Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  “Probably the only truly independent country in the entire world.”

  “Don’t know,” Lambert said, feeling argumentative. “I used to ship out to Africa on the steamers. Ended up in a place near the Equator where the women didn’t wear nothing and didn’t care who did what when. Figured that was independence.”

  My father nodded. “All depends on what’s in the heart of a man,” he answered. Lambert stuck his tongue in his jaw and shut up.

  “Coffee’s ready, skip,” Eager called out. He poured a cup for each of us. It was stone cold and tasted like vinegar.

  “Nothing like a good hot cup of java in the a.m.,” said Lambert.

  When it came time to drop the nets, it turned out they were in pretty bad repair, what with tangles created by Lucifer himself and dry rot to boot. So we dropped a few hand-lines with bacon and cod scraps tied neatly to each hook. My father was in a meditative mood and just gazed back at his beloved island from beyond the gull-splattered ledges of Rat Rock.

  “Been talk of turning this island into a sort of resort,” Lambert said, pointing to the Rock. It was a low, granite ledge of maybe three acres inhabited by several thousand sea birds. The rocks were bleached calcium white by the gull shit. A broken-down duck hunter’s cabin stood on the west end. Lambert pointed to it. “A man would fix up a place like that and retire there. Have an easy life of it away from the maddening crowds.”

  In truth, I could see the romance of Rat Rock. There were deep, dark, mysterious pools all along the edge. Seaweed swayed back and forth in the shallows. Seals dipped up and down just a few feet away. It was an expansive blue world out here on a day like this. And time had ceased to exist.

  Eager cracked open a bottle of home-made beer and pulled up a crate beside me. I was having no luck with catching anything.

  “I’ll tell you something, Ian,” he confided. “Never go to work for nobody. A man can answer to only one boss and that’s himself. You take Lambert there. He thinks he’s God almighty ’cause he got this bucket of a boat. If it weren’t for me, he’d have lost his shirt years ago.”

  Lambert pretended not to hear.

  Just then the engine stalled. “Jesus Christ on stilts!” Lambert roared.

  Eager set his beer down and propped open the engine cover. I peered in and breathed the smell of a red-hot, oil-soaked engine. “What do you think she needs, boss?”

  Lambert stuck his finger down the throat of the carburetor. “Crap in the needle valve again. Only thing for her is a good splash of gasoline straight down the throat.”

  They had played this scene before. Eager grabbed a coffee cup and filled it with fuel. Lambert stood back as Eager splashed the gas half in, half out of the carburetor.

  “Give her some ignition,” Lambert ordered, but almost as soon as Eager pushed the starter, a flame shot out of the carburetor high up into the sky. It was like the devil coming up from the centre of the earth, right through the sea and the centre of the engine. A six-foot yellow-blue flame. I swear I could see a face in it. Everyone jumped back. Just as suddenly as it had flared, it sucked back into the carburetor and the engine backfired. But by now some of the spilled gas had caught fire. The engine was burning.

  My father heaved a bucket of sea water onto it, and it seemed like it would go out, but there must have been a leaky fuel hose there, too, because it flared up again, the flame growing wilder.

  The men tried to pour on more water, but it didn’t seem to help. The wood around the engine had caught fire. My father, ready to admit that things were already out of control, was pulling on the rope of the dinghy that trailed behind. He told me to climb in, and as I did I noticed that all of our hand-lines were tugging at once. Finally we had caught something, but it didn’t matter now.

  My father went back to trying to help, but it was a losing battle. Half the deck was on fire. Lambert and Eager were screaming at each other. Soon all three of them were up to their ankles in sea water, and a dark plume of smoke filled the air. Then they, too, were in the small boat, and we all said goodbye to the Sister Theresa. It had all happened so quickly that I could not believe my eyes.

  “Well, ain’t that a handshake in hell,” Lambert said. “A man’s livelihood headed for the bottom of the sea. Just like that.”

  Eager was sulking. “There was a case and a half of good home-made brew on that boat.”

  My father appeared stoic. “Perhaps forces in the universe greater than us conspired this moment for a good reason.”

  “Just the same, it’s hard luck,” Lambert said, sucking snot back up his nose.

  “That it is,” my father admitted.

  “But no one got hurt,” I chimed in, trying to put a good face on it.

  “No one but my pocketbook. I had close to a quarter-million tied up in that boat,” Lambert lied.

  “What about my beer?” Eager complained.

  I grabbed one oar and my father the other. We began to row. After a few minutes, the bitterness of the loss seemed to fade.

  “Reminds me of the time the steamer went down off of Cape Race. I was in the water. There was just me and these three beautiful women. All around us were maybe twenty or thirty sharks. I told the ladies not to be scared. One of them was right upset, though, and she grabbed onto me like I was her heavenly hope. She went and wrapped her legs around me, felt just like lobster claws, the bite was so intense. Then after a while, we were bobbing up and down in the water, and she starts to moaning. Heck, I didn’t know what it was, but then I seen she had a smile on her face. Pretty soon she got tired, and one of the other women give it a try. Then finally the third one.

  “Well sir, by the time the coast guard feller come by, I was plain tuckered out. The women, well, at first they said they didn’t want to be rescued, that they liked it in the ocean just fine. But me, I wanted to get back ashore and get some sleep.”

  “That so?” my father said with beneficent disinterest.

  “Well, I suppose we’re not going to be lucky enough to just drown,” Eager began. “I never did mind the notion of drowning. I just hope this doesn’t turn into one of them ordeals. I never could stand an ordeal. Like when you get up in the a.m. and you can’t remember where you left your shoes. I’d rather drown outright than have to go through all the contortions of figuring out where I lost my shoes. Yep, a watery death would seem just like a holiday compared to that.

  “Or waiting in a line. I waited in a line once down in Halifax. I think it was a movie house that some fool had persuaded me to go into. I waited in line for over twenty minutes, and I swore that nothing was as bad as that. That’s why I moved down the shore. I just didn’t want to have to wait in no more lines.”

  With all the excitement and confessions, I hadn’t kept an eye on the shoreline. I had just rowed my one oar. I guess my father was steering. I just assumed we were still a long way at sea, but when I turned around I saw that we were pulling into a tiny cove of sorts on Rat Rock.

  “Why don’t we just get out and stretch our legs before we row on ashore?” my father suggested.

  Lambert seemed elated to finally be setting foot on the Rock.

  “I been to islands before not much bigger than this one. Down around the Canaries, they were. Nothing but big-breasted women and a few wimpy little men. Could never understand what so many big-chested women were doing on such a tiny little island. It gave a man pause to think about that.”

  “I know what this is,” Eager said as he put his feet on the Rock. “This is hell. We have already died and gone on to the next place. Nothing could be worse than this.”

  “Every man makes his own heaven or hell,” my father told him.

  “That’s true,” Lambert added. “I seen men at sea go mad from loneliness, and others turn into friggin’ saints.”

  “I ain’t no saint,” Eager said. “But I guess you’re right. It could be worse. Could’v
e pulled up in front of a movie house and be told by the devil we’d have to stand in line. I couldn’t handle standing in no line. Not after going through that once.”

  My father and I did some exploring and found a tiny, rusted-out stove in the deserted hunter’s cabin. There was one good match on a shelf, and the old man’s luck held. He torched a year-old copy of the Halifax Herald and lit up some scraps of driftwood. He found one old pot and put in some sea water. Then we went down to the pools and found sea urchins, clams and quahogs. He set them to boiling, and we gathered up the other two survivors, who were sitting beneath a canopy of angry seagulls.

  A few minutes later we were inside, eating a minor feast of seafood. “I can picture this whole island as a resort for rich people,” Lambert said, the quahogs warming the lining of his stomach. He spread his arms out across the entire three-acre bare-stone-and-bird-shit island. Above us the gulls screeched and roared.

