Fit Month for Dying (6 page)

Around two o'clock we come to the end of the sorting, and then we put the bags, stuffed to the hilt, in my car and take them to people who, according to Philomena, can make good use of Hubert's things. When we return, Philomena goes upstairs to take her afternoon nap and I sit in the den and think about Hubert. Even though his belongings have been removed from every room in the house, the essence of him remains: the groove in the arm of the chair, the smell of his pipe, the sound of his cough. I recall how good he had always been to me, how he had taken my side in any brush with Philomena, especially when she would get a choke-hold on some notion, like searching for my biological father, and refuse to let go of it no matter how much I tried to make her see reason.

After about half an hour of this recalling and remembering, retracing the years, the everlasting absence of Hubert becomes so crushing I have to get away from the house. A walk is what I need, and I leave immediately, stopping in the porch long enough to put on a heavy jacket. Even if it is mid-June, the wind is still winter cold and the fog is pea-soup thick. I close the back door quietly behind me so as not to wake Philomena.

I saunter through the Cove, something I rarely have time to do. When I rush out for a weekend, I usually have to go see this one or that one about some problem they want solved. Through gaps in the fog, I see how ragged the village has become. With the fishing long gone and the American base all but withdrawn, the young people have moved away to find work. I pass abandoned houses, steps sagging, front yards gone wild, the palings enclosing the yards gap-toothed. Where there used to be windows, there are now shabby boards or in some cases just gaping holes. The once-upon-a-time painted clapboards have been licked to the bone by the northeasters. The fences surrounding the rocky meadows that climb the hills behind the houses have fallen in upon themselves, and the lanes are gullied and rutted from spring runoff. A heartbreaking sight, especially since I know that most of the occupants of these houses had no choice but to leave.

And I know not only why the people left, but also where they were headed when they pulled out of the village. As I walk along, I wonder about the ones who left and whether anyone who has been weaned on salt air and sea can ever be happy in the tar sands of Alberta, in a factory in Toronto, in the timber woods of British Columbia. And I wonder if at night these expatriates from the Cove long to hear the roar of an angry tide battering the side of a cliff? Or the blatting of a foghorn. Or the scrape of a dory being hauled up over beach rocks. I wonder, too, whether the weight of their loneliness will one day become too heavy to endure, and then, like the whale that couldn't support its own weight on land, they will return once again to the sea looking for it to bear them up.

Verses from a song composed by a mother whose son had to leave the Cove for the tar sands of Alberta come to mind, and I hum as I walk along.

Are you ever lonely, Neddie,

For the life that you once had,

Walking on the beach rocks

And fishing with your dad?

And are you ever angry

That they led you to believe

There'd be work right here for all of you,

No one would have to leave?

Despite all the signs of decline in the village, I notice a comforting sameness. Spruce trees still cover the back hills, even if they are a little more scraggly and wind-whipped than I remember. The pond is still there, holding the separate parts of the village together although its landwash has changed. No longer is it edged with purple flagroots. Years ago, the Americans dug these up to replant them on their army base, eight miles away; surrounded by asphalt and dry ground, they parched to death. And the strip of narrow beach is still there, as always appearing inadequate for the task of keeping such an expanse of ocean at bay.

When I left Philomena's house to go walking through the village, it hadn't been my intention to go to the beach, but after only a few minutes, I find myself veering in the direction of the shortcut over the cliff. The path is so overgrown, I tell myself as I push aside young birches, spruce saplings and skinny poplars, that I might as well be blazing a new trail, that I would have been better off taking the road. I recall what Grandmother used to say to me about taking shortcuts: “The longest way round is the shortest way home.” She would say this as if I were supposed to understand what she meant. However, as I push through the underbrush and feel the sting of young junipers snapping back at me, I understand that the shortest way is not necessarily the easiest way. I regret not having taken the road to the lighthouse, from where I could have doubled back across the long stretch of rocky beach.

