Great Cape Breton Storytelling Read online

  God’s Country

  17 Cape Breton Stories

  Classic and Rare

  From the heart of a storytelling island . . . .

  for

  Kaya, Octavia and Dziko

  Jake and Nate

  Finn and Lucas

  God’s Country

  17 Cape Breton Stories Classic and Rare

  Selected with an Introduction by Ronald Caplan

  Breton Books

  God’s Country © 2013 Breton Books

  The copyright for each story belongs to the author. Our thanks to the authors for permission to include their story. “The Boat” from Island: The Collected Stories by Alistair MacLeod. Copyright © 2000 Alistair MacLeod. Reprinted by permission of McClelland & Stewart.

  In presenting the stories in God’s Country, the editor has decided to respect each author’s choice of Canadian and American spellings.

  Cover Photograph: Warren Gordon’s “Cap Rouge Along the Cabot Trail.” Captured during an early evening in August 2011, this classic photograph received the best pictorial image of 2012 from the Professional Photographers of Canada.

  Editor: Ronald Caplan

  Production Assistant: Bonnie Thompson

  eBook design: Joseph Muise

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

  We also acknowledge support from Cultural Affairs, Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture & Heritage.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  God’s country : 17 Cape Breton stories, classic and rare

  / Ronald Caplan, editor.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-926908-41-0 (ebook)

  1. Short stories, Canadian (English)--Nova Scotia--Cape Breton Island. 2. Canadian fiction (English)--21st century.

  I. Caplan, Ronald, 1942-, editor of compilation

  PS8329.5.C36G63 2013 C813’.010897169 C2013-905260-7

  Contents

  A Brief Introduction

  Silver Donald Cameron • Snapshot: The Third Drunk

  D.C. Troicuk • Overburden

  D.R. MacDonald • Sailing

  Tessie Gillis • The Innocent

  Joan Clark • God’s Country

  Sheldon Currie • Lauchie and Liza and Rory

  Clive Doucet • Philibert Goes to Heaven

  Douglas Arthur Brown • The Epistle

  Lynn Coady • Jesus Christ, Murdeena

  R.J. MacSween • The Burnt Forest

  Mike Finigan • Passion Sunday

  Alistair MacLeod • The Boat

  Maureen Hull • Marigold

  Beatrice MacNeil • The Family Tree

  Angus MacDougall • An Underlying Reverence

  Claudia Gahlinger • Harvest

  Ellison Robertson • Johanna, an tàilleur

  About the Writers

  A Brief Introduction

  God’s Country is a companion volume to the recent and much-acclaimed collection of new Cape Breton short stories called The Men’s Breakfast. But for this book I wanted to gather a collection of Cape Breton classics—seventeen short stories that have played their role in winning for Cape Breton a lasting place at the table of Canadian literature. Some of these stories are well-known and much anthologized and even dramatized, such as Alistair MacLeod’s “The Boat” and Silver Donald Cameron’s “Snapshot: The Third Drunk.” Other worthies are harder to find—exceptional buried gems that should not be lost—such as Mike Finigan’s Journey Prize finalist called “Passion Sunday” and Claudia Gahlinger’s impeccable “Harvest.”

  For a collection of classic short stories, God’s Country turns out to be a personal book. I’ve lived with many of these stories for years—often as companions on walks or through the occasional sleepless night—and I see each of them as a solid accomplishment, worthy of any reader’s attention.

  Wanting to keep this book manageable, I limited myself to just one story per author, even though several of these writers have more than one story that can be called classic. And for those who want more, I have added suggested further reading in “About the Writers” on page 207. Moreover, some readers will have other stories they think should have been included, and I hope to hear from them—which happily points toward yet another collection down the road.

  Cape Bretoners tend to honour their heroes by using only their given names. In conversation, we speak of fiddlers as Buddy and Winston, Dan R. and Ashley, Natalie and Theresa and Donald Angus—and everyone understands. In recent years our singers have joined in that tribute, such as Rita and Raylene, John Allan and Mary Jane. And today, more and more, we refer to our authors that way—as Alistair and Silver Donald, D.R. and Sheldon, Frank and Lynn. Our writers have become heroes and—by that—a part of our everyday lives.

  I want to thank the authors for permission to include their stories, and the librarians at Cape Breton University and the Cape Breton Regional Library for their efforts toward gathering these texts.

  Ronald Caplan,

  Wreck Cove

  Silver Donald Cameron

  Snapshot: The Third Drunk

  The man on the left is Phonse. The man on the right is Wilf. The man in the centre appears to be drunk.

  Falling down drunk. Head lolling, hair lank. Slumping between Phonse and Wilf. His knees loosely bent. Held up by an arm over Phonse’s shoulders, another over Wilf’s, each of them grasping his hand to keep him from falling. The drunk wears a dark suit. Phonse and Wilf in shirt-sleeves are grinning, grinning too heartily. Even in this dog-eared wrinkled old photograph, the well-dressed drunk looks pale.

  Phonse stamps on the plank floor of the Anchor Tavern roaring for another.

  “See ’im,” grunts Jud. “Says it’s dear, but he’s havin’ another.”

  “Didn’t make beer money today anyways,” Phonse says. “Got just about enough for a chowder, that’s all.”

  “Them scales is wrong,” Jud repeats. “We had that old box full up last week and they said it was two thousand pounds. Now we get half-filled and they say fifteen hunnert.”

  And the smell: the pungent, malty tavern, the sour reek of the fishmeal plant, sweat and tobacco, and beneath all, like a bass figure in an old song, the salt nip of the beaches and kelp, and cold spray over the stones . . . .

  “What the Jesus you gonna do?” Phonse shrugged. “Not like the old days. Didn’t need no money in the old days.” He winks at me. “You should of been here then, boy. By the Jesus, we had some right roarin’ times in them days.’’

  “Need money now,” Jud said.

  “You can’t starve a fisherman, though,” Phonse insisted. “Old Wilf Rattray used to say that all the time, ye can’t starve a fisherman. D’you mind old Wilf, Jud?”

  “Can’t really say so. I was just a kid.”

  “He must have drowned in — let’s think now. In the big storm in ’sixty-three, just before Christmas. He was on a wooden side dragger out o’ North Sydney.”

  “I was about ten then.”

  “Must of been that ’sixty-three storm. Wilf was at Reg Munroe’s wake in ’sixty-two, and there wasn’t anyone from here drowned off a dragger for a couple of years after ’sixty-three, I don’t believe.”

  “I got a sort of vague recollection of him.”

  “Oh, J
esus, he was a great old boy. Your old dad there, he’d mind him, don’t you, Alfred?”

  “Great old boy?” Alfred rumbled. “He was a god-damn Jonah, was Rattray. Black Foot Rattray, we used to call him.”

  Phonse winked at me again. “Call ’em Black Foot when they’re so god-damn unlucky their feet get dirty in the bath.”

  “Black Foot Rattray,” muttered Alfred, shaking his head.

  “Great old fellow all the same,” Phonse insisted. “He wa’n’t so much unlucky as stupid. Sign him on as engineer, he’d go down and tinker with the engine. A tinkerer, that’s what he was. No matter how sweet she’d been runnin’, Rattray’d have her bustin’ head gaskets and burnin’ out bearings the first day at sea.”

  “I shipped along of him once,” Alfred declared. “Never again. That was the trip he cut off his finger in the winch, an’ Jesus, he’d already had us back home once with engine trouble.”

  Phonse started to laugh. “He was a Jonah, right enough. But he was a barrel of fun at a party. We had good parties in them days.”

  Alfred chuckled. “We did so,” he murmured. “We had some parties, all right.”

  No bullshit: there is no bullshit in Widow’s Harbour. Drifting along the coast with a little money and no plans, all my futures behind me, I followed the back roads off the back roads and discovered Widow’s Harbour at the dead end of a rocky peninsula thrusting into the Atlantic like an arthritic finger. In Toronto, someone else was editing manuscripts. Someone else was meeting the Senator for lunch at the Westbury. Someone else was agreeing to be at the television studio a little before 3:00 for makeup. Someone else.

