Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  “Stunning originality and lyrical brilliance.” ­—Vancouver Sun

  “Radiant with energy.” —Winnipeg Free Press

  “A constant source of pleasure.” — Quill & Quire

  Dance the Rocks Ashore, a milestone in Lesley Choyce’s leaps-and-bounds career, attests to almost twenty years of continuous invenitveness and craftsmanship in the art of the short story. It’s a powerful mix: “Dance the Rocks Ashore,” a bittersweet account of an elderly couple’s decline; the hilarious and bizarre “My Father Was a Book Reviewer”; “The Third or Fourth Happiest Man in Nova Scotia,” with a peculiar hero reminiscent of Noah; and “The Wreck of the Sister Theresa,” in which spring fever hits like “a handshake in hell.” Favourite stories from previous books include “Losing Ground,” the pivotal chapter in Choyce’s acclaimed 1989 novel The Second Season of Jonas MacPherson, as well as “The Cure,” “Dancing the Night Away,” and the complex and disturbing “Conventional Emotions.”

  Other books by LESLEY CHOYCE

  ADULT STORIES

  Eastern Sure (1980)

  Billy Botzweiler’s Last Dance (1984)

  Conventional Emotions (1985)

  The Dream Auditor (1986)

  Coming Up for Air (1988)

  Margin of Error (1992)

  ADULT NOVELS

  Downwind (1984)

  The Second Season of Jonas MacPherson (1989)

  Magnificent Obsessions (1991)

  Ecstasy Conspiracy (1992)

  The Republic of Nothing (1994)

  Trap Door to Heaven (1996)

  POETRY

  Reinventing the Wheel (1980)

  Fast Living (1982)

  The End of Ice (1985)

  The Top of the Heart (1986)

  The Man Who Borrowed the Bay of Fundy (1988)

  The Coastline of Forgetting (1995)

  NON-FICTION

  Edible Wild Plants of Nova Scotia (1977)

  An Avalanche of Ocean (1987)

  December Six: The Halifax Solution (1988)

  Transcendental Anarchy (1993)

  Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea (1996)

  Cpoyright © 1997, 2014 by Lesley Choyce.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying of any part of this book should be directed in writing to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Published by Goose Lane Editions with the assistance of the Canada Council, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the New Brunswick Department of Municipalities, 1997.

  Edited by Laurel Boone.

  Cover illustration ©Andrew Bostwick. Reproduced with permission.

  Cover and book design by Julie Scriver.

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.

  ISBN 9780864928252

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada

  Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the

  Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick

  through the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For the memory of Alden Nowlan

  CONTENTS

  THE SHORE

  The Third or Fourth Happiest Man in Nova Scotia

  From the Second Season of Jonas Macpherson Losing Ground

  Muriel and the Baptist

  Dance the Rocks Ashore

  From The Republic of Nothing Eye of the Hurricane

  Dragon’s Breath

  The Wreck of the Sister Theresa

  THE ROAD

  It All Comes Back Now

  The Cure

  Conventional Emotions

  The Reconciliation of Calan McGinty

  Coming Up for Air

  THE TOWN

  Breakage

  An Easy Winter

  Prying Loose

  Dancing The Night Away

  Rose and Rhododendron

  My Father Was a Book Reviewer

  Acknowledgements

  The Shore

  THE THIRD OR FOURTH HAPPIEST MAN IN NOVA SCOTIA

  The first time I saw Ray Doucette he was climbing up a thirty-foot spruce tree out by the mouth of the inlet. The top of the tree had been sheared right off by the lightning, and just below the damage was a giant nest. Ray was climbing up to that nest, his boots slipping on the wet branches and his hands clutching each new hold like vice-grips. He was carrying something in a red handkerchief pouch that dangled from his mouth. Inside the pouch was some frightened creature that was screeching like a banshee.

