by Lucy Treloar
‘Got anything else?’ a redheaded one asked from behind. She played a long bootlace through her hands as if it were rosary beads, wrapping it around and pulling it tight.
‘Here you go.’ I gave them the bread too, after tearing a piece off for Hurtle.
Another girl said in a wheedling way, ‘I like your jacket.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was my dad’s, so . . .’
‘Mmmm,’ the girl said, feeling the fur lining peeking from a sleeve. ‘Looks warm.’
‘It is.’ I patted at my side. ‘Good deep pockets too so I can fit my gun in, you know.’
She pulled her fingers away and sat back. They became formal after that: ‘Excuse me’, ‘Thank you so much, ma’am’, ‘You’ve been so kind’, ‘Your dog’s such a cutie’, that sort of thing, fake, but polite, carefully reared as far as words go – as if they’d come over for a tea party bringing a bunch of flowers. They scampered off at sundown like wolf cubs, like jungle cats, like hyenas, one with the bag of dog food under her arm. I envied them in a way. We weren’t far from a town, so perhaps they swarmed through it in the night getting the things they needed. There are all sorts of ways to live and they seemed to have each other’s backs, but they were wild things, fragile in one way even if they were tough in another. I wondered about their families and where things went wrong. A thought raced: A girl needs her mother. Was that true?
They reminded me of Claudie, who would have been about their age when I returned to Wolfe. She’d had that lithe eagerness, the fierceness, the desire to break away and be part of a gang. She had Hart those years; she had her father. But without me there, what would she break from? I’d been so sure she didn’t need me – I’d persuaded myself of that.
I took the indicator arm from the car interior, also the rear-view mirror, which I used right there because of its weight. I had to so I could keep going. I made a figure from a roadside stump and affixed the mirror to it, facing south, and wired it there securely. I laid some long branches in tracks from its base, and bound them with grasses. It seemed unfinished. It needed some metal – brass that would weather to verdigris in time – riveted to its body. I made a note of that and wrote a little beneath.
Now the deep cold of evening has set in along with some light drizzle. It’s not cosy in the car, but it is at least dry. Hurtle and I have moved to the passenger seat, windows up, facing forward, like we’re waiting for a driver. There is an old car smell – of grease and dust and distant journeys, and maybe a little coffee, and a wild smell outside that’s trying to break in. The drizzle has cleared and the moon has started to slide across the window. It’s almost too dark to write now. Soon I will be imagining homecomings, as I do every night, trying to lull myself to sleep. Sometimes Doree is there and sometimes Hart. It is always warm and clean and sweet-smelling and I am clean and they bring me food. Hurtle is her best self. It is better that than thinking of prison. People have died and I made that happen. There is the law and there is justice and I consider the second to be more important than the first. Still, I can’t stop remembering when my eyes close. It comes in storm surges. I am glad of Hurtle in those moments and glad of the future brought close. It pulls me along.
It hardly seemed worth standing in the morning, but cold was worse than hunger; we found a slice of sun and stood in it. I thought I might steal at the next town and wouldn’t judge myself for it. Hurtle was depending on me, after all. I felt around in every pocket and found the Silverado key, a box of matches and three pieces of dog food wrapped in a frayed tissue. They were in my hand, chunky and rough, and they looked good. Hurtle stared unwaveringly, drooling. I would have shared them between us. I thought of it. Then I lowered my hand and unfurled my fingers. ‘There you go,’ I said. They were gone, and Hurtle was quivering in expectation of more. ‘That’s it.’ She shuffled her haunches along the ground, being a good girl. I knelt and opened my pockets so she could see I wasn’t holding out on her, and we started walking, not fast, just keeping on. She stayed with me. She might have been looking after me.
Nothing stopped, nothing even slowed, and at dusk Hurtle and I walked off the road into the dark woods. Sleep seemed like the only peace there was. I could lie behind a bank of grass and see those stalks moving above, and even if they were hit by the draught of a passing truck, all laden up with local militias with semi-automatics and assault rifles, if I could not see them, I would fall into a sleep so deep it was another world as far away and safe and beloved as Wolfe Island.
