Cold Clear Morning
a novel
Published by Pottersfield Press at Smashwords
Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada
Copyright © 2011 Lesley Choyce
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used or stored in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying – or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems shall be directed in writing to the publisher or to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5E 1E5 (www.AccessCopyright.ca). This also applies to classroom use.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Choyce, Lesley, 1951-
Cold clear morning / Lesley Choyce. -- New rev. ed.
Originally publ.: Vancouver : Beach Holme Pub., c1992.
I. Title.
PS8555.H668C64 2011 C813’.54 C2011-902802-6
Digital edition: Mary Ann Archibald
Cover design by Gail LeBlanc
Cover photo: iStockphoto
Edited by Julia Swan and Peggy Amirault
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the support of The Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada. We also thank the Province of Nova Scotia for its support through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.
Pottersfield Press
83 Leslie Road
East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia
Canada, B2Z 1P8
Website: www.PottersfieldPress.com
To order the print edition of Cold Clear Morning, phone 1-800-NIMBUS9 (1-800-646-2879) www.nimbus.ns.ca
Table of Contents
An Interview With Lesley Choyce
Laura. Over and over. There was a girl once …
No.
There was a girl once, and there was a boy. The two of them lived alone in a very private world of sea and sky and deep forest, and there was sunlight and there came snow and ice and a long, cold winter.
And then one perfect cold clear morning the two of them stood at the harbour edge just as the ice broke up to signal winter would soon be over. There was the smell of the ice, the sea, the salty, salty air and, along the shoreline, crystalline exaggerations of beauty. They stood like that, alone, watching islands of ice set sail for the sea, watching an armada of blue-white jagged ice pans drifting, drifting. And the sun was warm on their faces as they gazed into the clear dark waters that now had been unlocked from the winter prison.
It was only the third day of March, but Laura said, “It’s the beginning of summer.”
I remembered clearly who I was then and dutifully held on to that prototype of me, even as I changed through all the inevitable manifestations to follow. That person standing there with Laura was the core of me, and I could never lose that. I loved being alive. I loved that dangerous, beautiful harbour. I loved being with her. I loved Laura. And I even loved myself. It was all quite extraordinary and simple, and I locked those moments into my heart forever.
Laura went from being taller than I was and skinny to something else. Her freckles all but disappeared. She grew her hair longer and longer. Flowing down her back, it was a rich, lustrous brown waterfall of hair. She lost the tomboy look altogether as her body changed. Older boys and men noticed her beauty as the tomboy girl lost the battle with womanhood and physical maturity triumphed over youth. Soon I was taller than she was, but I still looked very much like a boy while she had blossomed into a goddess. At least that was how I remembered it.
My father tried to prepare me for disaster. “You two have been together ever since you were little kids. It gets really tough once you get into high school. Something might change that’s beyond the power of either of you. It won’t be anybody’s fault. Just don’t blame her and don’t blame yourself.”
“I don’t think that’ll happen,” I said with the greatest conviction. “I think we’ll be together for a long time. We’ll live together after we get out of school. I don’t know if we’ll get married.” Laura and I both mistrusted the institution of marriage. I had good reason to do so from my own experience, but she had “philosophical reasons.”
“Two people who love each other don’t need a piece of paper,” she said.
When we were sixteen, I walked Laura home one night and entered her kitchen where Jim Dan sat alone in a pool of light, listening to Cape Breton fiddle music on the radio. The mill had closed on him and he had been forced to go back to the mines. He had just arrived home after working a week in the shafts near Stellarton. Now he was drinking. While Laura was out of the room, Jim Dan sat me down. He had an exhausted, almost angry look, and I thought he was going to tear into me for keeping her out too late or seeing too much of her, but it wasn’t that. “Taylor,” he said, “the world’s a dangerous place. A girl like Laura needs someone there for her all the time.”
“Sure.”
“I’ve known you for a long time, Taylor. Known your father. You and him have one important thing in common. You’re both steady, both have character. You don’t flit from one thing to another. You don’t change your minds like the wind changing directions. You figure out one thing and you stick to it.”
I wasn’t sure this was all complimentary, but there was truth to it.
“Promise me you’ll never go down into a mine.”
That one caught me off guard but, hey, that was no big deal. “I promise I’ll never go down into a mine.”
“Number two. Promise me you’ll always be there for Laura. If she needs you or not. Even if she says she doesn’t need you at all. Promise me you’ll be there.”
Number two was almost as easy to go along with as promise number one. “I promise.”
The fiddle sang sweetly in the kitchen air. I breathed in the perfume of his rum-laden breath and felt bonded to this good man who was Laura’s father, this man who earned his family’s keep by rummaging for black rocks deep in the bowels of the hard, cold earth.
Laura’s mother came into the room then and shook her head indulgently. She had on an old flower-print housecoat and her hair was in curlers. She had a soft, round face and wore rimless glasses that always made her look much older than she really was. “Jim Dan, you needs your sleep. Give poor little Taylor here a break. The boy don’t need so much of your nonsense.”
“Come here, woman, and give me a kiss,” Jim Dan said. He cracked into a grin and his eyes went a little funny. He pulled his wife to his lap and kissed her hard on the mouth.
Laura walked back into the kitchen and laughed. “Would you two cut it out? That’s gross. You don’t have to do that in front of Taylor.”
