Two New Guys

The two young fellows chatted as they walked up the slope from the ferry dock. They stopped at the road, shook hands, and went their separate ways.

Willie Whittle watched them from the ticket booth as the taller one, with the black hair down to his shoulders, turned and waved. Willie gave him a thumbs-up. As he had walked off the ferry, he had stopped beside Willie and said, “Hi. I’m looking for a family called Spinner.”

Willie grinned and looked up at the BC Ferries sign above the dock: “SPINNER’S INLET.” “Looks like you came to the right place,” he said. “Which one do you want? Samson, Rachel, or Jackson?”

“Rachel? She’s still alive?”

“You might want to ask her.” He considered that. “Or maybe not. What’s your name?”

The young man told him, then said, “I’ll try Samson.”

“Up the hill, left onto the highway, about one kilometre, left again, road down toward the water, giant cedar on each side, big old house on a ridge. Can’t miss it. Good luck.”

Willie turned to the other young man, another stranger, about the same age as the first one, with a mop of fair hair. “Help you?” and soon gave him his directions, too. Willie made a mental note: Phone Silas at The Tidal Times. Item for the social column. A two-beer tip, surely.

The big old house, built with first-growth, rough-sawn timbers and rocks hauled up from the beach, sat like a sentinel above the inlet that the first Spinners had named more than a century and a half before.

A man in his sixties, wearing workboots, experienced jeans, a logger’s shirt, and a perplexed look, studied a stone he was about to place on a low wall in need of fixing. The stone seemed considerably bigger than the hole waiting for it. He looked up as the stranger raised a hand and stopped close to him. “Hi. Mr. Spinner?”

Samson examined him. Then more closely. Looked away, then back. “Yes,” he said. “Samson Spinner. Who are you?”

“Also.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m also Samson Spinner.”

Samson Senior placed the stone on the wall near the hole.

“I mean, that’s my name,” the young man offered. “I go by Sam.” He frowned at the unrepaired wall. “I think we are distant cousins, or something.” He seemed fixated on the wall, and the stone, and the hole where it was not going to fit.

Samson said, “Christ.” Then, “I don’t have any spare money.”

Sam shrugged, dismissing the thought. He cocked his head, still staring at the wall.

Samson looked from Sam to his stonework. “Something wrong?”

“Well, I don’t know about wrong, exactly …”

“But?”

“Well, it’s just not how I would have gone about it.” He swept an arm, taking in the whole length, about thirty feet, of the structure, which had an unevenness about it in several spots—dips and humps and such. “It’s going to fall down, eventually.”

“And what would you … ?”

“I’m a waller.”

“A brickie, a bricklayer?”

“Waller.”

“So, a kind of stonemason, then.”

“No, brickies and stonemasons use mortar, like you’ve done in places. It’ll crumble with these salt winds off the water, and …”

“It’ll fall down?”

“Eventually.”

“And if you built it?”

“As I said, I’m a waller. Like many of our—yours and mine—early family members. Dry-stone wallers. I’m from that branch. You lot are from the colliers, worked the pits on the west Cumberland coast. Ours worked on the fells. Then we left as well, went to Newfoundland.” He shrugged, apparently in explanation. “We had an Irishman in the family—my great-great-uncle Patrick something. My aunt Lizzie has it all recorded, a family-tree thing. She goes on Find My Past, Ancestry, UK government records office, those kinds of things. I know quite a bit about us.”

Samson looked at his unfinished job, wiped his hands on his pants. “Tell me about our wallers.”

“Over a beer?”

Samson smiled. He went to the house and returned with two opened bottles of Sleeman’s Honey Brown Lager.

They sat on the deck and Samson listened, and learned. … A trench four or five feet wide … two rows of footing stones on each side … space in between filled with heartening or little rock fragments … subsequent layers on top of the footings … each stone resting on two stones below … and finally the cam stones on top.

“And no mortar?”

Head shake. None.

Samson looked at his wall, considered the stones that lay about on the beach and the ones in the field behind the house. “Tell you what.”

An hour later Rachel Spinner spun her veteran Dodge pickup into Samson’s drive. She climbed out, carrying several three-ring binders.

Sam put down the stone he was holding and watched her as she advanced on him.

“Over here.” Rachel pointed to a convenient log that had sat many Spinners, and opened one of the binders. Sam sat beside her, as directed, and listened and followed Rachel’s finger running across pages of births, marriages, and deaths.

Rachel stopped, stabbed at an entry. “That’s you,” she said. She beckoned Samson over. “That’s him. He’s real. Look at this one. It’s a copy of his great-great-grandfather’s death certificate. Henry Spinner, died in Cockermouth, Cumberland. You know that’s where Wordsworth was born, don’t you? Cause of death, pneumonia. Occupation, waller.”

“They worked winters on the fells,” Sam Spinner said. “Freezing cold, pouring rain, they just kept at it.”

Rachel nodded at Samson. “He’s real, all right.” She examined the corner of the new wall that Sam had started. “I hope you’re paying him for that.” To Sam, “Willie at the ferry said you had a lad with you. Is he another of us?”

“No, but he said like me he’s here looking for a relative, an older one, forget which ‘great’ it was.”

“What’s this older relative’s name?” Rachel asked.

“Svensen.”

“Christ,” Samson said.