The Rest is Silence (4 page)

“Not today, I'm afraid.”

She walks me to the door. I stand, awkward and quiet, wanting her to say more, wanting her to keep me from leaving. I want her hand in mine again.

“Let me get your money.” She turns back into the room.

“Forget it. The rest was good.”

I leave the house.

“By the way,” she says as I stand on the grass below her. “He's not my grandfather.”

Lucy follows me back to the hole and lies nearby while I finish digging. When Art comes back I show him where the pipe is broken.

“I called down to Home Hardware,” he says. “They stopped ordering PVC pipe a month ago. Everybody's afraid it's gonna fall apart like the rest.”

“It won't. It's different plastic.”

“I have a length of the old clay stuff in the shed.”

It is suppertime when we finish, fill the hole, and stomp the ground back into place. Art helps me put the tools back in the shed.

“Will you stay for supper?”

The smell of sewage is stuck in my nostrils if not on my clothes. I look at my pants and shirt sleeves, covered in dirt, and then at him.

“To hell with that.” He waves a thick hand in the air. “I've smelled a lot worse.”

I wash my hands, then stick my head under the tap, revelling in the warmth and volume of water. I grab a towel from the rack and rub my hair. The towel smells like Lina. On the shelf above the toilet is a bottle of geranium essential oil. I consider putting a drop of it on my wrist but think better of it. In the kitchen, I sit on a stool at the counter where Art cuts vegetables for a one-pot chicken casserole. He pulls two bottles of homemade beer from the fridge and puts one in front of me. The cap flips off the stubby brown bottle and rolls in a spiral in front of me.

“To shit staying underground,” he says as he raises his bottle.

Our bottles click and he raises his to take a sip.

“You want a glass?”

I shake my head and tip the bottle to my lips, pretending to drink it. The pine floorboards creak at the back of the house. Lina comes into the kitchen and washes her hands at the sink.

“I was telling our friend here that you don't care much for the sludge at the bottom of my beer.” He winks at me.

“And I told you, Art, it has nothing to do with your sludge.”

Her back is to us. I could lift that braid, feel its heft, coil it around my neck like a heavy scarf. She dries her hands on a dish towel and pours a glass of tap water. She comes to sit on the stool beside me. She smells, not only of flowers, but of laundry hung out in the sun, and when she smiles, I take a small step toward feeling human again, as if there is more to life than splitting firewood and hauling water.

“I tried to draw him while you were in the woods, but it didn't work out.”

“He'd make a good hawk with a nose like that,” Art says.

“His nose wasn't the issue. Some days I can draw and some I can't.”

“On the days you can't, you might as well lay your pencil down and take up a hoe.” He turns to me. “Lina's here to look after Louise's gardens for me. I can do the rough work, but it takes a feminine touch to make the flower beds look like they used to.”

“Your wife?” I say.

“She's living in a home in Bridgetown. Her memory's all shot to hell.”

“I'm sorry.”

He waves me off with a snort. “How can you be sorry? You never knew her.” He continues chopping the onions and carrots. “I hate this time of day. She called it
entre chien et loup
. Soon after Louise and I married, Joshua sold us this land at the edge of the farm he and I grew up on. There was an old house here with its roof caving in. Louise and I were up there together, into November, with the rain beating down on our backs, repairing it. She passed me boards and I'd nail them in place. We shingled the whole thing too.”

He is staring through the window. It's dusk, and though I can see his reflection, he's looking far beyond it as though he were expecting his wife to return from the garden, a spectre holding a hoe and her gardening gloves, mind intact.

After supper, while I help Lina do the dishes, Art gets out his fiddle and plays a melancholy tune. His mood has infected me, and, given Lina's reticence, she and I say little, listening to the plaintive singing of the sheep-gut strings under his bow. She hands me a heavy pottery plate, handmade, and our hands touch for the second time. Her tapered fingers return to the sudsy water and massage the sponge against a cup. When she hands it to me and meets my gaze I realize I've been staring. I look down and go back to wiping the plate.

