Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  She wished she could tell Frank about her own journey north all those years ago, no doubt following some of the same roads he had, their own storms driving them onward. There were words in her mouth — only she couldn’t speak them, given her pact with her father to keep the past hidden.

  “Say, Miranda,” said Frank, interrupting her thoughts. “Would you call this the end of the island?”

  “The end? Islands don’t really have ends. But — the road ends in Pummelly, you can’t go any farther than the far side of the harbour, out on Careless Point. Why?”

  “Someone told me to go to the end of the island.” Frank spoke with a grin. He was changing the subject.

  “I thought you wanted to go to Funk Island.”

  “Actually the end of this island feels a little more pressing.”

  The wind pushed hard at the back of Miranda’s neck.

  When Frank pulled off his sunglasses, she tensed. “Miranda, have you by any chance seen a couple of men around here, Americans, of course you wouldn’t necessarily know that unless you spoke to them. Tall, they’re both tall, one has longish hair, kind of a flamboyant demeanour, the other’s more clean-cut. They might have blown in here in the last couple of days.”

  “After the storm or before? Are they birders?”

  “Not birders,” said Frank with a fugitive smile. “You could say they’re my accidentals. I think they came here, I assume they arrived before the storm. They may even have left already. In which case I’m too late. I don’t know why I thought I would just stumble across them. Is there, like, an airport here? They probably flew in on a small private jet.”

  A jet. The afternoon before, at that distant whirr of sound, Miranda had looked up from the garden to see a spark descending in a circle, an unusual sight, particularly before a storm. The airstrip was far off. In the middle of the island. In all her years on Blaze Island she had never been there. Then, as the storm blew in, she’d heard her father, on his phone, ask some unknown person, How was your flight? Now here was Frank, asking his own questions about strangers and arrivals. She’d seen no one who fit his description of the two men. So why was discomfort travelling up her spine? “I haven’t seen them.”

  “What about your father? Do you think he has, or anyone in the village? Do you think there’s a chance they’re in the village, Pummelly, that’s what it’s called?”

  Miranda said, “I really don’t think those men were in Pummelly this morning. I’d have seen them or heard something.” Someone would have mentioned word at Vera’s general store or stopped by while she’d been having tea with Mary, yet her heart kept beating savagely.

  There was an energy in her that wanted to make Frank look at her, to bring back that arrow of heat, to feel it shoot all the way through her, yet she also wanted to retreat as far from him as possible. He aroused too many feelings. There were things about him difficult to pull into focus. He was like a skipping stone. He’d arrived wearing a ratty, unravelling sweater yet the car he’d been driving was a shiny, new-model hybrid. He lived in a house with roommates and was looking for people who flew a private jet. A few other birders sometimes found their way to the island. Miranda had run into them in Green Cove and out on the headlands. They clutched binoculars, carried cameras with telephoto lenses and seemed obsessed with birds at every moment.

  “What’s in that white house over there on the other side of the water?” Frank squinted at it. He had turned his attention back to the hills. The wind swept straight black hair across his forehead. Like a skipping stone, he sent out ripples. Even his gaze seemed to alter the world as Miranda knew it.

  Sometimes she had imagined a stranger arriving, she had, yes, a stranger arriving just for her, a young man, beautiful and inviting, but the imagined stranger had never asked questions that provoked such internal tumult.

  “It’s Caleb Borders’s house and he’s renovating it but no one lives there now. Sorry, I really need to get to work.” The abrupt words spilled out of her mouth, her feet already in motion.

  “Miranda —” Frank called.

  But she was racing down the lane away from him, Ella at her side, making for the red-black rocks and the sea on the far side of them.

  . . .

  Six months after Anna Turi’s visit, Miranda begged her father to drive them across the wintry island to the shop in the town of Blaze where they had once purchased books about rocks and trees and flowers to be her schoolbooks, so that she could buy a notebook of her own. As she slipped the notebook under her mattress, wood stove ticking below, she made a private resolution. She, too, would keep a record of the weather. All kinds of weather.

