More than once, when I’ve started across the beach towards the fire, I’ve seen David move away and start skipping flat rocks out into the maws of the breaking waves, as intent on the surf as if counting the number of skips had become his full-time career. Keiran moves away then too, but not as far, leaving Madeline alone at the edge of the blaze, responsible for the pyre, her chin stuck out as if daring me to do something, her hair smelling of smoke.
I don’t find it surprising that they have more in common with each other than they have with me. The cliffs are high and dangerous, and because of that, Madeline has spent virtually every waking minute with them, certainly every minute when they step outside the fence—supposed to keep the foraging sheep away from the tower and the house and the weather sampling station—and into the dangerous ground beyond.
The weather station is what takes most of my time. Other keepers didn’t have to do as much with it, but several times a day I have to measure wind speeds and fog density and the thickness of freezing rain on the guy wires for the big signal tower. I have to log temperature and wind direction, even before making sure everything is running right, servicing the big triple foghorn and keeping the equipment in the tower in proper condition.
Once, I came down from working on the light’s gears, cleaning out the old black fouled grease from between each tooth and packing in new lube with the grease gun, and found all three of them in the garden, Keiran little more than a toddler, David maybe five, collecting cabbage worms in empty paper drinking cups. Madeline was talking, telling the boys she was amazed how the cabbage white moths could find their way so far across the barrens to eat our cabbages, and I was struck for a moment by how much the fluttering, seemingly directionless flight of the moths reminded me of her.
Later, heading out to set the caterpillars free on the barrens, they left the gate open and the sheep got in and ate all the small plants right down to the ground, leaving only insolent black buttons of manure behind. I was furious when I found the gate swinging open and the plants—cabbage and carrots and potatoes—all gone, but Madeline just laughed and laughed and said, “Cabbage worms come in all sizes and some of them are woolly,” and then started laughing at me, because I couldn’t stop being angry, even when she put her hand up and ruffled my hair and said, “Woolly sheep, woolly sheep.”
I pushed her then, a hand in each of the dips inside her shoulders, knocking her backwards into the fence and then down hard, flat on her back.
Afterwards, I said I was sorry.
I searched up and down the tide line, but they weren’t there. I even went back up the brook behind the barrisway to the spot where they had had a lean-to earlier in the summer. The lean-to had fallen over, but there was still an apple juice can standing next to the firepit, its top cut off and a strand of heavy wire stretched across it to make a primitive tea kettle for boiled tea, all the paint burned off the outside and the rust furred and feasting on the burnt metal.
Madeline had spent one summer night alone out there with the boys after I said there was no point to camping when we were practically camping our whole lives anyway. But she had taken them out, all three loaded up with blankets, food and the good frying pan, and I watched them disappear down over the crest of the hill, then spent the rest of that evening drinking beer and throwing the empty bottles off the cliff to watch them tumble in the air and smash on the sharp rocks we were always telling the boys to avoid. When the wind and the angle of the bottle were just right, I’d get one thrumming whistle from the open neck as the bottle fell, coming back up through the air like a voice yelling an elongated and ever-fading “OOOooooo.” Like the quiet version of the surprised sound you might hear if you came up behind someone and just pushed her quickly over the edge.
The third year we were at the Cape, Madeline knocked on our front door as if she were a stranger—as if there were ever any strangers out here—and I opened it to find her standing on the porch. She was wearing a short yellow summer dress, the wind picking at the hem, her feet and legs bare and scratched by the brush, holding a handful of fans of ground juniper boughs. The smell of the sap burst sharp off the branches, and the black berries made me think of gin.
“Surprise. Buy a bouquet for the lady?” she said, smiling, the words coming out in a put-on British accent.
So I brought her in and sat her down and got the first aid kit, wiping up the cross-hatched bloody lines on her legs and wondering where she had left her shoes. Some of the cuts were deep and jagged, where the thorns from the wild roses had caught and dragged, juddering, across her skin, leaving spots where the blood had risen, beaded and dried black. She just looked at me while I knelt there, cleaning her up. When I looked up, she was staring at me with a distracted, distant, half-smiling look, as if once again I had failed to grasp the point.
In the end, I forgot to put the juniper in water and the needles fell off all at once, leaving the grey and scaly branches looking like the limbs of an animal that had died and then shed its fur.
The next morning, I woke up alone in bed. Madeline said she had been so tired that she’d fallen asleep on the couch. David told me later—quietly, in that small boy’s singsong voice and with his eyes darting back and forth as if he was betraying a confidence—that she had spent the night in his bed, that they were crew on a sailing ship bound for port in France. The gale that came up outside that night had been ripping the sky like fabric, so I told him that any sailing ship near us would have been blasted far, far away by just one breath of savage wind, and would’ve sunk. All hands lost.
I hit her in the face—hard—on a hot July morning when she was three steps up from the bottom of the circular staircase in the light tower. I just pulled my arm back and waited, and then let it go as soon as she was in range.
Madeline sat down sharply on the metal step.
“Surprise,” I said. I thought I’d made my voice sound light enough, as if I were joking.
I had been standing off on the edge of the stairs, and Madeline had come in out of the bright summer sunlight, blinking in the sudden change from light to gloom. If I’d really meant to hurt her, I would have waited until she was farther up the stairs, so that the fall would have been even worse than the punch.
I watched her nose begin to bleed in the shadows, a dark line running down from each nostril, waiting to hear just one more smart-mouthed word. Instead, I watched all the mischief seep away, right there in front of me. Watched it empty out until she didn’t even look like herself. Then I turned and walked up the stairs.
I may have hit her before, maybe a few times, but it was only out of frustration, and it wasn’t ever as hard as that, and she hadn’t looked like that afterwards. It hadn’t ever been quite like this. But it wasn’t my fault.
They had been gone all day on a mission because Madeline had heard on the radio about new fossils found at Mistaken Point, and while they were gone I’d been doing everything. I’d done laundry and dishes in the house, finding my own lunch when they still hadn’t come back halfway through the day. Wrestling with the wrong-sized wrenches in the tower, working on the gear train, barking my knuckles when the wrenches slipped, unable to get into town and find the right-sized sockets because I didn’t have the car. I had the right wrenches somewhere, but I couldn’t find them: Madeline and the boys had gotten tired of hiding themselves, and their new game was hiding things like tools. I’d see something shiny sticking out of the rock wall below the tower and find a pair of Vise-Grips stashed in there almost out of sight. I told them that it wasn’t funny, that it was dangerous if anything happened and I couldn’t set the light, that there were ships and sailors depending on us, but they laughed, Keiran doubled over, laughing so hard that it looked like he might pee in his pants.
“If they wreck on our beach,” David said seriously, “we’ll go on board and steal their shoes and their clock and their bare-o-meter.”
I told him he had no idea what a barometer even was.
They’d gone on their fossil
exploration and I was working away, getting more and more angry, waiting for them to come back, knowing I’d probably have my head under something when they all charged in and startled me again. The more I thought about it, the better idea it seemed to be to have a surprise of my own. That’s why I met Madeline in the dark, coming up the stairs, probably hoping to startle me again. It was not the best idea to hit her, but really, it’s not all my fault.
When I came up out of Arnold Cove on a long, careful loop, still looking for them, I was miles out of the way and soaked to my knees from crossing the caribou bog. It was hot enough that I at least knew I wasn’t likely to get caught in a sudden fog. I could see the tip of the light tower, but that was almost the only familiar landmark.
The barrens are low, rolling hummocks of peat, each hummock hiding more hummocks out behind. It’s easy to lose your way, but at least I had the tower far off to my right, and I was pretty sure, wherever they were hiding this time, I had to be far enough out to be clearly behind them. I knew they wouldn’t expect that: their little game depended on their knowing the direction I’d be coming from, and I wanted them with their backs to me, stretched out flat on one of the drier, higher mounds, oblivious to the fact that I was close until I was right on top of them.
I had fallen hard climbing up out of the valley, and that was on grey slippery rocks, gashing my shin through my already wet trousers. I went into a boghole, deep treacle-wet peat, and I remember wondering how it was that the caribou that make the barrens home don’t break their legs getting around. You see them in the distance regularly, the caribou, ragged white and light brown cotton tufts gathered together in groups of twenty or so, like scarecrows with their clothes coming apart and their stuffing coming out. Usually there are ten or so down on their chests; the others are up and feeding, but there’s always one or two that are alert and looking around, making sure that nothing is sneaking up on them. It’s like they set up their own broad perimeter, watching out in all directions for any unexpected movement. They don’t care if you can see them, as long as they’ve already seen you first. And then they always move off as soon as you try to get too close.
I wrenched my knee badly in the third fall. By then I was too angry and tired to be careful.
The ground on the barrens is uneven; the walking jars your knees and ankles as you stagger from dip to moss mount, and I was already streaming with sweat. Around my face and above my head, the biting stouts had caught my scent, and the big deer flies were endlessly circling my head, waiting for the right chance to draw blood.
I put a foot wrong as I was going over a pile of loose rocks, then put the other foot down through a screen of juniper covering a deep hole. I teetered over and fell sideways, feeling my knee give out. As I fell and before the pain started, I felt a curious ripping in my knee, like the feeling of tearing heavy corrugated cardboard crosswise. When I stood up, there was a sharp pain the moment I put weight on my leg, and I sat down again, almost crying out. I sat for a while, ripping up bog plants with my fists, tearing apart any flower stalk I could reach.
It was her goddamned fault, I thought. This was her fucking game and her fucking fault. I was out sitting on my butt on the barrens and they’d all think it was a big fucking joke. I remember thinking there’d have to be payback for this.
It’s time they realized just how goddamn serious it really was.
As soon as I got moving again, I went straight through the bog covering a small pond. Falling forwards, my leg still stuck out straight, I knew I was going into the water the moment the bog gave way.
