Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  So she learned to be careful. She refused to pretend there was anything reasonable in the way other people took sickness and fear and disasters for granted and even expected them, but she kept her mouth shut about it. She watched others sometimes as if they were all mad, the way a child who had learned to solve problems based on the assumption that two plus two equals four might feel on discovering that everyone else was building whole cities based on the belief that two plus two equals five. But she knew better than to shout warnings.

  In school, though, it wasn’t always easy to be inconspicuous. Whenever the school nurse visited and lined everyone up for polio vaccine or inoculations she was the only one left sitting in her desk.

  “I suppose you think you can’t catch polio or smallpox?” one teacher had said.

  “Not think,” she answered, “know. If I only thought I couldn’t catch them probably I would.”

  The teacher sniffed, as if to say, “We’ll see about that,” and went on marking some papers she had laid out on her desk.

  “It was arrogant of you to answer like that,” her father told her, later. “That teacher’ll think you’re a smart-alec.”

  “But I told the truth,” she said. “Does speaking truth mean they have to force you into loneliness?”

  “Some people think truth is only what they can see or touch. She didn’t even know what you were talking about.”

  She had told Mrs. Starbuck something of her isolation, but what could she expect? Mrs. Starbuck could add two and two and get five like everybody else. She told Charlene a girl her age had no business being so serious. She said, “You should be thinking of little-girl things, never mind worrying about religion and things like that.”

  And now, it looked almost as if Mrs. Starbuck was throwing a challenge at her. As if saying “Now am I so perfect, Miss Smart?” As if trying to make it impossible for Charlene to think of her as anything else but a violent mad woman and a lawbreaker.

  But some calmer part of herself insisted that she was thinking nonsense. Jumping to conclusions. Maybe the boy was just some runaway who’d chosen that attic to hide in. Maybe Mrs. Starbuck didn’t even know he was there. He could be hiding from mean foster parents or the police. He could be sick or dying. But there was that dish of food. And all those boy clothes around the sewing machine. And more than once in the past year Charlene had heard sounds up in that attic which she’d passed off as bird sounds or a rat. Like it or not, she had to believe that Mrs. Starbuck was guilty.

  And didn’t even know yet that her secret was out.

  Nor did her father know, who stood beside her again, eating a sandwich. He bit off a corner, winked at her, and narrowed his eyes to show what she was missing. When he’d swallowed he took a good look all around the front yard and said, “Yessir, she was mad.”

  “Just leave her alone,” Charlene said. “She had reason.”

  “Oh not her. I mean Mrs. Wright.”

  She looked up and saw laughter sitting in his eyes. “Oh her.”

  “I thought the top of her head was going to go zing straight up in the air. It’ll probably take her a week to get over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she actually expected Mrs. Starbuck to throw that axe at her.”

  Charlene swallowed a giggle. “And those Larkins!”

  “Well,” he said.

  “Calling Mrs. Wright a fox terrier.” She put her hand over her mouth but the giggle leaked out.

  “They’re just grown-up kids,” he said. “There’s no harm in them.”

  “Spreading their low-IQ seeds!” she cried. The giggle was out, had escaped, was shaking her whole body.

  Her father pulled a face, an attempt to look as small and cranky as Mrs. Wright. “I’m surprised,” he said, as stern as could be, “to see a man with a teenage daughter so free and easy about such scum!”

  She tried to bark like Mrs. Starbuck: “Don’t be crude, Millicent!” but she collapsed instead in a fit of giggles and had to put her face right down. Oh, why did people have to take anything seriously?

  But her father was still Mrs. Wright. “Some day, Mr. Porter,” he invented, “your daughter may just end up married to one of those morons if you insist on being so tolerant.”

  “Oh no, not that,” she laughed, “I’d rather die.”

  Because she nearly had, anyhow, the one time she had let them close, had nearly died of fright. “Those three,” she said. “ought to be locked up somewhere.”

  “Now now,” he said, a warning, a hand on her arm.

