Hugh’s eye began to swell. I pressed a handful of snow to it.
“I’m okay.” He beat snow from his mitts. “Why don’t you go on in and put some coffee on? That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? I’ll be in in a bit.”
“God, Hugh, I’m sorry…I’m—”
“Not your fault,” he cut me off. His eye looked like a boxer’s and his toque had ridden up, perched now on top of his head. Awful, but his appearance made me want to laugh.
“Really, Hugh, I know he didn’t mean to. Sonny wouldn’t—”
“That kid of yours is a piece of work.” He smiled saying it, but his tone stung me. Pushing down my scarf, I looked at him.
“Sonny?” I bellowed. “Mind those rocks! One slip and—”
“Doesn’t know his own strength,” Hugh said through his teeth, still smiling. His eyes the same spitting blue as the water. “Tea’d be just as good—whatever.” He stumbled, reaching around to goose me.
He came inside a little while later, stomping snow into the porch. I spooned the last of the coffee into the filter; he shook in salt. His cheeks were rosy, the eye flaming now. His breath smelled metallic.
“Where’s Sonny?” I said over my shoulder. “Not on the rocks, I hope.”
“Nah.”
“Did you get him back?” Trying to make light of it.
“Huh?” He winced. “Oh yeah.”
Oreo was still yapping out there.
“Quit teasing the dog,” I muttered under my breath, pouring the water.
Hugh poked a split of wood into the fire and went to change. I hadn’t had a chance to do likewise, and the knees of my jeans were stinging wet. Squatting by the oven door, I warmed myself while the coffee dripped, then put on a couple of eggs and tuned in the radio, waiting for them to boil.
Oreo’s barking got louder. Maybe there was a ship coming in, or he’d spotted a whale. As I went to the window, there was a tinkling, a chime of icicles breaking. Glass. Moving to the porch, I glimpsed a hand poking from the shed window, the top of Sonny’s Canucks toque.
Wobbling into my boots, I ran outside. The wind bit through my sweater, the yard stretching like a field. Closer, I saw blood—Sonny’s hand reaching through the shattered pane, groping for the padlock. His pale wrist, the spikes of glass glinting blue. Everything dazzled—the sun blazing off whiteness and the sparkling crush of sea and a little spill of red on the snow. For a split second I lost myself, falling backwards, breathing salt. Then, as if it were somebody else stumbling up, I called his name. His face was pale and frightened; his hat kept slipping over his eyes. The key—it took a second to realize—was there in the lock. It turned without a hitch and as the door swung to, Sonny fell outside. His nose was running, his breath coming in jerky sobs as he sucked at his hand, at the gash below his thumb. His mouth looked red. Dripping to the snow the blood was as bright as the lantern.
Sonny’s sobs turned to whimpers. “It stank in there, Mom! Like, like—fish. Like an outhouse. It was so—dark. Dark as a hole. I hate him. The fucker!”
My watch your mouth leapt idiotically, fizzled. Tears jiggled from his lashes. Something inside me stiffened, as if enfolding a lump of shale.
“He tried to bust my arm. He did! Mom! He grabbed me, like this. Shoved me against the wall. He tried to kill me, he did!” It tumbled out, his voice rising. “He’s—such—a—fucking—asshole!”
“Sonny!”
“He could’ve, he could’ve busted my arm.”
I got him into the kitchen, ran his hand under the tap. The water ran pink. I glimpsed, or thought I did, the paleness of bone. Grabbing the dishtowel, I wrapped it and held it tight. Red oozed through.
The first aid box was on the fridge, unopened since Oreo’s run-in with the fox. Gripping Sonny’s hand, I rooted out a dingy roll of gauze, the last, battered-looking alcohol swab. He cried and flinched as I cleaned the cut, then staunched it with gauze, wrapping it and winding on adhesive tape.
He put his head down, cradling his thumb, sniffling at the bloom of pink through the bandage. The tears left salty streaks and he rubbed them away.
Footsteps sounded overhead. The toilet flushed. The eggs knocked together in the pot, steam spitting on the burner. The radio cackled, and Sonny blew his nose on his sleeve. Suddenly Hugh filled the doorway. Without speaking he strode over and lifted the lid off the eggs. He’d put on jeans that needed washing. His T-shirt sagged as he spooned an egg into a shot glass. “He needs stitches!” I cried out.
