by John Benditt
As she holds the spoon up, he nods over, eyes closing. But she’s gotten some broth into him, and even a few pieces of fish. He lists like a ship capsizing until he’s down again and sleeping. She covers him and leaves. His sleep is less broken. He’s not talking, or singing, or turning. Just rising and falling under the covers. She realizes how tired she is from caring for him. How, even though she tried to let go and let everything take its course, as the doctor had advised, her body was still hoping and fighting.
Now she feels how much the fight has cost. She goes down to the kitchen, feeds herself soup, goes back up to her daughter’s bed. The child is asleep, thumb in her mouth, golden curls across her face. She undresses, feeling as if her clothes weigh a hundred pounds. She folds them over a chair and climbs in bed next to the child. Then all three of them set sail together in the dark from Small Island out onto the waves, cold, gray and numberless, that have beaten on that tiny speck of land since time began.
The next morning she and the girl leave early and go walking over the snow to Harbortown. When they have been gone an hour or so, the man wakes and gets up from the bed where he has been lying for two weeks. When he stands, he is shaky. He goes down the stairs in his underwear, long bottoms and long-sleeved top not particularly clean. He sees her house as if for the first time. He looks around the kitchen. There’s little enough in it. He is ashamed of himself for taking her time, making her miss work. He owes her a lot—and he is a man who cannot bear to owe anything.
He goes upstairs, finds his clothes balled behind the bed and gets dressed. His denim overalls and brown corduroy jacket are loose. Once dressed, he starts coughing, feels the pull of the soft bed. It would be easy to get back in and wait for her return. He knows she would like him to be there when she comes home. Coughing interrupts his thoughts, cutting his chest and throat. He sits on the bed, pulls on his boots and laces them. They are tall boots like the woodcutters wear, with thick gripping soles.
He goes down, his boots loud on the stairs. He stands in front of her door, his breath pluming into the cold air, feeling thin and chilled.
It’s not spring yet, but there have already been days of thaw. The crust on the snow has melted and refrozen. His tall boots break the crust, push down into soft white.
Around the side of her house he finds his wheelbarrow, filled with snow, ice packed between the spokes of the wooden wheel, like slices of an icy pie. Now he sees how he got to her house. He admires her, pushing him over the frozen snow in the wheelbarrow. She is small, and it would have been a heavy load for her, alone in the dark.
He looks at the snow and ice on his barrow, reaches with the toe of a boot and kicks a wedge of ice out from between the spokes of the wheel for the pleasure of seeing the shards skid away over the frozen ground.
He looks around the clearing that stretches away from her house. On the far side smoke floats from one chimney. He can smell cooking. He’s hungry for the first time in his new-born life.
He scoops snow out of the wheelbarrow, regretting that he has no gloves, wipes his hands on pants and jacket and starts pushing his barrow across the clearing, over the hill and into the woods.
In the evening when she comes home from work, she knows even before entering her house that he’s gone. She goes upstairs and pulls the covers down, sees where his body has compressed the mattress in night after night of sweating half-sleep. She wants to lean over and breathe in his smell, but she is aware of the girl beside her, who already asks enough questions.
Before the events of this past year, the woman always knew what she wanted. When she was seventeen, she knew she wanted to marry Valter, even though she didn’t particularly like him. Two years ago, she knew she wanted to leave Valter’s house, because she was ready to be on her own. Those things were clear. Like Small Island, they had definite outlines. Now, nothing is clear. Her life is like the sea: huge and formless, always in motion. Sometimes she even misses Valter. That frightens her. She strips the bed and lets the mattress air, then carries the sheets downstairs and leaves them with the other laundry that is waiting to be redeemed.
CHAPTER 3
After he leaves her house, she doesn’t hear from him for many weeks. It’s the longest she’s gone without hearing from him since they began spending time together a year ago. She wonders whether he’s angry with her for following the doctor’s advice and leaving things in the hands of God. The doctor’s a fat, smug fool, she thinks. And she was weak. But that can’t be it. He can’t know what the doctor said. He didn’t even remember that the doctor had been in to see him. He was unconscious, tossing on her bed, singing about the wild duck. Men and their drinking songs. Idiots. No one is worse in that way than Valter, who knows hundreds of songs. She thought this man was different: quieter, less a fool, in spite of his drinking. Perhaps she was wrong.
But if he isn’t angry at her, what is it? What keeps him away after she has lowered herself to run after the doctor, made the fish Valter left at her door into soup, nursed him until he was well? The man’s silence makes the woman sharp and cranky; the girl keeps her distance.
As she goes about her business, winter is finally coming to an end. The snow loosens and slides down from the roofs to the ground, where it lies in piles under windows, next to doors. Water drips from the eaves. The earth reappears between her house and the others. Small dark patches spread and link with their comrades until the snow is surrounded: a defeated army, retreating to lick its wounds, regroup and counterattack at the beginning of November. She leaves her door open, looks out to see her neighbors doing the same.
On a day when the snow is almost gone, she comes home from work to find a table sitting inside her house next to the front door. The table is simple but well made. The four legs mark a square on the floor, lean in, braced halfway, ending in a smaller square under the top. The table comes to her waist, which is small and she knows he likes.
