The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham Page A

at Art’s all day. He stands leaning against the door jamb as I unroll the sleeping bag on his couch.
    â€œLouise loves to ski.”
    â€œThey’ll get the roads plowed soon.”
    He isn’t listening.
    â€œShe’s so graceful on skis. The nurses look at her and see the sparkle in her eyes. They tell me they know she’s still there.”
    I have learned from the short time I’ve spent with him that it’s best not to say anything. If you start asking questions or give him your opinion on the matter he either gets lost or shuts up. I know he needs to get where he wants to go with this.
    â€œWhen she started to lose her memory it wasn’t obvious. She’d leave one of the burners on after pulling the pot off. Or she’d go into the garden on a rainy day and leave the front door open. ‘Put wood in the hole,’ I’d shout after her. She had always been the one reminding me to close that door. Then she’d look at me all confused and say she was sorry, and I’d regret barking at her. Life’s a bugger sometimes.”
    I nod.
    He wipes his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, pretending he is weary. “I’ve gotta get some sleep.”
    He turns and leaves the room. The heat makes me drowsy, but I can’t yet sleep. There are so many things I still can’t understand.
    *
    My first trip to Nova Scotia, August 1985
    As much as I liked gardening with my father, it took forever for the middle of August to arrive so we could go to Nova Scotia. When it did, my sleeping bag and bathing suit had been packed for three weeks by the end of my bed.
    It was the peak of summer, and as we drove across Maine, the smell of freshly spread manure was everywhere. We had all four windows rolled down, the hot summer air pouring in, and the smell from the fields filling the car. Dad inhaled the rich pong of soil fertility through his nostrils. We crossed the bridge onto Mount Desert Island, under which the water was rushing out to sea, and drove to Bar Harbor. There we sailed on the Bluenose to Yarmouth. The first night in Nova Scotia we stayed at a campsite on the edge of a lake. I asked him why he always took the site the wardens assigned to us. We never looked around to see which site we wanted. He said that if he were a pioneer he would take the first piece of land he came to. He wouldn’t keep walking over the next hill to see if it was any better.
    The next day everyone started leaving the campground. Dad asked another camper why they were leaving, and she told us that a hurricane was sweeping up the coast. My father was the kind of father who looked at that as an adventure. Good thing Mom wasn’t there.
    The winds picked up long before the storm arrived, whipping the lake’s surface into whitecaps. He put me in our small inflatable raft, tethered it to a tree onshore, and watched me ride the waves. I was laughing as the raft went up and down and spun around in the wind. We went to sleep that night anxious and excited, the tent tied to the spruce trees in the campsite. The wind pushed the trees around all night until I thought they would split, but there was little rain.
    I woke first, as usual, and was looking down on him when he opened his eyes. Sunshine and the shadows of leafy branches fell on the canvas. I whispered, dramatically, “We’re alive!” He loved that joke. He said it cured him of any doubt that I’d take to camping.
    We drove along the coast by Digby. When Dad stopped at the side of the highway to pee a little beyond Annapolis Royal, he collected seeds from the pods of desiccated lupines to sow in our garden at home. Our destination that day was Middleton, the town Dad was born in. After his father died at Dieppe, my grandmother took him to live with her sister on a farm. He tried to find the house, but he had little information to go on. We found a museum that had genealogical archives and found a record for his father, Stuart,