Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  Here goes, I said to myself, putting into action my little plan. Now, the experts had said, stay calm and reassuring, slowly and carefully remind the person of who he is and where he is. But I wouldn’t do that and rob my husband of whatever dignity still threaded its way through his brain.

  Instead, I slapped him playfully on the leg, then tickled him under the ribs. “Don’t be silly,” I teased. “What games are you trying to pull on me?” Then I traced my fingers once through his thinning hair and ruffled it up like when we both had been twenty years old and he had had this big, shaggy mop of thick, curly brown hair.

  Truth is I’m a lousy actress, always was. Couldn’t recite a couple of lines from a play in school in front of a class, couldn’t pretend to be anybody other than who I was in my whole life. This was a real test, I’m telling you.

  I’m not sure Jim figured out much of anything in those few seconds except for the fact that he was safe and this was where he was supposed to be. If I’d have asked him, he wouldn’t have known his own name, I think, and it would have scared me to the root of my being, but I wouldn’t let that scene happen. If Jim was going crazy, then I’d have to go halfway crazy with him if we were going to work it out. One foot in crazy, one on solid ground, that was my plan.

  “Let’s not get up right yet,” I said, and I tickled him some more and wrestled him down under the covers until I got him stirred up enough so that we made love. That was something we didn’t need any talk for at all, and whoever the hell we both were right then didn’t seem to matter much. Everything worked out just fine. It pulled us both back into some warm, secret world full of tenderness and light.

  Afterwards, Jim reached over and flicked the shade on the window so it flipped up in a snap. The late November sunlight came flooding into the room like a big, friendly, happy dog. “What’s for breakfast, woman?” Jim asked in his pretend-to-be-tough voice. I had always liked the way he did that, mostly because it was pretend stuff. Jim was tough, all right, but tough deep down in some strong way that few men on this shore would ever know.

  “Anything you want,” I answered, pretending to be the dutiful wife who only took orders.

  At breakfast, Jim talked to me like there was nothing wrong at all, and I knew that I was going to be able to handle whatever the memory eater could throw at me. I even believed that, if I fed Jim enough of the right food and took good care of the old guy, everything would work out fine. That’s why I fried up some of the cod tongues we’d kept hoarded away in the freezer for special occasions. Jim loved fried cod tongues for breakfast the way some rich people must love their caviar. But caviar could never compare with cod tongues done up just right. When breakfast was over, I checked the stock of what was left in the freezer. It was a hard case of reality coming back to haunt me. We had maybe a dozen more feeds of the blessed stuff in there. It dawned on me then that, with the cod all killed off, I might not ever be able to replenish the supply. I’d have to dole it out carefully and make it last as long as I could. Cook it up only on extra-special occasions like this.

  Jim saw me standing there with the upright freezer door open and cold smoke pouring out over me like a spring fog. I quickly closed the door before he might begin to consider what I was worrying about.

  “I’d like to go down to the boat,” Jim said to me, and I didn’t know if he was still thinking she was in the water afloat or if he could remember that those days were all over. But then he added, “Good day for a walk. Maybe you want to come with me.”

  “I’d like that,” I told him, and began to take the plates off the table until Jim stopped me.

  “I’ll take care of this. Go get yourself ready.”

  Out on the road that morning, we walked the same path Jim would have taken every working day, winter or summer, whenever the weather allowed the boats to go to sea. Despite the cold, the sun felt hot on my face, and I felt young again like you wouldn’t believe. Everything made me smile. Jim holding onto my arm, the McCarthy’s big stupid dogs yapping at us as we went by, the sunlight sparkling off the ice crystals that grew like diamonds in every blooming pothole in the road. It was a day to be fully alive. It was a cold but clear day, not a touch of wind. I was all bundled up, but Jim had on nothing more than his old ratty wool pullover. We walked down the gravel road that leads from the highway to the fishing wharf. Beyond that point, the road dwindles off to nothing. It doesn’t exactly come to an end, it just fades to nothing that looks like a road, just a patch of stubbly stones and a stretch of flotsam and sand. Further beyond is a stretch of rocks sticking up out of the water like broken teeth. That’s all that connects what’s left of Crofter’s Point to the mainland. Still farther out is what’s left of the headland where Jim had grown up, on a farm at the very tip of the land named for his family. Unfortunately, the sea has swallowed up most of the old farm. It’s hard to believe that in forty short years the Atlantic could have been so hungry as to chew up a barn and a field and so much land. Every time I thought about that place through our entire marriage, I had this sneaking suspicion that the sea had stolen Jim Crofter’s family farm and that it was anxious to snatch him away as well. Even though I loved the ocean for its beauty, I never trusted it once in my whole life. We were sworn enemies, she and I. Both of us had wanted Jim, but I had won.

