The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  He opened his book and stared into it, seeing nothing. At the front of the room, their conversation ran on. Joe looked up again and saw, on her cheek, that pale dusted whiteness, a burn, or a birthmark: the brand of the evening on the river.

  She, too, was speaking French. He thought she sounded French, the way she rounded the sounds, savouring them before she sped them on their way with protruding lips. Mr. Kay’s wide, grinning face — at the moment it seemed an overgrown boy’s face — had reddened.

  Joe turned a page. But it was all a charade now. He might have been an actor pretending to read while he waited to say his next lines. He kept looking up at her, at her dress cut in a low square at the back, exposing tanned, ideal skin; at the thin silver bangle she toyed with at her wrist. Her light voice had a trace of something low in it, an impure chest note that thrilled and obscurely frightened him. He listened to their conversation with dry mouth, half-resenting her arrival: he had been happy with his life.

  What were they talking about? Though he’d always done well in French, he was lost before the effortless flow of their talk: it was something about France, he thought, or was it Switzerland? Something about picnics and cheese and the price of coffee — or was it cafés? In the street, Vern Melling’s truck rumbled by, carrying a small mountain of fly-circled trash, and from a juniper bush below the window a bee floated up, testing the flow of cooler air along the glass.

  The rest of the class began to arrive, a hubbub of voices and flung gym bags and books slapped down on desks. The girl in the light-green dress looked around, curiously. She did not see — though Joe saw — how in the aisle behind her Elaine Brown hugged her books to her chest and directed a tolerant smile at the interloper who had stolen her desk.

  “Bien!” Mr. Kay said loudly: their signal to quiet down. “Alors mes amis,” he said. A book dropped, and through the open window the bee floated in, drifting upwards towards the fluorescent lights.

  The teacher discovered Elaine, waiting.

  “Ah Elaine! Ton banc!”

  “C’est votre banc?” the girl said. Silence was spreading through the room as the others became aware of her.

  The girl started to rise, but Elaine said she was happy to sit at the back. “You’re sure?” the girl said. In her voice was a hint of laughter, as if she were secretly enjoying this bit of confusion. Hugging her books, Elaine walked to the back, smiling a prim, self-congratulatory smile.

  Speaking in French, Mr. Kay introduced the new girl: Anna Macrimmon. The name sounded odd to Joe, a patch of rocky land amidst the smooth lawns of the French. She had turned to the class and Joe looked again into her face, drinking every detail: the birthmark on her cheek, the faint Asiatic slope of the eyes, a pale, unusual green under her dark and well-defined brows. Her bobbed hair with its thick bangs gave her a tomboyish look, he thought.

  “Bonjour,” she said to the whole class.

  One or two ragged bonjours answered back.

  “Non, non,” Mr. Kay admonished. “Encore! Plus fort!”

  They managed it better the second time. Joe was chagrined, on her behalf. Their welcome must have seemed childish to her, he thought, like something in grade school.

  Mr. Kay handed out scrap paper. The test was about to begin. The teacher’s brogues squeaked as he paced slowly at the front of the room, reading out, en anglais, the sentences they were to translate. “He will have come. You ought to stay. She will have been there.” Pens scratched and tapped in the pauses. Anna Macrimmon tilted her head to the side as she studied what she had written. The wing of her hair fell forward, and she tucked it back behind her ear. He saw that her ear stuck out a little, a flaw of sorts. Above, the bee followed the fluorescent lights and then abruptly glided down to touch the poster of the Roman theatre at Orange: the golden ruins under their blue, savage sky.

  In small groups, the students of 13A walked along a sidewalk white as bone and as straight as a runway, between the carports and burnt lawns of the new housing development known as the Shade Survey. Every year, Mr. Mann invited his senior history class to lunch at his home. Joe trudged along beside Smiley, who was telling some story about how he and Freddie Farmer had been nearly killed on the weekend. They’d been driving along the Johnsonville Highway, going almost ninety, Smiley said, and it wasn’t only dark, it was foggy, and suddenly they’d noticed the road curving away to the right and they were headed to the left, into God only knew what. “Shit, man,” Smiley said, and a great happiness shone in his deep-set eyes, “I thought we’d bought it.”

