by John Farrow
So this is no joke. “Sticky, I’m sorry, but my dad doesn’t go around helping people out. What did he get out of it?”
At least, given his expression, he seems to understand her objection. He isn’t living in some alternative world. “I know what people say. Your old man’s a hard crust. But you ever deal with the folks in Dark Harbour? Some are good people, most are, but if it’s not a harpoon between your ribs from a few of the men living there, it’s a shiv. There’s lunatics in that crowd, in my opinion.”
“Maybe. But they might also have justification for their grievances. Some do. Anyway, what do you know about Dark Harbour? You’re a mainlander.”
“When I started with your father, I used to pick him up there.”
Again, similar to his remark about her father’s helpfulness, this makes no sense.
“Sticky, what are you talking about? My dad never lived in Dark Harbour.”
“Of course not. But he’d like to go there. Down to that beach. He had business with the people harvesting dulse, for one thing.”
“That’s true, but why would you pick him up? He could drive himself.”
“He liked to walk.”
“What? He didn’t.” This she cannot believe.
“Sometimes you came with him.”
“I did not. You must be thinking of someone else.”
“You were a babe in arms, Maddy. He liked to hike there. Across the back of Seven Days Work, over the Whistle, on along that escarpment. He’d take you on his back. You in a pack. Then the long descent on the trail to Dark Harbour, and after he did his business there, I’d pick him up and take both of you home by boat.”
Maddy goes quiet. She can remember something like that. Not as a babe in arms or as a toddler, but perhaps later? As a child? “Sticky, did you pick my dad and me up when I was a bit older?”
“Sure did. He loved his hikes. Loved bringing his little girl along, too.”
No, he didn’t, Maddy’s insisting to herself, but she questions how much she really knew about it back then. Perhaps less than Sticky McCarran does.
“So, you were like a water taxi for him? Is that right?”
This time, he takes a turn at being silent. Maddy holds her stomach as a bad moment passes, then suddenly she’s rapt, astounded by the steepness of their descent down a wave. She’d scream if she hadn’t taught herself not to do that, to bear through the fright and the wildness of the sea. This time when the hull slams hard, the impact jars her teeth and bones.
“Ooompf.” Maddy’s expiration vocalizes what the boat feels.
“Sorry,” Sticky says, but it’s no fault of his that they’re out on this night.
Perhaps he’s forgotten her question as the boat begins to rise again, but momentarily he adds, “In the early days, me not much more than a kid, and your dad becoming a successful man, from the fishery. He started with dulse when it was small potatoes.”
“It’s still small potatoes.”
Sticky isn’t willing to concede that. “He did well with it. He saw the potential, your old man. Him and me, we hauled the dulse that he reduced down to powder into the United States. Totally legal now. I’m not saying it was then.”
“Pulverized dulse isn’t alcohol. It’s not a drug. When was it not legal?”
“It’s an importation. Subject to taxes, rules and regulations. People ingest it. That’s a whole other book of forms you need to fill out, and a bunch of tests, not to mention pay the fees, the fines, and, like I said, the taxes.”
“So you smuggled dulse powder so my dad could avoid taxes.”
“He was just starting out and I had big payments on the boat. The risk was worth it back then.”
Maddy looks more closely at Sticky this time. Something makes sense to her. If someone on the island worked with her father to illegally smuggle dulse into the United States, then someone else on the island would have found out about it and reported him. Few would have had any compunction against betraying him. So he contracted with someone off-island to help keep an illicit enterprise secret.
“He arranged it for you, didn’t he?” Maddy asks him.
“Arranged?” McCarran asks in turn.
“Your boat loan. He got it for you.” That way, he could own him.
Sticky nods.
“It all worked out,” he says. “I did those shipments. Didn’t like it much, but bills got paid. A few good years and your dad’s powder business prospers, he can go legit, bring it aboveboard. My loan on the boat is under control, that puts my fishing life in half-decent shape. Until the cod ran out so now it’s lobster. A short season here, not like in the States. So I still run errands for him. I like your father. He’s been fair to me. He’s a good one.”
