Rosie O'Dell Page 3

“Yes, she’s up there with her father.”

  “But why do you think it’s her, Tommy? I’m sure there’s lots of other people up there it could be.”

  “I just do.” Torture wouldn’t have dragged out of me my secret reason. I had willed it, I had made it happen.

  “There’s not much chance of it, though,” said Mr. Anstey. “How old are you now, Tom, thirteen?” Mrs. Anstey swivelled her head in surprise and he said to her, “I know, I know, he’s eleven like Brent, but he always seems older to me, with all the smart grown-up stuff he can talk about. Now then, in your eleven years of life, how many drownings have you heard about?”

  “A nice few,” I murmured. I wished he’d go back to listening to the news, but he seemed to have forgotten all about it.

  “A nice few pretty well covers it,” he said. “Small boats capsizing in ponds, snowmobiles plunging through ice, vessels foundering on the high seas, for God’s sake, death by drowning is a way of life here in Newfoundland. It’s our sacred culture. So, that could be anyone, which means there’s very little chance of it being her.”

  “And besides,” said Brent’s mother, “she’s too intelligent to do anything foolish on the water. She’s the one who comes first in your class all the time, isn’t she?” I felt the chagrin registering hot in my face. Brent must have told his mother about my humiliation at Rosie’s hands.

  Luckily, Mr. Anstey piped up again. “That O’Dell girl, now her mother is your mother’s friend, I know. But her father, isn’t he the gentleman with the unusual first name we met at your parents’ cocktail party last Christmastime?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, Dad,” said Mrs. Anstey, “Don’t start that again. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with Mr. O’Dell’s first name.”

  “No, not one thing wrong. The first name of ‘Joyce’ on a big hairy-arsed man, that’s just dandy.”

  Even Brent laughed with me and he wasn’t normally amused by his father, however funny. Mrs. Anstey tried to glower her husband quiet, but a big grin forced its way onto her face as he continued. “And I suppose there was nothing in the world wrong with how he carried on at that Christmas party, either, the way he staggered up to Tom’s father and fired a drink of scotch in his face.”

  Mrs. Anstey did her best to use the episode as a teaching experience for me and Brent. “I heard him apologizing to Tom’s father for that, which is only right and proper when you do something wrong.”

  “Yes, and a good apology too: ‘Sorry, Joe, my mistake, that dirty look you gave me when I was topping up my glass again made me think you were the wife.’”

  Mrs. Anstey squelched her guffaw in mid-squawk and glanced at me. She probably thought I’d be blabbing all this back to my mother and her friend Nina O’Dell. “You’re making too much of that, Dad,” she said. “The man had a drop more to drink at a party than he should have, that’s all, and anyway he’s a writer or something.”

  “Oh a writer, is he? That makes it okay, then. I’m sure Tom’s father is sorry now he wanted to smack him in the gob.”

  I recalled hearing from my bed after that party my father pronouncing to my mother downstairs, “Gladys, that Joyce O’Dell, that psychotic goddamn drunk, is never setting foot in this house again. And the same goes for that nasty arrogant nouveau riche bastard Anstey—thinks because he’s made a few bucks ripping people off at his used car stand the sun shines out of his hole.” To a protest from Mom that he was going overboard, Dad roared in a whisper, “No. We only invited him and his wife in the first place because Tommy and Brent are best friends.”

  Mrs. Anstey said now in Twillingate, “The tide is out, boys. Why don’t you go down and pick some snails off the rocks and catch some connors and tomcods from the wharf?” When neither Brent nor I leapt up at the mention of our favourite pastime, she said, “It won’t be her, Tommy. She’d have a life jacket on. Not like the boys around here who think it’s too sissy to wear a life jacket.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with sissy, Mom,” said Brent. “When that longliner out of Fogo Island went down last winter between the Offer Wadhams and the Funks, the two dead bodies they found had their life jackets on. So, what odds if you’ve got a life jacket on or not? When your number comes up, that’s it!”

  “‘What odds?’ and, ‘That’s it!’” said his father. “Where’d you hear that old foolishness, Brent?”

  “I heard you saying it.”

