The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  39

  PENNY CAME DOWNSTAIRS with her soap carving. She felt elated, yet nervous, the carving — which she had been working on for weeks and shown to no one — cupped carefully in her right hand. When she saw her father in his chair in the living room, gazing into space as if into another world, she caught her breath. But she had come down hoping to find him: he was her favourite for showing her artwork to. Discovering her, his eyes blued.

  He held the little soap dog in his fingertips.

  Penny writhed with suspense at his knee. “It was supposed to be Red, but I think it’s — it’s just a dog,” she said, her heart falling. The yellow soap dog was too thin for Red, the legs too short: it seemed a mess now, no good at all.

  “It’s terrific,” her father said.

  He turned in his chair and put her carving on a book lying on the windowsill. Beyond, boys were playing road-hockey in the cul-de-sac. It was still light outside, but in the room the weak, silvery daylight had been hollowed by shadow.

  Penny climbed into her father’s lap. “Aren’t you getting too big for this?” he said, and she said, “Nope” and settled in with her head against his shoulder while he swivelled the chair a little, back and forth. They both looked at the dog. She had made its ears prick, like little tents, like the skunk-cabbage sticking above the mud in Wiley’s swamp.

  “Reminds me of Queenie,” her dad said, his dog when he was a boy. Immediately she felt hopeful. “Sure, that tail. That’s Queenie to a T. And he’s almost the same colour!”

  They were quiet for a while longer, looking at the dog, which was looking out the window at the boys running up and down.

  “Am I your girlfriend?” she said.

  Her father said nothing.

  “Hey you,” she said, panicking a little. She poked him in the chest. She had felt so funny saying Am I your girlfriend, as if she’d dressed up in her mother’s shoes and jewellery, something she did do sometimes, but only in secret. She didn’t want to say it again.

  “What’s up?”

  “Am I your girlfriend?” She was blushing now, with a sense of touching on forbidden matters.

  “Darn right,” he said, giving her knee a squeeze.

  They were silent a while longer. She was not appeased, not quite. She waited, hoping he would say more.

  “Absolutely,” he said, bouncing her a little.

  “Am I your only one,” she said. Her face hot now.

  She felt him pause, in a little shock of surprise, and in that moment, her own heart seemed to fail, on the edge of things she did not want to know. But he said, “Well, there’s your mother. She’s really girlfriend number one.”

  Penny let that sink in, and it seemed all right. Or almost all right. Looking at her yellow dog, against the moving heads of the boys outside, she sensed that there was something, still, that did not quite fit. But it was so small, smaller than a speck of dust, that she was able to brush it aside.

  “Tell me a story,” she said. Her father seemed not to hear. She nudged him with her elbow. “Hey you! Tell me a story!”

  “Oh I don’t know —”

  “Tell me about Johnny North.”

  “I think you’ve heard all my Johnny North stories.”

  “Tell me the old ones then. Tell me all the stories.” Yes, she wanted them all, a flood of stories to carry them both away.

  For a long time her father looked towards the street. Penny glanced up at him, and when he began, she snuggled back in, idly watching her yellow dog, with its pricked ears, that was watching the street. The dog was all right now, it had found a home. Her father’s hand gently gripped her leg.

  Her father had known Johnny North when he — her father — was a boy. Johnny North was a man but in some ways, her father said, he had stayed a boy. He lived in a shack on the banks of the Attawan River. He had worked for a few years as a mechanic in the mill, but one day, her father said, using the words he always used, “He just walked away from all that.” Johnny made a paddlewheel boat powered by a bicycle, and he would sit up on his bicycle seat, pedalling his passengers along, passengers who paid a nickel for a tour to the rapids. Sometimes he’d recite his poetry to these people. He wrote long poems about fires and train crashes and recited them dramatically, waving his arms as he guided the boat among the islands. In the newspaper he was known as “Johnny North, Bard of the Attawan.”

  Johnny North was quite a character, her father said, chuckling a bit as he remembered. “I don’t think he ever took a bath, unless you count swimming in the river. The fellow stank — well, Pete used to say you could smell him coming around the corner.”

  “Around five corners,” Penny corrected.

