Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Kids were born to the goat does as caribou moss turned the hills lime green. Sylvia, who slept in the barn some nights, grew tense and short-tempered, caught up in the kidding. After Fleur gave birth one night at three, and Jewel the next morning, Sylvia allowed Miranda to climb into the stall to hold the tiny, newborn doelings, Fern, Willow, and Alder, the bucklings Bally and Catter. Caleb had named them.

  One afternoon, as they scrambled along the shore path between Caleb’s house and the cove, Caleb told Miranda how, the summer he was six, his mother had gone to work on a longliner. There wasn’t much work to be had so why shouldn’t a woman, if she was strong enough, go fishing. No man would take her on his boat at first, because of the bad luck of it, not even her brother Tom who fished, until Horatio Pine of Tom’s Neck lost his brother to a slashed wrist and offered Sylvia a place on the crew of his boat Starlight. She lasted a season. True, there wasn’t much fish to be had that year. But, Caleb said, it was being away from him for weeks at a time that proved too hard.

  Out of the blue, as a black-backed gull flew past at head-height, Caleb asked Miranda how her mother had died. Something clanged inside her. What would her mother think to see her here, like this? If her mother had lived, would they have come here? Would her mother have wanted to live in such a place? In her room in Mrs. Magdalene’s house, Miranda kept her mother’s small painting perched on a dresser. Sometimes she vanished into it.

  “In an accident,” Miranda said.

  Caleb seemed to be waiting for more. “Was it long ago?”

  She shook her head, mouth full of all that couldn’t be spoken, time travelling. On the anniversary of her mother’s death, she and her father had found a sheltered place among the shore rocks between the village and the house in the cove. Just like that, the wind had died, and they’d been able to light the candle they brought with them. At home they lit more candles and said a prayer to honour her spirit. Now it was June month: roots like snakes underfoot, moist earth, berry plants blossoming. Her mother was Jewish, Miranda told Caleb. Then she asked him, “Is your father dead?”

  She’d assumed he was. Caleb never spoke about his father. There was this equivalency between them: a missing parent.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know. My mother won’t tell me a thing about him. Won’t speak about him ever. Only he’s not from around here, is he? You know what? I don’t even know that. She won’t say a word. He must have been something, right? He must’ve fetched up long enough in St. John’s for something to happen. By the time I was born she’d moved to a house in the woods, that side — over there on the main island.”

  His light brown skin, his dark hair, his smallness. There was pain in him that he was covering with a jokey manner. Every so often Miranda caught a glimpse of Sylvia in his slim chin, the contours of his face. She, too, felt like an outsider but Caleb wore his difference more obviously.

  When they got back to the village, to the puffy buns with jam that Sylvia had left on the kitchen table, Caleb asked Miranda to come upstairs to his room. This was a place she’d never been. When it rained they stayed in the kitchen or parlour or hung about in the barn with the goats or in the shed across the yard, which had its own wood stove, and where Caleb liked to do his homework, when he did it.

  Caleb kept his bedroom very neat. From the bottom drawer of his dresser, he pulled out a cardboard box, removed the lid, and folded back a piece of red velvet to reveal a small curled animal foot, the fur rubbed nearly off the hard skin in places. A rabbit’s foot, he told Miranda.

  He said the only memory he had of his father was of a man’s large hands slipping a pair of tiny rabbit-fur slippers, silky-soft, fur-side in, over his small feet. He must have been very young. In a cradle maybe? A glimpse of a man with brown skin, tight curls in his hair. It was his belief that his father had hunted the rabbit, made the slippers for him. He was certain the slippers had existed, though they’d vanished by the time he and his mother came to Blaze Island when he was two. If he asked his mother what had happened to them, she would say only that she had no idea. She didn’t deny their existence. Besides, he still had the rabbit’s foot. There were no pictures of his father to be found anywhere. He’d searched the house when his mother wasn’t around. None of his relatives seemed to know anything about his father, though he knew they had their theories.

