At the bottom of the box she finds a tin that’s flat and heavy. Without a thought, just by habit, she takes a chair to push the tin to the back of the highest shelf, behind the oven cleaner and ammonia. Then, leaning across the gap, her hand braced on the cupboard door, it occurs to Hannah that she hasn’t done this in years, though once she did it every month. And she climbs down from the chair still holding the tin.
When Murray comes in she’s clicking her fingernail against the narrow key soldered to its back.
“This is the end of it,” says Murray. With his hip he pushes the door shut. He lets his box slide to the table. “Eggs in here. Mind you don’t break them.”
“Murray?” she says. “What possessed you to buy oysters?”
He stares at the tin, at the chair, at the cleaning cupboard with its door hanging open. “Oh,” he says. “I don’t know.”
“I started to hide them,” she says. “I was thinking— Murray, you haven’t bought oysters in years.”
They were Squid’s favorite food; she could go through a tin in a minute, picking the oysters out with her fingers, slurping the juice until it dribbled down her chin. Every Christmas there was a tin of oysters in her stocking.
Then Murray, in his daily lectures on biology, chose mussels as his subject. They grew on the steep-sided shore to the south, in clusters on the reefs. He tore a big one free and said, “Gather round.” He always said “Gather round” to start it off. Squid was six or seven.
Hannah, Squid, and Alastair sat on rocks as sharp as nails. “This is the byssus,” said Murray, spreading with his fingers the cottony threads that held the mussel to its rock. “It’s spun by a gland in the animal’s foot. He lashes himself in place, like Ulysses to his mast.”
He turned the shell in his hand. It was a California mussel, nearly eight inches long. He pointed out the scars along the shell, like patches of white on its deep purple back. “This fellow,” he said, “has had some sort of an accident. He might have been whacked by a log.” The scars were deep, and Murray picked at the grooves with his nails. “The poor brute almost bought it there. Must have got the fright of his life.”
“How old is he?” asked Alastair.
“Hard to say.” Murray bounced the mussel in his palm. “He’s an old-timer, all right. They grow like weeds in the beginning; more than three inches the first year. But then they slow down, and this one’s lived on the island maybe as long as I have.”
“Wow!” said Squid.
“He’s terribly strong,” said Murray. “Stronger than any of us. Just try to pull him open.” He made everyone have a try. Alastair grunted and frowned. Squid rapped it on the rock, and a chip of shell flew off. Then Murray pulled out his clasp knife and shoved it through the hinge.
“Sorry, old man,” he said to the mussel. There was a tearing sound as he pried it open.
“He’s screaming!” shouted Alastair.
“No, no,” said Murray. “That’s only his hinge you’re hearing.” He held the opened mussel, and the children leaned over him, one on each side. At their feet, the swell surged at the rock.
“Why’s he so orange?” said Alastair.
They had all seen the insides of mussels before. But Hannah, too, was always surprised by the lurid color, a ghastly orange bright as boiled yams. She had never thought to wonder why the mussel looked like that.
“It’s just the way he is,” said Murray. “Colorful, flamboyant.” He poked at the flesh with the tip of his knife. “It sets him apart from the oysters and the clams. He’s the man-about-town of the shellfish family.”
“Is he related to oysters?” asked Alastair.
Murray nodded. “Like brothers.”
“But oysters aren’t orange,” said Alastair.
“No. They’re too sedate for that,” said Murray. “An oyster wouldn’t dare to be orange. He has a shell as thick as armor, but he likes his water deep, where the waves won’t knock him about. That’s typical for the shellfish to be timid like that. The whole lot of them are utterly harmless, locked up in their shells all their lives. Oysters especially so. They’re not nearly as outgoing as a snail.”
Alastair poked at the orange goo. “Where’s his brain, Dad?”
