by Sheree Fitch
Thomas rolled his eyes.
“Move along, mates.” The voice behind us was friendly but impatient.
Goodbyes are many things all mixed up together, I thought as we took our place on deck.
The ship’s horn sounded. Throngs of people waved and a cheer went up from those left behind. Libby was now just a little dot of red and black, like a ladybug, I thought as she got smaller and smaller and smaller.
The grinding and moaning of the ship was deafening. We headed with purpose for open waters. Thomas’s hand covered mine. At first I thought it was some sort of accident. But no.
“Wave, John Hindley, wave goodbye to the shores of our homeland, and I’ll wave goodbye to my heart.”
“Oh brother!” Oh lovesick brother.
I was all ready to pretend to blow kisses back to Rebecca, but Thomas moved his hand just then. He placed a protective arm around my shoulder.
I held my teasing back and we stood on deck a very long time, as did most folks, stood there until the last speck of land turned a pale grey and seemed to melt finally, blurring into the line between the sky and the sea. England disappeared as easily as a cloud rubbed out by wind.
— THE BONE CLOSET —
“’Bout time,” Nana snapped from behind the door, as if she’d been lying in wait for me the whole time. She had a purple plastic flyswatter in her hand. I half expected her to start swatting me in the back of the legs with it when I brushed past her to go upstairs. I wanted to wash the skull and get a better look at it.
“Suppose you’re hungry now. Well, we better get something straight right off about meals—”
“What?” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as I could.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something,” she said.
“I did,” I said, then pulled the skull out from under my shirt and thrust it in her face. I was hoping to freak her out. She barely blinked. Then she turned so fast she squeaked. I’m certain I could smell rubber burning from her boots.
“Bring it into the kitchen first,” she said. “Then I’ll put it with the others.”
The others?
I followed her into the kitchen.
“Just put it on the table,” she ordered.
She cleared a spot by shoving aside what looked to me like my breakfast. I suppose it would have been my punishment for running off. She would have made me eat a bowl full of cold porridge.
She filled the sink up with warm sudsy water and then motioned to me to bring it over.
“It’s yours. You have to clean it.” She handed me an old toothbrush. “Be gentle.”
I scrubbed at least ten minutes. As the dirt dislodged from the cavities and pockmarks, the skull became more recognizably human.
“Okay, that’ll do,” she said and held out a terrycloth towel. I watched as she dried every nook and cranny, and even used a Q-tip on the smaller spaces she couldn’t get at with the twisted corner of the towel. She handed the skull back to me. But it was the strangest thing. It no longer felt like a skull. It felt like a head. It was warmer for one thing. It gave me the heebie-jeebies.
Nana clasped the key that hung from a rope around her neck and pulled it over her head. Or tried to. She was wearing an oversized man’s plaid shirt and the key got tangled up in her collar. After tugging for a bit, she finally croaked from beneath the folds of the shirt, “Help me with this, would ya?”
Rather trusting, I thought, letting me help her with a rope around her neck.
When she had the key in her hand and her shirt back in place, she pointed to the skull and then upstairs. With the skull in my hands—like a dead weight, which it was—I followed.
She cackled. “I call this the bone closet.”
Just as I feared and always suspected. There was something secret and deadly behind that locked door. Great, I was thinking, she’s a vampire witch and I’m in the middle of a horror movie.
But at first, it was nothing spectacular. A small storage room. I smelled mothballs and cedar and stifled a sneeze. There were books and boxes everywhere. Herbs hung upside down in bunches. She reached behind a neat stack of shoeboxes and chocolate boxes and scooped up bundles of dirty old tea towels. Cradling them in her arms as if she was carrying a baby, she placed the five bundles on a steamer trunk.
“Unwrap them,” she instructed. The creepy feeling slithered into my belly again.
“No,” I whispered.
She laughed. “They won’t bite.”
“I’m telling Dad,” I said.
“What?”
“That you’re scaring me.”
