Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  So I tackled him, and the rock came down hard on my back as we poured down into the wet moss. He let go a flock of curses learned from a professional, his father, a man with the devil’s own dictionary under his skull. I could feel the weight of the pain drive down my spine from John’s ancient weapon, but I didn’t care. He tried to grab a dead branch to skewer me, and, had I not known him. I would have run for my life, figuring he would kill me instead of fish, death having its warrant out and willing to settle for spilled blood, cold or hot. But I kept him busy. I knew his spirit and knew he could fight, but so could I for different reasons. We were so equally powered that there could never be a winner. John had an easy temper to strike, but his hate could only drive him so far. I simply had a stupid sort of stubbornness that wanted me to finish whatever I started. So we both fought till we bled enough to satisfy our pride. Then we quit. The fish were gone, the first wave of the year safely upstream in deeper pools for the coming night. And Kincaid didn’t care then. A fight was as good as a bucket of bloodied fish, and we were friends as usual. John said he’d kill me next time, and I said, “Try.”

  Later that spring a man from Halifax came out with a pickup truck and a pair of pitchforks. Kincaid and I were walking up the road to the railroad bridge, and this guy pulled over and asked us if we wanted to make a few cents shovelling fish. We both said sure and got in the truck, where we had to sit on bare springs that had torn free of the seat. The radio was on, but there was nothing but static. Mr. Otto Bollivar, the man said his name was, and that we could call him Mr. Boliver, but we didn’t call him anything. And then he asked where he could find a good gaspereau run, and I knew enough to shut up.

  But John spoke up sharp, ready to give out time-honoured secrets that sent us straight to the spot. Mr. Bollivar was pleased and started coughing like maybe he would die or something if he didn’t quick light a cigarette that he had to roll first. That seemed to stop the coughing. He threw me a pitchfork that would have gone through my boot if I hadn’t moved quick. He told John, “Here. Use this net, it’ll do.”

  “I ain’t helping you with the fish,” I said. Mr. Boliver looked at me like I said I was born on Jupiter.

  “I’m paying you, ain’t I?” He hadn’t said how much.

  “How much?” John wanted to know.

  “Twenty cents apiece. Now shut up and let’s get to work.” I could already see that the stream was wrestling with itself the way that it does when the gaspereau are running.

  “Look, you can’t eat the damn things anyway,” I shouted at him. He was a townie, a stupid city-slicker who probably didn’t know. Instead of thanking me for saving him the work, he dropped his pitchfork, bit down on his cigarette and angled over to me.

  “You know that. And I know that. But them stupid buggers in Halifax don’t know cod tongue from coffin hinges. They’ll buy it if it’s the right price. And it’ll be the right price.” He coughed up something and spit a wad of yellow, awful phlegm on the ground.

  “Forget it,” I told him, “twenty cents or no twenty cents,” and I walked on home. I knew Kincaid would stay, and he did. Later, he told me that he got the full forty cents, which was a lie because he only got a dime, if he got that.

  A couple of years after that , John Kincaid and I had our own boat. It was a boy’s boat because no man would ever have set foot in it, at least not in the condition that it was in. It wasn’t what you’d call a skiff and it wasn’t a dory and, as far as we could figure, it wasn’t anything that anybody had fixed name for.

  We found her right side up in the wide marsh at the foot of Rigger’s Lake in the winter. When the lake froze over, you could go walking out there and feel the arctic wind bear down until it made you feel good, all cold and clean inside like someone had just taken lye powder to your soul, and you wanted to just suck in that cold frozen air, let it paralyze your nose hairs, then knife down into your chest. It felt that good. Kincaid and I didn’t have ice skates, but we liked to slide our feet out across the glazed wilderness. No one ever felt as free as we did then, and it didn’t catch up to us until the north wind drove white teeth marks into us with frostbite. Then we’d have to run back home and sit in front of the cookstove, where our faces bloomed beet-juice red, and our legs, Lord, how they’d itch, but we knew for sure we were alive.

