Midnight Hat Trick

by Vernon, Steve

  Nice one, Dad.

  "Besides," he said. "I'm already spoken for."

  I knew what he was talking about and he was wrong, dead wrong, but this wasn't the time or the place to try telling him that. He still believed that he had seen that damned Gray Lady and he had sworn to stay faithful to her.

  "Are you still kidding yourself about that?" I asked. "I can't believe you still haven't wised up."

  I think he was only faithful to the idea of himself keeping that lonely midnight vigil, night after night, down on the beach all alone.

  "I've seen her," he said. "I'm still seeing her."

  "You're living in a dream, Dad."

  He looked away, staring at nothing.

  His eyes cleared and he seemed to make a kind of peace with something that I couldn't see.

  And then he re-raised his glass.

  "In vino veritas," Dad said, toasting me finally.

  Dad always liked to impress people by spouting a little Gaelic or Latin, trying to make himself appear educated, worldly and colourful all at once. Usually I let him get away with it but I wasn't ready to make peace today.

  "It isn't wine, it is cheap draft beer," I pointed out angrily. I was having a hard time maintaining my sense of calm. I had been away for three years. Surely things should have changed in that time.

  "And you're paying for it," Dad said, with that indefatigable grin of his. "Will you toast with me or not?"

  I wasn't done with the man. I hadn't hitched my way through three provinces just to sit here and reminisce about old delusions.

  "Veritas my ass," I said. "You wouldn't know the truth if it swum up and bit you on your door knob."

  His eyes frosted over and whatever was swimming beneath them headed for the bottom straight on down.

  "Drink up, drown and be damned," he said crossly.

  I drained my glass dry, swallowing it to the last drop.

  I was home.

  I wondered if I'd ever left.

  Of course it had changed.

  Only memories ever stayed the same.

  Sitting here with my dad in this tavern, my mind wandered a half a million stories away from here. I didn't really like to think of my dad sitting alone in a barroom and drowning his life away one glass of draft beer at a time, although the truth of the matter is that he'd spent most of his life in this very tavern even back before he and Mom had first split up.

  That sort of behaviour was par for the course here in Cape Breton. The tavern, the Bingo hall, the kitchen party – this was our culture and recreation and how we learned to socialise with others.

  It was tradition.

  It was habit.

  And it was a road map painted and blended in a strong mix of alcohol, music, tobacco smoke and the telling of stories that were often punctuated with the riffle of shuffled cards and a well-timed fart. We Cape Breton Celts needed a little gamble in the wall paper banality of our existence.

  Only every now and then my dad would improvise.

  "Sometimes you've got to keep folks guessing," he'd tell me. "Especially yourself."

  This is just how I remembered one of his improvisations.

  Just one more goddamn ghost story.

  Here's how it went.

  On my thirteenth birthday my dad and I hiked down to the far shore and we built a campfire out of driftwood. He didn't bring a birthday cake and we didn't sing happy birthday. All of that would be far too ordinary for the likes of my father. Instead, we built the fire with the customary air of rituality and improvised tradition that my dad performed all of his day-to-day activities with. Mom always said that Dad could make the simple act of changing a tire seem as sanctified and holy as the second coming of Christ himself.

  "Some of these scraps of driftwood have probably been scraped up from the sunken bellies of shipwrecks dating back as long and far as a century ago," Dad said. "They are out there hiding in the bottom of the ocean, cast down like bits of crap shoot luck, kept vigil over by the selkie and the mermaid and the sea wyrm and the bones of a thousand long-forgotten sailors."

  It just looked like plain old wood to me and I told him so.

  "There's a history etched into the grain of every stick and board," he informed me. "The ocean has done her level best to wipe the slate clean, only it can't be done. Memories grow bone deep out here on the coastline and they linger longer than they ought to."

  He pointed out to the sea.

  "That water out there is awfully old," he said. "Would you like to hear how Deeper Harbour got her name?"

