Since then, of course, Phonse and his recycling yard had gone green. Someday Oickle’s Pond would return to its natural state, but it would take scuba divers and cranes and some sort of newfangled toxic sludge incineration plant like the one that never worked right on the Sydney Tar Ponds. Government money, big wads of it, would have to be involved. Phonse would have to wait for that.
Phonse was Acadian by blood. His people had been escorted out of Grand Pré by the Brits and tossed ashore in various American locations. The Doucettes had ended up in Virginia and were not wanted by the snobbish English living there. The Virginia House of Assembly had been generous enough to provide a ship and a few crusts of bread to send them back to Nova Scotia. So Phonse’s people were set back down along the shore near Lunenburg. Not much to work with, but after a couple of generations they got their pride back intact and handed it down like a cherished heirloom from father to son until Phonse received the gift. Phonse was proud, resourceful, cussed at times, but a guy who, if dropped from a twenty-foot ladder head down while trying to paint the side of his big pink and blue house, would always land on the balls of his feet and be back up the ladder again with a fresh can of paint in no time flat.
“My people knew how to care for this land,” Phonse assert-ed.“The English knew nothing. If we didn’t feed them way back when, they all would have starved.” Way back when was a muddle of history, mostly bad news for the worthy Acadians. Way back when it took two generations for an Acadian family to build a dyke, say near the Cornwallis River, and create beautiful, fertile croplands and pastures. Two generations and it didn’t seem a problem.“They were this close to the land back then.” Phonse pinched his finger and proved the point.“Soil in their blood. An Acadian could grow anything anywhere. Set a cabbage seed on top of a rock out there at Nubby Point and make it grow into a big, beautiful thing that’d make five of us a good dinner. Piece of salt pork and that cabbage grown on a rock and we’d be full up, belching and farting like a big happy family.”
The Acadians knew how to grow things, while the Englishman would just look at a field and feel sorry for himself, wonder where he was going to find someone to work it or how he was going to find himself a cup of tea for his morning break. That’s what an Englishman would have done. Back then. Or now maybe. Not much changes.
No one really complained much when Phonse started bringing the wrecks over from the mainland, one a day on the ferry service. School busses, old hearses, dump trucks gone bad, pick-ups, service vans. One by one until he had that hill filled up with junk. A dream realized. Once the phones were in, people could phone Phonse for a part and he’d send it over on the ferry to be picked up in Mutton Hill Harbour. If it didn’t fit or if it was the wrong one, it could be returned or just tossed in the bay, and Phonse would send another one over.
To some people it seemed like a lot of trouble for a car part and they’d end up driving to Bridgewater to get a new or reconditioned fuel pump from Canadian Tire. Often a part from Phonse’s yard was seized up pretty bad. All that salt air doing its work. But business was business for Phonse and he didn’t mind a little hard work to make a go of it. Hell, none of his people had ever shirked hard work.
“Dirt under the nails, that’s what makes any man happy,” Phonse said. Caked oil and grease made him happy, but farming, growing cabbages in his little dyked area next to Oickle’s Pond, made him even happier. His own little dyke by the pond only cost him two days work with his backhoe instead of two generations, but it freed up some fine little marsh full of rich sediment. Phonse liked working there, puttering on a summer day in his off hours, talking to philosophical red-winged blackbirds who looked at him sideways as they dangled on the sides of cattail plants. And frogs; the dark, oil-stained waters of Oickle’s Pond were always full of frogs, as well. Bullfrogs, big as footballs. Tiny peepers, too. Fish in the pond too, of course. Nobody knew what kind. Unidentifiable. Started out as suckers maybe and evolved to survive the change in water quality. Tasted some good, eaten cooked or raw. Phonse was particular to the livers of such fish.
And the cabbages. The big mealtime ones that could have been grown by an Acadian on a rock with just a sprinkling of piss, two ground-up clam shells, and soil cleaned out from under one thumbnail. But these cabbages were even more than that — grown in the Acadian soil of Phonse’s little garden, a cabbage was a thing to behold. Big as a beach ball. No holes in the leaves from cabbage flies or other bugs ’cause Phonse always kept them doused in cold wood stove ashes. Seemed to help the flavour of a cabbage. Phonse had no German in him but he knew how to turn that cabbage into sauerkraut if he had a mind to. Enough salt to preserve a mummy. Made your eyes water just to think about it. But a Phonse Doucette cabbage was a prize. Men who pay other men to mow their lawns back in Mutton Hill Harbour would pay ten bucks for one head of Phonse’s cabbage and not ask any questions how it was raised. Send one over on a hot summer day to the mainland in a box that’s just been used to ship a big boat engine battery over from the mainland. People’d just stare at that cabbage the whole trip back to Mutton Hill Harbour, not even look at the scenery.
All that was in Phonse’s blood. Heritage. The ability to develop (“devil-up” as Phonse would say it) a piece of land in the old Acadian tradition. Only this was the modern version of it — if anything at all could be called “modern” on Ragged Island. He had retained a French accent, bestowed upon him by his parents, and he had fine-tuned it while growing up. He sounded more like Jean Chrétien than a true Acadian, but no one knew what a true anglicized Acadian should sound like anyway.
Sure, some men with old junkers did come across on the one-hour ferry ride to Phonse’s salvage yard for parts, but these were men who didn’t mind investing a little time in finding the right flywheel for an old Oldsmobile, men who preferred talking over working any day of the week. And Phonse could talk the ears off a dead mule if he wanted to.“It’s because I have so many ideas,” he’d say.“Possibilities. Dreams. If only I could devil-up each and every one of them. The world would be a better place.”
Better, perhaps, or at the very least, more cluttered. So men would come for the talk and buy something or other, usually a car part that wouldn’t fit or, if it did, was seized, chipped, cracked, or otherwise brutalized by the island’s weather. No one ever complained. Yet over the years, Phonse noted the marked decline in customers, what with the Canadian Tire only a half-hour’s drive from Mutton Hill Harbour, and other competition from junkyards on the mainland. Men with German names, some of Irish descent, some from Halifax. Some, it was said, were even tied in with computer networks telling the world that they had available for sale the drive shaft of a 1957 Chevy station wagon. “Computers,” Phonse said, and shook his head. “Someday, I’ll show them how that is done. I’ll be on that Internet thing. I’ll put some of my ideas on there. Then people will see.”
Phonse was not ever discouraged. Like his ancestors, he adapted to hard times and thrived on adversity. Cabbage seed on a rock. Spit on it and look at it with kindness and it will grow. Feed six families.
So the junkyard business was slow. Some of the old regulars would come, though, and buy something or other. If it was a slow day, Phonse would get out his guns. He loved guns, all kinds of guns. But he never, ever hunted. He hated hunters and would love to see all hunters tied up together in a big huge fishing net and picked up by a Coast Guard helicopter, taken out to the deepest part of the sea, right there in the pathway of the whales that cruised back to this island every summer. He’d like to see them dropped from the sky and sunk to the bottom of the sea to feed the fishes or whatever. That’s what he would do with hunters.
So you couldn’t talk about hunting around Phonse when he got out his guns. Everyone knew this and was careful. All those Mutton Hill Harbour duck hunters and deer hunters, men who shot a thing and paid another man to skin and clean it for them. Those kind of men. Pale, pasty-faced, and mostly English.
Phonse’s gun collection, all unregistered, would have