Cally's Way

by Jane Bow

  She should fly down the beach before Wrecks discovered her, launch herself onto Oliver’s back, knock him off his feet. She dropped her towel. Stopped.

  If he had seen her, why did he have time for a swim? Why was he not running up the beach?

  He always did this after being in town; that was why. To get the fumes off him, to come to her clean, he said. And his knapsack was full.

  She sank onto the sand and tried to stop shaking. Wrecks must have caught the movement. He ran up the beach barking, his tail wagging his whole back end.

  And then, picking up his clothes, walking up the beach against the candy-red sky, here was Oliver taking her face in his hands, holding her with his eyes, unable to speak, drawing her closer so that her arms could come up around his neck, so that belly to belly, her breasts cushioned against him, she could feel the safety of his strength.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  Daylight faded, the moon rose, Aphrodite danced above the breaking waves, and still they did not leave the beach. Sitting beside her, Oliver began to speak, his stream of words stumbling, halting, carrying on, taking her down inside an inner self that usually sought refuge in hearing, tasting, smelling and touching only the present moment. Keeping his well of guilt and rage and betrayal safely out of reach. Until now.

  Finished finally, he picked up a handful of sand and tossed it away, smiling sadly.

  “We can’t raise our baby in a cave, Cally.”

  ix

  When she had told him she was pregnant, Oliver had fled, on Esmee, to the base of a trail leading straight up the south side of Mount Psiloritis, Crete’s highest peak. A hard climb was what he wanted, solid rock under his feet. The path steepened. Left the trees. The sun shone. Breeze cooled the sweat on the back of his T-shirt. Wrecks slowed to a walk. Finally, when only grey scree stretched above him, empty as a moonscape, he sat down, stretched out his legs, took an apple out of his pack, and bit off a piece for Wrecks.

  “Looks like it’s just you and me again, bud.” Far below him, the lower hills buckled out toward the sea.

  The path circled to the east, around the high shoulder of the mountain toward the Ideon Cave, where the myths said Zeus had been raised, in hiding from his father. Below Oliver, the great green Nida plateau came into view. The cave was a gaping hole hidden by its altitude and a bit of a lip in the rising slope. There was nothing in it but an old rail track, the detritus of some bygone excavation. He liked this place though, the emptiness, the clear air, the view down over the plateau. Two separate flocks of sheep were grazing. Taking out his binoculars, he looked to see if he knew them. He had always found happiness up here, taking over an Anogia shepherd’s flock up here so he could have a holiday, or helping to churn cheese in one of the plateau’s round mitatos, where shepherds made some of Crete’s finest sheep cheeses. The mitatos, shelters made of piled stones, were indistinguishable from the stony landscape surrounding the plain, if you did not know where to look. Resistance guerrillas from the Anogia area had used them as hideouts during the war.

  Oliver shifted his focus to the far side of the plateau, found the shape of a man’s head laid out in stones. Even though all the town’s men had been shot after the kidnapping of Nazi General Kreipe, the women of the region had made the stone man as a memorial to the Germans who had fallen in the Battle of Crete. They were just young men too, they said, who had died far from home.

  Forgiveness. If the Cretans, of all people, could put the Nazis behind them, Oliver thought, why the hell couldn’t he do the same with the U.S. Marine Corps?

  The lone tree on the far side of the plain, with a fire pit and a stack of wood beside it, reminded him of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s book about the shepherd boy who, sleeping beneath the tree, had dreamt of treasure. He tried to see through the dusk. These sheep, clustering with heads together, waiting to sleep, looked familiar. He was still half a kilometre away from the tree when under it a fire leapt into life. Beside it someone was singing softly. He recognized the pick-up truck parked at the edge of the road.

  “Geiá Leftherio!”

  “Oliver?” The shepherd came to his feet, his bearded face open with delight. “How are you, my friend?” he said in Greek.