  “I like it better the way it is,” Eager countered. “If a place like this got developed, soon there’d be movie houses and possibly crime. A man could wake up in the morning and find someone had stolen his shoes. I couldn’t handle such a life.”

  The talk went on late into the afternoon. Lambert decided that it was good fortune, after all, that his boat had gone down. He was tired of fishing, he said. “Besides, this is the best time I’ve had in years.”

  “I’ve seen better,” Eager complained, lying back on a sunny rock and falling asleep, his shoes tucked deftly under one arm.

  Then Lambert fell asleep. It was nearly four o’clock when my old man woke them up. We had been exploring every inch of Rat Rock and even gone swimming in a beautiful blue grotto that was carved into one shore.

  But we had to get home. My mother would be worried. The final half-mile row to shore was a quiet one. Lambert had begun to talk of a salvage operation to save the goods on board his sunken ship.

  “It’s too late,” Eager countered. “Them beer bottles would explode from the pressure down below. Ain’t nothing worth saving out there.”

  My father said that it was his duty to see that Lambert and Eager came up with a new boat. He said he’d talk to Ernest Cowley about building one, and everyone on the island would chip in.

  “That’s kind of you. In the meantime, I guess I’ll go stay with my sister in Halifax,” Lambert said. “She was about due for a visit. She’s got thighs thick around as tree trunks in the Amazon, but she has some mighty nice petite lady-friends. Eager here is welcome to come along to town if he wants.”

  Eager sat up straight in the boat. He seemed insulted. “Might as well cut off my hands and feet with a chain saw, then stuff the rest of me inside the jaws of a lion. That’d be kinder.”

  But a few days later I heard that Eager went along anyway for a week or two. When he returned to our island, he treated himself like a man who had just seen the end of the world and had survived. He swore he’d never set foot off Whalebone Island again.

  The Road

  IT ALL COMES BACK NOW

  It’s night now. The small towns blink on and off as you head away from one coast toward another. When morning comes you know what you will see.

  There will be a stretch of road, no houses. Trees will be crumpled up along the side from when the highway was built maybe twenty years ago. Never burnt for wood, never cut up. The ground that slopes off from the raised, well-drained road will not fully recover from having been scraped clean of plant life. Red mosses, tires, mostly infertile soil. The spruce grow beyond, though rarely more than thirty feet high and never all that healthy-looking, but somehow stately with all that funereal fungal growth, beautiful but draining the life out of the wood.

  And when you approach town, there will be a house, a basement really, a full basement rising maybe four feet above the ground and then finished off, a flat, tar-papered roof where the owner intended to build the real house but ran out of money. There will be one junk car in the yard. A good body, but you know some engine or transmission crisis stole the life out of her a while back and at the most inopportune time.

  As the sun tilts up over a crest in the road, you see several hastily cleared lots where mobile homes are parked. What was once natural to the land is bunched up in a pile at the back of the property where the bulldozer operator shoved the goods. Things in the way. The mobile home looks exactly like every mobile home you’ve ever seen. You wouldn’t want to see the inhabitants for fear you’d recognize them. Even if the sun is in your eyes, you know there’s bunch of old bald and blown-out tires on the roof to keep the noise down in the wind. Aluminum skins are noisy mothers. Two junk cars in the yard. One’s an old four-wheel-drive vehicle of some sort. A man’s dream, his hopes of trekking endlessly through the interior of the province, buggered up just days after he bought her at a steal from a guy in the next county.

  One driveable wreck, looking in worse shape than the two derelict cars, sits as close as possible to the door of the house. Mobile home owners avoid walking, the carrying of groceries over any distance.

  The husband has built a wonderful platform and pulley system for the wife to dry clothes outside. The platform looks as if it could be used for hanging. The victim would walk the steps and put his head in the noose and step, or be pushed, forward. Instead the wife will use multicoloured plastic clothespins to attach sweet-smelling, clean clothes to a blue plastic-covered wire. The pulley system allows her to send the wash out over the frozen, muddy yard. The pulley at the opposite end is attached to a lone stunted spruce tree, now dead, left standing near the corner of the forest. In cold weather the clothes freeze on the line, and they can be hauled in like lumber, piled near the furnace outlet to melt and then dry. In warmer months, the fog may be thick, and it will take days, often a week for the clothes to dry.

