Timing was the key to Moses Slaunwhite's life. He was the first child born in Nova Scotia in the year 1951. The very first. His father had watchmaker's blood in him and had a house full of Swiss and German clocks, all set in perfect accord with a short-wave radio report he received regularly from Greenwich, England. The scratchy report would always go like this: “When you hear the long tone following a series of short tones, it will now be something o'clock Greenwich mean time.” Then followed annoying radio noises, several short and one long, and that
would be something o'clock on the hour on the other side of the Atlantic. Moses' father, Noah Slaunwhite, would subtract several hours to account for time zones and he'd have it precise, then race around the house checking all of his clocks right down to the second hands swirling about their orbits as if they could give a damn about precision.
So from the start, timing was everything, and Moses was evicted from the warmth and security of his mother's womb at one minute after midnight Atlantic Standard Time on January 1, 1951. Just as planned. Moses' father was very proud, especially of the exactitude of it all. Moses' mother was in considerable pain and couldn't wait to drop the placenta and be done with bringing another child into the world. She wanted sleep. Lots of sleep.
Now, it so happened that the newspaper in Halifax had a contest going with dozens of prizes for the first child born in 1951. Why the owners of the paper thought it was such a great thing to be the first baby of 1951, nobody knew. As far as they and the fun-loving public were concerned, when it came to babies in this contest, you didn't have to be the biggest, the prettiest, the happiest, or the smartest. You just had to be the first. Some mothers missed it and failed to achieve the goal, ending up with a really late 1950 baby. Some hung on too long to their parcels of delight and waited until several minutes of the new year had slipped by and other babies had already popped out from North Sydney to Yarmouth.
But Moses arrived at 12:01. The head appeared at midnight exactly and the whole child had emerged, rather perfunctorily, within one minute, tops. The father was proud, the mother was exhausted and near unconsciousness as was the way with women giving birth.
It was New Year's Day in 1951 and Noah Slaunwhite was in his boat frothing his way across the waters to Mutton Hill Harbour to make a phone call to the
Herald
in Halifax. A proud
father alone in his boat, having left his wife home to sleep and heal with a neighbour woman named Sylvie who would attend to any worries should they arise.
Now there was the problem that Noah hadn't expected in his precision-laden world of clocks and watches chiming on the hour every hour, even on his boat where the clock was called a chronometer and housed in polished brass. The problem with his timely, successful son was the remote location of where he had been born so precisely.
A cold mackerel of a young man was holding down the baby hotline at the
Herald
office, an unhappy lad who had been forced to miss all the fun of New Year's Eve sitting at the newspaper office taking telephone and telegraph reports of babies being born. If another woman called from New Minas or New Glasgow to tell the news of her son or daughter he would have to report the same sorry tale. It was all too late. Too late to win.
And then this call from a man with a strong South Shore accent, this Noah Slaunwhite on the horn from Mutton Hill Harbour. Said his son was born at 12:01 on the dot at home on Ragged Island, wherever the hell that was.“I'm sorry, sir, but in order to be eligible your child has to be born in a hospital and the official time recorded by a doctor.”
“But there are no hospitals and no doctors on our island.”
“Then I'm sorry, but your child is not eligible.”
Noah Slaunwhite began to curse in German. The young man at the
Herald
had not heard German cursing before except in black-and-white war movies. The cursing was loud and guttural, offensive but interesting, and he held the receiver a short span from his ear and listened until Noah's rage had vented itself over the telephone wires stretched like tense violin strings from the South Shore to Halifax on that chilly January morn.
After the rage was pumped into that thin phone line, probably scaring off any number of birds that had been riding out the
windy morning with toes gripped around the wire, Noah slammed the phone back in its socket. It rang, and a phone operator came on the line asking for another fistful of quarters for the long distance phone call. She must have been listening in on the line because she sounded offended.
So Moses' arrival in Nova Scotia was not properly heralded with those seemingly infinite prizes that he deserved for his promptness. There would be no full year's worth of Quaker Oats cereal, no hundred-dollar gift certificate from Mills clothing store, no shopping spree at Simpson Sears, no free baby carriage, no free oil changes for the proud father's car (if he had a car), no parental handshaking with the
Herald
editor-in-chief, the mayor of Halifax, and the premier himself. All down the tubes. Ah, hell.
