Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  She taught her children to be observant, to see the wonderful, unexpected architecture of an ant’s nest glistening like molten lava in the sun. Listen to the crickets, she said. Look at the mallard ducks, how they swim in pairs, peaceably. Look at the dragonflies, filled with light, primitive, unsteady, like ancient aircraft. Even: Look at this robin’s egg, shattered, vacant, useless. Look at this dead raccoon, its paws stiff as hooks. Go ahead, look, she said. It won’t hurt you to look.

  She had a recurring dream, only it was more the memory of a dream that recurred, rather than the dream itself. In the dream she got up from her bed and went outside. She crawled through the hedge and crouched there in its shelter. She could see Arthur Daisy by his shed, the door swinging open, and inside the shed it seemed there was a greater darkness than the dark of night. There was Arthur Daisy, striking with his shovel at the ground, which had baked hard as clay after a long drought interrupted only by that one downpour the day the search party went out with the dogs and all the other useless things they took, sticks to beat down the grass and maps and walkie-talkie radios. All of them searching in the wrong place. Saffi was the only one who knew. But who would listen to her? What was true and what was something else, a made-up story?

  It happened on the seventh day of the seventh month; Saffi was seven years old. She saw the sevens in a line, affronted, braced like sailors, their little tongues of flame licking at the air. They linked up and made a barbed-wire fence no one could get through. They made a prison house no one could enter.

  A mist was rising over the yard. In the mist was a turtledove. The bird-boy wasn’t lost anymore. He wasn’t a boy waiting near a riverbank for a shape to appear comic and deceptive and dangerous as a troll. He was indeed a turtledove, soaring higher and higher, giving the night a sort of radiance that came from within, his soul or spirit shining out. In the dream Saffi spoke to herself kindly, saying, Hush, hush, it’s all right. It will be all right. And the only sound that came to her from the soundless well of her dream was the ringing of a shovel against the unyielding earth.

  HOME SCHOOLING

  IT BEGAN WITH THREE SISTERS who lived in a cottage beside the sea. Except the cottage wasn’t beside the sea, it was some distance away, and it wasn’t a cottage, it was an old farmhouse, and the farm was no longer a farm, it was a boarding school. Then something happened, a tragic, unforeseeable accident. One night a boy called Randal walked out of his dormitory and was found some hours later in the salt marsh. He had drowned. Less than three years after it had opened, the school closed. On a cold April day parents began arriving to collect their children. At first they refused to speak to the school’s principal, Harold Dorland. Annabel and Sophie saw their father trying to placate the parents. They heard him pleading for understanding, a little consideration, a little time. He was waved angrily away. The parents mentioned their lawyers. They accused Harold of incompetence, misconduct, negligence. Harold reeled. A cold wind stirred the trees; rain began to fall. The parents got in their cars with their children and drove to the wharf, where they caught the ferry back to Vancouver Island. And then the school reverted to a farm on which very little farming ever got done.

  Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, Annabel and Sophie looked in the windows of the deserted dormitories, at the cots stripped bare, locker doors hanging open, nothing inside but dust and cobwebs and mouse turds. Annabel missed the children. She missed their laughter, their silly jokes, their earnestness and ineffable patience. Just children, and yet how patient they’d been with Harold’s pedagogy, which he insisted wasn’t pedagogy, but a flamboyant careless engagement with life’s unevenness and unpredictability and wildness. Wildness tamed, that was, lined-up and biddable, waiting for further instruction before ripping itself loose and going on a rampage.

  “Everything this family does is doomed,” Sophie said. In her opinion, the school would have failed even if Randal hadn’t drowned. Anyway, he’d only done it to get Nori’s attention and sympathy, she said, and for that she’d never forgive him. Sophie could say anything and get away with it, because she was Sophie, with her precise, delicate beauty and her formidable musical talent. Annabel might at times almost hate her sister, but she also loved her. They were, after all, marooned together on this stupid island with no television or movies and they couldn’t afford new clothes and, since they were small, they’d been taught at home by Harold and Nori and had only ever had each other for company. Poor darlings, Sophie liked to say, of her and Annabel. She meant it.

