The creaky door of the summer shanty yielded easily to his familiar shoulder. Inside it was slightly musty although the wind persisted through some of the unsealed cracks. Their eyes adjusted to the gloom and the few sticks of basic furniture that remained. The primitive mattresses had been stored away to protect them from mice and the dampness of the sea. They held one another in their urgency and lay upon the floor fumbling with the encumbrances of their clothes. She felt the wet burden of his garments almost heavy upon her although the length of his body seemed light within them.
“Oh,” she said, digging her fingers into the dampness of his neck, “when we are married we can do this all the time.”
At the moment of explosion their breaths bonded into a single gasp that bordered on a cry.
She thought of this later as she passed the closed door of her parents’ room. Thought of how her breath and his had become one, and contrasted it with the irregular individual snoring which came from beyond her parents’ door. She could not imagine them ever being young.
The same wonder was there the next morning as she watched her father in his undershirt preparing the fire and later going to polish the thick glass of the lighthouse lamp. She watched her mother washing the dishes and then reaching for her knitting needles and the always-present ball of yarn.
She went outside and walked down towards the shanties. The door was pulled tight and she had a hard time getting it to move. Inside it all seemed different, probably, she thought, because of the daylight. She looked at the grey boards of the floor thinking she might see the outline of their bodies or even a spot of dampness but there was nothing. She went outside and walked to the wharf, to the spot where the dark boat was moored, but again there was no sign. He had “borrowed” the boat of the man he had fished with and had to have it back before dawn.
The wind was rising as the temperature was dropping. The hail-like rain had given way to stinging snow and the ground was beginning to freeze. She touched her body to see if it had been a dream.
As the winter began she was alive with the prospect of marriage. She sent for her birth certificate without ever revealing why and helped her mother with the knitting. As the winter deepened she looked at the calendar more often.
When the ice began to rot and break in the spring she looked out the window more frequently. It seemed like a later spring than usual although her father said there was nothing unusual about it. One day the channel would be clear of ice but the next day it would again be solid. The wind shifted and blew from inconsistent directions. On the mainland they could see, or imagined they could see, men moving about and readying their gear for the opening of the season. Because of the ice they were still afraid to launch their boats into the water. They all looked very small and far away.
When the first boats finally came, the dogs ran down to the wharf barking and snarling and her father went down also, calling to the dogs and welcoming the men and telling them not to be afraid. She looked out the window but did not see him in the boats or on the wharf nor moving about the familiar shanties. But neither did she see the mainland man he fished with nor his boat.
When her father came in he was filled with news and carried some fresh supplies and a bundle of newspapers and a bag of mail.
In the midst of all the newness it was a long time before he mentioned the mainland fisherman’s name and added, almost as an afterthought, “That young man who fished with him last year was killed in the woods this winter. Went to Maine and was killed on a skidway. He’s looking for another man right now.”
When her father spoke he was already looking at a marine catalogue and had put on his glasses. He raised his eyes above the rims of his spectacles as he lowered the catalogue and looked toward them. “You remember him,” he said without emotion, “the young fellow with the red hair.”
“Oh poor fellow,” said her mother. “God have mercy on his soul.”
“Oh,” was all she could say. Her hands tightened so whitely on the metal knitting needles that the point of one pierced and penetrated the ball of her thumb.
“Your hand is bleeding,” said her mother. “What happened? You’ll have to be more careful or you’ll get blood on your knitting and everything will be ruined. What happened?” she asked again. “You’ll have to be more careful.”
“Nothing,” she said, rising quickly and going to the door. “Nothing at all. Yes, I’ll have to be more careful.”
She went outside and looked down towards the shanties where the newly arrived men were busy preparing for the new spring season. The banter of their voices seemed to float on the current of the wind. Sometimes she could hear their actual words but at other times they were lost and unknown. She could not believe the magnitude and suddenness of change. Could not believe the content of the news nor the method of its arrival. Could not believe that news of such outstanding impact could arrive in such a casual manner and mean so little to all of those around her.
She looked down at her bloodied hand. “Why didn’t he write?” she asked herself and considered going back in to recheck the contents of the mailbag. But then she thought that both of them were beyond letters and that in the instant of his death it was already too late for that. She did not even know if he could read or write. She had never thought to ask. It had not seemed important at the time. The blood was beginning to darken and dry upon her palm and between her fingers. Suddenly last winter, although it was barely over, seemed like a long, long time ago. She pressed her hand against her stomach and turned her face away from the mainland and the sea.
