Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Once she would have talked things over with Caleb and felt the stir of his encouragement. There were vegetable plots on the other side of the cove where Caleb’s uncles had grown potatoes. Caleb had put in a crop in the spring. Once she and Caleb had spoken of growing things together, farming on the land, farming at sea; seaweed would be their carbon sink. Sometimes when she knew that Caleb wasn’t around, she’d walk down the Cape House lane and from there out along the trail that led around the headlands.

  Now, kneeling in front of a raised bed of potatoes, fingers in the soil, heat rose in her limbs, as, under Frank’s watch, she loosened the earth around a handful of nubs, then tugged on the greens until the whole plant came free. The moist soil felt good on her fingers, luscious. All this, the air, the soil, could be set against the storm and its damages. How to describe that lusciousness, or draw it; she loved to draw things, like her mother. Yes, the nubs were firm enough and ready to harvest. Miranda rubbed dirt off a potato and handed the nub to Frank, who seemed about to hand it back until she rubbed one clean for herself and bit into it.

  His face.

  “You can eat them raw when they’re fresh,” she said. “They’re crisp. Like an apple?”

  Crouched at her side, Frank finished his. “Do you ever get lonely out here?” he asked. The dome of the sky was huge. Robin’s egg blue. At least she’d convinced him to stop asking her about her father.

  “No,” Miranda said. Sometimes, out on the headlands, hiking by herself on the far side of the cove, she’d be overcome by fierce joy. The silence of the land was its own singing, beneath the shatter of waves, her blood beating a sensuous pulse.

  Certainly, when Caleb had been in the picture, she hadn’t been lonely. Almost every day he’d stopped by or she’d gone to his house or they’d set off on the trails together. And if they hadn’t seen each other, they’d spoken. She’d never spent much time with the few girls her age on the island, the ones she’d gone to school with who spent all their time texting each other. Most of them had left by now. It had taken time getting used to life without Caleb. A part of herself remained shuttered away, where the hardest feelings couldn’t catch her. She’d had to learn anew to keep herself company. There was Ella, found homeless in the streets of Nain as a puppy, sent south to them four years ago by Luke, brother of Agnes Watson, one of the young scientists come to visit her father; Ella, whom Miranda had trained and who went everywhere with her, who came trotting up now, grass seed in her fur, tongue at a pant. There was her father, often busy but always a presence.

  “Do you ever think of leaving, like to go to college?” Frank asked. He said college the American way, meaning university, something Miranda remembered from her old life.

  “No,” she said. “My life is here. I’m going to farm.”

  Was that, distantly, the soulful roar of her father’s quad?

  “Hey, Miranda.” Maybe Frank registered the sound, too, because a new urgency seemed to take hold of him. “I’m wondering, do you happen to know if there are other scientists on the island? Like climate scientists?”

  That word. It aroused a small panic in her. It heated up her skin. “Not that I know of.”

  “Okay, I’m going to take an insanely wild gamble and ask something else. Have you by any chance heard of something called the ARIEL project?”

  “The what?”

  A very strange question, alarming even. That sound. It was her father returning, surely it was.

  . . .

  The night of their arrival on Blaze Island, Miranda’s father, who had been Milan and had become Alan Wells, hefted their bags upstairs to their room in the Pummelly B&B, run by a brassy-haired woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Christine Brett.

  “Now, Alan, mind the ceiling,” Mrs. Brett said, her father’s new name banging in ten-year-old Miranda’s ears. The ceiling was close above their heads. Beneath his trucker’s cap, her bearded father barely spoke. Once the door to their room closed behind them, he threw himself onto one of the beds and pulled a pillow over his head. Miranda climbed into the second bed, listening as a new world creaked and pressed around her.