  And she understood what he meant. Yes, even those three, with their warped sense of humour and limited intelligence, were people too and just as true as she.

  Try telling her that the day last year when she went into their back yard for eggs (mud and feathers right to the floor) and the two men rode motorcycles around and around her getting so close to her toes she cried out at last for Shelley. Try telling her they were perfect reflections of God too like everybody else when they tried to get her on their bikes. (“Too scared, eh C.P.? Too scared to sit a motorbike.”)

  “Not scared, just sensible. I got this funny ambition, I want to grow up alive.”

  And Shelley too, on the front step combing her long black hair and singing, “She’s only fourteen,” as if it were a crime or an affliction that couldn’t be helped.

  “There’s fourteen and fourteen,” she said.

  “And you’re the scaredy kind,” Shelley said. “If I ride one will you the other?”

  So she had sat on Bysshe’s seat, arms clamped around his chest, a voice inside saying “He might not have much brains but he’s kept himself alive on this thing, maybe I have a chance,” and rode that black machine four times around the yard (chickens scattering at every turn). And was just breathing easy that it would soon be over when he turned left instead of right and went out onto the road, spraying gravel like chicken feed in every direction, and speeded up.

  “Go back,” she cried, and would have pounded his back if she could have pried her hand loose. “Stop and let me off, I’ve had enough.”

  But enough or not there was more. Twenty miles more up Cut Off Road at sixty miles an hour at least, then onto gravel and dust for fifteen more of logging road; down into the ditch and up again to avoid the watchman’s gate (her screaming now and considering her chances if she just let go and fell), around two small lakes as flat and smooth as corners chipped from mirrors, and up a dozen switchbacks through newly logged-off mountainside (him rising as natural as a huge black bird up those slopes) until they skidded to a stop by a river and waited while their own dust caught up and swirled around them and thinned out.

  “Now there’s just one thing I want to do,” she said, when her feet were on the ground, “to show how much I appreciate the ride.” She tightened her fist, pulled back her arm, and hit him as hard as she could in the middle of his chest.

  But he laughed. “You’re no fighter,” he said, and took off. Glided down the slope as if all of this, all this mountainside and sky belonged just to him.

  “Caliban!” she yelled after him, but he didn’t hear, and anyway he wouldn’t have known what she meant.

  She was left, spitting dust and curses, at the top of that hill. When his brown cloud had settled, she looked down on the road ahead like a dropped rope leading round-about back to home. She was left with nothing but a noisy whiskey-jack for company and thirty-five miles to walk.

  I bet they think I’m scared of a big old brown bear jumping out of the bush to eat me, she thought, and (glancing behind to be sure) started walking. I bet they think I’m terrified to know I couldn’t possibly get home before dark. I bet they’re sitting down there in their mucky yard laughing at me, sure I’m listening for sounds of footsteps behind or cracking branches in brush.

  She sang two verses of a hymn her father had taught her but got too interested in the wild blackberries at the side of the road to go on. She was knee-deep in vines, face smeared with red juice, when Mrs. Starbuck’s old paint-pee
ling car came chugging up the hill and stopped. “Weren’t you even going to try getting home?” Mrs. Starbuck said.

  “I forgot,” she said. “I knew someone would come. I just wish I had a bucket with me though, these berries are too good to leave.”

  Mrs. Starbuck got out and pried off a hub cap. “Here’s all the bucket I got, so pick. We’ll make jam together and I get half.”

  They picked three hub caps full before Mrs. Starbuck’s back started to ache. Charlene set them out on the back seat, went back to fill a plastic bag she’d found, then got into the car and slammed the door. “Too bad I don’t have time to pick another hub cap full for Bysshe,” she said.

  Mrs. Starbuck started her motor. “Them three,” she said. “They’ll kill somebody yet. No sense at all.”

  “Oh they’ve got sense all right,” she said. “They just don’t know it was meant to be used. What brought you up this way?”

