Chapter II: The Dead Man Makes His First and Last Appearance

The death of his father--of whom he had seen so little--gave Matt a haunting sense of the unsubstantiality of things. What! that strong, wiry man, with the shrewd, weather-beaten face and the great tanned hands and tattooed arms, was only a log swirling in the currents of unknown waters! In vain he strove to figure him as a nebulous spirit--the conception would not stay. Nay, the incongruity seemed to him to touch blasphemy. His father belonged to the earth and the seas; had no kinship with clouds. How well he remembered the day, nearly three years ago, when they had parted forever, and, indeed, it had been sufficiently stamped upon his memory without this final blow.

It is a day of burning August--so torrid that they have left their coats on the beach. They are out on the sand flats, wading for salmon among the giant saucers of salt water, the miniature lakes left by the tide, for this is one of the rare spots in the Province where the fish may be taken thus. What fun it is spearing them in a joyous rivalry that makes the fishers wellnigh jab each other’s toes with their pitchforks, and completely tear each other’s shirt-sleeves away in the friendly tussle for a darting monster, so that the heat blisters their arms with great white blobs that stand out against the brown of the boy’s skin and the ornamental coloring of the man’s. Now and then in their early course, when tiny threads of water spurt from holes in the sand, they pause to dig up the delicate clam, with savory anticipations of chowder. Farther and farther they wander till their backs are bowed with the spoil, the shell-fish in a little basket, the scaly fish strung together by a small rope passing through their gills. The boy carries the shad and the man the heavier salmon. At last, as they are turning homeward, late in the afternoon, Matt stands still suddenly, rapt by the poetry of the scene, the shimmering pools, the stretch of brown sand, strewn with sea-weeds, the background of red head-lands, crowned with scattered yellow farms embosomed in sombre green spruces, and, brooding over all, the windless circle of the horizon, its cold blue veiled and warmed and softened by a palpitating, luminous, diaphanous haze of pale amethyst tinged with rose. He knows no word for what he sees; he only feels the beauty.

“Come along, sonny,” says his father, looking back.

But the boy lingers still till the man rejoins him, puzzled.

“What’s in the wind?” he asks. “Is Farmer Wade’s barn on fire?”

“Everythin’s on faar,” says the boy, waving his pitchfork comprehensively. His dialect differs a whit from his more-travelled father’s. In his little God-forsaken corner of Acadia the variously-proportioned mixture of English and American which, with local variations of Lowland and Highland Scotch, North of Ireland brogue and French patois, loosely constitutes a Nova-Scotian idiom, is further tinged with the specific peculiarities that spring from illiteracy and rusticity.

David Strang smiles. “Why, you are like brother Matt,” he says, in amused astonishment. All day his son’s prattle has amused the stranger, but this is a revelation.

“Like your wicked brother Matt?” queries the boy in amaze. David’s smile gleams droller.

“Avast there, you mustn’t hearken to the mother. She knows naught o’ Matt ’cept what I told her. She is Halifax bred, and we lived ’way up country. I ran away to sea, and left him anchored on dad’s farm. When I made port again dad was gone to glory, and Matt to England with a petticoat in tow.”

“But mother said he sold the farm, an’ your share, too.”

“And if he didn’t it’s a pity. He had improved the land, hadn’t he? and I might have been sarved up at fish dinners for all he knew. I don’t hold with this Frenchy law that says all the bairns must share and share alike. The good old Scotch fashion is good ’nough for me--Matt’s the heir, and God bless him.”

“Then why didn’t you marry a Scotchwoman?” asked Matt, with childish irrelevance.

“‘Twas your mother’s fault,” answers David, with a half-whimsical, half-pathetic expression.

“And why didn’t you take her to sea with you?”

“Nay, nay; the mother has no stomach for it, nor I either. And then there was Harriet--a little body in long clothes. And the land was pretty nigh cleared,” he adds, with a suspicion of apology in his accent, “and we couldn’t grow ’nough to pay the mortgage if I hadn’t shipped again.”

“And why am I like uncle?”

“Oh, he used to be allus lookin’ at the sky--not to find out whether to git the hay in, mind you, but to make little picturs on the sly in the hay-mow on Sundays, and at last he sold the farm and went to London to make ’em.”

Matt’s heart begins to throb--a strange new sense of kinship stirs within him.

“Hev you got any of them thar picturs?” he inquires, eagerly.

“Not one,” says David, shaking his head contemptuously. “His clouds were all right, because clouds may be anything; but when he came to cows, their own dams wouldn’t know ’em; and as for his ships--why, he used to hoist every inch o’ canvas in a hur’cane. I wouldn’t trust him to tattoo a galley-boy. But he had a power of industry, dear old Matt; and I guess he’s larnt better now, for when I writ to him tellin’ him I was alive and goin’ to get spliced, he writ back he was settled in London in the pictur line, and makin’ money at it, and good-luck to him.”

