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Ebb Tide

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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, 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

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

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

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, 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

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

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

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

Homeward Bound

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By Ed Staskus

   “How does it happen that you’re from Sudbury,” Kayleigh Jurgelaitis asked JT Markunas. He was sitting across from her at Junior’s Bar & Grill.

   “World War Two,” JT said, giving the pint in front of him a break. “My father is from Lithuania. My grandmother Antonina was from Russia, a schoolteacher in Saransk. My grandfather Jonas met her during the first war.” The town and an army garrison were in the badlands, four hundred miles southeast of Moscow. “He was an officer in the Russian Imperial Army.”

   “You’re part Russian, like Ivan the Terrible?”

   “A part of me is, so watch your step.”

   “Yes, sir,” Kayleigh said, mock saluting.

   “He was conscripted and trained as an officer and sent to serve with an infantry regiment. Back then they said drinkers go to the navy and dimwits to the infantry. He had to keep the dimwits in order.” The Imperial Russian Army counted more than a million men in uniform, most of them conscripted, most of them peasants. There were a quarter million Cossacks, too. Only the Cossacks knew what they were doing.

   “He swept my grandmother off her feet and they got married. They had a daughter in 1917. Another daughter was born the next year.” JT’s father was born six years later, in 1924. He was named after King Vytautas the Great. His mother called him Vytas. His sisters called him many things, including the Little Prince. They didn’t always mean it as a compliment.

   They lived in Siauliai, which is home to the Hill of Crosses. The hill bristles with tens of thousands of crosses, crucifixes, and statues. It was after Czarist forces crushed the November Uprising of 1831 when the first crosses appeared. By 1918 Lithuania had been missing from the map for more than a hundred years, having been disappeared after the Partition of Poland. Since that time, it had been under the thumb of the Russian Empire.

   In late 1919, when Russia was being torn apart by the Bolshevik revolution, Jonas and his family went home to a newly independent Lithuania. “The country didn’t have many officers when they formed their own army,” JT said. “Most of them were men who had been in the Imperial Army. My grandfather fought in the post-war battles around Klaipeda and after that served in the secret service in Kaunas, which was the capital then.”

   “Was he a spy?”

   “He was more like somebody who kept spies on their toes. After the fighting he got some land for serving his country. They had a house in town and a farm outside of town. Later on, he became the police chief.” 

   During the interwar years Lithuania was divided into twenty four districts and each district had its own governor and police chief. Farming was what mattered the most. Lithuania and Prince Edward Island are both mostly farm land. Potatoes are number one in both countries.

   During the late 1930s the world was changing fast. The Lithuanian world was changing even faster, although it didn’t change so much as fall apart. “The Russians showed up in 1940” JT said. “All of the country’s officials were let go and they put in new people who they wanted to run the show, like the British did here on Prince Edward Island back in the day.”

   He signaled Junior for more fried pickles. When Lithuanians go grocery shopping they buy pickles by the bushel. His mother in Sudbury had pickled cucumbers and served them at the dinner table all winter. He remembered sitting at the living room window with a bowl of them, watching snow fall until there wasn’t any place left for it to fall.

   The annexation of Lithuania was completed by the autumn of 1940. Businesses were nationalized and collectivization of land began. As the Russian presence expanded the family talked about leaving the Baltics. “They had a chance to leave the country and go somewhere else, but didn’t.”

   The stayed on their farm through the winter. Mass arrests and deportations of politicians, policemen, and dissidents began. “My grandfather was in his kitchen plot, wearing a shirt, old pants, and slippers when they drove up, a carload of Russians, and stopped, saying there was something wrong with their engine,” JT said. “He walked over to the car with them to help. They shoved him into the back and drove off.”

   He remained under lock and key in the local lock-up until he was finally loaded into a boxcar with many others. Four days later, the 4th Panzer Group, part of the first phase of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, destroyed the Russian armored forces in Lithuania. Within a week Nazi Germany seized the whole of the country.

   “It was too late for my grandfather. He  was transported to a labor camp in Siberia. He was forced to work in a logging forest. He slept in an unheated barrack and starved to death during the winter of 1942.”

   “That’s horrible,” Kayleigh said. “My father worked at logging when he first came to Canada, somewhere north of Sudbury,” Kayleigh said. “It wasn’t anything like Russia, though. Nobody starved to death. They didn’t lack for food or shelter. What happened to the rest of your family?”

