Wolfe Island

by Lucy Treloar

  ‘I don’t know. Are you all wanted? And how much do they want you? There’s a reason you washed up here and if anyone’s looking for places you might go, any relatives could come up, and they might check things out down here, even if it’s just to cross Blackwater off a list.’

  Cat glared down at me. ‘Why do you care?’ she said.

  ‘Because I do.’

  ‘So we’re screwed with the shopping.’

  ‘Not what I said. You’ve got to think in an island way. It’s spring, time to plant, get things growing. Get some corn in, tomatoes, salad greens, beans, carrots. Potatoes. Think about preserves. I can do a little shopping for you, but people will ask questions if I do too much. We’ll check everywhere for seeds, any drawer we come across.’

  I was alert for visitors after the shopping trip (it was too early for birders and day-trippers) and Luis kept Alejandra close.

  ‘Tell me, Kitty, where would you hide if you needed to?’ he asked a couple of days later.

  I knew him a little then. It wasn’t an idle question. ‘Not in a house or any building. Out in the marshes, I guess. You’d be cold and you might get wet feet, but not a person could find you without a dog helping. Girl’d take care of that. Yeah, the marshes for sure.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  But things were quiet and the sense of danger receded. We began a search for seeds. Old breakfronts yielded best. We found folded packets of seeds: Grandma’s squash, Eggplant (striped), Scarlet runner, Tiger beet, Glory’s best, Royal carrot, and other such things. Doree’s mother had been a wonderful gardener. Her yard had hummed with bees and what seemed like the very sound of plants growing every summer.

  Not a one of them – Cat or Luis or Josh – knew about planting or tending a garden. They were townies. Alejandra said their mother had one, and she used to pick the tomatoes and corn when they were ready, and she had little yellow flowers too. ‘Marigolds maybe,’ I said. ‘Let’s put some in.’

  It’s a beautiful time of year. Sitting here in my makings room, gazing south through the open doors right now, I have a strange feeling of contentment at all the new life. I write a little and look out. Girl is lying in the sun. Spring is flooding the island in waves of colour and light and warmth: the pink blush on the shrubs bursting into leaf, new grass thrusting from dead clumps, the sky colouring deeper, more birds arriving. With them have come a few birders – the first of them last week – as seasonal as the birds themselves. They’re no trouble, just moving quietly on pathways near the marshes. Luis and Alejandra go inside and lock the doors at the sight of them, in case people are tempted to poke around inside, just from curiosity. It’s happened to me more than once. A dog is useful.

  They’ve been building a new vegetable garden, skimming off any sweet soil they can find from around the island and hauling it back in the barrow. I showed them how to plant and quite a few things have begun to peek up. Josh seems to find gardening demeaning, as if he imagines a crowd of jocks might pass by and jeer, but Cat and Luis don’t mind. Alejandra loves watering best, not that it’s needed just yet. She goes about with an old can of Tobe’s. He used to love it too. ‘Some for you, and some for you.’ She tips a little on each plant. ‘Some for you, Girl?’ But Girl doesn’t want any. She has a bowl of her own.

  The prisoner told me once how much he’d liked watering. It gave me a strange feeling, knowing that, and thinking of Tobe. After the prison film was made, his lawyer asked if I’d visit him again to relieve the loneliness of his confinement, which was solitary, and I said I would. I’m still not sure why. His family didn’t visit. They might have been too poor and too far away.

  I visit him a few times a year, though it’s a while since the documentary came out. Chas had wanted to show the faces of the inmates, what that closed-in life did to them, and to hear what they thought. It was hard to forget their faces. That might be one of the reasons why I go.

  He was worn out and ready for everything to end the last time I saw him, as if he didn’t care about the future, as if it had ceased to exist. The few times before that, his lawyer was appealing his sentence, and it seemed he still hoped, despite everything, that his life might turn out not so bad in the long run.

  ‘What do you do out there on your island?’ he asked.

  ‘I garden a lot,’ I said. ‘I have to so I have fresh food.’

