The woodstove drew fast in forty to fifty below. By the time Tristan got back to the shed at night, the morning stoke was burned to ash, no coals. He went to bed fully dressed, with his boots on and thick blankets tucked around his neck or pulled over his face. He pulled the blankets up for warmth, and so he could smell her. Until his mother was gone, he didn’t know that she smelled like this, a certain way. She smelled like cedar, he thought, but not fresh-cut. It was cedar on the ground, warm in the sun, starting to decay.
She had disappeared into dry air. She must have crossed the ice, they said. She must have headed to town or jumped the train line. The boy was the child of a child – he was hers – with the same thick black hair and vague mouth. He looked just like her. At morning, he waited out on the open ice. Mr. Matthews had to remember to call him in. If he didn’t, he was sure Tristan would have stood still until he fell.
If he annoyed people, they couldn’t say why. If he saddened them, he didn’t look sad himself. He tried to ignore how the snow was turning to slush on the paths. The snow was supposed to hold on to the roof of the shed, to the eaves and sills of the row houses; it was supposed to climb the base of the trees and silhouette the branches. The snow had held on with teeth like the tiny tight teeth of the bass you grab to land and that rough your thumb. The snow had held on but was letting go now: it melted, dripped down and wet his hair. The walls of the shed were wet inside and out. The men pulled their ice-fishing huts to shore, and a week later the ice went out in a way no one could ignore. It moaned through the night like someone was sick in the family.
This was the real new year on Prioleau Lake, time for resolutions. The smell of the earth returned and made more seem possible. And in this spirit, Codas told Mrs. Matthews, ‘On the next boat, he goes.’
Codas didn’t have to explain who he was talking about.
‘No.’
‘We have to do the right thing.’
Mr. Matthews didn’t know what that meant. ‘Where will he go?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I don’t know, but we can’t keep him here. Rachel must have gone down south, so he’ll go south. He should follow her.’
No one wanted what happened next, not even Keb, and he was the one who did it. He was stuck in town for breakup. For weeks the lake was covered in cankered ice, open only in patches, a gasping black. He was going to Treble Island. He didn’t have to explain. ‘I’m going down the lake today,’ he told Anuta at breakfast.
She didn’t answer, but Marie couldn’t help herself. ‘Find out if it’s really happening,’ she said. There was a rumour Rachel had disappeared.
‘Happening?’ Anuta said. ‘It already happened.’
More than once Keb had wished Rachel gone. He told himself that he wished it because of the money he gave her. But that wasn’t it. By picking up extra work, he had paid for her easily. And he didn’t care about money anyway. He didn’t care if people knew they were together. If he seemed complicated to people, he was. He had wished her gone because of her: her ambivalence. ‘Don’t we know each other?’ He couldn’t stop remembering this. ‘We try, I guess,’ she’d said. ‘Why don’t you try harder?’ ‘I don’t want to.’ Her answer.
She was gone, the grocer told him. Keb couldn’t remember the grocer’s name then, though he’d known him his whole life. Standing in the cereal aisle, he felt that his heart was something loose in his jacket pocket, a folded square of paper, dry and tricky to slip out with his fingers. He tried to be gentle, not to crumple the paper as he picked it out and unfolded the creases. He felt his heart was a list and it would tell him what to do next. But he did not have his heart in hand. It was a list of groceries Anuta had given him.
Keb went home from the grocery store, walked through the door straight into the living room and sat down in a chair. It was Marie’s chair. It was too small for him still wearing his winter parka. He sat there and began to sweat, feeling sorry for himself, and also embarrassed by the sweat. He needed to get up, to change his clothes, to put water on his chest, to wash his face. Instead, from her chair, he played fourteen games of gin rummy with Marie. He liked Marie’s company. Everyone should be like Marie, he kept thinking, including himself. Marie let him sit in her chair. She didn’t ask him why he was wearing his coat.
‘It’s not a sure thing,’ Codas told Keb. ‘There’s no body.’
