At other times her mother had tried to reach the mainland before her children were born. Sometimes she would cross almost a month before the expected delivery because the weather and the water in all seasons, except summer, could never be depended upon. She had planned to do so this time as well but the ice that covered the channel during the winter months began to decay earlier than usual. It would not bear the weight of a horse and sleigh or even a person on foot and there were visible channels of open water running like eager rivers across what seemed like the grey-white landscape of the rotting ice. It was too late for foot travel and too early for a boat because there was not, as yet, enough open water. And then, too, she was born a month earlier than expected. All of this she was, of course, told much later. She was also told that when the winter began her parents did not realize that her mother was pregnant. Her father was sixty at the time and her mother close to fifty and they were already grandparents. They had not had any children for five years and had thought their child-bearing years were past and the usual signs were no longer there or at least not recognized until later in the season. So her birth, as her father said, was “unexpected” in more ways than one.
She was the first person ever born on the island as far as anybody knew.
Later she was brought across to the mainland to be christened. And still later when the clergyman was sending his baptismal records to the provincial capital he included hers along with those of the children who had been born on the mainland. And perhaps to simplify matters he recorded her birthplace as being the same as that of the other children and of her brothers and sisters, or if he did not intend to simplify perhaps he had merely forgotten. He also had the birth date wrong and it was thought that perhaps he had forgotten to ask the parents or had forgotten what they had told him and by the time he was ready to send in his records they had already gone back to the island and he could not contact them. So he seemed to have counted back a number of days before the christening and selected his own date. Her middle name was wrong, too. Her parents had called her Agnes but he had somehow copied it down as Angus. Again perhaps he had forgotten or was preoccupied, and he was a very old man at the time, as evidenced by his shaky, spidery handwriting. And, it was pointed out, his own middle name was Angus. She did not know any of this until years later when she sent for her official birth certificate in anticipation of her own marriage. Everyone was surprised that a single document could contain so many errors and by that time the old clergyman had died.
Although hers was thought to be the only birth to have occurred on the island there had been a number of deaths. One of them was that of her own grandfather, who had died one November from “a pain in the side” after pulling up his boat for the winter – thinking there would be no further need for a boat until the spring. He was only forty when it happened, the death occurring two weeks after his birthday. His widow and children did not know what to do as there was no adequate radio communication and they were not strong enough to get the boat he had so recently hauled up back into the water. They waited for two days hoping the sullen grey waves would subside, and stretching his body out on the kitchen table and covering it with white sheets – afraid to put too much fire in the kitchen stove lest it might hasten the body’s decay.
On the third day they launched a small skiff and tried to row across to the mainland. They did not know if they would be strong enough to make it, so they gathered large numbers of dried cattails and reeds from one of the island’s marshes and placed them in a metal washtub and doused them with the oil used for the lamp at the lighthouse. They placed the tub in the prow of the skiff and when they rowed out beyond the shape of the island they set the contents of the tub on fire, hoping that it might act as a signal and a sign. On the mainland someone saw the rising funnel of grey-black smoke and the shooting flames at its base and then the skiff moving erratically – rowed by the desperate hands of the woman and her children. Most of the mainland boats had already been pulled up for the winter, but one was launched and the men went out to what looked like a burning boat and tossed a line to it and towed it in to the wharf after first taking off the woman and her children and comforting them and listening to their story. Later the men went out to the island and brought the man’s body over to the mainland so that, although he died on the island, he was not buried there. And still later that evening someone went over to light the lamp in the lighthouse so that it might send out its flashing warning to possible travellers on the night-time sea. Even in the face of her husband’s death, the woman, as well as her family, harboured fears that they might lose the job if the Government realized the lightkeeper was dead. They had already purchased their supplies for the winter and there was no other place to go so late in the season, so they decided to say nothing until the spring and returned to the island after the funeral accompanied by the woman’s brother.
The original family had gone to the island because of death, or rather to aid in death’s reduction. The lighthouse was established in the previous century because of the danger the island represented to ships travelling in darkness or in uncertain weather. It was thought that the light would warn sea travellers of the danger of the island or, conversely, that it might represent hope to those already at the sea’s mercy and who yearned so much to reach its rocky shore. Before the establishment of the light there had been a number of wrecks which might or might not have been avoided had there been a light. What was known with certainty was that survivors had landed on the island only to die from exposure and starvation because no one knew that they were there. Their skeletons had been found accidentally by fishermen in the spring – huddled under trees or outcrops of rock in the positions of their deaths. Some still had the remains of their arms around one another. Some still with tattered, flapping clothes covering their bones although the flesh between the clothing and the bones was no longer there.
