I think of Art and the way he said he finds that Louise’s physical presence has been replaced by silence. His memories can’t keep that silence from roaring across the bay, through his woods, over the roof they repaired and shingled together, and on up the mountain. Something almost clicks into place for me — the sense of drowning, suffocation, people leaving without saying goodbye — and I roll that something into a ball and hold it in my head for another breath, trying to make sense of it. I exhale all of it hoping it will go where it needs to go and I can be done with it.
I open the tent door. The sound of the zipper is all there is besides the rain. But, hey, what’s this? Sunshine. Again. The flutter of poplar leaves has fooled me into welcoming rain that still has not come. I pull on my shorts and a T-shirt. I don’t need to garden today. The garlic bulbs I’ve harvested, gleaming white and tied in bunches, are hanging to dry from the branches under the canvas tarp of my outdoor kitchen.
I cook oats on the stove and carry them into the garden, picking blueberries as I go and dropping them in the pot. The crunch of the dry grass under my bare feet sounds like the crackling fire I have most nights in front of my tent. The garden craves rain and the road needs rain and the leaves of the dusty poplars lining that road beg for rain. All that dust has been churned up by the pickups, tractors, hay wagons, and manure spreaders that use Lily Lake Road as a shortcut. I can do nothing about the lack of rain, but I can wash the dust off my skin in the pond down the hill. I leave the empty bowl by the stove.
At the base of the steep hill Lily Lake Road becomes paved and crosses the main road connecting Margaretsville to the town of Middleton. Then there is a small, fenced cemetery next to Phinney’s Pond. A man who once owned my land is buried there among the dandelions and dry grass, the candy wrappers and broken glass. Phineas Bent was descended from a New England Planter, Elijah Bent, who received a land grant in 1760 from the governor of Nova Scotia following the expulsion of the Acadians. Elijah moved his family from Sudbury, Massachusetts, to twelve hundred acres of fertile land straddling the Annapolis River and running up the North Mountain. Generations of Bents made their home in the Annapolis Valley, including Phineas, and with each new batch of sons, parcels were carved off the family grant until all that remained was the fraction of rock and trees and blackflies I bought. As far as I know neither Phineas nor any of the Bents lived on what is now my land. There’s a rotting door hanging from the trunk of a balsam fir not far from my tent, and I found one high-heeled shoe deep in the woods. But that’s it for evidence of habitation.
Some of the gravestones have eroded, their archaic lettering unreadable. A few have toppled or broken. Phineas is buried off to one side. He was an RCAF officer who died in 1942. The lettering on his marble stone has sharp edges.
Beloved in life
Cherished in memory
He liveth and was cut down like a flower.
Despite the poetry on some of the stones, I don’t go in the graveyard anymore and am glad it’s fenced. I don’t need to have Phineas haunting me. I’m not sure that memory is something to cherish. It may be a blessing, but nostalgia is a curse, and the line between them is thin. I’m tripping over it too often these days.
You’re supposed to pay a quarter to use the beach since it’s part of a private campground, but it is rare that anyone is present at the canteen to collect my change, and there’s nobody here today. This is the distilled essence of my experience of rural Nova Scotia: a canteen with ice cream cones and potato chips, change rooms that double as outhouses, the twenty-five-cent swim. What can you get for a quarter anywhere else these days? It’s as if I travelled thirty years back in time when I came here. I change into my running shorts in a rank outhouse and choose to think that the damp on the soles of my bare feet is condensation from the plywood floor. On the way to the shore of the pond I wipe my feet across the dry grass, then on the coarse sand of the beach. I wish I could strip on the shore and swim naked, but getting caught once was enough. The morning that happened, I had believed it was early enough that nobody would be around. The man who surprised me took one look and turned away without saying a word. He looked at least as embarrassed as I was. I can’t afford to be ostracized, and the locals already have me pegged as strange, even though they are polite. They drive by me as I’m riding my ratty old bike, my long hair flowing out of my Blue Jays cap, and must wonder what a Come From Away thinks he’s doing buying a chunk of rocky forest, living in a tent, and trying to grow peas and carrots in bedrock.
