Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America’s more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination’s mist.
One of them used to have a tame seagull at his house, had it for seven years. His older brother found it on the rocks and brought it home. His grandfather called it Joey. […] It died last week and they held a funeral about a mile away from the shore where there was enough soil to dig a grave. Along the shore itself it is almost solid rock […] It’s the same with people, they say. All week they have been hopefully looking […] for another seagull but have not found one.
“John here has the makings of a good fisherman,” says the old man. “He’s up at five most every morning when I am putting on the fire. He and the dog are already out along the shore and back before I’ve made tea.”
“When I was in Toronto,” says John, “no one was ever up before seven. I would make my own tea and wait. It was wonderful sad. There were gulls there though, flying over Toronto harbour. We went to see them on two Sundays.”
All three of them begin to sing, spanning easily the half-century that touches their extremes. The old and the young singing now their songs of loss in different comprehensions. Stranded here, alien of my middle generation, I tap my leather foot self-consciously […] The words sweep up and swirl about my head. Fog does not touch like snow yet it is more heavy and more dense. Oh moisture comes in many forms!
“When she married in Toronto […] we figured that maybe John should be with her and with her husband. […] Well, what was wrong was that we missed him wonderful awful. […] Like us had no moorings, lost in the fog or the ice-floes in a snow squall. Nigh sick unto our hearts we was.”
“Well, it was all wrong the night before the going. The signs all bad […] But still I feels I has to go. It be foggy all the day […] And I says, small to myself, now here in the fog be the bad luck and the death but then there the plane be […] soon he comen through the fog […] Powerful strange how things will take one. That night they be killed.”
“Jennifer Farrell of Roncesvalles Avenue was instantly killed early this morning and her husband James died later […] The accident occurred about 2 A.M. when the pickup truck in which they were travelling went out of control on Queen St. W. […] It is thought that bad visibility caused by a heavy fog may have contributed to the accident. The Farrells were originally from Newfoundland.”
I stand and bend my ear to hear the even sound of my one son’s sleeping. […] I hesitate to touch the latch for fear that I may waken him and disturb his dreams. And if I did, what would I say? Yet I would like to see him in his sleep this once and see the room with the quiet bed once more […]
Once, though, there was a belief held in the outports, that if a girl would see her own true lover she should boil an egg and scoop out half the shell and fill it with salt. […] In the night her future husband or a vision of him would appear […] But she must only do it once.
It is the type of belief that bright young graduate students were collecting eleven years ago for the theses and archives of North America and also, they hoped, for their own fame.
And perhaps now I should go and say, oh son of my summa cum laude loins, come away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout and I will take you to the land of the Tastee Freeze […] Again I collect dreams. For I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto’s Queen St. West and the grinding crash of the pickup, and of lost and misplaced love.
He opens his hand to reveal a smooth round stone. […] Suddenly he looks up to my eyes and thrusts the stone toward me. “Here,” he says, “would you like to have it?”
Even as I reach out my hand I turn my head to the others in the room. They are both looking out through the window to the sea.
The salesman’s wife stands waiting along with two small children who are the first to see him. They race toward him with their arms outstretched. “Daddy, Daddy,” they cry, “what did you bring me? What did you bring me?”