Run errands. She knows a euphemism when she hears one.
In her lifetime, no one has ever called her father good or fair within Maddy’s earshot. She just can’t believe this guy, or these other aspects about her dad. A hiker? He did something for recreation that he enjoyed? He took along his daughter? The news strikes her as incomprehensible, and coming while she is on her way to hear his last words before his death, she scarcely believes her own ears.
“My father,” she says. “You’re not describing him in terms I usually hear.”
Sticky spins the wheel to cross a wave. Hard to see in the dark, though, and they bury the bow again.
“I know what you’re saying,” he tells her. “I know how people talk about him. Maybe they have reason. He’s a hard crust. But with me, at sea, I think he was more himself. I tell people that, they doubt what I say. But when it was just the two of us out on the water, Mr. Orrock was a contented man. I’ll tell you what—always, he was fair and good to me.”
In a way, hearing these words about her father makes her angrier still. If he was capable of being fair and good, then why wasn’t he that way more often? Or once in a while at least? Or all the time? Or with her? In the past, she bolstered her morale by reminding herself that her father was not capable of normal, kind behavior. She is discovering now that that might not be true, which means that when he was being unkind, it was not merely a consequence of his nature, but a conscious choice. He made it his business to be unkind. That makes everything worse.
She won’t attempt to explain any of it to Sticky, and after their talk they brave the night in a silence that is rarely interrupted. For no reason that she can fathom, Maddy is not violently ill again. Instead, she suffers a different sort of misery.
SIX
On the steep, dark embankment that descends into Dark Harbour along the high western shore of Grand Manan, among the trees and rocks where the ragged homes are embedded in the forest and permanently manage without electricity, as the residents prefer it that way and shun most modern accoutrements, one man rises from his lair just as the storm is on the verge of abating. He stretches and yawns mightily, as though emerging from the maw of the earth after a lengthy hibernation. He does not intend to fling open his door, but the wind catches it by surprise on his way out and he’s thrown back a step before regaining both his footing and a firmer hold on the handle. Impenetrable at its peak, the wind has calmed enough now that a man can stand upright without being blown down, yet it perseveres with sufficient force that he desires to walk in the storm awhile, to witness the gale’s denouement. Not on his rickety front porch, either, sheltered by the trees, but out on some wild bluff where it’s impossible to distinguish sky from sea or where the wind touches down on land. Something in the air has announced the weather’s impending diminishment, a lessening of the roar and whistling, a quarter turn of the tap to reduce the velocity of precipitation. In such a tempest, a man might assume that he won’t be lifted up in a swirl and tossed out to sea, although he’ll take the risk, and anyway it’s the sea that he wants to observe, that restless convulsion.
Although familiar with such storms throughout his life, and his lodging offers only rudimentary refuge, he has never grown weary of their might.
He returns
indoors a minute, dressing properly in outdoor garb that’s more sophisticated than what his neighbors might wear, then embarks upon a hike. He will stroll through the utter darkness across the cliffs of Grand Manan while the wind whips the island’s back and rain pelts down and the waves below crash and crash again in beautiful and ferocious rhythm. Dawn will surely find him upon some rock above the seascape, content in his tribute to this wild season, exhausted in his jubilation, the whales content in their travels below, as fishermen return or those who are safe in their harbors tonight venture out.
The man plants food in his coat’s big pockets and is on his way.
* * *
Madeleine Orrock steps from the Donna Beth onto a floating dock in North Head Harbour on the island of Grand Manan. She takes a moment to locate her footing, to be sure she’s steady. Her body feels as though it’s still moving, even when her mind is reasonably certain that she’s standing still. Following this internal contest of wills, she knows that she’s all right, no longer seasick, and fit to stroll down the dock and up the gangway even as they sway to the motions of the disturbed water. All is dark in town. Indeed, all is blackness, with no more than an occasional candle flickering in a window. A power failure again. Too well she remembers them from childhood. She and the skipper have concluded their business—Sticky will wait for daylight before returning to Blacks, sleeping on the boat in the interim—but before departing she has a final question for him.
