Storm Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  All the way home I examined the texture of my own short hair, expecting that, at any minute, the blond curls of my guilt might come into evidence all over my head.

  The Boat

  PRIDE

  The children spotted it first and simply watched it in an attitude children will take—plastic pails hanging, forgotten, from their hands, muscles tensed, alert. It looked to them like a wounded sea monster, thrashing and lurching in the waves. But when it moved closer and they saw it was a boat, they ran to us in great excitement. For although impressive yachts and sleek fibreglass sail-boats floated through their days at the beach, this craft, coming as it so obviously did from somewhere else, and heading for their very own shore, seemed to them to be the essence of what a boat should be.

  I sat in my deck-chair under a colourful umbrella, reading the paper and staring at the ocean. My wife knitted. We seldom spoke, except to the grandchildren. To call them back in concern, to tie hats firmly on small heads to prevent sunstroke, or to apply more sun-tan lotion. I was golden brown and quite fat. I looked vaguely tired in the manner of older people who are only halfway through the two-week visit with children of whom they are overly fond. My wife had brought a picnic lunch with her to the beach and she was thinking about that now—the small problems associated with eating there: keeping the grandchildren from eating too fast, or from eating nothing but chips and cookies, or from eating too much sand. The appearance of the boat interrupted her midday thoughts as even she shaded her eyes to determine the nature of the distressed vessel.

  Its mast, which I would later come to know was made from the trunk of a slender tree, slapped the surface of the water, and then, as if involved in a desperate struggle, hauled itself upward, totem-like, against the sky. Hanging down from this, attached by a series of disorganized ropes, was a sail of real canvas. Part of it lay crumpled in the interior of the boat, but the major portion was draped over the gunwales and bubbled in the water. Unbleached, the beige colour seemed so unfamiliar, so non-plastic, that in its altered, broken state it was like the ghost of an earlier time and it frightened me somewhat, though I didn’t know why.

  Having caught the attention of everyone on the beach directly before it, the boat made its limping progress towards the shore. Propelled forward by one six-foot wave, it would pause briefly, rock slightly, and wait for the thrust of the next, moving sometimes sideways, sometimes forward as it was meant to. By now the life-guard, who was posted at our rear, could see through his binoculars that the boat, at one time, had probably belonged to a fisherman and was meant to be managed by a series of large oars. The mast and sail, then, would have had to be a later addition, made for the purpose of moving the boat out of the calm of some harbour and into the thick of an inexplicable journey. He could also see that whoever had planned this journey was absent, as were any passengers, that they had either been rescued at sea, or more likely had been swept overboard by the huge waves that had existed on the ocean for the last few days. Laying down his binoculars on his tanned thighs he relaxed his shoulders feeling functionless in this particular drama.

  Within a half an hour the boat had ended its marine performance and had, with one last determined shove, buried its prow in the wet sand at the shoreline. There it rested, listing somewhat to the starboard side, its sail moving back and forth in the water with the motion of the waves. The children ran to it to peer inside. I, too, left my deck-chair, my Styrofoam cooler, my newspaper, to look at what the sea had brought in.

  The children, of course, were most interested in the boat as an object. They responded instantly to the brightly coloured boards and twisted ropes. And they especially loved the broken parts of the boat where the flat planks had separated from the frame and tiny waterfalls appeared with each new wave. Small lakes had gathered at the bottom of the hull and beneath the prow was a perfect, enclosed, damp space where several small people might huddle together and giggle. Their hands automatically reached up to the gunwales in their desire to climb inside, to claim the boat as their own.

  But I held them back. Sensing the blacker side, I knew that the boat called to my mind something I had forgotten so completely that I could not remember it even now with the fact of it rolling there in front of me at the edge of the ocean. And when I saw the open suitcase, the clothing, the portable baby’s bed, the toothbrush, the shoes, all of which littered the hull, I understood that whoever had set out to sea in such a craft had arrived in my world despite rescue or death.

