Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  The goat had two marbles for eyes and, at the centre of each, a green diamond displaced from a night star. They were unblinking eyes that might have been borrowed from a god or a devil, for the Baptist had seen the goat stand upright in the wind on a November night beneath a full moon. Muriel had seen it, too, and without explanation she had taken a box of salt out and sprinkled it in a circle on the grass. In the morning she found a perfectly circular formation where the green grass had been ripped out and the few inches of soil dug back, so that nothing showed but a smooth circle of seamless bedrock that had been polished clean as if someone had licked the stone to a shine.

  For the Baptist, the sacrifice of the goat would help insure that the human race would begin new and fresh in the new year. The goat did not blink as he held out the gutting knife and sliced along the line, watching its own blood fall on the green frost-white grass and then, in a matter of minutes, begin to freeze in a widening dark pond around itself and the Baptist. With virtually no struggle at all, it was as if the creature had no qualms about giving up any rights it had on this earth. But when the last cup fell from the neck and splashed on the Baptist’s shoes, the man found he could not move; his feet were frozen fast into the red ice, and he looked up to see his wife standing there, her head bent over as she stared at the blood and let out a mournful wail. As she walked back to the house, the Baptist had to take the knife and chip away at his shoes, without success. He removed his feet, leaving the shoes frozen stiff and stained red, then continued with his ritual, cutting alders and piling them in an arc toward the heavens, and then lifted the blood-drained carcass to the top.

  With kerosene he doused the pile and attempted to send his offering above, but a cold, hard rain started, freezing instantly anything in its path. The pile glazed over in a matter of minutes, and the tomb was ice, not fire, and remained like that half the winter as the ice grew thicker but unclouded, staying perfectly clear and building up so that it acted as a magnifying lens, enlarging and distorting the impaired covenant. Had anyone found his way this far out to the point in January, he would have seen one gigantic green diamond eye fixed on the door of Muriel’s house.

  On that morning, when the Baptist had found his way back to the house, he was himself partially glazed, and his bare feet seemed to sweat blood. Muriel washed them in warm soapy water, then made a breakfast of oatcakes and salt fish.

  On the third day of the ice storm, Muriel asked the Baptist to go with her to the basement and pray there upon the bedrock with bared knees, and he did, shouting in his solemn voice to the massive timbers that held up the floors above him, speaking in tongues Biblical and unknown but fearing for once that the words might have come from Satan rather than the Almighty, both having shared the same language once.

  I relate this all to you as best I can by piecing together the fragments of Muriel’s own story from her numerous visits. What happened next remains shrouded, but Muriel took the gutting knife to the Baptist, that is fairly certain, and she may have watched his blood slide along the rock floor and settle in tiny pools, and maybe she left him there for the rats to gnaw, or perhaps she did something else. I’m not one to speculate on that. But when she went back up into the warm house, she had made her own offering to the Old Testament God and consummated a difficult marriage beyond heaven’s gates.

  I was one of the few to have even met the Baptist and never once considered his absence until the following year, when Muriel had begun her own preaching along Penchant, condemning the MacQuarries to a burning pit and requesting in public the Lord to swallow up the men as they stood on the wharf. But to me she said only kind things and simply asked me to read a bit of Revelations to her out loud, which I did in, my most proper schoolboy voice. For that she was grateful, and annually, wherever I lived, she would seek me out and ask me to read.

  The loss of the Baptist was unquestioned, but so were a great many other things along here, and what we always said in public was this: “Probably fell off a boat and drowned,” which was the way so many went that it was said in much the same way as someone might have said: Your neighbour is suffering from a cold, too bad. The goats increased and wandered all over the peninsula looking for better feeding ground. Many turned wild and found their way into the fields as far away as MacQuarrie’s, and for years you couldn’t head over to that end of the land without somebody or other saying to watch out for the wild goats. At least one hunter had been reported to have been gored by the curled horned of a snow-white goat with a long shaggy coat, but everyone said it served him right because he was an American come up from the Boston States looking for moose, and we didn’t need his kind anyway. But the kids were warned off, and generally no one really wanted to trust a car on that winding stretch of ruined earth called a road to see how Muriel was faring with her farm. Not until the Voice of America, the radio people who wanted to send messages to Europe, decided that the three low hills out near the tip of Penchant were just perfect for their radio towers. They inquired of the government to discover the land’s owner and found, to their delight, that Muriel didn’t officially own any of her land anyway. And, oh, they were polite about it and said that she could keep her house and her little kitchen garden and the barn, but that the three gentle hills of such perfect geometry must go to the Voice, and so they did.

  Some of the construction crew shot a few of her goats, and she tried to set fire to a bulldozer, but the RCMP came for the first time ever and said she would have to go if she didn’t co-operate. So she went back to shouting names from the Old Testament at the sea as the radio people skewered the sky with three giant towers, each with evil blinking red lights, each sending invisible messages in foreign tongues to people on another continent.

