29 These days have been cold, the hills wearing hats of fog.
The whitecaps pushing out the Narrows yesterday morning. The sea starts here. Unleashing waves that will rush to Portugal.
The first strawberries ripened this morning. I gave one to Iris on a small white plate.
Feeling still so exhausted, beaten down. Max said, It’s good to see you up in spirits. Last seven times I’ve seen you youve been in misery. I thought you’d forgotten how to be happy.
I feel worn out and unworthy. Not being strong enough. I had wanted so much to be big.
30 I ask Maisie if she sometimes found herself in an uncomfortable silence with Oliver. Often, she says, we’d be doing different things in the same room, but it was understood we were together.
But what if you were eating a meal together.
Maisie: I can remember that happening, but it’s normal for a couple – especially if they live together – to run out of things to say. Eventually you know all about them. I asked Oliver once if he felt uncomfortable with anything, and he mentioned the mealtimes. At first he’d tried to fill in the lapses of conversation, but then he realized our main reason for eating was to have food. And then he was okay with it. The way I see it, a dinner party is when you converse, and dialogue is the prime reason for being together – but regular meals are just to eat.
I tell her Oliver’s having a hard time of it.
Maisie: I’ve heard.
I confess my despair. That my journal is full of it, and Maisie says, Well, Gabe. You have to write the low points as well.
31 It’s the weekend of the food fishery, and Max invites me out.
Max: A pound a foot will hold a boat.
Meaning a forty-foot boat needs a forty-pound anchor.
He says that when he was young, he’d ask his father how he knew when to turn in to port in the fog. You couldnt see anything and they didnt have sonar. His father said, Well, son, I’m on my second chew now When that’s gone, we turn in.
He was given his father’s boat. Max has put in sonar. All the fishing boats have a metal diamond on a mast that acts as a radar reflector.
We can see the cod sitting on the sonar screen, a white mass in the blue water above the orange seabed. The caplin are just below the surface. Out on the water, the puffins are feeding on the caplin.
We throw over our jiggers. We let the line down to the bottom, and then haul in about four feet. Then we jig.
I get one quick and haul it up. It’s just a dead weight. It takes thirty seconds of hauling to bring it to the surface. I see the cod’s white belly and the arc of its black, freckled side. I’ve hooked it through the gut and it flops over the boat rail. About four pounds. It wrenches its tail up in agony.
Max jigs a sculpin. It’s yellow and green and spiny. He beats it against the side of the boat until it falls off the hook.
Those are the only fish we catch.
The cod are full of caplin, Max says. They are little purses full of silver coins.
August
1 On our way to Gallow’s Cove. Max and Lydia and me. We stop at a Mary Brown’s to eat fajitas. We sit in the parking lot to eat them. We look over the lot and across the road and over another paved lot to a Sobeys. There are about three acres of bare property that caters to automobiles. Fajitas perched on our high, bent knees. Then we wipe our fingers in the new grass and drive on.
The Cove is slanted green into the sea. There are cows, a weathered fence to duck under. We scan the field for a bull. It’s the most easterly farm in North America. We descend towards the ocean, you can hear a cluster of gannets in the cliffshore. We check the dung of cows. Under trees we find chanterelles, small but we pick them. We look for psilocybes. Max finds a lone one.
Another month, he says.
I say, I’ve never done mushrooms.
This begins something for Max and Lydia. They swap psychedelic experiences. It happened in the fall with Lydia and at NewYear’s for Max. The full moon ascends and blurs behind a jacket of cloud. It smudges the moon into Saturn. The ocean is surging white against the blue, upraised slate. Max was with Maisie Pye then, and that’s why Oliver has never liked him. This, under the influence of the mushroom. Lydia was with Earl.
Max has forearms from manual labour, from laying pipe in the Northwest Territories, from living a summer in a canvas tent while building a hunting lodge. Each time I’m with him he has a previous life to reveal. He can always illustrate a point with a personal story. It’s as if, left to think long enough, Max could summon an entire personal universe.
