Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  By this time, Miranda’s father had appeared, shaggy-haired, bringing his own air of abruptness. Sylvia Borders stepped inside. She repeated her introduction and handed Miranda the jam.

  Her father said, “That’s very kind.” There was an awkward silence.

  “Would the two of you like to come for supper?” Sylvia had a quick-moving smile. To Miranda she said, “Have you met my son, Caleb? He’s often wandering about.”

  Caleb must be the dark-haired boy.

  To Miranda’s father, she said, “I’m sure you could go out hunting with my brothers if you wish.” She added, “My brother Tom brought me a brace of eider. I’ll roast one. Eider or turr, though turr’s more fishy, so I believe I’ll offer you eider.”

  The wood stove poured heat into Sylvia Borders’s kitchen. In the centre of the wooden table, a beeswax candle burned. Sylvia’s kitchen was nothing like Magdalene Trewitt’s or Christine Brett’s. For a start, all sorts of dried plants hung from the exposed rafters. Shelves full of jars lined the walls, jars filled with mysterious dried leaves. In the back kitchen were more shelves of preserves: jams of vibrant colours, bottled meat and fish. It was like no kitchen Miranda had ever been in before. The dried plants gave the room a rich, earthy aroma that mingled with the woodsmoke. Red, floor-length velvet curtains hung over the door to the back kitchen and the door to the parlour. To keep the drafts out, Sylvia said as she tugged them closed. She opened a bottle of dandelion wine, which she said she’d made herself. Out of the flowers, Miranda’s father asked and Sylvia said yes and added that dandelion was a good liver cleanser.

  “You can make honey out of dandelion flowers as well, Alan, though you’ll want at least forty pounds to do that.”

  “That’s a lot of harvesting,” said Miranda’s father as Miranda repeated his new name to herself. How strange it was to hear others say it. He’d put on a clean sweater, combed his beard, and while he seemed interested in his surroundings there was some part of him still wandering elsewhere, as if he hadn’t yet fully arrived.

  Sylvia brought the roast duck to the table. There were no rings on any of her fingers. No wedding ring. She carved the duck, asked Caleb to pass around the potatoes and pickled cabbage, something Miranda had never eaten. She’d never eaten roast eider either, which tasted rich and had a hint of salt in it.

  Yes, she’d grown up on the island, in Pummelly, Sylvia said, her long red hair flowing over her shoulders. Then she’d left to go to university. She had a degree in sociology. She’d come back to the island when Caleb was small. In those early days she’d done some work in elder care up at the hospital. Had they been that way yet, up along the road to the town of Blaze?

  “Yes,” Miranda’s father said. He asked if she did that still, and with a quick shake of her head Sylvia said no.

  Later, she’d trained as a massage therapist, though most people on the island considered such a thing a luxury and weren’t inclined to pay for it. She sold herbal products made from the plants that she foraged and dried. Some people still liked the old medicines. She pointed at the plants hanging above their heads. She sold jams. And knitwear. She included Miranda in her gaze though her comments seemed to be directed mostly to Miranda’s father, who, like Sylvia, spoke with a halting tentativeness.

  While it might make sense to leave the island for work, Sylvia said, she had no wish to give up her life here. “It’s not a life I could have anywhere else. It’s possible to live at least partway outside a monetary economy in a place like this.”

  Alan’s attention twisted into focus at these words.

  “Christine says you’re planning to stay the winter,” Sylvia continued. Candlelight made patterns on her fair skin.

  “That’s the plan,” Alan said.

  “Winter’s hard out here.”

  “I’ve lived through some harsh weather.” Alan flexed his hands until the knuckles cracked. “We’ll adapt. I want to live a quiet life close to the sea, in a northern place, whatever the weather. That’s the sum of my aspirations.”

  “Low-pressure system coming in tomorrow,” Sylvia said. “Sky’s clear enough tonight to see the dark side of the new moon. Likely rain if you’re thinking of heading out.”