  By daylight, when she tugged at the curtains in their room, the village revealed itself, a belt of wooden houses cinched around a harbour, the land flat except for a low rise of rocks beyond the houses. Across the room, her father lay unmoving. When she called to him, he stirred enough to tell her that he was too tired to get up. She should go exploring by herself. Miranda ate breakfast alone in a dining room looking over the harbour, her only company cheerful Mrs. Brett, who served her scones and a boiled egg and asked her questions she didn’t know how to answer. As soon as she could, Miranda slipped away and set off along the main road, where she discovered that there were no restaurants, no cafés, no shops other than one small, weather-beaten store with a single gas pump outside it. On the far side of the harbour the road came to an end. Sea pounded against rocks. She was on the far side of an island, facing another small hummock of rock called Sheep Island, only she didn’t know that yet. There were a few dots of other tiny islands out there, above the yellow horizon, then nothing. Shivering, she imagined the sea reaching out to tug her into its depths, no mother or father to wrestle her back to land.

  By now it was August. Occasionally there were other visitors in the dining room at breakfast: Gillian and Warren from Toronto, Michael and Gregory from Witless Bay. What’s your name, they asked Miranda. Where are you from? She told them the things her father had instructed her to say. We’re on vacation. We’re from Waterloo, Ontario. Waterloo, where the Amish are, said Gillian. Miranda gave a nod. She ate her eggs quickly and toasted some bread for her father, who never came downstairs for breakfast and in fact rarely got out of bed at all. Sometimes, when she brought the toast upstairs, he was asleep. Or he was buried under the sheets and blankets and not asleep. When he spoke, his voice was raw and gravelly. One morning Miranda awoke wondering, What if he dies? She lay there, paralyzed. Her father turned his pale face to her.

  Dear one, he called her. “Please walk about our new home and tell me what you find.” So she went out. She wanted to do the thing that would make him get well and come back to her. When she kissed him, his beard prickled her skin.

  On the far side of the harbour, a footpath traced its way behind the houses, along the ocean shore. Out there great slabs of red and black rock tumbled against each other, and flat grey rocks were littered with broken sea urchin shells. The wind blew at Miranda, off the ocean. Overhead, a gull dropped a sea urchin from a great height, then swept onto the rock to stab its beak at the broken shell and eat the exposed flesh. Miranda’s hands curled inside the mittens Mrs. Brett had loaned her. Mittens, in August. How was she to make a new life in this raw, ferocious place? Was this what her life was going to be like from now on?

  Her father must have had some conversations with Mrs.Brett, because Mrs. Brett was feeding Miranda not only breakfast but other meals: fried fish for supper some days, fried bologna others, moose stew and moose meat loaf the rest. Mrs. Brett taught Miranda words like duckish, the light at the hour that darkness falls, and explained that lunch was a meal or a snack eaten late at night. In the evening, they played cards together. Or bingo, the calls broadcast on the local channel from the Lion’s Club on the other side of Blaze Island.

  Mrs. Brett told Miranda that her dear husband had passed some years ago. “And your mother, is she at home in Ontario?”

  Miranda shook her head.

  “Do you live with her sometimes, my love?”

  Miranda shook her head again. Her father had said, if someone asked, she could tell them her mother had died. Passed, Mrs. Brett had said. “She’s passed,” Miranda whispered.

  “Oh, my darling.” Mrs. Brett pulled Miranda onto her lap, holding her close, the way her mother used to, only Mrs. Brett’s body was larger and had a solid warmth that was different than her mother’s fervent embrace.

  In the Princeton house, on nights when Miranda had trouble sleeping o
r when her mother wanted to be close, Jenny would climb into Miranda’s bed and stroke her face while gazing at her as if all she wanted was to drink Miranda in and reassure herself of something. In the dark of the room in Pummelly, heart aching, Miranda whispered to her.

  Weeks went by. One day, in the general store, which every­one called Vera’s after the name of the woman who ran it, as Miranda deliberated over a chocolate bar and a carton of chocolate milk, wondering which would tempt her father the most, she turned to find a boy staring at her. Dark-haired, close to her own age. He was in line at the cash alongside a tall, red-haired woman. Miranda stared back. The woman wore a hand-knit sweater, jeans, rubber boots, and her hair travelled in a long red braid down her back. There was something formidable about her beauty. By the time Miranda paid for her chocolate bar and left, the pair were some distance ahead, an odd couple walking side by side along the main road. They took the Little Harbour Road turnoff, the one that led past the Catholic church to the B&B, but by the time Miranda reached the turn, they’d vanished.