  The life-guard and I hauled the boat farther up onto the beach, beyond the tide line. Then, standing slightly back, we began to speculate about its origins. The astonishing lack of synthetic fibre suggested to us that the boat was most certainly foreign. I thought it might have come from one of the smaller, more obscure Caribbean islands. He suggested South America. Our conversation dwindled. It seemed futile to discuss the fate of the boat’s passengers, or even their reason for attempting to cross the sea in such a dangerous fashion. So we stood back and looked, our arms folded, feeling cheated, a bit, of the sensationalism that so often accompanies accidental death in our own country.

  That night, tucked snugly away in our climate-controlled condominium, I dreamt a hundred dreams of the boat. In one dream I was building the boat, or at least working on part of it. Sometimes I pushed large sharp needles through tough canvas. Sometimes I wove ropes. In some far corner of my brain, where I remembered my father’s carpentry shop, I steamed and bent wood for the frame long into the night. Then I fitted the skeleton-like construction together in record time. My mother, whom I had all but forgotten, appeared in one of the dreams, saying over and over in a carping, critical fashion, “It looks like the ribcage of a dead elephant. It looks like the ribcage of a dead elephant,” until I shouted at her, in a way I never would have done in real life, “Well, you are elephant flesh; grey, loose and wrinkling!” Then I dreamt I was planking the frame—setting the thin bevelled boards higher and higher, fastening them with bright galvanized nails. I whispered to myself in an unfamiliar language. “Garboard, shutter, sheerstake,” I said quietly, but with amazing confidence. The work went well.

  My wife, because she had been a mother, dreamt about mending the boat—caulking the seams with cotton dresses she had thrown away years before and patching the holes with oilcloth and horse-hoof glue. She claimed she spent half the night untying the knots in the ropes and winding them up into well-organized, tidy coils. Then she carefully stitched the torn sail, sometimes with brightly coloured embroidery thread, sometimes with the more functional white variety. Later she repainted the simple geometric design, which had, in some places, been rubbed off the stern. And finally, she dreamt that she hauled the sail away from the place where it lay in the damp sand, put it through the wash cycle in an enormous machine, and hung it out to dry on a clothes-line strung between two telephone poles. And all the Lincolns, Chryslers and Cadillacs on Ocean Boulevard ground to a halt, amazed to see this expanse of canvas, like a brown flag with grommets, flap up towards the sky.

  The children dreamt of sailing the boat, or of driving it, or flying it, depending on their personalities, just as it was—injured, wrecked—with sand and water spilling into its hull and its sail dragging behind it like long drowned hair. They were too young, too satisfied, to actively search for change in their dreams and so they dreamt of the fact of the boat and of access to that fact; of scaling the sides, leaping over the gunwales and sitting at the rudderless helm. In truth they dreamt of taking command of the boat as something the sea had arbitrarily given them.

  When we arrived at the beach the following morning the boat looked more familiar, less foreign to us. I brought my little black camera with me and marched down the beach with it to capture the image of the boat from all sides, forever. My wife fussed and clucked, almost affectionately, about the untidiness of the boat. Some of the clothing, which had earlier spilled from the hull, had been brought in by the waves and had formed a colourful strip at the tide line. She moved slowly
towards this and, gingerly picking up the pieces of fabric, dropped them in a neat pile, hoping that the machine that came at night to bury seaweed would dispose, as well, of this reminder of the human factor.

  The children began to play with the portable baby’s bed. Unnoticed behind the stern they constructed a sail from a large stick and a plaid cotton shirt. Borrowing the laces from an unmatched shoe that hung from the port gunwale, they were able to tie miniature ropes through the buttonholes and pull the fabric tight enough to catch the wind. They pounded the stick through the canvas bottom of the tiny bed and placed the youngest child inside as a navigator. Then, screaming with joy, they propelled their little craft out to sea where it turned slowly round a few times before being pushed under by the white froth of an incoming wave.

