Seals perched out on the shoals to wait and see what the Trough would bring by next. Dead men floated in during a pair of world wars. Sylvie had seen them both and was thankful that it was only one dead man per war.
Oh, before she was born, ships loved to come aground here. Ignorant British captains caught unaware by the zealous current of the Trough and then trying to counter the pull, only to ram aground on Rocky Shoal. Bleached pieces of those ships and a few bleached bones even still littered the shores along here, but once the sea has its way with a thing human or inanimate, it doffs it off its back up onto the rocks and lets the shoreward lift have it: waves and then the work of rust, lichen, and blooming red moulds. Old shoes, washed up, bloomed with life — moss and yellow pan flake lichen, soldier cap fungus and crawling natty ants. A little soil caught in a crust of heel and suddenly sea rocket grows green, then bursts a pale electric blue flower atop. Before you know it, some bird from Antarctica is foraging a meal from the worn leather of the toe and the succulence of a rotten lace filled with bugs only a bird can savour.
An island was a place to live and to die. Few had had the same privilege as Sylvie; she knew that, and felt blessed beyond even her years.
Two hundred and some people lived upon the island now, fewer than in the past, but enough. The peripatetic ferry made two crossings over and two back each day. Older kids would go to school on the mainland while the younger ones hung back a few years, taken good care of by the woman from the States, Kit Lawson, who knew the names of all the stars in the sky as well as the names of great composers, and who sometimes talked about seeing things on the moon with her expensive black telescope. Kit was as bad as Sylvie. Couldn’t hold a man and did it by fours. Sylvie had seen it happen. Boyfriends, she guessed, not for marriage but here for the live-in type relationship as they do these days. Seemed serious enough. The first was an island fisherman named Ned. The next one had long hair and smoked a pipe, an intellectual type who spoke to everyone about politics. Having failed to convert anyone to atheism or socialism, some supposed, he fled back to the mainland and a job.
The third one was a dreamer — a poetic sort who lounged along the shores at the Trough sometimes and picked at a piece of driftwood until there was nothing left in his paws but salt. Always had a notebook but never wrote anything down. He too found his final ferry back to Mutton Hill Harbour and headed back to civilization. Then that last one. Nice, sweet boy who came and made friends with everybody. Started growing marijuana in the unused cabbage fields and found himself in trouble with the law.
None of the islanders held it against Kit. Sylvie had sympathized with her when it turned out the dope farmer was only using her, as men do on occasion, for mercenary purposes. His claim to fame was that he was an herbalist, but he had specialized in only one herb, the Mounties asserted.
There were no whales today. Perhaps in another week or two weeks they would return. This was the season of whales, and Sylvie knew that the whales had saved this island from ruin almost brought on by bad decisions on the mainland. Saved it for her.
Things were being cut back in Halifax. All sorts of things. People shoved out onto the streets, it was said, lifted hilly dilly out of hospital beds and told to leave. Women having babies in the morning and being carried over their husbands’ shoulders later in the afternoon because things were tight. The government was pinching the pennies, making people feel they didn’t deserve it as good as before.
Legislators as far away as Halifax and even Ottawa were trying to make her leave. Make everyone leave. They didn’t have to steal your land from you, all they had to do was take away the ferry service and everything would begin to shut down.
But they would not do that. As long as there were whales. The whales brought the tourists, brought them right on through Mutton Hill Harbour and onto the ferry to her island. Moses Slaunwhite had dropped fishing like a hot potato and started taking tourists out to see the whales near the Trough. Moses knew the waters, had a big enough boat, and was raking in the cash. It was a sweet combination for all as it turned out. The mercantile interests in Mutton Hill Harbour scrambled for the money from the passers-through and polished up the town. Motel owners and bed and breakfast people suddenly had loved right whales all their lives, even the ones who had never even seen a right whale.
Hell, everybody loved whales now, and no one owned up to the fact that grandfathers with harpoons once slept ashore in those bed and breakfast beds with their old socks still on, socks soaked in slimy whale blubber. Now, by Jesus, everyone loved whales. And there was this economic link, as they were calling it. Ragged Island was the centrepiece. Jacked the prices up on the ferry but at least she still sailed back and forth. Once the warm months were over, it would go back and forth only once a day, but kids could still go to school each day on the mainland if need be, men would still work there and come home to the island. And Sylvie could still stay here, living alone at eighty, if she wanted.
She would pay no heed to all those well-meaning mainland friends who wanted her “safe and sound on solid soil.” As long as she had the island she was okay. As long as the whales were there the tourists would come to gawk and take too many foolish pictures, and her brood of sea mammals would perform with a mere blink or a small geyser and let the mainlanders squint at the sun glinting off a sleek, arching back.
A whale could take the indignation of a thousand Styrofoam cups in the sea or a tossed jelly bean. A whale could handle that. Moses knew how to keep a fair distance, knew how to humour his clients but keep them from drowning on the Shoal, keep them from harassing the whales.
“You keep the whales safe and satisfied and the tourists amazed and the island will be safely looked after,” said Moses to Sylvie. “Halifax is up to sending hired actors in oil skins off to Rhode Island and Japan with the news that they can touch the sandpapery skin of the beast if they fly here and bring their dollars and yens. Dollars and yens — that’s all that matters nowadays. Perhaps a Swiss franc or two. But the Swiss are not so easily amazed. Remember, they were the shrewd bastards could keep the Nazis from coming over the mountains and disrupting their quiet little lives.”
And so, Sylvie was certain, the whales would come back this year as every other. They would return for her because she cared for the island and she cared deeply for them. And now there would be no more men in her life, but there would be sea creatures and clear, sunny, squint-eyed mornings like this to last a person through her winter, snug in memories.
Chapter Four
Lonely without whales, Sylvie craved womantalk. Words to fill empty spaces in her life, chinks in the walls. Kit Lawson would do. It was a Saturday, schoolteacher’s day off, and Kit would be alone now that her dope-growing young man was gone off to rehab or jail. Sylvie hoped it wasn’t terrible punishment. He’d been a cheerful lad, seemed to care about the bees and the soil conditions. Understood rotting kelp and seaweed, was willing to learn all the tricks of gardening on an island like this. She hoped his motivation had not just been profit.
Kit lived in a large one-room house with a loft area for a bedroom. Once a fisherman’s house, it was a dream come true for her. “When I first set foot in here,” she told Sylvie,“this place reeked of authenticity. I asked Ned where the toilet was, and he asked if I needed to pee or do the other. I said I just had to pee, and he pointed to a little piece of one-inch black plastic pipe in the wall. I looked at it, then through the window, and saw it went outside and emptied into a little stream that grew ferns and cress. Ned had never encountered the problem of a woman having to take a pee in his old house, owned up to it, said it’d been a lonely several years. Then he built a first-rate outhouse. I had to tell him it had to be away from any watercourse. He said women were funny creatures, but