‘Think she took off?’
‘People say she could’ve walked out, but no one has before.’
It made Keb sick to think of someone finding her. He’d been possessive but now was more so. He should go home, he thought. Instead, he walked past Codas and continued to walk through the field behind the chapel.
Before he could knock, Tristan opened the door and put his head out.
‘Let’s see you,’ Keb said, pulling the boy outside into the damp air, though he was wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. He’d been running the stove all morning and had made a sauna of the shed. Tristan started shivering and tried to step back inside, but Keb put his hands on him. ‘Spin around and let me see you,’ he said. Tristan didn’t move, only looked at Keb. His eyes were too placid for a boy, and so was his voice. ‘Why should I spin around?’ he asked. He didn’t want to spin.
§
The cushion Tristan sat on in the bow was warm from the sun and gave him a dim impression of breath and life in the hollow of Keb’s boat. He told himself it was nothing. He told himself it was a boat, not the beast he’d stoned and stoned and never killed. He might have asked where they were going, but put his head down instead and closed his eyes. When he opened them some time later, familiar coves and cliffs stretched out around him and rose high. He was headed home to their island.
He used to pass these cliffs in the canoe, looking hard at the cedars growing out of the rock slough that couldn’t be enough to nourish them. ‘Not enough dirt to cover your tongue,’ his mother had said, he remembered. It had been his habit to look through the first rows of the trees into the darkness behind to search for animals, their movement or shapes, and when he couldn’t find any animals, he would lean over the gunnel and let his ribs rest against it, and he would look down at the mute bottom rocks sliding under the canoe. They shape-shifted as the boat cut across them. But not today. Today the boat clove the water and with its easy speed clove him from these old feelings.
They pulled up to a long finger dock at the back of the island. The dock was new, the wood so freshly cut it glowed. ‘You’ll work here for food and a place,’ Keb told him as they pulled up.
Tristan didn’t understand. At the end of the dock, there was a path where there had been no path the year before. It was cut wide enough for them to walk side by side, but Tristan didn’t want to walk beside Keb. He’d never been with anyone on the back of the island.
These were his trees lying down. His to brush past and lean on. Their song was so huge he could never hear it all. Now he walked past and over their stumps. One stump smelled more sweetly of pine than the whole island ever had, and Tristan breathed it in and hated how sweet it was, and wondered how the smell of something dead could be so appealing. The stumps were sticky. Sap pushed up through the cuts, sent by roots below to what was now a bad dream of branches. Did the roots not know the tree was dead? Tristan rubbed his hand in the sap and his fingers stuck together, then burned as he tried to stretch them open.
The path ended in a clearing where their cabin had been. Keb walked Tristan around to show him. ‘They need workers here. You can work for them,’ he said. ‘They’re building a lodge, sleeping cabins, docks, and whatever they want.’
Tristan searched the ground for a sign they’d lived here. He searched thoroughly, wanting to fall to his knees and use his hands. But he didn’t fall as three men arrived on the far side of the clearing, walking down another new path.
‘Keb, good to see you,’ said the first man.
It was Richter, leading the others. His clothes were clean and his
hair was cut in a style Tristan had never seen, parted on a white line down the side. He had short bangs on his forehead, which he kept brushing away as if they were in his eyes, though they weren’t.
‘We’ve missed you,’ Richter told Keb.
‘I would’ve sent word I was coming today, but I’m the one who sends word. So here I am.’
‘Okay.’
‘I brought you a set of hands from Treble Island. They’re small but good.’ He pushed Tristan forward.
Richter thought the kid looked bad.
‘Tristan, shake his hand,’ Keb said.
Tristan did what he was told. He put out a sticky hand.
‘You can tell him what to do,’ Keb went on. ‘You can’t always tell a man that.’
Richter and the others guessed Tristan’s age in their heads. He was ten, eleven, twelve at most.
‘How old are you?’ Richter asked Tristan.