  As for me, I was sitting on a precarious lobster trap at the end of a sagging wharf, sharing a bottle of Abbey Rich Canadian port ($1.40) with Phonse and Alfred Nickerson. After that there was a dozen of Tenpenny and some talk about gill-netting and long-lining and the lobster season, and then there was some Captain Morgan rum, and then there must have been something resembling a decision not to drive on that night. Around noon the next day I found myself surrounded by clean flannelette sheets with the threads showing, in a small, white, slant-ceilinged room, and when I stumbled downstairs I discovered Phonse’s wife Laura making lunch for the kids who would soon be coming home from school. Laura snickered at my headache and poured some black coffee. Phonse had gone fishing at 4:00 a.m.

  “He’s usually away by three,” she said, “but I guess you fellows really tied one on last night. Phonse, he was some full.”

  There seemed no reason to leave the next day, or the next, and when I found the shack across the road was for rent, I took it. I could make enough to get by on if I were to run into Halifax every week or so with some radio talks, and I had friends in Widow’s Harbour. It was a good place to read, talk, drink, and grow strong. In the scrubby woods, mushrooms erupted from the spruce needles underfoot. I combed the beaches for driftwood to be converted to lamps for the shack. There were deer and rabbits to be hunted with Purvis, my landlord; nets to be mended with Phonse and Alfred; and radio talks to be written about these things and others. I found I was living comfortably on about a sixth of my Toronto salary, and at that I was making a good thousand dollars a year more than Phonse or any of the others.

  Widow’s Harbour can afford no bullshit: It lives too near the bedrock of health and illness, shelter and food, death and tax sales. No one can hide: The snow-filled easterlies and the neighbors’ tongues scour every cranny. Toronto’s bruises soon fade. They are not, after all, catastrophes: On this bare rock, along this open coast, where even death is contemptibly familiar, the loss of a salary or a lover stands revealed as a petty misfortune at most.

  “Come on over for some breakfast,” says Phonse, shaking my shoulder, “and get a wiggle on. Supposed to be a blow coming up tonight, but we’ll make a few sets before she hits.”

  Two shirts, heavy sweater, pea jacket; long johns, two pairs of pants; extra socks, rubber boots. Crossing the road in the coal black night, slithering on ice, yawning and blinking. Phonse frying bacon and eggs. The kitchen clock: 2:15.

  “You usually have bacon and eggs?”

  “Me? Naw, just bread and molasses and away I go. Don’t usually have company for breakfast though.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Phonse.”

  “Stop bitchin’ and eat.”

  Down the snowy road to Alfred’s, plastic bags of bread and molasses in our hands. Grunts of greeting, and down to the wharf. Fluffy snow on the Harvey and Sisters, a sweet, forty-foot Cape Islander with a high flaring bow. The Buick V-8 sends a throaty purr through the big hot stack spearing up through the wheelhouse. Frost on the windshield. A light chill wind ruffles the harbour.

  The purr turns to a heavy burble as we clear the harbour mouth, line up the yellow leading lights, and make an hour’s straight steaming to the fishing grounds on Widow’s Bank. Desultory talk. Phonse pisses over the side, back in the wide cockpit among the waiting tubs of trawl.

  Then overboard go the highflyers, buoys with tall flagstaffs, easy to see even in the eerie predawn, and the trawl pays out, the baited hooks every fathom or so, and a highflyer at the end. Steaming back up the long lines for an hour and a half at sunrise, and hauling in fish.

  “Another taxi driver, Jud.”

  “Why do you call pollock taxi drivers?’’

  “Dunno. We just do, that’s all. Oho! Them big steakers is what we like to see.”

  Monkeyfish and dogfish to be thrown back. Cod and flounder. A day of heavy hauling, icy water everywhere, with one coffee break, bobbing around in the fo’c’sle with the engine shut off. As the short day closes in, Alfred spins the wheel, heads Harvey and Sisters toward shore.

