When the women bent over in their tube tops, an inch of white skin, revealed alongside the caramel tan on their necks and arms, would convince the boys they’d seen chest.
One of the women, Mrs. Hynes, had gotten lost out here. She’d strayed from the group and spent three nights out here alone.
“It’s the senses that drive you mad,” she’d said for years afterwards while telling her story over a game of cards at the Union Hall. “First it’s your sight; you see things that aren’t there. I saw my son beckoning me to follow him. Then it’s your hearing. You hear things that aren’t there. I heard my grandchildren calling out to me, Nanny, supper’s ready, they’d called, confused as to why I wasn’t coming to the table to eat.”
Jack was on the path alone now, and it was silent. The sun had risen and he was nearing the falls. A few more feet to go.
Finally, no one here to tell me what to do.
Out here he couldn’t feel the swell of Angela’s will or the tether of Peter’s friendship.
I can’t hear my children, my parents, my wife, or my friends. Free from responsibilities. I could stay out here forever. Let them send out a search-and-rescue crowd.
They’d sent one out for Mrs. Hynes, found her covered in patches of moss she’d pulled from the ground to make a quilt to keep warm.
Angela had been unforgiving. “Why would anyone leave the group while out berry-picking? She must have wanted to get lost in the woods,” she’d said and rolled her eyes.
Angela would go out with her mother every year and fill ten buckets, and they had jam, scones, muffins, pancakes, pies, and cakes all year long. She’d give the girls bowlfuls swimming in milk and sugar for breakfast. She even made tea with dried berries and honey.
Of course, Angela wouldn’t have strayed from the group. She’d have shepherded them from bush to bush, inspected pails, and created an emergency plan in case of black bears or charging moose.
Jack’s mother had also been unforgiving. “It was the death of her father that did that to her, made Angela all funny,” she’d say and roll her eyes.
Jack quickened his pace along the trail. He only had a few hours before she’d come looking for him and drag him back home. He rounded the corner to the clearing. The rocks were thirty feet high, the falls pouring down in a single straight spurt and pooling at the bottom in a twenty-foot hole, fit for diving and swimming. Jack took off his clothes and climbed up the side of the rock wall, footrests smashed by hand a generation ago. His own father and grandfather before him had scaled these walls for the thrill of a dive.
At the top of the cliff he waded in the cold, silty water. His ankles turned a sudden sharp red. His feet were unsteady on the pebbles but he made it to the edge without slipping. He threw his arms up and jumped head-first. The moment of weightlessness before hitting the water; the sucking punch of the palm of water as it rushed to envelop him. Then the cocooned suspension as the water ballooned out around him. It was a pure joy.
Jack relaxed underwater for a few seconds. All he could hear was the waterfall hitting the rocks and the blood in his skull.
I could stay underwater forever, he thought. The minute the skip cage dropped him underground, he always panicked, worried he’d never see the sun again, but not here, not in the water. His was a family that loved swimming, especially in the ocean. They loved to pile in the car and drive to places like Corner Brook or Baie Verte, or the summer they drove even as far as Bonavista Bay. They’d spend the day at the ocean eating nothing but brown bags full of salty chips and chunks of battered cod. Peter and Wanda would follow behind them in their car. One time Peter goaded Jack into a drag race on the highway. Angela had put a stop to it before it even got started, raised a fist and stuck it out the window; Peter slunk back into his lane and slowed down.
This was before Susie was born, when Wanda, barely twenty-one, fed Maggie from her bottle, changed her diaper, cuddled and held her while Jack, Angela, and Katie cavorted in the waves. She must have been three, Jack thought, when I would slather ocean foam over my face and we’d play barbershop. He’d run his finger over his face in a straight line and ask her if she was next to have a shave. It made her laugh so much, Jack thought and smiled.
He came up and flopped from side to side like a fish. He treaded water and squinted under the glare of the sun.
I’ll miss this place the most. He couldn’t count how many times they’d come out here. The time when Angela was pregnant with Katie, she’d sat on a rock, belly swollen out over her black bikini, the reddish swell of a fireball-shaped clump of stretch marks already seizing the skin underneath her belly button. She’d wanted to do nothing except eat tinned peaches. Her long black hair stuck to her back and shoulders as she sweated happily in the sun.
Jack got out of the water and stretched out on his back on a grassy bank. He dragged his knuckles through the thin black soil. His gut gnarled with grief.
I can’t believe this is it. I haven’t had a stretch of time to myself like this in a long time. What will I do with myself besides fill out my forms for the dole and look for work? I haven’t worked anywhere else, been there since I left high school, about eighteen when I started. Married two years later. I am afraid to go. I don’t want to go, he thought.
He slept for an hour or so, waking to see that the sun had moved halfway across the sky, his skin white from cold.
Angela will kill me if she knew I was swimming so late in the fall, he thought. He got dressed quickly, stood for a minute at the base of the falls, then turned around and quickly got on the path. He wiped water from his eyes and forced himself to walk forward. He didn’t look back once he’d rounded the bend.
Angela and Jack whispered good night to the babysitter, hired for the evening so they could attend Peter and Wanda’s going away party, and trudged up hill to the doctor’s place. His grand house was hidden from Main Street by a clump of birch trees — peeling white bark scabbed with black moss. Remnants of Mrs. Nelson’s garden welcomed visitors at the front walkway. Lilacs and roses, once abundant, flopped from side to side, grieving for the gentle touch of their keeper’s hands. The wilting flowers made the grandeur of the bright and charming interior a splendid surprise. Dr. Nelson’s housekeepers, a roster of intern nurses from St. John’s, kept clean the oak floors, ornate spiral banister, five bedrooms, sitting room, dining room, and a modern kitchen with dangling copper pots suspended above a marble island.
Sheila shepherded them inside. In the dining room the musicians were draped over the furniture like fruit at a banquet. Snerp, an acne-prone skinny bag of bones, the custodian in the men’s dry — responsible for mopping the floors and changing the garbage — held an ivory, silver, and charcoal-grey dented squeezebox on his lap. His long, curly hair flowed like bunches of grapes. Mooney’s round face, cheeks flushed apple red, was ablaze with joy as he plucked away on the mandolin. The neck of Gulliford’s guitar was held by a strap with a banana-yellow muff that rested across his shoulder, his chest concave as his fingers strummed softly. Doctor Nelson stood and stomped, a cracked and scratched fiddle — as old as he was — tucked underneath his jowly chin, skin flapping as he raked the bow across the taut strings.
Sheila and Angela whistled and clapped. Peter clumsily whirled Wanda around the room, and Wanda blushed, conscious of her weight. She smoothed her skirt and hoped to hide the folds of fat that had grown comfortable across her hips. Peter wheeled her into a corner and she broke free, almost tipping over on a loose beer bottle.
Gulliford’s wife started to chant, “Sing us a song,” and goaded the crowd into the
