by Lucy Treloar
Forty years younger than the man who killed Girl, and who I killed in turn.
Younger than the man who’d killed Luis and wanted to kill Alejandra, and who I killed to save her.
I couldn’t breathe. All those people. What was I these days? Eddie looked at me like I was clean out of my mind. He probably was right. I was panting, huh, huh, huh, like that, as if I was giving birth. It was that terror I used to get about what was behind me. ‘Don’t look back.’
He was alarmed. ‘You okay, ma’am?’
I shook my head. ‘Some people.’
He brought me a glass of water, about the best water I’ve ever tasted. Sipping it, I slowly began to put my feelings back, to smooth them.
After a while I got out my notebook, and began to feel better after some work. It took me out of myself. I drew a couple of things that I liked about Eddie’s home – the connection techniques he used which I considered original and pleasing. I drew a picture of the young runner who had been shot, and wished I’d helped him on his journey north, for a few days at least. (It was Luis who had been on my mind, the thought of him lying in a parking lot, a shrouded thing.) By the time I thought of travelling with him it would have been like searching for a shark tooth in marshland.
Things I wished I’d brought with me
-Bandages and bandaids
-Adhesive tape
-Antiseptic ointment
-Painkillers
-Tweezers
-Space blanket
-Waterproof matches / a lighter
-Firelighters
-Jelly beans, chocolate, energy bars
Eddie began to cook, standing at his bale-and-wood kitchen bench, dicing dried apples and putting them in a pan with vanilla and some water. A sweet spicy smell wafted about.
‘Mmm, cinnamon,’ I said.
He gave his diffident half-smile. ‘My mother liked cooking with it.’ He was getting his words going now.
‘And the straw.’
‘Yeah. We had a farm. Drought got it. Ended up walking. I went through some times until I set up here.’
He began a pastry. The pictures moved in the breeze that he made, depending on him for their life. I could use that in a making, get people to walk past or through a making so it moved and they were helping it become itself and becoming part of it themselves.
We ate his apple pie in the middle of the afternoon because we were hungry. I considered the way he lived refined, and the place he lived as fascinating as any art I ever saw. I told him I liked his work, mentioned my line of business and asked him if he considered himself an artist.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I wondered why you store your pictures in plastic.’
He shrugged.
‘And why you hang them.’
‘I don’t want to bend them and I don’t want to lose them. I don’t want them getting wet.’
‘So, for someone? One day?’
‘I don’t know.’ He sounded sharp then.
‘My daughter Claudie would say, “God, Mother,” right about now. I didn’t mean to be nosy.’
‘Yes you did.’
‘Yeah, I did.’
He smiled then.
‘But it is very good. I want you to know that.’
He looked pleased, shy-pleased, and then gave that shrug, like he was saying, So what? What do I care what people think?
I told him about the Watermen calling. I found a picture I’d drawn of them early on, after we left Wolfe Island, as if they might be able to watch over us from there. ‘I didn’t know I wanted other people to see my work.’
‘I wouldn’t mind seeing them.’
‘Yeah, well, come visit sometime.’
He stared at me hard. ‘What happened to your son?’
‘Died a few years ago.’
‘I had a feeling.’
‘He had a place something like this.’
‘Oh yeah? Did he like to draw?’
‘No. He liked the water. He was a waterman. How about your mother?’
‘Car accident when I was fourteen. Didn’t like my dad’s new wife. She didn’t like me, so—’
‘How long you been living like this?’
‘A while.’
He looked at the ground furiously. He hated himself then, and he hated me because I’d asked and he’d told and felt something about it again. It was pollution in this pure safe place. He got up, flung on his jacket, threw the flap door back and went out. All the hanging papers swayed wildly in the wind he’d made and the breath of the outside and began their strange whispering. I heard some chopping sounds – plenty of dead trees around to be going on with. I looked through a couple of his drawings and wrote in my book, and worried about Cat and everyone, and wished Luis was here in this safe place. Tobe too.
