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On The Floor
Of The World
“Carver,” he said, “if I catch you speeding one more time I’m
going to have to take your boat.”
Grandfather stared impassively at the police officer. “I was barely
going fast at all!” He sounded insulted, almost petulant.
The police officer sighed. I got the feeling that this was not the
first time Grandfather had been in trouble.
Now I could see why I hadn’t seen this man since I was a baby.
We’d been on a boat, my family and I and my mother’s friends. It
was dark, so dark that the night settled upon us like a blanket with
only the faint shine of the stars a universe away to guide us in our
blindness. So dark that we didn’t see grandfather coming, speeding
towards us on his boat. In that moment we were his prey, his
targets, faceless, unseeable objects on the floor of the world, far, far
below him.
It probably didn’t happen that way. I’m only reconstructing the
stories my parents told me, filling the gaps they left with an image
of a man who resembles my Grandfather.
’
I remember: two weeks before myMother sentenced me to a month
with relatives I’d never met in some far off corner of the United
States, I was standing at the farthest tip of a cove. I had jumped from
rock to rock until I was thigh deep in cold water and had no more
rocks to jump to. Before me the shallow shelf gave way to the dark
blue depths. Skin sheathed in goose-bumps, I was shivering. The
expanse of the sea stretched out before me, vast and imposing, and I
felt impossibly small. I wanted to yell:
Is this it?
But the numbness in
my stomach had spread all over my body like a lake freezing over, my
words blocked by an impenetrable wall of ice.
Now here: Saint Lawrence where the water was perfectly wild.
The wind swept the water up and down into mountains peaked by
white foam and dark valleys that swelled and swallowed. The
canoe’s seat dug into my back and my nose was pink and sore from
sunburn, yet I still felt cold.
Chip was one of my younger cousins, with a warm smile, broad
shoulders and bright orange hair. In truth, I did not know how
exactly I was related to him, he could have been my brother and I
would have still looked at him as if he was a stranger. Chip had
insisted in taking me out canoeing. I had hesitantly agreed, not
wanting to stay another day being introduced to the seemingly
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