  “You can hold it. Rub it for luck,” Caleb said. Miranda took the little foot in her hand, touched the wizened skin and disappearing fur, understanding this for the act of trust it was.

  “Who do you think your father was?”

  A strange expression crossed Caleb’s face. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Miranda said, “My mother died in an accident. A car hit her. Last year.”

  “Oh,” said Caleb as his face seized up.

  July month: Miranda’s new bedroom in the cove smelled of sawdust and cut wood. The walls were slats of wood laid sideways, painted a clean, calm white. A turquoise chair, fisherman’s union green, stood in one corner. Above the dresser hung the small luminous painting by her mother, the landscape of another world. Out the window lay fields, then water, then bare hills on the far side of the cove. Miranda woke to the whoosh of waves and the bleating of Pat Green’s lambs. Each morning she walked out into the field behind the house and scrambled over the rocks at field’s end to where the sea burst in frothy waves. She named some of the largest rocks: after her mother, another Uma, another Craggy, and another one Mister Big. She gathered sea urchin shells. She flapped her wings and became a gull, learned that gannets were the white birds that dove like comets into the water. She ran into a wind that sculpted her limbs, enjoying a freedom unlike any she’d ever known, as long as she told her father where she was going and when she expected to return. When she did return, she stared in wonder at her muscular father as he hefted and nailed and sawed.

  Now Pat and her father were talking of moving an old store shed that Pat wasn’t using anymore across the land on skids. There was a gasoline generator set up outside the house, and a small portable solar panel for power until the bigger solar panels were delivered and installed. Sometimes Alan took a break to cut the grass around the house with the scythe he’d had delivered by mail order. When Miranda held its two wooden handles and tried to swing the metal blade, she could barely lift it, but her father made the scythe’s movement fluid and fierce. He placed her hands into position, his sweaty body close, guiding her into a swing. When he stepped back, a smile flew across his ruddy face. You’re not the girl who arrived here a year ago, he told her. This seemed to please him. And she wasn’t.

  Her father swung the scythe as if he couldn’t bear to be still. He kept his beard trimmed short, his dark hair in waves, longer than it had ever been in the old life. Miranda’s body, too, had grown lean and muscular. She stared at herself in her bedroom mirror, shocked at the sight. At times, her father turned broody and kept to himself. At other moments, Miranda sensed a tremble of joy in him, satisfaction as he touched the fresh white clapboard of their house and eyed the fields all around them, no sign of other humans apart from a ruined house behind spruce trees on the far side of the cove. He took daily weather notes. He spoke about getting a pony. Or a dog. About bringing in hives for bees and covering one side of their roof with moss. He set up stakes in the place on the low slope behind their house where the land was rich and fertile, where he was going to dig a vegetable garden.

  Here in the new, new life, Caleb dropped by almost every day. Sylvia, too, brought eggs and lettuces from her garden, jars of fresh goat milk. Sometimes Sylvia and Miranda’s father went off on walks together, talking about bees or gardening, or they stayed in the new kitchen with its white walls, speaking of their children, while Caleb and Miranda flew about outside. Other times Sylvia took Miranda foraging along the shore for lovage, also called sea celery, which tasted like celery, wild parsley and sea rocket and beach pea and oyster leaf, all good to be mixed in a salad. Sylvia had a particular concentration when she forag
ed, an eye for every thing that grew.

  For Miranda’s eleventh birthday Sylvia baked a cake. The next day, Miranda watched Sylvia trench her potato beds, wielding a spade with a tough strength not unlike her father’s. Handing Miranda the spade, Sylvia told her to give it a try. Here was another pleasure, to be able to dig in deep and turn the earth. Miranda set off by herself along the shore path, towards the cove, scrabbling like a goat over the rocks. This new confidence was becoming part of her, the swoon of being out on the land alone. At night, in bed, she fell asleep with her father creaking in the kitchen below, the smell of the sea on her hair and in her skin.

