Beach Reading Read online

  “Where’d he get the olive oil?” said Robbie.

  “G-g-good point.”

  “What?”

  “The olive oil. It’s like thirteenth century Scotland. Lot of olive groves around, were there?”

  “Look, Scotland in the middle ages was the most civilized place on earth. They had universities when the rest of Europe were living in mud huts.”

  “And the sun was in a different place in the sky?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, olive trees don’t grow farther north than the Mediterranean.”

  “So what? They traded for it.”

  “From where?”

  “Italy or France or wherever the fuck they make olive oil.”

  “Thought you said they were living in mud huts there.”

  “Mud huts with olive trees outside, then!”

  “Just trying to get the facts straight.”

  “Facts!” Wallace snorted. “Where was I, Brucie?”

  “He was w-w-wounded.”

  “Yeah, ‘cause he’d been poisoned. Otherwise they could never a-laid a hand on him.”

  “Though he did p-p-pretty good though.”

  “Well, yeah, he did pretty good, no doubt about that. I mean, Robert the Bruce, even half-poisoned with a dose that would leave the average man writhing around on the ground or dead, could still kick the bejeezus out of anything they could bring onto the field of battle, let me tell you…”

  “The cave,” reminded Robbie.

  “Right! Anyhow, the cave. So he’s lying there, and a spider’s making a web and he figures, if that spider can do that, I can beat the British, so he got better and he did. Now where’s that fucking lawn mower?”

  “That’s not how it goes,” said Robbie.

  “Look. You telling the story or am I?”

  “Well, tell it right.”

  “It’s my story.”

  “No it’s not. Dad used to tell it.”

  “Well, you tell it, then.”

  “The spider. That’s the important part. He was watching the spider make a web. And he’d been beaten six times.”

  “Robert the Bruce?” said Wallace.

  “Yeah. But then he watched the spider make his web seven times.”

  “Why would he do that?” said Wallace.

  “I dunno!” said Robbie. “Because he had fuck-all else to do.”

  “Robert the Bruce had fuck-all else to do? How about saving Scotland from the English?” said Wallace.

  “Yeah, but he was wounded, after he lost six times…”

  “Not my Robert the Bruce.”

  “Yes your Robert the Bruce. That’s the way you used to tell it!”

  “Well….how the hell am I supposed to remember what I tell you? And who gives a shit? The point is he rallied and beat the crap out of the English. Got it, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are?”

  I nodded.

  “OK. Now can we cut the grass and move the tractor?

  “You said the l-l-lawn mower was broken.”

  “It is.”

  “And you also said the t-tractor won’t start.”

  “It won’t .”

  “So how we g-gonna move it?”

  “Push it.” We followed Wallace over to the tractor. “Get behind, there. And Brucie, get up in the seat.”

  “How come he gets to drive?”

  “You’re too heavy to push.”

  “Well, what about you?” said Robbie. “You’re no sylph.”

  “What’s a ‘Silf’?”

  “A skinny little scrawny fuck.”

  “Don’t swear. OK. Now, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are get behind here. One, two… and push.” We heaved. Nothing happened. “Is it out of gear, Brucie?”

  Brucie rattled the gear shift in neutral. “Yeah.”

  “Is the brake on?”

  “I g-g-guess.”

  “Well take the brake off.”

  “H-h-how?”

  “One of those foot pedals.”

  “Which one?”

  “I dunno. Just start kicking things.”

  Brucie stood up on the tractor and stepped on pedals until the tractor unclenched and rocked.

  “There! OK. Ready? One. Two. HEAVE!” And we pushed and the tractor moved. Wallace grabbed the tread of the wheel and leant into it, and the tractor proceeded across the yard with Brucie steering, and when it was rolling, Robbie ran ahead and opened the barn door, and we rolled it right inside, where it was quiet and strange and the light came through the gaps in the boards and streaked everybody like zebras.

  “Right,” Wallace announced. “Lunch!”

  We traipsed back out and across the yard to the house, onto the porch and through a door on the side to enter the kitchen.

  The house was built on Rural Canadian pre-electricity standards, and the kitchen had a table and big shelves, a huge woodstove, an electric stove as well, and beat-up linoleum on a sagging floor.

  Over near the corner where a lawnmower was stripped down and lying about in parts something rustled in the walls and the fridge was humming with a dangerous electrical sound. Wallace flung open its door to reveal not very much.

  “No bread, no milk, no eggs,” he listed. “What’s this? Cheese Whiz?” He opened the jar and sniffed. “Smells OK, and…What else?…. Oreos. That’ll have to do.” He threw the package of cookies onto the table. I ate one. The filling tasted like chemically sweetened paper and the chocolate biscuit was like sugar and soot.

  “OK,” said Wallace when he’d finished. “I’m going to Barrisway to get some nails. You, Robbie?”

  “I gotta read up on something.”

  “Brucie?”

  “N-nothing.”

  “O.K. Then I suppose I’ll have to buy something for supper. You want supper, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I can bring some potatoes.”

  Wallace looked at me. “Oh good.They’re hard to find on PEI.”