  “Exactly. And when I shoot off foolish, stupid old sayings like that I’m teaching you what the good old Newfoundland culture used to be. But you youngsters in the new generation are not supposed to pay any attention to that old nonsense anymore. For example, here’s some more Newfoundland culture from the olden days for you. When I was about your age, my dying grandfather told me that his old grandfather boasted to him that when he was a young man he shot one of the last of those penguins called the Great Auk. And I said, ‘He shot it, Poppy! My God, what’d he shoot it for? There’s no Great Auks left now!’ And he said, ‘He had to shoot it, boy. They were getting so scarce by then he might never have had another chance.’”

  Brent didn’t laugh and I tried not to. We’d learned in school how tragic had been the extinction of those once countless birds by indiscriminate slaughter, and we were at the self-righteous age. But I couldn’t help having one little chuckle, before going sober again.

  “Yes, go ahead and laugh, Tommy,” said Mr. Anstey. “How can you not laugh at the good old Newfoundland culture? It’s so beautiful and insane.”

  Brent’s mother said to me, “Phone home to St. John’s, my ducky, and relieve your mind over who got drowned before you go out.”

  I saw myself, when my mother or father verified my premonition, bursting into tears and blurting out how it was all my fault. “I’ll wait and see if they call here,” I replied. “They’ll let me know if anything’s wrong.”

  “And save me two bucks for the long-distance call,” said Mr. Anstey. “Besides, your father would have called already if there was anything wrong. No one lets you know faster than him when there’s something wrong.”

  As we got up from the table, Brent’s father said, “Don’t go near the dump today.”

  Brent said, “Why would we go near the dump? I’ve never been near the dump in my life.”

  “Well, just don’t go there today.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m telling you not to. Who’s the father here, you or me?”

  “Good effin’ question,” said Brent under his breath before heading out the door.

  On our way down to the landwash with our hooks and lines, Brent said to me, “After we catch a few connors, let’s go in to the dump.”

  “What for?”

  “What for?” said Brent incredulously. “Because prick-face up there said don’t go near the dump.”

  “You figure something good is going on in there?”

  “You can mark that down. I thought you’re supposed to hate that one O’Dell’s guts.”

  “I do. I can’t shagging stand her.”

  “Then it can’t be her who drowned then. If you liked her, and definitely if you were cracked about her, then that would be her who got drowned, guaranteed. But if you can’t stand somebody, nothing bad ever happens to them.”

  For some reason Brent’s excellent logic, no doubt paternal in origin, left me more uneasy than before. Then I recalled hearing Mom on the phone with Nina talking about how Pagan and she would be joining Rosie and Joyce in Sop’s Arm a few days after their start for a driving trip. Maybe, owing to Brent’s logic, God had deflected my death-prayer onto little Pagan. “Oh Jesus, Brent, Pagan O’Dell was supposed to be going up there too,” I said.

  “Frig,” said Brent before his next paternal cause-and-effect argument came to him: “But they’re girls, boy. Don’t look so worried.”

  “What has being a girl got to do with getting drowned, Brent, for the love of fuck?”

  He jumped ahead and faced me, walking bac
kwards: “Okay, this is how it works. It’s exactly like Dad said to Mom. He said: ‘You hardly ever hear tell of a woman getting caught for drunk driving. It’s always men who get nailed.’ So now he makes Mom drive the car home whenever they go out to the club and she’s never been stopped by the cops yet, even though, like Dad says, she always has just as much to drink as him. But before he started making Mom drive home, he got caught and lost his licence for six months and the judge said next time it would mean weekends in the clink. And it’s exactly the same with girls drowning. You never hear tell of a girl getting drowned in a river or a pond from a boat or canoe. When you hear the name of whoever it was who drowned on that river, any bets? It won’t be them, it’ll be a man or a boy. Mark it down.”

  I conceded the merit of Brent’s argument, but inside I felt the return of an intuitive certainty based on my privy prayer which no amount of powerful reasoning could overcome.

  The two of us lay on our stomachs on the warm wood of the wharf in the delectable morning sun, dangling our baited hooks over the edge into the placidly swelling sea water below. It was so clear and transparent we could see the bottom sloping out and precipitously dropping many feet away, and the small fish and jellyfish suspended in between. The usual three cats weaved over and between us, purring and rubbing against our legs and shoulders. One animal, a grey female barn cat, half the size of the other two, would poke her moist nose into our ears in passing, making us laugh and swear and push her hard little body gently, vainly, away. I loved her.

