Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  I watched Burnet Jr. pick up the axe now and wield it like a weapon in front of him, ready to pounce, to lop off my head, maybe, or chop my father and me in two.

  “I don’t give a shit what happens to that dog,” Burnet Sr. answered, taunting, trying to push my father over the edge so that he’d have cause to rip into the bloody politician with his own teeth and tear him limb from limb.

  “Seems to me all this dog needs is a little something to eat. He’s half-starved,” my father said. And with a quick, sudden motion, he wrenched hard on the dog’s neck, pushing it forward towards Burnet Sr. until the creature’s muzzle was square in Burnet’s crotch. Then, quick as lightning, my father let go of the dog’s head as it chomped down hard on the first thing in its vicinity. McCully fell backwards as his son ran to pull the dog off his old man, who lay howling on the step. As we walked away, my father repeated the words of Hants Buckler. “Can’t blame the dog,” he said. “Can only blame the master.”

  My father seemed particularly rejuvenated as we stood on the little bridge after the incident. “In a true anarchy, Ian, you have this problem about freedom. If everyone is free to do what they want, every once in a while you have some asshole, like Burnet there, whose freedom causes trouble for someone else. Then somebody has to set things straight or you have an unfair system. Otherwise you have to start creating a bunch of laws and good people start to lose their personal independence.”

  I guess I didn’t realize just then that my father was himself a lawmaker — that was what the legislature was all about. Up until that minute I don’t think he had ever seen himself as such. He got elected on a fluke and wanted to change the world. He didn’t want to make a bunch of laws.

  “Without laws, though, who decides on the punishment?” I discovered that I was unconsciously holding onto my crotch, still imagining what it must feel like to have a full- grown, razor-toothed German shepherd lunge at your privates and take a deep bite.

  “Me,” my father said. “Somebody had to do something or those damn dogs might have gone back one night and killed Hants Buckler.” He seemed almost smug now. Even at my age, I could see through his logic. Something was wrong. We both looked down at the clear, cold water flowing toward the sea beneath the bridge. It carried a beautiful mane of long, flowing, green, gold and reddish seaweed. “Necum teuch,” my father said. “That’s how the Micmac would have described this stream. Meant ‘hair of the dead.’”

  As I looked into the water, I could see what the Micmac had seen. Long flowing hair in the channel, long-gone remains of their ancestors, still with them or trying to find their way back to the surface of the earth.

  “That doctor friend of yours?”

  “Ben. Ben Ackerman,” I reminded him.

  “Think he knows how to stitch up a man’s pecker?” I thought that my father had lost his conscience in Halifax, but something in the little creek reminded him. The dead Indians were speaking, maybe. It’s not fair to let a man die because he doesn’t take good care of his dogs.

  “He’s a doctor,” I said, shrugging.

  “I wouldn’t want even Burnet to bleed to death.”

  Ben was meditating in his kitchen when we got there. My father was a little uneasy around him at first, just like before, but I could see that they liked each other. My old man told him what had happened. “I guess I got a bit carried away,” he admitted.

  “We better get over there quick,” Ben said.

  Back at the Burnet house, my father and I stood out front while Ackerman knocked on the door, explained who he was and went in. Burnet Jr. let him in and scowled out at me. I knew I was going to pay for this somehow, on the bus or at school. It’s one thing for fathers to feud, another what kids have to live with and suffer.

  Afterwards, on the walk back, Ben said that Burnet Sr. would be okay. “Gonna hurt like hell to piss for a while though. Couple places the teeth went clean through.”

  My father hung his head.

  “Don’t you think your measures were a little strong?” Ben asked.

  “It was a political act,” my father said. “Besides, those dogs don’t even get fed proper.”

  Ben laughed. They did like each other. I had a funny feeling about it, though, as I slipped behind and watched the two men walk ahead of me. My mind was conjuring up a comparison of the two, and it occurred to me that I knew Ben Ackerman, with all his well-intended lies and half-true past, better than my own father. And it scared me more than staring down Burnet Jr. from thirty paces outside his doorstep.

