At the Edge of the World

by Jones, Kari;

  “What was in the shed?” Peter asks once his plate is empty.

  Bo looks away from him as he says, “Mostly wood.”

  Peter freezes, and I do too.

  “Wood? As in my wood?” Peter asks.

  Bo nods.

  “My wood that I’ve been drying?”

  “I’m sorry, Peter, I know you asked me to move it ages ago. I just didn’t get around to it yet.”

  Peter doesn’t say anything, but his whole body slumps. The wood that’s just burned is worth thousands and thousands of dollars. I exhale slowly. I’m afraid to look at either of them.

  Peter glares at Bo. “The ebony?” he asks.

  Bo nods.

  Without saying anything, Peter shoves his plate away, gets up and leaves the room. Bo and I don’t look at each other, and we don’t say anything.

  We both know how important that wood was.

  * * *

  Peter’s gone for most of the day. Before he leaves, I overhear him talking to Bo, and though I can’t hear all of what they’re saying, I do catch the words Maddie and university. Peter was planning to sell a violin to help pay the cost of my tuition. Now he won’t be able to.

  It’s Sunday, so I get the last of my homework done, then spend the rest of the day in my room, trying to concentrate on painting. Trying, but there are a lot of thoughts swirling around in my brain, and I end up doodling in my sketchbook instead. Having the wood burn should make things easier for me, because I don’t have the money to pay for the tuition not covered by the scholarship myself. No violin, no tuition—an easy way out. Somehow it doesn’t feel that way.

  From my bedroom window at the back of the house, I can see Bo poking around where the shed used to be, and I know he’s looking for anything he can salvage. He must be feeling pretty bad today.

  It’s late when Peter comes home. He comes straight to my room and knocks on my door.

  “Come in.”

  Peter is tall and ruddy, and his thick hair makes him look healthy. But not today. He looks gray, and his shoulders are stooped. He sits on the end of the bed and flips through my sketchbook.

  “Some of the wood’s okay. I think I can salvage enough of the ebony.”

  “I’m glad, Peter.”

  “Emily Carr. I’m so proud of you, Maddie.”

  The doodles stare up at me. I want to tell him again, I’m not going, Peter. I don’t want to go. But I can’t find the courage. Not when he’s sitting on the end of my bed looking like he’s aged ten years in a day.

  “I know you can’t see it now, Maddie, but you really must go. It’ll change the world for you, and you can’t even imagine how much you’re going to learn.”

  “Peter…”

  “Maddie, it’ll be the best time of your life. Don’t deny yourself that. Give it some more thought. Promise?” He pushes the sketchbook toward me and stands up.

  “I’ve done nothing but think about it, Peter.”

  “What have you got against going to university?”

  “Nothing. I’ll probably end up going.”

  “Good.” Peter smiles.

  “No, Peter. You’re not listening to me. I meant I’ll probably end up going sometime later.”

  “You’ve been accepted now, Maddie. You’ve already told us that offer’s not going to be there later. This might be your only opportunity to go.”

  “That’s a chance I’ll have to take.”

  Peter glowers at me, and it’s hard to meet his eyes. “Five, ten years from now, Bo and I might not be able to help you with tuition, you know.”

  I nod.

  “So you’re just going to throw this scholarship away?”

  “That’s not how I see it. I want to see the paintings in the Louvre, and in the Picasso museum in Barcelona, and in the National Museum in Sweden. Travel, you know.”

  “Must be nice. How are you planning to pay for all this travel?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll find a way.”

  Peter shakes his head. “Being a hungry artist is tough, Maddie.”

  “I’m okay with that.”

  Peter blows air through his mouth, but it doesn’t come out as a word. He walks out of the room, and a few seconds later I see him through the bedroom window. He’s chopping firewood, fast and hard, though it’s too late in the season to need wood.

  My doodles stare up at me until I take my pencil and scribble all over the page.

  FIVE

  Ivan

  Des wakes me up a couple of days after the fire by pulling the sheets off my bed. “Jesus, Ivan, you going to sleep all day?” he asks.

