‘I knew you’d come.’
His voice was so low, it seemed he had risen from the earth. My whole body started to shake. My mouth opened for no reason. He moved back, motioning to me to step outside. The silence was broken by the regular, repetitive click-clacking of the knitting needles. We sat down on a long wooden bench on the deck. My hands were shaking so much, I had to press them against the slats to calm them down.
‘Christ in a chalice! All this is going to end up driving me mad.’
As I focused all my energy on breathing, the fisherman’s voice drifted towards me through a slowly dispersing fog, gradually gaining clarity as I came to terms with the strangeness of the situation. The clicking of needles knitted the air a little tighter as the waves rolled in at the foot of the cliff.
‘I don’t dwell in the past. I know I keep saying there’s no money in fishing anymore, and I can see the sea’s been drained of all the fish, but I don’t do nostalgia. For me, the past is all about suffering. The suffering of my mother, who died too young, and my father, who got screwed over by the government and their bloody Gaspésiennes. Too many slaps on the back of the head! I’ve never known any different. Christ in a chalice! There’s nobody here who’s known anything different! Fishing never lined the pockets of any French-Canadian, only the bloody English! Anybody wanting to try their hand at something else ended up at the pulp and paper mill. Christ in a chalice, what a place that was! Do you know why they shut it down? Because three quarters of the men got cancer! They close the mill, the bosses bugger off, and who are the cancer patients going to complain to? And where are they going to go? And what would they end up with anyway? Ten thousand bucks at best, and what would they do with it? Pop their clogs in a private room at the hospital? Might as well die in a room with four beds, at least that way they won’t die alone!’
One wave, two.
‘The Gaspé’s a land of poor folk whose only riches were in the sea, and now the sea’s on its death bed. It’s a mish-mash of memories, a place that keeps its mouth shut and won’t bother a soul, a land of suffering only the open sea can bring any comfort to. And we latch on to it like no-hopers. Like fishermen who need consoling.’
The needles were still clicking away. He let two waves roll by, then glanced over at me.
‘Did you come here because of the will?’
‘No, because of Cyrille.’
He twitched with surprise.
‘Cyrille… Cyrille, what is he, five, six years younger than me? It’s not a lot, but it’s enough for us to not have biked around the village together as kids. We weren’t friends when we were young. Later, when Marie Garant grew into her beauty, we were this close to being enemies. Christ in a chalice! Of all the men that were around, I’d be hard pushed to tell you which one of them she truly loved.’
‘Maybe she loved them all.’
He threw me an indecisive glance. ‘Maybe. She married Lucien because her first fiancé was dead. It was Jeannot who killed him, on a fishing trip. Cyrille was there, hiding on the boat. He nearly died as well, and he’s been handicapped ever since. He’ll never say so, but I’m sure the guys were fighting over her. I reckon Jeannot even tried to kill Cyrille. He must have thought he was dead, to bring him back to shore. They said it was an accident, but Cyrille’s never been able to talk to Jeannot since. If it’s nothing but an accident, you don’t fly off the handle like that at someone! But it’s the cancer that’s going to get the better of him. Cyrille I mean. And before crab season comes around, at this rate.’
Three, four waves.
‘I was drunk, the night of their wedding. I used to drink like a fish when I was younger. Marie and Lucien set sail in the late afternoon. They’d had their wedding early in the day, so they could set out to sea on their honeymoon.’
Resting his forearms on his knees, he rubbed his hands together, the rest of his body in stillness.
‘Irène, my wife, was sulking because I’d been drinking. Something happened, I don’t know what, but she tore a bit of her dress. Guylaine told her to come up to Le Point de Couture and she’d fix it. So, she came over to me and told me to keep an eye on Guillaume.’
He took a deep breath.
‘My son was ten years old. It had been a difficult birth and the doctor said we couldn’t have any more children. My wife and her sister were mad about the little kid. Guylaine was only young, but she’d always been a bit of an old maid, so she had nothing better to do than look after the kid and spoil him rotten. Christ in a chalice! I loved him too – of course I loved him like crazy – but whatever else could I have done for him? The women were always on his case with their “Guillaume, do this, Guillaume, don’t do that! Guillaume, come and try on the trousers your auntie Guylaine’s sewn for you!” So I wanted to do the opposite, you know, stay off his back and teach him manly things so he wouldn’t turn into a big softie.
‘But no matter what I did, it was never the right thing. Never. What should I have done? How the heck should I know? What more could I have done? I wasn’t allowed to take him fishing, I could never take him swimming, I wasn’t allowed to take him anywhere! The women used to tell me off like I was a child myself. “Don’t tell him that! You’re upsetting him, he’s a sensitive soul!” and all that. Sometimes I even wondered whether I had the right to be his father! Christ in a chalice! It’s not that I didn’t want to be all trendy and talk to him about philosophy and all that kind of stuff, but that’s just not my thing. I can’t rattle on about that! You can’t ask me to go on about something I never knew anything about, can you? All I ever knew were fish that never brought home the bacon, my unemployment cheques every winter, little jobs under the table here and there and a bunch of slaps on the back of the head! So no, I never did know how to talk to that boy of mine!’
He bowed his head.
‘I’d already had too much to drink. We were partying. I can’t remember whether Guillaume came to ask me if he could go out for a paddle in the canoe with the Boissonneau brothers. What was I supposed to say to him, anyway? “Don’t play down by the water”? Christ in a chalice, we live by the sea! I wasn’t going to tell him twenty times a day it was dangerous, was I? And the women were always brooding over him too much, anyway.
‘I must’ve said yes. I imagine I said yes, I can’t remember.’
The rain had stopped, and the sun was starting to burn off the fog.
‘The women were taking their time, and I kept on drinking. I don’t know what time it was when the wind picked up. Someone told me the wind was picking up. I thought I’d better go and check the mooring lines on my boat. Why ever did I think that? Maybe I was just looking for a reason to go down to the wharf and see where they’d gone off to after their wedding…
‘So, I went down to the boat and smoked a joint. The weather turned heavier, and it kept getting worse and worse. I shut myself into my wheelhouse, stretched my legs out on the seat and fell asleep.
‘It was Marie who woke me up. She was banging on my boat like a crazy woman, like she was going to smash it all to pieces. She was still in her wedding dress, but it was filthy and torn. Her hair was dripping wet and sticking to her shoulders and her makeup had run, giving her these big, ghostly eyes. I’d never seen her look so beautiful…
‘She was shaking and screaming that she hadn’t finished looking, that we had to get back out there. There wasn’t another soul on the wharf! Nobody except me. Marie Garant, in her dirty wedding dress, asking me, just a poor fisherman, to help her find her husband who’d gone overboard! What else could I have done, Christ in chalice? So I took her aboard and off we went…