‘Thirteen,’ said Keb. He didn’t know that Tristan was eleven. He’d never known his age.
‘Thirteen years old?’ said Richter.
‘It was a long winter, he’ll fill out. He’s got a good look to him, you’ll see.’
Richter looked, and thought Keb might be right. The boy’s face defied time. He was pale but had the blackest eyes and the most unusual rich black hair, features that spoke to inner resources. ‘I think I might see what you mean,’ Richter agreed.
‘Tristan, Mr. Richter owns this island.’ Keb made sure Tristan understood what was happening to him.
‘We’re going to make something out of it,’ said Richter.
This was his mother’s land. Tristan would tell them.
‘He’s a good boy.’
‘You’ll look after him?’
‘It’s not like that,’ said Keb. ‘He looks after himself.’
Tristan stopped listening and looked at the ground. He could see rake marks in the dirt. He would come at night and run his fingers through the furrows to see if anything could be found.
‘Do you know the waters?’ he heard twice.
There’s one water, Tristan thought.
‘He’s not from this arm of the lake,’ said Keb, stepping in, ‘but I’ll teach him.’
Why only burn their house? He would burn down the whole island and rake it all. He had to make sure not to burn the rake. Then what would they think of him? They wouldn’t say he wasn’t from here. They would say he was Rachel’s son, and that’s why he had done it to them, and that’s why he had done it to himself.
BOOK TWO
‘Learn how to turn your face.’ Tristan was already learning.
‘Like this,’ said Keb, turning the boy’s head for him, his fingers roughly in his hair.
Tristan closed his eyes and let his head turn.
‘Don’t stare at people. Look here – ‘ said Keb, pointing below his own shoulder, just over the breastbone.
‘Where?’ Tristan opened his eyes a little.
‘Look at the neck.’
He looked at Keb’s neck. It was sun-soaked, burnt in the creases.
‘What’s there?’
‘Nothing. Look there and you’re not staring.’
Keb wondered why he was doing this. The workday was nearly over. And the boy’s hair was the same as Rachel’s. It was almost black, like rain-soaked tree bark. Putting his hands in Rachel’s hair had been like rinsing them over the side of the boat. They disappeared. He had to pull back.
Two years of cutting and clearing, pounding and ratcheting, and lifting walls and roof trusses had turned Tristan’s island from an island like any other, a covered place, into the most open on the lake. That’s how they wanted it. Trees fell without ceremony. The more that fell, the more sweet they smelled, Tristan thought – so sweet he gagged and held his breath walking by.
No one knew when his birthday came. He didn’t say anything, turning twelve with hands and arms burning, carrying buckets of cement from the mixer to the holes, helping to pour concrete footings for the lodge and its constellation of small cabins on the hill behind; turning thirteen the day a generator as tall and wide as a man with his arms outstretched was hauled in on a barge. They wrapped chains around the generator, bound winches to trees, and winched it up the cliff, scraping a swath of the cliff clear of its pale green lichen. They set the generator down behind the lodge to power electric lights. It was silent that day. But its damp roar would soon grow more familiar to Tristan than the wind in the far islands.
He was sent into the trees by Keb to tack up the black-coated wire flowing from the generator, one tree to the next. He was told to hammer the tacks at the favourite height, he knew, of small birds to build their nests. Tristan imagined the wire was a black snake eating up all the bird eggs. It snaked from the lodge to the fishing docks, then east to the gravel tennis court, where he and Keb hung a cluster of bulbs under black metal hoods.
All clusters in trees threatened to come down: birds migrating, bats on the hang, caterpillar tents splitting. So these lights above the tennis court threatened, swinging in the wind, flickering as they killed insects, hissing and humming a dirge over the more subtle song of the wind and waves. They were hateful to him. The island was supposed to fall into darkness. Then he could smell the ground’s decay, the resin of the trees, like the smell of blood when he was cleaning a fish and the blood poured out across the wood.
