Ebb Tide

Treasure Island

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By Ed Staskus

   “Mammy, you know how those men dug a hole in the ground for daddy because he wasn’t alive anymore?”

   “Yes, Maggie, we buried his body in the ground but his soul lives with God.” Siobhan said after the funeral for her husband. He had been interred in the boneyard up the hill. She was in the kitchen preparing dinner.

    “I saw daddy dig a hole behind the barn and bury something in it.”

   “Is that the secret you wanted to tell me about?”

   “Yes.”

   “When did you see that?”

   “I saw it when he came back.”

   “Came back from where?”

   “When he left with all the horses that time and came back. Do you think he buried something in the hole for God?”

   Siobhan Foyle rubbed her hands clean on her apron. “Show me where that is,” she said. The widow and her daughter walked out of the kitchen, across the yard, and behind the barn. It was early evening, the sun arcing away from them. 

   “There, mammy, where the fox is digging, that’s by where daddy buried his treasure.”

   A red fox was digging, stopping, listening, and digging again. The animal had long, thin legs, a lean lithe frame, and pointed nose. His tail was bushy. Foxes ate everything, rats, mice, voles, lizards, rabbits and hares, birds, fruits, and bugs. Those on the shoreline ate fish and crabs. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t grist for their mill.

   “What is he doing?” Maggie asked, watching the fox watching and listening.

   “When he stops to listen, he’s listening for a mouse or a rat underground,” Siobhan said.

   The fox cocked his head. “I know you’re down there,” he announced to whatever was down there. “You can’t get away.” He dug deeper, not trying to be quiet. He knew he could dig faster than whatever rodent was soon going to be his breakfast could tunnel to safety.

   The tod was the size of a medium-sized dog. His vixen was probably in the nesting chamber with their pups. They lived in the dunes, in burrows they dug for the family. There were always several ways of getting into and out of the den in the event predators snuck in trying to eat the pups. The tod and vixen stored grub there, pushing it under piles of leaves, spending most of the day in the safe and sound, searching for more food mostly at night.

   The fox looked up. Siobhan knew they could see as well as cats, their vertically slit pupils glinting. If he yipped and turned to go, he would be gone in a flash. They were practically the fastest animals on the island. Many people thought they were cunning. Some people thought they had magical powers. Whatever spells they could cast never helped when a coyote was tracking them.

   When the fox finally got his mouse, he trotted off with it. Siobhan went into the barn and brought back a shovel. Maggie pointed at the spot where to dig. Ten minutes later her mother had a dirty leather tobacco pouch in her hands. She knocked the loose dirt off it and walked to the house, Maggie trailing behind her. They sat on the porch facing Foyle’s Cove. When she opened the pouch and reached inside it, her hand brought out money in bundles held together by elastic bands. She had never seen elastic bands before and never seen that much money, either. When she finished counting it there was $7,000.00 in her lap.

   It was all in fifty-dollar Dominion of Canada bills. The god  Mercury was on the front holding a map of British North America, along with drawings of a harbor, ships, and a train in the background. “50 Dollars Payable at Montreal” was printed on the back. Montreal was where her husband had sold his horses.

    “Somebody is coming,” Maggie said. A two-man horse and buggy was coming down the road, except there were three people in the buggy. There were a man and a woman and a one-year-old girl.

   “It’s Clara and Hugh come down from Clifton with their new-born,” Siobhan said as the buggy got closer. The rest of her children were on the porch watching. She stuffed the cash money back into the leather pouch and handed it to Kieran Jr., her oldest son. “Go to my bedroom and wait for me there. Keep this in your hands and on your lap until I come for it.”

   “Good day,” Siobhan said as the buggy came to a stop. Clara handed the child to her. Hugh walked around and helped his wife down to the ground. Lucy Maud Montgomery looked up at Siobhan and smiled. Siobhan smiled back. The baby girl cut cheese and Siobhan gave her back to her mother.

   “Lucy is a lovely name, but she looks like an Annie to me,” Siobhan said.

   “That’s odd, because you’re the second person who has said the same thing,” Clara said.

   “We wanted to stop and pay our condolences,” Hugh said.

   “Thank you,” Siobhan said.

   “Kieran was a good man.”

   “Yes, he was.”

   Hugh fed and watered the horse. The grown-ups sat and talked on the porch. The children played with the baby. When the sun started to set Hugh and Clara got ready to go to North Rustico where they planned to spend the night with relations.

   “Come and have dinner with us,” Clara said.

   “I would love that,” Siobhan said and that is what she did, but not before walking upstairs to her bedroom with Kieran Jr. and Sean, her second-oldest son. “I won’t be back tonight,” she said to them. “Put the other children to bed once it gets dark. Don’t light anything. Keep this bag in this bed with you tight between the two of you until we decide what to do with it tomorrow.” She kissed her sons, and the other children downstairs, and once outside walked alongside the buggy towards town. She carried the baby, cooing at the child as they walked past the burying ground.

   The next morning, she made breakfast for her children. When they were done eating, she and the girls cleaned up while the boys tended to their chores. Michael was too small to do much, but Kieran Jr. and Sean were strong boys who knew their way around animals and farmland. Next summer she would add on to the house, adding two bedrooms so when the boys and girls grew up, they could have separate bedrooms. She would improve the fields and fences. She would hire a farmhand, but not increase the size of her herd overmuch. Her husband had wanted to eventually keep a hundred horses, but she didn’t think the land would keep that many. She would devote three hundred acres to the horses and thought forty or fifty of them would be best. 

   She didn’t believe in continuous grazing. Horses had a bad habit of grazing their favorite grass close to the ground, then returning to eat the regrowth as soon as it came back. As the year went on there wasn’t enough of it left to capture sunlight. It had to use stored energy to regrow. If horses kept eating in the same place, energy stores ran out and the grass died.

   Horses liked orchard grass, smooth brome, and timothy the best. They could eat it all day long down to the bare earth which was when weeds started to grow in their place. Siobhan had heard of rotational grazing and that was what she was going to do. She would move the horses to one pasture and let the other pastures recover. Each of the pastures would be left empty for at least several weeks at a time. That was how long it took for forage regrowth after grazing to happen.

   She had four paddocks connected to a sacrifice lot. The lot had a shelter, a feeder, and a water source so that the paddocks didn’t need to have their own. The horses could get to the sacrifice lot anytime they wanted. They liked it that way. Siobhan was determined to keep draft horses. She wasn’t a racing horse woman. Prince Edward Island was a farming island and farmers needed draft horses more than anything else.

   When Friday came and before it went, she told the children they would be going to Charlottetown the next day, and staying overnight, so they could buy clothes, shoes, boots, tools, small barrels, utensils, dishes, a new table and chairs, and as many household necessities as they could carry back. Winter would be upon them soon enough.

   Her team could go at 15 KPH if they had to and get them to Charlottetown in two-and-a-half hours, or die trying. The road wasn’t especially rough or hilly, but it wasn’t smooth and flat, either. If the team plodded they could get to the city and live to tell the tale, although it would take them five hours-or-more. She would take the four youngest children with her and leave the two oldest behind. She stood Kieran Jr. and Sean on flattened brown paper and traced their bare feet for new shoes. She rolled the paper up and tied it with a string. She measured their arms and legs and height for new jackets and trousers.

   The five of them going all together would weigh less than 400 pounds. They would be markedly heavier coming back, but the horses could pull ten times and more that weight with no trouble and do it all day if the going was slow and steady. She hitched the horses to their farm wagon and started before dawn. Maggie and Michael, the two youngest, sat up front with her. Biddy and Kate knelt in the back on the floor of the wagon leaning on the tailgate, looking back at the way they were leaving behind. 

   When coming into Charlottetown she asked the children if they wanted to see Fanningbank. “Yes, please!” They were unanimous that they wanted to see it. “Our teacher told us it is the Government House,” Biddy said when she saw it. “Why do you call it Fanningbank?”

   “It’s because a hundred years ago Edmund Fanning, who was going to become the governor, set this land on the riverbank aside for the building of a residence for the governor,” Siobhan said. “The land was his and known as Fanning Bank then, and that is what it has stayed to this day.”

   Fanningbank was a large Georgian style house. It was the kind of architecture popular in England in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Georgian style valued classical balance. John Harvey was the second governor to live there. After the start of the new year of 1837, in the dead of winter, he held the first dress-up party in the elegant house. 

   “An entertainment upon a splendid scale was given by Sir John and Lady Harvey at Government House on Thursday evening last,” the Royal Gazette reported. “As this was the first occasion the rooms were thrown open to a large evening party, no pains were spared to give full effect. At ten o’clock dancing commenced, which was continued with great spirit and animation until after one o’clock. The rooms were brilliantly lighted, and this, added to the crown of beauty and fashion with which they were thronged, exhibited their handsome proportions and striking appearance to peculiar advantage.”

   The dancing, mingling, gossiping, and back-slapping took place in the Grand Ballroom, a high-ceilinged room surrounded by eight columns. When the party was over His Excellency and Lady went upstairs and rooted around under the covers in the Sovereign’s Bedroom. The party was the talk of the season that year. When the baby was born in September he was told all about the party.

   In 1864 the delegates to the Charlottetown Conference came to the house in the evening for an official dinner and dance given by Governor George Dundas. They had a grand time excited by their grand plans, although none of them had any illusions about what it would take to make their plans come true.

   “Mammy, why do they call them excellencies?” Maggie asked. “Are they better than us?”

   “I will tell you when you are a little bit older,” Siobhan said.

   They went on to the south side of Queen Square, one of Charlottetown’s main commercial streets. It was where Siobhan knew there was tailoring, the selling of dry goods, and the manufacture and sale of rubber boots and furniture. What she didn’t know was that a fire had swept through the section destroying all but one building on the corner of Richmond and Queen. Where wood had stood brick was being laid, but nothing  was ready yet to provide her with what she wanted and needed.

   Charlottetown was a small city but with big enough business, and she had no great difficulty finding the clothes and goods she was looking for elsewhere. One merchant’s loss was another merchant’s gain. The first merchant she visited was the shoemaker Thomas Strangman and Sons. A shoe stitching machine had been invented by an American in 1856. It was known as the McKay Stitching Machine and Thomas Strangman was the first man on Prince Edward Island to have one. Sole cuts tailored to fit the right or left foot were still on the way. In the meantime, it was make them shape up on your own.

   When she was ready to pay for the shoes and boots for her children and herself, she showed one of the fifty-dollar bills to Tom Strangman.

   “Is my money good here?”

   He looked at the front and back of the bill.

   “Yes, ma’am, your money is good here.” He would take it next door to the dry goods store, which was also an exchange bank, among other things.

   She bought rice, sugar, and coffee. She bought cotton socks, wool socks, undershirts, under garments, shirts, denim pants, and blankets. She bought rolls of calico, brown shirting, domestic gingham, and bleached cotton. She bought a heavy plaid shawl for $3.00. She bought a dining room table and eight chairs for $45.00. 

   On the way back to Foyle’s Cove the following Sunday morning the children sat on the chairs at the table in the back of the farm wagon all the way home, waving to everybody they saw, pointing out a cross-eyed cow, another cow who brayed like a crow, and singing songs. They took turns sitting at the head of the table. They sang parlor songs and minstrel songs. They sang “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “The Red River Valley.” They sang loud and off-key.

   They sang a sad song. “From this valley they say you are going, I shall miss your bright eyes and sweet smile, for alas you take with the sunshine, that has brightened my pathway awhile.” Siobhan kept her eyes fixed on the track ahead of her while her children sang. She let her horses find their own way.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Photograph: Charlottetown, PEI, in the 1870s.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A stem-winder in the Maritimes.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVDP8B58

Summer 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. A missing rucksack full of one hundred dollar bills. Two hired guns from Montreal. One RCMP officer stands in their way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Oliver and Emma

High in the Sky

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By Ed Staskus

   “Where are you staying?” Isabelle asked. Her name was officially Isabella, but everybody called her Isabelle. Her close friends called her Izzy.

