The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  He watched her drop her bag on the cot the nurses had set up for her, and bend over Jamie. She touched the boy’s hair, murmuring something Alf could not catch, touched the back of his hand.

  “Dr. Samuels was in,” he said. Samuels was the specialist from Johnsonville who was consulting on the case. Margaret looked at Alf, her eyes hard, bright.

  “He still thinks the chances are pretty good.”

  Margaret kept looking at him, as if she were testing the truth of his words. He flushed and looked away.

  After a moment, he stood up.

  “I guess I’ll go then.”

  Margaret didn’t answer, but went back to ministering to Jamie, feeling his cheek with the back of her hand. She turned to the cot, where she had dropped her bag and purse. Alf went on standing by the bed.

  “Well,” he said. All he wanted was a word from her, some acknowledgment. But she kept her back to him as she shook out a blanket. Then she turned.

  “It’s late,” she said. “Go and get some rest.” She told Alf this in a crisp, factual way, her eyes meeting his only briefly. The weary flatness in her voice unsettled him more than anger might have, for it suggested she wasn’t surprised by what had happened to Jamie. It was the sort of thing she might expect to happen now, in the place Alf had brought them to.

  He got home to find Joe and Penny in bed. Far from sleep, he sat at the kitchen table, in the dark. From the distant gravel pits, the faint clank of conveyor belts floated intermittently through the screen door. He stared out into the night, across Margaret’s garden towards the shadowy bulk of the dyke, the more distant greyness of Lookout Hill where a street lamp dropped an isolated cone of light over the road running past the park. He hardly saw these things.

  His gaze was trained on the depth that is more inner than outer, more concerned with the events of the vast invisible world than on the world of things we like to say is the only real one. But there is a place where both worlds mingle, and at one point he became aware that his thoughts were twined with a rushing sound that came from the river, from a place where a lone rock, known to him since boyhood, ploughed stolidly upstream, never getting anywhere, yet never ceasing to progress in the changing water. He let out a long breath and shifted in his chair and when the siren went off, lifted his head a little. The blasts kept coming, at short intervals. In the street, a car suddenly accelerated, as if it had been waiting for just this signal.

  Some time after the siren stopped, the phone rang behind him. For a few moments he sat without moving. But then, remembering Joe and Penny asleep upstairs, he rose to silence it.

  “Alf, the mills are on fire!” It was Jack Cornish, his foreman on the maintenance crew: his voice narrow and distant, as if calling down a pipe.

  Alf flicked on the light and blinked at the calendar. In the square of August 30, Margaret had printed PENNY’S TWELFTH BIRTHDAY! Another life: where people stroked exclamation points in acts of hectic enthusiasm, as if happiness might be commanded.

  “Alf, are you there?”

  Those buggers, Alf thought, those stupid, goddamn buggers.

  “Alf?”

  “I’m here.”

  “The fire department’s just come. Johnsonville’s sending two trucks. We need more men.”

  Alf’s heart seemed to be punching its way through his ribs.

  Through the windshield of the Biscayne he saw at first only roiling smoke, reddening below as it billowed over the mills. The lane off Bridge was blocked with vehicles. Hoses ran everywhere, veining wet asphalt. Several dozen people, many in bathrobes, had gathered under the wall of the arena. Passing the mouth of the lane, he glimpsed the livid windows: storey upon storey of fire, as if a party were going on in the mills, a party of strange, fiery creatures, their laws and language unknown to men, filling the rooms with their dances, their roaring conversations.

  There was no place left to park, so he drove around the corner, finally drawing into the parking lot of General Office, across the road from the mills. No flames were visible from here, though getting out of the car, he could hear the hollow, cascading roar of the fire, the small shouts of men calling for hoses. The glowing smoke from the far side of the mill complex rose over the flat rooftops, shedding an eerie light. Everything he looked at — the walls of the mills, even the asphalt roadway — seemed on the verge of exploding into flame. He crossed the deserted street, reaching the fence that bordered the millrace. A stink of mud — the race had recently been emptied, for repairs — mingled with the smell of smoke. Down the street, by a lone fire truck, several men with hoses were shooting water into a building. He began to walk towards them, glancing up from time to time at the darkened windows of the mills. Here and there smoke seeped from under a sash. He was breathing hard.

