The fog lifted. He saw Winterside.
He had to get to Winterside. For some reason. And so he sat up on the cot through the night, ducking out a few times to pee in the grass…and one time he visited the outhouse that was sliding down the hill.
Now he was preparing to clamber back on the bicycle and make his way to town.
Why? The reason continued to nag at him. So did the need to get up and get going.
***
Hy woke before dawn, as was her habit. She lay in bed and pondered. What if Abel were unable to see clearly? What if he had stumbled from home, ducky mug in hand, and gone…
Gone where?
From her bedroom window, Hy could just see the foam-tipped breakers on the shore, a pale unearthly blue catching a glimmer of the first light breaking on the horizon.
The shore. Of course, the shore. Not this shore. No, the other one, over the causeway, a small strip of land that belonged to Abel, a shore with a deep pond, a harbour that had been halfway dredged and was deep enough for Abel to keep his boat in the water. He had fished out of there for a number of years. Why would he want to go there? Abel hadn’t been to the shore, any shore – as far as anyone knew – in twenty-six years, ever since he had given up fishing.
He’d been a fisherman all his life. He might be living in that past.
Of course.
That’s where he would be.
She wouldn’t go there alone. She was tired of being the one who stumbled over the dead.
She’d round up Jamieson. She should be in on this. If Abel was dead, it was about time Jamieson shared in one of the gruesome discoveries that always seemed to visit themselves on Hy.
It was early, but Jamieson would be up soon.
***
Two Mounties – novices from away stationed on the island during the busy tourist season to police the Cavendish tourist area – had not been alerted about a missing old man, because it wasn’t their territory. They had drifted to this patch of the island on a haze of marijuana, smoked to make the early morning shift more palatable. They didn’t think much about the old man pedalling the woman’s bicycle down the road early that morning. Except that he shouldn’t have been there. No lights on. A hazard to himself and any motorists who might happen by.
One moment he was there, the next gone. The officer driving had brought the car to a stop by the side of the road. When he looked up, the old man and bicycle were gone.
His partner looked at him, shrugged his shoulders. The guy had just disappeared.
With a heavy sigh, the cop got out of the car, waving for his partner to stay behind with the vehicle. He didn’t like the feel of this. He crossed the road, peered over the embankment and began to gesture at the other officer to join him, with a frantic wave of his arms.
Not because there was someone there. Because there was no one there.
One shrugged his shoulders. The other scratched his head, and they returned to the cruiser and took off. This wasn’t their patch anyway.
They went back to their regular beat – the young, drunk, drugged-up crowd they’d barely escaped being part of themselves. They never said no to a joint, and puffed away at one as they headed away from the deep island and its secrets.
Chapter 11
Hy sped up Shipwreck Hill, right past Ian’s house. He was looking out his kitchen window, curious that she hadn’t stopped in as she did most mornings. She was heading for Jamieson’s at a clip. Must be something up. He stepped out the door.
What he saw next formed slowly in his vision, so unexpected was it. At the bottom of his lawn, where it sloped to the road. Yellow and orange. The ducky mug? He dove down the lawn, retrieved the mug and, holding it up like a trophy, headed for Jamieson’s, where Hy stood on the stoop, pressing the doorbell. The only doorbell in The Shores, installed last spring.
She heard the lock click on the inner door. It swung back, and Jamieson appeared, framed by the metal storm door, which she proceeded to unlock. The only pair of locked doors in the village. Hy backed up to let the storm door swing open and burst into the house, nearly knocking Jamieson over.
Ian had just about reached the stoop, trophy in hand, but was not fast enough to stop the door from swinging shut behind Hy. It slammed in his face. He was close enough to hear her blurt out:
“His fishing shack. On Montgomery Shore. We haven’t looked there.” Hy was jumping up and down in excitement. She had a feeling about this…
Jamieson grabbed her jacket, shoved it on, signalled Hy to follow her, pulled the inner door open, and pushed the storm door wide.
