Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  He had pale brown skin and high cheekbones, narrow eyes, black hair. A little cotton scarf was knotted around his neck and his cable-knit sweater had holes in it, threads dangling from the cuffs. His tight, muddied jeans were ripped at the knees. From his pocket, he pulled a slim metal phone, soaked like the rest of him, and seemed not to know what to do with it.

  In eight years, Miranda could count on her hand the number of times someone from away had stepped inside their house. People from the nearby village of Pummelly stopped by. Caleb Borders used to come all the time. For some years, his mother, Sylvia, too. But from off-island, other than the three young scientists, Anna, Agnes, and Arun, who had visited her father, no one, ever.

  . . .

  Caleb paced the parlour of his great-aunt Christine’s B&B with a restlessness that wouldn’t leave him. Nearly midnight. Wind and rain battled against the wide window. Outside lay the world he knew, the small village of Pummelly curved around its flat and treeless harbour, the ocean smashing beyond the outer ring of rocks.

  As the evening had worn on and the storm unexpectedly worsened, his great-aunt, who lived just down the road, had called his mother and asked for company, her last guests having left a week ago and her husband having set off some years previous for the grand hotel in the sky. Though he’d have preferred to hold out on his own, his mother, Sylvia, would have none of it, so Caleb was forced to accompany her through the driving rain along Little Harbour Road to his great-aunt’s house.

  In her parlour, the weather channel blared its endless reel of disastrous news about the hurricane, all the way from Florida up into New England: exploding power plants, flood waters stretching as far as the eye could see. Now the damage included houses with siding stripped away and gushing rivers where there’d once been streets in St. John’s, down on the Avalon Peninsula, where Caleb’s aunt Mona and his great-aunt Magdalene lived. From her armchair, his great-aunt Christine was speaking into her phone, telling someone how she’d been trying to reach her sister Magdalene all day. Caleb was halfway across the room when the lights went out, the television plunging into silence. From the kitchen, where his mother had been filling jugs of water at the sink, she gave an exclamation as Caleb held the blue light of his phone to the window, his own face shining back at him, rain streaming over the glass.

  His mind surged down the road that led out of the village and into Green Cove, where the girl lived with her father in their little white house. Let her be safe. In the old days, when a gale blew, he would have called her on the land line to see how she was faring, since the land line was all the girl had. Sometimes the pain of being cut off from her still felt like being stabbed. His thoughts swept farther, across the cove, anxious, down the lane on the far side and along the track that led to Cape House, up on its promontory, surrounded by black spruce and field and scrub, waves splintering below.

  Everyone had known some wind and rain were coming, the far reaches of the hurricane as it moved out to sea, but no one had predicted such a blow as this. The wind, blasting at Cape House on its landward side, would be broken by spruce trees — as long as the trees themselves didn’t break.

  Already Cape House had survived so much. Used as his uncle Charlie’s sheep shed for years, it was half boarded up when Caleb convinced his uncle to pass the wrecked house on to him. No one else wanted it, and his uncle no longer cared to keep a flock of sheep. In those days, teenagers would break in to drink out of the wind, leaving cans and bottles strewn across the wooden floors. The sheep lived in what had once been the dining room and parlour, shut in by planks nailed across the doorways. Boards covered the tall bow windows. Hay bales filled the breezeway and were stacked along the far kitchen wall. As a boy, Caleb sometimes stopped by, riding on quads with his uncles and cousins. Later he started biking out to the house by himself, his cousins, that pack of boys, leaving him to his own devices. He brought a broom to sweep the kitchen floor free of straw and cans and bottle caps and swirling dog hair. A hammer to nail down loose floorboards. A wooden fisherman’s daybed, with an ancient quilt flung over it, clung to a corner. Sheep hooves clunked from the parlour. Caleb had stood on the bridge outside the back door, scenting the land like a fox, as a dragonfly hovered. He had let himself imagine the views out to sea through the boarded-up windows, right to the edge of the blue horizon. The house itself whispered to him. He felt at home out there, at ease in a way he never did other places. Out there, the colour of his skin, so unlike that of everyone around him, didn’t matter.

