Wolfe Island

by Lucy Treloar

  There were some setbacks on account of his parents, who wanted him to finish college and had plans for him that a girl like me could only ruin. But he visited, and we weren’t as careful as we might have been, and got married when Claudie was on the way, although I was still so young. Hart travelled back and forth to the island until he had finished his degree; his parents insisted on that, and had some leverage as trustees of his grandmother’s estate. (It took a year or two for him to finish his studies, and another year before the old doctor retired and he could take over.) They never approved. I could have moved to the main then, but I wanted to stay on the island and live the old life.

  Chapter 5

  There was a low mist one morning, what my mother would have called a ‘simmerin’ mist’. Its surface seethed and spread, while a ‘smotherin’ mist’ lay waiting to stop your breath. Watching it from the landing window was like floating above the clouds. The second storey of Shipleys rose like a fairytale, shadowy figures moving about or gliding past windows. One of the windows flew up. Luis thrust out his head and looked around, and shut it. At another window Cat and Josh appeared and disappeared from the square of light. They’d be downstairs, like birds in a cloth-covered cage. Smoke began rising from its twin chimneys. The low cloud above began to glow grey and then white and pale gold and fell away, and finally the sun broke through and hit the mist, striking through it in places and lighting up bushes and boats and the Watermen above the docks, and finally melting it away.

  Luis came up, quite friendly, relieved that the mist had gone. ‘Freaky, wasn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘I love the sound. Did you hear it?’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘That’s why. It soaks it up. Kind of eerie.’

  He scanned the horizon. He seemed to breathe easier when he could see what was coming. He went in to use the computer and I went to my kitchen window seat to work on my notebook. He came out in a while and told me someone thought they had a trace on his mother, or someone like her. I could see how he didn’t want to get his hopes up. ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ I said.

  ‘I guess it is. It is, isn’t it?’ Times like this I could see how he was still a boy.

  It was the beginning of winter’s end. Over the week that followed the air softened a little more each day, and buds blushed and the days suddenly seemed longer. In the kitchen one afternoon, I set the kettle to boil and leaned against the counter, considering the pale room. Maybe another chair or a sofa and a few cushions by the fire would make it more welcoming, just in case. I didn’t think the Shipley household was going anywhere soon. They were waiting for more news. I went and looked at the vegetable garden, which was sheltered against a rickety shed, and bordered on the other side by a stand of pomegranates (hopeless gaunt things in winter) and surrounded by trodden paths. If Wolfe was a book, I was the only one who could read it. The wisps of corn that clung to verges, the remnant mulberries and pomegranates from when they were going to make us all rich, the overgrown ossuaries of animal bones, and the white shell paths that threaded the island were all that was left of its seas of corn, its orchards, its meadows of livestock, its teeming seas.

  Rising salt was the new crop. It had arrived in my garden a few years back after a decade creeping in from the shore. Things began to grow stunted: the corn no more than waist high, the tomatoes and peppers spindly and wan-leafed. I sweetened the soil with grass clippings and vegetable peelings, fallen leaves, and goat manure too, when I still had them. One beautiful year I believed I had it beat and bought an orange tree, the winters being milder by then. I loved that tree, the waxy sweetness of its blossom and its bright leaves. The flesh from the one small orange I got from it was as dry as shed snakeskin and tasted of nothing and I wished I’d left it on the tree. The fruit stopped setting after that, bees having disappeared, perhaps blown out to sea, and after that there was nothing for it but to hand pollinate – a tiresome task that went on all summer. Each year I built the beds higher, and mounded hills within walls, anything to keep ahead of the rising salt.

  There was nothing new in worrying about crops and vegetable gardens, but people had always paid more attention to the island being whittled away. Seawater coming up your hallway is disconcerting, I suppose. Every once in a while, right up until a few years before the last islanders left, there would be campaigns for a new jetty when the old one failed, and people ran fundraisers and sold cakes. Islanders watched the tattered shores and kicked at them and said, ‘She’ll turn around again, just you wait. It’s always been changeable.’

  TV people used to do reports on ‘the situation’. They’d put some folk in a room – watermen mostly, ten-year-old Tobe once as ‘a representative of the future’ – and some pretty young girl would say, ‘How do you feel about your world disappearing?’, and Tobe would shrug in that way of his. ‘Like, how do you think, sweetheart?’ I wanted to say. They’d act like something might come of it but nothing ever did. We were ‘the island that time forgot’, then they’d go right ahead and forget us again. A politician claiming some importance rang the mayor once and told him not to worry; everything would be fine. ‘Believe me,’ he said, and most islanders did. Thank you, mister. He turned out to be the biggest liar of all. The world wouldn’t stop for us. Some believed in the power of prayer. Others were waiting for the rapture. ‘There’s no reasoning with such people,’ my mother used to say.

