by Lucy Treloar
‘You need some good big pieces of wood to keep burning overnight. There’ll be some around,’ I said. ‘Think about what matters most: hot food, light, warmth, being clean. That’s what you have to work out with your power. You’ve got lamps and you’ve got wood for fires. It’s a waste using power for them.’
‘Got it,’ Cat said in her quick, almost terse way.
We went up the narrow attic stairs to get some extra bedding, and stopped to look out of the dormer window. It was as if the whole world had become glass-topped, that old glass with a hidden life in it: faint waves, pinpricks of air. It was dish calm, or deesh cahm as we used to say. Any object on it, boat or hummock or buoy, appeared to hover above its surface like a hallucination. Cat and Alejandra tried out some furniture, which I said they could take if the boys could manage carrying it. Cat found some bags of quilts and woollen blankets and we stood at the top of the stairs and threw them down and down through the house. Alejandra laughed – the first time I’d heard her do that. She put her hand over her mouth, but her eyes were still bright. Cat noticed it too. ‘Fun, hey?’ she said, and Alejandra nodded.
I couldn’t help noticing and trying to make sense of them and the things they did. It seemed like they were settling in, yet I didn’t ask about the time stretching out. It wasn’t because they made me feel good. I never felt as lonely as when I saw them all together and knew myself apart. I mention these things so you can see how quickly I began to change, how they became an intrusion into my mind. When I sat with my sketchbook, my ideas came to nothing. In the makings room my things were silent. Trying to wrench my life back, to get back on my own path, I went walking with Girl and turned my attention to the south end of the island, looking from the windows facing that way, walking that way, collecting that way. I had work to do: that’s what I reminded myself. And still I said nothing to them about their plans.
I visited Tobe’s shanty, which had been on my mind since talking to Cat. It hadn’t changed. I looked along the shelves, its ropes, chains and pulleys, boxes of floats, lath crab baskets, pliers and wires, hammers, mallets, hoop-handled shears, leather straps, awls, a brush for the shanty chimney, iron dustpans, sailcloth remnants for repairs, wooden carrying trenchers and things I recognised but did not understand. It was too tidy. It was like a makings room with nothing to make and no future. I hadn’t noticed when I was visiting Tobe. There was a draughts board and a half-finished game of Scrabble that made me weep. I stayed for a while on his bucket stool inside the doorway until the moment passed. On the way out I picked up an unused notebook from Tobe’s bookshelf. I hoped he wouldn’t mind.
When they, the Shipley household, had come to use the computer the first time, only a day or two after they arrived, I’d been in my makings room, which if my house was the telescope that it somewhat resembled would be at its narrowest end. They knocked. It was a courtesy they kept up, not only from politeness, but I think to stay separate: our paths were different and the sharing of our lives temporary. Cat called, ‘Kitty?’ (She had a clear voice, deeper in anger.)
‘Keep coming,’ I called back.
Their footsteps sounded on the old wooden floors as they approached, and they came in, pushing the door wide. Cat exclaimed: ‘Oh, it’s the same.’
Alejandra prowled around, looking at the things that filled the shelves: bottles, oars, driftwood, cans, stones, signs, tin cans, bottles, wire, metal, bones, stones, arrowheads, insect husks, tiny skulls of birds and other creatures, and large bones too. Luis and Josh stared, as people always did at first sight. It was unusual, I suppose.
‘What’s it called again, what you do?’ Cat asked.
‘Different things – bricoleur, assembler, sculptor. I make sculptures – makings, I call them – from stuff I find.’
‘There’s a documentary about Kitty,’ Cat said, with a little pride. ‘There’s a bit I always remember about that lady who found you.’
‘My agent? Mary Dove.’
‘I liked how she said it was as if the Watermen – that’s their name, right? – were calling her across the water.’
‘I nearly shot her by mistake. They left that bit out. Mary’s always been very good about that.’
‘Shit, Kitty,’ Cat said.
‘Why would you do that?’ Josh asked.
‘I didn’t. I only nearly did. I told you that. She crept up one day when I was working. A few things had made me jumpy – a story for another time.’
