Then William came home one day from his odd jobs on the wharf and he had more to his story. “I talked to old Slaunwhite again. Apparently Fichte got into a fanatical argument with one of the preachers on the island here. It turned into fisticuffs: determinism versus free will. Fichte was a passionate man when it came to the central idea of freedom of the intellect. They fought. He picked up a rock and nearly killed the clergyman. He barely escaped the island with his life. It changed his whole view of the world.”
Why this foolish tale was important to her husband, Sylvie couldn't begin to comprehend, but he was very enthusiastic about it all and wrote extensive, incomprehensible notes that evening as he rifled through a pair of books concerning German philosophy.
So Sylvie decided she could live with what William Toye believed to be true. And she began to understand that her husband's beliefs had something to do with why he left the university.
He was a good husband, though, a good man. What exists in the mind, she told herself, may be the only thing that is real after all. Great men and women had lived by such principles before, and an island was a good, safe place for such a high-minded doctrine.
There had been three happy years. She always thought of them as thus. And then, suddenly, he woke up one night and said outright,“Sylvie, I don't know what is real and what isn't anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I've discovered that some things I believed to be empirical fact, are not.”
“Why should this come as any great surprise to a man who has taught logic and philosophy?”
“It's not that. It's something different. It's like a big tangled pile of that rope on the wharf. I've started with one end and threaded it this way and that, just barely got it free, only to discover that it turns back on itself somehow to lead me to the same free end. And yet the knot is still there, bigger and more tangled than ever.”
“Just let it go.”
“I don't know if I can. I don't have a clear reference point as to what I know to be true.”
“I am real, you know that. And I love you.”
She held him and rocked him back to sleep like he was a little boy, but in the morning, she realized that something had changed.
Wild frantic birds for eyes. Like the swallow that had darted into the house. Unable to find a way out. Back and forth.
She walked him to the sea, to the Trough, to sit again and watch kelp sway back and forth in the sweet, salty pools of cold, clean water. She waited for whales to appear. And they did.
“I believe sometimes that I can hear the voices, the thoughts of those big creatures, in my mind,” she told William.
He looked at her intently.“Are you serious?”
“Yes. I am”
“It's probably just your imagination,” he told her.
“It probably is. Because I can't translate what they are telling me into any language. Yet I learn something new each time I hear them. There are unspoken ideas that cannot be formed into words.”
“Yes.”
“It doesn't even matter to me if those whale voices are real or not. I would continue to believe in them because they are important to me. They are part of who I am. Do you know what I mean?”
Just then,William Toye began to cry. He hung his head and wept, his wife's arm around him, until salt tears splashed upon the flat slate rock at his feet. “Yes. I do know what you mean. And I know why you're saying this to me. I love you all the more for it.”
William Toye became kinder and softer after that, but a great, ponderous uncertainty had set in like a damp, cold fog in his soul. He drank, but without his previous enthusiasm. He sought refuge in the arms of his wife and began to shy away from interactions with others on the island. He required care, and Sylvie was the one to provide it. They ceased being lovers and became great friends. William Toye lost his fervour for books and knowledge for the most part, although he settled into reading anthologies of old poets.
He died in his sleep three years into their marriage. Sylvie woke in the cool, thin, grey light of early morning and realized the man beside her was cold. Icy cold. His two hands were upon his face, covering it as if he'd just seen something that he did not care to look at. Sylvie did not pry his hands loose but held him in her arms and rocked him as she had done in recent months. She tried not to swear out loud or blame herself for the pain that
would now re-enter her life. But she could not contain herself. She cursed loud and long and then cried until her tears soaked into the nightshirt of her fourth husband. Grief swept over her like a familiar advancing army, crushing everything of her spirit, trampling her and leaving no room for her self. Leaving no oxygen in her lungs, no hope in her thoughts.
When she could bring herself to move, she walked outside and saw the pale three-quarter moon like a white ghost hanging in the morning sky, fading into invisibility as the sun began to burn off the mist.
She did not call for any assistance until late that afternoon, and soon after, she asked Moses to arrange for a simple burial, a non-denominational service.
The island does not sleep. Not in this century, anyway. Sylvie knows this, feels this in her old bones. Sylvie wakes at five-thirty today. July 15. The summer slipping by so quickly. Wondering how many summers there are left. The brevity of the season makes her love it all that much more. She awakens with the feeling that there are scattered pieces of something she needs to fit back together. She is significant, important. She is the essential connection between the island, the sea, the moon, and the people. Some kind of thread she is: these are an old woman's
thoughts rattling around in her brain. And she knows this is not madness at all, yet words will fail her should she try to explain this to Kit or to Elise, the woman from Upper Montclair.
Silence and stillness on a grand morning like this. Some would think the whole island at rest, at sleep, but not her. She feels the life of this place beneath her, all around. She knows the island will sleep again someday, will rest when the world changes. Another ice age, or rising tides from the melting ice caps. Then it will sleep until the moon or sun tugs it awake again. She is grateful that this is her home, as always. Love for this place. No one understands the sustenance of geography like she does.
Sylvie's feet upon the gravel road leading to the cemetery. Old barns leaning into the earth, swallows shooting like rockets from cracks in the walls. Old, quiet houses with families of young children asleep. Clapboard cocoons. Neat lawns mown with gasoline mowers, the grass smooth and sculpted around hillocks and cosy up to the boulders with flakes of silvery lichen.
Rotted fenceposts around the old cabbage fields where now wild mustard blooms yellow in the morning sun. Dew on everything like a crystal clear sugar glazing on baked goods. Her own breathing: a sigh, a gulp of clean air. A step forward. Why, on this morning, is she going to visit her dead men? She doesn't know really. Love, perhaps. Memory and love.
