Daniel and I took great-uncle Tub’s boat out when he wasn’t home. It’s not that he would’ve minded us taking the boat; it’s that he understood what a good day was to take out a boat, and he would’ve told us not to go out that day. We rode up to Purcell’s Cove on our bicycles along the winding road, wisps of fog whisking through our spokes. Not one car passed us. We crested the last hill and down below we saw the little inlet with Tub’s boats, and beside it, the nondescript gravel lane that led to Tub and Helena’s home.
Tub and Helena’s is the first house on your left. Across the lane was a network of jetties over the inlet. Tub’s shed sat on a jetty, jammed with boat and fishing tools, and countless miniature ships-in-bottles, a hobby he started when he retired from the firehouse. The shed had become even more crowded in recent years with finds from Tub and Helena’s rounds of early morning garage sales; it was now impossible for more than one person to squeeze past the tight network of tables and things.
Daniel and I left our bikes on the jetty and climbed the stairs to the house. Tub and Helena’s car was gone. Helena would’ve already poked her head out the door if they’d been home. I knocked anyway and we both turned to look at the inlet. We could see Tub’s boats: two larger ones that swung heavily from rope on either side of the main wharf, and two smaller boats sitting bottoms-up on a tilted wharf on the edge of the water.
“Should we take a boat?” said Daniel. “He always said we’re free to take it.”
“Did he say that?”
“Yeah he did.”
We crossed the lane and descended the stairs to the tilted wharf. We set our packs and fishing gear down and took off our shoes and untied the ropes to one of Tub’s little green boats. It slid toward the water and we struggled against its surprising weight, sliding off the wharf ourselves into the knee-deep water before we were able to flip it. Our panicked expressions faded into relief and laughter. We tugged the boat back to the wharf and Daniel said, “ladies first.” I climbed up the small escarpment to the wharf, and my foot slid onto something sharp. I had spent my summers barefoot and routinely cut my foot on unseen things. A clam had once sliced my foot so badly I needed stitches. I had been trying to dig the clam out with my foot, but I swore that the claim propelled itself back upward to attack me, because I had never come close to catching a clam by foot — a foot is a slow, flubbery shoveling tool used only when hands and arms got tired.
Daniel steadied the boat while I stepped gingerly into it. I leaned over and held onto the wharf as Daniel grabbed our gear and climbed in too. I pushed off the wharf and we drifted away from our shoes and passed the suspended boats. I grabbed onto the rope tied to the end of Tub’s wharf that held a bucket of clams underwater. I tried to lift the bucket but this made me lean over too suddenly, almost toppling the boat. Daniel yelped and threw his weight to the other side. We looked at each other, surprised, and then we laughed again. I leaned over more slowly this time, and instead of trying to lift the bucket, I reached in and grabbed a few clams. I tossed them into the boat and that’s when I noticed the blood ebbing along the bottom of the boat from my foot.
“What happened?” asked Daniel.
“I dunno. I stepped on something.” I lifted my foot and saw the gash. “Shit…” I dipped my foot over the edge of the boat and swished it around a bit. “Nothing salt water won’t cure.”
“Okay to go?”
“Yeah.”
I was surprised the evening before when Daniel called to ask if I wanted to go fishing the next morning. I almost didn’t know what to say. Daniel never went out on fishing trips and no one ever called me to go anywhere. I was the only cousin who went along with Tub, great-uncle Robbie, and our Granddad on fishing trips. Daniel came with us once, two summers ago, but it was the last time because he whined about having to pee when we’d only been on the water for maybe an hour; we had just settled on a spot when he began to whine and then cry, hysterically. I silently scorned him, and our grandfather chided him, but Daniel didn’t care that he had embarrassed himself in front of Tub, which seemed to me, the worst thing. I never complained and caught the most cod, every time, and Tub said I was a real fisherman. Fisher-lady, my grandad corrected him, but only once because I gave him the eye. I didn’t want to be seen as something different; I wanted to be one of them.
I watched Tub often as he steered the boat, never taking his eyes off the water and other boats. He would watch boats that looked far off to me with an intensity that seemed misplaced, except he had stories of idiots on boats moving too fast in your direction, and he would tell these stories in no more than three short sentences: “it was coming down thataway. Two drunks. Came in here, like this, and sliced the boat in two on a buoy.” Once a boat veered away, he would draw his attention to something else, I couldn’t tell what, but then a buoy would come into view, and you’d know he knows where all the buoys are before you see them, and what secrets they tell.
