The Drift

by Lloyd Kropp

  Slowly he made his way to the deck of The Mary Strattford. It was nearly six by his watch, which he had set that morning by the sun. Then Bright appeared from out of the hatchway to call David and Michael.

  “Dinner in just a few minutes!” she was saying. “When the sun touches the water you’ve got to come in!”

  “All right,” they said. “We’re just going to play one more form. We’ll be up soon as we finish.”

  The children sat like Indians in a circle of five on the deck of an English brig that lay one boat west of The Mary Strattford. When they saw Peter, Michael stood up and called out to him through cupped hands.

  “Sutherland! Come play with us! We’ll teach you shadowgames!”

  “Shhhh,” said David in a loud, furtive whisper. “Maybe he doesn’t want to play.”

  “Sure he does. Don’t you, Sutherland?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “It sounds too hard to learn in just a few minutes.”

  “We can teach you in a second!” said Michael.

  “It doesn’t take too long once you get the hang of it,” said David. He looked up at him shyly.

  Peter had never played with children, and he felt awkward and embarrassed. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I could try.”

  When he had entered into the circle and squatted among them, Michael introduced him to the two dark-skinned, bright-smiling Madrid boys, and to a frail little girl with almond eyes whom the others called Blanca. Then he began to explain the game.

  “It’s done in five parts,” he said. “First, someone thinks up a form. A form is a picture of something in your head, only it has to be something near you that everyone can look at. Then everyone thinks together—that’s why we sit in a circle, so we can sort of make a circle with our minds. The second part is when someone has to answer the form with The First Image. That’s something the form is like when you think about it inside your head. The third part is when someone else thinks up The Second Image. Pao calls that a mephador.”

  “A metaphor,” said his brother.

  “A metaphor,” said Michael without blinking. “Then the fourth part is when the next in the circle has to bring the two images of the form together to make a new form by finding a Joinword. Then the last part is when the last one in the circle gives a clue to a story using the two images and The Joinword, and then everyone tries to guess the story. See how we play?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Peter.

  “No one could understand, the way Michael explains things,” said David. “Let’s just play. Then we can show you how it goes.”

  “Okay,” said Michael, whose spirits apparently could not be dampened by any insult, and who still seemed peculiarly excited by the presence of an adult. “I’ll start.”

  He began to look about him in a slow, casual way. “Let’s do the sails,” he said finally. “My first form is the big sail on The Mary Strattford.”

  The second boy in the circle looked at the sail for a moment and then said, “The sail is like a bird.”

  A few moments later the third boy in the circle said, “The sail is like a ghost. It moves by an invisible power the way ghosts do. And besides, ghosts sometimes dress up in sails.”

  “You mean sheets,” said David.

  “Blanca, give us a Joinword,” said Michael.

  The little girl stared hard at the sail and her eyes narrowed. Her small bony shoulders hunched together, and she brought her knees up under her chin. It seemed that her whole body was intent and trembling upon the edge of that scrutiny. “A pre’storic bird,” she said at last.

  “That’s cause ‘bird’ and ‘ghost’ are joined by ‘pre’storic bird,’ ” whispered Michael. “Cause a ghost bird might be one that used to be but isn’t any more except when you think of it. So the thought of it is like a ghost. D’you see?”

  “Michael always has to explain everything too much,” said David. “It’s much better if you don’t explain.”

  “Let’s go on,” said Michael, ignoring his brother’s objections. “David, it’s your turn to make a story.”

  “It’s a tale of time,” said David.

  “It’s a tale of time,” repeated Michael. “Now its anyone’s turn. Who can guess David’s story?”

  “I can see that one,” said Blanca. The little girl closed her eyes and waved her hands in the air in great excitement. “There’s a bird who flies through time instead of through the air. One day he comes to Now. But in Now he’s a ghost because he doesn’t really live now—he lives a million billion years ago cause he’s a pre’storic bird. So now he rises like a ghost out of the water or maybe the sea of time and changes the way ships go by blowing on the sails.”

  “I see a sailor who finds a golden bird that takes him through time,” said one of the Madrid boys.

  “Blanca wins,” said David. “My story was about a bird who flies through time and turns into a ghost who blows ships off their courses.”

  “Ships in different centuries all blown off course by the same bird,” said Blanca. Her eyes were shining. “Oooh!” she said. “That’s a good story! Maybe Ramirez can write a song for it!”

  “Do you know Ramirez?” said Michael, looking up at Peter.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s The Bluewater Bard!” The boy grinned broadly, and all the children laughed. “Quick!” he said. “While we’re going so good let’s do another form!”

  “There’s no time,” said David. “We have to go in for dinner now. Maybe—maybe Sutherland could come out with us after dinner. I mean if you’re not busy.”

  “ ’Course he’s not busy,” said Michael. “No one works after dinner. Not even Tabor.”

  As they walked over to The Mary Strattford the Madrid boys and Blanca waved good-bye, and when they were out of sight Michael reviewed the game once again:

  “So if the form was sails again someone might say ‘bow,’ cause a bow shoots an arrow through the air like a sail makes a ship shoot through the water. And besides a bow looks like a lateen sail. And then someone else could say ‘fire,’ cause brown sails look like fire when the sun sets.” He pointed to the brown sails of The Mary Strattford as the setting sun filled them with a flaming orange. “And then someone could make a Joinword by saying ‘the sun sinking below the horizon,’ cause it looks like a fiery bow. And then someone would make up a story about the sun using the idea of a bow made of fire.”

  “I see,” said Peter.

  “It sounds so awfully hard when you explain,” said David. “Pao says that when you get real good at metaphors you get real good at feeling people with your mind and then pretty soon you don’t have to talk so much if you don’t want to.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” said Peter.

  “It’s hard to understand, but it’s not hard to believe,” said Michael, who tugged at Peter’s sleeve in order to draw his attention away from his brother. “Believing is easy. I can believe anything!” he said proudly.

  Nine

  ROSE

  At dinner he said very little. Pao was still missing, and that disturbed him. How long, he wondered, before he would see her again? Rose, the old woman, stared at him for minutes at a time during the meal. He felt uncomfortable in her presence. He was vaguely depressed.

  While the others discussed ways of raising a schooner that had nearly sunk the previous night and Bright talked of a new vegetable The Vague Noires had discovered growing near The Bridge, Peter watched Tabor’s children and wondered about the games they played. He understood now that shadowgames were games of the imagination that involved making up metaphors and stories. That much was obvious. But they also seemed to be guessing games that suggested the beginning of a kind of psychic power. And he had the impression from what the children had said that Pao and Tabor had some interest in these games and had helped teach the children how to play them. He suspected that shadowgames were a kind of education, a preparation for living on The Drift as an adult. It was part of a continuum,
as Michael had suggested, that ended in something called The Long Journey. It all suggested a surrender to the inward power of things, whatever that might be, and a rejection of the outward power, the power of the world beyond The Drift, whatever that might be. It made him think of Pao and the silver whistle; it made him think of the whistle’s hollow sound and the dark treasures that lay hidden in the third level of the old caravel. It was as if that day on the ancient ship they had been playing a kind of shadowgame.

  When the meal was over, he and Tabor stayed behind at the table to talk, while Bright cleared the dishes. She said nothing at first, but her quick eyes often touched them, and she smiled faintly whenever Tabor spoke.

  “Tabor, do you understand the games your children play?” Peter was saying.

  “Pretty well. Why?”

  “I’m not quite sure why they get so interested in them. Why do they love metaphors, for instance?”

  “Metaphors have a great power with children. They show correspondences between things. Not the correspondence of logic or science, but the correspondence of feeling and sense. Children find that very mysterious and wonderful.”

  “I’ve never noticed that,” said Peter.

  “Of course you have,” said Tabor. “Children see a lion’s head or a castle in clouds and spirits in the waves and soldiers in a row of clothespins. They’re forever pretending something is really something else. I think it may have to do with the way they learn words. Any new word is like a metaphor for a child because it brings so many things together for him under a single name. It has a sort of magic fluidity; words are not just counters for things. Beyond The Drift children lose that fluidity when they grow up; here we try to preserve it.” He smiled. “I suppose that’s something I learned indirectly from Pao,” he said. “I’m supposed to be her teacher, but sometimes I think I learn more from her than she does from me.”

  Peter felt somehow that he had lost the thread of the conversation. “So in shadowgames the children learn to see relationships,” he said lamely.

  “Life is a series of metaphors,” said Tabor. “A series of correspondences. The better you are at metaphors, the more you can bring into your circle of feeling and understanding. And the children begin to learn this when they play shadowgames. They come closer to the world, and they come closer to each other.”

  Bright, who had been listening to every word, was standing in the corner of the room washing plates in a wooden basin. “Pao told me about that once,” she said timidly, half turning around from her work. “She said that metaphors are a way of feeling, a way of looking at everything that touches your life. She says that with them you can feel the places where things meet if you don’t let the words put everything in different boxes.”

  She took off her apron and folded it and laid it carefully across her scrubbing board. “I think that to feel where things meet is what love means. Do you think that’s true?”

  Tabor looked up at her with great pleasure and surprise. “I think so,” he said.

  Peter smiled. “Well, from now on I’m going to confine myself to simple questions. Questions like, what’s the name of the funny-looking orange vegetable we had for dinner tonight?”

  Bright laughed. “That’s not such a simple question either,” she said. “It’s the new one I was talking about that The Vague Noires found. Weren’t you listening? Nobody knows where it came from and it doesn’t have a name.”

