Tag Archives: Ebb Tide

Back in Action

July 1, 2025 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“Oy, where is it you are coming from?” William Murphy asked the pussycat going on tomcat at his feet. The half-pint was looking up at him. He had been in Thomas Spate’s coat pocket when Prince Albert’s hired gunman shot him dead. As the ferryman was spitting out his last breath, the cat jumped out of his pocket and scurried to the side. He watched Bill Murphy roll push kick Tom Spate into the Stanley River. He floated face down into the New London Bay.

That was the end of Queen Victoria’s would-be killer, at least until he sank. When he did bottom feeders like eels would chew on whatever was left of his decaying decomposing body. The cat had seen plenty of eels in his short time on Prince Edward Island. He knew what they were up to. It was why he never snacked on them.

The kitten was striped and gray, still small but on the stocky side. “The only true animal is a cat, and the only true cat is a gray cat,” Lucy Maud Montgomery said years later while writing about the Green Gables girl. She had two of them. “When people ask me why I want to keep two cats I tell them I keep them to do my resting for me.”

Snapper was a Scottish half-breed from Rear Settlement, on the west side of Settlement Rd. beside a tributary of the Montague River. Everything had gone wrong a month before when Ann Beaton, the woman who had given him his name and kept him fed dry and warm in bad weather, was murdered when somebody smashed in the back of her head with a grubbing hoe.

Ann was 41 years old and a spinster. She was lonely but had a one-year-old daughter. Nobody knew who had gotten Ann pregnant. She had a lot of explaining to do but kept it a secret. She called the bun in the oven her snapper. When she found the kitten, having wandered away from his litter, she called him Snapper. She lived with her brother Murdoch and his family. The night she was killed was the day she went visiting her neighbor who was weaving some cloth for her. They had tea and raisin pie after dinner and Ann started for home when it was near to sunset.

“What do you say, it’s getting awful dark, maybe you should stay overnight,” her neighbor asked.

Ann said she knew the way back like the back of her hand and besides, she enjoyed walking in the dark. Her brother was away and one of his children was watching her girl. She wanted to get back so she could watch the young one herself. Ann was found dead the next day laying in a ditch at the back of her brother’s farm, day-old blood dry and caked.

She was laid out in the barn. She was a mess. She had been stamped on and violated. Her body and dress were marked with the prints of a shod foot. Everybody from the community filing past the viewing laid a hand on her. There was a Scottish belief that if a murderer touched the body of his victim, blood would gush forth. At the end of the viewing everybody was in the clear. The killer was still on the loose.

Snapper stayed alert as Bill Murphy walked back to North Rustico. He bounced up and down in the man’s coat pocket. The island’s pioneer days weren’t over, except where they were. Most folks still farmed and fished, but not all of them. Some made and sold farming implements while some worked in shipyards. Everybody needed lumber and many men worked at lumbering. There were sawmills and shingle mills. There were schools, churches, and post offices. There were some inns and hotels. There were plenty of distilleries.

Ann Beaton’s funeral was presided over by the Reverend Donald McDonald, a minister of the Church of Scotland. He had a large following of “kickers” and “jumpers.” They were known that way for the religious frenzy they fell into while being “under the works.”

The clergyman had emigrated from Scotland to Cape Breton and finally to Prince Edward Island. Everybody knew he drank too much when he was a Scotsman. When he became a Canadian, he tried to stay on the wagon. “Prince Edward Island is a dubious haven for a man fleeing demon rum,” one of his kinsmen said. There was plenty of strong drink on the island. A year before her death Ann attended several prayer meetings and while under the works knocked a Bible and a candle from Donald McDonald’s hands. She invertedly kicked the Bible. She purposely blew out the candle.

“They are both under her feet now and mark the end of that girl,” the clergyman said by way of a sour eulogy.

Snapper watched country folk going to Cavendish by horse and buggy to buy tea, salt, and sugar. If they had something extra in their pockets, they bought molasses and tobacco. They only bought clothes they couldn’t make themselves. They didn’t buy food as a rule. They grew and processed it themselves, picking and preserving berries, milking cows and churning cream for butter, and curing beef and pork after slaughtering the animals.

The grubbing hoe that killed Ann Beaton belonged to Archibald Matheson. He lived nearby on the Settlement Rd. with his wife and son. The three of them were arrested on suspicion of the crime. Some local women reported being molested by the farmer, but he and his family were soon released. Bad feelings among neighbors weren’t facts. He may have had a bad reputation, but so did Ann. There were rumors she had been killed by a jealous wife. A smutty ballad was written describing her as “light in her way.”

