The Lava in My Bones (14 page)

Each week ocean ships appeared like hallucinations on the horizon and grew larger until they towered beside our fungus-reeking dock. Tiny lifeboats rocked primly above steel-railed decks. The ships' bottom halves were black and the tops white. Huge whirling posts rose like giant screwdrivers at each end; the smokestacks were parallel flattened tubes, and the backs of the massive cabins were ascending block steps.

Cartwright was the most northerly Atlantic port in the Americas and was a stopover for ships heading to northern Europe; Cartwright is more important than it seems. Some ships travelled with midget boats beside them and others came in pairs mirroring each other. I'd count the storeys (seven), the windows (200). Some had no windows but were flat like huge floating tongue-depressors carrying cranes or levers that see-sawed up and down. I'd mouth the names of the ships in languages I couldn't understand. The blare of their horns was like a cannon shot hurtling through me, and they'd vanish into the distance even faster than they'd arrived.

On Saturday, as usual, Father took me out on his dory. How wonderful to get away from the town, school, and Estelle and her dresses!

Tongues of water slapped the sides of the boat and sent cold saltwater spray over my face and legs. The slat-seat pressed into my buttocks; I smelled wet wood, sea salt, and the Brylcreem in
Father's hair. He sat before me in his yellow oilskin, staring over the raised bow of the boat whose sides joined together like praying hands. A pole bearing a Newfoundland flag stood beside the box-like motor. Along the floor, coils of rope curled like snakes about which small flecks of water scurried. Getting into Father's boat is stepping into a live thing. Near my head, the lone lifesaver rocked and clattered on its pole. Waves smacked at the vibrating hull while the ocean groaned and rumbled beneath us.

“Dere's shoals in dis part,” Father said. “Many shoals.”

I leaned over the edge of the boat hoping to see glimmering fish, algae, or hidden rocks, but only beheld a grey formless mass. Between our dory and the shore, other boats, skiffs, sloops, and crab-trawlers bobbed in the sunlit water, and I imagined that every man huddled in their hulls was possessed by the same desire for escape as I.

On the shore rose Cartwright in terraced rows of bright white houses with sloping black-tiled roofs and pert, silver chimney spouts scattered across a small peninsula that bulged upwards like an overturned teaspoon. There were few trees in this windblown town but tons of bare rock and thrashing leather-leaved shrubbery. Only the T-shaped telephone poles stood motionless, like huge crosses in a cemetery of the living.

Beyond the town, where the land and peninsula met, cliffs towered arrogantly. I had never climbed the precipices that enclose Cartwright, but you, Sam, crossed the line the cliff tops make against the sky and headed east into a valley I'd never seen. On an adjacent hill, the vague outline of the Mother Mary statue stood like a severed finger testing the wind. Farther south, an
iron cylinder and a matchbox-shaped building formed the new steel foundry. Nearby, Mother's church crouched like a frog on its haunches and raised its unicorn-steeple into the air. I could not see my school and the football field, since they were hidden by a hillock angling from the earth like an elbow. From here, my town, with the restless waves rolling in the foreground, seemed static and unreal, a still-life painted in a time no one remembered and hung in a place no one looked. For a moment, Cartwright seemed harmless and beautifully inconsequential.

I shifted on my seat and turned starboard to see my favourite sight in the world: the horizon-line on the sea. Beyond lay Europe and Africa. Between this boat and that line was a distance greater than any I'd travelled, a space that made my mind buckle when I tried to imagine it. If we rowed 100 kilometres eastward, my town would shrink and vanish behind a horizon-line of its own, and I'd be suspended gloriously between two lines and not enclosed by either. I'd be alone in a blank space with only the sky stretching overhead and the endless ocean growling below.

A glistening swordfish shot up from the water and made an arc in the air. My father claims swordfish leap to shake off the leeches that cling to their skin.

We eventually came to the spot Father loves. He stopped the motor and lowered the leeboard. He spotted something in the water and patted the hair on his head. His eyes misted over and he muttered into the sea. Embarrassed and feeling I was intruding on something private, I coughed and
ahem'd
; he kept staring and babbling. I wanted to go to the spot where Cartwright
vanishes, but clearly Father was imprisoned behind borders of his own.

When his strange reverie ended, he leaned back on his cushion, farted, and scratched himself under the armpits. Father was different from other men, as I am different from other women; we sense this similarity and it binds us.

I decided to speak. “Father, I don't know if you've heard those things kids have been saying about me, but—”

“Hush, hush,” he murmured. “No need to prate.” Father was the only person not horrified by my honey-flow. He lifted his steel rod, attached a curled hook onto its end, nodded toward me.

I stood and he held the hook between my legs.
Splash-splash.
Two honey globules struck the steel hook, and he threw it into the sea. Years ago you could reach into the water and scoop up shining fish with your hands, but now men rarely come home with even one net full. It's rumoured the government is about to restrict the catch so the stocks replenish themselves. Yet with my honey as bait, everything changed.

Every ten seconds Father pulled in thrashing mackerels, flapping salmon, and frenzied cod gasping their last breath. Over and over my honey splashed onto his metal hook and an hour later the boat nearly sank beneath the weight of a mountain of fish.

