Deluded Your Sailors (6 page)

—Lew?

His father's voice.

—Lewis, what in the name of God are you doin up there?

—Digging, Skipper. I'll be down in a minute.

Thomas Wright, seventy-something, broad-shouldered and dressed like Oscar Goldman on his way to Studio 54, hauled himself up the silly ladder to the attic and looked at his son's knees. Then he glanced at the Ghostometer crate – they'd only discussed the apparatus once, both men embarrassed, intrigued – and finally, up at his son's green eyes, so like his own.

—But you're all right, Lew?

Not hangin from a rafter? Not suckin a gun?

Lewis had spit-warmed a .303 once but got interrupted. His father, who'd been making breakfast in the next room, did not know that, but he'd not have been surprised to find out.

—I'm fine, Skipper.

Thomas scowled at the dusty boxes. —This old stuff.

—Should be in a museum.

—Where's the sense in lookin backward?

—Fine words from a man on the board of directors for Rare Documents. Sometimes it helps you figure out where you're going.

Thomas changed tack, as he often did when potentially losing an argument. —You still takin all those old pills?

Secret boxes and hidden portraits, Prozac and Ativan;
‘old
stuff,' ‘old pills' – what's the difference?
Lewis dropped his gaze. Could it be normal for a grown man to fear his father still, normal to crave his father's approval the way he craved air? —It does me good.

—Witch doctors and mad scientists scrapin money out of you.

Lewis dared himself to look at his father again and caught a glint in the older man's eyes. A plea? No, the simple strength of a man who needed no doctors, no stuff and no pills, and who sure as hellfire knew what a bootstrap looked like, never you mind what he crammed in the attic.

Thomas rubbed his lower back. —I had a dream this mornin that's got me right in the rats. The minister out in Port au Mal at that old church. I used to dream of him whenever I got sick enough for a fever, or back when you were all banged up after you crashed your Cessna. He kept tellin me all this old stuff, but I couldn't make head nor tail out of it.

Lewis studied his father and worried a bit; Thomas must be upset to use so much dialect.

—He spoke to you in the dream?

—Valour and pilgrims. Just foolishness.

—Skipper? Mind if I let Nichole look at this old ledger? You remember Nichole. Stephen's daughter, used to write ad copy at the station.

—Never mind that. What ledger are you talkin about?

—The one you were thinking of giving to Rare Docs for their new collection. At the reunion?

—Tell her to be careful with it. And I want it back in time.

—Good, good.

—There'll be people at that reunion I literally haven't spoken to or set eyes on for years, Lew. Decades. Grown children I've never met. My sister and that leech she married moved away after she took the chafin pan to my head at that banquet. You remember that? No, you were still small. My other sister died so young. Nothin would have kept me from spoilin her children. Libby. Never mind that now. I've got an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon tomorrow, right down in the deepest bowels of the General Hospital. Can you come with me? I don't want to worry your brother. I just don't want anyone worryin. I – I'm not accustomed to...

To being afraid.
Lewis nodded.

—Yes, b'y, I'll come with you.

6) DIRTY DEEDS
F
EBRUARY
11-12, 2009, S
T
J
OHN
'
S AND
P
ORT AU
M
AL
.

Not flashback this time but memory, visited willingly: a hospital room in April of 2005.

Green curtains, frayed and holey, hid nothing, gave no sanctuary as Nichole argued with a doctor named Swift. —I can't be bipolar. Depressed, sure, but I'm not manic. I'm creative.

—Many bipolar patients experience delusions of heightened creativity and intelligence with manic episodes.

—My novel's a delusion, is it?

—Is it published?

—Not yet.

—Then it's a product of one.

—I'll be sure to get my publisher to add a delusion clause to the contract. Look, I'm crazy, yeah, I admit that, good-crazy most days, but I am not manic.

—You'll come to see it in time.

