Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  Sometimes I’m tempted to tell them “I knew a poet once, for a while. She invited me up into the mountains with her.” But they’d only say “Sure, sure,” and go on with their arguing, and talking about magic hands, and drinking their beer. Or say “How did a poet get into the mill?” which is as big as they think my world ever gets. No, that isn’t what they would say. They’d just look at me (Marsten squeezing his eyes into a squint, old Mrs. Bested leaning back to peer through her slits) they’d just look at me as if I had left my brains behind me somewhere on the road, and maybe roll a few sounds around in their mouths waiting for me to add more, something that would make sense to them, something that would fit closer to their idea of what I am like. It just doesn’t enter some people’s heads that others might not be what they seem. So I’ll never tell them about the poet, and anyway she may have come down off that mountain long ago now, and gone home.

  Though maybe not. I could go up there yet, to see. I should, to see for myself. She just might still be there. The most she could’ve found up there for company would be a timber cruiser or a half-crazy old prospector or a party of university students looking at rocks. Still, I like to imagine her stumbling into a camp of wild and desperate soldiers laying plans to set the island afloat and liberate us all from something. They tell me the mountains on islands in other parts of the world are just swarming with these secret armies and escaped convicts, with passwords and smuggled-in machine guns and whispered meetings. Not us, as far as I know, but I still like to think of her coming into a group of them, being caught by their lookout. They would kill the Crotch right away, of course, but she’d become one of them, and even more than that, she’d become a leader, too, in no time at all. Maybe she’s up there now, somewhere, plotting my freedom for me. I just may go up yet, to see for myself.

  In the meantime, I’ve still got the poem she sent me, the day after the Wooden Nickel, postmarked at the little village just up beyond it. It’s handwritten, not typed, scribbled out in her writing. Sometimes when I read it, it starts to make a kind of sense to me, if I don’t try too hard, but if I look up from it for even a second the meaning just disappears and it all looks like gibberish again. But she’s in there, somewhere. She’s in there somewhere looking at me clearer than anyone’s ever seen me before. If I could understand, if I could get inside those words with her, I think I’d be able to know what it was she saw when she looked at me, what it was that made her believe I could manage, that I could survive and go on. But I won’t tell Marsten about it. I know him, the son of a gun would go through the roof. Or die laughing. I wouldn’t tell him a thing.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jack Hodgins’ fiction has won the Governor General’s Award, the Canada-Australia Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and the Caribbean) and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, amongst others. He has given readings, talks, and workshops in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and several European countries, and has taught an annual fiction workshop in Mallorca, Spain. A Passion for Narrative (a guide to writing fiction) is used in classrooms and writing groups across Canada and Australia. In 2006 he received both the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence in British Columbia. In 2009 the Governor General appointed him a Member of the Order of Canada. His most recent novel, The Master of Happy Endings, was published in 2010. He and his wife Dianne live in Victoria. More information is available on his website: www.jackhodgins.ca.