One Year in Coal Harbor (15 page)

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Authors: Polly Horvath

BOOK: One Year in Coal Harbor
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“Why are you helping them if you’re on the side of the loggers?” I asked.

“People gotta eat,” she said.

“I know it’s none of my business but how can Dan Sneild clear-cut a forest that will ruin the view of the B and B that you both love?” I asked, trying to avoid the vegetarian war orphans, who were swirling around performing tasks that I used to. It was wonderful to have Ked as my best friend (even though I only referred to him this way to myself) but as a result I had lost my routine with Miss Bowzer, and these interlopers had filled the vacancy.

Ked elbowed me in the ribs. He hated it when I just came out and asked people things like this. He was the opposite of the vegetarian war orphans, who were like a strange nomadic tribe whose credo was “Stir up trouble.” They seemed to be having so much fun with the protest,
I sometimes suspected they forgot what they were protesting and it wasn’t the trees they loved as much as it was the life they had created for themselves, drifting from town to town, eating vegetarian, doing good things and enjoying the camaraderie of righteousness.

“There’s lots of stuff you don’t understand, Primrose,” Miss Bowzer said, bustling around, directing her patchouli-scented army.

“You got that right,” I said, and Ked elbowed me again. He dragged me outside and we walked down Main Street.

Then I remembered to tell him that my dad said the forecast was good for Saturday and he could come out on the boat. The last few Saturdays had been too stormy to take a beginner.

Ked suddenly looked so excited that I thought he might be sick so I took away the Baggie of penuche Evie had sent with him and which we had started munching.

“You could apprentice on my dad’s boat and then be a fisherman yourself someday,” I speculated, chewing Evie’s penuche with effort. The stickiness between your teeth was good for contemplating such things. Like cows chewing their cuds. I always think cows must have many deep thoughts.

“Nah,” said Ked. “I could never afford a boat.”

“Sure you could. You save up.”

“Yeah, right, do you know how much those things cost?” muttered Ked, looking at the ground. “If I ever get a boat, it will be a miracle.”

I decided to see if Miss Connon could help me find a Mary Oliver essay that Ked would like. Maybe she could find something that would make him feel more hopeful. But when I got to school the next day there at Miss Connon’s desk sat
MISS LARK!

“Where is Miss Connon?” I asked.

“Be quiet and sit down. Be quiet and sit down, all of you!” said Miss Lark, and the second bell hadn’t even rung yet.

When everyone was seated Miss Lark stood up in her large tan-colored tie shoes and ill-fitting plaid skirt. She wasn’t wearing a mackinaw but that was the only concession she had made toward normal fashion. She was wearing gray stockings topped by
ankle socks
!

“Miss Connon will not be returning for the rest of this semester. I will be substituting,” she began, when a boy in the back yelled, “You’re that author! You can’t teach!”

“Put your hand up if you have something to say, young man,” said Miss Lark. “I was a substitute teacher for many years and out of the goodness of my heart answered the call to duty because otherwise, you might have had to wait for a teacher to be found down island, which would mean missing school days that would have to be made up
in the summer
.”

You could tell Miss Lark relished this prospect.

“However,” she went on regretfully, “I have responded to the call of need and will take over until Miss Connon is herself again. If she ever is.”

Well, you can imagine the furor this created. Everyone liked Miss Connon except for some of the parents who thought the books with big words she favored were inappropriate. It was a well-known fact that Miss Connon was always getting in trouble with various parents who thought she should make at least a passing try at keeping us stupid. But Miss Connon always said she had no patience with people who kept a white-knuckled grip on ignorance when any fool could see that if you didn’t know a word all you had to do was LOOK IT UP. I noticed that Miss Lark was of the ignorance-is-a-terminal-condition school because she had taken all the Mary Oliver and Walt Whitman books from the free-time reading shelves and replaced them with Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys.

I told Ked all about this immediately after school.

“What can be the matter with Miss Connon?” I asked. “Missing a whole semester?”

“Maybe she has cancer,” said Ked.

Then we spent the rest of the afternoon riding around and debating which illnesses you could get that would make you miss so much school. But it turned out to be one we hadn’t even thought of.

“It’s not cancer,” said my mother at dinner. She’d been on the phone trying to suss out information. “She’s gone down island for a little rest cure.”

“She was just
tired
?” I said in disbelief.

“Yes. Teachers work very, very hard. She was tired and she needed some psychological help.”

“She’s
mentally ill
?” I asked in further disbelief.

“Oh, Primrose, don’t be so melodramatic. Everyone needs help from time to time. Why don’t you make her a card and I’ll mail it tomorrow.”

And then my mother changed the subject.

That night after my mother thought I was asleep she gave my father the lowdown.

“Complete nervous breakdown. That’s what Ruth, whose sister Joan teaches with her, says. Joan says people kept finding her crying in the teachers’ lounge and doing odd things like forgetting to bring her lunch and spending the whole lunch hour staring into space. Well, no wonder, John. She had the care of both elderly parents, her disabled sister and all that teaching. You know, teaching is always hard. Giving, giving, giving. So much going out.”

“It ranks second below air traffic controllers for burnout rate,” said my dad.

My mother rattled on as if she hadn’t heard him—the way she does when she’s all excited to relate something. “And she didn’t have enough coming in. I think that’s what did her in. You have to have a balance, John. It can’t all be outgoing. I wish there was something we could do for her. Primrose liked her so much.”