He set the egg in front of Sonny. “Try Wayne, then.”
The shot glass had a devil’s face with googly red eyes that seemed to follow you.
“It’ll be healed by the time we get there!”
Hugh’s eye was red as Mars. “He shouldn’t’ve cut himself. Shoulda been more careful.” Hugh whacked the egg open with a knife.
“It could’ve been his wrist.”
“So? He shouldn’t’ve—”
“What? Thrown a snowball?”
“Butter, Alex? A speck?” His voice was cheerful. I thought of our very first night, Hugh offering “A speck of tea?” and Sonny saying, “I guess so. What the heck’s a speck?”
“Alex?” he said. “You were s’posed to pull a Houdini.”
Sonny gouged out the yolk. Hugh mixed powdered milk in the yellow juice pitcher, and set down a glassful next to the egg. Sonny pushed it away.
“You need your protein, Alex. Bones and teeth. Right, Ma?” His tone made my blood go cold.
He smiled, his teeth stained. He needed a shave, and as if reading me, he rubbed his jaw. His skin looked transparent, a tiny blue vein pulsing at his temple. The whites of his eyes the very liquid blue as the light at the window.
I clenched my mug as if we were riding a round-bottomed lightship tossing to tunderation, as he’d joked once. “Sonny didn’t lock himself in there. He didn’t do this to himself.”
Hugh fixed me with a gaze, puzzled, haughty, then glanced at Sonny. “Drink up, kiddo. You been dreaming, or what? Got to be careful on those rocks, Alex. I told you, didn’t I?”
Sonny started to cry again, his mouth full of egg.
Hugh went over and hiked up Sonny’s sleeve, roughly, I couldn’t help thinking, compared to how he’d cradled a gull that’d washed ashore once, its wing broken.
“Hmmm,” he said. “We could try stitching it dog-style. Eh, Tess?” His expression the same as when he searched for the right note on his sax.
“If you go near him again, Hugh—I swear—I’ll tell.”
“What. Tessie?”
I could smell his hair, the wood smoke scent of his skin. “I’ll tell. What happened to Julie—”
“What about Julie?” His eyes were the bottom of that rocky shingle. “Go ahead, say it. What happened to her?” His hand moved to my shoulder. His fingers felt like gears. “I can’t believe it. Can’t believe you’d think—” Then he lifted Sonny’s hand, inspecting the bandage. Brushing Sonny’s arm as if brushing off sand.
Sonny shoved his milk away and ran upstairs.
“I’m serious.” My voice as tiny as the shudder of a pilot boat.
Hugh cracked an egg on the counter, started peeling it. “You tell, Tessie, and you know who’ll be sorry.”
My stomach clenched as he reached for me.
“A speck of egg, Willa?” His voice had a lilt—regret caught there?—a smugness, as he flicked a bit of yolk onto a saucer, no bigger than a bead. “Here, sweetie.”
I gave the dish a little push.
“Lay a finger on him, and I’ll leave.” The words hissed like the spray that rides whitecaps. Covering my mouth, I fled to the bedroom.
***
If birth is an act of self-immolation, then so must be love. You don’t choose to throw yourself into the sea—or into the ring of fire. But sometimes, maybe you have to sink—or burn
—before anything can save you. Before you can save yourself.
That night was clear and cold; the kind of night when stars beam an icy perfection and all the world seems out of reach. The wind died, leaving the drifts and our snowy paths carved against blackness. Just before dusk, the crows came. Frightening at first, then mesmerizing. The noise started a long way off, a ruckus from the woods: a fevered cawing, croaks and chirps. Then it closed around the house, a veil of sound echoing over the marsh till the radio’s warble was a breaking thread and in disgust Hugh switched it off. He wasn’t speaking; he moved about sullenly as if the place had been taken over by squatters.
At supper. Sonny’s eyes were crows about to peck out mine.
The noise—the real crows—drew me outside, from the deadly silence of the house into the frozen air. I tried coaxing Sonny to come too, but he holed up in his room. Even before reaching the pond I could hear it, a rustling muted by that racket; the birds’ descent like nightfall, from that distance a gleaming shroud settling over the trees. They seemed to be waiting—for the island’s snowcap to slide away? For a party somewhere in bird heaven? For a famine? I wondered. More than a murder of crows: harbingers of something. Plague?