  A voice caught him. It had come from above him, but when he turned and looked at the upper windows, he could make out nothing.

  The voice came again. It seemed, almost, to be sounding inside his own head.

  “You there! Help me!”

  Putting his hands on the fence bordering the race, Alf strained to see.

  “Get a ladder here!”

  Shouting harshly, trying not to scream: keeping to the last edge before the fall into hysteria.

  The voice seemed somehow familiar. But when Alf found the right window, the figure there was half-hidden in a streaming veil of smoke. He could not make out who it was.

  “Alf! Bring a ladder!”

  He went on staring, spellbound. The man seemed so small and faraway, absurd in the vast, empty buildings. What was he doing there? He seemed to have something to do with the fire itself, was fire’s creature; or he was the beleaguered, desperate spirit of the mills themselves, shouting out a last request for life. And he knew who Alf was.

  Smoke was pouring around the figure now, he was entirely invisible.

  Alf turned at the rail, looking for help. To the south, the hoses were sending thin, ineffectual-looking arcs into the mill. There seemed to be no ladders there. He would have to go around to the back of the mills by Bridge Street. It would take too long. Glancing to his right, he saw the narrow footbridge that crossed the millrace to the base of the building. At the other end of the bridge, a few wisps of smoke coiled gently into the night: the metal door was ajar.

  At the truck, Phil Jones gave his place at the nozzle to another man. His hands were stiff, his shirt soaked from a leak spraying from the hose. He’d been in bed with the flu when the siren sounded. Now, feeling both feverish and chilled, and more than a bit sorry for himself, he looked to the north and saw, in the light of flames suddenly leaping above the roof, a figure shrouded in a blanket, crossing the footbridge. Phil watched it lean forward and break into a run — it seemed, under the cowl of the blanket, to be headless — watched it disappear into the smoking side of the mill.

  63

  BY MID-SEPTEMBER, the poplars along the Atta had turned yellow. Their leaves trembled with the faintest movement of the air; their inverted reflections, just visible in shadowy water, suggested the presence of another world.

  For Joe, there was no question of university. He had failed to win any entrance scholarships, and besides, his mother’s new job as a clerk at Millie’s Dress Nook didn’t bring in enough to support the family, so he had gone to work in the liquor store. He spent his days filling the shelves in the backroom with cartons of Seagram’s and Baby Duck — a task he preferred to serving at the front counter, where he sensed people were watching him. He felt ashamed on account of the events that had befallen his family, as if they were in some way deserved, the punishment for some moral failure, punishment perhaps for having had the father he had had.

  The backroom of the store overlooked the iron water of the Shade. On the far shore, past the dyke and the playing fields, the blackened shell of the mills was being knocked down. All day he could hear the faint explosions as the wrecking balls assaulted the thick walls, and bricks fell in showers. Above the ruins, dark flocks of pigeons, like gusts of a
sh, beat away and frantically returned. One morning he was startled to see that the mills were gone.

  They had found his father on an upper storey, his head wrapped in the red tartan blanket. “Smoke was too much for him,” Patch Cooper, the fire chief, told Joe one day in his office. He said that one of his men had seen his father enter the mill, but by the time some of the crew had found masks and gone in after him, it was too late. “We don’t really know why he went in there. Myself, I think he may have been trying to help someone.”

  “Maybe that was it,” Joe said thickly.

  Patch Cooper looked at him for a moment before continuing. “Yes, well, two or three foremen went into Number Six, a little earlier. They were trying to close doors, save records, like. Maybe one of them got into trouble and he tried to help. It could be — course the investigation isn’t over yet — it could be he did a brave thing there.”