  Sand brown. Dark hair, thick with waves. That’s what his reflection showed him. He looked nothing like his cousins or his tall, pale, red-haired mother, that much was for certain. Not her lips or eyes but someone else’s. His mother had told him how she’d discovered she was pregnant a year to the day after her own mother had died and this had seemed a beautiful omen. A fine story, yes, but a fatherless one.

  There was a man out there somewhere, or there had once been, a man his mother refused to speak of even now. Caleb had searched their house on Little Harbour Road for clues, for photographs. The old kind you printed out. The photos on his mother’s computer began with their arrival on the island, when he was two, and from their earliest days in Pummelly there was only a scattered one of himself as a wary-eyed, chubby toddler.

  As a boy, he’d walked awestruck under the high and still-grand ceilings of Cape House, past the rippling wallpaper, the wide staircase up to the second floor. There was a hand pump outside the back door and clear spring water poured from it. When the girl arrived in his life, he brought her out there, herself an outsider, too, with her solar-panelled house and wind turbine spinning in its field. They sat on the broken bridge and watched fox cubs tumble in the long grass. Waving away stouts and nippers, they followed the path that led beyond the house, hugging the rocky shore all the way out to the headlands. Caribou grazed in the marshy fields beyond the scrubby borderland of spruce trees, their mottled bodies moving slowly in the distance, ankles clicking, heads raised as the wind carried to them a human scent or the sound of footsteps above the crash of waves.

  Now the house would be protected by the new shingles Caleb had tarred and nailed to the roof, the new clapboard he’d laid over the blue sheets of Cladmate tacked and taped between the strapping. This he told himself as he paced. On the inside, he’d stripped the parlour walls, added pink insulation and a plastic vapour barrier. He was fixing things slowly, carefully, room by room, sanding the parlour floors, installing snug windows, safeguarding the old house as best he could from the new weather, the new storms carrying winds up from the Caribbean like the trade ships of old, bringing them all this way north.

  The wind had shifted, from a southeasterly, into the east. There must be cracks in his great-aunt’s house, slivers around the airtight windows through which the wind whistled and sang. Safe where he was, Caleb longed to be elsewhere, out at Cape House, feeling the wind in his bones as it hit those walls. Helplessness rose in him, and a different urgency, the desire to repair another thing, to discover the act of salvage that would bring the girl back to him. There must be a way. He had a house. He’d told her his dream and seen a bright light in her eyes as he’d done so. When they’d kissed, she had been slow to pull away.

  From the dining room, his mother called, “Caleb, stop pacing. Come join us.” His great-aunt had the Scrabble set out, pieces clattering on the table, the squeak of a cork as his mother poured herself a shot of whiskey. Candlelight shivered up the walls, wind gusts coming at them now from every direction. The very rocks beneath them shook.

  Caleb was in the dining-room doorway when the air itself turned suction, a vacuum pulling at him, popping his ears. His great-aunt glanced behind her at the weather glass on the wall as a shudder ran all through the house. A boom sounded. The back door burst open, as if ghosts were plunging in along with the storm.

  He was first at the door, rain already soaking their jackets and boots. The coat tree toppled. He had to struggle through a thicket of
downed cloth in order to reach his boots and thrust his feet into them. One thought spurred him on: he had to get to Cape House to find out what had happened there.

  A loose piece of siding clattered down the rain-veiled road as his mother’s voice burst from behind him. “Caleb, what do you think you’re doing?”

  He couldn’t say, Driving out to Cape House.

  That was cracked.

  He couldn’t say, Looking out for my future.

  Grabbing him by the arm, his tall and still-strong mother wrenched the door closed as his great-aunt’s tourist booklets took flight in the dark all around them.

  . . .

