The Brides of Rollrock Island (16 page)

A
clump of us lads was fighting on the northern mole. The wind carried the first bite of winter in it; the water fussed and jostled on three sides of us.

I had Harvey Newsom down and was sitting on him. I’d no advantage of weight, but he’d clouted me on the side of my head, and my rage was pumping from that. And he was laughing at me—that made me stronger, and him weaker. His bright red cheeks and his orange curls glowed against the wet black cobbles. He flung up names:
piece of tripe
and
cat meat
and
fingerling
. His mouth was a mess of half-grown teeth, like all of our mouths lately. I sat over him shaking his shirt, punching his shoulders into the ground.

Then he stopped, and looked up at me sharply through his watery eyes. I saw the next insult occur to him, saw him hesitate, saw him throw caution to the winds. “Your dad is old as a granddad,” he said. “And your mam has hair like a man’s, and the biggest arse in Potshead.”

Well, it didn’t matter what size I was then: I laid into him and didn’t stop. His words poured power into me, poured size, made a brute of me, a brute with fine fast sight, seeing openings and throwing my fists and feet in, my knees. At first he kept laughing, delighted to have enraged me, and then he was too busy to laugh, trying to cover himself—and then, when he saw how much I still had boiled up in myself to deliver, he began to beg for mercy.

I felt I would never finish with him, but I could also feel tears coming, and only my mam was ever allowed to see me cry. I leaped up, gave him a couple of kicks for good measure and ran away along the mole, his words on fire in me, hissing and crackling, pleased with themselves.

The truth was, I had never noticed, before I heard it from Harvey’s fat face, that my mam was round and small, when everyone else’s mams were lean and tall; that her hair was not black silk like other mams’, but red curls, as men’s was if they let it grow; that her skin freckled like a dad’s if she caught any sun, rather than honey-goldening as most mams’ did in the summer. It was only as I ran up the lanes with a sob ready in my throat that I properly saw these differences, and felt dismay that they could be used against me. And why
was
Mam so different in shape and color? Why
was
her way of cooking, and speaking, and houseworking, different from the other mams’? I had never realized, so I had never asked.

I ran up home. I flew in, and straight to her at the sink in the scullery; I flung myself at her bottom as if I would cover it forever from the taunts of such as Harvey Newsom; I grasped her waist and buried my face in her. I was cold and windblown and full of rage and terror; she was warm and solid and smelled of home.

“Oh my gracious! What is this?” She dealt with the plate she was washing, then put her warm damp hand to my head as she turned in my arms. “Are you hurt, Dominic?”

I shook my head in the cushion of her front.

“What, then? Are they teasing you, calling you names?” She laughed somewhat through her sympathy, at my passion.

I shook my head even more fiercely. I could not have held her tighter. I didn’t know what to want, whether to hide myself away inside her, or to squeeze her down to a size where I could pocket her and protect her forever from any insult or other boy’s laughter.

“Are they calling
me
names?” she said with even more amusement.

I pulled away to look at her, my face fallen open in surprise. How could she know that? And how could she not mind?

Out sprang my tears; up burst the sob I had been containing, and another followed it, and another. I wept spots and splashes onto her pinny and skirt. My father came from the yard. “What’s up with the boy?” And she explained to him above me—I did not look, did not want to see the agedness of Dad that Harvey had drawn to my attention. They talked it back and forth between them and chuckled together, not at me but at the source of my tears, so that I knew, even as I sobbed, that we maintained our own customs and conventions here in this house, and that all was well in it, that nothing could injure either Mam or Dad, and certainly not the lip of Harvey Newsom. I was relieved for them, yet still cast away from them somehow. No matter how hard I clung here, or how soothingly they spoke overhead, I could never make Harvey unsay what he had said, so closely to my face that I
had felt his spittle on me. I could never unhear his words. I could never repair my mind to close over what had been opened up in it, the questions and the worrying, and the shame.

My dad and I sat before the fire. I was closer to it, right on the hearthstone, soggy with heat; my dad was more grown-up in his armchair. Mam had nipped down to Fisher’s, and then the rain had started; we were listening to it ticking against the window, wondering if it would worsen and strand her there.

It worsened. Drops collected on the window glass and streaked down; the patter and trickle on the roof slates, sounds that had been so cozy when she was here in the house with us, were alarming now that she was out in them.

Dad sat forward, hands on his firelit knees. “I should take her coat down to her,” he said.

“I can do it.” I sprang up.

But he stood too, and pressed me back onto the hearth. “I will. Can’t have you catching cold.”

With a whisk of his own coat and a bundling of Mam’s he was gone. He passed the window, downhill, in the cold gray afternoon.

I was too hot now. I climbed into Dad’s chair, and the sting when I sat back against my heated shirt and jumper made me gasp. I sat and waited and listened for the two of them outside. The house around me was one large comfort in the middle of the rain.

