“I woke you,” he said.
She turned from the frail light to look up at him in the doorway. “I was already up,” she told him. It was an old lie between them, one he never questioned. She poured the kettle full with water and set it on the crane. “Tea now the once,” she said.
He nodded at her and took the bucket she had just emptied and a second wooden container to go down to the brook for water. The stars were still bright. There was silver thaw on the ground from a spell of freezing rain some time through the night. The chill in the air made his skin feel tight across the shoulders. The freshwater brook ran fifty yards off the side of the house and rattled into the ocean at the foot of the cove. He walked towards the steady murmur of it, the dirt path under his feet trodden hard as rock. At the riverbank he balanced over stones as the buckets dipped and dragged full with darkness. Before he turned to start up the path he looked out across the water to the crooked arm of land that sheltered the cove.
He was a boy of seventeen the first time he arrived on the northeast shore, coming across from Poole with Harry Miller in April of 1766. They disembarked on Fogo Island and took Miller’s sloop into the Bay of Exploits, a spill of rough country almost uninhabited by Europeans at the time, the coastline shadowed by a ragtag fleet of smaller islands. Humpbacked granite, dark pelts of spruce. Barely submerged skerries breaking white water. Most of the winter’s snow was still on the ground, which suggested there was no colour to the land but white and the wet black of the forest and grey shades of ocean and fog and stone. Just sailing through the raw country set John Senior’s heart on edge. It made him feel he was capable of anything.
Among the islands there wasn’t enough drift to allow the sloop to travel any direction in a straight line. Miller cut and tucked through the tangle of ragged rocks and sunkers as if he was making up the route as he went. They came to anchor in the same small cove where John Senior now stood, below what was nothing more than a single-storey spruce tilt with boarded windows at the time. Two boats were hauled high up on the beach and overturned, covered by canvas and a layer of spruce branches. An uneven ring of hills rose into a thickening shawl of fog behind the shelter.
Miller stood at the gunnel of the sloop and opened the spair of his trousers to piss into the harbour. “How does she strike you, Mr. Peyton?” he asked.
John Senior didn’t know if he was referring to the cove or the miserable-looking little tilt or to the country in general. “Well enough, I guess,” he said carefully.
Miller grunted. He fastened his trousers and spat into the water. “She’s a whore is what she is,” he said. The country he was talking about, the place itself. “She’ll spread her legs for you, but you’ll have to pay for the privilege, don’t forget it.” He smiled across at John Senior. He was obviously content with such arrangements. He was happy to be back. The fog capped in the cove, the backdrop of hills disappearing behind it.
There was something in John Senior’s memory of that first arrival that brought the tidal bore terror of the dream back to him. He had carried it with him across the Atlantic from the old country, he knew. There was a long period of years when it lay dormant and he thought he had outgrown or simply outlasted it somehow and for a while he forgot it entirely. But it came back to him before John Peyton moved over from Poole and it was becoming more persistent as he grew older. The dream had changed only in the sense that it became murkier with time, less articulate. Like a cloth dyed with the colours of fifty years, it grew ever darker, the stain deeper and more sinister. Always he was flailing his arms, hands balled into fists or holding something cold and hard, and he was beating something helpless beneath him, something utterly defenceless. Each time he woke from the nightmare yelling, begging himself to stop.
He started up the hill from the brook, moving as quickly as his burden allowed, slopping water from both buckets as he went.