The Gravesavers (14 page)

Folks were tuckered out from partying the night before. The atmosphere on board was all whispers; a hush had settled over us. We’d been told we had to make an unexpected stop next day in Canada to take on more coal.

“I was telling you, wasn’t I,” Frith said, shaking his head, “that sail was always the best way to go. None of this stopping over in places we don’t have to in case we run short. So much for the modern way of doing things.”

“Bloody hell,” he said. “Excuse my language, lads.” He scratched those white whiskers of his, tough as broom bristles, and gave one of his snorts. “Ah well, I suppose another two days won’t matter that much though, eh?”

He was dead wrong. For most of us, one day seemed like a fortnight. We weren’t seafaring folks like him. A day was an eternity at this point. No wonder things were so sombre.

Ryan and Thomas were the exceptions. They figured two more days gave them more time to get chummy with Emily and Sara. They were off somewhere with them and
I was alone. Again. Except not really
that
alone. I had several conversations with Miss Maryanna. She asked me questions, and though I could barely whisper in her presence I told her things. Such as what I wanted to do when I grew up.

“A writer or a teacher,” I said.

“A writer! How romantic!” she said and grabbed my arm. And started to tell me all about her wedding plans. Definitely a writer, I thought, if that was the reaction of a beautiful woman. Mind you, little good it did when they were off to marry another. But I did have a friend in her. I had never told anyone those things before. I like to think she favoured me, but truth is, whenever I saw her with anyone else, she had that same smile and nod. You could tell they thought they were the most fascinating person in the world at that moment.

So Thomas and Ryan had girlfriends. I had a lady friend.

“Those girls would drive me foolish enough after a bit,” I muttered to Dad. “And what about Becca?”

“Sit,” said Dad.

We played a game of whist as a few musicians started up.

Then there she was. Miss Maryanna Rayborn had recovered from the previous night. Someone persuaded her to sing. Her voice was like a dream of angels singing. She sang a sad, sweet song, blushed, and when everyone clapped, she curtsied modestly. Even from where I sat, I heard the folds
of her dress rustle around her. A green dress to match those eyes of hers. They were sparkling as she looked around the room as if searching for someone. She was still up on the stage the musicians had built from wooden potato crates. Finally, her bewitching eyes settled on me.

“John Hindley! Your mother says you’re something of an orator. You’ve been so quiet all these nights. Perhaps you’ll give us a recital, maybe even one of your own, for I understand you’re a bit of a young Will Shakespeare!”

“Ma! You did not!” I cringed.

My mother shrugged her shoulders and smirked. “It’s true enough, John. A mother can boast if a child has a talent. Besides, when God gives a gift, it’s meant to be shared.”

I shook my head until shouts from the other passengers echoed around the room.

“Hear, hear, John!”

“Bend our ears, lad!”

“Imagine, a bard amongst us all this time!”

There was no polite way to refuse. Reciting for my school chums and family was no big deal. But this? My knees felt like Ryan’s had looked like in his raggedy dance.

I went to the front of the room, took Miss Rayborn’s hand and stepped up on the stage. She clapped with the rest, then bent and whispered in my ear—what, I couldn’t say. Her closeness seemed to make me deaf as well as dumb. And then she left me alone. I cleared my throat.

“For your pleasure, good sirs and madams, I will recite one of my favourite pieces. It is called ‘Bolton’s Yard’ and is by the Lancashire poet Samuel Laycock. Although I’m from Ashton, it could well have been our neighbourhood Mr. Laycock wrote of.”

I did a fine enough job, and there was a silence when I finished the poem. Then the clapping started. “Bravo! Bravo, young John.” I saw my mother’s beaming face and Dad dabbing at his eyes. As I made my way back to the table I was rewarded with many slaps on the back.

It was a while before I could settle down to sleep that night. The silence that happened before the clapping lingered—for one second it was as if all our souls were joined together. It was like nothing I’d ever felt in my life before, being one with so many people.

I was disappointed that Thomas had missed my performance. Plus, it was my turn to sleep in the bottom bunk. I’d been mad at my brother and Ryan most of the day. Ryan beat me when Frith timed us doing our knots that morning. I had bet my best and cleanest pair of socks. What Mum would have to say about gambling like that! Still, it was better than my carving knife. It was a present from Dad my last birthday. It was as beautiful as it was useful. The blade was curved and the handle made of black leather studded with dark green stones. Ryan wanted it, all right. Even Thomas was putting pressure on me to sell it.

“Money talks,” he said. “You might need some cash when we get to New York.”

“It doesn’t talk that loud to me!” I snapped back at them both.

Where on earth was he? I wanted to tell him about my reciting. I wanted to tell him I was sorry for being crabby. It was late. Some companion he turned out to be.

I snatched the top bunk back for my own. Just for spite.

He stumbled in a good thirty minutes later. It was more than ale he’d been drinking. Whisky, from the smell of him. Alcohol fumes filled the cabin.

“Johnnie.” Thomas shook me gently. He was trying to whisper but his voice was a saw cutting through the dark. “You’re in my bed, you lump of coal, get down, would ya!”

I snored, loud as a bear.

“Sure I know you’re awake, now fair is fair and it’s my turn.”

I was about to jump up and let him have his bed but I heard him flop down on the lower bunk and start snoring for real.

“Why do you like running?” Max asked me.

“I’m in training.”

“But why do you like it?”

I shrugged and ran off.