2 We’re at the Ship and Craig Regular buys me a beer. I hate how he pretends to like me. He says his house in the Battery has had plumbing for only twenty years. In the seventies there was a honey bucket.
Alex says she photographed a sentinel fishery crew throwing a thousand grapefruits into the sea. To mirror cod egg dispersion. They got back a hundred. She didnt think they’d get any back.
And then we see Oliver in the corner. He’s watching Maisie laugh at the bar.
I go over to say hello. Oliver says, Dont you hate it, Gabe. When the one you love has a laugh with someone else, a laugh you never hear from something youve said?
On the way home Lydia says, I like Oliver. Even if he is an asshole when drunk.
It’s true that Lydia prefers the company of men. That Maisie has always aggravated her a little. Because I get along with her so well.
3 I pick up Lydia in Jethro and drive west to Brigus.We stop to investigate a bog for bakeapples. I have a bottle of red wine, a clear bag of green arugula.
We walk through Daphne’s garden. Mini tree farms. Ginko. Across the water I can see Kent’s cottage. Bartlett’s house is hidden in hawthorn bushes. What I should do is come out here and write.
Daphne says this age will be lost because our records are so fragile they are prone to any catastrophe. She says our handling of the past – concentrating it in libraries and museums – makes our records vulnerable to disintegration. We may be the first generation to accumulate a vast knowledge of the past, but this knowledge will be lost for the first and only time, along with the evidence.
4 We walk the length of Water Street with Tinker Bumbo. To the War Memorial, where the kids smile, facing the water. They like Tinker. They line up to pet him. At Fred’s we check out the folk concert lineup.
Lydia says, I’m gonna take you home now.
We look at the fabrics in that Nepalese clothier. And back to the car. I do not protest. We hold hands. I try to recall where the Napoli pizzeria used to be. I’m surprised at how old photographs show the same structure, merely a difference in detail.
At my driveway we kiss, the headlights on the red gate.
Lydia: Can I visit if I’m feeling tired – tomorrow morning? Yes.
I won’t be able to talk to you, just sleep. You won’t be offended?
We kiss in three stints during this conversation. Three pauses in the goodbye. I’m gonna miss you, I say.
5 We stop into Max’s on our way to the folk festival. The thing about Max’s house is that it’s so big and beautiful that he has to take every job that comes to him. He’s a slave to the house.
They are eating blue burgers – blue cheese in the ground moose meat.
Daphne tells us how important it is to stay open and be friends with new people. That it’s true that when you get to be thirty this effort diminishes, but without the effort you may as well end it. You have ended it. Max, in his undervest and smallpox vaccine scar, confesses he prefers the company of women.
Lydia: Gabe does too.
Max: Or is it the feminine side of people?
Funny, I say. It’s the male side of women I like.
6 In the novel I have the boy grow up and come to St John’s. To this city. Composed of roofs and walls and chimneys, windows, stout maple and dogberry, an
d the bank of hills on the other side of the harbour are streaked with pipelines to a tank farm. This is all I see, but I have to imagine it as it must have been eighty years ago. Telegraph poles. A patch of harbour with not a wave on it. I hear the long rub of tires on pavement, the motors echoing off hills and buildings. Every morning I pick a plateful of raspberries and eat them with a cup of coffee. I can smell the raspberries on my fingertips. It is very early in the morning, the hills would not photograph well, washed out by the sun. The fog always sleeps in the harbour and then the sun, when it lifts off the water, chases the white fog into the hills. As if the hills soak up the fog. The sun a bright orange cod after caplin.
You can hear the rivet shot of a hydraulic punch as workers dismantle the last stretch of wooden wharves in St John’s. These wharves were here in the twenties. Making room for Hibernia facilities and the light blue Maersk support vessels.
7 Regatta day on Quidi Vidi pond. One ticket holding up the wheel. Sometimes the water is too bright to look at.
A family of ducks in the shade under a wooden walkbridge.