In the dark, it was easy to imagine it wasn’t now: none of this had happened. In the dark it could be three years ago, or one hundred years. In the dark he was himself before. To imagine it, he had to wait until they turned the generator off for the night and the lights coughed out. He had to outwait them, let them go to bed and fall asleep – without falling asleep himself, keeping watch on the rocks below their old cabin, though the cabin wasn’t there anymore, not even a piece buried under the lodge with its gaping double door.
Her mother tried to show her how to pack a suitcase, but Tomasin didn’t want to imagine where she was going or what she might need there. She held her hands out at her shoulders, forming a cross.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m stretching.’
‘What are you stretching? What muscle? I’ve never seen that stretch.’
‘My body,’ Tomasin said.
‘Fold this.’
Tomasin watched as her mother hung a shirt over the right arm of her cross. Blood moves – it skirts – she could feel it. But her blood didn’t just shuffle along as she breathed out, trying to slip the shirt off her arm and onto the ground by force of will. Her blood rushed insurgent from her heart in a current all its own. It was a river that pulled her under and through its rapids and lulls. This was, by now – she was sixteen and had never felt different for a day – familiar. The shirt fell.
‘Why are you standing like that?’ her mother asked.
‘You have to hold stretches for a long time or they don’t work.’
‘You’ll need that shirt.’
‘Who can tell what I’ll need.’
At the train station, her mother began to cry.
‘Don’t be sad. I’m the one who should be sad. You’re putting me on a train.’
‘By the end of summer you’ll have money to spend, and it’s so hot here, Tomasin, no one likes it.’
‘I like it.’
‘You’ll be on the water. You’ll like that.’
‘You don’t know what I like.’
‘You don’t know what you like either,’ her mother told her.
‘Do you know what you like?’ Tomasin asked back.
‘Some things, I do. And I know what I don’t like.’
When the train arrived, Tomasin didn’t hesitate. ‘Here I go,’ she said.
Her mother tried to touch hands but missed, and couldn’t tell if Tomasin had pulled her hand away.
Ten hours later Tomasin stood on a pool of loose gravel, the platform of Prioleau Station. The racket of the train all day had been a constant comfort, at least a distraction, and now she felt abandone
d to her own thoughts, and while some people liked nothing more, she liked nothing less. A small crowd gathered to meet the train, and when the crowd grew to the size of a class, she felt better, commotioned. Look at me, she thought, and kept thinking it. But the people did not look. She watched them walk away and wished they would turn around and take her with them. She wished they also didn’t know where to go.
She was surrounded by steep hills of pine. The lower the light fell, the higher the hills seemed to rise over her head. At dusk they turned from hills to mountains, a sight that made her feel that her mouth was dry from the train. She was a girl with a fresh mouth, and to prove it spat on the ground once, then again, and kept spitting. She did not want to live in a painting. Not in these hill-mountains. She would wait for the next train and go back to the city. If her mother wouldn’t have her, then she would go to a friend’s house and live there. She would steal from the fridge and go in and out of a basement or bedroom window.
‘Over here!’ said a man she hadn’t seen coming.
‘Yes?’
‘Are you Tomasin?’
‘I am.’
‘Let’s go,’ Keb told her, coming up to the gravel pool.
The first thing she noticed was that his clothes were too big for him. She wondered whose clothes he had on. She didn’t know that winter on Prioleau made the men thin.
‘Who are you?’
‘The water taxi. I bring everyone to the island,’ he answered. ‘I’ll bring you.’
‘Where are we going now?’
He walked in answer.
‘I need a drink of water,’ she said. ‘I’m desperate.’
‘You can have that.’
Keb walked ahead of Tomasin down a dirt road. She didn’t know dirt roads. He walked to the docks. She didn’t know docks. She walked to the edge and looked at the water breaking below. The edge of a staircase, a bridge, or the edge of another person – these compelled her. Edges made Tomasin want to go over edges.
Shot-Blue Page 7