It almost hit Ian in the face. He dodged it as she threw it open.
“Oops.” Hy grinned. “Almost pulled a Jimmi Dunn there.”
“That,” said Jamieson, “is precisely why doors should be locked and visitors should knock.” That it was more the opposite occurred to Hy, but she thought better of mentioning it.
“But I’ve found Abel’s mug.” Ian held it aloft, a big grin on his face.
Hy looked him up and down.
“And lost your clothes.”
Ian looked down. He was still in his pyjamas. Not his best pair.
He flushed. But Hy and Jamieson weren’t looking at him. They were staring at the mug.
“Where?” Hy and Jamieson asked at the same time.
“On the lawn. Near the road.”
“How long had it been there?” Hy reached for it.
“How would I know?”
Jamieson snatched the mug before Hy could.
“I’m going to take it to Gus to see if it’s the real thing.”
“I’m coming,” said Hy.
“Me, too,” said Ian.
“Not dressed like that, you aren’t,” Jamieson threw him a look as she headed out the door.
Gus was not the least surprised when she saw Abel’s mug. If anything, Hy and Jamieson were the ones surprised, at her composure as she identified it.
“I told you he wasn’t dead. I’ll agree, mebbe, he’s livin’ in the past. That could be why he’s turned up at his gramma’s.”
“His gramma’s? Ian’s place?”
Gus nodded.
“He pretty near grew up there, as a boy. His mam lived with her mam; their men worked the water and the land. That was the way people lived then. Old folks, young families, all together.”
“So Abel could have been going home, back to his childhood?”
Gus nodded and rocked back and forth, a wordless yes.
“What would make him go? What would make him leave?”
“The fog,” said Gus.
Hy looked out the window. A new wave of smoke was rolling into the village. “That fog?”
“No. In his head.” Gus pointed at her own.
“Gus,” Hy hesitated. “Do you think Abel could have Alzheimer’s?”
Gus looked up sharply, fear in her eyes. She didn’t have to say a thing, but she did.
“Old timer’s? I ’spec’ he has it. I ’spec’ for a long time.”
And Gus herself? Did she have it? Hy wondered. It annoyed her when people said Gus was “sharp as a tack.” Condescending, she thought. Implying there might be something lacking. Was there? Was Gus changing? Aging? She wouldn’t go there now. Not even in her thinking. Focus on Abel. Abel, whom she didn’t know, could not remember ever having met. Maybe it was she, Hy, who had Alzheimer’s, she thought with an inward smile.
“Still ’n’ all, he could of been passing on the road and dropped it.”
“Do you mind if I hold onto it?” Jamieson was gripping the mug as if it might escape.
“Go ahead. Use it if you want. I got no need for it. Never did like it. Plenty of others.”
“Ducky mugs?”
“Yup,” said Gus.
“Where?”
“Somewheres. Just li
ke Abel. Maybe you’ll find him as soon as he knows where he is hisself.”
Jamieson had never met Abel. She was more than willing to believe that he had wandered off in a fog of dementia.
***
The year that Abel courted Gus, there was smoke from Quebec, too. The lack of sun affected the potato harvest and islanders were resentful.
“This’ll be smoked fish, time it’s finished,” she said to her sister, as the two clambered on the roof of the house and laid the herring out flat to dry.
When they finished the job, they lay back for a moment and looked at the smoky sky. They heard the truck wagon pull into the yard before they saw him. But he had seen them.
“Hoi,” he had called up. “Got a cup of tea for a hard-workin’ man?”
She could hardly refuse him. Not especially when he hauled a sack of potatoes off his wagon. There were usually more potatoes than a person wanted this time of year, but they’d had a poor harvest, so they’d sold as many as they could and kept back fewer than they usually did. Not enough to last the winter. Their mother would be grateful.
“For your mam.” He tossed the sack over his shoulder and waited for the girls to climb down, first from one side of the tall roof, onto a gable, from the gable onto the porch roof, and down the ladder. He held onto it with one hand, the other hand holding the potatoes.