Dad and I used to walk over to Crystal Lake and swim off the public dock when I was a kid. I always found it hard to jump into cold water. I would count out loud, one, two, three, and run off the end. I had to talk myself into jumping, though I knew it was inevitable.
There’s no dock here, so I walk into the pond and do the breast stroke with my head out of the water. There is a small island some sixty feet out, and though there are signs prohibiting it, I always swim beyond the roped-off area and do a lap around it. Unlike in those drowning dreams, when I am awake and swimming it feels like I’m flying. It’s as if my bones are hollow, like a bird’s, filling with air each time I reach forward, making me float.
There are frogs sunning in the reeds along the shore. Martin tells me we should be saying goodbye to any frog we see since something is finishing them off. It may be the lack of ozone, he says, all that UV getting through and damaging their DNA. If they survive the mutations from that they have to leap the gauntlet of acid rain, global warming, and pesticides in the river from agricultural runoff. The worst thing for them is the estrogen that leaches into the waterways from all those pissed-out birth control pills and estrogen-mimicking BPA. He’s seen frogs on the banks of the Annapolis River downstream from the sewage treatment plant in Kentville with extra limbs and males with female genitals. I say goodbye to the frogs.
I am cold by the time I swim around that island once. Back when I carried twenty more pounds only fatigue could have stopped me. I leave the pond and sit in the sun on the grass. UV be damned.
I climb back up the hill and am sweating by the time I reach the top. The path from the road to my garden weaves among poplar saplings and passes between two large white ash that create a natural gate. It opens into the one-acre clearing where I am building my garden. When I moved here the clearing was covered with branches and other brush from the trees felled by the logging company that sold it to me. Most of the forests in Nova Scotia are, like this one, sad and small. They are recovering from being clear-cut at least three times. This land was cleared during World War II, when the spruce and fir were harvested to make pit logs for coal mines in Cape Breton to keep the land from caving in. It was cleared again for lumber and pulp. Now the woods are jammed with scrawny birch, alder, maple, ash, and willow. The trees have trouble remembering what it means to grow tall; before they reach their potential they are turned into two-by-fours, newsprint, or toilet paper.
Late September. I’ve been hauling rough lumber from the road to the site where I’m building an outhouse, downhill and downwind from my tent. I’ve got the last of the two-by-fours on my shoulder. Even with a rolled-up towel under them they bounce with each step and are bruising the bone. A vehicle stops on the road. Its engine is turned off and a door opens, then slams shut. There is no reason for a car to stop on the road unless someone is coming to visit or hunt. I don’t get visitors. Other than Martin and Jenifer, whom I might talk to when I get water, I don’t see anyone. I crouch behind some brush to spy on whoever it is. She is almost beside me when I recognize her, and it’s too late for me to stand up without startling her.
“Yiyy!” Lina says, jumping back.
“Sorry, sorry.”
“Why are you hiding?”
She laughs at me and I have to laugh too. Then she opens her arms to hug me. When she does I am enveloped, not only in the softness of her embrace, her breasts pressing against my chest, but by a faint smell of curry, earthy and warm. She is wearing a tank top, a skir
t, and flip-flops.
I show her the vegetable beds and the growing pile of firewood I’ve sawn and split from the birches surrounding the clearing. She picks some apple mint and yarrow and offers to make me a bitter tea. At my outdoor kitchen I boil water. When the tea is ready, we sit on the straw bales I use as chairs. She says nothing for the longest time and I wait for her to speak first.
“You know, I’ve got farming in my blood. My mother’s ancestors were the first farmers in Canada.”
“In Quebec?”
“Ontario. By Georgian Bay. We once had villages and farming, a whole culture that was wiped out by missionaries and smallpox. Some of my people went south to Kansas three hundred and fifty years ago. Others fled to Quebec.”
