The wind's twelve quarters - vol 2 (2 page)

Lif
went on and loaded his barrow with bricks. This time as he wheeled it down,
straining back against the tug of the barrow on the steep streets, swinging all
the strength of his shoulders to balance its course on the winding cliff-path
down to the beach, a couple of townsmen followed him. Two or three more from
Scriveners Lane followed after them, and several more from the streets round
the market place, so that by the time he straightened up, the sea foam fizzing
on his bare black feet and the sweat cold on his face, there was a little crowd
strung out along the deep single track of his barrow over the sand. They had
the lounging listless air of Ragers. Lif paid them no heed, though he was aware
that the widow of Weavers Lane was up on the cliffs watching with a scared
face.

He
ran the barrow out into the sea till the water was up to his chest, and tipped
the bricks out, and came running in with a great breaker, his banging barrow
full of foam.

Already
some of the Ragers were drifting away down the beach. A tall fellow from the
Scriveners Lane lot lounged by him and said with a little grin, Why don't you
throw 'em from the top of the cliff, man?

They'd
only hit the sand, said Lif.

And
you want to drown 'em. Well good. You know there was some of us thought you was
building something down here! They was going to make cement out of you. Keep
those bricks wet and cool, man.

Grinning,
the Scrivener drifted off, and Lif started up the cliff for another load.

Come
for supper, Lif, said the widow at the cliff's top with a worried voice,
holding her baby close to keep it from the wind.

I
will, he said. I'll bring a loaf of bread, I laid in a couple before the bakers
left. He smiled, but she did not. As they climbed the streets together she
asked, Are you dumping your bricks in the sea, Lif?

He
laughed wholeheartedly and answered yes.

She
had a look then that might have been relief and might have been sadness; but at
supper in her lamplit house she was quiet and easy as ever, and they ate their
cheese and stale bread with good cheer.

Next
day he went on carrying bricks down load after load, and if the Ragers watched
him they thought him busy on their own kind of work. The slope of the beach out
to deep water was gradual, so that he could keep building without ever working
above water. He had started at low tide so that his work would never be laid
bare. At high tide it was hard, dumping the bricks and trying to lay them in
rough courses with the whole sea boiling in his face and thundering over his
head, but he kept at it. Towards evening he brought down long iron rods and
braced what he had built, for a crosscurrent tended to undermine his causeway
about eight feet from its beginning. He made sure that even the tips of the
rods were under water at low tide, so that no Rager might suspect an
affirmation was being made. A couple of elderly men coming down from a Weeping
in the Heights-Hall passed him clanging and battering his empty barrow up the
stone streets in dusk, and gravely smiled upon him. It is well to be free of
Things, said one softly, and the other nodded.

Next
day, though still he had not dreamed of the Islands again, Lif went on building
his causeway. The sand began to shelve off more steeply as he went further. His
method now was to stand on the last bit he had built and tip the
carefully-loaded barrow from there, and then tip himself off and work, floundering
and gasping and coming up and pushing down, to get the bricks levelled and
fitted between the pre-set rods; then up again, across the grey sand and up the
cliff and bang-clatter through the quiet streets for another load.

Some
time that week the widow said, meeting him in his brickyard, Let me throw 'em
over the cliff for you, it'll save you one leg of the trip.

It's
heavy work loading the barrow, he said.

Oh,
well, said she.

All
right, so long as you want to. But bricks are heavy bastards. Don't try to
carry many. I'll give you the small barrow. And the little rat here can sit on
the load and get a ride.

So
she helped him on and off through days of silvery weather, fog in the morning,
clear sea and sky all afternoon, and the weeds in crannies of the cliff
flowering; there was nothing else left to flower. The causeway ran out many
yards from shore now, and Lif had had to learn a skill which no one else had ever
learned that he knew of, except the fish. He could float and move himself about
on the water or under it, in the very sea, without touching foot or hand to
solid earth.

He
had never heard that a man could do this thing; but he did not think much about
it, being so busy with his bricks, in and out of air and in and out of water
all day long, with the foam, the bubbles of water-circled air or air-circled
water, all about him, and the fog, and the April rain, a confusion of the
elements. Sometimes he was happy down in the murky green unbreathable world,
wrestling strangely willful and weightless bricks among the staring shoals, and
only the need of air drove him gasping up into the spray-laden wind.

He
built all day long, scrambling up on the sand to collect the bricks that his
faithful helper dumped over the cliff's edge for him, load them in his barrow
and run them out the causeway that went straight out a foot or two under sea
level at low tide and four or five feet under at high, then dump them at the end,
dive in, and build; then back ashore for another load. He came up into town
only at evening, worn out, salt-bleared and salt-itching, hungry as a shark, to
share what food turned up with the widow and her little boy. Lately, though
spring was getting on with soft, long, warm evenings, the town was very dark
and still.

One
night when he was not too tired to notice this he spoke of it, and the widow
said, Oh, they're all gone now, I think.

—All!
A pause. —Where did they go?

She
shrugged. She raised her dark eyes to his across the table and gazed through
lamplit silence at him for a time. Where? she said. Where does your sea-road
lead, Lif?

He
stayed still a while. To the Islands, he answered at last, and then laughed and
met her look.

