The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “Please,” Coreen said, pleading with both of them. “Alf, there’s no need —” But neither man was aware of her now.

  Alf had stationed himself inside Ford’s space, and loomed there, a little taller than the other man. Ford pushed at his chest.

  “Go back to your squaw,” he said.

  It was as if the foreman had touched a red-hot brand to Alf’s face. Alf pushed him and felt the plated muscle of Ford’s chest, saw him briefly stagger. Then Ford advanced with a gloating smile, and in a matter of a second or two, Alf had absorbed two quick punches to the head. Instantly drunk, he was aware only of Coreen crying out, and of Ford stepping closer to him, with his fists up on either side of his chest, like a boxer in an old photograph. Alf let his head drop. His own punch came almost lazily, as if out of a stupor, taking Ford unawares on the side of his mouth, sending him backwards with a surprised grunt. His head roaring, Alf made a terrific effort to crawl up the slope of his own fatigue, and in a moment he had closed with the foreman. They punched with staccato fierceness, bent on maximum damage, blundering between the tall machines that went on churning out cloth with a stately imperturbability, as if nothing else could ever matter.

  42

  TURNING OFF THE ENGINE, Alf examined his face in the rear-view of the Biscayne: the slitted right eye, embedded in swollen flesh like a turtle’s; the scraped, purpling cheek; the bloodstain, like a little brown goatee set crookedly under his cut lip.

  His untouched eye looked back, expressionless.

  As he let himself into the kitchen, he heard someone drop the lid of the piano bench in the dining room.

  “Hello?” Margaret.

  They listened to each other’s silence.

  “Just me,” he said, stooping stiffly to untie his shoes. As she entered the kitchen, he straightened, showing his face.

  Her cry gratified him. In an odd way, he was proud of his damaged face. There was something honest about a fight, and besides, he had not been beaten, no, he had not been beaten, though he had not won, either. At the moment this seemed important.

  She came over to him and stopped, her hands half-raised, not daring to touch him. For a moment he felt as if he had done something extraordinary: crossed a desert no one had ever crossed, or come back from the dead. He met her gaze frankly, with a sharp, threatening pride. He had not felt so alive for weeks.

  “I was in a fight,” he said. He was daring her to counter him — to breathe one word of criticism. This was what she had married, this. He would not hide it. He would not feel ashamed.

  She looked down at his ruined shirt.

  “Gave as good as I got,” he said tersely. “Maybe better —” He was fudging a little. After a couple of minutes, the knitters had separated him and Ford, and just in time: the younger man’s strength was beginning to tell.

  “Who did you —”

  “The foreman,” he said.

  “Matt?”

  He grunted sardonically. “A new guy.” And when she furrowed her brow: “I didn’t get the job, Margaret. They gave it to somebody else.”

  She stared at him in confusion. He had told her nothing about Kit Ford, and now it irked him that he had to explain. It seemed as if she had brought it up, to torture him.

  “Somebody —”

  “I didn’t get the job! Is it so difficult?”

  He glared at her, as if to punish her for her very existence. She looked down with reddening face. He crossed to the sink, reaching into the cupboard for a glass. Water ran from the tap in a silver rope, twisting and splashing as he stared blindly, struggling to subdue his reawakening fury. He kept seeing Ford’s pale, grinning face, feeling, again, the ridge of the foreman’s cheekbone as it met his fist. His hand trembled with the effort not to crush the glass. Finally he drank, and the cold water travelling across his parched mouth and plunging down his throat gave him his first relief.

  “I’ve been fired,” he said quietly.

  “Oh Alf,” she said. “What happened? Who fired —”

  “Ford!” he cried. Did he have to explain everything? “The foreman. The guy I fought.”

  She said nothing more. He looked around and saw that she was staring into the space between them, as if seeing other realities entirely. Her reverie — how could she go away at this critical moment — enraged him further.

  “Well?” he demanded, almost shouting.

  “Alf, I’m sorry!” There were tears in her eyes. But he did not want tears, or the threat of tears, and he turned away, leaning on the counter with both arms. She crossed the space between them and tentatively touched his upper arm. “Tell me what happened.”