Matt’s heart swells. That one can actually make money by making pictures is a new idea. He has never imagined that money can be made so easily. Why, he might help to pay off the mortgage! He does not see the need of going to London to make them--he can make them quite well here in his odd moments, and one day he will send them all to this wonderful kinsman of his and ask him to sell them. Five hundred at sixpence each--why, it sounds like one of those faëry calculations with which McTavit sometimes dazzles the school-room. He wonders vaguely whether pictures are equally vendible at that other mighty city whence his mother came, and, if so, whether he may not perhaps help her to accomplish the dream of her married life--the dream of going back there.

“An’ uncle’s got the same name as me!” he cries, in ecstasy.

“I should put it t’other way, sonny,” says his father, dryly; “though when I give it you in his honor I didn’t calc’late it ’ud make you take arter him. But don’t you git it into your figurehead that you’re goin’ to London--you’ve jest got to stay right here and look arter the farm for mother. See? The picturs that God’s made are good ’nough for me--that’s so.”

“Oh yes, dad, I shall allus stay on here,” answers Matt, readily. “It’s Billy who allus wants to be a pirate. Silly Billy! He says--”

His father silences him with a sudden “Damn!”

“What’s the matter?” he asks, startled.

“I guess you’re the silly Billy, standin’ jabberin’ when the tide’s a-rushin’ in. We’ll have to run for it.”

Matt gives a hasty glance to the left, then takes to his heels straight across the sands in pace with his father. The famous “bore” of the Bay of Fundy, in a northerly inlet of which they have been fishing, is racing towards them from the left, and to get to shore they must shoot straight across the galloping current. They are at the head of the bay, where the tide reaches a maximum speed of ten miles an hour, and the sailor, so rarely at home, has forgotten its idiosyncrasy.

“You might ha’ kep’ your weather-eye open,” he growls. “I wonder you’ve never been drownded afore.”

“We shall never do it, father,” pants Matt, taking no notice of the reproach, for the waves are already lapping the rim of the little sand island (cut out by fresh-water rivulets) on which they find themselves, and the pools in which they had waded are filling up rapidly.

“Throw ’em away,” jerks the father; and Matt, with a sigh of regret, unstrings his piscine treasures, and, economically putting the string into his pocket, speeds on with renewed strength. But the sun flares mercilessly through the fulgent haze; and when they reach the end of their island they step into three feet of water, with the safe shore a quarter of a mile off. David Strang, a human revolver in oaths, goes off in a favorite sequence of shots, but hangs fire in the middle, as if damped.

“Strikes me the mother ’ll quote Scripture,” he says, grimly, instead.

“I suppose you can’t swim, sonny?” he adds.

“Not so fur nor thet,” says Matt, meekly.

David grunts in triumphant anger, and, shifting his pitchfork to his left hand, he grasps Matt with his right, and lifts him back on to the burning sand, already soddened by a thin frothy wash.

“Now then, han’ us your fork,” he says, crossly. He knocks out the iron prongs of both the pitchforks, ties the wooden handles securely together by the string from Matt’s discarded fish, and fixes the apparatus across the boy’s breast and under his arms. To finish the job easily he has to climb back on the sand island; for, though he stands in a little eddy, it is impossible to keep his feet against the fierce swirl of the waters; and even on the island, where there are as yet only a few inches of sea, the less sturdy Matt is almost swept away to the right by the mad cavalry charge of the tide on his left flank.

“Now then,” cries David, “it’s about time we were home to supper. I’ll swim ye for your flapjacks.”

“But, father,” says Matt, “you’re not going to carry the fish on your back?”

“They won’t carry me on theirs,” David laughs, regaining his good-humor as the critical moment arrives. “What would the mother think if we came home without a prize in tow! Avast there! I’ll larn you how I’ll get out of carryin’ ’em on my back.”

And with a chuckle he launches himself into the eddy, and shoots forward with a vigorous side-stroke. “This side up with care,” he cries cheerily. “Jump, sonny, straight for’ards.” And in a moment the man and the boy are swimming hard for the strip of shore directly opposite the sand island, the spot where they had left their coats hours before; but neither has the slightest expectation of reaching it, for the tide is sweeping them with fearful velocity to the right of it, so that their course is diagonal; and if they make land at all, it will be very far from their original starting-point. David keeps the boy to port, and adjusts his stroke to his. After a while, feeling himself well buoyed up by the handles, Matt breathes more easily, and gradually becomes quite happy, for the water is calm on the surface, and of the warmth and color of tepid _café au lait_, quite a refreshing coolness after the tropical air, and he watches with pleasure the rosy haze deepening into purple without losing its transparency. They pass sea-gulls fighting over the dead fish which Matt left behind, and which have been carried ahead of him in their unresisting course.

