The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  Next to their house, larger and cleaner and better kept, were the corrugated walls of their barn (or “laboratorial venue,” as Fayther dubbed it), and as she drew closer, the path twisted one last time, a long S that wove its way between rocky outcrops and clumps of grass. Suddenly—on the far ridge, she saw something that made her catch her breath, a single involuntary intake, not a gasp but an inhalation. Poised on the ridge was an ewe, alone and backlit against the open sky, gazing out to sea with an ovine majesty. Had it started? Catherine’s heart was tugged like a fish on the line. She looked closer, eyes bright with the beginnings of a smile, but the ewe was not alone. Alas. Another sheep popped up—and another and another, and her heart sank. Not one of ours. They baa’ed and turned, loping along the edge of the field, flowing past and disappearing one by one. She could see their cropped tails from here. Fayther’s sheep were uncropped, tails swinging like fatty pendulums; these sheep belonged to the next farm over. She recognized the herd instinct, alive and well, as each followed the next along the ridge and out of sight, and sure enough, the ramshackle figure of a farmhand appeared, ambling behind them, crooked staff resting in one hand, smartphone in the other, thumb-scrolling through messages as he nudged the flock forward.

  The path grew muddier. A final familiar turn brought her into the yard, their bungalow looking more paint-peeling and woeful the closer she got. Someone once calculated the ideal distance to view a sheep, a unit of measurement that describes just how close you could get to one before they went from looking fluffy and adorable to soggy and matted: seven-eighths of a mile. That was the ideal distance, when a sheep changed from cotton ball to soiled livestock, from picturesque to pungent. She wasn’t sure what that was in kilometers, though.

  Fayther was nowhere in view. His stucco bungalow was surrounded by open vats of water, strategically situated along invisible energy lines, as calculated with compass and almanac. They looked like children’s wading pools created by using cross sections of a large metal culvert. The water absorbs essential vibrations. Fayther had explained this at length to the local Chamber of Commerce during a disaster readiness meeting. Redirects geothermic tremors, sends them harmlessly up into the air. He’d produced charts and diagrams, had been actively ignored, if such a thing were possible. She hated attending these meetings, hated the barely suppressed smirks and sly sidelong glances, hated the fact that Fayther was so oblivious. “They’re laughing at you,” she would complain on the long walk home, and he would blink. “Who?” “Everyone.”

  They weren’t laughing now, though. Fayther’s water-encircled bungalow had ridden out the earthquake with nary a crack in the stucco. The barn had rattled and swayed, too, but had withstood the worst of it. “Ha!” he’d cried. “Could’ve saved the entire city! If they’d just opened their ears.” Not their eyes, their ears. “Hearing and listening are two different things,” he would remind her.

  She found her father inside their home, perched over his graph papers at the dining table. The interior of their home always seemed lit as though through wax paper.

  “Katie!” he said. “You made it back just in time. Tea? We’re out of Bell’s, I’m afraid. Dandelions will have to do. Will you grab a few, next you’re out? We have a lot of work to do. The alignments are off, only a decimal or two, but it’s enough to throw the entire system out of whack. I’ll have to recalculate everything.” His voice, like everything about him, was fleshy and folded. He spoke in rounded syllables, as though chewing on something moist, a rag, perhaps, or a reputation. “You’ll see!” he said, answering a challenge that no one had issued. “I’d stake my career on it!” Career-to-be, that is. With her father, the accolades always lay ahead in a distant, barely glimpsed but brilliant future. It was, she suspected, a way of doggedly avoiding the past.

  The girls of Saint Mike’s had been mocking her at the very moment the earthquake hit, swishing their brown-and-mustard skirts, giggling innocently behind serrated smiles. My dad says your dad is completely off his nut.

