Sea of Tranquility (18 page)

Nothing, Greg understood, was the thing that drove you nuts when you were twelve years old. What happened today? Nothing. What are you gonna do this afternoon? Nothing. What's bothering you? Nothing. Nada. Inactivity. Lethargy and stasis. He fully understood Todd's dilemma. Nothing ever happened on the island. In one respect.

That's when they heard the hail begin to hit the roof of the porch they sat on. Both closed up their laptops and set them up against the house wall. “Holy Mother of Shit,” Greg said suddenly as he saw a waterspout moving up the eastern side of the
island from the sea. He'd never seen a waterspout before and neither had Todd. It was a tall dark funnel of water leading from the sea right up into the heavens, a water tornado. Both Greg and Todd were certain it would not turn out to be real, that it just had to be a Steven Spielberg special effect. Nature could never be this cool.

It only lasted about five seconds, at least the part they could see. Then it suddenly disappeared. The hail stopped hammering on the roof of the porch and, as Todd's mother and little sister came out of the house with mouths agape, the hail turned to heavy dollops of rain, each drop seemingly the size of a hardball. Puddles formed almost instantly and those massive clots of rain would hit and flatten, looking like shiny CD-ROMs tossed randomly about on the yard.

And then the fish began to fall out of the sky.

At least fifty mackerel splash-landed in the great sheet of water that was now the front yard. They hit with a splat, flipped and flopped around, along with a few slithery eels, rockweed, kelp, and the odd clam and quahog that cracked upon impact. Then the sun burst out just like that and there was a rainbow over the government wharf, where the tethered boats were rocking back and forth like toys in a tub.

Two hundred and forty-four. That was the number of living souls on Ragged Island. Sim Corkum at the D. O. T. finally had the figure he was looking for. His right-arm man,Vance Little, had this kid out there on the island; none of this blind government statistics bullshit. Always out of date, the feds' material was. The province had the actual number now and it was lower than they had reckoned. That was the good news. There was a bottom line to this thing that could be nailed down. Vance owed his minister a favour, big time. The Honourable Dancy Moxon. It was his
own riding, dammit, but Dancy knew he had to cut back the ferry budget to the bone to keep the minster of finance off his back.

It was all there in logical black and white. The only thing holding them back had been that damn whale-watching thing. Tourism was all over it like flies on shit. For God's sake. You might think they found gold out there or some friggin' thing. Assholes driving their families out here from all over North America. If it wasn't for that, Sim knew they could have closed that island down a long time ago. Close the school, give up on the subsidy to the ferry, the whole shooting match. Save the taxpayer plenty of out-of-pocket expenses. Nice neat package.

Moses Slaunwhite — all his fault. Couldn't leave well enough alone. But that was all over now. The Department of Tourism was getting complaints. No whales were being spotted on the Ragged Island tour. Big-ass company in Chicago funnelling all those tree-huggers and fish-loving freaks in; they were ticked off and were bailing out on the whole shebang.

Not one bloody reason left to defend the cost of the ferry service. All over but the shouting and the stink. So it was a done deal. Sim could tough out the clatter. That's why Dancy had appointed him to the job to begin with.

Moses took the call from Chicago with as much dignity as he could muster. Nails in the coffin, he supposed. Boat would have to go back to the bank, he realized. What next? Always something around the corner. If only they could count on a good water-spout once a week, they'd have tons of tourists. Maybe find some dinosaur bones or buried treasure. Jeez, what would it take? Wasn't like the old days when fish was enough, or cabbages. Had to roll with the swells, take the tide as she turned, what?

Nobody really knew what went through a mainlander's mind, especially the mind of some bureaucrat in bloody Halifax.
Up to his ear hairs in patronage and piss. Had Moses had a bit of foresight, he'd have rallied the people of the island sooner, but islanders thought they had seen it all — the good times, the bad times, wars, rum running, sea disasters, and the death of the fishery. But this was different.

It was a damp and mildewy afternoon when Sim Corkum and the Honourable Dancy Moxon stepped off the ferry onto the wharf. Moses saw them sniff the air like a couple of worried Labrador retrievers; he noticed the shoes the men wore — city shoes with a shine. Moxon had a Colwell Brothers suit on. No one wore a suit on the island unless it was funeral. Not even to regular church on Sunday. Only when someone died.

