Chapter 4
BANG—clack.
The second scariest sound I ever heard was the slam of the cell door and the clack of the bolt latching shut as Dad locked Granddad Angus and me in jail—for real.
“You need to consider the consequences of your actions,” Dad told me while he patched the broken window with a flattened cardboard box.
“Consequences” is one of those words—like “responsibility,” “expectations,” and “homework”—that grown-ups feed you. One of those words that tastes like spoonfuls of boiled, unbuttered, unsalted, and un-cheese-sauced cauliflower. I tasted that word while Granddad Angus rattled the steel window-breaking file against the cell bars—clanter, clanter, clanter.
Dad banged the last tack into the cardboard window patch, which fell to the glass-strewn floor at the exact moment that someone banged hard on the outside door.
THUDTHUDTHUDTHUD.
“Maybe it’s the prime minister of Canada,” Granddad Angus guessed. “Come to Deeper Harbour to hand out dory-sinking medals.”
“There is no way on earth the prime minister would come to a hole in the coast like Deeper Harbour,” I said. “I don’t even know what we’re doing here.”
Do you think I was being too hard on our town?
Let me put it in perspective for you.
If you look at a globe you’ll see Canada, a big stretch of open country that sits on top of the United States like a huge maple-leaf-scented, beaver-skin hat. At the eastern corner of Canada is the province of Nova Scotia, stretched out like a beached giant squid, with the Yarmouth, Digby, and Bridgewater end being its head and its tentacles wiggling up around the high country in Cape Breton Island.
Now get out your biggest magnifying glass and have a peek at the stretch south of Yarmouth and north of Cape Sable. Keep on squinting. Do you see that little fly pimple of a harbour just next to the town of Goodbye and Good Riddance and I Hope You Don’t Drown on the Way Out With the Tide?
Well, we’re just a little to the left of that.
They say tourists used to visit our town from time to time, but I find that hard to believe. Deeper Harbour couldn’t attract tourists if we built our own fantasy theme park and advertised free rides on flying dinosaurs.
Not even before they built that new highway.
You see, Deeper Harbour doesn’t have much in the way of tourist attractions. In fact, it doesn’t have anything at all. We’ve got a pizza shop that specializes in salt cod and pork scraps. We don’t have a McDonald’s. We don’t have a movie theatre. We don’t have anything at all but a complete lack of expectations.
Hypothetically speaking, I could be exaggerating how bad things really are in Deeper Harbour, except I couldn’t spell the word hypothetically if I gargled a bucket of alphabet soup while chewing on a dictionary sandwich. The fact is that life in Deeper Harbour isn’t really as bad as I’m telling you.
It’s a whole lot worse.
So when Warren Boudreau, Dulsie’s dad, stomped into the police station in a bathrobe, jeans, and a pair of fuzzy brown sasquatch slippers, I wasn’t the least bit surprised.
“You sure didn’t waste any time getting here,” Dad said.
“It was a lucky thing I was sitting by the phone at three in the morning just waiting for Molly Winter to tell me some crazy man in a kilt had thrown a stolen clothesline pole straight through my only dory.”
Warren kept on complaining, only stopping for breath every three or four rants, while Dad sat down at his desk and rummaged through the drawer. I watched closely as Dad fished out a pair of earplugs and worked them into his ears.
Meanwhile, Granddad Angus propped the saw between his feet and chin, leaning on it until the blade bent into a giant letter S, and began tuning up a rendition of “Farewell to Nova Scotia” on his musical saw, using a small homemade bow that he had previously constructed from fishing line and a small wooden ruler. He’d pulled the bow from out of his many-pocketed fishing vest.
“You let him keep the saw?” Warren asked.
“And a file too,” Dad answered. “I’m waiting for him to try to escape before I shoot him in the kneecaps a couple of times.”
Granddad Angus was far too busy making his own particular brand of music to notice all of that divinely inspired sarcasm. There is nothing that sounds quite so weird as a musical saw, all deep and moonish and eerie, as if someone were drowning a giant mutant screech owl in the belly of a kettle drum about a thousand miles beneath the ocean.
A vein on Warren’s forehead swelled up and pulsed in harmony with the caterwaul saw. It looked a little like a radioactive caterpillar had crawled beneath his skin and was giving birth to the Loch Ness Monster while sumo wrestling with Godzilla, which—
BANG!
My mom, the mayor of Deeper Harbour and the woman divorcing my dad, walked in and slammed the door behind her.
The whole room shook for a minute before becoming quiet.
“Take those earplugs out of your ears,” Mom said to Dad without missing a beat.
Dad yanked the earplugs out as if his earwax had caught fire.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, which was how I started most conversations with Mom.