Noah drank one cup of black hot coffee in Mutton Hill Harbour and then steamed back home with the bad news.
But none of that was little Moses' fault. He had arrived on time like his father had wanted him to. And if the
Herald
could not recognize the bravado of that, oh
Gott
, what did it matter? Moses' timing would remain good ever thereafter.
When he was twelve years old, he happened to be walking down towards the wharf on the mainland for the ferry ride back to the island when young Calvin Whittle fell through thin ice on Scummer's Pond. Moses was there to hear the scream, grab a rowboat oar, and shinny out on the translucent ice to tug the mainland kid to cold safety. Whittle's father owned one of those big, overdone houses that sat on a grassy shoreline, offending most island people who had to pass by it on their way home. Calvin Whittle's father was greedy, ostentatious, and hired many men to manicure his lawn (all of the above offended islanders), but he did like to reward bravery, so he gave Moses Slaunwhite a savings bond worth $500 that
would come due when Moses was nineteen. It was a lesson in investment as well as a reward.
The salvaged son of Calvin Whittle, Senior would grow up to be a sex offender and a murderer. None of which Moses could have foreseen. In later years he would ponder the irony that in having saved one life, he had inadvertently killed three innocent women and cost the provincial purse plenty to keep up with the Whittle estate's lawyers, who tried in vain to keep a rich man's son out of prison.
Nonetheless, Moses had made good with his five hundred dollars. With it he bought a boat when he was nineteen. And as soon as he had a boat, island fishermen had found themselves headed into five good years of profit from cod, cod, and lots more cod. Moses married Viddy Grandy, a beautiful young woman he'd sat alongside of in the island schoolhouse when he had been only nine. Viddy was talented â she played piano and flute. She was smart. She knew the names of all the capitals of all the nations on the earth. She had a good business head â could advise any man about selling his cod whole or in fillets, whether to sell it to the restaurants in Halifax or ship it on ice to Boston. She had a gift for many things that would make a man happy as well as profitable. Her only twin afflictions were an affection for large, stylish, but sloppy and frivolous hats, and tardiness.
If it hadn't been for Viddy's lack of respect for the clock and Moses' own good timing, they probably would have never married. One damp, cheerless day in April of Viddy's twentieth year, she had decided to leave the island and go take a job in a factory she'd heard about in Saint John, New Brunswick that made fashionable women's hats for the American market. She was packed and rushing to make the three-thirty ferry but missed it by five and a half minutes â according to Moses' Swiss pocket watch that his father had given him upon graduating from high school.
So there was Viddy, floppy hat in hand, her head bowed, long braided hair down to the middle of her back, sobbing. Clearly, there must have been more to it than a missed ferry ride. But Moses' timing as always was good. He had a clean handkerchief that his mother had ironed. He had just had a shower and didn't reek of cod or lobster. He had to sit down because he had just gotten a cramp in the calf of his right leg. The fog looked like it wanted to lift (but never did fulfill the promise). And the ferry would not return that day due to a bad batch of diesel fuel pumped on at the dock in Mutton Hill Harbour that afternoon by Hennigar's Marine Fuel Service Limited. The rest would be marital island history.
Noah and Moses would argue often about Viddy's tardiness, but never in front of her, and, despite this small canker of family strife, it was a good and happy marriage. Whenever she was ashore, Viddy would drive their mainland automobile to all the Frenchy's used clothes stores up and down the South Shore and buy umpteen hats. Whenever she returned from the mainland on such a day, everyone on the ferry boats knew what was in all those boxes and bags. Moses built many closets. A hat was never thrown away by Viddy. But he didn't mind. She was a wonderful woman and gave him twins â Clay and Dawn. When Viddy went hat hunting on the mainland, their good neighbour Sylvie would mind the kids and tell them stories of the island in the old days. When Sylvie would babysit for a day, all the clocks were turned towards the wall and the household schedule went to hell. Neither Moses nor Viddy cared, and once Sylvie was gone, they would not turn the clocks back to face them for well over twenty-four hours.
