Doley’s dreams were simple dreams and Sylvie understood that they were worth sharing. He always referred to their house as “Sylvie’s” and never felt any rightful ownership. Doley was a quiet man, and Sylvie learned to spend entire evenings in near silence. Sometimes he carved small figurines with a sharp knife, carefully scraping the blade across soft, wet spruce wood. Sometimes he just sat and looked at her or into the flame in the lamp. Doley liked doing housework and this always made Sylvie laugh. A big man washing dishes or folding clothes. Doley enjoyed that as much as he gained satisfaction from splitting wood or rebuilding the shed from the ground up.
Doley had a secret that he kept well hidden until one night three years into their marriage when some young roughnecks from Mutton Hill Harbour came over one night. Wayne Dorsen and some of his cronies he ran around with. Beached their Boston whaler at Front Bay and went looking for an empty house to torch or anything worth stealing.
Lights were out early at Sylvie’s house and it seemed empty, so they entered, shoving open the door and smacking it against the wall even though it wasn’t even locked. Doley was sound asleep after a hard day of working at sea. Sylvie got up to see what was going on when one of Dorsen’s friends, a twenty-four-year-old good-for-nothing named Teazer, shone his flashlight on her and called her a name she’d never been called in all her days alive on the island. The scoundrel started to move towards her when he saw another dark figure come through the doorway of the bedroom and reach out towards him. The next thing Teazer knew, he had something that felt like a bench vice squeezing his Adam’s apple and he couldn’t breathe. Dorsen and his other ally grabbed hold of Doley, but Doley elbowed him hard in the gut and smacked the other backhanded with a fistful of knuckles hard as beach stones. Then Doley proceeded to lay his intruder flat on the floor and pound his head onto the floorboards with a regular rhythm like he was beating a drum to some ancient, primitive chant. A sound came out of Doley, but it was not words from any language.
Dorsen and the other one fled but Teazer lay motionless on the floor. Doley looked like he was ready to hit him again. Sylvie screamed out for him to stop. He stopped and let go of the man, sat back on his haunches and shuddered.
Sylvie had never believed Doley was capable of such rage, such violence, and it frightened her more than the fact that their house had been broken into and a stranger in the dark had made dangerous advances towards her.
Sylvie helped Teazer to sit up and wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. She leaned close to him and could hear his breath in her ear.“He’s alive.”
“I’m glad you stopped me.”
Teazer found his way back to the mainland in the morning on the first ferry. Neither he nor his two buddies would ever return to Ragged Island.
Doley tried to explain that he had a violent temper, even though she had never seen it before this. He explained how his father and nearly everyone else he knew had made him feel so hurt and angry as a kid. He’d never gotten over it. He had, however, devoted a great deal of his energy to developing the distinguished skill of containing the violence that was within him. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure he could hold it in forever. He said that, now that she knew, if she wanted him to leave, he would.
“Can you promise me you’ll never be violent again, even against someone like that?”
“Yes, I can promise you that. But can you trust me to live up to it?”
“Yes. I know you, Doley. I know this is part of who you are. Maybe you can’t get rid of it, but you can control it and you can live with it.”
And so Doley kept his promise. He kept his violence, his throttled engine of hurt and anger, under control. Because he believed he could do anything at all if he still had Sylvie. He loved her deeply.
The next day, Sylvie walked the property with a willow dowsing branch and pointed to the ground. Together they dug a new well, a fifteen-foot-deep hole in the ground. She helped him shovel. He broke stones with pickaxes, lifted boulders from the pit. From the shoreline he brought other stones that fit together as if preordained for this purpose, and the walls of the well were rocked in to the surface. The water was clean and pure, and the old shallow well was given over to frogs. Doley put in a pipe below the frost line so it would not freeze in winter and talked about getting electricity soon — power for lights but also for an electric pump.
Doley began to speak a new dream to Sylvie about moving to Lunenburg and opening up a hardware store. He didn’t exactly know why it had come back into his life, this idea of being something other than a labourer, of selling things, of being a proprietor of his own business on the mainland. Mainlanders had never been anything but cruel to him.
