12

As the evening sky darkened into night and the long day of the northern summer came to an end, the buzz and babble in the parking lot moved back first to the Legion hall, and then, when that closed up, the crowd finally dispersed and we went back to MacAkerns’. Before I left the Legion I checked the pictures on the wall, and for the life of me I couldn’t find Wallace’s Uncle Eugene, or Wilf MacAkern. But it didn’t matter. Wallace had the momentum. Word was spreading and, against all odds, it was looking like he might actually win, or at least beat Robert Logan Head.

“Well done,” said Bailey.

“Got lucky, is all,” said Wallace.

“Or unlucky.”

“What do you mean?”

“The fun part’s over.”

“That was fun, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Now, work.”

“How?”

“Win the election.”

“Then what?”

“Assume power.”

Wallace cocked his head to one side. “Yeah, but then what?” he said. Suddenly it all seemed real and possible.

“Then you serve your constituents.”

“How?”

“By working with the opposition.”

“But…and then what?”

“Christ, I don’t know. Up the ladder. Into the system.”

Wallace considered. “It seems the obvious choice.”

“That it does. But don’t be fooled. It comes with a price.”

“I suppose so. What, exactly?”

“Exactly? I dunno. But don’t kid yourself that you’ll be in power. Nobody ever is. You’re going to be in a balance of power. Constantly trying to outwit and set up your opponent, constantly being outwitted and set up by him, in a world where you’re forced to befriend people who stabbed you in the back yesterday, and who are trying to stop from being stabbed by threatening to be the stabber and not the stabbee. Until you’re double-crossing the person nearest to you.”

“Aiden.”

“Can’t blame him really. They had something on him.”

“What?”

“Same thing they had on me. Pot. I think that’s why it’s illegal. To give the people who make the laws something on people they want power over.”

“That’s ugly.”

“That’s power.”

“Hmm.”

“I always thought there was something suspicious about him,” said Melissa. “Sucking up to you like he did.”

“Forgive and forget,” said Bailey. “And anyhow, how’s what he did any different than what we’ve been doing? They found his weak point, and exploited it to find my weak point. Luckily Wallace found theirs and exploited that. Politics. And does it really help anything?”

“Keeps things moving.”

“Yeah. Revolution. Good name for it. Around and around… Anyhow, Wallace, what’s it gonna be? Cut your losses or move to the next level?”

Wallace didn’t say anything, but next day, he went and visited Robert Logan Head.

***

Wallace is the hero of this story not because he slew the mighty dragon. I am of the belief now that the mighty dragon is never slain, not completely. Wallace is a hero because, lest he become the dragon itself, he used the high point he was then occupying to help the people around him. When he guessed at the things that could be given to him, when he felt the temptation of an audience who liked him, he saw at the end of those tunnels something worthless, another trap. So he traded off on what he had.

Discussions were held behind closed doors. Political aides were flown in from Ottawa, an angry group of people, publicly smiling and privately swearing, held together, it seemed to me, by the mutual fear that if they were to expose anyone in their immediate circle, secrets that were held on them would be exposed. And for all their bluster, they were helpless, having lived in that world too long to escape, locked in the same death-grip that Rattray and I had almost assumed, and would have assumed permanently if I hadn’t publicly confessed.

Some new deal was worked out between Wallace and Head. First of all, Head agreed to sign an affidavit wherein it was stated that he knew but had not informed the police about Bailey’s marijuana use. This ensured that if Head were ever to exploit this information again, Bailey could thereby incriminate his accuser, and so a measure of protection was afforded to Bailey, and a balance of power was achieved.

Also, when all Wallace’s other “rejectables and deal-breakers” were eliminated, it was agreed that he and his family could stay on in the MacAkern home and Wallace would be hired by the park as a historical interpreter. The house would be repaired and the front parlour turned into an interpretation centre, which pleased Robbie no end, and meant she’d get her roof fixed. They could live in their house until the death of the last of them, whether it was Wallace, Robbie, or Brucie. They would each in turn receive a salary from Parks Canada as “Interpretive Officers,” though nowhere near the hundred thousand a year which had been one of Wallace’s original demands. If all this could be put into place before the election, Wallace would drop out of the race.

A phone call to the Minister of the Environment fast-tracked the agreement, buttons were pushed, strings were pulled, and it was done. But, as it turned out, all the wheeling and dealing was a waste of time for the Conservatives. The Liberals won the riding.

It was not long after that I saw Wallace’s first historical presentation. It was questionable in its historical accuracy, but full of drama and action. His Taillefer family saga, easily as lively as his epic “Exile from Castle MacAkern,” was lifted in large part from Dumas, but he also fabricated a royal connection, the Sieur de Montlouis Taillefer, who saved the Queen but was exiled as a threat to the power of Cardinal Richelieu. The story included Acadians hiding out in the swamps up west and a family deported to Louisiana. We were all there for the performance, myself and Robbie, Melissa, Brucie, Dunbar and Fergie. Bailey, his work on the election over, was back in Rastafarian mode, his tam on his head, his smile on his face and his posture once again supple. There was a party afterwards where I drank, but only in moderation, and I didn’t smoke any pot.

Afterwards, on the porch, I talked to Wallace, who adopted a tone I had never heard him use before: all seriousness. “I just want to do what I want,” he said. “And not because it’s me who wants it, either. It’s just, people should.”

“And what do you want, exactly?” I said.

“Fucked if I know. And if I did, I sure don’t know what I might want a year from now. Or a week from now, for that matter. But I know that having this house gives me more choices to do whatever that is. That’s what they’re trying to take away from us, always. Freedom. What does it say about that in that Bill of Rights of yours, Christian?”

