Paradise Misplaced

Noah was in shock.

He had been thinking of the village as a sort of paradise, where miracles abounded by sea and by land, and where people took care of each other when hurricanes or blizzards made the paradise a little dicy.

Then, on a morning when he went to the dock before school for a quick row in the harbour, he found his boat had been sunk.

By the cleat to which the boat’s painter was still tied, stretched taut as it led underwater, was a note with a rock holding it down.

The message, in pencil, was shaky, as if written either by an exceedingly decrepit hand or an exceedingly angry one. When he had made the words out, Noah determined them to say, “This is what happens when you mess with my traps. The next time, the shotgun gets pointed at you.”

He didn’t tell his mother. He didn’t tell Betty. He didn’t call the police. As well as he could, he survived the school day. And in the afternoon, he told a ghost.

Neverclear was what his Daddy Mac had called him, in part because of his partiality to the spirit Everclear (ninety-five percent alcohol) but most of all because his meaning was invariably obscure drunk or sober. Daddy Mac thought the world of him because he had a penchant for penetrating that obscurity and finding wisdom in his friend’s blather. He commemorated Neverclear’s passing with the words, “First Come, Whatsoever, and Good Night”, that was both the title of the eulogy and its complete text. Noah, who held his grandfather in profound reverence, therefore also kept Neverclear’s memory on a sort of pedestal, and from time to time would visit the man’s boarded-up fishing stage for inspiration.

On this day he got more than he bargained for. Wanting to be away from everyone because he felt so hurt, he sat on the backside of the stage, rather sideways on the falling-down and therefore crooked dock, and looked out the harbour entrance at the sea, almost afraid to breathe. It hurt even to feel his heartbeat. He wished he could have licked his wound like a dog and laid it in some mud to cool it down. Instead he confided his pain to the air.

“Never fear, Neverclear is here,” came the reply.

He heard the raspy words as if they had been whispered in his ear. He didn’t jump, though. He wasn’t even frightened, though he recognized the voice and knew it for that of a ghost. That was how much he was hurting.

“Yessiree, let it be. It’s just a Coppertone soiree. It never was no paireedice. It’s way more genuine than that.”

“I don’t care what it is,” Noah said. “I didn’t do anything.” The presence had settled beside him, and even though he didn’t care he spoke while looking straight ahead, because he didn’t want to see.

“Aye, I be a sight. The way of snakes for hair turned men to stone. That’s just how the seaweed’s on me. But harkee, this here lonesome outpost by the sea, there’s feuds as have been going on a century. Men get crazy but they don’t let on till suddenly they get the trigger fever. Better’n fireworks, mhm. Better’n soaps and the aftermath. But here, I knew your Daddy Mac. No way I’d let some dead man do you wrong. It ain’t got lost, your paireedice. Mayhap you left it in your other trousers, eh? Now you go home and never mind, y’hear? Old Neverclear will put things right.”

Noah never did mention the incident. Either of the incidents. The next morning his boat was afloat again, just as it had been before, with no signs of a hole or a patch. And whether or not he was crazy, more than anything he was grateful, so grateful even Betty never heard about old Neverclear. Or the other trousers he had put on soon as he got home.

28 June 2024
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca