Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  “I’ll drive you,” said Eve, getting to her feet.

  “No!” said Antonine.

  “No?”

  “I mean,” said Antonine, “he wants to walk some of the way. He loves the scenery around here…don’t you Dylan?”

  I was staring at the one remaining muffin. If I had eaten seven…or eight…then they must have only eaten two each, at the most.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you want to take that one with you?” asked Eve.

  “Yes,” I repeated.

  “I’ll be back soon, Mom,” said Antonine as she almost lifted me out of my seat and directed me toward the door.

  We didn’t start talking until we were well down the street. Even then, we didn’t talk loudly. It was as if we were involved in some sort of espionage and had to be secretive.

  “So, what do we do next?” I asked. We had found an incredible clue and yet we seemed to be at a dead end at the same time.

  “Learn more about the wood?”

  “Confirm that it came from a ship, and then figure out the age of the ship, maybe?”

  “Who would know that? A pirate? One from the sixteenth century?”

  We walked along for quite a while before either of us said anything more.

  “It didn’t really look like a ship timber to me,” said Antonine finally.

  “Then what is it? Why would your father hide a half-burned piece of wood in his shed?”

  “We both know why,” said Antonine. She stopped and sighed. “Somehow, it’s from the phantom ship.”

  She said it very quietly, but I had no problem hearing her. I couldn’t look at her and the main reason was that I agreed. It was as if we were saying that we’d just found Harry Potter’s wand…or Long John Silver’s wooden leg.

  We had come to King Avenue. I think every town in Canada has either a King or a Queen street. This one ran right through the centre of town and there were many bus stops on it. There was a bus approaching. I’d have to hop on it, if I wanted to get home before it got too late.

  “What about Florence Green?” I asked as the driver noticed us waiting and signalled to pull over.

  “I don’t see her as a former pirate.”

  “Yeah, but maybe she knows somebody who knows about old ships. She works at the museum, doesn’t she?”

  I got on the bus, leaving Antonine standing there. I walked back to the rear seats and watched her as we pulled away. She was still in the same spot. She was nodding.

  15

  Expert Analysis

  Someone was calling my name. It sounded like Bomber. Then I realized where we were: in a rowboat out on Chaleur Bay, and Antonine was with us. I was wearing her invisible necklace and she was sitting beside me, not saying anything, just smiling at Bomb and me as we talked. He was rowing the boat and in the distance behind him, in the direction we were going, you could see a big ball of fire on the water.

  “Dylan!” said Bomber.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know what I think, pea-brain?”

  “What, useless excuse for a human being?”

  We always talk this way. It’s a form of affection. Trust me.

  “D’you know what my greatest moment was?”

  “The time you peed your pants at Boy Scouts?”

  “Close.” He paused. “Be serious for a second. It’s important, once you’re dead, to remember what is of value in life.”

  “You aren’t dead. Don’t be a fart.”

  “Yeah, I’m dead, Dylan. Answer the question and be serious.”

  “I don’t know, maybe the time you scored four goals in the bantam championship game?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, how about when you came fifth in our class…grade three?”

  “No, try again, numb nuts.”

  “When Lisa Greenway gave you that Valentine?”

  Antonine laughed.

  “Very good guess, but wrong-o.”

  “Okay, tell me.”

  “Remember that time you had that concussion, when you hit your head on the rock going down the hill behind our house on the toboggan, and you almost bought it? Remember, they took you to SickKids Hospital and you were unconscious for, like, half the afternoon and then you slept for long periods after that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I came in and sat beside you for hours. I even held your hand once or twice and said some prayers.”

  “How could that be your greatest moment? I didn’t even know you were there.”

  “That’s why.”

  “I don’t get it. You might as well have been invisible.”

  “Well, that’s what matters, Dylan. Invisible things. When life is all over, you’ll know that.”

  The ball of fire was suddenly very close.

  “Let’s go!” cried Antonine, and she and Bomb jumped out of the boat and swam toward the fire. I could see now that it was a ship, an ancient pirate ship, engulfed in flames. There was a woman at the front shrieking in pain, and you could hear men on deck screaming.

  “NO!” I yelled after my friends.

  I couldn’t move, though. I was frozen in place, watching them. They climbed onto the ship! They were both going to die.

  “DYLAN!”

  I came wide awake. It was Mom, standing over my bed in the very early sunshine, in Bill and Bonnie’s house in New Brunswick.

  “What?” I groaned.

  “There is someone on the phone for you.”

  I glanced at the digital clock on the bedside table. 7:45 a.m. Sunday.

  “Someone?”

  “You know who.”

  “Dylan?” said Antonine over the phone from her place, sounding very awake.

  “Yeah. Do you know what time it—”

  “Florence Green is an early riser, gets up at five every morning to go for a jog. I called the museum last night and she wasn’t in, but then Mom said I could probably reach her around seven, between her jog and before she headed out to help set up for services at her church.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “She knows someone.”

  “So do I, in fact. I know many people.”