  Caleb took Miranda to visit the animals. The goats, Jewel, Noelle, Gabby and Fleur, had prickly hair on their long noses and banged their heads against Miranda’s hand. Their bright, curious eyes made her never want to leave them. Caleb’s small body moved with solid purpose as he forked the goats some hay. There was authority in the way he closed up their barn for the night. The goats were a kind called Nubians. When he spoke he ducked his dark head bashfully. His skin was much darker than his mother’s, darker than anyone else Miranda had yet met on the island.

  His mother took the does off-island to visit a buck and this was how they bred them, Caleb said. They drank the milk and in the summer made yogurt and cheese. They’d tended the ten hens by hand when they arrived as three-day-old chicks. He told Miranda how he’d given each chick her name, as he locked up the hens in their house, too. A fox lived in the hills beyond town, Caleb said. He’d seen her there and in the cove, down where Pat Green’s old, abandoned house stood.

  The night air was salty and moist. Miranda listened to the goats chewing hay in their barn, a soft, bewitching munching.

  Caleb said, “Pummelly, Pummelly, it’s the sound the pebbles make when waves rock them at shore.”

  “You mean the waves pummel them,” said Miranda.

  Caleb picked up a stone and hurled it with a force that came close to Miranda then violently retreated.

  One autumn afternoon, as Miranda walked by herself around the harbour, white-haired Mary Green, tiny and sharp-eyed, beckoned from her back door.

  Over partridgeberry muffins and tea with Carnation milk, Mary told Miranda the story of how, in the spring five years before, she and her friend Wanda Travis had outrun a polar bear.

  One fine day, the two of them decided to walk to Lower Cove, an abandoned settlement down the shore where Mary had lived as a child, a distance of a few hours on foot. At first glimpse, Mary reckoned the large white creature glimpsed through spruce on a headland was a horse. Yet who kept a white horse on the island? Then she and Wanda were running as fast as they could, tripping over branches and the cords holding up their rubber rain pants. Luckily, Mary said, the wind blew the bear’s rancid, fishy scent to them, not theirs to him, and their rain gear helped conceal their smell.

  They reached the cove but Mary had forgotten to bring the key to the cabin. Neither of them had a portable phone. Rather than risk the long walk back, they determined to spend the night on the cabin roof, Mary boosting Wanda from the railing of the bridge, Wanda hauling Mary onto the roof after her. My, what a sight we must have been, Mary said, though by then there wasn’t even a bear to see it.

  At last the sound of a purring motor reached them. When a speedboat turned into Lower Cove, they were after waving frantically to Ferg Foley, come to visit his own cabin farther along the shore. Mary said he didn’t believe her when she told him they’d been spotted by a polar bear. He showed no interest in searching for the tracks of the vanished animal, but he did take them back to Pummelly in his boat.

  Two days later, word came that a man had shot and killed a polar bear on one of the Little Blazes, the small, uninhabited islands that lay close to Blaze Island in the bay. Ferg stopped by Mary’s house to apologize and say that he should have taken her at her word, but the story of two old women outrunning a polar bear seemed too fantastical to be believed.

  Back around the harbour, Miranda went to find Caleb Borders who was up in the goat barn, doing chores. As she patted the goats’ shifting flanks, Miranda asked him if he’d ever seen a polar bear.

  Two years ago, Caleb said, he was buying flour at Vera’s when a polar bear walked into the village, down the path from UpABack Cove. Before anyone could call wildlife, it shook its greasy yellow fur, turned and walked back out again.

  “What would you d
o if a polar bear showed up outside your door?”

  “I’d only pull out a gun if I had to.” Pitchfork in hand, dark hair falling into his eyes, Caleb seemed friendlier than at their first meeting.

  “But where do they go when they’ve come all this way south?”

  “I don’t know, Miranda,” Caleb said solemnly, “but I don’t suppose they find their way home again.”

  When Miranda told her father these stories, over a supper of stewed cod and kale and bread, he laughed at Mary’s story, said Ferg Foley’s response was more evidence that humans were very good at believing only what they wished to believe.

  A moment later, Pat Green hollered through the back door that he’d dropped a load of wood for them at roadside. Calling out, Alan grabbed a bottle from the top of the fridge and poured a dollop of whiskey into two cups of black tea.