  Harold’s school was, or had been, called Miramonte. When they first came here Annabel had discovered the name carved into a rock near the front gates. When she’d shown it to Harold, he’d said how interesting: the apartment building where he’d lived in San Jose, the auspicious year he’d met their mother, was called the Miramonte. He’d considered the coincidence a good omen. He’d called to Nori, who had been up near the house hanging laundry out on a clothesline, to come and see. She’d picked Mika up and walked down the driveway to where Harold and Annabel were standing. “I remember that apartment,” she’d said. She’d handed Mika to Harold and had drawn a finger lightly over the carved letters, then wiped her hand on her jeans. “It isn’t a name I’d pick,” she’d said, her voice cool.

  “What would you pick?” Harold had asked. Nori had said she didn’t have time to think about it. She’d taken Mika from Harold — Mika was still a baby, less than a year old, when they came to the island — and trudged back up the drive to the waiting basket of cold, wet laundry. Harold had brushed dust and grass seed off the rock. The name shone out at him, a light in darkness, Annabel could see, although in truth the letters were weathered, malformed, with a dark greenish tincture, like verdigris on copper.

  Annabelle saw first the woman’s hands, bruised and scratched from her work. Then she saw her laced-up shoes, blunt at the toes, with rundown heels and draggled laces. The woman’s unruly reddish hair tumbled from under a rain-spotted, wide-brimmed hat. She crouched near the rock. I gave our home this name, she seemed to say. Another time, the woman stood in the field near the forest, not alone, but with a companion. Annabel saw them and they saw her, she knew they did. Their names were Jane and Fredericka. Their story went something like this: in the early 1930s they came to the island and purchased five acres of low-lying land on Mariner Road, where they built a house, the same house Annabel lived in now. Jane, it was said, had been escaping a jealous husband — and a child, according to some versions of the story — and Fredericka, who was called Freddy, had given up a promising career in the civil service to be with Jane. On the island they could walk arm in arm along the beach, go skinny-dipping, hold hands outdoors, run through the grass with their hair streaming in the wind, their faces flushed with exertion and laughter. They could do as they pleased, with no one to give them curious looks, not that they would have cared.

  Jane shot wild ducks and quail. Freddy dug clams at low tide and kept chickens and acquired an amphibious car that she navigated across the channel to town when she needed to stock up on supplies. Annabel knew these things about Fredericka and Jane because Patrick had told her. When he was six years old, Jane and Freddy would let him feed their chickens and play with the newborn kittens in a cardboard box on the back porch. They’d invited him to their house and fed him treacly oatmeal cookies that stuck to his teeth. They poured glasses of homemade blackberry cordial, sunlight reflected like clotted cream in its murky depths. Iron pots the size of cauldrons simmering on the stove, a mousetrap in a corner, a Westminster clock that chimed the quarter hours.

  Patrick was Annabel’s best friend — and more than her friend — but she didn’t tell him Jane and Fredericka appeared to her at Miramonte. They belonged to her. If she spoke of them, she was afraid they’d vanish, they’d turn into air. She thought of Macbeth: “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,/And these are of them.”

  Jane was tall and thin. She wore breeches and a wide-brimmed straw hat to shade her face and went around
with a shotgun tucked under her arm. Freddy wore a chambray shirt and a voluminous khaki skirt. Her eyes had a hectic, unfocused lustre; dry leaves were tangled in her lank ropes of hair. At night, when Annabel was on her way to meet Patrick, Freddy and Jane followed her as far as the road.

  “We hope you know what you’re doing,” Freddy said.

  “Remember,” Jane said, “the joy of love endures but a single moment, while the pain of love lasts a whole life long. That’s something to think about, isn’t it?”

