Island (17 page)

Once, though, there was a belief held in the outports, that if a girl would see her own true lover she should boil an egg and scoop out half the shell and fill it with salt. Then she should take it to bed with her and eat it, leaving a glass of water by her bedside. In the night her future husband or a vision of him would appear and offer her the glass. But she must only do it once.

It is the type of belief that bright young graduate students were collecting eleven years ago for the theses and archives of North America and also, they hoped, for their own fame. Even as they sought the near-Elizabethan songs and ballads that had sailed from County Kerry and from Devon and Cornwall. All about the wild, wide sea and the flashing silver dagger and the lost and faithless lover. Echoes to and from the lovely, lonely hills and glens of West Virginia and the standing stones of Tennessee.

Across the hall the old people are asleep. The old man’s snoring rattles, as do the windows; except that now and then there are catching gasps within his breath. In three or four short hours he will be awake and will go down to light his fire. I turn and walk back softly to my room.

Within the bed the warm sweetness of the rum is heavy and intense. The darkness presses down upon me, but still it brings no sleep. There are no voices and no shadows that are real. There are only walls of memory touched restlessly by flickers of imagination.

Oh, I would like to see my way more clearly. I, who have never understood the mystery of fog. I would perhaps like to capture it in a jar like the beautiful childhood butterflies that always die in spite of the airholes punched with nails in the covers of their captivity – leaving behind the vapours of their
lives and deaths; or perhaps as the unknowing child who collects the grey moist condoms from the lovers’ lanes, only to have them taken from him and to be told to wash his hands. Oh, I have collected many things I did not understand.

And perhaps now I should go and say, oh son of my
summa cum laude
loins, come away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout and I will take you to the land of the Tastee Freeze where you may sleep till ten of nine. And I will show you the elevator to the apartment on the sixteenth floor and introduce you to the buzzer system and the yards of the wrought-iron fences where the Doberman pinscher runs silently at night. Or may I offer you the money that is the fruit of my collecting and my most successful life? Or shall I wait to meet you in some known or unknown bitterness like Yeats’s Cuchulain by the wind-whipped sea or like Sohrab and Rustum by the future flowing river?

Again I collect dreams. For I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto’s Queen St. West and the grinding crash of the pickup, and of lost and misplaced love.

I am up early in the morning as the man kindles the fire from the driftwood splinters. The outside light is breaking and the wind is calm. John tumbles down the stairs. Scarcely stopping to splash his face and pull on his jacket, he is gone, accompanied by the dog. The old man smokes his pipe and waits for the water to boil. When it does, he pours some into the teapot, then passes the kettle to me. I take it to the washstand and fill the small tin basin in readiness for my shaving. My face looks back from the mirrored cabinet. The woman softly descends the stairs.

“I think I will go back today,” I say while looking into the mirror at my face and at those in the room behind me. I try to
emphasize the “I.” “I just thought I would like to make this trip – again. I think I can leave the car in St. John’s and fly back directly.” The woman begins to move about the table, setting out the round white plates. The man quietly tamps his pipe.

The door opens and John and the dog return. They have been down along the shore to see what has happened throughout the night. “Well, John,” says the old man, “what did you find?”

He opens his hand to reveal a smooth round stone. It is of the deepest green, inlaid with veins of darkest ebony. It has been worn and polished by the unrelenting restlessness of the sea, and buffed and burnished by the gravelled sand. All of its inadequacies have been removed, and it glows with the lustre of near perfection.

“It is very beautiful,” I say.

“Yes,” he says, “I like to collect them.” Suddenly he looks up to my eyes and thrusts the stone toward me. “Here,” he says, “would you like to have it?”

Even as I reach out my hand I turn my head to the others in the room. They are both looking out through the window to the sea.

“Why, thank you,” I say. “Thank you very much. Yes, I would. Thank you. Thanks.” I take it from his outstretched hand and place it in my pocket.

