The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  While he and Mom and Dad were visiting a winery, I went for a walk. I climbed a hill and went along through some fields. I met a shepherd. My first shepherd! He had a dog, and his sheep were milling around at the edge of a field where he sat eating his lunch on an old stone. (I guess all stones are old, but this one looked older.) Actually, the dog saw me first, and came barking, till the shepherd called him off. We had quite a conversation, at least what I understood of it. The old kind of French they speak here is pretty strange. The sheep kept putting in their two cents. He might have been fifty, or younger, with an unbelievably leathery face, and shy brown eyes that seemed to belong to a much younger man. He told me he’d been a shepherd all his life, ever since he was twelve, when his father took him out of school. I asked him if he’d wanted to leave school, and he looked away at the hills, and then at the dog. I felt no one had ever asked him this before, and he didn’t know what to do with it. We were both embarrassed. But of course, being me, I didn’t let him off the hook — I mean, I didn’t say anything to help him out. There’s a part of me that would be cool in a train crash, I think, just coolly watching to see what happens. I felt the sadness of his life, and something more than that: his fate, maybe. The shape his life had taken.

  I wonder if people have fates any more, or do they just have careers? Is everyone’s life now so much like everyone else’s, so bland and predictable, that a real fate can’t happen? Or do we just pretend we don’t have fates — but they happen anyway, in a dishonest, backdoor sort of way. No two fates are alike, and I think that’s why we’re afraid of our own. It means we have to embrace our own aloneness, our own uniqueness, and as much as we might say we want to do that, really, we’re scared. Better to be like everybody else — and not stick out too much. So life misses us.

  In the end, he just shrugged. It was like he’d said, “This is how things are. No use regretting.” He gave me some wine, in a thick little tumbler.

  I saw three dolphins this morning.

  Tomorrow, Italy: Livorno, Rome, Naples. Thinking of you warmly, Anna.

  He read it three times. The thin paper seemed fabulous in its blueness, as if at any moment dolphins might rise from its depths.

  27

  LIKE A SUDDEN INFLUX of fresh air after weeks indoors, her letter intoxicated him, as if she had held out to him the promise of a finer life; as if the landscape she had described — the blue Mediterranean glimmering at every turn — had sent its ranges and peninsulas into his own existence and he was already wandering with her there, in a partnership he could not clearly fantasize, for he had known nothing like it in his life. He stared at the edge of the bathroom sink, where a single plastered hair appeared like a crack in the porcelain, and wondered if the letter didn’t mark a sea change in her attitude to him (wasn’t there some hint of it in that phrase “thinking of you warmly”?) and at the same time, applying the lash of common sense, he told himself there was nothing in it but friendship.

  But just that she had thought of him, over there, that she had sat on the deck of a great ship and aimed these words at him! It seemed she had reached across the world to create this space inhabited by only the two of them. And at the same time, her letter reminded him by contrast of his relationship with Liz, which every day seemed more false. He was spending a lot of time at her house, or driving around in her father’s Lincoln, and yet he knew there was something temporary and, yes, dishonest, about his link with her, because the truth was, as much as he enjoyed her physically — and really, he couldn’t get enough of her in that regard — he had to admit to himself (and he saw this clearly, in the sudden shift of atmosphere — the widening access of clarity — that Anna’s letter brought) that he didn’t like Liz McVey very much. The thought that Anna would come home and find him with her ignited an obscure shame.

  The next Saturday he and Liz drove over to Johnsonville in the Lincoln to see a movie. All evening he kept meaning to tell her they were finished, and all evening he kept postponing the confrontation, though he managed to hold himself a little aloof. She must have sensed something was wrong, because she was even more attentive than usual, constantly touching his arm in the dark theatre, keying her laughter to his. Afterwards, in the car, she asked if he wanted to go to the motel. He’d been planning to deny himself that pleasure, but found himself helpless when she started to kiss him. Later, in bed, his excitement was extreme. But immediately afterwards, he regretted the tawdry room, the vapid sailboats on the wall, her pathetic, crouching nakedness as she washed herself in the long tub. They drove back to Attawan in silence.

