The new woman didn’t need to call the wind. But it had come, perhaps of its own accord. Maybe it followed her, punished her, threatened to thrust her back from whence she came. Or it could have been the old Witch, complaining from her mossy grave outside the churchyard.
How would I know, anyway? I didn’t have the power of a reading. I was just a human battery. In times before, I would have been a sacrifice atop one of the old bluestones on the high bluffs to the north. Now I was Christina’s sweetling, giving of myself, but well supplied with ale and bed favors in exchange for my continued services.
It wasn’t ale or bed favors I was wanting today, though. It was knowing how the salt had jumped back into the bag, and how the bag had jumped back into the pocket of my greatcoat. Sure as the cemetery gates creak, it wasn’t the majesty of the law which had done this.
Christina would be furious, but she’d be smart enough not to blame me for the business. Probably. I shivered as the mercantile loomed out of the driving fog. The side stairs were slippery as ever, but my feet knew them well.
Up to her well-decorated door, and knocked three short raps—tak, tak, tak—as was our arrangement. I stood as the wind buffeted me, amusing myself with leaning into it, letting the steady push of its force hold me suspended over the railing. The wind, in turn, amused itself with letting up every so often, threatening to throw me to the muddy track below. We fought to a standoff, and Christina had not come to the door.
Tak, tak, tak. And silence, save the howling gale about me.
Most peculiar.
I did not dare put my ear to her door or my eye to her keyhole. The memory still stung from the last time I’d taken such unwonted liberties. Instead, I rapped once more, then gave a heavy sigh and took my thirsty body back down the reeking stairs.
Sara Maarinen herself was before me as I took the final step. I had not seen her coming, and you may well believe I had been looking. She was much on my mind, and then she was clutching the raw woolen collar of my coat and pulling, pulling. She drew my reluctant ear to her lipsticked mouth and whispered, “You’ll not find what you need up there, young Palka. Though it may amuse you to tumble in her bed, she is no gift for you.”
I reached for my easy pub grin, but it slipped from my grasp even as I drew away from Sara’s hiss. “I... You don’t...” Words failed me.
“My cottage,” she said. “I am told you hold the key. You will take me there now.”
I looked up and down the street, but no one ventured out into the howl and the whine that poured down from the angry skies. No, this I would have to do on my own.
It had ever been so, since Grandfather had given me the Palka legacy.
Sara Maarinen let go of my coat and spun around, marching down the street without a glance behind her. As I followed, I noted the sparkle of salt at her heels.
~o0o~
Grandfather had been generally accounted a difficult man. Famously so, in fact, and this on an island renowned for difficult people. Our folk were stubborn as the Irish, thick as the Norwegians, and slow-tempered as any vengeful moneylender of old. Bone Island had feuds which dated back before the Christ came to our shores, rooted in such trivial causes as pig-thievery and fence-hopping.
We are a proud people, and we are proudest of the fossils carried in the bedrock of our pride.
Yet even among these folk, who could turn a single misspoken word into the slow-burning sport of a seasons-long quarrel, Grandfather Palka had been another kind of man entirely. He must have been young once, for no one is born into their later age, but by the time I came along to know him, there wasn’t a soul to testify to whatever wit or charm or grace had sustained him through his younger years, two wives and three mistresses.
My grandfather was an iron bastard with flinty eyes and bones which might just as well have been quarried out of the island itself. He didn’t have either kind of magic, just the cynical wisdom of an old man in a hardscrabble place.
It was he who took me out into the raddled hawthorn copse that filled the ravine behind the Palka farm. It was he who showed me the cave hidden behind the brambles that lined the stand of trees. It was he who took me within, to the broken altar and the old stone axe with stains as deep as time.
“Cary,” he’d said. “Time was, the business of living got done here.”
Grandfather wasn’t much for talking, either, beyond “pass the salt.” That alone was very nearly a lecture. When he went on after a long slow breath, I was amazed. “Our name means ‘priest’ in the old tongue. It also means ‘keeper’.”