  I pull my pillow over my head and try to recapture the dream I was having. It’s true that I haven’t done much over the past couple of days, even though I should have been going to school for study sessions and getting ready for finals, but I’m still tired from our night of firefighting.

  Des pulls the pillow off. “Come on. Arne says we can take out his boat.”

  “What for?”

  “Bo says the storm the other night washed up some good wood.”

  “Why now?”

  “The tide’s good.”

  “I should study.”

  “When are your exams?”

  “Next week.”

  “Plenty of time.” He throws me a pair of jeans and says, “Hurry.”

  I fumble my way into my jeans and shoes and follow him to the van.

  “How’s your throat?” he asks as we climb in and he jiggles the ignition to get the engine started.

  “Still rough. Yours?”

  “Yeah, same,” he says. “It’ll take a while, I think. Smoke inhalation’s bad for you.”

  “Yeah. It’s a nice excuse for doing nothing for a couple of days,” I say.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You could’ve been looking for a new job,” I say.

  Des snorts and says, “I’m not the only one.”

  “Like it’s my responsibility to keep food on the table. I have exams, remember?”

  We pull into the dock. I’m already set to bail on the day and head home. To hell with spending the day with Des. But when we get there, my friend Noah comes up to the van door.

  “I asked Noah to join us,” says Des as he turns off the ignition, and before he opens the van door and gets out, he leans over the gearshift and says, “I’ve got something worked out, for your information.”

  “A job?”

  “You could call it that,” he says.

  “That’s great. How come you didn’t tell me?”

  But Des has already jumped out of the van.

  We head down the ramp and onto the dock, and then Noah and I settle ourselves on the bow of Arne’s boat. Noah’s new to Bear Harbour. He still thinks heading out to the islands to salvage driftwood is exciting. Despite my grumbling, I like being on the water. We’ve collected firewood from the islands ever since I can remember. When I was little, Mom used to wrap her arms around me to keep me warm, and it was my job to watch out for things floating in the water: logs, crab traps, Styrofoam—once, a dead sea otter. Des would pretend he hadn’t seen it until I yelled to him it was there, and then he’d change his course dramatically, making both Mom and me squeal. Yeah, that’s how things were before she left. Anyway, that’s how I remember it.

  Now, as we pull away from the dock, Noah tells me about this wave he caught yesterday. He’s getting pretty good at surfing.

  After a while Des heads the boat toward Pitbull Island. Crossing the channel is choppy, so Noah and I pull up our hoods and huddle, backs to the wind, until we round the headland of the island. The wide beach is filled with driftwood. As Des noses the boat onto shore, I pull a chain saw out of a toolbox in the cab of the boat and hoist it onto my shoulder. We all wade to shore and start hunting for good firewood.

  “It has to be new. The old stuff has too much salt in it,” says Des.

  “Yeah, I know,” I say.

  “I was talking to Noah.”

&nbs
p; Bo was right. There are logs everywhere. “Looks like a lumberyard lost a boatload,” says Noah.

  “A barge overturned. Lost half a million dollars’ worth of logs. Storm washed them all to shore,” says Des.

  “So this is salvage? Don’t you need a license for that?” Noah asks, but neither Des nor I answer him.

  It doesn’t take long before I find a log long enough to be a telephone pole lying at the top of a big pile. I rev the saw, and a flock of small birds flies away.

  “Sit on this, will you?” I ask Noah. He straddles the log to steady it as the saw bites into the grain. As the cut falls to the ground, Noah says, “Do you do this all the time?”

  “Sure. I was about four the first time I came out with Des,” I say.

  “Seriously?”

  “I was in charge of protecting the crabs. I had a little circle of stones, and every time someone found a crab under a log, they’d shout and I’d come to the rescue.”

  “It seems like it wouldn’t be legal, taking all this wood,” he says.

  “It’s only illegal if you sell the wood.”

  “My mom wasn’t sure I should come.”

