On Island

  To the people of the coast, with admiration and affection

  CONTENTS

  CAT DUMP

  NATURE LOVERS

  PRIESTS AND PAGANS

  GARDEN PARTY

  BLONDIE

  BATS IN THE BELFRY

  PET PARADE

  BATTLE FOR THE BEACH

  MEDICAL CLINIC

  BURN PILE

  FISH FRY

  DOCK DEBATES

  LIGHTS OUT

  BOOK THIEF

  HARBOUR GIRL

  FAMILY FEUD

  FAMILY WEDDING

  STORM

  THE INLET

  SEA WOLF

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many of the events in these stories happened somewhere, sometime, on British Columbia’s coast. The characters are fictional. Since there are no names, no names have been changed.

  Who, where, and when? It is the reader’s choice.

  Pat Carney

  Saturna Island, BC

  CAT DUMP

  ONE SUNNY SUMMER MORNING A woman drove off the inter-island ferry in her battered white 1986 Saab 900 and parked in front of the Wharf Store, leaving the engine running. Who she was and where she came from doesn’t matter. We never see or hear from her again. It is what she did that counts.

  In the time it took the ferry crew to discharge the ship’s load of cars and passengers and board the traffic heading off island—maybe ten minutes—the woman opened the backseat door of her car, unloaded a couple of cat carriers, opened their doors and dumped eight cats on the potholed blacktop road. Then she climbed into her car, shifted into gear and drove back on the ferry. She never looked back.

  The eight cats staggered to their feet and looked around. They arched their backs to stretch, or sat down and licked their coats or groomed their whiskers, ignoring the glances of the embarking foot passengers. They were a motley mix of felines: tabby, golden, black, grey, black and grey, calico, tortoiseshell and one startlingly beautiful white cat with chocolate ears and blue eyes who glanced calmly about her. They were all very thin.

  After the ferry sailed with the woman on board, the wharf area sank back into the singing silence, broken only by the shrieks of the gulls and the intermittent comings and goings of people entering the Wharf Store or the pub built below it.

  At first, the cats stayed in the sun-warmed patch of road, guarded only by the cormorants that stood like solitary sentinels, each assigned to the top of a single wooden pile of the island dock. Some cats curled up in the sunlight and slept. Later, as the afternoon shadows cooled the blacktop, they dispersed, one by one, into the bushes or trotting tail up along the edge of the road. By evening, all had disappeared.

  The next morning the Professor and his wife, newcomers to island life, were enjoying their fresh brewed morning coffee on the patio of their waterside home. “Look,” said the wife excitedly, pointing to the birdbath at the edge of the patio where a young raccoon was standing on its hind legs drinking the rainwater out of the bowl. When it had finished, the raccoon dropped back onto all four feet and moved toward the house. They watched in horror as it vanished into a hole in the basement foundation.

  “How will we get it out?” asked the Professor’s wife in dismay. She had heard stories of raccoons taking over basements, nesting with their young, chittering away at all hours of the night, entering houses through the cat door in search of food and water, making enormous and foul-smelling messes for the occupants to clean up.

  Then, as if on cue, they saw a beautiful white cat with chocolate ears step out of the garden hedge and follow the grey raccoon into the basement through the hole in the foundation. They held their breath, waiting for the carnage, the tearing of flesh, the screams of pain from the little cat that was sure to follow when the raccoon turned on the invader.

  Instead, there was silence. The couple picked up their coffee mugs and retreated into the house, shutting the glass patio door firmly behind them. Island life was not for the faint of heart.

  Later that day, the Church Warden phoned his wife on her cell phone from his cluttered workshop attached to his garage. She was playing bridge in the Community Hall.

  “What is it?” she asked irritably, studying her hand.

  “I am being held hostage by a cat,” he said in a voice pitched low to avoid being overheard by the tabby that crouched at the workshop door with baleful eyes, barring his exit.

  “That’s ridiculous,” his wife snapped. She surprised herself. It was uncharacteristic of her to speak so sharply to her overbearing husband. “You can’t be serious.”

  “But it won’t let me leave the workshop,” he replied gruffly, eyeing the cat. “It moves when I do and blocks my way.” He didn’t like cats. They were one species he couldn’t intimidate.

  “It’s probably hungry,” said his wife impatiently. Her bridge partners were listening intently to her side of the conversation. “Take a can of tuna from the earthquake supplies cupboard in the garage, open it, put it down beside the cat, and then step over it.”

  The Church Warden did what she ordered. He was able to retreat to their house beyond the garage, where he poured himself a rum and Coke. The next morning, he found the tabby sitting on the back step off the kitchen, paws tucked under its body, eyes fixed on the kitchen door.

  The Church Warden sighed. “Let’s call it a truce,” he told the cat, turning away to write cat food on the shopping list on the refrigerator door.

  A day or two later, the Master Gardener was examining his climbing beans in the community garden down in the valley when he noticed a black and grey cat crouched in the long grass near the Cat House, the penned enclave where the islanders nurtured the abandoned strays and feral cats they collected from all over the island.

  The present Cat House population was nine, all housed in gaily decorated boxes and kennels retrieved from the Free Store at the Recycling Centre. Although clearly fatigued but too proud to beg for food, the black and grey cat exuded a certain male authority from his post in the grass. The Master Gardener calculated the number of males and females, all spayed or neutered—or “fixed,” in island parlance—currently in residence and concluded there was room for one more.

  “Why do people who move off island think their pets can survive on their own and leave them to fend for themselves?” the Gardener muttered to his plants. “Indoor cats aren’t mousers. And they can’t defend themselves from mink or raccoons.”

  He approached the cat in the grass slowly, with a soft step. The cat quickly retreated. A crow perched in the trees along the road cawed a caution. The Gardener thought. He couldn’t leave the gate to the Cat House open or the resident cats might escape.

  He crossed the street to his garage where he stored his cat food, opened a can of whitefish, and spooned some into a cat dish. He poured fresh water into another container. He went back to the Cat House, placed the food and water near the gate, and left the garden.

  That evening, when he went back to feed the resident cats, the dish near the gate was empty. There was no sign of the black and grey cat in the grass. It might take a few days, thought the Gardener, but eventually he would coax the visitor into the Cat House to join the others. Unless a mink got to him first.

  Goldie the golden retriever rescued the golden cat in the Dog Patch up the road by the island’s only General Store, where shoppers were encouraged to tie their dogs to the trees to reduce the risk of them being run over by the island vehicles that rumbled in and out of the narrow parking lot. Goldie’s owner, a musician known as Blondie, was collecting the mail at the island Post Office, located inside the General Store.

  She also picked up a bottle of Little Creek salad dressing to assist the local sheep farmer, who fitted the empty bottles with special screw-on lamb nipples, made in
New Zealand, and recycled them as lambing aids to supply the baby lambs with extra milk.

  She stopped for a coffee in the adjacent café, snatching a quick read from the Guardian newspaper on the communal table by the serve-yourself coffee flasks on the counter. The café was staffed on a complicated schedule dictated by ferry schedules and recycling hours that brought customers in for a gossip and the cinnamon buns and a few food items, although most islanders did their big shop on their weekly trip to town on Big Island. Seniors on OAP, or old-age pension, travelled on days when pedestrian fares were reduced.

  When the musician came out of the café and walked over to the Dog Patch she found a tail-wagging Goldie with a small golden cat in its mouth. “What have you got this time?” she asked the dog, who responded with more frantic tail wagging, unable to bark an answer with his mouth full of golden fur.

  The musician and her partner lived up the mountain that centred the island and provided refuge and pasture for the herd of feral goats that overran the higher meadows. Over time, the couple collected abandoned and orphaned animals until they could find homes for them.

