BY MID-AFTERNOON, FLOSSY O’REILLY could draw a satisfied line through each of the chores on her list: kitchen swept, beds made, groceries in, flowerpots watered.
With a good three hours to go before her company arrived, all that was left was to find Jimmy and call Richard, which she was studiously putting off. Then wait. Something she’d never done all that well.
“Out you go Oscar; let’s get some air in our pants.” She grabbed her straw hat and walking stick, nudged the cat outside and headed for the car again. A cicada whined somewhere in the butternut tree. The old Valiant was steamy inside. She opened both front windows and, as she turned the key, the engine jostled to attention.
Jimmy had given her the rusting ’75 Valiant five years ago. He loved that old car too much to send it to the scrapyard where it properly belonged. She’d had to learn to drive a standard gearshift at seventy-eight. Learn to drive, more precisely, though some would have winked behind her back at that notion. It didn’t bother Flossy; mostly she never shifted out of second anyway. A small tank on wheels, Falstaff, as she’d christened the car, was visibly crumbling in the body but staunchly reliable in the soul. In a bitter nor’easter it would start like a John Deere tractor. She patted the dash affectionately. The car lurched towards the intersection of the main street where Flossy turned right and rumbled over the metal bridge crossing the Great Village River.
The first house beyond was where dotty old Uncle Amon had died. She’d taken an early disliking to him. “Our Jimmy, here,” Uncle Amon, on the O’Reilly side, would announce with a tight grin to a room full of people, his lower teeth having to hold his upper plate in place, “always lands with his arse in the buther,” slapping the silent boy on the back, “don’t ya Jimmy?”
It was so, but Flossy could always sense Jimmy’s silent humiliation. Her younger brother had been the O’Reillys’ miracle boy, the bystander to every one of the tragedies of their lives yet always himself squeaking through. At least — Flossy glanced in the rear-view mirror at the cars in a tight line behind her — at least from what anyone could tell. She pulled over to let them pass.
Clusters of clapboard houses, a gas station, two general stores and the fire department all seemed Sunday-morning sleepy, though it was Friday afternoon. This kind of heat, Flossy knew, could imprison people in their homes every bit as much as three feet of snow. Most of the houses were painted white, though some of the younger people were branching into sage and taupe. (Mealie’s influence there. She herself would have said green and brown.) They faced each other across the main paved road that cut an elbow through the village, a country highway known as Route 2 on maps but more commonly referred to locally by whatever lay beyond: the Road to Bass River or Economy, even Parrsboro, a town forty miles away. It was the same with other streets. Everyone called the newly named Lornevale Road, any one of the more familiar Old Post Road, the Scrabble Hill Road or the Cumberland Road for the county beyond Colchester.
It was on this road, a century earlier, that the much-loved Hiram Hyde raced his stagecoach along the mail route to Amherst. The man was so affable, and the letters he delivered so cherished, that for half a century babies would be named for him all up and down that road and clear back to Halifax.
Cheerful red geraniums poured from window boxes. Planters hung from porches. Idle swings awaited cool, unhurried evenings when men and women might rest and watch the neighbours strolling past, though few ever did. Many of the houses distinguished themselves with a modest splashing of paint here and there: a bold raspberry door, dainty lemon-yellow window frames,a royal-blue rocking chair unmoving on a porch.
Outside the Esso station loudspeakers broadcast a woman’s sad song over the whine of a steel guitar. Across the street was the Bulmer house where Elizabeth Bishop once lived. Poor old Mrs. Bulmer wouldn’t have liked that country music serenading her day and night. You could be thankful for some people that they were long dead and gone.
The old clapboard United Church with a huge black spire sat unavoidably in the centre of the village where the main road jogged a dogleg left. You had to turn one way or the other around it or you’d end up in the narthex. Flossy could see the spire from her kitchen window. In fact, on a close summer Sunday with the church doors open, she could hear the Chief Gougers singing “How Great Thou Art,” the soloist’s warble swooping across the Great Village River and up Hustler’s Hill to their houses along this side of the Station Road, “Now sing my so-o-oul …”
If she happened to be pottering in the garden just then, she would shortly after hear Mealie’s windows slamming. No other tune, she’d said, could get stuck on a loop in her brain quite like that one. “I’d much prefer to hum the dial tone.”
