The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “So even parents shouldn’t say to their children, I love you —”

  “Even that.”

  “That’s monstrous,” he said, stopping. She turned to face him, perfectly calm, it seemed. “Without love,” he said, gesturing with his free arm, “there’d be, I don’t know, no glue holding things together. It would be awful —”

  “I’m just talking about the word,” she said. He felt her smile was false, a placating of him, a bit patronizing. “I know there’s something there the word refers to — I just think we should think about it a bit, before we throw it around.”

  “So what I just did was throwing it around, even in Latin —”

  She looked at him. He was breathing hard, really upset. He felt his heart had been laid bare and, in some way he could not quite put his finger on, mocked. He kicked at a little pile of dry grass. “Now I feel you’re trying to put me in a straitjacket, telling me what I can and can’t say.”

  She came up behind him and leaned her head into his back. They stood like this for some time. He was sulking, really hurt. He could not understand why it wounded him so much, this refusal of hers to have him use the word “love.” To her, it was just an intellectual matter; to him, it was as if she had rejected his deepest self.

  He turned to her. In the weak light of the street light her face seemed misshapen, as if bent by the atmosphere. But there was concern for him there, real concern, though he saw, too, that spark of amusement in her eyes. Nothing, it seemed, could quench it.

  “You say what you like,” she said quietly.

  “I will,” he said. “You can just take your chances.”

  They looked at each other. She leaned up suddenly and kissed him on the mouth. He seized her by the shoulders, intending to plant a firmer kiss. His tongue sought hers. But she pushed him firmly back, with her free arm. They went along together, through the park. The sense of disjunction between them seemed stronger than ever to him, a sadness. It seemed to come out of the ground, out of the damp hay and blossom scents, out of the branches of new leaves: a sadness and, yes, a sense of deepening vulnerability. Like a trapeze artist, he had abandoned his swing to throw himself into the air towards her. He had to be sure her hands were there to catch him. Perhaps, he wondered with a kind of terror, she was warning him off love in an attempt to get him back to his perch. But it was already too late. He was tumbling through the air, his arms outstretched, his hands open.

  55

  ARCHIE MANN PULLED the plastic wrap from one of Shade’s diaries, exposing the leather-bound volume to the air of his study. He opened the book carefully, turning its parched, crackling pages. At his elbow, Joe and Anna saw the brown loops of the founder’s hand.

  “I like this one best,” Mann said, handing the book to Anna. “Be careful. The pages are halfway to dust.”

  Anna held the book at chest level, bowing her head to decipher the block of writing. As Mann stepped out of the way, Joe moved in beside her.

  The flowing streams of this enchanted place —

  Enchanted and enchanting both, a boon

  To whosoever haps upon its tune

  Of waters — trees, hills, Arcadian grace

  Bidding at every turn —

  “Rather Wordsworthian,” Mann said.

  “Rather hackneyed,” Anna said with a laugh. She went on reading. Joe felt the stab of her comment. He wanted her and Mann to get along; he wanted her to find some reason for pleasure in Shade’s poems. Her brutal judgment seemed to put a chill in the room. He struggled with the dense tract of handwriting, but gave up before the end.

  “I like it,” he said. “It sounds like he meant it, anyway.” He did not actually know if he liked the poem or not; he was trying to smooth relations between Anna and his teacher.

  “I think he did,” Mann said, a bit testily. He had moved down the long table, where he had picked up a magazine. Now he tossed it down again. Anna turned a page.

  “Are there others?” she said.

  “Two pages over,” Mann said.

  Again Joe read at her side. She had recently torn a hangnail from her thumb: a livid red strip ran beside the tan page.

  “ ‘The robin tenders his note from the vale,’ ” Anna said, quoting. “That’s a nice phrase.”

  Mann said, “I think it’s rather wonderful that a man as busy as he — he was a very successful businessman — would write such a thing. I mean, it’s rather graceful, even if the phrases, as you say, have been used before. I wonder how many businessmen would attempt such a thing today?”

  “Not too many, I hope,” Anna laughed.