But there was nothing gross about it. And Laura wasn’t serious. We both enjoyed seeing her parents make happy married fools of themselves. I felt the ache of my own loss of a mother yet again, but before it had a chance to settle into my heart like a cold block of ice, Laura said, “Taylor and I are going for a walk.”
“Again?” her mother asked.
“It’s early,” she said.
We walked out into the dark beneath the canopy of the Milky Way, toward Orion, all the way to my father’s boat shed where we went in and smelled the pure pine shavings from a day’s hard work on a new boat. Without turning the light on, we climbed to the little overhead loft, bumping perilously into razor-sharp saws and woodcutting tools that hung along the wall. When we lay down on the single khaki blanket above, I lit a small kerosene lantern I had strategically placed there two days earlier.
We lay side by side, kissed, moved our hands up and down the length of each other’s body. Everything looked softly radiant in the light of the kerosene flame. I could see our reflection in the little window and beyond that only darkness. We were alone, the two of us. Safe in our embrace, in love, yes, but not yet obsessed with sex. That would come later. It was a private, shared ecstasy that diminished time to absolute insignificance. The clock stopped here.
“Remember the time that…” I was sure I said it or she said it and then we repeated tales told to each other ten times apiece or more until the stories were moulded and reshaped in the telling. “Remember the time out on the ice…,” I said at one point.
“It didn’t happen that way at all,” she said after my telling. “It was your idea to cross the harbour.” The magic was suddenly breached, but I refused to let our tryst be broken.
“Right,” I said.
I saw the boat before I even saw the house. It was there in the front yard with a for sale sign on it. My old man’s latest creation was about thirty feet long. I knew she was made of good wood, every inch of her. The cabin was painted glossy red. The boat sat on a cradle of logs, propped on all sides by sturdy spruce poles as if waiting for a really high tide, a Noah’s ark of a flood to come and lift her off her resting place. There was a name painted on the side, my mother’s name – helen. I knew what that meant. My father hadn’t gotten over her yet.
I pulled the car to a stop in the driveway and got out. I heard the sound of old clamshells cracking underfoot. It was a white driveway, calcium pure from years of dumping shells on it. It didn’t look any different from when I was a kid. I tried to focus clearly on where I was and closed my eyes. Gull shrieks in the distance. Wind in the tops of the spruce trees. Smells. The forest out back of the house. A billion spruce trees, a carpet of moss, bogs, lichen, bugs everywhere. Saltwater sea someplace in the backdrop of it all. Home, Nickerson Harbour. Crunch of clamshells as I took the first few steps and my legs almost gave out.
The only way I could get those legs moving to get around the house toward the back door was to put one foot after the other, give them directions like a Hollywood director, remove myself to some other safer plane of existence and tell the actor who was inside this body to move it mechanically from point A to point B. Camera pulling away to a safe distance – above and back, a dolly shot. Things were going better than I’d thought possible.
Then the door opened. My father. So many years it had been without a face-to-face. He looked so old. Add to it shock, surprise, some kind of hopeful excitement. He took a step forward, then had to steady himself on the railing. I knew there were rules to this game of return. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to throw myself into his arms and pretend I was a little boy, I wanted to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but I knew it wouldn’t be what he wanted. Or at least I was afraid to gamble. I’d seen him crack only once. Didn’t want to see it again.
I nodded toward the boat in the front yard, put on the voice of an up-the-road Halfway Harbour fisherman. “What do you want for ’er?”
He was smiling now. “Give her away free to a good home. Only a fool would buy a boat to ride around in on an ocean with no fish.”
“Good-looking boat, though. How many hours went into her?”
“I gave up counting.”
Then I dropped the script. “You’re still a damn fine builder, Dad.”
He stepped forward, put his big bear arms around me, and squeezed hard. “Taylor Colby. I can’t believe you’re finally home.”
I hugged the old man as tightly as I could. “I can’t quite believe it, either. I guess I had to come back sooner or later.”
I pulled off and he held me at arm’s length, looking me straight in the eyes. “Sooner would have been better. But later is just fine if that’s what I have to settle for. Gets pretty lonely around here.”
“Nothing’s changed much.”
“Not on this shore. People have kids, the kids move away. Old guys like me stay here and do the only things we know how to do.”
“Build boats.”
“Build boats that no one needs and then we sit inside watching Oprah just to see how screwed up the rest of the world is. Don’t know who’s in sadder shape, us or them.”
“I believe it’s them. But just be sure to include me along with them.”
“Come in, come in. I’ll get you tea or rum or both if you like.”
“Both would be just fine.” I couldn’t believe how small the back porch had grown over the years. Once it had been the size of a football field. Now it took two steps to cross. The back door was low and the house itself had diminished in stature during the years of my absence. But in the kitchen an old oil stove still sang its sombre little tune, the kitchen table was still a solid slab of forest oak, and a picture of my mother at twenty years old still hung over the sink. I looked at it and shook my head. “Jesus, Dad, you’re some case.”
He waved his hand in the air. “Your mother was a good-looking woman. No harm keeping her picture around.”
“So you stare at it every time you wash the goddamn dishes?”
“Makes me wish she was still here to do them herself.”
“She was never partial to housework.”
“But she had her good points.”
There we were already into the conversation. I had to ask. “You ever hear from her? She still in Ontario?”
My father sat at the kitchen table and looked at his hands. He put his right thumb in the palm of his left hand and seemed to trace the crease of his lifeline with his nail. “She’s been gone a long while. Must be me or something. First she goes and then you.”
