Island (46 page)

One day when there was a lull in the storms some of their relatives crossed the ice with a horse and sleigh. They were shocked at the condition and appearance of her father, seeing him changed “suddenly” after an absence of weeks while those who were with him had seen him change but gradually. They insisted that he return with them while the weather was good and the ice still strong. Reluctantly he agreed on the condition that his wife go with him.

After years of isolated permanence he was aware of all the questionable movement.

“Sometimes life is like that,” he said to his daughter as he sat bundled in a sleigh at the moment before departure. “It goes on and on at a certain level and then there comes a year when everything changes.”

Suddenly a gust of wind passed between them, whipping their faces with fine, sharp granules of snow. And suddenly she knew in that instant that she would never ever see him again. She wanted to tell him, to thank him or perhaps confess now that their time was vanishing between them. The secret of her own loneliness came down upon her and she reached toward his bundled body and his face, which was muffled in scarves except for his eyes, which were filled with water converting to ice.

“It was,” she said, “the red-haired man.”

“Oh yes,” he said but she did not know with what degree of comprehension he said it. And then the sleigh moved off with its runners squeaking on the winter snow.

Although she was prepared for the death of her father, she had not anticipated the loss of her mother, who died ten days after her husband. There was no physical explanation for her death and it seemed not unlike that of certain animals who pine away without their mates or who are unwilling or unable to adjust to new surroundings. As wild birds die in captivity or those who have been caged die from the shock of unexpected freedom or the loss of familiar boundaries.

Because of the spring break-up she was unable to attend either of their funerals, and on the respective days she looked across the high grey waves and the grotesque icebergs that rolled between. From the edge of the island she saw the long funeral processions following the horse-drawn coffins along the muddy
roads to the graveyard by the mainland church. She turned her face into the wind and climbed up toward the light.

That spring and summer she continued to tend the light, although she had little to do with the mainland fishermen and never walked down by the shanties. She began to sign the requisition slips for government supplies with the name “A. MacPhedran” because her initial and that of her father were the same. After a while the cheques came in the name of “A. MacPhedran” and she had no trouble cashing any of them. No one came to question the keeper of the light, and the sex of A. MacPhedran seemed ambiguously unimportant. After all, she told herself, wryly, her official birth certificate stated that her given name was Angus.

When the fall came she decided to remain on the island for the winter. Some of her relatives approved because they wanted “some MacPhedran” to remain on the island and they cited her youth and the fact that she was “used to it” as part of their reasoning. They were interested in “maintaining tradition” as long as they were not the ones to maintain that specific part of it. Others disapproved and toward them she was, secretly, most defiant. Her aunt and her aunt’s family had grown attached to her daughter, had “gotten used to her” as they said, and regarded the child as their own. When she visited them she experienced a certain fearful hostility on their part, as if they feared that she might snatch the child and flee while they were busy in another room.

Most of her relatives, however, either willingly or unwillingly, agreed to help her with the island, by assisting her with supplies, by doing some of the heavier autumn work, or even by
visiting occasionally. She settled into the life with a sort of wilful determination tempered by the fact that she was still waiting for something to happen and to bring about the change.

Two years later on a hot summer afternoon, she was in the lighthouse tower when she saw the boat approaching. She had been restless all day and had walked the length and width of the island twice. She had gone to its edge as if testing the boundaries, somewhat as a restless animal might explore the limitations of its cage. She had walked out into the cold salt water, feeling it move gradually up and through and under the legs of her father’s coveralls which had become, for her, a sort of uniform. She walked farther out feeling the water rise as she felt the rocks turning beneath her feet. She looked downward and saw her coveralled limbs distorted in the green water, shot through by the summer sun. They seemed not to be a part of her but to have become disembodied and convoluted and to be almost floating away from her at a horizontal level. When she closed her eyes she could feel them intensely but when she looked at them they did not appear the way they felt. The dogs lay on the shore, just above the water line, and watched her. They were panting in the summer heat and drops of water fell from the extended redness of their tongues.

She returned to the shore, still dripping, and walked among the shanties. The lobster fishermen had departed at the end of the season leaving very little of themselves behind. She walked among the deserted buildings looking at the few discarded objects, sometimes touching and turning them with her toes: a worn woollen sock, a length of spliced and twisted rope, a rusted knife with a broken blade, tobacco packages with bleached and
faded lettering, a rubber boot with a hole in it. It was as if she were walking through the masculine remnants of an abandoned and vanished civilization. She went back to the house to put on dry coveralls and to hang the wet ones on the outside clothesline. As she left to climb to the lighthouse she looked over her shoulder and was startled by the sight of the vertical coveralls. Their dangling legs rasped together with the gentlest of frictions and the moisture had changed their colour up to the waist. Droplets dripped from them onto the summer grass which was visibly distorted by their own moving shadow.

There were four men in the approaching boat and she realized that they were mackerel fishing and did not have the island in mind as a specific destination. The boat zigzagged back and forth across the stillness of the blue-green water, stopping frequently while the men tossed their weighted lines overboard. They jerked their lines up and down rhythmically hoping to attract the fish by the movement of the lures. Sometimes they dipped their hands into pails or tubs of
gruth
, dried cottage cheese, and flung the white handfuls onto the surface of the water, waiting and hoping for the unseen fish to strike. She turned her head and looked toward the back of the island. From her high vantage point she could see, or thought she could see, pods or schools of mackerel breaking the surface, beyond the meeting place and the table rock, and beyond the bay of the shipwreck. They seemed like moving, floating islands, changing the clear, flat surface into agitated areas that resembled boiling water.

