One Year in Coal Harbor

by Polly Horvath

  “Where would she go then?” I said.

  “Maybe she’s protesting with your mom,” said Uncle Jack.

  So because I still didn’t want to go home and neither did Uncle Jack we decided to head out that way.

  When we got to the end of Jackson Road we found my mother. She said Miss Bowzer had been drifting about but she hadn’t seen her lately. Uncle Jack and I strolled on, looking for her. It was noisy, between the sounds of chain saws and falling limbs and the singing and chanting. I was so rattled and vibrating already that it was giving me a terrible headache. The whole top of the mountain was bare.

  We finally found Miss Bowzer sitting on the top steps of the B and B. All Miss Clarice’s furniture had been moved down island, even the porch furniture. Miss Bowzer was staring at the mountain glumly. When she saw Uncle Jack, her eyes lit up momentarily, and then she turned her gaze back to the mountain.

  “You look as miserable as Primrose,” said Uncle Jack, clearly floundering the way he always did around Miss Bowzer. He and I plunked ourselves down on the step next to her. My headache was getting worse and worse, so that it seemed to be vibrating as much as the chain saws.

  “Of course she’s miserable,” said Miss Bowzer tartly. “Because Ked is gone. Everybody’s who’s been around knows that.”

  “Ruffian was just killed by a car,” said Uncle Jack quietly. “She saw it happen.”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” said Miss Bowzer. “What an awful thing to witness.”

  They both looked at me sympathetically but not really understanding at all, and it detonated all the stuff inside I had felt but not told anyone.

  “I DIDN’T SEE IT HAPPEN! I CAUSED IT! I KILLED KED’S DOG! HE BIT ME SO I TURNED HIM LOOSE AND TOLD HIM TO GO PLAY IN TRAFFIC AND HE DID!”

  Uncle Jack squinted as he sized me and the situation up and then he said quietly, “Don’t be silly. You didn’t think that would happen. It wasn’t deliberate.”

  “AND I DIDN’T SAVE KED!” I said in new agony because this was the thing that had really been bothering me for some time.

  “No, but you don’t know how things will turn out for him. Just because he’s out of our hands doesn’t mean nothing good will ever happen to him. It’s certainly his turn,” said Uncle Jack.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in justice,” I said in surprise.

  “I don’t but I believe in the occasional miracle. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be asking …,” and he was opening his sports jacket when I remembered something else.

  “AND I NEVER TOLD HIM HE WAS MY BEST

  FRIEND! I NEVER TOLD HIM! AND NOW HE’LL NEVER KNOW!”

  Miss Bowzer, who had been looking concerned for me and irritated with Uncle Jack, frowned, looked a million miles away, and suddenly shot up, yelling, “I WANT TO GET MARRIED! I WANT TO GET MARRIED. I WANT YOU TO MARRY ME!”

  Poor Uncle Jack looked stunned. Women were leaping around porch steps shouting unexpected things with no apparent provocation.

  After a pause to take in this new information, he said quietly, “Okay. Okay, I’ll marry you.”

  “I DON’T WANT TO MAKE YOU MARRY ME! I DON’T WANT IT TO BE MY IDEA!”

  Uncle Jack stood up, mopped his brow and took Miss Bowzer by the shoulders and whirled her to face him. He had beads of sweat all over his upper lip, and his hair was kind of standing on end. “That’s not what I … If you’ll just hold still one second, you’ll see I’m trying to declare myself.”

  “Oh!” said Miss Bowzer, and all the air went out of her and she collapsed onto the steps with an audible whomp.

  “Jeez, Louise!” said Uncle Jack. He opened his sports jacket again and from an inside pocket took out a small box and handed it to her. “What I was about to say before I was interrupted was that if I didn’t believe in the occasional miracle I’d never have the nerve to ask you to be my wife. I’ve been carrying this around for months.”

  Miss Bowzer opened the box. Inside was a beautiful, sparkling ring. There was an emerald in the middle that I bet he got because it was the color of Miss Bowzer’s eyes. Good ring choice, I wanted to say, until I remembered that this was supposed to be a romantic moment and not a jewelry critique.

