Island (47 page)

When she reached the lighthouse she heard the cries of the scavenging gulls. She looked in the direction of the sound and saw the boat cutting a V in the placid water on its way to the mainland. The men were bent double, grasping their fishforks and throwing the dead mackerel back into the sea. The gulls swooped and screamed in a whitened noisy cloud.

Two years later she was in a mainland store ordering supplies to take back to the island. Usually she made arrangements with one of her relatives to take the supplies from the store to the water’s edge and then ferry them across to the island, but on this day she could not find the particular young man. One of the items was a bag of flour. As she stood paying her bill and looking
out the door in some agitation, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the white-haired man in the navy-blue jersey.

“This is too heavy for you,” he said. “Let me help,” and he bent down and picked up the hundred-pound flour sack and threw it easily onto his shoulder. When it landed some of the flour puffed out, sprinkling his blue jersey and his cap and his hair with its fine white powder. She remembered the whiteness of his body beneath the blue jersey and the frenzied afternoon beneath the summer sun. As they were going out the door they met her young relative.

“Here, I’ll take that,” he said, relieving the man of the bag of flour.

“Thank you,” she said to the man.

“My pleasure,” he said and tipped his cap toward her. The flour dust fell from his cap onto the floor between them.

“He is a real nice fellow,” said her young relative as they moved toward the shore. “But of course you don’t know him the way we do.”

“No,” she said. “Of course I don’t.” She looked across the channel to the stillness of the island. Her expected child had never arrived.

The years of the next decade passed by in a blur of monotonous sameness. She realized that she was becoming more careless of her appearance and that such carelessness was regarded as further evidence of eccentricity. She came ashore less frequently, preferring to try to understand the world through radio. She found her teenage daughter to be foreign and aloof and embarrassed by her presence. Her aunt’s family harboured doubts about their decision to rear the girl and, one day, when
she was visiting, suggested that she might want to live on the island with her “real mother.” The girl laughed and walked into another room.

Gradually during the next years things changed even more, but so quietly that, in retrospect, she could not link the specific events to the specific years. Many of them had to do with changes on the mainland. The Government built a splendid new wharf and the spring fishermen no longer came to inhabit the shanties, which began to fall into disrepair, their doors banging in the wind and the shingles flying from their roofs. Sometimes she looked at the initials carved by the absent men on the shanties’ walls, but his, as she knew, would never be among them.

Community pastures were established, with regular attendants, and the bound young cattle and the lusty rams no longer came to the summer pasturage. The sweeping headlights of cars became a regular feature of her night vision, mirroring the beam from her solitary lighthouse. One night after a quarrel with her aunt’s family, her daughter left in such a car, and vanished into the mystery of Toronto. She did not know of it until weeks later when she came ashore to purchase supplies.

The wharf at the island began to deteriorate and the visitors came less often. When she sought help from her relatives, she found herself often dealing with members of a newer generation. Many of them were sulky and contributed to the maintaining of island tradition with the utmost reluctance and only because of the badgering of their parents.

Yet the light still shone and the various missives to and from “A. MacPhedran” continued to travel through the mails. The
nature of such missives also changed, however gradually. When the first generation of her family went to the island it had been close to the age of sail, when captains were at the mercies of the winds. In her own time she had seen the coming of the larger ships and the increasing sophistication of their technology. There had not been a wreck upon the island in all her time of habitation and no freezing, ice-caked travellers had ever knocked upon her midnight door. The “emergency chest” and its store of supplies remained unopened from one inspection to the next.

One summer she realized with a shock that her child-bearing years were over and that that part of her life was past.

Mainland boat operators began to offer “trips around the island,” taking tourists on circumnavigational voyages. Very often because of time limitations they did not land but merely circled or anchored briefly offshore. When the boats approached the dogs barked, bringing her to her door or sometimes to the water’s edge. At first she was not aware of the image she presented to the tourists with their binoculars or their cameras. Nor was she aware of how she was described by the operators of the boats. Standing at the edge of the sea in her dishevelled men’s clothing and surrounded by her snarling dogs, she later realized, she had passed into folklore. She had, without realizing it, become “the mad woman of the island.”

It was on a hot summer’s day, some years later, when, in answer to the barking of the dogs, she looked out the window and saw the big boat approaching. The men wore tan-coloured uniforms and the Canadian flag flew from the mast. They tied the boat to the remnants of the wharf and began to climb
toward the house as she called off the dogs. The decision had been made, they told her quietly, while sitting in the kitchen, to close the lighthouse officially. The light would still shine but it would be maintained by “modern technology.” It would operate automatically and be serviced by supply boats which would come at certain times of the year or, in emergency, they added, by helicopter. It would, however, be maintained in its present state for approximately a year and a half. After that, they said, she would have “to live somewhere else.” They got up to leave and thanked her for her decades of fine service.

After they had gone she walked the length and width of the island. She repeated all the place names, many of them in Gaelic, and marvelled that the places would remain but the names would vanish. “Who would know?” she wondered, that this spot had once been called
achadh nan caoraich
, or that another was called
creig a bhoird
. And who, she thought, with a catch in her heart, would ever know of
Aite na cruinneachadh
and of what had transpired there. She looked across the landscape, repeating the phrases of the place-names as if they were those of children about to be abandoned without knowledge of their names. She felt like whispering their names to them so they would not forget.

She realized with a type of shock that in spite of generations of being people “of the island” they had never really owned it in any legal sense. There was nothing physical of it that was, in strict reality, formally theirs.

