The Unforeseen
Page 27
“Hello, Alice, I brought you something.”
She walked down to meet the girl and held out to her a small ring-bound notebook with a fresh pencil stuck through the rings. Alice took the book and opened to the first page and then looked up.
“It’s a place to write down what you see, and find, and what you wonder about. You must write your name at the top, and the date, on every page, but it’s not to be a diary. It’s a place to write the names of the birds you see, if you know what they are. Or you can say what they look like, or make a drawing—you write on this side of the page, and make your drawings and maps over on the other side. And write down where you saw the birds and what they were doing, and how many there were. Write in it every day. Later on you will probably want to record your observations in ink in a more systematic way, but I’ve been keeping books like this one since I was a little girl. I have so many books now, they fill two long shelves.”
Alice looked up from the book, pressing her hand in it to keep the wind from lifting and fluttering the empty pages. “There’s a coyote I see sometimes, and a porcupine. Should I write those down too?”
“Yes, I shouldn’t have said so much about birds. You must be a naturalist, for now, and not a specialist until you are older and decide for yourself what interests you most. So write down everything you see, everything in nature, any animals you see, what the weather is, and what the plants are doing—are they leafing out, are the buds swollen, are they flowering? And if you collect shells and rocks, write down what you’ve found, what kind they are, or what you think formed them. And write down what you wonder about, but try to be very sparing of sentiment and opinion—the best scientists are impartial, not swayed by their own beliefs.” She smiled slightly. “If a woman is to have birds or other creatures named for her, she must be the very best in her field.”
The girl tucked her chin to hide her own expression which was not a smile. Then she said, “Is it all right if I think back, and write down what I remember from a while ago? Just to catch up.”
“Yes, but you will want to be clear. You could say: ‘This is what I remember from last week, or last summer.’ ”
After a moment, Alice said with a glance, “I want to write down about the oystercatchers.”
“Yes. You should do that.”
The girl’s look shifted toward the sky in the west, the thick black flaw above the tops of the trees. “Did you work out what killed them? The oystercatchers?”
She hesitated. “No. But I hope someone will discover it eventually. You should write down everything you saw around the time of the storm, and afterward. But only what you know or have seen. These things might be important, later, to understanding what occurred.”
The woman who had answered the door was still watching from the porch of the Whalebone Inn. Now she called out, “Alice, you ought to be washing up for supper before long.” The wind lifted and snapped the front of her apron like a flag.
Alice answered her, “I will,” but without moving to do it.
Then, after a silence, Alice said, “I have seen birds going into that hole in the sky. Have you? There’s saw-whets and barred owls that live on Long Island and when I was camped over there the other night I saw five of them go up.”
She had written that morning: Fourteen willets—usually solitary, have never seen so many fly together—up and gone. She had seen children on the beach write notes and tie them into the tails of kites, and when they let go the tethering string the kites lifted into the blackness and disappeared. She did not say any of this to Alice.
She said, “You should write down what you saw, the owls disappearing, but Alice, no one knows what it is, so you shouldn’t call it a hole in the sky.” Then she said, “Did you row over there to the island? I would worry. The bay has been very rough.” From the dock at Nahcotta it was at least a mile across Willapa Bay to Long Island. When she was no older than Alice, she had used to row a canoe on Clear Lake even in the fall when the hard easterly winds would blow foam off the choppy waves; but that was before Tom drowned.
The girl shrugged. “I went at low tide, and it was shoal water. If I was to overturn, I guess I could have stood up and walked to shore.”
They went on standing together in the yard a few more moments. Then Alice looked down at the book in her hands and said, “If it’s a hole and the birds are going on through it, I wonder what is on the other side.”
The wind drew a lock of hair across the girl’s face and she pushed it back and hooked it behind her ear. It was late in the afternoon and the sky had begun to redden above the black flaw. They both looked up at the hollow barking of gulls overhead, and watched without speaking as a flock of twelve or thirteen flew west and disappeared into the depths of the blackness.
• • •
From a thicket of arrow grass in the salt marsh she watched a lumber ship half a mile off the point laboring into the bay, the white surf booming against the ship’s hull and decks. This was dusk at the end of a wet day, and a pair of whimbrels foraging in the mudflats were the only birds she had seen in an hour. Her attention drifted. She looked away and then back, and the big vessel at that moment heeled over suddenly with a terrible shrieking of metal. Two men in bright yellow anoraks, small as the end of her thumb from this distance, slid off the deck into the gray water and disappeared. She drew in a loud breath as if it might be possible to call them back, but the sound that came on the exhale was hollow and wordless.