“You’ve got yourself worked up, is all,” she said and laughed again. “Your imagination’s far worse than the truth. Unwrap them.”
So I did.
I let a yelp out of me that travelled to Katmandu and back. Sure enough, there were more bones and partial skulls.
“Calm down,” the witch was snorting. Laughing! “Don’t look so terrified. It’s not like I ever killed anyone!”
I had to plug my nose for fear of upchucking right there on the floor. I started to back out of the closet.
“No you don’t, get back here. It’s not pleasant but it’s a fact. I figure this here was a man, this one a woman, this child, maybe four, five years old. You found a baby this morning. See?”
She put her glasses on and rummaged through a wicker basket. From a rat’s nest of trinkets she produced a measuring tape and proceeded to measure the baby’s skull.
“Not more than two months old, I’d say. God bless her little soul.”
“Nana, what’s going on?” The room was starting to wobble in front of my eyes, like heat rising from hot pavement in summer.
“Out!” she hissed. She didn’t have to tell me twice. She locked the door behind her. “Put on some boots. I’ve got someplace to take you.”
“I didn’t bring any.”
“There’s an extra pair of rubbers by the door.”
She grabbed the keys to her truck. I didn’t even have time to untie my sneakers, just threw them off and stepped into boots miles too big for me. I clomped after her as fast as I could. She was already in the truck with the motor gunning by the time I caught up with her.
— GRAVE SIGHTS —
“It’s only five minutes from here.”
“What’s five minutes from here? Where are you taking me?” She had a wild-eyed look about her. Crazy, I kept thinking, my whole family is bonkers now.
“You’ll see when we get there.”
She sped like a demon down the main highway, then turned onto a dirt road I’d never been on before. It was narrow and cut through dense forest of fir and pine. We were in the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t seen a house for at least a mile. Nana honked suddenly.
It was a squirrel. The truck hit the soft dirt on the shoulder of the road and fishtailed until she finally got control. And she just kept on going!
“Nana!” I screamed.
“Relax,” she said, “I’m a very good driver.” Compared to who? I wondered.
After a few more hair-raising twists and turns, she parked. We got out of the truck and she looked around, almost as if she was sniffing for danger.
“Hold still,” she said. I turned in time to get showered with bug spray. She just missed my eyes.
“The no-see-ums are buggers this time of year. They get me every time.” She doused herself with the musky stuff, dabbing it behind her ears as if it were perfume from Paris. From the cab of the truck, she pulled out a stick and some bells.
“Never seen a bear in these here woods, and never want to neither. Just in case, though, this’ll scare them off.” I think she thought it was a good joke. I didn’t laugh.
She crossed the road and clambered down into the ditch, motioning to me to follow with an impatient wave of her arm. I squished after her, darn near sinking in mud the colour and thickness of tar. I had to fight my way through a grove of cattails, most of them taller than I was. Nana was breathing heavil
y by this time, but then so was I.
“Shh!” she hissed, looking behind me. I slowly turned. It wasn’t a skeleton or a bear, but a doe, just a few steps away. She noticed us, and with a flick of tail showing the white patch around its bottom like a thong bikini, she was gone.
“This way,” said Nana. An overgrown trail led deeper into the forest. “Careful of the branches,” she said. “One snap in the eye and you’ll be blind for the rest of your life.”
I followed at a safe distance as they whipped back. She was ploughing through like some dog on the scent of a rabbit. The wild blackberry bushes and thistles on either side of the trail attacked my ankle bones. Finally, we made it to some sort of a clearing.
Panting, she trudged up a small knoll in the centre of the clearing. I joined her, almost blown over by the force of the wind, gasping at what I saw. It was a view of the ocean even more spectacular than from the hill behind her house. Stretching out as far as I could see was nothing but ocean. It was a wild and thrashing sea, the roar of the waves like thunder beneath our feet.