After the funeral she was buried in the Pioneer Graveyard. Her brother moved away nobody knew where. Nobody knew what happened to her baby, either. Nobody wanted to know. By the time Snapper was on his way to North Rustico everybody had done their best to forget all about it.

The kitten was sleeping in the back of a wagon one day almost a month after Ann’s death. He was sick and tired of nobody feeding him. Before he knew it the wagon was on its way. When he looked back, he didn’t see much worth going back to. He made himself comfortable and went with the flow. The flow was towards the northwest. The wagon stopped overnight at Saint Andrews and the next night at Covehead before getting to the Stanley River, where it rang for the ferry. Once they were across, and the wagoner was stretching his legs, Snapper stretched his legs, too. When he was done the wagon was long gone. Unlike wagoner’s hauling freight, the kitten wasn’t on a schedule. He was go-as-you-please footloose.

Tom Spate’s young wife took him in, poured him milk, and fed him scraps of white fish. He bulked up and stayed agile staying out of Tom Spate’s way. The ferryman had a bad temper and wasn’t above hitting his wife or trying to kick the cat. Snapper was fast and none of the ferryman’s kicks ever landed. Tom Spate’s wife wasn’t fast and had the bruises to prove it.

He wasn’t overly distressed to see the dead as a doornail Tom Spate floating away. Bill Murphy was his kind of man, gruff but not mean-hearted. “I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible,” he thought. Snapper stayed where he was, not jumping ship. Besides, he had already spotted foxes along the coastline. He would deal with them once he was grown up and ready for bear, but for the moment he kept his eyes open and his nose on high alert.

Snapper saw a lighthouse in the distance. It was weather-beaten. He was nearsighted and needed spectacles but saw well enough a few feet past his nose. He made good use of his nose and ears for everything closer. They walked past a house where it was wash day. Behind the house was a field of sunlit rapeseed. A woman was raising water from a well with a bucket and washing clothes on a washboard with home-made laundry soap. She pressed what clothes needed to pressed using an iron she heated on her kitchen stove. Snapper didn’t own or wear clothes and thought it was a lot of bother.

A traveling tailor was walking up the path to another house. He was going to stay for several days, maybe even a week, making wool coats for everybody. The lady of the house had already spun dyed and woven the cloth. What Snapper didn’t know was winters on the island were long and cold. He was going to find out soon enough. When he did, he was every single day going to sniff out wool so he could curl up into it.

When they got to North Rustico there was still plenty of daylight left in the day. Snapper ran behind the boarding house where Bill Murphy was staying and started pawing at a beetle. He batted it one way and another way. The beetle looked for a tree to scurry up. The only beetles Snapper never messed with were lady bugs. He liked the way they went about their business and took lessons as they hunted for aphids. They were deadly killers of the pests.

Snapper slept at the foot of Bill Murphy’s bed that night. He made himself small and pressed himself against the man’s feet. The Irishman wasn’t a tosser and turner, which suited the cat. He didn’t have to catnap with one eye open, ready to jump at any minute. He slept better that night than he had in many days and nights.

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, 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 thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Shock Wave

December 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

“When Britain is at war, Canada is at war,” Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier said in 1910. “There is no distinction.” Four years later when Britain entered World War One, Canada signed on, too. In August 1914 the Governor-General of Canada vowed that “if unhappily war should ensue, the Canadian people will be united in a common resolve to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honor of our Empire”

Empires are made by plundering and slaughtering. They are always sure of the rightness of their cause. They never go down without a fight. It doesn’t matter if there’s any honor in the fighting, or not. They plow straight ahead.

The country had no air force, a navy fit for a bathtub, and an army of 3,000-some men. By the end of the war more than 600,000 Canadians had enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight for King and Country and more than 400,000 of them served in Europe, out of a population of fewer than 8 million nationwide.

“The Empire Needs MEN” is what the posters said. “All answer the CALL! Helped by the YOUNG LIONS the OLD LION defies his foes. ENLIST NOW!”

Everybody wanted in on the fight because everybody thought it would be over by Christmas. Canadians lined up to support the British Empire and collect steady pay of $1.10 a day. The harvest that year was bad, and unemployment was soaring. But machine guns fired ten times as many bullets a minute as they were paid pennies a day. Hundreds of thousands on all sides were slaughtered week by month by year by the rapid-firing weapons on the Western Front.

