It’s amazing how many notions can run through your mind in a split second of extreme danger. First came the almost comical realization that I was about to die after saving my parents. Then I heard this is why I came to Ireland’s Eye running through my mind. I had been trying to figure out what had drawn me here ever since last summer. It had seemed to me that it was something mystical. When the storm was about to drown me at the entrance to the island, I thought for a moment that I understood what it was all about. Now I knew for sure. I had come here to die.
But there was more than that running through my tiny mind, thank goodness. What came to me next was much more reasonable. Save yourself, a voice said. It wasn’t my grandfather or my mother or father or some mysterious presence on Ireland’s Eye. It was my own voice, plain and direct. So I did.
Shooting both arms out towards the rock, I grabbed for something, anything. My fingers raked along the hard surface like fingernails on a blackboard. But the rocks were rough-edged and soon I had a grip. Now I was dangling by my fingers over the ocean.
That was when I came to value the concept of preparation. Had I not gone through all the training to get myself ready to come to Newfoundland, I would never have been able to save myself at that moment. Part of getting ready had been weight training and by early this summer I had succeeded, once, in bench-pressing my own weight. Lifting myself up onto my elbows now would mean hoisting my whole weight, and with the adrenaline flowing the way it was I’d have the extra strength necessary. Slowly but surely I pulled myself up and put one entire arm and then the other over the top. From this position I hauled the rest of my quivering frame back onto solid ground.
I lay there for a full five minutes, my heart pounding, staring straight up into the sky. Before long an eagle floated by, just a speck in the distance. I’d better get up, I thought, before he figures I’m dinner.
When I got to my feet my legs were still shaking. There was no need to run back to Mom and Dad. I only had one shoe now anyway, so I would hardly move at a gallop. And the henchmen were finished. They would never get there before the coast guard, and they would never try to get away without retrieving their stash. So they were in an impossible situation. If they tried to high-tail it to the woods, the coast guard would send for whatever reinforcements they needed and track them down. Their boats were tied to the dock, and in order to go anywhere they had to have their boats. There was no escaping Ireland’s Eye. They couldn’t even make a quick run for their goodies—Mom and Dad knew where they were hidden. “Stay with the stash!” the old Newfoundlander had yelled at his lookout man at the mayor’s house just before they started chasing me, in earshot of all of us: me, Mom, and Dad. Just exactly what that stash was I didn’t know, but I did know this: those thugs were caught in a trap of their own making and it seemed like a perfect place for people like them.
Passing by the Eye, I ran my fingers along it, set my hand on the ridge I had dug into with my foot and thought about how terrified I had been just a few minutes ago. But that moment now seemed like a dream or a movie of some sort; no one else will ever quite understand what it felt like. It must have been that way for Bill Barilko too.
Three or four hobbling steps on my way back to the main harbour, I remembered that I hadn’t even bothered to look through the eye of the Eye. I walked back to it, stood on my tiptoes, pressed my eye right into the hole and gazed out. It was remarkable. My eye fit into it as though it had been moulded for me. But I didn’t see Ireland. All I saw was the horizon. Beautiful beyond belief, but in the end, just the horizon. There was no magic in Ireland’s Eye, I thought, and I had not been sent here for any reason. It was just a trip, a good one, mind you, and full of an adventure I would never forget, but really just a trip.
Getting down from the Eye again, I turned and headed back towards the harbour. I hadn’t walked for more than a minute when I saw something white lying on the ground. At first I thought it was a book, but it was really only part of one, a chapter that someone had torn out. “A Brief History of Ireland’s Eye” read the first page. As I flipped through it, it seemed that every sheet was clean and white, as if they hadn’t been read. Then I found one that was soiled and marked with a pen. The instant I began reading it I knew it had fallen from the clothing of one of the thugs. I also knew something else.
It seemed to take me an hour to get back. And it wasn’t just because I took off my remaining shoe and walked in bare feet. No, I just took my time and stared out at the ocean and the islands nearby. I paused in the woods to look at the trees I had rushed past so quickly just a short time before. What am I becoming, I thought, laughing to myself, some sort of a nature lover like Mom and Dad?