“He has no brain,” said Murray. “No heart or lungs. He breathes water through his gills, and most of him’s a stomach. Like the oyster, he’s a simple, stay-at-home sort of creature, happy to munch away all day on microscopic plants and animals.” He poked harder at the mussel, burying the knifepoint inside it. “No pearl in this one. Not that it would be worth anything if there was. And of course we won’t eat him. Tell me why not.”
“Red tide!” shouted Squid.
Murray grinned. “Right you are. If our friend here has been eating the wrong sort of things he could be loaded with poisons. So we’ll just put him back on the rock.”
He set the mussel gently on top of the others.
“Will he lash himself down?” asked Alastair.
“I’m afraid not,” said Murray. “He’s a goner now, rest his soul.” He closed his knife and slipped it into his pocket, twisting his hip up from the stone. He rubbed his hands together. “Well, any questions?”
There never were at question time.
“Then, there being none, we’ll break into teams for a wrestling game. Men against the girls.”
The memory is vivid to Hannah. She can still hear Squid’s happy shout. She can feel the wind in her hair, and the rock under her feet as she stood for the run to the beach. She can smell the sunburned skin above her lip and feel the glare from the sea in her eyes.
But Alastair stayed where he was, hunched and small, beside the clutch of mussels.
“Come on!” said Murray. “You’ll let down the team.”
Alastair looked up at him, like a worried little gnome. “We shouldn’t eat oysters,” he said. “It isn’t right.”
Squid laughed. “It isn’t right,” she mocked, grinning with the sunlight bright in her hair.
“Shhh!” said Murray. He knelt beside Alastair. “It’s the natural process,” he said. “The oyster eats plankton; something eats the oyster; something else eats that. This mussel here, he’s not a waste. When the tide comes in, some sea star will wander along and think himself very lucky not to have to jack him open.”
“But he’s harmless,” said Alastair. “He lives in his shell and never comes out.” He touched the flesh one more time. Already it was drying to a hard, dead thing. “He’s all dark and nearly black on the outside. And inside he’s so soft and pretty. It isn’t right to kill him.”
He was describing himself; Hannah can see that now. He was describing just the way he would be in a few more years, a dark and brooding child, so tender inside. And suddenly that day, he burst into tears.
“Why are you crying?” asked Squid.
“ ‘And all the little Oysters stood and waited in a row’!”
In the kitchen of the big house, Hannah smiles at the memory. Then Murray, seeing her, says, “You look so sad, Hannah.”
She sniffs. She wipes her cheeks, and it surprises her to find them wet. “He quoted from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ Remember that?”
And Murray laughs. It’s not his old laugh, so deep and loud that it almost hurt to hear it. He chuckles, as though he doesn’t want—or mean—to laugh.
“Poor Alastair,” he says. “He never ate another oyster after that.”
She wants to tell Murray now that she saw him. That the island has not one ghost, but two. In the single flash of light, as he stood on the lawn staring in, Alastair looked healthy and full-blooded and strong. He wasn’t wearing glasses.
She puts the oysters on the counter, but it bothers her to have them there. She tucks the tin sideways behind the rack of dishes, aware that Murray’s watching.
“Do you ever think that he’s near?” she asks. “Do you ever have a sense that he’s close?”
“Not so much anymore,” says Murray. He starts to collect the empty boxe
s, pushing one inside another. “At first I did. I’d be walking down the trail and I’d think he’d come and walk behind me. I heard him laughing once. I thought I saw him get up from a rock—och, a hundred yards away—and hurry off along the sand.” The boxes squeak as he pushes them down. “I think there were a couple of times when I went up to his room. Did you know that?”
“No,” she says. It was many times more than a couple.
“I always had the feeling he was there. That he’d been there just a moment before. But it’s gone now, that sense of that. He’s cleared off, I think.”
He bends at the knees and picks up the stack of boxes. “Anything else for burning?” he asks.
Hannah shakes her head.
He goes out to the porch and puts on his shoes. He reaches back to close the door. “I made them work too much,” he says. “I should have taken more time for play.” Then the door clicks shut, and he cocks his head at her through the square of glass. He gathers his boxes and goes thumping down the steps, peering round the cardboard.