When it became obvious that she was expecting a child there was great wonder as to how it came to be. She herself was rather surprised that no one had ever seen them together. It was true that she had always walked “over” or “across” the island while he had walked “around,” seeming to emerge suddenly and unexpectedly out of the sea by the table rock of their meeting place. Still the island was small and, especially during the fishing season, there was little opportunity for privacy. Perhaps, she thought, they had been more successful, in some ways, than they planned. It was as if he had been invisible to everyone but herself. She was struck by this and tried to relive over and over again their last damp meeting in the dark. Only the single instant of his dark silhouette in the lighthouse beam was recallable to vision. All the rest of it had been touching in the dark. She remembered the lightness of his body in his dark, wet clothes, but it was a memory of feeling rather than of sight. She had never seen him with all his clothes off. Had never slept with him in a bed. She had no photograph to emphasize reality. It was as if in vanishing from her future he had also vanished from her past. It was almost as if he had been a ghost, and as she advanced in her pregnancy she found the idea strangely attractive.
“No,” she kept saying to the pressure of their questions. “I don’t know. I can’t say. No, I can’t tell you what he looked like.”
She wavered only twice. The first time was a week before her delivery at a time when the approximate date of the conception was more than obvious. They were all on the mainland and the late August heat shimmered in layers above the clear deep water. The shape of the island loomed grey and blue and green across the channel and she who had wished to leave it now wished she might return. They were at her aunt’s house and she would remain there until her baby would be born. She and her aunt had never liked each other, and it bothered her now to be dependent upon her. Before her parents left to return to the island they came into her room accompanied by the aunt, who turned to her father and said, “Well, go ahead. Tell her what people are saying.”
She was shocked to see the pained embarrassment on his face as he twisted his cloth cap and looked out the window in the direction of the island.
“It is just the way we live,” he said. “Some say there was no other man.”
She remembered the erratic snoring coming from her parents’ room and how she could not imagine that they ever had been young.
“Oh,” she sai
d. “I’m sorry.”
“Is that all you have to say for yourself?” said her aunt.
She wavered a moment. “Yes,” she said. “That’s all. That’s all I have to say.”
After the birth of her daughter with the jet black hair, she received a visit from the clergyman. He was an old man, although not as old as she imagined the one who had confused her own birth records, it seemed to her, so very long ago.
At that time it was in the power of clergymen to refuse to christen children unless they knew the identities of both parents. In cases such as hers the identities could be kept as confidential.
“Well,” he said. “Can you tell me who the father is?”
“No,” she said. “I can’t say.”
He looked at her as if he had heard it all before. And as if it were an aspect of his job he did not greatly like. He looked at her daughter and back at her. “We wouldn’t want innocent people to burn in hell because of the wilfulness of others,” he said.
She was startled and frightened and looked toward the window.
“Tell me,” he said quietly. “Is it your father?”
She thought for a flash of her own unexpected birth and of how her father was surprised again although the situation was so very much different.
“No,” she said firmly. “It isn’t him.”
He seemed vastly relieved. “Good,” he said. “I didn’t think he would ever do anything like that. I will stop the rumours.”
He moved toward the door as if one answer were all answers but then he hesitated with his hand upon the knob. “Tell me then,” he said, “one more thing. Do I know him? Is he from around here?”
“No,” she said, gaining confidence from seeing his hand upon the knob. “He isn’t from around here at all.”
That fall she stayed on the mainland until quite late into the season. It seemed as if her daughter were constantly sick and each time the journey was planned a new variation of illness appeared to stifle the departure. Out on the island her parents seemed to grow old all at once, or maybe it was just that she saw them in a different light. Of course they had always seemed old to her and she had often thought of having grandparents for parents. But now they seemed for the first time to be almost afraid of the island and the coming of winter. Never since the first year of their marriage had they been there without a child. When her father fell from the ladder leading up to the lighthouse lamp it was almost as if the fall and the broken arm had been expected.
Ever since her grandfather’s death from “a pain in the side,” the Government had more or less left them alone. It was as if the officials had been embarrassed by the widow’s reluctance to tell them of her husband’s death and by her fear that she might lose, in addition to her husband, the only income the family possessed. It was as if the officials had understood that “some MacPhedran” would always be on the island that bore the name and that no further questions ever would be asked. The cheques always arrived and the light always shone.
But when her father fell it brought a deeper seriousness. He could neither climb to the light nor navigate the boat across the channel, nor manage, quite, to look after the house and buildings and the animals. It seemed best that they should all try to stay on the mainland for the winter.
Her brother came home from Halifax, reluctantly, and manned the light deep into fall. He was a single man who worked on construction crews and who drank quite heavily at times and was given to moods of deep depression. He was uneasy about the island although he understood it and was regarded as “an excellent man in a boat.” At the beginning of the winter he said to his father, who stood in the departing boat, “I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to stay here at all.”
