Midnight Hat Trick

by Vernon, Steve

  I once drank with a stranger in a Toronto tavern who told me that he'd seen my father tell his tales there in Deeper Harbour while he was indulging in a summer vacation.

  "He really is a truly remarkable man," my drinking friend told me. "You must be very proud of him."

  I supposed proud was a word.

  I listened to the stranger talk, trying to sieve out some trace of my father's existence. In the end there was nothing more than the ghost ring of my beer glass upon a black bar.

  Dad died last year while he was in the middle of telling the story one more time. Even back then he still had the old magic skirling in his words. He had those tourists hooked hard and wrapped around his gnarly raw-boned nicotine-stained fingers.

  And then he just up and let go.

  I bought a black suit and returned to Deeper Harbour for the funeral. We stopped the clocks in the family home and draped the mirrors and we all stood wake. All of the family and friends came around to gather and listen as we took turns telling out all of Dad's old stories.

  I heard of ship wrecks and treasure hunts and fishing tales and bad Newfie jokes.

  Finally, at the end of it, Mom told the Gray Lady, her way.

  She stood there, a tall proud stranger from away - the woman who had married one of the town's finest tale tellers. Her neighbours stood round her and the casket, politely giving ear.

  "They've been telling this story one way or another for a very long time," Mom said. "It's not much as tales go but I'll give it a try."

  She drew a breath in and closed her eyes.

  "There was a man. You can call him by whatever name feels comfortable. He worked in a coal mine, down in the darkness. He would come out at the end of the day, not knowing the sun from the shadow, covered head to toe with a fine black dust."

  "Born in womb and wet and darkness he spent his growing days crouching in tomb and wet and darkness and in time he learned to breathe his work and he would carry it with him, marred and charred in the wet memory of his lungs and etched in his lonely blue scars."

  Some of the people standing around the living room and the casket were beginning to look at each other nervously. I saw one man tap the tip of his index finger significantly against his right temple.

  But I just stood and listened.

  My Mom was holding forth.

  "He would sit with his friends in the tavern, washing away the memory of the mine as best as he could, telling the day's adventures back and forth, giving the gift of memory to the air."

  "He never talked to his wife that often. She was far too close to bother speaking to."

  That brought a few mutters out from the audience but their muttering was nothing more than background to a story my Mom had been trying to tell her whole life.

  "One day he told his wife he was tired of working in the mine. I want to see new people, he said. I am going away to the sea."

  "What will a coal miner do in the sea, his wife had asked him."

  "I guess I will just have to go and see, the man said. And he sailed away and never came back. All that was left was the sound of his words upon the sea wind. They would blow into her window night after night. If she stared too hard after them they would catch in her eyes and tear up and salt."

  My Mom looked out down over my Dad's casket and out the curtained window and down towards the sea. I think that's how I'll always remember her, standing over a casket and staring out towards the distant waters, hearing and finally understanding the only story the waves ever told.

  "Folks around the town will tell another story," she went on. "They'll tell you that on moonlit nights when the sky is looking down, you will see the ghost of that woman dancing on the coastline, moving between the water and the land."

  Finally someone found the nerve to speak.

  "Well that's not how the story goes," that someone said.

  "No," my mother agreed sadly. "But that's just how the story went."

  Three days later we lowered him into the darkness of the dirt and just for a moment I thought I saw a woman dancing along the shoreline. She seemed to be beckoning to me and a part of me wanted to go and see her but when I looked again it was only Mom, standing there beside the grave, the tears crawling down her face like slow wet snails.

  That had been in the late October, three days before Halloween. Dad had made it to the end of one more tourist season. Mom promised she'd make it until Christmas but she didn't.

  I stayed on at Deeper Harbour.

  I kept the tales and I wrote a few books and eventually I went on to become the storyteller, although I was never quite the storyteller my Dad was. You see, my Dad lived those tales and I just told out the echo.

  "So what really happened," my son asked me.

  I looked down at him squatted before me on his thirteenth birthday out here on the coastline looking down over the fishing shack where his grandfather had lived out his last years alone, not more than a stone toss away from the town where he told so many stories.

  The water talked to the shoreline and I could hear my father's voice in the wind that whispered over the waves.

  Someday I might see her, that Gray Lady who hides beneath the water. Someday I might go with her and learn the stories that she told to my Dad. But for now there were others who required my attention.

  My son looked up at me through the memory of my father's eyes and the sorrowed secrets of my mother's heart. I could feel both of their gazes shining up at me from out of the darkness.

  "A man died of loneliness and the sea," I said. "His woman died of sorrow and followed him down afterwards. That's really all there is to tell of it."

  The End

  AFTERWORD

  I love a good novella. It is like a short sharp punch in the abdomen. Delivered properly – it has impact!

  Sudden Death Overtime was originally released as a separate novella. I wanted to sit down and write a B movie – but I was too lazy to learn proper screenplay format – so I decided to just sit down and write something that would entertain both my reading public and myself – just as much as a good solid B monster movie – such as Tremors or The Lost Boys or Fright Night or 30 Days of Night does.

  I've long been fascinated with seeing how ordinary people deal with the face of evil. That's who my favorite characters are – just regular downhome kind of people. I like to imagine them brave and wild and romantic and full of life – because we all have that potential buried deep inside ourselves. So – when I sat down to write Sudden Death Overtime I just took the toughest people I had ever dreamed of and threw them up against the forces of darkness.

  Hammurabi Road was originally released in 2007 as the second novella in a two novella collection entitled HARD ROADS – published by Gray Friar Press. The story is my way of revisiting my childhood home of Capreol, Ontario – a little railroad town that I grew up in.

  The last novella – Not Just Any Old Ghost Story has never been published before.

  I hope that you enjoy these novellas as much as I enjoyed writing them.