Boy on the Edge

by Fridrik Erlings

  John looked at him, his troubled eyes searching Mark’s face for an answer or an explanation of some kind. Mark tried to smile.

  “We are your friends,” he whispered. “Henry and I. And we’re going away from here soon, I promise you. All three of us. So don’t you worry about a thing.”

  A shy, trusting smile appeared on John’s lips. Tears ran from his eyes and his breath trembled.

  “Will you stay with me?” he pleaded.

  “I will,” Mark replied.

  John fumbled for Mark’s hand and lay back. Then he sighed, closed his eyes, and fell asleep in an instant.

  Mark sat on the bed for a long time, holding the bandage tightly on John’s wounded arm while the weather pounded the roof, the beams creaked, and the wind howled.

  Henry sat on the other bed and waited.

  “Will he be all right?” he whispered.

  “He has to be,” Mark said. “We just have to take good care of him, you and I. As soon as we can, we must move the boat to the cliffs.”

  “As soon as winter is through, we’re gone,” he whispered.

  Looking at John sleeping, Henry wondered if it was such a good idea anymore. John was desperate enough to attempt suicide, and so Mark seemed more determined than ever to save his friend. To save him from Jesus, and the reverend, from his parents, from his criminal record, and this cold country that offered no hope for the future, but only more trouble.

  Back in his own room, Henry wondered what it was that Mark wanted to escape from so badly. Was it just the farm? It wasn’t really so bad here. Or was it something else? Henry knew one thing for certain, for it had been the story of his life; nobody could escape from himself. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized that Mark had probably not learned that lesson.

  The first two months of the New Year, as always, were utter darkness. Snow covered everything, and it was as if time had come to a full stop. There were no days, only eternal night. Henry woke up in darkness and went to bed in darkness and between that, nothing happened.

  Every morning the snow had once again covered the tracks he trod between the cowshed and the house, so when he finally reached the farmhouse, he was fuming inside and wanted to scream at everyone.

  Ollie had the flu and so the breakfast table was quiet. Emily stayed by Ollie’s bedside and Henry milked alone. Henry found himself hearing Ollie’s voice every time the shovel scraped the canal or when the wind pounded the roof. Words here and there, sometimes whole sentences, began to reverberate in his head, in that ringing clear voice, reading a story or chanting an ancient poem.

  Henry put on the leather gloves from his mom, fought his way through a snowdrift with the wheelbarrow full of steaming shit, and emptied it onto the frozen dung heap.

  Sometimes, while he worked, Henry thought about what Reverend Oswald had said about agricultural college, so long ago. Although it was almost unbelievable that it would ever happen, he allowed himself the luxury of dreaming.

  He imagined a beautiful countryside with green fields as far as the eye could see and no lava fields, a cowshed full of happy fat cows, and a brand-new dairy machine. Maybe even horses too.

  But it was just a dream; he knew that. Emily did not force him to read, and he did not want to, so it would all come to nothing. He would never be allowed into college. Why on earth did farmers have to read anyway? Farmers worked with their hands and took care of their animals. Books didn’t have anything to do with that.

  Henry guessed he would stay here for the rest of his life, unless he ran away with Mark and John. He’d been excited about the idea, though mostly he’d been excited about Mark becoming his friend. But all they ever talked of was the escape plan and how Mark imagined life in Spain. Mark never asked Henry about how he felt about it, what his dreams were. And as the weeks went by, Henry found himself being more of a listener than a participant. He was the audience that Mark needed to think out loud to, to paint his dream for so he could see it more clearly himself.

  Mark was worried about John, who had been in bed since Christmas. Emily had asked the doctor to have a look at him. Mark told John to say that he had cut himself in the smithy. Whether the doctor believed it or not, he realized that John was depressed, so he prescribed some pills for him.

  Finally, thanks to Mark’s encouragement, John got out of bed and began to fiddle about with wood in the smithy again. Now he sat there every day carving out his chess pieces.

  “The sooner I get him away from here, the better,” Mark said.

  Henry sat by Mark’s side but said nothing. In his mind he played with the idea that if John and Mark went to Spain, he would probably be allowed to drive the tractor next summer. He would mow the fields on his own and fill up the barn with fresh hay. And perhaps he would teach Ollie to milk the cows, herd them to pasture, and take care of them since he would be far too busy himself. Thinking of that made him feel better. But at the same time he felt guilty because Mark relied on him for the escape plan.

  Every time they talked, Henry couldn’t help thinking how much he would miss the farm, the cows, Emily and Ollie, maybe even the reverend. What would he do in Spain, anyway? But he dared not say anything to Mark. Perhaps they weren’t real friends after all. You should be able to say anything to a friend. Maybe they were just talking because Mark needed Henry’s friendship even more than Henry needed Mark’s. Mark needed someone to help him escape to that faraway place where dreams came true. But Henry knew that his dreams were right here, waiting for him in the summer breeze.

  The rain showers arrived from the ocean and the snow melted into the lava. One day a green knoll of moss appeared from under the snow and the southern winds rounded up the fluffy clouds and made them gallop across the sky.

  The promise of spring laughed in a brook and whispered in the yellow grass at the swamp. It shook the ptarmigan in flight with a playful gust of wind, which made it spring into the air, brown-breasted and white-winged.

  Then the birds arrived at the sea cliffs.

  The wind was warm and the foxes’ cackles echoed across the lava field. The ocean was wild with joy. The surf foamed like mad around the cliffs, gushing up from crevices and clefts in high fountains that collapsed on the rocks with loud smacks.

  Now that spring had arrived, Mark was tackling the escape plan with new energy. He was eager for a chance to move the boat to the cliffs, but they couldn’t do that in broad daylight unless the reverend and Emily went away. But they could sneak down to the sea cliffs and try out Henry’s idea with the iron bar and the wheel with the long steel cable. They carried the wheel out of the smithy between them and hid it behind the barn. After dinner one night they carried it down Spine Break Path, past the Gallows, and continued all the way to the edge of the cliffs above Shipwreck Bay. The iron bar fit perfectly into the square hole in the middle of the wheel.

  The end of the cable should obviously be fastened to the hook on the stern of the boat. That way one person could lower the boat down the cliffs, turning the wheel slowly, while another held on to the chain, making sure the boat didn’t get stuck on the way down. It was simple, once they had figured it out.

  But they still had to wait for a chance to carry the boat out to the cliffs to test this properly. Meanwhile Mark decided it was time to let John in on the plan.

  When Henry got to the smithy, John sat by the table with his chess pieces in front of him. He was explaining to Mark that the white pieces were Christ the King and Queen Mary, his mother. There were archangels instead of bishops, knights, and castles, and the pawns were all apostles. The King of Darkness and the Queen of Lust made up the black team, with all kinds of demons and goblins as their bishops, knights, and pawns.

  “Soon we’ll be able to play chess, Mark,” John said with a smile. “It’ll be a great battle when these two meet,” he added, raising a half-finished Christ and a fully-fledged King of Darkness.

  Mark took a piece in his hand and examined it.

  “It looks good,�
�� he said.

  “That’s Andrew the apostle,” John explained. “He’s the brother of Peter,” he added, pointing at another figure holding a key.

  “What’s Andrew holding?” Mark asked.

  “Oh, it’s supposed to be a net,” John said, frowning. “But it’s not very clear.”

  “Oh, right. He was a sailor, wasn’t he?” Mark asked.

  “A fisherman,” John replied. “The Savior’s fisherman.”

  “Must be fun being a fisherman, don’t you think?” Mark said. “Sailing the ocean on a little boat? Would you like that?”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have a boat,” John replied.

  “But what if we had one?” Mark continued. “Then we could go fishing.”

  John looked down and chipped a tiny fragment off Christ’s shoulder with his knife.