She
did not laugh. She only said, Are they there? Is it true, then, there are
Islands? Then she looked over at her sleeping baby, and out the open doorway
into the darkness of late spring that lay warm in the streets where no one
walked and the rooms where no one lived. At last she looked back at Lif, and
said to him, Lif, you know, there aren't many bricks left. A few hundred.
You'll have to make some more. Then she began to cry softly.

By
God! said Lif, thinking of his underwater road across the sea that went for a
hundred and twenty feet, and the sea that went on ten thousand miles from the
end of it— I'll swim there! Now then, don't cry, dear heart. Would I leave you
and the little rat here by yourselves? After all the bricks you've nearly hit
my head with, and all the queer weeds and shellfish you've found us to eat
lately, after your table and fireside and your bed and your laughter would I
leave you when you cry? Now be still, don't cry. Let me think of a way we can
get to the Islands, all of us together.

But
he knew there was no way. Not for a brickmaker. He had done what he could do.
What he could do went one hundred and twenty feet from shore.

Do
you think, he asked after a long time, during which she had cleared the table
and rinsed the plates in wellwater that was coming clear again now that the
Ragers had been gone many days— Do you think that maybe ... this... He found it
hard to say but she stood quiet, waiting, and he had to say it: That this
is
the end?

Stillness.
In the one lamplit room and all the dark rooms and streets and the burnt fields
and wasted lands, stillness. In the black Hall above them on the hill's height,
stillness. A silent air, a silent sky, silence in all places unbroken,
unreplying. Except for the far sound of the sea, and, very soft though nearer,
the breathing of a sleeping child.

No,
the woman said. She sat down across from him and put her hands upon the table,
fine hands as dark as earth, the palms like ivory. No, she said, the end will
be the end. This is still just the waiting for it.

Then
why are we still here - just us?

Oh,
well, she said, you had your things - your bricks - and I had the baby...

Tomorrow
we must go, he said after a time. She nodded.

Before
sunrise they were up. There was nothing at all left to eat, and so when she had
put a few clothes for the baby in a bag and had on her warm leather mantle, and
he had stuck his knife and trowel in his belt and put on a warm cloak that had
been her husband's, they left the little house, going out into the cold wan
light in the deserted streets.

They
went downhill, he leading, she following with the sleepy child in a fold of her
cloak. He turned neither to the road that led north up the coast nor to the
southern road, but went on past the market place and out on the cliff and down
the rocky path to the beach. All the way she followed and neither of them
spoke. At the edge of the sea he turned.

I'll
keep you up in the water as long as we can manage, he said.

She
nodded, and said softly, We'll use the road you built, as far as it goes.

He
took her free hand and led her into the water. It was cold. It was bitter cold,
and the cold light from the east behind them shone on the foam-lines hissing on
the sand. When they stepped on the beginning of the causeway the bricks were
firm under their feet, and the child had gone back to sleep on her shoulder in
a fold of her cloak.

As
they went on the buffeting of the waves got stronger. The tide was coming in.
The outer breakers wet their clothes, chilled their flesh, drenched their hair
and faces. They reached the end of his long work. There lay the beach a little
way behind them, the sand dark under the cliff over which stood the silent,
paling sky. Around them was wild water and foam. Ahead of them was the
unresting water, the great abyss, the gap.

A
breaker hit them on its way in to shore and they staggered; the baby, waked by
the sea's hard slap, cried, a little wail in the long, cold, hissing mutter of
the sea always saying the same thing.

Oh,
I can't! cried the mother, but she gripped the man's hand more firmly and came
on at his side.

Lifting
his head to take the last step from what he had done towards no shore, he saw
the shape riding the western water, the leaping light, the white flicker like a
swallow's breast catching the break of day. It seemed as if voices rang over
the sea's voice. What is it? he said, but her head was bowed to her baby,
trying to soothe the little wail that challenged the vast babbling of the sea.
He stood still and saw the whiteness of the sail, the dancing light above the waves,
dancing on towards them and towards the greater light that grew behind them.

Wait,
the call came from the form that rode the grey waves and danced on the foam,
Wait! The voices rang very sweet, and as the sail leaned white above him he saw
the faces and the reaching arms, and heard them say to him, Come, come on the
ship, come with us to the Islands.

Hold
on, he said softly to the woman, and they took the last step.

A
TRIP TO THE HEAD

Most
people 'lead lives of quiet desperation', and some stories start there, too. We
were in England and it was November and dark at two in the afternoon and
raining and the suitcase containing all my manuscripts had been stolen at the
dock in Southampton and I hadn't written anything for months and I couldn't
understand the greengrocer and he couldn't understand me and it was desperation
— but quiet — stiff upper lip, don't you know. So I sat down and started
scribbling words, perfectly hopelessly. Words, words, words. They went on about
as far as ' "Try being Amanda", the other said sourly,' and stopped.
A year or so later {British Rail, all honor to them, had found my stolen
suitcase, we were back home in Oregon, it was raining) I found the scribble,
and went on scribbling, and came to the end. I never did find out what the
title ought to be - my agent, Virginia Kidd, did that, to my delight.

There
is a kind of story which I would describe as a Bung Puller. The writer for one
reason or another has been stuck, can't work; and gets started again suddenly,
with a pop, and a lot of beer comes leaping out of the keg and foaming all over
the floor. This story was definitely a Bung Puller.

'Is
this Earth?' he cried, for things had changed abruptly.