Things Invisible to See

by Nancy Willard

  Clare buried her face in her hands.

  “What proof?” inquired his wife in icy tones.

  “Jack came over last night and he heard you. I’ve got a witness.”

  “Jack was in our bedroom?”

  “That’s the last time you’ll ever tell me you don’t snore.”

  “I was in my negligee and you brought Jack into our bedroom?”

  “You were snoring so loud you never heard us.”

  “For God’s sake, Bill, stop!” cried Nell.

  “It’s my birthday,” quavered Davy.

  “That’s right, it’s his birthday,” said Uncle Bill. “Some people have to ruin it for everybody.”

  “Let’s play,” said Clare, lifting her head. “Please. Please.”

  Davy looked at his hand. He had the queen of spades! He had the old lady.

  “Pass three cards to your left,” said Uncle Bill’s wife.

  To his left sat his mother, his good, kind mother. Perhaps he could pass to the right? On his right sat Aunt Helen, who had made the cake and invited the guests and gone to so much trouble for him. No, no—he could not pass her the queen. Pass to the left. Uncle Bill stood behind Davy and said, “Well, you’ll want to pass this, of course, and this”—the king of spades—“and maybe the ten of clubs. You don’t have many clubs. It’s good to clean yourself out of one suit so you can discard.”

  If anybody could clean a person out of his suit, thought Davy, that person would be Uncle Bill’s wife. She was so clean, always sweeping up crumbs, brushing lint off other people. He no longer wanted to play the game; he felt sleepy and wanted to take a nap. He thought of the moment when the cake was brought in, how happy they were then, how wretched they were now, and an earlier moment flashed across this one, a night long ago in Christmas week when he woke to hear children singing. Grandpa had called, “There are carolers at the door,” and Davy rushed down and saw them through the glass—sixth graders, he supposed—and their tin lanterns dangled on long poles and the cutwork of the lanterns threw black diamonds over their faces and over the snow. He was the only listener at the door; Aunt Helen was running around the house, trying to find something for them to eat.

  Good King Wenceslaus looked out

  On the feast of Stephen.

  By the time Aunt Helen returned with a box of Mary Lee chocolates, the carolers were gone, and she had let him put on his boots and his coat over his pajamas and run in the snow after them. But they had disappeared. Next year, Clare promised him, you and I will go caroling, even if there’s just the two of us.

  “Clare, can we still go caroling next year?”

  Nobody heard him.

  “Are we ready to start?” asked Aunt Helen.

  Davy slipped the queen out of his hand and sat on her. Immediately he felt better, lighthearted. Danger was out of the world. He chose three low cards, three good cards, all diamonds, and passed them to his mother.

  Hearts fell, Uncle Bill told him to play this and play that, and his mother said, “Well, somebody’s got her,” and Clare said, “She never shows up this late,” and Uncle Bill whispered in his ear, “Play this” and “Play that,” until the cards ran out.

  The last trick. The end of the game.

  “This deck has no queen,” announced Uncle Bill’s wife.

  “She must be here,” said Uncle Bill. “Davy had her and passed her on. I saw the queen in his hand.”

  “Cheating hurts nobody but yourself,” said his wife, glaring at him.

  “Who’s cheating? Not with you around.”

  “Maybe she fell off the table,” suggested Nell, and she crawled under it and Uncle Bill followed her.

  “Shake out the tablecloth,” said Aunt Helen. “She might have got caught in the ruffles.”

  Uncle Bill’s wife bent down and peered under the table. She said not a word. She picked up the chunk of birthday cake when she saw Uncle Bill coming up and brought it down on his head.

  Just like Eddie O’Toole, thought Davy. She’s just like him.

  And started to howl.

  23

  Charted Waters

  IT TOOK BEN A long time to realize that Cooper was not cranky but shy, as unused to small talk as a hermit. When Ben admired the log he kept in the weather station, Cooper went so far as to show him the map he’d made of the island. A nervous line defined the coast, the five dead koa trees, and the patch of pigweed. A crude sketch of the government building defined the interior. He was also keeping a list of birds sighted:

  The brown tern

  The grey gull

  The albatross

  Rita Hayworth

  “Is there really a bird called Rita Hayworth, sir?” asked Ben.