Her coat still on, the girl beside her, she lets her hand fall to the surface. Cherry, she thinks. Her favorite. On the table is a pale blue envelope. It’s been in and out of pockets, folded and marked in pencil and ink. Figures march from top to bottom like twin columns of ants. She doesn’t want to touch the envelope. But the girl reaches for it. In a swift gesture, the woman picks the envelope up and lifts it out of reach.
“What is it?”
“Something someone left us. Look at the table. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“What’s in the envelope?”
The girl is at an age where she has to know everything: what something is, where it belongs, why it belongs there, how it got there, what it’s made of, who made it, why they made it. Sometimes the woman feels as if the questions, many of which can’t be answered by anyone who has learned to think like an adult, will drive her mad. She wishes the man were here. Even though his relations with the girl aren’t always easy, he sometimes has a way of answering her questions that makes her laugh and then silences her.
She stuffs the blue envelope with its double file of ant tracks into her coat pocket. Mother and daughter stand in the doorway, faces bearing the same expression, one dark, one light. The sun, slanting in, is higher than it has been all year at this time in the late afternoon.
“Is the table from Papa?”
“I don’t think so, sweetheart.”
“Did the man who was sick make it?”
That’s what she has taken to calling him: the man who was sick. The girl can’t imagine her father sick that way, sitting up unconscious with his eyes open, howling stupid songs. Her father is dignified. His house is large. His family is rich. She knows her mother doesn’t want her to feel this way, but she waits for her father’s visits with excitement, loving the fish he brings, along with his smell, his dark clothes, his voice and his power.
“That’s enough. I’ll tell you more when I know.”
Of course she knows who made it. The man’s hand is in this table. There’s no mistaking it. And no doubt whose ant-track calculations are marching do
wn the envelope. If there’s one thing she can’t stand thinking about, it’s money. That’s one of the things she grew to loathe about Valter: Everything was money. Money, money, money. She wishes she had never seen the envelope. The table is different. It has his hand in it, the hand that touches her secretly. She sees it in the glow of the surface, the way everything fits together neatly. He is not good with words, it often seems difficult for him to let them go. But sometimes the things he does without words—like making this table—are so deft that they take her breath away. She steps into the house, bringing the girl with her. After dinner she will take a walk.
She makes dinner, tucks the girl into bed, goes downstairs and pulls her boots on. She takes the envelope out of her coat and opens it. It is just as she thought. There are no words, just banknotes of the Mainland, folded to fit.
She pulls the bills out. Some are pale blue, others yellow or buff. Each note has the face of the king looking out from an oval frame. The king’s face is narrow, thoughtful, with a fringe of beard, oval glasses and alert, intelligent eyes. He’s not old, the reigning king, but he’s been on the throne since he was a boy. He’s already had a long reign, but he’s never seen fit to visit Small Island. But then, why should he? The island is just a dot on the sea, a world away from the capital and the wonders of the palace. The woman knows why the man has left her this money. It makes her sad and angry in equal measure.
When she’s sure the girl is asleep, she leaves her house, pulling the door closed quietly behind her. As she walks, the earth under her feet is dark, moist and yielding. Next to the path, shoots are nosing up: crocuses tightly wrapped in green. She’s still angry with the man, but also excited and uncertain. She doesn’t know what to expect when she gets to his shed. He may be angry, drawn into some place where she can’t follow. Or deep in drink, passed out on the floor, tools scattered around. When he’s sober—which can be for days, weeks, months at a time—he’s a hard worker. But when he starts to drink, there is no stopping him. It might be weeks before he emerges, torn and dirty, pockets empty, like something that’s been dragged through the woods by an animal.
She hates his drinking, but she feels a tenderness for the part of him that is unable to resist. She believes her love could change him if he would accept it as fully as she wishes to give it. She is mostly a sensible woman, but this feeling has remained with her for a year. As she walks, the almost-spring wind picks up. The path leaves the open field and dives into stands of fir, pine and spruce. Most of Small Island has been logged at least once, and there isn’t much of the original forest left. A quarter moon stands out from the sky like pitted silver. She pulls her coat tighter against the cold.
Coming out of the woods, the path leads her first along the side of his shed, then around the front, a rectangle of unpainted boards with a door and window. It was built as a shed for storing tools, open in front to the woods. When he moved his tools in, it hadn’t been used in so long no one could quite remember who had built it. He began by storing his tools in the shed. Then, when he wasn’t working on other jobs, he started to rebuild it, closing the open front, hanging a door and a window, replacing rotten boards. His hands started the work on their own, without his having to think much about it. Then he went on a big drunk, ran out of money and lost his room in the Harbortown flophouse. He moved into the shed. In the year they’ve known each other, she’s been in his blankets on the floor of this shed many times.
Standing in front of the shed, she can see that something is different. He’s taken down sections of the walls at one corner; a white shape extends from the corner out into the woods. It looks as if the shed has given birth to a smaller version of itself in canvas. Lantern light shines through the canvas and meets the light of the quarter moon.