  Catherine was always astonished by how, on American TV, school uniforms spoke of private institutions and moneyed privilege. Not so in New Zealand. Everyone wore school uniforms down here. It was egalitarian, is what they said, much like New Zealand society supposedly was. Where Australia had been a penal colony, settled by criminals and cutthroats, New Zealand had been selected for a more genteel clientele, the “deserving poor,” as they were known, given free passage to the antipodes. That was the version of history that was told here, anyway. A poverty softened by flowers, with jacaranda and hyacinth, which, having escaped the gardens, now grew wild in glorious disarray. This was the myth of their islands. But she knew better. It wasn’t poverty, it was middle-class poverty, the worst kind because it pretended to be something it wasn’t. It was a dishonest poverty. Out here, on the heights, or down below on the Canterbury Plains, school uniforms—blouses and blazers, and the inevitable tartan—were as common as sheep.

  When the florescent tubes had begun to burst, popping like Christmas crackers, showering glass, the girls of Saint Mike’s had squealed, partly in fear, partly delight, had scattered like little birds. If only those boulders had taken out her school. If only they’d rolled clean through the classrooms, the desks, the girls’ changing rooms. But like everything else she longed for, it stopped just short.

  “Katie?”

  He’d asked her a question. “Yes?” she said, stepping out of the kitchen with its wax paper light.

  “The school,” he said, repeating his question. “Still standing?”

  She nodded. “Still standing.” Unfortunately. “Saw a boat,” she added. “In the cove. It was there this morning. Gone when I came back.” But Fayther wasn’t listening.

  He waved her over. “Come on, luv. Let’s have a look.”

  With a sigh, she handed over her textbooks and he put on a pair of round reading glasses, dainty in their way and at odds with his fleshy features and that wild, flyaway frizz of reddish hair that encircled his bald pate like an afterglow. “Let’s see.” He flipped through the pages, shaking his head. “Pass me my marker, luv. The big one, in the tin.” Slowly, methodically, he went through her books, crossing out entire sections, providing mumbled commentary as he went, more to himself than for Catherine’s benefit. “Hearsay… never proven… mere conjecture… dubious… never validated… highly unlikely.”

  She looked down at her long limbs and knobby knees. Where had these come from? An inheritance from her mother, no doubt, laid to rest under a shrub overlooking the sea. A manuka tree. Honey producing. Your mother would have liked it. There was very little of her father in her, though in certain lights, her hair caught faint streaks of auburn, like an echo of her dad somewhere inside her. His entire inheritance.

  Fayther handed back the textbooks, now annotated and “improved,” as he put it. “Make sure you explain these to your teacher so they can contact the publisher to make the necessary corrections. They’ll appreciate the help.”

  But of course they wouldn’t. Whenever Fayther did something like this, Catherine would simply wait till end of term and then tell the school office that she’d lost her textbooks. “Again? Really, Catherine! If your head wasn’t screwed on…” and Catherine would pay the forty-dollar fine, which she would have to sell one of their lambs to help pay for, dragging it tethered and bleating across the paddocks while her father was away, dragging it to the next farm, where her neighbors paid with an insincere smile and a feigned look of concern. “Your father, he’s all right then?”

  Fayther never knew how much money they had or where it went. It fell to Catherine to keep this entire creaky enterprise going. The worst part was not the pity or feigned concern or the folded bills she hid in her tampon box (there were limits to her father’s scientific areas of interest), it was the stupid glee he showed whenever he next counted the flock and found another one gone. Always a celebratory moment. “Katie! It’s starting!”

  Sheep in the heights versus sheep in the plain
s. Two very different breeds. Hardscrabble, up here. The freelance shearers would arrive, seasonally employed, jaunty and carefree (part of the job description, it would seem). These boys could shear a midsize ewe in seconds, turning them over, under, around, leaving mounds of twiggy wool behind, which her father would then sell at cost to the co-op. This wasn’t a working farm, after all, it was a scientific endeavor. Profits didn’t enter into it, with Fayther counting his flock, mixing his nutrients, charting “acts of independence” in his ledgers. There were times she hated him so much it turned to love.

  “I added a potassium derivative,” he said. “It alters the vascular regions of the brain, helps oxygenate the hippocampus. That’s where I suspect we’ll find it. Free will.” This was an obsession, one of many, him trying to pinpoint where exactly mind resided in the brain, where in the firing of chemical neurons free will dwelled. “Added a touch of magnesium, a bit of calcium”—he spoke as though it were a recipe rather than the alchemy it was. “Plus, a trace amount of soil.” Soil? Better not to ask.

