Lisette was a year younger than Jacques and me, twelve to our thirteen the year she died. She had stiff black hair and brown eyes that tipped at the corners, a straight nose and a round brown face, and I thought she was beautiful. She had a terrible temper. If she thought she was being teased she’d throw whatever came to hand, a book or a rock or a handful of salt water. She loved End Harbor. She was one of those who lived with the awareness of the magic shining through their skins.
“Look at her,” my grandmother used to say. “There’s one child who really belongs in this place.”
While the old man, who had never belonged, would scowl and look away.
I went in to check on him. The hoarse labor of his breathing filled the room, echoing the drag of the surf on the rocks. I stood over him, watching the lantern light waver across the harsh bones of his face. He didn’t seem to have changed at all. He only had to open his glaring yellow eyes and he would be the same man who had lured Lisette to her death.
Who had made me lure Lisette to her death.
“She’s the only one who can help us,” the old man had said to me. After days of rage, wild cursing, violent tears, he had fallen into a long, thinking silence. Where this sudden calm came from I did not question, any more than I questioned the subject of his contemplation. I clung to his surety like a starfish clings to a rock in a storm. He said, “Your grandmother is right. The girl is part of the presence of this place. She can help us tap its power. She can help us bring them home. You must tell her to come.”
Matwa’s people knew about magic, about imposing the will upon the world. I did not have to forget his bloody tales of where their power came from. They were buried as deeply as my parents and grandmother were buried beneath the waves, or beneath the gray fog that swept the End, giving and taking away. I swore Lisette to secrecy and told her to come. She agreed without pause, her dark eyes shining with a child’s curiosity and an adult’s compassion. The idea of magic was as natural to her as the idea of breathing, and she wanted to help. So did I. I knew when the old man went out into the woods back of the house to make his preparations. And when he returned and said he’d been in the village, when he said he’d seen Lisette and she’d told him she couldn’t come after all, I knew it was a lie. He sent me down to the cove on the other side of the point to gather driftwood—an ingredient in the spell, he said. I circled round through the trees until I could see the house, and I waited, as he waited, for Lisette to come.
This I remembered, as the surf beat beneath the house’s foundations, and the breath rasped in the old man’s throat. I remembered everything.
The fog crept in before dawn and drowned the world. As the dim underwater light grew, I sat by the open front door with my face to the trees, but they never came into view. I might have been on a raft, surrounded by the rhythm of the waves and the groans of the house as it leaned over the brink. On a raft, drifting into the unknown, with the fog a cool touch on my skin. I held my hands out before me, as if the damp air alone could wash them clean. It carried strange scents into the house, a powerful ocean smell one moment, a delicate spice like birch bark and cinnamon the next. I knew all the signs. It was a stranger’s fog, the fog of change.
Jacques came out early, as he’d said he would. I heard his boots on the muddy trail long before he appeared out of the gray. I wiped my wet hands on the tail of my shirt and carried the coffee pot out onto the porch, along with a couple of cups.
“Hey,” he said as he climbed the steps.
I handed him a steaming mug. “The old man’s dead.”
He looked up from his coffee, dark eyes searching my face through the steam. “How’d he go?”
“I was asleep.” I turned my shoulder to Jacques to pour coffee into my mug. “He wasn’t breathing so good when I went to bed, but it wasn’t any worse than before you left.” I shrugged. “I could have stayed up with him, I guess, but I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Not a lot you can do if somebody stops breathing.” Jacques settled himself against the railing and looked out into the fog, but he might as well have been staring at me still, the effect of his attention was the same. “You really think he killed Lisette.”
I swallowed bitter coffee. “I guess I have, subconsciously, for years.” I drew a slow, careful breath. “I’m sorry, Jacques.”
“You said it yourself. The old man was nuts.” His voice was brusque with an old grief. He gentled it some when he said after a while, “We’re going to bury her today.”
I nodded. “He can wait till tomorrow, then.”
Jacques turned and looked at me strangely. “Why should he? Put them down together. That way it’ll all be finally over.”