While she waited for that particular revelation, Nichole took up bad habits the way a toddler might throw a tantrum. Cigarettes beloved and abandoned, though she still craved the spongy filter between her lips, the nicotine smack to her sludgy morning brain. No more cocaine, though.
Cocaine got me in enough trouble (what a
great pun, yes, girl, dart down to see the Morgentaler crowd) back in
university, happy happy happy.
Nichole wondered if the coke hadn't corroded bits of her brain. Very little excited Nichole anymore, and she longed to feel. Dr Miller connected the numbness to her chronic post-traumatic stress disorder;
repeated strain and dread affect the
neural pathways and can literally re-wire the brain.
Antidepressants helped, a bit, but this hole... Sometimes she saw herself as one of those wretchedly obese people whose skin fused to their blankets and chairs, whose bodies become one with previous comforts that now galled. Hidden wounds festered, and nothing could reach them. Happy? Some stimulant, please. Some shade of the flame of being alive. Espresso mixed with cereal milk helped ease her off the cigarettes but then greasily led to three double americanos a day, then three before lunch. The caffeine burnt her stomach and duodenum until only rice pudding digested easily.
Leave it to me to abuse the polite and
respectable drugs. Well brought up, that Wright girl.
Fortune smiled, and Nichole obtained a fine supply of Boost and Ensure when cleaning out Claire's apartment. Odd time, that, Claire not quite dead but not coming home, waiting for a transfer to palliative care, so tired – sick to death, even – of IVs and feeding tubes. Light a smoke, light the whole pack, light a candle. Nichole cleaning out the apartment with Callie, Claire's mother. Claire's various illnesses while growing up and Nichole tutoring her when she missed school. Claire's neglected work wardrobe, blouses and skirts balled up and tossed to the back of the closet when she quit VOIC. Claire's corner cupboard crammed with loose tea, three full shelves of it. Nichole and Callie laughed, and Claire not even dead yet. (Eat, eat something, anything, chips, damn I'm out of rice pudding, raw pasta noise and crunch
cram
the mouth and chew, chew and chew and chew so your jaws ache molars crack til it all hurts so bad because you deserve this hurt you rancid worthless slut you deserve it even the pain of knowing and losing Claire but you see this pain you can control just cram chew chew chew and swallow gulp it down, always swallow – Claire – food explodes in your gut throw it up fingers down there
throw it up –
)

No bingeing on tranqs, though. Nichole no longer longed to die.

Just wished it all didn't hurt so much.

Asleep now, this tedious night in February 2009, head on a towel spread over the toilet lid, she dreamt of the Church of Prevenient Grace at the End of Things. Nichole hadn't gone near Prevenient Grace since the late 1970s, when the pastor frightened her with a sermon on the sins of the fathers, but in her dream she remembered it quite well. Sharplined, cold and dark, no electric lights, no heat. Deny the flesh and sharpen the soul. An apocalyptic church, this Prevenient Grace at the End of Things, though mysteriously inconsistent, for The End Had Come, right on schedule, back in 1974. Blissfully ignorant, mankind suffered on, denied even the grace of oblivion, as Reverend Winslow answered when pressed.

Reverend Elias Winslow. That voice tonight through the phone and the plumbing – finally, a name for the voice that tried to preach though the hissing in her stupid nightmare, and damn it if that dream hadn't slopped over into the recurring abortion dream – Nichole seeking her foetus as it cried weakly from within a misplaced box, Nichole finding the box, opening it, releasing a swarm of wasps.

She woke. Reverend Winslow, collar and robe and patient eyes, stood by her bathroom vanity, coaxing Nichole to seek paths to God through tangled starrigan and tuckamore, bogs and rocks, traps and snares. Then he helped her stand up and totter to her bed. She suddenly felt very weak, feverish, like that time she brewed pneumonia and coughed up phlegm gone the hues of old photographs, sepia and grey. Spruce needle tea, a great steaming mug of it, Reverend Winslow holding it near Nichole's mouth and coaxing her to drink it.
Make you feel better.
Nichole arched her face away:
I don't drink, no, gave it up.
Winslow gently guided the cup to Nichole's lips again:
It's only spruce tea. I would not poison you,
not when you have such talent for poisoning yourself. Drink the tea. Only tea. Shhh
.