  One Sunday afternoon in early January, Smiley dropped by the house with his skates and stick. Joe was taken by surprise, he hadn’t seen Smiley for some weeks, not since he’d dropped out of school and gone to work in Bannerman’s dyehouse. But here he was, just like old times, planted on the kitchen doormat in his rolled-down rubber boots and bright blue-and-white hockey jacket, announcing that the Atta was frozen solid right up to the first rapids. Such perfect skating conditions hadn’t been seen in years. There was no snow to shovel off, and the ice, Smiley said, making Jamie laugh with pleasure, was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

  Joe leapt at the chance. He felt as if his old life — his life before the arrival of Anna Macrimmon and the complication of Liz McVey — had made a return, was offering the chance of a forgotten, uncomplicated happiness. Penny and Jamie wanted to go too, so there was a general rush to dig out skates and toques and hockey sticks. They were nearly ready to leave when Joe’s father appeared from the cellar, carrying his ancient stick and the long, battered skates with thin blades that Joe hadn’t seen him wear for years. Penny and Jamie danced around him: Daddy was going skating! But Joe, standing by the door with Smiley, felt that the day had been stolen from him. In the days since their fight, his relations with his father had existed in a state of suspension. They were friendly enough, in a formal, superficial way, but Joe sensed that each of them was waiting for the other to make the next move, but whether it would be towards reconciliation or fresh hostilities, he couldn’t say. Just now, his father’s gloomy face — smiling wanly at the young ones — seemed like the spectre at the feast. There could be no joy around him. At that moment, his father looked over at him and — to Joe’s complete surprise — winked. Instantly, something in him started, gladdened.

  They set off in a noisy gang. Margaret, who had never learned to skate, watched them go out the door. “Don’t fall in,” she said dryly. Smiley promised her he’d keep an eye on everybody.

  Behind Bannerman’s old hosiery mill on West Street, they descended to the millpond. Out on the wide ice, a dozen men and boys were playing shinny, gusting here and there like a flock of windblown starlings, under the cloudless sky. They sat on logs to put on their skates. Joe and his father helped Jamie and Penny. Then the two of them sat side by side, lacing up with numb fingers.

  “So you think you’ve forgotten how?” Joe teased his father.

  His father did not respond. His fingers were attacking his laces fiercely, with what might have been anger. Joe felt the shadow of their antagonism.

  Then Alf finished and picked up his stick. As he skated away, he tossed back, “No one catches the old man,” and the day was made whole again. Joe watched him skate towards the other players with slow, lazy strokes, accelerating suddenly for a step or two, his head down, then stroking easily again, rocking slightly as he sped along. He looked as natural, even more natural, than he did walking down the street, as if all his life had been an exile from the easy freedom of ice.

  Joe followed a minute later. Smiley had dropped a puck, and he and Jamie and Joe’s father were passing it back and forth. Joe streaked upriver. “Hey, Walker!” he shouted, and his father looked up and saw him. Joe took his pass close to his feet, lost it for a moment, then circled back with the puck, floating an easy pass to his brother. Jamie fanned on it and promptly landed on his back.

  Joe was exhilarated by the huge expanse of ice. He felt he could
do anything out here — wheel, fly, brake on a dime — under a sky that seemed to smile on every improvisation. He forgot about Liz McVey and Anna Macrimmon, that whole impossible tangle. What else mattered but to chase a puck across the wide, dark river? After a while Smiley and the Walkers joined the game of shinny. There was only one rule: whoever got the puck hung onto it as long as he could. It was fox and hounds, with nearly everyone playing the fox at some point. Joe laughed as his father took the puck and started to dipsydoodle through the crowd like a madman, with his hair sticking out from under his too-small toque. Joe managed to poke the puck away from him, but it went straight onto the stick of Larry Langlois, easily the best player there. Larry was seventeen, tall and loose-jointed — it was said he’d been scouted by the Leafs — and he ragged the puck as if it were wired to his stick, covering the ice in effortless sweeps, his eyes laughing. He’d tempt you with the puck, throw in a body feint, and leave you crashing into air.

