Blackstrap Hawco (61 page)

As they neared, the swell of the waves rose to the rim of the punt and a body thudded the side, an arm reaching into the punt and then swallowed back by the plummet of the swell.

It seemed that Ferrol might not have seen the body for he was laughing with greater wildness and bending forward, reaching with his arm as though to clasp hands with something living. Patrick was made to lurch forward to grab for the oar that Ferrol had released, to prevent it from being forever lost in the water. Holding fast to the oar, his eyes were trained toward Ferrol's reach, seeing the curve of wood strapped together by rings of iron. A barrel rammed the side of the boat with astonishing force, then drifted back, plucking away any merciful thoughts of its contents, forcing Ferrol to lurch for it in a peculiar
flailing of limbs that resembled a jig. Leaning, his grip missed its target and his body straightened in agitation. At once, he stood, his feet set as anchors against the punt while the others cast wary looks up at him, fearing that his movements in the jerky craft would lead to their peril.

Ferrol stared toward a target, the grin widening on his face while he raised his arms straight above his head and dove in.

Cian, shouting a noise that was nothing, made a spasmodic grab for Ferrol, almost losing himself, as well, to the sea.

At once, Patrick snatched hold of the other oar, drew both into the punt and laid them to rest. It was now necessary to extend his arms to each side of the boat and hold tightly to ensure not being flung from her.

On the open sea, the lash of the rain was incredible and the salt water spray near blinded his eyes so that he could barely perceive anything through the blur. He leaned toward the side and scanned the water to discern that Ferrol was nowhere in sight. The watery swell strained his eyes with the hypnotic illusion that such motion was impossible, his brain confounding him with the sight of the liquid disorderliness rising and setting at once to various heights and depths. Frantically, he glanced around as a barrel – hurled out of the nearby blackness – struck the side of the punt, crushing his fingers where they were securely gripped to the edge. Cringing with misery, he withdrew his hand and was tossed to the other side, banging his legs against the hull. In that position, blinking away the rain, he searched over the star board side. No sign of Ferrol as another barrel smacked against the lip of the punt with such force that there was a shuddering and splintering of wood.

At once, Patrick caught the whiff of port. The barrel had sprouted a leak and was gushing into the boat, faster than the rain. Behind him, another barrel pounded the bow. On his back and twisting around, he caught the desperate look on Cian's face. In the company of this younger man's fear, any remnants of Patrick's bravado were cauterized to expose rawer sentiment. With Ferrol gone, this was not so much an adventure now as what appeared to be a jaunt into intended jeopardy.

Another barrel rose alongside them, hoisted by a swell that shrank and dropped the vat into the boat where it shattered the bones in Patrick's legs. The pitch of his scream was deadened by all manner of
nature as he desperately shoved to remove the barrel that, perhaps for his own good, kept him pinned within the punt. He saw the rain-drenched Cian stand to help or search around for a means of escape, and shouted out a protest, his hands going up, all to no avail, for in that single ill-chosen moment Cian, with limbs fluttering like the wings of a tormented bird, was dumped overboard.

Frantically searching over one side then the other, for the craft was now being tilted in every direction, Patrick learned that he was surrounded by barrels, their slick wooden staves rising above him and falling and swirling in the discord of the sea.

Another barrel struck the bow, its end flipping over, knocking him from his slat, before it was carried away, back out into the sea. His legs pinned, he fell sideways into the punt. Salt water sloshed into his mouth. It stung twice as badly, as now it was cut with port. He thought that his lips might be split. As much as he desired to, he tried not to swallow. The barrel that had trapped his legs was spilling from its side. He reached ahead with one hand and felt the flow of port, somehow cooler than the rain. He cried out for help, whimpering the names of his loved ones. Then he merely cried.

Trapped sobbing, his head tilted back to stare at the black sky which was wet and malignant, he heard an answer to his cry; a seagull or some creature in flight screeched from the blackness, the sound rising, swooping, nearing, until Patrick decided that it was not a gull at all but the rhythmic recurrence of a triumphant laugh, as though Ferrol had boarded the shipwrecked vessel and stood upon its deck in glorious claim. His calls of ‘Faaaack, faaack, faaack' soon ran together and became sharper, cut with the screech of a gull and a crow, and faded, faded, faded…until the sea brought forth a wave that slammed into the punt and flipped her upside-down.