  I was afraid to say a word. Finally, Ray looped one arm over a lightning-splintered branch and lowered his head until his package sat snugly back in the nest. Then, just as the screeching subsided from one source, it rose again tenfold from out of the sky. Ray lost his footing and hung by one armpit as his feet kicked the empty air.

  The mother eagle made a lunge for Ray and knocked his hat off. Then it flew upward, hovered, tucked its wings, and dove straight for Ray’s face. Ray didn’t flinch. I just closed my eyes and heard one god-awful shriek. Then nothing.

  When I looked up, the mother eagle was sitting perfectly still on her young one returned to the nest. Ray was smiling eyeball to eyeball with the giant bird, and his one free hand was petting it on the neck. I could just barely make out that he was singing something. Rock-a-bye baby.

  Ray Doucette lived with his wife, Adele, in an old crooked house near the head of Tom Lurcher Inlet. He had a tumble-down wharf, and every day of the year when the seas allowed, he went out fishing in his boat.

  It was such a deceptive little inlet, with jutting rocks and an incorrigible channel, that more respectable fishermen had given up on the place long ago. I once asked Ray about the problems with negotiating the inlet. He said, “Well, the channel’s just like a snake that’s got its back broke in maybe twenty-five places. And, when you get to the mouth, if you don’t plant the boat dead between the gull rock and the Cannonballs, you’ll run aground.” The Cannonballs, he explained, was a hidden shoal of perfectly round rocks that shifted around with the storms and the seasons.

  “Did you ever think of moving to another inlet?” I asked.

  He looked at me like I just told him that he should try eating arsenic for breakfast. “This is one of the deepest, cleanest, most interesting channels on the Eastern Shore,” he told me.

  Altogether, twelve families had lived in the ramshackle houses on either side of Ray in years past. But the families were all gone. The men had taken city jobs or moved off to fish inlets less interesting than Tom Lurcher.

  It was around the time of the exodus that Ray had married Adele. She had grown up in the house next door. Adele, so the story goes, just moved in with Ray when everyone else moved away. Ray said that it was Adele who had made him the third or fourth happiest man in Nova Scotia. All you had to do was look into her blue, summer-sea eyes and feel better about living. Adele entered Ray’s life with a rooster and a hen.

  Aside from Adele moving in with him, I don’t think Ray paid much attention to all the other families moving out. He always paid more heed to wind direction than neighbours
, anyway. He hauled in his fish, checked the oil in his engine and went about his life as usual.

  Then the rooster got sick. “I hadn’t thought that much about living things up till that. I guess he was mean the way roosters are, and he was always underfoot. But I couldn’t stand to see him die.” So Ray nursed the rooster back to health by feeding him fish oil and corn flour. After the rooster recovered, Ray sometimes took the bird out to sea with him on calm days. The rooster recovered so well that Ray had thirty other chickens by the end of that first year. They gave the chickens the Slaunwhite house to live in and the chickens seemed to like it fine.

  By the time I met Ray, the rooster was gone, dead, but his descendants roamed freely up and down Tom Lurcher Inlet. It was impossible to walk across Ray’s yard without stepping on eggs. Adele could never keep up with which ones were fresh and which ones were old, so most of the eggs got fed to the gulls.

  The first sea gull came into Ray’s life when a hunter arrived at the inlet from the city. The hunter couldn’t see any ducks, so he started shooting at a couple of Ray’s chickens. The chickens were too quick for the hunter and took cover in the mossy rocks. But the gulls weren’t as wily. Pretty soon the hunter had shot the wing off one herring gull. Ray was just snaking his boat back in from the sea when he saw it fall out of the sky. He steered towards the wounded gull, knowing full well he might tear the bottom out of his boat.

  Sure enough, Ray’s boat plowed into something and she started to leak. But he fished the gull out of the sea and got his boat back to his wharf before it sank and settled on the bottom. The gull, of course, was big and mean as only three- year-old herring gulls can be, and it tore into Ray’s wrist like a chainsaw into softwood.

