by Lucy Treloar
After Claudie and Tobe left for school and Hart had gone to work I fled to Wolfe and pretended for a while, rocking on the porch swing in the sun, walking, collecting a few things, watching the soft heaving sea.
The dragonflies were about. Oh, I loved them – their flighty movements and uncanny stillness. They were fierce. A dragonfly’s wings beat fifty times a second; they can fly at forty miles an hour; they can see in front and behind at the exact same time. I liked knowing those things. I loved their names too, which I considered poetic, and have noted some here so you can see what I mean. (Some are known by name only these days, which I consider a loss.)
Dragonflies
-Ruby Meadowhawk
-Little Blue Dragonlet
-Comet Darner
-Swamp Darner
-Harlequin Darner
-Unicorn Clubtail
-Spine-crowned Clubtail
-Black-shouldered Spinyleg
-Blue Corporal
-Common Whitetail
-Eastern Pondhawk
-Tiger Spiketail
Time was nothing on those Wolfe days until I saw where the sun hung in the sky, and I’d race to get back before I was discovered. Hart was someone different on the main, as I was. I believe I became pitiful in his eyes. It’s possible he was trying to protect the children and me. He mentioned the hairdresser and bought me a lipstick. I should not hang clothes to dry outside in the good clean air. I left the laundry to him since he cared so much. The suffering patience of him.
I lost myself and couldn’t find my way back. I stopped making things, let passing thoughts pass, misplaced my notebook and didn’t care. I watched women in the street with their long curled hair and new clothes and high shoes walking together beneath the tall trees, slowly, talking without cease, as if time and place and people would never change. I knew they might, so to me they seemed like dreaming creatures. There was some innocence about them that nothing could shake. Stubborn, you know? There is no certainty, only the dream of it lived so perfectly that a person can believe it as long as it endures.
I practised another voice, as if I was a ventriloquist and its doll together. People didn’t comment on my new accent, but I wouldn’t speak like that to family. What if they preferred a woman with neat hair and a bright mouth and a mainland voice? She had nothing to do with my past or me. I stopped her dead. At first it was an effort to speak again in the island way. I took some pleasure in people’s stares – at an exotic, a remnant, seeing their childhood memories flying at them: boats slicking and bright water, the fat claw of a rising crab gripping the thing that would lead to its death. It shook something loose in me and I began working on small makings, feeling my way. I didn’t have room for anything else. The bigger things I kept for visits to Wolfe.
Family visits were never enough. The first time I stayed on the island alone was for three nights. It was the end of a hot, still day. Through narrowed eyes Hart and I watched the sun falling like a red-hot penny into a slot machine. A rich swampy muddy smell drifted from the salt meadow on a quiet breeze. Birds called out in their different ways. Time and sound and light were slow.
‘Why don’t you go on back without me,’ I said to Hart. The words came out unthought, as if a secret person had delivered them for utterance. I didn’t look at him. And what I’d said seemed so obvious that I went on. ‘It’ll be easier to clean the house without you tracking mess through.’
‘What mess?’
‘Everything. I’ll make it nice for next time.’
‘It’s already nice.’
‘I’ll be back on Friday.’ It was Tuesday that day.
‘School starts Monday.’
‘And I’ll be back before then. Plenty of time.’
I suppose people judged me for leaving my children behind.
It is not entirely true, what I said earlier. Claudie wasn’t always the way she became. One time she said, ‘Mama, come back with us.’ She must have been sixteen by then. Hart had brought them to the island when I didn’t come back after a couple of nights – who knows why? To check on me, to persuade me, which there was no need for in my mind. I would be back; I was merely delayed by a making. ‘I’ll be there tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Home – you mean home,’ Hart said.
‘Sure,’ I said.
Tobe wanted to stay. I should have backed him up. But I was in the middle of something and the timing wasn’t good.
‘A couple more days and I’ll be finished. You’ll be okay,’ I said to Claudie.
I am sorry about that. I didn’t go back; I stopped pretending.
While I’m talking of untruths, I should correct another. I said that I wasn’t lonely on my own on Wolfe. The truth was I didn’t think I could stand being there on my own at first, despite my years of dreaming. Tobe stared back at me when they got in the boat; I waved from the dock and called out, ‘See you soon, have fun now,’ stupid things to hide the truth. Tobe’s eyes were hidden beneath his thick dark fringe, so like Hart. Hart did not look back, which I thought hard at the time. He saw before I did how things would unfold. They were close to grown by then. Claudie had nearly done with school. Tobe might have been thinking it wasn’t fair that I was out there and he wasn’t when he wanted to be too, for his own reasons. I couldn’t see the difference I made to them. Claudie hardly said a word to me. My accent embarrassed her, I think. She didn’t say that, but I felt it. I was working seriously again and didn’t care what people thought. My mind wasn’t really on them. I was probably thinking of how to join a spoon to a bicycle chain.
