Time does not heal all wounds, she believed. Wounds become part of your life. And you live with them each day. December of 1945 seemed like the coldest it had ever been in her life. Sylvie closed off all the rooms but one. She lived in her kitchen and fed the wood stove with softwood she had cut herself with the ragged-blade handsaw. She felt great pity for herself. She endured immense sorrow for the world. January was also an appropriate month to continue to suffer. Sometimes the fire burned down in the wood stove, water froze in the sink, and she huddled beneath blankets. She lost her appetite and finally became ill. She had a high temperature and felt dizzy through most of the day, then slept for fifteen hours at a stretch.
Sylvie was twenty-eight. Her life had been an abysmal disappointment. She did not want to die but she did not have any wish to go on living. Could there not be some other, third alternative?
The fever was at its worst on the fifteenth day of January. Wind blew wisps of snow in under the door. She had mustered a low, begrudged fire from damp kindling. A woman in a bundle of blankets, eyes red, hair asunder, face pale as plaster of Paris one minute, then flushed with red the next. A body at war with itself, resulting from a strain of influenza that had found its way here all the way from Europe.
Wind raged on from the north with cold, cold, cold. Snow sifting and sculpting into little piles outside. Spruce trees bending under the weight, branches snapping off. The old grey sea slapping on stones, turning snow to slush. And a single man, hunched over, face into the wind, walking along the island road from the wharf. Unshaven, but fully dressed for the weather, gloves with holes, a scarf the colour of molasses, huffing as he trudged. Finding the courage in his own desperation to knock on the door to the house at the end of this forgotten road.
Sylvie did not answer.
He knocked again, and a third time. Nothing. Turned to go on his way. Not much luck today. A bad stroke for sure. Better to have stayed on the mainland than try a hunch that people on the island would take some pity on him and give him some work. Wind. Curse it. Sucking snow through his teeth, trying to whistle as he spit it back out. Bloody weather, anyway. He wasn’t even sure anyone was living here. So what’s the point?
But as he was turning to leave, he thought he heard someone crying inside this old house. Whimpering, maybe. Not his business, whatever it was. Better to move on than to get concerned in someone else’s misery. Every time Doley Keizer ever tried to get involved in any damn thing it turned bad on him. He didn’t know how to help others with their problems. Jeez, he had so much heartache of his own, how could he muster enough brain power to help another living soul? He trudged on, back to the wind now. Knock on another door or give up and go back to the boat, bum a free ride ashore. He tried to leave the sound of the woman’s crying there on the doorstep where he’d found it but it stuck to him and kept gnawing at him with each step.
“Damn it all.” He went back. Knocked again. Nothing. He opened the door and set foot inside.
It was dark. He stood on the bare wood floor and cleared his throat, stamped one foot and then another to loosen the snow, let whoever was in there know someone had walked in. Finally, he closed the door behind him as a puff of snow spilled in like unwanted confetti through the door.
Sylvie felt the rush of cold air and saw the silhouette of a man in her doorway. Tried to speak but found her mouth dry as dust, her voice gone.
Doley didn’t know what to do. He held his hands out in front of him and tried to form some kind of a question or a greeting as he focussed on the poor woman hunched over in a blanket by the cookstove. She was shaking, and he didn’t know if she was cold or scared of him or what. Finally he swallowed hard.“You all right, miss?”
Sylvie shook her head no. She knew she was not all right. She did need help.
“Cold in here, miss. Whyn’t you let me get the fire goin’ for ya?”
Sylvie blinked her eyes and nodded ever so slightly.
Yes, Doley would get a fire going, warm the place up. It was the least he could do. He reached for a light switch on the wall by the door so he could see better but there was none. Of course, many people on the island didn’t have electricity yet. He saw a kerosene lamp on the table and lit that with a wooden stick match. He nearly singed his eyebrows as he was leaning over it when the wick took the flame.
“You’re sick, aren’t ya, miss? Don’t worry, I’ll get the place warm and I’ll help ya.”
