves breaking on the headlands, water worrying stone. He and his son stare down through the Tickle with binoculars as the ship staggers by the northern entrance, Breen’s Island out of sight behind a crook of land.
As they trace the arm of the Tickle in open water, he names the pairs of islands to port: the Gannets, the Ferrets, the Wolves. The seascape like a book of rhymes from childhood he is unforgetting in fragments. He points out the stretch of bog where they picked bakeapples in August, the deep water shoals best for jigging cod at season’s end. And Breen’s Island just over the cliff to starboard, as good as fifty years away. When the ship clears the arm they turn to watch the Tickle recede, passing the binoculars back and forth between them. Half a dozen tiny islands in the mouth, one revealed behind the other like a series of Chinese boxes each hidden inside the last. Do you see it, his son asks, and he grins uncomfortably, as if he wants to say yes for his son’s sake but can’t. They aren’t close enough to make it out for sure. He knows they never will be. The ship heaves south on the dark swell toward Red Point, Indian Tickle slowly blurring out of focus.
The steady drift of rain like a cataract clouding his eyes.
AFTERWORD
* * *
In the summer of 1995 I came home to Newfoundland with a Canada Council “Explorations” grant and a vague notion of writing a book about my father. I brought a notebook, a borrowed laptop, a handheld tape recorder and a box of wishful thinking. I was almost thirty years old and more or less unpublished. I owned nothing but an ’83 Ford Taurus purchased from my parents for a dollar when they retired. I was still sporting a hockey mullet.
Jesus in the Garden.
I had no plan for the project other than getting Dad to talk about growing up in Western Bay, about fishing on the Labrador. I poked around the old saltbox where he was born in 1930. I went over to Fogo Island, visited the Fisherman’s Museum in Tilting. I camped with friends in Gros Morne and up the Great Northern Peninsula. Dad and I took a two-week trip down the Labrador on the coastal boat (my ticket paid for by the aforementioned Canada Council grant). I spoke to his brother and sister and other relatives, taking notes because they wouldn’t let me use the tape recorder. I drank beer and shot pool at the Captain’s Quarters in the afternoons. I wrote poems and little stories in the basement of my parents’ house on Glover Place. Played cribbage and 120s with Dad and Aunt Helen, my father walking around his chair counter-clockwise to change his luck when the cards ran against him.
I was living in Kingston at the time and flew back to Ontario in September, with just enough money to get me to the new year. I’d never had the chance to write full-time before, and it was a delicious, almost illicit sensation. I went to bed every night with the thought of sitting at the computer in the morning, of the luxurious hours ahead to muck with the stories and anecdotes I’d collected during the summer. To try to pin those voices, so familiar I’d barely taken note of them before – rattling accents and a prodigal vocabulary meant for talk, for drunken foolishness and backhanded compliments, for rackets and gossip and black humour. Finagling a place on the page where they would seem halfways at home.
I didn’t have a sweet clue what I was up to, to be honest. Jumping into the black without knowing how deep the water was. But I had hold of something substantial, was my feeling. Writing back and forth between the three sections, which seemed individual and all of a piece, like separate core samples from the same body of ore. A book taking shape out of the welter of material. It felt like a magic trick, a sleight of hand I’d been fumbling at for years and had suddenly got the hang of, pulling coins from behind the ears of relatives and strangers.
By January, Hard Light was more or less there. I carried on editing for two more years, on my own and then with the wonderful Gary Draper at Brick. “32 Little Stories” was moved from the end of the book to the front. Pieces shifted within and between sections. A friend suggested an epilogue to mirror the stand-alone “Rust” at the start. Everything was swept and brushed and clipped and tidied. But the interior life of the book, the substantial something I had hold of, was already on the page by the time I went back to my miserable fucking day job in February.
The Ford Taurus died a slow death on the streets of Kingston before I moved home to Newfoundland for good in 2000. I can’t recall its exact fate, though I must have brought it to a wrecker. It was too beaten down to sell. The mullet was also long gone and hardly a soul remembers it now, please God. But I couldn’t tell you when it got the axe or what finally convinced me to make the change.
We lose whole chunks of our lives that way – inadvertently, while we’re looking ahead. One review of Hard Light described it as a book from which the author was almost completely absent. It was meant as a compliment and I took it that way at the time. But it feels now like a mild curse was being cast. Most of the work between the covers of Hard Light is so far removed from me at this point that it might have been written by someone else. I’ve lost that intoxicating sense of being inside the material, of wearing it like a layer of skin that moves and breathes with me. And the sheen has gone off it in places, of course. There are moments that make me wince, the way coming across pictures of my old hockey hair does.