Later, as I looked down from the top of the hill, I could see the coast guard boat at the wharf. Mom, Dad, and the captain were talking to the handcuffed crooks, frantically motioning up the hill in the direction I had fled. One thug made a shoving motion in the air as he talked and then a slight falling action, like someone toppling off a pedestal. As Mom listened to this she collapsed to her knees and Dad started running, tearing up the path towards the Eye.
A strange thought passed through my mind. As far as anyone knew, I was dead. Right now, this very instant, I was dead. So what if I stayed here? I could easily hide from Dad, and watch him search for me from a good vantage point. He would look all around the Eye and then peer over the cliff and perhaps see my shoe floating in the ocean. Imagine something else: what if I could get off the island on my own somehow and get back home? I remembered a part of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom and Huck were lost on an island and then came back to see their own funeral. That’s got to be every kid’s dream. Imagine seeing all those people sobbing over you; imagine the looks on Rhett and the Bomb when I suddenly appeared, back from the dead!
But going to your own funeral was for storybooks.
“Dad! Dad! Up here!”
I wanted to live, and when I did die, I wanted people to remember me for what I had accomplished, not for what I might have been.
And when I saw my dad throw up his hands and actually give a shriek of joy to see me alive, I knew it wasn’t in me to put them through that sort of pain. It would even be okay if he said he loved me.
He was still shouting now as he ran towards me. Down below, Mom, good old guilt-ridden, smart aleck Mom, who I would never trade for another mom, rose to her feet and cried out as she spotted me doing a barefoot sprint down the hill towards Dad.
I leapt into his arms and he told me he loved me. I didn’t bother to scoff, not even inside.
“They told us they killed you!”
“They lied.”
“You remembered the Eye and the story about the coast guard. I knew you would!”
“From now on, Dad, when you’re telling a story, I’m all ears.”
Moments later, after being reunited with Mom, I watched the coast guard load the men onto the boat. The captain was very apologetic, as if he felt the need to take some personal responsibility for the actions of a few bad Newfoundlanders. Dad told him it was not only the most beautiful province he had ever been in but the friendliest, and if the captain wanted to see, as Dad put it, “some truly badass dudes,” he should pay a quick visit to our “neck of the woods.”
But I wasn’t paying much attention to their conversation. I was waiting for a chance to speak to the old Newfoundlander. There were things I had to ask him. When he was about to make his way on board, I asked the captain if I could speak to him. He was immediately collared and shoved in front of me.
“How did you do some of those things?”
“Yu means the ghosts?” he snarled.
“Yes.”
“Well, it wasn’t very complicated. We had yu goin’ right from the start, that was the main ting. If yu get people into the right frame of mind they’ll believe anyting, eh? I heard yu barkin’ about comin’ here and we couldn’t have that. We’ve been usin’ this here place to stash loot for over a year now. No one comes here no more.”
“No one? I thought people visited it as a sort of tourist attraction.”
“Not in kayaks. Folks get brought out here in motorboats from time to time, sure. But buddy here knows all the guys who run those outfits and their schedules too, so we can keep tabs on them easily. But in those dinghies of yers? That’s somethin’ else. In all my born days, I’ve never seen that before. We didn’t know how long yu’d take, when yu’d get here, how long yu’d stay. And we couldn’t even hear yu comin’. We had to set it up so yu’d get the hell out almost the minute after yu got here. So we rigged a few tings, some ghosts.” He laughed.
His laughter seemed a bit uncalled for.
“The cigarette?”
“Didn’t yu see that there spyglass?”
“You did that?”
“Sure. Worked didn’t it?”
“And my name carved in the desk?”
“Did that the night before. And then I snapped that there map up and down a few times, and then we popped our heads in and out of a few windies when yu were snoopin’ around with those binocs of yurs. We even lay in the grass by the boats to see if yu might tink yu saw a ghost. Did yu?”
“Yes.”
“Rang the bell in the church.”
“Right.”
“Tipped over some gravestones. Damn lucky ting yu tripped over one that seemed to spook yu.”
“Well, the boy on the headstone was almost exactly my age.”
“Really? That was a bit o’ luck. Too bad it didn’t work better.”