   “In North Rustico, but not exactly. We’re in the National Park, up from Doyle’s Cove, in the Coastline Cottages.”

   “Where the seaweed smells bad?”

   “That’s the place, except it doesn’t usually smell bad, only when there’s a strong wind blowing onshore that piles it up, or there’s a storm that tears Irish moss from the ocean floor and dumps it on the beach there.”

   “How do you know where the smell comes from?”

   “My older sister Emma told me. She knows everything. She’s always reading books and stuff. She’s my right hand man.”

   “Isn’t she a girl?”

   “I don’t mind. She helps me hunt monsters where we live in Ohio.”

   “Oh, I see. Anyway, we’re in the Gulf View Cottages on that hill above the guard station where you have to stop before coming into the park, except not this year. They have something special going on so everybody can just come and go.”

   “You’re not far away, at all. I could walk over and visit.”

   Isabelle and Oliver were talking on the front deck of the Stanley Bridge Hall, watching cars going in circles on the roundabout. They had spent the past two-some hours listening to Lennie Gallant tell stories and sing songs about Atlantic Canada, the two of them coincidentally sitting in the same row. It was where they met for the first time. Oliver and Emma were with their parents, come from away in Ohio, and Isabelle was with her parents, who were from Louisiana.

   “My people came from Spain, around 1800, when Louisiana was a Spanish colony, and my husband’s people are from here, from even longer back, when the Acadians were deported by the British,” Isabelle’s mother said. 

   “My name is the same as my grandmother’s,” Isabelle chimed in.

   “We live in Lafayette, which is more-or-less the cultural capital of Acadiana, which is where the Cajuns live in the southwest part of the state. My husband has long wanted to visit the island here, around the Rustico lands, where his family came from.”

   Acadians were from the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Most of them were deported in the mid-18th century during the French and Indian War. It was called the Great Expulsion. Thousands of them died of disease or drowning when ships sank. Their land was given to Scottish settlers. Many Acadians were transported to the American colonies. Those that ended up in Louisiana settled in the Atchafalaya Basin and the prairie lands to the west. 

   “Mom, can Isabelle and I go the Sandspit tomorrow?” Oliver blurted out. He wasn’t especially interested in history lessons. School was going to start soon enough and he would soon enough have more history than he could handle.

   “I don’t see why not. Check with her mother, and if she agrees we will take the two of you tomorrow.”

   The next day the mothers dropped the two children off at the Sandspit.

   “We’re going to Raspberry Point Oysters to hear a talk all about oysters and afterwards eat some of them,”  Oliver’s mother said. “Then we’re going to drive to New London to see Lucy Maud Montgomery’s birthplace, before she moved to Cavendish. They have a museum there with some of her personal scrapbooks from when she was working on ‘Anne of Green Gables.’ We will probably stop for coffee somewhere and pick you up around five o’clock.”

   “OK, mom,” Oliver said, barely listening, and running off with Isabelle in train.

   The Sandspit is an amusement park in Cavendish, about six miles from  North Rustico on Route 6, except they didn’t take Route 6. They had taken the Gulf Shore Parkway through the National Park, stopping at the overlook at MacKenzies Brook to see where the Cactus Pot had once been. It had been a sandstone sea arch that was lashed black and blue by Hurricane Fiona in September 2022 and collapsed one Sunday morning two months later after the tropical depression Nicole passed through. 

   “It’s not there anymore,” Oliver said, looking at the nothing where the sea arch had been.

   “When Fiona went by it took a nice little chunk out on the right-hand side of it and that kind of weakened the structure a lot more, and then we had Nicole, and I guess with the heavy rains and winds that we had, it was the last straw, “ said Timothy Gallant from nearby Rusticoville, who was taking photographs of the coastline. “We had been watching it deteriorate for quite a little while, well, since Fiona, and we were wondering when it was going to happen.”

   “It’s scary, but it’s Mother Nature, the  hurricanes, like where we live in Louisiana,” Isabelle said.

   “Dad says they’re scarier these days,” Oliver said.

   “So does my dad,” Isabelle said.

   The first ride Oliver and Isabelle went on at the Sandspit was the Ferris wheel. It was seventy feet high and they could see the whole amusement park from the top. Once they got their bearings they ran from one ride to another. They rode the Cyclone roller coaster, the longest roller coaster in Atlantic Canada, screaming down the sharp drops and through the corkscrews. They rode the Sandstorm 360 pendulum with full rotations. They rode the Paratrooper and Tilt-a Whirl and after that the bumper cars and bumper boats. They whooped it up on the Landslide and the Scrambler. The last ride they went on was the Cliffhanger.

   The Cliffhanger was a drop tower that took its riders fifty two feet up in the air before plunging straight down, creating sudden G-forces, making the riders feel weightless. At least, that is what it was supposed to do, except it didn’t. The ride was halfway up its fifty two feet when it suddenly peeled rubber. By the time it got to the top it was going like a rocket and shot their seat into the sky, scattering a formation of cormorants. The jet stream got behind them. Before they knew it they were  flying over North Rustico. 

   Ten minutes later they were flying over Brackley Beach. The seat was open-air bench-style with an over the shoulder restraint and a lap bar. They kept the restraint and bar where they were. They passed over Stanhope, Grand Tracadie, and Wild Harbour. They were on course for St. Peter’s Bay.

   “I like the green fields, the way they look right next to the red cliffs,” Oliver said.

   “The farm fields down there look like a patchwork quilt my mom has,” Isabelle said.

   They almost slammed into an osprey head on, but the big bird veered away at the last second, whistling and screeching its disapproval.

   “Maybe we could stop at Rick’s Fish & Chips when we get to St. Peter’s Bay,” Oliver said. “The man and his wife in the cottage next to us were there yesterday and said their fish hits the spot.”

   “That sounds great, let’s do that,” Isabelle said. “I’m getting hungry, but, how do we land this thing?”

   Oliver looked all around but didn’t see a joystick or any brakes, or even a parachute.

   “That’s a good question,” he said.

   Frank Arsenault was on St. Peter’s Highway outside of Morell when he saw the seat in the sky. He was driving his Dodge Ram 3500, transporting the drone that he used for crop scouting and monitoring field health back to his barn. That don’t look right, he thought, especially not with two kids along for the ride. He kept them in sight. As they were approaching St. Peter’s Isabelle noticed the pick-up truck tracking them. She made the one-handed Signal for Help sign, waving her hand back and forth.

   Frank sped up to get ahead of them and pulled off into a gravel lot next to the St. Peter’s Bay Volunteer Fire Department. He jumped out of the pick-up truck, unlocked the clamps and tie-down anchors holding the drone in its cradle, freed  the soft straps keeping the folding arms in place, and released the drone. He controlled it to the rear of the Cliffhanger seat and shot a tow line at it. The tow line’s hook snagged the seat. Frank brought it down in ever diminishing circles, landing it in the gravel lot like laying a baby in a cradle.

   “Are you kids OK?” he asked, rushing over to them.

   “Thanks mister,” Oliver said. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

   “What happened?”

   “The Cliffhanger took off and we just hung on.”

   Frank Arsenault had no idea what Oliver was talking about, but seeing they were unhurt didn’t ask any more questions, packed up his drone, and drove away.

   “Look, there’s Rick’s Fish & Chips across the street,” Isabelle said. 

   “Let’s go.” 

   They ordered a bowl of mussels swimming in garlic butter and a plate of haddock with fries and split their order, eating outside at a red picnic table in the shade of a white spruce.

   “I was getting dizzy up there,” Oliver said. “You came through with that S. O. S. sign. You’re like another right hand man.”

   “Call me Izzy,” Isabelle said, reaching for the last piece of haddock.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide” 

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Mob money gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Oliver and Emma

Ghost Ship

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By Ed Staskus

   Oliver could never afterwards remember exactly how it happened. One minute he was standing at the railing of the MV Confederation in the moonlight listening to an old man with a scraggy face telling him a story about rum runners and the next minute he was on the wrong side of the railing. He fell into the Northumberland Strait, a tidal body of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Prince Edward Island from the mainland. 

   “Swim to that ghost ship,” the old man shouted down to him. “There, where you see the flames. I’ll find the skipper of this here boat, we’ll come back for you.”

   “No, wait, throw me a life preserver first!” Oliver shouted, but by then the man was gone. The boat continued on its way, leaving him behind. He kicked his shoes off and stripped off his clothes, except for his underwear.

   That’s better, he thought, dog paddling.

   The MV Confederation was a roll-on roll-off ferry. It could hold six hundred passengers and more than two hundred cars. It sailed from Caribou, Nova Scotia to Wood Islands on Prince Edward Island eight times a day in the summer. The crossing took about an hour-and-a-half. 

   Oliver, his sister Emma, and their father and mother were on the last departure of the day from Nova Scotia. It was their second trip to the island, although they had taken the 8-mile long Confederation Bridge from New Brunswick their first time the previous year. They had spent a week at the Coastline Cottages in North Rustico. They soaked up Atlantic Canada and were back for more.

   The ghost ship was a half mile away. Oliver had been taking swimming lessons at the Lake County YMCA in Painesville the past two years. The first stroke he had learned was the front crawl and it was still the stroke he was best at. Even though he had only swum in untroubled open water on Lake Erie at the Mentor Headlands State Park, he thought he could make it, ocean or no ocean. The water wasn’t especially cold or wavy, although it was salty, which he wasn’t used to. He spit out what was in his mouth. 

   Lake Erie was full of perch and walleye. His father sometimes took the family to Pickle Bills in Grand River for a perch platter. His mother didn’t like walleye. She said the fish was too fishy for her, so they always had perch. One of their neighbors in Perry, where they lived in Ohio, was Polish. He always said, “Fish, to taste right, must swim three times, in water, in butter, and in wine.”

   What was in the water of the Northumberland Strait? He thought there were probably cod, bass, and mackerel. He hoped the West Point Sea Serpent wasn’t around, or the barrel thick sea worms he had heard about. He didn’t especially like worms, to begin with, and was sure he wouldn’t like a big sea worm bearing down on him, at all

   He started towards the ghost ship, slow and steady, not trying to rush the crawl. He got there in twenty minutes. When he got close to it he noticed the flames engulfing the ship didn’t feel hot, or even warm. There wasn’t any smoke, either. It was flying a tattered distress flag. The flag was upside down.  He flipped over on his back and looked up the side of the starboard side of the  boat. It was a three-masted sailing schooner. A face appeared at the gunwale. It was the old man with the scraggy face.

   “What you be doing in the water there, boy?”

   “I fell off that ferry,” Oliver said, pointing to it in the distance. It didn’t seem to be turning around.

   “I don’t see no ferry.”

   “All right, but can you help me get out of this water?”

   “Look to yourself, boy, the devil is loose.” His voice had the sound of an unfriendly cackle in the dark. Oliver wasn’t sure he liked that.

   “What does that mean?” he asked, but the old man had fallen silent. Just then he heard ripples. He looked over his shoulder. It was a barrel thick sea worm bearing down on him. He made for the Jacob’s ladder on the side of the ship and clambered aboard the schooner.

   The old man with the scraggy face was perched on a barrel. It was a provision tub filled with salt pork. His eyes were shiny and sharp as the tip of an icepick. There was a clay pipe in his hand. It was a nose-warmer kind of clay pipe. It was filled with plug tobacco that had been soaked in molasses. There was a wooden piggin of grog in his other hand. 

   “Never trust a fighting man who doesn’t smoke or drink,” he said.

   The helmsman on the aft deck was staring straight ahead, his line of sight far past the booms and sails. Three dogs were chasing one another from one end of the ship to the other. A knot of sailors were at the main deck hatch covers, playing cards on the flat wooden surfaces that doubled as tables. They were playing whist, some copper and silver coins scattered about, along with slips of paper, which were IOU’s for future rations.

   All the while the sailing schooner was burning, although it didn’t seem to have any effect on anybody or anything.

   “What is this ship?” Oliver asked.

