February (10 page)

I like the idea of a nicely kept grave, he wrote. I am thinking of commissioning a new stone, he said. They have a new grey speckled marble at a masonry store downtown, and it’s softer looking than the solid black. I’m thinking of a gloss finish. Your mother was a classy lady, he wrote. Graves have to be maintained!

Jane felt sure he’d crafted the last statement, with its single exclamation mark, as a kind of plea. But she could not give herself over to the shrill calm in the email. She was working on her thesis. He has a new wife, Jane thought at the time. Let her take care of it.

Jane was at the Tim Hortons in Pearson Airport when she opened the email from her father about the baby.

The baby needs a father, he wrote. As far as he understood Jane’s situation, he said, she was by no means financially secure. She could not expect others to assume the cost of her carelessness. It was that kind of thinking that had the whole world in the mess they were finding themselves in right now. Had she thought of the state of his portfolio, he wondered. Had she realized every penny he had made over the years had been saved and invested, and he was watching those investments shrivel on a daily basis, and soon he might have to sell off some of the horses. Maybe let somebody go, too. Those boys have been loyal, he wrote. They’ve been like sons.

He also told Jane that Glennis Baker had moved out and that Glennis had taken an end table Jane’s own mother had refinished in a course she’d done alongside the inmates at the pen, and that was an end table Jane’s father had meant to leave to Jane. He asked Jane: Do you ever think about anybody but yourself? She had not finished her studies, he reminded her. Jane was making a mistake. Adoption is the only recourse, her father wrote. He hoped that she would do what was best for the baby. Thank God your mother was spared this, he wrote. I’m glad your mother is not around.

Now Jane looks for her phone, but when she finds it she just presses it against her chest.

The girl from the Tim Hortons has wedged herself out from behind the counter and is methodically spraying the tabletops with a squeeze bottle of blue disinfectant. She stops by Jane’s table and puts one hand on the chair back opposite Jane and leans in. Her slowly blinking eyes take in Jane’s face and the cellphone in Jane’s fist and the fist pressed to Jane’s chest. The girl breathes in through her teeth and sighs deeply.

Can I get you something, she asks.

. . . . .

John Lucid Dreaming, November 2008

JOHN WAS IN
a youth hostel in Tasmania the evening after the astonishing phone call from Jane. He had paid extra for a private room but in the kitchen down the hall there was a woman from Sydney, Australia, along with her daughter, cooking a meal. He wandered into the kitchen, and when he sat down the chair scraped over the tiles.

He said at once about Jane and the baby. He said about Iceland. He told the whole story. The woman from Sydney chopped onions, one hand on the knife handle, the other on the top of the blade. The knife rocked hard, up and down, and the finely shredded onion piled up, and John’s nose hurt and his eyes watered.

I’ve been to Iceland, the woman said. I had my throat slit in Iceland. John looked and saw that she had a thick white scar across her neck.

He had dreamt, the night before, a pedal-operated flying machine, creaky, with some kind of animal skin stretched over the wings. In the dream he had decided to land on the roof of Atlantic Place at home in St. John’s. This was how he practised lucid dreaming. He became aware that he was dreaming and he tried to change the course of the dream. He tried to make it bend to his will. This time he wanted to land the flying machine on the roof of a building a few streets up from his mother’s house. Then he would climb down the fire escape and walk home.

He had managed to fly, in the dream, to the outskirts of the city. But at the last moment the dreamscape morphed out of his control and he’d crashed in a marsh of bakeapple bushes.

When I was a student, the woman in the kitchen said, I worked in a cod factory in Iceland. This was years ago. I had a station on a conveyor belt that ran over a light table. I was checking for worms in the cod.

She took the chopping board to the stove and scraped off the clump of onion and it fell in the pan and the hot oil roared. Checking for worms, fillet after fillet after fillet, she said. She slid the spatula under the onions and they hissed and stuck and she tossed them over.

Last night, John suddenly remembered, he had also dreamt a fish on a chopping block and he had forced himself, in the dream, to examine the fish very closely so he could see each individual scale, opalescent and silver, tinged with blood. But when he got to the gills of the fish, the skin lost its scales and became pink and wrinkled, and the fish had a baby’s face. He had awoken exhausted.

The woman’s daughter was chewing gum and she was about seven years old. The child sat with one knee drawn up on the chair, reading a comic book.

A bloke from England, the woman said. Comes in, decides to joke around, turns the hose on me, he had no idea about the pressure. This was a pressure hose used for cleaning the concrete floor. Everybody in the factory just stopped, the woman said. The machines shut down all at once. She was cupping a pile of bean sprouts and she opened her hands and let them fall in with the onions.

They were all looking at me, she said. I reached up and touched my throat and looked at my fingers and there was blood, and next thing, I couldn’t breathe. The water from the pressure hose had cut my throat and I couldn’t breathe and I passed out.

After his father died, John had a vivid recurring nightmare. Every night, for a long time, a presence would seep through his bedroom door. An evil presence, in the form of a cloud, wet and cold. It swirled over his bed, full of weather and stars, and settled on his chest, and as it grew heavier, John felt a paralysis creep through him until he couldn’t move. Then the cloud took on the form of a naked old woman who squeezed her hands over his throat. He’d feel himself suffocate. Sometimes it was an old woman, sometimes it remained a cloud, but always he’d felt awake, alert with terror, and he could not breathe.

Then John would wake for real, soaking wet, his hair stuck to his face, sometimes screaming. If he screamed, his mother would come and hold him. He began to sleep with his bedroom light on and insisted all the bedroom doors in the house be left open at night. An old woman whose face changed shape; or sometimes there was no face, but she climbed on top of him anyway.

John’s mother had sent him to the guidance counsellor at school. The counsellor said John had been visited by the old hag. He said that in outport Newfoundland they used a thing called a hag board. A piece of wood with nails driven through one side that you could strap to your chest, nails standing out, and the hag couldn’t sit on it. It was folklore; it wasn’t true. Nobody really used a hag board, the counsellor had said, but the old folks talked about it.

There was a hag board, the counsellor had said, made by an artist, in the Newfoundland Museum on Duckworth Street.

John could also see, the counsellor had said, the doeskin dress and moccasins of Shawnandithit, the last of the Beothuks. Shawnandithit’s skull had been taken off to the British Museum and lost during the bombing of London, along with lots of other skulls that had been collected from all over the world like trophies. Hundreds of skulls, the man had said, in glass cases, and the roof caved in and the glass popped and all the skulls rolled together and that was it, you didn’t know who was who.

They got me to the hospital, the woman told John. She was slicing a deboned chicken breast into thin strips. And sewed me up.

I have a bottle of wine, John said.

Wine would be nice, the woman said. The child turned a page of her comic book and blew a bubble that burst over her nose and chin like a mask.

It was dark all day and all night in Iceland, the woman said. She was reaching up into a cupboard but could not reach. She drew a chair over and climbed on it and got the plates. I never saw the sun, she said.

John knew he should have helped her but he was thinking about Jane’s phone call. He was thinking about Jane hanging up and how he had no way to get in touch with her.

The woman put three plates on the table along with forks and knives, and she lifted the lid on a pot of basmati rice. A huge billowing of steam lifted up. The lid was hot and it clattered into the sink.

Just watching all day for worms, the woman said. The stink of fish. And then my throat. The British guy on top of me, his hands around my throat. Holding my throat together.

The school counsellor, it seemed, had wanted John to know he was right to be afraid. There were very real things in the world to be afraid of. He had taught John some lucid dreaming techniques. These will help you cope, he’d said.

There’s more, John had told the counsellor. He shifted in his chair, one leg kicking the desk in front of him rhythmically. She does stuff.

Sexual stuff, the counsellor had said.

It’s terrible, John had said.

You orgasm, the counsellor had asked.

Yeah, that, John had said.

I hope you like ginger and chili, the woman said. This is a dish with lots of hot spice.

Where’s the father, John asked. The little girl’s father?