  So a few years ago when a documentary filmmaker emailed to ask if I would care to be part of a project I thought it was the same old thing. His name was Chas Dartmouth. You might have heard of him. Perhaps he thought me a relic of an old way of life. People couldn’t get enough of the way we spoke, like it was a birdcall or scat that must be analysed. But it turned out Chas Dartmouth was interested in my art, which he had seen at a recent show in Escher, and the ideas of decay and renewal in my work and my environment – his words, not mine. He thought it symbolic or metaphorical or resonant – something like that. That was the second time in my life someone took me seriously, and it was a strange feeling. So we made that film and it was shown around and things went well for my work. I quit making jams and preserves, except for my own pantry. People came to Wolfe to talk to me about my makings. If they were artists or sculptors or assemblers I would offer them cake and coffee; if they were not, I told them not to touch anything, went inside, and kept an eye on them until they left. That died down after a bit. Word spread that I was not easy company. A few people said I was a recluse. It was not true, but it suited me for people to think so. I worked on another project with Chas a couple of years later and he became a friend.

  ‘So you’re like the last of the Mohicans?’ Josh said to me one day, poking around for a way to get into my good graces. The way he presumed he was charming irritated me so, and I think he felt that, even if he didn’t understand its cause.

  ‘Not really,’ I told him. ‘I have visitors, and I go visiting. There are islanders around, just not so many on the islands as there used to be.’

  Something in his question must have stung. I went around for days thinking of better answers, and made a list of last year’s activities, so I was prepared should he ever ask again.

  Visitors to Wolfe

  -School groups x 3 (art, biology, history)

  -Two scientists of my acquaintance, Jean and Lloyd, who I first met when they were measuring Wolfe’s erosion for a government project. The funding dried up, but they came out anyway for coffee and cake and a day of peace, and told me stories of the main that were so queer I could hardly credit their words.

  -Several birders, who I kept an eye on, since some of them bother the birds.

  -Two out-of-season hunters who I sent on their way by introducing myself as the island’s caretaker and wildlife officer.

  -Mary Dove, my agent, who visits once a year.

  Visits to the main

  -Shop
ping visits to Blackwater x 2

  -Visits to prisoner x 3

  It was true that I preferred not to visit the mainland. In fact, it was not until I was almost seventeen that I spent a night away from Wolfe. Hart wanted me to see the world. He might have been hoping I’d fall in love with it. Some people don’t mind mountains and trees in the way; I was used to the edges of my world falling away like water from a plate. In the mountains, the trees were dark and tall by the roadside, turning the sky into another kind of road that was distant and travelled by solitary birds that hung above us, and it seemed as if time had stopped and I was looking back at someone else’s memory. We walked a trail. There were butterflies, the light was green and sweet, the wind hissed in the trees. We lay in a clearing on leaf litter that was the fallen worlds of thousands of years. I smoothed his fringe. He smiled and I loved him and told him so. I wonder if he remembers.

  The second trip was to a beach, while I was still travelling between Wolfe and Blackwater, trying to keep things together – biding my time, though I didn’t know that then. It was a beachfront hotel with a plastic-looking portico. The hotel staff had faces like carnival heads. The sun was brassy on the horizon line and the sand seemed to sicken on the beach. We went walking early and came upon staff clearing up dead fish that had washed onto the shore. Hart acted like it was everything he’d ever dreamed of (apart from the fish), mostly to annoy. On the drive west towards home, my spirits flung upwards like a kite and I hummed old songs as if the sky had sent the words down to me. The signs along the roadside, the grassy ditches and pines lining the route and the crops between turned familiar. Hart was in a mood to quarrel and for the first time in a week I was not. I put my hand on his leg and said, ‘Sweetheart, let’s get drunk tonight.’

  Not long after, we passed a farm prison where illegals and children, perhaps their own, all dressed in orange, were in trees picking fruit. It was the first I had seen of that sort of thing. When someone at the children’s school told me they guessed Wolfe Island was a kind of prison and I must be glad to have broken free, I’d learned enough to tell them they were wrong. They didn’t believe me. That’s the trouble with people. They have to see things for theirselves. Well, I didn’t understand exactly why Luis was still so watchful. I sometimes thought it excessive, but I had no idea what he was fearful of or what he might have seen. His manner should have been enough to tell me that he had good reasons.

  I took a cake or two down to Shipleys. Cat was tired and not eating right and losing weight, but I wouldn’t know if she ate any. She said, ‘Thanks, Kitty,’ in a cool sort of way and not much more.

  I didn’t know the world they were raised in, what had made them and how they felt about those things, so they might just as well have washed up like wreckage from a foreign country with strange lettering printed all over. The idea of our isolation never occurred to me when I was growing up. Islanders didn’t care too much about what was happening elsewhere. The mainland was another world and we couldn’t see the difference it made. I knew some of it, but not much. I began to look at the news, trying to understand what they had left behind.

  I read about militias and vigilantes running wild more or less in some counties, and authorities making use of them to do their work while they looked away, laws turning wispy and insubstantial in the face of life, zealots working for the rapture to arrive. They ploughed fields of solars and felled wind turbines to hasten the Lord’s coming. It seemed like there was a lot of pretending: people saying one thing and doing another. (I’d seen plenty of that on Wolfe. Practically everyone I knew said they’d never leave, but they did anyway.) I had not known a tenth of what was going on. It’s easy to miss small changes in a place you live, and it’s easy to misunderstand the things you’re seeing. A trip to the main was like getting a glimpse through a tiny window into a crumbling old house.