Dancy went to the Aetna with Sim and they ordered clams and chips, sat at the picnic table outside, and talked to a woman and her two kids from New Jersey who were there eating ice cream cones. Sim realized that Vance's college kid had probably counted them since they were spending the summer there. Three, he realized, three fewer year-round residents. Island population down to 241. Can't subsidize a bloody year-round daily ferry service for a mere 241 people. He pointed this out to Dancy after the family left.

Where to begin? Dancy had built a career in a short span of time out of glad-handing the public and then turning around and dropping to his knees at Province House any time the premier or minster of finance wanted him to chop jobs or service. Not that he liked it, mind you, just the way things were. He referred to it as “the government of the here and now,” as if that meant dick. Not exactly the fat days of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Not that at all. Deficit reduction was the name of the game, the ladder to the top.

Where to begin? He knew he was brave to even be here at all. Away from Halifax and here in his own riding to put forward the
bad news. Public meeting coming up at four o'clock. Had to be out of there on the six-thirty ferry. Home to the wife by ten if he was lucky. Back to civilization. Clayton Park on Bedford Basin suited him much better than where he had once lived in Blue Rocks. Course, there was still the constituency office in Lunenberg. Two afternoons a week. And now here he was. On a bloody offshore island. Legwork. No one would ever accuse him of not trying to face up to the music. He knew he could ignore New Germany, Hebb's Corner, or Vogler's Cove. As long as he had Bridgewater and Chester in his pocket. And Mutton Hill Harbour. Mutton Hill would understand, he knew they would. People in the town always believed islanders were backwards. There would be resettlement to consider. Think of Joey Smallwood doing what he knew he had to do for his people in Newfoundland.
Come ashore boys and burn the boats. Join the twentieth century.

Only now it was nearly the goddamn twenty-first century and a province couldn't afford to keep people living on islands like this. Health care. Education. Transportation, the worst of it. Consolidate. Pay some compensation if need be, although there would be an easy away around that. No work on the island. What were you compensating people for? Doing them a bloody favour, was the truth to it. All this swimming through Dancy's head like a school of piranha as he worried his fried clam on a plastic fork.

He nodded to the old woman with the card table beneath the willow tree. He waved and said hello even though he figured she was probably old and deaf. “Look at the old thing,” Dancy said to Sim, “sitting there with a couple of cakes and a loaf of bread, waiting to sell them to tourists, but there's no tourists here. Oh hell…”

Dancy got up and went to the old woman, offered to buy the bread and her cakes. Gave her a twenty and told her to keep the change. She seemed puzzled, didn't like the feel of the money in her hands, knew it to be charity and wondered what
Dancy Moxon was going to do with her baked goods.

Nothing left to sell, she was off home and Dancy gave the stuff to Corkum, who peered around the area like a bloody vandal, and when he was sure no one was looking, he tossed the stuff into a trash bin. But got seen in the act by Moses Slaunwhite running towards the Aetna.

Moses tipped his cap and then tried to smile but couldn't. Saw Dancy Moxon sitting at a picnic table with fried clams and greasy fingers.

“Sim Corkum, D. O. T.,” Sim said, trying to be civil.

“The meeting, right?”

“Yup.”

“You two aren't really out here to tell us what I think you want to say, are you?”

“It's just an information gathering session. Dancy tries to keep in touch with his constituents. Nothing political about it or anything.”

“That's a load off my mind,” Moses said with a fresh coating of sarcasm.

The old woman sat in the front row at the meeting. Moses and his wife, Viddy, were there. Viddy had a new haircut from the unisex salon in Mutton Hill Harbour. Short, like the women on the TV shows they picked up on their satellite dish with the illegal decoder. Kind of like English schoolboys. Everybody noticed Viddy's hair. She liked it that way.

Everyone also noticed Sylvie sitting front and centre. Probably so she could hear, they thought. An old woman probably needed to be close to the action to hear anything.

