This All Happened(66)
9 Eight of us aboard Max’s boat in Placentia Bay. I love getting out of town. Sunny, steaming southwest of Long Island. Trying to remember how Lydia’s foot looked in a white nylon: the red polish on her toenails showing through. As if her foot were dusted with sugar.
We see eagles in the distance. Some sea stacks that look like ancient pillars of rubble. I’ve had about five beer with absolutely no effect.
The horseflies are bad.
Discarded scallop shells shine along the bottom near the wharf in Harbour Buffett. Their reflected glare allows you to see more of what’s on the bottom. Connors dart and coast around the legs of the wharf.
The wharf is the deck of an old oak schooner. All the houses are gone now, resettled to Arnold’s Cove in the sixties. This was where Max was born. He has shown us photos of when his father moved the house to Arnold’s Cove. They jacked the house and rolled it down to the water on logs. Then a barge shipped it down the length of Placentia Bay. They didnt break one pane of glass until they got to Arnold’s Cove. Max says his father didnt mind the idea of resettlement. It was the speed. In the summer of 1967 there were two hundred people in Buffett. By September there were none.
And then what was left was pirated.
Even five years ago you’d see the shells of houses, still standing but their spines broken, about to collapse. You could see the size of the communities. But now all that’s here are cabins. People are starting to return. The cabins are mushrooms growing on a dead log.
Max, looking at the topo maps, says we can go across to Merasheen, but if the wind is from the south, you just dont know.
Max has fibreglassed the boat eight sheets on the hull,
sixteen overlap on the keel. And six sheets cover the house. Fibreglassing saves on maintenance.
We pass the whaling station on Merasheen. Across from Rose au Rue Island. Abandoned in the forties. A pasture to the south where the whaler’s quarters were, now caribou graze there. Rusting boilers, a vat, and the sticks of a wharf. On the ocean floor we see the outline of a sunken whaler, its hull arcing through the green depths.
10 This morning we ate blue mussels a friend of Max’s raked from the bottom around the island in Buffett Harbour.
The friend says, Max and I we’re the one age.
Big mussels that Lydia boiled in wine and garlic.
We watch two old women tend their drying fish. They stroll over to the chicken wire mesh, where the fish lie split and salted, to turn them over. The coastline is like a polygraph to see if the island’s lying.
Off the wharf I catch a few connors with Una. I’m using raisins for bait.
If you can imagine a tarnished beer bottle capable of wriggling, that would describe a connor.
Daphne: We like being near running water. Because we’re 90 percent water.
Driving back, in the dark, I almost hit a moose. I have Lydia, Maisie, and Una in the car. The moose is all legs, and then the legs join a torso. I never see its head. But I brake and swerve around him, I see fur against my right headlight. And Lydia says, holding my arm, You did well there.
11 How did I know Craig Regular was going to address me? He asked, Is this just olive oil? He was speaking to Lydia and something lifted in his chin that made me look, something that stopped us gently in our expected progress while he asked in a tone slightly lower to indicate an aside. Yes, it’s just oil, I say, and he resumes the soft talk on editing film on computers, dipping his torn baguette in the green pool. I am intimidated by taller men. I’m not used to it.
12 Lydia is supposed to have her period today. I ask in the morning and there’s no sign. It’s the only thing she’s never late for. On our bicycles we see Oliver Squires on his back step, soaked in heat, elbow propped on bare knee, eating a thick wedge of watermelon. Hottest day in thirteen years, he says.