I don’t know the geography, so she picks up a stick and begins to draw a map of Georgian Bay on the ground at our feet. I lean over with her to watch. Her hair, brushing my cheek, feels like the feathers from the belly of a crow. I smell her again and long to run my fingers over the warmth of her bare shoulder. She points to a place on her map.
“It was quite a small area.”
I am enjoying the closeness of our faces, and then she sits up.
“It was small, but they did some amazing things. They grew enough — corn, beans, sunflowers, squash, tobacco — to feed themselves and to trade for meat and iron tools.” She looks around at my little clearing. “Their gardens were something like this. A clearing carved out of the woods. Plantings between stumps. Forest gardening.”
I’ve bought a chunk of land that is too wet in the winter, probably too dry in the summer, and infested with blackflies and ticks. The trees are stunted, there is little topsoil, no electricity or running water, and it’s in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road. All this has made me question my sanity. What she says fills me with pride for what I am doing.
“It’s so peaceful here,” she says. “Have you got good water?”
“I hope so. There’s a healing spring directly below here in the valley. For now I haul water in jars from the neighbours’. I’m going to get a well drilled next spring.”
“I could see living here.”
Those five words are better than a cord of wood, enough to fuel a winter’s worth of dreaming. I take her comment, and her whole visit, as an invitation. It’s heartening that Lina sees what I am doing as hopeful, not as an escape. I miss love, and she makes me optimistic for its return.
After we finish the tea we walk in the woods to the pine grove, the ground spongy with decades of fallen needles. She climbs one of the six tall white pines that weren’t cut down, hoping to see the Bay of Fundy. She can’t, but she pretends she can see Art in his yard. Too soon we are back at her pickup and she gives me another hug before she drives away.
4
Lily Lake Road
A week after Lina’s visit the rain is splattering mud out of puddles onto the canvas of my tent. I have no interest in gardening, no desire to read my homesteading books. My tent is small, damp, and gloomy. A hurricane is racing up the Atlantic coast and threatens to come ashore. I put on my rain gear and coast on my bike down to Art’s.
I knock on the glass door that opens into his kitchen at the back. The CBC is on loud and he’s doing push-ups on the carpet. I admire him for hopeful stunts like that, an old man making the effort to stay in shape. Without hope we’re nothing but a sorry sack of bones, waking regretfully each day, mulling over a list of woes, then falling heavily and gratefully into sleep, TV, alcohol — whatever it takes. I’d better not lose my hope.
He can’t hear me knocking. I wander through his yard on top of the leaves thrown to the ground before their time by the rain and wind. A fishing boat struggles in the waves on the bay. The gusts keep shifting direction, churning the surface of the dark mass of the water into white foam. The wind whipping the treetops behind me is exhilarating, but it is hard to enjoy it, seeing the boat being made sport of. My hair is wet from the rain blown under my hood. The damp sleeves of my shirt cling to my forearms. The sound of the radio gets louder and Art is standing in the open door. Lucy barks and comes running toward me, wagging her tail.
“Get your foolish keester in here,” he yells.
I take off my rubber boots and hang the dripping raincoat and pants on hooks in his mud room.
“Nova Scotia ain’t for sissies. What the hell brings you down here in this weather?”
“I figured you and Lina wouldn’t be doing much on a day like this.”
“I drove her to the bus yesterday.”
My face betrays my disappointment.
“I see why you’re here now,” he said, laughing. “But you’ll have to keep your pecker in your pants till she shows up again next spring.”
He tells me that they had spent the week bucking logs, trying to beat the storm, before she left for Quebec. I sit in his kitchen all morning, listening to him talk. He speaks of his life with Louise, of what it had been like to grow up in rural isolation. Any little thing I say sets him off on another story from his past. At one point I ask if there used to be a lot of white pine on my land.
“Sure. There were two-hundred-year-old pine all through the Maritimes till the Royal Navy needed masts. They took the tallest, straightest ones. Every single one that was any good. They should never have cut ’em like they did. You never take the tallest tree.”
