Blackstrap Hawco (62 page)

Blackstrap climbs aboard his Galaxie 500 and pulls shut the heavy door. The new car smell still lingering. He looks across the seat to where Agnes usually sits before sliding over to lean close to him, to kiss him on the cheek. He bought the car last year, before all the bad news found its way to them, out of money earned from crab fishing with Roger Barnes.

He had liked the Galaxie's black colour and the sleek look of it under the lights in the showroom. But most of all, he admired the way the salesman had described the car, running through its features like the car would be a friend to Blackstrap: ‘A V8 engine with three-speed column shifted automatic transmission. Power steering. Three-hundred-and-ninety-cubic-inch big block.' All of that was impressive, but what had set Blackstrap's mind on buying the car was the crowning touch that the salesman had used by describing the car as having ‘an aggressive stance.' The salesman had said: ‘You won't be let down by this baby's aggressive stance.'

Blackstrap sits in the seat, his mind in the brightly lit showroom in St. John's. Soon, he wonders where he might go. Not far. It's Christmas Eve. If it were any other night, he'd take a run into St. John's, go downtown, just to get lost for a while. But not tonight. Christmas Eve,
a bunch of bullshit. Any day now, this place gone for him. He'll be forced to head to the mainland because of the sorry state of things. People from around Cutland Junction, Port de Grave and Shearstown Line already up in Ontario and Alberta. Rumour has it that several more young men will be heading off soon, nothing to keep them at home. Ted Bartlett and Ray Foley are already gone, just before Christmas. Jobs waiting for them up along. Jobs in Ontario factories or in the oil business in Fort McMurray. Pockets of Newfoundlanders everywhere in Canada: Galt, Toronto, Calgary…And there's no sense sticking around Cutland Junction for Christmas when there's no money for presents.

Blackstrap reaches for the half case on the floor in front of the passenger case. He tears open the flap and pulls out a bottle, the neck between his fingers. He uses the opener on the chain hanging from the radio dial and pops the cap. Taking a drink, he switches on the radio. Christmas songs on most of the AM channels. Then a station playing the Bee Gees' ‘How can you Mend a Broken Heart.' He tries the FM rock station. Gordon Lightfoot's voice, pure and smooth and full of hard luck all at once:

 

If you could read my mind love,

what a tale my thoughts could tell.

Just like an old time movie

'bout a ghost from a wishin' well.

 

The sound of Lightfoot's voice snags on something in Blackstrap and he turns up the volume dial, making full use of the new speakers.

 

In a castle dark or a fortress strong

with chains upon my feet

you know that ghost is me.

And I will never be set free

as long as I'm a ghost that you can't see.

 

Blackstrap starts the engine. Revs it. There are shadows cast on the snow from the kitchen window at the side of the house. Dancing
shadows. He revs the engine some more, feels the power lift in front of him. The solid roar of it beneath his feet. Then he backs out of the driveway, takes the dirt road up, and around the grove of evergreens toward the centre of Cutland Junction. Down into the valley then uphill, waiting to catch sight of the bungalow. At the top of the rise, the new Bishop house, built out of money made from work on the mainland. Built to be sold and move on. He watches Agnes' house while he passes. The Christmas tree in the big window. The cars parked in the paved driveway. He could pull in. Park his car and go in for a visit. Agnes' mother. A nice-looking woman always kind enough when he visits. Like she's happy to see him. He slows down. Thinking that Agnes might look out the window, see him as he passes by, as he rolls by for a final look. He presses his foot into the accelerator.

Beyond Cutland Junction, he follows the highway. Black-green spruce running as shadows on both sides of him. And takes the turnoff for Bareneed. Follows the pock-marked road that leads down from the highway. And ends at the ocean. Glad to have left Cutland Junction behind. The Christmas lights that make him feel lonely. Christmas always makes him feel left out. Isolated. Thoughts of Junior and Ruth. Gone off. Leaving him with just bits and pieces of them.

Most of the old houses down around Bareneed harbour, the ones abandoned after relocation, are black and desolate, unoccupied for almost twenty years. But he notices there are a few with lights on. Some people having moved back to their homes and living on welfare. The houses circle the arc of the harbour. Dark shells staring toward the ocean with blinded eyes.

