Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  Dancy and Sim were walking now toward the back door, ignoring the faces. Somebody tore up paper and tossed it at Dancy; that was as physical as it got. Greg leaned against the back wall and regretted his role, however small, in what was happening here. The ferry was waiting, the very boat destined to be axed for good come fall.

  Sylvie sat silently, her hands folded. Kit came up and sat down beside her with hurt and madness in her eyes. Sylvie took her in her arms and rocked her like a little child while others watched them. Sylvie was the oldest islander. In many people’s minds, Sylvie represented the island and its past. Now this.

  Sylvie rocked Kit and wondered what it would be like to be an old woman, left alone to herself on a deserted island. How long would it take for almost all of them to leave, despite their loyalty, once they were cut off from the mainland, set adrift. What would happen when she needed medical help? She knew she could not leave but that the government would try to pressure her into doing so.

  She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her four dead husbands and their graves. She could not even begin to tolerate the idea of not waking up in her house, not having her backyard, never again going to sit by the sea at the Trough and wait for whales. She knew the world had moved on without her — the mainland world. Her existence, her life, her dreams were inconsequential. Sylvie felt the eighty years of her life collect and push down on her as if the gravity of the planet had just increased tenfold. She began to sink into the depths of the Sea of Cold, the Bay of Despair. Sylvie hugged Kit to her and wondered if she might not be approaching a good time to give up her allegiance to life. Eighty years on. Better to collect it all and say it had been a very good life. The best. Better that than leave the island.

  Chapter Fifteen

  No. She could not live on the mainland. She envisioned the town. Mutton Hill Harbour. And the hospital there. She had not thought about the hospital for a long time. She had not thought about the baby.

  Kyle Bauer’s father had drowned at sea in a fishing accident, as had his older brother,Taggert. Kyle himself had put in two years working on long liners out of Lunenberg before he found himself one day on the Grand Banks in the middle of his first truly vicious storm. A November hurricane, the last of the season; the first that year, however, to make it this far north.

  Kyle came within six inches of going over the rail when one of his shipmates reached out a hand and grabbed the back of his rain gear as he started to go over the side. Kyle fell back onto deck, locked onto something solid, and hung on, barely able to pull oxygen into his lungs, the air was so full of sea water. He lay like that, shivering and crying, until the captain steered the ship out of the worst of the storm, and they had to pry what was left of the young Bauer kid off the deck plates. Whoever had saved his life had gone overboard. Three men in all had fallen prey to the hunger of the sea: Kessel, Hennigar, and Johnson. Kyle thought it was Hennigar who had saved him but he could never be sure, so he prayed for all three and spoke highly of all of them to anyone who would listen. Hennigar was a heavy drinker who kept a knife in his pants and would use it on anyone who he felt deserved it; Kessel was quiet and moody and never had any time for anyone; Johnson was a bully who always liked to pick on the weaker men on the Good Fortune. One of the bastards had saved his life.

  It was 1942, a bad year for the planet, when Kyle Bauer left the sea for good and took up farming. But instead of moving down to his family’s old acreage in New Germany, Kyle was lured to Ragged Island, where cabbage was king.

  He held fast to the railing as he sailed out on the ferry, on a clear day in June, to see what there was to see on Ragged Island. An island at sea seemed an unlikely place to have a sauerkraut plant, but there it was — a big old warehouse by the government wharf where island women shredded cabbage heads with knives that looked like sickles and dumped the cabbage into brine solutions. There was a growing mainland market for island sauerkraut. It had a reputation as being the best sauerkraut in North America. It was served in fancy Halifax restaurants. It was shipped by the truckload across Canada and down into the Boston States. Better still, Ragged Island Sauerkraut had landed a massive contract to supply the armed forces. Canadian soldiers would go into battle against German troops with salted cabbage (made from the oldest of German recipes) in their stomachs.

