The Brides of Rollrock Island (29 page)

Things fast went out of my control, as they will when a boy lets slip his secret, even to one other. First Mam confided to me that Kit’s mam too must go to sea. And then all the mams must come, she said. Then Kit’s mam must bring Kit, and then, yes, all the other mams must bring their boys too. “Especially you, Daniel,” said Mam, “who are up for the greatest punishment. The only way I can protect you is to have you with me.”

“You can do that? You can take me?” A mad hope lit me. “How? I have no coat.”

“Oh, any coat will do for you: fish, sheep, bird, rabbit, sewn together with seaweed.”

“Will Misskaella magic it onto me?”

“Misskaella?” She laughed. “Oh no! We’ve no need of her. I’ll do the same as I’d have done if you were a girl-child—sew you up in skin and weed, take you down to the water, sing you across, land-child to sea. You are seal enough in yourself; the moon and the song will bond it to you. We all know how to bring that about.”

She put me in charge of the boy-skins, of collecting enough to cover each boy, without telling them what we were about. The only way to accomplish it was to pretend to be preparing a
secret costume play for the dads, in which each lad large or small had a part, for which he must be costumed. The crafting of this play to the point where it convinced the players, the devising of song-and-dances, the deputizing of the littler boys to gather sewing-weed, the fighting off of propositions to costume us in cloth or crepe paper—all this nearly broke me, especially in the face of scorn and resistance from some of the big lads. But our skin hoards grew, and the knowledge of our project spread so that even dads sometimes offered bits of leather that they had about, for use in our entertainment.

“Stand still, Daniel.” Mam’s hands were at my face, pinching, pinning. “Or I’ll have your eye out.”

“It’s tight as tight,” I said. “A boy cannot breathe in it.”

“Not here,” she agreed. “But once you touch water, it will soften, and you’ll grow great underwater lungs, so as to swim full minutes on a single breath. You’ve seen us.”

“I have. And will my nose work the same, and close and open on top of my snout?”

“It will, my sweet.”

I tried to make my boy-nose do it within the hood, twitching and snuffling.

“Tsk, wretched lad … There,” she said. “Now, don’t dislodge my pins, taking it off. It must be sewn right if it’s to fit and form you.”

I did not believe, particularly once the mams were consulted, that they would ever all agree on a plan. Once they had, I could not see how we would do everything that needed to be done to carry it out. Someone, surely, would betray our intentions to the dads, by accident or out of sympathy for them? I had come close
to spilling everything to my own dad several times, so much did I pity him.

But the time came. The moon entered the right phase for the thefts from the coatroom—and for our flight straight afterward, for once the mams had their coats in hand they could only go straight to the sea. And still, somehow, we remained undiscovered.

My other main task had been to engineer for the cupboard door to be left unlocked. This must be done early in the morning, when Mister Wholeman was doing the books, when he would not be tempted to follow his son around, nagging and chivying him and faultfinding every job he did. Then, as Rab put away stores, I must manufacture some small emergency for him to deal with, and finish the job for him, and hand him back the key just carelessly enough. This was not difficult; Rab was never good for much in the mornings, let alone spotting the sneak-thieving of a blameless boy like me. Still, I felt relief when it was done, and neither Wholeman’s suspicions had been roused.

At the same time, I was sick with terror of what was to come. I signaled that I had done my part, by hanging the rinsed bar mats out along Wholeman’s wall in the sun in a particular order. I didn’t know half of what the mams had planned to follow on from this signal; some things they had kept from me, so that I could not confess them if pressed by the men. There would be all the little businesses of making the day run along not too noticeably differently from other days, which was more difficult playacting than anything we lads had done. And neither must Trudle or Misskaella suspect anything, or they would alert the men to our plan, or thwart it themselves.

I went from Wholeman’s to school, and labored there over my
numbers and letters. Little rushes of gooseflesh ran over me, and I must remind myself to be calm and ordinary about things. The mams’ quiet work went on about me. Although it could not be seen or heard, I was astounded that no one else could sense the itch of it, the suppressed excitement. None of my fellows gave sign or word that the day had been signaled, that this night our lives would change—could it be that I’d devised and executed this whole marvelous scheme in an elaborate dream the night before?