  The dragon was asleep and didn’t wake until after lunch, when my father had lashed his tie around the pulleys and started up the car. No smoke this time. And then the dragon took my father away. He had said no more of Halifax, of moving. My mother was resolute about that, and there would be no persuading her. None of us wanted him to go. We all hoped that it was just a phase of madness, that he would quit, give up his seat in the legislature. I wanted things to be like before. We were island people, ready to welcome the refugees of the world but reluctant to lose a father to the mainland, to the world. The dragon was a promise that he’d return more often, that we’d see more of him, but it was also a reminder that he had joined another society, one that spent time behind the wheel of a gasoline-powered machine, that ate in restaurants and slept in homes rented from strangers.

  Later that night when the manic yelping began, I thought I was still dreaming of the day’s events. I opened one eye as I lay in bed and saw the full moon through my window. There were howls and barking. The dogs were out there again, prowling the island despite my father’s lesson. I thought of my old pup, Mike, who had survived the hurricane with me, that gentle, dumb dog so full of loyalty and happy for a scrap of anything. He’d been dead for several years now, and I wondered how a dog could be so corrupted by its master to become like these creatures of Burnet’s.

  My father was gone. We were alone: Casey, my mother and I. The barking of dogs came closer. Would they go after Hants again, break down his door and attack him in his sleep? Or had they found their way to my home? At least one had tasted human blood, possibly more. Could dogs with strong savage motivation kill one of us? I was sure that these dogs certainly could. I wanted it all to go away. I wanted to slip back into bed and fall asleep, but as I peered out into the moonlit yard, all at once one of the monster dogs lunged at my window with a horrific yelp. It smashed its face right up against the glass until I could hear its teeth click hard on the pane. It scared the living daylights out of me, and I fell backwards off my bed onto the floor. My heart was racing.

  There was no gun in the house. My mother refused to allow one. Suddenly, Casey burst through the door and ran over to me, threw her arms around me and hugged me with all her might. She was crying. The dog threw itself at the glass again. It would find a way in. A window wouldn’t stop it. I stood up, sat Casey down in a chair and threw on some pants. I surveyed my room for weapons. Not even a baseball bat. A collection of beach stones was the best I had. I picked up one the size of an orange and tried to borrow strength from it as I held it in my hands. Looking out the window, I could see someone standing outside. Not a man. A boy. Burnet Jr. This was his doing, not his father’s. And now I realized that this one was my battle, my test. My father was gone. I felt helpless. I didn’t have his politics, his strength or his courage.

  My mother was in my doorway now, wearing her long blue gown, her nightcoat. She saw the rock in my hand and my other arm around Casey. There was no fear in her eyes, only indignation. I stood upright and wanted to say something. I wanted to say, “I’ll take care of it,” but I wasn’t as good a liar as Ben Ackerman, and I was scared. Scared of the dogs, scared of Burnet as I realized that my father’s ability to settle problems in the Republic of Nothing had diminished to nothing in his absence. It was not a place for part-time presidents and simple violent solutions. But then there was my mother.

  My moth
er in the moonlight is a vision of beauty and power — strange, maybe even dark power. She speaks little to us, but you get the feeling that she is in communion with distant voices, maybe the dead Micmac below the streams, maybe the unnamed voices of her confused past. To some strangers, my mother is so frightening in her ethereal presence that they simply leave without speaking to her. Others, like Ackerman, are drawn to the dark beauty and power that she carries.

  The dogs were crashing at the door now. It sounded like the thrashing of monsters. I was reminded of the wind during the night Casey was born. A hurricane of dogs was assaulting our house. Typically the door was not locked and was held in place by a simple hook. It sounded like a battering ram was pummelling the wood. “Fear is always the worst of it,” my mother said. “Once you’re past the fear, things begin to fall into place.”

  And with that she left us, closing the door to my room behind her. I heard the ranting, growling, thirsting-for-blood madness of the dogs; I heard her footsteps across the kitchen floor, and I heard her unhooking the latch. The door creaked open, and then I heard nothing. The dogs went silent. In a panic I went back to my window. I couldn’t see anything but a cold white moon and the silhouette of Burnet. Damn!

  I opened my own door, closing it behind me with Casey still sobbing inside. My mother was nowhere in the kitchen. The outside door was wide open. I walked cautiously across a path of blue moonlight on the floor, expecting to feel teeth at my throat at any second, terrified that the dogs had already pulled my mother down. And then I was outside. She was there. Twenty feet away from me. She held her hands out, palms upward. They seemed white, glowing, but it was just the powerful light of the moon on her white skin. And the dogs were all lying down on the ground surrounding her, all ten of them. They might well have been dead for all appearances, but I knew they were simply asleep.

  I would not speak and break whatever spell she had put on them. Burnet was now stumbling backwards, his mouth agape. He was watching my mother as she bent down and petted each dog ever so gently. I kept an eye on Burnet, afraid he might do something — throw a stone, a knife, pull out a gun, but he soon disappeared behind some rocks and was gone. He had been let off easier than his father.

  I walked over to my mother, but she waved me away. Her eyes were cold blue fire in the moonlight, and I felt a severe chill creeping up from my fingertips. My mother saw my dread and gave me a warm, soft smile and waved me back towards the house. I said nothing. As I walked back, I heard a man running, panting in the quiet night air. It was Ben Ackerman. He had heard the dogs barking and come. When he saw my mother petting the sleeping dogs, he stopped in his tracks, didn’t say a word.

  The door to my house found me and I slipped back inside. I went to my room to tell Casey that everything was okay, but she was gone. In a panic I ran out to the other rooms, the kitchen, the living room. No Casey. Then I threw open the door to my parents’ bedroom. Casey was in my mother’s bed, asleep, and my mother was fast asleep beside her. I froze and tried to sort out the facts. It was simply impossible. But I would not wake them. Returning to the door and walking outside, I saw the dogs, gently loping away from the yard toward the bridge, toward Burnet’s house. And on the dry cold stones of the driveway, I saw Ben standing all alone, peering straight into the moon, like Casey does, as if the man in the moon could offer him some satisfactory explanation.

  THE WRECK OF THE SISTER THERESA

  Spring was in my old man’s blood. He’d look out to sea and tell me that he couldn’t stay here on shore another minute, that the world looked inside out when he was standing on a shoreline instead of looking at it from the sea. I was nine years old at the time, and I had learned how to look out at the blue horizon and give a long, plausible sigh, just like my father.

  “What you see out there, Ian, is a man’s dream taking form. Look at the thin, hazy edge where sea and sky melt together. You always try to find that place, but you never get there. I’ve almost touched the horizon with my finger once or twice, but it always found me out and sneaked off further to sea. I stopped trying once I married your mother. Your mother swam around in the sea once and said it was enough for her. She’d prefer a desert. That’s why we got all them damn cactus.”

  I had understood about the cactus long ago. It was more the old man’s palm tree growing in the rum barrel in the front room that worried me. “It’s just a symbol,” he told me.

  “What say we go make a visit to Lambert and Eager,” my father suggested.

  I knew he would finally get around to it. And this year I would be allowed to go along. “Sweets,” my old man announced to my mother, who was sitting in the kitchen sewing a new star onto the flag, “we’re going over to see Eager and Lambert, maybe help them out today.”

  Mom looked sullen. But she knew she couldn’t stop him nor me neither. “Just don’t come home drowned and all bloated out like seals,” she said with sandpaper in her voice.

  “I’ll make the boy wear a life preserver,” my father announced. We didn’t have any proper life jackets, so he harnessed a round cork life preserver onto my back. I didn’t dare complain.

