Spit Delaney's Island (15 page)

“Yes, 'tis,” he said, as if this too were a great joke on Halligan. “But 'tis
all boarded up now. There's only one family of them left in the valley.”

When Halligan told him he'd come here from British Columbia to visit
his mother in the village, he said nearly everyone in the valley had a son in
America, that he himself had two over there (besides eight in various parts
of Ireland), one in Chicago, and the other in New York. “But it's a lovely
boy ye are, to be coming home like this. Those two bostoons of mine have
not been seen in this land since they caught the ship that took them away.”
The finger went up again, and the eyes twinkled, as if this too was a joke
on Halligan he hadn't been able to foresee.

When he told his mother about the little man at the shrine she nodded,
smiled, said Yes that would be old Michael Donegan, a fine gentleman.
And yes, she had been up to the shrine herself once, years ago, but it had
all been overgrown with weeds. And it had been embarrassing to see someone down on his knees right out in plain view of cows and farmers and
any tourist who felt like driving by. These people, she said, just take it for
granted that everyone else is the same as they are.

“Will you come home with me now?” he said. “Will you come live with
me?”

She shook her head, slowly and, he thought, sadly. “'Twill be lonely here
without the man. But I'll have my friends here, all the same, and the
familiar places.”

Relieved in a way that surprised even himself, he became more genuinely concerned. “Isn't there a cousin?” he said. “Don't I remember some
mention of a cousin, somewhere in the country?”

She looked square at him. There was no way he was about to spoil the
enjoyment of her misery. “Cousin Polly
turned
,” she said. “A convert. Of
course she was always a wee bit crazy in her head, and it was a way of being
cared for. The nuns have got her in a home in Cork where she won't be
coming to any harm.”

“It's likely a good thing you're not coming home with me,” he said. “It
would only upset you to see the way those people race through life trying
to grab all they can. It's a land of greed and ignorance.”

“Find another place so,” she said. “No one is forcing you to stay there.”

Yet he did stay. He showed up at the bookstore the day after his plane
landed, re-arranged some of the books which had got out of place on the
shelves, filled in an order for a hundred new paperbacks. He loved the
shop. He loved the books: the feel of their covers, the patterns of their
words. He wished he could force the whole population of the island to
read every one of them. Perhaps then they would discover what they'd
been missing. Maybe some of them would even begin to buy books and
help put a little money in his pocket.

But he worried. He worried about his mother's loneliness. He felt guilty
if he got busy in the store or involved in a conversation and forgot about
her for a while. It was almost as if he believed that everything that added
something to his life was taking something away from hers. Yet he couldn't
help knowing that while he was concerned about the old woman's loneliness he was actually worrying about his own.

Bickham's sister told him, “For a mother who deserted you so young
she's sure managed to turn you into a momma's boy.”

“You've got too much time to sit around feeling sorry for yourself,” Bickham said. “What you need to do is get busy with things, get involved.”

The sister's idea of getting involved was to take him on an overnight
hiking trip down the lifesaving trail on the west coast. He went, more or
less just to please his friend, and came home scratched, bruised, and totally
exhausted. He spent the next two days in bed recovering, his head spinning with the roar of the open Pacific, the smell of pines and hemlock and
sitka spruce, the sight of gigantic cliffs and the foaming spray of the waves
that crashed against the rocks below.

And then, at the age of thirty-seven, after all those years of despising the
sister with her coarse bush manners across Matt Bickham's dining-room
table, he found himself growing fascinated by her against his will. There
had been plenty of time, following her down that long trail, to get used to
the width of her backside and the masculine harshness of her laugh. Her
face, with its weather-beaten skin and pinched beak nose, had not become
less homely from familiarity but at least there was a good deal of life in the
bulging eyes that mocked him from under their little hood-like lids.

“The trouble with you bloody Englishmen, even today,” she said, “is
you expect to come out here like colonizers and let the natives do all the
dirty work while you sit around enjoying what you call ‘culture.'”

She laughed at his reddening face and added: “Foreign culture.”

One evening Halligan invited the Bickhams and the sister, whose name
was Babe, to dinner at his apartment. He rented the second floor of a
square white pioneer house that stood on a hill looking down over the
town. It had been built a hundred years ago by a carpenter just arrived
from England and was filled with furniture and paintings brought over
on the boat by the present owner's grandmother. Halligan had searched
the town for some place with a little class and decided that this houseful
of Victorian clutter was as close as he was going to get. At least there were
chandeliers and some antimacassars and plenty of old books.

No cook, Halligan had learned how to prepare only the things it was
necessary to keep him alive. For his company he ordered a meal over the
telephone, to be delivered in a truck, ready to be put on the table. All he
had to do was put out the cutlery and china and chill the wine. It was necessary first, of course, to haul all the books off the chairs and up off the
middle of the kitchen floor and stack them over in a corner. Unlike many
booksellers he was not content just to be surrounded with books at work
or to read from the shelves at the shop, but bought copies for himself to
read and thumb through and keep at home. As a result, the shelves behind
the glass doors had been filled for years; the books had spread out all over
the room.

When he opened the door, however, only Babe was there, standing at
the top of the staircase in plaid pants and a calf-hide cape. She raised one
eyebrow. “Matt felt sick at the last minute so Terry suggested I come
alone.” When she tossed her head he saw there was a huge gold ring hanging from one ear. Suddenly, she laughed, the way Halligan imagined loggers laughed at the dirty jokes they told each other in the bush.

“I don't know how you keep that hotel of yours in business, you spend
half your time down here.”

“I may be the soul of the place,” she said, and stepped inside, “but when
I'm away the flesh still seems to hold together and continue without me.”
Beneath the cape, which she flung off in one swirling motion, she was
wearing a blouse cut so low she looked ready to fall out of it.