  Like the day two weeks later when, after a fierce sou’easter, all the men in Pummelly including her father walked up along shore to Pummelly Cove, out by the ocean. They walked, didn’t ski or skidoo or snowshoe, because there was so little snow. Only rain had fallen as the wind howled, and not much rain at that, the wind blowing harder than it ever used to do in winter, Pat Green said. The sea, so high and ferocious, had toppled the big boulders that waves had been smoothing for centuries, toppled and cracked them. There were no ballycatters, no blue ice coating the tumbles of rocks, no turquoise pans rafting and reaching in frozen clashes for the sky, cutting off the hard and gnawing waves from the land. Miranda and Caleb and his cousins, who had followed the men, were there to observe their soberness and to be yelled at not to go close to the water. It was unsettling, even for Miranda — where was all the ice that had been there the year before?

  Her father came home and wrote in The Book of Storms; he posted photographs of the broken rocks and storm details, including wind speed, to the online weather atlas. No doubt Harry Pratt wrote in his weather notebook, too. The next day Sylvia would walk out to observe the fallen rocks but rather than the rocks it was her father’s moods that Miranda kept an eye on. He had been less morose since Anna’s visit. Alongside the secrets of the past, new secrets were infiltrating their life, and these secrets included Anna, whose voice, by turns gruff and lilting, sometimes drifted from under the door of her father’s study. He must be calling Anna over the internet, Miranda presumed. In the beginning, her father seemed to be trying to convince Anna of something. This was a tone. Most of their conversations took place at the cabin. Miranda had overheard him say as much. I’ll call you from the cabin.

  The new secrets pulled him away from the world right in front of him, so that it was up to her to tug him back. Come out and look at the sheet of ice over the cove. Let’s go snowshoeing.

  Then there was the day when dark-red blood flowed out of Miranda for the first time, another kind of weather. A Saturday afternoon, her father wasn’t around. Miranda called Sylvia, as Sylvia had asked her to do, and Sylvia came over with supplies and raspberry leaf tea to ease the new throbbing from deep inside. With her capable hands, Sylvia wrapped Miranda in a quilt, gave her a pill to take if the pain didn’t settle. With a brusque gentleness, she kissed the top of Miranda’s head before departing. But the pain did settle and, after making a sketch in her notebook of the kitchen table and the mug holding the remains of the tea Sylvia had brought, Miranda went out. In her snowshoes she clumped along the shore path as far as the beach, a new landscape making space for itself inside her as the wind carved tufts and plains outside.

  One March afternoon, hurrying through snow across the school parking lot to the open school bus doors, Caleb at her heels, Miranda noticed an older silver car pulled up on the far side of the lot, recognizable despite the film of snow covering it.

  “What’s your mother doing here?” Miranda called but Caleb didn’t answer as they slid into their bus seat, Miranda at the window, Caleb by the aisle. Caleb, she said again. He had pulled out his phone.

  At lunchtime Miranda often left the girls’ conversations and went to find Caleb, knowing he’d most likely be by himself. At school her body felt stretched, as if it had distant vanishing points. Her new breasts set off a fizzing in her. Sometimes Caleb would be out
on the borders of the soccer field on the other side of the road, scuffing around in his puffy jacket, and when she reached him, he’d look up and say, his manner friendly if not demonstrative, Oh hi, Miranda.

  Caleb hadn’t said anything about his mother being at the school or the library, housed in a small wooden building on the far side of the parking lot.

  “She’s working in the library now,” said Caleb without looking up from his phone. A stubble of dark hairs traced the skin of his upper lip.

  “Since when?”

  “In the afternoons.”

  The library was only open in the afternoon, four days a week, and there had been a debate about whether it should stay open at all since fewer and fewer people were using it.

  Windshield wipers flapping, the bus stopped on its way out of the lot. In the library window, lit by a row of fluorescent ceiling lights, visible through the shimmer of snow, stood Sylvia. Tall in a knitted cardigan and skirt, something Miranda had never seen her wear, she held a book in one hand, beside a metal cart full of books. She was staring hard, as if caught in a trap, as if she would far rather have been outside, striding along snowy slide paths.

