The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  She sat opposite him while he ate, from time to time taking long, noisy sips of coffee. He was irritated by this, irritated by the way she put down her cup and sighed with a world-unsettling weariness. Her sighs seemed to go right through him, to touch his every secret dread and doubt. In his silences, his father retreated into the distance, leaving the air cold but clear: a kind of freedom. But his mother had a way of filling his mind with the atmosphere of her own concerns, and it was suffocating. He worked at his food and tried not to look at her sagging gown, where the tops of her breasts rounded, ivory at the frail lip of her nightdress.

  “I’m worried about your father,” she said.

  He hated it when she said “your father,” a phrase that seemed to block the light in his sky, as if a mountain had suddenly loomed. Reaching for the ketchup bottle, he shook out the red sauce stubbornly. He did not want to talk, not now; he wanted only the isolation of his sleepiness.

  “He hasn’t been himself for weeks now.”

  “He’s just sad about Pete,” he said quickly, through a mouthful of egg. He felt he knew more, far more, than he was letting on. And suddenly he remembered standing at the edge of Pete’s grave, as one of the pallbearers. He’d seen a darkness in his father’s face, not only shadowing his eyes but living somehow in his gaze, as he looked down at the box that contained the body of his friend. It had seemed to Joe that his father had a connection to the coffin that superseded all others: a yearning, as if he wished he could go down into the earth with Pete.

  Shocked, Joe had looked away, down the wall of the hole, and noticed a bit of root sticking out from the dirt. And this root — crooked and hairy and white at the tip, where the backhoe had sliced it — pierced him with a feeling so wild, lonely, and ungovernable that he had to bite his lip to keep from crying out.

  “It started long before Pete,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, shrugging, wishing she’d stop. He sipped at the hot coffee. He found something wrong, even indecent, in his mother’s prodding. There were times when he talked willingly enough with her about his father, airing his complaints. But just now he felt a powerful identification with his father and his silences. For a moment he understood the deep usefulness of those silences, in which pain and a lot of lesser but still bothersome things might disappear. He glanced at the clock.

  “I feel there’s more going on than he’s telling us,” she said. “At least more than he’s telling me.”

  At the window, a blue jay blundered into the glass with a soft thud and was gone before they could look.

  “Of course,” she said, and her gaze drifted into another dimension, “what has he ever told me?”

  “Don’t know,” Joe said, lifting his cup.

  “You know, he wasn’t always like this,” his mother said. Her eyes had found him now, with a commanding brightness.

  “Like what,” he said, frowning.

  “So quiet. When I first met him, he was almost chatty.”

  “Dad?”

  “He talked as much as I did, I’m sure. And charming? He could be the life of the party, your dad. I know it’s hard to believe, but he was really quite different.”

  “What happened,” he asked, interested now in spite of himself.

  “Well, the war,” she said, with a long, dismayed glance away, and he felt the word “war” enter the room in all its dark, mysterious glamour: the great event he had not known but which seemed to cast its shadow over everything that came after. He was insatiably curious about the war, all the more so because his father’s silences encompassed it so thoroughly. He had never heard his father speak more than a few sentences about his experience overseas, while from an early age he, Joe, had been instructed by his mother not to ask him about it. “We don’t want to upset him,” she’d say. And so the war had become a presence in the house, a presence he was not allowed to mention, but it lived in his father’s face and sat down with them for meals, and hung among his father’s tools, and hunkered in the spaces between his father’s words. Joe imagined the worst, he couldn’t help himself, for what but the worst could generate such a deep, long-held silence? Sometimes he imagined that his father had killed a man, or perhaps many men. He would look at his father’s hands and see the backs of them, the strong, nicked-up fingers with their dirty nails, roped with blood.