  She was trying not to listen, but her father’s voice was so loud, so insistent. He always spoke as though addressing an auditorium, as if his latest vitamin-and-mineral concoction, fed to indifferent sheep on an island at the edge of the world, mattered in the least. News flash, Dad, it didn’t. If their entire farm had fallen into the sea, the world would scarcely have noticed. Why couldn’t those boulders have taken out Saint Mike’s? She wouldn’t have minded, even if she’d been inside at the time, could imagine her herself, broken and dying with a final fading smile, knowing that the arena of her torment was going with her. The other girls, eyes flitting downward to her frayed gym shoes. The cruel moue that played across their lips as their gaze flitted back up to her face, her bangs. “I like your haircut. Where do you get it done?” “Um, I cut it myself.” “Oh my! You should open your own salon.” Were they being nice? Of course not. The head-high pivot, the rolling-hipped gait, the sudden gales of laughter as they walked away.

  She envied boys.

  You could walk off a punch; malicious laughter stayed with you forever. The bully boys left the targets of their attention bruised, but bruises wore off. Girls could gut you with a glance. She remembered one gerbil-faced boy she’d found cowering behind the bins, simpering and tear-streaked, who was constantly being targeted by the upper grades. Catherine would have happily swapped places with him, would have taken a bloody nose over the whispered asides of other girls as they floated past. “No one even likes her.”

  After the earthquake, the girls of Saint Michael’s had been in their glory, even though none of them had even had the decency to die. They were young and in their splendor, the girls of Saint Michael’s, photogenic and beauteously histrionic, “traumatized” as they liked to pronounce, arms held to their chests like actresses in a play. The earthquake and its aftermath were all about their feelings. In their world, everything was about feelings. Never mind the sewage backups and how that might affect groundwater contaminants, the earthquake was really about them, and they hugged each other and they wept and they practiced their lines before stepping in front of their appreciative audiences. It was the best thing that had ever happened to them. One was even interviewed by the local news station. Oh, the emotional toll!

  If only those boulders had rolled a little farther.

  “Zinc, chondroitin sulfate, vitamin D. I cut back on the glucosamine, it was making them sick. Would you, luv?” He nodded to the front door, where a plastic wheelie bin was filled with this month’s pellets.

  Out in the yard, wooden hurdles, low enough for the sheep to leap across, were they so inclined, formed a miniature corral. All the sheep had to do was make that leap, navigate a simple maze, and they would be free. Such a simple choice. But none ever had. They owned forty-two ewes, a scattering of lambs, and two barrel-chested rams for breeding purposes, their hollow foreheads partially caved in from ritualistic butting sessions, dull thuds, and snorts. The rams were held in a pen outside, away from the hormonal waft of ovine ovulation that drove them mad; rams were crazy over hormones, apparently. Catherine was afraid of the rams, hated going near them. A younger ram had broken out once, had indeed escaped, but instead of running free across the lands had chased Catherine into her house, only to turn, with a strut, and go back to the very pen it had just escaped from.

  She pushed the wheelie bin through the barn doors, left open, as always and intentionally so, inviting escape. Inside, the musty smell of root vegetables, freshly wrested from the earth, was leavened with that of silage, sweet and tart in equal parts. Stacked bales. Damp straw. A dimly lit pen crowded with sheep…

  Something was wrong.

  The sheep were wedged into the far corner as though in a rugby huddle, as Catherine rolled the plastic rattle-thump bin along the troughs, shoveling scoops of pellets into the auto-feeder—one of her father’s inventions, involving an elaborate series of tubes and chutes. What would a ship be doing way out here? Catherine watched the pellets tumble, separating themselves as they went. Not fishing. Too small for a pleasure cruise. She checked off the date and time on the clipboard that hung beside the feeder—a ballpoint pen was sellotaped to a string for that very purpose—and was about to leave when she turned around. Something strange was going on. The sheep were definitely afraid of something. They’d forced themselves into a single, massive soggy mop, compressed into the side of the far corner of the pen, were refusing to move, even for their feed. What was it that had frightened them? In another country, one might worry about wolves or foxes, or even snakes, but not here in New Zealand. This was a land without snakes, without predators—man excluded, of course. Had some ancient irrational fear been resurrected? Catherine had seen footage of zoo-raised chimps freaking out over photos of a snake, even though they themselves had never encountered one. Certain archetypes lay imprinted in the DNA. She knew this, because it was these very imprimaturs that her father was trying to reprogram. Had some buried instinct been triggered within the flock? Or had the earthquake simply spooked them?