“Stick, you mentioned six brothers. Four, plus you, have boats. What does the other one do? Does he fish?”
“He’s a chartered account,” the captain of the Donna Beth deadpans. He speaks in a sly way, before checking her reaction. She expects a further punch line, but Sticky only shrugs, as though to suggest that life at times is incomprehensible.
They repeat their good-byes a few times and Maddy, happy with her balance, walks down the dock and heads up the gangway. She calls back to him while he’s giving his dock lines a final inspection, “Hey, Sticky! Was I bad luck for ya?”
He returns her smile. “Not yet.”
So much standing water to slog through once she’s on hard land, puddles everywhere, and in the dark the size and depth of them is difficult to determine. The hard ground seems to sway as her inner ear settles. Overhead, clouds rampage past, and the moon, while never visible, casts an occasional glow, so at least the cloud cover is thinning and breaking up. Climbing the hill to her ancestral home feels akin to landing on Mars without the prerequisite buggy. In the dark and the rain and against the backdrop of a random shambles of memory, the place comes across to her as both eerily remote and colossally alien.
She strides on.
Of course. Her dad’s house is lit up. The rest of the island sleeps in the dark.
Just like her father to always assert his status.
Maddy doesn’t quite know what to do, how to effect this entry, and feeling awkward about her homecoming rings the doorbell. Bright, tinny, silly chimes ring out. She preferred Sticky’s. She lingers a few moments on the stoop but quickly grows irritated and enters. This is, after all, as she reminds herself, or tries to convince herself, her home, too. In a way, it is. At the very least, it’s the one she grew up in. She believes that she has a key for the door on her chain, but in any case, it’s not locked. This was never a policy her father endorsed—an unlocked door—so she blames the help.
She blames them as well for no one being on hand to greet her. A dying old man might be bedridden, for all she knows, but surely the help—a maid, a favorite bimbo, or whatever she might be, not to mention an attending medical staff, for surely her father hired someone—would at least answer the door. But nothing.
“Wakey wakey,” she warns as she checks out the lower rooms, but after sloughing off her rain gear and wandering around downstairs, she fails to locate anyone. Going by the leftovers on a plate, the La-Z-Boy was occupied in recent hours, and several lights are on, but no one’s about. She hopes she won’t find that maid/whore sleeping in her old bed. Or worse, sleeping in her father’s.
She climbs the broad staircase.
Maddy chooses to look into her old room first—it’s not occupied, and hasn’t been. On first glance, it gives her the willies. Nothing in there, nor the room itself, reminds her of herself or of childhood. A foreign place now. Her father’s room, she’s already noticed, is in the dark, lights out, and she doesn’t know how to proceed. Enter and wake him, then suffer his rebuke for doing so? Or let him sleep and risk finding out tomorrow that he isn’t even home, that he’s been hospitalized, and get chewed out for that, too.
Without much delay, she decides that she didn’t drive all this way and cross rough water to ignore her father before he dies, so she might as well screw up her courage and get this over with. Her compromise is to step through the dark to the far side of his room, where she’s close enough to discern by the faint yard lights that the old guy is securely under the covers, and appears to be sleeping comfortably.
The experience is a new one. She’s never observed him sleeping before. Somehow this strikes her as astonishing. The sight seems weird. Otherworldly. As her eyes adjust, she has the impression that he’s quickly gotten very old, an impression that drains her, and she feels, although not quite seasick again, wobbly on her feet.
Or, she tries to tell herself, she’s still getting used to a surface underfoot that’s motionless. Her feet haven’t adjusted, she keeps sensing waves.
Tiptoeing to his bedside, Maddy sits in the chair next to him and waits for her father to awaken.
