by John Straley
There was a splash behind him and then he felt the blade of an oar tapping against his chest. He was able to uncurl his arms and clamp them around the oar.
Ellie was swimming back to the dory with Annabelle sputtering in her arms. Ellie held on to the dory’s stern with one hand and was able to get the girl and the cage up into the boat with her other. Then both Ellie and Slip were able to steady the dory and clamber in.
The Pacific Pride motored down toward Dodd Narrows as all the rest of the boats began to funnel through the tight passage at the beginning of slack tide. Slip lay cramped up on the bottom of the dory. Ellie wrapped Annabelle in a wool blanket and tried to rub her dry.
Above them Buddy flew in wide arcs around the dory like a yellow meteorite enjoying his first full moments of freedom.
TWELVE
Slip’s teeth chattered uncontrollably as he rowed the dory out of the current. Ellie and Annabelle clung together under a wool blanket. The Pacific Pride continued through Dodd Narrows, the skipper apparently oblivious of his missing passenger. Once through the narrows, unless he found her missing within an hour he would have to wait for the next slack to double back.
The yellow bird circled the dory, chirping and calling out as he worked his wings through the damp air hard enough for everyone in the boat to hear the pushing of the air in his feathers.
“Buddy,” Annabelle called, and she lifted an arm out from under the blanket. “Come here, Buddy.”
Slip scanned the islands to the east for an opening. The current was fair for them close to shore in the swirl, so he pulled toward the islands to the east, bumping and hopping along the changeable currents. His ribs and arms ached with each stroke but the familiar effort at the oars began to warm him.
Annabelle was shivering uncontrollably, her teeth clattering together and wet tendrils of her hair swinging back and forth in front of her eyes. Ellie dug out two dry undershirts from the bag stowed in the stern as well as her black coat. Then she held the blanket in front of Annabelle so she could change out of her wet clothes without embarrassment. But even through her shivering, the little girl only watched the yellow bird circling the dory.
Buddy was a strange flicker of yellow flame in the light gray sky. Slip pulled on the oars and looked over his shoulder as the bird rattled and whistled around. He shipped the oars and changed out of his shirt, putting on his scratchy wool jacket over his bare skin. Ellie watched and rubbed an edge of the blanket against Annabelle’s wet hair. But the girl’s eyes bore out into the air and tried to ensnare the bird.
They didn’t speak as the current changed direction and the water flowed against them. They didn’t speak of Johnny or the Pacific Pride as the sun began to slip behind the western islands.
Once the parade of boats had gone through the narrows on the tide, they saw no one else. The darkness eased around the dory, and in the twilight, before any moon or stars, the passageway seemed unnaturally black: no stars, no moon, no lighted ships. Only the rumble of the wind coming from the north and the hissing of the waves as they slapped the side of the dory, lifting it up like a runner jogging in place. Slip pulled with his arms but he could not bear his full weight into the oars. Finally Ellie sat next to him and, taking one oar, they rowed together, awkwardly at first, but eventually they pulled alongside De Courcy Island. As a sliver of a moon rose above the island, they were able to see a narrow beach just past the end of De Courcy where the water lay flat in the lee of the sloping side of Rink Island. They pulled hard against the current and the wind. The progress of the dory was agonizingly slow, but eventually they slid onto the calm water and the commotion of wind and waves hushed.
Slip leaned back and lay in the bottom of the boat, winded and aching from rowing against the current. Annabelle was wrapped in a tarp near the bow. While Ellie stood in her dark wool coat and tried to find a fair beach to land, the wind pushed high clouds past the scythe of a moon. A light flickered on the far corner of the beach.
“Hallooooo.” It was a woman’s voice sliding over the water and Slip heard it first, not sure if he could trust his senses.
“Hallooooo.” The voice warbled like a loon’s. Slip sat up and looked over in the anchorage that was just coming into view, where a fire blazed on the beach and a lone figure stood in outline against the flames.
“You’ve just about made it. Over here.”
