Wolfe Island

by Lucy Treloar

  Summertime. When I wake early I can pretend things haven’t changed. I wait for this moment: first light arriving on the plain of Wolfe Island like a can of paint-wash water of clearest watermelon pink flung in an enormous delicate rush. I go out to the garden, adjust the shades to suit the forecast, do some pollinating, throw some water around, wonder about the failures to thrive, and think possibilities and adjustments. I make coffee and watch the world and listen too, before people obliterate the sounds.

  A day or two ago, Girl and I rambled the nearby shore, she sniffing and me poking around for what might have washed up – a sick bird or an old packing case or plastic from a long way off with lettering on it I couldn’t understand. Then I went to my makings room and its long benches, touching things, holding them, not thinking anything in particular, moving things about, seeing how they might create together. I went out and picked a few flowers, took one from the bunch and laid it down alongside a spoon, and then inside the spoon, as if I’d been fishing for flowers with it, and look at this one that came up – chicory, almost blue and almost purple. What would I make a flower out of? I had a piece of hammered blue tin that might work. Oh, believe me it would be exciting stuff to watch. Slow air came through the window, and the sound of a bird.

  The air turned ponderous and hot. I sprayed garlic about my yard to keep the mosquitoes down, and mowed the verges of the road between my house and Shipleys. The lawnmower fumes made a blue haze in the air. Pomegranates hung in the trees. Butterflies flickered. The marshes were as beautiful as I ever saw them, speckled with pink mallows and banks of snowy marsh hibiscus, their buds unfurling and shrivelling within a day, and the orange trumpet flower vines and honeysuckle scrambled and hung from every building, scenting the heavy air until every bit of it was sweet.

  Despite that old beauty I began seeing things – signs or occurrences – that gave me pause. It was as if a deep breath had been drawn, as if it might be needed for a race or a deep dive, and we were waiting. I began a list.

  Recent observations

  -Alejandra would have eaten handfuls of pokeberries one hot afternoon if I hadn’t banged on the study window and shouted. The poor girl jumped and the berries tumbled about her. Everything about the livid colours and fleshy stems of pokeberry bushes screamed poison to me but Alejandra was as helpless as a baby where nature was concerned. What else might she do?

  -The stump of Wolfe’s Pine washed free in a storm, roots and all, and there was nothing to take its place. My mother said there must always be a pine on Pine Point, and a young pine coming through. But the young pine had died of salt already and the point has already begun falling apart.

  -It’s bad luck to kill a summer goose. Who doesn’t know that? I couldn’t believe it when I saw Josh stalking them in the north marshes with a hunting rifle one morning. Girl and I went out. I hollered and called to Girl just to kick up a noise and even sang snatches of a song. Girl barked in a cooperative spirit. The geese exploded into the air, almost vertical in their haste.

  -Alejandra found a dead bird in the berry patch. She pressed a strawberry to its beak, but it did not wake, so she stroked its head. An adult passes a dead bird and they kick it aside; a child makes a coffin-nest filled with soft things and berries, a crust of bread, and puts soft old cloth (a silk scarf, say) as a lid on top to stop the dirt falling on its sightless eyes, so it continues its deep and pleasant sleep. They are kind to creatures in death, even if cruel to them sometimes in life.

  -I began looking at the sky and the clouds, the shape of the waves and the direction of birds’ flight, how they had all changed, and wondered what they meant. I knew how they felt; my direction had changed too.

  -The prisoner told me of a belief he had from his family or had heard elsewhere: ‘You need someone with you as you – you know – cross over.’

  ‘Cross over,’ I said stupidly, thinking he meant the bridge I’d travelled once already that day.

  ‘To the other side.’ He waited for me to catch up.

  ‘Oh, right. I’m sorry.’ I realised then what he was asking of me. ‘You mean me.’

  If I were as superstitious as my mother, I might have paid more attention to things that were happening, but it wasn’t until I considered my list that I understood its meaning. Bad things were coming.