There were other men staggering about on the ship—yellow warblers moving jerkily from branch to leaf, this is what came into her mind—and there must have been men in the wheelhouse far forward on the bow, men standing behind the dark, rain-streaked windows, though she could not see them, could not hear them shouting to one another, she only imagined this. The ship leaned and settled—hard aground, listing onto its starboard side—and waves broke on it in great foaming sheets.
She stood up numbly and threw off the marsh cape, took the pistol from her coat pocket and fired it three times into the sky. In a few minutes, someone on the ship shot off a signal flare, its blurred yellow streak wobbling upward, arcing toward the black flaw and disappearing into it. The ship’s horn blared, blared again, and a third time.
With the last of the daylight failing, she began hurriedly to gather driftwood and pile it onto one of the mud islands in the marsh. Beach bonfires had been forbidden since the beginning of the war but this was all she knew to do, it was what peninsula people had done in the days when shipwrecks were common, bonfires on the beach to illuminate the darkness for any crewmen who might be able to swim to shore. The wood was sodden, too wet to light, and she was standing there in her mud-caked shoes, breathless with effort, thinking about the can of kerosene half a mile away in her camp, when something like a rumble of thunder shook the ground. The ship in the channel had gradually become invisible but for marker lights drowned intermittently by the breaking seas, but when she looked toward it a leaping glare lit up the whole mouth of the bay. For a startled moment she thought the wet driftwood had ignited, but it was something belowdecks on the ship—covert munitions, she would think later, carried with the lumber—that had begun to burn. The ship was very low in the water, leaning hard on its keel now, and swells were breaking over the upper deck, smothering it completely in gray foam and solid water. The fire shot up higher after every flood, and flames followed the oil out onto the glossy water and lifted upward in a yellow curtain.
She stood and watched men holding to the railings around the wheelhouse let go and drop and disappear into the water. Someone threw a Jacob’s ladder over the lee side and men began climbing down it. One of them was Tom—she knew him by his plaid mackinaw—Tom!—and then a swell broke over the ship in a solid white sheet and he vanished under the cataract. Other men climbed down behind him and were swept off, or jumped from the last rung and sank in the burning water. All of this occurred in silence, or seemed to, as the wind, and the roar of the flames, deafened her.
/> People living in Oysterville four miles away, and in hermit cabins along the bay shore, must have seen the burning ship—it lit up the sky. They began to walk out of the darkness onto the firelit marsh, singly and in pairs, wading through the flood in their gum boots, until there were a dozen or better standing around her, staring and silent, or talking quietly. Someone asked what she had seen, and she shook her head, unable to speak.
After a while, a Coast Guard double-ended rescue boat came laboring out of the darkness into the glare. There was a lifesaving station near the North Cove lighthouse. She had only ever visited the station in summer—young men in white trousers, tight knit tops, white seamen’s caps, running rescue drills for small crowds of admiring tourists—but on the walls of the station house there were photographs of wrecked clipper ships and of rescue boats breasting enormous crashing waves, photographs captioned “Heroes of the Surf,” and “Storm Warriors.” The Coast Guard boat, very small against the hugeness of the firestorm, came within a few hundred yards and then held off, rolling and pitching on the heavy sea. Several men came out of the forward cabin and shot a line across the water that fell short. They tried again, and a third time, a fourth, and then stood and watched the ship burn. The fire rose up in a great column of vivid orange and writhing black, and the wind took it all west into the starless hole in the sky.
After midnight, when the fire had burned down somewhat, the Coast Guard boat began to motor back and forth across the heavy swells, evidently searching for survivors or bodies in the water near the wreck. The tide, someone said, would likely take the bodies up the Naselle River to Raymond or South Bend, but nevertheless a few people began walking the bay shore in case any might wash up along the Point.
She searched in the arrow grass and picked up her things from where she had dropped them—binoculars, notebook, the camouflage cape—and waded back across the marsh into the trees and found her tent in the darkness and lay down, shivering, in her wet clothes. When the night began to thin toward grayness, she put her notebook and Tom’s field guide in the knapsack and walked through the dark trees to the ocean beach.