  “The bastard’s ruined the place,” he said. “He’s alienated everybody.”

  “The new foreman,” she said.

  “Yes goddammit, the new foreman!” he yelled to the back of the sink. Spittle swung from his mouth in a bloody thread. He had only begun to understand his defeat, and was wild at his impotence.

  Afterwards, his wounds treated with iodine and bandages, he stood at the bedroom window and watched Penny coming along the road, on her way home for lunch. She was wearing her winter coat, and was carrying pussy willows, like a sheaf of knobbed whips. Her skinny legs in their red tights skipped up the curb. Suddenly she stopped and looked up at the house, wary.

  He shrank back from the window.

  Moments later he was hovering at the top of the stairs, listening as she entered the kitchen. First came her chiming voice, innocent and cheerful. Then Margaret’s lower murmur. “Just tell them I’ve had an accident with a knitting machine,” he’d instructed his wife. He was determined to stop the damage from spreading. He would keep everyone safe, yes, everyone would be all right if they just believed what he told them. “Say I look banged up, but I’m all right. Don’t mention about the job. We’ll tell them later. It’ll be all right.”

  As he came down the hall, Penny ran to meet him and, as if she were suddenly younger and smaller, launched herself with a cry into his arms. He carried her awkwardly to the kitchen, her face buried in his neck, though as they passed into the brighter room, she reared back to have a better look. “Oh Daddy!”

  His face felt stiff, false.

  Jamie arrived breathless, bursting with pride. “I ran all the way from the —” Stopping, he saw his father, and his sister crying in his father’s arms. Turning from the sink with the pussy willows in a vase, Margaret tried to explain. But Jamie’s face had gone ashen. “Are you going away?” he said to Alf, almost whispering. His eyes sprouted fat tears. “Is he going away!” he cried to Margaret as she bent to him.

  “No, no,” Margaret said, trying to inject a lighter note. “How many times do I have to tell you, silly goose, he isn’t going anywhere.”

  Soon they were all eating in relative calm at the kitchen table — all but Joe, who phoned to say he was staying at school for a floor-hockey game. When the phone rang a second time, the sound startled everyone, but especially Penny and Jamie, who looked up as if the knitting machine that had hurt their father were about to come lumbering into the room. It was Boomer Tomlinson. The whole of Number Six was in an uproar, he said. “They’re on the verge of sit-down or somethin’.”

  “Sit-down,” Alf said sharply, not quite understanding. At the table Jamie froze: wasn’t he already sitting?

  “We’re gonna get you your job back, eh? I’m gonna speak to Wilf Thomas.”

  Alf returned to the table in a state of astonishment. In his mind, he and Kit Ford had been alone in their battle, and the battle was over. But now, the workers were going to risk their necks for him?

  The phone rang again: Coreen Appleton, weeping and scarcely understandable. He’d been so good, sticking up for her like that, and now — it was so unfair! She, too, said she was phoning Wilf Thomas, the sweater-mill manager.

  Everyone looked at him as he came back to the table.

  “Just asking how I am,” he said, scarcely daring to look back. He picked up his spoon and contemplate
d his mound of ice cream. He wasn’t sure if all this was good news or not. There was something almost disappointing about the idea of getting his job back. In a way, he liked the extreme place he’d got himself into. There was something honest about it, about his fight with Ford, as if he’d come back to ground after years of floating about. And there was a sense of freedom. He didn’t have to go to the mill tomorrow.

  Again the phone rang.

  “Aren’t we popular,” Margaret said, getting up. The children watched her make the trek to the shrilling phone. She spoke briefly and hung up. “Wrong number,” she announced. In his chair, Jamie pulled a face and began to laugh — hah, hah, hah — with grating, theatrical harshness.

  “That’s enough,” Alf told him sharply. Jamie stuck out his jaw and glared at the butter dish.

  Later that afternoon Alf was alone at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of cold tea and leafing without much heart through the help-wanted pages of the Johnsonville Gleaner when the phone rang again. It was Wilf Thomas. He came straight to the point.