  Within two minutes Brent pulled up his line to display a connor wriggling at the end. He got to his feet above the mewling, chittering cats and yanked the hook out. Then he threw the fish towards the end of the wharf and we watched the cats race for the prize. The little female beat the two big males and crouched over the flopping fish and took it into her mouth. One of the males tried to snatch it from her but she emitted a ferocious guttural growl and cuffed him, claws out, across the eyes, forcing him to slink back a step. Then she scurried off the wharf with the fish tail wriggling from her mouth and disappeared behind a rock. Yesterday, I’d wondered to Brent if the man up the road who “owned” that great little cat would let me take her home to St. John’s with me when I left next week. Brent said probably, and we could ask him today. But today, it didn’t seem very important.

  I turned over on my stomach again on the warm wharf wood and peered through the pellucid depths to the stones and starfish so defined and vivid on the bottom. The pale doomed face, eyes closed now, appeared among them down there. A yelp from Brent roused me from my tragic meditation. He laughed, “That’s two connors for me and you haven’t caught shag all yet.” He wrenched the connor off the hook and threw it ahead of the scampering cats who batted it about as soon as it landed until one of them seized it between its jaws and bellied along the ground. I turned away from the sight of the poor fish helplessly twitching, its life purposelessly and heedlessly ripped out.

  “I can’t concentrate,” I said. “That accident on the news keeps bugging me.”

  “But like you said up at the house, your mother or father would’ve called you by now if it was one of them. Let’s go to the dump and see what’s going on.”

  “Okay.”

  As I started to stand up, my name came wafting over the air. It was Brent’s mother singing out from the back porch that I was wanted on the telephone. Brent looked down at me, eyes full of foreboding. “Jeez, that’s your mother now.”

  I sprang ahead. The agony of collision. It was the first time I’d thought of that since my Uncle Bill, visiting us from Halifax where he was in the Navy, told me that the most horrible feeling he’d ever experienced in his life was standing on the bridge of one ship as it headed straight for another, with nothing at all that anyone could do to stop them from colliding. The helpless watching and waiting for the unfolding, unavoidable disaster to happen. “‘The agony of collision, ’ they call that interval between the certainty, and the actual occurrence,” said Uncle Bill, “and they didn’t wrong-name it!” Running off the wharf now, knowing what I was going to hear up at the house, I could feel the emotion Uncle Bill had described in my bones and guts.

  The rhythmic swishing of the tall grass against my legs as I raced along the path from the wharf to the house evoked in my brain a chant: “Rosie O’Dell is dead and gone. Dead and gone. Dead and gone.”

  When I pushed open the screen door, Brent’s father was standing in the kitchen with the telephone receiver in his hand, looking pained. Less than an hour ago he had insisted it couldn’t be her. He spoke into the phone, “Here he is now. Yes, he had to come up from the wharf. I know, long-distance charges are wicked.” He turned to me. “It’s your father. Here, sit down at the table.” He passed me the phone with a mien as tragic as if he were handing me a chalice of hemlock.

  My heart was beating madly again, but not from the running. “Hi, Tom,” Dad replied to my squawked hello. “Mr. Anstey told me you heard on the radio that someone drowned. Mom and I figured you would, so we wanted to let you know who it was before they put the name on the news.” I heard my father’s voice in the roar of blood in my ears saying, “Rosie O’Dell… Mom is over with Mrs. O’Dell right now.”

  But suddenly I was not sure what I’d heard. “Who? Who?” I shouted, “Did you say Rosie O’Dell?”

  “Good God, Tom.” Dad sounded greatly wronged. “I specifically said it wasn’t Rosie O’Dell, because Mr. Anstey said you thought it was her. I said it was Mister O’Dell, not Rosie. What made you—”

  “I was scared it was Rosie. She’s up there with him.”

  “Yes, right. I know. No, it wasn’t Rosie, thank God, that would have been terrible, I mean it’s all bad enough, but no, it was her father, not her, poor fellow. This is all a big shock to everyone… Hello, Tom, are you still there?” The receiver was resting on my shoulder. I could hear my father but I could not answer him for the moment. I hadn’t burst into tears, but tears were streaming down my face. “Tom, are you there or not? This is long-distance.”