When light fell the first night I went down the street, my old dog Sweetie came gliding beside me in the curtains of dark. The light from our house was as blizzard-like as a slow photograph. Higher up, moonlight carved the air in clean bright chunks: there was the space between church steeple and a birch (a diagonal on one side, filigree on the other). The solar poles (blown away now) framed the emptiness of the streets. Sweetie leaped on a rat and it screamed. She squeezed her teeth into it and tossed it once or twice. It dragged itself away on its tiny hands, and she bit again, feeling its body with intelligence, feeling for the fluttering of its living heart. She picked it up and padded along with me. A listening quiet settled over Wolfe. Anything could be in the shadows. My voice speaking softly to Sweetie seemed foreign, almost indecent, the sound of a vagabond interloper.
We walked the long way home by the docks and the gutter bridge, Sweetie, her rat, and me. It was the first chill of autumn and my breath plumed white. I might have been breathing fire, I might have been a dragon, I might blast everything in my way. At home the wind hummed in the lines of the boat, and the metal cleats chimed in the night, a high and mournful sound. The wind struck the roof and I waited for it to fly away. Aeroplanes floated across the flat luminous grey. Later, red or white lights blinked low on the water, moving past – boats, dragging their sounds behind. There was some quiet triumph in my feeling. Nothing could stop me and nothing would get in my way.
Chapter 8
I walked from the Blackwater dock to Main Street and everything was strange. The ground was hard, when it yielded responsively at every step on the island. The two places might have been different planets, their orbits connected by nothing more than my boat, as if a slingshot had flung me across time and space, not only sea. The houses here were painted as pretty as playhouses and left me stranded between many feelings: at this moment the mystery of civic pride persisting when the world seemed to be falling apart. The truth is mostly irreconcilable with everyday life.
‘Kitty, honey,’ Doree cried from the other side of the road, as if I was the very thing she’d been waiting for. When I’d crossed she gave me one of her hugs, which are thorough but make me feel my boniness.
I was in town for food and gardening supplies and to drop off a bottle collection for Doree’s shop. Girl had dissolved into shadow in her eff
ortless floating gait – some business of her own to attend to, perhaps with the rare, shadowy coydogs and coywolves that had been sighted in the forested areas around Blackwater.
Inside the shop a radio was playing a lonesome country song. We moved down the aisles to the counter past starfish, boat wheels, decoys, candleholders and soaps, weathervanes that would never feel a breath of wind. The song stopped and a voice – high and chipper – broke in, as if offering a rare treat. ‘Remember the three Ps everyone! Federal agents are authorised to search premises, persons and possessions at any time, and to examine and destroy any unaccompanied baggage or to take any suspicious persons into custody for further questioning.’
‘That’s a new one,’ I said.
‘I had some agents through last week. I’ve seen people stopped.’
‘I had no idea.’ (That wasn’t true. There had been that woman getting in the police car.)
‘People just pretend. It’s like: “A bomb’s gone off. What shall we have for dinner?”’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘you got something for me?’
‘I do.’
She checked things over and took all but one, and looked up her books and paid for the last batch.
‘Now, you’re staying for lunch, I hope. I won’t take a no.’ There was good reason to stick to routine so I let her persuade me the same as usual.
It used to be that she’d tell me how well her boy Wilt was doing. For a while he was studying hummingbirds to see what could be done to save them. A year or two later she told me he’d given the hummingbirds away. They couldn’t make a camera small enough for them to carry about without them dying she said, try as they might. I didn’t know what to say. If you ask me, dominion, which Pastor Kevin had preached so often, is an evil thing. I was glad my children had never done such work. I didn’t say anything to Doree on that subject, though. Tobe was back from war by then, holed up in his shanty over the water, and a delicate quiet had settled between us on the subject of sons. Wilt was a big strong boy. I don’t know how he escaped the war and I never asked. Mothers will do a lot to protect their children. I didn’t know how to with Tobe.
I used to row to Tobe’s shanty, a pot of stew or a pie at my feet. He’d look at me sidelong, as if he’d been comfortably drifting away and my visits dragged him back to shore and he resented it. But he had beautiful manners. People used to remark on them. ‘Thank you,’ he said each time. ‘That smells so good.’
He covered his eyes with the palm of his hand. Finally, his hand slid down and he stroked the tiny blue teardrop tattooed below his right eye. He’d got it to match one a friend of his had done when he was doing time – ‘So he’s not alone when he gets out, you know?’ he said when I saw it. What would I say? ‘You’re asking for trouble, sweetheart,’ was what first came to mind. I wish I hadn’t said it. We watched the swifts lifting and darting over the water. Tobe belonged in this world because he rose from it. It had made him.
After one long silence he said, ‘I have to find work, I know that.’
I waited before I spoke in case it was one of the pauses that marked his speech. Finally I said, ‘If you want to. Take your time. You’ve been through something.’
‘I’ve done that. It’s not coming back. None of it is. I was writing a book about . . . everything. I’ll show you.’ He went inside, and came back with an old notebook, a school one, carefully kept. He must have scavenged it before the school fell. (I can’t remember how many years ago that was.) ‘Here.’ He held the spine nestled in one hand, and riffled the pages with his other. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘I’m sure it’s not.’ I couldn’t take my eyes from that book. He held it so loose over the water. I could see him spinning it free, the water dragging it down, and the pages staring up like a person’s face falling away.