Before it gets dark, I get on my bike for the long, slow ride uphill. Half an hour later I climb into my tent. The air is hot and the sweaty skin of my legs and back sticks to the nylon of my sleeping bag. I close my eyes, see Lina's, and can't sleep. I turn on the AM radio and tune in stations from the States. The baseball game from Boston, music, evangelists spouting their apocalyptic gibberish. Then, farther along the dial, a news report that makes me question if it is gibberish after all.

. . . the lack of plastic containers of many kinds has fuelled a drastic shortage of blood for surgeries in most hospitals. Authorities attribute this primarily to the loss of plastic collection bags and tubing. The dissolution of these and many other plastics has authorities baffled, but new evidence confirms the spread of a strain, or strains, of genetically engineered bacteria.

Blackouts continue to plague most cities as the coating on high-voltage power lines is dissolving or being eaten. The nylon in gas tanks is being digested from the outside and people are finding their cars standing in puddles of gas.

And while most computers continue to be susceptible as key components disintegrate, one company's products appear to be immune to this biological threat. Horus Computers' sales have skyrocketed. Company spokespeople say they simply can't keep pace with the demand even with the influx of money from the U.S. and Chinese governments to expand production.

It's only a matter of time before all this reaches out here. It's perverse, I know, but listening to this soothes me to sleep.

*

I am in a lake sinking and wanting to touch bottom. I empty my lungs and move my arms upwards to propel me down. Down, down to the soft bottom, where the muck oozes between my toes. My body feels weightless as I crouch, then push off, now hoping for the surface. The lack of air makes my skinny body less buoyant. I ought to feel like I am flying, but the movement is too slow, the leaden-footed escape from nightmare monsters. I am made of stone. My muscles ache for oxygen as I struggle for the surface. It is right there, the partition between water and air. The blue sky and the sun's orange shimmering down to me. At last I burst through this limen, open my mouth, and gasp in breath after grateful breath.

It is early morning, and I have been sleeping on my back again. My sleeping bag is unzipped and covers one leg. There is the sound of rain hitting the leaves outside my tent. These drowning dreams began soon after my father killed himself. What if I did not wake up, if I continued to sink and couldn't open my mouth no matter how I craved to inhale? That is a scab I am in the habit of picking and won't let heal. Scabs are reminders that something's gone wrong. In bed, I try to piece together what that something is, breathing in, out.

One night when I was a child, waking from a nightmare, I called to my father, and though my voice was hushed out of fear that the fox in my dream would get me, Dad heard and came to comfort me.

“Hey, bud, try to fall asleep on your side, O.K.? I have nightmares too when I sleep on my back.”

He sat on the edge of my bed and calmed me by rubbing my back until I fell asleep again. In the morning the daylight allowed me to wonder how I could ever have been afraid.

After he died, after he left without so much as a note explaining why, I felt him near me as a presence. For months after he died, whenever I was home from school, I'd open the door to his closet, run my fingers over his pants and his suit, and bury my face in his shirts. I slept with one of his shirts on my pillow. Over time, as I fell back into my routine at school, I was surprised when I noticed that I had a few minutes or part of an hour when I hadn't thought of him. And then his scent faded. I couldn't tell if he was leaving slowly or if I was pulling away from him by continuing to live. His presence dimmed as I ate and slept and lived without him, but there continue to be times, mostly at night, mostly when I dream, when he comes back.

I think of Art and the way he said he finds that Louise's physical presence has been replaced by silence. His memories can't keep that silence from roaring across the bay, through his woods, over the roof they repaired and shingled together, and on up the mountain. Something almost clicks into place for me — the sense of drowning, suffocation, people leaving without saying goodbye — and I roll that something into a ball and hold it in my head for another breath, trying to make sense of it. I exhale all of it hoping it will go where it needs to go and I can be done with it.

