Deluded Your Sailors

St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador
2011

© 2011, Michelle Butler Hallett

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing program.

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Cover Design by Todd Manning
Layout by Joanne Snook-Hann
Printed on acid-free paper

Published by
CREATIVE PUBLISHERS
an imprint of CREATIVE BOOK PUBLISHING
a Transcontinental Inc. associated company
P.O. Box 8660, Stn. A
St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador A1B 3T7

Printed in Canada by:
TRANSCONTINENTAL INC.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Butler Hallett, Michelle

Deluded your sailors / Michelle Butler Hallett.

ISBN 978-1-897174-77-7

I. Title.

PS8603.U855D44 2011                   C813'.6                   C2011-905322-5

SKY WAVES

Sky Waves
is a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling, which complicates oral/aural tradition... both raucously funny and deeply troubling as it delves courageously into Newfoundland's many-faced identity.
Sky Waves
mobilises the cinematic: we find ourselves investing personally in each character, trying to hold on to them in memory until they reappear, potentially in another time, another place. The elusive characters are nevertheless compelling, for their radio silences are punctuated with our developing relationship with them: we yearn for their return from the past or future, hoping that they might give us the key to the novel, a desire
Sky Waves
intentionally never satisfies. When they do come to the fore, they are painfully bright and neurotic, sharp with wit and experience, and even malice. Others are cast in warm soft-focus, threatening to retreat into the past before we get what we want from them; dead before they can speak for themselves, their loss haunts us like a voice we can't quite make out. When we do, Butler Hallett's characters come to life actively, fighting for air time. Their humour betrays generations of pain, and yet their pains are so incredibly human that frequently we can't help but laugh. –
Maple Tree Literary Supplement

Butler Hallett is not afraid to take chances with genre or format. The convolutions in the plotlines are clarified by writing that is imaginative and uncluttered... there are scenes of violence, psychological descent and physical degradation that are frank and unflinching. At the same time, Butler Hallett is often very funny. –
The Telegram

DOUBLE-BLIND, shortlisted for the 2007 Sunburst Award

Butler Hallett's own weapons are subtly deployed in this convincing human drama. Her characters are thorough and striking, and her book is replete with aspects of horror, mystery, and hospital thriller, while transcending the conventions of mere genre. The descriptions of medical procedures are impressive in their detail, but the book avoids ‘going textbook' on the reader. In fact, Butler Hallett's voice often surprisingly, pleasantly veers to the poetic. The Vietnam vets are described as ‘each rotting in his own illness.' Giving electroconvulsive therapy to one terrified kid, Bozeman discovers, within the child's psyche, ‘some brittle landscape, hard fruit on the ground.' Both Bozeman and Hallett dare to go beyond the accepted – in both cases, to impressively terrifying results. –
Quill and Quire

Double-blind
is wonderfully original while chillingly based in history. It really shook us up. Through the chronically self-deceived mind of the narrator, the novel delves into profound questions of ethics in a morally ambiguous world, and comes up with tragically ironic answers. The writing is incredibly layered, with metaphor and symbol perfectly balanced against the hard neutrality of scientific language. – Sunburst Award Jury.

Skill and confidence... economy and power. –
Books in Canada

THE SHADOW SIDE OF GRACE

A rich and demanding read... Butler Hallett seems often to be creating from a subliminal place, riding on intuition, unencumbered by the counsel of editors. –
The Globe and Mail

Draws from all of her influences to create a genre that is truly her own. –
The Calgary Herald

Her characters speak from the margins of society, or of their own sanity... her writing is succinct and taut, her topics both universal and so offbeat as to be genuinely original, and her manner spare and unsparing. –
The Telegram

Your men was not crazy, your men was not mad

Your men was not deep in despair-o

I deluded your sailors as well as yourself

I'm a maiden again on the shore, shore, shore

I'm a maiden again on the shore.

– ‘Maid on the Shore,'
folk song,
as sung by The Once.

Another one for Michael Thompson – dead, but I keep wanting
to show you how this one worked out.

And another one for you, David, husband and friend,
scant return on all your love.

Contents

ACTS OF FOLLY

1) Opening remarks

2) Case notes

3) Live documents

4) Big white phone

5) ‘Where once'

6) Dirty deeds

7) The sailmaker's secret knife

8) Bowgrace

ACTS OF FEVER

9) Windrose

10) The relics

11) Drink that light

12) Dead reckoning

13) Peter's Rue

14) Rara avis
, common curs

15) Little
Honour

16) Menhir

17) ‘If your legs be as long as the light'

18) The wandering eye

19) The critch and the nunny bag

20) Chasing word

21) God-walkers

22) Calenture

23) Blurred roughwork

24) Cuntspliced to the bummary

25) Booking passage

26) Final report

27) The surrendered plait

28) Dust on wet ink

ACTS OF FAITH

29) ‘fret thy shore'

30) ‘I ain't got a time or a place'

31) Family reunion

32) ‘winter's stern command'

33) Blowout

34) ‘But its truths are all bound to the never-ending escape'

35) Benedictions

ACTS OF FOLLY

Everything is Bulls**t = $$$

Phil Churchill,
Anything is Possible