That church, St. James United, its sermons and seasons, the choir, Reverend Mumford, the literary group that met there each month, these had marked and measured Flossy’s days, weeks and years for the better part of her young adult life. They’d meant nearly everything to her at one time, and now almost nothing at all. The lofty spire held not much more significance than Rick Moore’s brand new grain silos, a mark on the horizon to take her physical bearings on a cloudy day. Sin and salvation seemed the senseless preoccupations of a whole other lifetime. How strange to have got so out of the habit of such a habit.
So out of the habit that she’d left Mealie explicit instructions that there’d be no service when she died. Nothing. Flossy wasn’t going to let any minister who didn’t even know her by name have the last word over her life. She thought of David as her foot came off the gas. When the car chugged she blinked to attention as if to reverse the memory. She pressed the gas again, refusing to wallow in that sad marsh today. Someone behind scolded her with a blast of the horn for dawdling. She was always getting that.
Beyond the church, she met two other cars and a lumber truck. When houses gave way to farmland again, she slowed to turn south off the highway and drove the gravel road towards Spencer’s Point. She parked the car at the dead end, high up on the cliff overlooking the bay, and got out. She scanned the shore down towards Jimmy’s weir. No sign of him. She lifted her head and took a deep breath of salty air.
Back at the car, she grabbed her walking stick and hat and made her way east along the red sand and gravel roadway that cut through the orchard of the old Spencer farm and curled down towards the shore. It was not a real road; it was truck ruts with weeds growing up between them, what the locals’ pickups carved out of the sandy soil on their way to the water’s edge for beer and a weekend bonfire.
A jackrabbit jumped out and bounced off in front of her as if an unsteady old woman were any threat to such sturdy legs. A dozen decrepit apple trees on either side of the narrow track, some cleaved by lightning down the middle of the trunk, others with fallen branches, seemed to all but bow as she walked past, like a band of gouty Arthurian knights pointing the way to the water’s edge. In spite of their want of care, the old trees were thick with apples, dotting the grass below them and spilling onto the roadway: russets, yellow transparents, Bishop Pippins, all pocked with rusty wormholes and crawling with wasps. She could smell their overripe sweetness.
Flossy couldn’t come by here without looking over to where the Spencer house once stood. Momentarily overcome by weariness, she stepped from the road then through the tall grass to a tree stump out of the sun not far from what must have been a front porch before a wayward cigarette made kindling of it all. Everything took so much more effort these days. She sat down and closed her eyes to catch her breath.
The old Spencer sisters came to mind like heat radiating up from the parched earth, as did Palmeter’s Ghost who, some said, inhabited the house after the ladies were taken away. Flossy, of course, didn’t believe in ghosts but there were, lamentably, some things the memory didn’t have sense enough to put out. How long had that house been gone? A dozen years or more? She couldn’t be sure. Time had got away from her, and there was Palmeter taking up precious memory when whole decades seemed razed altogether, like the house that once stood right there.
Dried raspberry canes arched aimlessly above the tall grass. The leaves and browned seed heads at the top of a spindly old lilac cluster that once thrived outside the Spencer sisters’ kitchen window leaned over the burnt-out hole as if to peer into all that was left of a life. A cabbage butterfly drifted from goldenrod to fleabane and back. Seated there, Flossy surveyed the scene, a perfect study of nature reclaiming its own. If she hadn’t already known precisely where the house sat, she’d have missed it altogether. There was no scrap of paper, wood or metal left, no teacup shard or broken plate poking from the earth, no rusted enamel pots or cans, nothing to kick or dig out with the heel. There were only botanical clues, remnants of domestication scattered here and there, the lilac, rhubarb to the west, the yew and mock orange already reclining over the cliff.