I’ve heard stories of his fighting days, but it never added up for me: I’d never seen a crease in his round babyface, never a rumple in his quiet maleness. I watched the swift and decisive way he would do things with his Popeye forearms: the bucket of clams and seawater he’d swing over the side of the boat effortlessly in a perfect arch onto the hull. He gutted fish with three slices. My view of Tub was always from below: my spot in the boat was crouching in the bow or sitting on it when it was time to fish. Tub stood on the platform at the wheel, my granddad occupied the hull, and Robbie fished silently for haddock at the stern.
Daniel and I started to paddle, me on the right and him on the left. The water was still, but we struggled our way out of the inlet. At the mouth of the inlet, I told Daniel to steer to the right to avoid the buoy and the big rock under it. We were going so slowly it probably wouldn’t have mattered if we hit it, but I think I just wanted to show him I knew the right way. We arched around the buoy inelegantly, hollering directions at one another and laughing. It felt so new to laugh with someone — exhilarating, actually.
We hadn’t noticed a neighbour of Tub’s out on his wharf until he hollered: “You two! I can hear you carrying on to Sidney!”
“Sorry,” I said.
“You shouldn’t go out further. It’s not a good day with the fog.”
Daniel and I looked at each other dubiously. Wisps of fog hovered over the water, but the sky was rapidly thinning and peeking blue.
“We’re not going far. Just to the red buoy and back.”
“Does Gerald know you’re out?”
“Yeah,” said Daniel quickly. I would’ve said no. I could tell the old man didn’t believe us. He shook his head as he turned around.
“I bet he’s going to Tub’s right now.” I whispered.
“Naw,” said Daniel. “See how slow he walks? By the time he gets to Tub’s, we’ll be eating Helena’s scones at the table.”
We had drifted toward the shore during our exchange with Tub’s neighbour. Now we paddled furiously toward the red buoy that bobbed between Purcell’s Cove and the unnamed track of ocean water where ships passed like silent freight trains between the Halifax harbour and the open ocean. In Tub’s boat, we sometimes motored far toward the open sea, with the land on either side opening wider and wider, but we never got passed the arms of land on either side. I wondered what that would be like to be so far out in a little boat without land in sight.
Our paddling slowed when we were halfway to the buoy, still too young to know the art of pacing. With nothing nearby, our progress seemed nil. We both stopped paddling and looked around.
“You know what we’re missing?” Daniel said suddenly.
“What?”
“Purpose.”
“I thought our purpose was to get to that buoy over there?”
“I mean Purpose, the kind that inspires.”
We looked around again.
“McNabs,” Daniel said simply.
“McNabs? We can barely get to that buoy let alone all the way to McNabs.” As if Daniel had forgotten where it was, I pointed across the track of water to the elongated bump of land.
“Purpose!”
I shook my head and laughed. “I didn’t know you could be so dramatic.”
“Ha! You don’t know the half of it.”
Daniel clumsily righted the boat so it pointed to the vague shore of McNab’s. I had always wanted to explore it but would never ask Tub to take us there so I could poke around the shore and forests while three men waited for me. I would need hours to explore it properly.
The fog had not lifted, but with the cloud cover, I didn’t have to wince under my hat. We set about paddling but more slowly and steadily, a pace we could maintain. We passed the buoy unceremoniously; wisps of fog curled around its top like a ghostly hand unscrewing it. We rowed in silence, gulping the heavy air. Time passed, but I couldn’t place the sun anymore. My stomach started to growl: could it be lunch already? We heard splashing nearby and we both stopped paddling; a seagull sat on the water nearby, its orange feet paddling placidly under the dark water.
“Can we stop and eat?”
“Yeah, okay.”
We put the paddles in the boat and reached into our bags for sandwiches and water. We ate and threw the seagull pieces of crust. It lunged and swallowed instantly. We drank from our water containers and sat in silence, watching the bird look uninterested until we threw food. I tried to think of something to say, rummaging around my brain for some bit of conversation that would interest Daniel, but I had nothing. I had nothing to say, as usual. Daniel would never ask me to do anything again. She’s boring, he’d say, she doesn’t say anything. I stole a glance at him: how was it that other people felt so comfortable with others, that they can be silent or speak at will, and it was all the same to them?
When he finished our sandwiches, the gull flapped its wings suddenly and flew off. I looked around us: “Daniel?”
“Yeah?” But he already knew: we could only see within a circle around us, maybe twenty feet. The gull returned and settled at the edge of our vision; everything else was rolling fog.
