A step at a time, a breath. The air into her lungs, the air parting as she moves through it, the island air filling in behind as she moves on. Moving on, each day to connect one thing to the next, to keep things whole. Sylvie’s job. This morning, a thread must go out to the past.
Four graves are all in a line at the farthest back corner of the cemetery. This arranged against various misgivings of various ministers. Four husbands in a row. Death uniting them now, but each related somehow to each other, each husband of a woman named Sylvie. David Young, her first love, stiff body salvaged from the icy waters by the first mate. Why was it that the need to see the dead body is so strong that men go to great lengths to retrieve the lost from battlefields, from collapsed mine shafts, from deep saltwater canyons? The row of four, however, gives her a sense of unity. Some would say that she is a victim of all that loss. Some would say she has been punished for something she has done or for who she is deep down. But Sylvie knows the world does not work that way.
Something to do with men that she cannot explain. A thought planted in her head by William Toye in his ramblings. Time, our notion of it, he had advised her, was just a theory, not a fact. We like this backwards-forwards thing. Time on a single plane, one line. We can look back but always move forward, as if on a train. Mad William wondered if it was all wrong. There is only the present and we expand it somehow. We can live in the past or the future. Nothing ends, nothing begins. Things just are. And since that makes life too confusing and too impossible, we create a workable lie to satisfy us and we make beginning and endings. Births and deaths. And Sylvie was well versed in both.
Her own children — the ones she never had. She missed them all but refused to let the weight of her grief chase after them like dark shadows.
Her husbands, all buried. But all of them still in her heart. She placed a hand on her chest, just beneath her throat, and spread her fingers wide, felt something, felt the presence of these men. All with her here on this pale blue wonder of a morning. The tall, dark spruce trees at the edge of the graveyard had a practised, benevolent look to them. They’d seen her here like this before.
Suddenly the roar of a muffler-less truck up the gravel road and over the hilltop, churning stones. A loud radio blaring from the window. Moses Slaunwhite, driving down to the wharf. Arm out the window, waving. Sylvie turns and smiles. Men and trucks. Surrounding themselves with noise and machines. Chaos. The dust tries to rise from the road but is too damp and settles again, to sleep until the sun dries it and gives it the lift of an afternoon breeze.
Moses had seen Sylvie there at the graves before. Early in the morning like this. Knew not to feel sorry for her. No one needed to feel sorry for Sylvie. A strong woman, had a soul of stainless steel, heart as big as a Chevy V-8 engine. Smart old gal. Too bad about all those men going away on her. Moses didn’t think he’d ever die. He had a hell of a lot of things to do yet with his life. A life that seemed to be going just like it was ordered up that way, all planned out. Up until this summer that is. One thing always leading to the next. Fishing, eco-tours, etcetera. But that was washing up stiff now. What next?
Moses had noticed the orderliness of everything moving into the future ever since he was a kid. The power of the plan, Moses’ father, Noah, had called it. Plan. Act. Adapt. Learn. Duck the worst blows and roll with the punches you don’t see coming. But he hadn’t expected that the whales would disappear. And with them, the eco-tour business would go. And with that demise, his livelihood. The bank would want the boat soon even though there was bloody all they could do with it but sell it for a third of what it was worth.
Moses slammed on the brakes. Loved the feel of an old truck skranking along to a stop on the loose stones. Backed her up and made a little whipper turn there on the hill from Up Along — just like a reckless teenager would. Throaty exhaust talking back to him up over the rise and then he killed the motor out of respect for the morning quiet that filled in around him as soon as he slammed the door shut.
“Sylvie, how’d you like to go for a boat ride today?”
“I’d be honoured, Moses. What would you charge me?” she teased.
“Sylvie, you know I couldn’t take an old woman’s money.”
“You’re a practical man, Moses Slaunwhite. I’ve always known you to be. Must be some reason for you to invite me.”
Moses removed his cap that said Clearwater. He scratched the part of his head that had the least hair.“Whyn’t you just go ahead and read my mind, while you’re at it? You probably know more about what I’m thinking than I do. You’ve always been like that.”
“Are we thinking about whales?”
“Yes. Of course. We are thinking about whales.”
“I haven’t been to sea in a long time. I’m more comfortable here on the island.”
“I know you are. But here you are standing around the graves of your dead men and I just thought that you might like to hang around with the living for a while.”
“You think I’m morose?”
“Not at all. I’m not inviting you out of pity, darn it. I’m inviting you because I think you can help me figure out what’s going on with the whales. Madame, if I don’t find ’em soon, I’m up to my earlobes in ox droppings.”
Moses was funny. He made her smile. Her love for dead husbands would abide, it was true. She still had time for the living, those who needed her help. A boat ride to sea on a morning like this would be something.
“Who else will be aboard?”
“Just you and me, girl.”
“What if people talk?”
“Let ’em.”
The government wharf was pretty well deserted. Moses had the biggest boat of the lot, but it felt too modern, somehow sterile. The big engine roared into life, and Moses said there’d be cappuccino in a few minutes. She thought he was joking, but as he found the seaward channel and walked from the wheelhouse, he handed her a steaming mug of something that must have been cappuccino.