  The musician gently detached the golden furball from the dog’s mouth and determined it was a cat, not much more than a kitten. To her surprise, the little cat was purring. Her heart was thumping through the chest of her thin body as the musician held it in her long-fingered hands.

  The musician carefully placed the golden cat in her shopping basket and placed it in the front seat of her Jeep, away from the enthusiastic attentions of her dog, now in the back seat. I do not need another cat, she thought as she started the Jeep and headed out of the parking lot. We already have two outside mousers. But I can’t leave it in the Dog Patch. She turned onto the one-lane gravel road that led up the mountain, the cat purring in the basket on the seat beside her.

  A few nights later two islanders left the island’s only pub at closing time, their bellies full of beer, lurched up the stairs linking the pub to the road, and climbed into an ancient Ford Ranger pickup. The driver put it in gear, backed the truck up, and swung it around to turn onto the main road.

  It was dark as Satan. There were no street lights. The evening ferry had come and gone, discharging its grumpy load of shoppers returning from scrounging Seniors Day bargains in town. The driver and his passenger had no fear of police roadblocks as the pickup made its noisy and erratic way up the hill from the ferry. There were no police stationed on the island.

  They ran over the black cat as it scurried across the road from the Community Hall, where it had taken refuge with a grey companion cat after being dumped in front of the store. The Hall was skirted with cedar boards, some of which were missing, giving the building a toothless appearance but also offering protection from the rain to stray animals.

  The driver and his passenger felt the soft squish as the tire ran over the black cat. The driver braked to a stop. The men tumbled out of the pickup and stared at the dead body of the animal splayed over the blacktop under the front left tire. The passenger swore. “What do we do with it?” he asked his buddy. “We can’t just leave this mess here for the morning walk-on ferry passengers to trip over.”

  “I dunno,” said the driver. His beer-sloshed brain was trying to focus on the dead black animal lying under the tire. It was so dark it was hard to see anything beyond its shape, humping up from the blacktop.

  “Maybe if we lay it in the Church Warden’s driveway he can see it gets buried,” offered the passenger. He didn’t know whether to burp or throw up.

  “Right on,” said the driver.

  They retrieved a shovel from the bed of the pickup and scooped up the cat’s broken body and drove to the Warden’s house beside the church. They carefully laid the dead cat at the entrance to the driveway on the ridge in the centre so that the Warden would be sure to see it.

  Except, of course, it was the Church Warden’s wife who discovered the dead cat, laid out so straight in the middle of the driveway, when she went out for her morning walk. Shocked and upset, she ran back to her house shrieking for her husband, who was dumping kibble into a dish for his newly adopted tabby. He left it to nibble away while he soothed his wife and figured out where to bury the dead cat. The tabby didn’t look up from its dish.

  The grey cat, who had observed the squishy demise of the black cat, decided to take up residence behind the cedar skirts of the Community Hall, earning his keep on mouse patrol in the community kitchen, endearing himself to islanders as the official caretaker and community cat, rarely missing a concert or a public meeting and showing up for regular yoga classes.

  The off-islander was adopted by the calico cat that was living in the pub’s outside eating area that accommodated families who wanted coffee and food but couldn’t take their young children into the pub’s licensed premises. His wife and two children were eating their lamb burgers and chips at the tables in the garden when a child noticed the pretty calico cat, with its orange and white coat and black eye patch, sitting by his feet under the planked table, gazing fixedly at the burger in his hand.

  The cat was down to skin and bones, its ribs protruding through its fur. It was clearly starving. “Oh please, Mommy, can’t we take it home?” the children cried.

  Mommy looked at Daddy, who shrugged his shoulders. He wouldn’t be the one feeding it and changing the litter box. The parents asked the bartender for a box and some newspapers, and the family, plus cat, packed up and drove onto the ferry.