Doley was a large, clumsy man and he banged into a chair, knocked it over, looked around for kindling but saw none. Found an axe by the door and went back out into the snow. Stack of cordwood by the porch. All wet. He set a few logs on the frozen ground and quartered them and split each piece again. Dry enough on the inside. He gathered the wood up into his arms, went back into the house.
Doley balled up an old copy of the Halifax Herald, shook the ashes from the grate and set it down, placed some dry wood from the heart of the log, the splintered thin kindling on top, pawed a match until it came to life, bent over it, sucked the sulphur fume, lit the paper, opened the flue at the back of the stove and then the air supply. Whoosh of flame. He dropped in two more logs and let the wind above the chimney pull the smoke from the flame up the chimney. The fire roared to life and Doley felt like he had performed a miracle, done one thing right in his life.
Doley managed to cut his hand pretty bad trying to open a can of chicken soup, discovered it was frozen inside, but scooped it out with a big thunk into a pot and listened to it hiss. Couldn’t get any water from the hand pump at the sink so he went back out and collected snow in a clean bucket, added it to the soup. Started talking to her, the woman in the blanket with the sickness, didn’t know what else to do.
“Doley Keizer is who I am. Came out here looking for odd jobs today. Bad weather, though. Pretty stupid of me wastin’ my time like that. No takers. So here I am. Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay me or nothin’. This is just like a neighbour helpin’ out. How long you been like this anyway?”
The room was warm now. Smell of soup in the room. Sylvie didn’t know how long. The man handed her a cup of water that he had just melted from the snow. Placed the cup awkwardly to her lips. She tried to look him in the eye, but he couldn’t look straight back at her. She swallowed, let the cold water trace a small, blessed river down her parched throat. She took hold of the cup with her own hands and drank some more.
“That’s a girl,” Doley said, and realized that he sounded like someone talking to a pet dog.
“Thank you.” Sylvie smiled at him and the blanket fell away. She had been wearing an old flower print dress and it had been on her for three days. The room was warmer now. She shivered and noticed that her skin glistened with sweat. Doley picked up a dish towel on the table and dabbed at her forehead. She was very sick but he also found her very beautiful. His breath caught behind his teeth and he couldn’t let it go. “You’re going to be okay.”
Doley stayed on through the rest of the day, and, after putting Sylvie into bed, he sat at the kitchen table and fell asleep. He woke up several times to re-stoke the fire from the supply of firewood he had split and piled inside. In the morning, he cooked breakfast from eggs that had been frozen. He made a clear broth that Sylvie sipped off and on and he made some tea from the melted snow.“Snow tea,” he called it.
There was sunshine on the next day but the wind roared on and on until it stopped all at once at noon. Just gave up and went home. The outside temperature went up a notch and snow began to melt from the heavily weighed boughs of blue-green spruce.
Doley was a massive, homely man by most people’s standards, although it wasn’t so much his look but the way he carried himself, the way he shuffled when he walked, all hunched over, the darting eyes, the unshaven face. Underneath, Sylvie knew there was not a brute but a man with a big heart. Doley had nursed her back to health, acted with great gentleness. She didn’t quite know what to make of him. Once he had settled in, he fussed about the place, cleaning up after himself, m
aking her tea or broth, putting order to the kitchen, washing dishes but then always retreating to sit at his seat at the kitchen table as if not to intrude in any way further into the privacy of her home.
Sylvie got better but did not ask him to leave. Told him he could stay in the spare room. He obliged and asked no questions. At first, she did not tell him about her two deceased husbands, for she had spent so much time feeling sorry for herself that she did not want more sympathy from this man who had already been so kind to her.
When they ate meals together in the semi-darkness of the early evening, Sylvie wished she could tell him that he need not be so uncomfortable. Poor Doley was awkward with a knife and fork and shovelled food as he fed himself and then apologized for his rough manners. She insisted he give her his entire story — his life. But for now, she herself was offering up none of her own. She didn’t know why she was being so stingy. Maybe she wasn’t ready to give up the perimeter of her inner pain and loneliness. Whatever it was, Doley was a welcome guest in her house.
