by Lucy Treloar
‘Water is perilous in all its forms,’ I said. ‘Never forget that. Something my grandfather used to say to my mother. She passed it on to my sister and me. It’s your job to remember now.’ Even if water did not now freeze as it used to (usually for shorter times, and the ice not as thick or strong), the story of my grandmother dying still mattered. It meant more than it said and its meaning seemed to change for each person. Some stories have weight in them and require a voice. So I told it to them, and have included it in my notebook for interest’s sake.
When my grandmother died
Years ago, one icy winter, my grandmother was caught on snow-weighted ice-bound Wolfe Island, her home, while in labour. Things were going badly for her. No seaplane would chance a landing because of the wind and the building ice, there was no rescue helicopter at that time, and the only boat powerful enough for such icy waters having been frozen in at the docks, the strongest men on the island, my grandfather among them, went down with pickaxes and shovels and crowbars and any other bit of equipment that they felt might work to try to free it. Their white breath hung in the air. Despite the cold, their work of raising and driving their tools made them sweat and their clothes steam. Their tools chimed and bounced against the hard ice, and its cold smell, clean and sharp, in other circumstances almost delicious, began to rise around them. Chunks of ice flew and cut them on their high-coloured faces until the blood mingled with their sweat and caught in their stubble and gave them a wild and dangerous appearance above their soft fur collars and thick plaid jackets. They were mad with it and cursing, and their shouts and grunts travelled inland quite some distance, my mother said.
She heard it all from the gate, including her father’s shouts of desperation and urgency. She stood and waited in the bitter cold – too frightened by her mother to stay in the house – for her father to run back to see how her mother was faring before stumbling and sliding back down the icy paths to the harbour, waiting for fate to have its way and doing all he could to prevent it. But as fast as they chipped a hole through one section of ice and the piles of ice shards were shovelled away, the ice formed again behind them. Not a mother on the island would let a child close to look, much less help, or they might have kept the dark water moving freely about the boat so it could get away. But what mother would allow such a thing when everyone knew of people who had slipped into the icy holes made for oyster tonging and who were not seen again until spring, if ever.
Sometimes I couldn’t sleep for the thought of that moment: the fall into water, dark from above, green from below (I imagined), the thick ice as lovely as my mother’s chrysoprase ring – that soft opaque green which was also somehow clear because of the purity of its tone. That light would be the last thing I would see before the cold and the water poured into my lungs. Would I lift my hands to that under-surface, or goldfish for a pocket of air? Would time be slow or fast? Would I see people above foreshortened, obliterating the light as they looked down? And would a person looking down see a shadowy shape, me, beneath the ice? I thought of the currents below and where they might take a body, and in bed left my arms and legs uncovered until they were icy cold to the touch, seeking an epiphany. I always weakened before enlightenment arrived, to save my precious flesh.
After my grandmother died the same cold that had prevented her rescue now preserved her. Since the ground was frozen, her body was placed in the family’s storeroom, where hams and meats and sausages and dried fish had been hung, and where root vegetables had been stored in darkened bins, and dried fruits, sweet apples, corn and grains had been kept clean and dry for the long cold winters of centuries. (It’s gone now, demolished on account of the sad memories it held for them all. I knew where it had been, though; there was a square depression in the land, clearly marked in dry weather. I used to stand in it, as if in a half-dug grave. One warm summer day I gathered my courage and lay there, draping a silk scarf over my eyes to hold off the sun.)
My mother, who was eight at the time of her mother’s death, would creep out, her boots creaking on the snowed pathway, and she would lift the little hook latch on the weathered door, icy on her bare fingers, and go in and take her mother’s cold hand and stroke it and hold it to her cheek to see if she might be able to coax her back to life. It was dark in there, not true night dark, but dark just the same, with only a milky light drifting from the high-set four-pane window. The shadows were blue in the corners and a darker blue beneath the bench that her mother lay on, as if she was suspended above the grave that would be her final resting place. The sun cast a pale lemonade light over everything as it rolled the rim of the horizon, glowing through the winter basketwork of the wooded lot that edged their house at the time (trees long dead now of salt, or beetle damage, or drowned and felled and burned), and being so low it illuminated a path across the room above my grandmother’s dead body and struck the opposite wall in a clear patch of light intersected by what looked like the mark of a cross from the window’s form. Jesus was with her, someone said when they saw this sign, as they called it, when they’d come to pay their respects. I would suppose my grandfather didn’t agree, though his response isn’t recorded, since he declined to set foot in a church again.
‘She didn’t look so different. Just like she was taking a nap,’ my mother told me once. ‘She was cold, though. I took out one of her quilts – the pink and red maple leaf one, you know – and put it on her to keep her warm. She really looked like she might be asleep. No one believed me.’ Her voice was wistful, as if she wondered yet why the quilt had not revived her mother, and whether one more day or a little heat might have done the trick. ‘I thought if I could get everyone to believe at the same time and to pray for it, it would come true. I prayed for a miracle. Fishermen come back to life every couple of generations, though it is unusual, and in different circumstances. Drownings.’