  Nori used to play “Plaisir d’Amour” on the piano. She played it for the boy who’d drowned in the salt marsh. The salt marsh was out of bounds, the only place on the island forbidden to Annabel and Sophie. Until Randal’s accident, Harold had believed nothing should be proscribed. Not the dark, cold forests of fir and cedar and hemlock, or the stands of alder and cascara and small-leafed bitter cheery. Not the salt marsh with its weird vegetation: skunk cabbages, bulrushes, rotting trees incubating fleshy, tumour-like funguses with names like Dead Man’s Fingers, Witches’ Butter, and False Chanterelle. In the spring their inky spores gave the air a baleful hue, along with a faintly noxious chemical odour carried by the wind as far as the house, where it made everyone feel sadder and more on edge than they already were. Her parents were scarcely on speaking terms. Her father did nothing about putting up a secure fence, a requirement, according to the government inspector, if he wanted to reopen the school. Instead, her father sat at his desk in the school staring at nothing. He stayed up late at night going over bank statements. Annabel’s mother tried to make one chicken last for three meals. Sophie wrote obsessively in her journal and practised her violin, standing on an overturned washtub in the front yard. Mika sucked her thumb and clung to her mother all day.

  What could Annabel do? She had her own life. Your eyes kissed mine, I saw the love in them shine.

  While her parents and her sisters slept and moonlight sparkled on the sea and bats and nighthawks and owls were on the wing and racoons went waddling down to the beach with their kittenish young, she climbed out of her bedroom window, inched her way along the sloping porch roof and jumped to the ground.

  Blue Heron Road cut off from Mariner Road at a sharp angle and then meandered through the trees down to the sea, where an abandoned house stood in a clearing above the beach. This was where Annabel and Patrick met. Tonight, Patrick was late. Annabel waited. She walked around the house and then she pushed open the back door and went inside. It was a plain little house, with four rooms downstairs and four rooms upstairs. The glass was missing in almost all the windows. Wallpaper hung in strips that stirred spookily in the wind. The plaster and lathe walls were stained with water and mould. The linoleum was cracked. In the kitchen the cupboard doors were gone, the hearth tiles ripped up, bricks from the chimney pried from the mortar and left scattered around the floor. Somewhere, something made a hollow, tinny sound. The house breathed in and out, like a living thing. Shadows crept along the walls. Annabel couldn’t stay in there alone. She ran back outside and sat on the steps, her heart thudding. She thought, What if, in the dark, Patrick had ridden his ten-speed off the road? What if he’d hit his head on a rock? Or what if he was rowing the skiff around the point and it had capsized? Or say his mother had made him stay at home? What if he’d fallen asleep? He needed more sleep than she did. He could fall asleep anywhere. Not her. She never got tired.

  To calm herself she went through the Dewey Decimal Classification System in her head; by the time she got to the 500s — natural sciences and mathematics — Patrick was there. He took her hand and they went into the house. They had this little ritual, walking into each of the rooms. They liked to pick which one they’d sleep in and where they’d put their furniture if they lived here. The truth was, they had slept in nearly all the rooms. It had taken them eight nights to accomplish this.

  Annabel took off her clothes, putting them in a little pile on the counter, beside a stained sink with a rusty pump handle to draw water up from the well, but either the well had dried up permanently or the pump didn’t work. Patrick pulled his T-shirt over his head. He took off his jeans and socks. He and Annabel put their shoes side by side on the floor. A place for everything, and everything in its place, Patrick said. His skin gleamed like marble in the moonlight. He took Annabel’s hand. They climbed the stairs. Sometimes they didn’t make it as far as the second floor. Sometimes they got only as far as the landing, where Annabel ordered Patrick to remain perfectly still. She began kissing his face and shoulders and chest. She traced his ribs with her mouth. She pressed her face to his heart and felt the lovely unstoppable beat of it. And then he wrapped his hands in her hair, her long hair, and together, one creature, of one flesh and disposition, they sank to the floor.