“That’s not the same at all.” I suddenly found myself sounding overzealously defensive. My mother had left him – just walked out. Left us, that is, a long time ago when I was a kid. I had to watch my father fall apart and pull himself back together. I had to try not to show how hurt I felt that she had abandoned me, too. So I pretended for a long time that it didn’t matter. But it mattered, all right.
“Sorry. I know it was different.” He filled a kettle with water and placed it on the stove, then went to the fridge. “I forgot. Not a drop of rum in the house. Keeps me from doing something stupid. But I got a couple of beers here somewhere.” Two bottles appeared in his hands and he smacked them down on the table. He twisted off the caps and offered me one. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.” The beer slid down my throat smooth as silk. “You never got over her.”
“Never did. Some men are like that.”
One swallow of beer and suddenly I was being escorted into the darkest of dreams. Not his dark dream, however, not the sad melodrama of my old man enduring the near-ancient loss of a wife who ran away on him.
“I guess the Colby men never get over their women,” I said. “A sad pair, the two of us.”
He studied the look of anguish on my face. “This town has never been able to accept what happened to Laura.”
“Neither can I. I was afraid to come back here. Afraid her parents would blame me. Afraid they’d all blame me. After all the years of blaming myself, I still can’t accept it. I loved her, Dad.”
“I know you did, son.” Over four years had passed before we had finally arrived at this conversation. My eyes welled up again, and I slugged back some more beer. Laura, Laura, Laura. Recently, my memory had begun to erase the Laura I knew here when we were kids, growing up on the shorelines of Nickerson Harbour. The sun in the trees, the deep dark clear water. The love. All I’d been able to hang on to was the Laura I knew toward the end. The party freak, the wild one, the daredevil woman she had become in California. The one who overdosed and died. Now that I was back in Nova Scotia, I would have to reacquaint myself with the girl I had fallen in love with a long time ago. And it was going to hurt like hell.
“I don’t know if I can stay long,” I said. My head was about to explode.
“That’s your decision. Stay as long as you can. You’re always welcome here. And it’s bloody good to have you back.”
“Yeah. It’s been a long time. But I guess we both said that already. Have you really heard from her? From Helen?” I didn’t want to use the wordMom. Afraid to. Helen gave it some distance.
My father had drained his beer and got up for another pair of Mooseheads, which he set down with a thunk on the table. “There wasn’t a word from her for a long time. Then a couple of Christmas cards. Then a couple of mimeographed newsletters from her and that guy Frank. Then some short letters and a phone call. It got quite regular there for a while – weird as all get out. We’d have these polite, meaningless conversations about the weather here and the weather in Toronto – Scarborough or wherever the hell it is she lives. And then nothing again for a while. About a month ago she called and started talking about taking tests.”
“What do you mean, tests?”
“I don’t know. She had some health problems, I guess. Doctors had her taking some sort of tests. I haven’t found out anything yet. She thinks they just do it so they can collect their fees.”
“Probably nothing.” I refused to let myself feel any genuine concern for a mother who had messed up my life so much. Tests? Big deal. She always wanted so much attention, had to be the centre of attraction. Always wanted too much of everything. And she had left because she felt my old man wasn’t giving enough to her, or that he wasn’t good enough for her. After that the town pitied Horace Colby. And so did I.
“Probably. Still, she and I aren’t young anymore. Anything could go on you at any time.”
“Something screws up, they got replacement parts for it now. New pump this or that, new ticker. Out in California women get tired of the way they look, they get a new face and new set of boobs. When they wear out, they go in for a thirty-thousand-mile special and get another set.”
“Yeah, I heard about that on Ricki Lake or somewhere.”
“Christ, Dad, you watch Ricki Lake?”
“I still think about you out there by that Pacific Ocean, and sometimes when I watch tv from out your way, it makes me feel like I have some idea of what your life must be like.” A little beer was trickling down from the corner of his mouth because of a smile that had cracked through. He was tuning me up to play a happier riff than the one we’d been playing.
“That’s right, Dad. I’ve been meaning to tell you. In my spare time I’m a transvestite belly dancer going steady with a sumo wrestler.”
“Just don’t tell the kids around here. Some of them know about your music and think you’re a legend. You leak news of this and pretty soon all the boys along the shore will be wearing dresses and high heels.”
I shook my head and felt the warmth well up from deep inside. Staring at the intricate grain of tabletop wood beneath the shellac finish, I thought I saw a reflection of a little kid eating a breakfast bowl of cereal a long time ago in another lifetime, in another world where everything was safe and predictable. Where nothing ever went wrong because nothing ever could go wrong.
Every time I lay down on my old bed, I felt myself shrinking back to being a kid again. Twelve years old, ten years old. A long backward trip in time. I felt myself slipping into some numb zone. What was it going to take to survive crashing head-on into my long-lost self on this, my shameless pilgrimage to my home? It was midnight. Zero ground. My private dark time of having to remember the perfect childhood abbreviated by my mother’s leaving.
“She ran away,” I used to tell Laura in my most angry, desperate moments. “I’ll never forgive her.”
Laura’s voice was still in my head. Laura the brave one, the stronger one in so many ways. We shared an exclusive inner circle of close communion for so many years. Dreams, dreams, and more dreams.