“Over here,” she shouted. Barely visible for the alders and scrub brush around it was a cemetery. The tombstones were lopsided, crooked teeth in a dinosaur’s jaw. She pointed to a tall monument, a giant cement pencil pointing to the sky. “Looks like a miniature of the Washington Monument, doesn’t it?” she wheezed.
“I couldn’t say,” I said, “seeing as I’ve never seen the Washington Monument.” I was hot and bruised and frustrated and now wet by the spray from waves hitting the rocks below. I couldn’t look down without getting dizzy.
“Well, it does. Read what it says,” she ordered.
There was a rectangular plaque, tarnished from age, about halfway up the base of the stone. I read it out loud.
“‘This spot marks the burial of some 544 souls lost at sea in the marine disaster of the SS Atlantic on April 1, 1873. May they rest in the waters of eternal life.’”
“Five hundred and fo—” I was astonished.
“Everyone knows about the Titanic,” Nana said quietly. “They write books about it, make movies and spend millions looking for it. That’s fine, it should be remembered. But this shipwreck was the largest wreck before the Titanic. This one is all but forgotten. Nearly everyone in Boulder Basin and Terns Bay helped in the rescue that night.” She pointed just down the coast aways. “See that hump of rock out there, like a whale’s back?”
I nodded. It was only visible every few moments, as waves crashed around it.
“That’s where she hit. Not even eight hundred feet from Elbow Island beyond. Some made it to the island. Some washed up on its shore. Some say if you step on that island to this day you’ll hear the screams and dying words of those who didn’t make it. Those bones you found, they’re from here, this gravesite where those folks got buried. Time and the sea are eroding the earth. These poor buggers are drowning all over again.”
“You mean the bones from here make it all the way to your house?”
“All up and down this coast these past few years. Before that, people around here collected enough treasures and pieces of ship in their houses to set up a small museum. Which is exactly what I’d like to see someday. Anyhow, the erosion of the grave itself is a tragedy. I’ve been stashing the bones for a few years now, hoping I could get some action.”
“Action for what?”
“To restore this gravesite, first off. Thought we could fix up the shoreline here, bulldoze some earth back in and build up the embankment to keep who’s left buried safe. I started off writing a few letters. I went to some town council meetings.”
“What happened?”
“They told me it would cost too much—and the municipality doesn’t have that much money. Bullcrap. They have enough for their new yacht club and the cobblestone patio where all I can tell is just for the tourists and come from aways to go get drunk on Friday nights. I even wrote the government. Haven’t heard a word.”
“But what’s this got to do with you keeping a closet full of bones?”
“When I have enough I’m going to just march into Riley Tucker’s office—he’s our member of Parliament—and dump them on his desk.”
“Nana, you wouldn’t!”
“Yes, I would, then demand somebody save the grave. These folks were someone’s families. Everyone deserves a proper burial.” Her voice was barely a whisper. But fierce as the sea. A loud kathump of wave crashed just underneath us. “Besides, it’s just not good having lost souls floating around the area. Strange things start happening.”
“You mean ghosts?” I couldn’t believe I was hearing this from No-Nonsense herself.
“No. I mean spirits—like I said. The dead should not be disturbed. It’s bad enough they hang around out there on Elbow Island. We don’t want them here on shore.”
“Nana, let’s go back.”
“All right. If you’re interested, I’ve got a heap of stuff at the house for you to look through. Magazine articles and clippings, some letters, in those boxes in the bone closet.” She was almost smiling.
“Nah. I’ve got enough to do with my training.” A flicker of something passed over her face. Disappointment? Hurt?
“Fine, I figured you’d be too chicken anyhow.” Her voice was pulled tight and sharp as barbed wire.
“I’m not afraid, Nana! I could handle it. I’m just not interested.” This was a bald-faced lie. She already had me hooked. I just wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. It was that old harbour of hate, I suppose.
“Someday you’ll realize it’s better to be more curious than afraid.”
We drove back home in a silence as thick as the fog that was rolling in.