  “As bad as that,” her father said. And he recalled how Johnny would dress up in funny costumes — women’s dresses, or a Japanese kimono, with driving goggles to keep the dust out of his eyes — and go around town pulling a little wagon with a phonograph on it and a sign that read JOHNNY NORTH, ENTERTAINER. A few people hired him to perform at birthday parties, where he’d sing or do magic tricks. Not everybody wanted to hire him, though, because of his smell, and because you could never tell what he was going to do. “I remember this once,” her father said — and this was a story she’d never heard — “when Bob Drummond was killed in a fire, Johnny turned up at the front of the funeral procession. He was wearing a black dress and he did this strange, shuffly dance. Some people were pretty upset and wanted to get him out of there. But Lila Drummond — that was Bob’s mother — she told them to leave him alone. She told them, ‘Johnny’s just showing how he feels.’ ”

  “That was good,” Penny said.

  “Yup, that was good.”

  Another time Johnny had saved a boy from drowning — this was one of Penny’s favourite stories. Johnny’d seen the lad struggling, from his shack on the bank, and had rowed out to him. The town had given Johnny a medal and held a party, where he recited all fifty-seven verses of “The Wreck of Ninety-Eight.” The mayor’s wife had fallen asleep in her chair.

  In the winter, when people went skating above the dam, Johnny would keep a fire going on shore. He’d lace up the skates of the ladies and girls, always doffing his cap and calling each one Miss — “even if they were eighty-two,” her father said. In the summer Johnny rented out rowboats he had built himself. “He only charged a penny, and if you didn’t have that he’d let you have it for free. They leaked like the dickens, usually.”

  Penny loved the Johnny North stories: the stories were always there, they were always happening, it seemed, in a sunny corner just out of sight. Hearing them, she felt happy, being transported to a time when her father was young. She wasn’t born yet, but this didn’t matter: she felt safe, not being born, knowing that in the happiness of her father’s life she was still to come.

  When Johnny North got old, things were not so good, her father said. Penny went very still — she hadn’t heard this story. Johnny had arthritis, and in winter, he stuffed his clothes with newspapers that made a rustling sound when he walked. He blacked his white hair with shoe polish. He still wrote poems, though. “I remember this one bit — he must have written it for the town’s New Year’s party. They printed it in the Star:

  Onward nineteen-hundred and thirty-seven!

  I am out of my mammy’s home:

  To wander in dark woodlands

  Alone, all, all, alone.”

  “So sad!” Penny said, on the edge of tears. In the window, her yellow dog was walking with Johnny in his dark woodlands.

  “Well,” her father said, jouncing her a bit on his leg. “Some rich people in town took up a collection. They paid for Johnny to go to an old-age home, over in Johnsonville. He wasn’t very happy there, though — didn’t last more than a few months.”

  “You mean he died?” Penny said, sitting up. She had never thought of Johnny dying: that wasn’t part of his story. It wasn’t part of who Johnny was.

  She looked at her father, who seemed startled. He started to smile. />
  “Well sure, eventually. We all —”

  “No!” Penny cried fiercely. She threw herself back down against him. In the street, the boys continued to yell at their game. She clung to her father’s chest while he squeezed and rubbed her shoulder. She didn’t want to hear about Johnny North or about anybody else dying. She wanted Johnny at his fire in the snow, tying the skates of ladies. She wanted him peddling his boat upstream, proclaiming “The Wreck of Ninety-Eight.” And she wanted her father to be with him, a boy still, and safe.

  40

  THE SNOW FINALLY LEFT for good, swallowed by the slowly thawing earth. On the northward-facing slope of Lookout Hill, only a few patches glowed among the bare trees. But the season that arrived was no spring: it was an in-between season of black branches and soaked, dead-looking lawns littered with paper and dog shit. Time had run backwards, it seemed, as though November had begun again.

  One day, lying beside Lucille in her unsteady bed, Alf knew it was over. “Maybe we should lay off for a while,” he said, touching her on the cheek. His tenderness was real enough. He felt sorry for her, and guilty, for he knew he was no better than her other lovers, all of whom had left her. Reaching for her clothes, she avoided his gaze. In her eyes was a stoic darkness — a despair that could not or would not rouse itself to anger or condemnation. He would have felt better if she had upbraided him. This way, he felt hopeless himself.