  “Alf, I’ve heard what happened. Listen, if you can guarantee that kind of thing won’t happen again, I can offer you your job back.”

  Alf bridled at the implication (as he saw it) that he was at fault.

  “And Kit Ford, what does he have to guarantee —”

  “Alf, he is the foreman here. I’m going over his head to make you this offer —”

  It came out of him without warning, on a tide of sudden defiance and clarity: “I won’t come back unless you get rid of Ford. He’s destroying that place —”

  “Alf, be reasonable —”

  He wasn’t reasonable. After he’d hung up, he turned and stared at the kitchen table, stunned at what he’d just done. And yet he knew he’d spoken the truth. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, work for Ford again, any more than he could drink the man’s spit. But he was shocked all the same, to realize he’d cast his life adrift. In the blue vase, the paws of the pussy willows were furred with sun.

  Over the next few weeks, he made the rounds familiar to the unemployed. He filled out forms and waited in company waiting rooms, where stacks of ancient magazines spilled onto rugs the colour of mud, where photos of company officers and sports teams stared from the walls with the confident serenity of those who know they have a place. Once, on a loading dock he was interviewed by a foreman twenty years younger than himself, a stocky, harassed-looking fellow who scarcely glanced up from his clipboard and spoke to him in a coarse, offhand way Alf found so insulting he refused to move when the man dismissed him. A moment later the foreman went inside and Alf heard him say to someone, “If that asshole out there doesn’t leave, call the cops.”

  He had become that asshole out there. It was how he sometimes felt. It was his face, maybe, his ruffian’s face still blotched with yellow and purple bruises that put people off. Or perhaps (as he sometimes suspected) it was Kit Ford, reaching out to block his chances. Or perhaps it was his lack of real interest. Somehow his focus was still on Bannerman’s, as if he were only waiting to come out for a second round and fight again under the tall machines. There were times when to be looking for work anywhere else seemed an abandonment of his principles. Of his rights.

  It didn’t take long before he was sick of the whole business — sick, too, of knocking around at home on those days he didn’t look for work. Margaret seemed increasingly impatient, snapping at him for trivialities. He could hardly blame her. They were having to make do on his unemployment cheque, less than half of what he’d made before. They were buying the cheapest grade of stewing beef, bread from the day-old bin. He tried to be helpful by doing long-postponed jobs around the house, but increasingly he felt underfoot. One warm grey day in early May, he stuffed a peanut-butter sandwich and an orange into the pockets of his windbreaker and, taking Red with him, crossed the footbridge to the park, heading for the woods and river-flats northwest of town. The big dog kept stopping to lift his leg against various trees and pieces of playground equipment. Alf chose the path along the top of the dyke, aware as he walked of Pete’s bungalow perched in the wooded hillside above the park. Its closed garage door (hiding the Saratoga, which May had insisted on keeping) and curtained windows seemed to be watching him. He glanced at the house, and struggled not to glance at it again. But he couldn’t help it. He looked across the park to the slope of yellow lawn cut by the gravel drive that led to the garage. It was almost as if Pete himself were hiding up there, watching him. Yes, Pete seemed very close: he was in his house, or behind the next tree, or waiting for Alf on the wet path meandering above the hurrying river. And he was smiling, in revenge perhaps, now that Alf knew what losing his job felt like, or in simple merriment, preparing one of his stories. But it was all crap, wasn’t it? Alf was alone, more alone than he’d ever been in his life. “You stupid bugger,” he said to the house. His face had turned feverish. “You should have fought harder.”

  He reached the end of the park and entered a grove of cedars, following the flinty main trail that kept closest to the Atta. Ahead, Bannerman’s Number One dam made its hushing sound as the river thinned across its wide apron. He was directly across from the hosiery mill. With its mansard roof, the tall building had a graceful presence above the dark river, and for a few moments he stopped to look at it. Several windows had been propped open, and he could see people working inside — people who had jobs now, but who in a few months, he remembered, would be unemployed, when Intertex shut the mill. Soon you’ll be footloose and fancy-free, he thought bitterly, just like Pete and me.

  Red had reappeared beside him. He sat down and his ears pricked as he watched something across the river. Following his gaze, Alf saw a heron, standing motionless in the shallows. Very slowly, the tall, grey bird lifted one leg and planted it forward. Then its entire body flashed out on the horizontal and crashed in a belly flop among the stones. But it had caught a little fish, a wriggling flash of silver across its rapier beak. Alf watched, transfixed. He’d never seen a heron fall before, never imagined one could fall. Standing upright again, the bird put back its long throat and, with a couple of tosses, the fish was gone.

  Beside him, his tongue hanging out, Red seemed to be laughing.

  He went on, a little more enlivened, past the dam and into the woods that bordered the millpond. The dog trotted ahead of him now, his curled tail bobbing above the trail. Occasionally he paused to look around at Alf. The trail had been hardened by generations of use, and nothing would grow on it, though in the empty woods to his left and right the first green flames were licking among the tree trunks. He caught the chirpings and wheedlings of invisible warblers and, from a distance, the tongueless cry of a crow forever saying what could not be understood. He knew exactly the grove of pines it was probably sheltering in, crows had sheltered there when he was a boy.

  By two that afternoon he and Red had walked to Devil’s Cave by the high woods trail. Alf had always loved the place where the deepening Atta flooded the basin below the cave. As he stood looking at the river, Red disappeared. For a moment, Alf felt a stab of panic, as if he’d been abandoned by some loyal guide, though he knew the dog would eventually turn up at the house. He returned across the river-flats dotted with wild fruit trees just starting into blossom. In the woods beyond he found the white, shy stars of trilliums, motionless among their leaves. The woods were still and warm. The sand-coloured duff, soon to be smothered with new green, crackled under his feet as he left the trail.

  He sat in the empty woods, with his back to a large beech, listening to the birds. There was one song in particular — he had never known what bird made it, though he had heard it all his life — that had a curious spiral quality, as though the notes came curling down a long pipe. The song was fascinating, too strange to be called simply pretty, and somehow it gave a greater depth to the woods. But at the same time it left him feeling far away from everything. There was a melancholy in the close air now, a threat of rain. His limbs seemed weighted. He felt he never wanted to m
ove again: to remain under the tree as the woods sank into dusk.

  He might have been sitting there for an hour when he heard a new sound, far to his left. At first he thought it was an owl, hooting in its sleep. Or a duck or a goose, blundering inland from the river. It faded, then came on again, growing stronger with each minute. Then he glimpsed a black coat moving among the tree trunks. A man was walking along the trail, weeping. Weeping openly and unselfconsciously, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to be shuddering and sobbing and howling as he plodded through the trees. Alf froze against the beech in a kind of horror. He didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to interrupt or embarrass the man, and though the man’s way lay not sixty feet in front of him, Alf guessed his best chance of remaining invisible was to stay where he was.

  And so the man passed him, on the slightly elevated trail, appearing and disappearing among the trunks of the beeches and maples. Alf did not recognize him, though he seemed familiar. He was in his sixties or seventies — wiry and stooped, with a deeply tanned face and a shock of white, unruly hair that for a moment put Alf in mind of his own father — except that this man’s hair was patched with black, as if he had been painting a ceiling black (this thought actually occurred to Alf) and spilled some. He was wearing a bright-red tie that stood out sharply, like a long wound that had opened inside his coat. Just as he came opposite Alf, he stopped. Afraid he’d be discovered, Alf lowered his eyes, and at that moment the man blew his nose with a terrific honk, followed by several minor honkings and snifflings. Then he continued on his way, weeping.

  Alf listened to the sound growing distant in the trees. All the birds had fallen silent, as if listening too. A light rain pattered on the duff, among the great trunks. Again came the sound of the man honking. Then the woods were silent.

  43

  “I’M NOT SAYING IT’S BAD,” Mann said with a sigh. “It’s just not up to your usual standards.”