  “Not sightseeing exactly. You should’ve heard the story I had to tell that watchman. I ended up doubting it myself. That Bysshe rode into my yard and right up onto the verandah and said ‘Guess who’s just starting down the side of Handlebar Hill?’ I told him I hoped it was doom, heading for him, but he laughed and said no it was Charlene Porter who was too scared to ride back.”

  “That’s a lie. He left me.”

  “I figured it was. I thought, well I can’t afford to see Cut Off from the air so why not a bird’s-eye view from the hills? Here I am, and look at that sight.”

  They both looked down at the land below, a thick green rug with roads like worm trails winding through, farm fields like shaved-off squares. The strait, blue-white from here, looked full and thick and slow. “Let’s get,” Charlene said. “Those blackberries are soft and this sun’ll drip juice all over your back seat.”

  The next day she walked over to help make jam but Mrs. Starbuck already had the berries on her stove. “They haven’t boiled yet,” she said, “you can help me scald out the bottles.”

  She washed the jam bottles in the sink with hot water and soap, then set them on a rack and let Charlene pour boiling water from the kettle over them.

  “Bysshe, you’re in this bottle, stop screaming. Percy, here you are, here’s your turn, take it like a man. Shelley, don’t cry, it’ll only last a minute. No sense swimming, it takes the skin off anyway.”

  “I’m surprised at you,” Mrs. Starbuck said. “A person brought up the way you are shouldn’t talk like that. Leave me to do the mean things.”

  “There’s nothing mean about you,” she said. “I’ve never seen you mean.”

  Mrs. Starbuck chuckled. “Oh, I learned a few things from my husband. He was an expert.”

  “How come you never had any kids?”

  Mrs. Starbuck turned away quickly. “Here. Look here. These berries are started to boil. You take this wooden spoon and stir a while.”

  All that morning they worked together (like mother and daughter, she thought) until every one of those berries, mashed down and sweetened with sugar, was safely stuffed inside a jar and capped with wax.

  Mrs. Starbuck closed her eyes to breathe in the smell. And in the silence Charlene heard a sound in the attic. A bird has got in, she thought, for it was nothing louder than a small body hitting once against a board. It could even have been something knocked over by a mouse or rat. “There’s something alive up there,” she cried. “Hey you, come down! Mrs. Starbuck, you’ve got bats in your attic!”

  Mrs. Starbuck sat down heavily, dropped her body into a chair with a wumph that knocked her own breath out. “Look at me,” she said. “A fat cow in these clothes. You’d be ashamed of me for a mother. Anybody’d be ashamed of me.”

  “Not me!”

  Oh no, she’d take her out and parade her around and say “my mother” every second sentence. “I think you’re perfect,” she said. Mrs. Starbuck was about as far as you could get from that pretty little blue-eyed mother she remembered but she’d do. She’d do just fine. “I’d just love it, Mrs. Starbuck.”

  “Well I’ve had one husband already, all I could bear in this life. And your father’s still married to that other one, up there.” She pointed vaguely north. “So right now’s as close as we’ll ever be to related, like it or not.”

  “It’ll do,” she cried, but listen: “There it is again. You do have bats up there!”

  Mrs. Starbuck slapped her heavy thighs. “I may have bats in my belfry but there’s not one in my attic. Not a thing alive up there. Let’s go pick some peas.”

  “There’s only one thing I don’t like about your father,” Mrs. Starbuck said when they were outside. “The way he’s taught you all that religion stuff since you were too young to know what it means.”

  Charlene laughed. “I’ve never believed anything I couldn’t turn around and prove,” she said. “Christ didn’t come to start up a church or make himself into a hero. He came to show what we could all do for ourselves if we’d just recognize what we are.”

  “Just the same, I think a person should wait until he’s grown up before picking a religion, when you’re old enough to know what you’re doing.”

  Charlene stood up from picking and faced the sun. “How old were you when you made your choice?”

  “Me?” she said. “Me, I still don’t know what’s what. Forty-eight years old and maybe never will.”