She recalls him advising her one time when she was home for the summer from graduate school to get over herself, that worse fathers exist in the world. Did I ever abuse you? Hit you? Deny you anything that wasn’t in your best interest? Did I ever wrongfully scold you? His litany went on, and and to every question he forced her to answer honestly, the reply was always no. But that was the thing. He didn’t get how mean it was to be asking all those questions to which the answer was always no and yet at the same time be totally unaware of the harm he’d committed without ever abusing her, or striking her, or ignoring her, or any of the other legitimate complaints, in his words, that other children had about their parents all over the island. For that matter, throughout the world. He was so damn right but he was so totally in the wrong to imply that her complaints, by comparison to sordid stories, were rendered illegitimate. The cruelty of bestial parents, his argument seemed to be, dismissed his own. Really, you’re just a spoiled rich girl brat, and if that’s your only problem, then for God’s sakes don’t complain. Enjoy it. Didn’t I send you off to the university of your choice, which just happens to be to a school as far away from me as you could possibly find? What dad does that? And finally she could say yes, and she admitted, “Yes, you’re paying for Stanford.”
“Eight years of it,” he pointed out.
“Seven,” she corrected him. That’s about all that she had on him at the time of the discussion, that her seven years of university tuition felt like eight to him.
“Just seven years,” she repeats quietly now, her first words since entering the bedroom. Her first words spoken in person to him in three years. And having spoken, she suddenly detects his silence. Not only the still, interior quiet of the night, amid the diminishing rain and the generator going on outside, but the interior dead silence of this intimate space.
Suddenly, it feels expansive, as if it’s swallowing her up.
Maddy touches his wrist then. Her hand, that instantly, snaps back.
She feels her breath trapped in her lungs, as though they can no longer inflate nor contract.
And wills herself to touch him again.
He’s cold.
Cold, she confirms. Her father is cold.
Not mean cold. Stone cold.
She says what she never would have imagined saying. “Daddy.”
And flicks on the bedside lamp. Sees the nickels on his eyes.
The sight of him shocks her. The br
ight, sparkling money for eyes.
She’s stunned.
He did not wait for her. He’s dead.
Of course, when did he ever wait for her?
That quickly, her anger returns.
“You never, ever waited for me, not ever,” she remarks, as though the words constitute a formal complaint. Maddy sits back in the chair again, not knowing what to do, thinking that she is supposed to react a certain way, but she doesn’t know how. She may feel disconnected from this man, but death appalls her, and he is someone she has always known. Probably they were close once, a long, long time ago. She’s surprised by the anger rising through her bloodstream. When she was first alerted to the impending death of her father, she thought only, So? It’s about time. Good riddance. Yet a minute later she wanted nothing more than to get here before he passed away. She wanted to know what he’d say, and wonders now if anyone did get to talk to him. She expects that her one old friend on the island, and her father’s, the Reverend Lescavage, would have been here, but who knows whom her father let in the door these days? Could be anyone. Could be no one. Probably his whore/maid, the one who phoned, but where is she now?
Who was with him when he died, or was he alone then, too?
Who put the nickels on his eyes?
Suddenly, she feels the emptiness of the house, the loneliness of this death. Not that he deserved better, but had anyone been with him before he died, they promptly abandoned him, leaving him there.
Oh, probably to go party. Celebrate.
Thoughts boomerang in her head. She feels sorry for herself one second, angry the next, and all of it yields to regret, dismay, confusion, until she pities herself again. She senses a rising august hopelessness. For the very first time she understands that her race to arrive here derived from one lingering aspect to her nature—that she felt a lurking, private, provocative hopefulness swimming in her bloodstream. Her father must come clean, they must arrive at an understanding, a resolution. If she recognized it earlier she’d have done a number on herself to get rid of the whole ridiculous notion, but it crept upon her unannounced, like a flu bug, to take hold, tricking her defenses. Now that she sees it for what it is, it’s all too foreign and too late. Some deep residual hope has been dashed. She feels done in. As though she’ll never know that resident hopefulness again, only this sudden hopelessness, for now she can never know what her father was unable to touch upon in an endless litany of foul deeds, the ones he righteously claimed he never inflicted upon her, as if that absence of overt cruelty somehow negates the inexplicable, intangible, indestructible cruelty she breathed from the moment of her birth. Now that he’s dead, an inert, motionless, unrepentant nothing, no contrite act of repentance or fulsome admission of guilt or a complex explanation of why can save her, and her hope for that release is now extinguished with him.