After unknown moments of deafness and unaccountable deadness, and with a gasp frozen by the sea, Patrick discovered himself once again in possession of his senses. He had resurfaced to find that his hands were holding on to a barrel, that bodies, dead and slumped, were clung to similar barrels, that the barrel continued leaking and was pouring onto his numb face. Shivering with fear and in the watery grips of frigidity, he was pained by the suspicion that the sweet and sticky fragrance of port
might be blood. He opened his mouth as he was floated above other barrels and lifeless bodies, then dropped into a hollow, as though in a complex pattern of living maze, winding his way through a labyrinth that drew him here and there and rose and fell beneath his torso and smacked him with the disunity of hundreds of barrels set loose and afloat around him, being hurled and tossed like balls, above him and then below him, the world of water unformable, undefinable, unliveable.

Laughing and crying, he drank as best he could from the gushing port before a bone-smashing blow was delivered to the back of his skull. A barrel punched his neck and then another hammered his face, crushing his cheekbone. He was slugged in the chest. He was battered in the shoulderblade. Bashed once again along the hairline split in his skull.

On his back, floating in silence's embrace, his opened head and mouth filling with salt water and port, Patrick Lambly's eyes were ignorant to the unfathomable count of barrels drawn toward the violent eddy that sucked him under and buried him in the tumbling and rolling swirl of precious cargo.

 

The drenching night drags on, Siobin,

harrowing my head.

No stock, no wealth

This storm on waves nearby

Where towering crests collide

in recollection.

 

A daughter, Claire, a son, Angus,

Cold and dead to me these years

Though burn they do as embers now

upon my sea drunk lips that will not

die in this drenching night.

 

Three faces in my shattered mind

My love, my life, my penitence.

How fitting that the mongrel,

baying in the swim for distant shores,

succumbs to the echo of its own pursuit.

 

Book Two

1971–2007

 

Chapter I –1971

Helter Skelter

(April, 1971, 17 years old)

Charles Manson is being led from the courtroom. His eyes look like they could scare the fur off a cat. He has just been sentenced to death. Charles Manson and his family. The family lived together in a hippie commune, away from the rest of the world. The family came into the city to slaughter a pregnant woman, a movie star with long blonde hair and a pretty, movie-star face. The family used the woman's blood to write ‘PIGGIE' on the bedroom wall in a home in the United States. The movie star's husband is a movie director. The way the reporter is talking makes it sound like the movie director is strange. It was no surprise the movie director's wife was killed and butchered. Only a matter of time. Part of a weird movie that the director might, one day, direct himself. His own doing. It was bound to happen, even though it was – without doubt – a terrible, terrible,
terrible
tragedy. A shock to the community at large. What the family has done is the fault of a song by the Beatles called ‘Helter Skelter.'

On the television, a woman with a shaved head shouts into the camera: ‘It's gonna come down hard. Lock your doors. Protect your kids.'

Blackstrap Hawco is seated on the living room couch. His father, Jacob, watches the news. He looks over at Blackstrap. ‘You got any of dem Beatles 8-tracks in yer car?'

Blackstrap merely shakes his head, then wonders if music can do that to people, make them kill each other, make them cut off all their hair, make them look like they could eat you if the moon hung just right in the sky.

Blackstrap's mother, Emily, stands at the entrance to the living room with a dish in one hand. She has been drying it with a towel, drying it
over and over with a swirling movement. But now she stops. She watches the TV screen.

No one says another word.

The television is a new 25-inch Electrohome console with mahogany wood. The four legs that press into the carpet look almost pointed. Jacob has bought the television with money earned from the seal hunt.

Three faces continue watching the screen in shocked disbelief. Then Blackstrap looks away, toward the window for a view of the outdoors, his eyes wanting to shift back to the flickering images. He stands and goes to the window.

Outside, there is not a hint of a breeze. It is snowing ever so lightly, big flakes covering the roofs of the old and new houses. Big snow, no snow, as the saying goes. A rare spring snowfall. Smoke thickly rises from the chimneys. The snow settles in the boughs of the evergreens stretching for miles to the east, west, north and south of Cutland Junction.

 

(December)

The seven people beyond the window are wearing cloth masks and several layers of clothes, one piece over another, to disguise themselves. They hoot and holler and make screeching noises as they approach the house. Blackstrap has not been expecting them, but they often arrive without warning.

The crowd makes greater noise as they near the back door and hurl it open, the cold winter air briskly following them into the porch.

A knock sounds on the inner kitchen door. One of them calls out: ‘Any mummers 'llowed in?'

Blackstrap, who is stood in the kitchen doorway, smiles to himself.