I bet a quarter on the crown and anchor and win a dollar.
Four boats race at once. The coxswain holds a cord to a buoy. She also controls the rudder, on cords. Lydia’s film crew is next.
A girl in a booth displays a stuffed black fox. Samosas and puri and overboiled hot dogs in stale buns. There’s a brisk westerly. Close to thirty degrees.
I see Una with her friends. The kids have twenty dollars each: ten for gambling with, ten for eating.
Max last night, mimicking his father. I’m all right, he says, except I got the hole droppin out of me.
Lydia’s team is second in its heat.
8 I serve Lydia pasta outside at the picnic table, with home-brew. She’s wearing three shades of brown. And pink eye in both eyes. We lie in the grass. I’ve picked raspberries and I feed them to her. Lydia pretends to be a baby. A baby, she says, would not like raspberries.
No. A baby’d push the raspberries out with his tongue.
No, he’d do this.
And Lydia pushes out with her lips and tongue.
And he’d straighten his legs.
Get away from me.
There are no movies playing, and badminton is over for the summer. It seems like we can’t go out tonight, I say. And later. So, darlin, do you want to hang out together or do you want to get on?
Lydia: I want to hang out here and be your baby, baby.
In the park kids wag glowing haloes of rainbows. I ask Lydia and she says theyve been around a couple of years. How do they light? It’s fluorescent goop, she says.
9 Eight of us aboard Max’s boat in Placentia Bay. I love getting out of town. Sunny, steaming southwest of Long Island. Trying to remember how Lydia’s foot looked in a white nylon: the red polish on her toenails showing through. As if her foot were dusted with sugar.
We see eagles in the distance. Some sea stacks that look like ancient pillars of rubble. I’ve had about five beer with absolutely no effect.
The horseflies are bad.
Discarded scallop shells shine along the bottom near the wharf in Harbour Buffett. Their reflected glare allows you to see more of what’s on the bottom. Connors dart and coast around the legs of the wharf.
The wharf is the deck of an old oak schooner. All the houses are gone now, resettled to Arnold’s Cove in the sixties. This was where Max was born. He has shown us photos of when his father moved the house to Arnold’s Cove. They jacked the house and rolled it down to the water on logs. Then a barge shipped it down the length of Placentia Bay. They didnt break one pane of glass until they got to Arnold’s Cove. Max says his father didnt mind the idea of resettlement. It was the speed. In the summer of 1967 there were two hundred people in Buffett. By September there were none.
And then what was left was pirated.
Even five years ago you’d see the shells of houses, still standing but their spines broken, about to collapse. You could see the size of the communities. But now all that’s here are cabins. People are starting to return. The cabins are mushrooms growing on a dead log.
Max, looking at the topo maps, says we can go across to Merasheen, but if the wind is from the south, you just dont know.
Max has fibreglassed the boat eight sheets on the hull,
sixteen overlap on the keel. And six sheets cover the house. Fibreglassing saves on maintenance.
We pass the whaling station on Merasheen. Across from Rose au Rue Island. Abandoned in the forties. A pasture to the south where the whaler’s quarters were, now caribou graze there. Rusting boilers, a vat, and the sticks of a wharf. On the ocean floor we see the outline of a sunken whaler, its hull arcing through the green depths.
10 This morning we ate blue mussels a friend of Max’s raked from the bottom around the island in Buffett Harbour.
The friend says, Max and I we’re the one age.
Big mussels that Lydia boiled in wine and garlic.
We watch two old women tend their drying fish. They stroll over to the chicken wire mesh, where the fish lie split and salted, to turn them over. The coastline is like a polygraph to see if the island’s lying.
Off the wharf I catch a few connors with Una. I’m using raisins for bait.
If you can imagine a tarnished beer bottle capable of wriggling, that would describe a connor.
Daphne: We like being near running water. Because we’re 90 percent water.
