Sea of Tranquility (19 page)

“So when I hear him tell me that he's cutting the ferry service for good to Ragged Island, claiming that it's too expensive, too shamefully expensive amidst all the belt-tightening and squeezing of our financial resources, I stand up and say, ‘Mr. Premier, I'm not going to let you do that to the good people of Ragged Island.'”

“You're damn straight on that,” Moses cut in. “You cut the ferry service and you'd cut the lifeline to this island.”

Sim Corkum began to worry over a bit of a sunburn scab on his nose as Dancy nodded like he understood ever so well what folks were thinking about. “Well, there it is. I know you don't want me pussy-footing around it. I fought the good fight, friends. But I lost. That decision has already come down and I'm going to tell you what it was. And how it happened. Ottawa cut us back to the bare bones. You've all read the papers. We had a
choice. We either close down hospitals or we trim the transportation budget. We send people with cancer back home to die or we treat them. And in order to treat them we have to lose three ferry routes in this province along with cutting back in a hundred other places. All of which is gonna hurt, I know.”

People were on their feet. Men and women were mouthing curses in English, German, and French. Dancy stood his ground, took it all in. Sylvie thought his eyes were beginning to water. Was he feeling hurt at the rage of his constituents or was it well-deserved heartburn from his meal at the Aetna? She dared not guess which. Sylvie sat still as a stone. There was an odd numbness she felt in her toes and fingers, a dizziness in her head and a great hollow sensation in her chest.

“Dancy,” Moses said. “We're not going to let you screw us like this.”

Other people were less polite. Epithets were hurled. Sim looked with glazed eyes at the back wall. He'd driven down this road before, knew all the twists and turns, knew how to get himself out of a ditch if he had to, knew there would be a smooth patch further ahead to take a deep breath and cool off. All he had to do was keep from getting sucked into a public argument. Put a good face on it like Dancy. Damn, if the man didn't have the silver tongue of the devil himself. Some truth in what he said, but there was a prize awaiting Dancy if he could cut the budget. Dancy never went out on a limb like this unless there was something in it for him, probably get himself bumped up to a better cabinet posting. That would do it.

“Look, it's already done. By October of this year. And as far as I could tell, the province was going to do frig all to help you adjust. But that's when I put my fist down and said no way. So I fought for you again and now we have a plan.”

Everyone was talking to each other now. Chewing over this inevitable, impossible news. “Look, we've had meetings in
Halifax and stared at this thing upside down and sideways until we were cross-eyed. Your ferry was costing us, each year, over a thousand dollars per person. Unless we raise the fare to fifty dollars a head, each way, we still couldn't make a go of it. There was some hope for the tourism side of things. I argued until I was blue in the face about the spin-off dollars that went into mainland businesses and money coming into the province with the tourists but you and I know that things changed. Who ya gonna blame? Mother Nature?”

Moses seethed with rage. It was as if Dancy was pointing a finger at him. What the hell could he do if the whales stopped coming? He couldn't keep his mouth shut.“We're not going to take this lying down.”

“S'right,” Phonse said, loud enough to hear the echo in the room from the high ceiling. He was thinking about his arsenal of weapons. A lot of people on the island had become pretty good marksmen thanks to his outdoor arcade (as he was calling it now). And he had a pretty fair loyal following on the mainland, customers who would be cut off from their water taxi ride to his junkyard. Hell, he was about to lose everything he'd worked for all his life.

Dancy held his hands up in the air and offered up a theatrical glum look.“I know what you're feeling and I hear you. The bottom line is this. Nobody has to move off the island. But if you are willing to relocate, we're going to foot the bill. We're going to offer every bit of assistance we can and we'll even buy your property at the assessed value.”

Joe Krauss spoke up now.“You and I know that our homes aren't assessed at fair market value.”

Dancy shook his head, acknowledging this point. “Funny, nobody's ever complained before about their assessment. Nobody's ever come to the tax office to say they are not paying enough taxes and want us to raise their assessment.”