Bareneed cove is a bay of black water beneath a massive headland ten times blacker than the sky. A few boats are tied up around the community wharf that has fallen into a state of disrepair. Blackstrap shuts off the car's engine and climbs out. Only the sounds of his breath and bootsteps over the hard ground. Then a few sounds coming from across the bay, skimming the water. The toot of a car horn. A loud bang that might be anything. He heads for the wharf, minds his step, and casts off the lines before stepping down aboard his father's boat,
Bareneed's Pride
. The sense of the movable sea beneath his boots puts him at ease. He steps into the small wheelhouse and starts the
engine, sails around the headland towering above him at his right, then out to sea.

It is not until he feels the boat moving faster than he intended that he realizes how angry he has become. At first, it was a pleasure to be free of land, but then came memories of how Agnes used to ask to go for a ride in the boat. Just two of them out on the water at night. Her behind him while he was at the wheel. Her hugging him. Nothing behind him now. No one holding on. His mind filled up with the idea of Agnes leaving. Making him and the boat heavier.

Having cleared the headland, Blackstrap sees the widening of the bigger inlet to his left, and, far across it, tiny lights shine from the houses of Port de Grave. To his right and back a bit, the dilapidated houses remain perched along the Bareneed cliff. He can barely make them out, only a few lights burning. His family's house moved from there just after his tenth birthday. The top storey torn off. His bedroom – that used to belong to Junior – and his parents' bedroom, all rebuilt on the lower floor. Torn off because the house was too big and would be easier to move. Uncle Ace's house still there somewhere though. It's hard to locate in the dark, but he has an idea, catching sight of what he believes to be the roof edge. Blackstrap's been inside that house. Years ago, he thought of saving it, rebuilding it, back to the way it was, but the rot has made that impossible now. The sills gone, the structure leaning on one side. He'd be better off tearing it down and building a new house on the land. A one-storey bungalow with a concrete basement.

The vague shadows of the abandoned houses deepen Blackstrap's rage. Out at sea, with the houses fading into utter blackness, he feels himself drawn into that shadow as it seeps through him. He is on the water, in a boat, and he is stogged full of fury. He steers away from Bareneed, keeping the land over his shoulder, not looking back, while he aims toward Port de Grave where he might tie up and have a listen to the men and oldtimers gathered on the wharf.

Port de Grave.

Bareneed.

It is Bareneed he has come for.

Not Port de Grave. No more news of closures passed around. No more words from mouths that won't do a thing about it. Men with no
guts or balls to go out there and do something. Fight someone. Fight who? he wonders. Someone. Anyone. His anger gets the best of him, and what he has been ignoring over his shoulder, the dark remains, draws him back. He swings the boat around, turning the craft in a wide arc toward Bareneed's ragged cliffs that rise up eighty feet. White foam from the surge of the ocean in the distance despite the absence of the moon.

What comes into Blackstrap's head is an image of his brother, Junior, under the water to the east, bits of him still buried in the caved-in iron-ore mine, then an image of his little sister, Ruth, dead from a disease that came from his mother's pills. Not from Cutland Junction like they suspected. Pills. Ruth's misshapen face, her laugh, her crooked, blackened teeth. Too soft. Her teeth too soft, the doctor said. Her bones too soft. He remembers. Her blind eyes that knew him when he was near. Both his brother and his sister dead. And his mother living like a ghost, stuck in this life without the faintest hint of joy or pleasure.

And his father laughing it all off.

When his father dies, Blackstrap will be the last one of them. The last Hawco. The last one. He increases the throttle, feeling the engine thrusting beneath his boots, and aims straight for Bareneed, for the rocks and the cliffs and the white foam that grows whiter.

Agnes.

The last one.

He flashes on a memory of the crack in the headland that they used to crawl into as boys, just big enough for him to fit through. No turning back. And slightly to the east of the crack, the cave that you could run a small boat through. And above it all, the pasture where the goats, cow, horse and sheep grazed, all of it under darkness now, beneath a black sky capable of suffocating any man's spirit.

Speed increasing. The black wall of cliff no more than a hundred meters ahead. Jagged rock coming to him.

The rock.

