age, despite the deaths of four good — well, not perfect, but mostly good — husbands.
The currents of the Trough brought the whales in close to shore. Sylvie had seen her first whale here when she was ten. Alone, glinting up at the teasing sun it appeared, glistening, wet, and magnificent like out of a dream. It blew fountains of salt water up into the sky for her and showed its dark, mysterious eye. And blinked. Did that for her. Blinked as if to say hello, little Sylvie, then dazzled her with another shot of spuming sea-water way up into the morning breeze.
She told no one for years, for she knew they were killing whales back then, the men of the island, killing them and stripping their flesh and cutting it into big square chunks as if the only way to civilize a thing was to carve it into slabs with right angles. Then what did they do with the flesh they robbed from the sea? Somewhere over in Ketch Harbour they cooked it somehow, did awful things to it. She did not want any of that to happen to this one.
While Sylvie was growing up, as the island was shaping her into a dreamy, sensitive young woman, the fishermen of the island stopped killing whales and went back to harvesting mere scaly fish. It was not an act of compassion but economy. Whale oil gave way to kerosene, thanks to a Nova Scotian inventor named Abraham Gesner. He saved many, many whales, Sylvie would one day understand. If whales were in heaven, then Gesner was there with them as a hero of humankind. And Sylvie was certain, even now at eighty years into a sometimes disheartening life, that there were whales in heaven. For if there were not, then she herself did not want to take up citizenship in that celestial republic.
Heaven would also have to be an island. An island adrift in an endless sea, a sea with dark, glistening whales all around.
The Trough brought to the island other unusual things over the years. Fish that no one had ever seen before. Some called them prehistoric, flushed up from impossible depths and killed no doubt by their disappointment at discovering that there were worlds other than their own bottomless, dark haven. Fish that turned out to have big, long, absurd foreign names that no one could pronounce. So they were shortened. One was a “Chuck,” short for something like Chukensiatosiuk. Another was called by locals a cowfish because it seemed to have hooves. Some called it a devilfish, but there were already too many fish by that name in the sea.
Seals perched out on the shoals to wait and see what the Trough would bring by next. Dead men floated in during a pair of world wars. Sylvie had seen them both and was thankful that it was only one dead man per war.
Oh, before she was born, ships loved to come aground here. Ignorant British captains caught unaware by the zealous current of the Trough and then trying to counter the pull, only to ram aground on Rocky Shoal. Bleached pieces of those ships and a few bleached bones even still littered the shores along here, but once the sea has its way with a thing human or inanimate, it doffs it off its back up onto the rocks and lets the shoreward lift have it: waves and then the work of rust, lichen, and blooming red moulds. Old shoes, washed up, bloomed with life — moss and yellow pan flake lichen, soldier cap fungus and crawling natty ants. A little soil caught in a crust of heel and suddenly sea rocket grows green, then bursts a pale electric blue flower atop. Before you know it, some bird from Antarctica is foraging a meal from the worn leather of the toe and the succulence of a rotten lace filled with bugs only a bird can savour.
An island was a place to live and to die. Few had had the same privilege as Sylvie; she knew that, and felt blessed beyond even her years.
Two hundred and some people lived upon the island now, fewer than in the past, but enough. The peripatetic ferry made two crossings over and two back each day. Older kids would go to school on the mainland while the younger ones hung back a few years, taken good care of by the woman from the States, Kit Lawson, who knew the names of all the stars in the sky as well as the names of great composers, and who sometimes talked about seeing things on the moon with her expensive black telescope. Kit was as bad as Sylvie. Couldn’t hold a man and did it by fours. Sylvie had seen it happen. Boyfriends, she guessed, not for marriage but here for the live-in type relationship as they do these days. Seemed serious enough. The first was an island fisherman named Ned. The next one had long hair and smoked a pipe, an intellectual type who spoke to everyone about politics. Having failed to convert anyone to atheism or socialism, some supposed, he fled back to the mainland and a job.
The third one was a dreamer — a poetic sort who lounged along the shores at the Trough sometimes and picked at a piece of driftwood until there was nothing left in his paws but salt. Always had a notebook but never wrote anything down. He too found his final ferry back to Mutton Hill Harbour and headed back to civilization. Then that last one. Nice, sweet boy who came and made friends with everybody. Started growing marijuana in the unused cabbage fields and found himself in trouble with the law.
None of the islanders held it against Kit. Sylvie had sympathized with her when it turned out the dope farmer was only using her, as men do on occasion, for mercenary purposes. His claim to fame was that he was an herbalist, but he had specialized in only one herb, the Mounties asserted.
There were no whales today. Perhaps in another week or two weeks they would return. This was the season of whales, and Sylvie knew that the whales had saved this island from ruin almost brought on by bad decisions on the mainland. Saved it for her.
Things were being cut back in Halifax. All sorts of things. People shoved out onto the streets, it was said, lifted hilly dilly out of hospital beds and told to leave. Women having babies in the morning and being carried over their husbands’ shoulders later in the afternoon because things were tight. The government was pinching the pennies, making people feel they didn’t deserve it as good as before.
Legislators as far away as Halifax and even Ottawa were trying to make her leave. Make everyone leave. They didn’t have to steal your land from you, all they had to do was take away the ferry service and everything would begin to shut down.
But they would not do that. As long as there were whales. The whales brought the tourists, brought them right on through Mutton Hill Harbour and onto the ferry to her island. Moses Slaunwhite had dropped fishing like a hot potato and started taking tourists out to see the whales near the Trough. Moses knew the waters, had a big enough boat, and was raking in the cash. It was a sweet combination for all as it turned out. The mercantile interests in Mutton Hill Harbour scrambled for the money from the passers-through and polished up the town. Motel owners and bed and breakfast people suddenly had loved right whales all their lives, even the ones who had never even seen a right whale.
Hell, everybody loved whales now, and no one owned up to the fact that grandfathers with harpoons once slept ashore in those bed and breakfast beds with their old socks still on, socks soaked in slimy whale blubber. Now, by Jesus, everyone loved whales. And there was this economic link, as they were calling it. Ragged Island was the centrepiece. Jacked the prices up on the ferry but at least she still sailed back and forth. Once the warm months were over, it would go back and forth only once a day, but kids could still go to school each day on the mainland if need be, men would still work there and come home to the island. And Sylvie could still stay here, living alone at eighty, if she wanted.
She would pay no heed to all those well-meaning mainland friends who wanted her “safe and sound on solid soil.” As long as she had the island she was okay. As long as the whales were there the tourists would come to gawk and take too many foolish pictures, and her brood of sea mammals would perform with a mere blink or a small geyser and let the mainlanders squint at the sun glinting off a sleek, arching back.
A whale could take the indignation of a thousand Styrofoam cups in the sea or a tossed jelly bean. A whale could handle that. Moses knew how to keep a fair distance, knew how to humour his clients but keep them from drowning on the Shoal, keep them from harassing the whales.
“You keep the whales safe and satisfied and the tourists amazed and the island