  I taught Alejandra Chinese jump rope to keep her busy, hammering in four poles, notching them, and attaching elastic so she could play on her own. I thought of my sister Bette, the queen of games. There had been quiet when people watched her. Up she’d jumped, up, legs twisting, then down to her casual triumphant landings, the dust puffing at her feet. Our bodies in lilac evening intersected with those of dragonflies and hoverflies and midges, darting, lit up and graceful. Mothers paused in windows and looked out. One year a sporting scout came to see her and she left and things changed after that.

  Bette came visiting once and watched our games with a half-mocking smile. How island we were. Her eyebrows were plucked into fingernail moons and her hair was yanked back so tight it hurt to look at. We ignored her. Late in the afternoon she stepped forward. Everyone stepped back; she was the queen, after all. She went the whole way through, and even threw in a couple of flips. When she had finished we didn’t clap and she walked away and never once looked back. Everyone went home.

  Next day we went out in my skiff, the champion gymnast and the island girl puttering around hooking bottles for pocket money.

  ‘Boring here for you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, my life is really great.’ She tugged a reed free and whipped the surface of the water until drops flew.

  ‘Don’t let us keep you.’

  ‘I’ll be gone tonight, don’t worry, I won’t take up your space.’

  I rowed along.

  ‘You’re so stupid,’ she said.

  She gave gymnastics away not long after. ‘Coach was a jerk,’ she said.

  We read about him later so we knew what she meant. That was hard for my parents, who’d encouraged her in that foolishness, as they now saw it. Somehow everyone felt ashamed.

  She plumped up, working at Patty’s diner until it closed. Visitors sometimes told her she reminded them of a gymnastics champion from a couple of years before. She met a guy on a tour one day who said he liked a handful. They’ve got a little house fifty miles south on the main. I haven’t seen her for a long time. My sister.

  I told Alejandra about Bette. Alejandra told me about her baby sister, Selma, who was too small for Chinese jump rope and too little to leave her mama. ‘Do you think she’s walking yet?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I miss my mama,’ she said.

  ‘I bet she misses you too.’

  And then she chanted this rhyme, which I wrote on a piece of paper I make sure I always have in my pocket.

  ‘Silly Selma, silly Selma, one two three

  Called for Mama, called for Mama, from the trees.

  Policemen came, picked them up, but they forgot about me

  Luis, Cat, Kitty, Girl, set me free.’

  She stopped jumping.

  ‘I would come for you if you were in any trouble, and Girl. And Luis and Cat are with you already and are not going any place without you. And your mama would be here if she could.’

  Alejandra’s face got that old blank look I hadn’t seen in a while. ‘I’ve had enough now, Kitty. Bye, Girl.’ She stooped to pat Girl, who lifted her head. ‘Bye, Kitty. Thank you.’ She gave her low wave, her hand at her waist, and turned and walked home.

  That time I found Josh hunting I asked where the rifle was from, and he told me, ‘Just some house,’ he forgot which one. I didn’t like the thought of it, but what could I do? He was bored, I think, since there hadn’t been any runs for a while and he found the gardening so dull. Darts of meanness came out of him from nowhere.

  Alejandra had her own job in the garden fertilising the tom
atoes and the zucchini. Each morning she took a little paintbrush I’d found for her. ‘Some for you,’ she’d dab a flower, ‘and some for you.’

  She did a good job and I told her so. Josh said, ‘Pretty easy when you’re only a kid. Everyone else does the work, right?’ He said it in a half-joking way, but she knew he meant something else and was wary.

  ‘I’d be lost without her,’ I said.

  ‘I’m talking about work.’

  ‘So am I. Have you seen her? She’s one of the seven wonders of the world. Any tomatoes we eat will be down to her work.’

  Alejandra gave a little proud shake of her head, like she was settling her feathers back into place.

  ‘Come up later and I’ll show you something about the geese, around sundown.’ I smiled at Josh, trying to be pleasant for Cat’s sake, not mentioning him hunting for them. It’s always been better to get along out here. Don’t threaten, don’t involve the law: two island rules I don’t recall ever being broken.