  Bakeapples ripened early that year, and when they did, at the end of July, Sylvia invited the two of them berry picking, but Alan, who had spent the previous afternoon nailing new planks to the walls of Sylvia’s goat barn, said he had to stay to do some work at the house. Only Miranda went with Sylvia and Caleb and Christine Brett to their family’s bakeapple grounds, whose location, Caleb said, they shared with no one, so wasn’t Miranda the lucky one. She felt lucky, charmed even, as they hiked inland, the ground sometimes marshy underfoot, until they were surrounded by a sea of small, star-shaped leaves with little orangeish berries protruding from them. Sylvia showed Miranda how to pluck only the cloudy-coloured berries, not the hard, still-yellow ones, and how to shuck them, separating the hull from the fruit with your fingernail as you picked, teaching her, in a different way than her father, how to live on the land. At the plunk of berries into the plastic tub, stiff west wind on her face, a rush of happiness seized Miranda, for the first time in a long time, guilt, then again a surge of undeniable happiness. She hoped her mother could forgive her for it.

  She brought a bucket overflowing with berries back to her father, thrumming with delight. When, before leaving, she’d asked him why he had to stay behind, he said he was expecting a delivery. When Miranda asked of what, he said, equipment, but it was as if he were brushing her off. Now, out on the bridge of their new old house, he gathered her to him, running his calloused hands through her long hair, so much longer than it used to be. He told Miranda that he would cut it if she wanted and wouldn’t if she didn’t. “Do you like living here, my dear one?” There was a catch in his throat as he rocked her, hard and close.

  “Yes,” she told him. And again. “Yes.”

  “If only your mother could see us now.”

  “Yes,” Miranda said.

  “I’m doing all this for you,” her father said, almost crushing her in his embrace, and Miranda held him tight in gratitude.

  That night, they stepped outside together, holding hands. This, too, filled her with joy, as the two of them gazed up at the dark sky, the crazy vastness of the stars.

  In the utility room the boxes that had been delivered to her father waited in a pile. He was going to set up a weather monitoring station, he told Miranda, so they could keep track of the weather. They’d keep talking to other people from around the island, gathering their weather stories, which would form their baseline data. He was going to create an island weather atlas, compile as much information as he could, as a resource for himself and others.

  “Are you still a scientist?” Miranda asked. She was having trouble sharing her father’s excitement. What he was doing now was different, he said, it was called citizen science.

  For a week he didn’t unpack the boxes. They had to squeeze around them to reach the refrigerator. He seemed to be pretending they weren’t there and occupied himself reading the manual for the small wind turbine he was also installing.

  Her father was at the table, buried in a thick sweater, manual open in front of him, when, one August afternoon, Miranda stepped into the kitchen.

  “Dad. Mrs. Brett asked me to go with her across the bay tomorrow. She’s taking the seven o’clock ferry and coming back again on the six o’clock. To get her hair done.”

  They’d been on the island for over a year. In all that time Miranda had not left the island once. Neither of them had. A day ago, for the first time since their arrival on Blaze Island, she’d heard her father laugh.

  The ferry, she’d ride the ferry on a bright day, see a bit of the land on the far side, the bay itself, return. Most people went across regularly: to the malls in Gander, for medical appointments, to the dentist, the airport. Pat Green and his wife, Kimberley, went. Caleb and Sylvia almost never left the island, because of the goats and chickens, but even they had spent a week in St. John’s, leaving Miranda and her father in charge of the animals. So why did her breath feel quaky and her fists ball up as she approached her father with this request?

  Serious, even grave, he slapped shut the manual, pulled out a chair, sat her down beside him. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but that won’t be possible. Our life is here now. Other people will have different ways — but we only use gasoline for important things. Yes, we’ll go stock up at the supermarket. And buy fish at the fish plant. We’ll drive across the island now and again to talk to people about the weather. But on the whole, we’ll try to live without going far. And we stay on the island. We’ve left the rest of the world behind, remember? We may look like outliers but soon others will begin to live this way again, sticking close to home. There are other people who don’t leave the island — those sisters, you met them at Leo Borders’s kitchen party, what’s their name again? The man from Tom’s Neck who used to lay shingles and fell off a roof and now makes a living playing the fiddle.”

