LITMIR.BIZ

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       J. Kirk Howard, President

      Printed and bound in Canada. Printed on recycled paper. www.dundurn.com

      SEA OF

      TRANQUILITY

      Chapter One

      A woman’s voice rising up out of the silence of the island morning. Speaking the names of the men she once loved, still loved. A lone woman’s voice on a morning like this, conversing with no one save the wind, the young spruce trees abloom with tiny globes of crystal clear dew and the cloak of mist hanging from the sky. What better audience?

      Sylvie Young. On her eightieth birthday. She and the beginning of summer there in the great big backyard on Ragged Island. To be alive on a morning like this. Summer had finally come to Nova Scotia, damp and cool, but summer all the same. Summer had been on the mainland for a couple of weeks but couldn’t find safe passage to the island. Summer holed up in a bed and breakfast in Mutton Hill Harbour, reluctant to make the last leg, but finally, she shook herself and said, what must be done, must be done. Sylvie was waiting for summer to arrive. Never cursed its tardiness. Finally, this.

      Sylvie decided this would be the day to walk again to the graveyard. Hadn’t been all winter. Take a toothbrush and clean up the headstones of her four dead husbands. At least she could still count them on one hand, she offered to folks when they said how sorry they were that all her men had died. It was a sad thing for Sylvie, but she sometimes pretended it was the same as taking in a bunch of stray cats for pets. Fox would kill them or they’d get run over by one of the Oickle boys in his no-name, pieced-together car. Always something. Not a thing to keep whimpering over for the rest of your life.

      The truth was she missed them all and would scrub away the lichen on their gravestones with the toothbrush she’d been using on her own white teeth all winter. Use a little Javex and some Dutch Cleanser — on the headstones. Pull out the dandelions and make room for the grass to grow in sweet and green.

      “Eighty. Damn.” It was a sort of sweet, melancholy damnation that the nuthatches and cedar waxwings heard her say. The ravens had heard plenty worse and weren’t offended. Besides, Sylvie would spread seed in the backyard in about twenty minutes and they would try to get at it before the glib squirrels or the belligerent blue jays. It was just a number, eighty was. Like any other number.

      Sylvie looked around. She knew there was no one in her big, empty backyard, framed in by the tall, stately spruce trees, the good ones with deep roots, rare for these parts, planted and then thinned by her second husband, Kyle Bauer. No one was there, but she wanted to check anyway. That done, she sat down on the damp carpet of spring beauties, her favourite of all the flowers because it was the first one to arrive each summer, delicate but brazen as born-again bats. She settled there on the cold, wet grass, clutched at a little green puff of moss, and she cried.

      She cried not for all those dead men mouldering on the bedrock with gravel shovelled on their caskets. She cried not for the fact that she lived alone or had dozens of reasons to complain about her pains and minor sufferings. She cried not because she was lonely or destitute or feeling rotten as the floor-boards of Kenny Oickle’s ’59 Edsel.

      She cried because she was a woman who needed to cry. Plain and simple. Salt tears, saline as the sea that wrapped its cold, powerful arms around this island. Crying, laughing, saluting the sky, sticking your middle finger up to God. Maybe it was all the same. Life comes at you and you have to make something of it, you have to respond, Sylvie would say. You have to collect all of it and do something with it. Write a goddamn book, pick up a guitar and sing a drunken song. Shout at your neighbours for being who they are. Tell the frigging government to go shove itself up its arse until it’s inside out.

      Something to do with it. Take life and respond. Cry if you have to. There it is. Eighty. Tears falling on the little spring beau-ties. That’s done with it — for now at least. Off to the next thing. Books to be read. Things to think about. A tea kettle will boil. Birds will peck at the seeds dropped from her hand. Maybe it will be a good garden this year. But not before she wages war against the recalcitrant earwigs and the rapacious turnip bugs. Cabbage moths from hell; she’ll have to suffocate them with cold stove ash every day until they give up. All part of it, all part of living.

      She did not feel sorry for herself, but it was, nonetheless, for her own singular being that she cried. News of starving children in Africa did not make her cry. It made her angry and embarrassed to be part of the human race. But tears were saved for rare moments like this. Life coming at her like a two-by-four or a low doorway lintel. All at once — not bad, not good, just overpowering, with every blessed thing of this world and the next sweeping through her like a hurricane through a broken window.

      Sylvie sniffled, wiped tears from her face with a strong wrinkled hand. A lifetime stared back at her like mighty river deltas. Mississippis and Niles, Mekongs and Ganges. She had named them. Turned her palm over and there was her lifeline, strong and long and wrapping halfway around her wrist, her longevity documented from the time she was a child. Imagine what it takes in the way of courage to think of yourself as old when you are young. Sylvie had read her lifeline and believed what it prescribed. She spent afternoons as a teenager trying to figure out what she could do with all those eighty or

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