As I punched through the cardboard snow the sound of cawing and of ice grinding against the breakwater moved through me, instilling a cold worse than any weather. But the rustling drew me like a silky thread through a needle and before long I spied their hooded shapes in the branches. There were hundreds of them, perhaps a thousand: a shifting, swaying blanket of feathers. I thought of those bodiless sick people, cholera victims, and black-veiled nuns; as if all had risen and were calling from every branch and twig. The noise swallowed me, and the sky became feathered; the tarnished indigo of wings, alive with hooded eyes. I’d have given anything to have run back and found Hugh—my Hugh, not the false one in the kitchen—and to stand with him witnessing this visitation, as if every crow living and dead had come to roost. I thought of Minamata and crows falling from the sky. The snow burned through my jeans as I watched, bedevilled, till the moon rose and one by one the birds shut up and melded with the woods. Then, pressed by the weight of snow and a gnawing, hungry fear, I trudged back to the point.
A fire spat in the stove as I crept in. Hugh and Sonny were sitting at the table, the Scrabble box between them, unopened. Hugh turned the pages of a book, barely glancing up. Holding up his bandaged thumb, Sonny doodled on a paper bag, a cartoonish figure in a cape and mask, dragging a spiked ball and chain. Neither looked at the other. Neither spoke, as if a shatter-proof wall had risen between them.
“You won’t believe it, what I saw.” My voice scratched the poisoned silence.
Hugh didn't look up. “Okay.”
A feeling of suffocation swelled inside me, as if I had to struggle for air, still clinging to the wonder of those wings fanning the sky.
“One crow sorrow,” Hugh slowly turned a page. “Isn’t that how it goes?”
The tightness inside me opened. Something seemed to slip. “So many. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Every winter. Good nesting spot, nothing odd about that.” His voice was like wet felt. “No big deal.”
Sonny creaked his chair out to lean down and stroke Oreo, who’d nudged his empty bowl across the floor.
I said nothing. It was all I could do to keep myself together. Hugh closed his book and went to the bedroom, slamming the door. Shutting my eyes, I stood there, rocking slightly as the dog leapt up. He could smell them, maybe: lost souls.
“How cold is it, upstairs?” I whispered.
Sonny looked baffled.
“Two in the room might help, would you say?”
He made a face, wary.
“Our breath, darling,” I said as brightly as I could. “We’ll warm it up with our breath, okay? Two is always better than one.
We found ourselves lying upstairs, a frigid gulf of floor between us. Sonny in his bed and I in the spare one that smelled and felt as though an age had passed since it’d been slept in. We whispered to each other in the dark, our voices crossing that chilly divide, mine so false and cheerful. As long as he responded, I felt pinned between those musty sheets. As moonlight scaled the wall his breathing turned whispery, but I persisted. “School tomorrow, betcha any money. Back to it. No more sleeping in, mister.”
“No.” His drowsy protest breached the chill. “They can’t make us go back…yet.” He seemed to sleep-talk, then his breathing slowed to that shallow snore that made me want to huddle close and keep watch, like some sort of fairy, or angel.
***
I woke sometime later in the dark. There was a strange smell in my nostrils and sweat traced my skin, though the room had got colder, so cold my hands trembled pushing back the covers. But the mattress beside me felt warm, as did the stretch of pillow beside my head, even as I shivered. There was a warmth, lingering somehow even as it evaporated, as if someone had just risen, yet hung back, watching me.
“Hugh?” I called out, my tongue thick with sleep; the presence was so strong I almost felt something stroke my shoulder. My breath clouded the air, and it was so cold. Of course there was no one there at all, only Sonny sound asleep in his bed. But—I’d felt it. The silent hum of somebody in the room, somebody besides Sonny. From somewhere downstairs I heard the clink of glass, creaking footsteps; where that sudden, chilling warmth had been now there was only emptiness.
Sometime before dawn the temperature must’ve risen and the rain started. But it fell only long enough to melt the top layer of snow, until the cold bit down again to glaze it silver.