  There are several more mobile homes. Quicker, cheaper than building a wood frame house. Less work. You get a package deal. Furniture included. Insurance companies make owners put plywood around the bottom to cover up the axles and the wheels. That way they can be insured as homes. Otherwise, they’d have to rate them as vehicles, cars.

  There are two or three absolutely empty and final homes sitting alternately along the road before you hit town. The glass is out of the windows, the centre brick chimneys have fallen or were pushed over. The porches sag. They are small homes, all with wood shakes, one still has a pile of rotting firewood on the porch. If you looked closely you would see the loose stone foundation has shifted, rocks have fallen into the basement from the heaving of the spring frost. Or you could be wrong; the foundation could be perfectly intact as if set into place yesterday by a master builder of stone pyramids.

  An apple tree still grows, bent and gone mad with sucker branches, in the front yard. It still flowers in summer, and the small red apples fall to the ground in the fall and rot while the bees extract their last harvest of the year.

  You won’t stop to go inside any one of the three. God knows it will be hard enough to stop at all when you arrive. But you are sure that if you were to walk into the run-down house closest to town, you would find in one of the rooms one of the two: broken rum bottles or dog-eared copies of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. These old falling-down homes have become indoor parks for necessary evils that young folk can’t get away with in town. They are full of all sorts of mould. Plaster walls have become wet and bloated, and ancient wallpaper is stained beyond belief with years of neglect. Should an American summering in the province drive by, he would stop and enjoy the houses in his own way. He would go into town, ask a guy at the Irving station, Who owns the land? Is it for sale? He would like to restore the house.

  You feel your foot easing up on the accelerator, almost instinctively. You are coming into town. You are sure you are not lying in saying that this town looks like at least four hundred others just like it. You are neither pleased nor despondent over that. But there would be something to say if you could claim it looked di
fferent, unique.

  The Irving station has gone out of business, although a Fina remains open farther down the road. The church is white, stark, impressive in its size. It’s larger than would seem necessary for the town. Sundays, it always feels empty even when the whole congregation is there. But on Christmas and Easter many have come home, and it seems bright and full. There is a looming hardwood tree in front of the church. Without leaves you couldn’t name it, although memory should serve you here. You’ll say it’s a maple. A wooden sign with a triangular peak labels the church, names the minister and indicates that the sermon this week will be “Tithing: Is 10% Enough?” Oh, well, these are times of inflation, and perhaps the Bible writers did not take into account double-digit inflation.

  And of course, finally, the place to stop. The house itself should be familiar. It has changed, though. Tree roots knuckle up the hard-packed soil in front of the house where you are sure grass once grew. You drive up the path past the house into the back yard and stop alongside a wooden flagpole more grey than white. There is a chain tied to the pole and a perfect circular area of absent grass where the dog once ran its circumference. The chain lies rusted and wrapped tight around the foot of the pole.

  Familiar landmarks, though. An old refrigerator with brownish snow drifting up along one side of it. A cement mixer by the shed, and a small rock foundation where the outhouse once stood that was torn down even before you left. Through a broken pane of glass in the shed door you see the neat uniformity of bicycle spokes from a wheel hung on the wall.

  You turn off the car, not wanting to get out quite yet. It’s been a long trip. So much sameness. Perhaps it will be so here as well. You feel the heat leaving the car with the engine off. Soon you can see your own breath. As you watch it rise and freeze against the glass you notice smoke coming from the central brick chimney of the house. Someone is at home. You look at the worn steps that lead into the back porch. It would be hard to fit your feet into those ancient depressions. You decide to use the other door. Walking along the side of the house toward the front, you feel uncomfortable. It isn’t predictable. The wooden clapboard siding has been repainted a light green colour, and already the paint is removing itself in great curved chips.