  I didn't really figure I had much of a choice in the matter so I said sure. Compliance beat the hell out of coercion when it came down to it. I had heard the story before but that never stopped the man from retelling it.

  "Couldn't we just go home and watch a horror movie?" I asked. "There's a new Friday the 13th out at the video store. I'd sure love to see it."

  "There's no poetry in Friday the 13th videos," Dad said. "There's too damn much blood and not enough wonder. That's the problem with you kids these days, too damn much blood and not enough wonder."

  I decided to surrender.

  "Give it to me," I said. "I'm all ears."

  Dad grinned me that fish hook grin of his and I stared at the fire and listened to it talk. My Dad's voice rose up over the flames and the tale unwound. It beat slow torture by a little bit.

  Barely.

  "Just imagine that," Dad said. "That there harbour sitting here for all that time, just waiting to be named."

  "Didn't it have a name before we came along?" I asked, doing my best to think of England.

  "Of course," Dad said. "Before that the Mi'kmaq called it something that only the birds and the trees could pronounce that sort of translated as piss-hole-in-the-hard-rock, give or take a syllable or two, but even before that this old harbour had a name of its very own."

  "What was that?" I asked.

  "How should I know?" he said, pointing at the campfire. "The fire might know. The fire is old enough to know. The fire has been trying to start a conversation with the sea for just as long as there's been wood that knew how to burn."

  That statement struck me odd and I guess my expression must have shown my confusion.

  "I know what you're thinking," Dad said. "Fire and water are perfect opposites. But that's just it, don't you see? Fire and water are so opposite that they have a hard time staying together, so they feel they've got to make the attempt."

  He picked up a branch of kindling, caught a flame upon the tip of the stick and started gesturing so wildly with the flaming brand that I was afraid he was going to set the shore alight.

  "A bit of spittle spat onto the fry pan will hiss and skittle about like an ice skating flea," Dad said. "A pot of water will boil up to a nice soup or boil itself dry, given time. A bucket of the wet stuff will douse out a campfire, every time."

  "A little dirt never hurt," I pointed out, but my dad was holding forth and all I could do was to listen. My attempted input was nothing more than futile unnecessary distraction, a bird chirping bravely in the heart of an oncoming bullshit-monsoon.

  He brandished his flaming wand, carving rune signs and hieroglyphics into thin empty air. I tried to watch to see if there were any discernible pattern but as far as I could tell his method was far more mysterious than I could ever hope to make out. Those signs he was carving in mid-air looked like nothing more than signs to a road leading God knows where or maybe nowhere in particular at all.

  "All of these years the water and the fire have been trying to figure out just what would be the perfect and proper balance in which the two of them could safely co-exist, but sooner or later one of them has got to go away."

  Three years following my thirteenth birthday my dad would leave our home and build himself a little shelter here on the coast upon the ruins of an old fishing shack. I don't know if he was talking about his eventual leave-taking way back then but I wouldn't put it past the old bastard to have seen it coming from three yea
rs away and taken steps to properly foreshadow his retreat. He spent his days staring so hard at the past I believe it preternaturally sharpened his sense of foresight in a form of reverse English Newtonian physics.

  "So what's all this got to do with how the harbour got its name?" I asked.

  "Her name," my dad said. "The harbour is a cup and a swallow and is nothing if not female. She will make you or wreck you, like it as not. You get that straight in your mind while I tell it all out to you."

  And then he started in to tell his story.

  "Back in the late 1490's Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol and pointed the fine and pointy nose of his caravel into the waters of Deeper Harbour."

  "Sebastian Cabot? Wasn't he some kind of an actor?" I asked; enjoying playing dumb as only a thirteen old boy could do. There is a strong streak of wiseass that grows naturally in the prepubescent psyche.

  "All of us are actors," Dad said. "But only some of us truly know our lines."

  And then he went on talking as if that was supposed to make some kind of sense.

  "I'm talking about the original Sebastian Cabot, not to be confused with Brian Keith's gentleman's gentleman from that TV show, Family Affair," Dad said with only the slightest hint of condescension which stung a whole lot sharper than a barrel full of undiluted sarcasm. "This Sebastian Cabot was the son of the renowned Portuguese explorer John Cabot, otherwise known as Giovanni Caboto."