  He drove up to the cemetery. The Biscayne passed through the wrought-iron gates that were always propped open, past the red stone where his mother and father lay, following the narrow road into its final loop, where the crop of gravestones petered out in a few acres of yellow lawn. Pete’s grave was here, isolated from the others under the tall gloom of a spruce, as if his death were somehow different from the rest. May had erected a small grey stone with a polished front, where the word “Moon” had been carved, and under it, slightly to the left, “Peter Watson Moon, 1918–1965.”

  Alf stood under the spruce in whose branches the faintest wind could just be heard, like the distant hush of water over a low barrier. It was far from the first time he had stood here, looking at the wicker basket filled with plastic flowers May had set before the stone. But this time seemed more vivid, as if it were the first. He felt he had come back to something. What had his fling with Lucille Boileau been really but an attempt to escape this place? An attempt to burn up his guilt in her bed? He plucked a pebble from the half-frozen mud and cleaned it with his fingers. He had never realized, until his friend had gone, how much he had loved him. In fact, he hadn’t really known he’d loved him at all — “love” was not a term he had ever used in connection with his male friends. But now it was a torture to think that as he picked his way into the fields of death, Pete might have believed that Alf had abandoned him.

  “You dumb bugger,” he whispered. Tears had come to his eyes, in a rage against his friend. “You should have fought it. You should have told me. Hell, I should have told you.” Yes, if only he’d confessed to Pete, begged his forgiveness. But now the possibility of confession and forgiveness — with Pete, with Margaret, with anyone — seemed as remote as the dim grey line of bush crayoning the far edge of the field beyond the cemetery. He was in a place where no one else was, or seemed capable of approaching, a place bound in iron-clad distances. Overhead, the tree had filled with the cheerful rant of small birds.

  Each morning, hearing the cry of Bannerman’s whistle, it seemed that only moments had passed since it had released him from work the previous day. He trudged numbly up the stairs of the mill with the trudging incommunicado crowd, arriving in the room of tall machines that seemed to have been waiting for him all his life. He no longer had even a minimal pleasure in his work. He’d told Prince what he could do with the foreman’s job; his ambition had become an offering (an inadequate one, he felt) laid on the altar of Pete’s death. And yet, several times, he was appalled to discover himself staring at the fading notice on the knitting room bulletin board, as though some small, craven part of him hoped to be made foreman yet. Matt Honnegger was staying on, temporarily. Alf was still doing most of his work for him. It seemed that the foreman’s job — its burdens if not its title — had come to him by default.

  He did his work swiftly and automatically, with a curious sense that he was alone. Sometimes, though, he was wakened by a chance event that broke through his isolation. He might drop a wrench and, bending to retrieve it, be struck by the oddity of its existence: as if he had never seen a wrench before, or felt its cool heft in his hand, or looked at its square, silently howling jaws. And another time, one damp, cloudy evening, he had gone out for a walk and was just passing along the rail platform by the station, on his way to the old concrete steps that led to the Shade, when it seemed that someone had spoken to him. Alf, a voice said, a voice both familiar and not. Not seeing anyone, he stopped and looked around. Above him a Manitoba maple made a rushing sound as its dry seed pods — hundreds and thousands of pale-brown tags hanging in clusters in the bare tree — stirred in a faint breeze. It was odd, but he felt as if the tree had spoken, as if it had said, Look, and looking up through its branches he glimpsed the moon in a blue tunnel of cloud: a little, gibbous moon like a battered stone sailing along up there, and a shiver of excitement — of life — ran through him, though it was gone in a moment.

  That night, he dreamed he stood before a knitting machine, taller than any he had ever seen. It seemed somehow human to him — human and fatherlike and commanding in its sense of quiet power — and although it was not knitting anything (the threads were still, the whole atmosphere was one of lonely stillness), it seemed about to speak. However, it could not make a sound, and there was something both painful and suspenseful in this failure. On the machine’s great head, where it wore a rack of white bobbins like a vast crown, each bobbin was stained with a trickle of dark blood.