He talked about it often and then, realizing how it upset his wife, he stopped. But one day, at the dinner table, he heard himself speaking his foolish aspirations out loud again and saw the look on Sylvie’s face.
“How stupid can I be?” he said out loud.
“You’re not stupid.”
“I’m sorry, Sylvie. It was all talk. We’re not moving. We’re doing just fine. I don’t know what got into me.”
Sylvie knew that her husband would make any sacrifice for her and now he would make this one as well. He stopped talking about Lunenburg and about selling hardware to a store full of eager customers. He stayed put in his mind and in his life with what he had and did not feel sorry for himself in the slightest.
Sylvie began to teach Doley to read. It was both humbling and rewarding. Sylvie admired his efforts to learn something that seemed to her so simple, yet proved so fundamentally difficult to him. Words of three syllables appeared to him as the most complex puzzles, requiring him to test one piece of sound with another over and over until he got it right. Sometimes he would give up for a short while and sit stroking the cover of the book. Then he would pick up where he left off. She knew he was not stupid but it would be more than thirty years before she would understand that her third husband had been afflicted with a learning disorder, a common condition known as dyslexia. But that wasn’t Doley’s only ailment.
Doley was reading at a grade three level when he began to lose weight. He was only forty-eight, but his hair turned grey over a period of a few months. His skin took on a greyish yellow colour, and there were more trips to the Mutton Hill Harbour doctor. Although the doctor had no fixed name for whatever was wrong with Doley, he insisted that the big man check himself into a hospital in Halifax. Sylvie pleaded with him to go, but Doley insisted there was nothing really the matter with him. He was going through a “spell” of some sort. He would get better.
Instead, he aged as if something had taken the timepiece of his life and made the hands of the clock rush ahead on him. Sylvie watched him slip away, slowly but steadily.
When he was gone, Sylvie fought her impulse to curse and rage against such a sinister world that played such malevolent tricks on her over and again. She missed Doley and everything about him but stored his lessons in her heart. Even anger, hurt, and suffering can be tamed and channelled into something sad but beautiful. And Doley, Sylvie decided, had been a very beautiful man.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Legal action was levelled against Phonse Doucette and his junkyard. The place was condemned. Old cars and God knows what seeping into the ground and water table out there. Guns confiscated. Fun sucked wholesale out of this part of the world. Mounties came and issued summonses to anyone driving around the island without a license or with an unregistered, uninspected vehicle. Took all the dangerous kids off the road but a whole whack of their parents as well. Island became quiet for a bit. Health inspectors arrived. Problems with the hall, the school, the post office, the Aetna accused of serving bad scallops.
Welcome to Hell Island, Phonse was thinking. Downsize this, you friggin’ Halifax politicians. How had they swooped down all of a sudden and ruined them? And why? To save the province some money. Try to pressure everyone off the island. Already a dozen families had jumped at the price offered for their houses.
Good riddance. Let ’em go. Not true islanders in the blood. Couldn’t be.
Phonse, alone in his junkyard office, sipping homemade John Bull bitter in a Big Eight pop bottle. A man’s livelihood yanked out from under him. Not a fair thing to do. Curses on the graves of the mother and father of that little do-gooder pissant writer from the Herald who came sneaking around to sniff out his little pissy story. Like some kind of mongrel dog, no better. At least a dog would never be quite so vicious. Words had teeth. Phonse hadn’t known that before.
Still, something left of value in a man sucking on a warm bottle of home brew, down and out but not dead yet. No sir, not by a long shot. Phonse was fairly unrehearsed at feeling sorry for himself. He walked outside to take a pee and surveyed what he still had. A big acreage of scrap metal still there. Stored in every bloody wreck and rusty hatchback out there were legends, too — lives, tales of what went on in those vehicles. Graveyard for automotive scrap and then some. Good to have them all together like this. Old friends, cousins — kissing cousins — made in Detroit,Windsor, Oshawa. Some straight from Japan, a couple of Ruski cars in there and Yugos, Skodas. Cars that outlived nations as they split asunder or fell apart.
“Everything, every bloody thing has a soul,” Phonse said out loud. A place and purpose to everything in its season, under heaven, or something like that.
Phonse would not move off to the mainland. Not unless he had to do it for his kids. They were gonna close the school for sure. Fire regulations, health regulations. Arseholes, the lot of them. With arsehole regulations. Something else they came up with about the teacher, young Kit, being unfit. Leave it to mainlanders to screw it all up good, turn it all into lies or whatever it is they teach ’em to do in college and business school.
Nope. Mainland would be a hard scrape for the likes of Phonse. His life was falling apart into little scrap metal pieces around him and still he kept thinking that everything had a soul. And that was worth remembering. The island had a soul and he was part of it, it was part of him. If he moved ashore it’d be like taking your hand out of your pocket and not knowing what to do with it.
Bright guy like Moses should be able to figure something out. Moses always rolled with the punches. Phonse just never even felt the blows, never saw ’em, never felt ’em, and never swung back, always just stood his ground and kept doing what he did. Acadian away. All that good blood of Acadie swirling around in his veins with the alcohol from the beer. That’s the ticket. Rely on the cultural tradition. The early Acadians, it was well known, were willing to listen to the Mi’kmaq, and therefore they learned from the land. Whatever was necessary to survive through a cold, hard winter. Eat the roots, store the berries, dry the meat and fish. Build a place that was safe and warm for a good, healthy Acadian family.
Phonse would go for a walk out through his yard and listen to the wrecks speak to him in person, listen to the voice of their many metallic souls. Listen to the sky and the wind and see what the island had to say for itself today.
As he made his way to the top of the hill where those old Ford and Dodge windscreens were splashing sunlight right back up at the sky like a furnace of light, Phonse had a curious feeling that he couldn’t put into words. It was a sensation that cut through the beer and the verbal razzmatazz rattling around in his brain like loose change in a fish bowl. Phonse stopped and looked down at the soil, where old radio wires, lug nuts, and parking lightbulbs were scattered — as if on purpose, as if part of some quirky but honest work of art. This thing that he was feeling was larger than he was, but he didn’t have any words to attach to it, although he knew there was beauty in there, and sadness, and it was tied into history and Acadie. Loss and allegiance. Perseverance. Blind purpose in the face of adversity. Cheerful defiance. The full meal deal of something that made him feel small but not unimportant. What was going down was part of a grand scheme of notions, as if it was the very essence of truth, the marrow in the bone of life.
Phonse chose an old GMC pick-up truck. Opened the creaky door and sat down on the driver’s seat. He put two hands on the steering wheel and felt the truck’s history, a proud one, and he sensed that it had been a good machine and that the owner had taken good care of it until salt stole all the strength from its steel undercarriage.
The near tragedy of Angeline and the rescue had changed Bruce Sanger. He had a little room now in his head: panic, fear, desperate love for his family were all camped together in that room in close quarters and he’d open the door a peek and study those elements of his life until he could bring them into focus one more time.
While his little daughter had been in that cave, he had been sitting at a desk in an air-conditioned, windowless office in Manhattan. Phones going, computers threshing out numbers. People talking about the Mets and the Yankees somewhere over by the water cooler. He had a coffee in one hand when the phone rang. French roast. He dumped it straight into the keyboard. Sent off a hot, wet, caffeine message that hammered the hard drive. Oh, that long, agonizing trek by cab to the airport, then on to Nova Scotia. He had sworn to himself he would haul his family back home safe and sound to Upper Montclair, that the whole summer was a fiasco. What had he been thinking?
But then as he arrived and saw Angeline safe and sound, heard the whole incredible tale, he collected what was left of his frazzled self and settled into that little old house where women once made sauerkraut from bushels and bushels of cabbages. And after that, he began to really open up his eyes and ears to things going on there on the island. He heard the language of the rain on the roof, and the soft winds in the trees. He listened to the sea as it settled itself back to normal after Freda was diminished to nothing at all. He smelled the sea everywhere. At night, all four of them in a dark living room with the lights off, with nothing but a candle burning, they sat around on the rag rug on the floor and just talked. Then they’d all tuck into their own sleeping bags and sleep there on the floor. This place, this place, something about this place that Bruce kept trying to formulate into words. But Elise had caught onto it long before. She knew she didn’t have to trap the feeling with words. She just knew.
First there had been the relief that Angeline was alive, then the argument. They would all go back to New Jersey tomorrow, then the darn kids, not wanting to leave. His bold statement that he would stay until the end of summer. And Elise talking about the old woman. There were invisible threads tying the whole lot of them together. That goofy but brave college kid, Greg, and all the island people who came out to show support.
By the end of the week, Bruce wasn’t sure New York even existed. He thought about his job and wondered why he bothered. What was he, after all, but a kind of truck driver for other people’s money, shuttling it here and there over electric wires. Was he really helping the planet or was it just a kind of con job he’d done on himself and his clients? Holy shit. How many wineries can you buy in Chile and still say you are doing it for the environment and then turn over a yearly profit of 21 percent to your smiling investor? Face it, if the investor wasn’t turning a tune of percentages, he’d be out of Chilean grapes and coming up with a good ethical excuse to be strip mining bauxite in Malaysia.
And now here he was, with his family — that’s all that mattered. The island had nearly taken his daughter, but the island’s people had conspired to bring her back. Elise snuggled into his neck. He felt her breathing upon him, heard his children breathing too and listened to them squirm. All the while, the language of a soft evening rain, like poetry, like music.
Monday morning rolled around and Bruce snapped out of the spell. He decided he had said things he couldn’t live up to. He convinced himself that it was safe to leave them here yet again and go back to Wall Street, sort out whatever snarls there were from his absence. How many of his ethical investors would be able to have some empathy for him and his family crisis? He wondered. His boss was relatively sympathetic, but that was his style, after all. He had good people working for him and knew they needed physical hugs and perks a
nd room to sort out personal problems when they arose. He only hired solid performers and then treated them with respect and kindness. The bottom line was that it worked well and his traders remained loyal to the company and the bonus at the end of each year.
And then Bruce was back in New York. City streets of lower Manhattan on a summer day, a swelter of cabs and men moving merchandise on rolling racks, on trucks, on trading floors at the Exchange. Everything hot and sweaty and being hustled from one place to another unless it was jammed up on the crosstown streets or backlogged on a mainframe with a fancy virus stuck up its ass. And back in the office, the big trouble with Bruce was that he knew he had lost his edge. He had missed the Icelandic geothermal company going public on the NASDAQ entirely. So little of this mattered to him now. Now that he’d stared down the thought of his daughter drowning in a dark cave with himself sitting here in New York screaming inside his brain — paralyzed by time and distance to do anything. He was a prisoner trapped between two worlds. He would last only a few days before begging the jailer — begging himself — for release.
Bruce Sanger flew into Halifax from Newark yet again that summer, and it felt like he was coming home. This a surprise to a man not easily surprised by much of anything. Plunked himself down in another rental car, a white Taurus like the last one, and drove for two hours, parked her by the harbour, didn’t even lock the doors. A few minutes later he was on the ferry. The ferry that would soon be no more.
The wind was clear and dry, even out in the harbour, over the water. North wind, a fair breeze, sky and sea all around like they owned the place. Ragged Island out there on the horizon. He undid his tie and wondered at the fact that he’d left it tight around his neck all the way here. He slipped it off and held it out over the water, noticed how much it looked like the noose of a hangman. He looked left and right to make sure no one was watching and he dropped it in the water. Red stripes on blue, floating and then catching the wake as the ferry cruised seaward. Bruce made a tiny salute. Why did it feel so good to drop a forty-five-dollar tie into the sea? He was overcome by a foolish, teenage desire to strip naked and drop everything into the drink. Instead, he pulled out his wallet. No. Not the whole thing. Just the American Express Executive Card. He had cards aplenty there in his wallet. He tried tearing it once, but the American Express card was made of tough plastic. He bit into it, though, and left teeth marks, then pitched it like an old baseball card into the wake of the ferry, where the little sucker floated.
Sea of Tranquility Page 22