  They left the house at nearly two in the morning. Patrick wheeled his bike up the lane to the road. Annabel kept looking back at the house, starkly outlined against the starry sky. The house was a small planet with its own field of gravity, its own infallible laws of time and motion. Once they got beyond its reach, things changed. Patrick changed. When he and Annabel were in each other’s arms, he’d tell her he was going to buy the house, tear it down and construct a new one in its place. Wherever they went in the world, they’d always find their way home. When they got old, they’d live here happily, with their memories. Annabel believed him. Everything he said seemed possible and sensible. He was nineteen. He was studying to be a scientist, which presented a problem, he said, since science wasn’t something he could do on this island. He spoke like this when they were walking away from the house. Buying the house was a crazy dream, he said. He didn’t mean to end up like his parents, operating a little marina and general store no one frequented on an island so small it took less than two hours to walk around it at low tide.

  When they got to Marina Road, Annabel said, “Don’t go.” She didn’t know if she meant don’t go now or don’t go ever.

  “Annabel, I have to get some sleep,” he said. It was either very, very late, or very early, one or the other, he said, and at six in the morning he had to open the gas pumps at the marina.

  “But I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” Patrick said. “I don’t think I can get away. Not tomorrow. Maybe not the night after, either.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t get away?” Annabel said.

  “You’re wearing me out,” Patrick said, laughing.

  Annabel kissed him and bit lightly at his neck. “See,” she said. “You’re not worn out, you liar.”

  “Annabel,” he said. “Don’t. I’ve got to go.”

  “Tomorrow night? Promise?”

  “I can’t. I can’t promise.”

  “You can,” she said. “You have to.”

  She watched him pedalling down the road until all she could see of him in the moonlight was his hair and his T-shirt. Then he turned a corner and she couldn’t see him at all. In the ditches on either side of the road frogs were croaking their sad froggy lament. She walked to Miramonte and detoured over to the schoolhouse. She tried the door, but it was locked, so she sat on the doorstep. She remembered how, when she and Sophie had been the school’s first two pupils, the only pupils, Harold would stand in the schoolhouse door and ring a cast-iron bell he’d found at a junk store in Portland, Oregon. Sophie and Annabel had walked out of the house and down the path with their books and pens and gym shoes, as if they were real students going to a real school. It was all pretense and they knew it. They went along with it. Harold taught them mathematics and history and read Hamlet to them, and Macbeth. He took all the parts. He stormed around, shaking his fist and declaiming. Out, out, brief candle. The truth of the world is in poetry, he said. He read to them from William Wordsworth. He assigned essays and put algebra problems up on the chalkboard. While Annabel and Sophie worked, he read Wittgenstein, Rudolph Steiner, A. S. Neil, and John Holt, who, as Harold liked to point out, had also taught fifth grade for a number of years at private schools, just as Harold h
ad.

  Annabel had rested her head on her hand and tapped her fingers against her skull. Her skull was a vessel for her brain and her brain was a pale tuber. One day it would send forth its green shoots. Harold provided the sunlight and the nutrients and she was the raw material. She and Sophie both. With their music and drawing, their photographic memories and aptitude for making sense of the obscure and unreasonable, which was not an underutilized gift when you had Harold for a father.

  Annabel saw someone running across the grass. For a moment she thought of Jane and Freddy; she thought of the boy who had drowned. In this place a shadow could be anything: a deer, a dog on the loose, an owl, a spirit. But it was Sophie. She was wearing a sweater over her nightgown. She didn’t see Annabel. She flew into the night like one of those creatures that belongs to it: a bat, a nightingale, a firefly; not that they had nightingales or fireflies on the island. Sophie ran to the gate and then out to the road, taking the same route Annabel had taken a few hours ago on her way to meet Patrick. The frogs sang. The trees stirred in a light wind. Where was Sophie going? Later, Annabel would think: Why didn’t I run after her? Why didn’t I catch up to her and make her tell me what she was up to? Instead, she went back to the house and climbed onto the porch roof and into the window. Just before dawn she heard Sophie creeping up the stairs and getting into bed. Later, when Annabel went into the kitchen, Sophie was already at the stove, stirring a pot of oatmeal. Harold was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. Nori was at the counter, sprinkling yeast into water and sifting flour for bread. Mika sat on the floor playing with her doll. Harold rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palms.