But I still love this little book. For the fragments of my father’s stories that found their way into the text. For the pieces that feel like high-water marks – places I hadn’t touched before and have rarely gotten to since. For the flicker of its interior life which manages to feel like a real thing to me still, twenty years on.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Much of this book is a collaboration between myself and Newfoundlanders past and present. Some of the people ‘speaking’ here are no longer around to argue with how they’ve been represented, so I’d better say up front that liberties have been taken.
32 Little Stories is based on tales told to me by my Uncle Clyde, Aunt Helen, Annie Crummey, my mother, Pam Frampton, Toby O’Dea, along with a few nameless others. My own over-active imagination is responsible for a number of completely fictional pieces. More than anyone else’s, though, it is my father’s voice and his stories that made me want to write these things down.
Discovering Darkness was inspired by On the High Seas, the diary of Captain John Froude (1863–1939), published in 1983 by Jesperson Press. Born in Twillingate, Newfoundland, he worked as a fisherman, sealer and miner before spending a number of years travelling around the globe as a seaman on tall ships and steamers. The titles of all the poems are taken directly from the diary. Most of the experiences related, the references to history, mythology, science and religion, along with many of the sentiments expressed, can be found in some form or other in On the High Seas as well. In several pieces I have acted as much as editor as writer. But the sequence is not meant to be biography. Throughout I’ve been free with names, dates, places and anything else I felt the poems required.
A Map of the Islands grew out of a trip on the Labrador coastal ferry, the MV Northern Ranger, in August of 1995. A grant from the Canada Council made it possible for me to accompany my father on the Labrador trip and to spend some time writing afterwards, for which I’m grateful. My brother and sister-in-law put us up during stopovers in Goose Bay, and Paul found the maps that made “Naming the Islands” possible. My brother Stephen offered a home base in St. John’s during the summer of 1995, and Peter provided invaluable computer support throughout the writing of this book.
&
nbsp; Amber McCart offered me the use of the laptop on which many of these pieces took their first steps. Jan McAlpine suggested an epilogue. Carolyn Smart was the first to read an early version of the manuscript and suggested I send it to Don McKay at Brick Books. Gary Draper’s eyes and ears helped me find the version that ended up between the covers. Wanda Mattson made room for me in the house in which the writing was finished. Part of what this book is belongs to her.
Some of these pieces have been previously published, often in earlier versions, in The Capilano Review, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Grain and TickleAce. Thanks to the editors. A special thanks to Robert Sherrin at TCR for his interest and support.
All period photographs are from the collection of Helen Crummey. Document photos by Donna Vittorio.
My thanks to Robert Bringhurst for the new design. Thanks as well to Nick Thran and Sue Sinclair, who gave their time and attention to the myriad details involved in the process, allowing me to correct old mistakes and avoid some new ones.
Photo of Michael Crummey by Arielle Hogan
MICHAEL CRUMMEY has published nine books of poetry and fiction. Galore won the Canadian Authors Association’s Fiction Award, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and Caribbean Region), and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Governor General’s Award. Sweetland was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 2014. His most recent poetry collection is Under the Keel (Anansi, 2013). He lives in St. John’s. ¶ LISA MOORE is the author of three novels: Alligator, February and Caught. Her stories have been gathered in The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore. She has adapted her novel February for the stage, and teaches at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS
1 Anne Carson, Short Talks
1 Introduction by Margaret Christakos
1 ISBN 978-1-77131-342-1 (January 2015)
2 John Steffler, The Grey Islands
2 Introduction by Adrian Fowler
2 ISBN 978-1-77131-343-8 (February 2015)
3 Dennis Lee, Riffs
3 Introduction by Paul Vermeersch
3 ISBN 978-1-77131-344-5 (March 2015)
4 Marilyn Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl
4 Introduction by Lee Maracle
4 ISBN 978-1-77131-345-2 (August 2015)
5 Michael Crummey, Hard Light
5 Introduction by Lisa Moore
5 ISBN 978-1-77131-346-9 (September 2015)
6 Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein Elegies
6 Introduction by Sue Sinclair
6 ISBN 978-1-77131-347-6 (October 2015)
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