The Brides of Rollrock Island (32 page)

“Here,” he said. “There’s another.” He pointed with his thumb to the pot on the stove. As if this were an ordinary dinner.

I tried for both our sakes to pretend it was. I crossed and lifted the pot lid.

“But were you wanting both of these?”

“I thought I was,” he said throat-clearingly. “But I’m discovering that one of them is … quite enough.”

I pulled the sea-heart out by a hank of its grown-on weed and put it in a bowl, fetched a spoon, sat to table. I took Dad’s orange-smeared knife and cut the top off with my big capable hands. I tried the remark in my head, but did not say it aloud:
The last time I ate one of these, Mam had to open it for me, that tough skin
.

The steam flooded up and the smell: bodies, wet hair, boiled shellfish, sour seawater, the coziest of winter nights, her clear pale skin with a hint of green, her hair like a stilled flow of black water.

I spooned up a bit of the curd, and now I held my whole childhood in my mouth, warm and free of worry. The mams laughed together; Mam and Dad laughed too, looking to each other, leaning arm to arm. I would do things to stop them; I would perform; I would stand on my hands against the wall so that they would look at me again, include me with them. That was always my aim when Dad was there, to return Mam’s eyes and mind to me.

Well, I succeeded, did I not? The curd cooled on my tongue; it slid down my throat, soaking my head with the sweet-saltness. Up sprang tears, but not so far as to fall.

I raised my eyes and found Dad’s fixed on me, a spoonful of curd in his hand. “How is she, then, my Neme?” he said. “How
was
she, the last you saw of her?” He ate the curd, but he did not move his eyes, did not free me from answering.

“I don’t know,” I realized. “She was there. She was well. It is
different there; it is not like here.” I was embarrassed, the obviousness of this, but Dad did not laugh at me, or look impatient. He moved the curd in his mouth, as if by careful tasting and careful watching of me he might have knowledge of that place, of those five and more years that he lost of us.

“That was not even her name, Neme,” I said with a helpless shrug.

“What was her name, then? What was she properly called?”

I tried to say it, but it was as slippery as water in my mouth, as a piece of wind, and it had a high part that my man-voice would not reach, and a croaking that came out crude in a human room, came out animal only, carried not half its proper meaning. Seal-language, seal-song, were fading from my memory. If only I submerged myself, went down to the sea and put my head under, it might all come back to me, but while I stayed above, I could not keep hold of it.

I tried again. “No,” I said, “it is more like this.”

He listened to me try several times; he did not laugh.

“It sounds like nothing,” I said. “It sounds nothing like—But perhaps more shrill at the end, more trailing …”

He copied my next attempt; it was a good effort, and yet … I shook my head.

“Nothing like that?” he said sadly.

“Oh, something like it.” I scraped the curd out of the bottom of the sea-heart rind. “But only a very little.”

He made the sounds again, his only-human approximation. “What does it mean, then? How does it describe her, or set her apart from all the other … all the others down there?”

Again I thought, If only I were under there, if only I had a moment’s swimming. With the taste of curd in my mouth, I pressed my eyes closed with the heels of my hands and tried to imagine. A twitch of seal-muscle, a tail I no longer had. “I think it is about … how fine it is to move. How wonderful is smooth swimming, high in the sea, where there is light. I think it—” I dropped my hands. Here I was in this man-box with another man, both of us with our gangly, long-limbed bodies that never could do such swimming. “I think that is it,” I apologized. I licked the spoon clean of curd and laid it on my plate beside the hairy heart.

“That’s good!” he said. “That’s better than no idea at all.” He dug with his spoon in the corners of his own sea-heart. “And strangely like the name I gave her, which is brightness, and shiningness. I would like to think I knew that.” He sent me a bashful smile, and spooned up the last.

I smiled back at him, but he was already serious again. “How did she seem, under there?” he asked. “Was she glad to be rid of me? Did she even remember me, Daniel?” He covered his mouth then, to stop any further fears pouring forth.

I could not speak to those begging eyes. I turned side-on in my chair, made as if to take my plate from the table, slumped there, trying to recall. “Oh, Dad, who can say? They don’t feel the same things. Or think the way we think up here. Or talk the way—the way we do now.” I could not look at him; he would be so crestfallen. “You want me to say she missed you. But do you want me to lie? I did not see it. But did that mean she
didn’t
grieve after you?”

His face confused my thoughts, and I hunted for something more consoling to tell him. “But as for how was she? She was
her own self in the sea, that’s all.” I tried to find a way to explain it. “She was not in pain, you know, from her feet, and she could move, so well and so easily, not like under the blankets here, all weighed down—”

“She was happy, then,” he said.

I shook my head. “Not even that. But she was freed of … she didn’t have the sadness that she carried around up here. So I suppose, yes, she was happy. But, no—”

“It’s all right, Daniel—it’s
good
that she’s free of her misery.” He smiled me a painful smile. “I’d like to be remembered fondly, but I don’t want just a new misery to take over from the old. Otherwise, it would make no sense, what you did.”

“
Does
it make sense?” I looked to the window, as if the answer might fly in there.

“Oh yes, a perfect sense. It needed to be done, and none of us charmed men would ever have done it.”

I shook my head again, not in agreement or otherwise at what he said, but only at how, whosoever’s pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else.

“What of you, then, lad?” he said softly.

