The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  Sitting up, dazed, he heard voices murmuring on deck. The foredeck hatch was above his head. He pushed it open and stuck his head out.

  The fog had thickened or it was drizzling — hard to say which — and the air was coated with wet. He could just make out the government dock barely a hundred yards away, moving in and out of swirling layers of grey fog. MacIsaac had mentioned that the harbour lighthouse on Kidston Island, shown on all the charts, had been down for two days; the Coast Guard were changing the lens. Now the island itself had disappeared. So had the lobster boats and herring trawlers.

  Maddie, in a bright yellow slicker, was leaning over the aft rail, talking to someone. Joe stood up. Peering through the foggy dew, he saw a fellow in a dory that kept bumping the Son’s side gently, despite the fellow’s holding it off with one arm.

  “Anything the matter?” Joe called. He heard a boat somewhere, the guttural snarl of an old Ford V8 or a Buick Six, probably on one of the lobster boats. Had MacIsaac directed them to the wrong mooring? It wouldn’t be much fun trying to pick up another one in a strange harbour in that depth of fog. Visibility about twenty-five feet, not much of a tide, zero breeze.

  “Good day to you, mister,” the young man called. “Is everything all right? Do you have what you need?”

  “I think we’re all right. Are we all right here?”

  “It’s a beauty of a sailboat. Beautifully clean.”

  “Do you need the mooring?”

  “No, no, you’re plenty fine here. She’ll hold you nice.” The boy had a big jaw, a ridiculous pile of greased hair combed back and tapering into a sort of wedge. Rubber boots, flannel shirt buttoned up at the neck. A real hick, the sort who carried a comb in his breast pocket.

  “Do you like to eat lobsters, miss?” he said to Maddie.

  “Sure.”

  “Here you are then.” He was holding up a paper grocery sack. “Bit heavy now; careful.”

  A waft of fog crossed the bow and for a moment Joe lost sight of his granddaughter except for the yellow blare of her slicker. Then he saw that the boy had shipped his oars and was standing up in the dory and Maddie was reaching out and taking the brown paper bag. She peered inside. “Wow.”

  “Caught this morning,” he said. “Fresh as can be.”

  “How much do you want?” Joe said.

  “No, no, mister, there’s no charge.”

  “Three lobsters, and they’re huge! Thank you,” Maddie said. “That’s so nice of you.”

  “You know how to fix them, do you? Have a pot that’ll do? Have any crackers? Pliers and a hammer’ll do.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, there you are.”

  He sat down and deftly slipped the oars into the locks. The dory was drifting and he dabbled the oars to stay in close.

  “Oh, there’s something else. Yes. A dance on tonight at the parish hall. A bit of a band, couple of fellows with guitars. Perhaps you’d like to see it.”

  “That sounds like a blast,” Madeleine said.

  “You like country music?”

  “I like music, period. How do I get there?”

  She sounded eager. After twelve days on a thirty-six-foot yawl with her seventy-three-year-old grandfather, she’d probably swim ashore if she had to. She had been calling him Captain Ahab ever since their whale sighting.

  “I’m Kenneth MacIsaac. My father’s the IGA. I’ll come out to fetch you, miss. Say at eight o’clock? I warn you, it will be nothing fancy.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “That’s fine,” the boy called, pulling on his oars, already disappearing into the fog. “I’ll see you.”

  What the hell, Joe thought. The young need the young.

  ~

  He lay awake in his berth, listening to a buoy clanging somewhere and the creaking of the hull. Maddie was at the dance. There was hardly a stir from the rigging. He liked making things fast once on a mooring: sails covered, halyards snug, tiller secured. There was no breeze in the harbour, just the morose blanket of fog. And every now and then a sharp strain of music drifting across from the village.

  Grabbing a flashlight, he looked at his watch. Just after eleven, Atlantic time. He wondered when the party would end and when MacIsaac might bring her back. He was beginning to wish that she hadn’t gone, that MacIsaac had never appeared all shined up in his windbreaker, sport shirt, and cowboy boots, hair artfully piled and lacquered with some kind of oil. Fish oil, maybe. No, that wasn’t fair. There was nothing really wrong with the boy except that he was a hick. And his lobsters had been fresh, the meat tender and sweet. They’d missed having sweet corn for steaming, but there’d been no produce at the IGA except carrots and a few tasteless-looking apples. Maybe deeper in the countryside the people still kept kitchen gardens. Tomorrow, if he and Maddie walked farther, they might be able to buy beans and sweet corn straight out of the field. And blueberries — there had to be blueberries on Cape Breton.

  Maddie, anyway, hadn’t seemed too disappointed when the young man reappeared, rowing gently out of the evening fog. “Ahoy the Sea Son,” MacIsaac had called. “All aboard for dancing.”

  Maddie had kissed Joe on the cheek. “Sure you won’t come?”

  “No, no. Not for me.”

  She had stepped down neatly into the stern of the dory and then sat, the boy had pushed off, and that had been that — they were away, disappearing almost instantly into the silver fog. For a while Joe had heard the oars dipping but he wasn’t able to see a goddamn thing. Going below, he had cleaned up the remains of their lobster supper, burned the paper plates in the wood stove, dumped the shells overboard, and gone to bed.

  He ought to have been able to sleep. All day he’d felt a little bit sore in his chest, slightly drugged and tired, which he knew was his body fighting back from the strains of the journey. If anything he had underestimated the rigours of coming up the Nova Scotia coast, the constancy of the fog and the heavy force of those easterlies that never blew clear but just packed more fog on top of fog. Bras d’Or had felt like a return to real summer, but now that the ocean fog had caught up with them he was relieved their trip was over. Tomorrow he’d phone TCA and book their tickets on a flight to Montreal. MacIsaac Senior had promised he would arrange a car to take them to the Sydney airport.

  He couldn’t help remembering what country dances had been like in his day — not that he’d been to all that many outside of the weddings and wakes that everyone living along the river had attended, invited or not — the brawling and beatings, the coarse behaviour. Tonight’s dance was at a church, young MacIsaac had said, the Catholic church; and it was 1960 and things weren’t the way they had been, even in this lonely, fog-haunted corner of the world. Or were they? The boy’s father had offered to sell a bottle of whisky-blanc and it was probably everywhere, part of the life, just as it had been up the Pontiac. Even if they weren’t allowed to bring liquor inside the church, the young bucks at the dance would be stepping out to their cars and sucking it back.

  He began to feel afraid for his granddaughter. For days he had had no company but Madeleine, the weather, and the sea. He’d been at sea so long, out of sight of land, that he hadn’t been thinking straight when he’d let her go off with the boy. Cape Breton made down east Maine seem cosmopolitan. The storekeeper with his dour personality, the boy with his piled hair — these people had a bitter edge; they resented people from away, anyone who came sailing into their little harbour from places where the weather was mostly sunny.

  He’d been irresponsible, letting her just go off like that. Maddie was a stranger in this sort of backwater, an innocent. She could handle a boat but she didn’t know their ways up here. Cape Breton was like a foreign country. Madeleine had been well protected all her life, unlike his sisters in the clearing, with their stepfather. Maddie had been raised in one of the safest cities in the world. Things could get out of her control before she even knew she was in danger.

  What in hell had he been thinking, sending her off to
dance with a bunch of howling men, and how was he going to tell Margo if her daughter was lost in the back seat of a car on a back road in Cape Breton Island after her grandfather had seen her off to a Saturday-night dance in the company of the local bootlegger’s son? This wasn’t Montreal, wasn’t even Kennebunk. This was a primitive town, and he knew something about places at the end of the earth.

  He reached for his pants and started pulling them on, lying flat on his back in the V-berth. He buckled his belt, then sat up too quickly and banged his forehead on the bulkhead, so hard he was stunned.

  The clarity of pain calmed him for a few moments. Nothing’s happened, nothing’s wrong, he thought to himself. You’re overdoing it now. It’s the music, that’s all, the wild music. She’ll be fine. There’s nothing wrong.

  The moment was like a gap blown open in the fog, but then it closed in again. The music screeching and sliding across the water was like a taunt, and it was the only thing reaching him through the fog. He dragged on a shirt and sweater and hauled himself up the companionway. A sense of redness burned on his forehead, and touching the spot, he saw blood on his fingertips. It didn’t matter.

  The deck was slick with moisture. The lighthouse on the island was still extinguished. He couldn’t see the island or the government dock or anything on the mainland. He couldn’t see the herring trawlers. There was no tide, no current — nothing but fog, the beautiful Son wrapped in a ball of grey wool. He heard the buoy banging but wasn’t sure of its location. He knew he should check the chart but there wasn’t time and he was only three hundred yards offshore, and even if he got turned about and headed the wrong way he’d probably make landfall on the island. A Catholic church, a courthouse, and an RCMP detachment didn’t necessarily imply civilization. There would be roads clawing up those rugged mountains and people living along them, not town people.

  His granddaughter was utterly dependent on the boy. She was in his power. She had no way of getting herself back out to the Son except Kenneth MacIsaac and his dory. If she had to stand on the government dock and yell for her grandfather to come and get her, maybe he would hear her but maybe he wouldn’t. He didn’t want her stranded in the town while men with hanks of greasy hair falling on their foreheads rumbled through the dead streets in battered, muddy cars. He didn’t want her that vulnerable, or anywhere near. He’d been an idiot to bring her up here. The sailing had been far rougher than he’d predicted, the seas too big, the fogs too dense, the harbours too few.

  Without being entirely aware of what he was doing he’d been unwinding the dinghy’s painter from its cleat, drawing the dinghy alongside, and unhooking the life rail. Before stepping off he glanced at the compass. Sea Son’s bow was pointed south-southwest, but not very steadily; with no breeze and no perceptible tidal current, she was drifting on the mooring, and any other boats he came across in the fog would also be pointing haphazardly in all directions. But he only needed to row three hundred yards bearing north-northwest to make the government dock, or close to.

  If there were lights in the village, and there had to be, the fog had buried them. He had known fog in Maine, but only up in Fundy had he ever tasted a fog like this, warm and almost smoky, a real pea soup.

  As he was stepping awkwardly into the dinghy, a high-pitched ringing started in his right ear. He felt dizzy all of a sudden and froze, clutching the Son’s life rail. It passed after a few seconds, and he extended his foot and touched the painted wood of the dinghy’s middle seat, wet and slippery. He sat down quickly and pushed off. The oars were tucked under the seats. He was fitting the oarlocks into their holes when it occurred to him that he should have brought a horn or at least a flashlight.

  And he had forgotten to put on his shoes. His feet were bare, sitting in half an inch of warm water slopping around the dinghy. He considered going back but didn’t want to waste time going alongside and cleating, or at least wrapping the painter on a winch, and clambering aboard and going down the steep companionway in the dark to retrieve his shoes from the cabin. Most of all he didn’t want to have to step down into the dinghy again in the darkness and wet and risk the ringing in his ears and that blast of dizziness.

  It was a tiny village, and he remembered that the Catholic church was very near the government dock. It was an odd, ornate little wooden church painted white and just up from the harbour. Everything in Baddeck was just up from the harbour. He wouldn’t go inside, just stand across the road, satisfy himself it was okay and she was in no danger. He was already starting to feel calmer now that he was underway. He just needed one glimpse of her. If she was enjoying herself he wasn’t going to march in like some hillbilly father and drag her away. It was a parish dance, after all. There really wasn’t all that much to get excited about. A parish dance. Last Saturday of every month, young MacIsaac had said. The priest collected the dollar or quarter or whatever he charged for admission, kept an eye on things, and ran the show. She wasn’t likely to find herself in trouble in a Catholic church.

  The rowing calmed him. Being on the water always had. The fog was disorienting, though, and he ought to have left a compass in the dinghy. How many rules of good seamanship had he broken in the past ten minutes or however long it had been? But he never got spooked in fog the way some people did. He had never minded letting go, losing his bearings for a while, being a bit lost. He’d grown up in the bush, after all. You were never really lost because there was nowhere you weren’t lost. Those woods in winter, cutting firewood at four dollars a cord and clawing his way out through deep snow. Lynx he’d seen maybe twice, snow rabbits, starving moose, black bears roaming hungrily in the breakup season. If you got lost it didn’t seem to make much difference. It was only panic that caused trouble, and being alone had never frightened him; plenty other things did, but not that.

  He knew she was going to be okay, that nothing bad would happen; it was just that wild music that had spooked him. Maddie was a sensible girl and the boy seemed decent and polite — more than you could say for a lot of them at that age.

  His head hurt, not just the wound on his forehead but the back of his head too. He tried ignoring it but it was unrelenting. Pain was pushing at the bones of his skull. One thin streak of blood had run down his nose and chin; he could feel it. With both hands gripping the oars there was nothing to do except row to the dock and tie up. He’d need to clean up somewhere. He couldn’t tell if it was a scrape or a gash, but she wasn’t going to be happy to see it; he had better see if he could rinse it off somewhere. He wasn’t going to make a scene at the dance; they weren’t even going to know he was here. The things he remembered — the wildness and brutality, Mick Heaney slapping his mother, sawing away at his fiddle — that was all fifty, sixty years ago. That world was gone, dead and buried. If he tried holding on to things that had never belonged to him in the first place, something would get twisted, something would get broken. Fear wasn’t a lesson he’d ever meant to teach anyone.

  Oh Jesus, he thought, where the hell is that fucking wharf? He ought to have made it by now. Peering over his shoulder, he could see nothing through the blankness of fog. No cars or lights. Even if he had a flashlight it wouldn’t have done any good. Maybe if he had a horn, if there was someone on the dock to hear.

  “Hello, hello!” he shouted. “Ahoy there, Baddeck! Looking for the dock! Ahoy there!”

  Nothing. He gritted his teeth and pulled violently, and the left oar suddenly slipped out of its oarlock. For a few moments he lost control of the dinghy as it spun about. He held onto the oar and fitted its leather back into the oarlock, but he had lost his sense of direction.

  “Follow the tide, follow the tide,” he told himself, speaking aloud, just like an old man. He stared at the water surface, trying to get a sense of the flow, but if there was a tide it was very weak, or maybe he was moving on it. His head hurt. He shipped the right oar and touched the blood on his nose, then reached over, scooped up a handful of water, and splashed it on his face. The salt stung the gash on his forehead
and dripped into his eyes. He was angry with himself. He tried recalling the harbour chart, the mooring field wedged between Kidston Island and Baddeck village on the mainland. He needed to calm down and listen for the buoy; it was probably at the mouth of the harbour. If he could reach the buoy, at worst he would just tie up to it and wait. Baddeck Bay narrowed to the northeast.

  Not a single car, not one headlight. Either the town was smaller and even deader than he’d thought or the fog was thicker. There was a slight chance of missing everything and sliding out into the big lake — really an inland sea — but if he could keep to one heading there was a better than even chance he’d make a landfall very soon, somewhere. He dug in with the oars. His shoulders were starting to ache. The fog was warm but he was cold, cold inside. When you bled, your warmth leaked out: he’d read that somewhere. It occurred to him that he might be in real danger now.

  “Ahoy, Baddeck!” he shouted again.

  Then he heard a voice calling through the fog. “Granddaddy? Are you out there? Is that you?”

  “It’s me!” he shouted. “I’m in the dinghy. Where are you?”

  “On the dock!” Maddie called. “We’re just getting into the dory. Are you lost? Do you want us to come and find you?” The clear, bright line of her voice coming through the fog.

  “I’m not lost,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Ahoy, mister! Ahoy there!” He recognized the young man’s voice, Kenneth MacIsaac.

  “I’m putting up a good light.” MacIsaac called. “Just hooking up the battery; give me a second now.”

  “Should we come and find you?” Maddie called.