Mam gave me lunch, and likewise we barely met each other’s eye, let alone spoke of what was to happen so very soon. I walked up to Wholeman’s again. As I passed Cartwrights’, out of their window issued a stream of seal-woman song, and the way the mam held some notes and ran others together made me shiver and flee, stamping hard on the cobbles of my childhood, hurrying past the sunlit cottages of my friends, and their dads, and their lives that I knew so well, every one.

That afternoon I was sure someone would notice the difference in me, put it together with other odd happenings in the town and be wise to us. Every time a man glanced at or greeted me in the snug, or bid me bring him this or take away that, I must control a startled movement and swallow a gobbet of fear. Had he seen that I was not the boy Wholeman thought me, the one that could be trusted, the one in league with them against their wives, our mothers?

Grinny and Batton met me out the back as arranged, and I shut them in the coatroom, hooking the padlock on the hasp as before, but not quite snapping it closed. With only a pair of candles for light, they were to take down the coats and tie them,
so that boys could more easily carry them away after dark. I was sure that they would set themselves on fire in there, or stack the tied coats poorly so that they tumbled from their stack and made a noise, but I heard not a sound all afternoon.

As night fell I found a moment to tap the cupboard door in the agreed pattern. The response tapped back through, softly but clearly, and I hurried away, out to the yard beyond the pisser, where Angast was posted, both to give him the nod and to tell him who had turned up for drinking tonight, who was likely to stay and who might leave and be wandering the lanes at the hour appointed for running all the skins to their respective mams.

The snug clock had a chime that could be heard in the hall. The plan hung now on my keeping any man from going to the pisser between ten-fifteen and ten-thirty. In this I was aided by the fiddler Jerrolt, of whom I requested all the songs that were slow and funereal, and that it would be rude to get up and piss through: “The Night My Mother Died” and “Low Lay the Boat in the Harbor” and “The Fiercest Storm.” While he held the men perfectly steady and somnolent there, some of them joining in singing, some of them weeping, I hovered behind the bar where I could deliver the signal knock through the cupboard wall, if any man sprang from his seat between songs. But Jerrolt outdid himself that night with the emotion of his playing, and all of them controlled their bladders as if they were fully aware of, and determined not to disrupt, the game of fire buckets going on out the back, the tied skins passing along a chain of lads to Lonna Trumbell, who sniffed each one and told the next runner whose it was.

Ten-thirty struck during the storm song. At the end of
it, Nerdnor Prout sprang up and made for the hall door, and I knocked out the signal, just in case Grinny and Batton had run overtime in their emptying of the cupboard. Surely fifteen minutes had not been enough time. All those mams! All those coats!

“Give us a cheerful one now, Jerrolt!” cried someone. “A jig or something—‘Frugal’s Ball’ or ‘The Elf-King’s Daughter,’ one of those!”

I all but held my breath waiting. Nerdnor reappeared, and came up to the bar, and in a terrible fright I waited for him to deliver the news to Wholeman that the back hall stank of sealskins and the yard was full of shrieking children carrying mysterious bundles.

But all he said was “Another nip o’ the Gorgon, Storn,” and began to search about himself for the coins for it.

Was it done, then? Had we managed it? Were mams even now hurrying down to the waterside, singing and sewing their boys into patch-skins and swimming away with them? And what was the more terrifying, that our plan had run up against some unforeseen nosy-bones or circumstance, or that it was carried out faultlessly, that the wish I had had for my mam’s happiness had now emptied Potshead of every wife and son?

I went around the snug and gathered, then hurried to the scullery and washed and washed, wishing I had never begun this plan, wishing that the coats were still in their rows behind their padlocked door. I stacked the bottles and pushed the rack of glasses through to the bar, and then I ducked out into the hall myself—and to everyone in the snug it would have looked as if I were
only going to relieve myself, but in truth I was abandoning my post, abandoning my job, abandoning my dad chatting there with Fernly Ashman and Michael Clift, leaving behind the only life I knew.