  "I heard about him," I said. "In history class at school."

  "You heard lies," my dad said. "None of Cabot's journeys were ever truthfully verified, and his son's journeys wandered even deeper into the fathomless heart of unsubstantiated rumour."

  Whatever you say Dad, was what I thought to myself but I had learned long ago not to try and cut him off when he was functioning at full blown oration. It'd be easier trying to run a hip check on a runaway Zamboni machine.

  "But I know the truth. I know that the Mi'kmaq called this place "Cold Deep Water" and I know what Cabot called this place when he saw what it could do and I'll tell it to you if you can ever learn how to listen."

  I resisted the impulse to point out how he had already told me that the local natives referred to the harbour as piss-hole-in-the-hard-rock. Inconsistency was pretty well the only factor in Dad's storytelling that could be safely relied upon.

  "There's a reason why the words history and mystery are so close a rhyme," my dad said knowingly. "Sebastian Cabot was certain that our harbour, as deep as it was, would make a fine natural port. He was certain his discovery of this harbour would give him the opportunity to outstretch the impressive shadow his father had already cast."

  That made a whole lot of sense to me but I didn't say so.

  "Is this a good place, Captain Cabot, young Maurício asked," Dad said.

  "Who's Mauricio?" I asked.

  "He's the ship's boy," Dad said, as if that explained everything. "Some people believe he was the bastard child of Cabot and a ship's whore."

  "Ships had whores?" I said.

  "The sea is a whore," Dad said. "Fall in with her and she'll tumble you in her bed, turn your pockets inside out and leave you lying fucked and penniless on the shoreline."

  He coughed, loudly as if my mother might have been listening to his profanity.

  "Mind your language," he amended, even though he had sworn and not me. "Haven't I taught you better than that?"

  Actually, he hadn't taught me much at all but I wasn't about to correct the man. Dad always liked to tangle things up whenever he was trying his hardest to turn the bullshit into beef stew.

  "Cabot liked the boy," Dad said. "Maybe he liked him more than a captain should like a deckhand, but Sebastian blamed his father for that. His father was always too busy planning his next voyage and discovery, forever trying to stay ahead of his ever growing debt load."

  "You mean he was broke?" I asked.

  Dad shrugged.

  "Adventuring just didn't pay all that well unless you managed to discover a trade route to the East Indies. And John Cabot, like Christopher Columbus before him, was bound and determined he was going to find a way to sail straight through North America to get himself to the Far East."

  "It seems like the long way around the fish house to me," I said.

  "Explorers are like storytellers that way," Dad said. "They've always got to take the long way around to anywhere that they're trying to go. We make our own maps where ever we wander. It's more fun that way."

  "Why didn't Sebastian try something else?" I asked.

  "Like what?" Dad asked.

  I grinned at that. It was always a fine coup-counting moment when I could stump my dad with any kind of a poser.

  "If exploring didn't pay," I explained. "Why the hell didn't Sebastian take up a trade or open up a drug store or sell his life story to the Fox Network?"

  "Mind your language," Dad said. "And he couldn't do anything else. Exploring runs like a strong current in a young man's bloodstream, and he just couldn't learn to do anything other than what his father had blazed the trail for. It was a little like destiny, a little like birthright, and a little like karma."

  "What's karma?" I asked.

  "Tastes good on ice cream sundaes," Dad answered. "Almost better than chocolate. It sticks to your teeth and it's got a taste that keeps coming back at you long after the last swallow."

  Dad was bad that way. If he couldn't quite explain a question with any air of authority or stitch it into the running fabric of whatever yarn he happened to be spinning, he always felt free to bullshit his way around the problem.

  Meanwhile, Dad kept on telling.