  Miranda flushed with anger and frustration. All those people her father had mentioned, they were old people.

  “You don’t have to drive across, Mrs. Brett’s driving.”

  “No, Miranda.” Her father, with his sombre face, had never felt so implacable. There was wildness and freedom in the new life and there was a border, stern rules.

  “Are we going to be here for a long time?” In that moment Miranda didn’t know what she wanted. To leave? Never leave? Was the island a prison?

  Something caught her father’s eye. He tugged her by the hand, pulling her through the mud room and outside, into the wind-filled air. “Look,” he exclaimed, “snow buntings!” A cascade of small white birds flew over them. “Yes, the plan is to stay here!”

  . . .

  Mid-morning after the storm: Caleb leaped off the quad, his boots, the legs of his coveralls spackled with mud. The back door to Cape House swung open on its hinges. Alarming. When he stepped inside, wind met him, wind where there shouldn’t have been any. He followed the current into the parlour. The new windows that he and the old man had installed at the beginning of the previous summer, his pride, not to mention a big cut out of his bank account, had shattered, there and in the dining room across the hall. He sank to his knees, glass littering the newly sanded floors, glass and water and bucketfuls of heedless sunlight spilling all around him.

  He found some plywood sheets to board up the frames, swept up the glass, mopped the floors. It was the best he could do. The windows could be replaced. But it would take money to buy new ones, money he didn’t have, so the damage, while not ruinous, was ruinous for him.

  These were the rooms that he’d been fixing up first, because they were the most beautiful, with their big bow windows on either side of the old front door that faced the sea. He’d spent nights camped in the parlour, where sheep had once settled and pissed, wrapped in a sleeping bag on the planks that he’d scrubbed until he was breathless, before sanding them silky. Waking at dawn, he’d stare out the window, into the violet light, the epic stretch of ocean pulling at him. Walking the rooms in wonder and contentment, he’d wanted only to share the pleasure with someone else. His mother. More than anyone else, the girl. He’d gone for broke with double-pane glass, sliders, wooden frames. There was a man in Shallow Bay who restored old windows but made them airtight. These windows shouldn’t have been the ones to smash, with a storm out of the southeast. But there’d been those gusts from every direction. The sudden, violent pressure drop must have tugged the back door open, here as at his gr
eat-aunt’s house, sucking air out of the rooms and pulling the pliant glass with them.

  He was going to be late. Go right away, the old man had written in the note the girl had delivered earlier that morning. But the windows. Surely the old man would understand. Yet Caleb knew, from his encounter with those men the day before, that they were impatient to be off, especially Roy, the bossy one. Storms weren’t convenient. There was supposed to be a meeting. Enclosed in the envelope addressed to him was a note Caleb was to deliver to Anna. If it was so necessary to reach the men in a hurry, though, why hadn’t the old man rushed to them himself?

  Still, here Caleb was now, tearing along the road to Tom’s Neck. He’d come around Green Cove Pond on the trail before cutting back to the road at Cape House lane. Up in the Burnt Hills, beyond the washout, the road was fine. On its bare hilltop, to his left, the broken spine of the cellphone tower tipped, its support wires loose and dangling. Caleb stopped the quad long enough to tug off his helmet. He scarcely had to worry about traffic. The lack of cars suggested that people in Tom’s Neck already knew about the breach in the road. Someone had tried to get through or the wind carried the news. A white-throated sparrow’s song skipped to his ears. Beyond some goldenrod, the small bird darted from branch to branch, leaves turning ruddy as the seasons shifted.

  In Tom’s Neck, at Ruby’s Convenience, partway around the open curve of the harbour, Caleb stopped again. The old man had asked him to buy fuel. That’s what the bills in the envelope were for. Which was almost funny, given the old man’s strictures about fuel use, yet here he was, as anxious not to run out of gasoline as the rest of them.

  There were two gas pumps at Ruby’s and a chugging gasoline generator off to one side. Ruby herself, in rubber boots, dyed blonde hair ripping about her cheeks, directed what traffic there was.