  Here was a difference between their two families, not spoken of but sensed: Miranda and her father lived frugally but had enough money for her father not to worry about paying work, whereas Sylvia, despite her proud self-sufficiency, had to fret.

  Across the road from where the bus let Miranda off, fresh tire tracks entered the lane that led to her house. Two sets: her father had recently been somewhere and returned. The wind, gusting out of the north, pressed snow into hummocks against rocks and fencelines, scoured the field where the humming wind turbine stood, sang in the town power lines and pushed itself inside Miranda’s coat. Soon the tire tracks would be obscured. Some days when the snow was particularly wild, her father came to meet her at the top of the lane, but there was no one in the house when she dropped her bag in the mud room, only the wind huffing in the chimney. She was about to head across the yard to her father’s study when voices stopped her. Two, her father’s and a woman’s, outside, louder when Miranda stood between kitchen and sitting room, by the unused front door, at the foot of the stairs.

  Not Sylvia. Obviously. Not any of their neighbours. Not an island voice at all.

  The woman’s voice approached through the wind’s whine, solid yet with a flute-like timbre rising upward.

  Three things happened, the voice said as Miranda strove to catch her words. Something about the national weather service asking for data. The eastern Arctic —. Wanted to hold a briefing. I was to be the spokesperson for our unit. Permission —. One higher up. Another —. No. No to holding the briefing at all. The government —. Political expediency. You can’t speak about melting ice at a weather briefing. Ice may be melting but they’ve decided melting ice isn’t weather.

  A scientist, Miranda wondered as she stood rigid. Another visitor? She’d convinced herself that Anna’s arrival was singular, and as such it had been possible to come to terms with it. Now what she had assumed to be exceptional seemed to be happening again, and again without warning.

  “I got a call from my uncle Samuel,” the woman continued, closer now, perhaps on the other side of the door, “the one who likes to play Moravian hymns on the trombone, did I ever tell you about him? In February he went partridge hunting, thinking he would have one good day before the weather turned, but he found nothing. The night he was out, it rained, a torrential rain, then a cold front blew through. In the morning he had to hack his way out of the ice on his tent. Ice on the ground’s not weather, remember? Then he saw something strange. There were caribou. When he approached they didn’t move. There are so few left up there now, and these ones were very thin. They were encased in ice. He said they looked like statues. The rain had frozen all over them. They were alive and calling to him. He had to use his rifle to hack them out. He watched them wander off, slipping and sliding, looking back at him with terrible sorrow. He says to me, Agnes, you’re a scientist, can’t you do something? He was always saying to my father, the ornithologist, whenever he came through Nain, What good are scientists, with their analyses and their studying, they brought trouble when they first came, that’s when the weather started changing. But he’s saying it differently now. All the melting permafrost, it’s making his house tilt, like so many others. A pond he always used to guide himself has vanished, as if it never was. You can’t look at the clouds and know the weather, it changes hour to hour. He says, desperately now, Agnes, you have to do something, can’t you do something?

  “I put down the phone. I can’t decide whether to leave Ottawa, go home, back up north, or stay in Ottawa, gathering data no one will even let us talk about. When this mysterious letter arrives, unsigned but written by someone who seems to know me, I think it’s one of the people from the weather service, wanting me to come and collaborate in secret. I decide I’ll fly to Nain and from there to Gander with my brother, the pilot. I allow myself two flights north a year but even if I try to control my carbon budget, he’s going to cancel it out many times over. What can you do, it’s family. I sent the message saying I was coming —”

  “— to an encrypted account, I can assure you.”

  “It was you standing there when I got off the ferry. You, my old professor, with that beard, but still.”

  “Old, Agnes?”

  “Not so old?”

  Miranda set out, through the back door, pushed her way around the near side of the house through the sifting snow. When she rounded the corner, they were almost on top of her, her father in his down jacket and snow-dusted wool cap, and, in a white down parka, a woman with a pale, moon-like face and vanishing smile, forehead fringed with pale brown hair, beneath a snow-tipped hat of silvery fur. The wind pushed them forward. Alan startled, the wind having kept Miranda’s approach a secret. She’d unnerved him. Good.