When the family first went they were told that their job was to keep the light and offer salvation to any of those who might come ashore. The Government erected buildings for them which were better than those of their relatives on the mainland, and helped them with the purchase of livestock and original supplies. To some it seemed they had a good job – a Government job. In answer to the question of the isolation, they told themselves they would get used to it. They told themselves they were already used to it, coming as they did from a people in the far north of Scotland who had for generations been used to the sea and the wind and sleet and rocky outcrops at the edge of their part of Europe. Used to the long nights when no one spoke and to the isolation of islands. Used to seeing their men going to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company and not expecting them back for years. Used to seeing their men going to the vast ocean-like tracts of prairie in places like Montana and Wyoming to work as sheepherders. To spend months that sometimes stretched into years, talking only to dogs or to themselves or to imaginary people who blended into ghosts. Startled by the response to their own voices when they appeared, strange and unexpectedly, at the camp or at the store or at the rural trading post. In demand as sheepherders, because it was believed, and because they had been told, that they did not mind the isolation. “Of course I spoke to ghosts,” a man was supposed to have said once upon his returning. “Wouldn’t you if there was no one else to speak to?”
In the early days on the island, there was no adequate radio communication, and if they were in trouble and unable to get across they would light fires on the shore in the hope that such signs would be visible on the mainland. In the hope that they, who had gone to the island as part of the business of salvation, might themselves be saved. And when the Great War was declared, it was said, they did not know of it for weeks, coming ashore to be told the news by their relatives, coming ashore to a world which would be forever changed.
Gradually, with the passage of the years, the family’s name as well as their identity became entwined with that of the island. So that although the island had an official name o
n the marine and nautical charts it became known generally as MacPhedran’s Island while they themselves became known less as MacPhedrans than as people “of the island.” Being identified as “John the Island,” “James the Island,” “Mary of the Island,” “Theresa of the Island.” As if in giving their name to the island they had received its own lonely designation in return.
All of this was already history by the time she was born and she had no choice in any of it. Not choosing, for herself, to be born on the island (although the records said she was not) and not choosing the rather surprised individuals who became her parents after they had already become the grandparents of others. For by the time she was born the intertwined history of her family and the island was already far advanced. And when she was later told the story of the man who died from the pain in his side, it seemed very far away to her although it was not so for her father, who had been one of the children in the skiff, rowing with small desperate freezing hands at the bidding of his mother. By the time of her early memories, the Government had already built a wharf at the island which was superior to any on the mainland. The wharf was built “to service” the lighthouse, but it also attracted mainland fishermen who were drawn to its superior facilities. Especially during the lobster season months of May and June, men came to live in the shacks and shanties they erected along the shore. Leaving their shanties at four in the morning and returning in the early afternoon to sell their catches to the buyers who came in their big boats from far away. And returning to their mainland homes on Saturday and coming back again on Sunday, late in the afternoon or in the early evening, their weekly supplies of bread and provisions in burlap bags lying at the bottom of their boats. Sometimes lying in the bottoms of the boats there were also yearling calves, with trussed feet and eyes bulging with fear, who were brought to the island for summer pasturage and would be taken off half-wild in the cold, grey months of fall. Later in the summer the energetic, stifled rams would be brought in the same way, to spend monastic, frustrated months in all-male company before returning to the mainland and the fall fury of the breeding season.
He came to the island the summer she was seventeen. Came before the rams or the young cattle or the buyers’ boats. Came at the end of April when there were still white cakes of ice floating in the ocean and when the family’s dogs still ran down to the wharf to bark at the approaching boats and to snarl at the men who got out of them. In the time before such boats and men became familiar sights and sounds and odours. Yet even as the boat came into the wharf the dogs seemed to make less fuss than was usual and whatever he said quietened them and caused them to be still. She saw all this from the window of the kitchen. She was drying the dishes for her mother at the time and she wrapped the damp dish towel around her hand as if it were a bandage and then she as quickly unwrapped it again. As he bent to loop the boat’s rope to the wharf, his cap fell off and she saw the redness of his hair. It seemed to flash and reflect in the April sun like the sudden and different energy of spring. She and most of her people were dark-haired and had dark eyes as well.
He had come, she learned, to fish for the season with one of the regular men from the mainland. He was the nephew of the man’s wife and came from a place located over the mountain. From a distance of some twenty-five miles, which was a long distance at the time. He had come early to make preparations for the season. To work on the shanty and repair the winter’s damages, to repair the man’s lobster traps and to make a few new ones. He told them all of this in the evening when he came up to the lighthouse to borrow oil for his lamp. He brought them bits and scraps of news from the mainland as well, although they did not have that many people in common. He spoke in both Gaelic and English, although his accent was different from theirs. He seemed about twenty years of age and his eyes were very blue.
They looked at one another often. They were the youngest people in the room.
