Great Cape Breton Storytelling Read online

  I remember one December when I waited with my mother at a Cleveland dock during a bleary hour of the morning and watched his ship ease like an iceberg into her moorings. Freighted with tons of ice, she had gone down dangerously on her marks because of the added burden. My mother knew about the storm and had been worried. My father, bundled up like an Arctic explorer, waved to her from the Texas deck and she gave him the okay sign. Later that winter, at home, my father and I walked along the shore of Lake Erie, our eyes and mouths drawn tight against a wind so cold it pained. We squinted across a jagged icescape which, rough as rockslides and fluted with windrows of snow, had been repeatedly broken up by storms, freezing again and again into new shapes. Beyond it the water seemed calm and green in the distance. We passed a shed built along the lines of a little house and layered with several inches of translucent ice. Beside it a tree crackled, wind-driven spray having turned it as bright and brittle as crystal. Too chilled to bring a hand out of his pocket, my father nodded toward the shed. “Somebody forgot to keep the home fires burning, eh?” he said. He and my mother argued sometimes during the long winter months. She accumulated grievances in her loneliness and sometimes shut herself away in her room after he left. What they quarreled about I cannot recall. Little things which, I suppose, the strains of separation made larger. It no longer matters, not to him, not to anything. There is probably nothing more he can add to what I know of him. We walked in the wind that day until we could barely speak.

  “In a ship,” he says, “out there at night . . . it’s sometimes like you’re at dead center of everything, the works.” There are breaks in the overcast now. Clouds tear slowly into pieces and drift off like floes in the dark sky. My father watches them, then points. “The brightest star, there. Sirius. And there, Eye of Taurus.” Wherever I am, he has told me, I like to get a bearing. All I know about him are bits and pieces like this. He never talks about himself directly, never did. He prefers stories that entertain — anecdotes, mimicry. Some stories I have heard before, like familiar waters we sail over. I wish we could descend beneath them, that he could reveal things under the surface before it is too late. When he is feeling down he is merely politely silent. Yet I admire his reticence: it seems dignified in a land of public blubbering where people yearn to be heard. At my mother’s sudden death a year ago he was, as I expected, stoic, although the shock of her absence had tightened his face. She died next to him in bed, on a normal morning when he rose early and waited for her to come down to breakfast. When he looked at the clock later on, an ordinary day turned into something vaguely expected but never prepared for. “I climbed those stairs like I weighed a ton,” he told me. She was already blue and cold. It troubles him that he did not become alarmed sooner, that he might have reached her in time.

  The first night he arrived I passed his room and was struck to see him down on one knee beside his bed, whispering prayer. I had forgotten he prayed that way and I was briefly embarrassed, as if this was senility. No. Like other things about him, it is simple and private, as sincere as a Jew at the Wailing Wall or a Moslem on his mat. I wondered if he had prayed beside his bunk when he was a deckhand, how he found the chance or if he feared the jibes of his shipmates. What now does he ask for? What does he expect from God?

  He has marvelled at the flowers in February. He left the sidewalk one morning to stand among the branches of a tulip tree and touch the pale lavender cups of its blossoms. “You live in a garden,” he said. At home he took over my mother’s roses and put in peonies of his own, and marigolds. A sudden show of flowers makes him smile, almost shyly. He missed so many summers at sea, and they seem to strike at the heart of his youth when he knew them in the country.

  Yesterday we were hit with an earthquake. Still in bed, I woke certain that this was the Big One and I did not want to meet it hungover and naked. I stumbled to the doorway of the living room where a hanging fern swung like a pendulum. My father, half-crouched in front of his chair, had spread his arms like a wrestler — a reflex from years of steadying himself on pitching decks. We stayed as we were, our eyes fixed on each other, until the rolling passed and the house stopped shaking. At the front window my father looked down at the street, his face close to the glass as if he were back in a wheelhouse. “Not the same as a ship,” he said. “It’s like being thrown off the earth.” Then he smiled and raised his voice like a preacher’s: “‘If I take up the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost part of the sea . . . .’” He lowered his voice to a murmur, “‘. . . even there . . . .’”

