My Famous Evening

by Howard Norman

  “Do you have any sense of how they felt about what their mother did?”

  “They thought it was quite unique, what Marlais did. Either Don or Mary used that word. Oh, land’s sake, I can’t remember which. It was probably Mary. They didn’t just scratch their heads and take it in stride, you know. In a way they had lost their mother for a time, hadn’t they? You don’t forget something like that, do you? No, they put some thought into who their mother was and what she did. They loved her. But there were long years they didn’t get to spend much time with her. Alfonse saw to that.”

  “That’s a sad thing,” I said. “So why are you smiling just now?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking about Alfonse Quire’s thumb. You can’t help what leaps to mind, now, can you? I was just thinking how my sister wanted so desperately to believe he was dead and buried, and all he was doing was mending a thumb. Lord, strange things go on in the world, wouldn’t you say?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Love, Death, and the Sea: Forerunners and Divinations

  FORERUNNERS

  IN A LETTER MARLAIS QUIRE MENTIONS A DREAM IN which a seal kidnaps her children, then reveals, “it had the sensation of a terrible forerunner.”

  Let me again refer to the monograph “Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia.” Helen Creighton writes, “Forerunners are known in other places as tokens or visions, but all over Nova Scotia among people of all descent, the popular name is forerunner. Occasionally they foretell happy events; more often they predict death. It is not everybody who is gifted with seeing or hearing forerunners, just as ghostly visitants are only seen by certain people. Nor do they appear only to the unlettered and uneducated folk. Certain individuals, families, or dwellings seem to be particularly sensitive to these manifestations.”

  During the summer of 1974, and early summer, 1975, I traveled the width and breadth of Nova Scotia, collecting forerunners and divinations, as part of a project in oral history, originally begun at and sponsored by the Folklore Institute at Indiana University, where I, a rather lackadaisical student, had obtained an M.A. in Folklore. I had some private funding, too, but used up my resources quickly, when, in a bout of acquisition fever, I purchased, at private auction in Halifax, a rare print of “Black-tailed Gannet,” which Edward Lear had drawn for John Gould’s Birds of Europe.

  I didn’t own a house; I had no walls on which to hang this beautiful work. But I fancied myself somewhat as a collector of natural history art, or at least aspired to that. The truth of it was, I was as much intoxicated by the tense phenomenon of auctions as anything. Anyway, I soon got in over my head. Now, no longer able to square the cost of a room at the Lord Nelson Hotel with my budget, I moved to a rooming house on Robie Street. Using this as a base, I would set out in a dilapidated two-door Ford for Cape Breton, the Annapolis Valley, and Prince Edward Island to collect forerunners and divinations. I sat in restaurants and pubs, eavesdropped incessantly and without exception was treated with kind forbearance, though far more often than not a conversation, quite understandingly, resulted in my being handed around somewhat like an annoying cousin suddenly come to visit—“Oh, you might want to go over to Antigonish and talk to so-and-so, she’d know about such things. She’d know where you might put up for the night, too.”

  In my experience, collecting folklore was constantly a matter of calibrating the balance between conviviality and blatant request: The people I met were generally more than willing to talk about this or that subject, but sometimes I stumbled badly and could see that the person I spoke with felt, well, “researched.” This imposed an awkwardness and I backed off. Personally, I was grateful for the employment. I met lovely people I would not have otherwise met. I got to fish for salmon. I saw my first eagles in Cape Breton. I could gaze at “Black-tailed Gannet” any time I chose. Sunrises over the Atlantic were beautiful. My car was running pretty well—no small thing; the back seat was sprawled with books. I suppose it is part of the insecurity of the autodidact to write down the titles and authors of the books one has read, as if always needing to feel one is being educated. Consulting my journals, I see that in Nova Scotia that summer I had with me, The Carrier of Ladders by W. S. Merwin, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Quiet American by Graham Greene, and (what had gotten into me?) a bunch of novels by Anatole France. The latter included The Red Lily in a compact, red leather-bound Modern Library Edition, which I had purchased in a used book store in Toronto. Why memory persists in illuminating one thing and casting another into darkness is, to say the least, a mystery. But to this day I can recall a paragraph from The Red Lily, and credit it as having something to do with the most private tableaux of the creative imagination: “They were dressed for dinner. In the drawing-room Miss Bell was drawing monsters suggested by those of Leonardo da Vinci. She created them in order to see what they would say, convinced that they would speak and express rare ideas in curious rhymes. Then she would listen to them. It was thus that she generally conceived her poems.”