  I think it was hunters who had lost the boat or simply left the damn thing. It was half-rotten, poorly made to begin with, and filled with brown tide frozen up to the oar locks. Ironically, it was me who was the first to pick up a rock and want to bash in the sides just for the hell of it. But Kincaid, God, the light of Jesus took over his eyes because he had before him a boat , a rotten, dull and worthless thing, but a boat, a miracle, a frozen revelation from on high, the possibilities of life-ever-after and the means he had been looking for. He stopped my hand and let the rock fall at our feet, sending out a giant crack in the ice that shot northward halfway to Truro. “We’ve found a frigging boat,” was all he said. Water seeped up from the crack, and I worried that we had split the whole bloody planet in two, that it would turn inside out and the devil would present himself out of the depths and thank us for setting him free for good. He would have ice for a beard and icicles for hair and white blinding stones for eyes, for we knew that the Bible had gone through a number of translations and was all wrong. Hell was cold, frozen place, damp and bone-numbing like a winter fog.

  But nothing happened, save the setting free of one devilish spirit. The boat. I had never seen John so dedicated and so gentle. First we used dead limbs cracked off marsh spruce, then we tried chipping away the ice like Indians with sharp stones, and finally Kincaid ran off all the way to Baylor McNulty’s chopping block to confiscate Baylor’s double-bit axe for the rescue, while I stood guard as if there were hordes of other half-wits out wandering the frigid wasteland wanting to salvage the carcass of this pathetically contrived duck hunting boat, fragile as an eggshell and rotten as the politics in Halifax.

  But Kincaid made good with the axe and chipped away like a sculptor until it was free and all the worse for it. Then he let out a long, maniac yelp in triumph. “We got our boat, Joney boy,” he repeated three times over, and I knew what it meant to him, and I wanted it to mean as much to me. I knew it would always be Kincaid’s, but we’d have to do it together, whatever was to be done with that ice devil. So we dragged it home across two miles of frozen grass and paper-ice shelving left high and dry by a retreating tide. The blasted thing was heavy as lead over the rough little hillocks of chumped-up ice that had corrugated in the shallows. She was still weighted down with the freight of her own brown ice, and Kincaid wouldn’t let me touch the inside, fearing I’d split the gunwale and destroy whatever mysterious vortex of spiritual energy held the boat together. There we were, human flesh hauling dead, brown frozen water two miles over a pitiless lake in a gale come down special delivery from Hudson Bay. So of course we made it. All the way to Kincaid’s back step, and sure he wanted to haul the thing inside to thaw, only we would have had to remove the door frame, then chase out his father, propped up like a mannequin with a bottle in the kitchen listening to a near-shot radio playing opera.

  You have to understand that John’s father had lost the boat he owned to the bank and the government, he wasn’t sure which, but the boat was gone. Not a boat like ours, but a real Cape Islander with a German engine of some kind and a couple of sails. It was just about the biggest boat that anybody had seen on this shore for one man to own and to fish with, and you wanted to see that pile of cod it would deliver. Only something was frigged with the way the world worked because one day the people wanted to eat cod, the next day, so the buyer said, you couldn’t give it away with pitchforks for a penny, and what do you do with a boat with an engine yet and a hungry bank and a government that has made promises for you? Inevitably, the boat was lost, sent to Halifax and set up in dry-dock, where it would rot until the economy improved or until folks got their tastebuds
back for cod or mackerel but none too soon at that.

  George Kincaid galvanized himself with illegal rum and swore to God Almighty that he should have become a runner of rums himself like his father had suggested and used that German engine for some good business and let the fish go to hell. But he had been stupid. Here he already owed Lance Inkpen more money for his booze, what with nothing coming in. And what could you do but sit around in your own venom and get good and angry at everybody and nobody and forget about ever being the man you once were? John’s mother had become a ghost. She was there but she wasn’t. She always made the meals, and then it was like she slipped into a trance and waited for George to cancel himself out for the day. Late at night, John said, she waltzed around the kitchen alone with the radio on and hummed. This didn’t make damn bit of sense to him. He thought she was cracked. But he believed in his old man.