  ‘I never had a garden. But my pop – grandpop that is – he had a garden up on his roof, up this little ladder. You could see some light coming in around the edges of the trapdoor up top. I’d wait for him to open it and go through. The light, it hurt your eyes, you know? It was so bright after the dark.’ His eyes wandered around the grey room and the line of white light above. ‘I’d go about with him up there. He was okay.’

  Another time he said, ‘I had a little, like, can of water I took around with him to, you know, water the plants. That was okay.’ His eyes tracked around my face as if he was trying to judge if he’d made any impression on me. On this point I was not always sure myself, whether he had or not. I was not at my best at the time.

  He told me about this and I remembered the way that Tobe had of coming about with me when he came back from a day out on a boat. He’d tell me about drudgin’ and jimmies and sooks and a big one he’d heard of that had oysters growing on it. He spoke in the old way that he refused to forget, which Hart discouraged, telling Tobe to aim for better grades and think of a worthwhile career, one with opportunities. Tobe looked at him in his sweet way and went on doing what he did. Hart couldn’t change him and maybe Hart was right and I should have tried. I should have tried. I didn’t like thinking about Tobe and the prisoner together, but I couldn’t stop it happening.

  Things kept pulling the prisoner into my mind, like that watering can, like Luis running. The settled feeling that we’d had for a while – the Shipley household and me – didn’t last. How could it really? I had a letter from the prisoner asking if I’d stop by soon. A date had been set for his execution and he had a favour to ask me. And in mid-spring Cat and Josh left the island early one morning. None of us knew where they’d gone.

  Chapter 7

  There’s not a one of us knows what we might do if things go wrong, if the people we love are in danger, or if we’re taken from our home and all the things that make us. I tried to think the best of Josh. Getting Shipleys in shape, scavenging through houses for things to please Cat – a ladder-back chair, a flowered plate, a wicker settee – those things he was part of. He used his muscles; he hefted wood. He threw his arms around Cat and kissed her. They had escaped something all right, but they were together, and wasn’t that something? So when they left the island, and returned later without any shopping, it seemed at first like they’d just decided to go out, almost as if they’d gone on a date.

  Luis and Alejandra came up to see me in the afternoon like lost people wanting someone to say, No, you’re not lost. We’re here together, so we can’t be.

  ‘You know anything about it?’ I asked.

  Luis shook his head.

  They returned at dusk. We saw them from the porch, and when we wandered down, casually, they didn’t say anything about their outing.

  ‘Where were you, Cat?’ Alejandra asked.

  ‘We had some things to do. Helping out.’ They wouldn’t say more.

  When they went again the following week I asked Cat about it – was it anything to do with Luis’s mother? She said, ‘No. Kitty, you know the rules. It’s safer for everyone this way.’

  ‘But are you safe?’

  ‘I’m a good driver,’ was all she’d say.

  The messages she’d been waiting for seemed to be arriving. I worried about it, I did, but still didn’t ring Claudie. What would happen to Luis and Alejandra if I did? If Cat had been filled with high spirits and adventure, I might have spoken up. But she was neither anxious before a trip nor excited after. The thought of sending
her home to be looked after was ridiculous. She would just run again. Being away from the island and doing something that had a purpose seemed to settle Josh too. He stood taller somehow, with some pride.

  They were away more often as the weather warmed, sometimes overnight. I worried each time that they’d drowned. Luis did too. More than once I saw him staring out to sea towards evening while I was doing the same. When we saw their boat, we went inside.

  It got so their being away for a night didn’t seem so bad. (One good thing: they were able to shop on the way back. They avoided going to the same place twice, Cat said, and never shopped close to the island. But as to how they paid, I don’t know. Surely they would have run out of cash by then.) Then it was two nights, and I told Cat that was my limit. On the second night I had pictured them drifting on dark sea and sliding beneath waves, so vividly it seemed more vision than imagination, and I thought of Claudie. When they finally returned late morning, I went down to Shipleys, where Cat was poking around the kitchen making coffee and Luis was sitting in the nook writing. I told her she would have to tell me what they were involved in or I’d ring the coastguard or her mother. It was her choice and I made that clear. Cat was a fierce person. Coercion was bitter to her. She turned from the sink and balled her fist and punched her leg, and the look on her face made me step back. Still, I was ready to insist, but in the end it was Luis who broke through.