  The moon appears in the southwest. Its light turns the water darkly clear, the way it might be on Lake Superior streaming out a deep green against a wake white and crisp. We can see the pallor of our skin. My father sighs, a habit of his now, though usually no words ever follow. The last months his wife was living she would not enter a dark room. At the threshold she would step back and wait while he went ahead of her and put on a light. At the funeral he looked at her in that casket for a long while, and finally he said, to no one: “Where is she now?” I was of no use to him in this matter. I do not know how we move after death, or where.

  In our old neighborhood back home five widows have been good to him. They observed his birthday, they bring him meals, invite him to their houses for cards. One has taken to calling him dear, a familiarity he does not encourage. He has named her The Star Widow, but when she calls him darling, he says, he will have to cool her off. “I have old feelings to think about. I don’t need any new ones.” After my mother died, he burned her letters. My anger puzzled him. “Letters are for the living,” he said.

  In the Twenties my father wheeled on a small Canadian freighter whose captain, a reckless alcoholic, took her foolishly into a Lake Michigan storm. Her wooden hatches, weakened by boarding seas, were carried away and she soon foundered. He and three other men made it to the wooden raft lashed atop the wheelhouse. All night in the darkness they were swept from it time after time, clawing their way back aboard where they huddled like lovers in the cold. It was November and the water was not much above freezing. A man would stop talking for awhile and then he wasn’t there, having slipped quietly into the sea. By dawn when the wind had abated, only my father remained, half-conscious and hallucinating. A bearded man kept appearing on the edge of the raft warning him not to eat the ice he’d been nibbling from the lapels of his coat. He heard his dead shipmates calling to him from shore offering him sandwiches. “Go easy, I’m not dead,” he said to the Coast Guardsman who’d lifted him like a corpse. He lost two toes and the tip of a finger. “I survived,” he told me, “because I was young.”

  Vapor rises faintly through the moonlight, climbing into the boughs above us whose shadows flash in the steam. I see my father’s spare gestures, his pale form. And the occasional spark of his gold tooth, quick as an atom, so contained it seems all I know of him, that tiny glint. He bought that tooth in his bold and single days, just after lay-up, a bonus in his pocket and an aching bicuspid cracked in a fight with a redneck oiler. It always embarrassed my mother, fearful he would grin in church or pick it in a good restaurant. But I like it because it reminds me of his youth about which I know little. In Gaelic, a language his parents spoke, his name means sailor or mariner. As he grew up, I guess he merely eased into what he’d been christened, and that was his life.

  We have been up to San Francisco once during his visit. He likes to call it Frisco, a city he has always wanted to see. Indifferent to cities, I take us on a sketchy itinerary of sights. I look for a Scottish bar I’ve heard about but we soon end up, by mutual consent, in a dark Irish pub where we talk quietly in the cool malty dusk of our Guinness. Outside, people hurry past in the sun. We swap stories about the Lakes, boats we both knew, men we’d worked with, as if we’re ashore for a few hours while our ships unload. Later, reluctantly, we stumble out into the glare of the afternoon in time to board the ships docked at the Maritime Museum. We clamber around an old steam schooner, the sort
of working ship my father understands immediately. In the fo’c’sle he sniffs a tarry smell. “Oakum,” he says, grinning back to that tooth that can still surprise me. We inspect every accessible compartment and only the wheelhouse remains. It is perched high and solitary like the wheelhouses on the old Lake freighters that are no doubt gone by now. We climb to it but the door is locked. No public permitted. My father peers through the glass for awhile, hooding his eyes and cataloging the equipment inside. Then he turns and I snap a picture of him looking older in the cold wind. We hang around the piers. I know he doesn’t want to leave. He sees a sloop plunging through the choppy currents off Alcatraz Island and tells me about a skiff he had as a boy, how he rigged a little sail and put rocks in the bottom for ballast. As we drive home, the Guinness seeps ruthlessly from our spirits and I recall how harshly the sun struck us when we stepped into it. We are silent all down the Bayshore where nothing generates talk. I turn on the radio. On our little FM station Pete Seeger is singing, “Sailing down my golden river, and I was not far from home . . . .” I look over at my father. He seems dozy. Perhaps his thoughts are somewhere on water, on the cold dark sea of Lake Superior.