We eat our breakfast in near silence. After it is finished the boy and dog go out once more. I prepare to leave.

“Well, I must go,” I say, hesitating at the door. “It will take me a while to get to St. John’s.” I offer my hand to the man. He takes it in his strong fingers and shakes it firmly.

“Thank you,” says the woman. “I don’t know if you know what I mean but thank you.”

“I think I do,” I say. I stand and fiddle with the keys. “I would somehow like to help or keep in touch but …”

“But there is no phone,” he says, “and both of us can hardly write. Perhaps that’s why we never told you. John is getting to be a pretty good hand at it, though.”

“Good-bye,” we say again, “good-bye, good-bye.”

The sun is shining clearly now and the small boats are putt-putting about the harbour. I enter my unlocked car and start its engine. The gravel turns beneath the wheels. I pass the house and wave to the man and woman standing in the yard.

On a distant cliff the children are shouting. Their voices carol down through the sun-washed air and the dogs are curving and dancing about them in excited circles. They are carrying something that looks like a crippled gull. Perhaps they will make it well. I toot the horn. “Good-bye,” they shout and wave, “good-bye, good-bye.”

The airport terminal is strangely familiar. A symbol of impermanence, it is itself glisteningly permanent. Its formica surfaces have been designed to stay. At the counter a middle-aged man in mock exasperation is explaining to the girl that it is Newark he wishes to go to,
not
New York.

There are not many of us and soon we are ticketed and lifting through and above the sun-shot fog. The meals are served in tinfoil and in plastic. We eat above the clouds, looking at the tips of wings.

The man beside me is a heavy-equipment salesman who has been trying to make a sale to the developers of Labrador’s
resources. He has been away a week and is returning to his wife and children.

Later in the day we land in the middle of the continent. Because of the changing time zones, the distance we have come seems eerily unreal. The heat shimmers in little waves upon the runway. This is the equipment salesman’s final destination, whereas for me it is but the place where I must change flights to continue even farther into the heartland. Still we go down the wheeled-up stairs together, donning our sunglasses and stepping across the heated concrete and through the terminal’s electronic doors. The salesman’s wife stands waiting along with two small children who are the first to see him. They race toward him with their arms outstretched. “Daddy, Daddy,” they cry, “what did you bring me? What did you bring me?”

I
am speaking now of a July in the early 1970s and it is in the morning just after the sun has risen following a night of heavy rains. My car moves through the quiet village which is yet asleep except for those few houses which have sent fishermen to their nets and trawls some hours before. From such houses the smoke whisks and curls lazily before slanting off at the insistence of the almost imperceptible southeast wind. Upon my right the Gulf of St. Lawrence is flat and blue, dotted here and there with the white fishing boats intent on their quiet work. It has been a bad year for lobsters because of the late ice and then the early storms which destroyed so much of the precious gear. During the last week of the lobster season many of the fishermen did not even visit their traps, preferring to remain drunk and discouraged on the beach or within the dampened privacy of their little shanties.

Now since the lobster season’s conclusion on July first, it can be at least thankfully forgotten along with the vague feelings of hope tinged with guilt that accompanied its final days. The boats riding on the Gulf today are after a variety of “ground fish,” with some few after salmon. They are getting six cents a pound for hake and twelve for cod and no one has seen a haddock for a long, long time. In the cities of Ontario fresh cod sells for $1.65 a pound and the “dried cod” upon which most of us were raised and which we so heartily despised has become almost a delicacy which sells for $2.15 a pound. “Imagine that,” says my grandmother, “who would have ever thought?” Across Cabot Strait in Newfoundland the prices are three to four cents lower and there is talk that the fishermen may strike. All this runs through my mind now, although it does not really occupy it. Like the vaguely heard melody of some turned-down radio station heard softly in the background.