It was a cruel blow. Dancy knew he better cut it out. He was right on that point but he had to be more cautious.

“But what about the older kids who go to school on the mainland?” Kit asked.“How are they going to go back and forth?”

“They'll need to find a place to stay on the mainland if the families don't want to move.”

“How's this going to affect my school here on the island?”

Dancy was up against it again. “Education has decided the island school's cost is ineffective.”

“So you want us all to bloody move off the island, don't you?” Viddy blurted out.“Who are you, Joey Smallwood? What the hell is going on here?”

“Look. Each of you is going to receive the package of what we can offer. Some will want to stay, some will want to leave. What we're offering, I repeat, is an opportunity here. I'd suggest you don't turn it down. It will only happen once. And if it wasn't for me — I know you don't want to hear this — but if it wasn't for me, you'd all have squat. You'd lose the ferry and be on your own. Now you will have a compensation package, moving assistance, a buy-out of your property if you so desire, and back on the mainland you'll have full services, schools, hospital, the whole shebang.”

Moses was silently considering the alternative. What if he took up the slack and turned his boat into a shuttle to the mainland? He thought it through right down to fuel costs and knew that it was a losing proposition. He'd have to work his ass off back and forth each day and he'd have to charge twenty bucks, maybe thirty, or even fifty. It wouldn't work. He wished the numbers added up differently.

Dancy and Sim were walking now toward the back door, ignoring the faces. Somebody tore up paper and tossed it at Dancy; that was as physical as it got. Greg leaned against the back wall and regretted his role, however small, in what was
happening here. The ferry was waiting, the very boat destined to be axed for good come fall.

Sylvie sat silently, her hands folded. Kit came up and sat down beside her with hurt and madness in her eyes. Sylvie took her in her arms and rocked her like a little child while others watched them. Sylvie was the oldest islander. In many people's minds, Sylvie represented the island and its past. Now this.

Sylvie rocked Kit and wondered what it would be like to be an old woman, left alone to herself on a deserted island. How long would it take for almost all of them to leave, despite their loyalty, once they were cut off from the mainland, set adrift. What would happen when she needed medical help? She knew she could not leave but that the government would try to pressure her into doing so.

She couldn't bear the thought of leaving her four dead husbands and their graves. She could not even begin to tolerate the idea of
not
waking up in her house,
not
having her backyard, never again going to sit by the sea at the Trough and wait for whales. She knew the world had moved on without her — the mainland world. Her existence, her life, her dreams were inconsequential. Sylvie felt the eighty years of her life collect and push down on her as if the gravity of the planet had just increased tenfold. She began to sink into the depths of the Sea of Cold, the Bay of Despair. Sylvie hugged Kit to her and wondered if she might not be approaching a good time to give up her allegiance to life. Eighty years on. Better to collect it all and say it had been a very good life. The best. Better that than leave the island.

No. She could not live on the mainland. She envisioned the town. Mutton Hill Harbour. And the hospital there. She had not thought about the hospital for a long time. She had not thought about the baby.

Kyle Bauer's father had drowned at sea in a fishing accident, as had his older brother,Taggert. Kyle himself had put in two years working on long liners out of Lunenberg before he found himself
one day on the Grand Banks in the middle of his first truly vicious storm. A November hurricane, the last of the season; the first that year, however, to make it this far north.

Kyle came within six inches of going over the rail when one of his shipmates reached out a hand and grabbed the back of his rain gear as he started to go over the side. Kyle fell back onto deck, locked onto something solid, and hung on, barely able to pull oxygen into his lungs, the air was so full of sea water. He lay like that, shivering and crying, until the captain steered the ship out of the worst of the storm, and they had to pry what was left of the young Bauer kid off the deck plates. Whoever had saved his life had gone overboard. Three men in all had fallen prey to the hunger of the sea: Kessel, Hennigar, and Johnson. Kyle thought it was Hennigar who had saved him but he could never be sure, so he prayed for all three and spoke highly of all of them to anyone who would listen. Hennigar was a heavy drinker who kept a knife in his pants and would use it on anyone who he felt deserved it; Kessel was quiet and moody and never had any time for anyone; Johnson was a bully who always liked to pick on the weaker men on the
Good Fortune
. One of the bastards had saved his life.