  The hunter saw Ray at his wharf in the sinking boat and came over to see what was going on. There was Ray dripping blood from the wrist, standing waist-deep in the cold water that had sucked up the deck of his boat. The hunter asked Ray what happened. When Ray explained that he had saved the seagull, the hunter just laughed, called him a fool and then drove off.

  Adele had to stitch up Ray’s wrist with twenty-pound test fishing line, and Ray had never been prouder of his wife. The one-winged gull lived, and, once Ray got his boat seaworthy again, it fed happily every day on cod heads and mackerel guts.

  News seemed to have leaked out to the gull community up and down the shore because injured birds kept turning up. One gull had swallowed a fishing hook, another had lost a leg. Some had broken wings that could be set with splints and tape. Others arrived with no outward signs of injury but stayed on nonetheless. Many of the creatures that arrived could live outside, but some seemed to want housing, so the empty village was turned into a rest home for injured animals.

  By the time I met Ray, he had maybe twenty-five sea birds. His arrival home from sea each day was heralded with raucous, enthusiastic approval. Ray loved it. He had also taken to hiking the shoreline with Adele looking for creatures that needed help. Together they adopted a porcupine without teeth, an anorexic heron, a blind otter, wild rabbits that were missing body parts from snares, and an assortment of small birds crippled in various ways by the cruelty of men and nature.

  When Adele died, the doctor told Ray, “It was something she was born with. There was nothing you or I could have done about it.”

  Ray said, “But that’s not right.”

  The doctor just shook his head. “Sometimes it happens that way.”

  Ray told me that he just sat at the kitchen table with a cold cup of tea in his hand and didn’t move for four days. “I’d of sat there like that, too,” he said, “except that the gulls began to swarm all over the roof. And the heron kept staring at me through the window. And when I opened the door, the yard was a sea of hungry chickens.”

  Then, one day, a planner from the government drove the rutted lane down to Ray’s house. He’d never seen so many one-winged gulls and maimed creatures in his life. When Ray walked over, the planner rolled down his window and tried to explain something. But the words just went in one ear and out the other. Whatever it was the man was talking about, Ray decided to pay no attention.

  When I read about the harbour development program in the paper, I knew Ray was in for big trouble. Somebody had determined that Tom Lurcher Inlet had one of the deepest, cleanest, most interesting channels on the whole shore. The channel would just have to be dredged and straightened, the article said, and they’d blast the cannonball shoal to smithereens if they had to.

  Ray was heaving fish heads to his gulls on the morning I told him the news. He didn’t believe me. “What do they want this place for?”

  “They want to put in a new wharf and bring more boats back.”

  “But nobody lives here.”

  “They will,” I explained.

  Ray received notices in the mail, but he refused to read them. Then the planner drove up again, this time with a Mountie.

  The man pointed to Ray’s house. “We’re willing to make an offer . . .” But Ray didn’t listen to the rest.

  He got in his boat and headed to sea. The tide was wrong and he barely squeaked past the Cannonballs without ripping the engine out of her. I hired Bill Mannette to take me to sea to look for Ray. We saw Ray’s boat beached at Riley’s Island. When we came in close, I jumped out and ran up and down the beach, finally finding Ray sitting alone on a drift log.

  “This one’s not right, either,” Ray said. “But I’ll keep looking.” Ray pulled a wad of two-dollar bills out of his pants and shoved it into my hand. “Feed my creatures. I’ll be back in a while.” I tried to talk him into coming back now, but he’d have none of it.

  I kept an eye on Ray’s creatures, but I couldn’t get any of them to eat. I was sitting on Ray’s back step looking to sea when his boat appeared. The chickens and gulls exploded into life. I held my ears and covered my head. The gulls that could fly made a beeline toward the boat. Ray pulled up tight to the dock, cut the motor.

  “I found it,” he said.

