in firewood to feed the stove while we studied ancient Egypt.”
“Too bad the school board made you get rid of the stove again. I always liked the smell of softwood burning, brought your mind alive.”
“Spruced up your senses, so to speak,” the schoolmarm said with a clever inflection. “Oh well, it reminded me I wasn’t beyond the leash of civilization. Taught me a lesson. Kids suddenly seemed to be all that much more helpful once they saw I had lost a battle with authority. They were even kinder after John was arrested. I guess I knew what he had been up to, but John had this silly dream, believed marijuana would do no real harm. Felt that if he could bring a milder, more natural, and less harmful drug back into use, sell it cheap — no, not to kids — well, that would keep people from getting all caught up in the dangerous stuff. Mind you, I wasn’t fully convinced of this. But he always had a way of putting a good spin on everything. Even this. Something good will come out of it for John. You wait. He believes in lifelong learning. Self-education. Probably learn from his time in the institutions. Write a book about it, rise back above it. I miss him, though.”
“I know all about that.”
“I’m sorry. I guess you do. I have no idea what it must feel like to lose a husband.”
“It takes some practice, but you never get used to it. Men underfoot can be an annoyance, but when they are gone, it seems as if they get themselves all polished up in your memory. Can’t remember a bad thing about them. I still find an old shirt in the back of the closet and put it up to my face and it’s like he was a prince, a king among men, finest man ever to put two feet on the floor on any morning. You forget the other stuff.”
Then silence arrived like an unexpected house guest, didn’t knock on the door or anything. Just barged in, took the place over. Silence, a masculine silence. Sort of commandeered the big one-room house, tromped about, rattled the dishes, bumped into things like men do. Silence nonetheless. Two women staring away from each other for an instant and then back.
“John said he’d make some money from his plants and then we’d set up a camp here for kids from the city. A safe place, a happy place. They’d study the moon at night and we’d watch whales in the day. Go back to growing cabbages without pesticides.”
“Men have to have dreams, don’t they?”
“While women do practical things, is that what you mean?”
“Not always. I just think our dreams are more down-to-earth. At least mine were. But now I don’t know anymore. Living alone, you turn a bit inward. A good thing and a bad thing. Winter was hard but now this is summer. It feels good, but I need my whales back out there. They’ve never failed to show up.”
“There’s time,” Kit said. “Moses’ll be in some sour mood if they don’t show up. All those tourists coming out on the ferry to get on his boat. If he doesn’t have whales, he’ll be a sorry captain.”
Sylvie looked back at the map of the moon, its big, round, sallow, hurt face. She read the name of the great crater she was staring at: the Sea of Tranquility. She tried to imagine the man who would have named it thus. But Sylvie knew the real, true sea of tranquility. It was here surrounding this island on a summer morning and it took up residence in her heart, kept her tides in check during the hard times.
“It’s not just a big dead thing, is it?” Kit said.
“No, it’s not. It’s alive. Everything is. Everything. In its own way.”
Kit saw silence creep back in the room, wandering around, looking into cupboards, thought it wonderful that an old woman who had lost so many men to graves, a woman who must’ve hurt a hundred times more than what her hurt felt like, could still say a thing like that. Sit there, a little damp-eyed, and just spit it out without question. Everything alive, nothing dead. That was the lesson of the island. You can’t really kill a thing. It’s all alive, all you have to do is understand that, see it with your eyes, feel it in your bones. Dig deep and the news would always be there but you needed to hear it out loud from someone like Sylvie sometimes. Those few words embraced by masculine silence. And silence finally giving up on its own power, stopping to listen to a woman speak words, words that worked their way into all the important little crevices in the wooden walls. Words, sealing the place up against the cold. Words married to the silence in a good way. Ceremonies like that. Island ways.
Chapter Five
Timing was the key to Moses Slaunwhite’s life. He was the first child born in Nova Scotia in the year 1951. The very first. His father had watchmaker’s blood in him and had a house full of Swiss and German clocks, all set in perfect accord with a short-wave radio report he received regularly from Greenwich, England. The scratchy report would always go like this: “When you hear the long tone following a series of short tones, it will now be something o’clock Greenwich mean time.” Then followed annoying radio noises, several short and one long, and that would be something o’clock on the hour on the other side of the Atlantic. Moses’ father, Noah Slaunwhite, would subtract several hours to account for time zones and he’d have it precise, then race around the house checking all of his clocks right down to the second hands swirling about their orbits as if they could give a damn about precision.
So from the start, timing was everything, and Moses was evicted from the warmth and security of his mother’s womb at one minute after midnight Atlantic Standard Time on January 1, 1951. Just as planned. Moses’ father was very proud, especially of the exactitude of it all. Moses’ mother was in considerable pain and couldn’t wait to drop the placenta and be done with bringing another child into the world. She wanted sleep. Lots of sleep.
Now, it so happened that the newspaper in Halifax had a contest going with dozens of prizes for the first child born in 1951. Why the owners of the paper thought it was such a great thing to be the first baby of 1951, nobody knew. As far as they and the fun-loving public were concerned, when it came to babies in this contest, you didn’t have to be the biggest, the prettiest, the happiest, or the smartest. You just had to be the first. Some mothers missed it and failed to achieve the goal, ending up with a really late 1950 baby. Some hung on too long to their parcels of delight and waited until several minutes of the new year had slipped by and other babies had already popped out from North Sydney to Yarmouth.
But Moses arrived at 12:01. The head appeared at midnight exactly and the whole child had emerged, rather perfunctorily, within one minute, tops. The father was proud, the mother was exhausted and near unconsciousness as was the way with women giving birth.
It was New Year’s Day in 1951 and Noah Slaunwhite was in his boat frothing his way across the waters to Mutton Hill Harbour to make a phone call to the Herald in Halifax. A proud father alone in his boat, having left his wife home to sleep and heal with a neighbour woman named Sylvie who would attend to any worries should they arise.
Now there was the problem that Noah hadn’t expected in his precision-laden world of clocks and watches chiming on the hour every hour, even on his boat where the clock was called a chronometer and housed in polished brass. The problem with his timely, successful son was the remote location of where he had been born so precisely.
A cold mackerel of a young man was holding down the baby hotline at the Herald office, an unhappy lad who had been forced to miss all the fun of New Year’s Eve sitting at the newspaper office taking telephone and telegraph reports of babies being born. If another woman called from New Minas or New Glasgow to tell the news of her son or daughter he would have to report the same sorry tale. It was all too late. Too late to win.
And then this call from a man with a strong South
