Dead Reckoning -- oral traditions, part 1 "Ramlatch," chapter 1, "Drungs" (c) copyright 2009 Michelle Butler Hallett
DEAD RECKONING -- oral traditions
a novel (in progress)
(c) Copyright 2009 Michelle Butler Hallett
RAMLATCH
ramlatch n Cp Kilkenny Lexicon ~ v 'talk meaninglessly or incoherently.' An example of foolishness or nonsense.
— Dictionary of Newfoundland English, ed. Story, Kirwin, Widdowson
“Everything is Bulls**t = $$$”
— Phil Churchill, Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council 2009 Award Show Host’s Video, “Anything is Possible.”
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DRUNGS
Riordan’s Back and St. John’s, January 21, 2009
*Crazy cunt.*
Evan Rideout sighed, setting dust motes to dance. Harsh winter sunlight – tormented and intensified by windows so and old they seemed to melt and spill, dull panes thicker at the bottom, the glass refusing gravity, yet surrendering, and beautiful – galled his face.
—Now, where did I put those to?
Mrs. Rebecca O’Dea laid a china plate of cookies and squares on the table. A paper doily beneath the cookies absorbed butter and caught crumbs: date squares, lemon squares, snowballs, and Evan’s favourite, those parafinned chocolate mice with the crispy peanut butter centres. Moisture beaded the chocolate mice; Mrs. O’Dea had likely just fetched the cookies from the deep freeze.
—Last time I saw those letters, oh my – the day John barked his head off a rafter in the attic and fell so hard he nearly broke through the ceiling. The attic’s right above.
Chewing an entire chocolate mouse, Evan gazed at the leakstained ceiling, nodded.
—You’ll hear me lumbering about up there in a minute. I allow I know where those letters are to. Pour yourself some tea once it’s steeped, and have a few squares.
Evan just caught himself before saying *Yes, Nan*. —Thank you, Mrs. O’Dea.
He listened as she climbed a far-off ladder and then padded slowly over the ceiling – hands and knees, perhaps, wiser than her husband about where once he stood – and ate another mouse.
*Fuck you, Chris Jackman, you manic Ritalined pork-barrelling sleveen of a prick. Why can’t you do your own dirty work? Sending me out to Riordan’s Back in January, two-hour drive, roads not fit, Riordan’s Back not even on Google maps, got to find Port au Mal first. And why does this house have to smell like old people? Like must and powder and damp wood and copper and – Jesus, hidden decrepitude, some rotten old corpse all washed and dressed in old high collar and pocket watch is gonna plummet through a crumbling wall – *
Evan’s belt cut into his belly as he leaned forward to pick up his third, no, fourth chocolate mouse. He sat back, considered the expense of his tailored Republic Parks uniform an decided to stop for coffee but not doughnuts on the drive back to St. John’s.
*Least the house doesn’t smell all glassy piss and kerosene like Nan’s did. Her and that Mason jar full of kidney stones.*
Overhead, Mrs. O’Dea opened and closed something, possibly a trunk, and then crawled back to the ladder.
Jackman’s voice, all sudden dialect, verbally slumming as he talked about home: *Evan, me old cock, dart out to Riordan’s Back for me and see what Mrs. O’Dea’s got for the Settlement Celebration. I’d go myself, but I got three committee meetings and then the PM wants me over for a supper meeting. Some glad I seconded you from Parks. Beats collecting the dole all winter, hey b’y?*
Mrs. O’Dea stood before Evan, holding out a strange bag made from harp seal pelt. —Are you all right?
—Fine, thanks, Mrs. O’Dea.
Evan took the pelt bag, stroking it. So soft, after how many years?
Mrs. O’Dea sat down and poured tea into the china cups, white china with lush blue roses nearly the same hue as her eyes. Veins and knuckles interrupted the soft skin on the back of her hands. —Christopher’s call surprised me. Well, his message. Telephoned on a Sunday morning, during mass – a bit odd. I didn’t remember him until he mentioned his father’s name, and then it all came rushing back. Of course, the Jackmans lived on the Protestant side of the bay, over in Port au Mal.
