Island (43 page)

“A potato,” she shouts and flings herself into my arms, elated and impressed by her own cleverness and by my lack of understanding.

She is the great-great-granddaughter of the blind woman who died in flames and of the man called
Mac an Amharuis;
and both of us, in spite of our age and comprehension, are indeed the children of uncertainty.

Most of the major characters in this story are, as the man called
Mac an Amharuis
once said of others, “all gone” in the literal sense. There remains only Kenneth MacAllester, who works as a janitor for a soap company in Toronto. Unable ever to join the Air Force and fly toward the sun and see over the tops of mountains and across the ocean because of what happened to his eye on that afternoon so long ago. Now he has an artificial eye and, as he says, “Only a few people know the difference.”

When we were boys we would try to catch the slippery spring mackerel in our hands and look into the blindness of their eyes, hoping to see our own reflections. And when the wet ropes of the lobster traps came out of the sea, we would pick out a single strand and then try to identify it some few feet farther on.
It was difficult to do because of the twisting and turning of the different strands within the rope. Difficult ever to be certain in our judgements or to fully see or understand. Difficult then to see and understand the twisted strands within the rope. And forever difficult to see and understand the tangled twisted strands of love.

A
ll day the rain fell upon the island and she waited. Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.

She poked the fire within the stove, turning the half-burned lengths of wood so that they would burn more evenly. Some of the wood lengths were old fence posts or timbers that had been hauled from the shore before being cut into sizes that would fit the stove. Some of them contained ancient nails which were bent and twisted deep into the wood’s core. When the fire was very hot, they glowed to a cherry red, reminiscent of a blacksmith’s
shop or, perhaps, their earliest casting. They would glow in the intense heat while the wood was consumed around them and, in the morning, they would be shaken down with the ashes, black and twisted but still there in the greyness of the ashpan. On days when the fire burned with less intensity because the wood was damp or the draughts poor, they remained a rusted brown while the damp wood sputtered and hissed reluctantly before releasing them from the coffins in which they were confined. Today was such a day.

She went to the window and looked out once more. Beneath the table the three black-and-white dogs followed her with their eyes but made no other movement. They had been outside several times during the day and the wetness of their coats gave off the odour of damp woollen garments which have been hung to dry. When they came in, they shook themselves vigorously beside the stove, causing a further sputtering and hissing, as the water droplets fell against the heated steel.

Through the window and the beaded sheets of rain she could see the grey shape of
tir mòr
, the mainland, more than two miles away. Because of her failing sight and the nature of the weather she was not sure if she could really see it. But she had seen it in all weathers and over so many decades that the image of it was clearly in her mind, and whether she actually saw it or remembered it, now, seemed to make no difference.

The mainland was itself but another large island although most people did not think of it in that way. It was, as many said, larger than the province of Prince Edward Island and even some European countries and it had paved roads and cars and now even shopping centres and a fairly large population.

On rainy or foggy evenings such as this, it was always hard to see and to understand the mainland, but when the sun shone it was clearly visible with its white houses and red or grey barns, and with the green lawns and fields surrounding the houses while the rolling mountains of dark green spruce rose behind them. At night the individual houses, and the communities they formed, seemed to be magnified because of the lights. In the daytime if you looked at a certain spot you might see only one house and perhaps a barn, but at night there might be several lights shining from the different windows of the house, and perhaps a light at the barn and other lights shining from hydro poles in the yard, or in the driveway or along the road. And there were the moving lights caused by the headlights of the travelling cars. It all seemed more glamorous at night, perhaps because of what you could not see, and conversely a bit more disappointing in the day.

She had been born on the island at a time so long ago that there was now nobody living who could remember it. The event no longer lived in anybody’s mind, nor was it recorded with accuracy anywhere on paper. She had been born a month prematurely, at the beginning of the spring break-up when crossing from the island to the mainland was impossible.

At other times her mother had tried to reach the mainland before her children were born. Sometimes she would cross almost a month before the expected delivery because the weather and the water in all seasons, except summer, could never be depended upon. She had planned to do so this time as well but the ice that covered the channel during the winter months began to decay earlier than usual. It would not bear the
weight of a horse and sleigh or even a person on foot and there were visible channels of open water running like eager rivers across what seemed like the grey-white landscape of the rotting ice. It was too late for foot travel and too early for a boat because there was not, as yet, enough open water. And then, too, she was born a month earlier than expected. All of this she was, of course, told much later. She was also told that when the winter began her parents did not realize that her mother was pregnant. Her father was sixty at the time and her mother close to fifty and they were already grandparents. They had not had any children for five years and had thought their child-bearing years were past and the usual signs were no longer there or at least not recognized until later in the season. So her birth, as her father said, was “unexpected” in more ways than one.

She was the first person ever born on the island as far as anybody knew.