  Tall, lean Pat was a teacher who’d spent years up in the Arctic, at schools in Rankin Inlet on the shores of Hudson Bay and Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, places Miranda’s father had also been. He’d admitted as much to Pat. The shared landscape seemed to have bonded them, though Alan never mentioned ice cores drilled from glaciers, only that he’d spent time out on the land.

  “Miranda’s been telling me polar bear stories,” Alan said as Pat folded his long legs into a chair. “Your mother’s, for instance. Here’s another. I was out hunting with some Inuit friends, up on Devon Island, north of Baffin, got caught in a spring blizzard, which blew for three days, the tent humming and vibrating like a bad radio signal the whole time. One day I woke up to what I thought was a different kind of wind, shaking then not, shaking then not. The next moment, a pair of claws rips right through the nylon.”

  “Just what you needed, a little breeze,” said Pat as he downed a mouthful of tea.

  “I fired out the front and managed to scare the creature off.” There was something theatrical about her father’s manner, yet the story was a true one that Miranda had heard before. He was after something. She wasn’t sure what.

  “Sea ice up north is thinner so more find themselves stranded out on the ice, unable to return to land,” Pat said. “They’ll be caught on ice floes when ice breaks up in the spring and end up floating south on the Labrador Current. I’ve seen paw prints out near Green Cove Pond big as dinner plates.”

  “Is that so?” Alan said meditatively.

  “Harry Pratt keeps a record of all the weather around here. Clouds that don’t behave the way they used to. Fog coming out of the northwest. It never before did that. Cedar waxwings, that’s a bird we never used to see. And the ice, it’s not the same ice, there’s not so much of it for a start, pans don’t raft against each other on shore the way they once did.”

  Her father’s body grew still. “Do you think Harry Pratt would talk to me?”

  Outside in the falling light, Alan and Miranda said goodbye to Pat, who set off in his big grey truck, a plume of exhaust settling over them.

  A moment later, Sylvia Borders, tall and lanky in her rubber boots, came walking in their direction, with a profound, curious air that seemed to reach right to Miranda’s depths. “Good evening to ye,” she said.

  Alan, not unfriendly, said, “We’re inspecting the wood that Pat has so generously dropped off for us.”

  Crossing her arms over her thick sweater, Sylvia agreed that it was very kind.

  “Pat mentioned that Harry Pratt keeps a record of the weather in Pummelly.” Her father’s body, next to Miranda’s, was ticking, almost twitching.

  “Yes,” said Sylvia. “Useful, given all the weather weirding, as I’ve heard some call it.”

  “Does anyone around here deny the weather’s changing?” Perhaps her father was recalling his enemies, Miranda thought. Once, with something like anger, he’d let loose that they were still a force out in the world, growing stronger as the weather grew more unpredictable. There’d been a spate of wildfires in California — she’d glimpsed this on his laptop — whole towns going up in smoke.

  “Hard to do when you live as close to the wind as we do, when you step out the door and feel what’s happening for yourself,” said Sylvia. “The weather’s always been changeable but it’s never changed like this.”

  Alan ran a hand through his unruly hair. Sylvia asked if they’d like a half-dozen eggs. When Alan said yes, and she strode back to her house to fetch them, his eyes followed her, his preoccupied attention furrowing into Miranda.

  That night, as her father tucked her into bed, words burst out of him as if he couldn’t help himself. “Maybe we should visit Harry Pratt and ask to look at his weather records.”

  “Why?” Concern roiled in Miranda. Wasn’t the whole point of their coming to the island that her father had abandoned his old life as a scientist?

  “Or we’ll invite him round here for a cup of tea.” Her father kissed her forehead.

  That winter, they weathered blizzards fierce enough to make the walls of Mrs. Magdalene’s house sway. There were days when the wind blew so hard they couldn’t go outside at all. When at last Miranda stepped out on the bridge, the wind beat at her so strongly she couldn’t move. Inside, she sat by the wood stove with her father, turning the pages of the books on plants and clouds and geology as the house groaned. In the afternoons, seated at the kitchen table, he taught her to touch type, so that she could transcribe weather stories, he said. When, on a fair and windless day, they went to Harry Pratt’s drafty house on the far side of the harbour, out on Careless Point, her father brought along a notebook and small tape recorder. He took notes as Harry offered them green tea, unfurled printouts from an antique computer and spoke about the strong, hot summer winds that had begun blowing out of the south, high water in the harbour, winter winds that came without snow.