Eddie came back in. The cold came off his clothes in avalanches – a good clean hard smell. Sweat beaded on his forehead. ‘I don’t need anyone’s pity. I’m not looking for a mother.’
‘I’m not looking for a son. Your age doesn’t mean anything. I like your work. It’s interesting; you’re interesting. I have connections that might be useful for you – with your art.’
‘I’m not sure I want—’
‘Connection.’
‘No.’
‘The world?’
‘What’s the word? I’ve got enough . . .’
‘Charity.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Got it. People acting like you’re pitiful. Never mind the money. If you want people to see your work, you’ve got something to say, you’d like to talk to people about it, as equals – that’s what I mean. You’d be welcome as a friend.’
‘Well.’ He wouldn’t say thank you because he wasn’t grateful and he wouldn’t lie, but I think he understood that I meant well. He lived by rules I didn’t know, the way I had on Wolfe. I wondered what his were. ‘Be sure to welcome strangers’ would be one of them, some ancient frontier habit, maybe something from his mother. I had disturbed the stillness he lived in with my clumsy talk. I hoped I had not ruined it. What could the world do for him? I didn’t consider myself lonely at the time Cat arrived. The subject didn’t come up again. We were quiet after that for some hours. I caught up with recent events in my notebook.
Here, writing now, the past seems as close as the present. The straw prickles under me, feeling not so different from the dry saltmarsh we lay hidden in when we were small. I pull a little piece from the side and stick it in my mouth, nibbling the end. It doesn’t taste a lot, but it’s a pleasant thing to do. Eddie seems to find it amusing. ‘Hayseed,’ he says. It’s peaceful being around him. It’s the quiet of him, and the unhurried way he inhabits his world. I can’t help thinking about the sadness of his past and how he came to be like this. He has kept going despite all he’s lost, and his world is as filled with meaning as Wolfe Island was for me. He doesn’t seem lonely, merely alone. It suits him. He has lost everything and made something. Tobe lost things too, but not more than Eddie or Luis. He hadn’t finished with trying and searching for a new way and a new place to live. It was circumstance or fate – whatever you want to call it – that got in his way, as unstoppable as a weather system sweeping through. There is no controlling some things. What I mean is that what happened to Tobe is not all on me and, for the first time, I feel that.
What else can I do but move forward, persist, homeless and grieving though I am? I’ve lost almost everything, as Eddie has, and will have to find a new place to be. Who will I be without Wolfe Island? I don’t know, but Eddie gives me some hope.
On the second afternoon Eddie lifted his head. ‘Smell that?’
I lifted my head and sniffed. ‘No.’
‘Snow’s slowing.’
‘You smelled that?’
‘I might be wrong.’
/> I peeked out of the thick vestibule plastic. ‘You’re right.’ I poked my head out. The snow was unblemished, blue in the shadows of trees, and beautiful. ‘I had a place I knew like you know this.’
He looked up from his watercolour. ‘That where you’re going?’
‘As near as I can get.’
I gave him my name and Doree’s contact details on the final morning. He gave me some cookies. ‘Thank you,’ I said at the road. He ducked his head and turned back. Ten seconds after I started he’d disappeared.
Everyone I passed in that forest region warned that militias were about, and I spread the same news to anyone I saw. When danger is running loose, people begin thinking in old ways, more like animals. For two days I veered along the sparse edges of woods, the ridges of hilltops, old dirt roads that curled around hills, the threadbare edges of marginal farmland. One night I pressed into the corner of an old hunters’ cabin on a sleeping platform of hewn timber, fearful of every sound in the darkness. Finally, the road curved and descended at the edge of the forest and the hills made way for open farmland with grids of roads, asphalt and dirt. The white stubble on fields looked like new snow. I walked down into it, breathing easier now I could see into the distance.
I walked through Ruston and Edmore and the undulating farmland between. Signs on the scrawny outskirts of each announced their thoughts on people running and searching and escaping. In Ruston they said Welcome and bore directions to a centre where food or water or advice or warm clothes could be found. Another town had No Strangers Here and No Room Here yard signs stabbed into their lawns. People stared as I went past, unsure what abuse to hurl since I was heading the wrong way.