Suddenly swimming, I had a moment of sheer panic when it seemed like I wouldn’t be able to get back out. I was flailing around, tearing apart the bog, trying to find solid ground. When I tried to stand, I sank into the gluey, peaty black silt at the bottom, and I couldn’t seem to reach the edge. My injured leg was screaming as I tried to stay afloat, and I thought that this time they’d actually killed me with their stupid game.
Madeline should have known better. I had wasted the whole day looking for them, and that meant the weather observations hadn’t been done—no temperatures, no wind speeds. Now I’d get a careful message from St. John’s or Gander, questioning whether the system was down or whether their keeper was passed out drunk in his own kitchen again.
Eventually I got out of the bog, but I was soaking wet, my clothes shot through with peat, and I had dragged myself across the bog with my hands until I could finally stand. Even then, heading straight for the tower with my knee swollen and throbbing, it took me almost two hours to get back.
I didn’t even care if they were watching me anymore, didn’t care if they caught me or tried to startle me. They just better not come within reach. If I got back to the house and they were already comfortably back, I’d put the place up, I swore I would.
But the house was quiet.
By then, it was cooling a little outside, a light wind had come up, and I could see the front edge of fog rolling in. If I’d been caught out in that, I thought, I’d be on the barrens until the weather finally broke. And that could be days, if the wind was right.
They weren’t upstairs, and I was pretty sure they weren’t in the basement either, although I wasn’t going to hazard the stairs to find out, not with a knee that had swollen to the size of a grapefruit. It took me ages to get my wet jeans down over the swelling, and I threw all of the filthy, soaking clothes down the stairs to the concrete basement.
Let her deal with it, I thought. It’s her fault anyway.
I had a beer and then another, throwing the caps at the sink, sitting at the kitchen table and looking around, trying to decide when they’d be back, or if they’d been back already. It would be just like Madeline to take the boys into Trepassey for fish and chips and leave me on my own for a cold dinner of whatever I could scrape up from leftovers in the fridge.
After a while, I staggered around the house, trying to find any sign of where they might be. I ended up in our bedroom in front of the dresser.
I opened her top drawer, to see if the laundry had been done yet, to see if she had found the laundry basket down by the washer and had brought it back up, socks and underwear nestled down into their proper spaces.
The drawer was empty. Completely empty, as it had been since the day they’d gone to Mistaken Point and we’d met on the stairs. Just like every other drawer on her side of the dresser. Only the paper on the bottom, and the dry green smell of birch. I hit the dresser with my fist, over and over, because there was nothing else left to do.
I went to the boys’ rooms, where the pillows never moved and the covers were never thrown back, the beds always made and never slept in. Where stuffed animals had decamped for other pastures.
And I remembered a month earlier watching from the tower and seeing the back of Madeline’s head as she drove away—the boys too small for their heads to even show up in the back window of the car—the dust from the tires kicking up into the air in a grey-brown rooster tail and blowing away to the right of the road, disappearing in among the leaves of the blueberry bushes and rhodora.
Surprise.
SHARP CORNER
J OHN thought of the sound as a soft, in-drawn breath, a breath that was always taken in that last single second before the other sounds came. He heard it right before the shriek of tires pulling sideways against their tread. John would hear the police use the word “yaw” for the striated mark left behind on the pavement, and he’d start building it into his own descriptions almost immediately. “When you see yaw, you know they were going too fast.” Just like that.
The tires made a shriek followed by the boxy thump of the car fetching up solid, side-on, in a crumpling great pile in the ditch.
Then, the horn—and often, screaming.
The mailbox at the end of the driveway had his last name, Eckers, in precisely placed stick-on block letters. It was John and Mary’s second mailbox this year. Along the front of the property he could still see the places where he had pl
anted a regimented row of seven maples. Only one of the original trees remained, its leaves in late autumn blaze, and it was the tree down at the very edge of the property. The rest had been sheared off by a red Suzuki Sidekick, three teenagers and the unforgiving shallow turn in the road just at the end of the driveway.
“Three times?” other people would ask at parties, disbelief making their voices rise high at the ends of their sentences. “Cars have crashed three times right in front of your house?”
“Third time unlucky,” John would say wryly, as if the sentence had just occurred to him, as if it was a bitter turn of phrase that had sprung just then from quick personal reflection, and then he’d start talking about the sounds, the smells.
He had spent two days planting the trees—staking out the straight line, digging the holes, preparing the wet clay with buckets of topsoil so the trees would have at least a chance to get started and eventually grow into a stately line. He imagined the trees as much more than saplings, imagined Mary looking out the big front windows on the front of their bungalow, watching for the bright yellow of the school bus through the tightly woven leaves, waiting for it to pull to a stop. Every time, he imagined she had a dishcloth in her hands, imagined she was working the damp fabric around something as she stared out through the glass. The house was well back from the road, a small three-bedroom ranch, just one of dozens like it along the narrow highway.
No kids yet, but they were hoping. It was a hope that he almost had trouble figuring out. It was, he thought, as if he and Mary needed some particular completion that they just couldn’t find otherwise; that they felt there was something missing, something they kept looking for, and that they had loosely decided must rest in starting a family.
Whirl Away Page 11