  Muriel realized that she may well have sinned in the eyes of the Almighty back there in the time of the Baptist and knew that the sinister blazing red light of the tower had a message for her, too. The Lord did move in mysterious ways and had taken his time with settling up accounts with her. And she was grateful for that.

  Many years after the towers were built, she would visit us and explain how she prayed daily on her bare knees in her basement on a certain circumference of smoothed bedrock that, she said, she kept polished with her own tongue. She had shown Eleanor and me her knees, which looked misshapen and gnarled like old cat spruce limbs. The skin had a tough, leathery callus like the hide of some animal. She would ask if we would allow her to kneel for a while and pray on our own floorboards, and we would always oblige her. Afterwards she would thank us and compliment the softness of our boards. Then she would ask for a cup of tea, and we would sit quietly together like we were all the most civilized, gentle people on the face of the earth.

  DANCE THE ROCKS ASHORE

  I think I love him more now that he’s losing his mind than I did when I first married him. Pretty funny how things work out that way. He says he doesn’t want to go to a doctor, and I don’t blame him for that. Never know what they’ll do to you. We never went to doctors much the whole time we have been married. Just the way we were, the two of us.

  Hard to think ahead about what might come next. Tough enough to focus on the here and now. But I’ll tell you, I can see every little detail of our past life together like it’s right here before my eyes. The first time I laid eyes on Jim. Getting married before the judge, just the two of us before him in that big empty room. Of course we’d already been living together. Then there’s all those pictures of him and me swimming around in my head.

  Or sometimes I see pictures of just him. I can see Jim and the dog rolling aroundtogether in the yard. We always had a dog because we couldn’t have kids. Usually the dog would come with us when we took those long morning walks to the wharf, with the sun just barely fending off the shivers with its thin, grey-silver light. I don’t need to get out the photo album to see all that.

  Of course I’m not a hundred per cent sure that it’s him who’s crazy. Could be me. Caught myself
staring straight into the TV set the other day and it wasn’t even on. I was entertaining myself, I guess, with my own reruns of the past. Better that way, maybe. No commercials, no interruptions. But I don’t think that makes me crazy. Jim’s the one who wakes up some mornings, and, if I don’t wake up myself, he’ll be all done up in his rubber boots and sea pants, picking up his gear and heading out the door to his boat.

  Only there is no boat. Well, at least, she can’t go anywhere. She sits up on land now. The boat’s too old and too dry to ever go back into the water. Jim said it wasn’t worth keeping her in repair. Like us. Jim and me. Old, tired a lot, one or both of us crazy.

  Jim started to lose a grip on things when the fish gave out. Oh, we’d seen it coming for a long time. Jim came home one day, and he sat down on that piece of lawn furniture he’d built out of alder saplings, and he just looked at his hands.

  “What is it?” I asked him. I knew something was wrong.

  “It’s over,” was all he said, but I knew what he was talking about. I’d been catching bits and pieces of it on the CBC radio.

  “What do you want for your dinner?” I asked him, putting my arm around his shoulders.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  I had to walk away then ’cause I didn’t want to have to look at him. I didn’t want him to have to see me watching him cry. You know what I mean, what I’m trying to say. About men and all. I went inside and closed the door and let out this big sigh of relief. I could never come out and admit to him that I was secretly happy that it was over. He’d be safe now.

  Yes, he did cry. I know that. A man isn’t supposed to cry, but I think he can handle it as long as he thinks no one is watching. Jim always cried when the dogs died. Trouble with dogs is that you outlive them. We outlived three, Jim and me. All died of old age, but they died just the same. We have three good dogs buried on the edge of the forest here. Don’t know exactly why we never replaced Beauty. She was the last one to go.

  I guess Jim never had any real thoughts about what he’d do once he stopped fishing. But it wasn’t like he planned to die at sea. Jim had sense. He came home one day with a survival suit that the government helped to pay for. “A man could stay alive in this thing for days at sea if he had to,” he said. “Got pockets for food and everything.” He put the ridiculous-looking thing on, and then he put his arms around me and hugged me tight. “I’m never gonna drown like them other silly bastards. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving you alone. If my boat ever goes down, you better bet on me out there bobbing around like a cork, waiting for that Jesus helicopter ride. Just make sure I got plenty of sandwiches, in case. I’d hate to be out there without food. That’s the only thing that scares me. The thought of missing lunch.”

  Jim was always a survivor. Nothing got him down. He had that suit ready to just jump into the sea with my sandwiches in his waterproof pockets. He even had radio emergency gear to signal the coast guard by way of a satellite in space. Jim was not a man prepared to go down with his ship. He’d never be that mean to me.

  That suit is still hanging upstairs on a hook. Jim never had to use it. It was always with him on the boat, though, ready to save him and keep me from being lonely. It was the suit that got us both going on that conversation, you know the one. “If I go first I want you to . . .” Every married couple goes through that.

  “If I go first, I want you to find some sensible, pretty woman and marry her,” I said.

  “Not possible,” Jim said. “The two never go together.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped back, pretending to be insulted.