I open the tent door. The sound of the zipper is all there is besides the rain. But, hey, what's this? Sunshine. Again. The flutter of poplar leaves has fooled me into welcoming rain that still has not come. I pull on my shorts and a T-shirt. I don't need to garden today. The garlic bulbs I've harvested, gleaming white and tied in bunches, are hanging to dry from the branches under the canvas tarp of my outdoor kitchen.

I cook oats on the stove and carry them into the garden, picking blueberries as I go and dropping them in the pot. The crunch of the dry grass under my bare feet sounds like the crackling fire I have most nights in front of my tent. The garden craves rain and the road needs rain and the leaves of the dusty poplars lining that road beg for rain. All that dust has been churned up by the pickups, tractors, hay wagons, and manure spreaders that use Lily Lake Road as a shortcut. I can do nothing about the lack of rain, but I can wash the dust off my skin in the pond down the hill. I leave the empty bowl by the stove.

At the base of the steep hill Lily Lake Road becomes paved and crosses the main road connecting Margaretsville to the town of Middleton. Then there is a small, fenced cemetery next to Phinney's Pond. A man who once owned my land is buried there among the dandelions and dry grass, the candy wrappers and broken glass. Phineas Bent was descended from a New England Planter, Elijah Bent, who received a land grant in 1760 from the governor of Nova Scotia following the expulsion of the Acadians. Elijah moved his family from Sudbury, Massachusetts, to twelve hundred acres of fertile land straddling the Annapolis River and running up the North Mountain. Generations of Bents made their home in the Annapolis Valley, including Phineas, and with each new batch of sons, parcels were carved off the family grant until all that remained was the fraction of rock and trees and blackflies I bought. As far as I know neither Phineas nor any of the Bents lived on what is now my land. There's a rotting door hanging from the trunk of a balsam fir not far from my tent, and I found one high-heeled shoe deep in the woods. But that's it for evidence of habitation.

Some of the gravestones have eroded, their archaic lettering unreadable. A few have toppled or broken. Phineas is buried off to one side. He was an RCAF officer who died in 1942. The lettering on his marble stone has sharp edges.

Beloved in life

Cherished in memory

He liveth and was cut down like a flower.

Despite the poetry on some of the stones, I don't go in the graveyard anymore and am glad it's fenced. I don't need to have Phineas haunting me. I'm not sure that memory is something to cherish. It may be a blessing, but nostalgia is a curse, and the line between them is thin. I'm tripping over it too often these days.

You're supposed to pay a quarter to use the beach since it's part of a private campground, but it is rare that anyone is present at the canteen to collect my change, and there's nobody here today. This is the distilled essence of my experience of rural Nova Scotia: a canteen with ice cream cones and potato chips, change rooms that double as outhouses, the twenty-five-cent swim. What can you get for a quarter anywhere else these days? It's as if I travelled thirty years back in time when I came here. I change into my running shorts in a rank outhouse and choose to think that the damp on the soles of my bare feet is condensation from the plywood floor. On the way to the shore of the pond I wipe my feet across the dry grass, then on the coarse sand of the beach. I wish I could strip on the shore and swim naked, but getting caught once was enough. The morning that happened, I had believed it was early enough that nobody would be around. The man who surprised me took one look and turned away without saying a word. He looked at least as embarrassed as I was. I can't afford to be ostracized, and the locals already have me pegged as strange, even though they are polite. They drive by me as I'm riding my ratty old bike, my long hair flowing out of my Blue Jays cap, and must wonder what a Come From Away thinks he's doing buying a chunk of rocky forest, living in a tent, and trying to grow peas and carrots in bedrock.

Dad and I used to walk over to Crystal Lake and swim off the public dock when I was a kid. I always found it hard to jump into cold water. I would count out loud, one, two, three, and run off the end. I had to talk myself into jumping, though I knew it was inevitable.