The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “I’m not sure. All the new ones have it when they come out of the shell.”

  He helped her find a couple of others, which she put into the pocket of her dress. “This is one of the best trees for them,” he said, and watched her intently — her throat, her hair — as she gazed up into the foliage.

  “Do you live near here?” he said.

  “Over on Banting. I haven’t walked this way before.”

  He nearly said, I’m glad you did, but managed to hold back. They walked together up Shade.

  “Too bad,” he said, “about that cat business.”

  She did not immediately respond, and he wondered if he’d made a misstep. He did not seem able to be natural with her. She said, “I’m probably too sensitive about some things. It just occurred to me that that cat hadn’t died of old age.”

  “He gets them from farms,” Joe said. “Barn cats.”

  “Barn cats?”

  “They live half-wild in the barns. They keep down the mice.”

  “A good and useful life,” she said. “I don’t know why they have to die. It’s not as if we don’t already know about cat anatomy.”

  “No,” he said with a nervous laugh. There was a quickness in her, a quick, tart opinionatedness, a little intimidating.

  “Does he kill them himself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll bet he does. The man gives me the creeps.”

  A bee skimmed across the road, passing them at knee level. A red Studebaker swished down the tree-shaded street, and a woman in one of the large houses on the embankment to the east paused in the sweeping of her porch to look at them. Late summer had brought everything to perfection, though the autumn was present too, a honing of the air.

  Anna had stopped to fumble in her binder. She extracted a paper, shaking out its folds with one hand and offering it to him. “I wrote a poem about it.”

  He took the page in the glare of light. What did he know about poetry? Tennyson’s “Ulysses” — he liked that one — “Daffodils,” bits of Hamlet’s soliloquies, they knocked around in his head and sometimes, at odd moments, they’d pop out. “To be or not to be.” “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace.” He looked at the page with its column of typescript and suddenly, the slight touch of a breeze, he sensed her vulnerability as she waited for his reaction.

  The cat is not dead.

  That is only the illusion of her wet, spiked fur,

  Her stillness

  Her buttoned-down eyes

  Her last, desperate run stiffened into an emblem

  Of former cat.

  The cat is not here.

  What you see in these packed organs

  This grey waste of cells

  Is only a trace of cat —

  Cat-tracks

  Printing the snow of our notebooks.

  The cat has gone elsewhere.

  Once again

  The cat has eluded us:

  A whisper in dry grasses,

  A howl of dismay

  From the country of her other lives.

  Reaching the last line, he felt something. He wasn’t sure it was his nervousness around Anna Macrimmon, his terror springing a trap door to new depths, or if it was the poem itself, its strangeness, like a bullet severing water.

  “It’s good,” he said, and coloured at the appalling inadequacy of his remark. “It’s very good — wonderful! That last line.” He shook his head, stymied by his amazement.

  She took the page back from him, and they went on without speaking. Just knowing her the little he did, he had been pitched into new country. But this, her country, was stranger than he had realized. There were huge, shadowy regions, tricky paths, a wilderness. He was lost, and he didn’t like it. At the moment he felt he was failing her, in his silence.

  “You’re a poet,” he said to the space in front of him. “I mean, I don’t know about poetry. But that!”

  He glanced at her suddenly and found her looking at him; there was something alert in her eyes, searching, but he couldn’t decipher it.

  “Do you have more?”

  “A few,” she said.

  “I’d like to see them some time. I mean, if you —”

  He thought she was blushing.

  “I’m sorry, Anna, if you don’t want to —”

  “No, I’ll show you some time. I want to.”

  “Good!”

  “Good,” she said, a dull echo. He felt she was slipping away. Desperate, before his advantage disappeared entirely, he said, “There’s a dance next week, Friday. Maybe not the greatest dance in the world, but I wonder if you’d like to go with me.”

  She looked up the street. “I don’t think so, Joe.”

  Her voice sounded muffled. Not for the first time, he felt she was older than he.

  “Or we could go to a movie, or just …”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m just not up for that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing are you up for then?”

  She smiled faintly, shaking her head a little, as if she found him incorrigible and a bit amusing. She did not answer.

  He felt as if she had taken him very gently and put him aside. She was friendly enough afterwards, so that he wondered if she had dismissed him at all. But no: it was done. He licked his wounds for a day or two and then — he could scarcely help himself — began to shadow her again. He contrived meetings in the hall, and a couple of times ran into her on the way to school. He was careful not to force anything, to pretend to be at his ease, camouflaging his true feelings. Once or twice he tried to push things further, but she rebuffed him. He understood it was a matter of trust. If he did not chase her, then from time to time, for a little while, they could be together. Watching her, laughing at some joke she’d made, pretending she was only one of a dozen girls he liked, he drank her in secret, deeply and gratefully.

  And if there had been only two of them in the world — this was a fantasy of his — then friendship might have warmed to something else. But others were present: the North End kids had closed around her like a herd welcoming their own kind. She was often alone — it seemed to him her natural state — but when she wasn’t she was with Liz McVey and Diane Cochrane and Sheila Benson and Carol Jeunesse — all the reigning clique of girls. To his eyes, they were her inferiors. Walking with her down the halls, holding their books to their chests or under their arms, in their plaid skirts and neat blouses, their cardigans and blazers and cropped or bouffanted hair, they seemed her attendants only, ladies to her queen.

  And Brad Long was clearly in the picture. Brad Long with his easy ways and fine clothes — those always-new-looking shirts, their tab collars left so deftly open, the soft cardigans, the neatly creased khakis, the chocolate Hush Puppies — Brad was paying a lot of attention to Anna Macrimmon. His locker was beside Anna’s — damnable luck — but Joe thought there was more than coincidence in the number of times he saw Brad leaning there, leaning over her as she bent to select something from the narrow cupboard or simply listened to him, held in the protective space his tall body made, held by his low voice that surrounded her with a chuckling casualness, everything easy and smooth and carrying them on together like two idling lovers in a canoe.

  Once, too, he saw them walk away together after school, up Angle Street, which was telling: Anna Macrimmon lived in that direction, but Brad didn’t. He wondered if she’d asked him to her house. He followed them, at a distance, and saw them turn up Cairn, but after that, wary of being seen himself, he lost them. They could have gone into a house (he didn’t know which one) or turned down another street. He was too upset, too aware of his own pathetic absurdity to follow farther, but that night it seemed to him that he had certainly lost her, friendship was surely the most he could expect. And yet there was an anger in him, with her, with Brad Long, for he felt he was better than Brad, and better for her too, and it seemed a major fault in her, the first he’d discovered, that she could not see this fo
r herself.

  One day soon afterwards, he and Anna Macrimmon came to the fountain in the hall together. She bent to the silver knob — it seemed alive under its quivering beads of water — holding back her hair with the tips of her fingers.

  “So good,” she said, wiping her mouth with her hand as she turned to him. “Cold.”

  “It’s from springs outside of town,” Joe told her. “They get it before it even comes out of the ground.” And remembering dimly something from their first conversation, at Mann’s house, he added, “From the limestone.”

  Something sparked in her green eyes; he felt quickened by the sudden, stark watching at their centres. “I love the word ‘limestone,’ ” she said, studying his face, his mouth. “It’s such an odd word. There’s lime trees, and the colour lime, and the lime they used to throw on dead people.”

  “Quicklime!” he said happily.

  “Yes! And then there’s the stone,” she said. “All those things shouldn’t go together, but they do, because of the word. The word melts them, fuses them, somehow.”

  She seemed almost intoxicated with their wordplay: he felt challenged.

  “It makes me think of secret things, deep in the earth,” he said, still held by her gaze. He felt half-drunk himself, beyond the bounds of his usual nervousness. His mind was dancing. “Underground rivers. Caverns.”

  “Caves,” she said ominously.

  “I know a cave near here,” he told her. “It’s not very deep, really, but it’s made of limestone.”

  She looked at him brightly: she liked the sound of that.

  “What’s this?” Brad Long said.

  He had approached them from behind, grinning.

  “Oh Brad,” she said, glancing back to Joe with an air of complicity. “We were making poetry. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I love poetry,” Brad protested, in his joking way.

  “I know you do, poor boy,” she said, patting Brad’s cheek. Joe, who had been feeling wonderful about his exchange with her, was appalled at their familiarity.

  The three of them went into English together. Ahead of Joe, Brad brought up his hand behind Anna to the place where her blouse met her skirt. Joe couldn’t tell if Brad was actually touching her, or simply coming close, in a gesture of protection and ownership meant as much for his eyes as for her.

  9

  WHEN THE PHONE SHRILLED, Alf had his hands in the innards of a knitting machine. Quarter to nine. The lights were on in the deserted mill. In a nearby window, a yellow sky hovered behind the reflections of the machines. He had often complained to Margaret about having to work late, but the truth was he liked the quiet and isolation of the mill at his hour, when the knitting machines stood silently in their rows and he could concentrate on one thing at a time. He ignored the ringing and it stopped abruptly. Two minutes later it started again. Wiping his hands on a rag, he hurried up the aisle into the stark cubicle that was Matt Honnegger’s office. It was Margaret, gasping out his name as if she’d just been running. Jamie hadn’t come home, she said. He’d gone out after supper by himself and now he was an hour late. Joe had already searched the Island and the park.

  The fear he experienced seemed small and faraway, as if a fish had jumped out in the centre of a calm lake. “He’ll be along,” he told her. “He’s just traipsing around with one of his friends. Probably out in the woods.”

  “All his friends are at home.”

  Hesitating, he thought of the night outside, the long shadows of woodlots edging across fields, the cold, remorseless fret of water as it undermined banks, frothed over stone. He intuited all this in a flash — the wild lands to the northwest of town — and it woke him to a sudden, plunging loneliness, as if it were himself who was lost.

  When he swung into the driveway, the headlights of the Biscayne caught Margaret and Penny, turning on the top of the dyke to look at him. Behind them, Lookout Hill loomed darkly. His daughter’s white socks flashed and criss-crossed as she ran suddenly towards her mother. Below, Red’s tawny eyes burned. A few minutes later Joe appeared and the family stood by the picnic table while Alf tried to calm them and make a plan. They were all looking to him for a solution, he could feel the pressure even from Joe, as if in this hour of crisis some atavistic instinct to turn to the oldest, strongest man had pushed aside all the usual subtle and not-so-subtle challenges to his authority. But Margaret was only giving him this authority provisionally, he knew, sensing an impatience in her that verged on fury. “We’ll go up the river,” he told them. “We should check that fort he made with Johnny Simms. He’s always talking about going out to Devil’s Cave,” Joe said. And so they turned their guesswork into a kind of certainty. But Alf knew the boy might be wandering anywhere. He might (he pushed the thought away, but its essence remained) be miles from town. If someone had taken him, missing him by thirty seconds was as bad as missing him by a day. It might already be too late. In the light from the house, Penny had lifted her face to him. He could hardly stand the way her big eyes took in his every movement, his every word, as if she could conjure up Jamie out of his body. Alf swept her hot cheek with his fingertips. “Hey there, girl. He’s going to walk in here and wonder what all the fuss is about.”

  “This will teach you not to tease him,” Margaret said to her.

  “I never,” Penny said and burst into tears.

  Alf shot a glance at his wife. “This isn’t the time for a Sunday-school lesson.”

  “Well, I’m just saying, this will teach us all,” Margaret said defensively. She could change directions as swiftly as a politician.

  Alf nearly said, That’s not what you meant. But this was not the time for a game of deny and accuse. He could never beat her at that game anyway.

  “What about Red?” Joe said. “Maybe he could find Jamie.”

  The big dog had been trotting up and down the yard in a frenzy of impatience, whining and yelping, his ears pricking and laying back.

  “More likely to find a skunk,” Alf said. “Better tie him up.”

  He went into the house for his flashlight. When he came back out, Margaret urged him to call some of the neighbours. At first, Alf resisted. The prospect of a search party made his fear seem melodramatic. He didn’t want to look a fool in front of the Island men. “At least call Pete,” Margaret said.

  “We’re losing time,” he said, still irritated with her.

  “Alf, there’s so much ground to cover out there.”

  “Call him,” Penny said. Everyone looked at her, startled by something in her voice. She was staring with perfect calm at Alf, and for that moment she had more authority than anyone in the family.

  Alf went in to phone Pete. They hadn’t spoken since their quarrel.

  “Pete,” he said, starting right in, “we’ve lost Jamie. I think he might be up the river.”

  “I’ll be right over.”

  They gathered in the backyard. Their neighbour, Bill Olmstead, had arrived too, drawn by Margaret’s shouting from the dyke, and Bill’s oldest son, Dick. Alf disliked both of them, fleshy, overtalkative men, the son a taller copy of the father. They were brimming with high spirits, and gave the impression that hunting for Jamie was some kind of adventure. Pete, though, was subdued. He had brought a rope.

  Margaret and Penny came with them as far as the footbridge. They were going to stay at the house in case Jamie showed up. “Or if someone calls,” Alf said. He wouldn’t let himself think too clearly about who might call or for what reason. He knew the police wouldn’t call, they would arrive at the door.

  “We’ll get him,” Alf said, and for a moment met his wife’s gaze. It was too dark to see her clearly, but something in her face seemed to reach towards him, and in an instant his hostility towards her evaporated. More than anyone, she — the two of them — knew what was at stake.

  At the edge of Wiley’s farm, the men split up. Alf took the low trail, which followed the bends of the Atta through the woods. Over the high pasture to his left, the sky carri
ed a last faint streak of iodine. He lashed his beam at the shrubs on the bank and out over the river, unable to resist the call of his fear. Of course, he wasn’t going to see Jamie floating down the middle of the Atta (he told himself), but it was the river that worried him. A night in the woods wouldn’t hurt the boy, but the water was the unknown factor here, the water jumping now in his beam, hurrying on with a purpose of its own. High in the south, a chalky, flat-sided moon had escaped the clouds.

  He could hear the others shouting out Jamie’s name from the hills of the farm. He resisted shouting it himself, though the word “Jamie” kept rising in his throat. To shout seemed an act of desperation, and he was fighting desperation as though, once set loose, it might generate what he feared most. Then he heard Pete shout again, and almost as an echo, he shouted too: the word “Jamie” broke from him, leaping into the night sounding hoarser than he’d intended. He collected himself and shouted again, as his beam penetrated the saplings that had grown up at the edge of the dam. There was no response, or at least none audible over the steady bass hush of the water. For a few minutes he explored the neighbourhood of the dam, playing his light over the wide sweep of concrete, shiny with the water that skimmed down its steep face, and into the mildly boiling pool at its base. He found the dam disheartening. It was so huge, the volumes of dark water packed behind it so great, that he was glad to continue on up the trail. In a grove of dead saplings he darted his light at a sudden gleam and saw the metal basket of an abandoned shopping cart.

  He had walked on these paths all his life. He had played out here, fished, swum, he had even worked for a couple of summers for old man Wiley, at a dollar a day, weeding turnips, mucking out barns. Yet tonight the place seemed entirely new to him, as if he had never seen its true aspect, the malevolence lurking in a darkness that closed around his beam with a catlike swiftness, as though seeking to hide what he had narrowly missed. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. If the boy was conscious, he would surely hear their cries and call back. And if he wasn’t? Alf’s beam leapt between the trees, combed the undercover of tangled weeds, looking for a small, huddled body. Perhaps Jamie had knocked himself out, trying to climb a tree. Perhaps he had fainted with the pain of a broken leg. He tried to make orderly sweeps with the flashlight, but the density of the woods made a mockery of his system. He trekked through ferns — their brown, dying fronds flattened to the earth — and climbed the little hill to the swinging vines. There were footprints here, made by several shoes. Some seemed about the right size for Jamie, but he couldn’t be sure. He studied them, trying to force himself, unsuccessfully, to remember the pattern on the soles of his son’s shoes. The tracks seemed somewhat fresh, made in the last day or so. A little encouraged, he went on, under huge, leaning oaks. They had been giants when he was a boy. To his left the fields of Wiley’s farm — fields where he had once picked rocks and walked behind the hay wagon — had turned grey in the moonlight.