Flossy got to her feet again and walked slowly downhill through a wooded area with a thick canopy of maple, yellow birch, larch and poplar. Beyond it, at the water’s edge, she squinted out across the bay, a hand shading her eyes. Here was an old friend, a place open and predictable to gather some perspective and think things through. She looked in both directions up and down the shore again. Alone, with the tide rolling in, she leaned on the walking stick, her feet planted solidly at the water’s edge, a speck of navy in a straw hat beside a vast indifference.
This was her place of rest now, in spite of the O’Reillys’ long genealogy of sorrow here. She inhaled the smell of fishy waters, the most primal smell she knew. Some mornings when fog closed down the village she could smell the bay’s breath through her open bedroom window. It was easy to think nothing ever happened out here, though in fact the bay and its tides were a force of unending change.
From the time her grandparents settled along here, these waters were the only means of getting to places near and far: Old Barns, Halifax, Boston, England. It was the age of sail and you were a man blessed to get government pay as a Waiter and Watcher of Tides. Nearly a hundred great ships were built and launched from Great Village throughout the last century to sail as far away as India and Australia. They ferried passengers and goods back and forth from this very spot to all parts of Europe, Nova Scotia and the Boston States. It had even been one of the Cobequid captains who’d taken Stanley to find Livingston in the heart of Africa. The Great Village port bustled with commerce along natural north-south lines, people leaving to find work — young women as domestics and men as labourers — some returning home to marry and others to die. Vessels picking their way into this port brought manufactured goods, kerosene, molasses, rum, even exotic spices from as far away as the Caribbean Islands and loaded up again with cargo of iron ore, coal or lumber for the areas all along the Eastern seaboard.
It was all gone now, save a single line of ragged, bleached timbers where once a wharf had been. It always reminded Flossy of a prehistoric creature that washed up there and breathed its last, leaving behind the melancholy grin of a lower jawbone.
She looked behind again to the land. The cliffs were pocked with bank swallows’ nests. For the better part of a century the Spencer family had kept a light right up there, above where Flossy stood, above the swallows. At first it was only a lantern set out on a post each night of the year by Afford Spencer, the son of a sea captain, to warn ships that here the land jutted out into the bay and guide his father home. Later a kerosene lamp was built into a widow’s walk at the top of the house and Afford’s daughters continued to keep it lit every night of the year for another forty years after their father died.
A century of nights: those poor old ducks guarding the lamp through blizzard and gale, in sickness and health, awake all hours, watching, watching, never letting it go out, so steadfast and duty-driven. Even as they began to creak and dodder themselves, they kept that lamp lit, though ship travel had all but died, old women guarding a flame for a lover who’d long ago forgotten them. When it all got beyond them and the light, at last, went out,it was all let go, the dredging and navigational aids. All of it.
Nowadays you’d be lucky to see a boat of any kind out here from one year to the next, not a sunfish, kayak or motorboat hauled from Maine or Ontario by tourists buying up waterfront property who knew none of the dangers of those Fundy tides moving restlessly in and out of Cobequid Bay. After centuries of living along this shore, most people around there still didn’t look to the water as a place of any amusement.
Everything the Spencers had dedicated their lives to, their vast fidelity, had been quietly overtaken as sailing ships and steamers were replaced by roads, bridges and a railway that made effortless what had once been near-impossible overland travel.
She looked for Jimmy again, shading her eyes in the direction of the sun. He often ran Logie along here in the late afternoon. No sign. She thought again of that day by the water as children with their father. Without so much as a word whispered between them, she’d counted on Jimmy’s silence and he hadn’t disappointed, young as he was. Now she couldn’t shake a bit of substance out of him if his life depended on it. If he wasn’t talking about the weather, it was someone’s gammy hip, and if it wasn’t that, it was bugs on the potatoes.