They invited him into the kitchen, in the smaller, older part of the house. The two sides had been built at different times, and there was no way to get from the new bit to the old without going outside. Christmas dinner was a parade of people carrying hot dishes of food out into the snow from the kitchen and back inside to the proper dining room. That was one reason the room was almost never used. Most meals were served in the warm, homey kitchen, with its big pine table and wood range.
Getting inside didn’t do him much good. Her mother wasn’t there, nor her father. So he had his cup of tea and left, no wiser, and no closer to making her his bride.
His disappointment at the failure of his plan – to convince her through her mother – left him wanting a drink stronger than tea. He found it back behind the barn where a couple of her older brothers were ending a hard day with a hard drink. They passed the bottle around and soon were the best of pals. He confided in the two his desire to marry their sister, and how he’d hoped to convince her through her mother.
“Oh, no, that’ll never work,” said one.
“That’d be the worst thing you could do,” said the other.
***
Abel’s fishing shack on the Montgomery Shore. No one had thought of it, because it wasn’t handy to The Shores and Abel hadn’t used it in years. It was beyond repair, sliding crookedly down a secondary dune off Montgomery Shore. Not Lucy Maud’s family. Other ones – or so said Bill Montgomery, who owned most of it and was the only person on Red Island by name of Montgomery who didn’t lay claim to kinship with the famous writer. He was mistaken. Of course he was related. If not by blood, by a convoluted multi-branched tree of marriages. He was like an Irishman refusing to wear green on St Patrick’s Day. Or King Cnut, trying to get the waves to roll back. A Montgomery on Red Island had to be one of those Montgomerys, especially as he owned this patch of land deeded in the family name. Montgomery land.
Through a convoluted succession of trades, purchases, and card debts paid off, a small parcel of Montgomery Shore had come into Abel’s possession. He had planned to fish out of there – the pond and access to it had been dredged at one time, with the hopes of opening up a harbour. There was a fishing shack that belonged to him, now sliding down the sand. The trees, tilted by the wind, rising on a slope from the shore, appeared to be bending forward to hold the land in place. He’d built the fishing shack and an outhouse on a secondary dune.
That never would have been allowed now, although it still did happen. Tourists built summer homes on them all the time, and nobody, it seemed, was prepared to blow the whistle. There was too much money to be made in waterfront real estate. The closer to the sand and water, the better, preferably with a sunset over a cape.
Abel’s grand plans came to nothing. True, it was inconvenient to fish out of The Shores, dragging boats in and out of the water by horse, but Montgomery Shore was too far away. He used it more as a retreat than anything else, disappearing there on the eve of Setting Day and downing a bottle of moonshine with his fishermen friends. They claimed it was a Masons meeting.
When the storm surge came and ruptured the causeway, tossing boats and cars around like Dinky toys, that began the erosion that was causing Abel’s buildings to slip into Cousins’ Pond.
The outhouse, a two-seater, was almost as big as the shack itself. The two buildings were picturesque in their decay, with morning glory and cucumber vine encircling them, appearing to hold them together as they crumbled into ruin. The doors of both buildings had been cleared of vines. Someone had been there. Recently.
Looking at the shack and the outhouse, Jamieson felt a chill run up her spine. That would be the place. That would be where he was. There could be no doubt about it.
Hy was thinking exactly the same thing.
So was Ian. Properly dressed, though unshaven, he’d caught up with Hy and Jamieson.
Would they find Abel, undignified, in the outhouse? Sprawled on the tilted floor of the shack?
They would find him, they knew. It seemed so certain.
Their feet dragged, their spirits low, as they trudged toward what they were sure was Abel’s last resting place.
Here on the shore.
Where it should be, after all.
