by Abi Maxwell
This time, when Alice pricked her finger, it bled more. Yet she pretended it hadn’t happened and continued pinning squares, a small dot of blood on each square she touched.
“You were right out there on the beach. I don’t know why they didn’t go meet you.”
“No matter,” Alice said, and undid the square she had just pinned. She would not let herself be made a fool.
Dear Simon,
I shall interpret your silence as a wish to remain alone. That is okay. Please know that I continue to cherish the company your existence has given me in these months of mine on the island. I think of you often, and wish you well always.
Briefly, Alice had thought of going up to Simon’s cabin. She saw herself ransacking the place, finding letters to other women, from other women. His books she would throw to the ground. She could break a bag of flour over them and even break a window. But no, Alice would not do that. Yet she had written a number of drafts of this last letter. The first the cruelest and the rest less and less cruel until she finally sounded like the person she wanted to be. She would not go to his place again. She would not linger or wish. When she finished the kind letter she put it in an envelope and addressed it, sealed it. Alice was sitting on the porch, the early afternoon sun fully upon her, and when she finally squinted across the lake she was shocked to see that barge-like boat anchored not far in front of her property. She recognized the boat, the Lawrence, used to deliver building supplies to the islands. Wearing only her swimsuit and not feeling shy for it, Alice stood and waved. Yet quickly she realized that the driver had already rowed his way to shore and tied his rowboat. Now he stood on her rotting dock.
“Hello,” she called down the beach, her hand shading the sun.
“Ayup,” he called back up. He stretched his arms high above his head. A slice of his dark skin was revealed below the waist. Oh, she thought quickly and with a surge. Oh, here he is. That woman, that had been a sister. A cousin. Nothing like what Patty Jean had said. Here Simon is. Just a little shy. Not so heavy and sloppy, not so much at all.
“Simie up there says you needs some firewood,” the man said.
Alice realized her mistake and cleared her throat.
“Gots to unload the son of a bitch,” he said, and nodded toward the Lawrence.
“All right, then.”
Alice stayed on the porch and the man stayed there on the low dock. He took his shirt off, his skin gleaming brown. From his pants pocket he withdrew a pouch of tobacco, rolled a cigarette. He smoked slowly and with ease, and after a while he held the cigarette with the corner of his mouth as he stretched his arms upward once more.
“None too ugly here,” he said.
Alice nodded, moved from the porch to the beach. “The wood?” she asked.
“Oh sure,” he said, oh showa. He dipped his cigarette into the water and walked off the dock to the fire pit, threw the paper and tobacco remains onto the black wood. Then from his pocket he pulled a small bundle and held it toward Alice. “Mind?” he asked. His shoulders were broad and thin and he was quiet but not the least bit awkward.
“No, no,” she said, though she didn’t know until the wind blew her way that what he was doing in the cup of his hands was smoking some marijuana. When he finished, the man folded his body over and unlaced his wet leather boots. Then he stepped out of them and stretched his arms upward again, far above his head. His ribs showed clearly and he was majestic, there in the sun and half naked.
“What was it that Simon said?” Alice dared.
“His woman out here needs some wood.”
“His woman?”
“Alice?”
“Yes.”
“Mind?” he said again, and again she told him she did not. Slowly he unhooked his leather belt and dropped his pants. He wore underwear—this caught her somehow by surprise. In this underwear he walked to the lip of the water, then remembered his socks. These he took off and stepped toward the water again, yet again retreated. Here he dropped his last bit of clothing from his thin body. That last bit of skin, untouched by the sun, shone starkly like snow against the rest. With grace the man dove into the lake. When he began to swim she watched his body through a layer of water. Above the rocks he glided until he had swum beyond her view. When he had been underwater and out of her sight for some time, a flash of fear moved across Alice’s chest. But in a moment he emerged only to suck in another breath and continue.
His name was Isaac and before they slept together Alice cooked him dinner. They talked of Kettleborough and the lake but their talk was not much. Mostly they sat in silence by the fire, and when the sun had gone down and both of them knew he would neither unload the wood nor leave, he reached without hesitation across the sand to her body. In years to come, he would remain a gentle, dear friend to Alice, nothing more. Yet now they slept together without shame. Later, sometime in the early hours of morning, when he rose and ran a hand swiftly over her hair and then pulled his clothing on, Alice sat up and looked straight at him.
“I don’t need the wood,” she said. “Maybe Simon needs it but I do not. I am leaving the island before summer’s end. And I don’t even know who Simon is, so you do what you want.”
Polite
1982
I NEVER WANTED my son to return home. Karl could have returned; in fact he could have remained in Kettleborough all his life and I would not have had a single misgiving, for he was a simple and happy being and had he lived, he would have done well to take over his father’s business. Not Malcolm.