  I lifted the receiver again and said, “Mr. O’Dell. God that’s awful. Where’s Rosie now? Is she home yet?”

  “Not yet. She’s driving from Sop’s Arm to Deer Lake with the other men who were canoeing with them. An aunt from Corner Brook is meeting her in Deer Lake and flying with her to St. John’s on the first flight they can—”

  “Dad, I’ve got to come home too.”

  My father paused. “Pardon? Come home, my man? You?”

  “I’ve got to. Rosie is in my class.”

  “Yes, I know she is. But I didn’t have the impression you and she were… Why do you need to come home? That would mean someone having to get you and drive you back in the middle of all this—five or six hours one way. What—”

  “I can fly in like Rosie is doing, but from Gander. I can get a taxi from here. I’ll pay for that and the plane ticket myself out of my own bank account.”

  Dad said nothing for another moment. “It’s not a question of money, Tom. Though money is always a consideration. I didn’t think that these days, or for months now, you’ve been close enough to any of the O’Dells, especially Rosie who’s your own age, to make you—”

  “Dad. I’ve got to.” I sat there trembling.

  “You’ve got to! Why have you got to, Tom? We didn’t want you to go way out there to Twillingate in the first place, but you kept on and on until we said yes, and now after a couple of days you want to come back. Your mother and I were going to spend next week over in Bonne Bay hiking around Gros Morne, and then pick you and Brent up on the way back. Now how are we…? How is he…? Why have you got to come back now, Tom?”

  I couldn’t say why. But I had to go back. “Mom was always trying to make me and Rosie friends. Mom would want me to.”

  “Oh for the love of…” Sometimes I got the idea I really annoyed my father. I waited as he got over huffing and sighing to say at last, “Put your Mr. Anstey back on.”

  BRENT�
�S FATHER DROVE ME to Gander for the flight that afternoon, and his wife took advantage of it to be dropped off at the Gander Mall for an hour. Brent and I sat in the back seat. I loved that drive along the Gander River with mile after mile of tall silver birch trees lining the bank. On the way, Mr. Anstey said to his wife, “They had to shoot that bear. She tried to attack Wince Elliot’s young fellow. He only got away by the skin of his teeth. It was lucky Wince had his rifle in his pickup.”

  “What bear was that?” asked Brent’s mother.

  “The one hanging around the dump. The mother bear with the cub.”

  Brent and I looked at each other wide-eyed. We would have been up there this morning, probably all by ourselves, being attacked by a vicious bear if Dad’s call hadn’t come. “Why didn’t you tell us it was a mother bear with a cub in the dump?” asked Brent.

  “What? Everyone in Twillingate knew that. Except you, apparently. You know, it wouldn’t hurt one bit for you to spend a little time with your baywop cousins now and then, the ones you think you’re too high and mighty for. The little corner-boy city slicker might find out what’s going on in the real world.” After a pause, Brent’s father said, “I told you not to go near the dump. What were you going to do, go over there on the strength of that?”

  “My God,” breathed Brent’s mother at that certainty, putting her hands on the sides of her head.

  “No-o-o,” squeaked Brent, much offended, “we weren’t going to the dump.”

  His father laughed. “That would have been something to see, both of you trying to outrun each other so that the bear would catch the one behind and the one in front could get away.”

  No one else in the car laughed, Brent’s mother showing the least tendency to do so, going by the scowling stare at her husband. The one behind—that would have been me, since Brent could run faster. All the rest of the way to Gander, I had various immature thoughts. Mr. Anstey wouldn’t really have allowed us to blunder into that danger at the dump, would he? No, how could he? But if he would have, then divine providence had contrived to spare my life by drowning someone I knew so that I’d get the life-saving phone call. However, in divine providence’s infinite wisdom, the person drowned was Rosie’s father instead of her, as I had originally hoped, which in turn shocked me into seeing the truth about my feelings for Rosie. Christ, it all seemed stupidly complicated for any mind with a measurable IQ to contrive, let alone one of limitless intelligence, not to mention what a prick divine providence must be to kill off Rosie’s dad. It was the beginning of the loss of my childish faith. But not, unfortunately, of my belief that Brent’s dad was just a funny guy.