Saltwater Cowboys (4 page)

Peter wouldn't let that happen to his family. He'd been fighting to get out of Brighton, he would joke with Jack, since they took a trip to Montreal in 1976. What were they? Seventeen or eighteen and in love with the city that served drinks all night, the garish spectacle of the dancing girls, the smoked meat sandwiches at two in the morning, smothered with the best mustard Peter had ever tasted. Then they came back and Jack fell for Angela, watched her in her bikini at the swimming hole, diving off the rock cliff into the deep muddy water below, her long legs tapered to thin ankles, muscles taut under the swell of her heart-shaped bottom, and he'd never looked elsewhere. Shortly after Wanda was available — her boyfriend had died in a motorcycle accident — Peter ditched Sheila and made his move because he couldn't very well let the prettiest girl in school get away on him.

Peter looked once again at Jack in the pew, praying intently while Maggie climbed over him, her yellow skirt flaring like a petal. Angela, gaunt and stern, shepherded Maggie to her seat and shifted Lily on her hip, while Katie prayed alongside her father.

He better make it out
, Peter thought. He would do anything he could to make sure of it.

Jack didn't look back when he came up from underground for the last time, the skip cage rickety, confining, and sour-smelling, but he shook everyone's hands and put on a pleasant face. Inside he was angry and irritable. The other miners' tongues were as busy as ants on his last night shift.

“I got a job in Alberta,” one said.

“Me too,” another three or four chorused.

All night, talking of successfully selling their homes, belongings sorted and packed, going-away parties planned. The only thing louder than the men who had found jobs were the angry ones who had yet to find work.

“My wife has threatened to go out and work. What do I know about taking care of babies?” someone said.

“My wife has threatened to move back in with her mother if I don't find something,” someone else shouted miserably.

Jack was silent. Sad and still and silent with shock.

The din from the machinery was the last sound he heard when he came up from underground. It had never sounded so abrasive. It made him angry.

Above ground, it was a quiet morning. Mid-September mist clotted the air. A ribbon of sparrows trailed one after the other in jagged flight. The song of that bird — he never knew its name — with the high-pitched tweet followed by four notes, descending in pitch and key, always tore at his heart. It always sounded melancholy.

He'd told Angela not to wait for him or to worry. He was going to go for a walk after his last shift at work. He was going to sneak away to the swimming hole and spend the morning by himself.

The rising sun sizzled the mist off the rocks; it was a sudden sharp and direct light.

A swim might be just the thing
, Jack thought.

He walked down the hill and dropped his lunch tin, hard hat, and bag of personals from his locker on his back step and then took off. He quickened his pace, reaching the well-worn skinny path to the swimming hole in minutes. The backwoods quickly swallowed him up. The balsam fir trees were so thick, they looked black. One was so big, its roots stuck up out of the earth like a dried brown parsnip, tapered at the end to form a spindly root, a wheezy tie to the soil. The blueberry bushes were swiped clean. The women in Brighton donned kerchiefs, shorts, tube tops, and sneakers to collect them in late August under the drowsy sun, squatting over the bushes picking bucket­ful after bucketful, leaving very little for the black bears. Jack passed the crop of boulders and smiled. As kids they would hide behind the rocks with Peter's binoculars and watch the women picking berries. When the women bent over in their tube tops, an inch of white skin, revealed alongside the caramel tan on their necks and arms, would convince the boys they'd seen chest.

One of the women, Mrs. Hynes, had gotten lost out here. She'd strayed from the group and spent three nights out here alone.

“It's the senses that drive you mad,” she'd said for years afterwards while telling her story over a game of cards at the Union Hall. “First it's your sight; you see things that aren't there. I saw my son beckoning me to follow him. Then it's your hearing. You hear things that aren't there. I heard my grandchildren calling out to me, Nanny, supper's ready, they'd called, confused as to why I wasn't coming to the table to eat.”

Jack was on the path alone now, and it was silent. The sun had risen and he was nearing the falls. A few more feet to go.

Finally, no one here to tell me what to do
.

