Chapter 10 Samson
I wake to the sound of Amber barking. I sit bolt upright and peer through the wet dinette window. Water drips onto my sheets. If she doesn’t settle down she will set Dad off. I climb out of bed and find him stoking the fire.
“Morning, boy.”
I look around. “Morning.”
He doesn’t say a word about Amber. He doesn’t even look tense.
“How was your writing last night?”
“You know I don’t talk about that.”
“Sorry.”
“It was all right, as it goes. Finding your way into a fictional place, a universe that seems real inside your own head, isn’t easy on a narrow boat with you two here. But I’m moving forward.”
He leaves to check the batteries. We might need to run the engines for a while today to top them up and I know he’ll be pissed about that.
Mom is in the bedroom, so I wash my face.
I don’t know why the original owners installed a tub on this stupid British boat.
It takes up too much space and we never have enough water in the tank to fill it up.
We’ve not had a bath since we moved here, and I know how much Mom enjoys them because she had one most nights back at the bungalow.
She’d take a paperback in with her, a candle or a hot drink sometimes, and she’d emerge half an hour later with red cheeks and a towel wrapped around her head.
Snippets of dreams come back to me as I wipe down the windows.
Woodsmoke and mildew in the early winter air.
Dad came through in the dead of night and I think he whispered something to me.
He stoked the fire, I remember that. Switched from wood to coal to get us through the night.
I was dreaming about Jennifer Adamu, the girl on the railroad footbridge, but then she turned into Jim Kendricks Jr. I blink away the thought.
Mom steps through in her robe and slippers. She rubs the top of my head and then starts making oatmeal.
Amber barks again.
“She’ll upset your father.”
“I was wondering about your book, Mom.”
“No,” she says, abruptly, shaking her head, lowering her voice. “Best if you forget I told you about that, Sammy. Nothing will come of it, I’m sure. Ignore it, please, for me, OK?”
I shrug.
But if she does sell her novel for a few hundred dollars maybe I can go on the field trip to Beaver Island after all.
They have interesting rocks, apparently.
I’ve never been to an island before. I suppose I have on the river, but I’ve never traveled to a large island.
We’d catch a ferry there from Charlevoix.
An actual ship for cars and passengers. The price includes three nights in a guesthouse near the beach, and bus travel there and back.
Maximum spending money is five bucks per student.
I’d bring my Walkman for the bus and I think, what with all the excitement, the scenery, the journey, the voyage, they might just leave me alone.
Who knows, with us traveling to a totally different region of the country, they might even grow to know me a little better, might start to like me.
When I think of fossils and rock formations my shoulders relax.
History is thought-provoking, and lots of the grown-ups I’ve known are interested in it, but it is the intersection of ancient history and geology and archaeology that really fascinates me.
That’s what I do when I hide away in the school library: one of my few safe places, along with Smith’s Bookstore and Stationers at the bus station.
I sit close to a heater at the back and research archaeological and paleontological digs in faraway places.
I lose myself in the first-person accounts of tomb discoveries, and stare at the sepia-tone photographs of Egypt and Central America.
I take out the ashes and place them carefully in the box.
My breath clouds in the cold air and mingles with dust from the burnt wood.
A palette of grays. This afternoon, or tomorrow, I will set off up the embankment and scatter them near birches and white oaks.
Dad says it’s good for nature but when I leave them by trees I feel like I am concluding some dark ritual, some incremental and unholy cremation.
We eat oatmeal in silence.
Dad leaves the table for a moment to visit his writing bureau. He checks the locks one by one.
Amber starts up barking again.
“I’m sorry about the noise,” Mom says.
He grunts that away.
Why should she be sorry?
Mom drinks the last of her coffee and I notice that her necklace is missing from her neck.
She’s worn it every day since I was born, even when she gave me swimming lessons at the public pool.
I frown and she shakes her head and adjusts her collar and looks intently at me as if to warn me from mentioning it.
“You cooked that well, Peggy,” says Dad. “Smooth oatmeal, that was.”
Amber starts howling and Mom clears the dishes to cover the noise.
I set off with my schoolbag. My Walkman is in my pocket and Depeche Mode plays through the foam headphones.
Amber is sitting on the very front of Mr. Turner’s boat. Her pink leather collar looks too big for her.
The sky is murky, and there is a blustery wind blowing in off the sleeping cornfields, a mean wind, whipping up, pushing the birch tops over onto themselves.
I glance over at Mr. Turner’s boat. His lights are on.
“Personal Jesus” comes to an end through my headphones.
Amber howls again, her neck bent.
She barks.
I look down into the muddy waters of the canal.
It’s Mr. Turner.