  Alejandra and I cooked bean stew, corn, tomato salad with basil, baked potatoes with Alejandra’s snipped chives and strawberry shortcake for dessert. There was a change in the weather and we opened the doors and windows and the salt breeze moved about.

  Everyone except Josh came. Luis said Josh was busy fixing something. Cat made a disparaging noise. ‘That’s not it. A message came through today and I told him I wasn’t going on any more runs.’

  ‘And?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s pissed,’ she said. ‘He said he’d do it if I wanted him to, and I said he should do it because it was the right thing.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ I removed his place setting.

  We talked softly as we ate. Girl took a cob of corn into the yard and chewed the kernels off it.

  The sun dropped and turned orange and sank through clouds that were low on the horizon, and in the air, faint at first in the distance, came the honking of a lone goose. It came closer and circled down, drifting like a scorched leaf against the burning sky before it dropped to the water at the shore’s edge. The sound of its splash reached us a half-beat later.

  ‘It’s come home,’ Alejandra said.

  ‘Only one?’ Cat said.

  ‘Wait. Listen.’

  The goose honked again in that hollow reverberant way.

  ‘Is it lost?’ Alejandra asked. ‘Maybe it’s lost its family.’ She held my hand hard.

  ‘You’ll see,’ I said.

  The goose called out three, four more times before there was an answering sound, so high and faint at first that I believe we all thought it was in our imaginations. It seemed a perilous venture. The sounds became clearer, pulsing backwards and forwards, call and answer. Then they were there, circling in low, blurred shadows, more absence than presence in the failing light, their calls turning to a gabble of relief and reassurance even before they met on the water.

  We sighed a kind of release, knowing the tension with the loss of it.

  ‘There’s always one that calls them,’ I said. ‘Hard times coming.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘They circled three times. It’s just a superstition, but I’ve known it come true.’

  ‘Are there more?’ Cat asked.

  ‘Superstitions?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well . . . If you scatter rose petals about your house, your true love will find you there. A lone goose foretells a lone stranger. If you see one you must look for the other or trouble will come. A creature lurks beneath Bosum’s dock. Never linger on a bottom step. Raspberry sun, good things to come. It’s hard to remember them when there’s no one else who knows. We’d remind each other as we went along.’

  Josh decided to do the runs anyway, anger or not. He came looking for Cat after his first solo run two days later. He might have thought she would warm to him again if he did. She had become the centre around which we slowly circled. We all have a story we tell ourselves. He might have been thinking the loss of her attention was temporary – it was the baby, his baby, who had it for now, that was natural, but surely it would return. She was at my house to escape the mosquitoes and a sulphurous smell that had settled in the marshes approaching their house, and to sit under my fan.

  ‘Hey,’ she said vaguely, lifting her head from a book when he walked in, as if he’d just appeared from the garden. ‘Any trouble?’ And that was all.

  He stared in disbelief. He was burned by sun and wind. He’d been gone since sun-up, and it was evening, long after dinner, by the time he got back. Even I felt sorry for him.

  ‘All good. Hope you had a good day too,’ he said. ‘See you later.’ And he went back down the road.

  She called out but he didn’t turn. She pressed her hand to her side, distracted. ‘Not yet, baby.’

  I should have paid attention to Josh. I didn’t think. No one did. It seemed like it would always be summer, Cat would always be pregnant, Josh would always just be holding together, Luis’s mother would surely be saved and Selma found if not tomorrow then the day after, and Alejandra would grow up fine and straight and undamaged and I would have helped that to be so.

  The weather turned the following week. It was almost summer’s end, not long until Cat’s baby was due – another few weeks we thought. A thin waterspout writhed past the island. The algae began its torpid blooming further out, like a bloodstain, and a few choked fish washed up. One black night a spout churned the red sea into blue spangles – the prettiest thing. There were two waterspouts the next day, closer, and it seemed safer for Cat and everyone to move from the shore to my place, and to stay indoors. The heat was a clamped-down lid and but for shifting the shades over the vegetables and doing the watering we didn’t venture out.

