Speechless

by Anne Simpson

  SOPHIE GETS UP, watching the dog as he bounds to the shore, zigzagging near the edge of it, the lip. She wonders if some trace of her father remains in the water, the sand, the air. Does he exist somehow, or is he entirely gone? The wind is fierce; it carries the day with it, light streaming over her. Caught in the gusts, her hair waves around her head, and she digs in her pocket for her old, soft hat, one her grandmother knitted, pulling it over her head. It’s the tail end of April, almost May. The wind shouldn’t be harsh; it should be mild.

  A’isha. Her uncle told them he’d call when he knew the outcome. The second appeal meant months of preparation for him. Sophie wants to know the verdict; she doesn’t want to know. She’s afraid to know. Across the channel is a reddish-brown strip of beach, Ferry Beach, and beyond that an island spiked with dead trees, and, farther east, the indistinct hills of Cape Breton’s western shore, that blue coast, always mysterious, not quite there, as if hovering just above the earth. She saunters west, away from the estuary, back the way she came. The long curve of beach looks wintry, and there are patches of snow in the high ridge of dunes, a thin crust of ice over a tear-shaped pond in the sand. She kicks aside ragged heaps of eelgrass left after storms, and makes her way to the water’s edge, where the waves surge in, cold and greenish blue. Farther out, the water is much darker, a deep navy blue, but here it’s altogether different. She shivers. It’s freezing, with that bracing wind, and though she knows she’ll need a hot shower by the time she gets home, she doesn’t move. It mesmerizes her. A’isha is alive, still alive. Soon the news of the second appeal will come. The tide swirls in, gathers itself, pulls back, and sweeps in again, but it’s too cold to stand in one place watching it.

  Cuba, she calls. Cuba!

  The wind takes her cry, and she knows the dog won’t hear. She scrambles up the dunes, but she sees nothing except a ragtag of gulls blown above her, crumpled paper thrown into the blue. No dog anywhere. No, she’s wrong: down on the beach is a familiar plume of yellow-blond tail. He’s tugging at something. She circles back, sinking in the deep sand of the dune wall as she descends and chases the dog away from whatever he is intent on ripping apart.

  Hey, Cuba, get away from that!

  He has a dark piece of it in his mouth.

  Get over here!

  He comes reluctantly, the dark piece dropped, ready to wheel and go back to what he found.

  No.

  The thing is partly hidden under eelgrass. A seal, a deer? It’s hard to tell. Yes, a seal. There’s a bit of flipper. Something has been at it, and the seal seems to have been eaten away. A skull, bits of skin, or fur, and the socket where an eye used to be, before it was a mutilated carcass. Like nothing else, that stench. The sweet-sick smell.

  Cuba noses toward it, eagerly.

  No, she says.

  Her eyes blur with tears from the wind, and the seal slips from its place as if it’s moving. In that moment, Cuba disregards her. She doesn’t see him go to the seal again, but now he’s yanking at it.

  No! she cries.

  Cuba lets go, slinks away. She rarely speaks so sternly to him.

  The seal is dead. It can’t move. It’s nothing but a sack of leather-like skin, and bones, and putrid organs, and eyes that aren’t there.

  She leashes Cuba.

  Down the beach is a loose group of people, three or four. They must have come from the boardwalk together, maybe headed in Sophie’s direction. She hopes they’ll go the other way, toward the hill at the far end of the beach, a green flank sometimes topped by wedding tents in summer. From that hill she has seen pods of minke whales in the water below, their smooth, dark bodies slipping over and under the surface.

  Death takes creatures like the seal and turns them into distortions of themselves. It took her father and turned him into something like sand and he’d fallen through her fingers. The dog yanks on the leash and Sophie pulls back. It was a mistake to go to Nigeria in the first place. Yank and pull. She left Felix there and came home, another mistake. And it had been a mistake to have been so full of belief that she could write about A’isha, who lived in another country, another world.