  Our home was halfway out from the highway to the wharf. For Jim, it had been a kind of retreat back from the high hill of the headland where he grew up, a safer haven along the less troublesome, less greedy tides of the inlet, with its crystal clear water, its ribbons of eelgrass and its millions upon millions of underwater snails. We had a nice little house set back from the road and that big green lawn that he was always so proud of spilling down to the edge of Five Fathom Harbour. At the sandy shoreline, we had a grand view of every sunset of the year and all the privacy and beauty anybody could cram into a single lifetime.

  When we arrived at the boat, Jim’s own Just My Luck, it was like a big dark cloud suddenly came swooping across the sky even though the sun was still out bright. Jim sucked in his breath and reached up to put his hand on the bare, weather-stained wood of the gunwale. That touch and the look on his face was something I care not to translate. I was sure he was about to slip into one of his episodes and lose himself, either that or explode like some kind of volcano. Ever since the fishing had gone bad it was like everybody around here was ready to go off like a firecracker. Who the hell was to blame, anyway? Government, politicians, Spanish trawlers, the Russians? Was it us or the sea itself? Nobody could pin it down, and that frustration made some of the men go right crazy. Billy Jobb taking a hammer to the RCMP car one day for no obvious reason. Kyle McCurdy beating on his poor wife until she had to leave him and move to Truro. Stammy Woodhouse, who had always lived alone, just boarded up his house one day and took off in his four-by-four. Nobody every heard from him.

  Jim had his own way of dealing with it. He didn’t hardly talk to me or anyone for about ten days. And then he started to lose his memory.

  I took Jim’s hand off the side of the boat. We both looked like a pair of prize idiots, I know, standing there in the blasting sunlight staring at the side of an old boat whose paint was peeling badly. All that blue and yellow giving way to grey boards beneath. It seems that every damn thing along these shores of Nova Scotia first turns grey before it eventually gives up the ghost.

  Jim turned away from the boat finally and followed the track of where the boat had been hauled up from the inlet, skidded up on parallel logs leading ashore from the water line and the tidal zone, rich green with algae and slime.

  “Tide’s real low,” Jim announced.

  “Hardly ever gets that far down,” I offered. When you live all those years as a fisherman’s wife, you learn that any discussion of tide is a serious matter.

  “It does. A couple times a year. Easy to make a mistake coming in past the point. When she gets this low, you don’t want to trust the markers.�
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  That’s when I noticed Jim had turned his attention seaward. He leaned against Just My Luck, and I watched as he drifted off back home, to his first home, that is, on Crofter’s Point. A lot of people consider it an island now, since the rocks that connect it to the mainland are underwater most of the time.

  It had been a long while since Jim had gone home to what little was left of his old place. The last time he had gone there alone on his boat and rowed the skiff ashore. He never told me more than five words about his visit that time. I looked off to where Jim was looking, and I could see what he had discovered. “You could walk there today, if you don’t mind high-stepping all those slippery rocks.”

  “And if you get there and back before the tide slips.”

  Once the words were out, there was no turning back. I hated trying to walk on slippery, stony shorelines more than anything else, and there was probably some ice on some of those stones today as well, but like I say, there was no turning back.

  “I haven’t been home in a long time. Maybe there’s still something left.”

