The Island Walkers (67 page)

Anna had more energy for exploring than he did, so he trailed around after her, faintly pleased when something pleased her — an old gravestone, the absorption of a wire fence by the bark of a tree — but also resentful that on their last night, she could bother with anything but him. He could not forget her story. It was obvious, that compared to her painter, he had hardly touched her.

He watched her as she stopped to scratch a bare leg, watched as the wind plastered her dress against her thighs, revealing their shape — that sudden suggestion of hidden nakedness. It seemed he was seeing her for the first time, everything about her seemed that novel, that fresh - though it also occurred to him that this might be the last time too. The last time and the first — the two times had become one, painful in its vividness. He turned away from her, to the field behind the church. Someone, he saw with a start, was walking there — a tousle-haired child of three or four, walking by himself
through the wind-whipped grain. His heart leapt in recognition, though of what he couldn’t have said. A moment later, he saw that the “child” was only the upright iron seat of an old mower, abandoned at the edge of the field. But the vision had moved him. He turned to Anna, thinking to tell her about it. But words seemed pointless now; words could do nothing.

Later, as they drove away through the light-swept fields, he looked over at her where she sat against the door, gazing at a line of tossing maples.

“I have to,” he said, his voice breaking harshly. “I have to make love to you.”

She did not even seem to have heard; he felt that, in some way, she had already left.

“I don’t care about your period,” he said. And a moment later, throwing away the last of his pride: “Anna!”

“All right,” she said, looking over at him. He did not entirely believe her smile, but he was grateful for anything now. He swung the Bel Air up the river road, into the Reid Hills, sliding it into a narrow lane in the woods. When he began to kiss her, she stopped him. “Not here,” she said, “outside.” He led her down a trail, through poplars and spruce. They were sheltered from the wind now, in a kind of sandy bowl at the top of a cliff. They gazed east, over the Shade, the river descending through woods and fields. Far below, in the shadow of the cliff, the dim water whispered around a solitary rock.

They spread an old blanket and an afghan they had brought from the car, quickly stripped off their clothes, and slid into their makeshift bed. He wanted this lovemaking to be better than anything they’d had — it seemed a kind of last chance. She seemed determined too, but there was soon a problem. The mosquitoes were out. Even when he was moving in her, she seemed more aware of them than of him, continuously brushing the insects away from their faces, laughing at the discomfort they caused.

Afterwards, sulking, he pulled on his clothes in silence. He wanted her to speak first, he wanted her to ask him if he was all right — to
show
that
much care for what he was going through — but with only her panties on, she gathered the rest of her clothes and hurried back to the Bel Air. When he got in a little later, he slammed the door and stared out the windshield towards the thicket of birches. “I felt you were hardly there,” he said.

“I was there,” she said. Her answer came so readily, with such hardness, he retreated again into silence. They drove towards town. They were separated by a gulf now; he was almost relieved, feeling they’d come to something more honest. At least, he felt less vulnerable in his anger. But after a while, she slid over to him and with a sigh put her head on his shoulder. He was desperate to experience every minute with her, as if something yet might be achieved that had not been achieved, or found, before. He put his arm around her and steered with his left hand, watching the headlights of the Bel Air pick out trees and mailboxes.

It was after eleven when they embraced at her kitchen door. He was planning to come back in the morning, to see her off but, still, he didn’t want to let her go. They clung to each other in a kind of inert exhaustion, like those marathon dancers he’d seen in old news-reels. He was trying to convince himself she was holding on as tightly as he was. Finally, she broke away.

That night he woke at three. Unable to get back to sleep, he dressed and walked up West Street, past the old hosiery mill, its windows boarded now, and up the rail embankment to the Macrimmons’. The wind had subsided, under an obscure sky. In the yard, everything was still, ghostly: the table where they had eaten so many suppers, stripped of its cover; the dim mountain of the maple; their four chairs scattered forlornly on the packed dirt. He sat with his back against the maple watching her window. Some time later, the chaotic caroling of birds woke him, and he walked off his stiffness in the yard before resuming his vigil in a chair. He must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing he saw was Anna’s face. She was kneeling before him in her dressing gown. For a blissful moment, he forgot she was leaving, and simply smiled at her.