I switched on the light and was surrounded by my old stuff. This had been my life. A good kid growing up in a little fishing community in some impossibly out-of-the-way part of the Nova Scotia coast. That was me in the mirror. Older now. Stupider. Doesn’t know what to do next with his life. By the mirror, I saw an old game: Snakes and Ladders. Perfect. You rolled the dice or flicked the spinner, moved ahead two squares, or ten, or got a double and went again. You almost got to the top of the board, then you snagged the “snake” and slithered back down near the bottom. You were king. You were gloating and laughing with deep childish satisfaction at those beneath you. Next thing you knew you were back at the bottom where you belonged. Sucker.
I saw the spiders in the corner of the room now. Glad to have the company. Nova Scotian spiders never did any harm. My father could never kill one. “They eat the bugs that would chew up the wood,” he’d say. “Nothing wrong with spiders.”
It would be at that moment that I’d hear a loud whack as the rolled-up Chronicle Herald whomped down hard on the spider and killed it. My mother’s voice announcing, “Jesus, you’d think we were a pack of lunatic hillbillies.” Whack again, and my father cringing. But he couldn’t bring himself to raise his voice or an arm to stop her.
My father and mother were as different as night and day. He adored everything he had and everything that we were. She was never satisfied. In the end she took out her revenge on us in the cruellest of methods. She left. She ran away. Before she left she spit it out straight in our faces. My mother was no coward.
“You know I can’t live like this forever. I don’t want to blame you, Horace. It’s just that nothing changes. You knew I was expecting more. I just can’t live like this anymore.”
Like this had something to do with spiders crawling through the living room, all of us sitting around an oil stove in a kitchen with an old TV that could barely pick up one station. It meant being married to a man who was only a boat builder – a simple soul who took so long to craft a twelve-foot dory that what he earned from it was below minimum wage.
Like this was not enough for my mother. Like me, I suppose, she had dreams. But I was twelve then. And by the time I reached thirteen she had walked out. Kids laughed at me. Laughed at my father. “Let ’em laugh,” he said, a wood planer in one hand, his face stubbled grey, white, and pepper, the smell of sawdust and the feel of a wisp of shaved pine in my hand, curled up and delicate as something that might have fallen out of the sky. “Looks just like a wave, don’t it?” my father would say.
The spider sat frozen in the corner, shocked by the light. This old room of mine had been dark in the nighttime for a long time. The room belonged to the spider, and here I was an intruder from the other side of the continent. On the wall just east of my mirror was an old pullout fromSurfer magazine, a centre spread of a guy on a surfboard. He rode a long wall of blue-green Pacific Ocean at Malibu and the sun was out. The water was crowded, but everyone got out of his way. He had a look that said he was oblivious to all around him, just him and the wave. I think I wanted to be like that. I had become interested in surfing because I assumed it was a far-off, exotic California thing.
Soon after I’d fallen in love with the idea of surfing, however, music pushed it out of my imagination. Nobody surfed in Nova Scotia. I was sure it was possible; it was just that nobody was around to show me the way. I had watched the waves break on the rocks at Quoddy Point but could never imagine a surfer riding there. Couldn’t imagine doing it myself and, of course, never had a board or a wetsuit.
And then music gobbled up my attention. Music and Laura were enough – or should have been. After Laura died, it was Larry, my drummer friend, who saved my life by teaching me how to surf.
I had closed myself up in the house where Laura had died. I surveyed over and over the catastrophe that was my life. I could never forgive myself for leading Laura to this. California. Music. Drink. Drugs. Happy. Happy. Happy. Then something went too far. I could see it going that way but couldn’t stop it. Like my old man, in some ways. He saw that my mother wasn’t happy. He could have tried to do something to keep her. Instead, he just kept on doing what he always did. He worked. Built his wooden boats. Came home to supper. Earned enough money to keep us. Was a good husband and good father. And that was what drove away my mother. Like Horace Colby, his son couldn’t stop the life he was living, couldn’t change directions. Play music, get stoned. Party. Have a good time. Play more music. Drive up and down Sunset or Santa Monica Boulevard from one event to the next. Non-stop. My life was a repeated trip down one freeway after the next, at dark, in the night, in the fast lane. Somewhere up ahead, in that endless loop, that elevated highway had cracked, collapsed, and crashed. Then it had all come to an end. Like that freeway in the earthquake. It was always hard to find a direction to point the car after that.
I pulled all the blankets off my old bed and spread them on the floor of my childhood bedroom. For some reason the feel of a hard floor felt good. Above me, the poster surfer remained aloof, back arched, toes planted firmly on the nose of his board. The wave, frozen into a magazine. I stared at the ceiling, at the dust, the two bare light bulbs, the cracks in the yellowing plaster, and I realized I had never properly thanked Larry for surfing and for saving my life.
Twelve days after Laura had been gone, Larry broke the lock on my door at 5:00 a.m. “God, this place smells awful,” was the first thing he said.
I was awake but doing my best to imitate a man in a coma. Didn’t care about anything, anybody. Larry could see that when he found me lying on the sofa, TV on but no sound. An old Japanese science fiction movie with a sea creature about to swallow Tokyo.
“Taylor, man, what’s up?” Larry knew what was consuming me more than anyone. He had gone completely berserk at the funeral, started screaming at her, then me, then at God, then at everyone. Finally, he had fallen on the ground and cried his eyes out while the rest of us stood like zombies. I never cried at Laura’s funeral. I was hiding behind my dark glasses, behind a thick curtain of dull fog. I never even acknowledged Laura’s parents, who had flown there to see their only daughter buried. And Larry had made the whole scene that much more bizarre as if he had been chosen to go insane for all of us. Larry, one of my few sane friends in the music business. A good professional drummer who was no Ginger Baker or Neil Peart, but he knew how to work with anyone.