  It was nearly seven-thirty when we arrived at Lambert’s boat. There were maybe five hundred sea gulls asleep on the cabin. All the other skippers were already gone to sea. My old man knocked loudly on the door to the cabin, and in a few minutes out stumbled two of the hairiest, smelliest, arguingest men I’d ever seen.

  Lambert and Eager were both short, stocky men with bloodshot eyes.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” my father said.

  “We’ve been up for hours,” Lambert said. Lambert was the skipper. It was his boat.

  Eager was second in command, but you could tell he was a professional complainer by trade. “I never seen such rotten weather,” he said, looking up into a pure robin-egg-blue sky.

  “Goin’ out today?” my old man asked.

  “Hell, we’ve been and back,” Lambert said, a cold-blooded liar. Fishermen like to pretend they’re always several steps ahead of anyone.

  “That’s too bad. Ian and I though we might go along to help out.”

  Eager looked at the life preserver on my back. “What the hell is he supposed to be?”

  “He’s never been very far offshore before,” my father replied, “especially not in a boat as big or fancy as the Sister Theresa here.” He knew how to suck up to a guy like Lambert if he wanted to get his way.

  “I suppose we could go out a second time for the tourist trade.” It was an insult to my father, but he tried not to show the sting of it.

  Instead he felt obliged to remind Lambert of his status on the island. “I’ve been thinking we don’t have enough holidays here,” my dad said, reminding them of who he was.

  “That’s right,” Eager said. “Sonsabitches like Lambert here would work the balls off a mule deer if he could. Bastards like him gonna have labour unrest if’n we don’t get a few more good holidays.”

  “I’ll have to come up with a good occasion,” my father said.

  Of course, they hadn’t been at sea yet that day, or possibly the day before, from the looks of things. “Fire up the engine. Then make some coffee,” Lambert instructed Eager. “And don’t forget to retard the spark.”

  Eager looked at me like it was all my fault. “What the frig you lookin’ at?” he snarled.

  I walked over to the rail and pretended to be studying the water. Someone in one of the fishing shacks flushed a toilet and a pipe nearby gave forth like Niagara Falls.

  Lambert squinted at the logs of shit that hit the water just astern, plopping down like bombs dropped from a B-52. “Pretty soon that whole ocean’ll be nothing but a cesspool. Got a mind to hook up the new power bilge to the end of that pipe and fire back a cannonade of sea water. There should be some kind of law.”

  My father said nothing. He was a devout anarchist, and, while he favoured creating holiday
s for events no more monumental than field mice having babies, he shunned the idea of too many limitations on human behaviour.

  “Start up that damn thing and get us out of this septic tank!” Lambert yelled to Eager, who was still apparently intent on retarding the spark.

  The engine coughed, gargled, backfired, then roared into life. Almost at once, the boat lurched forward. Lambert had only a split second to pull the coiled rope off the bulkhead.

  My old man felt the first tweak of a sea breeze begin to tangle his hair as the boat moved south. His face lit up like a cherry bomb, and I knew it was going to be a good day.

  “Caught over three ton of hake last week,” Lambert lied. “We donated most of it to charity. The rest we sold for three cents a pound. If we wanted to we could retire, but the sea’s in our blood.”

  Possibly there was sea water in there somewhere, because a lot of the fishermen around had a habit of mixing rum with cold sea water to take the edge off a day.

  “Head her out past Rat Rock, Eag!” Lambert shouted.

  “Aye aye, skipper,” reported the helmsman, although I could see that the wheel was lashed onto an upright pole, and Eager was trying to light a fire under a soot-black coffee pot. The boat seemed to know where to go, and nobody was surprised too much about anything.

  My father was looking back at the shoreline. I stood beside him, and he put a hand on my shoulder. “That shoreline has freedom written all over it.” You could now see from one end of the island to the other. You could see Hants’s old shack toward the east end, my own house at the west. In between were some other houses and lots of grey, jutting rocks and scrub spruce trees that pretended they belonged there to ward off the elements.

  “Pretty as a picture,” Lambert observed.