The struggle through the underbrush makes me recall a trip I took with a friend to Cape St. Francis a few weeks earlier. It was her mother's birthplace, and although the tiny, isolated community no longer exists, she wanted to see for herself the nooks and crannies her mother had so often spoken about. The road that led down to the shore was rutted and potholed and so leached out from running water that rocks as sharp as axe blades jutted up every few feet, gouging the tires on the car. And its undercarriage also took a walloping from the road's raised centre. At the end of the day the car was in such bad shape we were barely able to hobble it back to St. John's. For the next several days, especially after she received the repair bill, my friend questioned the folly of that journey.

Now I, too, question the folly of this journey that takes me over the cliff to the beach. The undergrowth is so dense, so snarled and so tangled that it snags my hair, and I leave telltale strands of it on the branches like sheep's wool on a break in a fence. I haven't been near this beach since the day of Dennis's funeral, almost fourteen years earlier, and as I push forward I can't help wondering what possessed me to come to this place on this day of all days, a day sad in its own right, a day that doesn't need to be further burdened with memories. However, once I break out into the clearing and I am able to see the beach stretching before me, bleak and abandoned except for a few sheep grazing on the salty tufts of grass that grow beside the larger rocks, I feel so light-headed with my success that I'm glad I persevered.

From my lookout point I can tell from the way the water lips its way into the landwash that the tide is low, although on this beach it isn't easy to tell the difference. It appears to rise and fall without any great fanfare, much like the seasons in these parts, which begin and end in a loose, inexact and haphazard way. Now it's spring. Now it isn't. Now it's spring again. Here the concern is with rough tides and gentle ones, rather than with high or low tides. Today the tide is not only low, it is also gentle, a rare condition not to be under-appreciated. The waves lap at the shore like a cat washing itself on a sunny windowsill, as if the effort is almost more than the job is worth.

Once I step out upon the beach, I walk quickly towards the rock behind which Dennis and I used to take shelter from the wind whenever the tide was low but the waves were spitting spray in all directions. The smooth grey rock is faithful to my memory of it. The face of it is so tide-smooth it could pass for polished marble. I immediately search out the initials I chiselled into it on the day of Dennis's funeral. I run my fingers over them, much like Philomena did over the groove in the arm of Hubert's chair. Although time and the elements have sanded the edges and rounded the corners of my crudely carved letters, they are still readable: 1970. D.W. SFM. 1970. T.C. MHA.

I take off the jacket and lay it on the damp sand and then crouch on its fake fur lining. I close my eyes, and in the shelter of the rock and in the warmth of the mid-June sun I let my mind gallivant across meadows and hills and oceans and years, searching for yesterday's faces and yesterday's voices.

“Stop slapping the Lord in the face with yer lack of gratitude!”

This is the spare voice of Grandmother the evening she found me lying face down on my bed, a huddled mass of misery, wishing I could die because Dennis Walsh had just left for Ontario with his uncle, the Jesuit priest. From his uncle's house he was to go to a seminary that would lead to his ordination to the priesthood, which would put him beyond my reach forever.

“The Almighty gave you life and be thankful for it.” Without invitation, Grandmother sat on the edge of my bed and insisted that I take my face out of the patchwork quilt and look at her while she scolded me. She cast her eyes up at the crucified Jesus hanging on the wooden cross on the wall beside my bed and gorged me with guilt.

“Do you know how many children there are who have never been born? Do you ever ask why you were chosen to see the light of day?”

“That's some foolish question to ask anyone!” I had churlishly replied. “How am I supposed to know how many children have never been born? And I never ask why I was born. Never!” The heat of this bald-faced lie flushed my face.

The truth was that I had asked this very question every time the Redemptorist Fathers delivered a hell-and-brimstone mission sermon in the parish, although I never asked it in the grateful way of which Grandmother would have approved.
Why me, Lord? Why did you pick me to be born? If you hadn't picked me, I wouldn't have to live with the fear of going to hell after I died
. And there were other questions on this same subject, questions that I had felt were too fearsome to put even to God, so I just let them fly around in my mind, free and unhindered like the puffins on Bird Island.