  I stand up and stretch my hand. The saw’s heavy, and I need to take a break. My arm’s still not as strong as it was before I broke it a couple of years ago.

  “Want me to take a turn?” asks Noah.

  I shake my head and say, “How come you came then?”

  Noah uses his feet to push the log up and down like a teeter-totter. It’s balanced perfectly in the middle.

  “Sit on the other end,” he says, so I clamber to the far end of the log. We’re about the same size, Noah and me, both fairly tall and of medium build, though he’s dark and I’m blond. We balance each other well.

  For a few minutes we ride the log, taking turns swinging high into the air, then pushing off the ground. It’s like being a kid again. But then Des shouts at us to quit messing around, and we go back to cutting the log into lengths. I cut and Noah hauls the lengths to the beach.

  After about half an hour, I stand again and stretch. My arm is sore.

  Noah says, “In answer to your question, I came because I’m okay with a little bit illegal.”

  “It wouldn’t be you who got in trouble anyway,” I say. “I mean, if there was any trouble to get into.”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  An hour later the boat is so full the words on the side of the hull are half in the water, and both of my arms ache from loading what we’ve cut on board.

  “That’s enough,” says Des. “We’d better get going.” The tide’s still coming in, and the beach is a lot smaller than it was. Des unties the boat from the tree he threw the rope over, and we all push the bow, then hop in.

  Noah seems relaxed. He doesn’t say much, but he has a smile on his face. The two of us sit on the bow and share a bottle of water, then spread out across the deck to enjoy the sun. The water’s calm between the islands, and the sun’s warm on my face, and it doesn’t take long before the sound of the engine lulls me almost to sleep.

  I don’t pay much attention when Des changes course—there are many ways back to Bear Harbour from the islands—but I sit up when we slow around a point and the bow is slapped by choppy waves. Des turns in to a small bay and cuts the engine, letting the boat drift. In front of us is a rickety wooden dock with a boat pulled up beside it and an orange buoy hanging off a tree at the beach end.

  “What’re we doing here?” I ask.

  “I told Pedro I’d stop in on him,” says Des. “I’ll be quick.” He steers the boat up to the dock. It’s usually my job to hop out and cinch the line around the cleat, but that would mean I’m agreeing to stop here.

  Fuck that. Pedro’s an asshole.

  I lie back down on the bow.

  “Suit yourself. Noah, will you tie the rope?” Des asks.

  Noah raises his eyebrows at me but hops off the boat and leans on the rope to pull the boat into place. His foot slips, and he staggers, and I have to leap from my spot and grab the end of the rope, pull with him and cinch it off.

  “Thanks,” says Noah, rubbing his hands.

  I almost get back onto the boat, but it seems cruel to leave Noah with Des and Pedro, so instead I follow the two of them into the woods. A hundred feet along, the trail opens into a rocky clearing overlooking a crescent-shaped bay. A cedar-shingle house and some sheds huddle between the forest and the rocky shore. Laundry hangs on a line, and there’s smoke coming out of a small chimney. It looks homey. Great camouflage.

  Pedro comes to the door and calls out, “Hey. You brought the family. I thought you were coming alone.”

  Des grins. “Pedro! You know Ivan, and this is Noah, a new friend from Bear Harbour.”

  The old man looks Noah up and down, then wipes his hand on his pants and sticks it out. “Nice to meet you,” he says.

  Noah shakes his hand.

  “Come on in,” says Pedro, but I’m already walking down to the beach. “Got brownies,” he calls after me.

  I give him the finger and keep walking.

  Noah follows me down to the beach, but as we pick our way among the logs to the sand, he says, “What was that about?”

  Before I can reply, Pedro’s little five-year-old granddaughter, Willow, runs up the beach and launches herself at me. I stagger as I catch her in my arms and lift her over my shoulder. “Hi, Willow.”

  “Come look,” she says, and she wiggles down and runs along the beach to a pile of rocks. I squat next to her. “What’ve you got there?”

  “I’m making a home for these.” She lifts one rock, and a purple shore crab skitters away.