  Cooper shrugged. “If I can’t find it in the bird book, I name it myself.”

  One morning he invited Ben into the weather station and pointed to the ceiling. Ben followed his finger and gave a whistle of surprise. Over his head hung a dozen glass balls, pale amethyst and amber and luminous green like moss. On their shining surfaces Cooper had pasted the tiny silhouettes of cats, elephants, snakes, dogs, buffalo, otters, and voluptuous women. It was a galaxy of planets laced and fretted with shadows.

  “Did you make it, sir? It’s fantastic.”

  “Jap fishermen use these globes,” he said, nodding ever so slightly. “They probably drifted over from Tokyo. Or Manila.”

  “They’re wonderful, sir.”

  “But I can’t get any good glue here,” Cooper went on. “Everything turns so brittle. The animals fall off.”

  As he spoke, his breath dislodged a lamb, which fluttered to Ben’s feet.

  “Everywhere I go—catastrophe,” said Cooper. “Sometimes I think suicide’s as good a way out as any.”

  “Suicide, sir? No, thanks.”

  “But if you had to kill yourself,” persisted Cooper, “which way would you choose? Pills?”

  “Not pills, sir,” said Ben. “I’d probably botch it.”

  “I’ve always favored shooting. In the mouth. That’s the quickest way.”

  “It’s hard on the folks who find you, sir,” said Ben. The subject was making him uncomfortable.

  Cooper had clearly thought a lot about it. “Who would find us?” he asked.

  “How about a firing squad, sir?” suggested Ben jokingly.

  Cooper frowned. “Where would we find a firing squad on the island?”

  The island felt as small to Ben as one of Cooper’s gloves. He’d explored the grove of five dead koa trees, and he’d seen two of the three kinds of lizards Cooper told him lived here: the green lizard that sunned itself on the rocks in the morning and the brown lizard that came out to feed in the evening. All Cooper knew of the third kind was the message on a tube of sulfathiazole in the first-aid kit issued to him when he was assigned to Hewitt: “For the bite of the blue-horned lizard, apply twice a day. Also good for pigweed allergy.”

  There were no pigs and no other living plants on the island except pigweed. To Ben it hardly seemed worth God’s time to make an island that had so little on it.

  I gave unto Hewitt Island a host of microbes, seashells, sandal-worms, terns, albatrosses, cormorants, the speckled shark, the striped marlin, all lovely and lively beyond description, said God. Where were you when I made this island? Where were you when I broke the sea for its decreed place and said, “Hitherto shall thou come but no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?”

  “Sometimes, on a good evening, I can pick up Harry Owens’s band at the Royal Hawaiian,” said Cooper.

  Ben sat in the main room and fiddled with the dial on the radio, and Cooper watched him and went on knitting. Ben knew he would knit ten rows, and rise, and go to the weather station and check for fallen animals.

  “Every day I lose a few,” he explained. “They get torn or bent. I paste them back on. It’s a losing battle. Are you going out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Far?”

  “No, sir. Just to look at the star
s.”

  “The Southern Cross is the best place to start. Once you find the Southern Cross, all the other stars fall into place.”

  The wind was up; the water was choppy. Ben tipped back his head to search the sky and was not prepared for what happened next, did not even know when there flashed over him a deep, familiar darkness, through which Tom Bacco was driving, because he alone knew how to keep the old green Packard from stalling. Charley and Henry and Tony and Stilts and Louis and Sol and George and Ben. They drove down to the river where night came early under the black willows and they could not see the families gathered at picnic tables across the water, though they could hear them talking and laughing and their dogs barking and their kids yelling.

  Durkee’s in Manila.

  Look at that bird. Bet you can’t hit it.

  Bet I can.

  A high fastball rushed toward him and Ben slammed it to the spot where the white bird would arrive in three seconds. In the darkness a girl cried out. Ben sank to his knees, sobbing, and the waves pitched their cold tents over him and rolled him to higher ground.