Out here he couldn't feel the swell of Angela's will or the tether of Peter's friendship.

I can't hear my children, my parents, my wife, or my friends. Free from responsibilities
.
I could stay out here forever. Let them send out a search-and-rescue crowd.

They'd sent one out for Mrs. Hynes, found her covered in patches of moss she'd pulled from the ground to make a quilt to keep warm.

Angela had been unforgiving. “Why would anyone leave the group while out berry-picking? She must have wanted to get lost in the woods,” she'd said and rolled her eyes.

Angela would go out with her mother every year and fill ten buckets, and they had jam, scones, muffins, pancakes, pies, and cakes all year long. She'd give the girls bowlfuls swimming in milk and sugar for breakfast. She even made tea with dried berries and honey.

Of course, Angela wouldn't have strayed from the group. She'd have shepherded them from bush to bush, inspected pails, and created an emergency plan in case of black bears or charging moose.

Jack's mother had also been unforgiving. “It was the death of her father that did that to her, made Angela all funny,” she'd say and roll her eyes.

Jack quickened his pace along the trail. He only had a few hours before she'd come looking for him and drag him back home. He rounded the corner to the clearing. The rocks were thirty feet high, the falls pouring down in a single straight spurt and pooling at the bottom in a twenty-foot hole, fit for diving and swimming. Jack took off his clothes and climbed up the side of the rock wall, footrests smashed by hand a generation ago. His own father and grandfather before him had scaled these walls for the thrill of a dive.

At the top of the cliff he waded in the cold, silty water. His ankles turned a sudden sharp red. His feet were unsteady on the pebbles but he made it to the edge without slipping. He threw his arms up and jumped head-first. The moment of weightlessness before hitting the water; the sucking punch of the palm of water as it rushed to envelop him. Then the cocooned suspension as the water ballooned out around him. It was a pure joy.

Jack relaxed underwater for a few seconds. All he could hear was the waterfall hitting the rocks and the blood in his skull.

I could stay underwater forever
, he thought. The minute the skip cage dropped him underground, he always panicked, worried he'd never see the sun again, but not here, not in the water. His was a family that loved swimming, especially in the ocean. They loved to pile in the car and drive to places like Corner Brook or Baie Verte, or the summer they drove even as far as Bonavista Bay. They'd spend the day at the ocean eating nothing but brown bags full of salty chips and chunks of battered cod. Peter and Wanda would follow behind them in their car. One time Peter goaded Jack into a drag race on the highway. Angela had put a stop to it before it even got started, raised a fist and stuck it out the window; Peter slunk back into his lane and slowed down.

This was before Susie was born, when Wanda, barely twenty-one, fed Maggie from her bottle, changed her diaper, cuddled and held her while Jack, Angela, and Katie cavorted in the waves.
She must have been three
, Jack thought,
when I would slather ocean foam over my face and we'd play barbershop
. He'd run his finger over his face in a straight line and ask her if she was next to have a shave.
It made her laugh so much
, Jack thought and smiled.

He came up and flopped from side to side like a fish. He treaded water and squinted under the glare of the sun.

I'll miss this place the most
. He couldn't count how many times they'd come out here. The time when Angela was pregnant with Katie, she'd sat on a rock, belly swollen out over her black bikini, the reddish swell of a fireball-shaped clump of stretch marks already seizing the skin underneath her belly button. She'd wanted to do nothing except eat tinned peaches. Her long black hair stuck to her back and shoulders as she sweated happily in the sun.

Jack got out of the water and stretched out on his back on a grassy bank. He dragged his knuckles through the thin black soil. His gut gnarled with grief.

I can't believe this is it. I haven't had a stretch of time to myself like this in a long time. What will I do with myself besides fill out my forms for the dole and look for work? I haven't worked anywhere else, been there since I left high school, about eighteen when I started. Married two years later. I am afraid to go. I don't want to go
, he thought.

He slept for an hour or so, waking to see that the sun had moved halfway across the sky, his skin white from cold.