  “Yes, but we can’t be fishermen if we don’t have a boat,” he mumbled, and seemed to become immersed in his work again.

  Mark watched him for a moment.

  Then he walked toward the wall, moved the barrels away, and rolled them across the floor. John looked up slowly, watching his friend with surprise.

  “I tell you, brother,” Mark said, “the Lord will provide.”

  Grabbing the corner of the sailcloth, Mark pulled it away in one swift movement, causing dust to scatter in the air around him.

  John put Christ down on the table and stood up, gawking at the rowboat. The dust twisting and turning in the air, catching the light from the bright sunbeams pouring through the window, caused the boat to glow in a heavenly light.

  “It’s a sign,” he whispered.

  He walked toward the boat, touching it gently, as if he were afraid it would disappear as easily as it had appeared if he weren’t careful. But it was a real boat, a real fisherman’s boat. John knelt beside it, stroking it hard as if testing its strength, with a big smile on his face.

  “A miracle,” he murmured.

  “The only thing we have to do,” Mark said, “is to move it to the cliffs.”

  John nodded, mesmerized.

  “And then we can sail wherever we want to. Even to Spain,” Mark said.

  John laughed a little, but then he fell silent and looked at Mark as if he had suddenly understood what he was really talking about. “I’d like that,” he whispered finally.

  A few weeks passed until a day came when Emily decided she had to take Ollie to the city to buy him new clothes. At breakfast the reverend told the boys to keep up the good work in the smithy and said they would be back before dinnertime. As soon as the car had disappeared down the road, Henry emptied the last bucket of milk into a container. Then he hurried to the smithy, where the other two were waiting.

  The rusty hinges creaked loudly as Henry pushed the double doors open. Mark and John turned the boat and dragged it between them out into the yard. There was a fresh southerly wind; the sun was bright between the light clouds. Now and then a few large drops fell from the sky as if it was about to rain. But the wind grabbed the curtains of showers and threw them north across the red slopes of the mountains.

  After several failed attempts to lift the boat and carry it, they decided to turn it over. Mark slid one oar under it, which John grabbed on the other side. That way they were able to lift the stern. Henry placed himself under the bow, letting it rest on his shoulder.

  As he limped onward, they followed. They inched their way across the yard with the boat on their shoulders, along Spine Break Path. They had to stop many times on the way to rest, especially Henry. His foot ached under the weight of the boat.

  Gray curtains moved past the sun and heavy drops smacked the hull of the boat. As the rain showers glided across the lava field, glowing rainbows appeared in their wake.

  When they finally reached the cliffs, a wave broke, lashing white foam around the rusty wreck of Young Hope. A little farther out the sea was calmer. The timing was right. The tide was low. They had four hours before it would begin to rise.

  They rolled the wheel into place and fit it on the iron bar. Then they pulled the end of the cable and locked it to the iron ring on the stern of the boat. Henry rotated the wheel slowly while Mark and John eased the boat carefully over the edge.

  The iron wheel squeaked as Henry unwound the cable. The boat drifted slowly down the cliff wall, but Mark hung on to the chain by the steps, supporting it with one hand. The white birds screeched all around them, astonished to see a boat sailing down the cliffs.

  Henry clung to the rusty chain, following John down the steps. When they had reached the sandbank below, they pushed the boat into the water and stepped on board. It rocked sideways, light on the waves. Mark put out the oars and practiced rowing.

  John just gazed up at the birds on the cliffs, spellbound.

  Once they were out of the bay, Mark turned the boat westward.

  From here the cliffs seemed to rise much higher than Henry had imagined.

  Monstrous rock formations rose from the deep, reaching higher and higher to places that no one could reach but the bird on the wing. The birds seemed so tiny as they spun in an endless whirlpool, like snowflakes spiraling around the cliff wall.

  A single bird followed the boat for a while in silent observation. The joyful sound of its beating wings rapidly approached and then faded into the distance.

  The day was pink and fresh, and clattering sounds echoed from gorges and peaks above them, across the silvered surface. The waves barely rose before sinking again to the rhythm of the ocean’s slow and silent breaths.

