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 Shore accent, this Noah Slaunwhite on the horn from Mutton Hill Harbour. Said his son was born at 12:01 on the dot at home on Ragged Island, wherever the hell that was.“I’m sorry, sir, but in order to be eligible your child has to be born in a hospital and the official time recorded by a doctor.”
“But there are no hospitals and no doctors on our island.”
“Then I’m sorry, but your child is not eligible.”
Noah Slaunwhite began to curse in German. The young man at the Herald had not heard German cursing before except in black-and-white war movies. The cursing was loud and guttural, offensive but interesting, and he held the receiver a short span from his ear and listened until Noah’s rage had vented itself over the telephone wires stretched like tense violin strings from the South Shore to Halifax on that chilly January morn.
After the rage was pumped into that thin phone line, probably scaring off any number of birds that had been riding out the windy morning with toes gripped around the wire, Noah slammed the phone back in its socket. It rang, and a phone operator came on the line asking for another fistful of quarters for the long distance phone call. She must have been listening in on the line because she sounded offended.
So Moses’ arrival in Nova Scotia was not properly heralded with those seemingly infinite prizes that he deserved for his promptness. There would be no full year’s worth of Quaker Oats cereal, no hundred-dollar gift certificate from Mills clothing store, no shopping spree at Simpson Sears, no free baby carriage, no free oil changes for the proud father’s car (if he had a car), no parental handshaking with the Herald editor-in-chief, the mayor of Halifax, and the premier himself. All down the tubes. Ah, hell.
Noah drank one cup of black hot coffee in Mutton Hill Harbour and then steamed back home with the bad news.
But none of that was little Moses’ fault. He had arrived on time like his father had wanted him to. And if the Herald could not recognize the bravado of that, oh Gott, what did it matter? Moses’ timing would remain good ever thereafter.
When he was twelve years old, he happened to be walking down towards the wharf on the mainland for the ferry ride back to the island when young Calvin Whittle fell through thin ice on Scummer’s Pond. Moses was there to hear the scream, grab a rowboat oar, and shinny out on the translucent ice to tug the mainland kid to cold safety. Whittle’s father owned one of those big, overdone houses that sat on a grassy shoreline, offending most island people who had to pass by it on their way home. Calvin Whittle’s father was greedy, ostentatious, and hired many men to manicure his lawn (all of the above offended islanders), but he did like to reward bravery, so he gave Moses Slaunwhite a savings bond worth $500 that would come due when Moses was nineteen. It was a lesson in investment as well as a reward.
The salvaged son of Calvin Whittle, Senior would grow up to be a sex offender and a murderer. None of which Moses could have foreseen. In later years he would ponder the irony that in having saved one life, he had inadvertently killed three innocent women and cost the provincial purse plenty to keep up with the Whittle estate’s lawyers, who tried in vain to keep a rich man’s son out of prison.
Nonetheless, Moses