  On one visit to the main I saw police talking to a small dark-haired woman. She looked into their faces with worry and distress, and away as if someone else might say something to save her, and then, holding onto her dignity, the only thing she had in that moment, she got in their car. Maybe she was helping them, or maybe she was in deep trouble. I say that now, but I didn’t think about it then. I didn’t bother. I was thinking on my own problems. I’d heard talk of ‘the situation’ and ‘the way things are right now’, and saw more people carrying guns and heard announcements in shops. But it didn’t seem so strange. I carried a gun myself. I felt better for it.

  Now I looked at Luis and Alejandra and Cat and Josh – runners and runaways – and wondered about more than what kept them together. Cat and Josh were bored rather than frightened, but Luis looked out to sea as if staring from a cage. Sometimes he ran and ran up the marsh road, up every road and every track of the island he could, beating against its edges – but he wasn’t imprisoned in a way that I was familiar with, except by circumstance. A true prisoner can’t see beyond their walls. Perhaps he was one then.

  I’d begun visiting the prisoner I mentioned earlier when Chas Dartmouth ‘reached out’, as he called it, while working on his next project, about the lives of prisoners who lived in solitary confinement on death row.

  He came out to Wolfe for a meeting and we sat on the porch drinking iced tea and looking over the water, which had turned brittle in the late sun.

  ‘You’re against the death penalty? Because I couldn’t care. Really, I could not care,’ I said. ‘Why choose me? You imagine I’m some sort of prisoner and I’m going to change my thinking?’

  Chas shook his head and blinked rapidly behind his round black glasses, unsettled by my agitation, but still gentle. He was a good man. He wanted to understand people, and I respected him for that. He waited for me to settle. ‘No, Kitty. I do not. I don’t know what’s in you – what you think and feel. I don’t want to change you. It’s not that at all. I don’t even know why I’m interested. I mean, do you always understand why you try things out? All I know is this is what I’m thinking about and what I have to do.’

  It was a reproof in a way, a plea too, and I listened. He told me about the prisoner, whose name I will not mention here. Chas had known of my connection to him from when we first met. It might have been on his mind, and when the man was sentenced to death he’d got thinking. It was a hard thing to take in, but I was curious to meet the fellow he was talking of, I will not deny that, and I agreed.

  It was autumn, two months later, when I met Chas in the prison car park. We were silent on the walk to the great gates where we paused to be checked in. There were red maples, their leaves falling, and the red leaves drifted and rustled onto the asphalt in the breeze.

  ‘You okay?’ Chas asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘There’ll be a pat down, nothing to worry about. And a metal detector.’

  ‘I’d best leave this in the car then.’ I took the gun from my pocket – that gave him pause – and went back to the car and put it in the glove box.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said again.

  ‘I’m not worried,’ I said.

  ‘I am.’ He gave a short laugh and pushed his glasses up. He was sweating, though it was not warm.

  The prison was a deathly place: close, sour, antiseptic, and humming with dread. We walked through the narrow guts of the building. We might as well have been inside a carcass for the view there was of the outside. Everything was grey and the doors were grey iron, numbered, with narrow flaps. The guard was soft-looking, with close-cropped hair, his belt pulled in snug beneath his belly, and his gun holster rubbing against his thigh like a loose dick. He touched it once or twice as he walked in front of us. The keys and cuffs he carried sounded against each other in a calm and repeated way and he cared so little about it that I was quickly terrified, as if I was being walked in to begin a sentence myself. Sweat prickled at my hairline.

  ‘Here,’ the guard said. He opened the door. ‘You can set up. I’ll get
him.’ He left.

  We sat on one side of a table in a room so narrow that the table divided it almost exactly in two. There was a door on the other side of the room and the door that we had entered by, and this room connected two worlds. The walls were grey, the ceiling was grey and low, lit with two fluorescent strip lights, and the floor was grey linoleum spattered with red as if in anticipation of stains to come.

  Chas fussed with his camera and tripod, trying to get the right angle. The door opened and the meeting proceeded. I remember little of the visit, except for one bit that I try not to dwell on, which was when the two guards came for him. They opened the door and came in and each put a hand on his shoulders. ‘It’s time,’ one said.

  ‘Okay,’ the prisoner said, and then, to Chas and to me, ‘I thank you for the opportunity.’ He stood immediately and without hesitation. He had to lean forward to shift his weight, his wrists being shackled to his metal belt. His ankles were shackled too, so he moved like his body was broken. The part I could not bear was when he said, ‘Okay,’ for a second time. Sometimes I can’t help thinking of this.

  They turned him around as if he was a thing – a shopping trolley, say – and he shuffled out without a backward glance, like a child who has learned the futility of making a scene, and has reason to expect punishment if he does. He was as broken as a person can be, had been broken long ago. How would he ever become whole again? Who would care if he did not? Life had whittled him to nothing. He was a sorry thing, but a hard kernel in me would not loosen. I am not sure what it was – not hatred, not exactly. Maybe it was the sadness of him sitting alongside the sadness he had wrought around him and in me. It had become part of me, and it’s not easy to let such things go. Who would I be without it?