  I spent untold insomniac hours writing letters and in journals, cramming as much into each day as possible. Time spent alone. During which I came to be somewhat shamefully aware that, whereas loneliness might be pitied, aloneness could be set on a higher moral plane: You could come to some knowledge of yourself. In those peripatetic months, in terms of what I deemed my potential in life—for a family of my own, for a true calling, a place to live—I can say without sentimentality that I was not lost, simply in abeyance.

  What’s more, I associate the summer of 1974 with discovering a central fact of my nature, that each day I have to work my way up to melancholy. Of course, it was better to realize this than to experience the effects of a quite manageable melancholia and yet not comprehend the source. A few years later in, of all places, Churchill, Manitoba, a friend, Helen Tanizaki, gave me a piece of writing by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, author of Rashomon and Other Stories, in which he poses the question: “What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?” I have asked myself this every day since.

  The same week I purchased “Black-tailed Gannet,” I did research at the Historical Archive and Dalhousie University’s Library in Halifax, and frequented a bakery near the Historic District along Upper Water Street and the harbor. There I met a young woman named Kristen Heckman, a student in Russian Literature and Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. She was born and raised in Nova Scotia of French Huguenot and Anabaptist German ancestry. Her ambition was to be a translator at the United Nations, which she finally became for a decade or more, then married and worked as a translator for Voice of America. The morning I met her in Halifax, I was having the first of the dozen or so cups of coffee I drank each day, when Kristen walked into the small bakery and sat down at the next table. We struck up a tentative conversation, in which she informed me that she had been taking care of her invalid aunt Tanny and that she allowed herself a midmorning and midafternoon respite, there, in the bakery. I returned that afternoon.

  Kristen was quite beautiful, proved, in the short few months I was enamored of her, to be wistful, edgy, quite judgmental, with the most erotic shrug of the shoulder I have ever seen, even compared with Hedy Lamarr’s brooding performance in the classic Boom Town, where she displayed a wonderful repertoire of shrugs and dismissive glances. Except for her red hair, Kristen very much reminded me of Hedy Lamarr. (For whatever little it’s worth, I somewhat based the character of Margaret Handle in a novel, The Bird Artist, on Kristen, reconfiguring her complicated demeanor into a 1911 Newfoundland setting.) The directness of Kristen’s flirtation was unsettling, and peculiar in that it seemed to take place only in the little bakery. When I mentioned what I was “collecting” throughout Nova Scotia, she said, “Oh, come on over. My aunt will talk your ears off about that stuff.”

  Her aunt lived on Robie Street, merely two blocks from my rooming house. As we cut across Citadel Park, Kristen suddenly acted as if I was “a goat who had asked
her to dance” (a phrase I heard in the village of Joggins). I found this comical, she immediately picked up on her demonstration of severe formality which so contrasted with her appealing suggestion in the bakery that we “go down and look at the boats” that very evening, and she laughed a most infectious laugh.