She hurried down from the lighthouse and shouted and gestured to the men in the boat. They were still far offshore and,
perhaps, saw her before they heard her but were still unable to comprehend her message. They directed the boat toward the island. As they approached she realized that the movement of her arm, which was intended as a pointing gesture to the back of the island, was also a beckoning gesture, as they might understand it.

When they were within earshot she shouted to them, “The mackerel. At the back of the island. Go around.”

They stopped the boat and leaned forward trying to catch the meaning of her words. One of the younger men, probably the one with the best hearing, understood her first and relayed the message to the others.

“Behind the island?” shouted the oldest man, cupping his hands to his mouth.

“Yes,” she shouted back. “By the bay of the shipwreck.”

She almost added “By the meeting place” before realizing that the phrase would be meaningless to them.

“Thank you,” shouted the oldest man. He took off his cap and tipped it to her and she could see the whiteness of his hair. “Thank you,” he repeated. “We’ll go around.”

They changed the course of the boat and began to go around the island.

She rushed up to the house and changed out of her coveralls and put on a summer dress which she found in the back of a closet. She walked across the island accompanied by the dogs and went down to the meeting place, where she sat on the table rock and waited. The rock was hot from the heat of the day’s sun and burned her thighs and the backs of her legs. She could see the floating islands of frenzied mackerel beyond the mouth
of the bay. They were deep into their spawning season and she hoped they would still be there when the men in the boat arrived.

“They seem to be taking an awfully long time,” she said to no one in particular. And then she saw the prow of the boat rounding the island’s end.

She stood up and pointed to the boiling, bubbling mackerel, but they had already seen them and even as they waved back they were in the process of readying all their available lines. The boat glided silently towards the fish and by the time the first one struck it was almost completely stilled. The mackerel seemed to surround the boat, changing the water to black by their own density. Their snapping mouths fastened on anything thrown their way and when the men jerked up their lines there were sometimes two or three fish on a single hook. Sometimes they broke the surface as if they would jump into the boat and sometimes their bodies were so densely packed that they became “snagged” as the hooks went into their bellies or their eyes or their backs or their tails. The scent of their own blood spreading within the water spurred them to an even greater frenzy and they fell upon their mutilated fellows, snapping the still living flesh from the moving bones. The men moved in their own frenzy as if to keep pace. Hooks snagged in their thumbs and the singing, sizzling lines burned through the calluses on their hands. The fish filled the bottom of the boat and began to rise in a blue-green, flopping, snapping mass to the level of the men’s knees. And then, suddenly, they were gone. The hooks brought back nothing but clear drops of water or shreds of mutilated
seaweed. There was no indication of them anywhere, either on the surface of the sea or beneath. It was as if they had never been, apart from the heaving weight that caused the boat to ride so low within the water. The men wiped the sweat from their foreheads with swollen hands, sometimes leaving other streaks behind. Some of the streaks contained a mixture of fish blood and their own.

The men looked toward the shore and saw her rise from the table rock and come toward them until she reached the water’s edge. They guided the boat across the glass-like sea until its prow grounded heavily on the gravelly shore. They tossed the painter rope to her and she caught it with willing hands.

All afternoon they lay on the table rock. At first they seemed driven by the frenzy of all that had happened and not happened to them. By all the heat and the loneliness and the waiting and all the varied events that had conspired to create their day. The clothes of the men were sprinkled with blackening clots of blood and the golden spawn of the female fish and the milky white semen of the male. She had never seen fully aroused men before, having known only one man at one time, and having experienced in that damp darkness more of feeling than of sight.

She was to remember, for the rest of her life, the oldest man with the white hair. How he took off his cap and then pulled his heavy navy-blue jersey over his shoulders and folded it neatly and placed it on the rock beside her. She was to remember the whiteness of his skin and arms compared with the bronzed redness of his face and neck and that of his bleeding and swollen hands. As if, without clothes, his upper body was still clothed in
a costume made of two different materials. The whiteness of his skin and whiteness of his hair were the same colour but totally different as well. After he had folded his jersey he placed his cap neatly upon it. It was as if he were doing it out of long habit and was preparing to lie down with his wife. She almost expected him to brush his teeth.

After the first frenzy they were quieter, lying stretched beneath the sun. Sometimes one of the younger men got up and skipped flat stones across the surface of the sea. The dogs lay above the water line, panting and watching everything. She was later to think how often she had watched them in the fury of their own mating. And how she had seen their surplus young placed in burlap bags, weighted down with rocks and tossed over the boat’s side into the sea.

The sun began to decline and the tide began to fall, the water receding from the heavy boat which was in danger of becoming beached. The men got up and adjusted their clothes. Some walked some distance away to urinate. They came back and all four of them put their shoulders to the prow and prepared to push the boat back into the water.

“One, two, three, heave!” they said, moving in concentrated unison on the last syllable. Their bodies were stretched out almost horizontally as they pushed, the toes of their rubber boots scrabbling in the loose beach gravel. The boat began to move, grudgingly at first, and then more rapidly as the water took its weight. The men scrambled over the prow and over the sides, wet up to their waists. They seized their oars to push the boat farther out so there would be room to turn it around and face it toward home.

She watched them leave, standing on the shore. As the boat moved out, she noticed her undergarment crumpled and discarded by the edge of the table rock. The boat moved farther out and farther away and the men waved to her. She felt her arm rising in a similar gesture, almost without her willing it. The man with the white hair tipped his cap. She knew in one of those intuitive flashes that they would never say anything to anyone, or scarcely mention the events of the day among themselves. She also knew that they would never be back. As the boat rounded the island’s end, she scrunched up her undergarment and threw it into the sea. She began to walk up toward the lighthouse. She touched her body. It was sticky with blood and fishspawn and human seed. “It will have to happen this time,” she thought, “because there was so much of it and it went on so long.” Comparing the afternoon to her one previous brief encounter in the dark.