  And then she forgot about the woman and boy, because when she entered Mrs. Brett’s kitchen, she found her father, thin as an egret within a thick pullover, still bearded, but out of bed, drinking a cup of tea with Mrs. Brett. His dark hair was wet and combed, he must have had a shower. Though there was fragility in his every movement, as he turned his head and the wind cried at the windows, he was up, he was on his feet.

  With a crinkled smile, he said to Miranda, “Mrs. Brett has found us somewhere to live.”

  Magdalene Trewitt’s house stood across the road from the B&B. It belonged to Christine Brett’s sister who lived in town and had already shut it up for the season. The water had been turned off, but it could be turned back on. The house was small, two storeys stuffed with large pieces of furniture. From the window of her bedroom in Mrs. Magdalene’s house, Miranda spotted the dark-haired boy trudging along the road through a driving rain, first thing in the morning, a knapsack weighing down his shoulders. Yet she’d seen no school in Pummelly.

  The school, Mrs. Brett told her, was in the centre of the island, now that there were so few children there was only need for one school. On this point, her father, who seemed uncertain about other things — how long they were going to stay, what he wanted to eat — was adamant. Over dinner, their first night in Mrs. Magdelene’s house, he announced, “You’re not going to school. I’ll be your teacher. And I’ll teach you things more useful and important than anything you’ll learn in school.”

  Like the names of all the things that grew around them.

  They began to take walks together, slowly at first, for her father had shockingly little strength. Miranda was the one leading him up the path beyond the white house at the end of Little Harbour Road, the one with the paddock full of goats, both of them bundled in sweaters, clad in gloves and wool hats. She held his hand sometimes and waited for him, when, hunched, her father stopped to catch his breath.

  Out on the path, he pointed at things. Ground juniper, with the prickly needles, had blue berries, he said, which were edible but they weren’t blueberries, which grew on a smaller, shrubby plant with shiny leaves. Labrador tea had leaves that almost looked like needles and, when pinched, gave off a sharp scent. He handed a sprig to Miranda. A vivid spike of purple flowers was fireweed. Small stems of cotton grass were topped with cloud-like puffs. They stopped to picnic on a rise where the air had a green spice to it. The plants that grew here, close to the ground on this wind-hugged shore, were not all that different from those he used to see on his field trips in the Arctic, her father told Miranda, sounding wistful as she passed him a thermos lid full of steaming tea. It feels like a homecoming, he said and reached out thoughtfully to touch a frond of cotton grass. He plucked a small red berry, partridgeberry, known as lingonberry in Europe, he said, from greenery clinging to a rock. In Miranda’s mouth, the berry was a bright burst of tartness. Marshberry, her father said, holding out a different kind of berry, adding, Northern berries are full of nutrients. Miranda repeated these words to herself: Labrador tea, partridgeberry, marshberry.

  Wherever they were in this land, they were immigrants, and in some sense they would always be, her father said as he gazed out over the water. He had been the first in his family born in a new country, and Miranda had been born in the same country, but then, because of his work, they had moved, from country to country. Both of them were cut off from the places their people came from, the old countries full of stories of hardship and war: people forced to flee, lands overrun. He, too, had almost never seen his grandparents while growing up or where his parents had been born. Now here they were, getting to know a new place. What better way to live than to open themselves to the land on which they found themselves and invite it to shape them?

  “Yes,” Miranda said, glad that being immigrants was something that bound them.

  For thousands of years, her father told her, a people called Beothuk had paddled their canoes among these islands and built their summer fishing camps onshore, before the Europeans came. Now that the Beothuk were gone, killed by the Europeans, they could nevertheless remember them and sense the traces of their presence. Miranda closed her eyes.

  Day by day, the wind and sea air brought colour back to her father’s cheeks. His stride grew stronger. He remained quiet, he was not Miranda’s old father. What was he going to be, she wondered, now that he was no longer a scientist? Nevertheless, in his company, amid the wild wind that constantly boxed her ears and weather that was sunny one moment, raining the next, something in her began to relax.

