Midnight Hat Trick

by Vernon, Steve

  The men stood there, considering that image.

  "Do you want to know what I think?" the oldest man on board asked.

  "What do you know?" the first mate asked derisively.

  "I think that a man will do anything for a woman he has dreamed of," the old man said, grinning a fish hook grin that would have left my dad's own grin-muscles dog-paddling enviously in its well-molared wake.

  The first mate snorted.

  Cabot shook his head slowly.

  "These waters run deeper and darker than I first believed," was what Cabot said.

  "Perhaps we ought to call it Deep Dark Harbour," his first mate suggested.

  Cabot shook his head with a little more certainty.

  "No, no," Cabot said, looking out over the cold and merciless waters. "These waters are Deeper."

  And the name stayed stuck.

  That's how I remember my dad telling it to me and memories are something that never really change for a man, no matter how old he lives to grow. They might stretch and they might blur but they never really change.

  Only people change.

  "And the name stayed stuck," my dad finished his story way back then.

  The waves made a sound against the rocks. We both listened.

  "That boy is out there still, bound to the mud flats, never leaving, never straying and the woman dances around his bones like a song."

  Finally I spoke.

  "Is that how it really happened?" I asked.

  "That's how I told it to you," he said.

  I guess that was all that really mattered.

  We sat there watching the flames ember down into ashes – a thirteen year old boy and his father - and the tide kept talking the whole night through.

  "Did that scare you?" he asked me.

  "Just a little, maybe," I confessed.

  He smiled.

  "Good," he said. "A ghost story will do that to you a lot better than any of those horror movies you are always watching. There's no need for all that blood. It's the shadows and the chill and the whispering what-if that scares a body a lot more than any amount of blood."

  I wasn't going to argue with the man.

  He was right, every time.

  "You've got to learn to listen to the waters," my dad went on. "You'll hear them talking to you no matter where you go."

  And it was true what he told me. Years later I would wake up in the heart of downtown Toronto and the hissing whoosh of the downtown traffic sounded like the voice of the Atlantic waters, telling their story over and over and over. I think if I travelled to the heart of the Himalayas and climbed the tallest mountain and sat lotus-legged contemplating the wonders of a truly barren existence I would still hear the sound of the Atlantic waves washing the dirt of the harbour I grew up beside.

  Dad unrolled a sleeping bag.

  "We're sleeping out here?" I asked.

  "Why not?" he answered. "The ocean will keep us company and the stars will grin down and keep watch the whole night through."

  I didn't agree. It was cold and it was wet. I didn't want to stay here. I wanted to go home.

  Only I didn't have much say in all that went on out there by the water.

  "I would have brought a pup tent if I'd known you were planning on having us play Boy Scout," I said.

  My dad grinned at that.

  "I've never made a plan in my whole lifetime," he said. "The road opens before me and I follow it home."

  "So why in the hell don't we just go home?" I asked.

  "Mind your language," he said, which was another way of politely telling me to shut the hell up. "We're home right here."

  He looked out towards the water and he was still grinning.

  "I think a man could live here and listen to these waters talking every night," he said. "A man could listen and get his story straight."

  Looking back on it know I'm not certain that my dad could ever dream of getting his story anywhere handy to being straight but back then I was just thirteen and the deepest remark I could think of was, "Uh-huh."

  We sat and said nothing.

  The waves kept reaching up towards the shore, never quite touching.

  Finally my dad spoke.

  "This is right where I saw her," he said.

  "Saw who?" I asked. "Mom?"

  Dad snorted.

  "The Gray Lady. This is right where I saw her, way back when I was your age. I'd snuck out because somebody had said they'd seen a pod of whales out here and I was hoping to catch a glimpse of them, but instead I saw her."

  I damn near jumped out of my pants when I heard a whale singing background to my Dad's story, almost on cue. When Dad called the tune even God and Mother Nature were bound to follow right along.

  "So where'd she come from?" I asked.

  "Right down there in those rocks," Dad said. "She began slowly, like the first curls of smoke from a kindled campfire. I saw her rising up from the beach as if she were made of sand and sea spray and smoke. I could hear whispering in a thousand tongues, soft tangled secrets that men's ears were not meant to unravel."

  "What was she doing?" I asked.

  "She was dancing. She moved like smoke running over water. Since then, I have seen storm clouds rolling up from the Caribbean Sea and I have watched the rippled shimmers of the Aurora Borealis playing across the evening sky and I have never seen anything as beautiful as that night when I watched the Gray Lady dance."

  "I thought she was supposed to be sad," I said. "It doesn't sound like she was feeling all that sorry for herself at all."

  "Maybe she never heard that story," Dad answered. "Maybe nobody ever told her she was supposed to be sad."

  I thought about that.

  "So what did you do?" I asked.

  Dad smiled softly.

  "I guess I peed in my very best set of fishing pants. The first time I'd peed my pants since diapers. I don't think I've ever felt so damned nervous and embarrassed and excited all at once."

  We sat there and listened to the waves talking. I kept expecting to see that strange spirit out there on the shoreline but there was nothing but the darkness and the talking of the waves.

  Finally my dad spoke.

  "I think that it was the only way I could think of making salt water," Dad said quietly.

  I considered that.

  "Did you ever tell Mom this story?" I asked.

  "I don't think she'd ever want to hear it," Dad allowed.

  He picked up a rock and heaved it into the water. It made a splash that rolled on into the motion of the waves and for all I know it is out there still.

  A measuring tape could not begin to tell you the expanse that the Deeper Harbour Public Library actually encompassed. The library was a monument of true interspatial and trans-dimensional construction with its foundations firmly grounded in the infirm and eternal firmament of the imagination itself.

  Or at least that's how I saw it.

  The library was located in the cellar of a two story harbour side structure of brick and mock-Tudor bastardized design that had once been the home and place of business of a local merchant by the name of Malcolm Crowthers who some claimed to have indulged in the occasional rum-running expedition, back during the years of prohibition. An ill-thought-out visit to Las Vegas in his later years had cost the merchant the ownership of the home.

  Rather than return to Deeper Harbour and face the wrath of his wife and his creditors, Malcolm Crowthers chose to drown himself in a Las Vegas parking lot fountain, after packing the pockets of his suit coat with every packet of salt he could manage to pilfer from the local Macdonald's franchise.

  I guess it was the only salt water he could find.

  Since then the main floor of the building had fallen into disuse. For a time it served as an impromptu after-hours bar and then later it fell into the hands of a local crack dealer. The town put up with those dealings for a whole summer before they ran the crack dealer back to Halifax. Since then the floor was powdered with dust and memories
and cobwebs, stuccoed with broken glass, burn marks, empty beer cans, crack vials and the taint of long lost hope.

  The attic remained untouched. I sometimes wondered what was up there. I imagined there was a kingdom of daydreams and memories and maybe a doorway to Narnia or two.

  "Nothing but a few old ghosts and the occasional rat," my mother had told me when I'd asked.

  And she would know. She had squatted there in the ruins for an entire year, rebuilding the basement and framing it up with a series of interlocking pine shelves constructed from a heap of recycled lumber that had been donated by the city after numerous hand written letters of appeal from my mother. She had taught herself carpentry from a stack of do-it-yourself magazines and had borrowed the tools and equipment from my father's abandoned work shed.

  As far as my mother was concerned, the thing that made this library more beautiful than any other ever seen or not seen were the memories that hung like cobwebs from every beam and rafter. It was as if every syllable of every word read or browsed or simply gone unnoticed had been marinated in library paste and had somehow clung to the framework of the old building, holding there the hopes and faith of every card-carrying member that had crossed its threshold or even thought about it.

  "You're late," my mother said.

  "Was I expected?"

  "For nine months, a week and six days. You were late, even then."

  My mother's sense of humour was as dry as her paper-parched skin. I smiled to show her I appreciated the joke.

  "How are you doing at school?" she asked.

  I couldn't lie to her any more than I could lie to my father.

  "I've quit," I said.

  "And you've come on home to Deeper Harbour?"

  "For a while," I said. "I'm just trying to get my bearings, is all."

  "Well I hope you aren't thinking of moving back into your old room," she said.

  "Hadn't given it any thought," I admitted.

  "I've remodeled it."

  "Been watching all of those home makeover shows, have you?" I asked.

  "Actually, I read some more home repair books."

  "And what did you build? A sewing room? A larder to keep your jam in?"

  My mother stuck her tongue out at me. I wondered just how professional a gesture that was for the town's head librarian to be making. I thought a wagging finger might be more appropriate.

  "Actually I turned it into a walk-in sauna and built myself a harem for all of my many love struck boy-toys."

  This was how my mother coped with life. My dad hid behind his stories and my mother took cover behind her jokes. Fancy and giggle always danced well together, or so Dad always said.

  "So have you talked to him?" Mom asked.

  I nodded.

  "You went to him first, didn't you?"

  I nodded again.

  "He won't tell me anything more than just his stories," I said. "Can you tell me any different?"

  She smiled at that.

  "That's all he really is these days," Mom said. "There's nothing more to the man than just a handful of bloody old ghost stories."

  "There's no blood in ghost stories," I told her.

  "You think that, do you?" Mom said.

  I nodded again. The way things were going in this conversation I would need some Three-in-One-Oil for my neck muscles.

  "Ask him to tell you the one about Ragnhnall Mac Aileen Oig and the Headless Woman," Mom said, rolling out the old Gaelic as if she'd been born to the tongue. "There's more than your share of blood in that."

  "Actually, I was wondering about the Gray Lady of Deeper Harbour," I said. "Do you think you can tell me the truth?"

  She stood there, half obscured by a teetering stack of books, thinking about the question that I'd asked.

  Finally she spoke.

  "L.J. Costello's Salt Water Ghost Stories from Lalumière Press has a lot to say about the Gray Lady of Deeper Harbour," Mom said. "I could photocopy you the story, if you like."

  "I don't want a copy," I said, shaking my head. "I want the truth."

  She stood there, staring off into space. I wanted to reach over and hug her but her desk was in the way.

  The wall clock ticked on slowly.

  I could hear the waves talking above the clock.

  "I don't know if I've ever known just what that really is," Mom finally admitted.

  "That's not good enough for me," I said.

  "So what do you want?" Mom asked softly. "Do you want me and your father to get back together? Is that what you came home for?"

  Her voice continued to rise.

  "Do you think it's a fairy tale we're living in?" Mom asked. "Do you think there's ever a happy ever after?"

  I shrugged.

  My shoulders appreciated the work-out.

  "I just want to hear a story, is all," I said.

  So she told me one.

  "A long time ago, back before your grandfather's grandfather had ever been thought of, men and women lived upon the water. This woman, we don't give her a name, she married this man who worked down in the coal mine. Every morning he would rise up in the shadows before the sun rose and he would walk out into the gloom of pre-dawn and climb into the elevator and shoot down into the darkness. Every night he would make his way home and she would do her best to sponge off the coal dust and try and see the man that was hiding there within. The bath turned black and the sponge ran gray and her fingerprints tasted of newsprint and pencil lead."

  "One morning the man woke up and decided he'd had enough of the darkness and the shadows and he walked down to the harbour coast and stood there staring out towards the sea. The sun rose up over his shoulder and he didn't notice until he saw the shadow cast by the woman who was looking down on him."

  "What are you doing down here, she asked. Shouldn't you be off to work?"

  "I'm done with work, he said. I'm tired of tasting coal dust and the rocks and the shadows have told me nearly everything I need to learn from them. I'm going away to sea, to see what's out there off beyond that far horizon."

  "And saying that, he climbed into a dory that happened along and the men in the dory rowed him out into the distance. The woman stood there by the shoreline waiting for him to return, her tears sliding down her cheekbones and tainting the sea. Only he never returned. He chose distance over shadow and forgot about love. She's out there still, some folks say; weeping her heart out by the shoreline, for as long as the tide continues to flow."

  I sat for a while after my mother had finished telling her story.

  Finally I spoke.

  "Do you regret what happened to you and Dad?" I asked. "How the two of you drifted apart?"

  Mom shook her head slowly.

  "I see him, sometimes," Mom said. "Once I tiptoed up and stood to the right of the tour bus and listened while he talked. He's really found his calling, I think. He gets better every year."

  I wondered how often she'd gone down and listened.

  "Does he ever come home?" I asked.

  "Nothing but the shadow his money casts," Mom said. "He deposits his share of household expenses in our joint account; just as regularly as the tide. He leaves me his Canada Pension check as well."

  "It sounds like he's happy."

  Mom shrugged.

  "We're still married," Mom said. "Only the walk between our bedrooms has grown a little more distant, is all."

  I had this vision of my mom walking ghost-like from our back door down through the town to my father's fishing shack.

  It wasn't a very comforting image.

  I did my best to shake it off.

  "He makes that much of profit from his storytelling?" I asked, having a hard time believing that my father's yarns could ever evolve into anything close to practical.

  Mom shrugged.

  "It keeps him in rum and beans," she said.

  "Dad was always big on balance," I said.

  "One foot planted on the seashore and the other planted squarely upon a banana peel."
>
  "I can't believe he stays out there," I said.

  "He's happy, I guess," Mom said. "He's close to her."

  "The sea?"

  "His dream."

  "Is there a difference?" I asked.

  "It's all just one big story to him, I think," Mom answered. "Everyone else is nothing more than characters."

  I thought about that.

  "You never know the ending until it sneaks up on you and it's too damned late to turn away," she went on. "One day I expect to find him out there, frozen stiff."

  "I think it's too late for that," I said.

  She considered that.

  "Dad says that she is dancing," I pointed out. "Not crying."

  My mother looked at me as if I were a sudden kind of stranger.

  "Does he?" Mom said, staring at me hard and cold. "And what would he know?"

  And then she returned to her books.

  I closed the door behind me and walked away.

  That night in the calico wall-papered stuffiness of my room at the Harbour's Sorrow Bed and Breakfast I had a dream. I dreamed that Dad was dancing with the Gray Lady and the waves were full of dollar bill hands that were clapping in applause and trying to drag him under.

  In my dream Mom was standing on the high ground, on a widow's walk above the sanctuary of her library, reading obituaries aloud from a telephone book and tearing out the pages of her books and scattering them to the wind that rose up from the Atlantic waves.

  I reached out to Dad, trying to save him. I'm not sure just what I was trying to save him from. It seemed as if he was happy. It seemed as if he were dancing.

  He whispered something to me.

  Something slow and close and wet.

  What he whispered sounded like waves, crashing upon rock.

  His face froze over.

  He was smiling and the tears froze up in the corners of his eyes and slowly cracked and then I woke up.

  I returned to Toronto and I finished my schooling and I graduated and went on to teach English in a High School for a few years. I heard nothing from Deeper Harbour save for the occasional photograph that Mom mailed to me around Christmas time. It was always the same – a fishing boat, a sea gull and Mom waving good bye