knew. They were fragile beings. Men and their trouble: large egos in need of feeding and preening; dangerous work on boats or bridges, in mines and railroads.“I love men,” her own mother had once said, probably quoting someone, for she was always quoting something she had memorized, “not because they are men but because they are, thank God, not women.”
Sylvie had even predicted that she would spend much of her life alone. Solitude had always been like a mythical Greek god to her. Solitude was geography and body and place and a feeling of closeness — with what she was not sure. Sylvie had tried being in love with God. She had dabbled with the idea of a celestial marriage to God or Jesus or the church or any other masculine spiritual thing worth marrying. But it was a failed attempt. God was in her heart where her father and mother had put the idea and it was neither a he nor a she, and, as much as she tried, she could not externalize any god and propose marriage.
Marriage was now a thing of the past in all forms. Divorce, the great twentieth-century deception, had certainly never been considered an option. She’d known men with pent-up rage even, but they’d never taken it out on her, not even Doley, her third husband. She would have stuck by him though, good or bad. That’s what women should do with their men. Doley had carried with him hurt and pain from one of those “traditional,” hard childhoods. No one called it abuse in the old days. They’d just say it was the way some folks brought up their kids. Good parents and bad parents. Doley grew up loving everything that lived, except for himself. He loved Sylvie dearly and was always kind to her. Then he was gone.
Sylvie had stayed right by him and watched as he slowly travelled away from her. She had known then there would not be many more men in her life. She ached for him when he was finally gone. Ached and ached for him, just like the others. And then said goodbye and, with the help of Phonse and Moses, laid him to rest, down on the all-too-familiar granite surface beneath the deepest soil of the graveyard.
Her only crime, it seemed, was her ability to endure. Long lifeline, good blood, heart like a mighty backyard hand pump, set nonstop from here to eternity.
What was there in a day? A book to read. Birds coming to you from all directions, flying out to visit you here because you leave them seed on the ground to find. Mist, soon and certain to lift from the feather tops of those trees. A blue sky waiting for the right moment of surprise. Summer coming out to Ragged Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia.
Summer and the tourists again. Sylvie loved to see the tourists come out on the old ferry boat from Mutton Hill Harbour. Not like Peggy’s Cove. Not like that at all. Tourists could not bring cars here, but they brought families, most of them. Walked around the island in disbelief.“Like going back to another time,” they’d say, ever and again. They were sometimes exasperated by the old wrecks of cars, however, driven around by the islanders. No mufflers, lots of noise. Noise was sometimes good on an island as quiet as this one could be. No one who lived here would ever complain.
But she knew the only thing that brought the tourists now was the whales. Moses Slaunwhite’s boat tour out of the little harbour. Mainlanders wanting real adventure would take the ferry out from Mutton Hill Harbour in the morning and then go to sea with Moses, out in front of the island, out where the big waves rolled and rolled in the deep. And the whales were there waiting. Every summer. Whales guaranteed. Right whales. The same whales that had disappeared altogether early in the century. Vanished. But they’d come back, once the whalers of this island had stopped killing them.
Sylvie believed that the whales had come back for her, because of her. She was one of the few who had been around when island men killed whales. She had seen the butchery ashore and openly cursed the men who did it. Tried to get it stopped. And succeeded. Or at least she had taken credit for it. And then the whales began to come back. Close enough to shore that you felt you were there with them. Deep water right up to some of the rocks out near Nubby Point. Deep, deep and dark and treacherous and secretive in ways that Sylvie understood and the whales understood.
And she did not curse Moses Slaunwhite for his boat and his tourists. The tourists came and brought children again to the island. The sound of their voices like choirs of wonderful noise. Their parents would buy the baked bread and cookies Sylvie made in her wood stove oven. And they would talk. They would reassure her that life went on beyond the refuge of her island. Sometimes she thought the world was coming to an end and it was only the sound of children’s voices in the summer that reminded her the cycle was continuing. She loved all the children and tucked candies into their hands and they stared at her in a kind of fear and wonder. Was she an old witch? Was she a sea hag? No one was ever cruel to her, though, and the parents were polite. They would all ask, “Have you seen whales? What do they look like? Do you think we’ll get to see any when we go out on the boat?”
And Sylvie would say,“The whales are great and wondrous creatures. Kind and friendly and playful and talkative and you must listen very closely to hear them singing.” She would never tell one of the children, or even their wide-eyed, curious parents with their hand-held video cameras, that soon the whales would be gone from the waters around the island. Soon, she knew, the whales would stop coming here in the summer.
For Sylvie knew silence to be a reliable ally, a dedicated friend and advisor who had carried her through many bad moments. Silence was almost always hand in hand with wisdom. And so the children continued to smile for her.
Chapter Two
Phonse’s Lighthouse, they called it. But it wasn’t a lighthouse at all, more like a mirror. Only worked on sunny days with all that sunlight reflecting off the windshields of maybe five hundred wrecks of cars. You could see it, though, and use it to guide a boat home from as far away as Indian Harbour, Pearl Island, or even Peggy’s Cove. Phonse’s Light.
Phonse Doucette was forty-six and he was that rare man who had lived his dream. Born on Ragged Island, all through school he pledged to stay there, spend as little time on the mainland as was humanly necessary. He was one of those blessed men who had a dream and knew how to follow it. The dream: his own junkyard. Went through several incarnations: Phonse’s Junk Yard, Phonse’s Salvage Yard, Phonse’s Quality Used Car Parts, and, most recently, Phonse’s Auto Recycling and Environmental Control. Well, that was stretching it some, but Phonse thought it might make him eligible for some government incentive programs.
When Jack Zwick looked at his new hand-lettered sign and stated flatly,“Environmental me arse,” Phonse said in defence of himself, “I’m hauling junk cars off the mainland, aren’t I doing that? Cleaning up the place. Putting some of the parts of them bloody cars back into circulation.”
Everybody still called the place the junkyard, though, even Phonse. And there it was: Phonse’s Junkyard, on the hill with its beacon of car windshields all facing south, tail lights all pointed toward the mainland, some of the trunk lids propped open like the cars were mooning the people who lived way back in Mutton Hill Harbour. The well-to-do inhabitants who used lawnmowers on their lawns, or hired people to use them. “Lawnmowers kill snakes,” Phonse muttered to the ferry captain one day. “I love snakes, ’cause they’re natural and they’re good for the environment. There oughta be a law.” Against killing snakes, he meant.
Right off to the side of Phonse’s litter of cars was Oickle’s Pond, which had ended up somehow, through an ancestral convolution of gambling negotiations and a bad year of herring fishing, in the Doucette family. Oickle’s Pond. Could swim in it once, he remembered, but old transmissions kept finding their way to Oickle’s Pond, rusty gas tanks and oil pans, the odd driver’s seat from an old Mustang with springs popping through it like so many toy snakes from a Chinese store.
People other than Phonse found Oickle’s Pond suitable for depositing old stove oil tanks and oil barrels, other kinds of barrels with warnings about toxic substances all rubbed off or camouflaged with rust. People used to swim there once. Phonse remembered that Sylvie did when she was younger. Phonse talked about cleaning it up, swore that people sneaked in and threw things in there. Well, that was partly true, but Phonse had probably started the problem himself. Back before anybody thought anything about tossing garbage wherever it looked like it would fit. Phonse was always amiable, trying to please. Back then, if one of