Howard Norman - What Is Left the Daughter

I drove to the bakery to deliver this news to Hans and Tilda. It was already nine A.M. but they'd just sat down for breakfast. I'd heard rumors that newlyweds sometimes slept in like that.

IN THE END, the Dewis family decided not to put out the money, and Tilda lost that mourner's fee. "No good deed goes unpunished" was Cornelia's response, after she'd informed Tilda that Reverend Plumly had called to cancel her services, with apologies. "And here you'd gone and changed the date of your wedding on their behalf." Yet the same day Tilda got another offer to mourn, in the village of Lorneville.

"It's arranged through Reverend Greene at Lorneville Methodist," she said.

"Didn't he refuse to perform your wedding service?" Cornelia asked.

"One of many who did," Tilda said. "I don't have to be his best friend, I just have to work with him half an hour."

"Practical of you," Cornelia said.

Over the next few days — October 11, 12 and 13—I lived like a hermit. I pretty much kept to the house, scarcely laying eyes on my uncle, though I'd hear his truck come and go. And what I'm going to tell you about now, Marlais, which occurred on the night of October 13–14, I didn't see as a premonition at first. Yet it must've been a premonition that led me to wander into Donald and Constance's bedroom and sit on my aunt's side of the bed. I use the word "premonition" because, a few days later, an article in the Mail substantiated that the ferry Caribou had been torpedoed and sunk at about the same time of night.

I hadn't been able to sleep. My uncle was out in his shed. Sitting on the bed, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the room, then toured the ancestral portraits in frames on the walls. I looked at my aunt's hairbrush on the bureau, her hand-held mirror, the vase of dried flowers, her blue cotton bathrobe on its hook on the door. I looked out the window. The moonlit view was down the scrub pine slope, a number of ponds, a stream that eventually widened out into the Minas Basin.

There were several lights on in Betty and Abel Wickersham's house; possibly they were already up and about. I recalled how a week earlier at the post office Abel spoke to me about the change in Donald's character. "This war — all of us are coming apart at the seams," he said. "That young man from Advocate Harbor and that other from Diligent River shipped home in coffins. Fellow from Portapique, what family was he from, the Cogmanaguns, wasn't it? Reverend Witt says people need to use all the old prayers more often, but come up with some new ones, too, to fit this war in Europe. So much sadness and not always knowing what to do about it."

"I sure don't know what to do with mine," I said.

"It's nothing new to our part of Nova Scotia," Abel said. "Being from Halifax you may not know, but during the Great War not one man of conscription age from Great Village ever came back. Not a goddamn single one survived. That whole generation of men, absent like if you woke up and discovered your middle finger had disappeared. After that, if you were a young woman from Great Village wanted to marry, you looked elsewhere."

"The world's gone haywire again, Abel, hasn't it."

"Who doesn't feel that? So tell me, what gives Donald the right to poke his finger into our chests, hectoring about U-boats as he's been doing?"

"You got me there."

"Look, I've known Donald Hillyer my entire life, and I'd be the last to contend he's mild-mannered by nature. But he never used to hector like that. Understand, I'm less filing a complaint than mystified."

Moonlight flooded the wide field behind Patrick and Marcelline Bastow's house, down the road to the west of the Wickershams'. The Bastows had only their porch light on. Their son, William, served with the ambulance corps in France. Tracing their road farther west, I came to Reverend Witt's house. Witt lived alone and raised about a hundred sheep, which brought the behind-his-back comment that a Christian flock wasn't enough for him. Not more than ten days before, Reverend Witt had dropped by the house and told my aunt that Donald had asked to deliver a sermon in church.

"Donald getting up in front of all those people?" Constance said. "He couldn't have been serious."

"Here's the list he gave me of his ideas," Witt said. "See for yourself."

My aunt and I both read it. My uncle's every topic was U-boats, no surprise there. My aunt could only shake her head, incredulous, and say, "My Donald's got smoke blowing out of his ears. Tea, Reverend Witt?"

The three of us sat down for tea. Witt said, "Just so you know, I told Donald that I had sermons composed for the next long while. I could see this didn't sit well with him. He said, 'If that's the best answer you've got, I might approach churches elsewhere.'"

Now, I realize, Marlais, that human memory is an unreliable stenographer of such conversations, but you get the gist of them. The one with Abel Wickersham, the one with Reverend Witt. In fact, many of the people who'd had run-ins with Donald had come to a similar conclusion: my uncle in effect had (to paraphrase Scripture) become what he beheld — U-boat atrocities, radio war reports. He'd become those and was almost a broken man for it.

The night of October 13–14, I tried to sleep on top of the quilt on my aunt and uncle's bed, but couldn't. At first light I went to the shed to attempt to make amends, but my uncle was nowhere to be found. I killed some time — doing what, I can't remember. Around noon I drove to the bakery, and Cornelia said that early that morning Donald had dropped by for coffee. "He was on his way to get toboggan runners from the blacksmith in Truro," she said. The blacksmith's name was Steven Parish. He'd fashioned runners for my uncle for two decades, had only once raised his price, in 1934, but not before or since.

"Tilda around?" I asked.

"She and Hans went to visit Randall Webb in hospital," Cornelia said.

I got in my car and drove to Truro. My uncle's truck was at the blacksmith's shop. The shop was across the road from a restaurant that featured a view of the Tidal Bore, the berserk tide that filled the long cove in just minutes. The cove was not fifty meters from the restaurant, though locals regarded the Tidal Bore as a world-class phenomenon of nature. In fact, the restaurant, McKay's Diner, bragged-up the Tidal Bore at the top of its menu — a drawing of a couple, daredevil in a rowboat riding a tall wave, eating a big stack of pancakes. The printed motto was "Our blueberry pancakes fill you up fast." For my aunt's sixty-first birthday, January 5, 1942, we'd gone to this restaurant for breakfast, Donald and Constance, Tilda and me, and the pancakes were excellent. When Donald had started in on a story from his childhood about his competing in an ice-skating race despite a sprained ankle, my aunt said, "Husband, don't be a tidal bore." I laughed loudly, so did Tilda, and so did our waitress, who'd been refilling our coffee cups. But then the waitress asked my uncle, "Well, did you win or not?"

The sign on the door of Steven Parish's shop read BLACKSMITH AT WORK, and when you stepped inside, that's exactly what you found. Parish was born and raised in Truro. He was about fifty years old, handsome, with curly black hair usually tied back from his forehead with a bandanna, taut of build. He wielded the tools of his trade with precision and grace, especially considering his "youthful arthritis," as Constance called it. Anyway, when I opened the door into the heat-blast of the forge, Parish, wearing a smudged leather apron, goggles and thick asbestos gloves, saw me and walked over. He pressed the working end of a hammer against my chest and said, "Wyatt, whatever's on your mind, I wouldn't speak a single word of it to your uncle. He's in my office listening to a nightmare bulletin on the radio. So I'd get right back in your car and drive home, is my suggestion."