  And here was his mother saying that, before he’d gone off to France, his father had been a different man — a cheerful, outgoing person who once came to a masquerade ball dressed as Rudolph Valentino, with his blue eyes shining out of a black half-mask, and charmed every woman there. And after the war, he had come home a moody, paranoid, silent man who would throw himself face down in the street when a truck backfired, who slept badly, and who could not break the habit of crumbling up his cigarette butts so they could not be found by an enemy that still lurked, apparently, in every street. His mother could hardly recognize the man she had fallen in love with, and although she did not say so directly, she hinted to Joe that she had wrestled with the question of whether she still loved him, whether they should still marry. Of course, she had gone ahead, and borne in her life this particular cross of trying to lure (persuade, trick, love) back into the mainstream of life a man who had left it.

  “What those boys went through over there,” she said to the haunted place above her coffee cup.

  “But what happened to him!” he cried, leaning forward abruptly. The gap in his knowledge of his father seemed critical. He was curious about the war, but this curiosity had something to do not only with battles and guns and wounds, but with how to grow up, with how to be a man. And the war seemed the central clue: it seemed to contain some secret of courage or survival or growing older he needed himself.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, looking at him in a wondering way. “His brother was killed, of course — he wasn’t there for that, they were in different regiments — but his mother never forgave him for it afterwards.”

  “Never forgave him because Joe died?”

  “Joe was her favourite. She was always harping at your father to look after him. By the time I met your father, he’d made a kind of joke of it. But when he came home from the war without Joe — I think she felt, well, I probably shouldn’t say this, but if only one of them was going to make it back, it should have been Joe.”

  The next morning his mother asked him to come to church with the rest of the family. He hadn’t gone for months, not since declaring his atheism, but he softened in the face of her “I can’t do this alone.” She did not have to explain what “this” was. There was a sense of unhappy drag in the family, centring on his father’s isolation. It had fallen mainly to her — to the engine of her brisk English cheerfulness — to lift them back to normal.

  They took their usual pew on the main aisle, about halfway to the altar. When the choir entered in their red robes, Joe looked automatically for his mother — he had done this since he was a boy — and watched as she sat, her posture self-consciously erect. Her air of weary concern had lessened a little, he thought. She had lifted her face and seemed to be listening for something, a kind of call, that came from the old, dark rafters and hanging Union Jack and banner of Saint George, from the altar with its white embroidered cloth and tall candles and fretted golden cross. To Joe’s surprise, he found himself moved by all this — first by his mother’s bearing, and then by the church itself, warm and welcoming and all but full on this bright winter morning.

  Penny and Jamie knelt beside him on the thin prayer-board, worn into shallow hollows by the pressure of countless knees. Beyond them knelt their father. Joe had often felt there was something out of place about his father here — that collapsing hair, his badly knotted tie, his stare of bleak abstraction — but today this quality seemed to have deepened, as if his father, for all his trying, could never fit among the others. Joe felt pity for him, and at the same time, remembering what his mother had said — that before the war, his father had been a different person entirely — he
kept glancing along the pew, as if he could find in the way his father held the prayer book, or looked blankly beyond its pages, some trace of the happier, more talkative man he had once been. As the phrases of the general confession sounded around them, Penny sang out the responses almost rapturously. But Joe, aware of his father’s silence, kept silent too. Almighty and most merciful father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. O Lord, have mercy upon us miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults …

  Emerging from the church, they blinked in the snow glare. It was as if they had been born to a new world and needed time to get used to its superior brightness. Icicles dripped from the church eaves, and the parking lot was flooded with exhaust fumes, billowing like cumulus in the warming air. At home, he found himself thinking of Anna Macrimmon, though in a way he was reluctant to think of her — it was like bringing her into a sad, squalid room, a room that must make her think less of him. Yet he kept sensing her, up there on the hill, in the house with the white porch, a reminder that his life belonged, or might belong, to places other than this house with its chipped baseboards and stink of Brussels sprouts and deepening atmosphere of defeat. He wanted to be rid of his family, whose troubles were not his. What did he have to do with his father’s sadness or his mother’s searching gaze that seemed to beg of him a solution he knew he could never deliver? The next morning he put on his best slacks and cardigan, as well as the suede jacket with the knit sleeves (after the Niagara trip it had come back from Anna smelling faintly of her, so that alone in his room he would often bury his face in it, until he could no longer find her in the stronger smells of suede and his own sweat), and climbed the hill to school.

  It was another blazing-white winter day, painful on the eyes, and in the dimness of the corridors he was momentarily unable to see anything. The other students drifted like shadows amid the slamming of lockers. But his eyes had adjusted by the time Anna came. Elated, he watched her feel her way down the stairs, in her cloak and tam. “Joe, is that you? This light —” Smiling in her blindness, she grasped his arm.

  “I wonder if this is what Hades is like,” she said, looking happily around her.

  “I don’t know,” he said, his heart thudding. “I’ve never been.”

  She laughed briefly and let go of his arm (the skin of his forearm was on fire) and was about to pass on when she added, in a quieter voice, “Joe, have you given any thought to the Christmas formal?” Her green eyes met his with a merriment he recognized as flirtatious. “Have you thought about taking anybody?”

  He shook his head, but he was lying. He had thought of asking her but had abandoned the idea because of course she had forbidden any such thing, and anyway, he had to assume she was going with Brad. She touched his arm again, letting her fingers linger on the outside of his biceps. “I was thinking it might be nice if you asked Liz. I know I shouldn’t say this, but I know she’s dying for you to ask her.”

  He saw she was manipulating him. She was using her power over him to get something he might not want himself. He was a little taken aback, for he had held her morally above him, above all of them: she might know moments of weakness, but she was good, good all the way through, frank and kind and open, and everything she did, her slightest gesture from smiling to reading an essay, was touched with a rightness. He felt a flash of anger against her, for letting him down. Yet his positive feelings were vast, in comparison, and later in the day he talked to Liz. Her beautiful, madeup eyes fixed his intently. “I’d love to go with you,” she said with a quiet directness that surprised him. He was more pleased than he expected: Liz McVey was attractive, and besides, by taking her, he would be close to Anna. Even though Anna would be there with Brad, he would ask her to dance. His plan came to him with a leap of excitement: he would take her onto the floor, put his hand into the curved small of her back …

  That afternoon Anna fell in beside him as they walked to Biology.

  “Well, you’ve made one girl very happy.”

  “Who, you?” he said coldly. He had not quite forgiven her.

  “Well, yes, me,” she said, her face reddening. “But you know who I mean.” She touched his arm. “I hope you’re not angry with me.”

  “It’ll cost you,” he said. “You have to promise me at least once dance.” And he dared to add, “A slow one.”

  She stopped abruptly, so that he had to turn back to her.

  “I haven’t told you, have I? I’m not going to the dance, Joe.”

  She was going with her parents on a Mediterranean cruise, over the holidays. They would fly to New York and on to Lisbon. Then by ship past Gibraltar and so on to Barcelona, Marseilles, Rome. He listened to her itinerary with a sinking heart. How could he not be happy at her obvious happiness at the prospect of her trip? But she had come from over there, and he had always held an irrational fear that Europe might one day reclaim her. He was almost more jealous of Europe than of Brad Long.

  He thought of breaking his date with Liz, but in the end went ahead, in a spirit of defiance. He would do it, but he would do it his way. He paid $2.50 for a corsage at Mills’, and drove up the hill in the Biscayne, its front left fender bearing a fresh dent caused by his father’s having skidded into a tree. He was not in the least embarrassed by the car: something in him was almost daring Liz, the whole world, to find fault with him. She wore a thin-strapped gown of black velvet and long, matching gloves that she peeled off halfway through the evening and stuffed in the pocket of his rented tux. By ten o’clock she had wrapped both arms around his neck. They swayed in place, barely moving, while candles quivered at the perimeter tables and the Morganaires in their baby-blue jackets and frilly shirts stood up as one, their horns filling the dark with a swelling ballad.

  Afterwards, in the Biscayne, they necked in the school parking lot until their mouths were sore, and when he moved to touch her breasts, it was Liz who suggested they go somewhere more comfortable.

  She took charge so easily, he felt she had done all this before — with Bobby the salesman, no doubt — but he had no jealousy of Bobby for he had no particular claim on Liz other than the claim of pleasure. She guided them to Johnsonville, to a double-decker motel built around a pool filled with logs and snow. He found their room nice, tasteful, far superior to anything he knew at home, with its twin beds, a painting of sailboats on the wall, a single lamp shedding a warm light over the flowered spread. “I’ll be out in a minute,” she told him, kissing him before she slipped off to the bathroom. There was something theatrical in her look — her eyes flashing meaningfully at him before she disappeared — that made him feel he was taking part in a play. A moment later, turning to undo his tie and stiff collar, he was swept with doubts. What was he doing here? He wasn’t sure he even liked Liz McVey. Just being with her, especially here, was a kind of lie. He went on undressing, though. From the bathroom came a sound of running water. When it stopped, he heard the familiar words of a Christmas carol seeping through the wall from a TV or radio in the next room. Silent night. Holy night. Sung in a high, clear, inviolate voice: a boy’s.

  23

  “SEE, IT SAYS CRAZY HORSE. ‘Crazy Horse grew up in a Sigh-Ox village,’ ” Jamie read, hesitating only a little on the hard words, “ ‘on the great plains.’ Can you read that?”

  On the bench beside him, in the Children’s Room of the library, Billy was grinning his grin that was not really a grin, showing his brown-edged teeth. They were alone.

  “Try to read that —”

  “Crazy Horse,” Billy said, giggling as if it were a great joke, and his black eyes snuck sideways, as if he wanted to get away. Jamie was trying to teach him to read. One day they had met Billy’s mother on the street, and seeing that Jamie had a book and Billy had none, she had said, “I wish you could get Billy here to read — get him out of that class with the retarded kids.” So he’d taken Billy to the
library. And seeing that Billy just looked at the backs of the books on the shelves and then started walking on the benches as if that were more interesting, Jamie thought he’d find him a book he might like. The Story of Crazy Horse was one of his favourites. But all Billy did was flip through, looking at the pictures, then he started balancing on the benches again. So Jamie started reading it to him in the hopes he’d get interested and read it to himself. “Read that!” he said, pointing. “Read the next sentence. It’s really a good story.” Billy stared where he was pointing, and his grin got more fixed and the light in his eyes looked as if it were going to burn him up. He pushed the book away.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  They went outside, into the slowly falling snow. At the corner, Billy said, “I got you a present.”

  “What?”

  Billy wrestled inside his windbreaker and dragged out the Crazy Horse book, in its clear plastic wrapper.

  “You took this book?”

  “It’s for you,” Billy said, in his flat voice. “I hooked it,” he said, still grinning, and Jamie remembered the chocolate marshmallow cookies Billy had hooked the day before, from Kinnear’s store. They’d eaten them at the rock in the Indian Trail.

  “You don’t have to hook things in the library. They’re free. You can take anything you want. You just show them your card.”

  Billy grinned: Okay, he knew that!

  Jamie took the book from Billy, explaining he’d already read it, put it inside his coat, and snuck it back into the Children’s Room. When he came out, Billy was throwing snowballs at a Stop sign. They started across the road, and it was then, looking south towards Water, that Jamie saw his mother. She was crossing Water, marching briskly along in her grey coat, her arms filled with groceries. All she had to do was glance to her right and she’d see him with Billy. His father had seen him with Billy one day on the main street and had only winked at him as if their being together was a kind of joke. It would be different with his mother. There was a sharp edge inside her, and wrong was on one side and right was on the other, and she never hesitated to tell him which was which. And also, he wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t wrong to be with Billy. He hadn’t felt too good about those cookies. But he had no other friends, and besides, Billy wouldn’t leave him alone. He stuck to Jamie like glue.