At the outskirts of the village the narrow paved road turns to the left, away from the sea, and begins its journey inland and outward. If followed relentlessly it will take you almost anywhere in North America; perhaps to Central and to South America as well. It will remain narrow and unpretentious and “slow” in the caution that it demands of its drivers for approximately fifty miles. Then it will join the maple-leafed Trans-Canada Highway and together they will boom across the Canso Causeway and off Cape Breton Island and out into the world. As the water of the tributary joins the major river, its traffic and its travellers will blend and mingle within the rushing stream. They will become the camper trailers with their owners’ names emblazoned on their sides, and the lumbering high-domed
motor homes and the overcrowded station wagons with the dogs forever panting through the rear windows. They will become the high-powered “luxury” products of Detroit, loaded with extras and zooming at eighty miles per hour from service station to service station, as if by speed alone they might somehow outrace the galloping depreciation which even now threatens to overtake and engulf them. They will become the scuttling Volkswagens in the “slow” lanes on the long hills and the grinding trucks with their encased and T-shirted drivers carrying the continent’s goods and the weaving, swerving motorcyclists with their helmets reflecting the slanting sun.

By night these travellers will all be miles away; comparing mileages, filling their radiators and looking at their maps. They will be sitting around campfires and sweating in the motels. Some will be in the havens of their homes while others will follow the probing paths of their bug-spattered headlights deep into the darkened night. Some few will end in twisted, spectacular wreckages, later moaning incoherently in the unknown hospitals or lying beneath the quiet sheets of death while authorities search through glove compartments and check out licence numbers prior to notifying the next of kin. It is a big, fast, brutal road that leads into the world on this July day and there is no longer any St. Christopher to be the patron saint of travellers.

But for me, in this my twenty-sixth year, it is not into the larger world that I go today. And the road that I follow feeds into no other that will take the traveller to the great adventures of the wild unknown. Instead, at the village’s end it veers sharply to the right, leaves the pavement behind and almost immediately begins to climb along the rocky cliffs that hang high above the
sea. It winds its tortuous, clinging way for some eight miles before it ends quite abruptly and permanently in my grandmother’s yard. There the sea cliff slants down almost vertically and it is as if the road runs into it as it would into a wall. At the wall’s base and at the road’s end nestles my grandmother’s tiny farm; her buildings and her home. Above this last small cultivated outpost and jutting beyond it out to sea is the rocky promontory of Rankin’s Point. As one cannot drive beyond it, neither can one see beyond it farther up the coast. It is an end in every way and it is to the beginning of this conclusion that my car now begins its long ascent.

For the first two miles there are still houses strung out along both sides of the road but soon such signs of formal habitation fall behind; and as the road becomes steeper, rockier and more narrow the wildness of the summer’s beauty falls and splashes down upon it even to the extent that it is close to lost. The overreaching branches of the silver birch, the maple and the poplar slap across the hood and windshield, impeding vision and almost the passage of the road itself. The alders lean and hang from the left bank, their sticky buds smearing the car door’s sides and leaving stains that will annoy car washers for a long, long time. The wild flowers burst and hang in all their short-lived, giddy, aromatic profusion. When the tough but delicate red-and-white roses are nudged by the car they cascade and strew their fragile, perfumed petals across its hood even as their thorns scratch the finished lacquer of its sides.
Everything has its price
, they seem to say. The sweet red-and-white clover swarms with bees. The yellow buttercups flutter and the white and gold-green daisies dip and sway. The prickly Scottish thistles are in their lavender
bloom and the wild buckwheat and rioting raspberry bushes form netted tapestries of the darkest green. As the road dips and twists around many of its hairpinned turns the icy little streams cascade across it; washing it out in a minor way, the water flowing across the gullied roadbed instead of beneath it through the broken, plugged and unused wooden sluices. At such spots near the fresh water’s edge the bluebells cling to the velvet-mossed stones and the blue-and-purple irises march downward to the wetness. The gentle, large-eyed rabbits hop trustingly near the road which is so untravelled that it holds for them neither fear nor any threat of death. The road is now but a minor intrusion that the wildness will reclaim.