Without warning, tears spilled out of my eyes. I could not seem to control anything anymore. I raised my arm to wipe my face on my sleeve, but when I took it away I could see Jacques was crying too. So we stood there together and silently wept, while the trees dripped, invisible in the fog.
The murdered and the murderer went in the ground together, side by side. There’s no preacher in End Harbor, and no undertaker, so funerals are a community affair. The women lay out the bodies and sew the shrouds, while the men dig the graves. It’s hard work, digging a deep hole in the heavy, root-clogged earth. Jacques and his father dug Lisette’s grave together. I dug Matwa’s alone.
Sweat soaked my shirt and stung my eyes, while blisters burned on my hands and fog moisture gathered in my hair. Every spadeful hurt, the sodden dirt as heavy as the old man had been when we carried him wrapped in blankets from the house to the Peaches’ boat shed. He lay there now, washed and bound in linen and cedar bark, ready for the end. Old Mrs. Reedy, Margaret Peach’s mother, lined the graves with damp hemlock boughs, and then they were ready as well. Tired as I was, I could imagine lying down there on that fragrant furry green to sleep. Sleep as black and heavy as the earth.
The dead were carried up from the water’s edge to the graveyard above the village. Men in clean sweaters bore the biers, while women walked behind, singing. Not hymns, but children’s songs for Lise’s sake, eerie in the fog. For Matwa there would be nothing.
He had spoken so gently to Lise, there at the foot of the cliffside cedar near the house. I think that must have been why I in my hiding place felt no fear for her, although it was utterly contrary to his usual manner. I could hardly recall an instance of kindness from the old man, yet Lise even laughed once at something he said as he cut symbols into the tree’s bark. The sun was golden in the vapor that slid high among the branches of the trees, and seagulls were dancing on the wind. How many times had we stood on the back porch, Lise and Jacques and I, throwing scraps for the big white birds to catch in their yellow bills? Laughing ourselves sick when two gulls fought over the same tidbit, tumbling fearlessly toward the waves. As fearless as Lise, trusting Lise, who wanted to help. Who stood while Matwa dug his symbols in the flesh of the tree. Who fell when that same blade released her blood to flash like a scarlet banner across the air.
The violated earth of the graveyard smelled just the same as the ground where I had pressed my face. Hiding from the sight, burying my screams.
There was food at the Turnbulls’ after the funeral. I stood alone in the crowd, sick with a decade of silence, while End Harbor ate and talked, talked and ate. I was lost in time. I was the same boy who’d stood quietly at Margaret Peach’s side while the village mourned the loss of my family. The same boy who’d trailed after the searchers, suffocating with the need to speak, choking on the words I could not say.
Choking, because—deep in my heart, in a place neither words nor conscience could reach—I was waiting for Matwa’s magic to work. I was waiting for the sacrifice to bring my family home.
The fog was only just beginning to thin as we filed out of the Turnbulls’ onto the boardwalk below their store. The evening sun was a white ball balanced at the mouth of the inlet, weaving its cold light through the skeins of mist above the water. The tall ship riding the tide into
harbor was a ghost, a wraith, a mockery of all my sins.
“Eh, there, wouldn’t you know,” Margaret sighed. There were sighs like hers all through the crowd, an acceptance that was half humor, half exasperation. “Trust the fog to bring ‘em now,” her husband said, and someone answered, “Death and change, Harold Peach. Death and change.”
I stood at the boardwalk railing with the rest of them to watch the ship drop her anchor and lower her boat. She was a three-master, her square sails hanging lank and white as shrouds in the dimming air. The water of the inlet was a still dark perfection, a mirror, the interface of worlds. Men rowing the boat called out even before they had reached Turnbull’s dock, asking in a harsh alien tongue where they were. Mr. Turnbull and his tomboy daughters went down the gangway to take their line. The Turnbulls were long accustomed to offering reassurance without words. They would take the strange ship’s officers in, give them a good meal and warm beds, and tomorrow there’d be trading. Used to this schedule, the adults of End Harbor were saying their goodnights and gathering up their reluctant children.