   “It was every man for himself, unless you were a Red,” JT said. “After the deportations they left the farm. It was too dangerous to stay. They went into the forest. But then my grandmother told my father, who was around 18 years old, to go to Vilnius, the capital, and tell his older sister their father had been arrested. She wanted her daughter to know to be careful. He took a train, but as soon as he got there, he got a phone call saying his mother had been arrested.”

   “They were still living in the forest?” Kayleigh asked.

   “They had built a lean-to near a stream and camouflaged it,” JT said. “His other sister stole food from nearby farms. They had a rifle. The gun didn’t do them any good, though.”

   “Most of the Acadians around here were deported during the French and Indian War,” Kayleigh said. “They didn’t have many guns, not that it would have mattered. I’ve heard people call it the Great Expulsion.”

   “The way I’ve heard it was that if you were Acadian, you were removed from your home and your land,” JT said. “Your house was burned and the land given to settlers loyal to Britain, mostly immigrants from Scotland and New England.”

   The Great Expulsion was the forced removal of Acadians from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island during the French and Indian War. Most of the Acadians were deported, most of them ending up in France, Louisiana, and Massachusetts. Half of them died of disease, starvation, and  shipwrecks.

   “Was your grandmother sent to a prison camp even though she was Russian?” Kayleigh asked.

   “Yes, she was sent to a prison camp. She was transported to the Gulag. She was released in 1956, after Stalin’s death, but not allowed to go back to her home. She was sent to live out her days in a one-room cinder block  apartment near the Baltic Sea.”

   “What did your father do?” 

   “After his mother’s arrest he stayed in Vilnius, with his sister and her husband,” JT said. “He stayed there for a month but went home when summer ended. The farm had to be taken care of. It had chickens, some pigs, and draft horses to do the heavy work. It was a dairy farm with more than twenty cows. “He started taking care of things, even though he didn’t know much. He had mostly been a schoolboy until then. He knew the cows had to be milked and the milk had to go to the dairy. But about the fields, he didn’t know anything. That fall he sent farmhands to till the ground. When his nearest neighbor saw them working, he ran across the road yelling and waving his arms.”

   “What the hell are you doing?” the neighbor yelled.

   “He told him they were preparing the ground for next year,” JT said.

   “You’re ruining this year’s seed and you won’t have any grass next year,” the neighbor said.

   “He stopped right away. He learned what to do.” 

   A year later he was on a horse-drawn mower cutting hay when he saw storm clouds gathering. He decided he would walk the horses, lightening the load so they could pull the mower faster, and jumped down from his seat. “As he hopped down, he stumbled and fell on the blades of the mower. The horses stopped. One of his hands was almost cut off. The boy who was helping him ran over. My father told me when the boy saw what happened, he passed out.”

   As the war dragged on, JT’s father had problems keeping the farm going. He had only partial use of his injured hand and farmhands were deserting the countryside. He went to a nearby  prisoner-of-war camp where he knew they loaned Russians out. They gave him some of them. They kept the farm going but one morning they were all gone. He had to go back to the Germans and ask for more. They were mad about it. One officer insisted he hadn’t looked after them, that he needed to lock them up at night, and that they weren’t going to give him anymore. “I need more,” he said. They eventually gave him more. He kept them locked up after that and they were still there when he fled Lithuania.

   “My father had to do that, too,” Kayleigh said. “He had to get out fast in 1944.”

   In 1944 the Red Army stormed back into Lithuania. JT’s father fled with a mechanized company of Wehrmacht, whisked up by them as they passed. They had been stationed near the prisoner-of-war camp. They told him he had five minutes to decide whether he was coming with them as they retreated. “They were in a big hurry. They said the Russians were on the other side of the Hill of Crosses. He only had time to fill a bag with a few clothes, a little money, and some photographs of his parents.”

   In July the Red Army took Siauliai, inflicting heavy damage on the city. Two months after that the counterattacking German 3rd Panzer Army was destroyed and Lithuania became part of the Union of Socialist Republics. “My father ended up in Sudbury in the late 1940s with a duffel bag and enough loose change to get a sandwich,” JT said. “He got a job with Inco and that’s where he stayed. At first, he worked as a black powder blaster, one of the more dangerous jobs, but over the years the grind got easier.”

   “After my father made it to Canada,” Kayleigh said, “he cut down trees to make a living. He moved to Sudbury after he got married. We later moved to Toronto, and from there to Buffalo. No matter, I still think of myself as a Sudbury girl.”

   “Where did you live?”

    “We lived on Pine Street, around where all the Eastern Europeans lived.”