  “Do you suppose you could excuse us for a minute?” Uncle Jack asked, looking down at me. I realized what I must look like, staring up at them with my mouth open, my face all blotchy, practically drooling on the bottom step. I was hardly adding anything decorative to the occasion so I moved off.

  I walked among the protesters but looked back at the porch steps from time to time to try to catch a glimpse of the big romantic moment, but Uncle Jack and Miss Bowzer had gone around the side of the house to have it alone.

  They were gone so long I had time to replay everything that had happened in one year in Coal Harbor. As I did, my temples slowly stopped throbbing and my headache began to dissipate. For a small town an awful lot had gone on. A lot of it had been sad and now some of it was my fault. But at least, finally, something really happy had happened.

  Miss Bowzer and Uncle Jack were returning to the porch and there was a point I was suddenly curious about.

  I ran over. I noticed that the ring was now on Miss Bowzer’s finger.

  “Why did you wait so long?” I asked Uncle Jack. “If you already had the ring?”

  “I wanted to have things worked out first,” said Uncle Jack.

  This was so like him. He always wanted all the pieces in his deals put together perfectly and all the angles figured out before he acted on them.

  “I wanted us to have something we could do together, Kate, or at least in proximity,” he said, turning to her. “At first I thought I’d get a successful restaurant going and then we could have two restaurants. I thought you’d like that. I certainly didn’t want to continue working down island so much after we were married, that is if you decided to accept me.”

  “Oh, you!” she said, smiling and nudging him in the ribs with her elbow, which put her diamond-clad hand at a particularly good display angle. I imagined we were going to see the hand at that angle quite a bit in the weeks to come. And why not? Miss Bowzer had waited a long time for someone who would go out into the storm after her, forsaking all else.

  “Then when I realized you wanted the B and B—”

  “When I told you she did,” I interjected.

  “Right, when Primrose told me you did, then I decided to sell a bunch of my holdings down island and buy it. Dan and Miss Clarice, soon to be Mrs. Sneild, had asked me to find them a farm down island to transfer her buffalo enterprise, so I was busy with that as well.”

  “Dan Sneild is marrying Miss Clarice?” I interrupted. “Oh, the snake! He was courting Miss Bowzer!”

  “Oh, hush, Primrose, I knew about Miss Clarice all along,” said Miss Bowzer. “Dan followed her up here from Duncan and told me the first night that he was going to try to convince her to move back with him.”

  “Well, you certainly had me fooled,” I sniffed.

  “Hush,” said Miss Bowzer again. “I want to hear what Jack has to say.”

  “Oh,” said Uncle Jack. “Well, I figured once I had the B and B secured, I would ask you to marry me. I was going to put an offer on it today, actually. Miss Clarice knew I’d be making one as soon as I could. But now, looking at that clear-cut, I’m worried about this B and B doing business. Maybe we should look for another with a better view.”

  “No,” said Miss Bowzer stubbornly. “I want this one. I’ve always wanted this one.”

  We all stared at the big ugly bald strip across the way.

  “All right then,” said Uncle Jack dubiously. “But hey! Here’s a happy thought—we can serve all the French food we want!”

  “Oh! So that’s what that was about? You were auditioning me?” And Miss Bowzer started to turn an irritated scarlet, proving that she could get prickly even at the most romantic of moments. I could tell they were going to have some spectacular dustups in the years to come.

  I decided to change
the subject before the French food could be further explored and my own nefarious part in the boeuf bourguignon affair be revealed.

  “It’s too bad you can’t buy the mountain,” I said hastily, “That would stop the logging.”

  And that’s when Uncle Jack stood up and left. Without a word.

  “NOW WHAT!” said Miss Bowzer, to no one in particular. “NOW WHERE DID HE GO?”

  She was still shouting everything as if she weren’t aware she had a volume control.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I know that look on Uncle Jack’s face. He didn’t just disappear. He has a plan.”