It was 1942, a bad year for the planet, when Kyle Bauer left the sea for good and took up farming. But instead of moving down to his family's old acreage in New Germany, Kyle was lured to Ragged Island, where cabbage was king.

He held fast to the railing as he sailed out on the ferry, on a clear day in June, to see what there was to see on Ragged Island. An island at sea seemed an unlikely place to have a sauerkraut plant, but there it was — a big old warehouse by the government wharf where island women shredded cabbage heads with knives that looked like sickles and dumped the cabbage into brine solutions. There was a growing mainland market for island sauerkraut. It had a reputation as being the best sauerkraut in North America. It was served in fancy Halifax restaurants. It was shipped
by the truckload across Canada and down into the Boston States. Better still, Ragged Island Sauerkraut had landed a massive contract to supply the armed forces. Canadian soldiers would go into battle against German troops with salted cabbage (made from the oldest of German recipes) in their stomachs.

Kyle had never been to the island before. All he knew was downtown Mutton Hill Harbour, the waterfront of Lunenberg, and throwing up on ships bobbing up and down on sickening swells over the Grand Banks.

Even though it was an island, in the middle you could forget the sea. It had a prairie sky, old swayback barns painted with ochre paint, a big empty forty-acre field going to wild mustard, and Kyle had money burning a hole in his pocket.

If he acted immediately, he could still plant for the coming summer season, but he'd have to move quick. So he leased the field and the ancient barn in poor repair. He hired old Mr. Swinnemar to plow the place for him and Kyle began to plant cabbage — just him and a hoe.

And then it rained for nearly a month. Kyle holed up in the barn and read from a stack of old
Weekend
magazines he found there. He made friends with the field mice and thought he was beginning to comprehend the language of the ravens who visited. At night there were owls and even bats. He thought it was all much better than being at sea. He thanked God every single damp night of that month that he was no longer a fisherman.

It was during the third week of the rainy season at about ten o'clock in the morning when he heard someone knocking at the barn door. When he opened it he saw it was a young woman — a tall, elegant slip of a thing with brown hair tied up in a bun. She wore a long dress and had a picnic basket in her arms. “Come in, please.”

Lately, Kyle had only been communicating with ravens, mice, bats, and owls and had lost a good grasp of the English language.
He remembered that someone from Lunenburg had told him that most people on the island, cut off as they were, still spoke German instead of English. He could still remember his own grandparents speaking in German when he was quite young.

Sylvie Young walked into the gloom of the barn and smelled the wet hay. It was intoxicating. She saw a bed of straw underneath a tarp slung up over the beam to keep the insistent rains out.“One more week of this and the sun will be out, you'll see,” she said.

“I'm not complaining.”

“Hungry?”

Kyle felt a little dizzy. Hungry, he was. Hungry for food, for companionship, for something more than the way he'd been living here. Hungry for life to start over for him. He wanted to shout it all out but he held it back, didn't want to scare the young woman. What was she? Twenty-three, twenty-four? Older than him but only by a year or two he guessed.

“I'm Sylvie. Live out at the end of the road. Up Along. Brought you some bread. And cookies. And tea. Do you drink tea?”

“Yes, please.”

Kyle lit an old kerosene lamp so he could see her better. The place was like a dungeon but as the warm yellow light came up, it transformed instantly into a palace.
Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie
. He took one sip of tea and stared into her dark, warm eyes and his life story spilled out of him. Then he let go a deep, significant sigh that had been trapped inside him for either three weeks or all his life. And he felt so much better.

And Sylvie understood, or at least thought she understood. She believed she knew all about men and their dreams and their intentions. Sylvie, who had sworn off ever getting involved with any man after the death of David, also felt something let go inside her chest. Kyle's story had suddenly reminded her that men were also human.