It seemed an old-fashioned way to die. As long ago as it was, it was still uncommon. It’s a beautiful old quilt. I suppose it was too fine to bury or to throw away, one of her best, people said, and she was a known quilter and needlewoman. I still have it, but not in my room. (If I ever get back to the island and it hasn’t washed away, I’ll rescue it.) It has something of a blue shadow hanging about it still.
I visited my grandmother’s grave often and always left a posy of flowers – red and pink like the quilt. The baby never had a name. There was just my grandmother’s name, Suzannah Hawke, on the gravestone, and the dates, and below that BABY with the date of its birth (if it was born in the end, which my mother could not remember or had never known) and of its death. For a long time there were just that gravestone and the gravestone of my own parents remaining. My mother didn’t want her bones or my father’s or her parents’ getting mixed up with other folks’, so I did not permit their removal during the relocation. Let them wash away if that was what the world meant for them. I felt different when they began to show – and made some arrangements. I must tell Claudie where they are.
When I finished the story, leaving out some of my own wondering about it and other matters, Cat and Luis and Alejandra were quiet. Snow was as thick and slow as feathers now, landing softly on the windscreen and being wiped away.
‘I think my mother told me about this,’ Claudie said. ‘About her great-grandmother dying on the island. She said it wasn’t going to happen to her and it wasn’t going to happen to me. She said it was irresponsible.’
‘It must have frightened her. I didn’t know that. She’s a practical woman.’
‘Is she? I never thought of her like that.’ Cat said. ‘I never saw any graves. I would have taken flowers.’
‘The place where they used to be is mostly underwater now – the church too,’ I said. I didn’t mention that once, passing that way, I’d come upon a skull peering towards the sky, and another time what looked like a leg bone washed up on the shore. ‘My grandfather and my parents – your great-grandparents, that is – were the only ones left for a
long time. They moved everyone else when the sea reached them. That was before my mother died. People didn’t like to see the bones poking out so they took them to Blackwater. It was part of the package when everyone left. “Documented removal and relocation of all buried human remains.” What a fuss there was. My mother was superstitious. They muddled the bones, which she said would confuse their spirits, and there’d be no end of trouble after that. I’ve always wondered about her people, whether they’d been on the island for longer than she said or knew.’
‘Where are their bones?’
‘I got a private contractor to move them and the gravestones. All the Wolfe folk are lined up as neat and straight as if they’re about to have their photograph taken. Chudleighs from the north end muddled with Jimses from the south, which they would have had something to say about if they were still living, that I can tell you. I got them to put the stones for our family the way they’d been on the island, turning into each other, sort of cosy, like they’re having a chat.’
‘I don’t like bones,’ Alejandra said.
‘I remember that.’ I turned the wipers up. ‘Not everyone does. They don’t mean any harm. It’s people do that, not treating each other right. Some people. The Watermen were just looking out for us. Guardian angels. We could use some of them now.’
‘What are angels?’
‘Beings of protection everyone needs more of, wolfdogs and people.’
I would tell them about our wolfdog cub Baby another time; it would be too much for one morning. If you call something Baby it seems like you’re asking for trouble. Maybe if we’d called her Lady or Madam or something like that she might have survived. She was like a baby. She liked to be carried, which is not usual for a wolfdog. She licked our cheeks with her pink tongue and made the children shriek. She was a dangerous combination of wicked, funny and sweet. Claudie and Tobe would make beds for her and fight over her and give her treats for no reason, and I let them because of the rareness of them sharing something. It spoiled her. She didn’t learn any sense or pay attention to us. She thought rules were nothing to do with her and that was our fault. It was winter and just the once she walked out on thin ice and broke through. It wasn’t even deep enough for her to drown – just enough to hold her there while the cold did its work. We were inside and didn’t hear a sound.
She turned from her wolfish nature because of us. I have taken care since not to make the same mistake. A wolfdog is not a person; bending their nature is a sin, I believe. My mother used to say I was a quarter wolf at least. She told Hart my nature would not change. He said that suited him fine and my mother said, ‘As long as you know, as long as your eyes are open.’
I didn’t tell the story of Baby and that was a lesson lost and someone would have to suffer again to learn it. I will try to tell it if it comes to mind another time.
The sign to the prison came into view then and took all my attention.
Chapter 17
Every time I see a prison sign it feels as if officers might make a mistake and detain me, believing me to be someone else, and as if there’s no choice but to obey. And now I had done something wrong and deserved to be in prison. I could almost imagine they knew about Andover and Josh and were waiting for me with a verdict and sentence, and that gave me a sick feeling.
There is a silence around a prison that is hard to understand or explain. They hollow something out of a place, as if a bomb has gone off and every creature has disappeared apart from the ones that have been hit, the ones with their wings burned. This one reminded me of the one Hart and I passed by once, with its double layers of mesh fencing, the barbed curls of their tops hunching inwards like buzzards over meat. Orchards ran alongside to the south in their own high-fenced compound, which in summer would be swarming with inmates, all of them waiting to be sent somewhere they didn’t know any longer, if they ever had, no doubt some of them doing the work they used to be paid for. We drove to the visitor car park. Security cameras were all around.