   “Some along the New Brunswick  coast, they say we be the John Craig Light, a ship that wrecked off Shippigan Island. Other herring chokers on that coast say we be the Colbum, lost in a storm in 1838. Over in Pictou, down there in the Scotia lands, I have heard them say we are a contraband runner once bound for Scotland, but never heard of again. It’s all false reckonings. What we are is the Isabella. We left Charlottetown for South America in 1868, loaded with lumber. We was last seen outside the harbor by the lighthouse keeper at Amnet Island. We was never seen again, but the lumber we was carrying still burns, boy.”

   “Oh, I see, well, that’s very interesting, but I’ve got to get to Wood Islands, my parents will be worried sick if they can’t find me. Do you have an inflatable life raft with an onboard motor I could borrow?”

   “Inflatable?”

   “You know, a rubber boat you blow up with CO2 when there’s an emergency.”

   “Are you are spinning me a yarn, boy?”

   “No, I don’t have time for that, I’ve got to get going.”

   “There is no going anywhere once you be on the Isabella. We need help in the galley and you will do.”

   “What kind of help?”

   “Lighting fires, peeling vegetables and potatoes, scraping mess kits, and then there’s carrying food and drink from the galley to the crew topside, and after that there’s swabbing the decks and hauling rope up the ratlines. We will make a reefer of you soon enough.”

   “I can’t do that, whatever all that is. I’m in fifth grade. School starts right after we get home.”

   “Your lessons start right here, right now.”

   The schooner lurched forward suddenly, picking up speed, even though it was going against the wind. Oliver looked around. He had to get off the ship. He saw a rope dangling from the stern. At the other end of the rope was a yawl being towed. He ran to the stern, found a rigging knife, cut the rope, and  jumped off the ship into the yawl. There was a monkey jacket tucked under the sternsheets. He put it on and started rowing.

   It was a clear night and he didn’t have any trouble finding Wood Islands. He landed at the lighthouse, walked up a provincial park trail lit by moonlight to the terminal, and spotted the family Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot.

   “Where have you been?” his mother asked. “Why are you wet? What happened to your shoes? And where did you get that ratty coat?”

   Oliver hit the sack as soon as they got to the Coastline Cottages and slept like a log. It was later in the week that he, Emma, and their parents were at the Stanley Bridge Hall for a ceilidh, Scottish and Irish folk songs on fiddle, guitar, accordion, whistle, and occasional bodhran. Lennie Gallant, a singer songwriter from nearby Rustico, was on stage, telling stories and singing songs. When he broke out into “Tales of the Phantom Ship” Oliver pricked up his ears.

   “There’s a burst of flame and a flash of light, and there on the tide is a frightening sight, as a tall ship all aflame lights up the sky, tales of the phantom ship, from truck to keel in flames, she sails the wide Northumberland Strait, no one knows her name.”

   “Isabella,” Oliver called out, jumping to his feet. “It’s the Isabella.”

   “Yes?” a voice beside him said.

   He looked down at the voice. A dark-haired girl around his own age was looking up at him from her seat. She flashed a smile at him.

   “I am Isabella,” she said.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide”

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

No Stone Unturned

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By Ed Staskus

   When JT Markunas checked the weather report it looked like the outdoors was going to be in the 20s and sunny. It had been in the 20s and sunny yesterday, too. It was mid-summer. Sitting on a lawn chair outside his rented house in Milton he thought the forecast was like the murder he had been investigating on-and-off the past few months. It wasn’t any different today than it had been yesterday and looked like it wasn’t going to be different anytime soon.

   The difference was nobody could do anything about the weather. The RCMP could do something about the murder. They knew how the woman with the empty briefcase had been killed but didn’t know where or why. They still didn’t know who she was, nor did they have a clue about who might have done it. The more days went by the more it got pushed back in everybody’s minds. It was starting to go unresolved and cold.. Nobody had seen or heard anything the past fall and by the time anybody knew something had happened, winter was over and it was spring. Now it was summer.

   It was a hell of a shame, he thought. Nobody should get away with murder. Murders are often a spur of the minute violent outburst, but what happened in Conor Foyle’s field wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate. It rankled him to think whoever did it thought they could get away with it. It was usually some poor slob who couldn’t get away with jaywalking. They got locked up. The rich hired somebody to talk their way out of it. They walked away free. JT thought what happened had to involve money, and lots of it. The rich didn’t brandish axes to get what they want. They had fountain pens for that.

   An execution is justice, but murder is injustice. There was no justice in taking the law into your own hands. There was money in farming and fishing, which Prince Edward Island did a lot of. Farmers and fishermen rarely shot each other, or anybody else. At one time lenders got rough when it came to collecting from debtors, but that time was gone. Criminal gangs shot first and didn’t ask questions whenever they were crossed, but there were no criminal gangs like that on the island. There were some with criminal minds. That’s why the force existed. He thought it likely that whoever did the killing was a lone wolf. That meant whoever it was, was likely to keep to themselves. Whoever it was, he was going to be hard to find. JT wasn’t holding his breath. He was a patient man, though. He believed he would get his man eventually.

   It was going to be a tough nut to crack but it was a nut that would have to keep. It was his day off. He tossed his bicycle into the back of his pick-up. The bike was a Specialized Rockhopper, nothing special, but virtually indestructible. It went up and down potato roads and single tracks just fine and rode smooth enough on pavement. Brackley Beach was about 20 kilometers away. He drove there.

   JT parked at the west end of the beach. It was 15 kilometers to Dalvay By the Sea. He was going to keep going another 5 kilometers farther on to Grand Tracadie, stop and stretch his legs, and ride back. Forty kilometers in the saddle would be enough for him. When he started the wind was at his back and the living was easy, until he realized it would be in his face on the way back. He thought he would find somewhere in Grand Tracadie to have a bite and a drink before turning around.

   He rode past the Harbour Lighthouse, some cottages, Ross Beach, some more cottages, Stanhope Beach, Long Pond, and stopped at Dalvay By the Sea. He rode to the front steps, parked his bike, and walked down the sloping lawn to a set of red Adirondack chairs in front of the big house. He was sitting there looking out at the ocean when somebody walked up and asked if he would like tea and biscuits.

   “Make it black tea and butter for the biscuits,” he said. He need not have asked for butter. If there was anything homegrown plentiful on the island, it was homegrown butter. There were enough cows in all directions that everybody on the island could go on an all-butter diet if they wanted to and there still wouldn’t be a shortage. There would still be plenty to export.

   Dalvay By the Sea was a big house and seasonal rooms. Before becoming lodgings, it was only a house. The Gilded Age industrialist Alexander Macdonald, who was an American, built it just before the end of the 19th century on grounds of 120 acres. The lower half of the house and all the fireplaces were island sandstone. Windmills supplied power and water. He kept horses and carriages and a cohort of grooms to look after them. He and his wife entertained all summer when they weren’t riding their horses and at the end of every summer hosted a lavish dance for the locals. They were like patroons from an even earlier  age.

   By 1909 Alexander Macdonald was dying. At the beginning of that fall he stood on Long Pond for the last time staring at his house. He missed it already. He knew his heirs were spendthrifts and nothing good would come of them or his house. He died the next year. After his children squandered the family fortune the house was sold to the man who had been tending it. William Hughes had asked the family what should be done with the 26-room mansion. They said, “You can have it for the back taxes.” He bought it and all the furnishings for less than $500.00. Fifteen years earlier it had cost more than $50,000.00 to build. The furnishings were gotten during family travels to France and England. They were transported to Prince Edward Island by ocean steamer. Nobody knew what it had all cost. William Hughes turned around and sold the house for a handsome profit. The last owner went broke and sold it to the government in 1938, which turned it over to Parks Canada, which under a concession had been operating it for the past fifty years as a summer hotel.

   JT finished his tea and biscuits, saddled back up, and buckled his helmet. Before he got started, he saw two young women on bicycles going his way. They were noodling it. He rode past them giving them a friendly wave. They waved back. He thought they were both good-looking, one more than the other. He had a job, a house, and a bed, but he didn’t have a girlfriend. His job was the problem. The job was a Catch-22. Most of the women he met who liked policemen, he didn’t like them. Most of the women he liked, they didn’t like policemen.

   There wasn’t much other than houses and fields in Grand Tracadie. He rode as far as MacDougalls Cove and turned around. At first, riding back to Brackley, the breeze was at him from the side. Once he got back on the parkway, though, it was in his face. It wasn’t a windstorm, but it wasn’t a gentle breeze, either. He dropped his bike into a lower gear and plodded on. He rode the bike for fun and fitness. The ride back to his pick-up was going to be about fitness.

   He had just passed Cape Stanhope when ahead of him he saw the two young women he had seen earlier on their bicycles. It almost looked like they were riding in place, although he could see they were peddling. He was thirty-some yards behind them when a red motorcycle went past him fast. He had barely heard the motorcycle and was taken aback when it zipped by him. It was going 140 KPH for sure, maybe faster on a road where the speed limit was a third of that. When it passed the women the rider wiggle waggled his motorcycle at them and flashed away. The women were riding on the shoulder. The one closest to the road got shaky and see-sawed, lost control, and fell over. She bounced, her arms outstretched, and bounced again sideways into the sand. The other woman stopped and ran back to the fallen woman.

   If he had been working traffic enforcement in the Mustang Police Interceptor he could have caught the motorcycle, maybe. It had to be a Japanese bike. They made the quietest motorcycles. He hadn’t gotten the plate, but he knew high-tech when he saw it. It looked new and was probably faster than his Ford Mustang Interceptor. He stopped where the fallen woman was rolling over and sitting up. Her hands and forearms were scraped and bleeding. She had broken her fall with them. Both of her knees were scraped and bleeding, one of them worse than the other. He put his hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down when she tried to stand up. “No, don’t do that,” he said. “I’m with the RCMP. Stay where you are.” He turned to the other woman.

   “Don’t let her get up until I come back. It should just be a few minutes.” Some gulls flew up from the beach to see what was happening. They made a choking ha-ha-ha sound. After they saw there was no food to be had, they flew away.

   He rode back across the bridge the way he had come, turned down Wharf Rd., and stopped at the first deep-sea fishing shack at  Covehead Harbour where he saw somebody working. He telephoned for an ambulance and rode back to the two women. They were where he had left them, except a man and woman had stopped to help. Their Ford Taurus was half on the road and half on the shoulder behind the women, its flashers blinking. The man was Barry MacNeil and his wife Gloria.

   “We saw it happen,” Barry said. “That jackass must have the brain of a paper cup. If he had done something like that on the track, there would have been hell to pay, believe you me.”

   An emergency truck from the North Rustico Fire Department arrived and carried the injured woman away. The other woman went with them. Barry put their bicycles in the trunk of his car, securing the trunk with a bungee cord.

   “I got the address where to take the bikes,” he said  “She’s got road rash all over and there’s something wrong with her leg. At least they won’t have to shoot her.”

   JT stopped at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital the next morning. It was almost new, the biggest hospital in the province, having replaced two smaller and older hospitals seven years earlier. He was told the woman had been treated and released.

   “Is she an islander?” he asked.

   The woman at the desk said, “I don’t know, but she lives here in town.”  An islander was anybody who had been born on Prince Edward Island. The designation was closely watched. When a woman who had been brought to the province from elsewhere as a baby died 90 years later her obituary in the newspaper read, “Woman From Away Dies Peacefully in Her Home.”

   Some said you had to be conceived on the island to make the grade. A boy living in Souris was flummoxed when he found out he might not be an islander, even though both his parents were, and he was born on the island. It turned out he was brought into existence on an impulse in a dark corner of the ferry crossing the Northumberland Strait. “He was not conceived on the island so he’s not an islander,” his uncles and aunts said, their noses out of joint. His parents took the matter to his father’s father. 

   “It all depends on whether the ferry was going away or coming back,” the boy’s grandfather said.

   The fallen bicyclist’s name  was Kayleigh Jurgelaitis. JT got her address and went to work. After he was done wasting his time arresting a teenaged dishwasher smoking pot behind an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant, he clocked out at the end of the day, changed his clothes, and went looking for the address. He didn’t have far to go. She lived near Holland College. It was a two-year trade school, home to the Culinary Institute of Canada and the Atlantic Police Academy.

   He recognized the friend when she opened the door and she recognized him. When Kayleigh limped out of a hallway into the living room, she was limping up a storm.

   “How’s the leg?”

   “Better than yesterday, believe it or not. I couldn’t even walk. You’re the cop, right?”

   ”Constable.”

   “Right.”

   “So, what happened to your leg?”

   “They said I have a slight meniscus tear in the knee,” she said, sitting down and elevating her bad leg. “I’m supposed to keep it elevated and put ice on it every couple of hours. They think I should be back on my feet in a week or two.”

   “I’m glad to hear it. So long as I have it on my mind, did either of you get the license plate of that motorcycle?”

   They both said no.

   “Neither did I,” JT said. “He was too far ahead and it happened too fast. We might be able to find him, but probably not, except maybe by accident.”

   “If I never see him again it will be soon enough,” Kayleigh said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him lose his license.”

   “I couldn’t help taking notice of your name,” JT said. “Are you Lithuanian?”

   “Yes and no,” she said. “My mother was Irish, from here, and my father was Lithuanian, from there. I’m half of the one and half of the other. Why do you ask?”

   “Because my name is Justinas Markunas,” he said, explaining he went by JT.

   “I was wondering if I was the only Lithuanian on this island among all the Irish, Scots, and the Acadians,” Kayleigh laughed. “Now I know there are two of us.”

   “Spud Island is immigrants through and through,” JT said. “Everybody here came from somewhere else. I’ve run into a few Jews, some Swedes and Hungarians, not to mention the Mi’kmaqs. There aren’t many of them even though they were here first. I’ve even heard some Asians are thinking of setting up a Buddhist community in Kings County, which will probably make everybody’s heads spin when they do their chanting.”

   Before leaving, pausing at the door, he asked, “Since it seems it’s just the two of us on the island, we should have lunch or dinner sometime and toast our native selves.”

   “I think I might take you up on that,” Kayleigh said. “In the meantime, I’ll keep my eye out for the Tasmanian Devil on two wheels.”

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide”

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Road Map

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By Ed Staskus

   There are more than six thousand kilometers of two-lane roads from one end of Prince Edward Island to the other end. Some of them are some fast roads but most of them are not. Tractors, cows, and dogs slow the going down. About two thousand of the kilometers are unpaved and even slower, especially if it is a motorcycle or a sports car trying to get up to speed. The ruts and chuckholes would make short work of them. All the unpaved roads are red clay dirt. Many of the paved roads are hued red.

   “At one time there was beach sand that was used in concrete,” explained Jamie Reid, the PEI operations manager for USCO Concrete.

   The landscape of Prince Edward Island is layered over sandstone bedrock. The sandstone is leavened with iron oxide, giving the countryside a distinctive red color beneath blue skies overlooking green fields. The natives who lived on the island before European colonization called their world Epekwitk. They thought Glooscap, who was their god, after he finished making the rest of the world, mixed all his colors with a final flourish and made their island.

   Sandstone can be dug up by backhoes and is still sometimes used for local and seasonal roads. Wet weather transforms unpaved byways and tractor paths into what some islanders call baby poop. “When I was a kid most of the roads around here were dirt,” Kelly said. “Sometimes after a bad winter storm you couldn’t go anywhere for a day-or-two.”

     The first roads on Prince Edward Island were built in the late 1760s. At the turn of the 20th century cars were banned on most roads most of the time, especially on market days. It didn’t have anything to do with drunk driving. There was a total ban on alcohol on the island, anyway. A Red Flag law was legislated, ordering there be a man at the front of every car with a red flag, ready to wave it just in case things got out of hand. Twenty years later the law was thrown out , the red flags were put away, and cars went anywhere they wanted so long as there was a throughfare they could handle without breaking an axle.

   Kelly has lived in North Rustico, a small town on a natural harbor on the north-central side of Prince Edward Island on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, most of his life. He owns the Coastline Cottages on Doyle’s Cove on the National Seashore, operates PEI Select Tours, and was a lobster fisherman for many seasons.

   “I didn’t grow up in a fishing family. I grew up on a mixed farm. It wasn’t anything elaborate, basically turnips, which is a rutabaga, and we grew grain, barley, and wheat. My father was the farmer.” Mixed farms are for families who need a farmer three times a day, mainly for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

   Tom and Doris “Dottie” Doyle farmed one hundred acres, although at one time the family had almost four hundred acres. “Most of our land is rented,” Kelly said. “We used to have seven fields on our acres, but now it’s three fields.”

   By the early 1900s Prince Edward Island’s dense forests had been largely cleared and ninety percent of the island’s land was being farmed. There were more than twelve thousand farms, almost all of them between fifty to one hundred acres. The land was sub-divided by dikes, which are walls built of rocks dug up when clearing fields.

   “Those dikes were full of berries,” Kelly said. “Our mom used to send us back in the fields with buckets. We’d come back with them full of wild raspberries and blueberries.” 

   After World War Two technology and tractors led to modernization and bigger farms. One-crop planting became common. By 2006 there were only seventeen hundred working farms on Prince Edward Island and more than half of them were growing potatoes. The island is sometimes called the Million Acre Farm. Other times it’s just called Spud Island.

   “Fields were smaller fifty years ago. Maybe it should have stayed that way. Now they’ve ripped out all the dikes and sprays kill all the wild berries. It’s a shame to see it. My family were boat people from Ireland in 1847,” said Kelly. “It was on his third sailing here that my great-great-grandfather landed and stayed. He did something so that the Queen, or somebody, granted him land, including two shore lots.” 

   By 1850 a quarter of the people on Prince Edward Island were Irish. The last wave of immigrants was from County Monaghan. They usually paid their own way to North America and usually made their own way once on the island, rather than submitting to tenant farming. Most freeholders farmed and controlled livestock. By the mid-1800s the island was already exporting surplus foodstuff all over eastern Canada and to Great Britain. The Doyle’s, however, raised horses and propagated thoroughbreds. The family later took advantage of fashion and bred black silver foxes for their pelts.

   The riddle of breeding foxes on Prince Edward Island was solved in the late 19th century. Twenty years later single pelts sold for as much as $2000.00, at a time when farm laborers made about a dollar a day. In 1913 the provincial government estimated foxes were worth twice as much as “all of the cattle, horses, sheep, swine, and poultry” on the island.

   Whenever fish and crop prices went south, men turned to fox breeding. No one was overly concerned about the stink, the skunk-like smell of the fox farms. The fur bubble burst on the eve of World War Two. “When they went out of style my dad let all his animals out and he became a farmer.” By the early 1950s the fox industry was finished.

   Kelly grew up on the family farm and went to the nearby Stella Maris School, across the street from the Church of Stella Maris. The school was built in 1940 and burned to the ground in 1954. “We stood looking utterly helpless in our misery,” a nun at the nearby Stella Maris Convent wrote in her diary. A year later, a year before Kelly’s birth, the town re-built their school. “It is the most modern fourteen room school in the province,” the Guardian newspaper touted in its feature article at the time.

   “I went grades one through nine. Almost everybody my age quit in grade nine. It was the 60s and 70s. There was no need of education around here. Fathers would tell their kids, you’re not going to do anything in school, get to work in the boat. All of us said we’ve got better things to do and banged out of our classes.” 

   As a young man he wasn’t ready for boat work, or steady work of any kind. He instead roamed around Lower Canada, living in Montreal and sowing a bushel full of wild oats, until returning to North Rustico. He built a cottage on family land on a hillside overlooking Doyle’s Cove, but couldn’t find work.

   High unemployment in Atlantic Canada has been a constant since the 1950s. The eastern provinces are more invested in  seasonal jobs, like agriculture, fishing, and tourism, than Canada’s other regions, leading to seasonal layoffs and involuntary part-time work.

   “Back in the 70s and 80s, she was pretty lean here. There was no money around for years.” 

   In the 1980s the gross domestic product of Prince Edward Island was the lowest in Canada, only 56% of the national average. Next to Newfoundland, the province had the lowest per capita income in the country. There was always the fruit of the sea to fall back on. When Kelly was offered work on a fishing boat putting out of the town harbor, he took it.

   “When I first started fishing everyone had a gasoline engine in an old wooden boat. Everything was done manually, except for hydraulics to haul gear off the bottom. The steering was even done by chains. Then everything went fiberglass, everything went diesel, and everything went hydraulics.” 

   As late as the 1980s fish men went door-to-door, making a living selling cod, until a ban on the taking of ground fish was put in place. Fish stocks had been over-exploited for decades up and down Atlantic Canada. They were severely depleted.

   “When I started fishing, people were baiting hooks and hauling trawls for halibut, haddock, and cod. Then the moratorium came in. All we were allowed was lobster.” 

   Kelly harvested tens of thousands of lobsters for almost three decades. “Lobster traps were invented a while ago and they’re as simple as mousetraps,” he said. Except, unlike mousetraps, lobster traps are remarkably half-baked, even though they almost always get the job done. Invented just more than one hundred years ago, they have changed little in the interim. Even though entrances to the traps are one-way, any lobster that tries to escape can get away, if it has a mind to.

   “My theory is there are two ways lobsters get caught. One way is what I call simple mindedness.” Since lobster brains are less than the size of the tip of a fountain pen, he might be right. “Lobsters won’t usually back out the same way they’ve come in. They crawl up the net, there’s a flap on it, then once they’re in that they can’t go back. The other way they get caught is they just stay too long in the trap eating bait, and when we jerk it out of the water, they get tossed into the back by the sheer momentum of us pulling it up with the hauler.” 

   Since lobsters spend almost all day and night racking their brains about where their next meal is coming from, crawling everywhere on their walking legs to get to it, and finally eating all the crabs, mollusks, fish, and even other lobsters they can get, it lends credence to Kelly’s second theory about overindulging on bait..

   Kelly’s brothers, John, Mike, and Kenny, all fished. “We weren’t farmers, exactly, but we weren’t fishermen, exactly, either, although I think it was naturally in our blood, since every one of us was at ease on the water.”

   John fished for several years before marrying and moving to Ontario to raise a family. Mike Doyle was one of the first satellite television providers on the island. “Mike had rubber boots and oil gear and he went out, too, but then he got into TV’s.”  He later transitioned from catching lobsters to serving them at his Blue Mussel Café, a seafood restaurant at the far end of the harbor. Kenny Doyle spent fifteen years fishing on local boats, and the next ten years fishing commercially with his brother, Kelly. “He’s captained deep-sea fishing boats for tourists out of Rustico for fifteen years, too. Kenny’s an able man behind the wheel.”

   Cathy and Elaine, the Doyle sisters, stayed on dry land. They did so for good reason. In North America fishing boats sink to the bottom of the sea at the rate of one every three days. Unpredictable storms roil the ocean. “You get black and bruised. During those seas, you do everything slower. You have to be a lot more careful with your gear, your traps, and the rope under your feet. You always have to watch your P’s and Q’s.”

   Kelly fished with his partner, Paul Doiron, a man he’s known since they were youngsters, although nine years separates them. “Paul, that’s my buddy, that’s my partner in crime.” Their boat was the Flying Spray, a modern, high-bowed 40-foot fiberglass craft built in nearby Kensington. “Paul’s roundish, built a bit like a buoy. He lives right here in the crick.”

   North Rustico has been known as ‘The Crick’ for many years. “There was a creek that ran right through the village,” said Kelly. “The city folks from Charlottetown either didn’t know what a creek was, or misunderstood what we were saying, and ended up calling it the crick, so we ended up being nicknamed that.”

   There are only three houses on the shore lots on the northwestern side of Doyle’s Cove. One of them is a newer house built by Kenny Doyle, the other is the old Doyle family house, and the house nearest the cove was Andy’s Surfside Inn. Andy Doyle was Kelly’s uncle. “Andy turned 90 a couple of years ago and was still over there.” When he passed away, a cousin took over the house, renovating it.

   Kelly’s all-year cottage, large sliding glass doors fronting red cliffs and the curving shoreline, is on the field side of the Gulf Shore Parkway, the National Park roadway between Cavendish and North Rustico. Since the late-1980s he has one by one built five seasonal cottages adjacent to his, which are the Coastline Cottages, on the crest of the hill overlooking Doyle’s Cove. In the new century he added a kidney-shaped saltwater swimming pool. 

   “People thought, I’m turning it into a tourist trap,” he laughed. “Most of my friends ended up getting married. I ended up having cottages and getting in debt. There was no money around here for years. We’re all making a living now, but there still isn’t any great amount of it.” He owned and operated Amanda’s, a fresh seafood diner, in town across from the market, for many years. It wasn’t in his blood, but it was. 

   During the 1960s his parents had a small restaurant in nearby Cavendish. “It was 7 cents for pop, 30 cents for a hamburger, and 17 cents for fries back then,” he said. “That was the kind of money you made in 1964. There were six kids in our family. Some of those French Acadian families around here had a dozen births. It was no different for anyone.”

   Besides his cottages and fishing for lobster during the months of May and June, like many men and women on Prince Edward Island he has always had other jobs to keep his head above water. He operates PEI Select, a tour guide service catering to Japanese tourists visiting Anne’s Land, the home of “Anne of Green Gables”. The series of books by Lucy Maud Montgomery, about a plucky red-haired girl, are big in Japan. In 2014 a Japanese-language version of the “Anne of Green Gables” musical wrapped up a sold-out nationwide tour by playing in Tokyo.

   In the spring he rents his farmland to neighboring farmers for hay, grain, and soybeans. He doesn’t allow potatoes to be planted on his land. “I let them grow food that uses the least amount of herbicides and pesticides,” he explained.

   Coastline Cottages, the Doyle houses, and the cove are in the National Park, but are not part of the National Park. The park was established in 1937 and encompasses more than five thousand acres of coastal headlands, sand dunes, and beaches. The Doyle’s didn’t sell their land when the park was being created on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. 

   “But they have the patience to wait everybody out,” said Kelly. “That’s the beauty of the National Park. You don’t want to sell right now? That’s fine. Your son will want to sell, and if he doesn’t want to, his son will. If it takes two hundred years, we will get you out of this park.”

   Only change is unchanging, even though when times change it sometimes seems like not much is different. “There’ve been a lot of changes around the island, but it’s nice to go home and say it hasn’t changed much right here. That’s another beauty of the National Park. Since it’s a national park, it stays the same.”

   About 285 million years ago Prince Edward Island was a mountain range. Over time it evolved into a low-lying basin as glaciers advanced and retreated. Most of the ice was gone by 10,000 years ago and the island slowly took shape. Living in a traditional farming and fishing community, looking past the sandstone cliffs of Doyle’s Cove and out over the Atlantic Ocean, from the vantage point of Kelly’s front porch it can seem like little has changed in a long time.

   “Only the rabbits and trees get bigger,” he said.

    Before the Gulf Shore Parkway was rebuilt, featuring a new all-purpose trail as it winds down a long highland past the cove, there was the old Gulf Shore Parkway, and before that there were tracks, and before that there weren’t any roads, at all. 

   “When the road came in sometime in the 1950s it cut our farm in half,” Kelly said. Before it was a road it was a hillside. When it rained in early spring or late fall, and especially when it rained all day, the slope that is now a road turned into a slippery slope of PEI sandstone, red clay goop slippery as an eel. The Doyle’s nevertheless always got to where they had to go. Getting somewhere is staying on your feet, and trimming your sails when you have to. Sometimes any road, or even no road at all, will get you where you want to go.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide” 

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

Fish Tank Blues

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By Ed Staskus

   It wasn’t breaking news that Prince Edward Island was an island. It was old news that it had not always been one. It was news that didn’t matter to some who lived on the island, however. They weren’t overly concerned about the past. They were concerned about right now. They cared about heating oil being delivered on time and what time the school bus was coming. They cared about the flu that stopped them dead in their tracks. They cared about how they were going to put food on the table. They knew for sure that nothing from the prehistoric past had anything to do with it. 

   What the land and the sea were all about wasn’t news to the lobsters who lived offshore. They had been around much longer than the fishermen, farmers, and townsfolk who plied their trades in the Maritimes. The crustaceans had seen it all, although they hadn’t seen amnesic shellfish poisoning before. The new toxin was killing Canadians who ate shellfish that year. No lobster ever went to any of their funerals. “That’s a dose of your own medicine,” Louie the Large said, chuckling to himself that the toxin wasn’t bothering his kith and kin.

   Lobsters didn’t have a trade or much else to do, other than eat anything and everything they could all day and night. Everything was grist for their mill. They hated crabs and crabs hated them and it was the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s whenever the shellfish ran into each other. The lobsters were bigger, badder, and more determined than the crabs. Three of their five pairs of legs were outfitted with claws. They usually carried the day. Might makes right was their rule of thumb.

   The number one rock ‘n’ rollers among the island’s lobsters were the B-52’s. They were the house band in their part of the world. Every lobster knew the lyrics to their “Rock Lobster” song. The band had released it ten years earlier and when they did it shot up the shellfish charts, even though every single crab in the Gulf of St. Lawrence scorned it as the devil’s music.

   “We were at the beach, everybody had matching towels, somebody went under a dock, and there they saw a rock, it wasn’t a rock, it was a rock lobster!” 

   Whenever any crab heard the song, it spit sideways and cursed. They were happy to see the island’s fishing boats go after their country cousins every spring. They showed up at the island’s harbors for the blessing of the fleet on Setting Day and shouted “Godspeed!” when the boats broke the waves. There was no love lost between crabs and lobsters. “We don’t need no skunks at our lawn party,” crabs far and wide said.

   Even though lobsters could be as bad as a Hells Angel waking up on the wrong side of the bed, all they really wanted to do was eat and have fun. They were always on the move, moving in parties of twenty, fifty and even a hundred, looking for a party. They ate non-stop so as to have plenty of get up and go at whatever good time they found.

   “Havin’ fun, bakin’ potatoes,” they sang. Prince Edward Island was known as Spud Island. It was no small potatoes when it came to the tuber. It was the smallest province but the top potato producing province in the country. Everybody’s favorite way to eat lobster was boiled in the same pot with fresh corn and new potatoes.

   “Boys in bikinis, girls on surfboards, everybody’s rockin’, everybody’s fruggin’.”

   The blue and brown backed crustaceans couldn’t move fast enough to frug, but it didn’t matter. They got into the spirit of the song. They lived in harmony among themselves ten months out of the year, except when one of them happened to eat another one of them. The other two months of the year all bets were off. That’s when the island’s lobster boats went after them. That’s when the angels sang and it was every man for himself. They didn’t like it, but they had to take their lumps like everybody else.

   There were about 1200 boats on the island sailing out of 45 harbors. More than three dozen boats came out of the North Rustico harbor. Every one of the boats was out to get lobsters. Once they got them their fate was sealed. Every lobster knew it in its bones, even though all they had was an exoskeleton. Their inner selves had no bones. They were going to be boiled alive and there was nothing they could do about it.

   Traps have escape vents to let shorts leave while still on the bottom. The under-sized lobsters who overstayed their welcome were thrown back into the ocean. Egg-bearing females were also thrown back. The female carried her eggs inside of her for about a year and then for about another year attached to the swimmerets under her tail. When the eggs hatch, the larvae float near the surface for a month. The few that survive eventually sink to the bottom and develop as full-fledged and grown-up. For every 50,000 eggs spawned two lobsters survive. The rest of them feed the fish.

   Some diners sporting bibs argue that lobsters don’t have a brain and so they don’t feel pain. They have probably never seen tails shuddering like palm fronds in a hurricane when the shellfish get thrown into a pot of boiling water. They aren’t twitching to the beat of the B-52’s. Their brains might not amount to much, but they have a nervous system. They react to pain like everybody else. The hormone they release when hurt is the same one that human beings release when hurt. 

   “How about coming down here with the rest of us,” they wanted to scream from the boiling pot mosh pit. They would have screamed if they could. As it was, all they could do was click and clack.

   The Prince Edward Island fisheries considered lobster to be their crown jewel. It was a gourmet known for its juicy meat. But that was like getting the Medal of Honor when you weren’t around anymore. Who needs to bask in that kind of glory? The only consolation lobsters had was that the island’s fishermen took care to manage their resource. They didn’t pull up over many of them in their traps. They kept the surrounding waters clean as could be so there would be plenty of them year after year.

   It was small consolation though. It only meant fishermen were in it for the long haul and weren’t going to change their minds about snatching them up anytime soon. The only consolation a lobster ever got was when somebody reached for it and the lobster was able to get the outstretched hand in its crusher claw.

   “We were at a party, his earlobe fell in the deep, someone reached in and grabbed it, it was a rock lobster!”

   When that happened, there was no quarter given. The lobster was going to sell its life dear. The human hand was going to pay dearly for sticking its nose where it didn’t belong. The nose should have stayed where it was before it ever came to the island. Why didn’t they stay in the Old World? What lobsters didn’t know was that fishermen came from the same place they did. Way back when they had come from way down in the ocean. But they weren’t ever going back. The sooner lobsters got that through their thick heads the better.

   “Lots of bubble, lots of trouble, rock lobster.”

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide”

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Rat in the Hat

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By Ed Staskus

   Aksel was a Norwegian rat, although there would have been warm words if anybody had tried to tell him that. He believed he was a Norman rat since his forebears had come to the New World aboard a French ship that sailed from Normandy long ago. Norwegians sat around their fjords fishing in the moonlight. He came from a land of fighting men. It had been more than a hundred generations since his ancestors landed on Prince Edward Island. He had never met a Norwegian. He didn’t even know where Norway was.

   He didn’t know what day, week, or month it was, either. He didn’t know what century or millennium it was. He  didn’t know anything about art, culture, religion, politics, money, calendars, or legal codes. He lived in a biological reality, not a constructed reality. He believed in warm fleece, not whole cloth. He didn’t know he was living in North Rustico on the Atlantic Canada coastline. He had no clue about the North American continent, or any other continent, for that matter, although if he had known it wouldn’t have mattered. He knew where Stella Maris and Rollings Pond were. 

   The pond was where he spent most of his evenings and nights. He slept in the basement of the Stella Maris Catholic Church during the day. He never went to mass or confession, though. It wasn’t that he was an atheist, not exactly. He simply couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of a Supreme Being who played rattle and snap with fate. He was unable to understand why the all-mighty created sinners and as soon as they sinned condemned them to Hell

   When it came to fate something was always out to get him. Human beings called it neophobia. He called hiding in dark places and moving along walls common sense. He lived and died by his survival mechanisms. He always had to do everything for himself. He didn’t own anything, not even a fork or plate, but his bedroom in the church was cozy. He stored some dried food there and had a bed of straw and a small pillow. He kept a handful of loose change he had found in the parking lot at Cape Turner under his pillow for a rainy day.

   Aksel was known by the nickname of Left Hand. How he came to be called Aksel the Left Hand was beyond him, since he was right handed. In the event, he didn’t gripe about it. It was better than some of the other rat nicknames he had heard in his neck of the woods, like Soggy Thighs and Foul Fart. He liked to think of himself as a man about town, except he didn’t have a gent’s low crown top hat to wear when stepping out.

   He wasn’t a farmer, even though he lived on the Million Acre Farm, which was one of Prince Edward Island’s nicknames. He foraged for food instead of sowing seeds. He ate anything and everything. He had eaten countless kinds of food in his lifetime. Some people said he was a glutton. He didn’t disagree with them. He preyed on chicks, lizards, and other rodents. He ate any discarded morsels he came across as well as all crops from all fields. He ate all the time, snacking on whatever came his way. He caught fish on Fridays, just in case there was a God.

   Before the Europeans came there had been Mi’kmaq, but so few it hardly mattered. When Europeans arrived they reproduced like nobody’s business. There were swarms of them in no time. Rats had been around for five million years. Human beings went back only about three hundred thousand years. As soon as they planted their crops the battle was on. They called rat infestations plagues. Aksel was insulted but what could he do? When the French were in charge, whenever rats showed up for dinner they called it an “excessive misery.” Since ‘The Year of the Rodent’ in 1815, when rats and mice ate almost all the crops island-wide, it had gotten tough and tougher. it went from farm cats to mechanical traps to arsenic to warfarin. Killing him and his kind became Integrated Pest Management. What they didn’t know was there were more of them now than ever. They were moving into urban areas with plenty of shelter and plenty of year-round food. It was better than the countryside. He had seen in a scrap of a newspaper that Summerside and Charlottetown had become the rattiest cities in Atlantic Canada. The news made him tingle with gladness.

   His mother one day let slip that their kind only lived two or three years. He was aghast. There was no time to waste. He looked around. His eyesight had always been bad. He needed glasses. He was colorblind, too. His other senses, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, were outstanding. He wasn’t Olympic Games agile, but he could run, jump, climb, and swim better than most, enough to keep danger at bay. He used his face whiskers to feel the world around him. He could wiggle each one of them individually, unlike cats like Spike, who was from Doyle’s Cove and was always messing with him. He and Spike were going to have it out one day. The cat was always lying in wait for him. He had to find a way to cancel out the mouser’s claws, which were razor sharp and deadly. He had the scars to prove it. 

   Except for Spike, cats rarely bothered Aksel. He was too big for most of them, feral or otherwise. Spike was a different order of things. He was as big as cats come. The beast was dangerous. The cat and the rat were a stop-and-go dance in the dark. When Aksel stopped, Spike stopped. When he started up again, the cat was on his heels again, low-down and deadly quiet. There would be blood one day.

   Islanders didn’t always give Aksel his due. Some called him a street rat, even though he was a field rat. Others with college educations called him a Hanover rat. He tried to explain he was a Norman rat, but couldn’t speak the language of the learned. He didn’t like it whenever he was called a dirty rat. He was fastidiously clean. He washed and groomed himself ten times a day. He was a brown rat with a white underside. He was a big boy end to end, his body length almost a foot tip to tip, with a tail slightly shorter than a foot. All he had to do was flash his teeth and wiggle his tail at passersby to make them jump and lose their sandwiches.

   One night he met one of his own kind in the dumpster behind the North Rustico Food Market. After giving each other the secret handshake, after which both rats were sure the other one was legit, they chewed the fat and gossiped about local doings. His new-found friend, it turned out, had come off a cruise ship in Charlottetown three weeks ago, gone on a self-guided tour, been late getting back, and was now stranded until another ship rolled in. He had wandered up to the north coast and was thinking of staying.

   “I’m a free agent,” he said. “I can hijack myself onto any boat anytime I want to. You know those round things they attach to mooring lines, what they call rat guards, and how they coat them with grease? They ain’t no hedge, no sir. First, I puff up my cheeks. Second, I suck up the grease. Third, I spit it out over my shoulder as I go over the rat guard.”

   Cruise ships had been docking in Charlottetown since just after the turn of the 20th century, pulling into port to hearty welcomes. They let loose hundreds and sometimes thousands of tourists all at once to stretch their legs, eat, drink, see the sights, and buy ‘Anne of Green Gables’ dolls. They filled up the eateries on Water St. and Victoria Row. When they did the rats showed up for the leftovers.

   It was after midnight when Aksel and Yeoman Purser, which was what his  friend called himself, went their separate ways. “I know I’m just a mug, but I have got to say this seaside place you got up here is something else, just beautiful, and everywhere you look there is food.” The hometown boy twitched a whisker in agreement.

   He had a love hate relationship with the human race. On the one hand, he preferred living near them since they were a rat’s number one food outlet. On the other hand, they were always trying to kill him. They checked his droppings unceasingly and tracked him by them. They were always putting out traps and bait stations. Whenever they found his nest they gassed it. He had gotten to be as cautious as an accountant. He knew full well what glue boards and snap traps were about. It didn’t matter if they were baited with his favorite fish and cereals. He snorted when they were baited with cheese. The curdled stuff gave him gas.

   “My mama didn’t raise no fool,” he told himself, clicking his teeth and eye-boggling the sky, giving all the snares a wide berth.

   He knew there were many animal and plant species threatened with extinction, many of them within decades. He didn’t want to become one of them. The Sixth Mass Extinction was going on, propelled by human activity. Almost a quarter million species had disappeared in the past five hundred years. Agriculture got started ten thousand years ago and since then had taken over a third of the earth’s land mass. Habitat destruction went on and on. Climate change wasn’t helping. The squeeze was on.

   Aksel was more nocturnal than not. He slept during the day. One morning, dreaming of his favorite food, which was Cheerios, he was woken up by an RCMP police car, an ambulance, and a fire truck racing up Church Hill Rd. They descended on Doyle’s Cove. He had just rolled over in his straw bed and thought he would roll right back, but he was curious. He coughed and cleared his throat, blinking. He popped up out of bed. He made his way past Rollings Pond, up the rise, and to the top of a field from where he could see what was happening.

   When he looked down on Doyle’s Cove he could see a knot of men with shovels digging something out from where a wall of red sandstone had collapsed. Cliff failure happened all the time, intense storms and rising sea levels undercutting the rock formations. There was less and less sea ice, too, which protected the shore during winter. He saw an arm being pulled from the rubble. He guessed the rest of the body was down there somewhere. It looked like they were trying to dig it up, although why was beyond him. Whoever was down there wasn’t going to be coming back to life. He knew the would-be rescuers weren’t going to eat the remains, so what was the point? 

   Aksel lost interest in the digging. There wasn’t going to be a free meal in it for him anytime soon unless somebody dropped some crumbs from their lunch tote. That was something else that puzzled him about human beings. They seemed to never want to pick up food they had dropped, especially the women. In his world no rat did that. They ate everything, no matter what it was, no matter how small it was, and no matter where it was.

   He ran across the open ground behind him. He could run faster than any man alive. He could run six times his body length in a single second, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. When he got to the tree line he slowed down and caught his breath. He was out of sight and safe as he ever was going to be in the Jack Pines. When he got to Church Hill Rd. he looked both ways before crossing to the Stella Maris Catholic Church. There was no sense in being run over on his own doorstep by a bucket of bolts driving past the roof over his head.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide”

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

Nowhere to Hide

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By Ed Staskus

   JT Markunas was assigned to the Queens County RCMP detachment.  He routinely patrolled the north coast of Prince Edward Island. He didn’t mind pulling duty in a police pursuit vehicle. He didn’t mind the car he had drawn today, either. He could have done without the blue velour interior but he liked everything else about it. It was plenty fast enough. It was a Ford Mustang Police Interceptor.

   He had rented a two-bedroom farmhouse in Milton. It was small but the appliances had been updated and it sported a new roof. He planted a root garden. His parents were pleased when they saw the photograph of beets, turnips, and carrots that he mailed them. JT was from Sudbury, Ontario and Prince Edward Island was his second assignment since joining the force. His first tour of duty had been at Fort Resolution in the Northwest Territories. He missed his hometown but didn’t miss Fort Resolution.

   When he was growing up, the Canadian Pacific hauled ore on tracks behind the family house on Stanley St. in Sudbury. When he was a boy, astronauts from the United States trained for their moon landings in the hinterland, where the landscape resembled the moon. After he grew up, he trained for the RCMP at a boot camp in Regina. He was surprised to see women at the camp, the first ones ever allowed on the force. They kissed the Bible and signed their names, like all the recruits, and wore the traditional red serge when on parade, although they wore skirts and high heels and carried a hand clutch, too. 

   He was sitting in his Police Interceptor under a sky that had opened up that morning. Even though Ford had built more than 10,000 of them since 1982, the RCMP had only gotten 32 of the cars. He had one of the two on the island. The car’s motto was “This Ford chases Porsches for a living.” There were lights on the roof, front grille, and rear parcel shelf. He was in Cavendish, on the other side of Rainbow Valley. He was watching for speeders, of whom he hadn’t seen any that morning. He was thinking of stopping somebody for whatever reason, if only to justify the pursuit car. He was also thinking more seriously about having a second cup of coffee, but was waiting until he started yawning. He thought it was going to happen soon. When it did, he would 10-99 the radio room and take a break from doing nothing.

   Cavendish was Anne’s Land. It was where Lucy Maud Montgomery’s book “Anne of Green Gables” was set. He had never read the book, but doubted it had much to do with what he could see in all directions, although the amusement park across the street was named after her book “Rainbow Valley.” It featured waterslides, swan boats, a sea monster, monorail, roller coasters, animatronics, castles and suspension bridges, and a flying saucer gift shop. The paratrooper ride might have been everyone’s favorite, at least if they were children who didn’t know what fear meant.

   Earl Davison, the man behind Rainbow Valley, had been looking for a roller coaster when he found the paratrooper ride. He was in Pennsylvania searching for a bargain at a park that had gone bust. Their coaster seemed to fit the bill at first sight. “It’s a terrific ride, but you’ll need to have a good maintenance team to keep ’er running,” the Pennsylvania man said with unexpected candor.

   When Earl hemmed and hawed, the man suggested his paratrooper ride instead. “It’s the best piece of equipment I have. I will sell you that for $25,000 and we’ll load it for you.” By the end of the next day Earl had written a check and the ride was ready to go for the long drive back to Prince Edward Island. He flipped a coin about it fitting on the ferry. The coin came up heads.

   Earl dreamed up Rainbow Valley in the 1960s, buying and clearing an abandoned apple orchard and filling in a swamp, turning it into a pond. “We borrowed $7,500.00,” he said. “It seemed like an awful lot of money at the time.” When they opened in 1969 admission was 50 cents. Children under five got in free. Ten years later, he bought his partners out and expanded the park. Most of the attractions were designed and fabricated by him and his crew.

   “We add something new every year,” Earl said. “That’s a rule.” The other rule was launching smiles on the faces of children. “Some of the memories you hear twenty years later are from people whose parents aren’t with them anymore. But they remember their visits to Rainbow Valley and that lasts a lifetime.”

   When his two-way radio came to life, instructing him to go to Foyle’s Cove to check on the report of a suspicious death, JT hesitated, thinking he should get a coffee first, but quickly decided against it. Suspicious deaths were far and few between in the province. Homicides happened on Prince Edward Island once in a blue moon. If it was a homicide, it might be his only chance to work on one. When he drove off it was fast with flashing lights but no siren. He reported that the address was less than ten minutes away. 

   Conor Foyle saw the Police Interceptor pull off the road onto the shoulder and tramped down the slope to it. Some people called the RCMP the Scarlet Guardians. Conor called them gavvers. JT put his cap on and joining Conor walked up to where Bernie Doiron was waiting beside the tractor. When he saw the arm handcuffed to the briefcase, he told Conor and Bernie to not touch anything and walked back to his pursuit car. He wasn’t sure what code to call in, so he requested an ambulance and asked for the commander on duty. He described what he had seen and was told to sit tight.

   “Yes sir,” he said.

   It wouldn’t be long before an ambulance and more cars showed up. They couldn’t miss his Mustang, but he turned the lights on top of it back on just in case and backtracked to the tractor.

   “Who found this?” he asked, pointing at the arm. 

   “I did,” Bernie said

   “Is it the same as you found it?” JT asked. “Did you move or disturb anything?”

   “No, we left it alone,” Bernie said. 

   “And you are?” JT asked Conor.

   “I’m across the street in the green house,” Conor said. “These are my fields. Bernie was plowing. He came down and got me when he found this. A fox has been at the arm.”

   “I see that,” JT said, even though he didn’t know what had happened to the arm. He rarely jumped to conclusions. The arm was flayed and gruesome, whatever had happened. He wasn’t repulsed by it. He was patient and objective. The quality that made him a good policeman was that he was patient. He waited alongside Conor and Bernie for backup resources to show up. None of the three men said much of anything..