  Two of the people are going the other way, and they have a dog, no, two dogs. Was it a mistake about A’isha? Yes, they have two dogs, a light one and a dark one. A big one and a small one. They’re chasing each other, scuffing the sand, digging at it and racing away, as if slingshotted. She’s glad the couple are taking the dogs to the western end of the beach, that rougher part, strewn with rocks. How could she have known what would happen? Felix. No, she won’t — she isn’t going to think about Felix, how she —

  One person remains at the water’s edge, not far from where the lifeguard’s tower is placed in the summer months.

  Cuba wrenches her wrist, hauling on the leash.

  At night she lies in her bed without sleeping, thinking of him, tossing, not thinking of him. It’s true she abandoned him. She goes to the grocery store and finds herself turning over a Spanish onion; she wanders down an aisle with no idea what she’s searching for. The ache catches her as she reaches for a bag of coffee beans, dark-roast Colombian, on sale. She picks up the bag, holds it in mid-air. When she puts gas in her mother’s car, she’s no longer staring at the hat-shaped hill called Sugarloaf, she’s in the hospital and Grace is holding her. The driver in the car behind her honks, and she’s startled into taking the nozzle out of the gas tank, ripping the receipt from the slot. She drives away and parks on the far side of the gas bar, turns off the car, leans back against the headrest. Sugarloaf. Something inside her is pierced, and beyond that hole, that Felix absence, is the blue afterworld, the far-off place that can’t be reached.

  She wonders if she can let Cuba off the leash, whether that solitary person will mind, because the dog is bound to investigate, bark, sniff for a treat. Some people like dogs and others want them gone.

  She lets Cuba off the leash.

  THE MAN WEARS A BORROWED HAT and scarf, and with the hat pulled down and the scarf wrapped around his face, only his eyes and nose are visible. His down jacket, thin and easy to pack, is meant to be warm, meant to withstand any weather. He feels the wind penetrating it. To stand here, wind assailing him, is not the smartest thing to do.

  He sees that the woman has let the dog off the leash and knows it will come to him. This is what dogs do. She and the dog are still some distance from him, and he shifts his gaze away, away from the white hat, away from the blue jacket. He concentrates on the water, counting the beats between each curl and drop, each foamy drift of spent wave. So damn cold.

  One, two — his mind slips off and he brings it back. One, two.

  A ribbon of kelp at his feet, and a mound of stuff, heavy and thick and tangled. He touches the tip of his German shoe to it, his glossy leather shoe that’s entirely unsuitable for walking on a beach.

  She’s closer, the dog is closer.

  The dog begins to bark, galloping over to him, barking and wagging its feathery tail. It won’t stop barking until the man bends over, rubbing between its ears, and then it wants to play, whirling and whirling around him in a frenzy of exuberance.

  Cuba! calls the woman. I’m sorry, I should have had him on the leash. Here, I’ll get him away from you.

  It’s all right.

  No — he’ll jump all over you. He has no sense, really. He’s never had any sense — Cuba!

  Soph, he says.

  She lets the leash drop on the wet sand, a lopsided figure eight. The froth of a wave slides over it.

  He moves back. His shoes are wet, his ridiculous leather shoes that aren’t meant for beaches. It’s me, Soph.

  The dog barks again, running one way, then the other, leaving the marks of its claws drawn deeply into the sand.

  Your mother told me you’d be here, at Pomquet, and then she found neighbours of hers who could take me out here, because you have the car.

  I do, she says. I have the car.

  I came by bus from the airport, and then taxi.
I had a time of it, finding the house, but the taxi driver asked around. I didn’t know your mother’s place was outside town, and the driver didn’t know the name of the lane, but everyone knows everyone else here, or at least they know someone who knows — I mean, it’s not a big place. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.

  He’s talking too much. He needs to sit down, lie down on a bed where he can rest. His mother had said it was too soon to go halfway around the world, he’d do himself damage, but he didn’t listen.