  Kyle had never been to the island before. All he knew was downtown Mutton Hill Harbour, the waterfront of Lunenberg, and throwing up on ships bobbing up and down on sickening swells over the Grand Banks.

  Even though it was an island, in the middle you could forget the sea. It had a prairie sky, old swayback barns painted with ochre paint, a big empty forty-acre field going to wild mustard, and Kyle had money burning a hole in his pocket.

  If he acted immediately, he could still plant for the coming summer season, but he’d have to move quick. So he leased the field and the ancient barn in poor repair. He hired old Mr. Swinnemar to plow the place for him and Kyle began to plant cabbage — just him and a hoe.

  And then it rained for nearly a month. Kyle holed up in the barn and read from a stack of old Weekend magazines he found there. He made friends with the field mice and thought he was beginning to comprehend the language of the ravens who visited. At night there were owls and even bats. He thought it was all much better than being at sea. He thanked God every single damp night of that month that he was no longer a fisherman.

  It was during the third week of the rainy season at about ten o’clock in the morning when he heard someone knocking at the barn door. When he opened it he saw it was a young woman — a tall, elegant slip of a thing with brown hair tied up in a bun. She wore a long dress and had a picnic basket in her arms. “Come in, please.”

  Lately, Kyle had only been communicating with ravens, mice, bats, and owls and had lost a good grasp of the English language. He remembered that someone from Lunenburg had told him that most people on the island, cut off as they were, still spoke German instead of English. He could still remember his own grandparents speaking in German when he was quite young.

  Sylvie Young walked into the gloom of the barn and smelled the wet hay. It was intoxicating. She saw a bed of straw underneath a tarp slung up over the beam to keep the insistent rains out.“One more week of this and the sun will be out, you’ll see,” she said.

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “Hungry?”

  Kyle felt a little dizzy. Hungry, he was. Hungry for food, for companionship, for something more than the way he’d been living here. Hungry for life to start over for him. He wanted to shout it all out but he held it back, didn’t want to scare the young woman. What was she? Twenty-three, twenty-four? Older than him but only by a year or two he guessed.

  “I’m Sylvie. Live out at the end of the road. Up Along. Brought you some bread. And cookies. And tea. Do you drink tea?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Kyle lit an old kerosene lamp so he could see her better. The place was like a dungeon but as the warm yellow light came up, it transformed instantly into a palace. Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie. He took one sip of tea and stared into her dark, warm eyes and his life story spilled out of him. Then he let go a deep, significant sigh that had been trapped inside him for either three weeks or all his life. And he felt so much better.

  And Sylvie understood, or at least thought she understood. She believed she knew all about men and their dreams and their intentions. Sylvie, who had sworn off ever getting involved with any man after the death of David, also felt something let go inside her chest. Kyle’s story had suddenly reminded her that men were also human.

  She had kept herself at a comfortable distance from them for a long time. Now she wondered how she could have done that for so long. She had learned to live fully alone. Men were always polite to her on the island, but always formal with her and she with them. On separate planes of existence.

  Now, in a barn, with a fledgling cabbage farmer from the mainland, she felt otherwise. She poured tea, cut off big, thick slices of dark br
ead, and talked about death for an hour straight. Kyle told her about Hennigar, Kessel, and Johnson. Ugly, selfish, and even violent men, he could attest to that. But one of them had saved his life so he could turn his back on the sea and become a farmer.

  “I don’t think the rain can keep going much longer,” Sylvie said. “I haven’t seen the moon in nearly a month now. The moon always gives me a feeling of peace. And I miss that. But even without seeing the moon, I can close my eyes and feel its effect, the tides tugging one way or the other. I know other people on the island have this ability too. I can tell you if it’s high or low, mid or whatever. I can see it in my mind even if I’m not there. Isn’t that silly?” Sylvie didn’t know why she had launched into talking about her personal little quirks, her eccentric tricks of mind and body, but there it was, out in front of them like the food on the blanket spread out on the straw.