  John couldn’t wait for spring to loose the chains on the boat of his, so he set to carving out the ice with a hand axe ever so slow and painstakingly, and once I tempted him to pour hot water on her, but he shot the idea down, fearing it would crack the moulded ribs and the boat itself would melt into the soil. Maybe it would just drain away in the spring rain or simply self-destruct, evaporate or dissolve.

  Finally, a tense winter sun in late February began to burn holes through the snow piled on the roof, and Johnny hauled out some old framed windows to set over the boat. By the end of the afternoon, she was dry and sound. Sound and solid as cork. You could have put your fingernail through her just about anywhere, but this didn’t bother John at all, and what the hell, I was getting excited. “She’ll take a little paint. That’s all she needs,” I said for no good reason. Good God, then I had to turn away, because John Kincaid was about to cry, and for once I realized I loved him. I didn’t know up until that time that you could love a friend. But I let it be at that. I couldn’t say a word, knowing that it was the same sort of love John felt toward me for saying something so foolish in his favour and believing that this pitiful gathering of planed spruce was more than a memory gone sour.

  * * *

  Sopping spring again. Cold, damp and angry with life there just beneath the surface ready to break the locks and sweat itself into summer. The ground cracked finally one day and was about to swallow up the cars and the horses and pull man back to mud at last. The boat had been glazed to lightning gloss with stolen green paint, so that when the sun broke like warm champagne on our navy she sang bright chords of sea shanties locked up in her rotten wood. We had to carry her half a mile to Rigger’s Lake, then farther down the shore to where the ice had given up and salt water lapped fresh. The gulls still sat on the ice in favour of winter, and they watched as we slid our hopes out into the blue-green water. Kincaid was in a trance, a spiritual ecstasy, a man of water at last. To hell with land, such a sad substitute for the floating world. A man arrived, a child acquitted, a soul saved.

  “Sit down before we both drown,” I told him as he danced about lightly as a sandpiper and crazy to boot. He sat. We were floating, oarless, the obvious tools forgotten, left on the shores. What did we know of reason? Left to himself, John would have let the current slip him out to sea as soon as it was able. He didn’t care. I did.

  “Dig, damn it!” I chastised him, meaning to use his hands. We had to quick paddle back to shore, retrieve the ends to our means. It was like pulling Lucifer out of heaven. But I made the lunatic dig.

  Each leaning over a side, we plied the water up to our elbows, in slow painful strokes. God Himself had performed a dirty miracle and allowed this body of water to stay liquid well below the freezing point. It was like dipping your arms full-length into a barrel of razor blades and stirring them up. The cold was magnificent, absolute and horrendous. John howled from the pain. My arm cramped up and I had to switch. It was maddening and wonderful. The logic of boats, of currents, was not with us, and we lost ground, only to be saved by a sunken trunk that nabbed the boat just as we were about to slip into the channel itself and make ready for the sea, where the waves were cracking like fireworks over the rocks at the shallow mouth of Rocky Run. I jumped for shore and landed on a wafer-thin shelf of ice left from another tide, then danced through sheets of glass and jeweller’s mud until I was on the bank with the rope.

  “Good work, Joney, good work,” Kincaid rattled, not shaken a bit. Death and life were all the same to him now he had the boat. Either way he was saved.

  In the summer that followed the salvation of the boat, we were at it. Fishing. Making real money. Not much, but our own. Cod, hake, haddock, mackerel. Sold to women for half its worth and only the best fish. Independence. John, a changed creature. Self-respect, pride, the ability to endure the world forever. In August the sun turned benevolent and peeled our shirts off, then painted our skin red. Even the water warmed against its better judgement. By our own tiny wharf, we gutted and scraped and heaved heads to gulls and pretended it would go on like this forever — blue sky, mica-mirrored fish scales electric with light; it was like some wonderful balloon was bursting in my chest. There was nothing to do but wait till Kincaid had put down his knife for an instant to wipe snot, and I launched at him and we arced off the wharf through a cloud of herring gulls and into the inlet, slapping down on the afternoon chop like tandem divers. Ten feet of water, hardly more. Green-blue, with seaweed at the bottom and crabs in miniature armies shuttling away from the invasion.