He looked at me sidelong, those gray eyes sparkling like the sea beneath a storm front.
I nodded to show I was serious, that I was listening, that I wasn’t scared. All lies, of course, but a hard man of five decades can see through even the lies of a barely teen-aged boy, as I was then.
“Got no duties now except memory. The witches took the business from us long ago.” His fingers brushed the ax, its crude handle perhaps generations old, yet still surely renewed time and again across the span of Bone Island’s history until the original was only a memory of a memory. “And we let them keep it,” he added. “You won’t be wanting it back.”
After a while in which the wind whickered at the shallow cave mouth and the reek of salt almost overcame me, I asked the question which seemed obvious to me. “Sir, what is it I am to remember?”
“Why there is still blood on this ax after a dozen dozen generations,” he said slowly. “What it is that brings the midwinter sun to the sky and spring crops from the soil.” He looked at me again, the ax forgotten now. “And that you, a Palka, are always going to be alone, until you can give the duty to a son or nephew or grandson.”
Alone, that was me, following Sara Maarinen to the witch’s cottage. The garden was turned as if freshly plowed, though I knew better. The windy fog had lifted a bit, so the feral orchards behind the house could be spied in silhouette like a line of acromegalic soldiers on sentry duty.
The Palka legacy was a flinty old ax and a hole in the ground, and I had neither of them now. Only the memory of something I didn’t understand, and the stirring certainty that whatever had baffled Christina’s magic and worried everyone here on the island was tied into the that old, old business the witches had taken from one of my grandfather’s grandfathers, back when the sun was redder and the ice lay on the ocean so the wolves could cross the bight.
“You know it’s mine,” Sara Maarinen said. She had stopped all a-sudden on the path and now stood facing me, her fingers pressing into the bruises Christina had left behind.
She understood too much, this woman with the noisy magic.
“No, I don’t know that,” I told her, and wondered how the hell those words had found their way out of my mouth. Clearly I was on my own way to being famously difficult. Or possibly famously dead, if my stirring intuition was not simply spinning nightmares out of no cloth at all.
Where was Christina?
Sara smiled, at long last. She let my shoulder go and tossed her raven-colored hair over her shoulder, in a gesture I would have understood utterly coming from an island girl in the pub: from Janey Iverson out and about without her daughter, or Ruth Wilder, before she’d taken up with Connor Makepeace. But from Sara, it only served to shrink my manhood—what of it still remained as I shivered through this frigid wind from off the sea. “You know it’s mine,” she repeated, and then all I could do was follow her again.
~o0o~
Of course she was a witch, descended from the witches. I’d been fooling myself before, pretending doubt. We all had, and a poor showing on us to have done so, but so we did. In our defense, the witches’ line had thinned and faltered, strained through the outcrossed blood from the mainland folk, till the best anyone who still had the touch could do was call a few crows to her side, and then only if they felt like it. (The crows, that is.) The old one, buried outside the churchyard fence, had been the last true witch. Too many of us secretly thought this a good thi
ng.
There were some who could, as Christina did, see things that weren’t there, at least not yet. It’s a small magic, but there were a few times in my life when I’d have not turned it down.
Such as the moment we arrived at the front door of the Bone Island Witch’s cottage. I’d have given any number of brimming pints of fresh ale to know what I’d find within, without having to open the door first, with this terrible woman hovering at my shoulder.
Sara gave me that chilly grin again, the one that had unmanned me on the path. “Let me in, Palka.”
I stood on the stoop in the blowing, grime-gray fog, trying not to shake. My hands clung to the insides of my greatcoat pockets like Gracie Fenniman had to the bones of her tug after it broke up on Deacon’s Rock last winter. My arms would not obey the command of my brain. I was certain that Sara Maarinen was going to commit foul magic on me if I did not move, but still I stood.
Then I felt her move a step closer to me, and the moment was shattered. I hauled out the skeleton key and shoved it into the lock. Something crusty and white fell out and fluttered to the ground—not salt, not this time. Something worse. And it was jammed in the lock, so I had to wrestle the key. But there was no turning back now. Sara’s breath was thick and greedy in my ear as she leaned in, watching the key in the hole. I smelled her breakfast of blood sausage and pork-fat-laden biscuits, and had to swallow my rising gorge with an effort.
The key slipped, and finally turned.
The door eased open as if it had not been shut up these long lonely years.
~o0o~
I’d first met Christina shortly after Grandfather had shown me the duty. I mean, I’d always known her. Everybody on Bone Island knows everybody else, or at the least we’re aware of each other. She’d been a senior in our tiny school when I first started, impossibly tall and old, practically an adult. When I was biking down chalky paths to risk a cliff-top header into the ocean, she’d been doing whatever young adults do on an island with fewer than a dozen retail businesses.
I’ve seen TV. I know on the mainland kids get jobs at the mall or join the army or live in huge apartments in New York City with a dozen of their friends. Some of them even go to college. Some of us even go to college. We’re not ignorant.
Not Christina. Whatever she did in those years was invisible to me, though of course later on I realized she was finding the quiet magic.
When Grandfather showed me the duty, I was fourteen. Scruffy beard which wouldn’t fool anybody but the boy in the mirror, narrow shoulders stuck up high in a pretense of manly pride, saved from my own social ineptitude only by a ready smile and the curious kindnesses of a small place where everyone understands one another’s faults and loves them anyway.
When a slender twenty-five-year-old Christina stopped me on the town’s one paved street—cobbles, not macadam, for we have far more rocks than tar in this place—of course I paid attention to her. She was pretty. I was young. She was a woman. I was convinced I was a man already.
“You’re a Palka,” she said.
I stared at her: I knew she knew that. “The Palka, really.” Mother and Father were already gone, and Grandfather, well, he was old. That’s how I saw it then, when in effect the entire universe had only been created a decade and a half earlier at the moment of my birth.
“The Palka.” Something in her smile made my groin twitch. I squirmed on my bike saddle. Christina continued: “Come see me sometime. I live over the mercantile.”
My God, I thought. I have a date. With a real woman. With breasts and everything.
“Um, yeah, sure.” I was so cool. I even flipped my hair.
The smile changed, and I felt very small then. The wind changed with it, bringing the salt-and-rot smell off the harbor, and when I glanced away for a moment to take the sting from my eyes, she was gone.
I don’t suppose I need to tell you what happened when I went up to her place. No wild fantasies, no sexual initiations. She wanted to talk about seeings and blood and the old families of Bone Island. Beautiful and dangerous as Christina was, it was like talking to Grandfather.
What I didn’t understand until later was that the sex would come when I opened myself up to her seeings. And when it did come, it wasn’t anything like I’d hoped it would be. But by then it was much too late.
The old witches, they didn’t need boys like me. They carried it all within themselves, the noisy power.
The duty, it belonged to me, if only I could understand it. It was all connected, like a trapline beneath the leaves.
With that thought, I realized the brass knob beneath my hand was as cold as Sara Maarinen’s bloody breath on my neck.
“Go on, boy,” she said, eerily gentle. “Or are you afraid?”
“Ma’am,” I said fervently, “I am always afraid.”
With the lock unleashed, the door pulled at my hand as if the haints within tugged on it in their eager, unquiet rest. I let the knob go and the door fell open as I blinked my eyes in disbelief.
Inside, it was just as we had left it. The chairs were neatly set around the polished oaken table, the small bed was made up, and the air was fresh with a faint scent of pine, as though Gertie had come down with her needle-broom and swept up ten minutes ago.
Strangest of all, of course, was the bright sunlight that slanted through the small back window.
I stood in the doorway, staring at the golden light. It couldn’t be.
“Well?” Sara Maarinen hissed.