“Your son wrecked my dory,” Warren said, pointing at me. It didn’t sound like he’d figured out Dulsie was part of our caber caper yet—and that was probably for the best.
“He had help, you know,” Granddad Angus butted in.
“Warren, I can’t remember the last time I saw you out in that dory,” Mom said.
“I was saving it for when the tourists came back,” Warren explained, looking hurt. “I figured I could give rowing tours of the harbour. Tourists are just hungering for that sort of cultural experience.”
Hungering?
I giggled, picturing a horde of undead zombie tourists stumbling off a rusty black bus, their arms stuck out Frankenstein-straight, moaning for brains, postcards, and t-shirts.
“Warren, you have got to stop reading those tourism brochures,” Mom said, shaking her head sadly. “Your boat shed and the old wharf are both nearly ready to tip over into the sea. They should have been torn down years ago.”
Then she turned to Granddad Angus. “It’s a good thing you’re so handy with that saw of yours—since you seem to be responsible for sinking Warren’s dory, you can drag it up to the shore and help Warren patch it.”
Granddad Angus didn’t like that. Neither did Warren.
“I don’t want that man anywhere near my dory,” Warren said.
“I don’t remember asking your opinion,” Mom said, turning to look at Dad. “Have you told your son what we’ve been talking about?”
Dad didn’t say a word. He looked down at the floor. I think he was wishing he’d kept his earplugs plugged in.
Mom looked at me.
“What?” I asked, trying hard to keep that you-know-what tone out of my voice.
“I’m going to get your father to unlock this cell and let you go free.”
That was good news.
“I want you to take the time this summer and play just as hard as you can.”
Also good news.
“I want you to spend as much time with your father and your grandfather as you can. I also want you to help your grandfather patch up Warren’s dory…because by the end of the summer you and I are leaving Deeper Harbour. We’re moving to Ottawa.”
Leaving?
All of a sudden everyone started talking at once.
“But I don’t want to leave,” I said.
“You’ll love Ottawa,” Mom assured me.
“I grew up in this town,” Dad said. “So did you. Roland should too.”
“What about my dory?” Warren wanted to know.
“Are you still here?” Mom asked, giving Warren a look.
Warren opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it up again. He turned and shuffled out of the police station, his furry sasquatch slippers leading the way.
“This town is dying,” Mom said. “There’s nothing here to see. There’s nothing here to do. There’s no future for a boy Roland’s age.”
“That’s fine talk for the mayor,” Granddad Angus said.
“I was a mom long before I was a mayor,” Mom said. “You wouldn’t have gotten into the kind of trouble you did tonight if you had been living in a city where there was more to do than just get into trouble.”
“I was having fun,” I said.
Except Mom wasn’t listening to me.
“I’m resigning from my position as mayor,” she said. “I’ll give proper notice at the council meeting next week.”
“Mayors can’t resign,” Dad said.
“Watch me,” Mom replied. “I’ve already taken a job in Ottawa.”
“But I don’t want to go to Ottawa,” I said.
Except nobody was listening to me.
“I’ll fight you in court,” Dad said, drawing the threat like a line in the dirt.
I had heard Mom and Dad fight a lot these last two years and even back before they thought of divorce, so I should have been used to this sort of arguing. Still, a fourteen-year-old kid doesn’t like to hear his parents going tug-of-war on him like he’s a bone caught between two stray dogs.
“You’ll lose,” Mom said to Dad. “Look at you. You’re keeping him locked in a jail cell, for heaven’s sake.”
Dad didn’t have any kind of answer to that one.
“Get packed and come home,” Mom said to me. “I’ll be expecting you for breakfast.”
Then she turned away and slammed the door behind her.
BANG—clack.
Dad got up and walked slowly to the freshly slammed door.
He took a deep breath—and then kicked it down.
BLAMMM! Right off the hinges.
Granddad Angus kicked his saw across the floor of the jail cell. It made a bow-wowing-tin-roof-explosion sort of sound—not half as noisy as kicking down a door, but with a lot more echo. The saw wobbled across the cell floor, fell with a clatter, and lay there like a set of giant robot dentures. I didn’t have anything to kick so I stood there feeling like someone had slammed a door in my face about ten thousand times.
My heart sank deeper than the bottom of the sea, sank about two miles deeper than that, drowned a little, and continued to sink on down. I just sat there, listening to the silence that hung on a long time after the door-slam and the door-kick and the saw-fall had died away.
And that was it. That’s the sound that scared me more than anything in my whole life. Not the cell lock clicking shut, not the kicked-down door, not even the howl of the caterwaul saw. That silence hanging on long after the thunder of Mom’s wordless goodbye was the single scariest sound I had ever heard.
Life had gone and changed.
Suddenly.