  One day her father stood her on top of a rock covered in lichen, a rock that didn’t look like the other rocks so close to the shore. He said the rock was a dropstone, and an ancient iceberg had abandoned it there, on land once underwater as the great glaciers that covered North America retreated. He asked if she could identify the direction the wind came from, wind that was like a big cloth all over her, bashing her face, her arms, her legs.

  “Where is it strongest?”

  “There,” Miranda said, and pointed to her left cheek.

  “What direction is that?” asked her father, the wind entering and buckling his jacket. “Where’s the sun? Where does it rise and where does it set?”

  “Southwest?” said Miranda.

  “Yes,” said her father.

  Forty million years ago, where they were standing had been the peaks of high mountains, he said, the top end of the Appalachian chain that ran like a spine all the way down the east coast of America and marked where even more ancient supercontinents once collided. As they lay on the ground side by side, the thunder of great waves eroding the rocks that had once been mountains entered their bodies. The past, Miranda’s past, which had already seemed far off, dissolved even more in the face of this ancient geography. Could you be an immigrant of time, she wondered, squeezing her toes in her boots. Her father turned to her, smiling, his revived face full of wonder. Her teacher. He touched her cheek. Love, she felt it brush her skin. Here was a kind of magic: that she, once more, could be a cord, pulling him onward, out of the worst of loss and grief. She squeezed his hand. A flock of eider ducks flew over them, wings clacking, and the moss beneath her body was a soft bed.

  Back at the house, Alan instructed Miranda to scrunch up old supermarket flyers, place a layer of bunched-up balls inside the wood stove, sticks of kindling over these. He balanced a log on top. When she held a match to the paper, a little flame lit. Everything seemed hopeful, until a cloud of smoke sent them running out of the house. Soon, though, when she held a match to wood and paper, the flames lit neatly and the wood burned. She learned to clean out the wood stove too, carrying buckets of ash into the yard.

  Some mornings, her father baked bread. He taught Miranda to knead the dough until it was supple. In a quiet cove they picked blueberries until their fingers turned blue and came home to make a pie, pastry and all. They were barely apart. They went out even when it rained and the wind was high.
They went out in all weather. Almost all. It was as if her father couldn’t tear himself away from the land and the weather.

  Sometimes they arrived home at the end of the afternoon to find tinfoil-wrapped dishes on the doorstep, or in the back porch on top of the washing machine, or even waiting for them on the kitchen table. Pork chops and potatoes, moose stew with doughboys, macaroni and cheese, meat loaf topped with ketchup. The women of Pummelly were cooking for them. Kimberley Green, Wanda Travis, Vera McGrath, Della McGrath, Irene Foley, Susannah Pratt, Rita Borders. Slowly they met people, out on the road, or in Vera McGrath’s general store. By now everyone seemed to know that her father, a former weather forecaster, had lost his job and Miranda’s mother had died.

  “Forecast too much weather, did you, boy,” joked Dan McGrath, which made Miranda’s father nod and wince simultaneously.

  One late afternoon, as the light turned duckish, there was a knock at the back door. No one locked their doors in Pummelly, no one ever used the front door, and most everyone entered a house without knocking.

  They were sitting in the parlour, studying a book about clouds that Alan had found in a store in the town of Blaze, a store that sold wool and sweaters and T-shirts, along with books about wildflowers and trees and local geology. He’d bought a copy of each book. These were to be Miranda’s school books.

  “Go see who it is, Miranda, will you?” said her father, sliding the book under a sofa pillow.

  At the back door stood the red-haired woman, taller and younger than most of the women who’d come bearing casserole dishes. Up close her fierce beauty felt like cliffs and the sea. Sea air was a perfume around her, in her large, loose sweater, dark jeans, and rubber boots. She was holding out a jar of jam, the deepest ruby. There was abruptness in her manner, hard edges not entirely rubbed smooth. She said she was Sylvia Borders, Christine Brett and Magdalene Trewitt’s niece, daughter of their sister Eva, now passed, who used to live in town. Tom and Leo and Charlie Borders, who lived along the road with their wives, those were her brothers. The Borders boys. She lived in the white house with the green roof right at the end of the road, the one with the goats in the small field on the hill behind it. “I’ve seen you go by on your way up Lighthouse Hill.”