While all around us the talented heroes were losing it to booze, coke, heroin, ego, or the occult, Larry had wired down a survival kit of his own: one joint, five beers per day, as many gigs as he could nab as a session player or stage drummer. He lived in Venice and sometimes Topanga and he surfed. “Don’t knock my system,” Larry told us all. “If it works, don’t mess with it.”
Why I had never surfed until Laura died was a bit of a mystery. I was this wicked guitar player with a hefty rep. I was good at this one thing and couldn’t handle being a novice at anything else.
It was 5:00 a.m. in purgatory when Larry broke into my California house. I hadn’t eaten for a long time. Wanted to die real bad but didn’t really have the energy to do anything about it. “You need a bath, bro. Need to get you into some water. That’s why I’m taking you surfing. Wind’s offshore. Waves are five feet. Forty minutes from here and I’ll have you back to life.”
“Leave me alone, Larry,” I begged him. But he carried me out of there, heaved me into the passenger side of the front seat of his big Ford station wagon.
“I got two longboards on top. One for you. One for me. Coffee’s there in the thermos. Dunkin’ Donuts in that bag there. Today is the day you make proper acquaintance with the Pacific Ocean on her terms.”
I chewed, I swallowed, I felt a little caffeine kick in somewhere in my brain, sugar slip into my bloodstream. It was almost like being alive. By sun-up we were at a beach, somewhere north of L.A., not Malibu. I could see oil rigs offshore. We weren’t far from the highway, but there was no one else on the beach. Larry kept talking non-stop about waves, about surfing. “Once you tap into it, man, you’ll dig it.”
It was still easier to let someone just guide me around than try to make any form of protest. I carried the board to the water line. My feet found the ocean. Just as Larry told me, I lay down on the surfboard and paddled – straight out to sea. The sky was clear and the water was warm. We paddled without even getting our hair wet. I was amazed that my arms knew how to move. Then we paddled some more over to where waves were breaking on a sandbar beneath us. I watched as Larry did this thing I had dreamed about as a kid.
Smooth, easy strokes, and then he had it. He stood, let out a loud yelp, dropped to the bottom of the wave, watched it feather at eyeball-level, turned, trimmed, walked to the front of the board, and scooted down the line as the wave broke in fine precision behind him. When he paddled back to me, I was shocked, almost angry at myself when he said, “Good to see you smiling, Taylor. Welcome back. Now it’s your turn.” I was shaking my head even as I followed Larry’s instructions: “Face shore, lie down. Here comes one. Paddle hard.”
Then I made my arms move. Suddenly, I loved the feel of the warm water, the sensation of movement, of floatation. I loved the sky above me. I loved the feel of my lungs demanding oxygen. I actually felt the wave under me, matching my speed, picking me up. I leaned back, instinctively, so the nose of the board wouldn’t go under. The wave was beneath me. I knew I’d fall off if I tried to stand. I didn’t need that. I felt a rush of speed, and it was as if someone was pumping the spirit of life back into me. I hadn’t felt alive for days and had lost touch with everything except my own self-pity. I heard Larry yelling at me now. He had caught a wave behind and was following my first ride. “You got it, man! Keep going. Don’t pearl.”
I knew that pearling meant to slip too far forward so the nose of the board went under and you wiped out. Had I not heard him and considered the meaning, I probably would have done just fine. Instead, I lost my instinctive concentration and pearled, holding on to my board, which was a mistake. The wave, once companion, now adversary, used its converging energy to flip me and the board, slamming down like a fist on the two of us. I didn’t really care, because when I came up gulping for oxygen, Larry was right there grinning like a wild man, both arms in the air.
Climbing onto the board again, I started paddling out and followed Larry outside to catch another wave. I was laughing at first, speechless, feeling good, feeling real good, and then out of the blue, as if I had been struck with emotional lightning, I started to cry. I cried like a baby for what must have been a half hour. Larry sat there saying, “It’s okay, dude. It’s okay. It’s all salt water. Nothing but salt water out here.” When a couple of young guys paddled out toward us, they quickly recognized a truly weird scene and caught waves that took them farther down the beach.
When the tears stopped, I screamed Laura’s name to the sun. I screamed it long and hard twice. Then Larry had to look away; he was about to lose it. He splashed water on his face and, when he looked back at me, blinked more salt water out of his eyes. Then he dove off his board deep down under the clear blue sea and surfaced. I followed, and when I came up, I knew I would continue to live. I would move my arms and catch waves. I would learn to stand. I would learn whatever skills Larry had to teach about riding the wave, about avoiding the pitch of a collapsing wall of water, about survival.
I learned to surf that day by falling off dozens of times, by getting rolled, pummelled, and gulped by the power of the sea, by holding my breath, by relaxing in the face of disaster, by repeating mistakes until I figured out what I was doing wrong, by taking advice and by doing this thing over and over until it locked into my brain and I was standing poised, erect, balanced, perfectly in control across a five-foot wall of seawater arced in the most graceful, sensual curve ever seen on the planet. The world had colour again – blue and gold – and only in the distance could I see the L.A. smog that reminded me that nothing on earth was perfect.