A man and his son drifted with me on the other side of the road. They were clean, their hair was cut neat, and their clothes were warm. They were bored and angry, each feeling diluting the other, but they threw some stones at me anyway and one hit my coat. It gave me a bad feeling. Finally the man summoned some dogged remembrance – ‘You can get on out of here, bringing disease’ – as if the words were his civic duty.
I was tired after that and rested in the lee of a highway wall just out of town. Three skinny teenagers, two girls and a boy, their thin legs stretched out, hands buried in their pockets, were already in occupation, but they didn’t mind me. One girl’s hair wisped about like thin smoke. She reached into a raggedy plastic bag and pulled out a tough old baguette, and broke it over her knee as if it was kindling, and handed the shards around. It tasted good. The traffic droned past, a strange experimental music. There are many ways of living.
Chapter 23
Rose was smaller and older than me, like a colourful bird – an oriole, say – with her short grey and pink hair. She’d picked me up on a curved stretch of highway bordered by fields and distant long-dead pines still standing and as white as bone. (One lone loblolly put me in mind of the tallest tree on Wolfe Island and the time years ago that someone took a chainsaw and cut it down. People had looked for it out at sea for as long as anyone knew. Wolfe’s Pine, gone.) I was glad to be inside a moving vehicle for a while. The outside of Rose’s camper was covered in stickers of places she ‘hearted’; inside, the seat springs were gone and they squeaked as we bounced. She sat forward in her seat with cushions beneath and behind, almost pecking the wheel in her need to see out. She rolled the sleeves of her plaid shirt, which spilled loose immediately until she looked like a dishevelled child. I picked at the vinyl piping of my seat, poking back the grey stuffing that was nosing out.
Words rolled out of Rose. She’d been working up north, seeing her daughter, but her dog couldn’t get along with her daughter’s boyfriend’s dog and she couldn’t get along with her daughter’s boyfriend and he said it was between him and her and if she didn’t move on he would, so her daughter told Rose goodbye. Not to worry, Rose said. She got it. Her daughter’s man was the future, and her mother was something from the past. She, Rose, had places to go and friends to catch up with; right now she was heading south for a regular gig at a factory warehouse pulling stock, only the hours were long and she had the dog. The dog, a scrappy scruffy thing, condescended to sniff my hand.
‘She likes you,’ Rose said.
‘You can tell from that?’
‘Well. She’s slow to warm. Isn’t that right, Hurtle?’ The dog panted lightly and stared ahead. ‘She’s not really my dog.’
‘You don’t mind moving about so much?’
She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. ‘I don’t know why I would mind. As long as I can, I will. What else would I do? It pays the bills; I get to see the country. If it gets too much, though – well, I’ll worry about that when the pearly gates come into view. Ha!’ It seemed like an old joke. Perhaps it held the truth at bay. ‘How ’bout you? Looks like you’ve seen some times.’ Her eyes flickered to the dark stains on my knees.
‘I took my daughter north. My car got burned out. I’m walking home instead.’
‘That sucks.’ She tapped the top of a floral-patterned thermos and glanced at me. ‘Coffee? Help yourself.’ So I did, holding the cup in one hand, popping the top of the flask and pouring. A few clumps of undissolved milk powder came out along with the coffee. Rose looked at them. ‘Cheaper than fresh and no waste.’
‘Have you got another cup?’
‘Nope, just the one. Pour me one when you’ve finished.’ We jounced along for a bit and then she said, ‘I heard there was a big storm down south a couple weeks back.’
I had lost the way of keeping up my end of a conversation so fast. I said, ‘Really?’
A while later she said, ‘I heard we’re in for an early spring.’
‘Is that right?’
‘I heard vigilantes been killing more folk.’ She looked at my knee again.
‘That’s no good,’ I said.