  “An old ship expert, dummy.”

  I brightened. “Really?”

  “Yeah, a fisherman named Alfonse Gallant. Lives down near Caraquet.”

  “Caraquet!” I said loudly and then lowered my voice. Mom had gone back to bed, but it was possible that either of the parental units or the Bill and Bonnie Show were awake enough to hear me.

  “I know; it’s a long way.”

  “How are we going to get there?”

  “Mom will drive us.”

  “But—”

  “I told her everything. We had a long talk. We were up almost all night. She was really good about it. She is fine with driving us and very interested, though she says it is still our deal. She will just wait in the car. We’ll pick you up in about fifteen minutes.”

  “But—”

  She hung up.

  I had to get ready. I had no choice.

  Mom wasn’t my biggest fan after the way I’d talked to Bill yesterday, but she let me go anyway. Maybe she wanted to be rid of me for a while.

  The Clays arrived in about fourteen minutes. I don’t even know how they did it, since I thought it would take much longer than that. They didn’t look like they hadn’t slept at all. They were both excited, their hair combed and shining, and they were chatting away. That is another thing about females: it seems they can just crawl out of bed and look like a million bucks. We, on the other hand, look like something the dog dragged in until we’ve had a good breakfast and maybe a lounge or two on the couch.

  Eve had actually brought breakfast for me! It was some sort of omelette wrap and it was pretty awesome. Well
, it wasn’t just one wrap…it was three of them. Eve had seen my appetite.

  The first thing that surprised me when I got into the car, though, wasn’t the big bag of great-smelling wraps Eve deposited on my lap as I crammed myself into the back seat, it was the fact that there was a third passenger—and that occupant took up more room than the three of us put together. It was the burned ship timber, stuck between the two front seats and extending all the way back to the rear windshield, almost touching it. The black part was right next to my head.

  We cut back through Bathurst, right across town and East Bathurst and then along the same route that I had been on with the parental units and the Bill and Bonnie Show. We went by Salmon Beach again and past the houses sparsely placed in the beautiful countryside and the little Acadian villages, the blue water evident from the road. Neither Antonine nor Eve said much and that was fine with me. We had too many things on our minds. I just wanted to look out the window, out over the bay, and imagine what this guy might tell us. It was all made more intense by the ship timber being right there next to my nose. It isn’t every day that you hang out with a piece of lumber from a ghost ship.

  Alfonse Gallant lived on the Bathurst side of Caraquet, just before you turned to head toward the Acadian Historic Village, in that little place called Grande-Anse that Bill had pronounced so inappropriately. Well, Monsieur Gallant didn’t actually live in the village, he was out on the water. We passed the Marché Grande-Anse and then turned left at a big church, Catholic I’m guessing, like almost all the other ones around here, and headed toward the water. It was beautiful. The houses weren’t big or fancy for the most part, not like Bill and Bonnie’s, but they were very well kept, as if their owners took a lot of pride in their homes and community. It almost seemed as if we were going to drive right into the water for a while. The land and the road sloped downward, and we could see a little man-made harbour like a U in the water and boats lined up there at a wide-plank dock.

  “This man spent his entire life fishing these waters,” said Eve from the driver’s seat.

  Alfonse’s house looked lonely, sitting on its own at the far end of the road, just a small building almost like a trailer but with a fresh coat of blue paint on it and lovely flower beds everywhere. I noticed the paint was almost exactly the colour of the bay. There was some sort of turret rising up from one side, like a miniature lighthouse. Eve pulled up into the Gallants’ gravel driveway.

  “If this visit doesn’t tell you what you need to know, then I don’t know what will. Alfonse knows the bay like no one else and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the marine history of the area. It seems he knows every boat that ever sailed here, right back to the sixteenth century.” She smiled. “Now, out you get, you two. I’m going in to Caraquet for some groceries. I’ll see you in half an hour.”

  We wrestled the wood out of the car and made our way up to the front door, but we didn’t have to knock. Madame Gallant, a smiling, rotund woman under five feet tall, wearing a lovely bright dress that I doubted she normally wore around the house, opened the screen door just as we stepped onto the front porch.

  “Bienvenue à Acadie!” she said to me.

  “Merci beaucoup,” I managed, which made her giggle.

  We were very excited, and it probably showed, imagining what Alfonse was going to tell us.

  The greeting inside, however, was not nearly as friendly.

  “No!” shouted Alfonse Gallant the instant he saw us.

  We had just stepped into the house, both of us gripping the plank, turning to our left and looking down the long narrow living room with a big window that gave an incredible view of the bay, toward a white-bearded man in jeans and suspenders and a red plaid shirt. He had been sitting in an easy chair reading but had looked up to see us when we entered. He didn’t just shout “No!” He also waved his hand at us in a dismissive way, as if to say to us “get out of my house!”

  “Alfonse!” cried Madame Gallant.