When I woke up in the thin grey light of morning, I was still on the floor. Restless night, I guessed, because my face was stuffed against a wall in spider country. My first snack of the morning was lint and dust, but it was better than nothing at all. Neck stiff, brain cells trying to get organized into some kind of useful mode, I sat up and scanned the room of my youth. I’d gone so far, done all that stuff, thought I had it made and then, bang, back in my old room feeling like a fooled and foolish little kid. I had to do what I did every other morning of my life as a lost soul: find a guitar and hit an A minor chord, wrestle with it until I could find a mate of a second chord and then start to finger-pick.
The only available guitar was the old black one with the stencilled cowboy picture on it hanging by the surfing poster. I picked it up and sat on my bed. The strings were rusty, but they were all still there. Tuning was like trying to persuade a politician he was wrong. It had a sound all its own. Something appropriate for a tin-cup cowboy who had grown up inside the music department at Sears and could never find the doorway out.
Nonetheless, the A minor chord did what it was supposed to do: confirmed my feeling of being lost and lonely, which was what an A minor chord was designed for. So I hit it several times, worried over the high E string, feathered the low E with my thumb, brushed my callused fingertips across all the strings as if I were a lover of metal and rust. Thought of all the songs that had been written that began, “Woke up feeling like …” Fill in the blank. Country tunes, blues tunes, hard rockin’, smoke coughin’ electric guitar tunes. Thought about that one I’d been working on: “Woke up feeling like inventory day at the La-Z-Boy warehouse / So I did a slow dance with the dark side of Chase and Sanborne …” Then where did it go?
Eventually, I found an E minor and a couple of slightly more optimistic major chords and a seventh, finally arriving back in the world of the living. Sweet Jesus, what did it mean to be back on a foggy morning in early summer in Nickerson Harbour?
A tap at my door. It opened.
“Taylor. Son. Great to hear that thing still sings.”
“It’s a good guitar. My tenth birthday, right?”
“I think you were eleven. And you hated it, remember? Looked too much like a toy.”
“Why Mr. Sears wanted to stencil a picture of some sad-ass cowboys onto the front of a black guitar is beyond me.”
“Your mother thought it had something special. If it had been up to me, I’d have bought you one of Old Man McCully’s rebuilt violins. But your mother thought the guitar was the instrument for this century.”
“It was her idea?”
“Guess so. Sorry. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut and taken credit for it.”
“And you wanted me to be another goddamn fiddle player? This province has always been infested with fiddle players.” I knew I’d never have gotten along well with that puny little four-string whiner of an instrument. Guitar was in my soul. Part of me had been sitting around doing nothing inside my head for those ten or eleven years waiting to find a place to put three fingers on the neck of a cowboy guitar and strum my first A minor chord. The rest was history. And tragedy, of course. I shook my head. “Maybe if I had taken up the violin, my life would have turned out better than this.”
I hit a fancy, somewhat dissonant jazz chord and set the instrument down. So the guitar had been my mother’s idea.
My old man was zoned right in on my brain waves. “I called her last night.”
“You what?” The thought of my father still having a civilized conversation with my mother in far-off Ontario sent a shock wave through me.
“Yeah, I called your mother. Told her you were here.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Dunno for sure. Felt like it, I guess. Remember she broke the ice a while back. I thought she’d want to know you were here. Just did it out of courtesy.”
“Dad, she walked out on us when I was twelve. She scooped out a big hole in our lives and disappeared – the best I can figure it was because she wanted to live someplace where she could spend more time shopping in department stores. She shipwrecked this family, or what’s left of it. And you felt the need to be courteous?”
“Just thought I should, I guess.”
I was sitting in my underwear and a T-shirt with a ridiculous message: you must lose a fly to catch a trout. I pulled on my pants and threw on my only shirt. It smelled of airports and airplane seats and a man worried that he was spending twelve hours flying in the wrong direction. I looked at my father – sixty-five years old, a stubble of grey and black on his face, shirt half tucked in, shoulders slouched. I tried to make myself look in his eyes, but I couldn’t. “Don’t you hate her guts?”
“Who?”
I made a fist but didn’t hit the wall. I think I’d hit every wall of my house in the California hills until the plasterboard was dented and the paint cracked. It wouldn’t work here on these walls of inch-thick, foot-wide planks of ancient spruce. “Who?” I snapped back. “Her – Helen. You’re still naming your new boats after her. Like that one sitting out front. You can’t forgive a person for doing what she did!”
My father refused to rise to my anger. “That was a long time ago. Not much point in digging up all that stuff.” Then, as if the hurt of decades could now be swept out the door and forgotten, he asked, “Want some toast?”
“Yeah. Toast.”
“Coffee?”
“What kind?”
He looked puzzled.
“Sorry. Where I come from, there’s no such thing as a regular cup of coffee. You have options. It was a joke.”
He smiled. Suddenly I saw the wrinkles, a lifetime of them, waves in the forehead, crow’s feet around the eyes. I saw myself thirty years from now, and desperately hoped I could be as sane as this man.
“I’ll boil some water,” he said, turning to go. “By the way, I told your mother you’d call her when you woke up. Phone’s in my room. Number’s right beside it. She said to call any time.” He walked down the short hallway to the kitchen.
I was outraged. How could he do this? I couldn’t call her. We hadn’t talked in a long time. We didn’t have anything to talk about. I stalked after my father. “You both must think I’m crazy. No way am I going to call her up.”
My father was fussing with some dirty dishes in the sink, trying to get the kettle under the faucet. “I guess it’s up to you. She just asked me to ask. Nobody can make you.”