These questions were always the same, although not necessarily asked in the same order.
Is it better to have been born facing the possibility of hell, or not to have been born at all, forfeiting forever the possibility of heaven? If you have never been given the opportunity to know God, should you be kept out of heaven? If you can't be kept out for not having had the opportunity of knowing God, should we be Christianizing the heathens, thereby placing them in jeopardy of going to hell? Is it better to die an amoral heathen or an immoral Catholic?

Sitting on my bed, Grandmother had delivered a chastisement that was a lot less lofty in nature. “Girl,” she said, smoothing out the quilt that I had bunched up underneath me, “yer acting as if Dennis Walsh is the only bit of spawn in the ocean. Let him become Pope if that's what he wants. Don't you know that nothing less will satisfy that mother of his? Eileen's hell bent on a gold and white mitre for poor Dennis so she can say ‘My son, the Pope.' She sure as blazes don't want you mooning over him to sway him in another direction.”

She had paused a moment before attempting to quench my grief with a dose of even stronger reality. “And besides, girl, even if he never went to the priesthood, Eileen wouldn't think you were good enough fer her one ram lamb simply on account of you being Poor Carmel's Tessie. She'd keep at him until he broke up with you. So stop this foolishness right now!”

On her way out of my room to go downstairs, she had looked out through the window at the greying evening sky that was on the cusp of turning into night, and she tipped one of her maxims on its head, something she was wont to do when it suited her purpose. “Weep before dark,” she had said, thinking she was giving me comfort, “laugh before dawn. Things will look brighter in the morning.”

I was certain she was dead wrong. I would not be laughing before dawn. In fact, I knew I would never laugh again. Dennis's departure had seen to that. It had turned the Cove into a grey abyss, even greyer than usual. The sky, the dories, the fences, the beach rocks, even the clapboards on the stables all had turned a leaden grey the moment he left, a mournful grey that would never give rise to laughter. And the usual village sounds that in their familiarity had become merely comforting background noises — the fog horn, the squeal of clotheslines being reeled in, the voices of men spreading manure on the meadows, the bleating of sheep — now grated on my nerves like the rusty hinges on the sheep house door. The screeching seagulls as they battled the wind seemed to be an echo of my own anguished cries, and whenever the train was pulling out of the village, its whistle, which I had hardly noticed before, took on the melancholy sound of departure.

As it turned out, however, Grandmother's prophecy contained more than a grain of truth, although it took some time for this to become apparent. For sure, Dennis Walsh wasn't the only bit of spawn in the ocean. I found this out later when I moved to Montreal and met Leonard — or more precisely, when I met and married and divorced Leonard. The divorce came about soon after I found out that not all spawn is created equal. After my divorce I returned to Newfoundland, where Dennis's life and mine interlocked once again.

At the time of our reunion I was the Liberal candidate for the Cove with a campaign well under way, and Dennis was home on holidays from his missionary posting in Peru. Coincidentally, it was his brother-in-law, Dolph, who was my political opponent and whose own campaign was in full swing. Soon we began secretly meeting on this very beach and in the shelter of this very same rock where I now crouch in the hope of making peace with Hubert's death. In adolescence our love had been sweet and delicate. When we met again as adults our love was even sweeter and even more delicate because it was now a secret love, an unsanctionable love. And because it was also a chaste love, it was all the more carnal.

One rainy, windy evening, the day before polling day, less than twenty-four hours before I was to find out I had won the seat for the Cove riding, Dennis and I walked the landwash together. We walked, arms around each other's waists, until long after dark had closed in, until long after the far shore had disappeared from our sight, until long after the trees could no longer be distinguished from the cliffs they clung to. Sometimes Dennis related marvellous tales about his work in Peru, but mostly we walked in a silence that was broken only by the sounds of the choppy sea as it flung fresh kelp ashore with each grumbling wave. The kelp slithered green and slippery beneath our sandaled feet. And because it was June and because in those years the seals hadn't yet devoured all of the capelin, we could smell these small silvery fish as they schooled by the thousands, just offshore, unaware that they, like the kelp, would soon be pitched high and dry upon the landwash.