  A sudden thaw in February brought winter rain like no one had ever seen. Then snow so deep it buried the village for two days. Alan dug pathways between their house and Christine Brett’s place and Caleb and Sylvia’s. He helped Caleb and Sylvia clear paths to the goat barn. Every day he seemed to move with more strength and vigour, excited by the prospect of their upcoming move to the little white house on the near side of the cove — Pat Green’s old hay store. Alan had asked Pat if he could buy the abandoned house and some of the land around it and, after some coaxing, Pat had agreed.

  Inside Mrs. Magdalene’s house, wood stove piled high, her father stamping snow off his boots in the back kitchen, Miranda thought: Down in the cove, we’ll be all on our own. There’ll be no one near us. Not Caleb or Sylvia or Mrs. Brett. Winds and storms will be fiercer. Maybe there’ll be polar bears.

  Soon she was going to lose her brief home in the village. Only they had to move. Come summer, Magdalene Trewitt wanted her house back.

  In March, Miranda’s father went out duck hunting with the Borders brothers, all of them clad in snow-white jackets. Caleb Borders appeared at their door, snowshoes strapped to his boots, an extra pair in his mittened hands. He showed Miranda how to fit her boots into straps made out of pieces of old car inner tubes. Eagerly she trudged after him up the hill beyond the goat barn that led towards the metal rigging of the automated lighthouse. Pack ice is what the sea brings in, Caleb told her. Slob ice lies like a slushy skin over the water and moves with the waves. Ballycatters, those are the big pans of ice rafted at shore, their blue-green edges sharp as knives, and the slippery mounds of ice that salt spray sends to coat the shore rocks. He seemed to take pleasure in telling her these things. In a sudden rush of snow up on the hilltop, a dwy, said Caleb, they lay side by side and let the wind sift snow over them, the world growing more and more quiet.

  Caleb’s abrupt silences no longer felt rude. The curt intensity with which he liked to explain his world was becoming a shared pleasure. Miranda had seen his cousins tease him as they played shinny out on the ice of the harbour, all of them skating away from him except her, but Caleb didn’t talk about this. She wished she could tell him more about her mother, who would have thrown herself into the snow beside th
em, laughing with delight, sweeping her arms like a snow angel as she stared up at the grey clouds. She’d told Caleb her mother’s name was Jenny and she was a painter. She would never stop missing her. Never.

  On March 15, a robin appeared in their yard. A robin already, her father said in surprise. He scribbled something in a notebook. Snow fell again in April, Sheila’s Brush, the last storm of the winter season. Arctic ice began to drift south, earlier than in the old days, according to Sylvia.

  In the sudden, intense heat of May, May month Caleb called it, Pat Green and Alan started work on the little house in the cove, along the road from Pat’s house. They pulled off its rotted clapboard, wrapped the exterior, batted down insulation against the interior studs, rebuilt the walls with new electrical in them, connecting these to the batteries that would supply power to the house. Alan presented Miranda with leather work gloves and a hammer and screwdriver of her own, set her simple tasks. Learning to make things was as important as any other skill, he said. She nailed in baseboards. She painted primer on walls. In the evenings, he taught her to sew while mending a tear in his own jeans at her side.

  Sometimes on weekends Caleb came out to join them, following her father and lanky Pat Green around like a puppy. He didn’t seem to mind not being with his cousins. In the village, Miranda had heard his cousin Danny call Caleb names: Dirty and Smoked. When Caleb asked if she would ever go to school, she told him that the world was her school. She was learning about the wind and clouds and plants.

  “Don’t you know those things?” Puzzled, Caleb brushed waves of dark hair out of his eyes. Caleb didn’t know the proper names of clouds like her father, but he knew that mackerel clouds brought wind and when woodsmoke doesn’t rise, that’s a sure sign of a storm coming. Miranda explained that what he called whisper clouds, her father called cirrus. The ones that brought rain, those were altostratus.