That autumn and winter her rituals seemed without meaning. There was no need of so many supplies because the future was shorter and she approached each winter task with the knowledge
that it would be her last. She approached spring with a longing born of confused emotions. She who wanted to leave and wanted to return and wanted to stay felt the approaching ache of those who leave the familiar behind. She felt, perhaps, as those who leave bad places or bad situations or bad marriages behind them. As those who must look over their shoulders one last time and who say quietly to themselves, “Oh, I have given a lot of my life to this, such as it was, and such was I. And no matter where I go, I will never be the same.”

That April as the ice broke, for her the final time, she was drying the dishes and looking through the window. Because of her failing eyesight she did not see the boat until it was almost at the remains of the wharf, and the dogs did not make their usual sound. She saw the man bending to loop the boat’s rope to the wharf and as he did so his cap fell off and she saw the redness of his hair. It seemed to flash and reflect in the April sun like the sudden and different energy of spring. She wrapped the damp dish towel around her hand as if it were a bandage and then she as quickly unwrapped it again.

He started up the path toward the house and the dogs ran happily beside him. She stood in the doorway uncertainly. As he approached she realized that he was talking to the dogs and his accent was slightly unfamiliar. He seemed about twenty years of age and his eyes were very blue. He had an earring in his ear.

“Hello,” he said, extending his hand. “I don’t know if you recognize me.”

It had been so long and so much had happened that she did not know what to say. Her hand tightened on the cloth she was
still holding. She stepped aside to let him enter the house and watched as he sat on a chair.

“Do you stay here all the time?” he asked, looking around the kitchen, “even in the winter?”

“Yes,” she said. “Most of the time.”

“Were you born here?”

“Yes,” she said. “I guess so.”

“It must be lonely,” he said, “but I guess some people are lonely no matter where they are.”

She looked at him as if he were a ghost.

“Would you like to live somewhere else?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

He raised his hand and touched the earring as if to make certain it was still there. His glance travelled about the kitchen, seeming to rest lightly on each of the familiar objects. She realized that the kitchen had hardly changed since that other April visit so long ago. She could not think of what to say.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked after a moment of awkward silence.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m pressed for time right now but perhaps we’ll have it later.”

She nodded although she was not certain of his meaning. The dogs lay under the table, now and then thumping the floor with their tails. Through the window she could see the white gulls hanging over the ocean which was still dotted with cakes of floating ice.

He looked at her carefully, as if remembering, and he smiled. Neither of them seemed to know just what to say.

“Well,” he said getting up suddenly. “I have to go now. I’ll see you later. I’ll come back.”

“Wait,” she said rising as quickly, “please don’t go,” and she almost added the word “again.”

“I’ll be back,” he said, “in the fall. And then I will take you with me. We will go and live somewhere else.”

“Yes,” she said and then added almost as an afterthought, “Where have you been?”

“In Toronto,” he said. “I was born there. They told me on the mainland that you are my grandmother.”

She looked at him as if he were a genetic wonder, which indeed he seemed to be.

“Oh,” she said.

“I have to go now,” he repeated, “but I’ll see you later. I’ll come back.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes, we will.”

And then he was gone. She sat transfixed, not daring to move. Part of her felt that she should rush and call him back and another fearful part told her she should not know what she might see. Finally she went to the window. Halfway across to the mainland there was a single man in a boat but she could make no clear identification. She did not say anything to anyone about the visit. She could think of no way she could tactfully introduce it. After years of secrecy it seemed a dangerous time to bring up the subject of the red-haired man. Perhaps, again, no one else had seen him? She did not wish to add further evidence to her designation as “the mad woman of the island.” She scanned the faces of her relatives carefully but could find nothing. Perhaps he had visited them, she thought, and they had
told him not to come. Perhaps they considered themselves in the business of not disturbing the disturbed.

Now as the October rain fell she added yet another stick to the fire. She was no longer bothered by the declining stock of wood because she would not need it for the winter. The rains fell, turning more to the consistency of hail and she knew this by the sound as well as by her sight. She looked away from the door as she had so many years ago, the first time at the table rock. Deliberately not looking in the direction of his possible coming so that she could not see him
not
coming if that was the way it was supposed to be. She waited, listening to the regular patterns of the rain, and wondered if she were on the verge of sleep. Suddenly the door blew open and the hail-like rain skittered across the floor. The wet dogs moved from beneath the table and she heard them rather than saw. Perhaps she should mop the wet floor, she thought, but then she remembered that they planned to tear the house down anyway and its cleanliness seemed like a minor virtue. The water rippled across the floor in rolling little wind-driven waves. The dog came in, its nails clacking across the floor even as little spurts of water rose from beneath its padded paws. It came and laid its head upon her lap. She got up, not daring to believe. Outside it was wet and windy and she followed the dog down the darkened path. And then in the revolving cycle of the high lighthouse light she saw in a single white instant the dark shape of the boat bobbing at the wharf and his straight but dripping form by the corner of the shanties.

They moved toward each other.

“Oh,” she said, digging her fingernails into the dampness of his neck.

“I told you I’d come back,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh yes. You did.”

She ran her fingers over his face in the darkness and when the light revolved again she saw the blueness of his eyes and his red hair darkened by the dripping water. He was not wearing any earring.

“How old are you?” she asked, embarrassed by the girlish triviality of the question which had bothered her all these years.

“Twenty-one,” he said. “I thought I told you.”

He took her hands and walked backward while facing her, down to the darkness of the bobbing boat and the rolling sea.

“Come,” he said. “Come with me. It is time we went to live somewhere else.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes we will.”

She dug her nails into the palms of his hands as he guided her over the spume-drenched rocks.