Sometimes I dream that I am still on Wolfe. The closer it is the more now it seems. Someone once told me that dead people are everywhere, they follow us along the roads we travel. (Eddie. It was Eddie.) They are here, like Wolfe Island, the past too. Those times are strange and bright. Sound rises out of memory: a few words, a song, a shout – otherworldly, you know? Did we live in that place? It will be a story that people tell. People might look to their grandparents and ask was there a place called Wolfe Island where they really once lived. Perhaps they’ll notice the shadowy contours on sea charts and say, ‘Imagine – all of it underwater now.’ I might too, tracing the route from dock to my house, up the marsh road and beyond to Stillwater and even to the old pine that Tobe felled at Pine Point, angry or sad or both. There are sunken worlds all around that have no certain meaning to me – shallow spots where sabre tooth tigers might once have roamed. Once upon a time watermen dragged up great bones grown all over with shellfish in their oyster tongs. Sometimes it seemed like these islands were just waiting to become sea again. But everything continues in one form or another – ourselves included, even after death, and in that way and others what Eddie said was true.
It was the day they came to see me on Wolfe that Tobe felled the pine – when Claudie asked me to go back to the main with them and Tobe looked back and Hart didn’t when they left. Before that, Hart had been fixing a shutter, which was nice of him, and Claudie had been sunbathing on the dock. Tobe found me in the makings room.
‘Can’t I stay?’ he asked, hanging about the door. ‘Can’t you talk to Dad?’ He’d got to that lanky stage, shooting up and skinny as anything, his thick brown hair growing out and falling on his face, a little fuzz starting on his upper lip. Things were happening while I wasn’t around. A hug wasn’t going to fix things now.
‘I don’t think so, honey,’ I said. ‘You know what he thinks.’
‘Yeah, but what do you think? You can stay. I could stay with you.’
‘I’m working. You need an education.’
‘I don’t need that shit, not for what I want.’
‘Tobe.’
‘What are you going to do – fucking ground me?’ His eyes were bright. He must have been desperate to lash out like that. But he was right. I’d given up any claim to chastising him.
I looked at him as steady as I could. I couldn’t bear to tell him that what he wanted – the old life – was dead and gone on Wolfe. My face probably told him. He stormed up the marsh road, punching his leg and whipping the reeds either side with a long stick until their heads flew up. I saw him from my makings room. And then I looked away. I didn’t hear anything or notice anything until the next morning when I went mudlarking, and felt a hollowness on the skyline. Wolfe’s Pine was gone. That sent me out on my bike. All the way out I was hoping I was wrong, that it had merely fallen. But it was true: Tobe had cut it down. He’d left the chainsaw right next to the stump so there could be no mistake. At least half the tree was in the sea, with the waves breaking in line after line through the branches. He was lucky he hadn’t been injured or killed right there. I was thankful for that, believe me. But I felt as if I’d been struck. It was like a mortal blow to the island. I don’t know what he meant by it exactly. He knew hurting the island hurt me, and he knew what my mother had always said about Wolfe’s Pine. I dug up a few pine seedlings I knew of from elsewhere and planted them at Pine Point and watered them, but they all died. It see
med like they needed the shelter of the big tree to survive.
I never mentioned the tree to him, and he didn’t speak of it to me, even when he came back to stay. He knew where to strike at me. He knew me well. It was a bad memory.
Chapter 25
We came upon a car wash on the outskirts of the next town. A man and a woman were sitting on a bench outside waiting for their cars and I joined them because of the sun. We were like birds on a wire, perusing the day and the neighbourhood. The woman got out a packet of beef jerky, teriyaki flavoured, and held it out and nodded at us, Go on, and we did go on.
‘Your dog like a piece?’
‘I think she would.’