   JT grew up on Stanley Street where it dead-ended a few blocks from Pine Street.

   “When were you born?”

   “1961.”

    JT had been born the same year. Kayleigh was the same age, from the same town, and they had grown up within walking distance of each other. The coincidences were piling up. He had never been sure if coincidence was a good thing or a bad thing. At the moment he thought it was a good thing.

   “Do you remember the Canadian Pacific trains blowing their air horns when they curled around the cliff at the back of Stanley Street?”

  “I sure do,” Kayleigh said. “Whenever they wailed, I wailed right back.”

   “Me, too,” JT said.

   They laughed loud enough so that Junior looked their way. They smiled at each other, seeing one another better than ever.

Excerpted from the book “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. Muscle from Montreal. JT Markunas, an RCMP constable working the back roads, stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

Back in Action

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By Ed Staskus

  “Oy, where is that you are coming from?” Kieran Foyle asked the kitten going on tomcat at his feet. The half-pint was looking up at him. He had been on board the ferry when Prince Albert’s gunman shot Tom Spate dead. As the ferryman was spitting out his last breath, the kitten jumped off his perch and scurried to the side. He watched Kieran roll, push, and kick the dead Englishman into the Stanley River. He floated face down into the New London Bay. The Kulloo flying overhead didn’t bother glancing down at the end of Tom Spate.

   That was the end of Queen Victoria’s would-be killer, at least until he sank. When he did bottom feeders like eels would eat whatever was left of his decomposing body. The kitten 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. The Green Gables author 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, was murdered when somebody smashed 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 to keep her company. Nobody knew who had gotten Ann pregnant. She had a lot of explaining to do but kept it a secret. She had called the bun in the oven her snapper. When she found the kitten, who had 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 suggested.

   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 to her young one. Ann was found dead the next day in a ditch at the back of her brother’s farm. She was lying in blood day-old dry and caked.

   She was laid out in the barn. 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. There had not been any gushers. The killer was never found.

   Snapper stayed alert as Kieran 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 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 still 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 had knocked a Bible and a candle from Reverend McDonald’s hands. She invertedly kicked the Bible, too. 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 bad feelings among neighbors weren’t facts. He and his family were soon released. 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 composed 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 had been 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 anything worth going back to. He made himself comfortable and went with the flow. The flow went 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 a bowl of milk, and fed him scraps of white fish. He bulked up and stayed agile by 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 kitten. Snapper was fast and none of the ferryman’s kicks ever landed. Tom Spate’s wife wasn’t fast enough and had the bruises to prove it.

   Snapper wasn’t overly distressed to see the dead as a doornail Tom Spate floating away. Kieran was his kind of man, irascible but not mean-hearted. I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn’t irascible, the kitten 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.

   He saw a lighthouse in the distance. It was weather-beaten. He was farsighted but saw well enough so long as it was 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 be 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 a nearby 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 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 Kieran 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 as they hunted for aphids. They were deadly killers of the pests. Snapper never killed lady bugs. It would have brought bad luck. Everybody knew that.

   Snapper slept on Kieran’s bed that night. He made himself small and pressed himself into the man’s ribs. The Irishman didn’t toss and turn, which suited the kitten. 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 nights. By the morning he had forgotten all about Tom Spate.

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, 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

Ebb Tide

Shock Wave

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.

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

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 19th 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.”

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

Ebb Tide

Swept Away

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By Ed Staskus

   Jimmy LaPlante’s neighbors either didn’t know a thing about him or thought he was R. B. Bennett’s double with a nice dog. Since they hardly ever saw Jimmy, they knew for sure he was a recluse. The dog was a Labrador Retriever, young and friendly, ready and able to chase any stick thrown by anybody into the bay. Jimmy didn’t especially like dogs, but he had gotten the black puppy last fall to keep him company and be a first alarm. He wasn’t worried about his neighbors. He was worried about Montreal. He was from Quebec but had lived on St Peter’s Bay the past eleven years, He kept himself to himself for good reason. The reason was Montreal.

   Nobody on Prince Edward Island knew anything about him except his dog and his niece. Now it was only the dog. He had made sure Montreal didn’t know where he was. He had made absolutely sure of it. He was sure they still didn’t know. He was careful talking to them on the pay phone outside the fish and chip shop down the street, never talking for long, always cutting it short. He knew they knew how to trace calls.