With a wink to Emily, Jacob rises from his chair and opens the door. The mummers are pulling off their boots and leaving them in a pile. With exaggerated gestures, they hurry in, fiddles and accordions in hand, and begin dancing around, playing a brisk rendition of ‘Mussels in the Corner.' De-de-de-de-de-de-de…de-de-de-de-de-de-de…de-de-de-de-de-de-de…‘Mussels in the corner.' They disguise their voices, talking in deep or high pitches as the music reels out and the mummers perform foolish steps of dance around the kitchen, clapping their hands,
bending their knees and scuffing their heels. Dancing in circles, arm in arm, the mummers appear puffed up because of all the clothing. Two of them pull Emily from her chair at the table, where she has been sitting quietly in thought, and hurl her around in dance.

Emily tries her best to smile, but her heart seems not to be in it. The disguised person doing the jig has a pillowcase over its face with eyeholes roughly snipped out. A green woollen hat is pulled over the top of the pillowcase. The person is wearing three layers of clothing. A sweater over a woman's dress. And mittens on its feet that make stepping without slipping a tricky chore. This becomes part of the dance, another slapstick addition to the merriment.

The final notes of ‘Mussels in the Corner' drop away and another tune starts up, one Blackstrap can't pin a name on, although he's heard it a hundred times if he's heard it once. Back when his father used to play the fiddle. He wonders who the people might be, going through a few names from the community. If he saw the car they came in, he'd know right away.

Out in the living room, the hi-fi radio continues playing. Blackstrap leans back a little to catch scraps of lyrics and bits of the tune from ‘Brown Sugar' by the Rolling Stones. Before the mummers' arrival, Blackstrap had been in the living room – the room that has recently been built onto the side of the one-storey square house to make room for the television – listening to ‘Stay Awhile' by the Bells, the sweet whispering voice of the female singer always does fine things to his head. If he can only find a woman who sounds like that. The voice makes him feel sleepy. Makes him want to touch a woman in a dark room.

His mind on Agnes Bishop. Her gentle voice. The long smoothness of her dark blonde hair. No one but her for as long as he's known. Since the time they moved to Cutland Junction and he went to school for those first few days, before he dropped out to stay at home and look after little Ruth, who had been born all twisted up and blind. His mother still sick from Junior's death. Never the same, and needing help with Ruth. His mother with no energy then. Eight years ago. And little difference now. The way Ruth was born having to do with the new place, Jacob and Blackstrap suspected. Cutland Junction. Being forced to move from their home. And then little Ruth's death. That had made his mother even sicker. Cutland Junction had.

One day, Blackstrap plans to move back to Bareneed, onto land they still own down there by the ocean. He's already checked at the records of the town hall. It's only to save for the building materials. He had planned to move there with Agnes. That was the way it was meant to go, an unspoken understanding between them, or so Blackstrap had thought. But Agnes has other ideas now.

He remembers kissing her out in the coldness on his eighteenth birthday last week, after she'd given him the new trouting pole and reel, all wrapped up in birthday paper and her joking about him never figuring out what it was. Not in a million years. That's all he's ever had of her, that kiss. It was a kiss with all of her body and heart in it. A kiss that was slow at first, then faster, in need of something more, some sort of telling, then slower, creating a feeling that made plain the fact that he never wanted to look at any other face except hers. Her hands on his cheeks. Her eyes on him.

It was after that kiss that she told him – in a voice that could've cut him in half with its sad sweetness – that she was going away to university.

The sight of the telephone hung on the kitchen wall reminds him that he is supposed to call her. He has a Christmas gift for her, a ring that was meant for baby Ruth, that had been sent by one of his mother's relatives, an aunt named Annie in England, when Ruth was born. To be saved. Blackstrap had wanted Agnes to have it. Now that she is going away he can't bear to see her. Her family moving to the mainland at the end of January. Her father already working up in Fort McMurray, Alberta, wanting the whole family to join him. Mr. Bishop had enough of being away without them, only coming back for special occasions, like he was back now for Christmas. That was what Agnes had said. Her last Christmas in Cutland Junction. Their house up for sale. A sign with a ‘Sold' sticker on it, the house already bought by Isaac Tuttle.

Blackstrap watches the mummers dance. His thoughts on Agnes, what she might be doing. Plenty of relatives at her house exchanging presents. No presents exchanged here. His mother's relatives all in England. She doesn't have much to do with them, only the occasional letter arrives from that aunt. Emily's mother and father both dead. On his father's side, Uncle Ace has been missing for seventeen years, dead,
everyone assumed, since Blackstrap was a baby. And Jacob's mother, Catherine, had passed away before Blackstrap was born. He'd never known either of them. No presents from them. No big family around like most of the other people had in Cutland Junction.