She gave Hurtle a piece. Hurtle edged closer, like she was reconsidering her options, and stared fixedly at the bag’s progress up and down. I gave her a sliver more. The man fluffed out the zip edges of his jacket, the way a hen does its wings and feathers when settling into a good patch of fine and sunny dust, half closing his eyes. It was quite a rapturous moment for us all. He said it was good jerky and we agreed. I could have eaten the entire packet in a few minutes but I took care not to look desperate. After a bit, the woman shifted towards the man. Heat has a way of releasing scent and stench both. I took my leave, using my politest voice, and they wished me a good day.
I used to be comfortable sitting near folk like that. Girl had commanded respect and I hadn’t liked to let her down. I missed those things, but Hurtle and I were survivors, we suited each other, and we’d look better with a feed and a wash. It was circumstances that made us this way. I bent and smoothed Hurtle’s soft cheek and straightened her ear so she looked her best. ‘Good girl,’ I said. She picked up her feet, almost jaunty, and gave me a look like we were partners in something. It lifted my spirits.
We got a ride with a trucker right there at the car wash exit, the first I’d ever caught with Hurtle. She leaped up without hesitation, making me wonder whether somewhere in her murky past was a truck and a warm cabin and easy days. She lay against my lap, jiggling with the truck’s movement. We got so warm I undid my jacket and dozed, head lolling against the window.
I woke with a start on the fringes of a town, about to shoot or be shot. I might have cried out. Hurtle barked. The trucker was looking at me wild-eyed. ‘You okay?’ he asked. I rubbed my eyes and nodded yes. He didn’t ask about my dreams, just held the backs of his fingers to his nose and leaned away.
‘What day is it?’ I asked.
‘Thursday.’
‘I mean the date,’ I said. When he told me the answer, I knew already. I said, ‘That would be right.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Someone I know is dying today. It’s the day of his execution.’
He looked at me and looked at me, rubbing the side of his finger over his lower lip. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m heading further east. I’ll drop you here if that’s okay.’ It was a bus shelter he pulled into, not a big one. I thanked him for the ride. He said, ‘“Make sure you take care of strangers. Might be your turn one day.” That’s what my mother always said.’
I told him I supposed he was right.
Hurtle and I sat pondering things. She might have been thinking of beef jerky or why we left the truck. I hauled her onto the bench and she settled there. While waiting for a bus, which the timetable said was passing through Blackwater, and for the further kindness of strangers, I saw that I was in Thornhill, a town I had driven through more than once on the way to the prison. The depot wall to my side advised anyone interested of the prison shuttle service timetable. It was peeling up at one corner and had a pen mark next to 9.40 am, and 1.30 pm underscored. My gaze kept returning to it, though I tried to distract myself with thoughts of home, with picking at stickers peeling loose on the wall, with the sky, which was a high water-wash blue. I couldn’t remember the time of the prisoner’s execution, and that troubled me.
I had been back to see him a couple more times after he’d confessed, though I’d sworn I wouldn’t. I had failed Tobe was my thinking, and this man was the consequence, yet I felt tied to him in some way. We did not speak about Tobe again, that young murderer and me. It was as if he was trying to work himself back into favour, like I might forget for a while who he’d killed, and what that person had been to me, or that I might even feel a bit of mother love for him, lacking as I was a son of my own these days. A bit of me could edge around the hardness that was inside of me then and see the lonely thing he was on the other side.
The last time I saw him he asked if I’d go along and be witness to his execution or, as he put it, ‘to keep me company while I pass over’. Seems like people cannot have enough of killing, like an execution is a ‘by invitation only’ RSVP function. By then I had made up my mind on the subject of killing. If that had been Chas Dartmouth’s aim, it had finally come to be. Why he asked, I wouldn’t know. I would have killed that boy to save Tobe, but that was done now. Nothing could change it or the way I felt. Perhaps it was a gift he thought he could give me after this time: ‘You can come see the price I have paid. We’re square now.’ Something like that. Maybe I was the closest thing to family he had left in the world. If that was so, how could I refuse him? Chas rang to ask me as well. The prisoner had asked him to, he said.