“Bought the damn thing for the clientele but now I don’t know if I’ll have any clientele. Don’t burn your lips on it. She’s hot.”
Sylvie smiled through the steam of her cappuccino and felt honoured to have this voyage to sea.
“Sylvie, you know I’m not just asking you out here to introduce you to fancy coffee drinks, don’t you?”
Sylvie smiled and her face recreated itself into a fine display of adventurous wrinkles.“Are you suggesting your intentions are not honourable?” she teased.
“Don’t test me now, Sylvie. You know all the men on this island have been in love with you ever since they graduated from grade five. Everybody always figured you were out of our league.”
“Or too dangerous.” She could joke about her dead husbands. It was one of the things she could do. She could do it with islanders, at least. They knew her. And she even knew there was some truth to the fact that, over the years, men and boys had crushes on her ever since way back when. But she was old now and all the teasing was doing her good. She took a sip of her drink and believed she was somewhere far off — on a boat in the Mediterranean, perhaps.
“All women are dangerous if you ask me. But this isn’t what I’m getting at.”
They were rounding the island now, passing Jack Zwick’s home at the end of the west road. Jack’s outhouse still stood on the edge of the land. Seagulls perched on top of it, where they whitewashed the roof with gull shit. Jack was in his garden with a hoe, leaning on it and looking at them as they passed. His house was painted a blazing greenish blue with pink trim and it had a blue shingled roof. Looked like something out of a theme park. Jack’s excuse had been a paint sale, but those were the colours he chose, the colours he liked. His wife spent all her time apologizing to everyone for a year and then gave up and decided she could live with it.
Past Zwick’s house there was nothing but forest pulling down to the shoreline of loose stones and flat slate outcropping. Sylvie felt an odd sensation, looking at the land from a boat. It had been
a very long time since she’d seen her island from this perspective. An island, placed just so in the sea, a thing unto itself. Houses, trees, people. Fully alive. Her place, her world.
“Viddy’s been into Mutton Hill Harbour and says there’s talk of shutting the ferry service down. Government bloody cutbacks. When we elected Dancy Moxon, he promised that would never happen.”
“They wouldn’t do that. The ferry’s been there for a long time.” But Sylvie realized she knew nothing at all about what they could do. Or who they were for that matter. She had no understanding of the world outside the island. In general, she wasn’t that interested in matters of the mainland.
“Still, if the ferry goes, a lot of people’d have to move off the island. I don’t see how the government could do that to us.”
“Don’t worry, Mo. It couldn’t happen.” As she said those words, the first deep water wave passed under the boat, a wave that had travelled from far away. It lifted them up and casually released them to come back down its back onto the smooth, flat sea. Sylvie found the feeling in her stomach a pleasant sensation. A brief experience of the density of gravity in a lift and then the graceful release and fall. Energy passing under them, created from wind on water maybe five hundred miles away.
“Things change, darn it. Sometimes you just don’t know. Like the whales. Which is why I brought you out here, if you don’t mind me telling you now.”
“I know. I know. I’m not sure what good I’ll be to you, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Sylvie. Look, I’ve never been a big believer in some of that stuff people say about you. I reckon you can find water. That dowsing thing’s been around for a long while, eh? Mostly just lucky guessing though, right?”
Sylvie didn’t answer. She knew people thought her odd.
“But I’m desperate here with this whale thing. Got this whole fancy packaging deal going with Chicago, people coming up here from the suburbs of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and God knows where, and I haul ’em out here and all they have to show for it is a sunburn and a cup of cappuccino. Well, the news is out. Folks are going elsewhere: Oregon, Baja, California, B. C. Hell, they fly off to Alaska. But that doesn’t help me and my family much.”
“Well, the whales weren’t exactly here because they were waiting for tourists to look at them.”
“I know that. But I don’t understand what happened. The whales were always around the island. Maybe we scared them off. Wouldn’t that be some ironic?”
“No, it wasn’t that.”
A single gull swooped low and tracked alongside of the boat. Sylvie was eyeball to eyeball with it. As if they knew each other. She reached into her pocket and found a crumb of a cookie, held it aloft, felt the beak touch her skin as the gull took the food. He dipped his head as if in thanks and then swooped off.
“Then you do know something.”
Sylvie knew more, much more than she ever let on to people. Deep intuitive things. She had collected knowledge and built upon things that came out of her connection to the island, the sea, the sky. She had never been able to fully harness the knowledge and form it into some orderly package, but she knew there was a powerful wisdom that she had accumulated. William Toye and his books — and even his madness — had been the catalyst for her to begin to harness some of it, to piece together a hodgepodge of science, philosophy, history, and metaphysics into something that, well, made sense. To her at least.