— UNDERCOVER RESEARCH —
It was well after supper when I ran my laps, sprints up and down that hill ten times. The feathery light of dusk fanned out into complete darkness. Tar Black. Black Raven. Darkest Black. Black Widow. Sorrow’s Black.
On the last lap I stopped at the top and looked long and hard out at that ocean. It was a calm night. The water was still but looked cold and oily, as if lying in wait to swallow a shipload of people. I could make out the faint shape of Elbow Island. Nana’s words of it being haunted by spirits revved up my O.I. It was in full spooky mode. I searched the sky, hoping for the comfort my father believed could be found there. The moon was a lopsided canoe hanging in the sky. The clouds were phantoms peering down at me from beyond the beyond. There wasn’t so much as a star for comfort. I ran fast as I could back to the house.
Nana was watching Jeopardy, one of her favourites. When I went to get a drink of water, I noticed she’d left the key to the bone closet on the table. I slipped it in my pocket.
“Who is Marco Polo?” I shouted out before she could on my way through the TV room. She grunted her displeasure.
“Night, Nana, I’m going to have a shower and then get into bed.”
“Night what is helium?” she said all in one breath. She’s in love with Alex Trebek. “He was born in Canada, you know,” she says every time the theme song starts playing. Repetition is another irritating habit of hers. This was also on my list of reasons I did not love her like a normal grandchild.
After I got in bed, I set my watch alarm. It was my only chance to find out more without her knowing.
It went off at exactly 4:22.
I crept along the hall. Every step creaked.
“One thousand one, one thousand two …” I counted to fifteen between each step. It worked. The witch did not wake up. The lock was stubborn, though, and I inched the door open, cringing with every squeak. Nana rolled over, muttering in her sleep. Finally I made it in.
Utter blackness. I had to feel my way along the wall.
Something—a wisp of hair, maybe—brushed my forehead. I smothered a scream. It was just the frayed end of the ribbon on the chain. I yanked the light on. I picked out a stack of chocolate boxes and shoeboxes. Then I reached into the hiding place. My hand touched one of the bundles of bones. I swear every hai
r on my head stood up like I’d just rubbed my scalp with a balloon. But I felt around until I found the baby’s skull. It was my find, after all.
I turned off the light and scampered back to my room.
I examined the skull. I tried imagining the face of the baby it belonged to. A girl or a boy? Dimples? Brown eyes or blue?
I tucked it underneath my pillow. Then I arranged the boxes out on my quilt. I opened the first box and glanced through the contents. I began to read. And then I read and read. Oh, did I read.
The accounts of the disaster were gruesome. Article after article and photocopies of old newspapers from places as far away as New York were covered in plastic.
I read enough to figure out the obvious—the shipwreck was world news at the time. Nowadays, it would be all over CNN. And it was beyond disaster
Minute by Minute
“I suppose it is not necessary,” said one of the crew, “to give you the minute particulars of how EACH LIFE was lost. Every succeeding minute waves washed off one, two, three; sometimes six, then a dozen were SWEPT AWAY and went out side by side into the valley of death. There is no language that can describe the feelings of a man holding on for DEAR LIFE to a bit of rigging and watching his friends and companions struggling, clutching, SINKING, DYING. The weakest of course went first …”
The words made the pictures clear enough for me. Sifting through the newsprint was like putting together the pieces of a novel with the chapters out of order.
My grandmother, in her own handwriting, had compiled passenger lists: Cabin Passengers, Steerage Passengers, Crew and Officers, Firemen/Trimmers, Storekeepers, Stewards. Name after name after name, and sometimes their ages.
I skimmed through them at first. The A’s, the B’s, the C’s. By the time I got to the D’s, I began to whisper their names. When I got to the H’s—H as in Hotchkiss—I was saying them out loud.
“Michael Higgins (32).
“W. P. Hill (22).
“Patrick Hindley (40).
“Mary Hindley (38).
“Thomas Hindley (15).
