“Then why concern ourselves with it? What can we do?”
“We can’t and I guess that’s my point. I’m sorry. It’s my grandfather talking here,” David admitted.
“I didn’t know I was climbing into bed with your grandfather,” Sylvie said, teasing.
“Don’t get me wrong, I want to have children. As many as you want.”
“I want ten,” she joked.
“Ten it is. Why not twelve?”
“Twelve is too many to feed.”
“We’ll start with one and see how it goes from there.”
“I want all of our children to stay here on the island.”
“So do I,” David agreed. “But once they outgrow us, we can’t make them stay.”
“No, but we can make sure they love the island like we love the island.”
David said nothing.
“Do you love this place?” she asked.
“I do, but not in the same way you do. I could almost be jealous if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to be jealous?”
“No. Let’s go to sleep now.”
Sylvie has a swarm of pictures in her head, the tea some strange, exotic drug now that has catapulted her mind into another place. Things that rule her life: fish and cabbage, the backs of whales in sunlight, that mysterious moon pulling the sea slowly in and out every day, the swimming seals. Generations of German and English and French ancestors, for she could trace her roots to all three. The island had lured all three nationalities together.
And she remembers David, standing in oilskins not a hundred yards offshore, hauling up nets with cold, slapping fish, a great steady stance he had in that dory made by his grandfather. She could still see the silhouette, the slanting posture, the wet net in his hand, back bent under the weight. His steady hand with a strong pull. While David stood there, German soldiers on the other side of the sea were slaughtering innocent families, preparing to slaughter the French and the English. In her memory, though, those two brief years of her first marriage, less than two years really, were a tenured stint in paradise.
March of 1936. Bad news for the fishermen. Almost no market at all for the valuable catch. Hope, however, in the fact that big ships would dock soon by the government wharf and look for men to go to the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Good money to be made from seal pelts.
“I’ll be gone no more than a month. Hard work, but we need the money. Save some up, spend some to build up the old place here. Plenty of food on the table after this no matter what the fishing does. Do something nice for you when I get back. Don’t fancy the thought of staying on a big sloppy metal boat that long with a bunch of mainlanders, but they say the Allen Grant is a good solid ship, steady captain and all that.”
And all that. Sylvie did not like the thought of butchering baby seals. The greys, the harbour, the hooded ones. She was opposed to the idea. Did not want to debate the difference between catching fish and killing baby seals on ice floes near Isle Magdalene on a ship captained by a Lunenburg man and owned by Halifax investors, they said.
“Good chance to maybe set a bit of money by and eventually get my own boat. Fish prices will come back. Here’s an opportunity at building a thing up. Maybe something better for our young ones down the road.”
And like that, one morning, he was gone, and Sylvie was waking up alone in her bed. A March morning. Rain. Eight days of it. Walked to the sea every day, the sea of rains. Pelting, icy, cold, drenching. Her own oilskins and high rubber boots to protect her. Seals right up on the island shoreline, one or two with big, round, dark eyes, not even afraid of her.
Even then she still felt the tug of the current. She stopped and stared at the clear little brook, the wet, glowing moss that looked so vital in any weather. Sylvie dropped a twig in the rapids and watched it get swept away, then catch on a shelf of root, then swirl in a little eddy round and round, then disappear down the watercourse.
When the news came back to her about David, it was delivered by his father. David’s father — a stout man who carried a hat in his hand almost always, worrying its brim until the brims wore out. He came without his wife, knocked once, walked in. Winter had completely slipped away in the rain and left a damp, warm procession of days. Blackflies, mistaking it for summer, had come alive. They were in the man’s hair and he brushed them away, a dozen of them, tiny black gnats. He caught one, however, and pinched it between thumb and forefinger, then stared at the burst of blood, the red stain like a lost thought on his finger.
“On the ice,” he said. “Shift of wind. Up ’til then things’d been going good. Nearly ready to return. Ice so unpredictable at that time of year. David was always one to be cautious, you would know that better than most. But he went in, not much after sun-up. Too far from his companions, I guess. Couldn’t get a proper grip on the ice, lost his pick, legs and hands going numb, I suppose.”
Sylvie didn’t hear a thing beyond that.
“Guess we’ll hear the full story when they come back. It’s a sorry thing for all of us.”
He swatted at blackflies again as he put his hat back on his head. “Sorry for … bringing all this in,” he said, waving at the bugs as he walked back out.
So, at eighty, Sylvie still imagines this scene, created from the clever guesswork of her imagination.
The sun is just barely up, shining bright. A man, her husband, climbs down from the side of a big metal ship that sits like a human grey disgrace in all that white, frozen beauty. Her husband rows with the other sealers across calm water laced with bits of ice stubble, docks besides a solid white sheet, flat as a stove top. She hates that pickaxe in his hand and can see the dried seal blood on the sleeves of his coat. She sees him head off away from the rest. Preferring to be alone at the dirty deeds rather than talking it through with the others.
She hears the crunch of his rubber boots on the hard snow atop the ice. A short hike across the frozen expanse and there’s a mother with several seal pups. She sees their dark human eyes. Sylvie cannot help but think of those eyes as the eyes of children. The irony, the terrible irony of her David, so fearful of the future — of inadvertently committing some crime against humanity — doing this. She will never voice her view that her husband is some kind of killer, that they all are. It will be a private condemnation that she can closet away from the world of speech. For she loves this man deeply, has travelled every twist and turn of thread of thought in his mind that sent him out onto the ice at sunrise.
David is doing this for her, for their children who will never be born. She will forgive him. She hears his ragged breath as he hurries, stepping across one small space between the ice pans, a distance no greater than hopping across the North Brook. She sees the boot land with a hard thwack on the ice. She sees the axe swing free in his hand. She wants to be able to see his face, but she cannot. Perhaps it’s better that way. What would she see in his eyes? Determination? Exhaustion, more likely. Eyes fixed on something a million miles away. Thinking of her, perhaps. Thinking of the island.
David stumbles on a small ice ridge, collects himself, walks on towards the mother seal and her several young ones. The ice is bleached pure and white as white can be. A sound can be heard now as the other men drive axe picks into the skulls of young and old seals alike as their mothers howl and try to defend their brood, only to find themselves butchered too. Something so appallingly wrong with this scene that it is inconceivable to Sylvie that she herself is somehow connected to this. But she is connected, inextricably so. This spectacle is part of her life, will never leave her.
David, she knows, is now sick at heart and exhausted beyond anything he has known before. Aches for his island and home, vowing never to sign on for such a thing as this again. The sun is over his shoulder