Margaret touched my arm. “Come on to our place, Dan. No need to risk your neck in that ill-omened wreck of a house tonight.”
I shook my head, then cleared my throat and managed, “Thanks, Margaret. I’ll come by in a bit, if it’s all the same to you.”
She patted my arm, then took her hand away. “Take your time, lad. Take your time. Dinner’ll be waiting when you get there.”
“Thanks, Margaret. I appreciate all you’ve done, the both of you.”
“Well, I knew when I told you to come home it’d be hard on you, but I never thought it’d be so bad as this. I’m sorry I ever called, so I am.”
“You were right, though. I had to come.”
She gave my arm a final pat, then collected her husband and headed for home. The lost sailors were climbing out onto Turnbull’s dock, talking amongst themselves as they interpreted Mr. Turnbull’s pantomime. Listening to the voices ringing in the quiet evening, I felt myself tumble through another layer of shock, as my grandfather must have tumbled down the cliff when he’d gone to see if Lisette’s first grave was still hidden. Shock, because I could understand some of what the sailors said. They were men from my grandfather’s world, from the island he called home. And hearing them swear in their confusion, I heard again his fury as he cursed me from the rocks beneath the cliff, the rocks where he’d fallen, shattering both his legs, after I’d pushed him off the porch.
“You said they’d come back!” I screamed at him the day Lisette had been given up for lost. “You said you’d bring them home!”
And he’d shouted back at me, in the language he so rarely spoke, “They are dead, you stupid boy! Dead and gone! It is I who should be going home!”
That was how I knew. He had not killed Lise to bring my family back to me. He’d killed her to bring a ship to take him back to his blood-soaked world.
His magic had failed us both.
I shoved at him with all my strength, and he fell off the porch steps, off the clifftop where he’d killed and buried my friend’s sister, my first love. I pushed him onto the rocks where he should have died, and ran.
That night at the Turnbulls’ I acted as interpreter, to the relief of the ship’s captain and the bemusement of everyone else. There was a good morning’s trading, while the last of the fog cleared and the wind rose up to tip the blue waves with white out beyond the harbor’s mouth. And when it was done, and there were handshakes and hearty thanks all around, I asked the captain if he’d give me passage. He gave me a long, wary look, as if he thought I was insane, but he took me on with the understanding I would work for my passage. The Turnbulls would have tried to dissuade me, I think, but I gave them no time. I climbed into the dory and took up an oar as if I’d been doing it all my life, and we rowed out to the ship with our faces toward the shore. Clutching the oar’s shaft in hands blistered from digging, I could not wave good-bye.
And now, as I stand here at the ship’s rail watching End Harbor slip out of sight, I can let myself remember the feel of the pillow in my hands pressing down on the old man’s face, and the way he had jerked and shuddered as his body fought to breathe. The sea air is sharp with spray, and the voices of my new shipmates are loud with fear and hope, for, sailing before the wind, we do not know what world’s ocean we will see by the light of tomorrow’s sun.
SUMMER ICE
Today Manon arrives at a different time, and sits at a different table. Her sketchbook stays in her bag: a student had lingered after class to show her his portfolio of drawings and her mind is full of his images. Thick charcoal lines smudged and blended without much room for light. She has not found solace in her own work since she moved to the city and began to teach. Her life has become a stranger to her, she and it must become reacquainted. She has always been tentative with strangers. Art has become tentative with her.
The table she sits at today is tucked against the wall opposite the glass counter that shields long tubs of ice cream. Summer sunlight is held back from the window by a blue awning, but it glazes the trolley tracks in the street. Heat shimmers above chipped red bricks. Inside, the walls are the colors of sherbet, patched paint rippled over plaster, and the checkerboard floor is sticky. Children come and go, keeping the counterman busy. He is dark in his damp white shirt and apron, his hands drip with flavors as he wields his scoop. An electric fan blows air past his shaved head. Through a doorway behind him Manon sees someone walk toward the back of the store, a man as dark but older, slighter, with tight gray hair and a focused look.