  So all that day my stock market quotations and the children’s plastic pails lay untouched in the sand beside the deck-chairs as we all responded to the boat. Sometimes we just stood and stared at it. It was something that could not be interpreted but could not be turned away from either. Sometimes we commented to each other that it really was a strong boat and might, in fact, be made seaworthy once again. The children played around the edges of the boat, having been forbidden, since the incident of the baby’s bed, to touch either the vessel or its contents.

  On the second night the dreams revisited us but in slightly different form. I, for instance, dreamt that I had discovered a miniature model of the boat. Walking through the streets of an unfamiliar city I had seen it in a junk shop window and had decided to purchase it though the price was much too high. When I placed it on the mantelpiece in my living-room, my wife had demanded: “Who told you I wanted a family portrait over the fireplace?” and I had replied, “You’ll never know till you light the fire.” I awakened with my heart pounding to discover that my wife, in the twin bed opposite, had been dreaming of adopting a child from a small obscure Caribbean island.

  But before this she dreamed of her childhood home, which had miraculously evolved into the boat. Upside down, the keel had become the peak of the roof, and, with little alteration, planks had turned to clapboard. Inside, the windows were gaping holes, providing a variety of ocean views and covered with curtains made of torn clothing and shoe laces. Her father crouched in the left-hand corner of the overturned stern, reading the Bible and writing stock market quotations in the damp sand of the floor. When we went back to sleep I dreamed I was a fisherman considering immigration to a new land.

  One of the children dreamed that he could see the pattern of the boat clearly charted by stars in a navy-blue sky. It was situated right between the Big and Little Dippers. He pointed it out to a crowd that had assembled somewhere vaguely to his left but they had been unable to see even the Big or Little Dipper and spoke only of fireflies and satellites.

  The next day we were all easy with the boat, as if our vision of the beach had expanded just enough to include it. And so, when late in the morning we watched the uniformed men tie the boat to their own authoritative coast guard vessel, we felt remotely sad and guilty too, as if the boat had committed some obscure crime, to which we were a party. We asked and were told that the boat would be filled with weights and sunk at sea. Our last glimpse of it was a spot of red on the horizon—its painted stern glowing in the sun.

  The following week vacation ended and the children returned to their home in the north where winter gradually bleached their brown skins. When they spoke of the boat, they did so with such confusion that their mother assumed that they had been taken on a fishing excursion, and their father believed that they had been presented with an expensive toy by us, their over-indulgent grandparents. Even their drawings, which often included the boat, were quickly glanced at by their parents and then forgotten.

  We quickly readjusted to our childless existence and finally forgot about the boat altogether except when it entered our unremembered dreams. Each day we went to the beach and sat beneath our colourful umbrellas. My wife knitted. We seldom spoke. I read stock-market quotations. She unpacked the Styrofoam cooler. Sleek fibreglass sail-boats and impressive yachts sailed across our constant vision of the sea. And when, a month later, our attention focused on the horizon, we did not recognize the subject of our dreams, the object of our very own design, believing instead that it was merely a wounded sea monster, thrashing and lurching in the waves. But the children had gone. This time we had caused the image, created it. This time it was our unsubstantial pride, moving slowly, painfully back to shore.

  Artificial Ice

  ANGER

  Every night I danced La Sylphide, creating my reputation with them as “the daughter of the air.” Heavy blue curtains opened and closed on fantasy after fantasy—painted scenery, paper gold. But I knew the blocks of wood inside my shoes, the hard reality of the boards beneath my feet. I knew no sylph with wings could lure a man from his marriage—the cold porridge of his life. I had spoken to myself about it often. No man, I said, will break through the walls he has built for a woman who flies, whether her flight be caused by magic, or, as in my case, by days of sweat in front of a ruthless mirror. And I continued to know this even on the nights when my dressing-room filled with white roses, champagne, diamonds.