He turned away from me and walked on board, his hands in cuffs, stepping carefully as the boat rocked. I turned away myself. Not far from us the captain was coming briskly out of the boat and approaching Mom and Dad.
“That was St. John’s on the radio,” he said. “These characters have a list of bank jobs and drug charges as long as a minke whale. Seems like they thought Ireland’s Eye was a good place to stash stolen money.”
“That’s not the only reason they’re here,” I said.
“What?” asked the captain, looking at me with surprise.
“What do you mean, Dylan?” asked Mom. It was the voice she used to talk to adults.
I reached into my back pocket and pulled out what I’d found near the Eye. They all leaned forward, anxious to see what it was. I glanced at the old Newfoundlander. He had noticed what was in my hand and his head had dropped.
“This is from a book about Newfoundland history,” I said, “and this section is about Ireland’s Eye. Do you see this page? It’s about the cemetery. It reads, ‘The people of Ireland’s Eye had a practice of burying their most valued possessions with them.’”
“So?” said the captain.
“There’s a shovel—a brand-new shovel—up in the cemetery.”
My parents and the captain looked like they’d seen a ghost. Then the colour in the captain’s face turned distinctly redder. He snapped his head around towards the old Newfoundlander and snarled. “Grave robbin’ eh, me darlin’? Isn’t that a fine practice for a gentleman like you?”
“But they mustn’t have even read the whole paragraph,” I said, cutting him off. “Because it says just a few sentences later that in Ireland’s Eye your most valued possession was your soul. Jewels and that sort of thing were always passed down to the next generation.”
With that the captain started laughing. Then he turned towards the men in handcuffs and really let out a roar.
But I was walking back towards the old Newfoundlander. I had forgotten to ask him one last thing, the most important thing.
“Dylan?” asked Mom, but I paid no attention.
When I got close to the old man he wouldn’t look at me. He just started talking quietly. “We wouldna disturbed any corpses, my son. We just woulda looked around the coffins and set ’em back, nice and peaceful-like. These people here they lived hard lives, I know, believe me, I was born in a place like this. The same ting happened to me mudder and fadder as happened to them. We wouldna disturbed any corpses. We were only trying to scare you too.”
“I have another question.”
“I’ll tell yu anyting I know.”
“What about the boy?”
He looked up at me, a genuinely puzzled expression on his face.
“What boy?” he asked.
I smiled. “You know, the boy you planted in the woods to chase me around and act like a ghost. He was dressed in clothes from a hundred years ago, all torn up…you know.”
The old Newfoundlander shook his head.
“I don’t know nuttin’ about no boy,” he said.
A chill ran down my spine.
“You know,” I repeated, laughing nervously this time, “the boy…in the woods. What, did you have a little person here with you or something?”
He looked at me for a long time.
“There ain’t been no boy around here—no boy udder than you—in generations, my son.” His voice was deadly serious. “Anybody who’s ever been here who was a boy ain’t no boy no more. They’re all gone. Everyone and everyting is gone from here, yu understand? Everyting. Yu didn’t see no boy in the woods, not here.… Impossible.”
I could hear one of the coast guard crew teasing the other gang members not far away. “I hope you didn’t make a slip-up, boys,” he needled, “and let any of those dead people out of their graves.”
We stayed on the island that night. I insisted. At night I got up, wide awake, and walked up the path past the church and into the woods. I stood by the tombstone of William Snow and called out to him. But he never came.
When I lie in my bed at night these days listening to the traffic outside, I often think about Ireland’s Eye. It’s still out there, alone in the ocean, miles and whole lifetimes away from where me and Rhett and the Bomb are killing time on skateboards in Toronto. The houses sit defiantly upright, the church holds on proudly, and the graveyard, that unforgettable graveyard, despite the trees that try to bury it, still guards the memories of people who were once so alive.
Sometimes in class when I look out the tiny windows, I don’t see the McDonald’s signs and the busy street below—instead it’s miles of trees, rocky hills, and the sound of waves hitting the shore.
I’ve never been a particularly good student but I’m doing okay, almost as well as that report card showed the semester before we went on our trip. My best class is history now. I’m a whiz at it. I never forget a date, never misplace a face, and never sneer at the things that people did before my time. I figure I owe it to Grandpa, and to William Snow.