I don’t have a father, the little girl said. She turned a page of the comic book.

When I was in Iceland, John said. It was twenty-four solid hours of light. We never slept.

. . . . .

Joke, 1981

CAL WOKE TO
somebody hammering on his door. Men shouting the rig was going down. She’s going down. He leapt out of bed to hit the light switch and his feet were wet. Water rushing under the door and more water through the door frame and the door was jammed. Something was holding the door shut and he banged on it with his fists and must have hit the lamp because the light was rocking on the bedside table, and he shouted, Let me out, there’s a man in here, let me out.

Cal told Helen about it over a plate of spareribs. The door gave and there were the boys, killing themselves laughing. They were doubled over. They had poured a bucket of water through the crack and held the door shut, listening to him bawling.

There’s a man in here, there’s a man in here
.

Killing themselves, Cal said. Laughing on the other side of the door.

Helen put the plate in front of him. She had parboiled the spareribs and then dumped a full bottle of barbecue sauce over them and left the ribs in the oven on low heat for the whole day, and the house was full of the smell. It was his favourite meal.

Often it was just the two of them in the kitchen and Helen would have a beer. Cal would look down at the plate before he touched it. His arms resting on the table.

It looked like he was giving thanks, Helen thought, but he was taking the time to recognize that the floor was solid under his feet.

The rig was big enough that the men could not feel the water moving beneath them, but they felt a marked difference in their balance when they came on shore. Cal would let the plate sit in front of him and he would notice how solid the floor was, and the table and the house and the ground beneath the house.

Then he would pat down the mashed potato with his fork. He always started that way, patting the potato, rallying the peas into one corner with the side of the fork.

Helen made sure to feed the kids early on the first night Cal was off the rig. The children would practically knock him over when he came through the door. They’d tackle him. John climbing onto Cal’s neck, Cathy with her arms and legs wrapped around his leg, Lulu flat on the floor clutching his ankle. He’d stagger into the living room with them clinging to him. Or he’d come through the door and they’d keep watching
TV
. They’d move towards him with their heads turned towards the
TV
. They would keep watching and they’d hug Cal loosely without even knowing what they were doing.

There had been a bad list on the rig a few weeks before it went down and the men all went running for the same lifeboat. They ran to the wrong boat. Each man had an instinct about the direction to take and it was the wrong instinct. The rig was the size of two football fields, and try to imagine how small in relation to the ocean around it. The crew had scheduled safety drills but they didn’t show up. They slept in. Men who had been on the night shift stuffed towels over the speakers so the announcements about safety drills wouldn’t wake them. They slept through.

The men were afraid of the helicopter, especially when the fog was thick. If they muttered in their sleep it was about the helicopter. Nobody could imagine the rig going down. The men broke bones or lost a finger. That was common. They were expected to keep on working if it was just a bad sprain or a minor break. A severed pinkie didn’t get a lot of sympathy. That was an occurrence they saw every month.

There are men who would kill to have this job: that was the wisdom they worked under. And: the helicopter was a terror. But it was impossible to imagine the whole rig capsizing.

If the men did imagine it, they did not tell their wives; they did not tell their mothers. They developed a morbid humour that didn’t translate on land, so they kept it mostly on the rig.

Cal patted the potato and told Helen about the men pouring the water through the door so that his feet were wet, but Helen didn’t get the joke.

That’s not funny, she said. And Cal looked up and saw her and didn’t see her.

They all knew they weren’t safe. Those men knew. And they had decided not to tell anyone. But it leaked out of them in larks and pranks and smutty puns, and it leaked out sometimes in a loneliness that made phone calls from shore hard to handle. A man would get his wife on the phone and have nothing to say. Great swishes of static and silence.

Helen was busy with the girls. She could not think about the rig because she could not think about it. And John was a handful. Cathy was having problems with schoolwork too. Helen made sure the spareribs were so tender the meat was falling off the bone. She had a case of beer and she made sure the kids were in bed early. It wasn’t for Cal exactly. It was so she could sit down opposite him and watch.