When they came back, I peered around under the chair’s wing
to watch them fuss and exclaim at the door. Dad took Mam’s milk bottle that she had bought, and she shrugged off her coat, and exchanged coat for bottle. The raindrops fell from both their hems to the rug there, and her hair straggled crimson on her cheeks. They were laughing about her having to be rescued, and how quickly and hard the rain had come on. “Specially to wet
me
, you would have thought, Dominic! See how it’s stopping, now that I’m home and safe in the dry?”

She carried the milk away to the kitchen, and Dad shook out and hung up their coats. I slid from his chair as he crossed back to the fire. I sat in Mam’s chair, which was smaller and of smoother cloth, with flowers. He resettled himself, and I waited for him to say one of the things he always said,
Two old codgers by the fire, then
, maybe, or
Oh, it’s a wild night to be out in
, which he would say whether it stormed or sat perfectly fine outside.

But he sat silent awhile, searching for his thoughts in the fire and smiling on them. Then he saw me watching, and his smile grew serious.

“When it comes to marrying, go to the mainland,” he said. “Get yourself a Cordlin woman, like your mother. That’s the proper kind of wife for men like us.”

Men like us?
Could he not see my legs stuck out here, the ankles only just off the seat? Could he not see how I had to lift my elbows almost level with my shoulders to rest them on the chair arms? Still, I was proud that he would call me a man in spite of these, would regard me as like himself; he charmed me with the idea of the two of us fronting up at life together in his mind.

I was so pleased and preoccupied with
men like us
that I let
the rest of what he said stay mysterious. It would never come to marrying, for me; I would always be a boy, running and fishing and fighting and mucking about in coracles. I would never want more than that.

“Harvey Newsom is a turnip,” said Neville Trumbell.

We were up on Whistle Top, with the whole town below us, and no one coming up the path. There was a springish wind about—maybe its warmth, and grassiness, and sea salt had made so much talk fountain out of me.

“Everyone knows,” Neville went on. “Newsoms will say anything to hurt you. They’ve all got that nastiness. Their dad was always picking fights up at Wholeman’s—you know that. That’s why he has to drink at his home.”

“It’s true.” I admired how Neville could dismiss Harvey’s words, how he did not let them stay and burn in him. They had never stopped burning in me since Harvey had said them.

“Everyone knows too about the mams. All the mams were like your mam once, and like our dads. They were of a piece, women and men the same.”

“They were?” I could not imagine such a thing.

“Oh yes. Didn’t your dad tell you? Or your mam, more likely? Course, she wasn’t here then; your dad went to mainland and fetched her in. But she was from an old Rollrock family—Trenchers, they were. She knew what she was coming to. Back in our dads’ times, it was, and our granddads’, some of us. None of
these other mams were about then. They were in the sea, being their sea-selves.”

I stared down upon the rumpled little jigsaw that was Potshead, with Meehan’s cherry tree coming into blossom in the nearest yard. I did know that, about the mams; I had heard and known about it all my life, that older world, that angrier. But somehow I had never properly listened and thought and put it together.

“Where did they go, then, the red ones?” I asked. “What happened to them?”

“Oh, they left,” said Neville. “All of them, of their own accord, in a great temper.”

“What did they have to be angry about?”

“Nothing,” said Neville. “They were just like that, says my dad. You’d only to give them
Good morning
and they’d go off at you like a cracked hen. They hated everything and everybody. We’re well rid of them, he says.”

“Hmph,” I said. “But my mam is not like that.”

“I know.” His face was clenched to hold a grass stalk in his lips the way some old men hold their pipe. “I said that to him once.
Dominic’s mam is peaceable enough
, I said.
But look to Misskaella
, he said.
You cannot get much fierier or fiercer than that
. He said your mam must not be full red-woman. She must have seal in her somewhere, he reckons.”

“You think?”

“I don’t think, no. Or why would your dad have gone all that way to get her, if he didn’t want her pure? That was the whole point.”

I nodded, though I had no idea. I’d no idea about any of this,
and I did not like to think of my mam and dad being passed about as ordinary Potshead gossip and legend.

“Besides.” Neville’s whole face changed, grinning, becoming boy again. “I like your mam’s arse. She makes a change, to walk along behind, the way she flubbles.”

I sprang at him with my fists, and he parried me, laughing, and that was the end of that conversation.

I was rising twelve when my dad died, one dark winter. He took the heart out of us, Mam and me, for a good while there; we washed and buried him, and then we sat about. Though the island thawed and seeped around us, still we stayed frozen, she and I. We could not be apart, each alone with this changed arrangement of things; we could not be together, knowing what we had lost with Dad.

People who were not Malletts, their lives went on around us, and they had never looked more peculiar to me than they did from within the cold shell of our mourning. The rude red men strode about, the dark silk-haired women with their soft smiles and their sea-singing moved vaguely about the town, and all of them seemed foreign, as did the boys, my fellows, who were mixtures of their mams and dads. Some were completely red after their fathers, and others had hair that fell flat, or that drink-of-water build of their mother, or her big dark eyes, or something of her floating manner. Whether red or black, they seemed quite distinct in nature from me, they were so energetic and enterprising,
they laughed so easily, and brought such passion to anything they talked about.