“You should be in a novel,” she scolded him delightedly as she led him into the kitchen, “waiting out there like that.” He sat at the kitchen table while she made eggs, standing at the stove in her dark-green dressing gown. He had never seen her in it before. He kept staring at the overly long sleeves she kept pushing back, her slender wrists — there was so much about her he didn’t know, might never know now. It seemed unfair that her novelty should go on unfolding so effortlessly before him, even on their last morning.

“What about Guillaume?” he said, and immediately felt sickened by his own need to know, in the face of what she’d been through. From upstairs came the sound of voices. Her parents would soon be down. “Do you think you might run into him again?”

At the stove, she went motionless. Then she turned, the spatula in her hand, and looked at him in what seemed incomprehension. For a moment, she fell into an abstraction, as if considering the idea further. Turning back to the stove, she shook her head a little — did it mean no, he wondered, did she mean she could hardly believe he’d ask such a thing?

“Anna,” he said.

“If I do,” she said, almost cheerfully, “I’m sure I can handle it.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

Everyone ate breakfast on the fly, while trying to do a dozen other things. Her father, who was driving Anna and her mother to the airport, acknowledged Joe gruffly and went off to call his office. Her mother hurried here and there as she kept changing her mind about the clothes she would take to France. He stood around, feeling he was in the way. He tried to make himself useful by cleaning up the kitchen. He helped Andrew Macrimmon carry Anna’s trunk downstairs. Everything was remarkably, nightmarishly, ordinary. He saw a squirrel run across the earth, leap to a lawnchair, and sit up on its haunches to eat something. It seemed curiously human to him — those dark little handlike paws — and when it scampered away behind the house, he looked after it in astonishment, as if its disappearance were a key to what was happening to him.

A few minutes later he sat on Anna’s bed, watching her make some last-minute changes to the contents of her suitcase. Her mother called up the stairwell: “Vite, vite, allons-y! Ton père nous attend!”

He helped Anna close the swollen case. They kissed, almost gravely, and with a quick movement she escaped his arms and went out the door. He pulled her heavy bag off the bed and followed. Her parents were already in the car. He put the suitcase in the trunk and closed it, in the sickening gust of the exhaust, while Anna slid into the back seat. Her mother extended a hand from the front window. “You’re a good boy,” she said. Her remark stung. He did not want to be a boy, did not want to be good. The man Anna had loved had not been good.

Anna had rolled her window down. He was taken aback by her tears, which made the mark on her cheek glisten. His throat tight, he leaned down to her. Their lips brushed — that smell of her, that scent of vanilla that was almost a no-smell, the scent of space itself — and the car began to back up. He walked down to the front sidewalk and stood watching as the Bel Air swung backwards into Banting, then, with the slight jolt of the gear-change, began to slide smoothly forward.

60

LATE AUGUST
, and the scream of Alf’s tablesaw, bees floating in the towers of goldenrod leaning beside his half-finished steps. Looking up, he saw through an open window of the sweater mill a carousel turning with a load of white bobbins. Swiftly, swiftly, the pale planets fled against the deeper darkness of the hall behind it. Other machines were invisibly at work with a steady brushing clash, like a waterfall, as thousands of needles and small metal parts raced through their tasks, above the deep, organic hum of the drive-belts. Regret lodged
a small stone in his chest: he had once been at the heart of that work himself, and though he had never cared as much for knitting as for carpentry, he was alone now, outside the ark of easy purposefulness men and women made when they worked together.

