Spit Delaney's Island (17 page)

And when it comes into sight she is there, on the platform in front of
the little sagging shed, watching. She stands tilted far out over the tracks
to see, but never dares—even when it is so far away—to step down onto
the ties for a better look.

The boards beneath her feet are rotting and broken. Long stems of grass
have grown up through the cracks and brush against her legs. A squirrel
runs down the slope of the shed's roof and yatters at her until she turns
and lifts her hand to frighten it into silence.

She talks to herself, sings almost to the engine's beat “Here he comes,
here he comes”—and has her smile already as wide as it can be. She smiles
into the side of the locomotive sliding past and the freight car sliding past
and keeps on smiling even after the coach has stopped in front of her and
it is obvious that Jim Styan is not on board.

Unless of course he is hiding under one of the seats, ready to leap up,
one more surprise.

But old Bill Cobb the conductor backs down the steps, dragging a gunny
sack out after him. “H'lo there, Crystal,” he says. “He ain't aboard today
either, I'm afraid.” He works the gunny sack out onto the middle of the
platform. “Herbie Stark sent this, it's potatoes mostly, and cabbages he was
going to throw out of his store.”

She takes the tiniest peek inside the sack and yes, there are potatoes
there and some cabbages with soft brown leaves.

The engineer steps down out of his locomotive and comes along the
side of the train rolling a cigarette. “Nice day again,” he says with barely a
glance at the sky. “You makin' out all right?”

“Hold it,” the conductor says, as if he expects the train to move off by
itself. “There's more.” He climbs back into the passenger car and drags out
a cardboard box heaped with groceries. “The church ladies said to drop
this off,” he says.

“They told me make sure you get every piece of it, but I don't know
how you'll ever get it down to the house through all that bush.”

“She'll manage,” the engineer says. He holds a lighted match under the
ragged end of his cigarette until the loose tobacco blazes up. “She's been
doing it—how long now?—must be six months.”

The conductor pushes the cardboard box over against the sack of potatoes and stands back to wipe the sweat off his face. He glances at the engineer and they both smile a little and turn away. “Well,” the engineer says,
and heads back down the tracks and up into his locomotive.

The conductor tips his hat, says “Sorry,” and climbs back into the empty
passenger car. The train releases a long hiss and then moves slowly past
her and down the tracks into the deep bush. She stands on the platform
and looks after it a long while, as if a giant hand is pulling, slowly, a stay-stitching thread out of a fuzzy green cloth.

In those early years, it seemed that she often dressed in green as pale and
just as gentle as the wild mint patch growing not too far from the house.
Oh, they would tease her for it; first he (born Barclay Miles but called
Duke then for riding the haywagons like some kind of royalty) and then
Dora and Mary too—all her children—saying maybe she was blind to any
other colour and afraid of wearing red by mistake, which was her only
hate, but saying it beyond her reach for safety just in case this once she
didn't want to laugh.

The wind too was green, in the metal-flake poplar leaves up against the
sky. Those poplars, twenty feet tall now or more, were planted near the
house when he was born, and measured out his life in the slow uneven
growth of unseen rings. All his life long they were growing, were stretching, were gauging time as strong and just as sure as any clock dong-donging on a mantel shelf.

In that certain year, the poplar's tenth year to the sky, they arrived at the
end of a long pale spring and moved on forward into summer, knowing
right away that it had to be a hot one. They could sense an orange-sky
summer without trouble, for even in June they could walk all the way to
the spring without once having to step on the planks, and soon—too soon—the long grass growing down the centre of the driveway started turning
copper from the sun. The adults looked out at the farm and then at each
other and said, “There's bound to be a fire season this year.” Then he, too,
looked out at the farm and then at the girls and said, “There's sure to be a
damn fire season this year,” because they knew even then that when the
logging camps closed down and their father stayed home, the farm was far
more work than fun.

One day Momma touched his shoulder. “You kids stay out of trouble
for an hour or two,” she said, because Mrs. Baxter's husband was killed
fighting fire and she was going over there.

“Yes,” he said. “I guess I know how to behave.”

“Then keep an eye on Dora, who doesn't know.” Which was true, too,
because Dora with her size would just as soon climb a tree right to the
highest branch as not, and then holler for help down.

“What can you do for dying?” he said.