I couldn’t help but notice that he used my real name.

Brucie came out from the kitchen. “I wrote a p-p-poem.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Wallace.

Brucie straightened up and declaimed:

“Don’t wanna go to England

Don’t wanna go to France

Don’t wanna go to Scotland

Where the people wear no pants.

Don’t want to go to Charlottetown

To Rome or to Tangier

Don’t wanna go

Nowhere, so

Guess I’ll stay right here.”

“Not bad,” said Wallace. “What’s this about no pants in Scotland, though?”

“K-k-kilts.”

“Ah.”

***

I worked at the park for the rest of the summer, and continued to add to my beach report. I stayed out of Rattray’s way, and he out of mine. My supervisor, Andrew Solomon, never showed up, though I found out that he was the one who had been responsible for the well-executed drawings in that pamphlet, which meant Claire had drawn the awful ones. I don’t know why, but when I heard this, something readjusted inside me and I realized that I no longer pained for her. The knowledge diminished her, though not in any destructive way. It made her more human, and the woman I had fallen for was a fantasy. I had been like that Welsh wizard who created a wife out of flowers. At any rate, when I thought of her again, I realized I was no longer in love, or in thrall, or whatever it was that I had been in. As intense as my feelings had been for her, they had obviously been stitched together with nothing stronger than gossamer. My heart had not been broken, just bruised, like my face, and like my face, my heart healed. My hair grew back too, keeping pace with Bailey’s, who stayed until Labour Day and then went back home.

The job came to an end. I finished the report and sent it to Project Ecology where it was promptly filed. I saved a copy and re-read it recently, just before I wrote the book you are reading now.

I went back to university that fall, took it more seriously, and graduated in three years. Somewhere in there I fell in love again, bruised my heart again, and it healed again, though more slowly this time.

I finished my studies and started my working life. When people ask me what I do, I always say, “The government pays me to lie around on beaches.” It’s not as easy as I make it sound, but try telling people that when you work for the government. My job description is Marine Biologist for Eastern Regions, and the geographical area which is my bailiwick is roughly the Gulf of St Lawrence. It’s not all sand and surf. There are rock beaches on the Great Northern Peninsula and outside of Stephenville that roll great granite bowling balls under your feet, and ledges of Appalachian rock by Forillon, as well as Precambrian shelves along the Lower North Shore and up the Labrador Coast. I love them all. My Littoral Environments On Canada’s East Coast is, I think, a respected work, albeit in a narrow field.

Of the people I worked with, some were good and some were bad, although it is probably truer to say that they were all just people, each with both good and bad in them. But of everybody I have come into contact with in the course of what is now a quite long life, nobody has ever seemed quite as vivid as who I met that summer.

Claire married. Actually she married a lot. I recently heard she is on her fifth. And apparently she’s still smoking.

Smooth Lennie disappeared for good, no one knew where, and Robert Logan Head never got into power again. He also never shook off his new nickname. When he died, years later, a writer at The Guardian started his obituary with “The Island mourns the passing of Robert ‘Dick’ Head,” and narrowly avoided being fired for the mistake.

Bailey, back in the States, was arrested for possession of marijuana. I believe that the drugs were planted, because at the time of his arrest he was helping organize an independent candidate who was starting to do quite well, and he never smoked pot when he was in campaign mode. He got seven years, but never served them. Two weeks into his sentence he hanged himself in his cell.

Wallace lived in the MacAkern home until his death. His last words were “Tell them that I…Ah, fuck it…See ya!” He was buried out on the point, as softening shades of evening fell, but no pipers were hired to perform that piece, which I think is a pity.

Brucie doesn’t stammer anymore, and I visit him whenever I’m in the area. Usually during the course of the evenings we spend with each other we sing the one song we know together.

Robbie and Melissa continued to live with each other and eventually married. More surprisingly, so did Rattray and Toe, apparently happily, so how can you not believe in some sort of benevolent God?

I myself became religious, though not, I think, in any flashy way. I don’t even go to church, because Jesus said not to. My scientific friends wonder about this spiritual side of me, but the older we get, the less we argue about it. My position is that God is the sum total of all good things, and if that’s true (so go my prayers) those who don’t have the knowledge of what Good is, let them be informed (that is, bless them). And those who do have that knowledge, bless them for having it. So, God bless everybody.

I went back to Barrisway last summer for the first time in years. The beach where I had set up my camp has disappeared, washed away in the tidal surge of two winters ago, which picked up all the sand, sucked it out, and in the next tide, moved it around the point where a new sandbar has appeared, a spit the shape of a billhook.

MacAkerns’ house, now the Interpretation Centre, is being slowly buried by the dune behind it, Things of God once again winning against the Things of Man. Picking of mushrooms or berries is not allowed anymore in the park, but some vegetable stands around the Island still work on the honour system.

I once knew a beach, shaped by the waves in front of the dunes that were shaped in turn by the wind. The marram grass held the sand with its roots, and in the swale behind, beach-pea grew over a jumble of driftwood. Behind that grew wild carrot and thyme and still further back, out from the floor of the spruce forest, briefly and magically the chanterelles sprang up, but if you weren’t fast, you’d miss them. There was always something growing, though, each in its season, growing then dying to make room for new growth. The moon and the tides, the shape of the shore, the cry of the seabirds rising and falling. The bite of cold ocean, the taste of salt air, the tightness of sunburn, the lap of the waves, at times the memories almost overwhelm me.