Chapter 33
It wasn’t nearly as deep as I had dreamed it to be.
Dad and I waded out to the dory and dragged Fogopogo to shore. Other people came out and helped us drag. I saw Warren and Dulsie and even the prime minister.
I pushed past them all, and wormed my way under to look beneath the nine-hundred-year-old moose hide. It was a misty blur inside the monster. Granddad Angus had laid a few pans of dry ice on the bottom of the dory, which had made the mist that we had all seen. The fiery nostrils were nothing more than two sets of three lit sparklers twist-tied together.
It was a cold, smoky mess in there.
Granddad Angus was leaning against the portside pedal.
His face was as pale as fresh fallen snow and his eyes were glazed in a deep, faraway kind of stare.
“Get him up out of there,” I heard my dad saying, somewhere close behind my right ear. “It’s his heart.”
Granddad Angus reached out and caught me with one hand on my shoulder blade.
“Did it fool them all?” he asked.
I tried to say something, but my mouth wouldn’t work.
“It fooled everybody, Dad,” I heard my father say. “You sure as shooting fooled everybody.”
Granddad Angus grinned and for just a moment I thought he was going to stand up and walk.
“When did you figure out it was me?” he asked.
“Who else in Deeper Harbour was fool enough to build themselves a sea monster?” Dad asked.
Granddad Angus tried to laugh, only he leaned back as if the funny hurt.
“It was something, wasn’t it?”
“It sure was, Dad.”
“I’ll take this with me,” he said.
And then he leaned back as if everything had run out of his body all at once.
“Don’t you dare let go,” my dad said. “Don’t you dare let go.”
Granddad Angus nodded weakly.
“Don’t you let go either,” he said.
“You taught me everything that I know,” Dad said.
“I learned as much from raising you as I could ever have hoped to learn,” Granddad Angus said. “You taught me more than you’ll ever know.”
He grinned a shadowy, tattered ghost of a grin and I could see my dad’s grin hiding behind Granddad Angus’s grin and behind that the grin I saw in the mirror every morning.
“I’m done now.”
And then he was gone.
“Well, that was truly something.”
I looked.
The prime minister of Canada was standing there beside me, his trousers bagged in seawater, staring at my dead Granddad Angus and my dad who was crying as hard as I had ever seen him cry. All the while he stood there, shaking his head and sort of gently half-grinning, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
Granddad Angus was gone.
Dad was drowning in tears.
Dulsie and Warren were holding onto each other and Molly was holding on as tight as she could to the two of them. Everybody else who crowded around was still trying to decide what exactly had just happened in this harbour.
I looked up and saw Mom standing there on the beach alone.
I waded ashore and walked towards her, my steps heavy, as if I were wading into a deep, cold stream.