  Joe flushed at her lack of tact. He looked over at Mann and saw his face knotting, the dark, hooded eyes frowning into some lower region. Joe wanted to please the teacher, and to see him so obviously displeased unsettled him. It was a bit shocking: Anna wasn’t speaking to Mann as one would to a teacher, with a note of deference, but candidly, as if he were just another person. To Joe, she was verging on disrespect.

  She said, “But there — he fumbles the next stanza entirely.”

  “Well, I’m not making literary claims for him,” Mann said, sounding really piqued now. His brown eyes flashed. “You see, to me the poems are evidence of a very interesting man. An unusual man. I mean, he had practical reasons for founding a town here. But he was much more than practical, in the narrow sense. He fell in love with the place, really. He never got over it. By the way, I think it would be a very good thing if our businessmen wrote poetry, or painted, or were at least interested in poetry and painting. They might come at things in a broader way. We’d all be better off.”

  “But if their poetry is bad,” she said, lowering the book.

  “It doesn’t matter. The point is, by coming into contact with the complexities of poetry — by paying some sort of homage to it — they’re going to enrich themselves.” Mann smiled at his own choice of verb. “In more than the usual way, I mean. Shade was an enormously complex man. Just read his diaries …”

  The teacher gave them dessert in the old belvedere. Sitting on its narrow, unpainted benches, facing each other a little awkwardly, they scooped at the little dishes of homemade chocolate mousse. “You wouldn’t find better in France,” Anna enthused, mollifying Mann a little. Far below, the Shade glinted under the rail trestle, as it spread towards the deep centre of town. The spring evening, a Sunday, was unusually warm. A bumblebee drifted through the belvedere, rising towards the green sky over the treetops. Mann took up his old theme again, talking about Shade. He seemed determined to make Anna understand his own fascination. “He was a more complete kind of man than is generally found now,” he insisted, gesturing absently with his tiny spoon. “He was a woodsman, an entrepreneur, an alderman, and mayor for many years, a much-loved figure, really. Many’s the needy family he helped out. He was a farmer —”

  “A farmer-poet,” Anna offered graciously. “Like Virgil.”

  Mann bowed his head in acknowledgment and went on: “And all this was part of the same ambition, somehow —”

  “To serve God?” she suggested.

  “Something like that. But here’s the interesting thing. He wasn’t formally religious, which was very unusual in a man of his position. He didn’t go to church. Still — this is where the poetry comes in — he had this passion for place, if I can call it that. He loved what was here, it was in his care, somehow. In his latter years, he could get tremendously exercised if — well, if someone was going to change a view by chopping down a grove. And this was a man who’d chopped down thousands of trees, in his time.

  “You see,” Mann continued, leaning forward. His gaze swept between Joe and Anna. But mostly he spoke to Anna. Joe was still guarding the bulwarks of propriety (long after they’d been breached) while these two went on hammering each other as equals. It was thrilling, and a bit unsettling. “I think he was in love with beauty,” Mann said. “He was in love with this place, with poetry, with — you know, the beauty of life that passes us by with hardly
a glance. You’re a poet, Anna — that was a wonderful poem you had in the Quill — so you know what I mean. It’s the thing that should make us happy, and does, but also makes us melancholy, because we can’t keep up with it — it’s too quick for us, too eternally — young.”

  When the visit was over, they trooped down the hill. Joe was carrying a knapsack and the rolled blanket his father kept in the Biscayne: when it got dark enough, they planned to do some stargazing. Mann had suggested they visit the old pioneer cemetery on the east side of town, where Shade and his family were buried. Joe had never been there and was as keen as Anna, so they crossed the Bridge Street bridge to the Flats and found the stony, deeply rutted lane that climbed behind several houses to a locked iron gate. They climbed over, into the isolated scattering of small, pale tombstones, with the rail line and the gravel pits guarding its back and, to the west, the roofs of the town gleaming in the dusk. Joe had never seen the town from just this angle, and stood picking out familiar buildings. The dark pyramid of the Presbyterian church roof dominated all, but there were other spires to the south, and a rolling sense of buried life, under the dark canopy of trees.