“Let’s keep the boat straight,” Daniel said.
We scrambled to put our paddles in the water, but it was impossible to tell if we were still facing McNab’s or if we had turned off course. We pointed the boat to point to where we both felt it should. A wisp of fog floated past my face and I reached out to touch it, feeling coolness waft through my fingers.
“Should we put the anchor down?” I said.
“Shouldn’t we row? I don’t think we were far from McNab’s when we stopped.”
“I can’t tell if we’re facing the right way.”
A heavier fog wafted by; I reached out and it whirled and curled around my hand.
“Let’s put the anchor down,” I repeated. “I don’t want to row and row and find ourselves out to sea.”
“Okay.”
“This fog should go away soon.”
“Yeah.”
Daniel lifted the anchor over the boat. The rope started its frenzied descent. We both watched it spin until the rope stopped abruptly, taut.
“It didn’t hit the bottom,” Daniel said, looking at me with wide eyes.
“We must be deep. I don’t think Tub meant this boat for this deep.” I stiffened at the thought.
“Well,” said Daniel suddenly, “I guess we won’t move as much with the anchor dragging along.”
The circle of fog closed in on us and we couldn’t see the gull anymore. It was so quiet, I thought I could hear his paddling feet. The cool air chilled us. A heavy waft of fog moved between us and I wondered if it would get so thick, we wouldn’t be able to see each other.
“It will pass,” said Daniel.
“Yeah. It’s supposed to be sunny today, so this can’t last.”
We heard a small splash from behind Daniel; the sound was too small to be the gull.
“Probably a fish,” I said.
The top of Daniel’s head was fringed with fog. I swirled my hand above my own head and Daniel did the same: the fog twisted and swirled, and for a moment, we forgot our fear and smiled.
The gull edged closer to the boat so we could see him again. “You’re still here?” I asked it. The anchor rope held taut and straight down. Daniel tried to tug it. “We’re still deep. I don’t think we’ve moved.”
I shuddered, thinking of the anchor, swaying alone in the depths.
“My dad dived here before I was born,” I said.
“Shit…” Daniel shook his head. “I don’t know how he did that.”
“Yeah. He said it was dark. That’s all he said about it: it was dark. But the things he found: the bottle made by the same company that built the Bluenose…”
“It’s on your bookshelf.”
“I guess you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
My stomach growled. I wished I hadn’t given the gull the crust.
“My parents are divorcing,” said Daniel, flatly.
“I know,” I said, too quickly. “Um, are they fighting a lot?”
“Fuck yeah.”
“Mine fight all the time too. I wish they would divorce.”
“Ha, yeah.”
“Who do you want to live with?”
“Neither. One of them is always mad at me for something.”
“I’d live with my dad,” I said.
“Yeah! Nobody likes your mom.”
Daniel’s comment stung me, but not the way one would guess: I worried that others saw my mom in me. My mother hurt people, deliberately. She seemed to make a game out of hurting people. My mother, the laughing woman wearing a leopard-print bodysuit in the driver’s seat, passing three cars along a winding country road and hollering victory on the dare of my five-year-old cousin; and my mother, the woman staggering around our backyard with a bottle of wine in one hand and a pill bottle in the other, mascara streaked down her face, crumpling to her knees when I pleaded with her, don’t. My mom was the centre of my carousel, and I spent my days both drawn to her and clawing away from her.
“My mom and I are very different people,” I started, but Daniel wasn’t listening to me. He was looking intently to his left as if he saw something through the fog. “What?”
“Listen,” he whispered.
I listened. I imagined a toy duck with circulating flapping feet, except a water version, slapping the water in a regular pattern. The unnatural sound persisted but didn’t seem to be getting louder. Daniel and I looked at each other as we listened, as if searching for clues in each other’s faces; we sat still, our bodies straining to the sound, trying to work it out in our minds, but nothing fit. The not-knowing was like an ache. I wondered if babies felt this way all the time, having no memories to draw from to understand what they saw and heard.
A current, more like a moving line, gently slid under the boat without a sound. Three more lines moved toward us in a similar way, at regular intervals, and then another larger line with some height moved more swiftly, overtaking the third line as they hit the side of the boat, making a slapping sound this time. Then several more currents in succession slapped the boat, and then the lines became waves so that the boat started to move over swells. We held onto the sides of the boat. The anchor line was now under the boat and pulling hard in the opposite direction.
“Daniel, I think we need to take the anchor up!”
“What?”
“I feel like we’ll flip over!”