At the beginning of the war, it was better to be killed than wounded. The wounded were taken off battlefields in horse-drawn wagons or on mules with baskets on their sides, the baskets soaked and dripping with men bleeding to death. There wasn’t any such thing as a dressing. If they made it to a train station, they were transported to hospitals. “One of those trains dumped about 500 badly wounded men and left them lying between the tracks in the rain, with no cover whatsoever,” said Harvey Cushing, the head of the Harvard Unit of volunteer doctors at the American Ambulance Hospital of Paris.

Nearly 60,000 Canadians were killed, most of them the result of enemy action, and more than 170,000 of them were wounded. Almost 3.500 men and one woman had at least one arm or leg amputated. Private Curley Christian lost all four limbs but survived.

During the Battle of Vimy Ridge he was unloading cargo from trucks when an artillery shell hit next to where he was, trapping him under debris for several days. When stretcher bearers tried to reach him, they were killed by more artillery. When he was finally rescued, he was transported to a military hospital and from there to London. His arms and legs had gone gangrenous and all four were sawed off.

When he got back to Canada he was fitted with prosthetic limbs and married Cleopatra McPherson. He deigned his own prosthesis for writing. Cleo and he had a son who twenty years later served in World War Two.

More than 7,000 Prince Edward Islander’s enlisted. Five hundred of them were killed and more than a 1,000 wounded. Tommy Murphy went overseas with a siege battery in 1915. Before he went, he got married to Freya O’Sullivan and got her pregnant. He got word of his son Danny’s birth by telegram while taking a break in an ankle-deep puddle of water sheltering in a trench during the Third Battle of Artois.

He had spent eight days at the front and was due for four days in a reserve trench and then four more days at a rest camp. When the bloodletting went on and on and the ranks thinned out, he never made it to the reserve trench much less the rest camp. It was that kind of a war. The Allied and Central Powers fought the same battles over and over.

The British French and Canadians assembled seventeen infantry and two cavalry divisions for the offensive at Artois, backed by 630 field guns and 420 heavy artillery guns. During the fighting the field artillery fired 1.5 million rounds and the heavy artillery 250,000 rounds at the Germans defenses. Tommy Murphy barely slept for days. Whenever he took a break, he felt like his arms were going to fall off after loading shells until there weren’t any more to load. He knew he had sent his share of Germans to Hell even though he never saw one of them die.

When the Allies tried to advance, they suffered 40% casualties. The battle went on from late September to mid-October when it ground to a halt in the middle of a never-ending autumn rainstorm and mutual exhaustion. By that time both sides were conserving ammunition because they were running out of it. They spent the rest of the month burying their dead, tending to their wounded, and withdrawing.

Tommy was a cannon man because he was taller than five feet seven inches and burly enough to do the heavy work of feeding artillery. He didn’t have flat feet or bad eyesight, He didn’t have the greatest teeth, but explained he was enlisting to fight Germans, not bite them. He could have begged off the war because he was married, but he was patriotic and wanted to do his fair share. Money from the Canadian Patriotic Fund helped his wife keep the home fire burning.

His battery had a lance corporal scout sniper attached to it. Francis “Peggy” Pegahmagabow was an Aboriginal who could split a bullseye nobody else could even see. He had more than 300 kills to his name. He roamed No Man’s Land at night for them, seeking out enemy snipers and forward spotters. He always came back in the morning. The other side never made it back to their side.

He wore moccasins instead of army boots, chewed dead twigs whenever he sensed danger, and always carried a medicine bag. “When I was at training camp on Lake Superior in 1914, some of us landed from our vessel to gather blueberries near an Ojibwa settlement,” he said. “An old Indian recognized me and gave me a tiny medicine bag to protect me, saying I would shortly go into great danger. The bag was of skin tightly bound with a leather throng. Sometimes it seemed to be hard as a rock, at other times it appeared to contain nothing. What was inside of the bag I do not know.”

Tommy had signed up for short service and when 1915 was over and done and it was April 1916, he was done with his one year on the Canadian Expeditionary Force. His commanding officer tried to convince him to re-enlist, but he had a wife, a child, and a farm that needed him. He didn’t need to kill anymore Germans. He was sick of the butchery. Three men from North Rustico were already dead. He didn’t want to be next. He knew if he re-enlisted it was only a matter of time before he went home in a box to be buried on Church Hill Rd.