“We’re drifting powerful from them thar coats,” grumbles David. “’Twill be a tiresome walk back. If it warn’t for them we could cut across country when we make port.”

Matt strains his vision to the left, but sees only the purple outline of Five Islands, and in the far background the faint peaks of the Cobequid Hills.

“Waal, I’m darned!” exclaims his father, suddenly. “If them thar coats ain’t comin’ to meet us, it’s a pity.”

And presently, sure enough, Matt catches sight of the coats hastening along near the shore.

“We must cut ’em off afore they pass by,” cries his father, hilariously. “Spurt, sonny, spurt. ’Tis a race ’twixt them and us.”

Sea-birds begin to circle low over their heads, scenting David’s fish; but he pushes steadily on, animating his son with playful racing cries.

“We oughter back the coats,” he observes. “They’ve backed us many a time. Just a leetle quicker,” he says, at last, “or they’ll git past yonder p’int, and then they’re off to Truro.”

Matt kicks out more lustily, then his heart almost stops as he suddenly sees Death beneath the lovely purple haze. It is the human swimmers who are in danger of being carried off to Truro if they do not make the shore earlier than “yonder p’int,” for Matt remembers all at once that it is the last point for miles, the shore curving deeply inward. Even if they reach the point in time, they will be thrown back by the centrifugal swirl; they must touch the shore earlier to get in safely. He perceives his father has been aware of the danger from the start, and has been disguising his anxiety under the pretext of racing the coats. He feels proud of this strong, brave man, the cold terror passes from his limbs, and he spurts bravely.

“That’s a little man,” says David; “we’ll catch ’em yet. Lucky it’s sandstone yonder ’stead o’ sand--no fear o’ gettin’ sucked in.”

Now it is the shore that seems racing to meet them--the red reef sticks out a friendly finger, and in another five minutes they are perched upon it, like Gulliver on the Brobdingnagian’s thumb; and what is more, they tie with their coats, meeting them just at the landing-place.

David laughs a long Homeric laugh at the queerness of the incident, quivering like a dog that shakes himself after a swim, and Matt smiles too.

“Them thar sea-birds air a bit off their feed, that’s a fact,” chuckles David, as he surveys his fish; and then the two cut across the forest, drying and steaming in the sun, the elder exhorting the younger to silence, and hiding the prongless pitchforks in the hay-mow before they enter the house, all smiles and salmon.

At the early tea-supper they sit in dual isolation at one end of the table, their chairs close. But lo! Mrs. Strang, passing the hot flapjacks, or “corn-dodgers,” with the superfluous perambulations of an excitable temperament, brushes the back of her hand against Matt’s shoulder, starts, pauses, and brushes it with her palm.

“Why, the boy’s wringin’ wet!” she cries.

“We went wadin’,” David reminds her, meekly.

“Yes, but you don’t wade on your heads,” she retorts.

“I sorter tumbled,” Matt puts in, anxious to exonerate his father.

Mrs. Strang passes her hand down her husband’s jacket.

“An’ father kinder stooped to pick me up,” adds Matt.

“You’re a nice Moloch to trust with one’s children!” she exclaims in terrible accents.

David shrinks before the blaze of her eyes, almost feeling his coat drying under it.

“An’ when you kin’t manage to drownd ’em you try to kill ’em with rheumatics, and then _I_ hev all the responsibility. It’s ’nough to make a body throw up the position. Take off your clothes, both o’ you.”