  They started a proper game. Larry’s team got only six players, to eight on the other side. The goalposts at one end were rocks and, at the other, a hundred yards away, someone’s cowboy boots. The boots looked forlorn and absurd standing there, six feet apart, their toes pointed towards the distant shores with their low clouds of winter trees. Smiley’s father, who despite being bald was playing without a hat, got the first goal with an explosion of reckless, windmilling speed that left the others whooping and laughing. As he coasted away from the goal, bent over his stick and gasping for breath, Smiley whacked him affectionately on the bottom.

  After a while, Joe noticed that his father had left the game. Jamie hadn’t been able to keep up with the older boys and men, so Alf had taken him off to the side and was laying soft passes on his stick. Jamie was working hard at it, digging along for the puck on ankles that barely seemed able to support him, falling down and bouncing up again with wild determination. Watching his brother, Joe felt a poignant stab of recognition. His father had once fed him passes in just the same way, and now, seeing Jamie, he was seeing himself, so eager to please the man, to best the man, who was both his god and his nemesis. But where was Penny? On the other side of the river, where some alders showed red against the grey of willows, he saw her, in her pink hat and mitts, pushing herself along with abrupt, erect strokes among her friends. Dipping, she opened her arms, extended a leg behind her, and became a gliding swan.

  Later, tired of the game, Joe gave his spot to a new arrival and skated upstream. It seemed less cold under the high cliffs, out of the wind, and he pushed steadily along, gripping his stick in one hand at his side as he passed islands and the great, leaning trunks of the willows, all floating past with a dreamlike smoothness, to the rhythmic swish of his blades. The bottom grew more shallow and he began to glimpse weeds and rocks under the glass of the ice. It was a bit spooky, to be gliding above the water, the fish, and he was soon out of sight and hearing of the players. At a bend where he had once caught a half-dozen bass, he met Penny and her friends, returning from upstream. They were laughing and gossiping — skating with the short, quick strokes demanded by their burred blades. Penny, he noticed, was eating snow out of her mitt, though when she saw him she tossed it down. A few seconds later, as the girls fell away behind him, he heard them burst into giggles that finally died out around the bend.

  He heard the rapids before he saw them. A soft, rushing sound that touched him with a faint fear. It was a reminder that the river was still alive beneath him, that this afternoon of skating was only a temporary gift, a kind of illusion.

  Most of the rapids had frozen over. But the biggest wave was still visible, flowing like the smooth, darkly glinting body of a serpent amid jumbled crusts of ice. Water had spilled over the ice below, where it had hardened in a yellowish mantle, like wax. He stood at the rapid’s edge, looking up to the swift coursing of black water, wondering if he dared bypass it by climbing up one side. At that moment, he saw the fox.

  It was watching him from the smooth ice above the rapid. He was sure it had not been there a few moments ago, and yet he had not seen it appear. It was standing almost broadside to him, head turned inquisitively, the fantastic orange plume of its tail tipped with white, stretching straight out, nearly as long as its body, and, except for a stir of breeze in the thick fur, motionless. The fox lifted its muzzle, trying to scent him; it turned its head a little more, and for a second Joe’s heart leapt as he met the fox’s unblinking stare.

  Then the fox trotted off, without haste, followed by the great, level plume. Something in the fox’s movement seemed unusual. Joe saw that half of its right hind leg was missing: the thigh tapered into a dark stump. He just glimpsed the end of it, swinging uselessly below the fox’s belly.