He got out when the going was good. The next year enlistments dried up as men near and far began to realize the toll the new style combat on the Western Front was taking. Machine gun fire and shell fire was murderous. On top of that there was poison gas. The dead were left where they fell. They were left for the rats. In May 1917 the government announced conscription through the Military Service Act. The rats stood up and cheered.

It was easier getting into the army than it was getting out. He finally found a ride on a troop transport from Calais to Dover, took a train to London, and spent the night at a whore house with a razzle dazzle girl. He took a steam bath the next morning and had lunch at a corner fish and chip shop eating cod with a splash of vinegar and a full pint at his elbow. He followed the first pint with a second pint and was happy for it. He had a ticket for passage to Halifax in his wallet, but it was a week away. His grandfather had come from Ireland, or so the family story went, and done something big for the Crown, who rewarded him with 400 acres of PEI shoreline. He unfolded a map and located Dublin. It was directly across the Irish Sea from Liverpool.

He bought a train ticket to Liverpool and the next morning landed in Dublin. It was Easter Monday. The Easter Rising had happened yesterday. The Easter Rising was happening today.

After landing at the Dublin Port, he followed the River Liffey, making for Dublin Castle and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His plan was to find a room for a few days and have dinner. He would explore the rest of the city after a good night’s sleep. He was wearing his Canadian Army uniform over a pair of Spring Needle underwear and carrying a rucksack. He had his toiletries, four pairs of clean socks, his rolled up military wool overcoat, and a paper bag full of Huntley & Palmer biscuits in it. The biscuits were so hard they would crack a man’s teeth at the first bite if not soaked in tea beforehand.

His papers and money were in a travel wallet attached to his belt. He had his Colt New Service revolver on his belt, too, for what it was worth now that his war was over. An hour later he was glad he had it, after he got it back, although he wasn’t sure if he was going to need it to protect himself from the Irish or the British.

Dublin Castle was in the middle of the old part of the city. The city got its name from the Black Pool, the ‘Dubh Linn,’ where the rivers Liffey and Poddle met. It was where the castle was. It had been a Gaelic ring fort in the beginning, a long time ago. Later, after the Vikings showed up, it was a Viking fort. For the past 700 years it had been a British fort, the seat of their rule in Ireland.

Tommy didn’t have anything against the British, but after a year of serving in their army, he thought the Irish might be better served ruling themselves. They couldn’t do worse. During the year he served on the Western Front three quarters of a million Jacks and John Bulls were killed. It made him sick to think of the men he had seen obeying orders to attack barbed wire and machines guns across open fields. Another few million men went wounded and missing. The broken might survive, but he didn’t think the missing were coming back anytime soon.

He was glad to be out of it. It hadn’t ended by Christmas of 1914. It still wasn’t over by Christmas of 1915. The next Christmas was in eight months and the talk was it would take a half-dozen more holidays to either win or lose the war. He meant to say a prayer in St. Patrick’s Cathedral before dinner.

He didn’t get a chance to say a prayer, find a room, or have dinner. He lost his chance when he came across the bridge leading to Trinity College, turned the corner towards Dublin Castle, and found himself face to face with a Mauser semi-automatic pistol. He knew exactly what it was. He stood stock still exactly where he was. The hand on the firearm was a woman’s hand. She was wearing an old military hat and a yellow armband.

“Hand’s up and on the wall, boyo,” she said, a second woman coming up behind him. The second woman was wearing a bandolier laden with a half dozen hand grenades. She had a revolver. It looked like it came from the Middle Ages. He did what she said. She patted him down and took his Colt.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” she asked.

“Tommy Murphy, Canadian Army, from Prince Edward Island by way of a year in France,” he said. “I’m here to take in the sights before going home. Now that we’re talking, I thought Ireland was sitting the war out.”

“We ask the questions,” the woman wearing the bandolier spit out.

“Come on,” the woman with the Mauser said, poking him in the small of the back with the barrel of the gun.

The streets leading to the city center were barricaded. When they got to the General Post Office, he saw there were two green flags flying in place of the Union Jack. They said “Irish Republic” in gold letters. He knew there was no such thing as an Irish Republic.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re rocking the casbah,” the grenade girl said.

There was a man outside the post office reading from a broadsheet. It was the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic.” There were copies of it pasted on walls. Newsboys were handing them out to anybody who wanted one. Not everybody wanted one. Most of them didn’t understand what was happening. The grenade girl handed him a copy. “Read this,” she said. There were men with rifles and shotguns on the roofs of buildings overlooking bridges.