Both of them look at each other, feeling vaguely the indelicacy of stripping at table. They put their hands to their jackets as if to compromise, then a simultaneous recollection crimsons their faces--their shirt-sleeves are gone. So David rises solemnly and leads the way up-stairs, and Matt follows, and Mrs. Strang’s voice brings up the rear, and goes with them into the bedroom, stinging and excoriating. They shut the door, but it comes through the key-hole and winds itself about their naked limbs (Mrs. Strang distributing flapjacks to her brood all the while); and David, biting his lips to block the muzzle of his oath-repeater--for he never swears before mother and the children except when he is not angry--suddenly remembers that if he is to join his ship at St. John’s by Thursday he must take the packet from Partridge Island to-morrow. His honey-moon is over; he has this honey-moon every two or three years, and his beautiful beloved is all amorousness and amiability, and the best room with the cane-bottomed chairs is thrown open for occupation; but after a few weeks Mrs. Strang is repossessed of her demon, and then it is David who throws up the position, and goes down to the sea in a ship, and does more business--of a mysterious sort--in the great waters. And so on the morrow of the adventure he kisses his bairns and his wife--all amorousness and amiability again--and passes with wavings of his stick along the dusty road, under the red hemlocks over the brow of the hill, and so--into the great Beyond. Passes, and with him all that savor of strange, romantic seas, all that flavor of bustling, foreign ports, that he brings to the lonely farm, and that cling about it even in his absence, exhaling from envelopes with picturesque stamps and letters with exotic headings; passes, narrowing the universe for his little ones, and making their own bit of soil sterner and their winter colder. He is dead, this brawny, sun-tanned father, incredibly dead, and the dead face haunts Matt--no vaporous mask, but stonily substantial, bobbing grewsomely in a green, sickly light, fathoms down, with froth on its lips, and slimy things of the sea twining in its hair. He looks questioningly at his own face in the fragment of mirror, trying to realize that it, too, will undergo petrifaction, and wondering how and when. He looks at his mother’s face furtively, and wonders if the volcano beneath it will ever really sleep; he pictures her rigid underground, the long, black eyelashes neatly drawn down, and is momentarily pleased with the piquant contrast they make with the waxen skin. Is it possible the freshness and beauty of Harriet’s face can decay too? Can Billy sink to a painless rest, with his leg perhaps growing straight again? Ah! mayhap in Billy’s case Death were no such grisly mystery.

Morbid thoughts enough for a boy who should be profiting by the goodness of the northwester towards boykind. But even before this greater tragedy last year’s accident had taken the zest out of Matt’s enjoyment of the ice; in former good years he had been the first to cut fancy figures on the ponds and frozen marshes, or to coast down the slopes in a barrel-stave fitted with an upright and a cross-piece--a machine of his own invention worthy of the race of craftsmen from which he sprang. But this year the glow of the skater’s blood became the heat of remorse when he saw or remembered Billy’s wistful eyes; he gave up skating and contented himself with modelling the annual man of snow for the school at Cobequid Village.

In the which far-straggling village (to take time a little by the forelock) his father’s death did not remain a wonder for the proverbial nine days. For a week the young men chewing their evening quid round the glowing maple-wood of the store stove, or on milder nights tapping their toes under the verandas of the one village road as they gazed up vacantly at the female shadows flitting across the gabled dormer-windows of the snow-roofed wooden houses, spoke in their slightly nasal accent (with an emphasis on the “r”) of the “pear’ls of the watter,” and calling for their night’s letters held converse with the postmistress on “the watter and its pear’ls,” and expectorated copiously, presumably in lieu of weeping. And the outlying farmers who dashed up with a lively jingle of sleigh-bells to tether their horses to the hitching-posts outside the stores, or to the picket-fence surrounding the little wooden meeting-house (for the most combined business with religion), were regaled with the news ere they had finished swathing their beasts in their buffalo robes and “boots”; and it lent an added solemnity to the appeal of the little snow-crusted spire standing out ghostly against the indigo sky, and of the frosty windows glowing mystically with blood in the gleam of the chandelier lamps, and, mayhap, wrought more than the drawling exposition of the fusty, frock-coated minister. And the old grannies, smoking their clay pipes as they crouched nid-nodding over the winter hearth, their wizened faces ruddy with firelight, mumbled and grunted contentedly over the tidbit, and sighed through snuff-clogged nostrils as they spread their gnarled, skinny hands to the dancing, balsamic blaze. But after everybody had mourned and moralized and expectorated for seven days a new death came to oust David Strang’s from popular favor; a death which had not only novelty, but equal sensationalism, combined with a more genuinely local tang, for it involved a funeral at home. Handsome Susan Hailey, driving her horses recklessly, her black feather waving gallantly in the wind, had dashed her sleigh upon a trunk, uprooted by the storm and hidden by the snow. She was flung forward, her head striking the tree, so that the brave feather dribbled blood, while the horses bolted off to Cobequid Village to bear the tragic news in the empty sleigh. And so the young men, with the carbuncles of tobacco in their cheek, expectorated more and spoke of the “pear’ls of the land,” and walking home from the singing-class the sopranos discussed it with the basses, and in the sewing-circles, where the matrons met to make undergarments for the heathen, there was much shaking of the head, with retrospective prophesyings and whispers of drink, and commiseration for “Ole Hey,” and all the adjacent villages went to the sermon at the house, the deceased lady being, as the minister (to whose salary she annually contributed two kegs of rum) remarked in his nasal address, “universally respected.” And everybody, including the Strangs and their collie, went on to the lonesome graveyard--some on horse and some on foot and some in sleighs, the coffin leading the way in a pung, or long box-sleigh--a far-stretching, black, nondescript procession, crawling dismally over the white, moaning landscape, between the zigzag ridges of snow marking the buried fences, past the trailing disconsolate firs, and under the white funereal plumes of the pines.