  That’s how Mendolay Mountain ended up with a statue of Mr. Honeycut on top of it. The strip that had been clear-cut was planted in wildflowers and kept tidy by the Honeycut Park Preservation Committee. Even though there was a lot of grumbling about it, I was kind of glad Miss Honeycut got a statue of her father up there. Although he was a pretty scary-looking guy. You’d think they’d at least have made the statue smile but instead they gave him a frown and a huge nose down which he could look at all of us forever. Which maybe Miss Honeycut would have liked, I don’t know. She never came to see it. We invited her for the dedication ceremony but I think she was at someone or other’s dying bedside and just wrote a letter to be read, saying a mountaintop park had exceeded her expectations and how clever Uncle Jack was. This part made everyone snicker.

  I thought the vegetarian war orphans would be ecstatic that the logging had stopped but they looked a little bemused, as if they’d had their protesting carpet yanked out from underneath them, all dressed up in placards and no place to go. But in the end they graciously forgave Uncle Jack for this and headed to their next protest, on the mainland. All except for the one who had once been a hairdresser. He decided to stay in town.

  After that, Uncle Jack took off for the Alberta oil fields, where men could make a lot of money fast if they were lucky. He had hoped to get money for the mountain from the land conservancy but even with that and Miss Honeycut’s Coal Harbor fund, he had to put all the money he had planned to spend on the B and B into buying the mountain. So he had to start all over to make his fortune. And he had to do it quickly before someone else got the B and B. And it was just like Uncle Jack that he didn’t make a fuss or promises or complaints. He just took off to do what he had to do. So that was that. Indefinitely.

  “I’m an idiot,” Miss Bowzer was saying to me and my mother as we sat around our kitchen table and admired her ring for the millionth time.

  “Because you tried to make him jealous by pretending to care for Dan Sneild?” I asked. I had been curious on this point for some time.

  “Primrose,” said my mother warningly.

  “No,” said Miss Bowzer shortly.

  I still thought that that had some choice idiot qualities about it, but if she wasn’t willing to discuss it, there was no point in pursuing it.

  “No, because he offers me the B and B I have always wanted, gives me a ring and I send him off to buy a mountain instead.”

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” I said. “You didn’t really send him off. I was the one who suggested buying the mountain but it didn’t occur to me that was actually possible. And besides, he’s going to make it all work. That’s what he does best.”

  “And what good would the B and B be if you sat on that porch and looked at that clear-cut? No, you did the right thing,” said my mother, and sighed. “Old hotfoot Jack.”

  “He just wants to give you what you’ve always wanted,” I said. “It’s very romantic, really.”

  Miss Bowzer just shook her head. “Ha! Don’t kid yourself. He’s having a wonderful time. There’s nothing he likes better than losing all his money and having to make it again. Part of me thinks he bought that mountain just so he’d have the thrill of having to start at square one.”

  I wanted to protest but I suspected she was probably right.

  “No,” she went on, “he just went whistling off. Well, who knows if he’ll ever make enough money for the B and B? Who knows how many years we’ll waste apart while he tries? Who knows if he’ll ever come back? That man is going to drive me crazy.”

  With all the excitement and fuss in town over, and everyone returned to their normal routines, I had time to brood more about Ked. He was always on my mind. It made me kind of angry that everyone else seemed to have accepted that he was gone and that was that. I wondered if my parents would be willing to take a family trip to Yellowknife in the summer. I was asking my mom about this after supper one night when my dad flipped on the news.

  “HUSH!” he said to my mother and me, which was so unlike him that we froze.

  Then we heard what he did. The tail end of a story out of Yellowknife.

  A reporter was saying, “… since a fourteen-year-old boy has disappeared off a frozen lake outside Yellowknife. His father, Jack Schneider—”

  “That’s Ked’s last name!” I said.

  “HUSH!” said my dad again as he strained to hear. My mother and I sat on the couch next to him.

  “RCMP officers say that the father claims to have forgotten his tackle and left the boy alone on the ice while he drove back for it. A bartender says Mr. Schneider arrived at his bar and began drinking, at one point got agitated, seeming to suddenly remember that he’d left his son out on the ice waiting for him. The bartender became concerned and called a local constable, who drove out to the lake and found footprints but no other signs of life. Search and Rescue has been called out but so far there is no sign of the boy.”