  John smiled.

  “It’s a good life, being a fisherman,” Mark said.

  “It sure is,” John said. “It’s perfect freedom.”

  His eyes were shimmering again.

  Henry glanced at Mark. His determined look gave nothing away, but Henry knew that he would go through with the plan, now that John had more or less agreed to it. The escape had been set in motion; there was no turning back now. In a week or two they would be boarding a freighter out on the open sea, heading for freedom, out there somewhere, where dreams came true.

  Mark turned the boat and headed back to Shipwreck Bay, the boat gliding past the wreck of Young Hope. He pulled in the oars as they looked up at the wreck.

  It was much larger than it seemed from the edge. It looked like a rusty red whale carcass, with broken ribs jabbing the sky, its portholes like hollow eyes.

  From the gaping wound lay chains and wires like rotting intestines, all tangled up with long blades of seaweed that rose and sank in the slow waves with a heavy sigh. As the undercurrent moved the boat toward the bank, John stretched out his hand so his fingertips brushed gently along the rust-burned carcass.

  They pulled the boat up the cliffs, but there was no place there to hide it properly. So they raised it upon their shoulders and carried it toward the Gallows. They put it down behind the two boulders, where it was invisible from the farmyard.

  They didn’t speak on their way back. The next time they walked Spine Break Path would be the last time.

  Ollie was out and about again, measuring the important distances around the farm with poems. It was a project he took very seriously; Henry couldn’t understand why, but there was much he didn’t understand about Ollie. The way he thought, the things he talked about, how all of a sudden he could burst into a song without any reason at all, just because he felt like it.

  Henry had noticed that he wasn’t the only one being neglected by Emily because of Ollie. Reverend Oswald seemed somehow to have fallen into a shadow. A lot of things had changed, now that there wasn’t a big group of boys anymore. The reverend spent most of his time at the farm in his office. Occasionally Henry saw him walking to the new church, perhaps to check if the windows were tightly shut or to sweep dead flies off the windowsills.

  He had decided on a date for the first service in the new church, and had invited all the people in the area to come. He spent his days out walking, preparing his sermon, or so he said. And he continued to drive
off to the city for days on end, without returning.

  Emily didn’t seem to mind. Henry knew she had moved Ollie to her bedroom when he caught the flu, and since then the reverend had slept in the Boiler Room. Even though Ollie was fine now, they hadn’t changed things back to normal. Early morning when Henry came into the kitchen with the home container full of milk, he heard the reverend’s snoring from behind the Boiler Room door. It was as if they had ceased being husband and wife. Ollie and Emily were like mother and child, and it seemed that the reverend had become a guest in his own house.

  Sometimes Henry thought about his mother, but it was getting harder for him to remember her face. What was left in his memory were a few moments from his childhood, some of them happy, some of them sad, but her face seemed to escape him. More often than not it was Emily’s face that appeared in his mind when he thought of happy things. And then sometimes he got angry, because she was being the kind of mother to Ollie that he himself felt he needed the most. Maybe he was too grown-up for her to behave like a mother to him. Maybe she was afraid of him because he had beaten his mother and broken her arm. But perhaps it was his own fault; if he hadn’t thrown her book away, then maybe things would be different now. And if Ollie hadn’t arrived? Yes, things would definitely be very different.

  Henry put the last shovel of dung in the wheelbarrow and pushed it out. Somewhere behind the barn he could hear Ollie’s voice, reciting a poem once again. When he came around the corner Henry saw him walking in his peculiar way, taking long strides very slowly along the wall of the barn, singing out the poem.

  Henry emptied the wheelbarrow and wiped his forehead with his arm. Ollie stopped and looked at him.

  “You startled me. I forgot the next line,” Ollie said.

  “Sorry,” Henry replied.

  “No, wait! What’s that? Over there?” Ollie said, pointing at the lava field.

  Henry looked at the two boulders.