About seventy-five people were in the room, in the dusty so-called town hall, which was hardly ever used. Everyone had given up on committees and meetings. Everybody ended up
getting mad at one another over nonsense like what to do with the town hall trash — even though there was hardly ever any. Dump it at Phonse's and pay him a small fee or send it to the mainland or just heave it into the ocean? Another environmental argument that was never resolved. Moses volunteered to haul it to
his
property and put it in a hole and bury it and some people had found fault with that. So they stopped having meetings. And the hall grew lonely, diminished in esteem, and dust gathered for conventions inside.

The dust made Elise sneeze. She was allergic to dust mite excrement and here she was among a whole universe of dust mites left to hatch and feast and roam about. She decided she could handle it. Something important was happening here. Canadian politics. Nova Scotian democracy in action. Something she could talk to Bruce about when he came up from Wall Street — or
down
from Wall Street as they would say on the island. The island was down. Everything else in the world was up. Even South Carolina was “up” from here.

Kit would have sat next to Sylvie but she didn't want to be up front. She sat in the back, and not far away from her, leaning against the back wall, was that college kid, Greg Cookson. Came to the island one day counting things and forgot to go home. The Swinnemars said he could have the fish shack on the front point for the summer and he went crazy fixing it up with discarded lumber and bent nails. Only today was Greg beginning to realize that his final report to the province (before he had quit his summer job) was somehow useful to these two assholes from the mainland.

Everybody in the room knew there was bad news coming. The good news was always
no
news, when everyone off-island left them alone. But now this.

Sim Corkum rubbed back his thinning hair three times when he stood up, as if paving the way for what was to follow.
“I want to thank you all for coming out tonight and I apologize for intruding into your well-deserved free time. I'm not going to talk too long but I just want to say that we've always had good relations with Ragged Islanders ever since the D. O. T. took over the ferry service. I know that Gil Lovelace has done a good job under contract for us to keep your roads in order and plow the snow in the winter, and our department appreciates his work.”

A couple of men with reddish sunburnt faces laughed, someone hooted, and there was one set of hands that applauded. Truth was Gil Lovelace did have the contract but did a bad job, or at least a lackadaisical one. Potholes aplenty in the summer. In the winter, snow had to be a foot or more before he'd start up his damn rig and do anything, but people generally didn't like to complain. If you did, you'd end up with some asshole like Corkum down here in the town hall trying to change things and make it worse. Lovelace himself cleared his throat heavily and with significant orchestration, wanted to spit but thought better of doing it in the hall and swallowed whatever he'd sucked up from the back of his throat.

“Now this meeting tonight,” Sim continued,“isn't going to be easy for me or you or Dancy here but I hope you'll bear with us because there's a silver lining to this thing and you just have to let him get around to it.” At that, Sim knew he better just shut up because he was setting everybody on edge, the very thing he was trying not to do. “So I'll just say it's good to see all of you here tonight and turn things over to Dancy Moxon, your elected representative.”

Scattered polite applause, cursory and insincere. Dancy stood up, studied the tips of his fingers, and looked up at the dark space above the exposed rafters.“God, I love this island,” he began.“You know, people in Halifax don't understand about places like this. They don't understand the importance of men and women and their families and their honourable traditions of working on the
sea, farming the land. They're too detached from all that now and they live in a different world. But I don't need to tell you that.”

Men fidgeted in their seats. Phonse Doucette couldn't keep his mouth shut so he blurted out, “Jeezus, Dancy, don't give us none of that sweet shit. Just cut to the chase and save the heavy breathing.” Which was pretty polite considering what Phonse really wanted to say.

“See. That's what I mean. You're a people who won't stand for all the foolish diddle daddle of bureaucrats and city talk. So I will ‘cut to the chase' as Mr. Doucette said. I'm here tonight to offer you a challenge and a great opportunity. The world's changing out there and I can't stop it. I can't do a damn thing about what they do in Ottawa, slashing those transfer payments, ripping the heart out of our social safety net and taking your tax money and wasting it on pension plans for Quebec senators. I can't change that. But what I can do is keep your voice alive in Halifax. I let the premier know at every blessed cabinet meeting who I represent and he hears me loud and clear.