Agnes in her house. The house soon to be empty. Blackstrap turns his thoughts away from her and thinks of people barging into his house. The way it has been for years. Mummers. Friends and neighbours walking in the back door for a bit of entertainment. He thinks of the Manson family in the news all the time. Everyone wants to know all about those crazy murderers. The woman who has been killed. A baby. Words written on the walls with blood. The noise before his eyes. The shaved heads. He stares at the movement. How far off are people from killing? How dangerous are they? The thought fascinates him. It is almost exciting, the absolute wildness of it, but he doesn't let it dig in any deeper than that. He concentrates on what's right before him, right before his eyes. Not a bit of harm possible here. Not with these good people.

Jacob is clapping his hands, winking and smiling at the crew of seven that spin around the kitchen and try to make light of everything. When one of the mummers – a man by the size of him wearing a woman's brassiere out over his green zip-up coveralls – approaches Blackstrap and takes him by the arm, Blackstrap follows along and gives a few steps before inclining away and drifting back to where he was leaning in the doorway. A new smile on his lips. A good one. The mummer keeps dancing a jig, bouncing his elbows and clapping his hands, kicking up his feet, while the others call out encouragement.

Rum or cherry syrup are poured for everyone, and plates of dark and light Christmas fruit cake are laid out by Emily. Despite the fact that she mourns what is missing from Christmas, she always takes the time to prepare the cakes, to do her baking, what is expected of her, as she was taught to do by Jacob's mother, Catherine, all those years ago, to do what is expected of her, before she returns to her bedroom and the darkness.

Jacob goes about trying to identify the mummers, calling out names that are denied right away with quick shakes of the head. He laughs and points. Glass in hand, he drinks back more rum. His cheeks and ears glowing pink. Three days' growth of beard on his face and his eyebrows all over the place.

There is not a worry in the kitchen. Not a speck of it, despite the fact that the fishery has failed that summer and the anti-seal-hunt movement has got its way, the know-nothing mainlanders managing to turn the seal hunt into the slaughter of big-eyed babies. They are a smart crew, though, for playing on people's emotions and hauling in the dollars. As good a job as any, Blackstrap supposes. They're on the television and radio all the time looking saintly, trying to sound like if only the baby seals could be saved from the ‘barbarian Newfoundlanders' then the world would be a more decent place. At first, it was just a bunch of snotty mainlanders making all the ruckus, but now scientists are on the television and radio too, saying that the seal population has dropped by almost half over the last twenty years, and the only way to save the herd from extinction is to stop now.

Stop the slaughter, they say. Stop the slaughter now.

Quotas have been set for the coming sealing season.

By the looks of it, Blackstrap might be making his last trip to the ice this spring. He's gone for the past two years, since he was sixteen, working right beside his father. The red fanning out on white. It will only be one of them going this year. Probably Blackstrap, leaving his father behind, back on land to putter around.

Blackstrap can't help but think: That's only the tip of the iceberg in the bad news department. It's hard times right across the island. Paper mills shut down on the west coast. All of it being reported on the St. John's TV news. The American army base in Argentia laying off seven hundred employees. And, worst of all, Newfoundland's on the brink of bankruptcy, close to one billion dollars in debt.

It said on the TV news that just last year some newspaper in Toronto wrote that Newfoundland should be put under Federal Trusteeship because Premier Joey Smallwood, the last living Father of Confederation, the man who hauled Newfoundland – bawling and kicking – into Canada in 1949, is making a shambles of the economy.

He wonders why this is all happening, who is at fault. He feels like Newfoundland is doomed. He feels like someone is trying to kill the whole island, strangle it to death. Why is it in such hard shape? With all the fish and all the forests and all the mines.

Jacob doesn't seem to have a worry in the world. Everything runs off
him like water off a duck's back, since Smallwood was defeated in the recent election. It was only by a narrow margin and Smallwood has since refused to step down, but Jacob still takes comfort in the fact that Smallwood lost, even if the premier won't hand over power. Arrogant bastard, Jacob calls him. Nazi.

Dance, thinks Blackstrap. Kick up your heels. He takes a swig of his beer, then tips it all the way back, draining the bottle. Discouraged by the easy laughter, he scoffs quietly and lays the bottle on the sideboard, leaves the room.

 

Outside, Blackstrap's 1970 Ford Galaxie 500 is parked alongside his father's pickup truck. He can hear the muffled sounds of the fiddle, shouts and clapping, from behind the walls, as he makes his way down the driveway. The night air still and sharp. Another vehicle is parked on the side of the dirt road. The big white Chrysler – Andrew Fowler's by the looks of it – that all of the mummers came in. Parked halfway across the road. No doubt the lot of them are three sheets to the wind.