“Who’s this?” said a man wearing a scrap of paper pinned to his breast. It said “Citizen Army.”

“We found him down the street, Sean.”

Sean was Sean Mac Duiarmada, one of Commander-in-Chief Patrick Pearce’s right-hand men.

“He’s Canadian,” Sean said pointing to Tommy’s regimental badge and the “CANADA” title at the end of his shoulder straps.

“We thought he was a Brit.”

“They’ll be here soon enough,” Sean said.

There were 1,200 rebels waiting for 20,000 British troops to arrive.

A shot rang out in the distance and Margaret Keogh fell down dead. She was a 19-year-old nurse tending to a wounded Citizen Army man. She was the first person to die during the Rising of Easter Week.

A team of Volunteers trotted past on their way to the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park. They took all the weapons and ammunition they could carry and blew up the rest. When the son of the fort’s commander tried to raise the alarm, he was shot dead. He was the second person to die.

“You’re free to go,” Sean said to Tommy. “Best you leave Dublin all together.”

“What about my sidearm?”

Sean nodded to the grenade girl, and she handed Tommy’s Colt back to him.

When a contingent of the Citizen’s Army approached Dublin Castle, the police sentry James O’Brien ordered them to halt. He was shot dead even though he was unarmed. He was the third person to die. When British troops showed up the rebels retreated to City Hall, stormed up to the roof, and fired down on the troops in the street. The man commanding the rebel contingent, Sean Connolly, was shot dead by a sniper, the first rebel and fourth person killed.

Tommy carefully made his way back to the docklands and the port. He boarded the same boat he had come on. An hour later the boat was steaming into Dublin Bay on its way back to Liverpool. Eight hours later he was asleep in a room of a boarding house on the waterfront, not far from the Three Graces.

The next morning was cold and damp. Women were out in the streets with their long-handled push brooms. They were called Sweepers. Others were in homes cleaning and scrubbing. They were called Dailies. Many more were at work in munitions factories. They were called Munitionettes. Liverpool’s men were on the Royal Navy’s battleships and in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. They were called Cannon Fodder.

Tommy found a greasy spoon near the port and ordered breakfast, eggs back bacon sausage baked beans a fried tomato fried mushrooms fried bread and black pudding. The Liverpool Daily Post headline screamed “REBELLION!” There was no need for him to read about it. He thought he might have this same breakfast at midday and tonight. Somebody once said, “To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.”

He put the newspaper aside. Pushing himself away from the table, he checked his ticket for Canada. He tucked it securely away with his service revolver. Tommy Murphy was going to keep himself safe and sound until his boat sailed for home. Once he was out of the frying pan that was burning and smoking on another man’s stove, he was going to stay out of it.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street at 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.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Down to Sea Level

July 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

There was a window seat midway back in the Boeing 737. JT Markunas parked himself there. The plane looked old but smelled clean. It had been built in 1969 with an expected lifespan of 20 years. It was 20 years old in 1989 on the day JT buckled his seat belt. He was on the one daily Canadian Airlines flight from Ottawa, the capital of Canada, to Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island. Crossing over the eastern end of New Brunswick, he looked up from his Car and Driver magazine. He took a look through the porthole window at the crescent-shaped island in the distance. The land wasn’t small, but it wasn’t big, either. It was blanketed by snow. He had been told his new posting was mostly farm country. He wondered what it looked like from outer space.

Seen from outer space Prince Edward Island can barely be seen. The solar system is a speck in the galaxy. The earth is a speck in the solar system. Prince Edward Island is a speck on the earth. When the sky is clear and the sun is shining it is a green and red speck under a dome of blue. When it is cloudy and stormy everything gets wet and gray until the sun comes back. It is the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Where he came from, which was Sudbury, Ontario, the sky was always either getting cloudy or it was already cloudy.

The lay of the land formed hundreds of millions of years ago. Creeks and rivers deposited gravel, sand, and silt into what is the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Before the last ice age, Prince Edward Island was part of the mainland. After the glaciers melted it wasn’t a part of it anymore. The Northumberland Strait became what separates it from the rest of Canada.

The province is one of Canada’s Maritime provinces, the others being New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Newfoundland and Labrador are nearby but more on their own than not, which is the way they want it. There are 225 kilometers from one end of the island to the other. It is 3 kilometers at its most narrow and 65 kilometers at its most wide. It is twice as far as the Kulloo flies from the island to Walt Disney World in Florida as it is to the Arctic Circle. Walt Disney World is far away and for pretend. The Arctic Circle is nearby and for real.