  “That was pretty sarcastic,” said Robbie.

  “It was supposed to be funny.” And because Robbie was still looking at him accusingly he added, “What? I’m inviting him to supper.”

  “Yeah, and all he’s got to do is bring his own food, and oh yeah, food for us. What does he get out of it?”

  Wallace looked around at the sagging floor, the worn linoleum, and the rodent-infested walls. “Atmosphere,” he said.

  “That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll go get what I got.”

  “And you can stay here overnight if you want,” said Robbie.

  If this was the kitchen, I thought, the upstairs was probably not spotless. I thought of my fresh bed in my tent, aired by sea breezes. “That’s OK. I’m set up pretty good on the beach.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  We walked out onto the porch. Down by the remains of the dock, the twinkling inlet had swollen up on the shore. A quarter moon stood in the daytime sky.

  “High tide,” said Wallace, taking a deep breath and drumming his fingers on his chest.

  Shit, I thought. “Shit,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I gotta get back…” I leapt off the porch and ran around the corner of the house.

  “Where’s he going so fast…?” I heard Wallace say as I scrambled over the dune and sprinted down the path. I ran around the sea-pond and through the spruce wood and jogged out onto the beach and toward my tent.

  The tide hadn’t swamped it yet, but it was a near thing. I dragged everything above where a line of eel grass marked high water. It wouldn’t have been disastrous, even if the tide had washed everything away. I could always warm some stones in a fire and sleep on them or wrap myself in kelp and let the mermaids sing me to sleep. Anything was possible on a day like today.


  I ate a potato to take the lingering taste of Oreo out of my mouth, and went back to the path to MacAkerns’ where I’d seen a raspberry patch which I ate my way through. When I’d had enough for myself, I went to the shore and found a plastic bottle bumping in the waves and with my penknife sawed off the heel for a berry basket, then went back and filled it. I didn’t know how long the season would last and thought I’d better pick as many as possible while I still could.

  Then, walking back to camp, I saw under the spruce a small patch of chanterelle mushrooms, picked them all then saw another patch a few feet away. One patch led to another. A squirrel sat on a limb and chattered at me, calling me names at high volume and velocity until I walked off. I went back to the beach, left the food in the tent, then walked to the road and picked some thyme. I could also make raspberry leaf tea, or labrador tea. I could try for trout where I had seen the geezers by the bridge, and over by the rocks, if I dove down, I might find lobster or crab. I went for a walk up the beach in the other direction to see what else I could forage.

  The dunes to the east cut up sharply above jumbled piles of flat red rock like terracotta, but in one spot the cliff had eroded under and toppled a weathered spruce, its roots in the air, making a ladder which I scaled. I dropped over the lip into a bowl of marram grass, and the sound of the sea passed over my head in the wind. I walked out of this bowl around a small dried marsh, and stopped when I saw a rabbit crouched motionless ten yards ahead of me. He waited, then hopped tentatively toward the undergrowth, took three quick zig-zag hops and disappeared. I could always snare rabbits too, I thought, but I didn’t know if I’d like to do that. I didn’t have any qualms about killing fish, which was odd, come to think of it.

  In the distance somebody was honking a horn.

  I had to remember, though, that not everything was edible here. Growing around the driftwood there was a beach pea which looked delicious but contained a neuro-toxin, and I must never mistake wild carrot for wild parsley, the same plant as the hemlock used to poison Socrates.

  The honking in the distance became more insistent.

  I looked up and saw a truck parked on the road and standing beside the truck was a man in a brown uniform looking right at me. I couldn’t make out his face, but even at this distance, I could see his whole body scowling. I heard him yell something like “Get over here,” I guessed, judging from the way he pointed at me then jabbed at the ground at his feet. I could easily have dodged away and escaped back in the direction I’d come from, but I’d never felt more innocent in my life. And his anger was reaching out across the beautiful day and made me want to retaliate. Why should I be bullied? What had I done wrong?

  So, innocent no more, I purposely took my time picking my way towards him, which made him angrier. He was so concerned with glaring at me that he didn’t notice Brucie, a hundred yards behind him, wandering up the road towards us. The man stomped, put his hands on his hips and glowered, reminding me of the squirrel. As I got closer, he started nodding his head faster and when I was within earshot I could see his red face and a vein in his forehead pulsing. What was his problem?

  “Do you have a permit?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you need one.”

  “What for?”

  “To walk in the dunes.”

  Brucie arrived. “Hi, C-C-Christian,” he said to me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  The man in uniform looked at Brucie. “Well, if it isn’t the MacAkern brat.” Then he turned back to me. “C-C-Christian is it? Is that your name?”

  “Hi, R-R-Rattray,” said Brucie.

  “My name’s not R-R-Ratrray. It’s Rattray.”

  “Sorry R-R-Rat-face.”

  “You mean Ratface.”

  “So you admit that’s your name?” snapped back Brucie without a hint of a stutter, looking right at him.

  Rattray’s face dropped. “I don’t admit anything. I don’t have to. I’m in charge here, and I was just arresting your friend for walking in the dunes without a permit.”