   He hadn’t been especially close to his niece, but he didn’t like it when he read in a newspaper that she was dead. At least he now knew something. Until then all he had known was that Becky was gone. She had been found buried in a potato field up around Rustico. What was she doing there? The cops weren’t saying much. The newspapers weren’t reporting much of what they didn’t want to say.

   What the hell happened? She had delivered the hundred grand of good cash from Montreal and long since was supposed to have delivered the two million dollars of bad cash to them, although he knew all winter long she hadn’t. He wasn’t returning his hundred grand, though. He told Montreal that and told them to find the girl themselves. He had done his part. When they found her, they would find their money, he said. They didn’t like it and told him so. He told them to drop dead and hung up. He knew it was the wrong thing to say, but what could he say? 

   He knew somebody would be showing up soon enough, looking for him and their money. The newspapers said Becky had been found with a briefcase but no identification. It didn’t say anything about what was in the briefcase. He knew without thinking about it that it had been empty just like he knew from now on he was going to have to be very careful. That’s the way the Quebecois men were. He didn’t think they would find him but started sleeping with his dog at the foot of the bed and a Colt .38 Super under his pillow.

   Jimmy was 16 years old when he made his first counterfeit bill. By his late teens he was making fake one hundred dollar bills that his friends spent everywhere without any of them bouncing. By his early 20s he was flooding the market with so many of the fakes that many businesses stopped accepting them. The Bank of Canada was forced to change the design to put their currency back on the right track.

   He got good at reproducing security holograms on banknotes and earned the nickname of “Hologram Tom.” His middle name was Tom. When he took a break from forgery, he took up impersonation. He masqueraded as a pilot for Air Canada so he could fly on courtesy passes. Over the next five years he pretended to be a doctor and a lawyer, among other things. One man died and another man was disbarred, but Jimmy left his mistakes behind him. He moved on to bank checks. In the end he went back to hard cash. It was what he knew best.

   What had happened to his niece? It had to be something to do with that biker boyfriend of hers, who he disliked and distrusted the minute he saw him and whose name he never was able to remember. He thought he was probably an islander, although he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know where he lived, but guessed it had to be Summerside or Charlottetown. He didn’t even know what kind of motorcycle the boyfriend rode, although he knew it was red.

   If push came to shove, he might tell the men from Montreal what he knew but make sure he told them from the back of his handgun. He wouldn’t let them get their hands on him. If they did, he stood no chance. He knew that as well as he knew anything. He wasn’t planning on leaving Prince Edward Island. There was no point to it. It would just make them testy and not believe anything he might tell them later on. He would sit tight until if and when they showed up. He had moved to Prince Edward Island to get away from a life of crime, although crime was how he made his living. He knew the everyday risks, which was why he left Quebec for Atlantic Canada. The past years had been peaceful and quiet, the occasional briefcase of phony money traded for real money keeping him in plenty of ready money.

   It had blown up in his face, but he put a brave face on it and took his dog for a walk. He pulled on a pair of rubber boots. His house was just past Bay Shore Rd. where it turned toward Greenwich Rd. The dog and he walked on the thin strip of beach on the bay past some cottages until there weren’t any more cottages.

   St. Peter’s went back to 1720 when the village of Saint Pierre was established. It was one of the most important settlements on the island then because it had a good harbor and good fishing grounds full of clams, oysters, quahogs, lobsters, trout, and schools of salmon. Many of the French considered it to be the commercial capital of Isle St. Jean. When the Fort of Louisbourg on Cape Breton surrendered to the British it was the end of Isle St. Jean. The French were all deported in 1758 and the English helped themselves. The land became Prince Edward Island. St. Pierre became St. Peter’s. 

   The British weren’t overly interested in fish. They were more interested in boats. They turned St. Peter’s into a shipbuilding hub, building 27 big craft between 1841 and 1850. There were three shipyards, all controlled by Martin MacInnis and William Coffin. They couldn’t launch their ships fast enough. The north shore had long been a graveyard for ships. They needed to be replaced.

   Passenger steamers between the mainland and Prince Edward Island sank all the time. When they did new ones had to be built. In 1859 the Fairie Queene from Nova Scotia didn’t make it. The bells of Saint James Church in Charlottetown tolled eight times of their own accord on the morning of the disaster, foretelling the deaths of the eight passengers on board the steamer. “Keen blows the bitter spirit of the north,” is what everybody said.

   The Turret Bell was driven ashore by a violent storm in 1906 at Cable Head. It stayed beached for more than three years and became a tourist attraction. Picnickers sat in the dunes staring at the rotting hulk, eating apples, drinking cold tea, and chatting. Their dogs ran up and down the beach barking up a storm.