  When we reached her aunt’s house, she led me directly into the kitchen, put on tea, called, “Auntie, you’ve got a visitor! I’ve already approved of him!” and, for the next hour or so, uttered scarcely more than a few sentences. Her aunt Tanny, however, was quite the chatterbox. She was, I would guess, about seventy, had been born in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, but in the course of her fifty-two-year marriage had lived in Meat Cove, an outport in Cape Breton, the mainland villages of Pictou and New Glascow, and “even as far away as New Brunswick for a year or two.” She spoke with the slightest German accent. What she referred to as the “Devil of this arthritis” had confined her to a wheelchair, a basic model without any of the modern apparatus that enhance mobility. I looked around: The fireplace mantel and every other surface, table, desk, windowsills, were crammed with framed photographs that appeared to chronicle her family back to the nineteenth century. One round table held so many photographs that some faced in opposite directions, which was why the table was halfway out in the room: Tanny could tour her ancestry by navigating the entire circumference.

  Kristen wheeled her aunt to the kitchen table. Introductions were made, Kristen served tea and cookies, then sat in the corner with an expression suggesting bemused curiosity, as if she had paid the price of a ticket and was about to be entertained. “Don’t be polite to her,” Kristen said, “because she won’t be polite back.” But Tanny was quite gracious, if a bit needling, and once I’d mentioned forerunners, she said bluntly, “I doubt you’ll be able to fully understand the sort of thing you’re collecting. You have to know the local circumstances and feelings, how people think.”

  “What do you mean,” I said.

  “Well, you might consider a forerunner’s just a superstition. But if you live in a place where the sea has claimed a lot of people, certain ways of thinking make perfect sense.”

  “I’ve got an open mind about it,” I said.

  “You’re from away, so you’ll do the best you can, I’m sure,” she said. “Let’s talk a while and when we’re done, I’m in for my nap. Then you and my niece here can do whatever it is you young people do when an old aunt’s asleep.”

  She laughed; it immediately reminded me of Kristen’s laugh.

  As I poured more tea, Tanny said, “Is there something I don’t know? In Kristen’s life, are you a person of note?”

  “Actually, we only met a couple of hours ago.”

  Kristen disappeared into another room. Then I heard the front door open and close.

  “Do you intend to be a person of note?” Tanny said.

  “I don’t have any intentions.”

  “Search your heart, of course you do. What man doesn’t?”

  “Your niece and I just met.”

  “She’s interesting, that one.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “Do you own a house?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any employment?”

  “For another two months or so.”

  “Well, no doubt you have other qualities.”

  “I hope so. Do you have any idea where Kristen went?”

  “My niece has probably gone out to make up her mind about you. She’s soon going back to university. As for romance, her notion is, better a small fish than an empty plate.”

  “Well, we really just met, Kristen and I.”

  “In the bakery?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where she tends to meet all her small fish.”

  “Maybe I’m an act of charity.”

  I meant this to be funny, but Tanny quoted the scriptures: “Acts of charity cover a multitude of sins. Are you Catholic or Protestant?”

  “Jewish.”

  “I’ll be. The Hebrew faith. I’ll be.”

  “I can leave if you’re tired. I appreciate your talking to me about what I’m interested in. And anyway, Kristen brought me over without asking you ahead of time.”

  “Just don’t hurry me, I’m not a sewing machine.”

  “All right.”

  “Let’s see, where was I?” Aunt Tanny fell right asleep; Kristen never reappeared.

  Predictably, late the next afternoon I went back to the bakery. Kristen came in, had a cup of coffee, then said, “Tanny’s got a story for you. We’ll make you supper. Want to go down and look at the ships this evening?”

  “I wanted to last evening.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “That’d be nice.”

  Kristen made us roast chicken and salad, set the food on the kitchen table, and promptly left the house. Tanny said, “When she’s visiting me, she stays out to all hours. But I’m her only aunt still living. She gives me a lot of time. She makes a lot of effort to visit me. She stays the summer.”

  “We’re going down to look at the ships tonight.”

  “Hold on to that wish.”

  “Anyway, it’s nice of you to have supper with me.”

  “I wrote a note to myself,” she said, taking out the note and read it. “‘Tell your guest about the scarecrows.’”

  “Did you tell Kristen to ask me back for supper?”

  “It was my idea, yes. And she figured you’d come back to the bakery.”