Manon scoops vanilla from her glass bowl and wonders at the fan, the hard cold of the ice cream. This small store must be rich to afford so much electricity in a power hungry town. She imagines the latest in roof solars, she imagines a freezer crowded with dessert and mysterious frozen riches. The dark man in white clothes behind curved glass is an image, a movement, that defies framing. A challenge. Her sketchbook stays in her bag. The last of her ice cream hurts the back of her skull. She does not want to go back to the apartment that has not yet and may never become home.
The stream of customers pauses and the counterman drops his scoop in a glass of water and turns his back on the tables to wash his hands. Through the doorway Manon sees the older man open the freezer door. She catches a glimpse of a dark, half empty space: part of a room through a door through a door behind glass. Depth and cold, layers of distance. The fan draws into the storefront a chill breeze that dies a moment after the freezer door slams shut. Manon rises and takes her bowl to the counter. The young man thanks her, and as she turns to the door he says, “See you.”
“See you,” she says. She steps into the gritty heat and carries with her the image of dimness, depth, cold. The memory of winter, except they don’t have winters like that here.
In the winter Manon and her sister tobogganed down the hill behind their mother’s house. Snow would sometimes fall so thickly it bowed the limbs of pine trees to the ground, muffling charcoal-green needles in cozy coats of white. Air blended with cloud, snowy ground with air, until there was nothing but white, shapes and layers and emptinesses of white, and the plummet down the hill was a cold dive on swan wings and nothing. Manon and her sister tumbled off at the bottom, exalted, still flying despite the snowmelt inside cuffs and boots. Perhaps to ground themselves they burrowed down until they found the pebbled ice of the stream that would sing with frogs come spring. Black lumpy glass melted slick and mirroring beneath their breath and tongues. Then they would climb the hill, dragging the rebellious toboggan behind them, and begin the flight again.
The city is still greening itself, a slow and noisy process. Pneumatic drills chatter the cement of Manon’s street, tools in the hands of men and women who seem to revel in the work, the noise, the destruction of what others once labored to build. The art school is already surrounded by a knot-work of grassy rides and bicycle paths and trolley ways, buildings are crowned with gardens, the lush summer air
is bright with birds and goat bells, but Manon’s neighborhood is rough with dust that smells of dead automobiles, the dead past. She skirts piles of broken pavement, walks on oily dirt that will have to be cleaned and layered with compost before being seeded, and eases herself under the plastic sheet the landlord has hung over the front door to keep out the grime. A vain attempt, all the tenants have their windows open, hopeful of a cooling breeze.
Manon opens the bathtub tap and lets a few liters burble into the blue enamel bowl she keeps over the brown-stained drain. The darkness of the clear water returns the image of the frozen stream to her mind. She takes off her dusty clothes and steps into the tub, strokes the wet sponge down her skin. The first touch is a shock, but after that not nearly cool enough. The bathroom is painted Mediterranean blue, the window hidden by a paper screen pressed with flowers. It smells of dampness, soap, old tiles, some previous tenant’s perfume. Manon squeezes the sponge to send a trickle down her spine. Black pebbled ice. Layers of distance. The counterman’s eyes.
She turns her attention to her dirty feet, giving the structures of imagery peace to build themselves in the back of her mind, in a place that has been empty for too long.
Ira, the landlord of Manon’s building, has been inspired by the work racketing in the street below. Even though the parking lot that once serviced the four-story building has already been converted to a garden (raised beds of the same dimensions of the parking spaces, each one assigned to the appropriate apartment) Ira has decided that the roof must be greened as well.
“Native plants,” he says at the tenant meeting, “that won’t need too much soil or water.” That way he can perform the conversion without reinforcing the roof.
Lupe, Manon’s right-hand neighbor, says as they climb the stairs, “The old faker. Like we don’t know he only wants the tax rebate.”
“It will mean a reduction in rent, though, won’t it?” Manon says.
In the Palace of Repose Page 16