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By Root 527 0

office one day, a first for me. She didn’t have time to chat. “I’m busy as an eavesdropper with a party line,” she said. Mercedes has stopped trying to fix me up with nurses or any women. I’ve been officially discharged as her patient. She’s more concerned about the health of my house than about me. Cyril is gradually recovering from the disappointment of not having another man on his premises. Two or three times a week, after supper on a fine evening, he drives out for a visit. We sit on the veranda with Folio at my feet, alert to any move, sound or smell. We talk about the price of clapboard, the best quality of paints, about how soon I’ll need to have the roof tarred again or about the state of the cod fishery.

Apart from that, not much else has changed. I still can’t swim except with a life jacket, still know nothing as far as Henry is concerned, still sound like a foreigner and still have two small beach rocks in my pocket. It’s natural for some things to stay the same. Take for example the retriever’s instinct to retrieve, the view of the horizon from the top of a cliff on a day without fog, the taste of salt and smoke on skin after a bonfire in a cove, the tenderness of the hand that consoles or the unthinkable terror before the nightmare’s climax. It’s also natural for some things to change. Eventually, the ripple collapses on the surface of the pond, high tide becomes low, miscalculations evolve into opportunities, the fool becomes wiser.

Henry calls in the distance. “Back off with the Chicken Bouillon Cube for the Soul. Make your point!”

My point is that not much has changed. Not even in spite of the lessons. I could practice forever with swimming and still drown without the life jacket. No amount of lessons will make me pass for a Newfoundlander. I never was clever at lessons. It’s about time I admitted it. Of course, I was a star at mathematics. My teachers used to say my ability had flooded into one area and parched the others in consequence. They didn’t know about my talent for memorizing. A Fahrenheit 451 scenario is unlikely but it’s always best to be prepared. I know Robinson Crusoe by heart now. It’s convenient to be able to draw on any page or section of the story no matter where or when. I have a collection of favourite passages, including this one:

I had now brought my state of life to be much easier

in itself than it was at first, and much easier to my

mind, as well as to my body...I learned to look more

upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon

the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather

than what I wanted.

It’s the type of ending I would have predicted for Crusoe’s tale. As far as my own tale goes, it doesn’t have a happily-ever-after sort of ending. It’s more of a once-upon-a-time ending. Henry would probably say, “It was a long-time-coming ending. Give me the abridged version next time.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the Writers’ Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador for its support. I’m grateful for the Writer-in-Residence program at Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador, which gave me the opportunity to receive feedback from some of the finest minds in Canada: Don McKay and Michael Crummey. Mark Callanan is another of those brilliant minds. I could not have wished for a better editor. At Breakwater Books, thank you to Annamarie Beckel for the encouragement I needed to see this book to the end and to Rebecca Rose and Rhonda Molloy as well. Thank you to the expert eyes of librarians Anne Hart, Lorraine Jackson and Suzanne Sexty.

Thanks to the following friends and family who read and commented: Dianne Anderson, Jack Eastwood, Louis Fortier, my son Adrian Gagnon, Carolyn Morgan, the Murphy crowd (Barbara, Anne, Paula [Lewis], Janet [MacDuff], Kieran), Marie Wadden and Elizabeth Yeoman.

I would like to acknowledge three sources I relied on to write the novel. These are: A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas A. Basbanes, “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, and the Library at Night by Alberto