The dark form appeared to be wearing a long coat. Fire illuminated the back and shoulders while the face remained in darkness. The firelight dazzled across the water and cast a strange shadow on the surface, where it looked like the mast and rigging of a sizeable yacht stuck up at an odd angle from the sea. A raven perched on the end of the mast that slanted out over the light-smeared ripples.
“You’ve just a few more feet to go. Come on.” The figure raised its thin arm and gestured “come,” so Ellie picked up the oars and pulled the boat toward the firelight.
Annabelle stood up in the boat and hopped out just as the dory pushed into the gravelly beach. An old woman in a long wool coat came hurriedly to the shore and took hold of the bow, being careful not to step into the water.
“Looks like you were having a time of it,” she said. “You must be the people who took the lamb from Carl’s flock down on South Pender.”
Ellie put the oars back in the water and turned to look at Slip, who had his hands in his pockets and didn’t say a word to the old woman on the beach.
“Come on, child, come ashore. Don’t have to worry. I never cared for Carl or his sheep neither. Just some talk off the mail boat. No one’s after you. Come on ashore. You look like you all could use a cup of warm soup.”
She said her name was Mary B. and she had a pot of fish stew sitting on a flat rock next to the fire. Slip and Annabelle pulled the dory up the beach and tied it off to a tree growing out of one of the steep bluffs that bordered the little anchorage. By the time Slip reached the fire, Annabelle had cantered up to Ellie and they both were sitting on a log hunched over their bowls, steam rising around their faces.
“Here,” Mary said, offering Slip a bowl of soup. Looking up in the woods, Slip saw the dark forms of buildings that looked partially fallen in, the windows broken out and supporting timbers sprung through the walls like ugly compound fractures.
“This is the right place,” Mary said. She watched Slip’s eyes take in the scene. “You’ve come to the right place. Don’t you worry.” Then she put a big spoon in the bowl. “He will be returning. You needn’t worry.”
She was an old woman though sometimes in the firelight you could see her as a child again. She was waiting there in the desolate anchorage, waiting for the return of her savior, a man she called the Brother Twelve.
She looked around at the refugees the sea had brought her. The girl was shivering as she ate her soup. Firelight painted their faces and each of them moved as close as they could to the flames. “Let me tell you about the first time I laid eyes on him,” the old woman said, and Slip wanted to leave the second she said it but there was nowhere to go in the cold, unfamiliar night.
She had been a college student when she first saw the Brother speak in a hall in Seattle. Her parents were both dead and she had inherited the money they had made from wheat over near Walla Walla. The executor had told her to go to college and she had been obedient.
“But when the Brother Twelve walked onto the stage, I knew, I just knew I had been saved.”
In the darkness the raven on the mast of the sunken yacht tipped forward and flew to a branch above the fire. He rattled and called down at the humans as if he were demanding some of the stew, and in fact the old woman dug the dipper into the pot and flipped a piece of salmon and two small potatoes into the darkness behind the fire. The black bird leaped from the high branch and curved into the darkness as the old woman continued her story.
The Brother was a tall man, well over six feet, dark complexioned, with wide intense brown eyes that others described as “burning embers” but Mary described as “pool
s of wisdom.” He had been the son of an English philosopher and an Indian princess. He had studied with swamis and saints and with brothers of wisdom in Italy, where he was accepted into their midst as a true seer and the twelfth brother in the Order of Wisdom. The Brother Twelve had received direction from God to build his following on the remote islands of British Columbia. There, he and his followers were living according to God’s plan and waiting for their induction into Nirvana.
His eyes found hers during the lecture. He could see she was sitting alone, and after the talk he walked straight to her and took her hands in his, knowing they were meant to be connected.
She didn’t have access to all the money in her trust, but she was able to funnel a sizeable sum into the Brother Twelve’s good works. She had lived with him there in the cove for several years. She shared him with the others in their flock, but there was no doubt that he knew she was the most devout of all the women who loved him “body, soul, and spirit.”