  It was a difficult trudge for me, a real battle of body and mind just to keep from crashing down and breaking a leg or an elbow, but Jim held me steady and had no trouble at all, except for the fact that I was slowing him down. It took forty-five minutes from the end of the road, and it wouldn’t have been possible except for the extreme low tide.

  Crofter’s Point, once a hundred acres of beautiful green pastures just poised above the sea, was now whittled down to a third of that size. Barely anchored to shore by that backbone of boulders and stones we had just travelled, it was as if the place was prepared to let slip from the mainland altogether and drift off to some other continent. Where the hills once curved smoothly and gently down to the sea, now there were ugly, scalloped red dirt cliffs and, above, a dagger-shaped plateau of land that was being hacked away by every storm and wave the world could conspire.

  Jim and I climbed up the lowest slope, him holding fast onto my hand as we set more stones free to rattle against their cousins beneath. Jim’s parents were long dead, no brothers or sisters left. He still paid taxes on this place and had never argued to have them reduced because of the fact that it was shrinking. We both knew that it would disappear forever without a trace not too many years after we were gone.

  The gulls were the true owners of this property now. They nested here on the grass in the early summer, their young ones grew, and those who survived took their first flight at the cliff’s edge. They swirled and shrieked about our ears as we walked through the tall, brown grass and dead thistles. I smelled the crush of bayberry plants beneath our feet. “This was quite a place for a boy to grow up,” Jim said as his eyes followed the swoop and flow of the gulls around us. Some looked like they were brazen enough to dip down and stab at us with their beaks, but it was as if an invisible barrier prevented them from getting dangerously close. It was obvious they didn’t like us being here. They didn’t trust us, and I could understand why. I’d seen fishermen shoot gulls for fun, a sickening game. Jim had gotten into a fight more than once with someone over that. He hated seeing anything killed without good cause.

  “It was heaven or hell,” Jim continued as we walked on to where the family homestead had been. “Heaven on a summer day with blue seas stretching to the horizon. Swimming in the pools with the fish and crabs, sometimes a young harbour seal slipping by right beside you like it was nothing at all. Other times, the storms came and battered away at the barn and the house, and a good blow might last three or four days, and you’d see the sun for only an hour before a new storm would come in right at you again until you thought you would crack. It was during those times my father would start to act like he wasn’t my father. He’d bang me around for some foolish thing I’d done.”

  “He beat you? You never told me.” I was taken completely by surprise. How could we have lived together all those years without him ever revealing this?

  “It wasn’t worth telling, I guess. Besides, I was afraid you knew what I knew — kids who grow up getting batted around by an old man with a temper usually grow up to be just like their fathers.”

  “That’s what they say. But why didn’t you ever tell me about it?

  “I didn’t tell you at first because I thought it might scare you away from marrying me. Then I didn’t tell you after because I thought you’d feel like I had somehow lied by holding it back.” Jim was about to either laugh or cry. I didn’t know which. “Then after about thirty years I figured it didn’t matter anyhow because I turned out not to be like him at all, so what’s the point in wasting words on it?”

  “Then why tell me now?” I asked.

  His face softened into a smile. “Guess I figured I didn’t have anything to lose and should get it off my chest.” His whole body seemed to relax as I shook my head and called him a big goof. “C’mon,” he said, “I want to show you something.”

  “Something” was the cliff where the barn had tumbled right off the edge into the sea. “I would have liked to have been here during the storm where she let go,” Jim said. “I’ve seen it fall in my dreams a thousand times and thought that if I had been here maybe I could have done something to hold it back. It’s crazy, I know.” Below us there was a scattering of loose boards, bleached greyish-white by the sun, salt and sea. Certainly not enough left to make a body think it had ever been a two-storey barn. And if the rocks were down there that had once been part of a carefully laid foundation, well, they just looked like all the other ones.

  “The barn was right there,” Jim said, pointing with his finger into some place that was now only air. I could almost see it suspended in space before us, floating on the light breeze. To think that the barn was gone, the foundation and lumber dropped below into the sea and the very land it once stood on evaporated to nothing. I felt small just then, and vulnerable.