There are farms from stem to stern of Prince Edward Island. There are so many of them the province is called the “Million-Acre Farm.” Jacques Cartier discovered it in 1534 and Samuel Champlain claimed it for France in 1603. The French explorers called it Île Saint-Jean. When they landed the native Mi’kmaq’s tried to explain they had been there for thousands of years, but all they got for their trouble was wasting their breath. They switched gears and tried singing some of their Top 10 songs. They sang “The Eagle Song” and “The Honor Song” and “The Gathering Song.” They accompanied themselves on rattles and hand drums.

“Try singing a different tune,” Samuel Champlain finally said. “I’ll teach you the words.” He meant for them to sing “The Giveaway Song.” The Mi’kmaq glared and reached for their bows and arrows. The French strapped on armor and reached for their swords. They were more savage than the savages and knew how to prove it. The natives grumbled to themselves and drifted away. They thought they could make it right later. They were wrong about later.

Kulloo could have set them straight, but he didn’t. He spoke in riddles, anyway. Hardly anybody ever understood his riddles. Over the centuries it had gotten so he held his tongue more often than not. He didn’t believe in explaining himself, anyway. He believed, being terse, say it once, why say it again? No matter what the Mi’kmaq’s thought he was, or meant to them, he was a lone wolf. He was big enough to hook a grown man with his talons and carry him away. If push came to shove, and the man couldn’t explain himself, Kulloo was strong and predatory enough to eat him. Men were his least favorite meal, being bitter and hidebound, bur he was never going to shortchange himself dinner.

He was at least a millennium old. Nobody knew how old he really was, not even Kulloo himself. The day he saw Jacques Cartier’s two ships come from France in 1534 he didn’t know what century it was. He lived by the seasons and the rotation of the stars. The ships and their crewmen piqued his interest. The Mi’kmaq had small boats that hugged the coastline. The big sailing boats had come from the other world, from the other side of the ocean. Kulloo had gotten word about that world long ago, but had never seen it. He suspected the Old World was intent on making the New World their world. He thought it best to take a closer look to see where he stood.

When the British took control of Canada East they changed the name of the island from what the French had called it to St. John’s, then changed it to New Ireland, and again on the eve of the 19^th century to Prince Edward Island. It was named after Prince Edward, who later became the father of Queen Victoria. He was beguiled by the island, even though he proposed transferring sovereignty of it to Nova Scotia. He visited his namesake five times. The journey took almost a month to sail one way.

It became a separate colony in 1769 and the seventh province of Canada in 1873. Charlottetown was named after the wife of King George III. Queen Charlotte barely spoke a word of English and never visited the capital city. She stayed home in Buckingham House and played her harpsichord. She liked chartbusters like Bach’s “Concerto in the Italian Style in F Major” and Handel’s “Keyboard Suite No. 5.”

“She ain’t no beauty, but she is amiable,” King George said about his wife. Queen Charlotte smiled slyly. She played “By the Light of the Moon” on her harpsichord for the man of the house. It was a lullaby. King George took a nap in his queen’s lap.

The province is the smallest and most densely populated Canadian province, although outside of Charlottetown and Summerside, where half of everybody lives, the habitants and their communities are spread far and wide. Most of everything is in the way of out of the way. Forests once covered the island. Trees still covered half of it. The red oak is the provincial tree. There are pine, beech, and spruce. There are no deer, moose, or black bears. There are rabbits and skunks, muskrats, and plenty of foxes. The red fox is the provincial poster boy. In early summer pink and purple lupins, weeds that are an invasive species, line fields and ditches. The Lady Slipper, an out-of-the-way orchid that grows in shady woodlands, is the provincial flower.

JT was looking out the porthole window when he saw Kulloo. The bird was bigger than an albatross and more stern-looking than an eagle. If it was sowing the wind it was going to reap a whirlwind. The plane was cruising like it had been for the last hour-and-a-half. The big bird was keeping pace with the plane off the tip of the wing. JT rubbed his eyes and looked again. It was still there, soaring. He scanned the aircraft cabin. Some passengers were reading while others napped. Nobody was looking out at the wide blue yonder. When JT blinked the bird was gone. When he blinked again it was back.