  But a lane had appeared in the headlights. They’d run over a gate and smashed the grill on Freddie Farmer’s dad’s car, but otherwise no damage done.

  Thirty yards ahead, Anna Macrimmon was walking between Liz McVey and Elaine Brown. Joe caught the back of her head, vanishing and reappearing among intervening bodies. Even when he lost sight of her, or looked elsewhere — at the sidewalk, or into Smiley’s tiny eyes, racooned with fatigue — he could sense her presence, a peculiar, magnetic darkness in the blazing sun. He had failed his French test, and had an intimation that worse lay ahead. His lack of a shower had left him sweating, a disaster when he considered that he was also wearing his red-and-white-checked sports shirt. The cloth was cheap, and stank as his sweat reacted with the dye.

  They went up the narrow drive between high cedar hedges, past the plaque that told them that Abraham Shade, the founder of Attawan, had built this house in 1823. Then the house itself appeared, a long, low cottage with unshuttered windows, surrounded by tall locusts. Patches of sun trembled on its walls of whitewashed plaster. The blue door stood open.

  They sat on the parched front lawn, under the huge, arthritic locusts, while Mann talked to them with his back to the valley of the Shade. The teacher — Joe’s mentor and favourite — was a slim, rather short man, his heavy eyelids pouched with melancholy, his thinning white hair combed forward in points like Julius Caesar. He spoke more quietly than any of their teachers and, on the whole, said less. Yet there was something in his slow, abraded speech that held them, a kind of casual sincerity, as though it would be impossible for him to say anything but what he actually thought. He was retiring at the end of the year.

  Mann spoke of Abraham Shade and his house. Behind him, the valley floated in late-summer sun. Details were visible, miniaturized by distance: the webbing of the CN trestle and, glimpsed through its stone legs, the brown water of the Shade, easing towards the sheer line of the dam’s edge. Beyond, the Bridge Street bridge and the backs of the downtown stores seemed at once to move and to remain fixed above the metallic glint of the rapids. But what predominated was the vast, ecstatic light itself, a presence that seemed to lean off the still-hidden reaches of autumn.

  “Try to imagine,” Mann said, “another day like this. A hundred, five hundred years ago. Some things don’t change, at least not very quickly. This kind of light. The crickets. This has always been a good place to be. There are springs in the hillside, hardwood trees for timber and shade and fuel. Good soil. This view of the valley where you can see your friends or enemies approach.

  “Of course, other people knew this place before Shade did — Indian people. I’ve found arrowheads in the hillside, bits of pottery. We call our town Attawan, after these people, but in fact we have no idea what they called themselves. It was the Hurons who called them the Attawan — the full name, the correct name, is actually Attawandaeron, quite a mouthful. The word means, ‘People who speak a slightly different language,’ and it tells us that the people who lived around here spoke an Iroquoian dialect, not too different from the Hurons’ own. Anyway, these people, the Attawandaeron, disappeared about four hundred years ago. Disappeared completely,” Mann added, and paused. A cricket went on turning its squeaky wheel. Faintly, mournfully, a diesel horn sounded beyond the town. With Mann’s word “disappeared,” some profound absence had been summoned. All felt it, and were held by it.

  “What happened to them?” someone said finally, unable to bear the
tension. There was a stir among the others, a deepening of attention: they had to know if they themselves had survived this absence.

  Mann shrugged, and shook his head. “We don’t really know. They may have been wiped out by disease, or by Iroquois raiders coming up from the south. Maybe they made some bad political choice, you know, allied themselves with the wrong power. Maybe they didn’t keep up technologically — were too slow to get guns or other things made of iron. In any case, they’re gone, and we’ve inherited these late-summer days of theirs, which they must have found as lovely as we find them.”