  The miracle of ignorance is always a wonder to behold. John’s ignorance in not being able to swim a stroke and my own at never once realizing the obvious fact. Kincaid held on around my throat with a wresting hold and tried to pull me down to where it seemed he wanted to writhe upon the rocky bottom. I understood his curses even below air and feared for us both. I had often noticed my inability to remain civilized when deprived of oxygen, and John obviously shared that affliction. Kicking him in the gut to free the elbow bent around my Adam’s apple, I pushed away and shot up for air, only to be hauled back down by a lead anchor around my feet. John, somehow refusing to even flap his way up to kiss air, preferred death for us all, but a man without legs is not without arms to whip about and fight for lung privileges. So I, too, cursed and hauled and hoped that, in fact, Kincaid held on, which he did, knowing nothing else below the waterline but my socks and the kick of my shoes in his face. And even after I had regained shore, it was like he didn’t want to give up in the shallows till I crawled up across the stones and busted glass, at least one of still human. John finally heaved himself up on a stump and coughed and vomited and let go of the blue in his skin. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  “You can’t swim, you bastard,” I swiped.

  “In a boat you don’t need to swim.”

  “In our boat you do. You could kill us both.”

  “Seemed like you were the one out for killing.”

  “The hell I was. Look, you stupid fisherman, if you want to fish, you bloody well better learn to swim.”

  “My father don’t swim and neither does any man on this shore who fishes.”

  “Stupid, God Almighty. I’ll teach you to swim.”

  “Never in a million years.”

  I didn’t have that much time, but I knew damn well Kincaid was going to do nothing but fish for the rest of his days, and if he couldn’t swim he might be getting a sad discount on his career.

  “I’m not going back in that damn boat with you until you can tread water.”

  “Go to hell with you.”

  I left fifty pounds of fresh cod on the cutting table to rot and walked home.

  I stewed over it for three weeks, until the first hurricane cut loose from Barbados and made unwholesome threats outside my windows on an evil, dark night. I wondered how many days John would wait for the swell to die off before he would try to run the inlet. He seemed to have no fear of waves and was masterful at rowing our frail little craft right out through ten-foot breakers, then on our way home skate us
down the face of a wave nearly into the railroad bridge. I couldn’t let him continue alone. Besides, I missed the boat myself, so I joined him the next day, and we tempted eternity once on the way out and once on the way in with a haul of fish that should have sunk a boat twice our size. John was cocky and corrupted by his victory, his ability to cheat fate, and the fact that I had given in.

  Only I hadn’t. I waited until the first of November, knowing that we’d have to quit soon anyway. The water temperature was still less than cauterizing. On a dead calm sea, just beyond the shallows of the run, I waited for John to start untangling a hand-line, then quickly hauled the hand axe out of my pack and, with a single swift blow, chopped a hole through the bottom of the boat that sent the axe diving toward a mussel bed. It was only a matter of seconds before the boat was swamped, and I made a dive for it over the side, away from my panicked partner.

  Maybe some boats don’t sink, but ours was not one of them. The sea was greedy, and I knew soon it would want Kincaid, but it wouldn’t be today. I let him curse and let him flounder and stayed close enough so he would fight hell itself to get his hands around my neck, but good God, he swam. He swam like a dragon breathing fire, a runaway water-wheel, a venomous roiling inhuman thing, but he swam.

  We landed ashore on fresh clean sand, white and fine as snow, Kincaid out of breath and boiling in the blood. He thought I had gone mad but wanted to kill me before I had a chance for a cure. He found a rock the size of a marker buoy and charged at me, wanting my skull. I was ready and moved off, waited for him to change weapons and come at me with fists. I let him plant two angry jabs in my face before I made my exit, knowing I had done good and realizing we could never be friends again.