It was quiet once I shut away the noise of Jerrolt tuning up again, the tide of talk rising again. The hall was empty, and smelt only slightly more sea-ish than usual. I hurried along to the cupboard, with the padlock closed in the hasp as it ought to be. I lifted the lid of the chest by the door, and there as promised was my mam’s bundled skin, which they had not conveyed to her in case she went straight into the sea without me. I pulled off my apron, snatched up the skin, closed the chest lid and left by the rear door, wrapping the bundle in the apron as I went.

It was uneasy weather. The secrets gusted about the streets with the leaves and litter, thick enough in the air to choke me. I tried to walk and look calm, but there was no one about, and before long I was running. House after house that I passed, that should have had a light in the window, was dark, and I heard no noise of movement or conversation within any of them, and this terrified me. I became possessed of the senseless fear that my own house would be as empty and dead, my mam gone never to return, that not only had all the mams and lads gone, but all the fathers too, so that I was the last person on the island, running from no one to no one, never to find companion or family again.

But our house was lit, and I burst into our front room, and there was Mam pacing. She scooped me up and squeezed me, tightly and for a long time. “While I have arms to do this,” she said.

She put me down and I thrust the aproned bundle at her. “Ah!” She hugged it to herself, pressing her lips and nose to the edge to draw off the scent.

“Do you remember it, then, from when you jumped out of it?” I patted the slithery skin with my bottle-washed hands.

“No,” she said. “But it is me and mine, very distinctly, by look and by smell. Let’s get on, then.” She fell to whispering. “Everyone else is gone, Daniel. Let us shut up house and follow.”

I had left my coat up at Wholeman’s. Mam took hers down from the peg, put it on, but did not button it. She picked up the tied skin, and the patch-skin she had made for me, and I put my hands on the latch and doorknob. We looked at each other, my dad’s absence thunderous around us. So as not to hear it, I lifted the latch and pulled open the door. We went out, the two of us, into the night, and I closed the house behind us.

She took my hand as we started walking, and hers was cold and tight. I thought she smiled down on me out of the stars, but the light was not good and her hair shadowed her face; she might just as easily have been wincing.

Down slippy-slap we went, the wind skirling and twiddling around us, caught in the narrow ways. Every now and again a strong breath from the sea would push at our faces, green and alive and massive. When that happened, Mam would almost run a few steps, as if being summoned more sharply.

The water was rucked up and difficult-looking between the moles. I thought I saw seal heads out there, two or three, but when I looked again I could not find them. I thought, then, that seals were strewn along the stony beach, all shades of them—but
no, those were clothes: coats and dresses, trousers and jackets. “Oh!” It was as frightening as if they had been bodies there, of all the boys and mams I knew.

Mam squeezed my hand. “Let’s go along,” she said. “I don’t want to leave from here. I want wilder sea.”

“Wilder than that?” I stumbled after her, eyeing the crisscrossing foam between the moles. I hoped this was a dream; certainly I had never felt such terror except in dreams.

Mam was entirely sure of herself, though; if I stayed right with her, perhaps I would catch some of her confidence. I waded down the sand dune at the end of the harbor front, and ran out after her across the sand of the northern beach. The town’s windows, its eyes, rose behind us, tightening the skin of my back; I glanced up, and there were the two orange squares that were Wholeman’s against the hill. The wind blew strongly with no more buildings in its way; the water shouldered up and smashed itself on the sand before us.

Let us run home
, I wished I could say,
and all go on as before
. But clothes were scattered about here too, half in and half out of the shallows, and lengths of twine from Grinny’s and Batton’s bundles. So many mams and boys had already gone! And Mam knelt before me, humming, unbuttoning my shirt, and her face in the moonlight was clear—alight as the moon, it was—and I was at first too cheered by her happiness to voice my doubts, and then I was too shocked by the sea-wind and the floating spume on my naked skin.

Last of all she took off my boots and trousers. I steadied myself with my hands on her shoulders, steadied myself against the
thought that she would not
have
shoulders much longer, we would neither of us have shoulders or hands. Now I was clothed only in the night cold and my terror of the water, shivering and goosefleshed top to toe.