Later she was brought across to the mainland to be christened. And still later when the clergyman was sending his baptismal records to the provincial capital he included hers along with those of the children who had been born on the mainland. And perhaps to simplify matters he recorded her birthplace as being the same as that of the other children and of her brothers and sisters, or if he did not intend to simplify perhaps he had merely forgotten. He also had the birth date wrong and it was thought that perhaps he had forgotten to ask the parents or had forgotten what they had told him and by the time he was ready to send in his records they had already gone back to the island and he could not contact them. So he seemed to have counted back a number of days before the christening and selected his
own date. Her middle name was wrong, too. Her parents had called her Agnes but he had somehow copied it down as Angus. Again perhaps he had forgotten or was preoccupied, and he was a very old man at the time, as evidenced by his shaky, spidery handwriting. And, it was pointed out, his own middle name was Angus. She did not know any of this until years later when she sent for her official birth certificate in anticipation of her own marriage. Everyone was surprised that a single document could contain so many errors and by that time the old clergyman had died.

Although hers was thought to be the only birth to have occurred on the island there had been a number of deaths. One of them was that of her own grandfather, who had died one November from “a pain in the side” after pulling up his boat for the winter – thinking there would be no further need for a boat until the spring. He was only forty when it happened, the death occurring two weeks after his birthday. His widow and children did not know what to do as there was no adequate radio communication and they were not strong enough to get the boat he had so recently hauled up back into the water. They waited for two days hoping the sullen grey waves would subside, and stretching his body out on the kitchen table and covering it with white sheets – afraid to put too much fire in the kitchen stove lest it might hasten the body’s decay.

On the third day they launched a small skiff and tried to row across to the mainland. They did not know if they would be strong enough to make it, so they gathered large numbers of dried cattails and reeds from one of the island’s marshes and placed them in a metal washtub and doused them with the oil
used for the lamp at the lighthouse. They placed the tub in the prow of the skiff and when they rowed out beyond the shape of the island they set the contents of the tub on fire, hoping that it might act as a signal and a sign. On the mainland someone saw the rising funnel of grey-black smoke and the shooting flames at its base and then the skiff moving erratically – rowed by the desperate hands of the woman and her children. Most of the mainland boats had already been pulled up for the winter, but one was launched and the men went out to what looked like a burning boat and tossed a line to it and towed it in to the wharf after first taking off the woman and her children and comforting them and listening to their story. Later the men went out to the island and brought the man’s body over to the mainland so that, although he died on the island, he was not buried there. And still later that evening someone went over to light the lamp in the lighthouse so that it might send out its flashing warning to possible travellers on the night-time sea. Even in the face of her husband’s death, the woman, as well as her family, harboured fears that they might lose the job if the Government realized the lightkeeper was dead. They had already purchased their supplies for the winter and there was no other place to go so late in the season, so they decided to say nothing until the spring and returned to the island after the funeral accompanied by the woman’s brother.

The original family had gone to the island because of death, or rather to aid in death’s reduction. The lighthouse was established in the previous century because of the danger the island represented to ships travelling in darkness or in uncertain weather. It was thought that the light would warn sea travellers
of the danger of the island or, conversely, that it might represent hope to those already at the sea’s mercy and who yearned so much to reach its rocky shore. Before the establishment of the light there had been a number of wrecks which might or might not have been avoided had there been a light. What was known with certainty was that survivors had landed on the island only to die from exposure and starvation because no one knew that they were there. Their skeletons had been found accidentally by fishermen in the spring – huddled under trees or outcrops of rock in the positions of their deaths. Some still had the remains of their arms around one another. Some still with tattered, flapping clothes covering their bones although the flesh between the clothing and the bones was no longer there.

When the family first went they were told that their job was to keep the light and offer salvation to any of those who might come ashore. The Government erected buildings for them which were better than those of their relatives on the mainland, and helped them with the purchase of livestock and original supplies. To some it seemed they had a good job – a Government job. In answer to the question of the isolation, they told themselves they would get used to it. They told themselves they were already used to it, coming as they did from a people in the far north of Scotland who had for generations been used to the sea and the wind and sleet and rocky outcrops at the edge of their part of Europe. Used to the long nights when no one spoke and to the isolation of islands. Used to seeing their men going to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company and not expecting them back for years. Used to seeing their men going to the vast ocean-like
tracts of prairie in places like Montana and Wyoming to work as sheepherders. To spend months that sometimes stretched into years, talking only to dogs or to themselves or to imaginary people who blended into ghosts. Startled by the response to their own voices when they appeared, strange and unexpectedly, at the camp or at the store or at the rural trading post. In demand as sheepherders, because it was believed, and because they had been told, that they did not mind the isolation. “Of course I spoke to ghosts,” a man was supposed to have said once upon his returning. “Wouldn’t you if there was no one else to speak to?”

In the early days on the island, there was no adequate radio communication, and if they were in trouble and unable to get across they would light fires on the shore in the hope that such signs would be visible on the mainland. In the hope that they, who had gone to the island as part of the business of salvation, might themselves be saved. And when the Great War was declared, it was said, they did not know of it for weeks, coming ashore to be told the news by their relatives, coming ashore to a world which would be forever changed.