already stripped Scotty out of his wet clothes and wrapped him in blankets, pulled Second back on board, and reassured me that my brother wasn’t going to die. The water was calm enough that George drew his boat almost touching ours, and John hopped over onto our deck. While Daddy cradled Scotty on his lap, John fired up the engine and ran the
Queen Jane
full-throttle back to the docks, where Momma and what seemed like half of the winter population of Loosewood Island were already waiting.
It wasn’t exactly a party at our house that night, but neither was it anything but a party. The Christmas tree in the corner winked at the room, the tinsel breezing like seaweed. The fridge was overstuffed with beer, and ladies brought casseroles, morethan we could possibly eat, as if they had started filling up their glass baking dishes the moment they heard me on the radio, and then couldn’t stop themselves from finishing their cooking once the news went out that Scotty had survived. The women hovered over Scotty, rubbing his hair and kissing him on the forehead, and the men put a full drunk on, toasting Second both for knocking Scotty overboard and then for trying to rescue him, toasting to me for keeping my head, even toasting to the shelf that the trap had landed on, knowing that with the short rope on the traps, if the water had been twenty fathoms or even ten—anything deep enough so that the traps would have pulled tight the fifty feet of warp and sunk the buoy beneath the waves—there would have been no pulling Scotty back from the water.
Scotty was tired and pale, complaining that his neck was sore and that his chest hurt from the water he’d swallowed, and he was put to bed early, worn out from the cold and from the experience of both dying and being reborn. Carly and Rena and I were allowed to stay up late—despite my sisters hacking and coughing to seize the day—but there were still at least a dozen men sitting around the woodstove and drinking beer when I went to bed, Second curled up near my father’s feet, celebrating a Christmas miracle.
Only the celebration had come too early. Sometime in the middle of the night Scotty started coughing, a pink, frothy ooze from his lips, and then his breath started coming in short gasps, and then nothing. He was dead before Carly, Rena, or I had woken. When the doctor finally got to the house, late in the morning and a thousand hours too late to help, he said it was delayed drowning, that Scotty had swallowed so much water when he had gone under that he continued to drown even after he was pulled from the water. Maybe if he’d been pulled out quicker, but the way it was, not much could have been done. Perhaps if Daddy had taken him to the hospital in Saint John, or even the clinic in James Harbor, but even then, whichever side of the border, a hospital probably wouldn’t have helped.
Years later, before Rena dropped out of nursing school, she called me and said she’d studied it, studied what killed Scotty.
“It was hypoxemia. That’s what they call it.”
“I’m not following you, Rena.”
“It was the salt. If he would have drowned in a river or a pool or somewhere other than the goddamned ocean, he might have lived, but it was the salt water. It pulled the water into his lungs.”
A few years after that phone call, she told me that she might have had her facts wrong, that maybe freshwater was worse, that there was some disagreement, but that she was so excited to have something that made sense to her that she just had to call. She wanted to make sure I knew that there was something that could explain how we had a breathing brother at night and a corpse in the morning. But knowing it didn’t change the fact: Scotty was dead.
Of course, there was more to it than that. The day of the funeral, December 24, Daddy slipped out early in the morning. I don’t think anybody else was up—which in a fishing village meant it must have been god-awful early—or that he
Queen Jane
full-throttle back to the docks, where Momma and what seemed like half of the winter population of Loosewood Island were already waiting.
It wasn’t exactly a party at our house that night, but neither was it anything but a party. The Christmas tree in the corner winked at the room, the tinsel breezing like seaweed. The fridge was overstuffed with beer, and ladies brought casseroles, morethan we could possibly eat, as if they had started filling up their glass baking dishes the moment they heard me on the radio, and then couldn’t stop themselves from finishing their cooking once the news went out that Scotty had survived. The women hovered over Scotty, rubbing his hair and kissing him on the forehead, and the men put a full drunk on, toasting Second both for knocking Scotty overboard and then for trying to rescue him, toasting to me for keeping my head, even toasting to the shelf that the trap had landed on, knowing that with the short rope on the traps, if the water had been twenty fathoms or even ten—anything deep enough so that the traps would have pulled tight the fifty feet of warp and sunk the buoy beneath the waves—there would have been no pulling Scotty back from the water.
Scotty was tired and pale, complaining that his neck was sore and that his chest hurt from the water he’d swallowed, and he was put to bed early, worn out from the cold and from the experience of both dying and being reborn. Carly and Rena and I were allowed to stay up late—despite my sisters hacking and coughing to seize the day—but there were still at least a dozen men sitting around the woodstove and drinking beer when I went to bed, Second curled up near my father’s feet, celebrating a Christmas miracle.
Only the celebration had come too early. Sometime in the middle of the night Scotty started coughing, a pink, frothy ooze from his lips, and then his breath started coming in short gasps, and then nothing. He was dead before Carly, Rena, or I had woken. When the doctor finally got to the house, late in the morning and a thousand hours too late to help, he said it was delayed drowning, that Scotty had swallowed so much water when he had gone under that he continued to drown even after he was pulled from the water. Maybe if he’d been pulled out quicker, but the way it was, not much could have been done. Perhaps if Daddy had taken him to the hospital in Saint John, or even the clinic in James Harbor, but even then, whichever side of the border, a hospital probably wouldn’t have helped.
Years later, before Rena dropped out of nursing school, she called me and said she’d studied it, studied what killed Scotty.
“It was hypoxemia. That’s what they call it.”
“I’m not following you, Rena.”
“It was the salt. If he would have drowned in a river or a pool or somewhere other than the goddamned ocean, he might have lived, but it was the salt water. It pulled the water into his lungs.”
A few years after that phone call, she told me that she might have had her facts wrong, that maybe freshwater was worse, that there was some disagreement, but that she was so excited to have something that made sense to her that she just had to call. She wanted to make sure I knew that there was something that could explain how we had a breathing brother at night and a corpse in the morning. But knowing it didn’t change the fact: Scotty was dead.
Of course, there was more to it than that. The day of the funeral, December 24, Daddy slipped out early in the morning. I don’t think anybody else was up—which in a fishing village meant it must have been god-awful early—or that he
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