Driving back, in the dark, I almost hit a moose. I have Lydia, Maisie, and Una in the car. The moose is all legs, and then the legs join a torso. I never see its head. But I brake and swerve around him, I see fur against my right headlight. And Lydia says, holding my arm, You did well there.
11 How did I know Craig Regular was going to address me? He asked, Is this just olive oil? He was speaking to Lydia and something lifted in his chin that made me look, something that stopped us gently in our expected progress while he asked in a tone slightly lower to indicate an aside. Yes, it’s just oil, I say, and he resumes the soft talk on editing film on computers, dipping his torn baguette in the green pool. I am intimidated by taller men. I’m not used to it.
12 Lydia is supposed to have her period today. I ask in the morning and there’s no sign. It’s the only thing she’s never late for. On our bicycles we see Oliver Squires on his back step, soaked in heat, elbow propped on bare knee, eating a thick wedge of watermelon. Hottest day in thirteen years, he says.
I ask him, What were you doing back then.
He pauses. Thirteen years ago. Walking around the hill. I met Maisie.Yep, that’s when it all started.
Oliver says, If you die 366 days after an assault, the assault is not considered a homicide.
He says, A woman in Labrador shot out the appliances in her home today, then lightly stabbed her husband.
Lightly?
Oliver believes that in a dream, parts of a house represent parts of your self. He is eating this wedge of watermelon at his back door. On the stoop. Hidden from public view, but still outside. And we catch him wolfing into it, a secret act, an act of private joy that Oliver could not appreciate indoors. His eyes find ours while his teeth are sunk into the meat of the watermelon. Such a hot day.
13 We wake up and I ask, and Lydia says no. I say a gentle prayer. For Lydia’s period. I have never had a prayer unanswered, though I’m careful what I pray for. Lydia is calm about it all. She says her breasts feel sensitive, and bigger.
Lydia believes the world can be split into dreamers and writers. For the dreamer, words are strung together easily, you can fill libraries with their answers. But only a writer can tell you what life has meant. A writer cringes at how easily the dreamer pours out words. Politicians and bad writers are dreamers. Art is made in the kitchen. Whereas dreamers speak in front of the king.
14 Lydia says, I’m pregnant. She says
this declaratively. We are going to have a child.
Let’s get married, she says.
Okay then, I say.
I love you, she says. And she means it.
I have a rippling ecstasy coursing through my shoulders. I have never permitted myself to plan the future. And now large chunks of clear landscape have risen up.
I have thought so long to make Lydia pregnant. Her belly swollen, cupping a hand to her stomach. I wanted her changed like that. Carrying a baby. Cradling her. What an incredible nine months this will be.
I confess that I’d prayed.
Lydia: That I wouldnt be pregnant?
Me: I was careful. Because of the monkey’s paw curse. You prayed I wouldnt have a monkey’s paw?
I prayed that you werent pregnant, yet. I wanted to make sure I wasnt praying that we could never get pregnant.
You wanted our baby to come later.
Yes.
Lydia: Maybe I should pray.
Okay. Something positive. That whatever happens will be a good thing.
Yes, that we’ll have lots of good times no matter what. That whatever happens it’ll have your looks and my brains.
15 We bicycle to QuidiVidi gut. Boyd Coady is fishing for sea trout. He nods to Lydia. I ask if they will take a fly he is using a spinner. Boyd says he’s seen people flyfish, but theyve never caught anything. The fish are too nervous, scared by the line.
A couple of skinhead bikers search for bait under boulders. Now three short-haired boys and a girl, about fifteen years old, are fishing. She’s got a waterproof radio. Sporty waterproof electronics are always yellow.
A tourist couple have walked behind us on the concrete breakwater.
One of the boys catches a sculpin. A friend has joined them: Have you brought me a smoke?
The boy is bashing the sculpin against the rocks.
Boyd says he had on a German brown that was sixteen inches.
Sitting on the concrete breakwater, poured in 1961. The Atlantic bearing down between the Narrows. My tall ginger bike glinting in the trees, leaning against Lydia’s.
This All Happened Page 14