  She climbed over the gate in her gumboots, looked around the urine-pooled and straw-bestrewn pen. There was nothing there, but the sheep were still wedged into that far corner. “What’s wrong?” she asked, half-expecting an answer.

  Across from this scrum of sheep, outside the pen, Catherine saw something. Just a mound of hay, but one that had been freshly turned. Still green, piled hastily. So she slopped across, her gumboots rubbing a ringed rash into her calves. Made it hard to walk, harder still to run.

  She climbed over the splattered metal fence to see what was nestled in this freshly turned straw, half-expecting, half-hoping to discover an act of ovine derring-do, a stealth ewe who’d managed to scale the fence, build a home, and hide on the other side. But no. Not an act of free will. A pair of shoes. Men’s dress shoes, with legs attached. The straw moved again, heaving slightly, and she realized with a start that someone was underneath it. A man. A small man, breathing raggedly, hand on stomach, sticky with blood.

  With a gasp, Catherine stumbled backward, choking on fear, too scared to scream, turned, tripped, tripped again, tried to waddle-run in her unwieldy gumboots, when a voice behind her croaked, “Don’t. They’ll kill you. They’ll kill your entire family.”

  There were worse things than tremors and boulders and overly dramatic girls in tartan skirts.

  INTER-ISLANDER

  THOMAS RAFFERTY WAS MOMENTARILY LOST at sea. An overcast sky had vanquished the coastline behind the ferry, even as a fog of rain had dissolved the one ahead of them. They had entered the tumult of Cook Strait, a fraught channel—chasm really—that separated the South Island from the North. This was a notoriously moody stretch of water, one marked by competing currents and embryonic whirlpools, and the Inter-Islander fought its way through, indomitable, plowing headlong into each incoming crest.

  Onboard, rising and falling on waves of nausea, Rafferty stood on the deck, trying to fix his gaze on the horizon as a means
of battling seasickness, a trick that worked only when there was a horizon to fix on. And still the dead man’s hand was reaching out for him from under the fallen wall. A strange end, and apt, perhaps, considering the havoc that same small man had wielded in Africa all those years ago.

  Rafferty was crossing over himself, after a fashion, going from the South Island to the North. These were the two main pieces of New Zealand’s map, the world’s easiest jigsaw. Most of New Zealand’s Maori lived on the warmer North Island, and the artifacts at the Christchurch Gallery had been on loan from—he had noted the name of the town—Hell’s Gate in Rotorua. If she was still in New Zealand, that was where she would probably be. She has something of mine. They wouldn’t give out a number or a contact, but they didn’t need to. He already had his destination: Hell’s Gate.

  A horizon, disappearing. A sea, berating itself. The Inter-Islander lifted up, dropped down, with Rafferty alone on deck, rolling with the motion, trying not to get swept off. Here lies Thomas Rafferty, born: Winterset, Iowa. Died at sea, lost between islands, body never to be recovered. He was at the age where you begin to consider the end of your obituary and how it might read.

  The sea surged, washed across the deck, soaking his boots, and, with the last line of his obituary imminent, he retreated through heavy sliding doors. The interior was sickly green and rocking drunkenly; it reminded Rafferty of a hospital ship in World War I, after the defeat at Gallipoli, perhaps. The sliding doors rolled back and forth. A sour smell, stomachs churning, the sound of retching from the toilets.

  On the cafeteria TV, compulsive images of the earthquake were playing, sound off and all the more horrific for it. Endless loops of falling buildings, masked rescuers. Smoke rising above the city. Lost at sea, yet tethered still by satellite signals, Rafferty opened his laptop not expecting to find a lifeline, was pleasantly surprised when he did. The usual backlog of messages were waiting: the angry emails of editors, irate and imploring. “Are you still in Christchurch?” “Where ARE you?”