Evan tried to mark the silence with the answer Mrs. O’Dea wanted, whatever it might be. He failed. —Yes, Riordan’s Back isn’t even on a map.
Mrs. O’Dea sipped her tea quite loudly. —Did you say you made cartoons about Signal Hill?
—I’m the military animator – in the tourist season. This winter I’m assisting Mr. Jackman with next year’s Settlement 250 initiative.
—Settlement 250’s been all over the radio. VOIC hasn’t shut up about it. Even John’s been asking me, and he’s in the Estuary Home with Alzheimer’s. John is my husband.
—Estuary’s in St. John’s. You’re a long way out.
—Dementia beds are all full in the Homes out here. And it’s John you need to thank, really. He’s the one who kept the old captain’s papers all these years.
*Jackman, you told me... fuck’s sake*. —So these letters haven’t been in your family for generations?
—Good lord, no. John got the letters and the pelt bag from old Captain Wright. That was, oh, 1947 maybe, when the Captain took ill. Crossed the bay a dozen times one day, pressing old things on random people. Not in his right mind, poor man. Winter before that he coppied ice pans barefoot, carrying a big slut kettle. We still don’t know why he didn’t slip and drown. Weight of the kettle alone would – did you get some tea?
—No, not yet. May I wash my hands before I touch the papers?
—Kitchen sink is right over there. Sugar in your tea?
*I don’t want any frigging tea. That’s why I haven’t poured any.* —Plain is fine, thank you.
After carefully drying his hands and returning to the table, trying not to look at the remaining chocolate mouse, Evan tugged on thin white cotton gloves, then examined the sealskin bag. Perhaps the size of a small purse, the bag fastened with a loop of leather and piece of bone: slender finger ending in a nail, pointing?
*Flipper bone, you fool.*
The nail reminded him of his zaftig ex, who filed her strong nails to a lovely almond shape, and who took Evan’s comparison of her lying prone on the bed to a harp seal basking on a rock completely the wrong way.
Mrs. O’Dea’s cup clinked against the saucer. —Aren’t you going to open it?
Not a malicious dig but a demand, as though Evan just missed a crucial step in a ceremony.
Evan gently lifted the leather loop from round the seal bone. Nothing crumbled.
Yes, so soft. What was that story? Selkies.
Mrs. O’Dea snorted. —Of course, I’ve been after John for years to bring that into a museum. Better off in a museum than some attic around the bay. But no way would John part with them. Leastaways the attic is dry.
Thready handwriting, the spill and the scratch of a quill, a feminine hand –
*Holy fuck.*
Sentences criss-crossed, half the text perpendicular to the other half, some ruint by folds, but most of it legible with a bit of patience and a trained eye, and Evan possessed both. Dated, dated ... Evan squinted, held the paper closer to his eyes while taking care not to breathe hard upon it.
*1745?
I am going to historically come in my historian’s pants.*
—So, do you think Christopher can use that for Settlement 250?
*Settlement 250 – presumes 1760. Shit. Shit! Hang on, no proof yet these letters were addressed to someone living in Port au Mal before 1760. Calm down, Rideout ... *
—Can you actually read that writing?
— Studied with a professor in Massachusetts a few years ago. Taught me all about eighteenth-century spelling and handwriting styles and –
*May 14th, 1745. From Newman Head, Merchant, Salem, Massachusetts. To John Cannard, lately of Bristol, residing now Port au Mal, New Foudne Lande. Sir, I do entreat your pardon, as the infirmity of mine eyes necessitates my daughter act amanuensis, introducing to our correspondence great risk of female weakness (yet, sir, my good father did insist to teach me to read and write) ...*
—Goodness, sit down. You look like you’re about to faint. Or kiss someone.
Unsteady, and no slight bit embarrassed by the hard-on poking the pleats of his uniform pants, Evan sat.
*17-fucking -45. *
—Lemon square? Or would you like that tea now?