  Mann paused, frowning at the ground as if slightly chagrined at his outburst of poetic sentiment. His audience remained still. He went on: “When Abraham Shade came here, in the early 1820s, he fell for this place immediately. We have his diaries’ word on that. He always said the place felt haunted to him. He and his family were the first whites to settle here, but he claimed he could sense the people who had lived here before, even though they’d been gone for, oh, two centuries or more at that point. It was his brother, John — John was a bit of a scholar, in an amateur nineteenth-century way — who told him what we know of the Indian people in this region. Shade decided to call the town after them. A lot of people didn’t like it at the time. There was quite a debate. But the name stuck …”

  By moving his head slightly, Joe could see Anna Macrimmon. She was sitting on the ground, under an oak tree, with her hands clasped around her shins, her chin lifted a little as she listened.

  They crowded into the long living room lined with books and comfortable-looking couches and chairs. Over the massive fieldstone fireplace hung a small, framed painting of mountains falling sheer to a glacial lake. In a corner sat a spinning wheel like some strange, upended wooden bicycle.

  It was the first time Joe had been in Mann’s house, the first time he’d looked into the teacher’s private life, and he was alive to every object. At the same time he felt uncomfortable and rushed, aware of his stinking shirt, and of the others who, with no idea how important this all was, crowded around Mann like cattle. He hated having to share Mann’s house with them, hated that Anna Macrimmon had come on this day of all days, when he wasn’t ready for her. He could sense her, somewhere in the hot press of bodies behind him.

  Mann said, “If you look down at the floor.”

  Joe looked down miserably at the wide, darkly gleaming boards. A drop of his sweat fell.

  “Usually, you’d expect pine floors in a pioneer house like this. But this is oak, two-inch oak laid across oak beams. In fact, again unusually, almost all the wood in the house is oak. Can anybody tell me why that might be?”

  Silence met his question. The brown eyes in the expressionless face swept slowly over them, challenging. While the pendulum clock ticked from the mantelpiece, a faint nervous urgency spread among the students: they knew the teacher was capable of waiting minutes for an answer.

  Joe put up his hand. Mann nodded at someone else.

  Brad Long spoke in his deep, pleasant voice, which easily filled the room with its usual hint of happy scorn — surely it was all so obvious! “There was lots of oak around here — it was handy. And also, being the kind of guy he was, he knew he wanted to be number one, so he put in the best.”

  “Good,” Mann said.

  Joe burned at the lost compliment: he knew as much. But Brad wasn’t through.

  “I guess he wanted us to stand here one day and admire him.” Brad raised his large hands and looked towards the ceiling, as if addressing a gallery of ancestors, looking down appreciatively on the scene from heaven. “Great floors, Abe!”

  The class laughed. Joe thought he heard Anna Macrimmon’s voice behind him, silver among the rest.

  They ate lunch outside. Joe took a sandwich and paper plate from the long table Mann had set out under the locusts and retreated to a shady spot near a concrete birdbath. Anna Macrimmon was still moving through the line. With her were Liz McVey and Sheila Benson, a pretty, sharp-featured girl with bouffanted hair and a hard, snorting laugh. They carried their plates to a little knoll under a tree and sat on the ground, tugging their skirts over their knees. A few minutes later, Joe watched as Brad Long joined them. He lowered his rangy frame onto the dry grass at their feet, stretching himself out with all the ease in the world — a Roman at a banquet — before the prim statuary of their folded legs.

  Brad raised his arm, gesturing lazily to make some point, and Joe saw how the cuff of his pale-blue shirt was turned back with a pleasing yet casual exactness, turned back once and kept there by some magical, gravity-defying power, unlike the cuffs of his own sad shirts, which fell down constantly unless they were rolled up several times. Now Brad’s laugh came, tolerant, self-enjoying, warm. Joe saw Anna Macrimmon shake her head in disbelief or denial, saw the heavy silk of her hair move like something alive. But she was smiling too, or fighting back a smile, as if to say, Go on with you.

  A little way off, a group of Brad’s friends — boys from the North End gang — were watching Brad with barely suppressed merriment, as if he were doing what they hadn’t the nerve to try themselves.

  Joe picked at his tuna-fish sandwich. Ever since he’d seen Anna Macrimmon that first afternoon on the river, she had seemed to exist for him only. And now she had become the property, in a sense, of everybody who cared to look at her, including Brad Long, who had no idea who she was, what her true value was, not really,

  “Yugga.”