Kneeling, he fit the board into the deck and nailed it home. Already, the fresh pine of the other boards was dirty with the confused prints of his workboots. Descending the stairs, he picked up another board and was about to place it on the tablesaw when he noticed that in the open window of the sweater mill the carousel had stopped. Minutes later it still had not moved. Above idle bobbins, threads belled slightly in the breeze. The knitter in him was instantly alert, critical: no machine should stand idle for long. As he stared up at the high window, he realized he could no longer hear the thrum of work. Suddenly — it was like the uncanny feeling he got when his heart skipped a beat — the mills seemed wrapped in the silence of desertion.

He looked around, the miraculous sole survivor of an event he could not grasp. Nearby, the bees, audible now, flew from frond to frond. A few moments later, he heard a cry. It might have come from a man or a woman — he could not tell which — and it sounded from the depths of the mills like some outburst of pain or alarm of the buildings themselves: as if the thick old beams had yielded up finally a reaction to the saws that had felled them a century before. A little later he heard other voices, shouting and arguing, phones ringing, the sound of breaking glass. The din was coming mainly from the sweater mill, from all six floors, though as he listened it seemed to spread, a contagion of anger or panic that soon echoed from other buildings as well. Standing on the unrailed deck, he looked around in amazement. And then he heard it: the drumming on the stairs that grew louder, and continued to grow louder, as workers streamed into the yard. His first thought was fire.

He saw Lil Hepworth stalk out purposefully, thick legs working under her shapeless skirt. Immediately behind came Jim Corcoran, a spinner, and his cousin Sid Corcoran, gripping the hair on the crown of his head as if he meant to tear it out. Everyone seemed dazed. They
stood in the yard, facing the doorways from which yet more workers were streaming. They were coming from all the buildings now: not in a solid mass, as they did when the sirens released them (he looked at his watch to make sure it wasn’t noon yet) but more raggedly, in twos and threes, from the door of the dyehouse, the knitting mill, the spinning mill. Some were grim-faced, silent. Others were arguing volubly. A couple were laughing and smiling as if they’d been released on holiday. Behind him now, people came clattering down the plywood ramp he’d rigged at the loading dock. Seeing Joe emerge, he called to him. Joe didn’t hear — he was listening to Eddie Baker, who was holding forth with clenched fists — but a woman who was closer to Alf, it was Linda Koch, raised her freckled face and shouted to him, “They’re shuttin’ the mills!”

Stunned, Alf watched her plump back retreat towards the others gathering in the yard. A man and woman — it was Lottie Connor and Art Freud — were arguing so violently, red faces inches apart, it seemed they must soon fight in earnest. Others were trying to calm them. The growing crowd seethed.

Alf left his perch and stood at the edge of the melee. Beside him, Davy Clark — a tall man of about sixty with a haggard, sour look — blew through his lips in little explosive bursts like the release of steam through a safety valve. Alf realized he was laughing.

When he asked what was going on — he could scarcely believe what Linda Koch had told him — Davy regarded him with bright, dismissive scorn.

“Closing ’er down,” he said finally, as if it was an event he had seen coming for weeks, and Alf, like the others, was some kind of ass not to have seen it too.

“What do you mean?”

He still had not grasped, would not let himself grasp, the full truth. There had to be some other explanation: a fire, a burst pipe, short-term layoffs.

“It’s over. Finished. They just announced it. They’re moving the whole damn thing to Quebec.”

“
Quebec?
”

“They say anyone who wants to work down there can apply. They’ll get priority. How about it, Alf, you like Quebec?”

There was a viciousness in this — a personal hostility — that added an extra current of confusion to the news that Bannerman’s was moving. Disbelief was pounding heavily in his chest, his face. He felt curiously exposed, as though the closing was somehow the result of his own missteps, his own naive miscalculations. He had the same feeling he’d had so often as a child. He could see blame making a wide turn in the far distance, like some kind of winged predator that had seen him on its first pass and now, despite his hopes that he had been overlooked, was returning for the kill.