  We walked around the dent in the ground that was all that was left of Jim’s family home and then crossed over the rim of lichen-covered rocks, and stood inside the old house. “Right about here was my room. The ice pellets used to beat against my window like machine-gun fire. Over there was the kitchen with the wood stove. When all the trees were gone here, I had to row softwood in a dory from up the inlet. Hard and slow work, but I liked it. If I didn’t get there and back quick enough to my father’s liking, he’d call me slow and lazy and sometimes take a belt to me until I bled.” I could see the pain in his face as if the beating had just happened. Then he took a big gulp of air. “Doesn’t matter now. All turned out okay. I still miss him as much as my old mother, who never did an unkind thing in her entire life. Funny, eh?”

  “Not funny at all. Times were different then.”

  “I guess. Look at this. My father would never have imagined this could happen. He believed in this place and thought he had captured the best of both worlds — the sea and the soil, cod and cabbages. At least it was enough while it lasted.”

  “Nothing lasts forever.” That was all I had to offer up, that sad, tired old phrase, as we poked around in the soil that had once been beneath the wooden floor. I expected to come across some old child’s toy or an old shoe, but there was only dirt and stones and bricks shredded into fragments by the weather.

  Suddenly, Jim walked from his old bedroom to the kitchen, for I knew the geography of this troubled home now, and across the threshold where the door had been. He walked straight out, turned left, and, with a sudden burst of energy, ran towards the cliff’s edge, about twenty yards away. “Jim!” I screamed at him, afraid that the return trip down memory lane had rattled him badly. What was he about to do? My heart jumped up into my throat.

  Jim knelt down on the ground and began to scrape away at the weeds, and I wasn’t sure if he was looking for something real or imagined, but when I scrambled over towards him, I could see what he had found. I knelt down beside him. He carefully lifted a dilapidated wooden lid. Below was a dark
, clear pool of water. “This well never went dry. Ever.” He sounded proud and exuberant and that made me feel tingly inside. “We had the best, purest water in the county, my old man said. And it never dropped an inch.”

  Jim threw off the wooden lid and leaned over. The water was almost flush with the ground. He pushed his face right into it and drank long and hard. When he looked up at me, droplets of water streamed from his face and caught the sunlight as they spilled onto the ground. “You know something, Mary? I feel like it was okay that I had heaven and hell, both of them, right here. I had the best life. And it just got better when I left here. I feel so completely alive.”

  I held his face in my hands. The cold drops of water collected on my fingers, and I put them to my mouth. The taste, oh my God, the taste of it all.

  To the gulls still spiralling above, we must have seemed like a curious pair of humans, kneeling side by side as if in prayer beside a hole in the ground. I looked up at those gulls, catching the updraft of air at the edge of the headland, and wondered at the amazing fact that this well, dug by Jim’s temperamental father, was now only eight feet from the very brink of the cliff and a drop off of over a hundred feet.

  The well was full to the brim with fresh, life-giving water, impossibly close to the end of the land where soil and stones gave way to empty air. A miracle of nature that could only result from this being the best well in the county, right here in heaven-and-hell land. But the miracle would be transient. In a year or two, five at the most, the land would give up, the rocks would be loosed by the wind, and the cold, fresh water of the Crofter’s well would spill out into the air, cascade down the side of the red dirt cliff and wash into the sea.

  “Tide’s sneaking up on us,” Jim said, helping me to my feet. “Time to dance you ashore.” It was an old expression of his. Walking on rocks was always like a dance. Jim would lead, I would follow. It was as if his feet agreed to the shape of each stone, negotiated a perfect hold, while mine rebelled at every step. A fresh wind had come up off the sea, and it had the sting of winter to it. Halfway back to shore, the dryer rocks had given way to little slapping waves, and we were ankle deep before we had finished the dance of rocks back to the mainland. We walked home with numb toes and warm hearts. Jim fell asleep that afternoon, the first of many daytime naps that lasted frighteningly long — two hours, three. Sometimes I’d have to wake him for dinner.