They came up often after that to use the computer, as Cat did perhaps a week after the cold snap, when I was at my work table one morning. She said little but hello before she settled in, her dark head bent in concentration over the computer. It gave me a bad feeling.
‘Did I do something to you?’ I said.
She raised her head. ‘No,’ she said lightly.
‘That can’t be true.’
‘I know you’ve got work to do. Me too.’
‘I see.’
‘Family’s not your thing. I get it.’
‘That’s not true. I like having you here.’
‘But you left your children?’
I can tell you, those words left me breathless. ‘Claudie . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter. I didn’t know you to miss. But you left my mother, and Uncle Tobe. I asked her about it.’
‘After you visited?’
She nodded. ‘She never said until then. I thought you’d had some argument. I used to think you were kind of cool after that film came out, like an outlaw or something. You’ve got to admit, it is weird what you did.’
‘It’s not like I abandoned them on a roadside. They had their father. We visited back and forward. They came out here, and I went to the main. Claudie wasn’t even there when I went to town. If she was, she wouldn’t talk to me.’
Cat glared.
‘You know how old Claudie was when I moved back here?’
‘Like eleven or twelve.’
‘Your age.’
That stopped her.
‘She’s not the one who left, though, is she?’ Cat said.
‘That’s true. She’s always wanted to fit in – nothing wrong with that. I didn’t know how. I did try.’ I thought some more, fiddling with some pliers. ‘I embarrassed her, I think. She was angry. It seemed like it was easier when I wasn’t there.’ I could have been trying to persuade myself on that point.
‘What about Uncle Tobe?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Tobe.’
When I didn’t say more, she returned to whatever she was doing. I did too. My work was a mess. Nothing hung together. It didn’t mean anything. When Cat stood to go, I dropped my tools. ‘What are you doing there?’ I don’t know what made me finally ask – irritation at her maybe, wanting to make her as uncomfortable as she’d made me.
But she didn’t mind a bit. ‘Waiting for news.’
I would know them from the sound of the keyboard if they didn’t call out coming in. Cat wrote short things in a rush, sometimes impatient, sometimes angry, or there might be a growl of frustration before she left. Mostly, she was bored, I think. Josh fumbled around typing and deleting – searching for things, I supposed. He wiped his history, so I wouldn’t know. Long streams of rattling keys meant Luis.
Boldly, I asked him one day what he was doing. He paused and considered me. ‘Looking for my mother,’ he said. ‘She was picked up by agents. There’s an immigration lawyer and a couple of church people I check with. They’re making enquiries – good people. I don’t want to worry Alejandra.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It happens.’
‘But this is your mother.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let me know if I can do anything.’
His expression brightened somewhat. ‘Do you know anyone?’
‘Out here, you mean? No one. I don’t know why I said it.’
/> ‘Thank you anyway, ma’am. For your help.’
‘It’s really nothing.’
‘It is something.’
I knew it wasn’t. What was I thinking? Anyway, at least I know a little then.
Claudie sent me an email, asking how I’d been and whether I’d been busy, had anything been happening. Since she hardly contacted me from one Christmas to the next, I surmised she was looking for Cat but couldn’t admit she was missing. I said I was well, and busy preparing for my next show. Winter was my best time: the garden lay fallow for a few months and it was just me and my thoughts feeling their way along. I felt some guilt about concealing Cat’s whereabouts, but I had Cat’s rules in mind. I sent Claudie my love.
The truth is that my work was going badly. My thoughts kept turning towards keeping everyone fed, and their plans, such as they were. It was a couple of weeks after they arrived that I began writing in the notebook from Tobe’s shanty. First I sketched a boat filled with people on a stormy sea, then wrote: The strangest thing after living alone for so long, some young people have come to stay a while and I’m not sure how I feel. After that I began writing about things that had happened and things I was wondering. (I still haven’t caught up.)