   JT looked at the ground around him. It was ready for the growing season. There was no growing season where he grew up. Farming had been blighted by smelting. His father had worked the nickel mines in Sudbury his whole working life, never missing a day. He had been an explosives man and made it through his last year, last week, and last day unscathed. He had always known there was no one to tap him on the shoulder if he ever made a mistake.

   His mother raised four children. She dealt with powder burns every day. The family was among the few post-war Lithuanians still left in Sudbury. The rest of them had worked like dogs, scrimping and saving, leaving for greener pastures the first chance they got. His parents put their scrimping and saving into a house on the shore of Lake Ramsey and stayed to see Sudbury transition from open pit roasting to ways and means less ruinous to the land they lived on.

   An ambulance from a funeral home in Kensington was the first to arrive, followed within minutes by two more RCMP cars. A rescue truck from the North Rustico Fire Department rolled to a stop, but there wasn’t anything for the volunteer firemen to do. They thought about helping direct traffic, but there was hardly any traffic to speak of. The summer season was still at least a month away. They waited, suspecting they were going to be the ones asked to unearth the remains. They brought shovels up from their truck and leaned on them.

   A doctor showed up, as well, and bided his time, waiting for a commissioned officer to arrive. When he did there were two of them, one an inspector and the other one a superintendent. They talked to JT briefly and then to the fire department. The firemen measured out a ten-foot by ten-foot square with the arm in the center, pounded stakes into the ground, demarcated the space with police tape, and slowly began to dig, opening a pit. They had not gotten far when the arm fell over. It had been chopped off above the elbow. One of the firemen carried the arm and the briefcase to a gray tarp and covered them with a sheet of thick translucent plastic.

   “Has anybody got a dog?” the inspector asked.

   Many of the firemen farmed one way or another. Most of them had dogs. One of them who lived less than two miles away on Route 6 had a Bassett Hound. When he came back with the dog, he led him to the pit. The hound sniffed around the perimeter and then jumped into it, digging with his short legs, barking and looking up at his master. The fireman clapped his hands and the dog jumped out of the pit.

   “There’s something more there,” he said. “Probably the rest of him.”

   They started digging again slowly and steadily. When they found the rest of him twenty minutes later and three feet under, he was a woman. She was wearing acid wash jeans and an oversized tangerine sweatshirt. She was covered in dirt and blood. One of her shoes was missing. What they could see of her face had been ruined by burrowing insects and worms. She was decomposing inside her rotting clothes. The doctor stepped up to the edge of the pit with the two men who had come in the ambulance. “Be careful, she’s going to want to fall apart as soon as you start shifting her weight,” he said. 

   The two men were joined by two of the firemen. When all four were astride the dead woman they carefully moved her into a mortuary bag, zipped it up, and using the handles on the bag lifted it up to two constables and two more of the firemen. They carried the bag slowly down the hill, the dog following them, placing it on a gurney and inside the ambulance.

   The two constables went back up the hill to join the rest of the men, who were getting ready to sift through the pit looking for evidence. They would scour the ground in all directions, to the tree line and the road. JT had gotten his Minolta out of the trunk and took photographs before and during the excavation. When he was done, he joined the others. They spread out and with heads bowed started looking for anything and everything.

   The ambulance was ready to go when Conor came down to the shoulder of the road. He stopped beside it and tapped on the driver’s side window. When the driver rolled it down, Conor pointed up the slope.

   “Don’t forget the arm,” he said.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide”

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

Queen and Country

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By Ed Staskus

   Kieran Foyle was a black-haired man who knew how to get things done. He was Black Irish. He was a careful man, too. He only took chances when there was a good chance of making good. It was why Prince Albert sent him to the Canadian outlands on the clipper ship “Antelope of Boston’” to deliver vengeance on the man who had tried to kill his wife. It didn’t matter that it was an American ship. It didn’t matter that he was an Irishman sent to kill an Englishman. When it came to killing each other the Irish and English were good at it.

   “Either bring the evil-minded rogue back to be hung or, better yet, put him in the ground where you find him and spare us the trouble,” Queen Victoria’s consort said. He had had enough of assassination attempts. There had been one too many. He loved his wife and wanted her to die in bed.

   The Irishman nearly lost his chance when he stepped out of the long boat landing him on the north coast of Prince Edward Island too soon for comfort and almost drowned. The water was deeper near the shore of the cove than he  knew. He sank to the bottom not knowing how to swim and only made it to land on the back of one of the sailors who knew how to dog paddle.

   The man he was after was Thomas Spate, a disgruntled veteran of the Crimean War. He had known how to kill Russians. When he was awarded the Crimea Medal, he threw it in his rucksack and forgot about it. When he was one of the first soldiers to receive the Victoria Cross for bravery at the Battle of Balaclava, he thought about throwing it in his rucksack, too, but didn’t. Instead, he wore it every day pinned to his coat over his heart. He kept it cleaner than anything else he possessed.

   During the war Queen Victoria knitted woolens for the troops and inspected military hospitals, wearing a custom-made red army jacket. When the war ended, she hosted several victory balls in her new ballroom. Tom Spate watched from the outside, driving himself crazy. He was alone and down on his luck. He blamed everybody except himself for the bad things happening to him. He walked incessantly, from one end of London to the other. He goose-stepped up and down Hyde Park. Small groups gathered to watch the performance. The queen saw him often enough to become familiar with him, although she never approached him.

   It was on one of his walks around London he spied Queen Victoria and Prince Albert outside Cambridge House. As their carriage left, it came to a stop outside the gate. Tom Spate had taken to carrying two flintlock coat pocket pistols. They were always loaded. He walked up to the carriage and pulled them out. He didn’t ask himself what he was doing. He straightened one arm and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. It was a dud. He brought the other pistol to bear and pulled the trigger. It misfired. He had just enough time to jump at Queen Victoria and strike her on the head with the butt of one of his guns before Prince Albert grabbed him, shoving him off the carriage. Men on the walk swarmed the would-be assassin and beat him.

   Queen Victoria stood up in her carriage and proclaimed in a firm voice, “I am not hurt,” even though she was gushing blood from a gash on her forehead. The blood was crimson on her yellow crocheted shawl. Prince Albert staunched the bleeding with his handkerchief.

   Tom Spate was arrested, jailed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to transportation and twenty years of hard labor in the penal colony on Tasmania. There was no appeal. There was no changing anybody’s mind. By most calculations he got what he deserved. Prince Albert’s calculations were more severe. “I would have had the rascal drawn and quartered,” he said.

   When Tom Spate escaped his jailers and disappeared, Prince Albert summoned Kieran Foyle, a mercenary adventurer who it was said always got his man. It took almost a year, but in the spring of 1859 he was making his way soaking wet up the hill from the cove to the village of North Rustico. He knew where Tom Spate was and knew he could take his time about the matter. He needed to get out of his clothes. He needed a hot cider and dinner. He needed a good night’s sleep in a feather bed on dry land that didn’t heave-ho all night long. He found the only boarding house in North Rustico and took a room.

   Kieran Foyle’s chuff was living on the far side of the Stanley River, nine miles northwest up the coast. The Irishman had grown up calling miles chains. His man was 720 chains away. It would take him about three hours to walk there on the coastal footpath. He had no intention of taking anybody back to England. The voyage itself took a month. “Jesus and Mary chain,” he grumbled. He had every intention of collecting his reward.

   Tom Spate lived in a rough-and-ready hut he had thrown together, living in it with his new wife and new baby. He had no land to farm and no craft to make his way. He made his way by operating a ferry service from one side of the Stanley River to the other. In the winter he closed it down when the water froze and everybody walked across. In January the ice got thick enough so that horses and wagons could cross. 

   He bought ice skates, carved sticks with a curve at the bottom by hand, and made rough and ready pucks. His wife rented them to youngsters who had eggs, salt cod, and potatoes to trade for playing shinny on the ice. It was a game of fast skating and trying to hit the puck between two sticks of wood marking the goal.

   Most of North Rustico was Acadian. They were Catholic like Kieran Foyle. St. Augustine’s had been built in nearby South Rustico twenty years earlier. It boasted an 80-foot-high tower. A man could see everything from the top of it. The harbor at North Rustico was filled with boats and the fishing was good. There were cattle and horses grazing and fields of turnip and cabbage. Piles of mud dotted the fronts of fields. On his way to send Tom Spate to his maker, stopping to rest, he asked a passing man what the piles of mud were about.

   “It is mussel mud,” the man, a farmer, said. “The land needs lime to breathe new life into it. We use the mud from bays and riverbeds. It is beneficial, filled with oyster shells.”

   “Do you dig it up?” Kieran asked. He didn’t ask why they called it mussel mud instead of oyster mud.

   “We go out in canoes at high tide and dam up a small space so we can dig it from the bottom. When we are full, we go back and unload it at low tide.”

   “It sounds like a great deal of work.”

   “It is, but without the mud we would starve on the farms, both man and beast. I couldn’t keep one horse but for it. Your cow needs at least a ton of hay to survive the winter. We have been doubling our harvests with the mud. We will have even more of it soon.”

   “How’s that?” 

   “We have got a man engineering a mechanical digger to harvest the mud in the winter through holes in the ice and carry it across the island by sleigh. There’s talk that we will be able to increase our crops of hay five and ten times. And then there’s the ice besides. We cover it in sawdust and put it into an icehouse so that we can preserve foods that go bad in the summer’s heat.”

   Kieran Foyle parted with the farmer, shaking his hand. He liked what he heard about mussel mud. It was a sunny day and the uplands looked fine to him. When he got to the Stanley River, he rang a bell hanging from a post. Tom Spate’s face appeared at a window on the other side. He waved and the next minute was guiding his flatboat across the water, using a rope anchored to oak trees. He pushed with a pole along the riverbed. Kieran paid him his two pennies and put his back to a pillar as Tom Spate pushed off.

   Near the middle of the river the Irishman felt for the sidearm in his pocket. He was carrying a new Beaumont-Adams percussion revolver. The cylinder held five rounds, although he knew he wasn’t going to miss his man with his first shot. He intended to be standing face to face with him when he dispatched the villain. He walked up to Tom Spate.

   “Thomas Spate, I have a message for you from your queen,” he said.

   Tom Spate’s face went white as a ghost when the barrel of the gun pressed into his chest, pressing against the Victoria Cross he was wearing.

   “For God’s sake, I have a wife and child.”

   “For crown and country,” Kieran Foyle said and pulled the trigger. The bullet rocketed out of the barrel slamming into and driving the Victoria Cross into Tom Spate’s heart, putting an end to the one-time war hero’s life.

   Kieran stood over him and decided in an instant that he was going to stay on Prince Edward Island. There was nothing in Ireland or the rest of the United Kingdom for him other than more killing and waiting for the day he would be the one killed. He had neither wife nor family. He would find a woman here, he thought. He would have sons by the colleen. He would raise horses fed with abundant hay grown in the goodness of mussel mud. He didn’t love his fellow man, but he loved horses.

   He bent a knee and using both hands pried open the hole in Tom Spate’s chest. He stuck his fingers into the man, feeling for the bullet and the medal. He couldn’t find the bullet at first but found the Victoria Cross easily enough. He yanked the medal out. It had been cast from the cascabels of two cannons captured from the Russians at the siege of Sevastopol. He probed for the bullet until he found it. He washed the blood on his hands off in the water. He pushed the body off the ferry with his boot. It bobbed in the river and slowly floated out to the ocean on the ebb tide.

   He walked back to North Rustico the way he had come. In his room he packaged the bullet, the medal, and a letter in an envelope. The letter didn’t have a word in it about what he had done, only asking for land on the shoreline where he had landed and the right to name the cove “Foyle’s Cove.”

   He posted the letter in Charlottetown, paying an extra penny to make it a “Registered Letter.” It would sail on the Gazette to Liverpool the next week. He hoped to have a reply by the fall. In the meantime, he would start building a house on the west side of the cove. The land might already be owned by somebody, not that it mattered. It was nearly all forest. Whoever the landlord was, there was no tenant. When and if the landlord showed up from England, the Irishman was sure he could set him straight.