  They settled Frank in a chair by the wood stove. It would take him hours to undo the laces of his boots, Miranda thought, having stepped out of her rubber boots in seconds, her father also, these boots like a second skin, almost all they ever wore. Nevertheless Frank tackled the tight, soaked laces with fumbling fingers. Released from the sitting room, Ella bounded to sniff him, impolite, ecstatic. The heat from the stove heightened the salt smell of his clothes. There was sand in his hair, mud on his knees where his skinny jeans had ripped and more sand all over him. It was impossible to stop staring. He, too, kept halting as if to take in where he was.

  “I’ll get you some dry things,” Miranda said, attempting to break from her trance.

  Frank was tall, taller than her father, long-legged. Upstairs, in her father’s wind-loud bedroom, she pulled jeans from his chest of drawers, a sweater, decided to forget about underwear. She was back in the kitchen before thinking about a towel, he’d want a towel as well.

  “So you drove all the way from Boston,” her father was saying. He’d already embarked on some kind of interrogation, Ella curled in a ball at Frank’s feet.

  “Yeah.” Frank seemed reluctant to say more. “I took off right after the hurricane began moving north again, ahead of any mandatory evacuation call. You could still buy gas most places. I confess, I drove fast.”

  He seemed relieved by Miranda’s reappearance. She explained things — bathroom upstairs on the left, spare room on your right, towels in the chest of drawers in the bathroom. By now he’d managed to remove his sodden boots and socks. He had long, slender feet. Miranda couldn’t help staring at them. Reaching out a hand to him in the storm had felt like a dream. This didn’t. No, it felt like a different kind of dream. What kind? Excuse the mess in the spare room. Watch your head on the ceiling beams.

  “Thanks, Miranda.”

  He was an American. In his voice she heard traces of the voices of her childhood, from her life before.

  “No whiplash?” her father asked. “No concussion?”

  Frank touched places on his body where he said he was stiff. He shook out his right arm. The kettle was boiling again. The wind had turned from the southeast into the east, billowing against the mud-room walls. On his way out of the room, Frank stopped to lean against the table, Ella now at his heels. Miranda called her back.

  He was upstairs, in the bathroom, no doubt taking off his clothes. Pipes shuddered. In the kitchen, Miranda tried not to think about the stranger’s naked body. Downstairs, it was just the two of them, she and her father, as it had been since they’d come to the cove and made a new life for themselves in this wild and far-off place. There was a deliciousness to be felt in walking for hours over rocks and scrub with the wind in her ears, by herself or in the company of her dog, feeling the long strides of her own body, becoming unhuman as her father said, Ella making her own loops outward. But now, Miranda’s body seemed to be undergoing another rearrangement, the entire surface of her skin quickening.

  Earlier that evening, her father had received a phone call. He didn’t receive many calls. Neither of them did. As soon as he saw the number on the screen, he had headed out of the house, away from Miranda, so that she’d caught only stray words as the door closed behind him: How was the flight? And: Haven’t heard from Agnes. Arun’s trapped in Boston. When he re-entered the house, he said nothing about the call and didn’t mention who had been phoning him. Flight, Miranda thought. This had pricked her attention. Also: Arun. And Agnes.

  Now, as her father dropped two tea bags into the teapot, poured hot water in, and set the tea cozy over it, she could ask him about the call. Or now, as she carried the pot to the table, soothed by its ordinary warmth, as her father placed Frank’s wet boots by the stove. The way her father moved was so familiar it was like something inside Miranda, and some part of her was reluctant to disturb this ease.

  Footsteps clunked down the stairs. Frank burst into sight at the foot of them, black hair towelled and tufted. The clothes altered him. The sweater was one that eighty-five-year-old Mary Green had knit, from wool that Miranda had dyed with Sylvia Borders’s help. Sylvia had spun the wool from the sheep of Pat Green, their neighbour and Mary’s oldest son. The jeans barely reached Frank’s ankles. He had to hunch beneath the ceiling beams in order not to knock his head. The socks were thick wool, a pair of Miranda’s making.

  “Magnificent,” said her father. Given his usual feelings about strangers, would he, as soon as the weather settled and Frank got his bearings, ask him to leave? The thought plucked at Miranda as she hung Frank’s wet clothes on the drying lines strung around the wood stove, ripped jeans, a thermal shirt of some slippery high-tech material, bedraggled sweater. The wind jittered through the cloth. Her own jeans were patched where she’d carefully mended them.