Farming is the number one way of life on the island, followed by the enterprises of fishing and fish mongering. There are a wealth of fields full of potatoes, grains, and fruits. There are cows everywhere, their snouts in the turf, waiting to be milked or slaughtered. There are boatloads of mussels, oysters, and lobsters to be had. Cod had been overfished to near extinction. There was talk of importing it from Iceland.

Tourism was growing and Liam Foyle and his Japanese girlfriend Mariko were building cottages on family land in North Rustico to get in on the summer trade. In the meantime, they stayed at Sandy’s Surfside Inn most of the time. It was on the Gulf Shore Parkway. It was on the park road but not in the National Park. They had never sold their land. His brother Conor was his only neighbor. Liam and Conor were Kieran Foyle’s descendants, more than a hundred years after the Irish triggerman from the Old World landed in the New World, his Beaumont-Adams revolver tucked into a sailor’s bag.

In 1989 the pickings were good for the Liberals. They swept the elections. Andrew, the new Duke of York, and Fergie, his wife and Duchess, visited, flying in on a Canadian Armed Forces jetliner. George Proud, one of the new Liberal members of the province’s parliament, stood on a bench for a better view of the royals as they were driven up University Ave. “We’re the commoners, and they’re royalty, and I think people in a strange way must secretly like that,” he said.

“It’s a great day,” declared John Ready, the mayor of Charlottetown. Not everybody agreed. A woman in the crowd groused, “I was talking to a friend this morning who said, ‘I don’t know why we should have to curtsy to a person who a few years ago was living with a race-car driver.’” During the parade the Duchess climbed over a rope barrier to talk to a group of senior citizens. “What are these ropes for?” she asked. “I can’t believe you’re penned in.” The senior citizens were polite but baffled.

Scouts Canada held their annual jamboree on the island that summer, honing their outdoor skills and running riot in the woods. The TV series “Road to Avonlea” went into production. The last train on Prince Edward Island made its last run, coming to a dead stop in living time. The tip-to-tip railway had been operating for one hundred years. The minute the clock struck the century mark it was done for good.

Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” was the top song on the radio. Malcolm “Monk” Kennedy was a thorn on the island that year, but nobody knew it until the Boy Scouts had all gone home. They were always prepared, it being the scouting motto, but nobody was prepared for Monk. Nobody was prepared for Jules Gagnon and Louise Barboza, either. They were hired guns from Montreal who came to the island looking for Monk and two million missing dollars.

Jules and Louise were good as gold at what they did, but didn’t know they were going to end up paddling upstream to get their work done. Monk didn’t know two million dollars was going to be so hard to spend. They didn’t like the stumbling blocks in their way, but by then they had picked their poison. The Hunter River was going to flow through North Rustico and out to the ocean, no matter what. They were going to have to find that out for themselves. They weren’t prisoners of fate. They were prisoners of their own minds. Monk couldn’t change his mind, no matter what. Jules and Louise wouldn’t change their minds, no matter what.

Kulloo peeled away from the Boeing 737 and swooped landward. He saw Louie the Large near the coastline. Hunkered down on a rock shelf not far from shore, the big shellfish was sizing up Monk, Jules, and Louise. Monk was scrawny. He was off the dinner table unless there was a famine. Jules looked better. He had some meat on his bones. Louise looked the best. He wouldn’t mind getting his claws into her, not at all. They shared a name. He liked that. He would like it even better if they shared some flesh and blood.

Louie the Large loved the ocean, deep and blue, the tides rising and falling. It was where all life came from. He understood the primal fear men and women had of it, which he encouraged with every click clack of his crusher claws. He knew Kulloo was laying low overhead. He kept one eye open for him. He knew all about the bird. He was dangerous as a switchblade. He knew the creature never slept and woke up every morning dangerous as ever. Everything on land and sea was fair game to him.

JT looked out the porthole window again, as the plane started its approach to the Charlottetown Airport, and saw that the bird was gone. He didn’t think he had imagined it. He wasn’t a fanciful man. He prided himself on thinking straight. He wasn’t especially impulsive or emotional, although he had been in love once and knew he could be as irrational and emotional as anybody. He didn’t believe any bird could be that big and that fast. It must have been a mirage of some kind, like in the movies.