‘I guess not.’ Rose darted me another look, assessing me for my political leanings or maybe my temper. I didn’t look back so I didn’t have to add anything to the space she left. Finally she quit her meaningful glances and said only, ‘I heard avocado is good for your skin – like I’ve got the spare change to put food on my face.’ She laughed.
It went like that, avocadoes and death mattering about the same. I guess that was right where she was coming from. Her van was a cocoon – her world – that kept her safe. I was sure it wouldn’t suit me. I wanted to see more of Claudie, if that was possible, if she was willing. Where would I put my makings things and my tools? Where would I store makings once made? I wanted salt meadow, a watery sky and a familiar sea. I wanted to put some roots down. Rose’s life seemed like a stone skipping across still water; she could never pause to see beneath . . . She could depend on no one and no one could depend on her. It made me shiver, thinking of it.
We stopped at a highway gas station and I went into the restroom and when I came out she was getting into the van.
‘Hey!’ I called. ‘Hey, Rose.’
She wound down the window and pointed. ‘Her name’s Hurtle.’ Hurtle was tied to a post with my pack, a big bag of dog food and a bowl at her side. When I looked back, Rose was accelerating away. Hurtle was trying to reach a fry just beyond her nose, making a hacking choking noise as her collar cut into her throat.
I approached Hurtle cautiously. She thought I was going to battle it out for the fry, and growled and snapped. I kicked the fry towards her with my foot and untied her gingerly while she was busy with it and searching for more. What else could I do? I was nothing but an anchor at the end of a lead to her. I kept her tied, though it would have been easier if she’d run off. She had wiry fur of many lengths, was no more than knee-high, and solid in her body without exactly being stocky. She kept a sideways eye on everything. She had a mean streak and had been looking out for herself for a while. Her growl came from deep in her body. She hated other dogs and didn’t like to be touched, but could abide lying along my outstretched leg if we stopped for a re
st. But these were discoveries for the next couple of days.
In your mind you might be thinking it’s because she wasn’t a wolfdog that makes me show her in an unflattering light, and thinking that she might turn out to be one of those chipper movie dogs with a bright eye and a cocked ear and a tail raised and a speaking look, like if I said, ‘Would you mind getting me Mama’s old recipe book?’ she’d trot to the breakfront, pluck it from its place with delicate teeth, return it to my lap and settle at my feet, her head resting on her front paws, and sigh, content that her job of loyalty and utility was done. She was not like that.
Even a dog that doesn’t care about you is better than no company at all. At the time I thought I’d taken her up and saved her; she might have thought the same.
There were no more rides after that, not that I’d ever caught many. Hurtle wasn’t a dog who’d add lustre and respectability to a foot traveller. After a long morning standing on a raised section of highway on the outskirts of that town, where I reasoned that I might be seen from the distance, I realised my hitching days were done. I had no clear idea how far I had to walk. The road signs didn’t mention Blackwater or any place I knew. I didn’t know places. All I knew was to keep heading south.
I couldn’t think too far ahead, I just kept moving forward. It was me and Hurtle, staying alive, safety and danger, hunger and wondering and searching, walking. That was all. It is a lot, put like that. And I got off lightly.
It’s harder to write on the road. My hands are often cold, or it’s too dark to see. But sometimes there’s a fire, or I find a sheltered patch of sun – the edge of a highway or a house porch – or I’ll wake at dawn and stay still for a while, Hurtle keeping me warm, and get out my notebook. It holds my worries at bay even if I’m writing about those very worries.
Right now, for instance, I’m sitting on a wooden staircase down to a river. The river is black and its surface is fissured with currents and slick – cold looking. The air is milky. The whippy saplings growing along its banks are grey-white, pale orange, scarlet and still. There are neither wind nor clouds. The sky is white – yellow white at the low sun. Hurtle has gone to explore. She looks back to make sure of me, frightened I’ll run. ‘Hey, Hurtle,’ I say. She has resumed her snuffling now. My hands are not too bad, so I am writing, and also thinking about some of the things I’ve picked up for makings, and the things that have been a wrench to leave behind. I take what I can and every couple of days do a making or a cull and keep what I like best.