The past is here all the time, running alongside the present, their currents flowing, connecting here and there, warm above and cold below, or fast and slow alongside each other, that sort of thing. Sometimes I’m touching both at the exact same time. I might be looking towards Stillwater and it’s like Tobe is about to come home from a morning’s explorations up a gut, while looking in the other direction his niece, twenty years later, is gathering kindling. My mother might be in the pantry; I can almost hear her. I wonder whether to Tobe and my parents (and to all the people who’ve lived on Wolfe for thousands of years) I might seem like a ghost from the future, if they caught sight of me.
As to what started me writing, it was as if something rescued me. My mother would say an ancestor was holding me close. Bette would call that superstition. My father would smile and say, ‘If it makes you feel better, sweetheart.’ I was slow at first, trying to distract myself from my worries and from thinking about Hart, who I was missing after all this time. It might have been seeing the closeness at Shipleys. A strange thing: I was going to say the closeness between Cat and Luis. They laugh and talk. They are friends, I suppose. Josh doesn’t seem to mind.
I’m not sure who I’m writing for – perhaps for Hart and Claudie, in case something happens to us, or for the long arc, so people will know I tried to do my best, whatever the outcome might be. I might even be talking to myself. I do a little writing, catch up with my thoughts and things that have been happening, and set free somehow, I can start work.
Observations of the Shipley household from the first month
-Alejandra lying on the dock edge dangling a line into the water, the milkiness that seemed to hover on the water and around her. It’s like watching memories, first of me and Bette and Doree, second of Tobe and Claudie. I imagine Claudie telling Cat stories and Cat passing them on to Alejandra. I would like to have heard them.
-Cat and Luis keeping Alejandra company; them laughing, and Luis forgetting what weighed so heavy, and Cat noticing. He looks stricken sometimes. I wish he would talk, but he is careful in the things he says. He might talk his troubles over with Cat, but I think not with Josh. At least, if he did, I never saw it.
-Josh puzzling at the mechanisms of a hundred-year-old crab trap, as if he’d ever need it in winter – or summer these days, for that matter. Very occasionally I saw a crab rising towards something, or slinking aside, and stayed very still and hoped it would survive. But that was in summer, and it was winter now.
They moved furniture balanced on a wheelbarrow, once a floral sofa from one of the tombstone houses, which kept tipping the wheelbarrow over. They laughed and shouted – I assume from the sounds and the ways their bodies moved. They righted it where it fell not far from the Peachblossom Road sign and sat there for a rest, and I think they might have left it there if Luis hadn’t got them going again.
They tried fishing, then tonging for oysters, which is cruel work. Cat fell in once while wielding the giant pincers. Josh pulled her up one-handed and they laughed together and he gave her a kiss. He can be sweet with her. Luis looked away. Josh and Luis hauled up bottles and whitegoods before giving up. You have to know what you’re doing with oysters, and these days you have to be lucky. They were raised for a different world.
They scavenged through the old houses and sheds across the island and wheeled back their treasure – old tins of food and so forth. This, they could do.
-Luis looking out to sea, scanning it, scanning the sky, doing this often.
Later on the day that Cat fell into the water while tonging for oysters, after everyone had finished laughing and teasing and she’d gone inside and changed, she came out again and joined the others, putting her hands to Josh and Luis’s backs in a friendly way, rubbing a little. Then she shoved them both in. When they bobbed up, Luis laughed; Josh did too, after a pause. I like a man who can laugh at himself freely. I always feel it’s a good sign. Hart was good in that regard – in fact he was laughing the first time I met him – but then I liked everything about him.
The first time I saw Hart my throat stopped as if I was drowning. Doree told me later that she’d overheard a couple of women say he was the hottest man on Wolfe in two generations.
My mother sat two rows ahead of me for revival meeting that year. It was summertime in the ‘tent’ (a tall open-sided wooden pavilion) in one of its final years, and her dark hair took the evening sun. Her cheeks were high and apple-ish, and her narrow eyes kept watch. I don’t know that my mother believed in what went on at revival. Her father had turned against God and the church after his wife’s death one harsh winter. My mother spoke sometimes of a vision she might have had at the time and her belief that her mother could have returned to life if she’d been truly faithful. Since she loved her father she respected his scepticism and even shared it to some degree, but she’d felt what she’d felt, so she sat through revival each summer, watching the goings-on, fanning herself languidly with a folded song sheet against the heat. I liked the songs. Marilynne Jims from the Craft Guild Confederation shop led each line in her ringing voice and we’d follow along more or less, the sound billowing like the murmurations of birds we sometimes saw and which our fathers shot. Starlings were a pest, they said.