  The fire chief avoided his eyes as he said this, and Joe had to wonder what his real opinions were. He knew Patch Cooper had to be aware, as he himself was, of rumours that his father had himself started the fire. He had tried to refuse this possibility, but there was a place in him where he feared it might be true.

  The only man who could answer his doubts was no longer there. Joe was still set against his father, as if his dying were one more affront. He’d be walking down the street, and the whole time a voice in him would be going on endlessly, carrying on arguments — Why did you do it you should never have gone in there why didn’t you think of the rest of us why — that met only a silence deepening like a kind of winter.

  A few days after Joe’s meeting with Patch Cooper, two provincial police detectives came to the house. They sat on the couch with their notebooks on their knees, interviewing Joe and Margaret. They were trying to piece together Alf’s whereabouts after he had left the hospital on the night of the fire. Apparently, someone claimed to have sighted the Biscayne near the mills, an hour or so before the alarm had been turned in.

  “What exactly are you implying?” Margaret said, indignant. Joe, seated nearby, watched her draw herself up. She had aged, he thought, her face gone sharp, her eyes too bright in their deepened sockets.

  One of the detectives, the softer-spoken one, said they weren’t trying to say anything; they just had to tidy up all the loose ends.

  “I think I’ve had enough,” she said, standing up abruptly.

  “I know it’s been hard for you, Mrs. Walker.”

  “You don’t know anything,” she said.

  When the policemen went on sitting, she left the room.

  “I got one more question,” the other detective said to Joe. “The night of the fire — after your dad came back from the hospital — were you aware of him leaving the house at any time?”

  Frowning, Joe glanced down at the rug. After he’d fallen asleep, he hadn’t heard his father come in, but he’d been wakened briefly by the sound of the Biscayne leaving. He had no idea what time that had been.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” he said, looking back at the detective. The man held his gaze for a couple of seconds while Joe, his mouth dry, brazened it out.

  Later, he found his mother in her garden, mucking furiously around her tomato plants with a hoe. As Joe approached she looked up at him. “They don’t know anything,” she cried, her voice full. “Your father —” She broke off and for a moment watched him haplessly, as some new thought rose brimming into her eyes, into features that now looked soft and oddly unformed. He tried to hold her, awkwardly embracing her and the upright hoe together. After a moment she stiffened and pulled back. “All right,” she told him. “Let’s go in.”

  Ten days after the fire, Jamie awoke, and in another few days he was well enough to come home. The side of his head bore the shrinking, yellowish traces of his wound, and he seemed slow and abstracted. When Margaret told him what had happened, he went very still, his eyes fixed in deep space. A minute later, he asked if he could watch television.

  For some time afterwards, he seemed reluctant to leave the house, even to play. Hoping to rouse his interest, Joe gave his brother his old fibreglass bow and three new arrows, beautifully feathered. One afternoon, glancing out his bedroom window, he saw Jamie standing on the shore of the river, aiming his bow towards the far bank. He wasn’t strong enough to pull it back to its full extent, but the arrow he released drifted over the Atta — a flash of orange — and disappeared into the foliage of Lookout Hill. Joe nearly shouted out the window at him — Those arrows were expensive! — but something in the rapt way his brother lowered the bow and stared at the hill held him back, and he watched as Jamie sped the remaining arrows across the water.

  Penny took it hard. At the cemetery, she had broken from her mother’s side and run to the coffin as Joe and the other pallbearers carried it towards the grave. Lately, she seemed possessed by an extreme urge to do something. She was often busy in her room, her table a mess of paper and paints and soap-shavings. She made a papier mâché figure, three feet high, with a black coat and a rather grotesque face, which she told Joe was Johnny North. Joe found it hard to meet her gaze for more than a few seconds because it sometimes seemed his father was looking out at him from her eyes, making some demand — for recognition, maybe, for help — Joe did not know what.