  My dad drove over to tell Bert and Evie in case they hadn’t already heard, while my mom and I sat in the living room glued to the television, but there was no more news.

  My mom let me stay home from school the next day. I watched the news and took hot baths but I could not get warm and nothing more was reported.

  “Do you think he found shelter?” I asked my mom when Search and Rescue was called off. “Just because they didn’t find him doesn’t mean he isn’t alive.”

  “That’s right,” said my mom. But I knew she’d heard what I had, that it was thirty below.

  Evie and Bert looked as haunted as I felt. We didn’t talk about it. The first week we all hoped to hear something, anything indicating that Ked was all right. And as time went on, any other kind of speculation seemed unthinkable. Finally the only way I could cope was not to think about it at all. But it existed like a fifth appendage that hung on my body, throwing me off balance.

  Miss Bowzer sensed I didn’t want to talk about it but she kept saying she had faith in Uncle Jack coming back soon, and I thought half the time she was really talking about Ked. She must have had some faith in Uncle Jack making the money he said he would, too, because when she and I walked out to the end of Jackson Road, as we did from time to time, to sit on the B and B steps and gaze at Miss Honeycut’s park, Miss Bowzer would tell me in detail how she saw each of the rooms decorated.

  “He thinks he needs something to offer me before he can marry me,” said Miss Bowzer. “It’s stupid but you can’t do much about people’s built-in stupidity. I mean everyone’s stupid in some form. I always thought that poor boy Ked was so quiet and shy because he thought he had nothing to offer anyone.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said stonily as I always did when someone brought him up.

  We stared at the mountaintop with its ridiculous barely-able-to-be-seen statue perched high on top.

  “Maybe you’ll see Ked again someday. Maybe I’ll see Jack. Life takes a lot of courage, Primrose. You can candy-coat that idea all you like but that’s the truth. A lot of it’s just hard.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Sometimes it helps to pretend he was never here.”

  “Of course Ked was here,” said Miss Bowzer, and I couldn’t tell if she was intentionally misunderstanding me or not, but she seemed determined to keep resurrecting him with talk. “He was getting to be quite a fixture, coming into the restaurant every day. I really li
ked him, even though he hardly said a word.”

  “He didn’t go to the restaurant every day. I was with him every day after school,” I said.

  “He came while he was waiting for your school to let out. I’d’ve thought he’d told you. At first I thought he was just killing time; then I realized he came in to pump the seer. He bought Harry something to eat every single day—a piece of pie or at least a cup of coffee or Coke or something. But he never bought himself nothing. I wanted to give him his own piece of pie for free, because he was always watching the seer eat it like he could put away half a pie himself. You know teenage boys. But the first time I offered he looked so embarrassed I didn’t do that again. You know, I think he just didn’t feel like he could show up and ask the seer to tell his dreamtown visions for free.”

  “But Ked never had any money,” I said. “It was one of his chief complaints. That’s why we were making the cookbook.”

  Then a thought struck me.

  “How did he pay for the meals?”

  “Cash,” said Miss Bowzer, looking surprised.

  “No, I mean bills or change?”

  “Oh.” She thought a second. “It was always change. Loonies, toonies, once he tried to pay for coffee all with pennies and I told him not to do that again. I don’t need a hundred pennies.”

  “What did he ask the seer?” I said, putting my head in my hands. Eleanor had been right and Uncle Jack must have known it. But I didn’t care. It didn’t change my opinion of any of them.

  “Well, gosh, let me think,” Miss Bowzer said. “What did he ask the seer? I think Ked wanted to know what was going to happen to him next. Seems that when I did overhear Ked that’s what he was asking about. But you know no one can tell you what’s coming down the chute. Just as well.”

  Uncle Jack made his way back the following spring with a bank account full of money, just as he’d planned. Miss Bowzer sold The Girl on the Red Swing to Bert and Evie. Bert and Evie came over one night to tell us excitedly all about it.

  “It was when we were helping Miss Bowzer run it that we got the bug,” said Evie.