‘I can’t,’ I told him. ‘I can’t watch someone being killed. Not for anyone.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a sin. It’s another sin to keep a person in a place like that without hope. I’m not watching something they tell me is justice.’
Once, I would have thought that death would mean freedom for the prisoner who killed Tobe. What kind of life did he have? But I read once that it is not easy to raise the veins on a person facing death by lethal injection. As the needle approaches, their veins recede far down into the flesh, like a whale diving deep, a bird plunged into a thicket, or a person behind a door or a haystack, beneath floorboards, in tunnels, in roofs. The body will try to save itself even if the mind says, Please let go. Release me now.
If that is so, it might also be that when the water finally, entirely submerged Wolfe, instead of watching the water rise around my feet and engulf my home and cover my eyes and lift me from my feet until I was a wraith in the water, I might fight to rise, erupting into the sweet thin air and drawing breath and choosing life. We do the same for others – help them rise, I mean – if we care for them, and sometimes, less often, even if we don’t. Tobe was beyond our reach, truly gone in every way but memory and in the things that he left behind, in his neat shanty and its few special things, gone now I didn’t doubt.
I wished I could be with the prisoner in the moment, not to see him killed, but because he was lonely and it was his wish, and because I hadn’t been with Tobe when he died, or often before. Nothing could change that. It is hard to believe in mortality. I find it hard despite the dead people I’ve seen. The ones I’d seen in the year just passed were mostly surprised, if they had the time to show anything. It didn’t make sense. Tobe didn’t make sense. But doing something right is not the worst way to die. He was a good person. I couldn’t separate that boy prisoner from what he’d done. Still, not a person or any creature deserves to die alone, unless they wish it so. We are all as broken as can be and most of us (people, I mean; I cannot speak for other living things) would wish some moments unlived. I declined the invitation; that is, I would not go, and now I was sorry for it.
I was glad I had Hurtle leaning warm against me. That boy could have done with a dog at his side in his final moments. I sat there for a while, and put together a small making, a winged figure with three sets of eyes: one set like Tobe’s, the startling blue of his father’s; one like Luis’s of shining black; and one like the prisoner’s, green-gold and wild. It was gazing upwards, taking flight. ‘Set them free now, set them free,’ I said, and held it to the light.
Part III
Home
Chapter 26
I sto
od on the bus step when it arrived. I said, ‘I’ve got no money right now but I can pay you back.’ The driver looked at Hurtle. Hurtle glared.
I said, ‘She’s a good dog.’
‘Doesn’t look it. What kind is she?’
‘Dog.’
He nodded in appreciation. ‘She bite?’
I considered this. ‘Sometimes. Not always for a good reason.’
‘You’re really selling her, ma’am.’
‘I didn’t raise her. I’m telling you the truth. We both need a ride.’
He listened seriously. I liked him for that. ‘Seat up the front’s good – a reward for your honesty. My grandmother came from down your way, by your accent.’
‘Oh yeah? Where’s that?’
‘Sutters.’
‘Right. Long gone.’
‘She talked about it a lot.’
‘People do who’ve lived out there. I thank you.’
He tipped his cap with simple elegance, an old-fashioned gesture. Hurtle fell asleep after a while and I sat in a daze and when I came to we were in Blackwater. That driver took us the whole way.
‘Ma’am,’ he said when I stood. ‘No charge.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.
‘You’re welcome.’
I thought I might cry.
Sometimes on Wolfe I lay on the docks looking at the stars and sometimes I felt the world turning. I lost myself in it. I didn’t matter, nothing did, except that it should go on. I never felt that on Wolfe after everyone came. Once or twice I did on my travels – in the lighthouse, and on the bus. That bus driver taking me along so softly and plainly, the bus flowing through the salted fields and raddled woods and marshes, past broken lives and houses and travellers, which flickered by in endless stream, the sunlight falling and falling on me, and I part of that brokenness – well, it was peaceful. I didn’t want to leave.