At the Prevenient Grace rectory in Port au Mal, Elias Winslow woke – eyelids dusty, chest sweaty – worried. Quite worried.

No storm surge, no loud teenagers: then what just woke him?

Purpose mislaid.

The handle of the sailmaker's secret knife left marks in his grasping hand.

Winslow eased himself out from under his bed – he slept curled up on the wooden floor – and caught the scent of spruce needle tea. Twice that night he'd offered troubled dreamers spruce needle tea: Seth Seabright and Nichole Wright. In the past he'd guided dreaming Seabrights to bottled messages and hanging nets, Wrights to cold barrens and jagged rocks. But why? Dust clots stuck to his dry lips. One good thing, at least: he remembered how to make spruce tea. Other old recipes had crawled off and died, bones and shades of them rattling round Winslow's skull in forgotten orbits, but he could still grasp the memory of spruce tea if he stood tall enough, if he reached.

Am I not supposed to torment these people instead of giving them
tea?

Small wonder I hardly sleep
.

Driving the hard road to Port au Mal, Lewis Wright spoke over a VOIC report on upcoming ceremonies to mark the sinking of
Sea Sentry
.—So that's why I want you to have the ledger. It's from Port au Mal: that much I know. The writing looks old, and the ink has gone that rusty brown colour. But I need it back before the family reunion. You know about that, right?

—A ghastly idea.

—Good, good. I haven't spoken to some of our cousins since – you know about that big rift when Skipper took over the station there after Grandfather crashed his plane? His sister, my Aunt Marie, she and her husband took Skipper to court, to get their share. All about money and memory, that was. Never quite understood it, myself. So be extra-careful with that ledger. We wouldn't want to get Skipper upset.

—I glanced at it this morning before we left St John's. Lewis, that ledger is a major find. I found dates in there well before 1760.
Before
.

—Keep that to yourself for now.

—It's right there on the page.

—Maybe so, but a lot of work's after going into Settlement 250. We've got to respect the date they've given us.

—Lewis!

—By the way, your book, a novel, right? Is that fiction or history?

—Fiction, Lew. A novel by definition is fiction. Mine's got history in it.

—But it's made up?

—Yes.

—The play won't be made up. That'll be simple history.

She patted the ledger. —Simple.

—That reminds me. The ACHE Board wants me to pass a message on to you. Whoever else gets cast –

—I'm not looking after casting. That's the director's job.

—Don't shoot the messenger, Nichole. Whoever else gets cast, someone named Seth Seabright has to get a good part.

—Why?

—Some arts-work quota scheme, tied into the government money. Actors' Queue, they call it. Seabright's next in line.

—Does he want to be in the play?

—Beggars can't be choosers. You ever dream about Prevenient Grace, Nichole?

—Mind the bumps, Lewis.

—Only ginger ale. That won't stain my upholstery.

—No, just my jeans.

—Good, good. I've always laughed at the name of it. Church of Prevenient Grace at the End of Things. I think it was the first place I ever felt sad. Truly sad, I mean. Up til then I'd just felt lost, or numb, like when a snowstorm traps you in the woods.

—You crashed a plane once yourself, didn't you?

Nichole hoped the taboo utterance would silence Lewis; she'd never known him so talky. Truth and memory should put him back in his place.

Fuck, I can't believe I just did that. Total power-tripping, dirty
Wright trick.

But Lewis only chuckled. —Long time ago now. Except I got out of it, unlike Grandfather. Banged myself up pretty bad, injured my brain. Not even twenty when I did that. Taking flying lessons out in Gander with the Americans. I signed up under a false name and put my brother down as next-of-kin. Didn't dare tell Skipper. He'd have put the kibosh on that right quick, right damn quick.