  Smiley. He sat down cross-legged beside Joe, his plate loaded with booty.

  “Food,” he grunted, playing the caveman. Joe looked away.

  Mayonnaise leaked from Smiley’s mouth. “That new girl,” he said, “I keep thinkin’ I’ve seen her somewhere.”

  “How could that be?” Joe said coldly.

  Smiley ate with hunched, predatory enjoyment. “I dunno. It’s weird. She’s pretty good-lookin’.”

  Joe said nothing. Smiley looked up with staring frankness, his mouth open.

  “Don’t you think she’s good-lookin’?”

  “She’s all right. I haven’t really noticed.”

  “You should. She’s right over there.”

  To Joe’s horror, Smiley pointed.

  Joe looked off miserably across the lawn, over trembling islands of shade and sun, into a lilac bush. He wanted to start the day, his life, over again.

  “Not there. Over there.”

  “For Christ’s sake, I know where she is. Stop pointing!”

  After a moment Smiley said, “I wonder what that thing is on her face — you see that?”

  “No.”

  “Look at it. It’s like some kind of burn.”

  Joe lurched to his feet and started to walk quickly towards the house, picking his way among groups of students. Just then Mann emerged, carrying a pitcher of ice water. Normally Joe was happy to see the teacher. He liked to stop after class to talk with him, finding in his power of listening — that stillness — something that made his own thoughts rise and come clear. But he wasn’t ready for Mann now. He asked where the washroom was.

  Mann put down his pitcher and led Joe through the house, which sprawled to the rear through a series of additions. The teacher moved with surprising swiftness, his small feet in their worn, pointed shoes pattering on the tiles. The bathroom was behind the kitchen. “The old summer kitchen,” Mann said, and as he stepped back to let Joe pass, the teacher touched him lightly on the back.

  Joe closed the door, fit the bolt, stripped off his shirt, and began to wash his face and upper torso, sloshing up water almost wildly. His face in the mirror seemed an assembly of imperfections. Under his right eye, a pimple raised its minaret of shame. Patting himself dry, he studied a framed photo hanging beside the window. Two young men, both wearing shorts and white shirts, their arms draped loosely over each other’s shoulders, grinned back at him with abandoned smiles of pure happiness. Behind them soared the white, tentlike summit of a distant mountain. He saw with a start that one of the men wa
s Mann: Mann with dark curly hair, his eyes less pouched, Mann in the bright disguise of youth. The other man had the kind of smooth, almost feminine face Joe remembered from a painting he’d seen in a book: the unearthly face of an angel by Raphael. This is crazy, he thought, breaking suddenly from the image with a sense of alarm. I’ll speak to her. I have to speak to her.

  He passed through the house with a feeling that he was living under a sentence, a feeling that he was being dragged forward in a kind of dream-state by his decision. And yet, the whole time, he told himself he was free: maybe he’d speak to her, maybe he wouldn’t. He was afraid of his own cowardice, and half-looking forward to its intervention. When he reached the front step he glanced across the lawn and saw with thudding heart that she had got up, that she was moving away from the others with a paper cup in her hand, following the hedge that ran from Mann’s yard into the adjacent property.

  And then Mann was there. The teacher held up an old-fashioned-looking camera, with an accordion chamber of black fabric, and asked if he could take Joe’s picture. He’d taken every graduating class for years now, he said, candid shots, it had become a tradition. He positioned Joe against the door, softly gripping his biceps to move him back a little. As Mann frowned into his viewfinder, Joe watched Anna Macrimmon drift down the line of hedge, her head raised and tilted a bit to one side, as if skeptically.

  “There we go. Handsomest fellow in the class,” Mann said with a grin. A moment later, laconically: “I see we have a new girl.”

  “Yes.” Joe evaded the teacher’s eyes.

  “Why don’t you introduce me to her?”

  “I don’t really know her. She just came.”

  “Then we’ll introduce each other.”

  Walking with Mann under the locusts, he was under sentence again, marching out to his execution. They passed Smiley, who looked up from his sandwich. “Yugga,” his friend said quietly. As if he knew.