In the early madness of the lobster season they did not speak to one another although they saw each other almost every day. The men were often up at three in the morning brewing their tea by the flickering lamps, casting their large shadows eerily upon the shanties’ walls as they moved about in the semidarkness. At night they sometimes fell asleep by eight. Sometimes still sitting on their chairs, their heads tilting suddenly forward or backward and their mouths dropping open. She worked with her mother, planting the garden and the potatoes. Sometimes in the evening she would walk down by the shanties, but not very often. Not because her parents openly disapproved but because she felt uncomfortable walking so close to so many men. Sometimes they nodded and smiled as all of them knew her name and who she was and some of them were her distant relatives. But at other times she felt uneasy, hearing only bits of the comments and remarks exchanged among them as they stood in their doorways or sat on their homemade chairs or overturned lobster crates. The remarks seemed mainly for themselves, to demonstrate their wit and masculinity to each other. As if they were young schoolboys instead of being mostly beyond middle age. Sometimes they reminded her of the late summer rams, playful and friendly and generally grazing contentedly in achadh nan caoraich, the field of the sheep, although sometimes given to spontaneous rages against those who would trespass into their territory or sometimes unleashing their suppressed fury against one another. Rearing and smashing against one another until their skulls thundered and reverberated like the growling icebergs of spring and their pent-up semen ejaculated in spurting jets, leaving them stunned and weak in the knees.
She and her mother were the only women on the island.
One evening she walked to the back of the island, down to the far shore which did not face the mainland but only the open sea. There was a small cove there which was known as bagh na long bhriseadh, bay of the shipwreck, because there were timbers found there in the long-ago time before the lighthouse was established. She sat on creig a bhoird, the table rock, which was called so because of its shape, and looked out across the seeming infinity of the sea. And then he was standing beside her. He made no sound in coming and the dog which had accompanied her gave no signal of his approach.
“Oh,” she said, on realizing him so unexpectedly close. She stood up quickly.
“Do you come here often?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Well yes, sometimes.”
The ocean stretched out flat and far before them.
“Were you born here?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I guess so.”
“Do you stay here all the time? Even in the winter?”
“Yes,” she said, “most of the time.”
She was defensive, like most of her family, on the subject of the island. Knowing that they were often regarded as slightly eccentric because of how and where they lived. Always anticipating questions about the island’s loneliness.
“Some people are lonely no matter where they are,” he said as if he were reading her mind.
“Oh,” she said. She had never heard anyone say anything quite like that before.
“Would you like to live somewhere else?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“I have to go now,” he said. “I’ll see you later. I’ll come back.”
And then he was gone. As suddenly as he had come. Seeming to vanish behind the table rock and the water’s edge. She waited for a while, sitting down once more upon the rock to compose herself and then walking up the island’s rise toward the lighthouse. Later when she looked down from the kitchen window toward the shanties, she could see him hammering laths onto a broken lobster trap and readying the bait buckets for the morning. His cap was pushed back upon his head and the evening sun caught the golden highlights of his burnished hair. He looked up once and her hand tightened upon the cloth she was holding. Her mother asked her if she would like some tea.
It was into the next week before she again walked down by the shanties. He was sitting on a lobster crate splicing rope. As she went by she thought she heard him say Aite
na cruinneachadh. She quickened her step as she felt her colour rise, hoping or perhaps imagining that he had said “the meeting place.” She went there immediately, down to the bay of shipwrecks and the table rock, and waited. She faced out to the sea and sat in such a way that she could not see him not coming if that was the way it was supposed to be. The dog sat at her feet and neither of them moved when he came to stand beside them.
“I told you I’d come back,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh yes. You did.”
In the weeks that followed they went more frequently to the meeting place. Standing and later sitting on the table rock and looking out across the vastness of the sea. Talking more and sometimes laughing and, in retrospect, she could not remember when he asked her to marry him but only that she had burst into tears when she said “Oh yes” and they joined their hands on the flatness of the table rock which was still warm from the retained heat of the descending sun. “Oh yes,” she had said. “Oh yes. Oh yes.”
He planned to work in a sawmill, he said, after the lobster season was done; and then in the fall or early winter, after the snows began to fall and the ground became frozen, he would go to work in the winter woods of Maine. He would return to fish with the same man the next spring and then in the summer they would marry. They would go then, he said, “to live somewhere else.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes, we will.”
It was in the late fall, on the night following a day of cold and slanting rain, that she was awakened by the dog pulling at the blankets that lay so heavily upon her bed. She sat up, even as she shivered and pulled the blankets about her shoulders, and tried to adjust her eyes to the darkness of the room. The rain slanted against the window with a pinging sound which meant that it was close to hail, and even in the darkness she could see the near-white pellets visible for a moment before they vanished on the pane. The eyes of the dog seemed to glow in the dark and she felt the cold wetness of its nose when she extended her hand beyond the boundary of the bed. She could smell the wetness of its coat, and when she moved her hand across its head and down its neck the water filmed upon her palm. She got up then, throwing on what clothes she could find in the darkness of the room, and followed the clacking nails of the dog as it moved down the hallway and past the closed door behind which her parents snored, sometimes snoring regularly and at other times with fitful catches in their sound. She went down through the kitchen and through the tiny puddles caused by the rain slanting through the opened door. Outside it was wet and windy although nothing like a gale and she followed the dog down the darkened path. In a single white instant she saw the dark shape of the boat bobbing at the wharf and his straight but dripping form by the corner of the shanties.
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