  That night he fell ill with a high fever. He lay shivering and sweating while a small, cold moon moved over the house. Shining between the curtains, it seemed to be seeking him out, like a flashlight whose glare hides whoever is holding it. Twice he threw up. The first time he didn’t quite make it to the toilet, and his vomit hit the hall floor with a sound like a mess of chains spilling. Then his mother appeared, and it seemed he was about four years old again, helpless before her tender scolding. She put him back to bed with extra blankets and a hot water bottle that in his delirium seemed to be a part of himself he couldn’t quite incorporate into his body. He dreamed he was in a bare white room that had no door. He had climbed up to a ledge, and was balancing there, precariously, while the fox with three legs kept jumping up at him from the floor below, showing its sharp teeth in a kind of smile.

  The next day, a Monday, he was still running a fever and vomiting, so there was no question of school. But he was conscious it was the day Anna Macrimmon was scheduled to come back. What he feared — what he was powerless to do anything about — was the reception he knew she would get from Liz. He could imagine Liz telling her, with an air of coy triumph, that she and Joe were steadies. Yes, she would somehow let Anna know that they were sleeping together, and this prospect seemed to expose him to the worst injustice of all — the injustice of being misunderstood, though exactly what would be misunderstood he did not let himself think too clearly about. Groaning, he turned violently in the bed and struck his fist into the wall.

  By Thursday, his sickness had turned into a cold, and he was able to go back up the hill to school. In Miss Todd’s homeroom, Anna Macrimmon’s desk, a sheen of birch veneer under a tall window framing a snowy sky, was empty. And it remained empty, in its various incarnations in various rooms, all morning. Her absence touched a note of hope — perhaps she hadn’t come back yet, and so had not yet been informed by Liz. He still had time to tell Liz they were through, but there was one problem with this: Liz, too, was absent, her empty desk echoing Anna’s in every room. Sometimes the two desks were far apart, but in French they were side by side, a constant reminder of the strange partnership he had made with them and, which in some obscure way, they had made with each other. In the hall after French, he fell in beside Brad Long, drawing him into a conversation about the schoolwork he’d missed. He asked casually if Anna was back yet.

  “Got back Monday.”

  Excitement and despair rose in him at once. She was here again, but on the other hand, Liz had undoubtedly told her everything. Yet he had to be sure.

  “Back here? At school?”

  Brad looked amused: “Where else?”

  “She sick or —”

  “Some bug she caught over there. Some foreign bug.”

  Brad’s eyes stayed trained on him, lit with mockery, and Joe had the feeling that his whole dilemma was common knowledge, as if Anna and Brad and God only knew who else had sat around a table discussing — having a good laugh over — the lovesick Walker.

  As soon as school had finished for the day, he hurried downtown to the florist and chose a small bouquet of dried heather, which he tucked inside his coat in its paper wrapper. Then up the hill again, walking so fast he was soon out of breath and had to stop to spit thick phlegm into the snow. Be
hind the houses on Banting, the sun sent low beams across the ploughed street.

  He mounted the front steps, under the little portico with its white pillars, in a straightjacket of self-consciousness, aware she might be watching. The house itself seemed alive. No light showed in the windows, yet each object he glimpsed inside — the top of an armchair, a lampshade withdrawing into dimness — seemed to take note of him.

  He pressed the bell button. There was no sound from inside the house. An Irish setter trotted alone down the street, its long, matted fur carrying little balls of ice that clicked together. Joe fumbled open his coat and retrieved the small bouquet. The house went on considering him.

  Then the door opened, and he saw a woman in a full-length white apron, her hair swept back from her face into an untidy bun. She was middle-aged and rather short, but there was something about the eyes — a distant glint of humour — that was familiar.

  “I’m Joe Walker. I’m a friend of Anna’s.”

  “Oh, Joe, yes, she’s spoken about you. I’m Estelle Macrimmon. Why don’t you come in —”

  Her French accent made “in” sound like “een.” Her warmth gave him courage. He found himself in a small entrance hall, aware of a staircase in dark wood, the smell of cooking.