“I can try to make it easier by taking cakes over and this pie and by just
talkin' a little to her. Which is just about all anybody can do when a
woman loses her husband in the woods.”

But the woods didn't close that summer. A fire burned all down the
side of Whistler Hill and Eddie Baxter died under a falling tree and they
did not close. The shallow wells dried up in the valley and cattle drooped
and still the logging camps did not close. “They aren't going to close,” his
father said. “Them big-time managers off to California or Hawaii don't
give a damn about safety, and one of these days a spark will fly and the
whole mountain will go up in smoke.” He had to take his turn once a
week staying behind until dark watching for sparks.

How do you watch for sparks is what I want to know. Do you crawl around
peering under logs and things smelling for smoke or do you sit up on a stump
like a squirrel watching all? Or do you curl up somewhere to read a book until
the light is too poor to see by?

Watching sparks was not the only thing his father found to complain
about that summer. For reasons known only to himself (kept in, like everything else he thought, as if sharing would mean losing too) he objected to
the way Momma was called on so often to help people out in their trouble.
While she was doing the dishes—he did his best talking when her back
was to him, it seemed, perhaps taking strength from the absence of the
cool level eyes that could look in too far for comfort—he studied his hands
first, dry and hard and cracked, and then said, “For a change you could
stay home with your family where you belong and let someone else go.”
Without even halting the motion of her hands she said, “What can I do?
They ask me to come and what can I do about it?” He said, “That's it,”
and she said, “Yes,” and he said, “What is it about you that everybody
comes crying to you with their troubles instead of someone else? Why
does it always have to be you taking on other people's troubles for them?”

So she shook the soap from both hands and turned to him, saying as she
wiped the hands on her apron, “I do what I can. Sometimes it seems there
is nothing anyone can do, but they say they prefer to have me there to anyone else, so I go. If you have a strength the others don't have, you just have
to share it a little so the weak won't suffer any more than they have to.
There's little enough I can do but I do what I can.”

What she could do they never learned. What strength she had for
others she kept secret from them. There she stood, steady as a fence post
and about as tall, and not one person in the house had ever seen just whatever it was she did when she went out of the house to fix the messed-up
lives of other people. So he decided right there, in the half-second it took
her to turn around again and plunge her hands down in the hot water,
that no secret in the world is strong enough to be kept for ever, and before
much longer went by he would relieve her mind of the weight of all that
private knowing.

And just as if she knew his thoughts and was every bit as anxious as he
was to share that knowing, she gave him his chance not more than two
days later, came up to him while she struggled into her coat on the hottest
day of July and said, “You got nothing better to do than stirring up mud
wasps with your feet?”

He pulled his bare feet away from the tap and drew them under him
on the bottom step. “Not much,” he said.

“It would be too much I suppose to expect an almost-ten-year-old boy
to get the idea all by himself that he could be out hoeing or maybe carrying wood.”

“Never thought of it,” he said, “but if that's what you want.” He drew
his feet out again and almost stood up.

“Never mind,” she said. “I guess I should know by now that the only
things boys think of by themselves is food and trouble and usually they're
the same thing. Come with me.”

“Where we going?”

“Never mind that too, just wash up and come on. What have I got this
coat on for, in this weather?” She took her coat off (new that Christmas and
green as grass like everything else) and threw it over a chair, then dived
into her bread drawer and took out two loaves of bread she had baked yesterday. “That's all I've got in the house,” she said, and then he had to run
to catch up before she got to the garage.

He settled himself back in the car seat and prepared himself. He imagined her walking into a house of sorrow where women wept softly and
then making them coffee and cooing words of sympathy. He imagined
black dresses and flowers and whispering. But no amount of imagining in
the front seat of a car would have prepared him for what did happen.

Because she did not walk in. She stopped the car in front of Sandy Melville's house and left him sitting there while she went up the hard dirt path
to the door and put the loaves of bread there on the step. Then she came
back, slammed the door hard, and sat waiting.

Quickly the door of the little house opened. Emma Melville, with half
her face the colour of a ripe plum, her body wrapped up in a long housecoat patterned like a tree, peered down at the bread, then up at the car,
frowning, until she recognized the car or Momma sitting there behind the
wheel as if she just never quite got away in time, and beckoned them in.