  “Fine, fine.” Oliver sat by the fire. Leftherio opened a plastic water bottle full of rakí, got two tin cups out of his pack.

  “So, you walked all the way across the plateau to visit with me. I’m honoured.” He passed a cup of the high proof rakí to Oliver, raised his own. “Yámas.”

  “How are the sheep?”

  “Oh, highly intellectual. Bella, she’s learning to count, and the other day, damned if I didn’t catch little Sweet Marie quoting Aristotle.”

  Oliver laughed, lay back on his elbows to watch the sliver of new moon and the stars take their places in the early blue-green darkness. Open spaces, freedom, friendship, what more did a man really need?

  “So, this problem that is weighing like a boulder on your head, is it for sharing?” Leftherio leaned over to refill his cup. Shepherds, used to being alone, to watching, became perceptive, and not just about sheep.

  “No, I don’t think so.” How could he tell Leftherio about Cally and the baby without also telling him the problem, that in the eyes of his country he was a criminal? Anyway, the baby was better off without him, and so was Cally. Without him to distract her, she would wake up to the fact that she should leave. He had always known that she would have to, one day, that there had to be no strings attached.

  “Good! Then we will drink.” Leftherio took two paper packages out of his knapsack, unwrapped them. “First though, some cheese, some olives …” He started singing again, a traditional Cretan folk song, keeping their cups full so that soon Oliver was joining him, endless verses one after another after another, sent full volume out into the night.

  Eventually Leftherio, Wrecks, and the sheep fell asleep. Oliver was left to sit, sipping rakí in the company of only the stars. And now Mikey’s face, so naive. “Really?” he’d said when Oliver had told him about the army’s education program. Mikey’s severed head, his hair soldier short, his eyes open, looking at Oliver. Forever. Always startled.

  He drank more rakí. The stars watched him cry.

  There was big, bright Jupiter.

  “You talkin’ to me?” He had read a book on stars, the energies they represent and how these influence human life. Jupiter’s positive force was expansive, pointing toward higher learning. Its negative energies were pride and arrogance.

  “So.” Leftherio was standing over him, prodding him with his staff, the sky barely white over his shoulder. “Do you stay to help me with the milking?” He handed Oliver a cup of thick sludge-like Greek coffee.

  His head and every one of his muscles ached. He dredged up the semblance of a smile.

  “Why do you think I’m here?”

  There was a rhythm to milking, the sheep’s udder warm under his hands as he pulled, the milk hissing into the pail, the sheep’s bell clinking against the feed pail. The smells of straw and manure and warm milk had always been like a balm.

  Not this morning. The prospect of living the rest of his life this way felt empty as the mountain landscape outside this sheep pen, harsh as his headache. There would never be another woman in his life. Milk hissed into the pail.

  Cally would keep this baby. He recalled her kissing his cheek to wake him, to tell him, so happy. She knew who he was — a royal fuck-up — and still she wanted him. Such a crazy, sexy, beautiful, smart woman. She seemed to have blithely forgotten that desertion from the United States army was punishable by death, asking damn fool questions about their future—

  He must have pulled a little too hard on the sheep’s teat. She jerked her rump, trying to get rid of his hand. One of her back legs lashed out, trying to kick him.

  “Sorry girl.” He let go of her teats, stroked her oily dust-caked wool.

  Brother Paul, blathering on about the Minotaur, had been right. Pride and the monstrous
arrogance of a viewpoint that, once taken, must never be relinquished were all that stood between him and Cally — and the baby she wanted him to father.

  x

  He would have to go back to the United States and face a Marine Corps court-martial.

  During the next days, Oliver spent hours with Brother Paul, trying to find the best way to piece together a future. In the evenings, she lay beside him, listening to the rollers breaking and hushing across the sand, watching the red fade into purple-grey in the bottoms of a few wisps of cloud, and tried to comprehend the bleakness that lay ahead.