  "Mauricio gazed out onto the waters of this cold dark harbour. His Captain swore he would find a passage to the hot ripe trading grounds of the East Indies but this cold dark water looked nothing like what Maurício envisioned the East Indies to look like. There were no spices, no savoury foods steaming in the wind, and there were no beautiful dancing women."

  "Yeah dad," I said. "Get to the beautiful dancing woman part."

  Dad pretended he didn't notice my wisecrack.

  "And then Maurício saw something moving through the mist and the salt spray. He glanced once at the Captain and wondered why the man hadn't said anything about the shape that was moving towards them."

  "What was it?" I asked, caught up in the moment in spite of myself. My Dad had that knack of hooking you on in even if you didn't want to snap at the bait.

  "Shh," Dad said. "You'll break the spell."

  So I shushed.

  "It was a woman," Dad said. "A beautiful gray woman. She stood there on the water, dancing like spray on the waves, dancing like a gull taking flight."

  Now I had seen many a gull and I had never thought of them dancing until my father had planted that seed of fantasy in the fertile field of my imagination. To this day I can't watch a seagull taking off without hearing a band striking up a slow waltz rhythm, as easy as one, two, three.

  "She was waving at the boy," Dad said. "Beckoning him closer."

  "She just waved at him and he came on over?" I asked.

  "He was a boy," Dad explained. "Means he was almost a man. Most men I've met will walk across fire, water and broken glass if a woman so much as winks at him. Especially if she's a pretty one."

  "Was she pretty?"

  "She was as beautiful as the moon rising on a hot summer night. She was as beautiful as a bird on the wing. She was as beautiful as…"

  "Okay Dad, I get it. She was pretty."

  "You asked me the question."

  I let it go.

  "In any case," Dad went on. "She was doing a whole lot more than just waving. She was painting pictures on the sky with her breath and her dance and her memory. She was telling the boy about everything he could have been and everything he had yet to see and all of the mysteries and the wonder that might be waiting for him."

  He paused and closed his eyes and for a moment it was as if I were standing there, right there on Cabot's boat, leaning and loo
king far out to sea.

  "She was telling him a story," Dad summed up.

  I sat there at the edge of the campfire, thirteen years old and caught up in the snarl and the tangle and the compulsion of my father's tale-telling. I hadn't wanted to be caught like this. I had fought it hard but his stories were as irresistible as a slow creeping tide. They drew you in and like it or not a body just had to follow.

  "Now this here was one of the first times that the Gray Lady of Deeper Harbour had ever been seen in this vicinity. Mind you, a few wandering Mi'kmaq hunters had come across her every now and then but they weren't big on the writing down of history and so they let that story slide on by."

  "So how'd you hear about it?" I asked.

  "I kept my ears open," he said. "You ought to give it a try some time."

  "What happened?" I asked, impatiently.

  "Mauricio stepped forward," Dad said. "Reaching out his hands for her and then he fell to the water and drowned. Some say that the selkie and the mermaids were waiting for him, some say that he was nothing more than food for the slow grazing sea wyrm, but the bone hard fact of the matter was Mauricio was drowned dead."

  "So what'd Cabot do about it?" I asked.

  "What else could he do?" Dad asked. "He told a story about it. Now listen on up."

  My dad kept telling and I fell completely into the story, ears first.

  "I have heard of such a woman who waits and sings for sailors to fall into the sea," Cabot said.

  "Sirens, they call them," the first mate said. "My father told me there were only two in existence."

  "There were three," an old Greek deckhand quietly corrected. "Parthenope, Ligeia and Leucosia."

  "Unpronounceable gibberish," Cabot declared. "When in the hell are you ever going to learn how to speak good honest Portuguese?"

  "I have heard there were five," the cook spoke up. "They ate the men who drowned around them. They say that the salt water flavoured the meat."

  The first mate shook his head.

  "There were two," he said. "My grandfather once saw them upon a beach off of the Spanish coast. They lay there stretched out on beds of dead men's bones, their feet resting upon gull-picked gore and gristle, dressed in the rags and the treasure and trinkets they had scavenged from the cargo holds that had washed up on to the beach."