He, too, is like the mussel, she thinks. He’s rooted to his island; his byssus is just as strong. To tear him loose would kill him.
She watches him head along the path, and thinks it’s sad that he has to pass the wailing wall just now, and again, with every load of boxes. Painting that little row of stones was Alastair’s first job. He was two years old, and he cried himself along the row, but Murray kept him at it until every stone was painted.
Sure enough, Murray stops there for a moment, and Hannah pities him for that. He’s being too hard on himself. There was lots of time for play.
Hannah puts a colander full of cherries in the sink. She turns on the tap, and a moment later, the pump switches on in the basement, humming below her feet. The water flows up from the cistern, pouring over her hands.
It never took more than three hours to do the work around the station. In winter it seldom took one. And then, apart from the weathers—a ten-minute job every three hours—the days were theirs to spend as they would.
They shed their coveralls and painting caps, their gardening gloves and work boots.
“Tools,” said Murray. And they went and hung them on their pegs, matching each one to the proper silhouette from the dozens that Murray had drawn on nearly every wall.
They put on bright-colored clothes of red and yellow and pink. Even Murray sometimes dared to wear an ocher-colored shirt. And then they ran; they flew. They pounded down the boardwalk, leaning at the bends, Murray in the lead, then Squid, then Alastair, spinning and leaping— squawking—flying across the island like a flock of parrots. Over the muskeg and into the forest, past the squirrels’ middens and the aeries of the eagles, plucking up feathers and ferns and running on, falling—at the end—onto the sand, dropping lemming-like into a laughing, squirming heap.
They lived at the beach, by the sea. Murray unslung Hannah’s kayak from the basement rafters, painted it red, and carried it down to the beach. He built a rowboat from the plywood of his packing crates, and set a thick pane of glass into the bottom. And they drifted all around the little lagoon, out through the gap to the channel, down to the point where the ocean swells burst in a rage on the rocks.
Hannah turns off the water. She shakes the cherries, gladdened somehow by their splash of brightness.
Those were the happiest days of her life, in that funny little boat, with the black stenciled message Handle With Care showing through Murray’s white paint like a shadow. She loved to stare through the glass as the beach dropped away, as the water got deeper and darker. And then a rock would glide past, or a strand of kelp, and suddenly the bottom would zoom up toward her, gaudy with starfish and anemones.
One day, as they floated at low tide over an always-drowned reef, Murray threw out a stone for an anchor. And they huddled round the pane of glass like Gypsies at a crystal ball. There were urchins below them, like a shelf full of pincushions.
“The urchin,” said Murray, beginning a lecture. “Another animal that starts life as a wanderer and settles down when he’s older. Some of them sit so long in one place that they wear hollows in the rock.”
“They look like porcupines,” said Squid, who had never seen a porcupine.
“Indeed they do,” said Murray. “The urchin protects himself with a fistful of swords, but it’s all for show; he never attacks another creature. If the ground was softer he’d turn his swords to plowshares and dig himself a pit. And if something comes after him, he won’t try to poke it. Most likely, he’ll run away, racing on his swords.”
They saw that too, a few days later. Through the glass of the boat, they saw the urchins hurtling along in an awful slow motion, climbing over one another, dropping from boulders and cliffs. They looked like panicked, stampeding cattle.
“Starfish coming,” said Murray. And sure enough, behind them came a big, lumbering sea star, a bogeyman crawling along. “They’re actually related. Close as cousins. But there’s no love lost there.”
The urchins’ spines waved and shook. They reached forward; they pushed from behind, and the urchins went tumbling along.
“Poor things,” said Alastair. “What will happen if the starfish catches them?”
“He’ll eat them, stupid,” said Squid. She leaned over the glass. “I’d like to see that. I wish he’d hurry, the stupid star.”
Hannah takes a towel from the drawer and lays it out on the counter. She spills the cherries across it, spreading them with her hand. Murray likes to have his cherries blotted dry. Otherwise, he thinks, they’ll rot and spoil.
