The Big Both Ways (22 page)

His eyes found hers during the lecture. He could see she was sitting alone, and after the talk he walked straight to her and took her hands in his, knowing they were meant to be connected.

She didn’t have access to all the money in her trust, but she was able to funnel a sizeable sum into the Brother Twelve’s good works. She had lived with him there in the cove for several years. She shared him with the others in their flock, but there was no doubt that he knew she was the most devout of all the women who loved him “body, soul, and spirit.”

“God is larger than the divisions we try to foist on him,” Mary said evenly into the firelight. “Christian, Protestant, Hindu, Jew … words … all divisions of our own creation. It wasn’t until I saw it in his eyes, until I felt it in his hand that I knew God was an undeniable fact of life, much larger than our poor ability to describe Him. The Brother Twelve was like a bare electrical wire you could hold on to and feel the force of creation.”

The wind blew in the trees and the raven flew up on the high limb and started cackling. Mary once again dipped into the stew and threw more food out into the brush behind her. She did this
without any apparent forethought or explanation. Once again the black bird carved an invisible line through the air to the food.

“He destroyed his earthly compound here and he sank his yacht.” She pointed at the mast that was sticking higher in the air since the tide had gone out. “He took his other wife but I have remained true. I am waiting here.”

Slip looked over his shoulder at the sunken yacht. Now more ravens perched on the mast, perhaps having sensed that there was someone throwing out food.

“When I saw you coming across the bay, I knew you were coming here. I knew you were going to wait for him.”

Ellie sat with Annabelle curled in her lap. The drowsy girl scanned the trees for her bird, and the punch-drunk seditionist drew stars in the sand with a stick.

“I know what you’re thinking. You heard the reports that the Brother Twelve died long ago in Switzerland. ‘He is dead,’ you say. ‘What’s the point of waiting for him here?’ ”

Mary B. gestured around the anchorage with her arms. Slip stood up and took a long piece of driftwood from a nearby pile and placed it on the embers. Then he picked up two smaller pieces and set one alongside and another on top to form a wooden pyramid for the tiny tongues of flame to lick.

“We will wait for him here because we are the faithful,” Mary said, and as she did, a bright yellow bird with vivid red dots on his cheeks landed in the tree above the fire.

Slip saw him first, nudging Annabelle awake, and the girl’s gaze drifted upward into the trees where she saw the match-head brightness of her pet bird. “Buddy!” She stood up and stretched out her arms. “Buddy!”

“Well, I thank you for the stew ma’am, but I think we better get going,” Slip said, and he stood up as well. Ellie looked at him as if he were crazy.

Annabelle ran down to the dory to get the cage.

“Don’t be silly,” Mary said. “You stay here tonight. I told
you, you needn’t worry about the gossip about that lamb. Isn’t anybody going to care about it now. Won’t you wait here with me for the Brother?” As the old woman spoke she looked up at the yellow bird with a confused kind of intensity, as if it perhaps wasn’t really there.

“No … thank you very much but we …” Slip said.

“Slip, do you really want to go?” Ellie asked. “You want to go through Dodd Narrows in the dark?”

He stared back at her, not speaking, not wanting to admit that the old woman had spooked him.

“People call me crazy,” Ellie said, and smiled at the old crone by the fire.

Mary stooped down and poured coffee out of a tin coffeepot by holding the wire handle with a rag and tilting the pot with a charred stick.

“It will be lovely. You’ll see.”

Annabelle came running up the beach with the cage rattling next to her leg. She had a handkerchief with some seeds folded inside. The yellow bird sat some thirty feet up in the dark tree and far out on the end of an overhanging limb. The firelight flickered around him and the luminous bird hunched up and trilled a song.

“Here, Buddy,” the girl called, and she held out the seeds in her hand. She jumped up and down on her toes. “Come on, boy. Here’s food for you,” and some of the seeds spilled out onto the rocks.

“Here, child,” Mary said softly, and put her hand on the girl’s shoulders. “Let’s just set the food back inside his cage and we’ll rig a little thread to trip the door when he goes in.”

And the old woman and Annabelle set about to do just that. Ellie got some blankets and tarps out of the dory while Slip scavenged some timbers from the old buildings for the fire. The stars were needling down through the night sky and only an occasional wisp of a fast-moving cloud ran past the moon.

The old woman saw them making their beds by the fire and
turned away from the girl who was laying out a trail of seeds leading up to the door of the cage. She walked up into the woods and came back with a long-handled shovel and gave it to Slip. Then she explained how they should move the fire about twenty feet over and dig out the rocks where the old fire had been. They could lay their blankets on the warm sand and even have a few of the warm rocks under the blankets with them.

“Makes it a bit more comfortable,” Mary said.

“Where do you sleep?” Ellie asked.

“I’ll be in the chapel. I’ve got a fine bed and a little stove up there.”

“Come on, Buddy. Come on, boy,” Annabelle called up into tree. She slowly backed away from the cage. She had gotten some tarred twine from the dory and had attached it to a stick that held the door of the cage open. She had several small piles of seeds laid on flat stones. The grownups were moving the fire down the beach and as they did she eased into darkness until there was only a film of light cast over the rocks. They scoured the sand for embers and Annabelle waited. They laid out their blankets and she crouched in the darkness, holding on to the end of the tarred twine.

Buddy flew down from the tree and ate the pile of seeds farthest from the cage. Annabelle could barely breathe. The yellow bird ate and preened and hopped back and forth at every possible sound coming from either the fire or the beach.

“Come on, boy,” the girl whispered.

Buddy cocked his head back and forth and flew up into the forest and disappeared.

They slept comfortably that night. The warm sand was a luxurious comfort. Only once did Slip wake up to the smell of burning wool. He flicked an ember off of his blanket, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

They slept close together to share the warm sand and rocks. Slip slept on the edge with his back to Ellie and Annabelle lay on the other side. The girl lay listening and watching the sky where
the black treetops spiked up into the horizon. She lay listening for perhaps ten minutes, then slowly warmth eased into her icy bones and her eyes closed.

Ellie rolled over and put her hand on Slip’s shoulder.

“You awake still?” she asked in a whisper, and the tired man grunted.

Ellie touched Slip’s hand with the tips of her fingers, “Do you want to go home?” she asked.

“Home?” he asked. “You mean the state of Washington?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t know,” he said, not opening his eyes as he spoke. “I can’t even imagine where my home might be now.”

“What do you mean ‘now’?” she asked.

“Now that I met you,” was all he said.

The next morning Mary was up before the sun. She built a new fire on the beach. The wind was sizzling over the island and the clouds were shredding through the tops of the trees. The sand had cooled from the outside of the fire ring toward the center, so they were now all curled next to each other like sea lions on a rocky ledge. Slip was the first to open his eyes. His left arm was over Ellie’s shoulder. Annabelle was tucked around Ellie’s waist. Slip gently lifted his arm away and eased out from the tangle of legs.

The fire flared and danced up from the logs Mary had dragged down from the trees. The flames seemed sick in the damp air. Where once the sky was a dome of stars, it was now a closed lid of clouds. Small waves were breaking on the beach. Far back in the trees he could hear the voice of the yellow bird squawking for his seeds.

“Good morning, sunshine. You bring to mind a litter of puppies down there on the sand.” Mary smiled up at him as she leaned toward the fire to take the coffeepot off its hanger.

“Good morning, ma’am,” Slip said softly. He put on his wool coat, which was still damp but it kept him serviceably warm. He hunched his shoulders against the wet wind pushing into the anchorage.

“Change in the weather,” he said.

“Oh Lord, yes,” the old woman said. “Changes its mind more often than a girl in a hat shop.” She smiled and handed him a tin mug of coffee.

This had always been his favorite time: these few moments before the day began. These early mornings, when the damp grass began to unbend and the birds began to stir.

Slip sipped the bitter coffee and shuffled back and forth in front of the fire, letting the heat from the tin cup warm the palms of his hands. He had always thought of his life as happy. His memories were sunlit and apple red but now … Now he wasn’t sure.

He thought of his parents waking up to a cold room every morning. He thought of his father’s thin face and how he bore the pain of the farm’s failure. He thought of the chalky dust that spread over his mother’s skin as the gardens withered and blew away. His belief in his childhood had been his faith up until now. Now he had killed a man. He was in a strange and cold country, with a woman who vexed him at every turn and a crone who was waiting for a salvation that would never come.

All he had ever wanted was a place on this earth. A home where he understood himself. And it was beginning to seep into his bones that this would never happen.

“You know we can’t stay,” Slip said softly to the old woman.

She looked down the beach where Slip was staring. “I suppose that’s true,” she said, and her voice was sad. “But I wish you would. We could keep each other company.”

“We could take you into Nanaimo.”

“Oh, thank you, child. But the Brother was none too popular in Nanaimo before he left. When he returns he won’t be sharing himself with those people.”

“Is there something else we can do for you? Cut wood? Haul water?”

“I’m fine, child. Just wait with me here a bit for the weather
to clear. It’s not right for you to take that girl out into the narrows when the wind is up and the tide is wrong. The current will run fair for you about mid morning.”

The rest of them woke and came around. Despite Mary’s protests, they split and carried wood up to the broken-down chapel back in the woods. The floor she slept on was at an angle. A fir tree leaned in through a hole in the roof. Ellie carried water from the rainwater cistern and filled up all Mary’s available pots. Annabelle was exempt from chores so she wandered through the woods and called for Buddy with a handful of seeds.

With each load of wood and dipper of water, Mary told them stories about the power of the Brother Twelve. She told of his command of both the Christian scriptures and the holy books of Asia. “He had seen Nirvana, you know,” she whispered. “That’s not a place, child, like Vancouver or Tacoma. It’s a condition. It’s the keystone at the top of the arch. Nirvana is the heaven we can find for ourselves, right here on earth.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Ellie said. She was making up the blankets on the cracked floor where the old woman slept.

Slip took Ellie by the elbow as they both broke from the woods onto the beach.

“I don’t know … Ellie …” Slip stammered, “but I have to get out of here.”

The wind was building and the trees were flailing against each other. They creaked and snapped as the wind blustered around them now. Out past the opening of the anchorage the water was a mass of whitecaps.

“We might have to wait out the weather,” she offered.

“This place is giving me the heebie-jeebies, I swear.”

“No sense getting killed.”

“I’m not saying that. Just … I’m saying we go at the first chance.”

She looked at him for several moments. She wanted to choose
her words carefully. “We’re going to be all right, Slippery Wilson. You know that, don’t you?”

“Do
you
?” A shudder of desperation crept into his voice.

“Yes I do.” She held on to his hand and turned him back to their work.

In the woods Annabelle wandered with her head cocked back as she whistled up into the trees. The violence of the wind brought her to a kind of panic. She hated to think of Buddy out in this pounding wind. In the interior of the island she could hear the boom of waves from every direction. The forest floor undulated as the roots of the trees shook with the wind. Annabelle called Buddy’s name.

She walked far enough into the woods that she didn’t know the direction of the beach where the dory was tied. She looked around her and saw nothing but a circle of trees. The top of the island was flattened out with small second-growth fir thickly packed together. In places she had to crawl through a thicket, and when she stood up she had to pry the limbs apart. She fought her way into a small clearing in the bracken and sat down on the moss.

After her parents had died Annabelle understood that she was an orphan. She knew she needed to be smart and do well with her studies. She had memorized her times tables at least a month before any of her classmates. She knew the names of the flowers that grew around her house and she could make change from any denomination of money handed to her. She knew she had to be ready to live anyplace in the world and be able to make her own way there and back. But right now she didn’t want to be anywhere. She didn’t want to get back into the dory, and neither did she want to stay on the island. She didn’t want to be back in Seattle in the room that overlooked the street, and she didn’t want to be back in Montana where the tire swing hung from the willow tree in the yard. She just wanted to be in the presence of her pet bird. She wasn’t sure why. He could be cross and objectionable. He didn’t speak and would only whistle a catcall occasionally. But there was
something about Buddy that made her hopeful. His company was all she wanted.