The drive back to St. John’s, rendered all steamed-up misery by snow showers, horrid early dusk, lap-spilt Timmie’s, chargeless i-Pod, staticky VOIC radio signal, and the sudden death of the car heater, kept Evan from swiping his timecard back in at Tourism, Culture and Recreation until almost 5:30. With any luck, Chris Jackman hadn’t yet left for supper at the PM’s house and still spooked the place.
Florescent lights spent greasy cold light to the dozens and dozens of cubicles cramming the department floor. A few committee heads and the Assistant Deputy Ministers worked in tiny Venetian-blinded and offices lining the east wall – the wall with windows. These happy few kept their doors closed. The Minister himself – Tom Parmiter, for now – rarely graced the department, but two executive assistants kept his cavernous office dusted. Much as Evan disliked swelling Jackman’s head still further, he must agree: the ADMs did all the work.
Evan followed his memory-thread to his cubicle. Street signs marked the pathways: Bannerman, Water, Elizabeth, Duckworth, Harbourside, Beck’s Cove, Clift Baird’s Cove, LeMarchant, on and on, each pathway named and navigable as they crisscrossed the like writing from 1745. Not paths, truth told, but lanes, though Chris Jackman had distributed several memos instructing staff to refer to the paths as drungs. If the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation of the Republic of Newfoundland and Labrador does not use authentic Newfoundland English, then who will? We cannot allow Newfoundland English to go to life-support the way Irish Gaelic did. Evan had chuckled when first reading the memo, and almost shared his thoughts with Jackman, but then Jackman would probably have seized them as a sell line or rallycall. *What once they spoke we speak? *
Evan’s cubicle, three desks left of the intersection of Harvey and LeMarchant, housed a small desk, one antiquated laptop, a refurbished olive green rotary dial telephone, one framed photo of himself in seventeenth-century Royal Newfoundland Regiment uniform including bearskin hat, a four-caster chair stained with whitish cleaning solution – one hoped. Evan just planted his arse in the wobbly chair when Jackman Kiloryed over the facing cubicle wall.
—Piss yourself, or what, Rideout?
—Coffee, potholes and winter. Deadly combination.
—Potholes are worse than moose, some days. Get anything from Mrs. O’Dea? Anything we can turn into a little play or something? For the tourists, right? Hey. What are you hiding from me?
—Nothing.
Chris Jackman ducked out of sight, the thinning brown hair on top of his head flying up dead straight. Evan sighed, turned round in his chair and faced the cubicle entrance. Chris Jackman leapt into the cubicle, first joyful and then quite disgusted Evan had anticipated him.
—Hoping to scare it out of you. Come on, Ev. I know that face. You’re either giving birth to a turd thick as your fist or you found something really good out there.
—I need to authenticate – give me back that Jesus briefcase!
—Ah-ah-ah, this is your boss speaking. Let’s see now –
—Jackman, put on the gloves first, will ya? Oils from your fingers could damage the paper.
—The letters are really that old?
*Old enough to wreck Settlement 2010.* —Dated eighteenth-century.
—That’s the eighteen-hundreds, right?
—Seventeen-hundreds.
—I always get that mixed up.
—I just want to bring them to the head curator at the Admiral’s Rooms, see what we can do to confirm the age. So I’ll probably be at the museum all day tomorrow.
—We got that ACHE board meeting tomorrow night. I need you there to take minutes.
—About that: should the non-voting government representative’s assistant be the one taking minutes?
—I can’t write that fast. And Lewis Wright’s the secretary. I’m not sure he can sign a cheque before sundown.
—Fine. Where?
—VOIC boardroom, up to the station on Kenmount Road.
—I thought the Wrights sold VOIC years ago.
—VOIC rents it out. And we’re lucky to get it. Bad enough the government’s spread all over St. John’s. And now I got the arts crowd after me about lack of rehearsal and studio space since they had to close down the Hall for mould. Jesus, I can’t even get a committee together and now some actors are whining they got nowhere to go play make-believe? Here.
And Chris Jackman tossed Evan’s briefcase at him.
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