“Why not?”
“Your sons will never know how tall a forest ought to be.”
“How many sons do you have?”
“This branch of the Mosher clan ends when I kick the can.” He stops. “You look like you seen a ghost.”
I force a laugh. “Do you have any relatives around here?”
He laughs hard at that. “Son, there’s a spot down the road called Mosher’s Corner. We’ve been here for seven generations.”
I laugh too, hoping he will go on talking.
“No sons, but Louise and I had two daughters. Neither of them wants to take over the farm.”
His family always had beef cattle, a few Jerseys for milk, a couple of sows, gardens large enough to put fruit and vegetables by two winters in advance, and the woodlot for firewood, lumber, and maple sugar. It must have been a hard life if my approximation of it is anything to go by. At least I can bike to Middleton if I have a hankering for a butter tart, and I always know Martin and Jenifer’s place, with its lights and bathtub, is next door. Over the generations, chunks on the edges of his family’s farm ablated like ice off the Antarctic ice sheet each time an eldest son wed. Art’s older brother, Joshua, moved into the original farmhouse when their mother died. Art and Louise lived within sight of the smoke from the farmhouse chimney. When Joshua died of stomach cancer, Art and Louise moved into the farmhouse. Their daughters had moved away by then. When Alzheimer’s took Louise to Bridgetown, the house was more than Art wanted to handle by himself, and he returned to the familiar memories of the smaller house they had repaired together. Over the years, the subdivided pieces had all been sold to vacationing Americans and Germans, and Art was the sole Mosher on the stump of what had been the original farm.
“If you cut the tallest tree,” he goes on, “the woods get shorter and shorter. Young folks nowadays see the forest and think that’s what it should look like. Their inheritance has been squandered.”
“There’s a small pine grove on my land.”
“I used to wonder why they left those trees. I suppose they’re not the straightest sticks on the ice.”
“They’re not, but they must be a hundred and fifty years old.”
“I used to climb ’em with Emmett Whitman. We thought we’d be able to see the bay from up there, but we could never get high enough.”
He sits silently for a while, then goes on.
“For some reason we got it in our heads to join the navy. Two farm boys like us on the ocean. Can you imagine? The first day we puked till we thought we was gonna die. Then we looked at each other and laughed. ‘I’d prefer blackflies and a kick in the nuts to this sh
it,’ he says to me. ‘Why’d we ever sign up for the fuckin’ navy?’ But we got our sea legs soon enough. The last place I saw him we was landing in Sicily.” He swirls the cold coffee in his mug and stares at the wall as if I’m not there.
“Real quiet and still day. But hot. I was standing on deck with Emmett. His mother sent three boys to that war and only one came back. And that one was crippled in the head for life from what he seen. It was in July, when we was transporting soldiers to invade Italy. There wasn’t a wave that morning but the ones we made on our way to the beach. Out of that stillness came a hum from the horizon, sounding like a hive of bees you hear off in the distance before you register what they are. But we knew, and I doubt there wasn’t one of those boys who didn’t feel the sick, empty feeling Emmett and I felt. We saw the Stuka bombers flying toward us over the water. I’ve never known anything like that before or since. You’re standing on the deck feeling as naked as the day you was born, with nothing between you and those bastards but your prayers, and you’ve got all your fingers and toes crossed. There’s nothing else to do. You can’t run for cover or hope they won’t see you.
“We see the bombs, little specks that grow big, like raindrops coming toward us. Some drop in the water. Then I see one hovering over our ship and my body does what it needs to do. I dive into the hold and fall twenty-five feet. I land on my back between two tanks. The bomb hits and destroys the decks. When I come back Emmett is lying on the deck all smashed up. He’s burned real bad and his jaw is hanging off his face. I can’t do a blasted thing for him. I talk to him, but he isn’t all there. His eyes are looking at the angel of death, or his mama, I dunno.”
The Rest is Silence Page 4