Angela will kill me if she knew I was swimming so late in the fall
, he thought. He got dressed quickly, stood for a minute at the base of the falls, then turned around and quickly got on the path. He wiped water from his eyes and forced himself to walk forward. He didn't look back once he'd rounded the bend.

Angela and Jack whispered good night to the babysitter, hired for the evening so they could attend Peter and Wanda's going away party, and trudged up hill to the doctor's place. His grand house was hidden from Main Street by a clump of birch trees — peeling white bark scabbed with black moss. Remnants of Mrs. Nelson's garden welcomed visitors at the front walkway. Lilacs and roses, once abundant, flopped from side to side, grieving for the gentle touch of their keeper's hands. The wilting flowers made the grandeur of the bright and charming interior a splendid surprise. Dr. Nelson's housekeepers, a roster of intern nurses from St. John's, kept clean the oak floors, ornate spiral banister, five bedrooms, sitting room, dining room, and a modern kitchen with dangling copper pots suspended above a marble island.

Sheila shepherded them inside. In the dining room the musicians were draped over the furniture like fruit at a banquet. Snerp, an acne-prone skinny bag of bones, the custodian in the men's dry — responsible for mopping the floors and changing the garbage — held an ivory, silver, and charcoal-grey dented squeezebox on his lap. His long, curly hair flowed like bunches of grapes. Mooney's round face, cheeks flushed apple red, was ablaze with joy as he plucked away on the mandolin. The neck of Gulliford's guitar was held by a strap with a banana-yellow muff that rested across his shoulder, his chest concave as his fingers strummed softly. Doctor Nelson stood and stomped, a cracked and scratched fiddle — as old as he was — tucked underneath his jowly chin, skin flapping as he raked the bow across the taut strings.

Sheila and Angela whistled and clapped. Peter clumsily whirled Wanda around the room, and Wanda blushed, conscious of her weight. She smoothed her skirt and hoped to hide the folds of fat that had grown comfortable across her hips. Peter wheeled her into a corner and she broke free, almost tipping over on a loose beer bottle.

Gulliford's wife started to chant, “Sing us a song,” and goaded the crowd into the same. Wanda cleared her throat, stepped forward gingerly, and began to hum the first few notes of “Tell My Ma.”

“When I get home, the boys won't leave the girls alone,” Sheila and Angela sang, drunk and slurring and well off-key.

Jack hung about the fringes of the party, sallow-faced and morose, limbs stiff.
I'll need to get good and drunk to relax
, he thought. He accepted another bottle of beer that came his way from the tray of drinks passed around by one of the nursing interns, cajoled into service by the charms of Nelson.

After the song ended, Dr. Nelson shouted, “My dear friends from Brighton, thank you for helping me give our good friends Peter and Wanda a warm sendoff. As always, Wanda sang beautifully — some things never change — and was a well-behaved drunk. Let's just hope that
never
changes. It's been a pleasure having you all here tonight. This may be some of the last few times we all have together” — his voice quivered — “but I must say, I've loved getting to know each and every one of you over the years in my capacity as doctor and member of this community. I know, we are on the brink of change” — he looked around the room tenderly — “but I know that wherever you go, you will stick together.”

“I'll drink to that,” Gulliford's wife shouted. They all raised their glasses of rum.

Together
, Jack thought. How would he keep it together with so many friends gone? How would he keep it together with no work and no idea of where they were headed? He'd be lost without Peter, he knew that much. No one to joke with, no one to drink with, no one to spur him on. He took another proffered beer and shot of rum. And a few more. He'd have to hide behind the swish of alcohol tonight. Let it flush over his flesh, turn his tight mind into mush.

At the end of the evening, good and drunk, Jack chased Angela down the street toward home. He teased and grabbed her waist and buried his face in her neck.

“Stop it, savage,” she said and broke free, scurrying down the street toward home, past the yellow, blue, green, and white clapboards, all lights extinguished, every window black except for the sky salted with stars, in a town that looked merciful, homely, and safe, except for the mine site, which looked morose, complex, and industrious, a cruel father forced to make painful, solitary decisions, choked of all emotion.