We’d played this one out before, as if in another life. My father, the diplomat. Why was it that other kids’ parents would scream and shout at them, bash them over the head, threaten them with the most horrendous possibilities to get them to study? All my father ever used was the it’s-up-to-you approach. It was powerful ammunition.
The oil stove was still singing the only song it ever knew. Same old stove, same old tune, but it was a good one. The room smelled slightly of stove oil, but for me it was what they would have called “aromatherapy” in L.A. Outside, the fog was waiting for me to come out to play just as it had done throughout my childhood. Fog never meant gloom to me; it meant a chance to enter into my private world where vision allowed short perimeters. Fog meant forest and fantasy life and dreams and falling in love with Laura.
I looked at the clock on the wall. Seven. “It’s only six in the morning in Ontario.”
“Your mother said any time was fine,” he said nonchalantly as he plugged in the electric tea kettle.
Exasperated and confused, I wandered back down the hall to my father’s room. I sat on the bed and stared at the old phone. Rotary dial. Put your finger in the hole and spin. There was the number. I picked up the slip of paper and stared at my father’s immaculate numbers. Sloppy in his dress and personal appearance, a genuine Eastern Shore slob of a harbour boy, my father had learned order and precision in other areas of his life: numbers, tools, and the work he did with his hands, building boats of wood. “A thing well done” was the highest compliment he would pay anyone. I had heard it a few times, but I had craved to hear it more from him.
I dialled the number. It was too early there. I’d get an answering machine for sure. Then I’d feel free to vent my anger into it. Or I’d get the man she lived with, the man she married. There was a lot I could say to him.
A phone was ringing somewhere in the early morning suburbs of Toronto. All too soon a voice answered. A woman’s voice. Not fully awake. An unmistakable voice.
“It’s you,” was all I could think to say.
“Taylor, you called. I’m so glad.” I was expecting hollow, meaningless language, expecting the strident, self-important voice I remembered. This was someone different. This was a warm human voice, not the voice of the witch I expected to hear.
“Dad said I should call.”
“And you did. That’s wonderful. You’re back at the Harbour. We thought you’d never come back.”
The words caught me off guard. It was something I might have said to her. “I shouldn’t have called so early. Sorry.” And then I wondered why Iwas apologizing to her for anything.
“It doesn’t matter. I told your father any time was all right. Frank and I were awake, anyway. We both have a hard time sleeping.”
Yeah, right. Frank. Good God. My mother’s other man. I reminded myself they’d been together for a long time. It wasn’t exactly a flirtatious fling, a one-night stand. Still, I was speaking to my mother and she was lying in bed with this other man. This man I’d never met. This salesmen from Ontario, for Christ’s sake. Silence on my end. I looked around my father’s room. Big surprise. Pictures of boats. Photographs of her. And me. The way we were.
“I’m so sorry about Laura,” she said. “Everyone said the two of you were made for each other.”
“Now they say other things. But I don’t want to talk about her. That’s all over.” Although it wasn’t. Nothing was ever over. Nothing about Laura ever really got easier for me.
“How does Horace look?”
I guess I sort of snorted. “I’d say he looks okay,” I said with venom. Considering. “He looks like the same old Horace – or what was it you used to call him, Horseface?”
“I could be cruel at times. I hope he’s learned to forgive me.”
Nothing I was hearing was what I expected. I wanted to hate the woman who was going to answer the phone. I wanted her to hear rage and disgust and loathing from this end of the phone slamming into her ear at 6:00 a.m. in Ontario. Why was it I couldn’t rally the hate I had been cultivating for so long?
Now I heard her say something to this other man, this Frank, with her hand over the phone. Then she was back on the line to me. “There. Frank’s up. He’s in the bathroom now. You know how men are. Always have to pee as soon as they get up.” I detected a change in voice. She was holding back something. Sucking in air as she spoke.
“What is it?” I asked. I still couldn’t bring myself to add the word Mom or Mother or anything endearing. This was the hag who had made me feel inadequate and insecure for so long.
“I had some tests done.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It doesn’t look good. They’re not sure, but it’s possible that it’s already spread.”
“Cancer?”
Now she was crying.
“Damn. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mom.” My head was swirling again. “Maybe they made a mistake.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was a bad line from a TV hospital show, but it was all I had.
“I need to come back to Nova Scotia. I need to see both of you.”
I said nothing but discovered I was shaking my head. I felt as if I’d been blindsided with a rock to the skull. What good would it do for her to come back here? What if she did have cancer? What would happen to my father? I didn’t know what to say. What I really felt like doing was to get the hell out of this return-home nightmare, climb aboard another plane, and fly off to Tokyo or Bangkok.
“What about him?” I asked. “What about Frank?”
“Frank’s a good man,” was all she said. “He’s a real good man.”
“Yeah, so was your first husband.”
“I know what you think of me. But I still want to see you both.”
I had lived for so long without a mother. Now I had one again, and she wanted to come back into my life. I took a deep breath. “I’ll be here. We’ll both be here.”
“You’re a good boy, Taylor. You were always such a good son.” I set the old black receiver gently back into the cradle, then walked down the hall and into the kitchen where my father was shuffling four eggs in an old black cast-iron frying pan.
“What’d she have to say?” he asked.
“She’s coming home.”
He put the frying pan back down on the oil stove. “Damn.” Then a big goofy smile broke out on his face.
I didn’t tell my father anything about the test results. I didn’t mention anything about Frank. As soon as we had eaten, my father started fussing around the house, cleaning. I didn’t want to offer to help and I didn’t want him to tell me why he was doing what he was doing. I needed a long, cool drink of morning fog, so I went for a walk.