Halligan was completely useless in unforeseen circumstances. “But I
ordered enough food for four people.”

She whisked two plates and a handful of cutlery up off the table and
winked. “Then I'll just have to stay long enough for us to eat twice.”

Which she did. They ate slowly all that they could of the fried chicken,
washing it down with a bottle of Australian wine, then put the rest in his
little refrigerator until five o'clock in the morning when they took it out
again and called it breakfast. Between the two meals she taunted him for
his stand-offish attitudes and he criticized her for being so raucous and
unladylike; she laughed loudly at his notions about educating the local
population, and he listened scornfully to her stories about the loggers and
fishermen who visited her hotel; she told him a son had no obligations
towards a mother who'd abandoned him as a baby, and he said knowing
it was one thing but feeling it was another; she sneered at his attempt to
remain an Englishman though he was obviously planted firmly on this
island, and he told her at least he had some clearly defined roots, which
was more than could be said for her. Before long she had shown him that
what she had instead of roots was a quick mind, a body she knew exactly
how to handle, and a determination to make the most of both. And he had
shown her that he was perfectly willing to be seduced out of his attitudes
for the sake of her continuing company. When she left she'd agreed to put
him up in her hotel for a week and take him fishing in the mountain lakes
that lay close by, and he'd agreed that on their honeymoon he'd take her
to Ireland to meet his mother and visit a few castles.

“A married man can't be content to stay a bloody pauper,” she said.
“Especially if he plans to travel. You better smarten up that business of
yours, make some money. Start buying things, furniture, get yourself a car,
start looking at property.”

When she had gone he went out too, and walked in the pale pre-dawn
light down the hill into town. All was silent, grey. The trees in the pioneer
graveyard were as motionless as the headstones below. He walked on the
painted concrete sidewalks past block after block of stores, reading the
advertisements in their darkened windows. He kicked a piece of loose
newspaper away from the door of his own shop. When he came out at last
onto the high grassy park above the harbour and sat on a bench near the
painted totems, a breeze had begun somewhere out over the strait and
plucked small waves out of the surface of the water, and the sun was just
appearing over the peaks of the mainland mountains. Halligan wondered
what on earth was happening to him.

He sat there for more than an hour, until a drunk stumbled up the steps
from the sea-edge path and offered him a drink from his bottle. “Don't forget,” the man said, and burped. “Don't forget today's the, is the day of the
loggers' sports. Don't forget to be there.” Halligan, starting away, promised that he wouldn't forget, though he told himself he would kill himself
first. There was a matinee performance of
Rigoletto
across the strait that
afternoon, and if he hadn't been so tired he would be catching the ferry
across, certainly not watching axe-throwers and men with chain saws.

But he slept through most of that day, and when he awoke it was too
late to catch the ferry. Babe telephoned and invited him to the dance that
followed the loggers' sports. “It'll be a real eye-opener for you,” she said.
He didn't want his eyes opened that way, he said, and took her instead to
the cocktail lounge of the Coal-Tyee Hotel. They met some of her friends
there and within an hour had moved upstairs to the beer parlour where
fifty or sixty people from the Island's west coast were celebrating.

Their honeymoon was a short one, financed by Babe's savings account.
They flew from Vancouver to Toronto, ran through the airport and caught
another plane to Shannon. With a rented car picked up at the airport they
drove south through the patchwork hills, stopped long enough for Babe to
climb up the spiral stairs of Blarney Castle and stare in horror at the people who nearly broke their backs in order to kiss a piece of stone slimy
from other people's lips, drove slowly through the wide curved shopping
street in Cork, and then headed west into the country. She made him stop
and tramp with her across farmers' fields to inspect every crumbling castle and prehistoric standing stone and tiny shrine along the way. She raved
about the difference it would make to her hotel to have one of those in her
back yard and complained that all she had to offer was a lot of thick bush
and a lake full of deadheads. When they pulled up in front of his mother's
cottage she leapt out of the car and took three photographs, saying she
wished she could cut this piece of village out and take it back home with
her just the way it was.

Halligan's mother found Babe's loud enthusiasm upsetting, and asked
him to make up excuses to get her out of the house. As long as her daughter-in-law was inside she tended to stare off into space and answer only his
simplest questions, but when Babe was off in the car exploring the countryside or talking to people in the village or tracking down some historic
spot mentioned in the tourist brochures, the old woman told her son that
life had got much worse even than she'd feared.

“'Tis a trial just to be getting out of the bed in the mornings,” she said,
“and wondering what is the point of it at all when there is only yourself to
talk to.”

“Come now,” Halligan said, “I don't believe that none of your neighbours ever drop in to visit.”

The old woman's eyes shifted away. “Oh, they're in and out of the
house all day long like a lot of magpies. But there isn't a one of them that's
a relative. What is a woman without a family?”

She had indeed deteriorated, Halligan saw to his horror. The skin of
her face had dried and shrivelled, her messy hair was so thin he could see
patches of scalp, her whiskers were like silver needles hanging above her
lip. The little kitchen, which on his last visit was whitewashed and spotless,
now looked as if she had decided to leave dirt and food and pieces of clothing just wherever they happened to lie until she should die and escape
them all.

She stood at the stove, one thick hand pressed against her back. “I took
to visiting my cousin Polly but she died. Tim Murphy drove me down to
the city once a week in his lorry so I could visit with her. Addled-headed
as she was, at least she was related. But they sent word up last week that
she'd dropped dead in chapel. Poor old thing. And now what have I left?”

Suddenly Halligan felt angry. “What you have left is the rest of your life
to do with as you please. You can sit around feeling sorry for yourself if
you want, but you'll have nobody to blame but yourself.”