The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  His mother usually came in after work, to give him the news of the day. And Penny liked to bring him his meals — what little he was able to eat. She’d begun to adopt Margaret’s manner of brisk cheerfulness and would sit on the edge of his bed chatting about school. One afternoon she brought him a little figure, carved in yellow soap. It was of a young man with a hockey stick in his hand, about three inches high. Joe turned it over in his hands. Penny watched him closely. “It’s you,” she cried finally, piqued that he hadn’t guessed. “You remember, when we all went skating above the dam!” And he remembered the hockey game: that day of blue-sky freedom. She had carved him skating alone upstream, his head bowed, his stick held idly upside down. She had caught the stoop of his shoulders, and his old jacket with the torn sleeve, and something else, some indefinable thing that was him. He was astonished — she had just turned twelve — and he remembered Penny and her friends, their chiming voices, as he skated up to the rapids. And again he saw the fox, its long, floating tail.

  After a week or so, he began to make small forays around the house. One Sunday morning, when the others were at church, he ventured outside. Everything was strange and bright — almost painful to look at — the green of the yard, reviving after a summer of drought, the sun glinting off the Lions Park footbridge. He still felt frail, unsure of his legs, and also frail in another way, as if what little courage he had for this walk might disappear in a moment. Soon his mind was racing with a nameless panic. It seemed that the future had ceased to exist. When he put out his foot, he half-expected it to fall on nothing. He had to be alert, he had to concentrate, to keep from being swept away.

  That first day he got as far as the bandshell in the park, where he sat relaxing, or at least pretending to, before he retreated to the house. Some days later, feeling much stronger, he dared a longer walk. He passed the dam, following the edge of the woods that curved around the fields of the Wiley farm. Though a bit lightheaded, he began to move more quickly, lengthening his stride, throwing out his arms. But then, pausing for breath under a grove of pines, he broke into a sweat. All his fear had come back, full force. He glanced around. The sky was too huge, every distance too vast.

  He looked up the long hill, to where the fields crested against the sky. That was the shortest way home, he realized — straight across the fields and over the hill — much shorter now than retracing his steps by the woods. The fields had not been ploughed for some time, and were covered with wild grasses, with outcrops of goldenrod and chicory and other weeds. As he looked across these fields, thinking he could never cross them (it was too far, too exposed), a wind came down the hill towards him. It pressed over the dry grasses and weeds, making their heads bend, until it reached him. And this wind, to his amazement, was warm. It was a cool day, but a warm wind was coursing over him, touching his face, wrapping him in warmth, moving the plants and branches around him. In his chest, something seemed to break.

  He did not know what happened next. In his whole life, thinking of it, he never would understand what happened next. But the next time he was conscious of anything, he was on the hilltop, two hundred yards from where he had just been standing. He had no idea how he had got there. It was as if he had crossed the fields in a dream, or as if some power — the wind itself perhaps — had picked him up and deposited him on the high, bald hilltop, on the grassy edge of an old lane.

  He realized he was weeping, gladly and without stint, sobbing like a child. He was sitting with his legs stretched out on the ground, like a child in a sandbox, amazed at everything he saw. Far down by the river, a few isolated poplar leaves glittered. Galleon clouds sailed overhead, a scattered fleet with emblazoned sails, swelling to the west. He saw the erect, white tail of a deer, disappearing over the hill. Normally, he would have been surprised to see a deer, but just now, everything was a miracle equal to it, everything surprised him. A flock of starlings pulsed by with a thrumming of wings he felt in his breastbone. A lone heron launched itself from the water’s edge, its wings rowing the deep air as it laboured over the town.

  He was rocking, in some ancient, vital movement of self-comforting, though the comfort seemed not to come only from him. Looking down the slope to the river, he knew he was part of it all still. It held him still. He knew he would go on whether he wanted to or not, because he would be carried on, by whatever had carried him onto this hill, by whatever it was that moved the clouds and the birds and the leaves swirling off a nearby tree. But also, he wanted to go on. It was in him again, the desire to go on, however weak or unhappy or afraid he still was, and this was as much grief as joy, because he knew, now, where life was headed. And yet he wanted it anyway, he wanted it because he wanted it, there was no more reason than that. He was alive.

  John Bemrose’s first novel, The Island Walkers, was a national bestseller and a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. It was also longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Bemrose is also well known as an arts journalist whose articles and profiles have appeared regularly in Maclean’s, where he is a contributing editor. In the past, he has written for CBC Radio’s Ideas, for the National Film Board, for the Globe and Mail, and for numerous other publications. He has also written a play, Mother Moon, produced by the National Arts Centre, and has published two poetry collections. Bemrose grew up in Paris, Ontario, the place that inspired the setting for The Island Walkers.

  Bemrose has lived in Toronto since 1970. He is at work on his second novel.