The war arrived and, despite the significant German population of Lunenburg County, certain individuals of German descent were singled out for derision. Doley Keizer was a prime target.“Dirty Nazi,”“Baby-killer,”“Hitler lover.” He heard them all. His looks were all broody and he had a trace of an Old Country accent: these were the only gifts his parents had given to him, the only family assets to take off into the world. He tried to enlist but even then, there was some reason why he was turned away. Fear, maybe, that he would turn traitor on Canada, sneak secret messages to his good friends working for
der Führer
.
It was insanely illogical but there it was. Maybe some actually believed poor Doley was sitting in his basement at night with a wireless radio, sending coded messages to submarines offshore, telling them how to sneak into Lunenburg Harbour at night and blow up all the mackerel boats.
Doley went back to work in the woods, swatting hordes of blackflies in summer and suffering frostbite of nose, ears, and fingers in winter. When the war ended, there was a flood of men returning to Lunenburg County wanting jobs. Doley, even though he was a fine and sturdy woodsman, was given the boot, and he suffered the indignity of going from home to home begging for odd jobs. And one day, fed up with the way people treated him each time they opened a door, he thought that, perhaps if there was no kindness, compassion, or a shred of yard work on the mainland, he would go to the island and see what manner of folk they be.
Doley stayed on for a week and then came to his own conclusion that it was not his place to take advantage of a poor widowed woman. He had already fallen desperately in love with her and knew this to be a hopeless situation if ever there was one. Sylvie was a beautiful woman, all of twenty-eight, in the prime of her life. Doley was nearly forty and nobody's idea of a prize catch of a man. He would do her a great favour and move quietly out of her life.
He moved himself to a small cabin in the woods on Noah Slaunwhite's property. Noah used to call it his hunting cabin, but there was no hunting anymore on the island. The deer had all been killed, rabbits pretty well wiped out by kids with wire snares. Nothing left to shoot at but tin cans and junk that washed up on the beach. Noah gave Doley some work and a serious lecture about how important it was for a man to “shave the grunge
off his face.” Noah bought him some fresh Gillette razor blades and gave him some old clothes from his attic. Noah tapped him twice between the shoulder blades and told him that if he wanted to stay on, he had to stop stooping like that. Doley tried the best he could to stand straight and, as result, hit his head almost every time he walked into the door of his cabin.
Noah made up work for Doley to do: things that he'd never really planned to get fixed in his lifetime got fixed, buildings never expecting repair found new boards. Shingles got nailed down. There was enough firewood cut, split, and piled into immaculate structures so that some of it would have to rot before it ever had a chance to kiss the flames of a wood stove.
Summer took Doley out on the boats, where he was slow to learn, but he was a good, faithful worker who never complained.
From winter on into spring that year, Sylvie tried to reconstruct a definition of love. What she had felt for David and what she had felt for Kyle. Similar but different. Two versions of love. First you are attracted to a man because of his smile, the way he looks at you, the way he moves. Then you get to know the way his mind works, what his dreams are, and you discover you can share those dreams together. But do you fall in love with a man just because he loves you? Or do you fall in love with a man because he's kind to you, because he maybe saved your life? Do you fall in love with a man you don't find particularly attractive? Is there some relationship between love and simple compassion? Can love be based on pity?
The crabapple trees near the fallen homesteads bloomed late in June. After the hard winter, the land was slow to recover, but something let go in the last week of the month and summer arrived without the precursor of spring. The whales came back to keep Sylvie company upon the sunny shoreline
of grey stones. The aching in her heart that was the lingering love and grief for Kyle Bauer seemed only to stop when she reconsidered again and again taking Doley Keizer into her life. But why had he not continued to come visit her? She had to ask him.