  “I don’t trust the sea,” Kyle replied haltingly. “Took my father and my brother. But still I couldn’t move inland. I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be — in the middle of this island. I’m safe here.”

  “You are safe here. And so am I. But why did you come out here?”

  “I don’t know. I’d never even been here before. Back in Mutton Hill Harbour, everybody talks about this place… well, you know how they talk.” Kyle was sorry he brought it up. Inbreds, hicks, and loonies was all that lived on the island. That’s what he had heard. Although it wasn’t true at all. Mainlanders’ prejudice.

  “The island can be kind and good. I know.”

  “Hasn’t been too kind so far.”

  “It’s a test.”

  “Right.”

  “Yes. Think about it. Water, the thing you don’t trust. Lots of it falling from the sky. Is it trying to drown you?”

  “You’re crazy.” Beautiful but crazy, he wanted to say.

  She smiled. She’d been called crazy before, and he meant nothing bad by it.“P’rhaps. But you haven’t drowned yet, have you?” Sylvie knew all about various forms of drowning. David Young down beneath the ice, over and over how many times in her waking and sleeping. Stories, oh those ungodful stories of all the men who didn’t come back from fishing. Of wrecks out front at the Trough. Yes, the sea had its hungers and its taste for humankind.

  “No. I’m doing surprisingly okay.” Okay meant he was going out of his mind and couldn’t bear to read one more magazine with gossip about Hollywood movie stars and what was going on in Toronto.

  Sylvie leaned back against a bale of old, musty timothy and looked up into the darkness of the lofty barn. The warm yellow lantern light dancing on the skin of her cheek and her neck made Kyle catch his breath. He moved towards her and could not stop himself from touching her face, gently with the tips of his fingers. Sylvie closed her eyes.

  Above them birds — swallows probably — fluttered. Kyle traced his finger across her lips and then pulled back, lay down on his back on the straw that was his bed. Sylvie found herself lying down beside him. They both lay there still and quiet. The rain came on quite strong just then and the kerosene lamp was running itself down to a half-sincere blue flame. It was a little chilly, after all, and the two of them came together for warmth.

  Kyle didn’t know he was going to kiss her until he was already doing it. Sylvie didn’t seem to mind, and Kyle knew he should stop there because this was so far the best thing that had ever happened in his life and he didn’t want to mess it up.

  He knew that he was finally drowning, but it was not as he had expected. He touched her hair, stroked her cheek, and kissed her again, so delicately that he didn’t go all the way to the bottom of the sea this time. Instead, he drifted down slowly and patiently and all the while he heard the sound of the thrum of rain on the wooden shakes of the roof. And so did she.

  The rain stopped six days later. The sun came out and only a third of the cabbage seeds had rotted in the cold, wet soil. That left two thirds to sprout and poke their way through, eager and waiting for the sun. Kyle and Sylvie replanted the lost third and Kyle never complained once about weather problems. The island gave him back the prairie sky he had remembered from the day of his arrival, and, because he was way up on a smooth, round drumlin of a hill, he could see the waters of the ocean and bay on all sides. There it was. And for once he was glad it was there. He had a high, safe place to live on an island and didn’t mind the sea at all if it could keep its distance.

  After a few days of working, Kyle noticed he had some problems with his feet, and his back was hurting him, too, just like on the ships where he had worked. Sylvie worked his back and massaged his feet sometimes and that made it all better. Sylvie was the most remarkable, intelligent, and mysterious woman he had even known. But then he’d really had almost nothing to do with girls and women. He had expected to live all his life alone and never marry. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  By August, Sylvie had invited Kyle to live with her, but he insisted they get married first.

  “I made a promise to myself never to remarry,” she told him.

  “Break the promise. Please.”

  And she did. A Lutheran minister of German descent named Keizer married them on Monday afternoon in Mutton Hill Harbour. It was a private ceremony. Kyle’s mother was there but that was about it. The minister was only half there. He wasn’t all that keen about marrying people who were not in his congregation, but he did it as a favour to Kyle’s poor widowed mother who invited him to Sunday dinner once a month.