Outside, my recently acquired rattletrap junk heap of an auto-mobile quietly rusted away in the yard. It had been rash to buy the clunker outright from a guy at the airport, but I felt good about it. I’d hang on to that car. Fix it up maybe. I didn’t know why. It just felt right. The Helen VIlooked grand and glistening propped up in the front yard. White below the water line, red and green above. I could see nothing but the reflection of spruce treetops in the glass of the wheelhouse. My father had started building these cabined fishing boats because that was what the local fishermen wanted. He preferred crafting dories and rowboats, but the demand for them was long gone. And now the days of any fishing boat seemed numbered. Maybe already dead and gone. The seas had been plundered, the cod stock decimated. Nova Scotia had shared the deed with nations from around the world. Dragged and hauled and scraped the bottom until it was like a desert out there on the sea floor. And nobody accepted any of the blame. I decided then and there that I’d buy my father’s boat. The Helen VI would slip into the sea, fish or no fish.
The village of Nickerson Harbour hadn’t changed much since I’d left – at least it looked the same as it ever did in the fog. Fog, blessed fog. It made everything seem like a dream, took the edge off reality, softened all the hard lines. A couple of pickup trucks went by, and the drivers waved a slow, almost unconscious hello. I didn’t recognize the faces, but they were old men driving old pickups probably to nowhere, to the store to buy a pack of cigarettes and a can of tinned milk for their tea. The men of Nickerson Harbour. Fishermen without a future, most of them.
The houses were a fifty/fifty mix of good and bad repair. I felt friendlier toward the ones with ragged greyish wood shingles for siding, several reincarnations of paint, all faded and worn, yellow lichen feasting on the roof shingles. That seemed about right.
Old Acadian-style sheds were slowly rotting into pulp. Moss grew up the sides of one as if the stuff were green fur and the overall impression was that of a large green cat trying to crawl onto the roof. A few junked cars sat in front yards with plants growing through the front grilles and spring flowers reaching out from the side windows. And in every third yard a fishing boat, some of them the handiwork of Horace Colby, was perched on a bed of old creosote railway ties, propped up like a cartoon character from a kids’ TV show with talking boats.
This was home. This was where I was at and where I would be from here on – maybe. Hell, I didn’t have a clue about what I was going to do with my life now. There was only this one street in town and it ended the same place it had always ended, at the wharf on the harbour. Gulls owned the place these days – old grey-backed birds, probably as bad off as the fishermen, dreaming of the glory days when fish guts flew into the air with wild abandon as men gutted and cleaned their morning haul. It was yet another minor-chord tune, nothing this songwriter could ever find the words or the tact to get right. I was standing there looking at the best of a Stan Rogers ballad or maybe something more ancient than that. Longing for all that was lost, Celtic sadness, Acadian sadness, a blend of fog and sea smells and dilapidated wooden boats and old men at their teapots in the kitchens on an early-summer day where once they’d have been at sea. Good God, how well we knew how to ruin what we loved and then stand back and mourn the loss, feeling sorry for ourselves as if we were the ruined heroes of the world.
At the end of the wharf a kid stared into the water. He wore a Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap, an odd allegiance in these parts. Suddenly, I craved talk of any sort, and I didn’t have the courage to return to my house and watch my father fussing over the cleanup of the homestead.
I picked up a flat stone and skimmed it into the water. It made a triple skip before it landed flat and sank to join the crabs and sea urchins below. The kid turned to see where it had come from.
I walked toward him and sat. “I used to hang out here when I was a kid. Caught fish right where we’re sitting. Big ones sometimes.”
He looked straight at me, eyes not blinking, with a look that asserted he hated all adults. And anything that happened before last week was deadly dull, boring, and of no value. “You think I care?”
“No, guess you don’t. Sorry.” I got up to go but just then something splashed in the water out in the harbour. I saw a head pop up and recognized it as that of a young harbour seal. He lay back in the water and swam on his side straight toward us until he was close and able to look directly at me and then the boy. The seal had deep, dark, beautiful eyes and a comical wire moustache. He was watching the boy intently and now I could see why. The kid had a tin of store-bought mackerel, but he was trying to keep it hidden so I couldn’t see.
“He was probably born on Sable Island,” I said. “I’d guess he’s about a year old. Still young and curious. I think he likes you.”
The kid looked at me again. He’d cashed in the hard look for a face that suggested whatever I had to offer wasn’t of any importance but that he’d tolerate the sound of my voice.
“You been feeding him?” I asked.
It was as if I’d caught him at an act of vandalism. “No.”
“Then I guess you really like mackerel in a can.”
The seal was within five feet of us now, eyes eager, awaiting his snack. I had obviously arrived at the scheduled rendezvous time and was intruding on an intimate encounter.
“Got it. Guess I’m out of here.”
The fog started to lift ever so slowly. There was a vague rumour of a sun above the clouds that sat upon the face of the earth. The sound of my footsteps on the loose boards of the fishing wharf sounded hauntingly familiar.
“Wait,” the kid said. “C’mere.” I turned and went back. The seal was in the water almost at the kid’s feet now. As I approached, he dove straight down, flipped his tail, then reappeared a little farther out in the dark, clear waters of the harbour. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
“Tell who?”
“My mother.”
“Wouldn’t know her if I tripped over her.”
“Or any of the creeps who hang around here.”
“Okay by me. But what’s the big deal?”