“God is larger than the divisions we try to foist on him,” Mary said evenly into the firelight. “Christian, Protestant, Hindu, Jew … words … all divisions of our own creation. It wasn’t until I saw it in his eyes, until I felt it in his hand that I knew God was an undeniable fact of life, much larger than our poor ability to describe Him. The Brother Twelve was like a bare electrical wire you could hold on to and feel the force of creation.”
The wind blew in the trees and the raven flew up on the high limb and started cackling. Mary once again dipped into the stew and threw more food out into the brush behind her. She did this without any apparent forethought or explanation. Once again the black bird carved an invisible line through the air to the food.
“He destroyed his earthly compound here and he sank his yacht.” She pointed at the mast that was sticking higher in the air since the tide had gone out. “He took his other wife but I have remained true. I am waiting here.”
Slip looked over his shoulder at the sunken yacht. Now more ravens perched on the mast, perhaps having sensed that there was someone throwing out food.
“When I saw you coming across the bay, I knew you were coming here. I knew you were going to wait for him.”
Ellie sat with Annabelle curled in her lap. The drowsy girl scanned the trees for her bird, and the punch-drunk seditionist drew stars in the sand with a stick.
“I know what you’re thinking. You heard the reports that the Brother Twelve died long ago in Switzerland. ‘He is dead,’ you say. ‘What’s the point of waiting for him here?’ ”
Mary B. gestured around the anchorage with her arms. Slip stood up and took a long piece of driftwood from a nearby pile and placed it on the embers. Then he picked up two smaller pieces and set one alongside and another on top to form a wooden pyramid for the tiny tongues of flame to lick.
“We will wait for him here because we are the faithful,” Mary said, and as she did, a bright yellow bird with vivid red dots on his cheeks landed in the tree above the fire.
Slip saw him first, nudging Annabelle awake, and the girl’s gaze drifted upward into the trees where she saw the match-head brightness of her pet bird. “Buddy!” She stood up and stretched out her arms. “Buddy!”
“Well, I thank you for the stew ma’am, but I think we better get going,” Slip said, and he stood up as well. Ellie looked at him as if he were crazy.
Annabelle ran down to the dory to get the cage.
“Don’t be silly,” Mary said. “You stay here tonight. I told you, you needn’t worry about the gossip about that lamb. Isn’t anybody going to care about it now. Won’t you wait here with me for the Brother?” As the old woman spoke she looked up at the yellow bird with a confused kind of intensity, as if it perhaps wasn’t really there.
“No … thank you very much but we …” Slip said.
“Slip, do you really want to go?” Ellie asked. “You want to go through Dodd Narrows in the dark?”
He stared back at her, not speaking, not wanting to admit that the old woman had spooked him.
“People call me crazy,” Ellie said, and smiled at the old crone by the fire.
Mary stooped down and poured coffee out of a tin coffeepot by holding the wire handle with a rag and tilting the pot with a charred stick.
“It will be lovely. You’ll see.”
Annabelle came running up the beach with the cage rattling next to her leg. She had a handkerchief with some seeds folded inside. The yellow bird sat some thirty feet up in the dark tree and far out on the end of an overhanging limb. The firelight flickered around him and the luminous bird hunched up and trilled a song.
“Here, Buddy,” the girl called, and she held out the seeds in her hand. She jumped up and down on her toes. “Come on, boy. Here’s food for you,” and some of the seeds spilled out onto the rocks.
“Here, child,” Mary said softly, and put her hand on the girl’s shoulders. “Let’s just set the food back inside his cage and we’ll rig a little thread to trip the door when he goes in.”
And the old woman and Annabelle set about to do just that. Ellie got some blankets and tarps out of the dory while Slip scavenged some timbers from the old buildings for the fire. The stars were needling down through the night sky and only an occasional wisp of a fast-moving cloud ran past the moon.
The old woman saw them making their beds by the fire and turned away from the girl who was laying out a trail of seeds leading up to the door of the cage. She walked up into the woods and came back with a long-handled shovel and gave it to Slip. Then she explained how they should move the fire about twenty feet over and dig out the rocks where the old fire had been. They could lay their blankets on the warm sand and even have a few of the warm rocks under the blankets with them.