  No one ever rescued the tortoiseshell cat. Nobody remembered what it looked like. It simply disappeared into the forest. Maybe it died. Maybe the wolf killed it. Maybe it found a feral family of cats and lived happily ever after.

  Who knows?

  NATURE LOVERS

  WHEN THE COUPLE FIRST CAME to the island, they experienced the initial stage of adapting to island lifestyle: euphoria. They rhapsodized over the beauty of the sea, the green forests marching up and over the island’s mountain backbone, the friendly people in their unpretentious homes, the home-grown veggies for sale at absurdly low prices at the Saturday village outdoor market, the prawn boat tied up at the dock when the fishery was open. Time was measured by the rise and fall of the tides, the coming and going of the ferries.

  Bliss, they told each other fondly, secretly pleased their spouse shared their pleasure.

  It was her idea to move to the island after he retired from his law practice in town. Every business day of his working life he opened the files on his desk, dealing with the marital debris of divorce, partner disputes over the roadkill of their bankrupt businesses, drunk-driving charges facing people protesting their innocence.

  “Every day I deal with somebody’s disaster,” he often complained to her. “Is this all there is?” He sighed, not expecting her to answer, and retired to his study with his newspaper folded open at the Sudoku puzzle.

  His solace was his appointment as an adjunct Professor of Law at the University, where he tried, with some success, to expose his students to the seedy realities of the careers they had chosen beyond the expectation of a fat income. He took to referring to himself as Professor.

  When he came into a modest inheritance, he sold the practice to his partner with great relief and retired, with more regret, from the university law faculty.

  Rejuvenated, the couple assessed the opportunities that might be available and practical for their senior years. He thought of buying a bankrupt pub up-island. But despite her small-town background, she couldn’t see herself as a publican’s wife.

  He mused on returning to his roots in the upcountry, with its sage-spiked hills fringed with timber, and nostalgically recalled his early adolescence on an orchard above green Okanagan Lake, boring their daughter with tales of his victories over raccoons stealing the ripened fruit and his battles with armies of tent caterpillars.

  But his wife didn’t like her in-laws, who were openly dismayed when he married a social worker from an Interior town after the expense they incurred sending him to law school in the
city, with its rich sorority girls looking for their MRS degree.

  And so, when she found the real estate advertisement about the cottage by the sea, she booked the ferry to the island on a summer day of blue skies, warm sun, and calm seas. She thought they were in an earthly Paradise, protected by a national park that annexed part of the islands in the Salish Sea. They were happily ensconced in their cottage within a few weeks.

  By winter, they entered the second phase of adapting to the island lifestyle: alarm. Winter brought storms, dark skies, endless rain. The power went out for days, the ferries were cancelled, the veggies in the only island store grew pale and limp, the villagers hibernated in their tree-shrouded houses. No birdsong nor children’s voices on the beach. Only silence. Deafening, pervasive stillness, broken only by sporadic squalls of wind thrashing the suddenly threatening trees.

  “Why did you bring us to this godforsaken rock?” cried the husband accusingly, pointing his finger at his wife. “What have you done with our lives?”

  His wife put another chunk of cedar in the wood stove. She had no answer, because she had no idea.

  By the following spring they had lapsed into the third phase: acceptance. “Making the best of it,” they affirmed to each other. Their only daughter had flown the nest and was busily building her own life up the coast. And the sea view cottage, they told each other, was very comfortable and affordable, despite the outrageous taxes.

  When the beautiful white cat with the chocolate ears moved in with them they felt their island family was complete.

  So the couple tried to fit in. They bought Symphony tickets for Sunday concerts in town on the Big Island. They went to the monthly Women’s Club dinners, joined the local service club, played bridge on Wednesday afternoons, and enjoyed the concerts in the Community Hall. They also attended the island’s only church.

  She joined the book club, although nobody ever seemed to have read the assigned books. Instead, members hotly debated the salacious details of island marital breakdown, gay and straight—they were liberal minded, they told each other.