  Alejandra found the old family Bible in the shelves. She turned its tissue pages carefully. ‘No pictures?’ I shook my head. She kept on politely, skipping somewhat, not wanting to concede defeat, and came to the last pages where she stopped in consternation. ‘Someone wrote in it.’

  ‘Everyone from this side of the family – my mother’s, that is. My father came from somewhere else. It’s about them, when they were born and died.’

  ‘Are they all died?’

  ‘No, no. Some have moved off, but I know where they are. Pretty sure I do.’ I wasn’t sure at all. What a speck of nothing I was, the last person – one of the last, I mean – to live on Wolfe.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Here.’ It was almost the last one, in my father’s intricate beetle-foot hand. Tobe’s entry was not finished. I should do that – sometime I would.

  ‘And Cat?’

  ‘Here. The last one.’

  ‘I am?’ Cat said. ‘Show me.’ So I did. ‘I didn’t know.’ She liked it, I think. She got what my mother used to call a secret look.

  ‘Would you like your name in there?’ I asked Alejandra.

  ‘Am I family?’

  ‘You are to me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I wrote her name – ‘just Alejandra,’ she said – her birth date, and the date of their arrival in brackets.

  She went to show Cat, who was in the window seat. ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘That makes us like sisters or cousins or something.’

  Alejandra looked like she’d burst with happiness, and its shadow that was always there for her: loss. ‘And Luis? And when we find Mama and Selma?’

  ‘Sure, if they’d like. We’ll ask.’

  ‘Luis would like it. I know he would.’

  But I forgot to ask. Maybe Alejandra did and he told her no. He remembered his parents, he remembered them being all together. But Alejandra had truly become family. I don’t know how, only that seeing her on the old sofa wiggling her toes in Girl’s fur, thinking of her name in the Bible made it so.

  I would do all I could to keep her safe. Having her name written there within those old pages mi
ght help. How would I know? How would anyone? We all believe things, many of them strange, generation after generation: the first snow must be fashioned into a snowman or a lantern, no matter how small; a candle must burn through the longest night of the year; people must walk through streets behind idols or saints on the longest day and sacrifices must be made on the shortest; warriors must drink from the skulls of their vanquished enemies; and a child should not be named until they are two so the devil can’t find and kill them. We don’t like to tempt fate. We do anything we can to keep the ones we love safe. We will thwart fate and live and prosper, dear God (if there is such a being) in heaven (if there is such a place), we hope.

  Chapter 11

  I told Doree only that Cat had run away from home and was staying with me for a while. Doree was surprised – ‘Lord Jesus and his mother Mary,’ she said in a very island way – but willing to help. She had the number of a doctor friend who could assist in an emergency. I was thankful for that. I loved Cat for her own sake, but there was Claudie too. I could not be responsible for her girl’s loss and I could not betray her daughter and I didn’t see how everything could be right.

  The week after, a hurricane ran the edge of the island like a zipper, and the land frayed and spilled afresh. I say that like it’s nothing, but you can’t know until you’ve lived through it. We couldn’t see for rain. Girl howled and paced. Afterwards, Wolfe was more water than land and quaked and gave to footfall, as if we were walking on a dead creature – one of the caramel-chew cows of my mother’s memories. Water pooled in our footsteps and remained. The sea turned unpredictable. Winds blew up and the grain of the water changed, running counter to itself, and waves lifted from nothing in minutes.

  I began to fear for Cat and what might happen if we were caught or forced to battle through uncertain seas. I was thinking of my grandmother and the winter of her death. We carry our families with us in our actions. My mother made sure not to conceive a baby that would be born in winter. Summer storms and hurricanes were a new danger. No sense in giving her more to worry over. There was no chance of Claudie forgiving me if anything happened – not much chance of her forgiving me anyway.