“And you think that’s a good thing, do you? You don’t think God has a plan for us?” Sylvie had been told by neighbour women over and over, neighbour women out trimming cabbages or drying cod on wooden slats in the sun or collecting summer savoury from their gardens, the words had been oft repeated.“’Tis all part of God’s great plan.”
“God was the one responsible for making everything accidental. It’s a big game for him, I guess. Wondering what accidental thing will happen next.”
Sylvie knew that this boy liked to talk strangely at times, but his words made her head and heart feel light, like a pair of swooping herons, she was so out of kilter. Her with burning boots turning to deep religion and philosophy in the schoolyard snow.
Somebody was throwing a snowball straight at David’s head, but it missed. A second was thrown. That lout Inglis, always bad intent. Another thrown and missed. David pretended not to see, but Sylvie stuck her tongue out at Coors Inglis. Another snowball, this time thrown harder and with worse aspirations, at Sylvie. David turned, put himself in the way, took it hard on the cheek. Looked over at Inglis, gave him a look but did not go after him.
“Sylvie, don’t ever cut your hair.”
“My hair? I wasn’t going to cut it.”
“Great. You have wonderful hair.”
“It’s only brown.”
“Brown hair is the prettiest.”
Sylvie had known the boy had feelings for her but those feelings had always been in check. Her own emotions had always been in check, too, the way it was supposed to be. Why did this absurd little compliment make her feel so powerfully changed? “I won’t cut it,” she said. “I’ll let it grow long like summer vines.”
“Thank you,” he said, and now, for the first time, he touched the cold wet spot on his cheek where the snowball had connected with his face. Sylvie could not stop herself from touching the spot as well. Her eyes went woozy and she had to take a deep breath, then pulled her hand away quickly as she saw Missus Lantz come out to ring a bell, calling everyone back in.
“My grandfather wasn’t a hundred percent right about the accidents, Sylvie.”
“Oh, how’s that?’
“You. You were no accident. You were meant to be.”
That was the last year of school for both of them. They could have gone to the mainland for an extra year or even two if they liked, but they did not. Nor did any of the other students from the island school, for the mainland was considered to be a sorry, inferior place. Sixteen gave way to seventeen for Sylvie and for David. The year was 1934. Far away on the mainland of Canada, the Dionne family in Quebec had quintuplets, five girls and they all lived. In Germany, a new leader, a führer, was sworn in. This man named Hitler would order the construction of concentration camps in Germany for Jews and Gypsies. Off the coast of Nova Scotia the fishing was good, but the prices were less than they should be.
In June of 1934, young David Young married Sylvie Down. Sylvie liked him more than any other boy on the island but she did not know if it was what she truly wanted to do. Her mother said she liked David and so did her father. That was not advice or parental pressure. Sylvie’s father spoke thus:“Comes from a good family. Good stock. Father’s a reputable man. Respectable family. Can’t see the harm.” Understatement was Sylvie’s father’s way.
“Women will have more opportunities in your lifetime, you know,” her mother said. Something she picked up at the Women’s Improvement Association meetings and in the newsletter that came once a month.“We want what’s best for you.”
“Can’t do much better than David,” her father had said, but there was still not a quarter ounce of pressure in his voice.
Sylvie felt herself to be the water in the North Brook — clear fluid, pure, slipping down with the pull of gravity towards the waiting sea. It was not an unpleasant feeling at all. She believed there was little control within her to change anything about this elemental force. Sure as the water drawn down the stream, she would marry, she would become the sea, and then what?
The day she said yes to her David Young, she asked him to go with her to sit on the rocks out by the Trough and be with her there all day. David said he would be honoured. Alone on a day in early June, blackflies held imperceptibly at bay by the cool presence of the open sea, they sat arm in arm. Only one whale appeared. It came up once from the deepest part of the channel, surfaced, spouted, let the sun perform for one silver moment upon its dark, wet back, dove deep again, and fanned its tail in a salute or goodbye.
A flock of tiny shorebirds appeared and settled on the rocks nearby, picked through the rotting seaweed that smelled like something sacred to Sylvie and David. Beach peas and sea rocket grew between the stones. A few fishing boats found their way across the sea in front of the island — too far from shore to make out who they were. Year-old seals came up on the flat stones of the shoal and lay on their backs, then at length slipped back into the sea.
The day made her love David more for his silence, but it also gave her mixed emotions because she didn’t know if she loved him or the island more. She wasn’t sure she could love both, and even though she would not be moving away, she felt like she was betraying some intimate, profound relationship. But she did not fight the sonorous current within her that would bring them to marriage in the little Baptist church with the bare walls, hard seats, and the endless drone of old turgid hymns cauterizing everything that seemed alive and chaotic and wonderful.
In Sylvie’s eighty-year-old imagination, David Young is still alive. Still sixteen, or maybe eighteen. His was the privilege of not growing older like the rest who remained on the island. Sylvie sees him as being yet another gift that the island gave to her. A gift with tenure. Time and memory have polished David, the first husband, like a beach stone, into something hard and true. Born of chaos, a child of a family who believed the world was ruled by chaos, by chance, David had come to her, grew up with her through childhood as if an invisible other, and then crystallized suddenly one winter day into something that would be the centre of her life.
Sylvie sits alone with a cup of cold tea on a summer afternoon in her backyard carved from the forest, her back to the sea, surrounded by tiny flowers of early summer. Spring beauties, blue violets, Indian cucumbers, and the fluted, spore-laden stems shooting up from the furry green moss. She has the great gift of knowing truly where she belongs. Here. Now. Inside her, time can drift. David is still with her and she can smell burning rubber boots and she can feel the pinch of biting blackflies although there are none out at this time of day.
Their first night of marriage, they talked through the darkness. They touched, yes, but only tentatively, briefly, fingertips brushing hair, tracing the collarbone at the neck, palms resting on the other’s elbow, hands cupped on the other’s shoulder. Sylvie was amazed at David’s love of ideas, notions. “Suppose we have children, good children, healthy children, and they lead good honest lives and grow up and they have children, good children, happy children, well-meaning children who have their own after that. And one of those children, our great-grandchild, becomes an inventor or a scientist or something and discovers something truly, truly wonderful, like a way to feed everybody on earth so no one will starve, right? And this is a great wonderful thing.”
Sylvie wondered at the odd nature of thinking of this man she had married. Here she lay in bed, expecting to be treated to some kind of new experience, some physical thing that both scared her and fascinated her. She had been warned it could be a harsh thing sometimes, but she was prepared, mentally and physically. But this was not the way at all.
“Now suppose this new discovery gets into the wrong hands and is used to create famines and starvation instead of preventing suffering. Suppose thousands or more die. Just suppose that happened.”
“David, what?”
He let out a long sigh. “I don’t know. Does that mean it would be wrong for us to have a child that would lead to such a terrible thing?”
“How