  He makes swimming motions with his hands. The water ripples and whitens behind him. I remember only one summer when he swam. His boat laid up because of a steel strike and in the afternoons we would catch a bus down to the lake. He would swim out a long way by himself, slowly and carefully, where there were no other swimmers and float for minutes on end, his face a mask on the water. I was too young to follow him, but I knew, anyway, he wanted to be alone. Summer at home was a strange time for him.

  He knows that I am still drifting. “A man needs some place to tie up to,” he said in the Irish pub. It troubles him that I have lived in so many places, that next year I may have another address. Quite likely it will not have this warm bubbling sea in the backyard. I work on and off as a technical writer. I don’t know where this will lead. In the spring my father was always gone as soon as the ice broke. A different ship but the same places. “Never mind,” he told me, wiping Guinness froth from his moustache. “The company gave boats to younger mates and put me mate with them so they wouldn’t screw up. I never got my own ship. You had to kiss their ass for that.” He looked across the bar at a woman in a slit skirt. “I was into my middle years when Paul came along, Kenny.” Paul is my much younger brother back in Ohio, a carpenter. He kept looking at the woman and nodding his head as if considering what Paul’s coming along had meant. Finally he said, “Just don’t have anything to do with business. It’s not in our blood.” We touched glasses and finished our Guinness.

  Once a bunkmate and I devised a game. Running up Lake Superior in hard weather, we opened the porthole in our cramped, below-decks cabin and climbed into our bunks. We lay there naked and uncovered, rigid as mummies, listening to the bow smash and split the heavy seas. Which of us would feel the first fiery lash of water so cold it could kill you in minutes? We heard the seas break along the shipside, rise to the porthole’s rim, splattering the top of our metal dresser, and we knew that inevitably a good wave would collide with the bow and swell upward. We tensed, our jaws clamped tight. Soon there was the sound — a growing hiss, a roaring whisper — and then a thump of spray shot through the darkness, striking one or both of us with a chill that jerked the body like an electric shock. Whoever yelled first lost. We played until wet bedclothes threatened our sleep. I thought of my father on that raft, that I was he. But I did not think of death: death was too distant, like the bottom of that dark sea two hundred fathoms beneath us, so cold it never gave up the drowned men who drifted there. As I closed the porthole, I was sure I would live forever.