  I might have expected his emotions to rise, but he was quiet, almost distant, not pleading for his own sake. He rested his chin on one hand, idly stroking his cheek. He laid down his pen and said: ‘Alejandra has nightmares when you’re away. She didn’t sleep last night. She’s lost three people in her family already. She is frightened of losing one more. You are her family now. If there is something I could say to reassure her, it would help.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Cat said. ‘I didn’t think.’

  They called themselves railroad drivers, she said. ‘We drive people places – runners. We have a section. We pick people up and drop them off. That’s all – a transportation service. No one looks twice at us. The two-night trip was because another driver fell through. Something happened, I don’t know what.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ Luis said, still quiet, but there was an edge in his voice now, and he glared. ‘What you’re doing is dangerous. You need protection.’

  Cat returned his look. ‘I’ve got Josh, and you’ve got enough to worry about. You think I was going to add to that?’ She wouldn’t say she was sorry.

  ‘You should have anyway,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re safe?’ I asked, as I had before.

  She shrugged. ‘I’m a good driver, I told you. I don’t draw attention to myself. Drivers never meet each other. We don’t know the names of the runners or where they’re from; we don’t talk to them about anything personal, we stick to the rules. I make sure of that, you know me. And we’re minors, so . . .’

  ‘Whatever would happen to minors if you got caught.’

  ‘Yes.’ It seemed like there was something else on her mind, but I knew there was no point in asking.

  ‘I wish you’d tell your mother.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Where you are, what you’re doing, your life, Cat.’

  ‘I’ve sent a couple of messages. She knows I’m okay.’ I made some sound of irritation. ‘You don’t know what she’s like,’ she said.

  ‘I know how a mother feels.’

  ‘Do you?’ she asked. I thought she was being sarcastic, but she tilted her head quizzically, looking at me all the while, as if she really was considering whether I might have motherly feelings.

  ‘I most certainly do,’ I said, and left.

  After an afternoon’s gardening they often stay to dinner. They sat before the fire one cool night in the middle of spring, Josh leaning forward, elbows on knees, and glancing at me earnestly, as if thinking to recruit me to his cause. He has a golden quality that draws people in. I guessed he’d always been protected; he took slights so hard. Tell him he’d pulled a lettuce by mistake and he looked ready to hit someone or something. I mention these things so you can understand the kind of attention that he must have got at school, and how that might turn a person. I know I made allowances for him on account of it. I wasn’t surprised at the way Cat looked at Josh, but I did wonder how long it might last.

  It was raining outside and they began talking, and it might have been that to them the house, dry and warm and shadowy in the lamplight, was a safe-seeming cocoon. I listened to their tangled talk and for once they didn’t mind if I asked them questions. He, Josh, had become involved in the railroad through Cat, and an art teacher at school and a friend of hers, he said. It was an accident of life that had set him on this course; he only had free time because a knee injury had sidelined him from the football team.

  I asked why he’d run. ‘My parents didn’t like the company I was keeping,’ he said mockingly – mocking his family and the company both, I thought.

  ‘Meaning me,’ Cat said. ‘My parents thought the same about him, of course.’

  ‘You don’t have to protect me,’ Luis said. ‘We know who they meant.’

  ‘Yeah. It wasn’t you,’ Josh said, serious for once. ‘They don’t even know you. They just didn’t want me getting political. It’s like they don’t see me. I’m just another one of them. But what if I don’t want that? I’ve always done what they said and I never thought about why.’

  ‘You want to know who you are?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess.’ Josh scratched the scarce stubble on his chin, thinking it over. ‘Something like that.’

  Luis didn’t say as much as the others, but Cat turned to me sharply once, as if there was something I had to know now. She said, ‘They probably got Luis’s father last year. Assholes. His family hasn’t heard from him.’

