Village Life

Today the island is shrouded in fog and looks mysterious, something tropical that a ship off course might discover near Mozambique. It would be an island inhabited by creatures never before seen unlike the bleak rock it is in reality supporting a few shrubs and the gulls that on occasion line the shore in anticipation of capelin or herring or mackerel. The barren island is the note that makes the composition of the coastline complete. It would be static without the island, quietly receding. The island makes it resonate.

The fog hangs above the bay, a curtain blocking the view of the other side, wanting to be drawn opened with the sun. The other side is a black wall of hundred foot rock cliffs half a mile away.

The curtain runs from the open sea to the beach at the end of the bay. The bay is still, no ripple on the water except for the wake of the gulls that wait below the fishing stage for the cod ghosts thrown to them by the fishermen who keep the dense fleshy fillets for themselves. The gulls are happy for what they can salvage from the bones and they fight each other for the remains.

There is only one fishing stage in the bay now when there used to be fifty.

The fishermen are at work after a few hours securing their catch. It is a period of grace, the personal fishery that lasts for ten days. They are men who worked with their fathers fishing throughout the year until that practice was brought screeching to a halt by the federal government who deduced the ocean was running out of fish and we would do our part to save what was left. Other countries have paid the depletion of fish stocks no heed and continue to fish merrily off the shore giving the finger to all these men who once lived only by what they caught at sea. They stand up in the boats and there is not a life jacket in sight. The posture of the men improves each time the food fishery is opened.  It is like their genes realign and there is a unity of purpose in their being. The fish is better in the autumn. Too soft and well fed on capelin in the summer. Cod is the only meaning of the word fish.

The routine of the fishermen takes them into the little shed at the end of the stage. It is where the filleting is done. It is their clubhouse and it is exclusively a man’s place.

A knife cut of sunlight slashes through the fog. The curtain thins and becomes more translucent.

The women read the weather and transmit their wisdom. Getting a line of laundry out is a sign that the day will be clear. They know this by the feel of the breeze against their skin, by the smell of the wind, by the force of it.

A line can be twenty yards long supported by a forked stick in the middle that allows it to move with the wind. Jeans hang from the belt loop, shirts from the collar, solid darks then colours, public garments then things more personal closer to the house. 

Little has changed in the village. Three new houses is all and more decay of the old ones that have been abandoned for years. Lovely old wooden houses with mansard roofs and bay windows caught up in family feuds. They are worth money now but there are quarrels to be won with siblings and with the village that shaped the mind. Land had no meaning and now it does. Land had no value and now it does. The traditional two storey houses, saltboxes, sixteen by twenty-four feet are a rhyming poem unto themselves, lyrical in the way they sit so firmly on the ground  amongst buildings that have been truncated, cut from two stories to one, the modern bungalow, clapboard replaced by aluminum siding and wooden windows now plastic instead. To the white one on the shore the owner added a twelve/twelve pitched roof and made her house larger instead. A single woman undaunted. She lived away for many years in Ontario where you can never have too much space.

There is no order in the village, no design, no plan. A house here another there, fence posts running randomly like the pencil lines of an infant on the kitchen wall. There is no burnish, no glamour. It is just a remote village on the sea where people have lived for three hundred years.

The crows are calling, screeching, hags all of them but comforting like the hag that fed the wild cats in France and called them with her scarred vocal cords, Minou, Minou, Minou and put a bowl of gruel on the ground and their tails shot up and waved and they rubbed against her legs and purred as she sang, Minou, Minou, Minou.

The cats here are not wild.

Dogs are everywhere in the village. Half of them descended from the same black Labrador and none of them care for strangers at all. The once fierce beagle is horse with age and can hardly move but still manages to bark, an ancient diner chocking on a piece of meat.

The black one runs with barred teeth and tries to come from behind and tear some flesh from the rump, a snarling irrational package, fifty pounds of determined white fanged darkness barreling down the street, like Gericault’s horses, with all four feet in the air at once.

Weekday mornings the school bus, a yellow dragon in a Chinatown parade, winds through the village scooping up the children, barely coming to a stop. The bus is as wide as the road. The little stand to keep the kids dry and out of the wind, an outhouse without a door, blew over in a storm and has been lying on the ground for weeks and the kids just stand beside it oblivious to the rain.

The roads adhere to the landscape. They are of the landscape. They are a dark outline on the landscape flattening out the illusion of depth. The yellow school bus races along the dark line of the road. One road is paved. It bisects the headlands. The rest are all gravel. They wash away with the heavy rain and require constant grading. One man has the job of grading the roads. His work is like Sisyphus, or The Woman Of The Dunes.

The fellow in the white bungalow facing the cove moves his cars around. He has a pickup truck and two sedans with another parked across the valley at his brother’s place. He changes the direction they face according to the weather. He is not the only one. It’s the male version of the weather forecast.  If the car faces the house things are calm, if the car backs to the house a storm might be coming and if the cars are all parallel to the house and lined up on the lawn all hell is going to break loose. The fellow in the white bungalow facing the cove owns the once grand house next door. It has been for sale for many years. He doesn’t want to sell it is just a way of having strangers come by for a visit to engage in conversation. There is an upstairs bedroom that he won’t open when he shows the house. He always conveniently forgets the key. The Tony Perkin’s moment on the tour. Either this fellow’s mother is in there under glass like Santa Catarina of Asisi or his alternate personality is blocking the door. It’s a real deal breaker for those looking for a house with an ocean view.

The sea rolls into the cove not in waves like other places but in an undulating curl that advances and retreats meeting the rock wall with a roar.

The sun pushes through the clouds above the cliffs on the far side of the bay, the black cliffs angled striations of rock and a thousand individual plains. It’s Cubism a billion years before Picasso, a stark beauty risen from the sea.