He did go to Europe for a time, you know. My Malcolm took a room in an aging woman’s flat; he bought her groceries and cooked her meals. It was from this woman that he bought an opal ring, too—he was in Paris, and he had fallen in love with a French girl. Those days of my son’s must have been the happiest and most carefree of his life. That dear girl, Francesca was her name, came from the countryside and when a letter arrived saying that he would marry her, I was so thrilled that I did not even tell Otto, for I worried that he would have some trouble with it. We had not met her, after all, and there was no invitation to the ceremony included. That was the sort of thing Otto would have gotten worked up about, and I knew his behavior could ruin the happy time.
Anyhow, it wasn’t long after he left that girl that he returned home. Thankfully he didn’t leave her at the altar. Back then he did tell me once that he had just driven off without a word in the middle of the night. Now he says that nothing such as that happened, and that I must have dreamed it. Still, I often think of that poor girl spending her life wondering whatever became of the American man who had been the love of her life.
After that he went west, and it was in California that he had the accident. He had read a book about the logging industry out in Oregon and he had been so moved by it that he thought it a life he ought to live, so he had found a friend and together they began their drive through the night. Malcolm had been driving when the car tumbled off the road. They’d been high on a cliff overlooking the ocean, and the nurse told me that when he first came to he said he had seen the lake when he crashed. She didn’t understand what this meant—of course she wouldn’t—but I knew.
I always hoped that you, too, would find some solace in the lake, dear Alice.
The truth is that I am getting older than most people know. Yesterday after washing the dishes I turned the garbage disposal on and after about twenty seconds I wanted to turn it back off but I could not remember how to do it. It is just a switch beneath the kitchen sink, and to turn it on is really no different than to turn it off, but I could not remember. I ran around the house looking for the place while that machine ground away, and after ten minutes I calmed myself down and breathed deeply and then I saw it. After that terrible episode I sat down in my chair and closed my eyes and when Otto returned home he wanted to know what the problem was but of course I could not tell him. He is a gentle old man, gentler and gentler as the days go on, and he loves me so, and to worry over my well-being is not some
thing I imagine him capable of doing at this stage in life. We had a difficult time of it in the early years, but as I look back I can say with certainty that we shared a wonderful marriage. Now the years have caught up to him, too; he nods off in the day and he has had three falls so far. One was outside in the drive and we had to call an ambulance.
Caring for Otto, playing the hymns for him, looking after my plants, these are the things that keep me busy but it is not busy enough. I have a lot of time to sit and think, and more often than not my thoughts go to you.
Your father had a lovely girlfriend, you know. Of course that would be your mother. Jennifer Hill was her name and she was so kind and so happy. Surely they would have been married.
But back to Malcolm. After that car accident he spent two weeks in the hospital and then he called his father. Otto bought him a plane ticket home and he never left again. He took over the store in town; I’m sure you’ve seen him there. He’s had a few girlfriends along the way but if he ever did fall in love again he never told me as much. I do know that he drinks; I can smell it on his breath and I see the bottles in the shop and besides that I suppose a mother might just be able to tell that sort of thing. He wanders around town, too. When he’s done with work he just wanders the way he did when he was a boy. I know he is a good person but he is not a satisfied or a brave person and often I find myself wondering where it is we went wrong.
Oh, but I don’t fool myself.
I used to believe in heaven, and then I believed in something, and now I’m afraid all the belief has vanished from my being.
I have tried to be simple and kind in my life, and tried to do as my husband asks of me, but I have always known that my mind is quite different from his. The story of my own mother, for example—my Otto never liked that story and he forbade me to tell it as though it were true. But it is the truth, Alice, at least it certainly is to me. And what else do we have in this life? My mother was named Ida and she followed a call that led her out upon the frozen lake and by that lake she was swallowed. Those tall rocks that stand in our lake today rose up immediately after she fell within. Year after year I have looked to those rocks waiting for some apparition to come forth, to no avail.
What a crazy old woman I make myself sound!
Perhaps I mean only to say that devoid of belief as I may be, I do still know that the world is more mysterious and grand than we could ever conceive of, and that I am ever so sorry that we gave you up.
To hear Signe tell it, she and I were the only relations of Eleonora’s to be spared by the lake. In it all other ancestors perished. Over the years, I often wondered if perhaps the lake had placed a curse over us. But how could that be so?
Shame. For shame we gave you up. Otto was too ashamed that his son had had a love affair, especially one with a girl beneath his class. Yet my shame was just as great: to speak against my husband, to let the curtain fall and have all the viewers see that we up on the hill were not a happy couple. So I remained utterly polite.
I don’t want to leave this earth with regrets, Alice, but it looks as though I may have to. I have written hundreds of letters to you but still have not had the courage to send even one. Did you ever stay up nights wondering who you were? I am at the stage now where to die would not be a sadness but a welcome change. I want to hang on only to care for Otto. But when he is gone, I hope only that I can return to the lake, to our flawed and immutable family.
The Old Factory
1982
THE RIVER LUMBERS through town, and if you walk the old railroad track across the river and then up the bald hill, you come to a brick building that most people in town believe to have been a factory.
But why would the factory be up on the hill and not down by the river?
No matter, the librarian knew the true history of the building, and she kept an ancient newspaper cutout about it in her drawer at the circulation desk, but in all her years at that library no one ever asked her about the building, so she had never said. The old factory, everyone called it.
Redbrick, boarded-up windows, tired grass and dirt surrounding. In at least the last twenty years, no one who went there had ever seen anyone else there. That’s part of why young Gerald Hughes Junior agreed to go there with his little sister, Rose; he wouldn’t be seen. Also because he didn’t have friends and when they got home from school that day their mother told them that their father had the day off and that they were to skedaddle, their parents wanted some peace and quiet.
“Won’t be quiet,” Gerald said, and his mother went red.
It was a gray and cold day and they lived in a railcar next to their grandparents, who also lived in a railcar. The big river ran behind their houses, and tumbled right there in view to the mill dam. Their grandfather had worked in the mill but the mill had long since shut down. At their grandparents’ house their grandmother wanted them to stay quiet, their grandfather was sick—he always was, he’d had to retire early for this, a cough and a stiff back and a general inability to rise from bed—and today he had finally fallen asleep. The kids whispered for a bit with their grandmother in the small kitchen.
“Gerald,” their grandmother said. “Do you know how many cookies you just ate?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Twenty-two, I been counting.”
Gerald looked in awe at his grandmother and Rose looked with the same eyes at her own brother and then the three of them fell into laughter. From the back bedroom their grandfather grunted.
“Get,” their grandmother said, and smacked their bottoms.
Rose was seven and Gerald was nine. Rose looked across the river and up the hill and the sun fell in one beam onto that old factory. It was speaking to her, calling to her, she believed that. There was something in that building that had pulled the sun to it, and something in the universe that pulled her eyes to the sun.
“Gerald,” she said. “I have the most extra-ordinary feeling.”
Gerald picked up a stick and a rock and hit the rock with the stick. He watched to see the rock land in the river but he did not see it.
“I’ve got to go to the old factory,” she said.
“Okay,” said Gerald.
“You’ve got to come with me.” Not really, he didn’t have to, but without him she knew she would be bored and perhaps a little afraid.
“Don’t matter to me,” he said, so Rose headed to the trestle. Gerald ran up behind her and grabbed her by the upper arms and gave her a little shake right there at the edge. The river was at least twelve feet below and if she fell she would surely die. She screamed and Gerald pulled her back steady and let go and ran on and she ran after him.
At the top of the hill Rose collapsed in the dirt and grass. She spread her arms and her legs out, a giant starfish, and she breathed heavily. Gerald circled around her and threw rocks at the building. The clouds moved over Rose and hit the building, and from her angle, on the ground, it was as though the building were eating the clouds.
“Wait,” she said slowly. She put her fingers to her temples. “Wait, right there, hold it, Rose,” she said to herself.
“Hush up,” her brother said.
“Eliza Plimpton!” she said.
“Whatever.”
“Eliza Plimpton, I see it all! I’m having a psychicness, Gerald! Eliza Plimpton and her sister and parents lived in the country and then her father died because a cow sat on him!”
Gerald laughed.
“A lot of people laughed but it was a truly sad event,” she said, her voice now floating miles away. “Eliza Plimpton, who dreamed only of becoming a sled maker, had to come to town to work in this factory. I see it all, Gerald. She worked in this factory and she took a room at the bottom of the hill where twenty women slept in bunk beds. Each morning she walked up the hill to take her post at the factory. She has only now just come into me, Gerald.” It was true. The name, though it meant nothing, had simply appeared in the girl’s mind.
“Big deal,” Gerald said.
> “Now the great mystery is why she came to me only just here now. How many people you think worked in this factory?” The building was shading the sun, and the red bricks had become darker, like dried blood. Rose still lay on the ground, and she looked up sidelong at her brother, who, beneath that great old factory, seemed incomprehensibly small. It wasn’t a look of defeat it gave him, though, but a look of wonder. With her miniature brother Rose could venture across the whole planet, all in secret. She stood up and walked to what used to be a window but was now a sun-bleached stretch of plywood. She put her small dirty fingers at the bottom edge of the plywood and it lifted right up. Dust clouds flew out to her.
Rose dropped the wood and ran to the next boarded window. It would not lift. Three more she tried and no other window would lift.
“That is something!” she yelled to her brother. “Now you tell me, why did I choose this window first?” She was back at the window that lifted. “S-I-G-N, brother man!” She ran the backside of her hand across her forehead; her endless capabilities exhausted her. When she gathered her breath and lifted the plywood and began to squeeze her body in between it and the building, her brother came and pulled her out and pushed her aside and he crawled right up, the skinny little thing, and lifted himself through the window. He called to his sister from inside and she lifted the plywood once more and he grabbed her wrists and pulled and in she came.
