Alone with the Powers that Be

In the aftermath of Noah's abduction by his father, the household seemed drained. Little Mac awoke the next morning feeling groggy and weak, and a sore throat soon ensued because of which, day after day for a week, he was forced to turn down several substitute teaching possibilities.

"What?" he croaked, putting his phone down on the bedside table yet again. "Is everybody getting sick all at once? Will the sun never shine? Will the skies always be grey?"

"Hush," said Big Bertha as she set down the tray with his breakfast. "It's not funny. We're all feeling it. Just pipe down and let it pass. You may be our big hero, but you're also the worst patient in the world."

Having fed her cantankerous husband, Bertha retreated to the first floor with him calling after her, "Chicken soup again! I'm growing feathers!" She sat down at her sewing machine feeling heavy and old, with a tickle in her own throat that presaged no good. Out the window it was grey indeed over the village and the white-capped ocean beyond, though an afternoon clearing was forecast.

At the kitchen table, her grandson Noah fiddled with his fork in the dregs of his pancake syrup, moving the crumbs around and letting them drip off the tines into endless indecipherable rearrangements. His mother Delilah was still asleep in their room, having worked a late shift at the hospital, and his companion Sir Barksalot lay curled up by the blazing woodstove as if glued there.

Finally clearing his dishes, he went to the dog and squatted and ran his hands through its tangled fur. "Okay, Barkie," he said, "you stay here. But I've got to go out. I will bring you back something."

The dog looked up beseechingly and then almost immediately, as if it had forgotten what needed beseeching, lay its head back on the warmth of the tiles on which the stove rested.

***

With his head full and his heart full and his body all bundled up against the cold, the little boy wandered the rocky shore. He had not forgotten the strange and troubling encounter with his father nor any of the wise and well-meant reassurances from his grandparents nor his mother holding him in her ample lap and hugging him and disparaging his father for hours afterwards.

He had not forgotten a thing. Yet he felt no allegiance to what he remembered. What had scared him and made him cry and what had comforted him and dried his tears, both seemed much of a muchness and neither worth being weighed down by. What he wanted, and why he wandered, was just to be out beyond all of that.

The shore with the ocean and its great openness spreading out at his feet had been a good place to start, but he wanted more. He wanted to be somewhere out in the great openness itself.

He went back for his grandfather's little rowing dinghy, that was just his size.

***

The north wind swept him out of the cove and out into the harbour and on across toward the harbour island called Saul. He hardly had to use the oars at all, other than to control his direction. Toward the end he did have to pull some, because outside the cove the wind shifted to align with the main shoreline and would have blown him out the harbour entrance. And he was afraid of that much openness. He was too small to row against the big waves in the unsheltered sea. He was almost too small for the smaller but substantially wind-driven waves in the harbour. It was, in fact, with every ounce of his miniscule might that he crossed the last yards between him and his goal, calling out with every stroke as he had witnessed Little Mac do on a similar occasion, "Heave ho! Heave ho, me brave boys!", until the craft beached with a crunch and he could jump out with his version of a roar and then half-drowned in the slippery shallows tug the craft slowly and never quite surely out of the reach of any rising tide.

***

Emma Christian and her husband Gillie were out checking their traps when the call came. Emma motioned to Gillie to slow down so she could take it. She quickly shucked the heavy gloves that protected her hands when she hauled on the traplines or grappled the lobsters.

"Hello?" she said, holding the phone close against the clamour of the engine and the tumult of the waves.

"Hello Emma? This is Alvah Norris. I just happened to be looking out my window with my binoculars, at a, at a bird, you know, when I saw that child Noah go a'rowin' in the harbour. He made it out to Saul, but I don't know how he'll ever get back. He's too small to be out there in the first place, and the wind's dead against him. Plus I think he fell in."

***

He was wet but he didn't believe he was cold. He refused to. He had found a fine spot and he was happy. The ground shook with the shock of the waves. The waves exploded better than any firecrackers ever. The spray carried and caressed his face.

No one wanted or did not want him there.

He wasn't the king of the world. He was better.

He was alone with the powers that be.


26 March 2018
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca