The Island Walkers (33 page)

Then Joe’s mother was there, hitting them with a broom as she shrieked for them to stop. “Is this who we are?” she kept crying. She was almost singing in a wild, new voice, tremulous and high. “Is this who we are?”

Looking beyond his father’s head, Joe saw her shins, nicked by the razor.

“All right, fella,” his father said hoarsely. They were lying locked on their sides, in grim equilibrium, their faces inches apart. He could smell the beer on his father’s breath, the stink of his father’s unhappiness. “Let’s get up,” his father said.

Joe extracted himself, avoiding his father’s eyes. As far as he was concerned, the other man no longer existed. This house no longer existed. He was through.

A couple of days later, Joe found his mother vacuuming in his room. “There’s a letter for you,” she told him, nodding at his desk where she’d propped up a small envelope with unfamiliar black-and-orange stamps. Joe carried it down the hall to the bathroom, where he locked the door and sat on the shut toilet seat to open it, in the steamy aftermath of someone’s shower. It contained two sheets of airmail paper, covered on both sides in Anna’s scrawling hand.

Dear Joe
,

I’m sitting on the deck of the SS
Independence.
We’re sailing east, towards Italy. Yesterday we had a day in Cannes, the best so far. We had lunch in a little place called Pont-du-Loup, just outside town — red-tiled roofs and white facades and long green shutters, under bushy hills rising to cliffs. The country is so rough but also beautiful. You wouldn’t think people could live in it, I mean, as well as they do. The towns are wonderful, so many hills, so many views of the sea taking you by surprise, a smear of light in the distance. I’m looking at it now (the sea) where it hazes off towards Corsica (which I can’t see) and Africa somewhere beyond that. I’ve always loved the
idea
of the Mediterranean and now that I’m here again, it’s wonderful
.

Mom and Dad rented a car, and we went exploring in the hills. Father Campion came with us. He’s American, a priest
we met on the ship, and the best company — a great storyteller. He doesn’t wear his priest’s uniform on holiday, looks more like a retired businessman. He’s plump, with a twinkle in his eyes that when you look closer is as sharp as knives. He enjoys his food more than anybody I’ve ever met, and loves to talk about it. When he picks up his wineglass he’s likely to take ten minutes telling you where the wine comes from (he seems to have visited a million vineyards) right down to the exact hill. He says he’s in love with me, and he’s very gallant, but since he’s sixty-something it’s really just a game. I tease him and tell him he’s not really a priest and he laughs till his eyes disappear. Dad says he’s probably having such a good time because we aren’t Catholic
.

While he and Mom and Dad were visiting a winery, I went for a walk. I climbed a hill and went along through some fields. I met a shepherd. My first shepherd! He had a dog, and his sheep were milling around at the edge of a field where he sat eating his lunch on an old stone. (I guess all stones are old, but this one looked older.) Actually, the dog saw me first, and came barking, till the shepherd called him off. We had quite a conversation, at least what I understood of it. The old kind of French they speak here is pretty strange. The sheep kept putting in their two cents. He might have been fifty, or younger, with an unbelievably leathery face, and shy brown eyes that seemed to belong to a much younger man. He told me he’d been a shepherd all his life, ever since he was twelve, when his father took him out of school. I asked him if he’d wanted to leave school, and he looked away at the hills, and then at the dog. I felt no one had ever asked him this before, and he didn’t know what to do with it. We were both embarrassed. But of course, being me, I didn’t let him off the hook — I mean, I didn’t say anything to help him out. There’s a part of me that would be cool in a train crash, I think, just coolly
watching to see what happens. I felt the sadness of his life, and something more than that: his fate, maybe. The shape his life had taken
.

I wonder if people have fates any more, or do they just have careers? Is everyone’s life now so much like everyone else’s, so bland and predictable, that a real fate can’t happen? Or do we just pretend we don’t have fates — but they happen anyway, in a dishonest, backdoor sort of way. No two fates are alike, and I think that’s why we’re afraid of our own. It means we have to embrace our own aloneness, our own uniqueness, and as much as we might say we want to do that, really, we’re scared. Better to be like everybody else — and not stick out too much. So life misses us
.

In the end, he just shrugged. It was like he’d said, “This is how things are. No use regretting.” He gave me some wine, in a thick little tumbler
.

I saw three dolphins this morning
.

Tomorrow, Italy: Livorno, Rome, Naples. Thinking of you warmly, Anna
.

He read it three times. The thin paper seemed fabulous in its blueness, as if at any moment dolphins might rise from its depths.

27

LIKE A SUDDEN INFLUX
of fresh air after weeks indoors, her letter intoxicated him, as if she had held out to him the promise of a finer life; as if the landscape she had described — the blue Mediterranean glimmering at every turn — had sent its ranges and peninsulas into his
own existence and he was already wandering with her there, in a partnership he could not clearly fantasize, for he had known nothing like it in his life. He stared at the edge of the bathroom sink, where a single plastered hair appeared like a crack in the porcelain, and wondered if the letter didn’t mark a sea change in her attitude to him (wasn’t there some hint of it in that phrase “thinking of you warmly”?) and at the same time, applying the lash of common sense, he told himself there was nothing in it but friendship.

But just that she had thought of him, over there, that she had sat on the deck of a great ship and aimed these words at
him
! It seemed she had reached across the world to create this space inhabited by only the two of them. And at the same time, her letter reminded him by contrast of his relationship with Liz, which every day seemed more false. He was spending a lot of time at her house, or driving around in her father’s Lincoln, and yet he knew there was something temporary and, yes, dishonest, about his link with her, because the truth was, as much as he enjoyed her physically — and really, he couldn’t get enough of her in that regard — he had to admit to himself (and he saw this clearly, in the sudden shift of atmosphere — the widening access of clarity — that Anna’s letter brought) that he didn’t like Liz McVey very much. The thought that Anna would come home and find him with her ignited an obscure shame.

The next Saturday he and Liz drove over to Johnsonville in the Lincoln to see a movie. All evening he kept meaning to tell her they were finished, and all evening he kept postponing the confrontation, though he managed to hold himself a little aloof. She must have sensed something was wrong, because she was even more attentive than usual, constantly touching his arm in the dark theatre, keying her laughter to his. Afterwards, in the car, she asked if he wanted to go to the motel. He’d been planning to deny himself that pleasure, but found himself helpless when she started to kiss him. Later, in bed, his excitement was extreme. But immediately afterwards, he regretted the tawdry room, the vapid sailboats on the wall, her
pathetic, crouching nakedness as she washed herself in the long tub. They drove back to Attawan in silence.

One Sunday afternoon in early January, Smiley dropped by the house with his skates and stick. Joe was taken by surprise, he hadn’t seen Smiley for some weeks, not since he’d dropped out of school and gone to work in Bannerman’s dyehouse. But here he was, just like old times, planted on the kitchen doormat in his rolled-down rubber boots and bright blue-and-white hockey jacket, announcing that the Atta was frozen solid right up to the first rapids. Such perfect skating conditions hadn’t been seen in years. There was no snow to shovel off, and the ice, Smiley said, making Jamie laugh with pleasure, was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

Joe leapt at the chance. He felt as if his old life — his life before the arrival of Anna Macrimmon and the complication of Liz McVey — had made a return, was offering the chance of a forgotten, uncomplicated happiness. Penny and Jamie wanted to go too, so there was a general rush to dig out skates and toques and hockey sticks. They were nearly ready to leave when Joe’s father appeared from the cellar, carrying his ancient stick and the long, battered skates with thin blades that Joe hadn’t seen him wear for years. Penny and Jamie danced around him: Daddy was going skating! But Joe, standing by the door with Smiley, felt that the day had been stolen from him. In the days since their fight, his relations with his father had existed in a state of suspension. They were friendly enough, in a formal, superficial way, but Joe sensed that each of them was waiting for the other to make the next move, but whether it would be towards reconciliation or fresh hostilities, he couldn’t say. Just now, his father’s gloomy face — smiling wanly at the young ones — seemed like the spectre at the feast. There could be no joy around
him
. At that moment, his father looked over at him and — to Joe’s complete surprise — winked. Instantly, something in him started, gladdened.

They set off in a noisy gang. Margaret, who had never learned to skate, watched them go out the door. “Don’t fall in,” she said dryly. Smiley promised her he’d keep an eye on everybody.

Behind Bannerman’s old hosiery mill on West Street, they descended to the millpond. Out on the wide ice, a dozen men and boys were playing shinny, gusting here and there like a flock of windblown starlings, under the cloudless sky. They sat on logs to put on their skates. Joe and his father helped Jamie and Penny. Then the two of them sat side by side, lacing up with numb fingers.

“So you think you’ve forgotten how?” Joe teased his father.

His father did not respond. His fingers were attacking his laces fiercely, with what might have been anger. Joe felt the shadow of their antagonism.

Then Alf finished and picked up his stick. As he skated away, he tossed back, “No one catches the old man,” and the day was made whole again. Joe watched him skate towards the other players with slow, lazy strokes, accelerating suddenly for a step or two, his head down, then stroking easily again, rocking slightly as he sped along. He looked as natural, even more natural, than he did walking down the street, as if all his life had been an exile from the easy freedom of ice.

Joe followed a minute later. Smiley had dropped a puck, and he and Jamie and Joe’s father were passing it back and forth. Joe streaked upriver. “Hey, Walker!” he shouted, and his father looked up and saw him. Joe took his pass close to his feet, lost it for a moment, then circled back with the puck, floating an easy pass to his brother. Jamie fanned on it and promptly landed on his back.

Joe was exhilarated by the huge expanse of ice. He felt he could do anything out here — wheel, fly, brake on a dime — under a sky that seemed to smile on every improvisation. He forgot about Liz McVey and Anna Macrimmon, that whole impossible tangle. What else mattered but to chase a puck across the wide, dark river? After a while Smiley and the Walkers joined the game of shinny. There was only one rule: whoever got the puck hung onto it as long as he could. It
was fox and hounds, with nearly everyone playing the fox at some point. Joe laughed as his father took the puck and started to dipsydoodle through the crowd like a madman, with his hair sticking out from under his too-small toque. Joe managed to poke the puck away from him, but it went straight onto the stick of Larry Langlois, easily the best player there. Larry was seventeen, tall and loose-jointed — it was said he’d been scouted by the Leafs — and he ragged the puck as if it were wired to his stick, covering the ice in effortless sweeps, his eyes laughing. He’d tempt you with the puck, throw in a body feint, and leave you crashing into air.

They started a proper game. Larry’s team got only six players, to eight on the other side. The goalposts at one end were rocks and, at the other, a hundred yards away, someone’s cowboy boots. The boots looked forlorn and absurd standing there, six feet apart, their toes pointed towards the distant shores with their low clouds of winter trees. Smiley’s father, who despite being bald was playing without a hat, got the first goal with an explosion of reckless, windmilling speed that left the others whooping and laughing. As he coasted away from the goal, bent over his stick and gasping for breath, Smiley whacked him affectionately on the bottom.