  Gradually, by day, a kind of normality settled on the house. But at night came the sudden cries, the drumming of his brother’s or sister’s feet down the hall to their mother’s room. Jamie wouldn’t go to sleep unless someone was watching him. To help his mother, Joe often took on that job. One night, while Jamie tossed and kept opening his eyes to check if his brother was still there, Joe sat on the bedroom floor with his back to the wall, rereading Anna’s letters by flashlight. In August, she had written to say she was sharing rooms with two English girls, revelling in the fact that each morning they awoke to the smell of fresh bread from the shop below. As for Joe’s standing with her, it seemed ambiguous at best. She wrote that she missed him, but her obvious pleasure in her new life made him wonder.

  He had written to her about the fire, omitting anything too specific. Of his father he said only that he had died while attempting to save another man. In one way, he was glad to have miseries to report. He felt he had earned the right to her affections. At the same time, these events filled him with shame, and he feared he would lose caste with her.

  Two days after he had sent his letter, he had found another of her blue aerogrammes waiting at the post office. Her father, she said, had written her about what had happened. Oh Joe, my dear Joe, this is terrible! Immediately the warmth of her sympathy flooded him. She had written him a poem, which, like all her poems, he soon memorized. It was about their last evening together: the churchyard where they’d walked in the wind. She’d been more aware of the poignancy of that moment than he’d realized.

  He went to the post office every day. In early October, another letter from her arrived. He took it to the little park, at the end of the main street, where the war memorial was. Sitting on the step behind the monument, his back to the cool stone, he read her news. She was studying German, she told him, and she’d just made a weekend visit to Chartres. After several paragraphs about the cathedral, she mentioned Doug, an American friend. He’s a philosophy major, very interested in Sartre. You know, you can actually see Sartre almost any day here, walking to his favourite café. He looks like a garden gnome. He has a walleye. It seems to be looking at things no one else has seen, that have scared one part of him witless. Doug’s trying to get up his nerve to speak to him.

  I should tell you, Joe, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get to Attawan for Christmas. We can’t afford it, and of course with the mills gone, my father is making arrangements to come back to France. They’ve promised him his old job again. But I want you to know how much our time together meant to me …

  He looked up from the pages, at the scarred side wall of the old Capitol Theatre, where fading advertisements for long-ago films were just visible, including the
image of an immense tiger with a red tongue. He had no idea who Sartre was.

  That evening after supper, he took a walk along the Atta. Moving slowly, he reached the dam, and for a while sat on the ancient concrete at its edge, looking out over the thin skim of water racing down its long, sloping face. Above, the deep water of the millpond approached the lip with a glassy stillness, before it slipped over. He had been thinking of Anna. But as he gazed across the pond, where a late dragonfly skimmed, he had an awareness of his father so powerful he stopped breathing. This was a place his father had known — he had swum and skated here as a boy — his father had been saturated with this place, as Joe himself was. He felt he knew what his father had seen and felt here, because he was able to see and feel it too. Spellbound, he looked out over the water.

  But then, a cold breeze rising from the Atta, everything changed. What did he know about his father, really? What could he ever know, now, about what lay behind his father’s eyes, behind his silences? Joe looked downstream, where the current surged over a rusted weed-clogged bicycle, and felt the chill of unrecoverable loss.

  Over the next few days, a weakness infected his body. He only wanted to lie in bed, not reading, not listening to the radio, but drifting in and out of shallow sleep. The yellow trees of Lookout Hill filled most of his window. His gaze kept drifting to a spot of delicate orange-pink — a young oak perhaps — about halfway up the hill. He would look for this tree first thing in the morning, upset if mist hid the hill. In the evening, he watched it with feverish interest as it dissolved in darkness. He had no idea why the tree compelled him so; but when one morning he discovered that a big wind had stripped most of its leaves, he was distraught.