“Who is taking care of the parents and sister?”

“A cousin came up to lend a hand.”

“Well, then it sounds like her bases are covered.”

“For now, but I wish something wonderful would come into her life. That’s what she needs. She needs incoming. To restore some balance. She needs something good to happen to her. Out of the blue! Do we know any nice single men, maybe?”

My father laughed and then their voices faded as I drifted to sleep, thinking of all the books Miss Connon had found for me.

I set my alarm clock for four a.m. Saturday and ran to Bert and Evie’s. My dad had gone down to the docks and I had told Ked I would meet him at his trailer and walk with him there. But when I got to the trailer, I found out Bert and Evie were planning to come too. This was such a big day for Ked. Evie had her Polaroid camera and kept snapping pictures of him: Ked leaving the double-wide on his first day of fishing, Ked leaving the trailer park on his first day of fishing, Ked between Bert and me on his first day of fishing, Ked taking a bite of a muffin with mini marshmallows as we walked down to the beach on his first day of fishing. She kept ripping off the Polaroids and showing them to me as they developed.

“It’s so nice to have these mementos of the occasion,” she said conspiratorially to me. “Men don’t think about commemorating the occasion—not the way women
do—but they’re glad afterward. I’m going to make a scrapbook for Ked. And I’m going to macramé a nice cover for it and attach some seashells.”

And I thought again how perfect Evie and Bert would be as Ked’s adopted parents. How Evie would always be macraméing things for him and how Bert would keep him company at guy things. How he could join a sports team finally because he would know he’d be around the whole season and Evie would bring snacks with mini marshmallows to the game and no one in the whole world would be prouder of a son than they would be whenever he did anything noteworthy like take his next breath. My dad would teach him to fish. And maybe he would tell me I was his best friend and I would say, Isn’t that funny, you’re my best friend too, and afterward everyone would know. And maybe we’d be friends for life and many years from now be the two old-timers who sat in The Girl on the Red Swing and dawdled over our coffee and young people would come to us for stories about the way things used to be in Coal Harbor.

Evie had dressed for the occasion in her highest red heels so it took us a long time to make our way down the graveled forest road that went from the trailer park to the dock. Halfway down the road we heard barking from within the trees and a second later a fierce snarling dog leapt out at us.

“Oh my goodness!” shrieked Evie, immediately
lunging for Ked and trying to throw her little body in front of his huge one.

Ked looked down at Evie in his sleepy way and smiled.

“Whose dog could that be, Primrose?” asked Bert.

“I’ve never seen it before,” I said.

“It looks hungry,” said Ked, gently moving back in front of Evie.

“It looks like it hasn’t been fed in a while,” said Evie, pushing her way back in front of Ked.

“It’s got burrs all over it,” said Ked. “Maybe it’s feral.”

He moved back in front of Evie, which put him just a couple of feet from the dog.

“You stay away from it, Ked,” said Evie. “You never know about stray dogs. It could have rabies.”

But the ferocious dog just started whining in a sad, plaintive way and before Ked thought or any of us could stop him, he had knelt down to give it a piece of mini marshmallow muffin and the ferocious dog made a sad little cry and put its head on Ked’s knee. Despite the fact that the dog was mud and burr covered, Ked picked it up like a baby and held it and fed it the rest of the muffin.

“We can’t just leave him here, can we?” said Ked when it was determined the dog was a him. “He’s so thin. You can see his ribs.”

“I guess we can’t leave it, can we, Bert?” said Evie.

“It don’t look too terribly feral.”

“Well, it looks
a little
feral,” said Evie.

“But it don’t act feral.”

“It isn’t feral at heart.”

“Only in appearance.”

“But good gracious, we got to get to the docks. You can’t keep Primrose’s dad waiting. Bring it along, Ked. Bert and I will take care of it while you fish.”

Ked carried the dog because he had no collar or leash, and we hurried down to the docks. When we got there, Ked handed him to Bert. The dog looked a little frantic to see Ked going off toward my dad’s boat and for a second Ked looked at him with worried eyes but Bert said, “Come on, Evie, let’s go get it something to eat.”

“And drink.”

“And a leash and collar.”

“We should go to the SPCA with it.”

“Just in case someone is missing it.”

“He appears to like mini marshmallows.”

“Well, who doesn’t?”

I ran up to see if I could engineer some conversation between my dad and Ked, sort of get the ball rolling because they are both so shy, but I needn’t have worried. There was clearly a kind of kinship in their love of boats and the ocean. My dad had gotten started teaching Ked how to lift anchor and they both looked at me like I was a mosquito, so I dashed back to shore.

I wasn’t used to getting up at four a.m. so I went back home to sleep for another three hours and by the time I
returned to Bert and Evie’s, Evie had gotten most of the burrs out of the dog’s hair and had brushed it. She told me she had been feeding him little bits of hamburger all morning.

“It don’t seem right just calling him Dog the way we been doing, though,” said Evie.

“He might already have a name,” said Bert.

“So we don’t want to confuse him with a new name.”

“But Dog don’t seem friendly.”

“How about Pooch?” asked Bert.

“That’s not much friendlier. That’s not so far from Dog,” said Evie.

“But a little bit.”

“Well, a
little
bit, Bert.”

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