She misses the old days, the lectures. There are things she learned from Murray that she’ll always remember, word for word.
“Whelks are cannibals. A hundred babies might grow in their capsule, but only one comes out.”
“The hermit crab is a scoundrel, too lazy to build a shell.”
The lessons made the children what they were. Alastair was sensitive; Squid was wild. The lessons inspired Hannah to go through Murray’s shelf of books, learning all she could of animals she had scarcely looked at before.
Then Alastair turned ten.
And Murray lectured on the barnacle.
The cherries spread before her remind Hannah of that day. Crowded on the towel, they’re lumps beneath her hand. She touches them softly, gently, the way Alastair touched the barnacles.
“They love company,” said Murray, squatting on the rocks below the tower. “They’re friendly as all get-out.”
Squid was quieter than usual. They’d walked right around the island, and Hannah had feared that Murray wouldn’t be giving a lecture that day. But he’d only been watching for a big mass of barnacles, to better illustrate his point. There were so many barnacles she couldn’t see the rock underneath them. They covered it like stucco, in clumps as jagged as broken teeth.
“See how they live in cities?” asked Murray. “In high-rises even, one atop another? But as children they go swimming through the ocean. They’re as free as butterflies, no shell to weigh them down.”
He touched the barnacles. “Gather round,” he said.
They found places at his elbows, Alastair right in front of him.
“When a barnacle gets a little older he decides to settle down. He finds a city and gives up his wandering ways; he builds his own little house in the city. And in it he’ll live for all his days.”
He ran his hand across them. “Look closely,” he said.
They all bent down. The wind ruffled round them, and a flock of gulls went by above.
“See how they live? They put up walls, a door at the top. Can you see how the shell is made in plates, with hinges and all the hardware? They’ve closed up shop because the tide is out, but their doors are still ajar.”
Hannah leaned over them. The barnacles dug at her knees and the flesh of her hands. But she saw the doors and wondered how it was that she’d never noticed them before. They were beautifully formed, a pyramid of plates. And they all slammed closed as s
he brushed her hand across the shells.
Beside her, Alastair was doing it too. She saw his face, the look of magic.
“In every house there’s a barnacle,” said Murray. “They stick their heads to the rock with cement. The strongest glue in the world. And when the tide comes in they open their doors and poke out their feet. They thrash and kick at anything that drifts by. Their days of swimming are gone forever; they can never leave their houses. And at the slightest danger, they lock themselves inside. They bolt their doors and cower in the darkness.”
He stood up. “There,” he said. “That’s what city life does to you.”
Alastair was still staring at the barnacles, still stroking them kindly. Squid sat back and brushed her knees. The skin was red and mottled, speckled with barnacle dust.
“Well,” said Murray, his hands on his hips. “Any questions? Then, there being none—”
“Wait!” said Alastair.
Murray frowned. There were never questions at question time.
“How do they . . .” Alastair bit his lip. “You know. How do they—do that?”
“You mean, how do they swim?” asked Murray, hopefully.
“No,” said Alastair. “Have babies.”
Hannah rolls the cherries under her hand and remembers how the question shocked her. She picks up the towel by its corners, folding them into a bulging ball.
It was inevitable; she can see that now. Not once in his lectures had Murray mentioned reproduction. The lives of his animals began in childhood and ended in lonely solitude.
Of course it was Squid who pressed the point. “Yes, Dad,” she said, springing forward again. “How do they do that? How do they have babies?”
“Funny you should ask,” he said, and scratched furiously at his hair. “I think it was Aristotle who wrote that barnacles grow as seedlings on a tree and drop from there into the water.”
Squid giggled. “What a silly guy!”
“Right you are!” Murray laughed. “Well,” he said, “I think it’s high time—”
But Alastair wasn’t about to be put off. He had his fingers spread across the barnacles, a look of worry on his face. “So how do they do it, Dad?”
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