   He sat in his room and fired up his Meerschaum pipe. When he was young and poor, he smoked spone, which was coltsfoot mixed with wild rose petals. Now he carried good tobacco in his purse. The smoke curled up from the Irish clay. He had found a kitten on the ferry and brought it back with him from the the Stanley River. The kitten watched the smoke, jabbing at it with its paws.

   “All the old haunts and the dear friends, all the things I used to do, the hopes and dreams of boyhood days, they all pass me in review.” It was a song they still sang in military barracks. He had been dragooned into the army while still a boy after being plied with drink by a sergeant in a pub. He took the “Queen’s Shilling” and there was no going back, especially after he deserted and went to work for himself, plying a new trade. 

   The window of his room faced west. The setting sun slanted in, the orange glow warming his face. When he was done with his pipe he would go downstairs for haddock, potatoes, and beer. He would bring some bits of fish and milk back for the kitten. Until then, he would sit where he was, smoking and letting his plans slowly unwind themselves from the back of his mind.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide”

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

The End of the Marco Polo

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By Ed Staskus

   Kieran Foyle, Jr. was 21 years old the day the Marco Polo was run aground by its captain at Cavendish. She was a three-deck three-mast clipper ship built at Marsh Creek in Saint John, New Brunswick 32 years earlier. During its construction the frame got loose in a storm and was blown all over the shipyard. The skeleton had to be reassembled. After the shipbuilding was done the launch didn’t go well. The ship grazed the bank of the creek while sliding down the slipway, got stuck in a mudflat, and went over on her side. A week later a high tide lifted her up, but she got stuck in the mud again. Two weeks later she finally floated free and was fitted with rigging.

   The ship carried emigrant men and women from England to Australia for many years. She set the world’s record for the fastest voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne, doing it in 76 days. More than fifty children died of measles on her maiden voyage and were buried at sea. Coming back, she carried a king’s ransom in gold dust and a 340-ounce gold nugget. The nugget was a gift to Queen Victoria from the colonial government, although she wasn’t able to pull rank and keep it under her mattress. Gliding into its home port, the ship unfurled a banner claiming it was the “Fastest Ship in the World.” Cannons boomed black powder discharges on her arrival.

   The gold dust and the big nugget were delivered to London by a fast coach guarded by a company of the King’s Men. There wasn’t going to be any Great Coach Robbery. They unloaded it at the Bank of England. One man after another carried the loot inside and stashed it in the vault. When they were done they locked it up tight and posted a sign saying, “Keep Out.”

   During the many gold rushes Down Under the ship carried boatloads of standing room only men to Australia. Nobody died of measles, although some of them died of moonshine. Fire is the test of gold. Many of the men died of typhus, what they called ship fever, burning up in their hammocks in the South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Tasman Sea. Many of the original settlers laying claim to aboriginal land, the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent with the least fertile soil anywhere, got there on the Marco Polo. 

   When she was retired from the passenger trade, she was refitted for the coal, timber, and bat shit trade. It was rough going. The hull was rotting and wasting away. Chains were wrapped around it and drawn tight trying to keep it together. A windmill-driven pump was installed to send leaks back where they were coming from.

   It was a late July morning, clear and sunny after the storm that had driven the ship to Cavendish. Kieran Jr. was in the dunes watching the crew wade ashore. They had been on the way from Montreal to England loaded with pine planks when they got caught in a gale. They plowed ahead but started to take on water. Two days later wind and waves were still pummeling them and they were still taking on water. The ship was flooding and the hands couldn’t plug the leaks fast enough. The windmill fell over and the pumps gave a last gasp. Captain P. A. Bull decided to save the crew and cargo. He put the clipper into full sail and wheeled it straight at Cavendish’s sandy beaches.

   The closer they got the better their chances looked until, three hundred feet from shore, he ordered the rigging cut. The masts groaned ,wanting to snap, and the bottom of the ship scraped the bottom. Everybody stayed where they were, staying awake all night, until dawn when the storm finally wore itself out and they rowed ashore. 

      Lucy Maud Montgomery was a pale 8-year-old girl, her long crimson hair in braids with choppy bangs, when she and everybody else in Cavendish watched the crew abandon the ship. She wore a white flower hairpiece on one side of her head and took notes on scraps of paper. Nine years later her short story “The Wreck of the Marco Polo” was published. 

   She wrote, “The crew, consisting of 25 men, found boarding places among the settlement and contrived to keep the neighborhood in perpetual uproar They were lively times for Cavendish The crew consisted of Norwegians, Swedes, Spaniards, Germans, and one Tahitian.” They were tough men. It was the beginning of the Tahitian’s second sea voyage. He was barely half-tough but looked more red-blooded than he was. He was speckled with tattoos and wore his hair in long braids tied up at their ends with small fishhooks.

   Kieran Jr. was hired by the salvage company stripping the ship. It was welcome work coming before harvest time. As soon as they started on the grounded vessel, another storm rolled in. Kieran Jr. was on the ship and had to stay where he was. Trying for the shore was too dangerous. They battened whatever hatches were still left and spent the night being battered. Captain Macleod and a rescue party from French River showed up the next morning. The wind beat him back the first time he tried to reach the Marco Polo, but he made it the second time, saving all the men except one. He and his crew got gold watches for their efforts. Kieran Jr. went home wet as a wet dog.

   He didn’t go home empty-handed, though. There were twin figureheads of Marco Polo adorning the ship. A man from Long River hauled one of them away and hung it in his barn. Kieran Jr. hauled the other one away and hung it in his barn. It was the end of the road for the many parts of the far-ranging ship.

   He was back on the ship two days later as the salvage work went apace. He was taking a break on the poop deck, leaning against a gunwale above the captain’s cabin, when a young dark-skinned man joined him.

   “I am Teva the Tahitian,” he said. “We are dead in the water.”

   “I am Kieran the Foyle,” Kieran Jr. said. “We are alive on the shore of the water.”

   Teva was the only one of the crew who signed on to help salvage the ship. The rest of them stayed in Cavendish drinking and chasing farmgirls. The Tahitian and the Irishman worked together for the rest of the week and into August. Teva told Kieran Jr. he was putting his purse together to get to Maine and sign on as a whaler.

   “My grandfather Queequeg was a harpooner,” he said. “He was the best in the world. You could spit on the water, and he could split your floating spit from the deck with one throw. He shaved with his harpoon and smoked from a tomahawk. He was a cannibal, but his favorite food was clam chowder.”

   “He was a cannibal?” Kieran Jr. asked, taken aback. 

   “Him, not me,” Teva said. “I don’t eat my own kind. I never met him, but my father told me about him before he went whaling. He never came back, either.”

   “They both went to sea and never came back?”

   “Both, never. A friend of my grandfather’s stopped on our island when I was a boy and told us about what happened to him. The man who stopped was a white man. His name was Ishmael. He and grandfather sailed and slept together.”

   “Slept together?”

   “In the morning his arm was thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” is what Ishmael said. “You had almost thought I had been his wife. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian, I always say.”

   Teva asked Ishmael what his grandfather had been like.

   “There was no hair on his head, nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead, large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had a creditor. His bald purplish head looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. His body was checkered with tattoo squares. He seemed to have been in a war and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his legs were marked, as if dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.”

   Teva lapped up water with his hands from a barrel, gulped, and spat on the deck.

   “Grandfather saved Ishmael’s life when their ship was head-butted by a white whale they were hunting. The coffin they had built for him when he was dying during the hunt was thrown overboard and Ishmael hung on to it like a buoy. He was the only sailor who survived when Captain Ahab, the crew, my grandfather, and the Pequod all sank to the bottom.”

   “I must ask, since your father and grandfather both went whaling and never came back, why are you going the south way to take up whaling?” Kieran Jr. asked.

   “It’s in my blood,” Teva said. 

   Every day when the day was fair and the sun shining, families picnicked on the beach at Cavendish, watching launches with two-masted ketch rigs go back and forth, taking what they could to Alexander MacNeill’s for auction. It was a Sunday when Sinbad the Sailor walked up to Kieran Jr., looked him up and down, and meowed. “They say our boat had no rats the whole last year,” Teva said. “This cat drove them off and those who thought they could stand up to him, they disappeared.” Teva tossed a piece of salt pork at Sinbad, who snagged it midair and gulped it down.

   Sinbad was a two-tone Norwegian Forest cat. “One of the Vikings brought him aboard,” Teva said. He was a twenty-pound bruiser with long legs and a bushy tail. His coat was a thick and glossy with a water-repellent top layer and a woolly undercoat. It was thickest at the legs, chest, and head. His ears were large, tufted, wide at the base, and high set.

   “He’s a good climber, very strong,” Teva said. “He can climb rocks and cliffs.” When he leaned on Kieran Jr. and reached up while stretching, flexing his front legs, his claws extended themselves slightly. They were sharp as razors. Kieran Jr. rubbed Sinbad’s head. 

   “He’s big enough to be a man-eater,” he said. “What’s going to happen to him when our work is finished?”

   “I don’t know,” Teva said. “The Viking left him behind.”

   That evening, when Kieran Jr. was walking back to the rude shelter he had thrown up for himself behind the dunes, Sinbad followed him. He put a bowl of fresh water out for the cat but left breakfast, lunch, and dinner up to him. He was sure Sinbad was not going to starve. The cat was a vole, shrew, deer mouse, snowshoe hare, and red-bellied snake widow maker. Even racoons, foxes ,and coyotes gave him a wide berth.

   Sinbad went back and forth to the ship with Kieran Jr. the rest of the month and the next month while the vessel fell apart piece by piece until a thunderstorm barreled up from the United States and finally finished it. The ship broke up along the coast, going down to the bottom of the sea. It was the end of the Marco Polo. 

   When Kieran Jr. packed up his bedroll and shelter and walked home, Sinbad walked beside him the five miles back to Foyle’s Cove. Kuloo watched them from on high. He sized the cat up. The cat was like him in many ways. Biddy and Kate were shucking oysters on the porch overlooking the cove, a pot at their feet. The oysters were from Malpeque Bay. Hundreds of boats big and small were in the fishery there and at St. Peter’s Bay. Until the 1830s oysters were plentiful but few people ate them. They were often spread over land as fertilizer. The shells were burned, too, for the lime they produced.

   After the Intercolonial Railway got rolling in 1876 new markets for Prince Edward Island oysters opened in Quebec and Ontario. But oyster stocks started to fall and kept falling as more boats joined the harvesting. Oysters fled for their lives. They didn’t like being eaten alive. Biddy and Kate didn’t give much thought to overfishing or the deep-seated fears of shellfish, so long as they got their fair share.

   “Oh my gosh, what a beauty!” Kate exclaimed when Kieran Jr. walked up to the porch with Sinbad beside him. 

   “He came here on the Marco Polo,” he explained. “The ship broke up yesterday in the storm and he needed a new home, so here he is.” Sinbad walked straight past the girls to the pot and started pulling oysters out, gulping them down without a single word of thanks.

   “Hey, stop that,” Biddy scolded, covering the pot. “You’ll ruin your appetite, silly goose.”

   Sinbad’s ears pricked up. He had taken a goose for dinner last Christmas. It had been delicious. He shot a look in all directions. He didn’t see any birds, but had no doubt there had to be one or two nearby somewhere. He was by nature a nomad, but as there was a pot full of oysters and slow geese to eat, he thought, I’ll stay for the time being.

   He was a back door man, but when the front door was wide open, that was the door he always went through. God might or might not believe in destiny, but he was only a cat and didn’t know anything about divine inspiration. He didn’t believe in the garden path, but when the living was easy in the summertime, that was the way he went.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland at http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East at http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal at http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.” His books are available on Amazon and Apple Books.

“Ebb Tide”

Summer, 1989. North Rustico, a small town on the north coast of Prince Edward Island. Crooked money on the move gone missing. A double cross and muscle from Montreal. One RCMP constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication