Wolfe Island

  I planned to see Hart again, though I didn’t know what would happen. I liked him. I loved him, actually. I always did. I worked that much out on my travels. (This is not really about him, though.) I might look for a place of my own or I might not. I had some ideas for makings. There were a few things lying around town no one seemed to care about and they were on my mind. And I had my notebook filled with ideas and sketches.

  Chapter 27

  Autumn (some years later)

  It’s a long time ago, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Memories are as faithful as dogs in their way, though not always tame.

  Alejandra came visiting as I always said she should. ‘You would not believe the fucking paperwork,’ she said the month before she came, reminding me of Cat. She made me laugh; she made Cat feel close.

  I was at the hall table putting a pomegranate stem in an old milk bottle when I caught sight of her. She was at the edge of the porch, gathering herself, looking all about at the sea and my dock and my yard. I had painted the porch floor green in some endless summer, that same light dark green with a hint of milkiness of Shipleys’ porch, and it might have been reminding her the way it does me. I always liked it. I don’t know what you’d call the colour; I’ve never seen it in nature; they mixed it for me at the hardware. She lifted her face into the sun and I imagined that she had shut her eyes. I didn’t know that for sure, though I did know the light was too bright to look at directly from there at this time of day and had raised my head the same way to feel the warmth of it. True autumn had come, with cattails drying brown and rasping and rustling, louder in death than life, and the other grasses (three-square, cordgrass, needlerush, switchgrass, cattails) turning grey-brown, golden-grey, silver-yellow, all the in-between colours of softness, their differences clearer at this time of year. Sparrows fossicked for seeds about the dying goldenrod. A blue heron stood a little distance off, ignoring us in its haughty way. That was a rare sight on the main, and I wouldn’t be telling anyone.

  Alejandra turned to the house, set her shoulders square and, seeing me, stopped and waved her tentative half-wave from the waist – the very one that broke my heart when she was waiting in the bus queue in the town we called Freedom, a minute before her brother died. ‘Kitty?’ she called lightly, and I went to the door to greet her.

  At first she was a stranger; she was so tall she could look directly into my eyes. A minute later it was hard to remember what she had been. She was exactly what she was going to become, only I didn’t know what that was until I saw her. Her liquorice hair was still long and loose, and she had the same sadness. It was part of her. ‘Grief is like childbirth,’ my mother said once, after Baby died. ‘You’ve got to get through it yourself. No one can take it away, or live it for you. I’m not saying it’s not hard. I’m here, though.’ I have learned that she is right, that feelings will have their way, eventually, and the world will have its way, eventually. People mostly pretend that’s not so.

  ‘All the way out here, Kitty. What are you thinking? Did you not learn a thing?’ She touched my arm as I would an unfamiliar dog, from affection and so as not to alarm, as if I was the one who’d suffered a great loss the last time we were together, not she. She was a woman grown, big enough to look out for me.

  ‘What do you mean out here?’

  Where I live now is a sliver of higher ground with a small wooded lot and an old farmhouse set in acres of marshland at the edge of the sea. It’s not so far out of town: as close as I can stand it and far enough away that I can hear only the wind through my woods or the sound of a boat sauntering past in the distance. I can drive if I want to, or make the journey by water, puttering along the coast and pulling up at Doree’s dock. She waves from her kitchen window if she happens to be there. We discuss packages coming through and supplies, a sort of business we have developed.

  Alejandra and I were laughing. Behind it, I was remembering the very first day. That’s how close to the surface it was, nosing along and bursting up for air. Life, what a thing it is. It was the pleasure of seeing Alejandra, and of being with someone who knew. ‘Oh, I think it’s a while before it’ll be an island,’ I told her. ‘The water’s not touching the road yet.’

  ‘You be careful,’ Alejandra said. ‘You could get cut off. Your drive’s no better than the marsh road. Does it stay open? Tell me now.’ She looked stern and peered into my face with searching eyes.

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘I knew it. It’s not safe.’ She looked so concerned I felt queasy about my age, which is not so advanced in my view. Also, I was as fit as a fiddle. I was about to say something on the subject when she looked around. ‘No dog?’

  ‘Not since Hurtle, a few months ago.’

  ‘Hurtle, that’s right.’ Her face twisted. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Kitty.’

  I put my hand to her cheek. ‘It’s okay, honey. We went through some things together. I miss her, which considering the way I felt about her when we met . . .’

  ‘I heard from Cat. Claudie told her.’

  ‘Claudie was here when she went. And Hart, Cat’s grandfather. You probably know that. It’s like I lost my shadow. That’s the truth. We gave her a send-off. I’ll get another one sometime. Or one will arrive. I’ll wait and see.’

  It was springtime. We’d got Hurtle through the winter, which was not severe – winters seldom were anymore – but cold enough for an old dog. She had stumped around as cantankerous as ever, keeping me company, groaning from time to time, eating the small treats (pâté on toast, poached chicken, pinches of grated cheese) I tempted her with so she’d live another day. She flopped to the ground, sides heaving, eyes filming up but tracking me with them just the same, and a sob and whistle sounded in her chest and she ran her paws if I moved from her sight, and when she got worse there was nothing for it but to lie down too and curl around her the way we had in the dark forests and the lighthouse and in the grassy verges, just the two of us safe for this time, and she’d be peaceful again. Hart came over and creakily curled around me, his arm a pillow, his body some warmth, and held me when she finally slept.

  ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ I said.

  ‘You can,’ he said. ‘You can. Look at her.’

  ‘Wait for Claudie,’ I said.

  ‘Does she like her?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Probably right,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t make me laugh. Don’t wake her.’ I stroked her velvet cheek.

  ‘I won’t,’ he said.

  ‘Will you stay the night?’

  ‘Of course. You know I will.’

  The first makings afterwards were memories of the things I made on the journey south. Rivets and wire did well for some; the first versions of others troubled me. The passingness of some things is unbearable and therefore powerful, and the first makings of them in their hardness were lies and ghosts. I learned new ways with grasses and fibres, weaving and braiding and knotting. The connections they made seemed true, since toughness and loss were built into them. Mary Dove thought well of them. I would have been pleased once. Now I thought: Can I sleep or not sleep knowing that I put them in this world? I think that Eddie, the young man in the cave, had learned this. There are things he said that I’m still learning to understand.

  My new makings reminded Mary Dove of the Watermen. She made me go and save them, and came along to be sure we did the job right. Hart came too. He said he’d been hearing about them for years and wanted to see what the fuss was about. He was quiet at the sight. He took some pictures of them and of me standing with them. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to me. I believed him. We took a crew of men, including two of the people who’d helped install them. There was some swearing about the care they’d taken years ago, but we paid them well for their trouble.

  Mary Dove sold the Watermen to a museum. I said they didn’t owe me anything; they had served me well. Once we left Wolfe Island we were on
our own; it was not their failing, what happened. My mother would have agreed and my father would have smiled, because what would be the point of arguing the matter?

  She called the show Vagabond Winter, which I had misgivings about, but Mary Dove had her way. An interviewer asked where I got my ideas from, and what my images were metaphors for. What were the meanings behind my iconography – ‘or visual lexicon, if you will?’ – and what was their source. I said that ideas came to me like wolves down shadowy creek beds in failing light. I could let them kill me or wait for them to approach – get to know them, you know? There was nothing between but lies. And the interviewer said that was interesting.

  I have included the names of some of the pieces to give you the flavour. You will see from the titles that the show was in some ways autobiographical, though not strictly representational.

  Some pieces from Vagabond Winter

  -Ghost tree

  -The runners

  -Silverado

  -Shootout

  -Girl

  -The burial

  -Burning house

  -Cub and basket

  -Cub and child

  -Holed boat

  -Drowning boat

  -Boy and girl

  -Wife and husband

  -Speed

  -Silverado pyre

  -The island is sinking

  -The mountains

  -Man on roadside

  -The Samaritan

  -Campfire talk

  -Dead chicken

  -Wolf girls

  -Teriyaki jerky bench

  -A lighthouse is an island

  -Hunters

  -The boys are flying

  This was how we had worked things out. Hart kept his house. I bought a place of my own – close to rising water on the edge of fraying land, like Wolfe. It felt a little like home, the way it sat lightly, as if it had just touched to earth and might take flight again. It was a stranger to me in other ways. Its marks and scars were silent. I would never hear them or know their causes.

  The house on Wolfe had been a living thing. I felt the lives of hundreds of years moving about in it in the smooth banisters, the scrubbed elm wood kitchen table, the declivity of doorway floors from the passage of steps, the pantry door and walls where children’s heights had always been marked. My makings room had been different things to us all: my mother’s gardening shed, my grandmother’s sewing room and my great-grandmother’s withdrawing room. My study was little changed from when it was my father’s reading room.

  Long ago, when Mary Dove first came to Wolfe Island and walked through my house to the makings room, she murmured ‘antebellum’ over the hall table and ‘eighteenth century, I suppose’ at sight of the bread bin. The kitchen table stopped her dead. ‘How long did you say your family had been here?’

  ‘Sixteen eighty.’

  She put her hand on it. ‘That’s about right.’

  ‘It’s a nice old thing,’ I said, and she laughed.

  I salvaged some things – furniture and a few items from the makings room – and now the watermarks of the floods they survived are part of their voices. There was never much sign of Tobe to speak of in the house. He was a person of the outdoors. His favourite place had always been his oyster shanty. Hart and I took his ashes there one day and emptied them about its ruins. They sat on the water’s surface and then sifted down or floated away. I did not feel much of anything then, except rightness. Hart cried.

  Hart stayed with me for days on end on what he called ‘Kitty’s island’. (‘Only a matter of time until it’s true,’ he said.) But there were times I preferred to be on my own, if my work had taken hold. I might be up in the middle of the night moving things around and humming, maybe playing a little music; I could spread my things about, while he liked things just so. He’d grown used to his own ways as I had mine, and things got testy before we found the right way to deal with it. I loved him and told him so often and freely. It was a relief.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told me in the beginning, after the long walk home.

  ‘I know you are. It’s done now.’

  He looked at me as if there might be more to say. There wasn’t, though. If he wanted my forgiveness he did not have it. If he wanted me to forget, that would not happen. All that was like a fast-flowing gut that must be jumped over or built over or crossed somehow. It would not close up. It’s not the nature of some wounds to close. They can stop weeping, though, the edges can dry, and you can find ways around them, even sometimes by pretending, by looking ahead, by keeping your balance, but they are there just the same. Tightropes and a steady gaze can get you through a lot I’ve found. The steady gaze I maintained on Wolfe those years held me together. Hart would like something more, I suppose, but what I am is the best I can do with what I am. Whether or not that was enough for him was not up to me. I told him so, and it made him angry and he stayed away for eleven and a half days, a time during which I considered the idea and limits of personal resolve, and when he came over again he looked like he had learned something about tightropes and a steady gaze too. (No doubt he had things he couldn’t forgive either.)

  We’ve got kinder to each other. Even if our failures hadn’t led to Tobe’s death, I couldn’t bear that we had added to the sum total of his sadness. There was no being free of that. Hart might be the only one who would understand, but neither of us could outright utter the words. The only way we might have acknowledged it to each other was in small kindnesses, each understanding the pain the other was in. If Hart, with gentleness, said he admired a making, it was as if he was saying to his son, ‘You did well there, Tobe. I’m proud of you.’ And if I brought Hart cookies and a coffee, in some ways I was doing it for Tobe, to show that I did know how to care.

  I wanted Claudie there when Hurtle died.

  ‘Why?’ Hart said.

  ‘I don’t know. Who ever knows exactly what they’re doing? To see what it means.’

  ‘What, though?’

  ‘That’s the bit I don’t know.’

  There is something about a dog. They love freely; they do not judge or blame; they forgive. That’s a blessing every day of their lives and you pay for it when they die. It is a pure grief, and it carries all your other griefs along with it and sets them free, sweeping them up and carrying them along as fast and awful as any body of running water. Your lost parents, all the lost dogs of your life, your lost island, your lost granddaughter and her dead lover, the lost girl you took under your shabby and broken wings, your lost daughter, your lost boy. Hope that there is someone to hold on to. Hurtle wasn’t dying of anything but old age. She wasn’t in pain. She was waiting; we all were. Her breathing whistled and her eyes tracked me and if I moved away she tried to follow me. So I curled around her, as I said. She seemed cold. I found my old aviator coat with its great fur collar and its furred insides and put it on and all the old smells of our travels were there. I pulled her in close and wrapped the coat around her, right around. She was breathing into my neck and I stroked her ear and her head and she gave a sort of whistling groaning sound and we lay like that for a bit and after a while she was gone. I hope I die like that, with someone watching over me and holding me, smoothing my hair, travelling out with me on that thin spit.

  Claudie hardly knew Hurtle but she cried just the same. She had plenty of her own things to be going on with, plenty to cry about, including Cat, seldom seen except on the news or on the internet, haranguing the world or cajoling. She’s something. And there’s Treasure, who Claudie has not seen outside of a photograph since she was a few days old. That’s a hard thing. She’s hoping for a visit one of these years and it might yet happen. It will, I’m sure. ‘Look at us,’ I said to her and reached up to smooth a piece of hair from her cheek.

  And she opened her eyes, sudden and startled, as if the idea had never before occurred to her. ‘That�
�s so,’ she said. The thought seemed to lift her.

  Her tears kept falling the whole afternoon that Hurtle died until her face was smeared with them, like land that can’t absorb another drop and must release it. Every once in a while she’d say, bewildered, ‘I can’t stop.’

  After a drink in front of the fire, Hart and I went up to bed. Not long after there was a knock at the bedroom door.

  ‘Claudie?’ I said.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Her voice quavered.

  Hart turned his head in the shadowy light, just a little moonlight blooming at the curtains’ edges, and called out, ‘Of course, sweetheart.’

  She edged in sobbing and shuffling, broken. Not since the day she started school had I seen her in such a state. (I’d found her on the stairs sobbing her heart out and asked her what was wrong. She’d looked up through her bedraggled hair. ‘It’s you, you, you!’ she screamed. ‘This stupid island.’)

  ‘Oh, honey,’ I said when she reached the foot of the bed, the great soft golden thing that she was.

  ‘Can I sleep in here?’

  It seems like we all carry our child selves around with us and sometimes they come out for a visit; they’re in some kind of trouble as often as not. Habit woke in us and Hart pulled towards his side and I pulled towards mine and a space formed there between us. I patted it and she crawled up on hands and knees in her polka dot pyjamas like she was six. I reached for the old apple quilt at the end of the bed – one I’d rescued from Wolfe when I first came back – and heaved it up and across her. Presently her shuddering subsided. ‘It’s just sad,’ she said. ‘You know?’