  What woke him? The sun? The stiffness in his legs? The grit in his clothes? The smell of coffee?

  When he walked into the kitchen, Cooper, his back to Ben, was marking the calendar. “The first of May,” he said.

  The date stirred a faint memory which came into sharp focus.

  “That’s my birthday, sir,” said Ben.

  Cooper did not hear him.

  “The one thing you don’t want to lose on this island is time,” he said and crumpled April into a ball, which he threw with great dexterity into a basket on the other side of the room.

  Time? To Ben they had more than enough time here—they had too much time. You could check the raft and the flashlight batteries and the ammunition—was it still dry?—and you could clean the floor and the dishes and your rifle—oh, you could clean your rifle for hours, burnishing each part lest salt and sand corrupt it—and you could hunt the rats, whose ancestors had come over on the ships of the first guano hunters when farmers started paying money for it, and you could fish for marlin and you could throw back to the sea the small yellowish-brown sharks that went for your bait if you used sardines or the green lizards that sunned themselves on the rocks in the morning, and you could clean the marlin and cook it (never would Ben forget the smell of cooking—kerosene and the dark dreams of smokestacks) and you could walk among the birds that nested in the rocks—there was no sand to speak of, just coral that cut your feet and raked your stomach when you swam, just a stinking network of small pools and the nests of birds; you could gather their eggs, still warm, feathers still clinging to the shells, smooth as if generations had touched them for luck, like alabaster trinkets from the tomb of a king; you could toss the garbage after lunch to the gulls and watch them dive for fish heads or a bit of gristle; you could shoot the plump terns and the skittery sandpipers which tasted like young ducks—but why bother? You could reach out your hand and take them. They were that tame and stupid.

  You could watch the birds and maybe see an albatross. Cooper had seen only three since his arrival: large, distant, and unforgettable.

  You could stand at the water’s edge in the breeze that smelled of ammonia—or was it iodine? what was that smell?—and the birds would dart past, crossing and swooping and crying out to each other. Those cries! Ben longed for wild geese winging south on nights chilled by the breath of the coming snow. All his life he had heard them and not known he was hearing them till Clare said, “Listen.”

  He waited for the mail plane. He wrote her long letters, not about the island, but about home, yet about nothing important, as if home were nothing, a rag-and-bone shop, all odds and endings. Remember the snow? Remember Precious Gems? His memory was caving in. The air was remembering for him, turning over, saving, throwing away. One day he could not recall his brother’s face but could perfectly remember the timbre of his voice. Another day he remembered the smell of his father’s glove but not the color of his hair. He remembered that Marsha was beautiful, but he did not remember how; was it her hair—the way it fell over her shoulders? What in the world had they said to each other? Whole scenes slipped away without telling him, without even saying good-bye.

  It was early evening but already dark. The water was rough, the sky heavy with clouds. A westerly wind was collecting the stink of the guano; Ben could not imagine anyone paying money for it.

  And on the fifth night of the fifth month a great wind arose, and the sun withdrew and the moon turned away, and darkness settled upon the parched face of Hewitt Island. And Ben Harkissian stood at the window and heard the roaring of the wind and the beating of the rain, and Captain Cooper hunched in the raft like a turkey buzzard wearing the yellow plumage of his life vest, waiting for the sea to take him.

  And the wind carried away four cubits of the roof to the west and great was the noise thereof, and Ben Harkissian opened the front door, and the water rose up in a wall to meet him and advanced with an army of ten thousand waves joined into a single wave, which rushed into the house and loosed the tables and chairs upon the tide, and the papers and planets and the animals thereon—all were lost in the tide save Cooper, who had prepared the raft, and Ben, who climbed in with him when the water rose to his knees and to his waist and he saw that the koa trees were gone and the pigweed was gone, the three kinds of lizards who lived in the pigweed were gone, and the government building was splitting, board from board, and the sea was carrying it away, tree, weed, lizard, sand, house, the island itself.