  They’re over there. He waves his hand. The neighbours — Ally and Ryan. She’s pregnant with their first. I think maybe you know them.

  She glances at the far end of the beach where the figures pick their way around boulders. The two dogs can no longer be seen.

  It’s so cold here, he says. The wind — I thought it was supposed to be spring in Nova Scotia.

  It’s you. Her eyes fill. Is it you?

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The seeds for Speechless were planted many years ago when I volunteered with CUSO (then known as Canadian University Services Overseas) as an English language and literature teacher in Nigeria. In the first year, I taught at a school for boys in Niger State. In the second year, I worked at an Advanced Teachers College in Benue State. In those years, I learned much about the rich and vivid culture of Nigeria from those who extended such a warm, generous welcome.

  The characters and story depicted in Speechless are fictitious, though there were several famous cases in Nigeria that helped lay the foundation for this novel. My invention of A’isha Nasir was greatly aided by a conversation with Hauwa Ibrahim at the Harvard Divinity School, and further helped by some details in her book, Practicing Shariah Law: Seven Strategies for Achieving Justice in Shariah Courts.

  I have taken liberties with my depiction of the border crossing at Imeko in Chapter 13. Generally, foreigners like Sophie MacNeil would cross the border from Nigeria to Benin at Seme.

  Novels take a great deal of time to write. I am deeply grateful to the Canada Council for a research and creation grant that gave me time to write Speechless, and for a Canada Council travel grant that allowed me to take up a brief residency with the Osu Children’s Libraries in Ghana. My thanks also go to Nova Scotia Communities, Culture and Heritage, which awarded me grants on two separate occasions to write Speechless. I also received an invaluable Access Copyright Foundation grant to do research at the Library of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal and at the Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University, in Boston.

  Jackie Kaiser, of Westwood Creative Artists, went the extra mile with this novel to help it find a home. Thank you, Jackie. I am fortunate to have discovered Freehand Books and to have worked with a truly wonderful team including Kelsey Attard and Anna Boyar, with editor Naomi K. Lewis, and with copy editor Emma Skagen. As well, I am most grateful for Yemi Stephanie’s comments on all matters to do with Nigeria.

  As I mentioned, Hauwa Ibrahim was a great help to me in the writing of Speechless. I am also indebted to Richard Kearney of Boston College. Linda Darwish, of St. Francis Xavier University, assisted me with answers about Islam.

  Kathy Knowles, Director of the Osu Children’s Library Fund, supported me in many ways during a residency in Ghana, where Joana Felih, Vivian Amanor, and Martin Legend were all very helpful.

  Imam Abdallah Yousri, at Ummah Masjid in Halifax, NS, was very gracious in answering many detailed questions. He spent a great deal of time going over Muslim funeral practices.

  Special thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Brennan and Dr. John Graham-Pole for answers to medical questions.

  I am also grateful to Atinuke Adeoye for her assistance.

  In terms of details of life in Nigeria from the perspective of volunteers, I was helped by Alison Mathie and Paul Marquis.

  Sections of Speechless were written at the Abbaye Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Rogersville, NS. My grateful thanks go to Sr. Kate Waters.

  Without Valerie Compton’s encouraging reading of this novel, I might not have revised it as I did. Warmest thanks also go to Carol Bruneau, Alexander MacLeod, Liz Philips, and Johanna Skibsrud.

  My heartfelt thanks to Janet, my mother, and to my sisters, Jennifer and Sue, and their families. And to my own family — Paul, David, and Sarah — my most loving thanks. I could not have done this without you.

  ANNE SIMPSON has published two novels, Canterbury Beach and Falling, longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and winner of the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction. She has also written five poetry collections, of which Strange Attractor is the most recent. She won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Loop in 2004. Her book of essays, The Marram Grass: Poetry and Otherness, examines poetry, art, and philosophy. Simpson has worked as a writer-in-residence at libraries and universities across the country. She lives in Nova Scotia.