He checked his seat belt to make sure it was snug. He looked down at the sea level he was going down to. Five minutes later he was landing on the Atlantic Canada land that was going to be his new RCMP posting.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Atlantic Canada

Rat in the Hat

February 1, 2024 Edward Staskus Leave a comment

By Ed Staskus

Aksel was a Norwegian rat, although it would have been a matter of rough-and-tumble 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 Bayeaux long ago. The Normans were hardy explorers. Norwegians sat around their fjords moon eyed. It had been more than a hundred generations of his family saga since his ancestors landed on the island. He had never met a Norwegian. He had no idea about any Norwegians. He didn’t even know where Norway was.

He didn’t know what day week or month it was. He didn’t know it was 1989. He didn’t know he was living in North Rustico on Prince Edward Island, either. He had no clue he was on the North American continent, for that matter, although if he had known it wouldn’t have mattered. He knew where Rollings Pond was. The pond was where he spent most of his nights. During the day he slept in the basement of the Stella Maris Catholic Church. 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 had his best interests in mind. Something was always out to get him. He always had to do everything for himself. He didn’t own anything, not even a fork, knife, or plate, but his bedroom 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 at Orby Head 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 Seaweed Neck and Foul Fart. He liked to think of himself as a man about town and sometimes wore a bowler hat.

He wasn’t a farmer. He foraged for food instead of sowing seeds. He gleaned grub far and wide. He ate anything and everything. He thought he had probably eaten hundreds of different foods in his lifetime. 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. Some people said he was a glutton. He didn’t bother disagreeing with them. He preyed on chicks, lizards, and other rodents. He caught fish on Fridays, just in case there was a God.

His mother let it slip one day that their kind only lived two or three years. He was aghast. There was apparently no time to waste. 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 especially Olympic Games agile, but he could run, jump, climb, and swim 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 Snaps, who was from Murphy’s Cove and was always messing with him. He and Snaps were going to have it out one day. The cat was a menace. He was always lying in ambush 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 Snaps, cats rarely bothered Aksel. He was too big for most of them, feral or otherwise. Snaps was a different order of things. He was as big as cats come. The beast was a dangerous son-of-a-gun. The cat and the rat were a stop-and-go dance in the dark. When Aksel stopped, Snaps stopped. When he started up again, the cat was on his heels again, low-down and deadly quiet.

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, his body length almost a foot long 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.

He liked hanging out in the back room of Lorne’s Snack Shop, where out of work fishermen hung around looking for something to talk about. Aksel wore morning dress, a bowler hat, and pantomimed Charlie Chaplin on table tops for handouts.

One night he met one of his own kind in the dumpster behind the co-op store next to Angie’s Eatery. 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 boat rolled in. He had strayed up to North Rustico and was thinking of staying

“I’m a free agent,” he said. “I can hi-jack myself back 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? First, I puff up my cheeks. Second, I suck up the grease. Third, I spit it out over my shoulder when I go over the rat guard.”

Cruise ships had been docking in Charlottetown since just after the turn of the century, pulling into port to hearty welcomes. They let loose hundreds sometimes thousands of tourists all at once to stretch their legs, eat, drink, see the sights, and buy “Anne of Green Gables” dolls and effigies. They bought on-the-spur memories to put away in their closets.

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 rat and a mug, to boot, but I have got to say this seaside place here is something else, just beautiful, and everywhere I look there is food.” The hometown boy twitched one whisker in agreement.

Aksel was more nocturnal than not, so when Bernie Doiron found something sticking out of the ground when he was plowing on the other side of the hill from Rollings Pond and every nearby cop car, ambulance, and fire truck descended on his stomping grounds, the noise that morning woke him up. He had just rolled over in his straw bed. He coughed and cleared his throat, blinking. He was curious and made his way to the top of the field where it was all happening to see what was happening.

He had a love hate relationship with members of the human race. On the one hand, he preferred living near them since they were a rat’s number one fast 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 gave them a wide berth.

“My mama didn’t raise no fool,” he grumbled to himself.

He saw what Bernie had seen and what the cops were seeing sticking out of the ground. It was an arm that had been chopped off. He guessed the rest of the body was still in the ground. It looked like they were digging it up, although why was beyond him. He knew they weren’t going to eat the remains, so what was the point? What the human race did day in and day out puzzled him more often than not.

Aksel quickly lost interest in the unearthing. There wasn’t going to be a free meal in it for him anytime soon unless somebody dropped some crumbs. That was something else that baffled him about men and women. 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, no matter where it was., and no matter how small 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 and was out of sight, he slowed down and caught his breath. 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 four wheel bucket of bolts rolling past.

Excerpted from “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication