The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  “That’s gratitude for you,” said Miss Yarrow.

  In late evening, as if they were on the deck of the Morning Light again, Kay and Thea sat on the veranda in their nightdresses looking at the moon over the orchard. Kay had been crying, but had stopped now.

  “Why can we let Pilot die, but not Aunt Lydia?” she asked.

  Thea gave the question room, but at last said, “People believe that pain, the act of suffering, brings human beings closer to God. We cannot know what value her suffering may have.”

  What value might Pilot’s suffering have? Kay wondered.

  Thea said, “God disposes. It would be a sin for any human being to presume to know when someone should die.”

  “I think God has forgotten to take Aunt Lydia.”

  Thea rocked to and fro slowly, gently, making no noise. It was mostly her work that kept the old lady alive, feeding and turning and tending to her, and Kay ought not to carp about that long tenderness. If she could keep tending Pilot, she would.

  “We are to do it in the morning,” she said.

  “I know. I will take Roddy in to see Dr. McKee, to spare him watching, as he would no doubt feel he must. There never was such a boy for feeling responsible. He is to be given a trial of asthma cigarettes, and perhaps that scientific excitement will take his mind from it.”

  Kay almost laughed to think of Roddy puffing away behind the barn, as if they were pilfered cigars. But the barn made her think of target practice there with the rifle, and she set her thoughts away from that.

  “It is a pretty moon,” she said out loud.

  “It is,” said Thea.

  They had learned silence during the war, and it was still useful.

  2

  Pilot

  Francis had taught her to shoot before he went away to France. He said Thea was too gentle, and Roddy was too young, but now that all the men were going overseas, someone ought to know how to handle a gun. Kay felt a dark mantle of duty fall on her then: if the Germans came over the sea and landed their U-boats at Meteghan and made their sneaking way overland, it was she who would fend them off with the hunting rifle.

  At six in the morning, she could not wait any longer, nor excuse herself from the task. She got up and dressed quietly, and washed her face.

  She took the rifle down from the summer kitchen doorway, breaking it open and checking to see that it was clean. It was, but she used her handkerchief to worry at a smudge of oil. The cartridges were on the shelf over the icebox. No need to keep them handy any longer, but they had never gone back to their original home in the barn.

  Francis was in the barn already. The plate of beef on the boards, uneaten. He had slept there, she saw, sitting propped against the stall wall with his legs crossed in front of him and one hand on Pilot’s flank.

  She should have spelled him off, not for his sake but for her own.

  “Those guns were used at Ypres,” Francis said, seeing the rifle when she set it carefully on the hayrack. “Ross rifles. By Vimy we had the Lee–Enfield.”

  That was the most he’d ever said to her about the war. She knelt and buried her hands in Pilot’s warm fur.

  “The bolts jammed. A boot heel might help, might not.”

  Kay nodded.

  His voice was calm. He had been awake all night, though. “Everything did jam. The Lee–Enfield, even. But some men called the Ross sheer murder. I had forgotten that.”

  She did not dare to answer, not wanting to make him think more, or not think, or have to react in any way. She had no courage at all where Francis was concerned. But she could be brave enough to do this, in case he could not.

  She bent to kiss Pilot and looked into his eyes, and touched his dear head, carefully avoiding his sores. He tried to lick her hand, but his tongue was dry and the movement seemed to hurt him.

  “I’ll do it,” Francis began.

  But she said, “No, I can.”

  She stood and lifted the rifle and checked it again, with her back to her dear dog. “You hold his leg,” she said, and then she turned and sighted and shot him once in the back of the head. He moved a little as if he was not dead, so that she lifted the gun again, but the movement stilled. Then he was more still. That was all.

  Even as fast as she walked the four miles, she missed the noon DAR train. So she walked along to the South Western station to wait for the two o’clock, which would land her in Halifax after nine.

  Nobody she knew was on the train; that was lucky. The engine staggered to a start and pulled out of Yarmouth, slowly at first, then gathering, gathering, like the lump in her chest was gathering. She sat back in the red leather seat, pressing against the slight give of the wicker seatback, and set herself to be still and show nothing.

  Three Acadian men sat by themselves at the end of the carriage, playing a silent card game on the table between their seats. Kay had a little French, acquired from books and tested at hotels in Calais and Tahiti, but these men had their own way of speaking, with flattened accents and words from English and other words she’d never learned in France, and she could not keep up. When Acadian carpenters or woodworkers came to the house, she tried sometimes, but they were a separate country. Only the girls who did the wash would speak to her, but their tongues went too fast, as if telling secrets—and Kay was not good at talking to people anyhow, even when they wanted to talk to her.

  Thinking of other lands and peoples, with Pilot weighing on her memory and not knowing in what state she might find Aren, Kay sagged into the windowsill and slept. She woke fitfully from station to station, and finally, fully, as the train steamed into Halifax. She had slept on her hat. It was squashed, but she could steam it.

  The station was not a bad place to be let off, even in late evening. She was hungry, though. At the terminal gates, she turned and walked down Barrington Street, hoping to find Aren at the victualling yard. He was not there. The man she asked shook his head and would not say more; perhaps he was a war veteran, for he looked distressed when she asked again. Instead, she left the yard and stopped at a milk bar for a bowl of soup. She had the number of the house, Francis had dug it up. Gottingen Street. She would just walk over and find Aren there.

  His name was written on a snip of paper slid into a brass holder in the front porch. One of eighteen slots in that tall house. Eighteen, to match his age. Too young to live by himself in this strange place. There was a button to press. She put her finger on it, not hoping for much, but a grating bell sounded, and after a moment she heard feet on stairs, and then the inner door was opening.

  When she saw him, her brother, tears started to her eyes. She pushed them back with her fingers. “I’m not crying for you,” she said. “We had to shoot Pilot. I had to do it myself. It was only fair, you can’t ask Francis to do that anymore.”

  Aren’s eyes filled too, but he let his tears spill out, and then she could too, the two of them crying in the vestibule as if the world was all over at last.

  He put his head down into his hands and Kay reached her arms around him, his folded-up elbows tucking into her embrace, and laid her cheek on his warm head. She was still taller than him, at least. She hadn’t meant to say it fast like that and shock him, but he always made her tell what was in her mind, whatever it might be. That wish to tell—she did not have that with other people. Because he would listen rightly.

  They were half in, half out of the little porch. She had already cried too much and had not much water left in her, so she pressed gently to make him back up, and he shook his head and did. The inner door, on a strong spring, shut behind her foot.

  Inside, the narrow hall was shadowy, but Aren led her to the stairs, keeping her hand in his. Three flights up, before he pulled at a door and they went into his new home.

  “He was ill, he was in terrible pain so that he could not move—cancer had made great sores on his jaw, and swellings—it all came up quite suddenly, he did not seem really ill before we left for Boston, but we came back to find him so.”

&
nbsp; There was no more to explain, nothing that could have been done.

  “Francis says he was old for a big dog . . .”

  Her tweed coat hampered her. She shucked out of it, and looked around for a place to put it. There was nowhere in this tiny space, this half room. A partition made of crumbling boards had been added down the middle of an ordinary small bedchamber, leaving half a window and six or seven feet of width. Maybe nine feet in length.

  Aren wiped his eyes with one sleeve. He took her coat and found a cloth to brush off the one chair. “Here,” he said. “Sit down, stay for a moment.”

  She had not thought beyond this, beyond telling him and finding some comfort. Where was she to stay tonight? The Barrington Hotel, down at the corner, perhaps. And never tell Thea. Or if she ran, she could catch the ten thirty DAR goods train, and be back for breakfast.

  The room was cold. She could not ask for her coat back—Aren had hung it on the only clothes hook he had, taking his own jacket off it first and tossing it in the corner.

  He was wearing a grey shirt without a collar, and dungarees. His boots were neatly placed by the door. This was a sailor’s berth, shipshape. Grey blanket on the cot, tucked in with hospital corners, his sea-chest at the foot, and on it some books. She was amused and a little comforted to see that he had brought with him his old picture book, Nursery Lessons, In Words of One Syllable, with the unsailable fishing boat and the good dog Dash and the aunt who gave the boy his horse. She touched it, saying quietly, “See here is a fine nag.”

  The floor was stained, but clean. On the green-washed walls he had pinned a few postcards: the Morning Light, the Belmont, Captain Hilton’s ship. A photograph of Roddy and Thea. Herself, scowling in a toga at the high school tableau vivant; and there again, shrieking, in the photograph Francis had taken of her when Aren slid the piglet down into the barrel bath.

  She touched the smooth little moon scar on her arm, from the piglet’s sharp hoof. “Are you better here? Happier than in Yarmouth?”

  He lifted his brows, that quick assent. “Good enough, there is nothing wrong with me.”

  He was the same person, always merciful to her. To them all.

  “I came without telling Thea, or I’d have never got away—but she’d have sent her love, and a parcel, if she’d known.”

  “I am all right for cakes,” he said. “They feed us well.”

  Kay hated that he must put a good face on it. Most likely, they were quite cruel to apprentices at the shipyards. All hard discipline and men shouting. But a person has to live somehow, of course. Aren could have chosen school, she told herself; this was his own choice. Only it was not. Staying at school in Yarmouth was impossible. It had been too difficult for her, and she was white and English; he would always be foreign and coloured, no matter how staunchly Thea championed him. Where else could a person go to make a life?

  “What have you done with him?”

  “Francis got Jerry Melanson to bury him, back in the orchard.”

  “You did not want to be there for the funeral?”

  He was laughing at her now. She caught herself frowning, and let it go. “I would not have held a funeral. Only one sacred song and a wreath.”

  “Well, a grave marker, though.” He was serious now.

  She nodded, having drawn one on the train. She did not want to show him in case he laughed again. Then she pulled out her notebook, for of course he wouldn’t laugh.

  He did not. Staring down at the careful lettering she had drawn, he lifted his eyebrows again and again in strong agreement.

  Fear not, I will Pilot thee.

  She’d drawn a straight marker, no cross, Pilot in her view not being subject to God, but being God’s straight emissary. Not requiring salvation, being without sin.

  “I wish you would come home, Aren.”

  He stood up and went to the tiny cupboard. “I am home.”

  “To your real home, I mean,” she said.

  At the cupboard, his back to her, he asked in his quiet way, “Where is my real home?”

  Then she heard what she had said. How stupid she was. Not Yarmouth, he meant. Where else could be their home now?

  “Pulo Anna?”

  He laughed at her, a furious burst of bitterness.

  She wished she’d never said those words. He was past reaching anyhow. She had wasted her time coming here, and he would never come back, nor want to. This half room, this ugly life was what he was choosing. No more business of hers.

  He laughed again, amused this time, watching her look around the room. From a stack in the cupboard he took a celluloid collar and began to attach it to his shirt. He was not meeting her eyes. But that was all right, he never did by choice, though he usually would allow their gaze to rest together. Maybe he was too sad, because of Pilot.

  “You caught me as I was going out,” he said.

  “Out where?”

  It was already ten in the evening. No restaurant or place to buy food would be open now, on a Thursday night.

  “To drink.”

  But—oh, he must mean to a secret place, a silent pig or a speakeasy, they called them. Not legal, but of course everyone knew where they were. Mrs. Curtis Surette ran one in Yarmouth. She had not been there herself, but Marion Hilton had gone to one of Mrs. Surette’s special nights with Murray Judge. Cocktails in china teacups.

  This would not be one of those places. Anyway, Aren was too young for drinking. But she did not know what his life was like now, or what it had been like for the last two years. He was a good deal older now than Jack and Arthur had been when they came aboard so drunk one night that Mr. Best whipped them at the mast next day to teach them manners.

  “How do you know where to go?”

  He laughed, a short bark. “Follow any sailor!”

  “Is that what it is like, being a workingman in Halifax?”

  “They’ve no choice—a sailor isn’t going to stay in dry dock for long.”

  Marion Hilton had gone to one, after all. “What happens if the police raid?”

  “You get arrested—give a false name, and they let you go in the morning.”

  A night in pokey would be a thing to experience. That would top Marion Hilton.

  He picked up his jacket from the floor and beat at it, not to much purpose. “I’m off,” he said. “Come if you like. I have a friend to meet. You can meet her too.”

  Kay looked around the half room and put on her squashed hat.

  The streets were wet, shining black and gold in the light from a few bright windows. The electric street lights did not cast much glow this foggy night, but served as direction pointers. They walked more or less together, Kay straggling behind sometimes when she thought perhaps she should not go after all. Then her courage, or her stubbornness, would come inching back, and she’d run to catch him up.

  After a considerable damp tramp, Aren turned in at a narrow corridor between buildings and down some metal stairs into the first establishment, where a large man took his money and opened a wine-dark metal door.

  It was darker inside than out. Aren stood poised a moment, holding Kay with a touch on her arm, and then started forward through crowded tables.

  She followed close, not wanting to be alone in that strange place. All the people there were darkly clothed and grimy, some of them clearly black-gang men from steamers, marked by oiled-in coal dust that would never wash off. The women, not very many of them, hung over the tables, breasts dangling under not enough fabric. They were not pretty, exactly, but their lack of care had a crazy attraction; Kay felt it herself. A sour disorder in the dress, that wantonness. They laughed and talked too loud, to be heard over the din.

  After speaking to one woman, Aren turned back and pushed Kay toward the door again.

  “Not here,” he shouted into her ear above the din. “Cherry says to try Isadore’s.”

  Each place after that one was worse. The raucous noise everywhere was surprising. Kay was not shocked, and certainly heard nothing sh
e hadn’t heard already from a thousand sailors, but she had thought speakeasies would be hushed places, to avoid detection. These closed-in rooms, each with a smoke veil hovering three feet down from the low ceiling, were tighter and hotter than she’d expected. She hadn’t thought about that part, the smell of other people, none of them in very good health. Worse than below decks, worse than any crew mess she’d looked in on. But she’d been lucky, always to sail on respectable vessels. So had Aren.

  And the drink, not a good smell either. Bootleg rum, or something water-coloured and tasteless that (when Aren passed her a tot to try) hit the back of the tongue and then the throat with a scrape like paint thinner. Everyone was pretty much half-poisoned, it seemed to her. The older men drank warm yellow beer in thick-bottomed glasses. Kay felt her insides curdle at the sight of it, horrible stuff.

  In each place, different but the same, Aren led the way through the press of people and stopped at one table or another to ask after the girl, Merissa. One woman had seen her, she thought. “Out Bedford way, she was.”

  Aren shook his head and said that must have been her sister, whose fellow lived in Africville.

  The woman nodded and shook her head, first nodding and then shaking, very drunk. She demanded abruptly, “Where you from?”

  “I am from the South Seas,” Aren said. “From an island called Pulo Anna.”

  “Yeah, I seed you was different from these other fellas . . .”

  Aren shook his head, giving it up, and they went out.

  In the fourth place, Jerry Joe’s, a player piano played at top speed, a man standing beside it banging on a drum. That was the loudest place yet.

  Kay had put her First Greek Book in her pocket to read on the train, thinking that perhaps she might find solace there in Cyrus’s old campaign, and it clunked against the table.

  Aren saw it peeking from her coat pocket and laughed. “Your vademecum.”

  She tried to shove it deeper, but he took it from her and flipped through the pages, shaking his head. “That old language is not even real, nothing they wrote is real any longer,” he said.