  Holding out his arm, he gathered Miranda beneath the warm wing of one shoulder. “Here’s a dear friend of mine. And colleague. Agnes Watson, of Nain, Nunatsiavut, and Ottawa, Ontario. Didn’t know until she showed up that she’d truly come all this way. Agnes, this is my wondrous daughter, Miranda.”

  Miranda’s breath caught in her throat. With reserved curiosity, Agnes held out a mittened hand. Where Anna had a willowy toughness, Agnes’s compact strength seemed to rise out of the ground. When she smiled, she didn’t show any teeth at all. Her sealskin mitten gave off its own secret warmth.

  “One day long ago,” her father was saying, “back when we lived in Waterloo, Agnes knocked on the door of my office. She was a first-year undergrad, geography major, first year in the south. She wanted to know if she could take my upper-level class on the cryosphere, the science of ice and snow. I only had to talk to her for a few minutes before declaring yes, you must, you can teach me a thing or two. The next summer, there she was, up on the Devon Island ice sheet, the first undergrad we’d ever had join our research team, not to mention the first young female Inuk scientist. You’ve likely no idea how unusual that was. She’s never looked back.”

  “I remember one day your father brought you with him to his office,” Agnes said with a small smile. “He was carrying you on his back in a baby sling, like an amaut. And every time he said the word ice, you cried.”

  It couldn’t be true, Miranda thought. Alan’s phone rang. Tucking it under his hood, he stepped away from them into a gust of snow, leaving Miranda to contemplate this peculiar story and the stranger, who had known her father as a much younger man, up on the polar ice, the man in the red parka, known him from when she was only a little older than Miranda was — and in a way she never could.

  “Why are you here?” she asked Agnes, unable to help herself.

  Agnes said, “I study black carbon. All the particulate matter in the snow cover, all the dust that travels north through the air from forest fires and industry in the south and darkens the snow surface when it falls.” Which wasn’t exactly an answer.

  “
Off Charmer’s Cove,” Alan was saying. “Tomorrow morning, yes, if you have one to spare, I’ll take one, with enormous gratitude.”

  To Agnes, he said, “That was our neighbour, Pat Green. He’s going sealing tomorrow, weather willing, one of two in town still with a licence. If the catch is good, we’ll have one.”

  At his words Agnes’s strong face lit up with joy. “If I’d known there’d be seal hunting, I would have come quicker.”

  “Time for the weather measurements,” Miranda said as loudly as she could.

  The next morning, a Saturday, the whine of a motorboat woke Miranda. Out in the cove, Pat Green’s speedboat plied a path through the open water between ice pans, two bundled figures in it. Across the hall, her father squeaked the floorboards, then knocked quietly on the spare room door, telling Agnes Watson he was on his way to meet Pat. Slipping back beneath the covers, Miranda listened to Agnes creak down the stairs after her father. Let them go. If the wind didn’t pick up, she and Caleb would go skating. They’d snowshoe in on the trail across the road from their lane and set off in the direction of her father’s cabin, but only go as far as Tucker’s Pond. They’d bring a broom to brush away snow and a thermos of hot tea, jam tarts made by Caleb’s mother, cheese sandwiches. At the insistence of both their parents, Caleb would first knot a long rope around himself. Leaving one end with Miranda on shore, he’d walk out and check the ice depth by carefully chipping a hole in its surface with a small axe. Four inches or more and they’d be fine, but they had to be careful, since just before New Year’s Aloysius Morton, from the town of Blaze, had fallen through a pond he’d always skated on and died of hypothermia, the ice still thin after the year’s slow freeze-up.

  Out on the ice, Caleb would skate with sure strokes while Miranda’s own skates cut fast tracks, her eyes keeping watch for cracks and bumps, her body growing loose and defiant. Out there, away from the awesome sea, the horizon being land and snow and twisted tuckamore, it was almost possible to forget she was on an island. She might even forget the changes that had entered her home, though other changes might touch her, the sudden cracks in Caleb’s voice, the strange new warmth pushing out of her own body.