The Lunenburg Werewolf (8 page)

There are an awful lot of fishing superstitions in Nova Scotia. Local fishermen will tell you that you should never turn your boat against the sun or counter-clockwise. They also believe that a piece of silver should always be placed beneath the mast of a sailing ship before she is launched, a deck hatch should never be turned completely outside down, black suitcases are considered bad luck, and whistling will bring a storm (as will throwing a penny overboard).

And some even say that the sight of seaweed on the floor and softly blowing curtains will chill a man or maid to their very soul.

Curtains, for Certain

There is a story that they tell in the Digby area of the Fundy shoreline about a young girl named Jenny, a fisherman's daughter back in the days of the tall schooners. Jenny was a hard-working girl who made a living cleaning the fish that the men brought to shore. She knew the ways of the water and could tell the tide and the time with nothing more than a quick glance.

Which was all it took for her to fall head over heels in love with Big Jim Dobson. She stole one brief look at the young man while he was working on his father's boat and she knew that she and he were going to be as one.

Mind you, Jenny was nothing more than sixteen years old at the time and Jim was all of eighteen, but things happened at a different pace back in those days. Jenny married Jim that summer and the two of them moved into a small house on the seaward side of the hill, overlooking the harbour.

For a time everything was wonderful. Every morning Jenny would see Jim smiling. Every night she went to sleep listening to the steady thump of his heartbeat and the soft talking whoosh-ha-ha of the waves washing against the shoreline. Life was happy.

Then, two weeks into what looked to be a happily-ever-after marriage, the first bit of trouble set in.

“You mustn't go to sea today,” Jenny told Jim.

“And why is that?” he asked.

“I saw the curtains moving last night,” she said. “And there was nary a wind stirring outside.”

Now every fisherman's wife in this harbour town knew that if a woman saw the curtains stirring on a windless evening that it meant there'd be a bad wind blowing the next day—a wind that might blow a loved one away. The sight of stirring curtains was what the old people would call a “forerunner,” a sure and certain sign of death to come.

“Those bedroom windows are double-paned sheet glass,” Jim told her. “And I caulked them myself. There is no way in the sea nor sky nor land that a smidgen of breeze could creep into this bedroom.”

“Jimmy, I saw them moving,” Jenny said. “It was like somebody had shackled a ghost to that curtain rod.”

Jim only laughed at his young wife's fears. “Look at that sky out there,” he said to her. “The air is so calm that the hay in the meadow is growing stiff from a lack of bending. There is no sign of a storm nor a bit of bad wind in the lea of a calm morning as this.”

“And yet those curtains moved.”

“It's calm, I tell you.”

“It is calmest before a storm,” Jenny warned him. “You're a fisherman, Jim. You ought to know that.”

But there were fish to be caught and money to be made and a mountain of new bills that weren't going to pay themselves. So Big Jim Dobson hauled on his gumboots and clumped down to the harbour to set sail.

And Jenny stayed home to wait.

All that day the curtains continued to blow. Jenny sat and watched them. The birds outside sang sweetly. Her friends passed and called for her to join them in the outdoor sunshine. But Jenny preferred to sit there and keep her vigil, staring at those curtains.

Morning wore into afternoon and poured itself towards the evening and Jenny still kept on watching. As she watched those curtains blowing, in her mind's eye she saw the sails on Jim's schooner billowing and snapping in a high Atlantic windstorm.

The curtain rods creaked. In her mind's eye she heard the masts of a sailing ship sway. The main and fore gaff swung hard. Hawser snapped and timber groaned.

And then all at once the curtains fell to the ground like a crumpled ghost.

Jenny reached for the curtain but hesitated, her fingertips not more than an inch away from the fabric, which seemed to pucker and writhe upon the floorboards of her bedroom like a clot of jellyfish.

She reached closer.

She could smell the sea wind blowing in through the window.

Closer.

She could hear the seagulls crying in the breeze.

Closer.

She could see the shape of Jim's face, outlined in the fallen curtains. She could see him kicking against the current. She could see him trying to escape the cold and hungry Atlantic waves. She could see him opening his mouth wide into one last soul-chilling scream.

A seagull screeched just beyond the window.

Jenny sank to her knees and touched the bedroom curtains. She gasped as she found them to be sopping wet.

She wept a little while, feeling the tears spill down her cheeks, splashing on the already sodden curtains. Then she picked the curtains up, folding them carefully over her arms. She was not surprised to see the tangled clumps of fresh kelp curled beneath the fallen cotton curtains.