26
SAINT ELMO’S FIRE
First thing in the morning I phoned Wayne, to make sure he’d be coming. His drawl conjured awful things. I couldn’t help picturing him crawling out of bed, naked.
Sitting on the edge of the tub, I peeled the gauze from Sonny’s hand, afraid to look. The gash had closed and blackened. There was an ancient bottle of Mercurochrome in the broken cabinet above the sink. I opened it and tried to wipe the wound. Sonny jerked and batted my hand away.
“It’s fine,” he kept saying, but after a bit of a struggle he let me give it a quick dab. Then I wrapped his thumb in the last of the gauze. I made coffee while he got dressed. He dawdled like a geriatric. The view outside was a solid glare, sea smoke swirling over the water. Sonny came downstairs dragging his pack. I tried to make him eat something.
“Someone should look at that hand,” I murmured, stealing around getting ready. He shuffled into his coat, which made his arms look like sausages, and he hauled on his pack. No hat, no mitts.
“Do you have a test? A make-up for the one you guys missed the other day?” I said quietly, bringing my leather jacket and boots in to warm them.
Sonny was waiting in the porch.
“You seen my belt?” Hugh’s voice boomed behind me, and Sonny shot outside. Hugh’s face was pale, his brow lifted above his swollen eye. Limping in, he poured coffee. There was a noise below the window as Sonny rushed past, like eggshells being crushed.
“Have you seen my belt?” Hugh caught my arm. “Alex should keep his goddamn hands to himself. You know I don’t like people touching my stuff.” I imagined Sonny running ahead now, smashing through that icy crust.
I thought of Charlie rooting around once for some work gloves. Wha’d you do with ’em, Alex? Kid, I’m gonna throttle you!
Charlie hadn’t meant it, though; of course he hadn’t.
“You know who you remind me of?” I asked, all the same.
“Willa?” Hugh sounded more leery than angry. “He’s out of the picture. Forget him.” It was like a cold cloth pressed to my chest. “Come here,” he said, tugging me to him. “Maybe you know what he did with my belt.”
“D-don’t you have things to do? I’ve got to catch up with—”
He let go, and I shrank from him, shivering. The
kitchen creaked. As if miles away, the sea sounded like icy milk being drunk through a straw. Peering out, I could just see Sonny disappearing past the drifts by the marsh.
“You must be hungry,” I said in a whisper, and he slouched towards the fridge. He rooted through it, sniffing at leftovers. “Where’d the bacon go? That little fuck eat it all?”
But I’d thrown on my things and made it to the porch. Outside, my feet slid easily through the tracks punched in the snow. I could hear the boat’s engine from the crown of the hill. Sure enough, as I rounded it they were already putting out. The two of them in the open boat, sea smoke swallowing everything, till I couldn’t see them any more. There was nothing to do but go back.
Hugh’s face brightened; his smile made me cringe.
“Don’t worry, Tessie. We’ll take a run over this weekend, okay? Wayne’ll be up for it. With no one around, he’s got nothing but time.”
No one. I thought of my dad out west, and my brother, wherever he was. Then I thought of Reenie. When you’re sinking—drowning—the nearest floating object will do; the least likely port becomes a haven. My eyes burned. My throat felt dry. There was a rattling inside me, a humming, as if I were above water now, high above water but losing altitude. Falling through clouds.
“Hugh? What made you do that to Sonny?” my voice rasped. “Put him in the shed?”
He looked startled. “He was doing me a favour, I asked him to get me a … hammer. The rocks, Willa. He went too close ...” His voice changed. “Christ, what that kid gets up to. You don’t know the half of it. Better watch him. Don’t mean to interfere, but. Fucking kid never listens. Never quits. There’s something wrong with him, Willa. Wears you out just being around him, that pissy energy, that attitude, rubbin’ everything the wrong way. Willa,” he seemed to plead, running his hand up my sleeve. His palm as cold as granite. “Dunno what the big deal is. Thing wasn’t even locked.”
I opened my mouth. “His arm—”
“I’m so tired.” He closed his eyes, his fingers lingering. Like a blind man’s, reading my arm, the tiny mole—a birthmark—inside my wrist. It made me think of a barnacle, a tiny creature attached to a rock, and then, oddly, of Charlie: moles on his back, a scar from an injury he’d got at work.
Berth Page 25