  The cabbage crop was a good one, especially the plants that grew from the late seeds. Some heads grew to be big enough to fill a bushel basket, one per basket. The sauerkraut plant was still gong strong making sauerkraut for the troops and so the price was fair and equitable. Kyle and Sylvie harvested cabbage right up to and beyond the first frost in late October. They were already planning for the next season in late November when Sylvie looked up at the quarter moon one night and knew she was pregnant.

  Kyle made the mistake of buying a radio to help entertain them through the long winter. Winston Churchill and FDR came into their lives — news of some very important meeting in Casablanca on the far side of the ocean from here. Kyle and Sylvie talked of Hitler, of Mussolini, of Japan and China even, and ravages of war all over the world. It seemed impossible that all of this was happening on the same planet they lived on.

  And then Kyle learned that someone had thrown a rock through his mother’s window in Mutton Hill Harbour on a Sunday afternoon while she was having dinner with the Lutheran minister. They were both, after all, Germans. Or at least of German descent.

  Kyle went ashore to fix his mother’s window and some young hoodlums came by and shouted curses at him. He picked up a newspaper later and discovered that German spies had been caught in Halifax and that German subs were regular visitors off the coast. Kyle cursed his own heritage but knew that whatever had happened in Germany was like some kind of disease, something he could not possibly understand: Jews being led into gas ovens, monsters killing babies, burning down villages, trying to rule the world. Impossible things.

  And so this was the world he was bringing a child into, he pondered on the ferry back to his island, back to Sylvie. All winter and into the spring, the radio reminded him of what was happening out there. Kyle realized how he’d had his head under a bushel basket. He was blessed with a wife and then a child on the way and he was in the middle of another good and profitable season of cabbage growing. He leased another field to grow savoury for the sausage makers in Lunenberg and also planted blue potatoes, kale, and Swiss chard. The crops were bountiful and life was good, but by August, he was cursing his own good fortune and haunted by the knowledge that there was an imbalance of happiness and tragedy in the world.

  It was a personal thing. He had no right possessing such good fortune if it meant that all those others were suffering. The thought grabbed him in the middle of the night and would not let go. Nothing could keep him here.

  Sylvie could not hold him back, and on the day wh
en he took the ferry ashore to catch the Halifax bus, she sat in the sunlight on the rocks at the Trough and felt the warm north wind, smelled the sweetness of cut hay and wild roses of the island. She waited for the whales to find her. She dipped her feet into the clear tidal pools that swayed with golden seaweed and asked the vast ocean to give her the proper perspective of time, the belief that time would pass and everything would be okay. Her husband would return. Kyle failed the physical to get into the army, and the navy would not take him. Problems with his feet and a minor deformity in his spine. Kyle had thought it was all mere aches and pains but it was going to keep him out of the war where he felt he should be. He took the failed physical personally, knew there was some personal and historical connection with being German and believed more vehemently that he must be part of the war effort. He had to end the incalculable suffering once and for all like the other men he was meeting who were willing to make sacrifices of themselves, who instinctively knew they must fight to keep the world free. He did not want any of the glory of war. He only felt duty and necessity. He would do this for his wife and child, for them and for all those of German descent in Canada and America who hated what Hitler’s Germany was doing to innocent people.

  So he did not give up. The Merchant Navy was willing to take him. Yes, of course, he’d had experience on ships. He would not admit how much he feared them, however.

  Kyle Bauer was assigned to an old tanker called the Piccadilly with a cargo of airplane fuel to be transported to Liverpool, England. With only half a crew, the ship sailed to St. John’s Harbour, where more men were brought on board for the crossing. Kyle was shocked to discover that some of the new crew were as young as fourteen and he went directly to the captain, who everyone referred to as the “Old Man.”