  And now, watching her father head down the lane towards the chicken sheds, Charlene too wondered if she knew what was what. But pushed that thought aside as quickly as it appeared, because she did know this: it was sometimes hard to hold on to what you know is real when everything is trying hard to hide it from you. She’d been betrayed, not by truth but by a friend. The real Mrs. Starbuck was hiding behind a new and ugly mask, the mask of a cheat and a criminal.

  And yet, behind the betrayal there was a sense of excitement. This was something that happened only in newspapers, to people in far-off places, to twisted and warped and violent people, or silent and sneaky people. But not to them! Not to Mrs. Starbuck and to her and to, yes, to Mrs. Wright. They were not people who were written up in the back pages of the big-city newspaper beside stories of two-headed calves and freak drownings and axe-murder trials. They were three women (she included herself, now, after this) who lived in Cut Off and passed from day to day through ordinary, growing lives. Happy, mostly happy, and knowing each other so well.

  Until Mrs. Starbuck became a monster.

  She tried to straighten out her thinking, put it in line with what she’d been taught. Her father would be disappointed if he knew what thoughts she’d been allowing in. She tried to see behind that new monster surface, to insist on the perfection beneath. If she refused to see anything in Mrs. Starbuck but the truth of her God-qualities, she knew, all this mess would somehow straighten out and things could go back to normal. Her father could do it, and so could she.

  But she couldn’t seem to stick to it. Because there was the boy, too, to think of. Shut up in that room like an old coat that’s out of style, not even able to see the sun shining out there or the dust rising along the road. Worse off than an animal. How could she push that picture from her mind as if it didn’t exist?

  Maybe Mrs. Starbuck let him out when no one else was around. Maybe she kept him there only when there was company. But if that was so, why was he there yesterday? Why wasn’t he running all over the house, playing? There wasn’t a toy in sight.

  And maybe she’d been wrong all along. There was still the possibility that Mrs. Starbuck didn’t even know about the boy, that he’d hidden up there just yesterday morning and could be gone by now. She’d been told often enough at school that she needed to learn to control her imagination a little, not let herself get carried away so easily.

  When her father had gone behind a chicken house, she started walking down the road, felt hot dusty rocks burn the soles of her feet. She would go over and face the ugly business and get it over with. There was no sense trying to solve a problem until you knew what it was.
Grasshoppers clicked in the long grass. And somewhere in the trees a cicada’s song whirred, high and thin as the hum of telephone wires. Sing your heart out, she thought. Seventeen years you’ve waited underground for this day so sing!

  But again Mrs. Starbuck wasn’t at the house. Still back at the well, maybe, still sad about the calf and ashamed to come home. She knocked and called, heard only silence; then ran upstairs, all the way up to the top of that ladder and crawled into the attic space. Nearly choking on the beat of her own heart.

  And “Come on boy,” she heard herself say. “We’re getting you out of this place.” Because he was still there, still real.

  She moved close enough to see his face, which was round and pale as the top pastry of an uncooked pie, nearly as featureless. No sunlight had come anywhere near. “You’re hardly half my size, we can manage. You’re free. This is your lucky day.”

  The child (she guessed ten years old) pushed right back into the corner, whimpering, and curled up into a ball. “Just hold onto me,” she said. “I’ll get you out of here.”

  He put his head down and wrapped his arms around it so he couldn’t see her.

  And she, she was St. Joan. She was Miranda when her father released the spell. “I don’t know how long you been up here but it’s too long,” she said. “Get ready to see the world.”

  She saw that there was no way she could get him out of this attic without his co-operation. Even if she managed to drag him over to the hole, he would have to go down the ladder by himself. “Look, I’m going to show you what you’re missing,” she said. A thick piece of cardboard was nailed up against one end wall, covering a small window she had noticed from outside. She would rip it off. “I’ll let some light in here and you can look out and see how pretty it is. Hear the grasshoppers. Smell the roses. See everything so pretty in the sun.”

  She tore the cardboard away from the wall and, yes, there was a window. A small square hole without glass, facing Mrs. Starbuck’s flower gardens and up the driveway to the road.