  But that night, my costume was new, with real silver threads woven through the cloth. These are the trails of meteors, my dressmaker said, running her hands across the glitter. And she was right. Dressed in it I scarcely touched the ground, burned across the stage. And later I received my encores and my roses with grace, felt, for the first time, a stirring of affection towards the audience, that anonymous beast whose eyes had scrutinized my flesh. So that even when I discovered darker roses (blood inside my shoes), I was not distracted from the exceptional mood of the performance.

  They were a people dominated by weather, held in check by unceasing cold. An irremovable layer of frost covered their windows in early October, cancelling all hope of a view for months to come. Icicles hung heavy on the beards of the men and snow filled the children’s hair. I was told of women from the rural areas who grew fingernails of ice, which hardened to such a degree that they never melted, even when their hands reached for flowers during that brief season. The dogs and horses that I saw had eyes with crystal retinas and coats covered with layers of hoar-frost. By January each year a solid stillness had entered the air. Too cold for snow, a final terrifying freeze set in and the outdoors became, in fact, quite dangerous. The lungs of a newborn baby could petrify in a second. A tear could solidify and leave serious scratches on an eyeball.

  Adults adjusted, however, to this prolonged winter and went about their business in the streets taking shallow well-ordered breaths and wearing a special kind of mask that was said to prevent damage to the eyes. But there was a further problem. The extra heat and moisture caused by the vibrations of vocal cords caused spoken words to crystallize and fall to the ground, replacing the discontinued snow. Occasionally, therefore, you would see a tiny set of white hills and know that there had been a conversation. In fact, in their language, the word conversation referred both to the familiar interchange of words and the tiny mounds of snow left on the street afterwards. And sometimes these, combined with identifiable footprints, could be used as evidence of one sort or another; evidence that, in some cases, was more precise and more meaningful than fingerprints. During the long ten months of their winter, therefore, the people seldom spoke.

  But they responded with unusual enthusiasm to gesture, and passionately loved the dance. Each night the huge theatre, situated in the city’s centre, was filled to capacity with a silent, attentive crowd. The women dressed in white satin and diamonds to match their national season. Over their heads the magnificent crystal chandeliers were scarcely warmed by the thousands of candles that burned in them. Above these were ceiling frescos of blue and silver and below a grey carpet like the first thickness of ice that covered the river early in autumn. And then the men, dressed in soft mauve uniforms, their pale blue eyes fixed on my darker, unfamiliar skin, nigh
t after night.

  Their prince, well acquainted with the ballets of the time, had followed my career for a long time before he sent for me to come and dance in his country. He heated the theatre, especially for me, with four giant furnaces and provided me with a coach to travel in. I was also given a house five miles from the city limits, where blue-grey ice stretched out towards infinity. Here messengers skated to my door with gifts from the palace: wonderful furs and velvets, and quantities of jewels—diamonds, sapphires, pearls. But the prince never appeared in my rooms, preferring, perhaps, to arouse my curiosity by the strange visual messages he sometimes sent along with the gifts. I would pull from envelopes a variety of objects masquerading as letters: a handful of frozen tears; a delicate bracelet made entirely of ice, which melted on my wrist; his fingerprints pressed into white wax; and once, a bright blue heart painted on the inside of the wrapper of a razor blade.

  The thought of him, this elusive prince, began to fill my waking hours. The first thing I would see each morning, when I breathed on the frost that covered the window pane, was his messenger’s skate blades gleaming on the horizon. They were like razors reflecting the sun. I spent my leisure hours inventing the pretty words I was certain he would say to me, imagining caresses. Someone said he kept a tiny room filled with photographs of me. Someone else said that he had demanded that all the ribbons from my discarded shoes be sent to him. I was fascinated. I desperately wanted to see him. I arranged elaborate dinners, unusual concerts at my house, hoping he would appear. I sent him special invitations scented with spices. He was utterly unyielding.