That summer I was fifteen I broke free. There was a scuffle up in the rafters, among the doves perhaps. Their feathers drifted and fell as soft as autumn leaves – everyone watched them, even the minister – and I started laughing and couldn’t stop. Pastor Kevin was preaching a wistful reminiscence of his vodka days. He slumped to the Wurlitzer when the sadness of sobriety overcame him, and broke into song and let the Lord take him, staring up at the dark-planked roof as if it was God rather than pigeons up there. Pastor Kevin’s kids played on their handheld games, the greenish light shimmering on their indoor faces; his wife Lorraine looked like she was weighing up whether to make a chocolate fudge or a strawberry cream layer cake the minute she got home. Hearing my laughter, Hart, who I had not met, turned and stared at me in a particular way and shook his head, pretending he was shocked, and that started me up again.
Doree dug me in the ribs and grinned. ‘Shut up,’ I mouthed to her and she shook her head and tick-tocked her finger and mouthed, ‘You are going to hell.’ (We were practised in the art of lip reading.)
I marched right up to him after the meeting was over. A desperate resolve had overtaken me. He would be gone so soon and my life would not be worth living if we didn’t converse. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I came for the meeting,’ he said.
‘Are you religious then?’ What a disappointment that would be; I had decided I was not.
‘Curiosity. Anthropology. Meetings like this
are a dying artefact, don’t you know? We’re living in the end times.’
‘You should have been paying attention then,’ I said.
‘You’re probably right.’ Then he paused. ‘Trouble was, I couldn’t look away.’
No one had said such a thing to me before. People on the island weren’t bold in their words, at least not to the people they felt boldly towards. He was teasing and telling the truth together.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Tell me yours first.’
I waited, which was a different kind of boldness.
‘Hart,’ he finally said.
‘That’s it?’
‘You want the whole thing?’
I nodded.
‘Don’t laugh.’
I crossed my heart.
‘Hartford Darkness.’
‘Well,’ I said. He waited. It mattered what I thought and I knew that. ‘That is a heavy burden to carry.’
‘You don’t know.’
‘I’m Kitty Hawke,’ I told him, and held out my hand to shake his.
‘Ha!’ he said and took my hand and threw back his head and laughed.
I went home and lay in a darkened room to keep my feelings pure. My mother came in and when I shouted at her, she laughed and said, ‘You do have it bad,’ and let me alone.
Two afternoons later she sat heavily at my side on the porch swing. ‘That idiot Tolstoy, what did he know? And Shakespeare. He’s another one, telling us.’ It was her way of saying sorry, which I didn’t understand until years later when I read some Tolstoy and Shakespeare – those long island winters. In those days I thought lightweight, light-hearted things were unimportant. Some years later I thought they held the world together. Things like comfort, pleasantness and sufficiency were reliable and constant, whereas love (and hate and retribution) complicated everything. I was wrong about that too. It is merely that all these things exist as the world does, as people do, each as implacable and destructive as any violent storm.
The first time Hart came back to the island he travelled in darkness, which is never wise. I was sitting on the stoop below our dock shanty when a boat took shape. I should have been cautious, pulled into the soft shadows, or called out, ‘Hey,’ and listened for a familiar voice in reply. But I didn’t. I watched the shape walk along the line of wooden slats, its feet hardly sounding above the water. There were plenty of stars out but only a sliver of moon and there wasn’t much to see. It was as if my mind was catching up with what my body knew and had been waiting for. It was Hart’s walk, which I knew by the shape of the darkness around him. Even though I’d hardly touched him except for that handshake, I threw myself at him when he emerged into light and stood there so straight and bright and young, and he held me as if I was the answer to every question he ever had.