  Alejandra abruptly began attending to Luna, straightening her wrappings and murmuring all the while.

  ‘Where would Luis and Alejandra go? Nowhere to go,’ Josh said. ‘We had to do something.’

  ‘Josh,’ Cat said.

  ‘What?’

  She glanced at Alejandra.

  Luis asked his sister to fetch some wood and she left the room.

  ‘You weren’t born here?’ I asked.

  ‘Only Alejandra and the baby,’ Luis said. She’d be on her own or in foster care if he was deported, which meant the danger of that system on her own or entering a different world of danger with him. Sometimes children disappeared, or were sold or lost, or used and then tossed away. There weren’t enough people to keep them safe or to keep track of their whereabouts. I wanted to say then, immediately, that I would care for her. I would. But they didn’t have their papers and without them, trouble would always be following them. Luis knew that. He had worn a path with his thinking.

  ‘It’s not that we don’t have family,’ he said, ‘but they are not here. Our father disappeared a while ago. Then they came to our house for my mother. She was out, so I rang to tell her don’t come back. We moved to the church and we lived in the basement there. We kept going to school. Then it got more difficult. If my mother got in touch during the day because she’d been taken, we had to get our bags and go. One day they pulled my mother over at a red light because of the way she looks.’ He repeated this quietly – ‘The way she looks’ – and touched the side of his face. ‘I got Alejandra from school and we left. “Do not hesitate,” our mother said. It’s what we agreed.’

  ‘Sins of the father,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Never mind. I’m not saying it’s right, only that it happens, that innocent children suffer.’

  ‘He did not sin,’ Luis said quietly. ‘Sometimes people have no choice.’

  ‘I think they do.’

  ‘People who don’t know think that,’ he said.

  ‘
It’s the consequences of actions I’m talking of, how our children suffer because of us, how we wish it were not so. But why are you doing this?’ I asked Cat, wondering what Claudie might have done to her.

  ‘Because I’m alive and I’m not wasting it.’

  The way Josh spoke about the turn their lives had taken made it seem like an adventure, driven by high spirits as much as a cause. His voice rose and his eyes shone. Luis watched until he was done, then said, quietly, ‘We were worrying about our parents going to prison.’ (I thought of the boy on death row.)

  Cat leaned and pressed her forehead against Luis’s upper arm. He sat very still.

  ‘What about your things?’ I asked Luis.

  He shook his head. ‘They took everything. My mother made us swear that we would find a way to go north so there is a chance we can be together again. This was her hope and our promise to her. We’re grateful for this safe place, Kitty.’ It was the first time he’d called me Kitty. It was an effort for him, a gift to me, and I was almost overcome.

  Alejandra came back with a shell from the makings room she wanted to show everyone. She’d forgotten about the wood.

  ‘I wouldn’t give you away for anything,’ I said. ‘Anything at all.’

  He nodded once as if it were a contract, the most courteous contract. I thought he would be a person who ran straight and true in all that he did. He was smaller than Josh, and less showy, but he was the kind of person people might remember years later and wonder about. I knew I would. It might have been his determination with his life and his gentleness with his sister. The word dangerous also came to mind, unsettling me. I had no reason to use it, but it stayed just the same. Once or twice on other occasions he spoke to me about their troubles. It was rare, though – a way he had of talking to himself.

  I had felt like a prisoner in Blackwater even if I went to live there willingly. School didn’t suit Tobe’s quiet ways. It was the opposite with Claudie. We moved the year she started high school but it made no difference – she had already pulled away. Everything was unsettled. At night I imagined flying over Wolfe Island, looking down. It was how I lulled myself to sleep. A tree in Blackwater was felled that year to make way for a new slipway. It was a sycamore. Children had run beneath, leaping at its spinning seed pods, and creatures had lived in its shelter. After the tree was gone birds wheeled its ghost canopy for days, as if branches might yet reappear. Where did they belong now? The tree had run through them like a path or a memory. It made them. Without it, they might as well have been pictures in a book. Take stories from their source and they were vases of dried flowers. Who was I now, on the main?