  “Too hot,” my father says. He rises, emerges from the water. I reach out a steadying hand he does not need. He towels himself slowly, in that careful way of old men, as if briskness would be unseemly. He was never a big man but now he has diminished into age. I think of the only time I saw him in the act of his work. Our ships had tied up at adjacent docks in Toledo and I could see him stepping smartly along the main deck over hatch cables and dock wallopers’ shovels to chew out a crewman for fouling a winch. I was surprised: he seemed such a different man, one a gold tooth might well belong to. I envied him. No one on that ship would question anything he said, and I hoped that one day I could gain that kind of respect. But I will always somehow remain an amateur. I have been an amateur in nearly everything of my life, and I am one now. Everything in my mind and in my hands seems uncertain, half-formed. But my father was a professional, skilled in those countless ways that make good seamen, and bring them other good seamen’s respect. That part of him was not passed on to me, that ability to find your way, deeply, into what you are good at. When I first went sailing, I knew the ore freighters, having as a boy roamed their cold iron darkness during winter lay-up, but I did not know their work. I felt homesick and inept. But for my father, I tried at least to be a reliable deckhand, for that would get back to him. What didn’t get back was the hot summer night I got thoroughly and limply drunk on cognac, me and the other two deckhands, cleaning up ore leavings deep in the cargo holds. Between alcoholic fits of energy, we leaned on our shovels and sang. We dodged the backing bulldozer and the first mate’s glances from the hatches above, we flirted with the Hewlett’s big iron teeth as its shadow descended over us. When the heat and the cognac struck home around two a.m., I crawled along the side-tanks all the way to my bunk and passed out. As penance, the mate put me to work at sunrise hauling up five-gallon buckets of heavy red mud and dumping them overboard. I felt sick enough to die. I hated every motion of the ship and the dull line of the horizon. I wanted to jump at the next port. But I endured it and said nothing because of the watchman. His name was Gunderson, an ex-gunners mate with bleeding ulcers, huge hands, a frightening set of false teeth, and identical square-riggers tattooed on both wrists. He came up to me while I was waiting for my bucket to be filled in the hold below. I must have looked grey as the sea, my jaws tight with nausea. “You know,” he said, “I been with some sons of bitches, but your old man is a fine mate. He was a deckhand once too.” I could have told him, no, he wasn’t, they made him a wheelsman right off when he said he’d been a seaman in Nova Scotia, he never had to do this. But I was grateful to Anders Gunderson. I knew then that to feel homesick was foolish, that I was not in a strange place.

  I will never forget a photograph my father gave me when I was young. He proferred it without comment one evening after I had pressed him for details about his shipwreck. I took the old clipping to my room where I pored over it more keenly than the pornographic cards we passed around at school. Something in its atmosphere I could not understand, cannot yet. The corpses of nine seamen are laid out in a morgue, the undertaker in his galluses posing at one end of them, his assistant at the other. A railroad ferry had sunk in December during one of Lake Erie’s fearsome gales, and these men, the only crewmen ever found, had frozen solid as stone in a battered lifeboat. Their faces, grotesquely calm, skin like putty in the incandescent glare of floodlamps, have been shaped by the mortician into the contours of troubled sleep. For the benefit of cameras they lie in a parallel row, heads slightly raised on makeshift pillows, sheets pulled snug to their chins. You can see the outlines of their arms folded across their waists. But something disturbs the almost Victorian dignity of their arrangement: there is one man, Smith the cook, whose belly is so swollen its girth has lifted the hem of the sheet, exposing the deadwhite flesh of his buttock. It is clear that all of these men are naked. A copy editor has crudely penned on each sheet the surname of each man. My eyes went slowly up and down that row so many times the order of their names became a kind of poetry. Steele. Shank. Allen. Smith. Ray. Hart. Thomas. Hines. Squars. What my father wanted me to learn from this stark picture I do not know. If he wanted me only to remember it, I have.

  My father has dried himself and wrapped a big white towel around him toga-like. “At home there’s ice now,” he sa
ys. “Clear across to Canada.” He waves. I hear his feet on the wooden steps. He disappears behind the trellis of ivy.

  The wind is gone. The moon, its crescent snagged on strands of cloud, filters down through a tracery of branches. Ivy, which has climbed above the fence and found nothing to grab but air, turns back into itself, forming a pitchblack whorl that seems depthless. I do not understand the heavens or their arrangement as they move through the seasons of the skies. Put my father on a dark and empty sea and still he will not be lost. I think he has never been lost. I must memorize the constellations, learn to guide myself through these winter nights. I stare into the vortex the ivy makes and imagine that black hole my father will wither into, gone beyond the skies that helped him, hindered him. All I know, for certain, is that we are sailing.

  Tessie Gillis

  The Innocent

  Willie MacSween swung his bony legs over the edge of the bed and reached down to pull the pants from under his feet. Shivering in the chill of the morning, he buttoned the three fly buttons, then ran a hand around the tail of the shirt he’d slept in. He opened the top button and tucked the tail into his trousers.

  “Ye gonna stay in bed all day?” he said, bending over to shake his wife. “Git up woman! Git my tea. I’m goin’ to town after chores.”