Sea of Tranquility. Lesley Choyce
island fishermen had found themselves headed into five good years of profit from cod, cod, and lots more cod. Moses married Viddy Grandy, a beautiful young woman he’d sat alongside of in the island schoolhouse when he had been only nine. Viddy was talented — she played piano and flute. She was smart. She knew the names of all the capitals of all the nations on the earth. She had a good business head — could advise any man about selling his cod whole or in fillets, whether to sell it to the restaurants in Halifax or ship it on ice to Boston. She had a gift for many things that would make a man happy as well as profitable. Her only twin afflictions were an affection for large, stylish, but sloppy and frivolous hats, and tardiness.
If it hadn’t been for Viddy’s lack of respect for the clock and Moses’ own good timing, they probably would have never married. One damp, cheerless day in April of Viddy’s twentieth year, she had decided to leave the island and go take a job in a factory she’d heard about in Saint John, New Brunswick that made fashionable women’s hats for the American market. She was packed and rushing to make the three-thirty ferry but missed it by five and a half minutes — according to Moses’ Swiss pocket watch that his father had given him upon graduating from high school.
So there was Viddy, floppy hat in hand, her head bowed, long braided hair down to the middle of her back, sobbing. Clearly, there must have been more to it than a missed ferry ride. But Moses’ timing as always was good. He had a clean handkerchief that his mother had ironed. He had just had a shower and didn’t reek of cod or lobster. He had to sit down because he had just gotten a cramp in the calf of his right leg. The fog looked like it wanted to lift (but never did fulfill the promise). And the ferry would not return that day due to a bad batch of diesel fuel pumped on at the dock in Mutton Hill Harbour that afternoon by Hennigar’s Marine Fuel Service Limited. The rest would be marital island history.
Noah and Moses would argue often about Viddy’s tardiness, but never in front of her, and, despite this small canker of family strife, it was a good and happy marriage. Whenever she was ashore, Viddy would drive their mainland automobile to all the Frenchy’s used clothes stores up and down the South Shore and buy umpteen hats. Whenever she returned from the mainland on such a day, everyone on the ferry boats knew what was in all those boxes and bags. Moses built many closets. A hat was never thrown away by Viddy. But he didn’t mind. She was a wonderful woman and gave him twins — Clay and Dawn. When Viddy went hat hunting on the mainland, their good neighbour Sylvie would mind the kids and tell them stories of the island in the old days. When Sylvie would babysit for a day, all the clocks were turned towards the wall and the household schedule went to hell. Neither Moses nor Viddy cared, and once Sylvie was gone, they would not turn the clocks back to face them for well over twenty-four hours.
Moses was generally healthy, and his only real affliction was the predilection of his body to cramp up in the legs. This was a result somehow of having become soaking wet the time he hauled young Whittle out of Scummer’s Pond. His father made him carry a cramp knot in his pocket to ward off the problem. A cramp knot was an actual knot from a tree, a cat spruce in this case. It was an old German folklore thing and it didn’t work, but he carried it anyway to make his father happy.
“It doesn’t work because you don’t believe in it. We used to believe in everything when we was young, but not no more,” his father said.
“I try to believe in it, I really do,” Moses said. And he carried it with him everywhere, even to bed to dispel the damn leg cramps, because Moses would get a leg cramp attack any time, any place. Hauling up lobster pots ten miles at sea or making love to his good wife Viddy late on Friday night after a chowder dinner and several pints of dark, homemade German beer. The cramps would always come, reminding him of the irony of saving Calvin Whittle who killed those poor women.
Moses was always one step ahead of the fishery, it seemed. Already moving into herring roe or silver hake, red fish, ground-fish, swordfish, or sea urchins when absolutely necessary, and, when it seemed that the whole fishery along Newfoundland and Nova Scotia was ready to go belly up for good, Moses anchored his boat on the edge of the channel at the Trough and he pondered the future. When the whales appeared like long-lost German cousins, he talked to them and, although they didn’t exactly talk back, they convinced him they were the future of the island, perhaps his only hope.
Moses knew that if he was going to stay on his island and remain prosperous, if he wanted Dawn and Clay to grow up with a roof over their heads and a chance to go to Dalhousie University or the Sorbonne or even just business or beautician school in Halifax, he had to time this thing right.
Whale-watching, it turned out, was already taking off in California,Alaska, Baja, Maine, and Maui. As his left leg began to cramp up and he rubbed a thumb on his shiny cramp knot, he phoned the tourist bureau in Halifax and then a travel agency in New York and told them about his whale-watching cruises that were going to begin in the summer of 1993. In two years, while all the other fishermen were grovelling for government handouts to help them through the death of the Atlantic cod and the decimation of the fishery, Moses Slaunwhite’s boat had a fresh coat of paint, and he had on clean shirt and pants and a kind of one-off captain’s cap designed and hand-sewn by Viddy. He also had a whole load of mainland tourists crossing on the ferry to the island dock to gleefully hand over a fair sum of Yankee doodle to have Cap’n Moses lead them to the blues, the fins, the minke, and the right whales.
Moses had been kind to the whales. Careful as an Old Testament shepherd to his flock of sea creatures. Never too close, never noisy, always full of respect and caution. How many times had he heard a Brooklyn accent say, “Can’t you take us closer so my kids can pet one?”
Moses smiled, never let his feathers get ruffled. He pointed out the barnacles on the backs of some whales, the ones he had named Joshua, Rebecca, Naomi, and David. Although he wasn’t particularly religious, there was something about giving whales Biblical names, if they were to have names at all.
“Where’s Jonah?” someone would ask.
“Inside one of them, no doubt,” Moses would answer.
A specialty eco-tourism agency in Chicago got wind of Moses’ operation and made a business proposition that he couldn’t refuse. His excursions were suddenly part of a world circuit of tours that sent nature-starved city dwellers to the seven seas to observe whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and flying fish. Moses even came up with a specialty bonus of taking visitors to sea on calm summer nights to see “devil’s fire,” that brilliant, green, glowing phosphorescence of certain diatoms that turned the Atlantic into something eerie, beautiful, and awe-inspiring.
Some islanders begrudged Moses’ success. Some spoke of creating competition, but none followed through. Moses bought a second boat, hired on several island men and a couple of women, paid good wages, and was ever careful not to push his visitors too close to the whales. On bright summer days, when he had his boat anchored near the point, he’d see Sylvie sitting there on the shoreline watching the whales. He gave her free rides to sea but she said,“The whales only talk to me when I’m sittin’ ashore. They know me there. I know them.”
Sylvie baked fresh bread and cookies for the tourists and set up a table by the docks. People paid her well for her creations — the bread, the cakes, the little cinnamon cookies, the homemade ginger snaps. She loved the children the most and gave them freebies when their parents weren’t looking. Sylvie was glad other people came to share the whales with her, glad they came to share the beauty of her island.
The only glitch was that the new wave of tourism brought a little too much attention to Phonse’s Junkyard, his shoot ‘em up theme park. The travel office in Chicago received some complaints from folks who had returned to Des Moines or Poughkeepsie and told of an environmental time bomb clicking away in Moses’ otherwise picturesque island. They’d seen the wrecked cars, the oil laden-pond, and heard the carwong of bullets hitting things. Only a matter of time, they said, before toxins would leach into the soil and out into the sea or until the rifle-bearing maniacs would start using whales for target practice.
“We’d like to see if you can bring government pressure on closing that place down,” Chicago told Moses. “You need to protect your investment up there. Eco-tourists don’t want to hear elephant rifles pumping lead