It seemed to me he was asking me about more than running. It was the way he looked, serious like a professor pondering over “the many quandaries of the world,” as Harv would say. The unanswerable questions, he meant by that, of which there were more than answered ones. I had a list yay long of my own.

As for the running, the answer was easy enough on mornings when the sun shone down with just enough heat to warm my shoulders and the breeze blew just enough to keep me cool and my legs felt strong and fast, as if they’d fly beneath me forever. I loved kicking up a dust storm behind me on those roads. I imagined myself a young, wild horse that no one could tame.

It was the way the air felt, too. Not just the air blowing around me. It was the sharpness of it—
peppermint cool—inside me as I breathed. I sucked that air like drinking pure water straight from a well. And that feeling in my chest as my diaphragm contracted, filling me up with that air. Sometimes, as I ran, I pictured this little army of window cleaners moving through my body, scrubbing it clean with that air after a thick fog of night’s sleep had settled in my bones and muscles. It was a wake-up call for the blood to start circulating and my muscles to start moving.

Running gave me a feeling of power. There was no doubt of that. I felt strong, not just on the outside, in my legs and my arms, but I felt strong inside too, as if in running harder and faster, climbing one more steep hill, I could convince myself that I was strong enough to face almost anything in life. Then there was the other way my body felt at certain moments—like my body dropped away and I
was
the wind. I was the road and the sky and the grass and the sea and everything.

“I love running,” I should have told him, “because I disappear. I am no longer who I am, but a wisp of wind, a flower dancing its petals in the early-morning breeze, a cloud shifting before your eyes. Weightless. A spirit. Like … my
sister.”

Not that I’d ever tell him that. Not that I’d likely have a chance. For a few days, I only saw him in the distance, always going the other way.

I focused on my training. I might have stayed focused too, but then it happened. One afternoon, the limousine honked. Mr. Mafia Bodyguard saluted but didn’t stop. In the front seat, beside him, was none other than … Hardly Whynot! I was almost positive. The provincial record for the hundred metres was shattered that morning as I sped back to Nana’s to call Carolina.

“I knew it!” she squealed. “I knew it!”

“I’m not a hundred per cent but—”

“Your mother will be so thrilled! Get me an autograph too, okay? He’s old but he’s famous.” She screamed. “Ohmygawd!”

I said I’d do my best. Then I told her about my discovery of the skull and the story of the shipwreck.

“It’s a sign,” she said.

“Of what?”

“That you are supposed to be in Boulder Basin—that you’re there for a reason.”

Carolina and her signs!

“You say the bones from the grave are washing out to sea and up on shore?”

“Yeah.”

“And your grandmother thinks something ought to be done?”

“Yeah. And for once, I think she’s right, but nobody paid any attention to her when she started trying.”

“Was it just her trying?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how many people did she have with her when she went to town council?”

“I think it was just her.”

“One little old woman? Look, Minn, people ignore older people and their causes all the time. What she needs is some help. You’ve heard the expression there’s strength in numbers, right? Well, here’s what you should do—help her. Get a petition going.”

“Petition?”

“Exactly, like the one we did to get new chairs for the cafeteria.”

“Carolina, you’re a genius.”

“Yes, I have been told that often enough. That’s why I have such a good job at the moment changing poopy diapers.”

We trashed Heather McDorman for a while and had a good laugh. I told her I’d met a boy.

“Is he cute?”

“I dunno.”

“Minn?”

“Sort of. I guess. But my mind’s on other more important things.”

“What’s more important than l-u-v?” she said. It was good to hear some things were still the same. By the time I hung up, my petition was already half written.

“Save the Grave!” I wrote in bright orange felt-tip marker. Then I wrote a paragraph explaining the condition of the gravesite and the lives lost on that day, and finished with: “Save the lost souls, add your name below.”

The hardest part was to approach Nana. This meant I had to admit that I was interested in the whole thing.

“So,” she said after she read it, peering at me fiercely over her glasses. “You’re thinking this might help?” She was trying not to look impressed. “Well, well, Walla Walla Washington! A petition, eh? Right proper and all?”

“I thought maybe we could put it on the bulletin board at Harv’s store and see what happened?”

“Suppose it wouldn’t do any harm to try,” she said. “But don’t go getting your hopes up. I tell you, people are mostly interested in their own business and things that happen now. They forget that the
past was once as real as the present and that one day their future will be past too, that someday they’ll be but memories, too. Maybe you got to get old to really know this—how no one wants to be forgotten.” She had this faraway look in her eyes.

“I’m not old,” I said, “and I think it’s important.”

“I’ll dig out the papers from the bone closet so you can get the facts,” she said. As if I needed to read them again.

But I did. I tried to put them in some kind of order. I hung a string across my bedroom and began to paper-clip the articles up like clothes on a line. I put a few of my Rigbyisms there too. Plus I took some paint swatches and made my name. I cut out an M in Bayberry Green. An I in Juniper. An N in Purple Heather. My room needed some colour.

But the coffin-like box that gave me the shivers? I shoved it far to the back of what I considered my treasure drawer. The one that held my mother’s paint swatches, a few rocks, my urchin and sand dollar, my journal, my training diary. Ordinary private treasures. Along with the skull.

When I took the petition to the store, Harv got pretty excited. He posted it front and centre of the bulletin board. He shared my grandmother’s passion in more ways than one, I guess.

N
IGHTMARE