Should she say that some believed the moon was a hole in the night sky with light coming from another dimension, an astral plane? Should she begin by telling Moses that dowsing had to do with the magnetism of the earth, that birds migrated north and south according to their knowledge of the earth’s magnetic field, that people were governed by it more than they ever knew? Should she let on that she could read the magnetic field with all of its pulses and variations like a road map? On the island, at least, she could do these things. She could walk anywhere on the island now with her eyes fully closed and know exactly where she was going.
And the dolphins, the fishes, and the whales all travelled in accordance with magnetic paths, the highways for migration. The earth had its own magnetism and the weaker but insistent pull of the moon sculpted those magnetic paths. It all made sense, perfect sense, until you said it out loud to someone and then you sounded like a bloody fool.
“I don’t think you can make the whales come back.”
“Don’t tell me that. Maybe we can attract them with something. I’m sure you know a lot more about whales than a bunch of Bedford Institute experts. Please, Sylvie, help me on this one. I’ve always, always been lucky in my life. Everything just fell into place, but I can tell that it’s not that way this time. I need your help.”
“You know what whales eat. You think you can drop several tons of krill each day here like so much chum to attract them?”
“No.”
“You say you can tell something’s changed?”
“Yes.”
“I thought men didn’t have intuition.”
“We’ve got something. We’re usually just too caught up in other stuff to pay attention.”
The boat was in the Trough now, and Sylvie studied her familiar shoreline from this unique perspective. In her mind she could see herself sitting there on her favoured rocks, waiting for the whales. She could see herself as a little girl. She could see herself as a young woman. She saw herself standing there in the spring after the death of her first husband, David Young. She saw all the whales of the past but none of the present or the future.
“Sylvie, where are they?”
Sylvie closed her, yes, and knew the whales were out there, far out there. East northeast.
“Can you take me to them?”
“Just point the way.”
Sylvie knew just where the whales were. Four hours from the coast of Nova Scotia, they appeared, three young ones, two old. Moses saw them before Sylvie did but she already knew they were there.
“How did you know?”
“I knew.”
Big swells rolled under the hull of the boat as it rose and fell gently upon the spine of the sea. Clouds — fuzzy white ghost ships — were scattered in the sky. It was an innocuous day of little wind. Good thing. Moses had not been this far out in a long time. He checked his global positioner to make sure he wasn’t lost, but knew that Sylvie could guide him back if need be.
“Can we go in close to them?”
“Yes,” she said. She held onto the railing at the side of the boat, watched the grace and beauty of the sea creatures rising with the swell and then falling back in the water. They are here and this is where they are supposed to be. She did not say it out loud.
“What can we do to lure them back toward the island? Is there anything?”
“What do you think I can do, talk to them, Mr. Slaunwhite?”
“Can you?”
“No.” It wasn’t like that. She felt their presence, she even believed that they were aware of her. This was not whimsy. The two older whales, she knew, had been there as she had walked the rocks along the Trough when she was twelve years old. They had always returned to her over the course of many years. They had not fallen prey to harpoons or disaster or disease or collision with supertankers. There was a thread of something that connected them to the island, to her. That was all.
“I’m glad they seem to be doing all right,” she said. “I’ve missed them.”
“Me too.”
“Moses, we can go back now?”
He looked at his GPS equipment and was about to cut the wheel and turn about but instead he switched it off with the flick of a wrist.
“You wouldn’t need this to find your way back, would you?”
“I don’t think so, but then there have been generations of sailing men who could find their way back home without the need of electronic equipment.”
“Well, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not one of them.”
“Can I steer?”
“Y
ou betcha. If you run ’er up on some rocks, I got insurance.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Sylvie liked the feel of controlling the boat as she turned her about and knew, just knew, exactly where her island was. Moses took off his Clearwater ball cap and placed it on her head, backwards.“That’s the way the kids wear ’em, Captain.”
“How am I doing?”
“You look like you were born to it, ma’am. But Sylvie, about the whales. I can’t bring visitors this far out. Too costly, too dangerous. Hell, it just won’t work.”
“I know. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“That’s not helping.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, not your fault.”
Sylvie almost believed she could formulate the words to share what was in her head. Simple cause and effect, connections, intentions, actions. Change. But nothing was absolute in life. Nothing final. Nothing perfectly meant to happen. There was always flexibility built in, she knew this. She had learned this during her eighty years. Always something to be made out of the flexing and shifting of various energies of the world. But she couldn’t bring herself to explain this to Moses Slaunwhite.
After a long journey home, expedited somewhat by a fresh wind at their back, the island appeared like a green smudge floating on the horizon. Right where she knew it would be. Right where she left it. She felt the island pulling her home. It was a mildly euphoric sensation. She felt the island tug at her, deep down. It was a wonderful feeling.
“I think you’ll want to take her in,” she told Moses.
“Like I say, got insurance in case you smash ’er to bits. Sure you don’t want to test your skill? You could probably do it with your eyes closed.”
Sylvie thought she probably could. “I’ve done enough for one day. Better the whole world doesn’t see a woman driving your boat. Bad luck, eh?”
“No such thing as luck.”
“Glad to hear you say that.”
Chapter Thirteen
Sea of Tranquility Page 12