Later that evening they brought her Jim home to the harbour. There had been a storm and a spar had snapped and fallen upon her husband while he was bent and working. He had fallen into the sea and drowned. Only grim luck had led them to find him when they brought in a net full of fresh-caught fish and Jim's cold dead body was tangled in its weave.

Jenny was waiting on the wharf when the boat returned. The curtains, now neatly folded, hung over her arms. At least she would have a shroud to wrap him in.

Some of the very best stories are found very close to home. This next story was told to me by my wife, whose family passed it down to her. I have gussied and ghosted it up a bit to make it fit this collection a little snugger and hopefully have got most of the details right.

This story takes place in Cape Breton, one of the richest breeding grounds for pure tale-telling talent. I wasn't able to figure out for sure exactly where in Cape Breton this tale took place, so I have taken the liberty of setting it in Cleveland, a small community sixteen kilometres northeast of Port Hawkesbury. I apologize in advance to any in-laws who are offended by free and frequent fudging of the facts.

Meet Aunt Minnie

It seems that Aunt Minnie was a widow, more than a handful of decades old. She lived alone in a small cottage with Mr. Coal Shadow, a sleek black cat with a bad habit of tangling Aunt Minnie's knitting.

Now, as anyone can tell you, a black cat is the worst of luck to anybody except its owner. And Mr. Coal Shadow was the very best of luck for old Aunt Minnie. He purred on her lap, kneaded her quilt with his paws every night, and never let her walk alone (that is, if she was headed in any direction that might eventually lead towards the kitchen). He glared at strangers and he managed the mouse population and he kept careful count of the birds that flew and frolicked in Aunt Minnie's rowan tree.

“Mr. Coal Shadow is my constant companion and very best friend,” Aunt Minnie always said. “He sticks to me closer than my own shadow.”

“How old is that cat, Aunt Minnie?” her friends and relations would ask.

“Mr. Coal Shadow is nearly as many years as I have fingers and toes,” she would answer.

“You ought to be thinking about putting the old cat down,” someone would invariably tell her.

“Mr. Coal Shadow will live just as long as I do and maybe just a little bit more,” Aunt Minnie would answer with a sly little wink.

Then one cold winter morning Aunt Minnie walked to the kitchen and Mr. Coal Shadow did not follow beneath her feet.

“Are you sleeping, Mr. Coal Shadow?” Aunt Minnie asked.

Only Mr. Coal Shadow wasn't sleeping. The old cat was lying stretched out in Aunt Minnie's favourite rocking chair. He wasn't moving. He wasn't stirring.

The poor old cat had died.

“Well,” Aunt Minnie said. “There is only one thing to do for this cat.”

And so, in the heart of a very cold Cape Breton winter, Aunt Minnie went out to the back shed and got her best gardening shovel. She carried Mr. Coal Shadow to the foot of his favourite bird-watching tree, the big old rowan—which some folks call witch elm and some folks call mountain ash—and she began to dig a hole.

It was awfully hard work. The ground was frozen as hard as a tax collector's heart. Roots tangled around the shovel blade and gave her grief.

When the snow started falling it made things worse. It was a soft-looking snow, the kind that some people call pretty. But looking at a pretty snowfall and standing out there ankle deep in the cold wet stuff are two completely different things. Aunt Minnie knew that it was several kinds of foolish to keep digging out here with the snow piling up the way it was—but she also knew that there was no way at all that she was going to leave her poor cat without a decent burial.

By the time Aunt Minnie had finished digging the grave, the snow had nearly covered Mr. Coal Shadow. She scooped him up and whispered something in his ear, and then she placed Mr. Coal Shadow in the grave, wrapped in the shroud of his favourite green plaid kitty blanket. She put his catnip mouse and his dish in the grave with him. Then she sang three hymns, shivering a little with the cold, before she finally buried the cat once and for all.

She walked back to her front door slowly, leaning on the shovel like it was a crutch. The tears had icicled her eye lashes up so that she could hardly see, but she knew her way just the same.

She tapped on her door as if she were coming to somebody's house for tea. Then she went inside and put the big iron kettle on the stove and sat down in her rocking chair to wait.

Only she had worked herself far too hard. The kettle had just started to whistle when death's cold hand reached out and stilled Aunt Minnie's heart.

The kettle had whistled itself dry by the time Aunt Minnie's niece tapped on the door and let herself in. When she stepped into the kitchen, she saw her Aunt Minnie sitting in her rocking chair with a shawl about her shoulders and a quilt upon her lap. And upon the quilt was the old black cat.

The old cat purred contentedly.

“Well at least she didn't die alone,” her niece said.

When she looked again the cat was gone.