  “What I meant to say was that a man can find a woman with those two qualities only once in life, and I found it.”

  “You’re a liar,” I teased. I wanted more of the flattery. Jim never was good at flattery, never said a whole lot about how I looked or if he liked my hair or dress. I learned to live without the language of flattery.

  “If I go first,” he continued, “You have to do something you always wanted to do but never did because of me.”

  Funny thing, but right then I actually thought about a whole list of things we never did, things that maybe I would do if he was gone. Drive to Halifax and go to a symphony concert, eat breakfast some day in a fancy restaurant. The whole time we were married, we never once ate breakfast anywhere other than at home, and half the time we were eating it in our kitchen with all the lights on because the sun wasn’t even up yet.

  Jim saw the look in my eyes, dreaming up a list of things. “If I go first, I want you to do whatever you want. Just be sure to bury me out there with the dogs. I’d like that. They were good dogs.”

  All he had to do was mention the dogs and I started to cry, feeling awful guilty for even thinking about Jim dead.

  “If I go first,” I said, “I want you to take good care of yourself.” That was all I could get out. Then he gave me a hug and went out to mow the yard with the lawnmower.

  I need to explain about the place we live in. It’s a house Jim built — well, I helped him build it, too — about thirty years ago. It sits on five acres of land that goes right up to the inlet, with a big lawn stretching down to the sand and the water. Jim has about ten pieces of lawn furniture out there made from those alders and young birch trees. Stick furniture it’s called, although the name doesn’t do it justice. People admire the chairs because they look like they are still wild and alive. Jim would mow the grass with a gasoline mower, and it would stay green right up into December. We’d go out there on one of those rare, warm days in late fall, and he’d say, “It feels just like summer.” The grass was a rich green, the water in the inlet was a piercing blue. Those were good moments. Those were better than any old breakfast in a restaurant.

  So hard to think of all the good things as being behind us. If we had kids like other people, maybe we’d have that way of talking about the future, seeing it in our children and grandchildren. But we don’t have that, and I’m not gonna go worrying myself about what might have been. Like I say, I’ve got Jim to focus my worrying on.

  It was a couple of weeks after the news that the cod were all gone. They might not be back for ten years, a hundred years or ever, that’s the way the government man said it. Jim sat down in the yard on his chair with a pile of newspapers he’d pulled out of the wood shed. And he started to read them. These papers were probably three years old or older. But he just sat down and started to read one after the other — the news, the classifieds with boats for sale, the sports. I didn’t say a word about it. What was there to say, anyway?

  Later that day when I was in the kitchen making a soup from an old ham bone and some stuff from the garden, Jim was walking around the house from room to room, like he was looking for something. He opened drawers and peered into cabinets, and when he was on his second circuit, I asked him what he was searching for. Jim seemed startled, and he looked at me with this odd blank stare on his handsome face. He tried to shape some words in the air with his hands, he stuttered, and finally he just said, “I don’t know.”

  I saw the fear in his face, and it scared the living daylights out of me, but I didn’t let on. I laughed and chastised him for being so absent-minded. “You’d lose your head if it wasn’t held on by your neck,” I said for the five-hundredth time in our marriage.

  One night I woke up and touched him on the shoulder. He didn’t notice, I’m sure. His breathing was so slow and steady, just like that of a child. I needed to talk, and I guess it didn’t matter much if he was awake or not. I’d been feeling guilty for some time about the whole fishing business. Like it was my fault or something that the cod had all gone away. Jim, I said to my sleeping husband, when you said it was all through with the fishing and the boat and hauling off in the morning in the dark to risk your life at sea, I had to hold back from smiling. I had to hold back from going bloody wild with happiness now that I’d never have to worry about you at s
ea again. Pretty selfish, I know, ’cause I wasn’t thinking about how you were feeling but thinking about me. I had you all to myself and wouldn’t have to share you with the Atlantic Ocean ever again. Well, I got that off my chest. Knew I had to say it to him some day because it had been burning a hole inside me. But now I didn’t feel so bad. Jim was safe, and I would have him with me twenty-four hours a day.

  But I guess I was fooling myself somewhat on that. It was like I was going to be punished after all for my selfish, foolish thoughts. The next morning Jim woke up first. When I opened my eyes he was sitting bolt upright in bed, and he was looking around the room in a strange way. I knew already what the look was about. He didn’t know where he was. I took a deep breath and sat up. Jim edged away slightly and turned his piercing blue eyes in my direction. I thought they were going to drill right through me. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice almost shaking.

  I knew that this would happen sooner or later, and I had been practising in front of a mirror for my own way of dealing with it. I’d a read a little bit in the Reader’s Digest about the disease that was affecting my poor husband’s brain. I didn’t understand it real well, but I knew there would be these lapses. His memory would go away, and it would come back, a little bit at first, a little more later. Something like the tide going in and out, but it would get more drastic over time. The tide would someday slip out and never come back at all.

  “What am I doing here?” Jim demanded as I tried to get a grip on myself.