Moses was generally healthy, and his only real affliction was the predilection of his body to cramp up in the legs. This was a result somehow of having become soaking wet the time he hauled
young Whittle out of Scummer's Pond. His father made him carry a cramp knot in his pocket to ward off the problem. A cramp knot was an actual knot from a tree, a cat spruce in this case. It was an old German folklore thing and it didn't work, but he carried it anyway to make his father happy.
“It doesn't work because you don't believe in it. We used to believe in everything when we was young, but not no more,” his father said.
“I try to believe in it, I really do,” Moses said. And he carried it with him everywhere, even to bed to dispel the damn leg cramps, because Moses would get a leg cramp attack any time, any place. Hauling up lobster pots ten miles at sea or making love to his good wife Viddy late on Friday night after a chowder dinner and several pints of dark, homemade German beer. The cramps would always come, reminding him of the irony of saving Calvin Whittle who killed those poor women.
Moses was always one step ahead of the fishery, it seemed. Already moving into herring roe or silver hake, red fish, ground-fish, swordfish, or sea urchins when absolutely necessary, and, when it seemed that the whole fishery along Newfoundland and Nova Scotia was ready to go belly up for good, Moses anchored his boat on the edge of the channel at the Trough and he pondered the future. When the whales appeared like long-lost German cousins, he talked to them and, although they didn't exactly talk back, they convinced him they were the future of the island, perhaps his only hope.
Moses knew that if he was going to stay on his island and remain prosperous, if he wanted Dawn and Clay to grow up with a roof over their heads and a chance to go to Dalhousie University or the Sorbonne or even just business or beautician school in Halifax, he had to time this thing right.
Whale-watching, it turned out, was already taking off in California,Alaska, Baja, Maine, and Maui. As his left leg began to cramp up and he rubbed a thumb on his shiny cramp knot, he phoned the tourist bureau in Halifax and then a travel agency in New York and told them about his whale-watching cruises that were going to begin in the summer of 1993. In two years, while all the other fishermen were grovelling for government handouts to help them through the death of the Atlantic cod and the decimation of the fishery, Moses Slaunwhite's boat had a fresh coat of paint, and he had on clean shirt and pants and a kind of one-off captain's cap designed and hand-sewn by Viddy. He also had a whole load of mainland tourists crossing on the ferry to the island dock to gleefully hand over a fair sum of Yankee doodle to have Cap'n Moses lead them to the blues, the fins, the minke, and the right whales.
Moses had been kind to the whales. Careful as an Old Testament shepherd to his flock of sea creatures. Never too close, never noisy, always full of respect and caution. How many times had he heard a Brooklyn accent say, “Can't you take us closer so my kids can pet one?”
Moses smiled, never let his feathers get ruffled. He pointed out the barnacles on the backs of some whales, the ones he had named Joshua, Rebecca, Naomi, and David. Although he wasn't particularly religious, there was something about giving whales Biblical names, if they were to have names at all.
“Where's Jonah?” someone would ask.
“Inside one of them, no doubt,” Moses would answer.
A specialty eco-tourism agency in Chicago got wind of Moses' operation and made a business proposition that he couldn't refuse. His excursions were suddenly part of a world circuit of tours that sent nature-starved city dwellers to the seven seas to
observe whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and flying fish. Moses even came up with a specialty bonus of taking visitors to sea on calm summer nights to see “devil's fire,” that brilliant, green, glowing phosphorescence of certain diatoms that turned the Atlantic into something eerie, beautiful, and awe-inspiring.
Some islanders begrudged Moses' success. Some spoke of creating competition, but none followed through. Moses bought a second boat, hired on several island men and a couple of women, paid good wages, and was ever careful not to push his visitors too close to the whales. On bright summer days, when he had his boat anchored near the point, he'd see Sylvie sitting there on the shoreline watching the whales. He gave her free rides to sea but she said,“The whales only talk to me when I'm sittin' ashore. They know me there. I know them.”