‘I’ll ask,’ I said. No one replied.
There was a low grey concrete and metal box room bolted to a concrete base, and a place where visitors had to make themselves known, a grille and thick glass that was foggy and scratched, and a small, dented microphone grille to talk into. A sign said: Attacks on government property are prohibited and punishable with a fine. I peered in and spoke to the woman.
‘They the inmate’s kids?’ she asked, nodding at the truck.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s an old friend.’
‘What time’s your appointment?’
‘We don’t have one. I didn’t know we needed one. Is there any other way?’
‘No cancellations today, ma’am. Could put you on a list?’ I told her okay and she looked at her screen and there was a faint tapping. ‘Name?’ she asked and I gave her one, which I will not mention here. ‘Address?’
‘No address. We’ve just sold up, moving north.’
She tapped a few keys. ‘Phone number?’
‘I lost it.’
‘Ma’am,’ she said, ‘how would I contact you?’
‘What if I came back tomorrow? Would you put me on the list for then?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘What number would I be for tomorrow if there’s a cancellation? What chance would I have?’
‘You would be –’ she looked at her screen again ‘– number seventeen.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Your place on the list, ma’am. You asked.’
‘Have you ever had that many cancellations?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘I see. What’s the wait for an appointment?’
‘Six weeks.’
‘Why—’
‘Ma’am?’
I looked at the sign, the scratched screen and the dented microphone plate. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘You’re welcome.’
I returned to the car. ‘Six weeks,’ I said. ‘That’s the wait. I’m sorry for that. Should have thought. I had no idea.’
‘We can’t see Mama?’ Alejandra asked.
‘In six weeks. Not until then. I’m so sorry.’
Luis put his arm around her, curved his hand right round until he was stroking her forehead.
I drove, trying not to think of the cameras, wishing I’d covered the plates, listening to Luis’s soft murmur, Alejandra’s hiccupping breaths. At my side Cat held Treasure against her front. ‘We should get her a what-do-you-call-them – baby carrier,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Cat said and stroked Treasure’s hair over her temple, the top of her head, all the soft places of her skull.
The road curled away and ten minutes later, maybe more, over the crest of a forested hill we came to a straight section of highway and a road crew truck and a band of prison inmates in bright orange picking rubbish from the wooded roadside. A guard in the truck cabin nodded to some music, a booted foot up tapping the windscreen; another stood on the tray holding a gun. They looked bored, all of them, and we slid by with hardly a one looking up.
Luis lunged forward. ‘Stop, go back. That was Mama. Mama, I’m pretty sure.’
‘Mama,’ Alejandra screamed and in the mirror I watched her kneel on the seat and peer out the rear window. She screamed again, ‘Mama,’ and scrambled through and banged at the window.
‘Go back?’ I said, gripping the wheel tight. ‘How? What would the guards do? They’ll see you then.’
‘We have to,’ Luis said. ‘So she knows we’re okay.’
‘Kitty, Kitty,’ Alejandra pleaded. ‘Turn around, Kitty.’
I pulled in and we cooked up a scheme that we thought might work; it was at least worth a try. And this is what we did. It was a sorry story, don’t think I don’t know it. We doubled back and parked a little further down from them and Alejandra pretended to pick something from the ground. Luis couldn’t
leave the car, we decided on that: too risky, too easy for him to be shot. That was hard for him, though he agreed. Alejandra and I walked along the concrete shoulder towards them.
Casually, the guard on the truck tray eased his rifle around and aimed it at us. ‘Ladies,’ he said. I tucked Alejandra close up behind so she was peering out from under my arm. Her eyes were huge. ‘Stop right there.’ The guard jumped down, his belly giving a soft bounce, and hitched his pants up snug beneath it and smoothed his plump fingers over his buttons. ‘Show me your hands.’ The inmates bunched up like fish do when something big is sweeping around.
I held my hands up. ‘The little girl here saw one of your prisoners drop something when we were passing. Can we give it to her?’
‘Oh yeah? Which one?’
Alejandra pointed.
‘You drop anything, three-eight-nine?’
A thin black-haired woman looked up warily and shook her head, and looked again, seeing Alejandra. That poor woman. It was not kind, what we were doing.
‘I guess,’ the guard said.
Alejandra began walking and I followed, not many steps. Then they were standing close together. ‘Mama,’ Alejandra whispered.
The woman spoke to her fast. Alejandra blinked very rapidly, which I knew meant she was getting upset, but she managed a few words in reply. She needed Girl at her side. I put my hand on her shoulder. Alejandra held out the thing we had thought of.
‘Wait, show me that,’ the guard said, coming up. Alejandra held out the little hairclip that her mother had given her a long time ago. The guard took it and looked closely and threw it to the ground in disgust.
‘It’s a kid with a hairclip,’ I said.
His fingers moved on his rifle. I should have stayed quiet. I gave Alejandra a tiny nudge, no more than a little pressure. He would not have seen it.
Alejandra picked the clip up and gave it to her mother.