  “Okay. Fine. What about the scarecrows, then, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll tell you this story, then I’m in for my nap. I’ll be watching T.V. late tonight. Then later there’s the radio to listen to. So I’ll want to nap first, to rest up for all that.”

  “I’m going to write this story down. Do you mind?”

  “Just don’t hurry me, I’m not a sewing machine.”

  The scarecrows.

  When Tanny was first married, she lived near Halls Harbour along the Minas Channel, which opens out to the Bay of Fundy. She had a neighbor who, as she put it, “every October set out a big family of scarecrows.” Tanny could not remember the man’s name, only that he kept a garden and had relatives in Vancouver whom he visited every summer, never for more than a week. “By family, I mean eleven scarecrows,” she said, “each dressed up in clothes. Each tied to its own pole. The children loved it. It was all amusement for the neighbors, those scarecrows. The scarecrows were dressed as fishermen, they had on rain slickers, the men, the sons, and the wife and daughters were dressed in school clothes, or house clothes, just the things you wore every day. It was for Halloween, you see. It was Halloween time he’d put them out in the garden, all dressed up that way.”

  Then one Sunday this man and his family (wife, two daughters, one son) went to church. They always sat in the second-row pew, farthest to the left if you were facing the pulpit. It was October; the scarecrows were in the garden. When the youngest daughter, age ten or eleven, ran up the aisle ahead of everyone, she suddenly cried out, “There’s a sparrow on our seat!” Or she may have called back, “There’s a sparrow on our pew!”

  Everyone saw that a bird had somehow got in, struck a window or the pew itself, and had died. However it happened, the bird was lying on the pew.

  “Well,” said Tanny, “they’d of had to have been deaf dumb and blind not to know what had just happened. The thing of it was, that day or the next, they were supposed to make a crossing by boat over to Parrsboro! But the mother—the man’s wife—she was so upset, she couldn’t even sit in church!

  “Naturally, they did not cross to Parrsboro, but there was a drowning that very evening!

  “Some young man capsized, but we didn’t know him, but everyone felt that the bird had foretold it. What’s more, the rest of October, and I believe on into November, the man dressed up those scarecrows in mourning. He put black clothes on them. It was as if the scarecrows were walking to church to mourn the one who drowned.
Maybe this man felt the one who drowned should’ve been him!

  “All I really remember is a sparrow got into the church and a man drowned.

  “October the next year the scarecrows were back in their former clothes. The fisherman. The wife. The sons. The daughters.

  “Now, you might say, ‘Oh, those folks lived by omens.’ But at least they knew what to take heed of. Imagine a world where you didn’t!”

  In eighty-eight of the ninety-nine forerunners I collected, birds were the symbol of a death foretold. (I always wondered if the fact that people knew I was a bird-watcher influenced their choices of which forerunners to tell me.) What’s more, all but two of the forerunners pertained to a death at sea. I do not mean to promote the obvious as a revelation, but the latter statistic certainly seemed a clear index of how, especially in the outports of Nova Scotia, the sea, for all of its transcendent beauty, will forever maintain its reputation as a grim reaper.

  “Death is part of the mystery of the sea,” I heard a parson say at a funeral at Charlos Cove in 1980.

  Red at night, sailors’ delight, red in morning, sailors take warning. The sea, with its powerful temperaments of weather and fluctuating light, its ambushing furies and hypnotic lulls, its ancient painterly dialogue with the moon, its salt, its brine, floating its woven carpets of kelp, its magisterial indifference, its indecipherable secrets, its witness of human folly and courage, its evolution, its ability to migrate leviathans and transport a nearly weightless piece of driftwood thousands of miles, and always birds on its horizons, profoundly infixes itself in the literature and daily life of coastal and inland Nova Scotia.

  “If you have a melancholy soul,” writes Darcy McNickle in her diaries of travels in Atlantic Canada in the early 1920s, “then live by the sea, here, for it is your very nature, then, to call the sea your home.”