Doley’s story, as it was revealed, in bits and pieces, tattered fragments of a life spilling out of him at random and unpredictable intervals, went something like this.
He’d been the youngest child in a large German family — the Keizers of Blockhouse, not far from Lunenburg. He’d always been told he’d amount to nothing much and believed the news that was delivered to him by his older brothers and his parents. Believed it as if it were law. There had been a pair of oxen that his father raised, and his father had taken better care of them than he took care of his kids. The oxen were harnessed by a colourfully painted wooden yoke and there was a cart drawn behind them. For some reason, the children were never allowed to ride on the cart. It was used to haul firewood and even to transport large stones from the middle of the potato field to the edge, but it was not for kids. Mr. Keizer rode proudly in his ox cart at the yearly exhibition in Bridgewater and he entered his oxen in the ox pull, winning it one year and never letting anyone forget that.
Doley did poorly at school and dropped out after his grade eight teacher called him “a stupid Kraut, the dumbest boy in all the school,” in front of the class. His father said he had expected as much from this son and put him to work in the fields in summer and in the woods in winter.
Doley left home at fifteen and went to work delivering coal in Bridgewater. On a Friday night, sometimes local boys would lure him into a fight, and Doley was an easy target, big but not at all capable when four or more bullies ganged up on him. He would wear a pinkish blue scar across his chest from where one of his more vicious adversaries took a broken beer bottle to him. On that night, Doley thought he was about to bleed to death, and he sat on a dark street by the LaHave River waiting for death to take him, but it did not. In great pain, he staggered to the police station and was rudely shuttled to the hospital, then later charged with “disturbing the peace,” fined, and let go.
After several years of working hard at hauling coal or lumber at the mill, Doley convinced himself he was ready to move up in the world and succumbed to his desire to be a salesman. He lasted only three days at a hardware store in Lunenburg before it was discovered he couldn’t read, write, add, or subtract with any accuracy. In the wake of that humiliation, he doubled it by becoming a door-to-door salesman of cookware, and then later, vacuum cleaners. An awkward, socially inept soul at the best of times, Doley did poorly but felt that the work was better than going back to hauling coal. Occasionally, a housewife would take pity on him and buy an Electrolux Queen with personal money she had saved for a rainy day.
The war arrived and, despite the significant German population of Lunenburg County, certain individuals of German descent were singled out for derision. Doley Keizer was a prime target.“Dirty Nazi,”“Baby-killer,”“Hitler lover.” He heard them all. His looks were all broody and he had a trace of an Old Country accent: these were the only gifts his parents had given to him, the only family assets to take off into the world. He tried to enlist but even then, there was some reason why he was turned away. Fear, maybe, that he would turn traitor on Canada, sneak secret messages to his good friends working for der Führer. It was insanely illogical but there it was. Maybe some actually believed poor Doley was sitting in his basement at night with a wireless radio, sending coded messages to submarines offshore, telling them how to sneak into Lunenburg Harbour at night and blow up all the mackerel boats.
Doley went back to work in the woods, swatting hordes of blackflies in summer and suffering frostbite of nose, ears, and fingers in winter. When the war ended, there was a flood of men returning to Lunenburg County wanting jobs. Doley, even though he was a fine and sturdy woodsman, was given the boot, and he suffered the indignity of going from home to home begging for odd jobs. And one day, fed up with the way people treated him each time they opened a door, he thought that, perhaps if there was no kindness, compassion, or a shred of yard work on the mainland, he would go to the island and see what manner of folk they be.
Doley stayed on for a week and then came to his own conclusion that it was not his place to take advantage of a poor widowed woman. He had already fallen desperately in love with her and knew this to be a hopeless situation if ever there was one. Sylvie was a beautiful woman, all of twenty-eight, in the prime of her life. Doley was nearly forty and nobody’s idea of a prize catch of a man. He would do her a great favour and move quietly out of her life.