“Makes it a bit more comfortable,” Mary said.
“Where do you sleep?” Ellie asked.
“I’ll be in the chapel. I’ve got a fine bed and a little stove up there.”
“Come on, Buddy. Come on, boy,” Annabelle called up into tree. She slowly backed away from the cage. She had gotten some tarred twine from the dory and had attached it to a stick that held the door of the cage open. She had several small piles of seeds laid on flat stones. The grownups were moving the fire down the beach and as they did she eased into darkness until there was only a film of light cast over the rocks. They scoured the sand for embers and Annabelle waited. They laid out their blankets and she crouched in the darkness, holding on to the end of the tarred twine.
Buddy flew down from the tree and ate the pile of seeds farthest from the cage. Annabelle could barely breathe. The yellow bird ate and preened and hopped back and forth at every possible sound coming from either the fire or the beach.
“Come on, boy,” the girl whispered.
Buddy cocked his head back and forth and flew up into the forest and disappeared.
They slept comfortably that night. The warm sand was a luxurious comfort. Only once did Slip wake up to the smell of burning wool. He flicked an ember off of his blanket, rolled over, and went back to sleep.
They slept close together to share the warm sand and rocks. Slip slept on the edge with his back to Ellie and Annabelle lay on the other side. The girl lay listening and watching the sky where the black treetops spiked up into the horizon. She lay listening for perhaps ten minutes, then slowly warmth eased into her icy bones and her eyes closed.
Ellie rolled over and put her hand on Slip’s shoulder.
“You awake still?” she asked in a whisper, and the tired man grunted.
Ellie touched Slip’s hand with the tips of her fingers, “Do you want to go home?” she asked.
“Home?” he asked. “You mean the state of Washington?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t know,” he said, not opening his eyes as he spoke. “I can’t even imagine where my home might be now.”
“What do you mean ‘now’?” she asked.
“Now that I met you,” was all he said.
The next morning Mary was up b
efore the sun. She built a new fire on the beach. The wind was sizzling over the island and the clouds were shredding through the tops of the trees. The sand had cooled from the outside of the fire ring toward the center, so they were now all curled next to each other like sea lions on a rocky ledge. Slip was the first to open his eyes. His left arm was over Ellie’s shoulder. Annabelle was tucked around Ellie’s waist. Slip gently lifted his arm away and eased out from the tangle of legs.
The fire flared and danced up from the logs Mary had dragged down from the trees. The flames seemed sick in the damp air. Where once the sky was a dome of stars, it was now a closed lid of clouds. Small waves were breaking on the beach. Far back in the trees he could hear the voice of the yellow bird squawking for his seeds.
“Good morning, sunshine. You bring to mind a litter of puppies down there on the sand.” Mary smiled up at him as she leaned toward the fire to take the coffeepot off its hanger.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Slip said softly. He put on his wool coat, which was still damp but it kept him serviceably warm. He hunched his shoulders against the wet wind pushing into the anchorage.
“Change in the weather,” he said.
“Oh Lord, yes,” the old woman said. “Changes its mind more often than a girl in a hat shop.” She smiled and handed him a tin mug of coffee.
This had always been his favorite time: these few moments before the day began. These early mornings, when the damp grass began to unbend and the birds began to stir.
Slip sipped the bitter coffee and shuffled back and forth in front of the fire, letting the heat from the tin cup warm the palms of his hands. He had always thought of his life as happy. His memories were sunlit and apple red but now … Now he wasn’t sure.
He thought of his parents waking up to a cold room every morning. He thought of his father’s thin face and how he bore the pain of the farm’s failure. He thought of the chalky dust that spread over his mother’s skin as the gardens withered and blew away. His belief in his childhood had been his faith up until now. Now he had killed a man. He was in a strange and cold country, with a woman who vexed him at every turn and a crone who was waiting for a salvation that would never come.