But he didn’t. ‘I’m done with all that, all of it. It’s not worth a thing.’ He took the notebook inside and placed it carefully on the shelf. I found it there later. I plan to read it one day when I’m ready.
‘You could live with your father in town. He’d love to have you.’
‘It’s hard living there,’ he said.
‘I remember,’ I said.
Sometimes he talked about the old watermen, and the times he went out on their boats, with Owen Jims especially. Owen had lasted longer than most. I came upon him once standing on the road at Stillwater outside his fancy-lettered oyster shed and mountain of crab cages, tugging at the stump of a finger. His wife had gone shopping and he didn’t know what to do. He was ghostly, his clothes as faded and worn as his skin.
‘The tanks in there were full of crabs, if you can believe it, we were into the main every week, hard times too though,’ he said without a greeting. His words flowed like water, the way they might have in his mind.
‘They could be.’
‘It was a beautiful life.’
I agreed.
‘She’ll be back soon, tell me what to do.’
‘I’m sure she will.’
There were plenty like him towards the end, chewing things over at the Fisherman’s Confederation Hut. ‘Chub biting in Coffin Bay,’ one old man would say. ‘Yup, yup,’ a weathered feller would reply, feeling the white bristles of his cheeks with his hands grown soft and his nails grown long and filthy at the quick, recounting the names of the old oyster reefs: Eight Mile, Jimmy’s Best, Sutters Line and so on, as if they were incantations.
‘I know what I’ll have to do and I know I’ll hate it,’ Tobe said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Work in the prison.’
‘Tobe.’ It was true there wasn’t much around. ‘You could go back to college.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘That tear might have to go.’
He put a finger to it, quickly, as if it needed protection.
The thought of him in a prison was cruel. Tobe used to putter the island in his boat. He had the whole island mapped in his head. You could ask him anything and he’d know – about muskrats, birds, currents, everything. Only island people could see the beauty and skill in that, and the sadness, since the island was going. It’s not easy for a person to live with. It’s a particular kind of burden. People turned from it. He reminded them. I was no help to him. Now, I think education, conservation, water management, ecosystems, biodiversity. I was stupid.
He went to work at the prison and came back when his shifts allowed. The tattoo went but he seemed to feel it still brimming on his cheek. He touched the place often.
Now, sitting over our lunch, Doree said, ‘Something on your mind?’
‘New seeds. They don’t keep like they used to somehow. This weather.’
‘Something else if I know you, but you go ahead and keep it quiet. You always did.’
I thought she had something on her own mind, but didn’t ask what it might be. Her eyes flickered out of the window to her boathouse. She was on edge.
I went shopping before lunch, checking my gun as advised by the sign at the supermarket entrance: STOP! Please ensure your safety catch is activated on entry. Have a nice day.
Folks said the same as always: how glad I must be of a change of scene, civilisation, fries, what was I doing in town, and so on. A woman tried to pet Girl. Had our daughters gone to school together? ‘Here, girl,’ she said, and when Girl shied away she asked, ‘What’s her name?’
‘Girl,’ I said.
I went back to Doree’s. ‘The questions they ask.’
‘They don’t mean any harm,’ Doree said.
‘I was just trying to do some shopping.’
‘Oh, Kitty, you make me laugh sometimes.’ And she did laugh a little.
‘Honestly.’
Afterwards I took our plates to the sink and looked down the long garden, where I saw a curtain moving and a light swaying. ‘Someone in the boa
thouse?’
‘A friend of a friend passing through,’ Doree said. ‘And that’s a big shop you’ve done. Not asking why, mind.’
‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? Claudie’s coming for a holiday.’
‘Is she? You’ve heard from Claudie?’
‘I had an email last week. It’ll be nice to catch up.’
It was not clear to me where we were up to in this conversation, what we were saying to each other and what we each believed of what the other said. Why didn’t I ask Doree outright about her boathouse? Why didn’t she say, ‘Kitty, I believe you’re lying’? We would have once. Secrets had entered the world we lived in – I’d learned that from Cat – and now they were in our lives and between us, old friends that we were. People didn’t know who to trust. We pulled back from this delicate point and had lunch and a glass of wine or two, but even then we kept our secrets.
Sometimes, way back, I’d call Sweetie in the afternoon and we’d take the boat to town. Not wanting to upset Claudie or Tobe, old though they were, we’d wait at the docks and when darkness fell and house lights began to go out, like fireflies dying at summer’s end, and doors stopped banging and people stopped calling to their pets, we walked beneath the tall trees to Hart’s house. The key was there beneath a limestone paver under the hydrangea where the air was cool and damp. There was a rustling – some other life running alongside mine. I crept inside, upstairs, listened to Hart’s slow breathing, saw his arm reaching, and peeled the cover back and pressed myself along his side.