Chapter 12
Gus nursed a small hope that Jamieson would find Abel at the fishing shack. She’d felt her heart leap at the thought of it. Perhaps it wouldn’t be long before they were reunited. She put in a load of laundry, full of his socks and shirts. They were clean, but he would have worn them if he’d been here. She’d have been doing the laundry, just the same. They’d be ready when he got back.
***
Her mother didn’t want Gus to get married. She wanted her to be a teacher like she had been. It was a job she had loved. She’d had a sense of independence, of earning her own way in the world, and that’s what she wanted for Gus, her eldest. She didn’t accept that Gus had no interest, that she wanted to be a wife and mother, that she didn’t think she was smart enough to be a schoolteacher. Her copybook had won first prize at the annual fall exhibition, but only because her penmanship was so neat.
Abel was a catch, and he knew it. Gus, winsome as she was, wouldn’t do better, and she knew it. Then why had she refused him? And why could he not talk to her mother? He was sure he could get her to agree. He had a way with women, especially older women. So, in spite of her brothers’ advice, Abel decided he would speak to her. He knew exactly when he would find her home, when she wouldn’t be in the fields or milking in the barn. Monday, “warsh” day, she’d be home. It was a day with as regular a function as Sunday, church day. There wasn’t a woman on Red Island who wouldn’t be hanging out her wash on Monday. This particular Monday was a day when the wind blew so hard that the sheets shot out parallel to the ground, dried and ready to be taken down almost as soon as they’d gone up.
“Good morning, missus.” Abel doffed his hat and had hardly finished forming his ingratiating smile when the sheet she was hanging swung around and enveloped him.
He felt at a distinct disadvantage, struggling to extricate himself from the wet cotton shroud. He finally managed, without any help from her. She knew why he had come.
“No,” she said, before he could get a word in.
“No?” he repeated, dumbly.
“No.” End-of-conversation tone. A tone her daughter Gus inherited and would use many times in her long life, to good effect.
“No,” said Abel, his shoulders slumping.
That was the end of it. The conversation. Nei
ther could have said much more, without raising their voices above the flapping of the laundry.
No.
Abel turned and left, almost ready to accept the answer. He was in need of a wife, and his mind turned to the charms of other women he knew. But he kept coming back to Gus. She was the only woman he knew with the practical good sense he wanted in a wife; with the household skills that were disappearing in their generation; with the good child-bearing hips and nature that would make her an excellent mother and wife.
Perhaps he should speak to her father.
Gus’s father knew his daughter. When Abel went to speak to him, he could see a good match. He advised the couple to elope.
They did. Abel arranged everything, but it wasn’t until they were standing in the parlour of a minister Up West that Gus had her chance to say “yes.”
Gus’s mother never spoke to her again.
Her mother-in-law more than made up for it.
She never stopped talking.
***
The bicycle wheels slipped on the thick morning dew coating the road. The old man hidden under the Tilley hat lost control, and for the second time that morning went sliding into the ditch. He jumped up and tried to retrieve the bicycle, which had one wheel still spinning around. He stopped it and hauled the bicycle up out of the ditch.
And he forgot. Forgot what he was doing. Where he was going. He didn’t even recognize the piece of road that he was on, the Island Way that he’d known all his life. The spruce trees lining the asphalt on either side loomed over him, threatening. He felt a sharp jolt of panic in his gut, spreading to his chest. He felt dizzy. His ears rang with the high pitch of tinnitus that had nagged him for forty years. Felt like he was somewhere he’d never been before. He hauled the bicycle out of the ditch, raising it high to skirt the tall grass.
Ears still ringing, one of them deaf to everything but the tinnitus, he was unaware of the car that pulled up behind him. Its driver had been trolling the Island Way in the smoky dawn.
As Seamus came closer, the old man disappeared, down into the ditch, and back up again. Seamus caught onto the rhythm of the hat the man was wearing. Up and down it bobbed, in and out of the ditch. It was semi-concealment. He may have wanted to catch a ride, but he didn’t want to be seen.
Cod Only Knows Page 7