As we headed to shore, the men in other boats watched, noses quivering like the ends of horses' snouts suffused with the piquant scent of tuna, the sour smell of mackerel, the acidic fragrance of flounder, cod, and swordfish; as honey flowed in rivulets through all the creases of my body, the men's nostrils, my father's nostrils, the nets, boats, and the whole harbour seemed to explode with
the glorious smell of fish, fish, and more fish caught live and glistening on the shallow banks of the North Atlantic. Seagulls cried overhead, and the fish scent entered my hair, clothes, and skin.

The buildings surrounding the port were of the same white-painted wood as the town, but here Cartwright's cube-buildings were elongated into narrow rectangles. On shore near the wharf stood rows of boats nestled between erect wood posts. At the dock was a gate like those at railway crossings, three trucks whose behinds were always turned to face the water, and a huge boulder larger than a house. At its base sprawled a spaghetti-like rope thrown there years ago and never removed. Chained tires hung along the cement wall that plunged into the sea.

We approached the wharf lined with staring men clutching empty nets. Father tossed his rope over a metal mooring. I stood up in the seesawing boat, carefully lifted my right foot, and was about to place it down on the dock's oil-stained boards when—during that one long second that my body was hovering suspended half over land, half over sea, and one metre above the Earth's surface—suddenly in the distance—a sound. All the fishermen dropped their nets, boys by the Dairy-Freeze stopped throwing stones, a mother with a stroller lifted and clutched her baby to her chest, and every head in Cartwright turned northward in the direction of an new, peculiar, unpunctuated buzzing.

I stood with both feet on the wood dock. My honey dripped to the earth.
Splash-splash,
it went.
Splash-splash.

All the next week, the buzzing continued. At school, students couldn't concentrate. Mr Schmidt closed all the windows, but we could still hear the distant, steady drone.

No one knew its cause. Many said it had something to do with the new steel foundry. My father claimed swarms of killer bees were about to invade. The town mayor said that unionized lumberjacks had gone mad in the woods and were approaching Cartwright armed with buzzing chainsaws. On television, a retired professor said that hordes of ravenous termites were eating their way through forests and would arrive and gobble up our homes. “As our wooden walls disintegrate, we will be exposed naked in our bathtubs or making love on our beds. All secrets will be revealed.”

At school, people assumed I was the cause of the buzzing. The sound was strange and I was strange.

“Jimmy's life's a nightmare,” Estelle said, weeping before a crowd by the flagpole. “He's alone in the woods and is too afraid to come back. Something awful's happening—all because of her”—she pointed at me—“the glue-pig girl!” In the hallways people jabbed pencils into my shoulder blades and splashed me with soda pop; when I walked home, students hid behind the hillock on Maple Street and threw broken glass and obscenity-covered paper airplanes at me. “Go to hell!” I'd shout back, lunging at people whom I deliberately splattered with honey. During recess, the boys tried to tie me to the schoolyard fence until they were caught by Mr Schmidt and sent to the principal's office.

One day, walking to history class, I noticed that the usual jeers and curses were mixed with laughter. I reached round and
touched, on my back, something cylindrical (a drink tin) next to a rectangular object (a French fry container). People had put things on my back that stuck. Estelle's piercing laugh was like a struck tuning-fork pitched an octave too high.

The whole student body participated in this new activity. As I passed, they'd stick chocolate-bar wrappers, empty pop cans, broken pens, crumpled sheets of paper, and cigarette butts on me. I desperately tried to pull things off, but they would just put other stuff back on. I hurled cups, forks, and straws at students, but they dodged my throws. I couldn't believe I'd once wanted to be friends with these people. I'd been right to ignore them all those years.

I tried a new strategy. If I were co-operative, people might pity me and end their game. At lunch hour when the patrolling teacher stepped outside to smoke, I waved and shouted from the table where I sat alone. “Okay! Do it!” People commenced tossing hamburger boxes and sandwich wrappers; they cheered when an object landed on me and stayed there. Boys played a game in which whoever got something stuck on my arms received four points; on the chest, eight points; and on the face, ten. After five minutes, every section of my exposed skin and honey-drenched clothes was coated with plastic cups, straws, paper airplanes, torn-off backs of textbooks, used yogurt containers, empty matchboxes, dandruff-filled combs, Vachon cake wrappers, cracked pieces of soap, and muffin cups.

At night, lying in bed, I screwed my eyes shut and imagined shit falling from the sky into my classmates' open mouths.

Each day the buzzing got louder and my situation grew worse.
First Estelle encouraged people to dispose of their snot-filled Kleenex on my back. Later she said, “What better place to put the tampons that keep overflowing our washroom bins?” One morning I heard hysterical laughter and smelled a horrible stench. I reached around, and my fingers pressed into something soft. My hand darted away; my fingertips were coated in dog poo.

Estelle and her boyfriend created a “turd-brigade.” Each morning he found shit—“a different colour every day,” sang Estelle—and she directed him to place it in the most aesthetically pleasing spot. I couldn't remove the turds since they were always put where I couldn't reach them. Even if I removed one, it'd be replaced right away or a second batch would be added to my hips or the back of my neck. Mr Schmidt repeatedly ushered me to the washroom for clean-up. The students caught abusing me this way were suspended from school, but returned more hostile than ever.