  “I don’t suppose you have a dryer,” Frank asked, handing over his black boxers.

  “Wind and wood stove’s our dryer,” said Alan as Miranda pegged the damp boxers to the line. Moments before Frank’s body had touched them and something moved into her fingers like an electric spark.

  “Aha,” said Frank. “Well then, it’ll be a bit festive in here.”

  Miranda asked if he wanted a cup of tea. Her cheeks flushed. Boston, he’d come all the way from Boston. Frank gave her a radiant smile.

  There was brightness in him, but then a wave of wooziness seemed to wash over his body. Alan told Frank to sit down. Did he want to lie down? Frank shook his head. But he began to shiver. Miranda bolted upstairs to yank the quilt from the spare room bed and when she handed it over, Frank wrapped himself tightly in it, sinking into a chair. He was so slim. Ella watched him, dark-eyed.

  “You came on the ferry?” Alan’s tone was kind, almost fatherly.

  “The one that left at six o’clock. The wind was blowing but not like now.”

  Miranda’s mouth was full of questions, even though her father was the one asking them.

  “Wouldn’t it have been wiser to find somewhere to pull in for the night?”

  “Everything was shut up. I couldn’t find a motel so I pulled over for a while, but then I decided to keep driving.”

  “All the way across the island.”

  “I didn’t know how far —. At last I came to the top of this big hill. By now the wind was trying to push me off the road. At the bottom I saw water, but I could make out the other side in my headlights so I thought I’d gun it, which is stupid — next thing I knew I was in the current. The car struck something and tipped, water started pouring in through the floor. I was trying not to panic. I managed to get the window open before the electrical cut out —”

  A needle of concern creased Alan’s forehead.

  “I squeezed through and dove —”

  “I’m guessing you were in the cove, and this is the brook you’re describing.”

  “It was totally dark. The current was so strong, I was sure I was going to be swept away. My mouth was full of salt water, there were rocks — and then I saw your light way in the distance. My feet touched sand, I grabbed hold of some grass, I thought, All I have to do to live is reach the light. I crawled across a big field. It took a long time but I kept clawing my way forward.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive.” The ghost of another possibility twitched across her father’s body. The feeling passed through Miranda as her father reached out a
nd touched Frank’s arm. Who knew how many hours he’d been out there.

  Some people were saved from accidents. There could be this huge, stupendous grace. Exhilaration rose in her. Frank stumbled to his feet, wrapped in the quilt. “Thank you for hearing me howl at your door and rescuing a stranger on a night like this.”

  “Miranda heard you,” said Alan.

  “Ella did.”

  Frank wrapped his quilted arms around Alan, then Miranda. It was like being hugged by a tent. She had never been hugged by a strange young man before. The steady warmth of his body stunned her. The surprising strength of the hug. Frank patted Ella’s eager head.

  At the counter, Miranda cut slices of bread and slathered them with butter and jam to calm herself, bread her father had baked that morning, partridgeberry jam she’d made the previous fall. She handed a slice to Frank. The moist bread in her mouth felt delicious, the slide of butter, tart burst of jam, she ate avidly, something to set against her unsettled body, against the wind still flooding all around them, Frank’s presence, his hug. Tremors moved up through her feet. They could measure the wind’s velocity and atmospheric pressure in the weather notebooks that she and her father kept, but sometimes measurements were nothing compared to how the wind felt. The house had firm bones, even as it shook, and it had stood through centuries, through so many, many storms. In Nova Scotia, even down on the Avalon, people were dying, homes destroyed, birds and animals drowned as well. Their house would surely stand through this gale. Except the winds, and storms, were getting worse.

  Storms move in a circle: her father had taught her this, and Miranda had learned to feel it. Would the three of them play cards, would they stay up all night? Should she tell Frank to go to bed? Possibly the wind was lessening as it turned. No. The next instant, gusts piled at the house from every direction.