  “I’ll never be sorry I walked away from that Kuwaiti desert,” he told her. “It was the right thing to do, to honour Mikey, but …” He waited for her to turn her head to him and looked into her eyes. “Our baby needs a father who is not on the run. I need to pay whatever dues are owing so that my son or daughter can have U.S. citizenship — whatever that’s worth — so they can make their own choices. There’s nothing I want more than to be with you and our baby, to give my life to the three of us. I can’t do that unless I get free of the past.”

  If he turned himself in, the charge of desertion would probably be reduced to Absence Without Leave.

  “I’ll have a felony conviction.” He was still looking at her, asking with his eyes if she understood what this would mean. “I’ll probably go to prison. I’ll never be able to get credit to buy a house. No one back home will hire me.”

  Prison in the United States: the idea sat like a boulder between them on the sand.

  She did not even know how to think about it. Several times she opened her mouth as if to reply, then thought better of it. Finally, thinking gave way. She sat up, got to her feet, and reaching down, took his hand to pull him to his feet. Heard herself tell him she wanted to marry him. Now, right here on the beach.

  It was the only way not to lose him to an American prison. Every time he touched his wedding ring he would know that she and their baby were waiting for him.

  xi

  “Love is a miracle,” Brother Paul told Oliver, “and you are one lucky bugger. So tend it carefully.”

  Because they were not members of the faith, a monk could not marry them in a Greek Orthodox Church, but the large cave in the beach cliff, Saint Paul’s first altar in Crete, must also qualify as holy ground. Brother Paul would ask permission to do an ex officio ceremony there. God and his abbot would probably approve.

  The best way forward was for Oliver to turn himself in as soon as possible. Brother Paul found an article online that said it would be rough. Both the military and the other cons would be looking to break the spirit of a man who would rather run away than fight for his country. There was no need for Cally to know that.

  “Visit your parents first.” Brother Paul went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  Waiting for him in the old leather chair facing the desk, where they had explored so many different subjects during the last ten years, Oliver saw the brick house he had grown up in, in upper New York State, the American flag flying above the front porch on the fourth of July, his father’s face.

  “You think they will never understand.” Brother Paul brought the tray through.

  “Or forgive me.” He had not spoken to them in ten years.

  “But how can you know what they are thinking or feeling?” Brother Paul handed him a mug full of American coffee. “You must think about your mother sometimes? And you can be sure she longs to see you.”

  The mug was hot in his hands.

  “I used to send them cards when I was travelling, just before I left a place, so the army couldn’t trace me.” But after awhile, the image of them waving proudly as he and Mikey walked off down the front path in their Marine Corps finery had stirred an anger too deep, too dangerous.

  “About forgiveness.” Blunt as a Boston longshoreman, Brother Paul never skirted the core of a problem. “Surely the most important thing for you to do now is to see if it is possible for you to forgive them. And yourself.”

  xii

  Wilfully blind, foolhardy, impulsive. Call her whatever you want. Four months after she had fled from Oliver’s bed in Plakias, she did not care what anyone thought. This sweet, fucked-up father of her baby was the one she wanted. Married, they could take hope with them into what promised to be the antithesis of the present. The ceremony here on the Preveli beach would allow them to take with them also the spirit of her grandparents.

  And after that? Up on the headland, she watched the early morning breezes play across a sparkling sea. The only certainty was that, with Oliver in an American prison, she would be alone with their child.

  A week before the wedding she moved into Oliver’s room while he and a carpenter friend built a ramp and a platform for Brother Paul just below St. Paul’s holy cave on the Preveli beach. She borrowed his telephone one morning to call her father just before dinner his time, when he might be having a drink, relaxing. If he was home. Punching in the country and area codes, then the number, she rehearsed the speech she had planned: about how happy she was; no, she had not taken the EO job — she had a few things to think through — but now she had met the man she wanted to marry, an American who worked over here. They were going to marry next week. Would he like to come?

