“Women will have more opportunities in your lifetime, you know,” her mother said. Something she picked up at the Women’s Improvement Association meetings and in the newsletter that came once a month.“We want what’s best for you.”
“Can’t do much better than David,” her father had said, but there was still not a quarter ounce of pressure in his voice.
Sylvie felt herself to be the water in the North Brook — clear fluid, pure, slipping down with the pull of gravity towards the waiting sea. It was not an unpleasant feeling at all. She believed there was little control within her to change anything about this elemental force. Sure as the water drawn down the stream, she would marry, she would become the sea, and then what?
The day she said yes to her David Young, she asked him to go with her to sit on the rocks out by the Trough and be with her there all day. David said he would be honoured. Alone on a day in early June, blackflies held imperceptibly at bay by the cool presence of the open sea, they sat arm in arm. Only one whale appeared. It came up once from the deepest part of the channel, surfaced, spouted, let the sun perform for one silver moment upon its dark, wet back, dove deep again, and fanned its tail in a salute or goodbye.
A flock of tiny shorebirds appeared and settled on the rocks nearby, picked through the rotting seaweed that smelled like something sacred to Sylvie and David. Beach peas and sea rocket grew between the stones. A few fishing boats found their way across the sea in front of the island — too far from shore to make out who they were. Year-old seals came up on the flat stones of the shoal and lay on their backs, then at length slipped back into the sea.
The day made her love David more for his silence, but it also gave her mixed emotions because she didn’t know if she loved him or the island more. She wasn’t sure she could love both, and even though she would not be moving away, she felt like she was betraying some intimate, profound relationship. But she did not fight the sonorous current within her that would bring them to marriage in the little Baptist church with the bare walls, hard seats, and the endless drone of old turgid hymns cauterizing everything that seemed alive and chaotic and wonderful.
In Sylvie’s eighty-year-old imagination, David Young is still alive. Still sixteen, or maybe eighteen. His was the privilege of not growing older like the rest who remained on the island. Sylvie sees him as being yet another gift that the island gave to her. A gift with tenure. Time and memory have polished David, the first husband, like a beach stone, into something hard and true. Born of chaos, a child of a family who believed the world was ruled by chaos, by chance, David had come to her, grew up with her through childhood as if an invisible other, and then crystallized suddenly one winter day into something that would be the centre of her life.
Sylvie sits alone with a cup of cold tea on a summer afternoon in her backyard carved from the forest, her back to the sea, surrounded by tiny flowers of early summer. Spring beauties, blue violets, Indian cucumbers, and the fluted, spore-laden stems shooting up from the furry green moss. She has the great gift of knowing truly where she belongs. Here. Now. Inside her, time can drift. David is still with her and she can smell burning rubber boots and she can feel the pinch of biting blackflies although there are none out at this time of day.
Their first night of marriage, they talked through the darkness. They touched, yes, but only tentatively, briefly, fingertips brushing hair, tracing the collarbone at the neck, palms resting on the other’s elbow, hands cupped on the other’s shoulder. Sylvie was amazed at David’s love of ideas, notions. “Suppose we have children, good children, healthy children, and they lead good honest lives and grow up and they have children, good children, happy children, well-meaning children who have their own after that. And one of those children, our great-grandchild, becomes an inventor or a scientist or something and discovers something truly, truly wonderful, like a way to feed everybody on earth so no one will starve, right? And this is a great wonderful thing.”
Sylvie wondered at the odd nature of thinking of this man she had married. Here she lay in bed, expecting to be treated to some kind of new experience, some physical thing that both scared her and fascinated her. She had been warned it could be a harsh thing sometimes, but she was prepared, mentally and physically. But this was not the way at all.
“Now suppose this new discovery gets into the wrong hands and is used to create famines and starvation instead of preventing suffering. Suppose thousands or more die. Just suppose that happened.”
“David, what?”
He let out a long sigh. “I don’t know. Does that mean it would be wrong for us to have a child that would lead to such a terrible thing?”
“How would we know?” Sylvie asked.
“We can’t know. That’s it. Each of us, each married couple like us, has the power to possibly change the world for good or bad. And we can’t do a thing about it.”
“Then why concern ourselves with it? What can we do?”
“We can’t and I guess that’s my point. I’m sorry. It’s my grandfather talking here,” David admitted.
“I didn’t know I was climbing into bed with your grandfather,” Sylvie said, teasing.
“Don’t get me wrong, I want to have children. As many as you want.”
“I want ten,” she joked.
“Ten it is. Why not twelve?”
“Twelve is too many to feed.”
“We’ll start with one and see how it goes from there.”
“I want all of our children to stay here on the island.”
“So do I,” David agreed. “But once they outgrow us, we can’t make them stay.”
“No, but we can make sure they love the island like we love the island.”
David said nothing.
“Do you love this place?” she asked.
“I do, but not in the same way you do. I could almost be jealous if I wanted to.”
“Do you want to be jealous?”
“No. Let’s go to sleep now.”
Sylvie has a swarm of pictures in her head, the tea some strange, exotic drug now that has catapulted her mind into another place. Things that rule her life: fish and cabbage, the backs of whales in sunlight, that mysterious moon pulling the sea slowly in and out every day, the swimming seals. Generations of German and English and French ancestors, for she could trace her roots to all three. The island had lured all three nationalities together.
And she remembers David, standing in oilskins not a hundred yards offshore, hauling up nets with cold, slapping fish, a great steady stance he had in that dory made by his grandfather. She could still see the silhouette, the slanting posture, the wet net in his hand, back bent under the weight. His steady hand with a strong pull. While David stood there, German soldiers on the other side of the sea were slaughtering innocent families, preparing to slaughter the French and the English. In her memory, though, those two brief years of her first marriage, less than two years really, were a tenured stint in paradise.
March of 1936. Bad news for the fishermen. Almost no market at all for the valuable catch. Hope, however, in the fact that big ships would dock soon by the government wharf and look for men to go to the ice floes in the Gulf of St.