The wharf at 2:30. Boats back from a day at sea. A good catch. Fish stink, slime, noisy talk. Men with sharp knives at grisly grey planks, slitting belly to head, spilling guts into the sea where waiting gulls scooped the entrails and fought each other time after time. Sylvie standing back a bit, watching Doley at work, watching the men making jokes at him, jokes about his size, his intelligence, all fairly benign compared to what Doley had known in his life. Sylvie standing there on a soggy, mild day with beads of mist caught like jewellery in her hair, looking at Doley, trying to attach words to what she was feeling.
“How come you don't stop by anymore?” she asks him, while everyone listens. The knives stop clicking. Motion of fish from tub to board ceases. Doley looks up, dumbfounded. The other men stand gawking. Jaws drop. Doley swallows hard, as usual doesn't know what to say. Someone begins to laugh but has the goodwill to stifle himself. Then Sylvie understands. Doley believes he's not good enough for her. He's doing her some kind of favour by not coming by.
“I don't know,” he says, and Bill Pleasance lets out a hoot, but then turns his head away when Sylvie gives him a look that would snap the head off a shark.
“Come for dinner, would you, when you're through?”
“Yes.”
Doley was clean-shaven and well dressed, something just short of handsome, as he arrived back at Sylvie's house. Sylvie was healthy
this time and radiant. She had resolved her definition of what love was, had decided love was many things. Pity, compassion, gratitude were part of the package. But they were only words â small harnesses to yoke onto large ideas and emotions. There was much more to it than that but she would be obliged to no one to explain it.
Doley married Sylvie in August on the island at the Baptist church. A fill-in minister from Cape Breton was holding down the church for the month while the regular clergyman, Reverend Snelling, was having his appendix out with ensuing complications in a hospital in Halifax. The young Reverend Steele had no problems with marrying these two fine people and gave them his blessing. Later he would weather a blast of insulting remarks from Reverend Snelling, but it would not trouble the Cape Bretoner a great deal, only convince him to change his stripe to a more liberal church.
Doley's dreams were simple dreams and Sylvie understood that they were worth sharing. He always referred to their house as “Sylvie's” and never felt any rightful ownership. Doley was a quiet man, and Sylvie learned to spend entire evenings in near silence. Sometimes he carved small figurines with a sharp knife, carefully scraping the blade across soft, wet spruce wood. Sometimes he just sat and looked at her or into the flame in the lamp. Doley liked doing housework and this always made Sylvie laugh. A big man washing dishes or folding clothes. Doley enjoyed that as much as he gained satisfaction from splitting wood or rebuilding the shed from the ground up.
Doley had a secret that he kept well hidden until one night three years into their marriage when some young roughnecks from Mutton Hill Harbour came over one night. Wayne Dorsen and some of his cronies he ran around with. Beached their Boston whaler at Front Bay and went looking for an empty house to torch or anything worth stealing.
Lights were out early at Sylvie's house and it seemed empty, so they entered, shoving open the door and smacking it against the wall even though it wasn't even locked. Doley was sound asleep after a hard day of working at sea. Sylvie got up to see what was going on when one of Dorsen's friends, a twenty-four-year-old good-for-nothing named Teazer, shone his flashlight on her and called her a name she'd never been called in all her days alive on the island. The scoundrel started to move towards her when he saw another dark figure come through the doorway of the bedroom and reach out towards him. The next thing Teazer knew, he had something that felt like a bench vice squeezing his Adam's apple and he couldn't breathe. Dorsen and his other ally grabbed hold of Doley, but Doley elbowed him hard in the gut and smacked the other backhanded with a fistful of knuckles hard as beach stones. Then Doley proceeded to lay his intruder flat on the floor and pound his head onto the floorboards with a regular rhythm like he was beating a drum to some ancient, primitive chant. A sound came out of Doley, but it was not words from any language.
Dorsen and the other one fled but Teazer lay motionless on the floor. Doley looked like he was ready to hit him again. Sylvie screamed out for him to stop. He stopped and let go of the man, sat back on his haunches and shuddered.
Sylvie had never believed Doley was capable of such rage, such violence, and it frightened her more than the fact that their house had been broken into and a stranger in the dark had made dangerous advances towards her.
