Monkey Beach Read Online Free PDF Page B

his boat. The docks had squealed and moaned, undulating over the water like snakes. One of the boats had swirled like a toy boat caught in the bathtub’s drain. The tide had risen so high, the ocean leaked and slid over the roads. Then the docks went underwater and the boats were floating over them, bumping and grinding their keels against them when the waves dipped down. Uncle Geordie gave up when the gangplank started twisting. Later, he found his seiner on the beach with half its keel scraped off.

    That spring was lush, filled with hazy sunlight and long afternoons on the porch with Mom, and we basked like lizards on her newly ordered patio furniture. Dad sat down beside us that afternoon and announced that he was going to grow a vegetable garden. Mom opened one eye, lifted a languid hand and sipped her coffee. “Good. Go do that.”
    At the garden centre, he poured over the seed packets, enlisting the help of passing clerks and othercustomers. He showed me pictures of the plants and asked if I’d want to eat this or that. He spent the next three weeks happily turning ground, fertilizing, balancing pHs and planting seeds in egg cartons on our windowsills. I enthusiastically searched for worms and brought interesting bugs into the house in a Mason jar with the lid punched through with holes. Mom refused to join in, annoyed when Dad asked if she’d mind weeding.
    “Look at these,” she said, holding up her perfectly manicured fingernails with their stylish red nail polish. “Do you know how long I worked on these?”
    Somewhere in our deepest past, in among eons of fishermen, there must have been a farmer. Whatever Dad touched grew like it had been fast-forwarded in a film. The sunflowers in the front yard shot up eight feet, with basketball-sized flowers that stared sullenly at the ground. The pumpkins and zucchini sprawled over potato patches and fought with the strawberry runners for ground space. Bees hummed contentedly in our greenery through the spring and summer, and the kids who raided our garden said there wasn’t a better one in the village. In the pictures of the garden that year, Dad posed me and Jimmy for maximum effect, standing us beside the largest sunflowers, having us sit on the most orange pumpkins.
    Over the years, he became more ambitious. He made an elaborate archway over the walk that led to our front door and planted trailing roses that everyone knew died in the winter. Ours survived to become thorough nuisances, choking Mom’s nasturtiums and displacing carefully laid bricks with their gnarly roots.Corn flourished for him, attracting hordes of crows and sparrows. Rhubarb spread broad leaves and grew to mutant-like heights, becoming hard and inedible when we refused to pick it, sick of the sweetly sour taste after weeks of eating it. Dad even transplanted a full-grown greengage tree from a house that was going to be demolished, and despite everyone’s predictions to the contrary, the tree survived, producing fruit three years after it was plopped in our front yard, attracting kids and birds. The birds squawked and fought over the plums, and at least once a year, some kid would fall out of the tree and break an arm.
    “Is a simple lawn so much to ask for?” Mom asked Aunt Edith over the phone. “Why does he always have to go overboard?”
    You could always tell when Dad had done something he knew she wasn’t going to like. His shoulders hunched, his smile turned up only the corners of his mouth and his eyebrows went halfway up his forehead, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d done either.
    “Now what?” Mom said, watching him gingerly carry a large cardboard box up our front steps. She opened the door for him, and we could all hear the high, sweet chirping of the chicks that poked their tiny beaks out of the air holes.
    Dad smiled his silly smile, and Mom bit down firmly on whatever she was going to say and slammed the door in his face. “Chickens!” I heard her shouting at him