  No need to mention the baby, or Oliver’s future, not long distance.

  The office was air-conditioned, but sweat trickled down between her breasts as, at the other end of the line, the telephone rang on the other side of the world. She imagined it on a wall, above a kitchen counter—

  “Hello.” The woman.

  Cally stumbled over her father’s name, gave her own.

  “Just a minute please.” Half sung, happily, in a world of sugar cereals and sunny kisses.

  What was she thinking?

  “Cally! Where the hell are you?” Gruff, old. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Dad.” She smiled. “In Greece still, Crete actually.”

  Silence.

  “You got my message?”

  “What message? You don’t mean the one four months ago, with no information except that you were not coming back, not even going to try the new job—”

  “Okay Dad. I’m calling with good news. I’m getting married. I’ve met this man —”

  “Married!” Buckshot syllables. Pause. Half a world away she could hear his breathing. “Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been?”

  Why? He had never shown any concern when she was right there, growing up.

  “I told you in the message that I was taking some time. And now I’m getting married. I thought maybe you’d come?”

  Silence. No questions, no emotion, no interest at all apparently. The years of his absence from the Overhampton house stretched between them as irrefutably as her loneliness during the last months of her mother’s suffering, obliterating everything but itself. She tried to excuse him: he was methodical, never good at spontaneity—

  “Dad! I’m happy!” But suddenly she was a little girl, afraid she would cry. “Bye Dad.”

  “No. Wait. What’s the rush? Why don’t you come home first—?”

  “We’re going to come home afterwards. I’ll call you.” Her voice quavered. Hopefully he did not hear it before she hung up.

  She picked up the receiver again. Punched in more numbers.

  “Hello?” A babble of babies’ voices and clinking dishes announced dinnertime at Slee’s house.

  “Slee! I’m getting married! Can you come?”

  “And why exactly would I do that, when what I really want to do is to wring your no-good, absent-for-four-months neck?”

  Yannis and Georgia were in the fish restaurant’s kitchen, across the street from the restaurant itself, their three-year old daughter Sofia colouring at a table just inside the doorway when Cally and Oliver dropped in to announce their wedding. Onion, fish, and spice odours from the various pots simmering on a gas stove flavoured the August heat.

  “So, a wife for Oliver at last!” Georgia
kissed both of Cally’s cheeks then stepped back, examining her. “You are lucky, many have tried—”

  “Pfff, luck.” Yannis stopped stirring a pot to wave the dripping spoon at her. “Did I not say to you: do not go with this man? Where will you live, in a shepherd’s hut? In your cave?”

  “Yannis!” Georgia peppered him with Greek.

  He pretended to back away. Behind him the lid on the pot began to rattle. Reacting with the reflexes of a man who had been doing this all his life, Yannis lifted the lid, stirred again, adjusted the heat, winked at her over his shoulder.

  “He gives you problems, you come to me.” He whacked the still hot spoon against the palm of his free hand. Oliver laughed.

  “I don’t think you have a wedding dress?” Georgia was still eying her. “But we are nearly the same, yes? You borrow mine. It will be years before our daughter is ready for it.”

  “Please, God,” said Yannis.

  “You come to Myrthios tomorrow afternoon. We make it fit.”

  Such generosity. For the second time in as many days, Cally was afraid she would cry.

  xiii

  Down at the end of Plakias Bay, three days before the wedding, the Dragon’s Head was snorting sea spray in a tricksy north wind that was swirling the road dust into dervishes. Standing outside the fruit and vegetable market, on the mountain road just above its juncture with the promenade outside the hotel, she was trying to keep her shopping bag out of its clutches when a car came past her. It stopped outside the hotel. A tall blond woman dressed in summer seersucker stepped out.

  “Slee!”

  Cally set off running.

  Her hug was boney, quick, a long lost treasure. The skin on her arms was smooth, a silver bracelet at her wrist, a green-white two-tone manicure on her nails.