She’d always hoped to talk to his girls, knowing he never could. She might have told them about Thomas and their grandfather to warn them of what might be lurking in their genetic roulette wheel. People always said these things ran in families, but as time went on and the culture of silence persisted, it just seemed easier to let it drift. The girls were never curious anyway, never came around for that kind of talk. You could be sure Jimmy’d not say a word. He could keep a lot inside him. Too much. She wished there were something to do for him, but you never could comfort a brother.
The water was friendly today, smooth as glass. Standing by the land’s lip, she’d swear it was barely moving, just breathing in and out again with each wave breaking on sand. If she didn’t know in her head that close to forty feet of water came in and went out of here twice a day, she could think it was innocent as an inland lake. As far as she could see there was just shrinking or expanding glass.
“Get the goddamn into the goddamned boat.” She clenched her eyes to let the breeze push the memory along but it only rose up stronger, her father’s blue-red face, the veins bulging at his temple. So, so much had slipped through the floorboards of her memory over the years, why not this? She tried to outwit the recollection by calculating the years again. Did Jimmy remember? Could anyone possibly forget?
Their miracle boy with his arse in the butter. You could easily think such big men as Jimmy capable of absorbing any amount of shock, forget about them as you forgot about a sturdy stone wall or these endless stretches of shoreline, especially so when you already had a Thomas on your hands, crushed by the fears and fidgets of his own imagination. But just let the slow drip of water at the sturdy wall, the constant wash of wave against it for any length of time, you’d know differently.
Out here, you could get caught out thinking the land was the constant, the solid earth was what you put your faith in. Oh no, Flossy knew water, endlessly patient water, with time long on its side, was by far the stronger. When her grandparents first came to this area, the bay was no more than four miles across, now it easily measured seven. Whole farms and an entire baseball field had been washed away.
She looked back across the water, peaceful as a sleeping child. Nobody looking at it on such a day would ever believe how vicious it could be when it took a mind to blow up a storm. Not nice little waves lapping spume over the sand nor even picturesque whitecaps chasing each other to shore, but god-almighty breakers crashing up against twenty-foot cliffs to put the fear of God into you, ripping away four feet of embankment, gorging on mature spruce trees and spewing them out to sea. The water won every time.
A cloud of sandpipers suddenly dropped in from the north, skimming along the water’s edge in perfect formation in front of her, one piece of shimmering silk lifting now, tilting left, right, like a scarf thrown into the air, that abruptly lands and begins its feverish feeding along the water’s edge, all individuals again bustling along on spindle-shanks, eyes to the ground. Without warning, they spooked as a unit, lifted and glided again as one body down shore, up, up, left, right and down again. She thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s magnificent sandpiper poem, how she often likened herself to the frenzied little bird searching the edge of the shore.
Now, there was another lucky-unlucky soul. Elizabeth and Thomas had started Primer class and grade one together — Flossy was sure she still had their school photo; she must pull it out for Richard. Her father died in Massachusetts shortly after Elizabeth’s birth and from there her mother began an unravelling that eventually saw her committed to the Mount Hope Asylum in Dartmouth for the rest of her days. Great Village would have been Elizabeth’s first memory of home where she lived a cherished few years with her mother’s people, the Bulmers, until she was plucked away at seven by her wealthy Bishop grandparents and taken back to the United States. It wasn’t her first loss and wouldn’t be her last; it was just more of the senseless kind inflicted by adults without an ounce of common sense to them. Would she have become a poet if she hadn’t left Great Village, found herself at Vassar and befriended the eccentric poet Marianne Moore? Flossy couldn’t say. Elizabeth had won a Pulitzer. That was lucky. She’d also awakened one morning to find her lover overdosed in the apartment. Suicide.
Could people seem lucky to everyone else but not to themselves? She wondered if Jimmy had always been waiting for the other shoe to drop, hoping for it. She was sure Elizabeth Bishop had. Everyone else thought her brother invincible, surviving calamity, getting through that war when so many others didn’t. But Flossy worried about him, worried most about the ones everyone else thought so lucky.