Fantasizing about a shipwreck, like he used to as a boy, the splinters of boat wood, the thick mast and the sail cloth in the water. Fantasizing about surviving. So he can save the other people who are near death. Like his great-grandfather, Patrick Hawco, after coming all the way
from Ireland, perishing in the sea on a stormy night in an attempt to rescue crew members from a wrecked Portuguese vessel. Where were those men now? The ones he had saved? Who would rescue him from this?

Who?

Where are the men who have been saved? And what are they thinking?

Sixty meters from blackness. The bow of the boat cutting the water. Blackstrap broods on his mother. His mother and her sadness. Always in her room, in the darkness. She might as well be in one of those black houses in Bareneed. He will die with what has been taken from her. He will go down with it. Without hope. But he cannot make her worse. He will not allow it. The pain he would cause her. He glances down and sees a small hand on the throttle, a girl's twisted hand. His skin prickles as the hand slides the throttle back a touch. He turns to look. No one.

The engine slows. Fifty-five meters away, but still steady toward collision. Uncertain of the force of the impact. Never having felt such a thing. Even just to know this destruction. The girl's hand no longer there. Rock reaches out to both sides of him, carved by the persistent sea. No way of turning with rock to either side of him.

His hand, frozen, greenish-white, snow-covered.

Fifty meters. Forty-five. What will become of the tale without him to do the telling? It will be told by others. And they will change it as they see fit. He considers leaping overboard. Forty meters. His body rigid with indecision. If he jumps, he will last only a few minutes before hypothermia sets in and the ocean kills him.

More and more of the sky now blocked out by the pure blackness of the cliff rock. Deadening sound. A shadow solidifying.

Thirty-five meters.

Near total blackness. White foam darkening.

Agnes.

Thirty meters.

Rock.

Twenty-five.

The last one.

He glances at his hand. The veins in it rising, the sheen of sweat on
his skin. His fingers. He lifts his hand and turns over the palm. Then he looks in front of him.

His legs frozen stiff. A whiteness and a roar.

End of story.

Beginning of story.

 

‘You're not very smart,' says the little girl, looking up at him. She has an accent. Not like a Newfoundlander. She sounds British. Proper enough to confuse him.

‘Why's that?' he barely asks, hanging there, uncertain, but brightly awake in the night air. The tiny lights from miniature houses glisten far across the water.

‘You think you're a Christmas bulb. But you're not,
are
you?'

Blackstrap laughs the freest laughter ever known to him. Easiness that evacuates his head, and puts nothing in there but clarity and fresh air. But, soon, the coldness makes itself known. In his hands, then on his face, and his body begins to tremble while he watches his little sister. Ruth with her eyes that stare at him. Seeing. Eyes so blue watching his face. And he is ashamed.

She looks nothing like his little sister, but he knows it is her. She holds a candy cane with one of her woolly mittens. The candy cane stuck to the fuzz of the wool. It is white with red stripes that smear when she licks or sucks. She's wearing winter clothing. Ear muffs. Boots with white fur around the tops. The rubber soles on a rock, and she's trying to not fall over. Her left foot, the most unsteady. She wobbles a bit. The rock sloppy beneath her. It clicks against another, and her arms shoot out to catch her balance. She checks down at her feet, like nothing is the matter. Just to look. To see. Then bites off a bit of candy cane, crunches it with her dark teeth, looks up at Blackstrap.

‘You don't even shine,' she says. And she is going to smile, and he will see her teeth. The black rotted teeth. They will be uncovered once her lips part. But there is white. A hint of white. A glisten…

As his trembling increases, Blackstrap feels that his arms are uselessly heavy at his sides. His eyes come back to him. He falls together with the weight of his own body and sees the tiny lights far across the black water in a new way. They are real houses. Not miniatures after all.
Across the inlet. Port de Grave. There as it was meant to be. A fishing community.

It is a mess. That's what he is in. His feet hanging beneath him. His boots not touching ground. He moves his legs around in air. His arms reach back to find the needles of a spruce tree, then reach up to check the branch that the back of his woollen sweater is snagged on. The sweater that Agnes knitted for him last Christmas. The first one she ever made, helped by her mother. A bit too big for him, but he always wore it with pride.