   The first sawmill was Leslie’s Mill near Schooner Pond. There were lobster factories on the northside. A starch factory opened in 1880 and stayed open until 1945. A trotter track opened in 1929. It was still there. Jimmy wasn’t a betting man and never went there. He liked horses but disliked racing. If God had meant horses to pull two-wheel carts for sport, he would have created two-wheel carts. If he had gone to the track he wouldn’t have bet real money, anyway, but that was beside the point. 

   Jimmy lit an Export-A and blew smoke out through his nose. He wasn’t interested in the past. He was only interested in what was in front of him. A seagull flew past looking for scraps. He and his dog went as far as Sunrise Ave. and took a break. Sitting on the sand leaning back against a mound he watched the dog run into the water after a stick. Whenever a stick went flying the dog became a creature of habit. 

   He watched a man and a woman coming his way. They were both in shorts. The man had a camera slung around his neck. It bounced on his chest with every step he took. He looked fair and sunburned. The woman was slightly shorter than the man. She was dark skinned. She carried a kind of messenger bag over her shoulder. She could have carried a man over her shoulder if she had a mind to. She was a hefty gal. Tourists, Jimmy thought, and thought about something else.

   They stopped a few yards away and watched the dog lunge out of the water and run up to Jimmy. He shook himself dry, the water spraying on all three of them. The woman reached into her bag. She pulled a Colt .38 Super out of the bag and shot the dog twice. The dog yelped, groaned, staggered backwards, and fell over, shaking uncontrollably until the shaking stopped. The dog’s last thought before giving up the ghost was, “What did I ever do to you?”

   Jimmy tried to get up.

   “Stay where you are. Don’t be the dog.”

   “Jesus Christ, why did you do that?” His ears were ringing from the blasts. He didn’t care about the dog, but was shaken.

   “Dogs are a man’s best friend,” the woman said. “I’m not a man. He wasn’t my best friend.” She threw the gun down at his feet. “That’s yours.”

   In that moment Jimmy understood they were from Montreal. He understood they had found him. He understood his life was in danger. He didn’t reach for the handgun. There was no point in trying. If he tried, he would be as dead as the dog in no time flat.

   “What you need to do, Jimmy, is print another batch of bills for us,” the man said, taking a picture of the counterfeiter with his camera. “If you don’t, what happened to your dog will happen to you. The sooner you print them, the better. In the meantime, we are going to find whoever stole our first batch and take care of that business. When we do, we will be back to get what is ours before we leave. Do you understand?”

   “I understand,” Jimmy said.

   “If anybody asks about the dog, just say he dropped dead,” the woman said. “And put that gun away somewhere safe, so nobody gets hurt on this shitty island.” They walked away, going up the bay the way they had been going. 

   “You’ve had a hell of a bad attitude ever since we got here,” Jules Gagnon said as they walked away. “There was no need to shoot that dog. What is the matter with you?”

   “Shut the fuck up,” Louise Barboza said.

   “And that’s another thing. You’ve been cursing up a storm everywhere we go. You’ve been cursing in Portuguese in your sleep.” Louise was Quebecois, like Jules, but her grandmother was Portuguese. The old woman cursed like a sailor and taught Louise everything she knew. The two killers were sharing a motel room with two queen beds. Jules avoided Louise’s bed the same as if a tarantula was lurking under the covers. “Tone it down. We’ve got to stay low profile.”

   “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she muttered, sullen and swellheaded.

   Waiting until the man and woman were smudges in the distance, Jimmy stood up and looked down at the dead dog. “Goddamn it,” he said to himself, and turned around to go back the way he had come. When he was gone gulls and crows started nosing around the still warm Lab. A fox crept out of his burrow to investigate. Flies put the word out and were soon gathering. Jimmy came back and waved them away. He pushed the dead dog into the bay. By that night the carcass had floated past Morell and the lighthouse. 

   Kulloo hung in mid-air high in the sky watching over him, watching him sink. When the moon came out the dog was gone out to sea. Kulloo had a bad taste in his mouth. There is going to be blood, he thought.

   The next day Jimmy drove to a farm outside Saint Catherine’s and got a new dog. It was a Pit Bull almost full grown and trained to bite on command. It took a week, but he taught the dog to hate guns. When he was done, the Pit Bull knew full well to bite any hand not Jimmy’s that had a gun in it.

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, 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.”