She walks to the door and knocks. He opens it, holding the lantern up to see who is at his door at this hour. A cigarette glows in the corner of his mouth. He seems unsurprised at her presence.
“Are you going to make me stand here?”
He moves aside to let her pass. Inside the shed, the flooring is gone, revealing hard-packed dirt. The little furniture he had is also gone, except for a toolbench. On the floor sit the spine and ribs of a boat, bow nosing out into the woods under the canvas. To the woman, the thing on the floor looks like the skeleton of a sea monster, something huge and dark sliding through the sea, far below the surface.
“What are you doing?”
“Building a boat.”
He stands looking at her, holding a hammer in one hand and a chisel in the other. He is wearing the same longjohns he had on at her house when he slept and sang in his fever. It doesn’t look as though they’ve been washed. Over the long underwear is a pair of dark blue overalls marked with paint, pencil and wood dust. She is relieved not to smell alcohol.
He puts the lamp down on his bench. His cigarette has burned to a glowing dot. He drops it to the floor and grinds it out.
“I can see you’re building a boat. What I want to know is: Why?”
“To sail to Big Island.”
“Big Island? Why in the world would you do that?”
She feels light, but not in a good way: She is empty and panicky, like a cloud floating on the spring wind above the trees outside. She wills herself back down into the shed and onto the dirt floor, wills herself to stay there.
“Because I’m going to do it.”
She knows from his tone that he won’t say anything more about his reasons. He’s drawn a line, like the ones he draws with his carpenter’s pencil. On the other side of the line there is nothing to say.
“You don’t know how to build a boat.”
He smiles, looking at the thing on the floor of the extended shed. The skeleton is well on its way to being a classic Small Island double-ender. The keel is oak. Also the upcurving ribs that remind her of a sea monster. The bow and stern are almost symmetrical, the bow a little higher and longer. It is a boat that can easily be sailed by one, though it would usually carry two, or even three. It looks frail, but Small Islanders have sailed and rowed boats like this into the northern sea for generations—and usually returned.
“The boatbuilder families will be angry. You know they don’t allow anyone else to build boats.”
At this he does not smile. He crosses behind her and closes the door, puts the hammer and chisel down. Stands close to her, leaning down, his face close to hers. He still looks thin, after his illness, but then he always looks thin.
She feels like a field mouse on the snow, hearing the whir of owl wings in the cold air above. He reaches down and unbuttons her coat, one button at a time, with a carpenter’s roughened fingers, until her coat hangs open. Then he slides his fingers under the coat, feeling for her, finding her.
He is rough and gentle at the same time. It feels as if he is reaching right into the center of her. After a time, he begins opening and closing her again, many times, on the dirt floor, next to the skeleton of his boat.
When she comes back to herself, several things are in her mind. She lies there running over those things while she feels the two of them cooling apart where they were connected. She feels him shrink out of her and slip away.
He gets up, finds the threadbare blanket he sleeps under, lies down and pulls it around them. On the roof and walls of canvas extending from the shed, shadows of new maple leaves move back and forth. The small leaves move away in the wind and then return to their original places, as if they know where their homes are.
She rolls on her side, looking him square in the face and says, “If you want to go to Big Island, why don’t you just take the steamer?” As soon as the words leave her mouth, she is embarrassed and wishes she could reel them back in.
He looks into her eyes, as dark as his own. He pushes the blanket off, gets up and stands with his narrow back to her, the bones of the spine showing clearly, the skin pale where the sun doesn’t reach. He walks around the unfinished boat, touching it here and there, bending over to pick up her clothes and
bring them to her. He finds his own clothes, slips into his longjohns, overalls and boots. Strikes a match, relights the lantern. From the lantern lights a cigarette. Stands, lantern in hand, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, smoke rolling up around his face, looking at his unfinished work without speaking.
She came to this shed with a purpose in mind: to give him back the money he left in the blue envelope. Now that she’s here, she knows she can’t return it. He won’t accept it. She’s angry, not sure exactly who she’s angry with. Angry or not, she knows that the envelope in her coat pocket must go back down through the woods with her. As she walks home, she will think about what to do with his money, which she cannot keep but cannot return. She gets up from under the blanket and dresses herself.
She looks at him where he stands examining his work as if he has forgotten she is there with him. Suddenly she is sure he will drown, like his brother. Everyone on the island knows that story. For her, there is no death worse than drowning. It’s bad enough when men fight in Harbortown, slashing each other across the throat and bleeding to death in the sawdust on the floor. But drowning is worse: There is nothing to say goodbye to. Even if the sea generously chooses to return his body, as it did his brother’s, it will likely be on some other shore.
She pulls on the rest of her clothes, walks to the door and lets herself out into the night without disturbing him. She takes the path through the woods, being careful not to crush the green crocus shoots before they have their chance to bloom. The blue envelope in her pocket is a riddle, but she is good at riddles. She has liked them ever since she was a girl.
By the time she reaches the clearing where her house stands, the moon is setting on the horizon, out past Harbortown. The sky is pale. She walks faster in order to be home before her daughter wakes.