“I...” My voice died in my throat. I tried to step back, to look at the sky behind me, back in the real world. It was as grey and sopping as ever. The fog was roaring up from the bight again, loping along on its big senseless panther feet.
Sara laid her cold silver eyes on me. “You what, Palka?”
I swallowed a hard lump in my throat and tore my gaze away from the impossible window. “Nothing.” I led her into the cottage. Her cottage, according to mainland law and the magic of paperwork.
She pushed past me, her city clothes making little silken whispery sounds as she went by. Straight for the diadem that Grandfather had hammered into the far wall she went, and when she got there, she put her thin white hands on it so eagerly it made me quiver. I watched her, unable to do anything else. After a minute I realized she was speaking, or crooning, but low, under her breath. I couldn’t make out any words. Maybe she was just humming at it as she caressed the evil thing.
All the while she ignored the sunlit window, so I did too. At least, I did not speak of it. I remained in the doorway, waiting for my next instructions.
That was when Christina showed up.
~o0o~
Back when my parents had first died, Grant Archerson spent some time taking an interest in me. Avuncular, I think the word is—like an old uncle. Nothing creepy. Here on Bone Island, all the real weirdoes seem to be women.
Nothing magical, either. I mean, I talk about it all the time, I think about it all the time, but really, most people here are just people. Maybe they know a bit more about what some things mean than mainlanders. The one fencepost with a shadow stretching the wrong way round at dusk. Why the swallows fly just that way over the Moravian Church steeple. When not to knock on the witch’s cottage door.
That’s not magic. That’s situational awareness.
And Grant was about as unmagical as a wooden spoon.
What he was, was the guy who ran the Tossed Pot, one of two bars on Bone Island. The other was the Scupper, down by the Fishing Pier, and mostly the working sailors drank there, along with anyone come in working a boat who wasn’t local. Nice enough place, if you like everything to smell and taste like fried fish (or fried fisherman), but the conversation lags quickly once you talk about anything that doesn’t involve a hull on open water.
The Tossed Pot, on the other hand, was the sort of bar that tourists dream of discovering. Which pretty much all of the ones we get do, since it’s also the only public restaurant on the island besides the dining room of the Whi
te Rock. There’s a dozen places to eat easy enough, if you drop by with a loaf of bread and a pound of butter for the table, but only one with a signboard and a menu and beer taps. Inside looks like the club room of another age, faded Imperial ambitions and war mementos brought home by men who fought under the tropical sun in woolen uniforms and puttees.
Which was total bullshit, of course. Grant bought that stuff up from catalogs, and swapped out the decor two or three times a year. A sort of hobby.
But he was also a hell of a nice guy, who kept track of what happened to the kids young and old. You wanted to ask about Dolly Paternoster’s daughter, drop by the Pot and chat up Grant. Dolly slept under a mossy granite headstone now, but Margot wrote Grant a postcard every few months. The little kids, too.
So when Father fell out of Old Kennewick’s boat trying to save a crate of Mark Fenniman’s chickens in a rising storm, Grant knew before I did. A week later Mother disappeared down at Bishop’s Head looking for the body on the tide. Or maybe she went for a swim to join him. I’ve never known, and Christina never said. But Grant probably knows, and he came looking for me even before Granddaddy found out.
For a while I lived half at the Tossed Pot and half at the Palka farm. I was too young to drink, even by Bone Island standards, and Grant had enough situational awareness to see where I was headed in life—college wasn’t in the script, he knew that—so he gently sent me back to the farm until I outgrew it as all farm children do.
But still, if I had a father on this place, a father of the heart, it was Grant Archerson. I don’t think he liked my bedwandering ways, and he never thought much of how I let Christina use me, but he still cared enough to keep tabs on me, and speak up from time to time.
Right now I was wishing mightily I’d listened to him, earlier on or just now. Being caught between Christina and Sara Maarinen was like being ground between two stones.
“What are you doing?” Christina asked, with that look in her eye and the barbed wire edge in her voice.
Eastlick and Other Stories Page 17