  And Phonse with a deft slash rips each fish from vent to gill and throws it to Jud, who scoops the guts out and overboard in one swift motion, tossing the fish into the bin in the centre of the cockpit. They gut a fish every six seconds. Every forty feet, regular as dripping blood, the guts hit the ocean, and the gulls come, a few at first, then a crowd, finally a swarm, dropping like dive bombers on the livers and intestines and half-digested mackerel. Ten minutes ago there wasn’t a gull in sight; now hundreds hover over Harvey and Sisters.

  The wind is rising, the whitecaps multiply, the promised blow is coming. Numb with cold already, I hunch in the wheelhouse, watching the first flakes of snow fly over the black water. Alfred has swung a hinged bench into place, and sits high behind the windshield, holding her steady by the compass now, back to Widow’s Harbour. Phonse and Jud stamp in, shaking like wet dogs.

  “Son of a bitch,’’ Jud observes.

  “Yessir,” Phonse agrees. “Yessir, she’s all of that.”

  Just outside the harbour, the storm hits: The sea begins boiling, the shriek of the wind sails in above the throb of the V-8. A whitecap foams into the cockpit.

  “Self-bailing,” Phonse reassures me. Another whitecap froths over the stern.

  “Runnin’ her a little close, Alfred,” says Alfred.

  “Save us some scrubbin’,” Jud philosophizes. And we are in, inside the harbour, with the wind down to nothing and the sea no more than a chop. The motor dies down, and Harvey and Sisters idles over to the fish buyers’ dock. After Jud and Phonse fork the fish into the crates for weighing, we will scour the boat clean and bait the trawl for the next day, coiling it carefully in the tubs so it will pay out smoothly.

  “What’s the time gettin’ to be, there?” Phonse asks me.

  “Two-fifteen.”

  “Good enough,” Jud nods. “Be home by seven-thirty, quarter to eight.”

  “Might even be time for a beer,” Phonse reflects for a moment. “Do you think, Alfred?”

  “Might be,” says Alfred.

  You can’t starve a fisherman. In the old days you didn’t need money.

  “Why, sure,” says Phonse, draining a beer glass. “Look now, everyone had his own co
w, so there was your milk and butter and cheese. Everybody had a few chickens, so there was your eggs and some of your meat. Everybody had a kitchen garden, so there was your vegetables, and the women got enough in preserves — well, you seen Laura’s preserves even now, ain’t you? We got enough there for two years even if we never ever got anything out of the garden this year. And there was always deer in the woods, more ’n now, and rabbits and ducks, sometimes a moose. You didn’t have to be any too fussy about the season then, either. Then you had your wild berries — blueberries and cranberries and blackberries and bakeapples — you ever see bakeapples growin’ wild? They look like a little orange hat on a green spike, just one to a bush, the swamps was full of ’em. Some folks had pigs and sheep, and the sea was always full of fish and lobsters, and we wa’n’t too upset about the season on them, neither.”

  “You still aren’t,” I said, remembering an evening with a dozen of the biggest, reddest, juiciest out-of-season lobsters I ever saw.

  “So they say,” Phonse countered, with a huge grin. “’Course I wouldn’t know. You take a chance now, you can lose your boat and your car and pay a big fine. I wouldn’t fool around with that sort of stuff.”

  “Christ, no,” I said shaking my head. “Wouldn’t be worth it.”

  Alfred burst out laughing.

  In the old days, the cows were put out to summer pasture on Meadow Island, in the harbour mouth. You took a rowboat and two men: One rowed, and the other held the cow’s head up, and the cow swam over to the island. Horses will swim without coaxing, but you have to help a cow.

  “I mind one time,” said Phonse, “I had to go get the cow at the end of the summer. Well, Jesus! Spent two days on that god-damn island and do you think I could catch that old son of a whore? No sir, couldn’t get near it. ’Course I always hated that Christly cow. I’m not a goddamn farmer, I’m a fisherman. But my old mom, she hadda have a cow, so of course I hadda get it out to the island in the spring and back in the fall. But I couldn’t even catch the bastard.