He moved himself to a small cabin in the woods on Noah Slaunwhite’s property. Noah used to call it his hunting cabin, but there was no hunting anymore on the island. The deer had all been killed, rabbits pretty well wiped out by kids with wire snares. Nothing left to shoot at but tin cans and junk that washed up on the beach. Noah gave Doley some work and a serious lecture about how important it was for a man to “shave the grunge off his face.” Noah bought him some fresh Gillette razor blades and gave him some old clothes from his attic. Noah tapped him twice between the shoulder blades and told him that if he wanted to stay on, he had to stop stooping like that. Doley tried the best he could to stand straight and, as result, hit his head almost every time he walked into the door of his cabin.
Noah made up work for Doley to do: things that he’d never really planned to get fixed in his lifetime got fixed, buildings never expecting repair found new boards. Shingles got nailed down. There was enough firewood cut, split, and piled into immaculate structures so that some of it would have to rot before it ever had a chance to kiss the flames of a wood stove.
Summer took Doley out on the boats, where he was slow to learn, but he was a good, faithful worker who never complained.
From winter on into spring that year, Sylvie tried to reconstruct a definition of love. What she had felt for David and what she had felt for Kyle. Similar but different. Two versions of love. First you are attracted to a man because of his smile, the way he looks at you, the way he moves. Then you get to know the way his mind works, what his dreams are, and you discover you can share those dreams together. But do you fall in love with a man just because he loves you? Or do you fall in love with a man because he’s kind to you, because he maybe saved your life? Do you fall in love with a man you don’t find particularly attractive? Is there some relationship between love and simple compassion? Can love be based on pity?
The crabapple trees near the fallen homesteads bloomed late in June. After the hard winter, the land was slow to recover, but something let go in the last week of the month and summer arrived without the precursor of spring. The whales came back to keep Sylvie company upon the sunny shoreline of grey stones. The aching in her heart that was the lingering love and grief for Kyle Bauer seemed only to stop when she reconsidered again and again taking Doley Keizer into her life. But why had he not continued to come visit her? She had to ask him.
The wharf at 2:30. Boats back from a day at sea. A good catch. Fish stink, slime, noisy talk. Men with sharp knives at grisly grey planks, slitting belly to head, spilling guts into the sea where waiting gulls scooped
the entrails and fought each other time after time. Sylvie standing back a bit, watching Doley at work, watching the men making jokes at him, jokes about his size, his intelligence, all fairly benign compared to what Doley had known in his life. Sylvie standing there on a soggy, mild day with beads of mist caught like jewellery in her hair, looking at Doley, trying to attach words to what she was feeling.
“How come you don’t stop by anymore?” she asks him, while everyone listens. The knives stop clicking. Motion of fish from tub to board ceases. Doley looks up, dumbfounded. The other men stand gawking. Jaws drop. Doley swallows hard, as usual doesn’t know what to say. Someone begins to laugh but has the goodwill to stifle himself. Then Sylvie understands. Doley believes he’s not good enough for her. He’s doing her some kind of favour by not coming by.
“I don’t know,” he says, and Bill Pleasance lets out a hoot, but then turns his head away when Sylvie gives him a look that would snap the head off a shark.
“Come for dinner, would you, when you’re through?”
“Yes.”
Doley was clean-shaven and well dressed, something just short of handsome, as he arrived back at Sylvie’s house. Sylvie was healthy this time and radiant. She had resolved her definition of what love was, had decided love was many things. Pity, compassion, gratitude were part of the package. But they were only words — small harnesses to yoke onto large ideas and emotions. There was much more to it than that but she would be obliged to no one to explain it.
Doley married Sylvie in August on the island at the Baptist church. A fill-in minister from Cape Breton was holding down the church for the month while the regular clergyman, Reverend Snelling, was having his appendix out with ensuing complications in a hospital in Halifax. The young Reverend Steele had no problems with marrying these two fine people and gave them his blessing. Later he would weather a blast of insulting remarks from Reverend Snelling, but it would not trouble the Cape Bretoner a great deal, only convince him to change his stripe to a more liberal church.
Sea of Tranquility Page 21