  The Shade monument was the largest in the graveyard: a tall plinth of white marble with a wider base on which the names of the founder and his family were carved. They prowled around it, reading the inscriptions out loud to each other, deciphering the Shade family tree, their scrutiny touched with a bittersweet sense of familiarity. They drifted among the other stones. Anna found notice of an eight-year-old boy, Julius Broad, who had drowned in the Attawan in 1896. The inscription read The river took him. Now God has him. “It must have been wonderful to be able to believe that,” she said. “If they really did believe it.” She sniffed, and he looked at her, realizing tears were running down her cheeks. “What Mann said was wonderful,” she said. “The truth is we’re just shades ourselves. We’re only here for about two seconds. Then — well.”

  “Yes,” he said, slipping his arm around her. Her bare shoulder was cool under his hand. He was not feeling what she was feeling, but he was grateful for the chance to comfort her. After a few seconds, she dug her little notebook out of the canvas knapsack and went off by herself. He continued his tour of the cemetery, reading the fading inscriptions on the white, leaning stones. From time to time he looked up and saw her legs, or her shoulder, sticking out from behind the Shade monument where she sat on the ground, writing in her book.

  One time, he saw that the notebook now lay several feet away from her, open on the rough lawn. He crossed to her. She was sitting hugging her knees, staring blindly.

  “Are you cold? Do you want your sweater?”

  She shook her head, almost imperceptibly. He went and picked up her notebook, glancing at a page before he closed it. There was a scrawl of words and darker, crossed-out bits.

  He held out the notebook for her. She glanced at it and looked away.

  “I’m no good,” she said, and a moment later: “That’s not true. I’m very good. But very good in a poet — oh! It’s no better than no good at all. The world doesn’t need any more very good poems.” She spoke angrily, with tearing sarcasm. “Very good poems. They’re about as useful as a — a three-legged horse. If you’re not a genius, you shouldn’t even try.”

  “Maybe you are a genius,” he offered with complete sincerity.

  She snorted. “You don’t know anything. Emily Dickinson was a genius. Sappho was a genius. I’m just a pretender. Well —”

  She took the notebook from him and abruptly got up.

  “So what do we do now?” she said.

  “Well, the stars are almost out,” he said hopefully. “We could put out the blanket.”

  But she was too restless to settle down. She walked around the cemetery and he spread the red tartan blanket. They had brought a bottle of wine and an opener she’d taken from a cupboard at home. Joe drew the cork and placed the bottle on a fallen stone. “Wine’s ready!” he called out to her. When she made no response he looked around and saw her stooping in the tall grasses at the back of the plot. Finally she came back to him with a bouquet of wild grasses, which she presented to him rather formally, with a clumsy curtsey, apologizing for her outburst. “You must be getting heartily sick of me,” she said.

  “Well, luckily I’m a tolerant guy,” he said.

  “I know you are,” she said. “And I thank you for it.” He looked at the bouquet she had brought him: the stiff, whiskered grasses, trembling in his fist.

  They lay on their backs, looking up at the stars. They picked out the Big Dipper — Ursa Major — aslant across the sky, and the North Star beaming feebly. Orion tilted in the south, with his sword-belt. She pointed out constellations he did not know, pressing close to him so he could sight along her arm. The Milky Way was a vast twinkling road — it passed, she said, not only across the dark fields of space, but through their bodies as well, entering just at the bottom of the breast bone and passing out their backs: could he feel it? He thought he could. Watching that great dusting of stars, that was beyond comprehension, it seemed he was drawn into it, and it into him, through some mutual gravity that bore them along together in the darkness among the stones.

  After a while they changed positions, sitting up with their backs to the Shade monument, trading the bottle back and forth. When she laughed at some joke he made — laughed with an almost shocking abandon — he realized she was getting drunk. He felt tipsy himself, released to a giddy freedom beyond his usual restraint and deference. They drank toasts to the stars, and to individual constellations, and let their minds run wild in speculation. He told her his old childhood fantasy, that the night sky was really the roof of a great tent, and the stars were pinholes where the light from beyond got through. She was intrigued by the idea of a light from beyond: a light so bright it could not be borne by human eyes, she said. It was like the radiance people attributed to the naked presence of God. And that set her off wondering about the power of God, if there was a God, was He wholly benign, as people generally supposed, or a dangerous and even destructive force that might on a whim destroy people’s happiness — hadn’t he done that to Job, for the sake of a mere bet? — or burn the earth to cinders. Her imagination was apocalyptic. She began to talk about nuclear war, and how it was impossible to think about it — all those Russian and American missiles pointed at each other — the end of the world, at any given minute, was only a few minutes away. She was appalled by this, and yet there was something else in her that seemed to thrill to the idea of such power, as if the devastation sleeping in those warheads were simply another facet of nature, great and mysterious like the stars.

  They lay down and kissed for a while. Suddenly she rolled away on her back. He made to roll on top of her, but she pushed him off, instructing him to lie beside her.

  “On your back,” she said. “Lie perfectly still. Your arms at your sides.”

  He lay still, looking up at the stars. One was blinking: a high jetliner, crossing among the constellations. Its roar sounded soft and far away.

  “We’re lying like they’re lying,” she said. “Only a few feet above them.”

  “I don’t like pretending I’m dead,” he said, after a while.

  “We are dead,” she said very quietly. He felt his breathing stop. The winking jetliner traversed the sky, in the remoteness of another life.

  After a time they heard the blare of a train’s horn, in the countryside to the east. Soon they saw its headlight, striking through the night, shining past the little cemetery towards the trestle that crossed the Shade. They were silent as it passed in a roar. They could make out a few passengers in the sad, isolated light of the nearly empty cars, reading newspapers, looking out into the dark.

  The engine rumbled onto the trestle. There was a deeper thunder as hundreds of iron beams and wooden ties shook, and thousands of fittings rattled like crude tambourines above the sudden valley. Then the train was gone. They could hear its mournful bleat as it tore towards the Junc
tion, straining for the fields beyond town.

  Anna got up. “I hadn’t realized we were so close to the bridge!” She began to walk rapidly through the cemetery, clambering a bit drunkenly over the grassy mound at its border, through the ditch and up the embankment to the tracks. Joe stumbled after her. Ahead, the surface of the trestle stretched away, with darkness on either side. The two sets of rails glinted placidly in the weak starlight, across the infinite articulation of the ties. There were no guardrails.

  She was walking with some difficulty between the rails, where the gravel was not quite level with the ties.

  “What are you doing?” he said as he strode along behind her.

  “I’m going out on the bridge.”

  “You can’t,” he told her. “People get killed out there.”

  “You don’t have to come,” she said with disdain. Immediately, she stumbled on a tie. He seized her arm, but she pulled away. Again he grabbed her.

  “Don’t!” she cried.

  “I’m telling you, it’s dangerous —”

  He went swiftly ahead of her, to the trestle, and saw the Shade in its calm lake behind Bannerman’s dam, a hundred feet below. The lip of the dam glistened and put out a soft roar of falling water. He had crossed the bridge himself, with Smiley. But they’d checked the passenger schedules first, and put their ears to the tracks to listen for approaching freights. And they hadn’t been drunk.

  He turned to face her on the tracks.

  “I won’t let you,” he said. “We’re too drunk. We’ll do it another time.”

  She tried to get by him, but he met her every dodge. She stamped her foot and made demon faces at him. He had become simply an object in her way. She flailed when he grabbed her and once scratched his face. In despair — he was convinced he was throwing away his chances with her — he was tempted to give in. But he clung to his sense he had to protect her.

  Finally she gave up and walked quickly back to the cemetery. He followed, disconsolate. Off in the distance, a diesel horn sounded. He realized dully that another train was approaching, this time from the west. In a few seconds the freight roared onto the trestle. They had not been aware of it, assuming that the sound of its horn was coming from the first diesel. Anna seemed oblivious to the train, but went about folding the blanket and putting the bottle away, with a cold briskness that dismissed him utterly. He stood in amazement, watching the boxcars rumble and bang past. “You see,” he said, turning to her. “If we’d gone out there, we would have had to dodge that.” But she wasn’t listening, and he felt like some old fuddy-duddy, a parent who can only say no, who must fence in life with common sense and fear. All he could do was limit her, it seemed. Even if he had saved her life — and who knew, perhaps he had — his role beside her was negative, secondary. They walked out of the cemetery, down the hill to the Flats. Under the branches of maples — their foliage bright green in the streetlights — a few silent cars gleamed by the curb.