I’m all mixed up about the days.
And mercy! Bompie’s name is Ulysses! Although everyone in the family calls him Bompie, apparently some of his friends call him by his real name. It’s hard for me to imagine that. Ulysses?
We’re still on Grand Manan, and sometimes I am longing, longing to get under way again, and I am longing to see Bompie (Ulysses!), but at other times, I get hypnotized by this island and the life here and forget that time is passing or that I’ve ever lived anywhere else or have anywhere else to go.
Yesterday, Cody and I met a tall, lanky woman and her German shepherd. She showed us her cabin, tucked in a scrub of trees. It was very small, one room, with no water or electricity.
“Built it myself,” she said.
“You mean everything?” I asked. “You mean you dug the foundation and you hammered it all together—how’d you do that? And the roof? And the windows?”
“Steady on,” she said. “Too many questions.”
I wanted to be that woman. I could see myself living out there in that cabin with my dog. In the daytime, I’d go lobstering and clamming.
“You don’t get lonely out here?” I asked.
“Lonely? Ha! Lonely? Not by a long shot. I’ve got my dog, and when I want to see people I just walk down to the harbor. When I want real quiet, I go on over to Wood Island.”
Wood Island, she told us, is about a twenty-minute dinghy trip from Seal Cove. “The few houses there were abandoned,” she said, “and now there’s only a couple hermits over there, and ghosts—”
“Ghosts?” Cody said. “You mean like real ghosts?” He seemed very intrigued by this.
“Hm,” she said. “What exactly is a real ghost?”
One of the ghosts, she said, is an old man who roams around in a black raincoat and a black hat; and the other is a woman and her baby who float around singing spooky songs.
“Why are they there?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” the woman said.
“I mean why are those ghosts in that place and not, say, here?”
“Honey, you sure have a lot of questions!” she said. But you could tell she was thinking because she was nodding her head and tilting it this way and that. Finally she said, “Those ghosts are coming back to a place they once lived. Maybe they forgot something.”
I liked this idea, that the ghosts might come back to check on something they’d left behind.
Today, Cody and I took off in the dinghy in search of the ghosts and hermits. The fog was thick as smoke, so by the time we were four hundred feet out of the breakwall, we were out of sight of land altogether. We took with us a few items for emergency survival: a compass, a flashlight, three cans of pop, and half a bag of candy. We drank the pop on the way over and ate the candy within five minutes of landing on Wood Island.
There are no roads on Wood Island, only paths that lead from deserted house to deserted house. We found a church, though, which was cleanly swept and dusted, with fresh wildflowers and candles at the altar.
“Maybe the ghosts come here and tidy it up,” Cody said.
I knelt down and said a little prayer for Bompie and for my parents and for my boat family and our journey across the ocean.
Cody said, “What’d you pray for?” and when I told him, he knelt down and closed his eyes, and I think he said a little prayer, too.
In one deserted house Cody discovered a bead necklace that was gnarled and broken.
“For you,” Cody said, gallantly presenting me with the tangled string and loose beads. “Maybe you can restring it?”
And when he put the beads in my hand, they were warm, and I felt as if there were other people in the house with us, maybe they were ghosts, and I wondered what had happened to them, and was this all that was left of their lives?
On we went, hoping to find a ghost or a hermit, but the only people we saw were two men building a house across the path from the church. One of them called out to us. “I guess your clothes won’t be drying too well in this weather, will they?”
“Huh?” Cody said. “What do you mean?”
“On your boat,” he said, “back in the harbor—all your clothes strung up on the lifelines. Too much fog for clothes to be drying, eh?”
“How did you know that was our boat and our clothes?” Cody asked.
They laughed. “Not too many strangers around these parts, nope.”
Cody thought they were being nosy, but I liked it that they’d noticed we were there. We weren’t invisible.
We headed for the center of the island, deep in moss and rotted leaves and trees. It was like walking through snow. Our feet sank in the mushy carpeting, and every once in a while we broke through to muddy swampiness underneath.
It was all so quiet and peaceful. There was open sky, with no power lines or phone lines or fluorescent streetlights. We heard only birds, with no sounds of cars or lawn mowers blaring. I started picturing myself living on the island. I could fix up one of those cabins and I’d live there with my dog, and maybe all the people who used to live there would come back, one by one, and fill up their houses and their lives all over again.
Shortly before sunset, we left Wood Island. The fog was much thicker, and we could barely see twenty feet in front of the bow of the dinghy. I couldn’t imagine how we’d ever find our way back, and I had a sudden panicky feeling, as if the fog was choking me.
“Breathe deeply!” Cody said. “Don’t worry—I’ve got the compass! Commander Compass at your service!” He switched places with me. “You row, I’ll guide,” he said. “Head a little left—no, not that way, your right, my left—okay now straight on, giddy-up, steady, you’re veering, okay a little more right—no, your left, my right—”
All I saw was fog, fog, fog. Fog shrinks the ocean. You feel as if you are in a tiny sphere of mist and water.
“Steady on, we’re okay, we’re right on course,” Cody said. “Onward!”
I rowed harder and harder and faster and faster to keep us from disappearing. On we went, on and on through the fog, until at last Cody shouted, “Ahoy! Fortress!”
And there we were, back at the mouth of the breakwall. Safe. Cody knows some things, after all.
When we reached the dock, Uncle Mo and Brian and Uncle Stew were with a fisherman on his boat, ready to go out to find us.
“Where the heck have you knuckleheads been?” Uncle Mo demanded.
“On Wood Island, exactly where we said we’d be,” Cody said.
“This man says he was out there and he didn’t see hide nor hair of you. Isn’t that right?”
The man nodded. “Yup, that’s right. I been out there all day and you weren’t there.”
“We were,” Cody said. “We were exploring.”
Apparently the fisherman had told Uncle Mo about the four-knot current that runs between Grand Manan and Wood Island, and he’d pulled out a chart and showed Uncle Mo how we’d be drifting far below Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy, freezing, starving, and about to be run over by a freighter.
“Well, we weren’t,” Cody said. “We weren’t lost and we weren’t drifting or freezing or starving or run over by a freighter.”
“But you could’ve been,” Uncle Mo said.
“But we weren’t,” Cody said.
Now I’ve been sitting here thinking. I wonder how easily it could have all gone wrong, and what if we had drifted out into the Bay of Fundy, and what if, what if, what if …?
And I wonder why I didn’t worry about these things beforehand. Maybe it was because I didn’t know about the four-knot current and I didn’t know about the bad things that could happen. I wondered if it was better to know about the bad things in advance and worry about them, or whether it was better not to know, so that you could enjoy yourself.
My brain is tossing these thoughts back and forth and making me antsy. I’m not going to think about them anymore.