  One day, soon after the midmorning break, all the knitters and fixers were told to shut down their machines and come to a meeting in front of Matt Honnegger’s office. The last to arrive, Alf peered over a mass of heads and shoulders at three men who stood waiting with their backs to the washing-up sink. Matt was part of this triumvirate, but the foreman had remained a little aloof, cradling his empty pipe against his plaid shirt while casting a bland smile at the floor, as if distancing himself from the proceedings. Beside him stood Wilf Thomas, the manager of the sweater mill: a solid-looking fellow whose Roman nose with its thick bridge lent him the gladiatorial air of an old football guard or hockey defenceman. Wilf was talking in low tones, his head down, to a man Alf had never seen before, a young man of thirty or so, with a taut, bony face and a brush cut so short it seemed his head had been shaved. He wore jeans, and a tight black T-shirt, and stood with his well-muscled arms folded, revealing on his left biceps a fading, bluish tattoo in which the hooked head of a hawk or eagle was just visible. He was chewing gum — so rapidly that it looked as if the lower half of his face were afflicted by a nervous disorder — and darting the gaze of his large eyes between the floor and the knees of the men and women who stood a few feet away, watching.

  “All right,” Wilf Thomas said at last in his gruff voice, turning to the crowd. Wilf gave off a sense of blunt integrity that inspired trust. Many of the workers had known him all their lives, as he had grown up on the Flats, the son of a spinner. “I won’t take too much of your time, folks. But as you know, we’ve been looking for a new foreman for this floor, and though we’ve had lots of good applications, we felt we needed a specialist.”

  Alf’s heart pounded: in a flash he understood that he wasn’t going to be made foreman. He had tried to convince himself he no longer wanted the job. But all the same, the tenacious weed of his hope — now crushed — filled his chest with the hot acid of disappointment.

  He heard Wilf out in a kind of dream, the manager’s words coming with a sense that was also non-sense, as if he were speaking of some other, distant place that Alf new little of, not the mill where they now st
ood, surrounded by the great crowd of motionless machines. “The reason we need a specialist,” Wilf went on, “is that Intertex is going to be putting a number of new machines in here that none of us know how to run, so we thought we should have someone who does. And I’m happy to say that in Kit Ford here, we’ve got one of the best. Kit comes to us from one of the most advanced mills in North America, and I know we’re going to appreciate his expertise. He’s already been telling me things I don’t know —” Here Wilf grinned, showing a gold tooth, but the crowd in front of him did not respond. “Kit’s staying in a motel in Johnsonville, but he’s going to be moving into town, and I know you’ll make him welcome. Oh yes, and I should mention that Kit was once in the Marines, so I know he’ll waste no time getting us in fighting trim. Kit —”

  Kit Ford said, “Yeah,” with a slight drawl. He licked his lips and looked at them with a bright, earnest gaze and thin smile. He spoke in rapid bursts, almost too fast to be understood, in an accent that seemed southern — from the Carolinas, maybe, or Georgia — and in his eyes was a straining, plaintive quality, which gave the impression he was laying too much stress on his own sincerity. “Yeah, been knittin’ most of my life,” he told them. “Fact I see some machines in here haven’t seen since I was a kid. The old Jacquards there — should be fun. Sure you’ve got a lot to show me. Look forward to that. Good to be in Attawan.” (Somehow he made the name of the town foreign, as if they’d never heard it before.) “Used to come up to these parts as a kid, to fish, in Quebec there. Good to be back. Look forward to knowin’ ya and workin’ with ya.”

  When the meeting was over, Wilf Thomas called to Alf, who turned back through the dissolving crowd. As he passed Dick Kenshole, the knitter leaned in close. “That job was yours,” Dick seethed in a demanding undertone: what was Alf going to do about it? Without responding, Alf went on to the place where the three men waited for him. He did not look at Kit Ford until Wilf introduced him, and then he calmly took his hard, damp hand and met the reaching, anxious sincerity of his gaze. In those wide-staring eyes he caught an insistent claim of innocence. I didn’t do it, Kit Ford’s eyes said. And though there was no indication of what “it” was, Alf felt a tremor of misgiving.