Fog obliterated the headlands and the surf, but in the half-light of dawn the flaw in the sky seemed to hang just overhead, a satiny black ribbon she felt she might stand on tiptoe and touch with an outstretched hand.
It was high tide, but there was a long black sedan parked on the beach. It seemed to her that the car would be lost to the ocean in the next quarter hour, and that the man who had driven it there was either unaware or unconcerned. He crouched behind a driftlog out of the wind and fiddled with a small piece of machinery—a toy rocket ship, she thought, or a Roman candle.
She walked down to him through a dimpled field of plover nests. There were no more than a few dozen birds still remaining on Leadbetter beaches, and the nests on this part of the strand were unpopulated, empty of eggs. The man glanced up but said nothing, intent on his work. He had not shaved in recent days and his graying stubble—he was a man nearing sixty—was bright with beads of rain. She sat near him and opened the field guide to a blank page at the back, where Tom had drawn a few rare and incidental species, and she began to sketch the machine, which was not a toy: it stood like a white egret on tripod legs, its neck and bill pointed upward.
The surf came in around the man’s big car and lifted it and carried it west a few yards and dropped it. The motion caught his eye, and belatedly he woke to the situation and shuffled to his feet. By then the tires had already settled half a foot into the wet sand. He stood there, considering, and then shook his head and said, “Hell’s bells,” in a tone of disgust, and crouched down again with his machine.
In a short while he took a piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, wrote a note, spindled it, and slid it inside the narrow beak of the egret. She had come to the beach with an uncertain plan—had thought she might build a fire on the sand and send something—a letter? the field guide?—in ash and smoke up to Tom. But now she tore a page from the back of the notebook and wrote a few lines. Tom, the world is hard, she wrote. But everything lives on. Even love. Even loneliness.
She folded the paper very small and held it out to the man. He barely glanced at her, took it without speaking and pushed it tightly into a cavity in the nose cone. Then he struck a match and lit a short piece of fuse and said offhandedly, “You should probably get farther back,” and they both stepped away fifteen or twenty feet. The rocket made a low grating or rasping noise—the sound certain gulls make, though she had not seen many gulls in recent days—and shot straight up, trailing white smoke and red sparks. They watched it rise through the gray sky and arc slightly and disappear through the rupture in the roof of their world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many of these stories owe their existence to Richard Butner, who now and again invited me to Sycamore Hill, but insisted I had to bring an unpublished story with me if I wanted to attend. And certainly the present form of these stories is due to the careful, insightful reading and critique I received there, from the various writers who attended. I want to call out C.C. Finlay especially, for his most excellent suggestion for the ending of “The Presley Brothers.”
More from the Author
The Dazzle of Day
Wild Life
Outside the Gates
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who now lives in the Portland area. She is the author of six other novels: The Jump-Off Creek, The Dazzle of Day, Outside the Gates, Wild Life, The Hearts of Horses, and Falling from Horses.
Her awards include the Oregon Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and a Whiting Award for Fiction, and her short story “Lambing Season” was a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her work often concerns the landscape, literature, mythology, and life of the American West. Visit the author at mollygloss.com or on Twitter at @mollygloss.
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Also by Molly Gloss
The Dazzle of Day
Falling from Horses
The Hearts of Horses
The Jump-Off Creek
Outside the Gates
Wild Life
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FIRST PUBLICATION
“Joining.” Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. June 1984.
“Interlocking Pieces.” Universe 14, Terry Carr, editor. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday & Co., 1984.
“Seaborne.” Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. December 1984.
“Wenonah’s Gift.” Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction. July 1986.
“Little Hills.” Northwest Magazine. March 22, 1987.
“Personal Silence.” Isaac Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction. January 1990.
“Lambing Season.” Asimov’s Science Fiction. July 2002.
“Eating Ashes.” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. November 2002.
“The Visited Man.” Eclipse Three, Jonathan Strahan, editor. San Francisco, Calif: Night Shade Books, 2009.
“Downstream.” The Grove Review. Spring 2010.
“Unforeseen.” Asimov’s Science Fiction. April/May 2010.
“The Grinnell Method.” strangehorizons.com. November 3/10, 2012.
“The Presley Brothers.” interfi
ctions.com. November 2013.
“Dead Men Rise Up Never.” Catamaran Literary Reader. Summer 2016.
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Molly Gloss
Jacket illustration copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey A. Love
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ISBN 978-1-4814-9850-0
ISBN 978-1-4814-9852-4 (eBook)