He would rather stay in the car, he said (meaning it now) but no, she
pushed him ahead of her down that path just as if she needed him this
time and couldn't go alone. She pushed him right in that front door, past
a huge wood stove with a reservoir at one end and a line of washing above,
past a flowered chesterfield strewn with magazines, and shoved him into
a red-and-white wicker chair. He picked up a magazine with a naked
woman on the cover and opened it.

“Sit down,” Momma said.

Emma Melville stood in the middle of the room with the two loaves of
bread in her hands. She looked as if bread was the one thing in this world
she did not know what to do with.

“Sit down,” Momma said again. “You look like you could do with a cup
of coffee.”

Emma Melville stood looking for a minute longer. She opened her
mouth to say something, but closed it, then opened it again and said, “You
set down, Lenore Miles. You ain't here to sip coffee with no one. You set
down and start listening, I have a lot to tell.”

The two women sat down at the table and stared at each other across
the loaves of bread. Momma said, “Then start telling.”

Emma squirmed. “What I got to say may not be right for young ears
over there.”

“Oh never mind that. He's got his nose in a book and won't hear a
thing,” Momma said, who should have known better than that, seeing not
one page turned yet.

“That bastard,” Emma said.

Momma stiffened.

“Yes. You mean Sandy.”

“Yes, yes Sandy. Yes, that shifty-eyed bugger. Yes, him. Lookit here.”

He looked too and saw the large purple swelling on the side of her face.
There was no missing that, even without an invitation.

“And this!” Her hand opened the housedress and pointed to something
he could not see.

“That's something,” Momma said.

“Well, that's all the thanks I get for going into town last night and dragging him out of the beer parlour before he got too drunk and started
smashing up expensive furniture like the last time. This is my thanks, not
that I expected any. He let me haul him out past all those laughing people
and drive him all the way home and then,
then
, when we're all alone, he
says
Couldn't you at least take your hair out of pincurls, Emma, before you
came huntin for me
? And then he laughed, and right in the middle of a
laugh he stopped and knocked me down like a stone to the floor and
kicked me,
kicked me
, Lenore, the way you kick a dog.”

“Did you yell?”

“Did I yell. I cursed and screamed, and then you know what he did?”

Momma said, “I don't know as I want to.”

Just try not telling, he thought, his eyes on the plum swelling. Just you
try stopping now with these four ears pricked up to listen. He wondered
what she had pointed to inside her housecoat.

“My God, Lenore, he dragged me into the bedroom.”

He did not intend to laugh. His body just jerked upright in the chair
and before he knew enough to stop it he had laughed right out loud like
an idiot, one sharp crooked sound he couldn't swallow. They both swung
their heads around fast, glowering, Momma saying “You hush” with her
voice and “Blast your hide” with her eyes, and then swung back again as
if not a sound had come from him and all that mattered in the world could
be found right there on the table with those loaves of bread.

Momma sighed and heaved her shoulders. “What now?” she said.

“Now he's gone. He walked out of this house and said he'll never come
back.”

Momma said, “He's done it before. He'll be back.”

And what Emma Melville didn't like she ignored. “He said never. He
said nothing could drag him back. He said he'd rather sleep in people's
barns than come back here.”

He had heard crying before, but nothing in ten years of listening to just
about every kind of sound a farm or family had to offer had quite prepared
him for what he had to listen to now: first, deep and heavy breathing
uncontrolled, then hoarse rasping sounds building steadily until he might
have been listening to a cow coughing from a thistle stuck in her throat.
Suddenly the room smelled no longer of the bread they had brought in but
of some staler odour, onions, maybe, that stayed around soaked up in the
woodwork or wallpaper to fight and beat out anything new that might
enter. In the wicker chair he was aware of that and the sound too, and, no
longer pretending to be reading the magazine, he watched the heaving
body of the woman with horror and fascination and then looked over to
his mother, green and solid across the table, thinking, even before she
noticed his staring,
Now, let's see you do your stuff
, in a manner he would
never have dared to speak aloud. But Momma's eyes caught his, and
maybe reading there just what thoughts went on behind, she got out of
her chair and said, “You go out to the car, Duke, and wait for me there.”

Still wanting to see how she worked her miracles, he said “No” and
barely got that one syllable out before she answered, “I said go out in the
car and wait. This is not for you to see.”

Or anyone else, he admitted. Still, she had brought him all the way over
here to see her in action and he did not want to miss it now. He said, “No,”
again.