  “We’ll help,” I say. “How big should the rocks be?”

  “That one.” She points to a rock the size of a motorcycle.

  “We can’t lift that, you goose.”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “Okay, then, like this.” She makes a double fist and holds it up.

  Noah and I wander along the beach looking for rocks that might make a good home for sea crabs. When we reach the far end, Noah asks again, “What was that about with Pedro?”

  I balance one rock on top of another before I reply. “He and I don’t really get along.”

  “No shit. How come?”

  “When Pedro and Des are together there’s always some scheme going on, and it usually doesn’t end well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He has a way of arranging things so that it’s never him who gets into trouble when things go wrong.”

  I don’t think that’s the kind of answer Noah’s looking for, but it’s what he’s getting for now, because Willow catches up with us and holds out her hands. She’s got a purple sea star spread across her palms.

  “Wow, look at that,” says Noah.

  “Do you want to hold it?” Willow asks, and when Noah nods, she goes through a complicated procedure of passing it from her hands to his. He holds it up so he can look under it.

  “That’s sick,” he says.

  “No it’s not—it’s very healthy,” says Willow, and both Noah and I laugh. We help her return the sea star to the water and let her show us the rest of the things she’s found on the beach: limpets, winkles, clams, different kinds of coral. She points to each of them and makes Noah repeat their names.

  When Des calls from the house, I say, “Bye, buddy. Until next time.”

  “Bye, Ivan,” she says, and she throws her arms around me in that amazing way little kids have of hugging with their whole bodies, then runs back down the beach to her crabs. Noah follows me up the path to the house. There are two huge backpacks leaning against the front of the house now. Des hoists one over his shoulder and points to the other. “Bring that,” he says to me.

  “What is it?”

  “Pedro’s laundry,” Des says, though the clothesline filled with shirts and socks is right behind me.

  “Big stuff I need the dry cleaner to do for me. They said they can pick it up at your house,” Pedro says,
and though I still don’t believe him, I hoist the backpack onto my shoulder and take it down to the dock.

  We climb into the boat and settle the backpacks under a tarp. Des makes certain the packs are well covered before he starts the engine. Noah and I take our places on the bow. The sun is high now and feels great on my face as I lean back and let it lull me to sleep.

  My friend Jack and his dad, Arne, are on the dock to meet us at Bear Harbour. Arne’s our local RCMP officer, which is why he has such a nice boat. He’s also a generous man. Which is why he lends it to us.

  “I see you found some wood,” says Arne when Des kills the engine.

  “Sure did,” says Des.

  “I assume you’re not going to sell this, Des,” Arne says.

  “Of course not.” Des grins at Arne, who shakes his head but smiles back.

  Noah and Des step off the boat, and Des says, “I’ll go get the van.”

  “We can help you unload,” Arne says, but Des says, “Nah, I got two strong boys here.”

  Arne laughs and says, “It’s no problem. What are friends for?”

  “Seriously, Arne, there are three of us,” Des says. He hops onto the boat and leans into the cab. A minute later he backs out with a pack in each hand. He hands me one. “Take this,” he says.

  My arms are already filled with wood, but he glances at Arne and whispers, “Take it.”

  I drop the wood onto the pile and take the pack from him, and I force the scowl on my face into a smile as I pass Arne on my way off the boat.

  “I’ll see if there’s a wheelbarrow free,” I say. Des and I walk up the dock, each with a backpack on our shoulder.

  “What’s in here?” I ask.

  “Not now. Let’s get the wood into the van first” is all the answer I get. Shit, I knew Des would be up to something.

  * * *

  As soon as Des and I drop Noah off at his house, I scramble to the back of the van and rip open the lid of one of the backpacks. There’s laundry there, all right, but it’s hard to mask the smell of weed, even with plastic bags, and under a thin layer of towels my hands find what they’re looking for.

  “Holy shit, Des, how much is there?”

  “Enough,” he says.

  “Enough for you to get busted for trafficking,” I say.