  After showing us in, she had immediately gone to her kitchen table to retrieve a big tray, on which were arranged two cups of tea and two tall glasses of juice along with a selection of some of the best-looking oatmeal-raisin cookies I’d ever laid eyes on, not to mention an entire plate of raspberry tarts. Man, it looked awesome. I had somehow noticed it with my well-trained peripheral vision. On the ice, I was known for being a good passer. Bomb was always my favourite target. My teammates used to say that I could spot him out of the side or the back of my head at full speed. I had to say, though, locating these raspberry tarts was at least as impressive, especially with an old man yelling at you to get the heck out of his house.

  Madame Gallant started really giving it to him in French. She dressed him up and down and sideways and his face started to fall. He looked quite guilty. Then he said something to her that sounded like a sort of apology.

  She turned to us and motioned toward the couch and the other living room chairs. They all looked very comfortable and every last one had a great view through the picture window at the water.

  “Assiez-vous,” she said to us. That meant “sit down.” I at least knew that from French class.

  Antonine and I seated ourselves next to each other with the board across our knees.

  “Monsieur Gallant,” Madame Gallant said to us in heavily accented French, “’az sometheeng to say to you.” She gave him a stern look.

  “I am sorry, please accept my apologies,” he said to us in clear English. “I was not referring to you. You are most welcome in our home.”

  Madame Gallant glowed at him, and then at us, and then motioned toward the food.

  “Bon appetit!”

  Well, I didn’t need any more encouragement. I got my mitts on a tart first and was shocked to find that I had another one in my hand before I had even finished the first one. I felt like such an animal, such an impolite Anglo boob, but something had just come over me. These tarts were delicious in a way that was almost unfair.

  “These are the best tarts I’ve ever tasted,” I managed to say.

  Madame Gallant glowed again. She pushed a cookie my way.

  “I…” stammered Alfonse, “I was referring to what you are carrying. That was what I was saying no to.”

  “Monsieur Gallant,” added Madame Gallant, “feels very, uh, strongly, about ships.”

  “And that is not from a ship!” he snapped. “I could tell that from across the room.”

  “Then what is it?” I asked, blurting out what was in my head again.

  “I have no idea, but a plank from a ship or a boat of any sort was never that kind of wood, that length, that thickness, sawed that way. It looks more like it came from a house.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Antonine.

  “A house,” he repeated.

  “A house?” I mouthed at Antonine.

  “Follow me,” said Alfonse.

  He got to his feet and led us to a little hallway, hobbling a bit as he went. There was a bathroom at the end of it and a bedroom to our left, but he entered another room on his right. Nearly every inch of the wall had either a painting or a photograph of a ship or a fishing boat and there were stacks of books about marine topics piled nearly to the ceiling in every inch of the room. Models of ocean-going vessels sat on top of them and on shelves, some of them ships in bottles. He motioned us over to a desk. There, he started thumbing through a pile of papers, all of them almost the length of the desk. I noticed that one of his thumbs was missing. He saw me staring at it.

  “Gave that one to the sea,” he said. “Now, look here.”

  He fished out about a half dozen of the papers and laid them on the desk in front of us.

  “Portuguese, 1500.”

  We looked down and saw an ancient ship, meticulously drawn, as if x-rayed, all its masts, its decks, its innards on display in a sort of three-dimensional rendering. He pulled it back and showe
d us the next one.

  “Spanish, 1600.” He displayed two more. “English, 1750 and French, 1750.”

  Then he somehow spread them all out so we could look at the whole group at once, and jabbed at the cross-sections.

  “See the planks used on these? Do they look anything like your board? Not a drop!”

  He suddenly seized the entire desk and wrenched it back from the wall and sideways, the legs grinding on the floor.

  “Look down,” he said.

  We glanced downward and saw a long piece of wood there, weathered and brown but smooth as concrete and about twice the width of our board and twice as long. It went nearly the entire length of the room.

  “That’s a piece out of an English man-of-war from the Battle of Restigouche. Don’t ask me how it is in my possession…because if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then he laughed, thank God, bringing his stumped thumb up to cover his mouth.

  “But as you see, your piece is nothing like this. It is no more a plank of a ship from those days than it is a part of a spacecraft. I get so many people coming here showing me things like this that are not authentic. I’m sorry, but I lose my patience sometimes. When Eve said it had something to do with the ghost ship, I became a little excited. There was some disappointment, you see.”

  “You mentioned our wood looked as if it was from a house,” I said.

  “That’s what it seems like to me. Someone is trying to fool you.”

  Antonine frowned.

  “It is curious, though,” Alfonse continued, “that it is partially burned.”

  After that, we returned to the living room and had a lovely chat with the Gallants about Acadia and fishing, and Alfonse and I even got in a few jabs about his dreadful Montreal Canadiens and my magnificent Leafs, but he refused to say another word about the plank.

  “We didn’t learn a single thing,” Antonine told her mother as we piled back into the car, jamming the piece of wood into place again.

  “Or maybe we did,” I said. “We can now be absolutely certain that we are out of our minds. This is just some chunk of burned wood that Mr. Clay kept in his work shed.”