“Oh,” said his father, “you’ll get used to it,” which was what they had always said to one another.
But it seemed he did not get used to it. Deep in the blizzards of February one of the island dogs crossed on the ice to the mainland and came to a familiar door. It was impossible to see or move for three days because of the severe temperatures and the force of the wind-driven snow. Impossible for a man to stand upright in the wind or, as they said, for one “to see the palm of his hand in front of his face.” When the storm abated four men started across the vast white landscape of the ice. They could feel parts of their exposed faces freezing and the exhaled moisture of their breath froze upon their eyebrows and they could see their eyelashes drooping heavily with ice. As they neared the island’s wharf they could see that it was almost buried under gigantic pans of ice. Some of the pans had been pushed so far up on the shore that they almost tilted against the doors of the summer shanties. There was no smoke from the chimney of the house. The dogs came down snarling and circling at first, but the one who had crossed to the mainland had returned and had a calming effect upon the others. The door of the house was open and the stove was cold. The water in the crockery teapot had frozen, causing the teapot itself to split into two delicate halves. There was nobody in any of the rooms and no answer to their calls. Outside, the barn doors were open and swinging in the wind. The animals were all dead, still tied and frozen in their stalls. The frozen flesh of some of them had been gnawed on by the dogs.
It seemed his coat and cap and winter mitts were missing, but that was all. A loaded rifle and a shotgun were hanging in the porch. The men started a fire in the stove and made themselves something to eat from the store of winter provisions. Later they went outside again. Some walked across the island and some walked around it. They found no tracks other than their own. They looked at the dogs for a signal or a sign. They even spoke to them and asked them questions but they received nothing in return. He had vanished like his tracks beneath the winter snow.
The men remained for the night and the next day crossed back to the mainland. They told what they had found and not found. The sun shone, and although it was a weak February sun it was stronger than it had been a week earlier. It melted the ice upon the window panes and someone pointed out that the days were getting longer and that the winter was more than halfway over.
Under the circumstances they decided to go back but to leave the baby behind.
“There seems almost more reason to go back now,” said her father, looking through the melting ice on the windows. His broken arm had healed, although he knew it would never be the same.
She was often to think of why she went back, although at the time there seemed little conscious thought surrounding the decision. While her parents were willing to leave the island to the care of their son they were not willing to abandon it to others. They had found life on the mainland not as attractive as it sometimes seemed when viewed from across the water. They also seemed bothered by the complicated shafts of guilt concerning their lost son and their headstrong daughter, and while these shafts might persist on the island there would be no people to emphasize and expose them. She, herself, as the child of their advanced years, seemed suddenly willing to consider herself old also and to identify with the past now that her future seemed to point in that direction.
She went back with almost a bitter gladness. Glad to leave her carping aunt and her mainland family behind, although worried about leaving her sickly daughter in their care. Still, she knew they were right to say that the winter island was no place for a sick child and she felt also that if she did not go her parents could not manage.
“Who will climb up to the light?” asked her father simply. They viewed her youth as their immediate salvation and thought of her as their child rather than as someone else’s mother.
It seemed a long time since the red-haired man had asked her to marry him and to share his life in the magical region of “somewhere else.” In her persistent refusal to identify him she had pushed him so far back into the recesses of her mind that he seemed even more ghostly than before. She thought sometimes of his body in the dark and of his silhouette by the sea. She was struck by the mystery of his age – if he had an age it had suddenly “stopped” and he had become p
art of a kind of timelessness – unlike the visible deterioration she witnessed in her father.
In the winter cold of February they returned with a certain sense of relief, each harbouring individual reasons. Because of her youth she did most of the work, dressing in her father’s heavy, shapeless clothes and following easily the rituals and routines that had become part of her since childhood. More and more her parents remained close to the stove, talking in Gaelic and sometimes playing cards or merely looking at the fire or out the frosted windows.
When March came in with its howling blizzards it seemed that they had been betrayed by the fickle promise of the February sun, and although her father’s will was strong his aging body seemed also to contribute to a pattern of betrayal. He was close to eighty and it seemed that each day there was another function which his body refused to perform. It was as if it had suddenly grown tired and was in the process of forgetting.
One day when there was a lull in the storms some of their relatives crossed the ice with a horse and sleigh. They were shocked at the condition and appearance of her father, seeing him changed “suddenly” after an absence of weeks while those who were with him had seen him change but gradually. They insisted that he return with them while the weather was good and the ice still strong. Reluctantly he agreed on the condition that his wife go with him.
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