  After dinner he stood for a few moments on the deck of The Mary Strattford, thinking about the tools and ropes and the new sail he had found near Driftsend and the work that lay ahead of him that evening. From across the deck came the creak of a rocking chair where Rose sat and stared at the brilliant orange clouds in the west, the last signs of the setting sun. After a while the silence between them became, for Peter, uncomfortable. And yet he did not walk away. It was strange, he thought, not to walk away. That was what he had always done, but now he could not. He watched the old lady and the sunset and listened to the sound of her rocking chair.

  “It’s a lovely sunset,” he offered.

  She made no answer.

  “I suppose you’ve been here for many years,” he said, trying again after a moment or two.

  The old woman’s head turned slowly, like an owl’s to look at him. “I was here on The Eighth Day of Creation,” she said. “That was when God made The Drift.”

  “I see.”

  “That must have been some time ago,” she added in a more conversational tone. “But you see, my husband and I were only married a month ago and were on our honeymoon when we came here. It was just after The Great War. He was a captain in the Eighty-seventh Fusiliers. But he did not survive the wreck. One of the spars fell on him and broke his neck.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Peter.

  “He was a very passionate man. We would have had many children.” Her eyes turned back to the orange clouds at the horizon. A faint, sudden smile cracked the corner of her mouth.

  Peter watched the old woman curiously. “I understand you were Pao’s teacher before Tabor,” he said.

  “Pao? Pay your debts and owe nothing.” The old woman burst into cackling laughter. It reminded him of glass breaking.

  “Pao,” she said again. “Paolozzi. Yes of course I was her teacher. But when was that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. “I haven’t been on The Drift very long.”

  At this she turned very quickly toward him as if he had startled her. An odd light grew in her eyes. “Are you from France then? Do you have a message for me from Benjamin? He said he would come back when the war was over and we would be married. He’s a captain in the Eighty-seventh Fusiliers.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know him. But I’m sure you’ll hear something very soon,” said Peter quickly.

  Then the light in her eyes went dead. “No,” she said. “He’s gone now. He didn’t survive the wreck. One of the spars fell on him and broke his neck.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Don’t be sorry. That was nearly sixty years ago. I’ve lived a long time without him, but I’ve never forgotten.” And then for a while there was another silence between them.

  Peter watched the old woman as she sat and rocked back and forth. She sat very erect in her chair like an old general watching troops pass in review. She wore a plain gray dress. Her arms were incredibly thin and withered, and the veins and tendons in her hands showed clearly through her yellowish, transparent skin.

  “Where are you from?” she said, quite suddenly.

  “I’m from Connecticut.”

  She was silent again for a moment. “Is that one of The Islands?” she queried.

  “It’s part of The United States.”

  “It must be out there somewhere,” she said, pointing to the horizon. “All the islands and all the boats come from out there. People are born on ships that are bound to be wrecked. When the storm comes and the waves swamp the decks, some men drown and some manage to swim to the islands and some come here. There’s nowhere else. Men make the ships and all the ships are wrecked in storms.

  “That’s why no one ever leaves The Drift,” she said. “Everyone here is afraid of sails.” Again she burst into her frightening laughter. “Perhaps it’s better this way. Did you ever look at the sea hyacinths around the ships?”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed them.”

  “Strange how they look like Lotus,” she said. “Very strange.” Again she laughed. “Lotus?”

  “This is The Land of The Lotus and you may or may not be Odysseus. I suspect tht you are.”

  “My name is Peter Sutherland.”

  “I know what your name is, stupid boy. When I say you are Odysseus I don’t mean your name is Odysseus. Are there flowers where you come from?”

  “Flowers?”

  “Come now, you must know what flowers are. Even Odysseus knows what flowers are. Roses, Gardenias, Lupine, Orchids—”

  “Yes,” said Peter, who was beginning to feel very awkward
again, “there are flowers in Connecticut.”

  “Here there are flowers in the mind where you cannot see them fade. Eventually they may fade, but you cannot see them fade.”

  “There are flowers in the water by The Cliff,” he offered.

  “I mean the flowers that curl back into seeds,” she said. “Not real flowers. Not that kind of real.”

  “Real flowers are the only kind I know.”

  “I daresay. Yes. You must be Odysseus.” Again she laughed. “But what were you saying about Pao? She was a student of mine, you know. I gave her all my gifts. All my poor flowers.”

  “That was—that was certainly very nice of you,” said Peter.

  Rose looked at him with a lidless serpentine stare that withered him with its sudden contempt. “My but you are a stupid boy,” she said. “But that’s of no importance.” She rose from her rocking chair and walked like a man, very lean and erect, toward the plank that led to the next ship. Suddenly she stopped and turned to look at him again.

  “And when are you leaving?” she said.

  “Leaving?”

  “You’re leaving The Drift. When are you planning to go?”

  He was stunned. “I thought no one left The Drift,” he managed to say.

  She watched him but she did not answer.

  “They would all stop me if I tried to leave,” he said.