“Me?” I seemed, to myself, to be nothing, beside Mam’s being gone.

“What of you—and the other lads, if you know, if you’ve spoken together? Now that you have been there, lived under that sea, are you always yearning, as your mams were, to go back?”

“I don’t know.” I lifted my shoulder to fend him off.

“Come, now—if you had the chance, if you had the right-sized suit made, and the magic?”

I all but hid behind the table. I put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands and suffered there awhile. “Yes, but only because … Down there, you see, I did not
care
and I did not
feel
. Whereas here—” I laid my head on my arms; he would only have been able to see the rounded-over back of me beyond the table now. “Here it is
all
feeling and caring, and it makes me so
tired
,” I said muffledly into my lap.

His chair scraped back. He came around to me, crouched at my head, rubbed my hair. He did not trouble me with more words, only rubbed and scratched my head as you would a cat’s awhile, and then he kissed it, and carried our plates away to the scullery.

When the wind was a particular strength of nor’easter, Toddy and I would run up toward Windaway Peak. There was a blade of land there, up which funneled all the airs from Gambrel Wood to Oaten Share, and we stood on it with our toes curled over the rock like eagle claws, and spread our arms and were held up by the wind. It would push and sluice around us, and overbalance us back down toward the path, or desert us so that we fell forward into a shallow little tumble room on the south side, and make us laugh. Toddy was a long stringbean like me; neither of us took much holding up. He was not glad to have been brought back to land, for he and his dad never got on, but he had emptied one of Wholeman’s junk rooms and installed himself there, earning it with the kind of work I used to do.

“You can almost imagine, can’t you?” Toddy would cry when
we had it right for several moments, when we were balanced in the streaming air.

And you almost could, though the wind was so much lighter and more fickle than tide and swell, and the bodies we put up to it were such different shapes and felt so differently from inside, so raw and rangy. They were right enough that we could convince ourselves that we were carving paths up and down the watermass, that that flap of coat was the touch of some sister, that others, large and small, sang and shifted their formations all around us. We could almost feel the excitement, the bursting of the family at its edges and the hugger-muggery in the middle, the jostling, the smooth adjustments and reinings-in and spurts of speed.

We would walk home quietened, blown clean of our sorrows.

“When it comes summer,” Toddy said, “when we can swim without freezing the nuts off ourselves, we will go down Six-Mile.”

“Yes, that will be closer.”

“So much more like it.”

A few paces of silence. The Spine was like the top of the world, with the sky all around us.

“But never quite, Toddy.”

“Oh, no. I know that. But perhaps … well, the next best thing. Perhaps close to close enough, what do you think?”

S
o I packed myself and set off for Rollrock Isle. There was no one to tell me not to, anymore.

I would not set foot there
, said my late mam in my head,
after what they did to the women. What they did to your
own gran.

But that’s all over, said that man. Since years ago
.

Oh, not so many years. And no doubt that’s what they told themselves last time
.

But I did not listen to Mam.

An island of nothing but men!
my friend Sally had said.
It sounds wonderful, and frightening! I should come and see you off at the bus—but I’ve to be at the bakery
.

Never mind—I shall see myself off
.

You are so brave, Lory. I could never do something like this
.

I was not brave, or frightened. I was not even excited as I left Mrs. Mickle’s boardinghouse. The key to the house in Potshead, as black and rough-looking as if it had lain in the sea bottom
for years, scratched at my hand in my coat pocket. Mam’s little case that I had always loved and wanted—it was mine now, and I wished it were hers again—onto the bus it came with me filled with the clothes that I’d taken to Mrs. Mickle’s. I put it in the rack and sat below, aware of it like some little cloud above me, blotting out the sun.

Knocknee slid away. I had seen this bus leave before, full of schoolgirls headed for a picnic, or surrounded by well-wishers for a departing honeymoon couple. Today it held only shopmen who had business in Cordlin, and a mam and her daughter who must see the dentist there, and rich Mr. Crowly Hunter, who popped back and forth all the time to show that he had the time and the money—and me, under my cloud, with my heart inside me like the husk of something.

We rolled out across the countryside. I tried to notice every shape of the land and every object on it. It’s the last time you’ll see this for a while, I told myself. But I could not strongly care. I was only grateful to get away from Knocknee and its four deathbeds, its purse-mouthed landlord, its hard-faced carters who had tried to get the advantage of a girl in mourning eager to escape. I had held my ground with all of them, as Gran and Mam always did; I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was leaving the town cleanly; I could come back whenever I wanted.
Don’t burn your bridges
, Gran had said, and I hadn’t. And I had the deed in my case for the bridge
she
had not burnt, the house on Rollrock, among those wild, sad men.

The port town reached up out of its valley and drew us down to the water. Why were they called the Heads, those two promontories?
They were so much more like arms, shielding the harbor water from any blow or swell. Down the town we went, which any other day of my life would have been exciting in its strangeness: the fine houses, the costumed people, the little milk truck there. But the whole world was strange now, without Mam in it, or Dad, or my brother, Donald. Even the most familiar things—my own hands, my face in the mirror over the washbowl this morning—struck me afresh. I was glad of new sights, for they shook me a little out of my grief, but I was not the excited girl I had been. Or the frightened one—getting from bus to boat, which would have terrified me a year ago, would now be a small thing, after these three recent deaths, three funerals.