Death is a small impediment to love, she admits to herself. Love collects. Somehow. Never diminishes. Oh, you can put it like a kettle on the back burner once it comes to a full boil, but there it will simmer. She's been simmering for a long while.
A step at a time, a breath. The air into her lungs, the air parting as she moves through it, the island air filling in behind as she moves on. Moving on, each day to connect one thing to the next, to keep things whole. Sylvie's job. This morning, a thread must go out to the past.
Four graves are all in a line at the farthest back corner of the cemetery. This arranged against various misgivings of various ministers. Four husbands in a row. Death uniting them now, but each related somehow to each other, each husband of a woman named Sylvie. David Young, her first love, stiff body salvaged from the icy waters by the first mate. Why was it that the need to see the dead body is so strong that men go to great lengths to retrieve the lost from battlefields, from collapsed mine shafts, from deep saltwater canyons? The row of four, however, gives her a sense of unity. Some would say that she is a victim of all that loss. Some would say she has been punished for something she has done or for who she is deep down. But Sylvie knows the world does not work that way.
Something to do with men that she cannot explain. A thought planted in her head by William Toye in his ramblings. Time, our notion of it, he had advised her, was just a theory, not a fact.
We like this backwards-forwards thing. Time on a single plane, one line. We can look back but always move forward, as if on a train.
Mad William wondered if it was all wrong.
There is only the present and we expand it somehow. We can live in the past or the future. Nothing ends, nothing begins. Things just are. And since that makes life too confusing and too impossible, we create a workable lie to satisfy us and we make beginning and endings. Births and deaths.
And Sylvie was well versed in both.
Her own children â the ones she never had. She missed them all but refused to let the weight of her grief chase after them like dark shadows.
Her husbands, all buried. But all of them still in her heart. She placed a hand on her chest, just beneath her throat, and spread her fingers wide, felt something, felt the presence of these men. All with her here on this pale blue wonder of a morning. The tall, dark spruce trees at the edge of the graveyard had a practised, benevolent look to them. They'd seen her here like this before.
Suddenly the roar of a muffler-less truck up the gravel road and over the hilltop, churning stones. A loud radio blaring from the
window. Moses Slaunwhite, driving down to the wharf. Arm out the window, waving. Sylvie turns and smiles. Men and trucks. Surrounding themselves with noise and machines. Chaos. The dust tries to rise from the road but is too damp and settles again, to sleep until the sun dries it and gives it the lift of an afternoon breeze.
Moses had seen Sylvie there at the graves before. Early in the morning like this. Knew not to feel sorry for her. No one needed to feel sorry for Sylvie. A strong woman, had a soul of stainless steel, heart as big as a Chevy V-8 engine. Smart old gal. Too bad about all those men going away on her. Moses didn't think he'd ever die. He had a hell of a lot of things to do yet with his life. A life that seemed to be going just like it was ordered up that way, all planned out. Up until this summer that is. One thing always leading to the next. Fishing, eco-tours, etcetera. But that was washing up stiff now. What next?
Moses had noticed the orderliness of everything moving into the future ever since he was a kid. The power of the plan, Moses' father, Noah, had called it.
Plan. Act. Adapt. Learn. Duck the worst blows and roll with the punches you don't see coming.
But he hadn't expected that the whales would disappear. And with them, the eco-tour business would go. And with that demise, his livelihood. The bank would want the boat soon even though there was bloody all they could do with it but sell it for a third of what it was worth.
Moses slammed on the brakes. Loved the feel of an old truck skranking along to a stop on the loose stones. Backed her up and made a little whipper turn there on the hill from Up Along â just like a reckless teenager would. Throaty exhaust talking back to him up over the rise and then he killed the motor out of respect for the morning quiet that filled in around him as soon as he slammed the door shut.
“Sylvie, how'd you like to go for a boat ride today?”
“I'd be honoured, Moses. What would you charge me?” she teased.
“Sylvie, you know I couldn't take an old woman's money.”
“You're a practical man, Moses Slaunwhite. I've always known you to be. Must be some reason for you to invite me.”
Moses removed his cap that said Clearwater. He scratched the part of his head that had the least hair.“Whyn't you just go ahead and read my mind, while you're at it? You probably know more about what I'm thinking than I do. You've always been like that.”
“Are we thinking about whales?”
“Yes. Of course.
We
are thinking about whales.”
“I haven't been to sea in a long time. I'm more comfortable here on the island.”
“I know you are. But here you are standing around the graves of your dead men and I just thought that you might like to hang around with the living for a while.”
“You think I'm morose?”
“Not at all. I'm not inviting you out of pity, darn it. I'm inviting you because I think you can help me figure out what's going on with the whales. Madame, if I don't find 'em soon, I'm up to my earlobes in ox droppings.”
Moses was funny. He made her smile. Her love for dead husbands would abide, it was true. She still had time for the living, those who needed her help. A boat ride to sea on a morning like this would be something.
“Who else will be aboard?”
“Just you and me, girl.”
“What if people talk?”
“Let 'em.”
The government wharf was pretty well deserted. Moses had the biggest boat of the lot, but it felt too modern, somehow sterile. The big engine roared into life, and Moses said there'd be cappuccino in a few minutes. She thought he was joking, but as he found the seaward channel and walked from the wheelhouse, he handed her a steaming mug of something that must have been cappuccino.
“Bought the damn thing for the clientele but now I don't know if I'll have any clientele. Don't burn your lips on it. She's hot.”
Sylvie smiled through the steam of her cappuccino and felt honoured to have this voyage to sea.
“Sylvie, you know I'm not just asking you out here to introduce you to fancy coffee drinks, don't you?”
Sylvie smiled and her face recreated itself into a fine display of adventurous wrinkles.“Are you suggesting your intentions are not honourable?” she teased.