The Rest is Silence Read Online Free Page B

between the cultivated flower beds. I stick my nose into a pink flower and inhale its scent.
    â€œSalt air makes them big and pungent. The septic tank should be here.”
    He scuffs the ground with his boot. “Or over here a bit. My brother, Joshua, kept track of that sort of thing. All the drains are backed up and the house smells bad. One of the pipes is blocked and we need to find it. According to the map Joshua drew forty years ago, the pipe runs along here.” I follow his hand with my eye to a half-dozen trees on the edge of the cliff that drops into the bay. “The outlet is between those two trees.”
    The outlet? The crazy bugger is flushing his raw shit onto the beach.
    â€œJust like in Halifax, huh?”
    My voice sounds harsh, but it makes me sad to see how the city treats its harbour like a giant toilet bowl. Piss, shit, and toilet paper, bleach, paint, used motor oil, battery acid: one big cesspool. The tides come twice each day, out-in, out-in, but don’t flush it out. There are snails in the harbour that can’t decide whether they are male or female, their indeterminate sex the result of who-knows-what synthetic hormones flowing out of sewage pipes.
    â€œNo, no, no.” He laughs. “The outlet pipe is a hundred feet from the edge of the cliff.”
    I’m relieved.
    â€œIf you dig here, you should find the connection. I’m going to the woods for a bit,” he says. “I’ve got a log that’s hung up in another tree.”
    A mattock and shovel lie on the ground near us. Digging holes by the shore is no easier than in my so-called garden. The shovel hits rock after rock, the shocks reverberating along my forearms. I straighten my back for a rest and lean on the shovel. Trees rim the clearing in front of me. The spruce and firs are blasted by the cold winds off the sea in winter and stunted by the cool fogs of summer. They might be a hundred years old, but none is so tall that I couldn’t throw a stone over it. From my right, beyond where the trickle of the pipe overflows onto the grass, comes the sound of waves licking the cliffs along the shore. Art walks through the clearing wearing an orange helmet and face guard and carrying a chainsaw and a couple of orange plastic wedges. His gait is stiff but purposeful. Soon, the crashing of the waves is interrupted by the whine of his saw.
    I go back to digging, bending down with each shovelful to remove the stones that impede my progress. It is almost an hour before I make it down three feet and feel the click-click of the shovel on the clay pipe we are looking for. Shit, it stinks out here. I dig a wider hole to locate the suspect connection, see that the outlet of the pipe is shattered, and begin to clear the soil from around and under it so it can be replaced. The lines on my fingers are traced with soil, like mini tattoos, and there is a dark rim under each of my chipped nails. My hands are never clean since I moved here.
    I think back over this first summer, all the hard work I’ve done alone, and I remember meeting Art a month ago. I had spent the afternoon in the sun weeding Martin’s carrot beds. He gave me a dozen lush tomato transplants when I was done. Jen invited me to go with her to a dance at the fire hall in Margaretsville that night. I was eager to get out and have some company. Martin doesn’t like to dance and didn’t want to go with his wife. I was glad he wasn’t coming. He’s always crapping on me for not being practical enough, and I suspect he’s jealous of the friendship I have with Jen. At that point it had been so long since I’d been in a city or heard live music that I would have listened to a marching band of accordions and kazoos.
    I went home and put the tomato plants in the ground late enough in the day that they wouldn’t be shocked by the sun and watered them. Then I watered myself.
    Jen drove us down the winding road to the