  He’d say nothing more. He fed his creatures from a boatload of fresh cod and over the next week built a barge out of wood from Adele’s first house. I offered to help, but he wouldn’t let me lift a finger.

  Ray took his time about what he was doing. I checked in every day, but he had little to say to me. It was about a week later that I heard the bulldozer thundering down the lane to Tom Lurcher Inlet. I ran down the path to Ray’s wharf, but I was too late.

  Ray’s boat, towing his barge full of animals, was on a slow, zigzag path to sea. A whirlpool of sea gulls swirled above the boat in the bright blue sky. I waved, but I don’t think he noticed me. I wanted to see his face, but he was too far away. I wanted to know if he was smiling, but I’ll never know. The boat and the barge passed by the Cannonballs and on beyond the lightning-splintered tree at the mouth of the inlet. Ray turned neither east nor west but went straight south until he was lost in the squint of the sun and the swell of the sea.

  From the Second Season of Jonas Macpherson

  LOSING GROUND

  When I was thirteen, my best friend was John Kincaid. In late spring the lifeblood of the planet began to run free, and the gaspereau were making their way up inside the land. John was a hard knot of a kid, with chipped bones from falling off back steps and close-cropped hair over a skull that suited the Reaper himself. He was always unhappy, dissatisfied with everything, primed with so much anger it shot out his arm like electricity. He threw things — rocks, wood, fists — because his father had hit him so often, pounded fear and hate into him in the evenings so that he would come out into the world and throw it around at everything. He always wanted to teach me how to kill things, and I hated him for that, for his private unbent cosmology of crippling living things and siding with the blatant burning death wish of all things that moved. But there was a kind of love between us, although I could never have called it that. The emotional economics of our ageing had dism
antled what little love we had and sent it off to scrapyards where we would have to go looking one day for the rusted remains, so that we might rehabilitate the engines of childhood and translate love into sex and sex into love and believe again in girls and women. It would not be impossible, but for now the corrosion was effective, and we were all but lost.

  So John Kincaid and I were by the brook where it swept soft curves of cold water light up into the sky and sped unsalted freshness into the sea forever. This tiny stream went miles inland to find its source at a stagnant, weed-choked pond that grew mosquitoes in summer and hatched dragonflies the size of toy airplanes and spawned frogs free and restless for Kincaid killings. But here at the edge of salt, the last instant of fresh water about to salt down its blood for good, we sat on a rare sunlit afternoon waiting for gaspereau to come flapping up the shallow brook so that we could do what? Catch them to eat? We had tried that once. “Better to eat razors,” John had said. “Better to sit down to a plate of hot sewing needles and chew hard, better to swallow fried radio tubes and wire.” The gaspereau were hopeless fish to us. Somebody’s mother (it was reported at school) cooked the fish for three days straight until all the bones were dissolved and a cord of softwood consumed, and then you could sit down to a plateful of mush which almost still tasted of fish, while you could be assured your house would stink of gaspereau until Christmas. No, I don’t think we had hope of catching them to eat.

  I didn’t even care to catch one. It was too easy, too pointless. To Kincaid, it was as if they hovered offshore all winter waiting for a chance to slap themselves out of the deep into the thinning waters of an unnamed brook looking for his stones to club them to death. Each year I hoped Kincaid would be different, that the death lunatic in him would die out so that he could go on with life, but I always expected too much of him.

  Then they appeared. I always felt my own blood race to my head to see a still and shining surface go mad with an avalanche of life, a vast churning orgasm of fish splashing about in a fevered dance to snake themselves up the stream, to swim between rocks and trade up salt for fresh. They were there on this late afternoon in May. It was so beautiful that I almost forgot to see the damn boulder that blasted John was holding over his head ready to go, ready to get in the first bash at the first flawed creature who found his way inside the rock’s shadow. But as I turned and saw him ready to pound, I decided this was the year he had to change.