  But I didn’t like the way he’d mocked Robbie’s stutter. “Where does it say I need a permit to walk in the dunes?”

  “Never you mind where it says. You just come with me.”

  “Where to?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “But it is so my business.” He stopped, surprised at my new tone. “First we have to establish where I am going and whether you have any authority to take me there.”

  “Who says?”

  “Every citizen of Canada has the right to liberty, as defined in the Canadian Bill of Rights.”

  It was a game I used to play with my older brother Benjamin, who was studying to be a lawyer. One day, bored, I had come up to him as he was reading. “Why do you want to be a lawyer, Benny?”

  “Why don’t you want me to be a lawyer?”

  So I fell right into it. “I’m not asking whether or not I want you to be a lawyer, I’m asking you why it is that you, personally, want to be a lawyer.”

  He looked up from his books. “And on whose authority are you asking this?”

  “Mere idle curiosity,” I said, a phrase I had read somewhere.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I do not choose to indulge it.”

  “And who gives you the right to withold that information?” I said.

  “The privacy section in the Canadian Bill of Rights.”

  “Oh to hell with it. I don’t want to know anyway,” I said and started to walk away.

  “That is of course your right,” he said, turning back to his work and smiling. I was thirteen at the time and he was in his second year at McGill. I went off and memorized the damn Bill so that I could argue with him better. My next encounter I was more informed, and a few arguments later, it ended, I remember, in an imaginary Supreme Court case.

  Back here on the beach, Rattray was looking at me narrowly. “What do you know about the Canadian Bill of Rights?”

  “‘No law of Canada” I said, “shall be construed or applied so as to (a) authorize or effect the arbitrary detention, imprisonment or exile of any person; or’ (jumping down to (c)) ‘…deprive a person of the right to be informed promptly of the reason for his arrest or detention.’”

  Both Brucie and Rattray looked at me with surprise, but it was really nothing special. Once memorized it was like A Field Guide To The Birds, where you sifted out what was pertinent from what was not, until you had identified the animal in question, or in this case, the relevant right or freedom.

  “Exile?” said Rattray. “Who said anything about exile? Nobody’s going to send you off to a… goddamn island somewhere.”

  “We’re a-a-already on an Island, Rat-face,” said Brucie, grinning widely.

  “Shut up!” said Rattray, turning and pointing a finger at him.

  But I broke in and he turned back. “‘Arbitrary detention’ is the relevant phrase in the Bill. On what authority are you threatening arbitrary detention?”

  “On what authority?” and pointed with his thumb at his shoulder badge. “You see this?”

  “I do. But by my interpretation, you seem to be over-reaching that authority.” I said it in a tone of voice which was undoubtebly very annoying. “Perhaps we should talk to your supervisor. Who’s the head park ranger?”

  Strangely, this allowed him to find some solid ground. “Provincial parks have rangers,” he sneered with contempt for anyone who would not know something this basic. “This is a national park and we have wardens.”

  “Then who’s the head warden?”

  “We don’t have a head warden. We have a chief warden,” said Rattray, flying high now.

  “Who’s the chief warden?”

  “Fergie Monroe, not that it’s any concern of yours.”

  “Let’s go see him, then.”


  “Now you want to go?”

  “Sure.”

  “So what’s the difference?”

  “Consent,” I said.

  “Jesus! It’s the same thing. I mean, you either come with me or you don’t!”

  “It’s a question of principle,” I said.

  “What principle?”

  “My mother told me never to take rides from strange men,” I said. “You might be a pervert.”

  “What?”

  “A p-pervert,” said Brucie. “That’s what he said. You might be a p-p-pervert.”

  “Fuck off!” Rattray said, stomping over to his truck, getting in and slamming the door. Fumbling for his keys, his face was beet red.

  “On second thought, I won’t go with you right now, thanks all the same. I’ll be over tomorrow morning anyway.”

  He didn’t even want to know what this meant. He was livid.

  And to tell you the truth, it shook me. It’s taken until my age now to be able to push that sort of behaviour behind me as soon as I see it. But at eighteen it was disturbing. It was an argument, but it wasn’t for fun. I looked past him across the inner bay. There might be clams there at low tide, which I could dig and eat, though I didn’t know much about shellfish…

  “Is there a library near here?” I asked Rattray, I suppose to try to change the subject. His face was red and murderous.

  “A what?”

  “A library?”

  “Do you see any big fucking buildings with, like, fucking librarians in them?” he said, then added, “You can both go fuck yourselves,” and roared off, spinning his tires and spitting up gravel.

  We watched the truck disappear down the causeway.

  “Poor old Ratface, has no c-c-clue, what to say, or what to do,” said Brucie like a schoolyard rhyme, though I don’t know whether he had composed it on the spot or if it was something he had just picked up.

  We went back to my tent and retrieved the food I’d collected. I left a few potatoes and some raspberries for myself, and Brucie said I should bring along the banjolele. On the way to MacAkerns’ I told Brucie how I was hired at the park and how I would start work tomorrow.