  And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and the waves pounded the raft and bruised the two men curled up on the floor of the raft, and the sea tossed cold water over her children, lest they sleep, she covered them with the cold salt spray of the storm.

  When the rain stopped, Hewitt Island was gone.

  Cooper raised himself and looked around. The gear was gone. The food, the water, the tarps, the matches, the staff and stuff of life: gone. Water sloshed around the bottom of the raft, chilling him. They would have to bail—with what? their shoes? Ben did not move. He lay on his side in the water, his face turned from the sky.

  The sea had left them the clothes they wore, the two life vests, the rags they used for cleaning the equipment, and the things Cooper carried on himself: his knife and pistol, his fountain pen, his compass, his wallet. The wallet held a hundred dollars.

  He uncapped the pen and scratched it on his life vest, and the ink appeared. Faithful friend! Over his heart Cooper drew a map. To his dismay the ink ran on the wet patches, but the sun was fast drying what the sea had washed. The salt winked and glistened on his clothes, his hands, his shoes.

  He drew islands to the east and to the west, as if he were redesigning the Pacific. Above the islands to the east he wrote “friendly and inhabited.” Above the islands to the west he wrote “Japs.” If the raft drifted into enemy waters, they would be shot, of course. The Japs did not waste time taking prisoners. At the bottom of the map, he scrawled something large and vague and labeled it Australia.

  Tonight, if the sky cleared, he could tell by the stars how accurate he was.

  On the right side of his life vest he wrote “log” and made a mark for the first day so that they would not lose track of time, would not lose their bearings, and their intelligence would not turn against them, leaving them in a backwash of madness with no map, no sign, and no way home.

  He picked up the bundle of rags and threw them over the raft, counted, and gathered them up again, and under the mark for the first day he noted the speed and direction of the wind and the drift of the water, wind out of the southwest, six knots, drift of one knot, while Ben fled through the long tunnel of fitful sleep, closing the hatches over the various shapes of terror as he passed them, and woke at last to find Cooper waiting for him.

  “Where are we, sir?”

  “Here,” said Cooper, pointing on the map to the empty space over his heart.

 
We’re not lost, thought Ben, and knew they were hopelessly lost. He sat up, and the sun nearly blinded him. The sea was the deep azure he’d loved when he first flew over it. Now its awful machine had wound down to a gentle lapping.

  “Sir, I still have the flashlight.”

  “Does it work?”

  Ben turned it on. There was nothing dark but the sea, and he pointed the beam straight down, over the side of the raft, and felt the flashlight glide from his grasp. It entered the water without a sound, its beam growing smaller and smaller, like someone walking down a road toward the horizon.

  “Oh, Christ. Oh, I’m sorry, sir.”

  Cooper did not answer. Neither did he look angry. He seemed to have reached a state beyond anger, a benign indifference. He looked at his watch, a gesture so absurd that Ben wanted to laugh. The next moment he wanted to cry.

  “It’s one o’clock,” said Cooper. “Take the watch at one o’clock.”

  One o’clock—what did that mean here? At one o’clock Ben fed garbage to the gulls and watched them dive for it. One o’clock on the island. That was when he wound the clock, just before he fed the birds. Yes. But it could not be one o’clock there now. At home it would be night. Lights turned on, fires lit.

  By afternoon, thirst took hold of them, inhabited them; they could think of nothing else. The flashlight had attracted sharks. All day they hung like dark islands in the clear water below, and Cooper sat, still as a cat, mouth dry, pistol poised, licking his lips. He could not clear the taste of metal and salt, as if some secret corrosion were at work deep inside him. He could feel his body shutting down, a house closing up for the season.

  Ben’s shout jarred him alive.

  “Look, sir—look! A boat!”

  It hovered on the horizon like a friendly sliver, though they could identify neither the kind of ship nor the flag under which it flew. Cooper pulled off his life vest and his shirt and handed the shirt to Ben.

  “Wave it.”

  Ben waved. He was certain he saw the boat slow down. When it glided out of sight, slipping over the curved face of the earth, he was not certain of anything.