Sylvie helped Teazer to sit up and wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. She leaned close to him and could hear his breath in her ear.“He's alive.”
“I'm glad you stopped me.”
Teazer found his way back to the mainland in the morning on the first ferry. Neither he nor his two buddies would ever return to Ragged Island.
Doley tried to explain that he had a violent temper, even though she had never seen it before this. He explained how his father and nearly everyone else he knew had made him feel so hurt and angry as a kid. He'd never gotten over it. He had, however, devoted a great deal of his energy to developing the distinguished skill of containing the violence that was within him. He wasn't a hundred percent sure he could hold it in forever. He said that, now that she knew, if she wanted him to leave, he would.
“Can you promise me you'll never be violent again, even against someone like that?”
“Yes, I can promise you that. But can you trust me to live up to it?”
“Yes. I know you, Doley. I know this is part of who you are. Maybe you can't get rid of it, but you can control it and you can live with it.”
And so Doley kept his promise. He kept his violence, his throttled engine of hurt and anger, under control. Because he believed he could do anything at all if he still had Sylvie. He loved her deeply.
The next day, Sylvie walked the property with a willow dowsing branch and pointed to the ground. Together they dug a new well, a fifteen-foot-deep hole in the ground. She helped him shovel. He broke stones with pickaxes, lifted boulders from the pit. From the shoreline he brought other stones that fit together as if preordained for this purpose, and the walls of the well were rocked in to the surface. The water was clean and pure, and the old shallow well was given over to frogs. Doley put in a pipe below the frost line so it would not freeze in winter and talked about getting electricity soon â power for lights but also for an electric pump.
Doley began to speak a new dream to Sylvie about moving to Lunenburg and opening up a hardware store. He didn't exactly know why it had come back into his life, this idea of being something other than a labourer, of selling things, of being a
proprietor of his own business on the mainland. Mainlanders had never been anything but cruel to him.
He talked about it often and then, realizing how it upset his wife, he stopped. But one day, at the dinner table, he heard himself speaking his foolish aspirations out loud again and saw the look on Sylvie's face.
“How stupid can I be?” he said out loud.
“You're not stupid.”
“I'm sorry, Sylvie. It was all talk. We're not moving. We're doing just fine. I don't know what got into me.”
Sylvie knew that her husband would make any sacrifice for her and now he would make this one as well. He stopped talking about Lunenburg and about selling hardware to a store full of eager customers. He stayed put in his mind and in his life with what he had and did not feel sorry for himself in the slightest.
Sylvie began to teach Doley to read. It was both humbling and rewarding. Sylvie admired his efforts to learn something that seemed to her so simple, yet proved so fundamentally difficult to him. Words of three syllables appeared to him as the most complex puzzles, requiring him to test one piece of sound with another over and over until he got it right. Sometimes he would give up for a short while and sit stroking the cover of the book. Then he would pick up where he left off. She knew he was not stupid but it would be more than thirty years before she would understand that her third husband had been afflicted with a learning disorder, a common condition known as dyslexia. But that wasn't Doley's only ailment.
Doley was reading at a grade three level when he began to lose weight. He was only forty-eight, but his hair turned grey over a period of a few months. His skin took on a greyish yellow colour, and there were more trips to the Mutton Hill Harbour doctor. Although the doctor had no fixed name for whatever was wrong with Doley, he insisted that the big man
check himself into a hospital in Halifax. Sylvie pleaded with him to go, but Doley insisted there was nothing really the matter with him. He was going through a “spell” of some sort. He would get better.
Instead, he aged as if something had taken the timepiece of his life and made the hands of the clock rush ahead on him. Sylvie watched him slip away, slowly but steadily.
When he was gone, Sylvie fought her impulse to curse and rage against such a sinister world that played such malevolent tricks on her over and again. She missed Doley and everything about him but stored his lessons in her heart. Even anger, hurt, and suffering can be tamed and channelled into something sad but beautiful. And Doley, Sylvie decided, had been a very beautiful man.