I tried to pull at the rope, but it was impossibly tight against the boat. The waves were now hitting us harder than the anchor moved with us, tipping us over enough that sea water frothed over the side. We threw our weights to the opposite side which eased the tipping, but the boat rocked dangerously. I clenched the gunwale and closed my eyes. I could hear Daniel sobbing, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” When the next wave hit us, spray hit my face. I closed my eyes tighter. Then a horn blast, a sound so deep and long and resonating as if it came from the sea itself, resounded through us.
I rubbed away the salt water from my eyes as if I was clawing my way out of a dream and I saw a great, brown wall loom in front of us; a great, brown wreck of a wall, with waterfalls of rust and gauges in the paint that revealed pale pink flesh underneath. The ancient wall moved passed us glacially, so big the fog swirled and lifted above us so that we could see the upper deck of the ship. It was empty of people. How could such a monstrous vessel be empty of people? Were thousands inside the walls, labouring over rusting pistons and squealing cranks of gargantuan size? And then I saw a single face peer down at us. The fog whirled in front of him. He didn’t wave to us.
The ship moved past us entirely, the fog wafted away with the boat, and we were left with blue skies and ocean shivering in the wake of the ship. I remained where I was, clutching the side of the boat, my cheek hurting against the edge. I heard Daniel say, “I can’t believe it…” I sat up. I noticed the anchor line had gone slack. The ship had tugged us closer to McNabs, another parting gift.
“Ship of dreams…”
“What?”
“It was like… a ship of dreams…” I repeated.
“What does that mean?”
“I dunno. It was like a dream, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
“We can’t tell anybody,” I said.
“What? Why?”
“That we were stupid enough to row out into the fog and almost get creamed by a ship?”
“Could it have creamed us? I mean, only if were directly in front of it, right? Could it have sliced us? A ship so big…”
“We would have flipped if we were any closer, for sure…” I thought about it for a few moments, “maybe even get sucked under by some… undertow.” I wasn’t sure if that was the right term.
“Yeah.”
“So… we don’t tell anyone?”
“Yeah, ok.”
I began to pull the anchor up. Daniel didn’t move to help me but stared out at the island. “We’re so close now… but I’m so tired.”
“Me too.” But I felt more than tired. I felt feverish and weak. I continued to drag the anchor up; it was terribly heavy with the weight of all that water on it. I pulled up a foot at a time, my hand shaving off the cold sea water which cooled me. With each foot of rope, I thought about the rest of the rope all alone in the dark, and I felt scared for the rope — ridiculously. I pulled more frantically, as if the rope was screaming for me to bring it all aboard. I sat up on my knees to get a better angle on it. I glanced at Daniel to make sure he wasn’t watching me. He sat shivering, still looking at the island as if in a trance. The rope is tied at the beginning and tied at the end, it could never be lost, never sunk without hope of retrieval, not with Tub’s knots. Eventually, the weight began to lessen, and I peered over the side as I pulled so I wouldn’t be surprised by the anchor hitting the boat, or more fantastically, flying out of the water like an angry fish and hitting me in the face. Soon the ghostly shape of the anchor rose from the depths. I paused for a moment, fear gripping me, not wanting this thing that has been so far, so fearless in the dark, to touch me, be beside me, ask me, why, why not you?
The anchor was too heavy for me to lift out. “Daniel…”
“What?” he turned to me.
“I need your help. I can’t bring the anchor over.”
“Oh…” Daniel inched his way over and we brought the anchor into the boat together. I sank down beside it; it, glistening with sea water and strands of sea grass.
“You don’t look so good.”
“I think… I’m sick.”
“Sick? Why? How?”
“I dunno, I just can’t…” It rolled over me like a wave. Weakness wrapped me in its arms and lulled me toward an irrepressible sleep. Daniel felt far away. He shook me. I wanted to tell him, “it’s ok, relax,” but I had no strength to form the words. I sank down into the present need.
I don’t know how much time had passed when I became aware of a motor approaching and Daniel yelling “Tub! Tub!” and the soft, unmoved face of my great-uncle looking down on me, and the wound that had reopened in my foot and swirled blood around the bottom of the boat. Tub swung me into his boat like a bucket of clams; at least it felt that way: ascent, arch, and descent – in one perfect movement. None of it was unpleasant, the wafting in and out of sleep, the other-worldly sensation of moving swiftly over water when all senses are dulled; no discomfort, no sharp edges, just the feeling of flying and the sea spray cooling my face.