The Brides of Rollrock Island (28 page)

Next day after school, with the boats gone out, I decided I would not head for home just yet, to sit oppressed by my mam’s sorrows another afternoon, with no Dad to busy about and keep cheerful for. I strolled instead down to the seafront. It was quite sunless, and a raw wind gusted, strongly enough to knock me off balance now and then. I hardly met a soul along the way, and those I did were scurrying between one shelter and another. My town had become an entirely charmless and cheerless place, and the shadow of Aggie’s death hung like a low cloud over it, or like sea-fog rolled into the streets.

I reached the harbor beach and leaned on the rail, watching the far waters heaped up gray. They seemed higher than my head, yet by some miracle they did not tumble forward and drown me. Here, closer, the water threw itself onto the stones as if cross with them, and it was hard not to see again white Aggie and her black coat caught near her in the edge there.
Free of suffering
, that mam had said in the crowd of us, as if there were nothing else for Aggie on this island, no man who loved her and no boys depending on her, no beautiful birds, no laughter with her sisters, nothing that could make up for the pain of living out of the sea.

The wind made my ear ache, so I turned my face into it and plodded past the northern mole to where the larger sea stretched
away, and the proper sandy beach, the dunes’ fine hairs blown back from their foreheads, opposite the lumpy water. The witches’ house was buried in among them somewhere, with Misskaella in it, and Trudle hardly less fearsome, and Trudle’s two wild daughters, who did not come to school and were not made to. I shivered at the thought of them, wild in that weird cottage.
They
could put an end to all our sorrows, those witches. They could refuse to bring wives out of the sea. They might terrify the men into agreeing that the coats be unlocked. Or could they magic them some way? I hardly knew what they were capable of. But if anyone could change the way marriage was done on Rollrock, those two women could.

But why would they? For it suited them, all the money they made from the bringing out and the blanket knitting. Why would they be moved by a boy’s plea for his mother, to restore her to her home and happiness, to set things right for her? Misskaella had no heart at all, and was training Trudle up to have none either. She had not yet managed to shift Trudle’s interest from any full-grown man who wandered by, but sea-wives and children they were both pleased largely to ignore.

I stared again out to sea, to the horizon, and the sky bleached of all promise above it. But then in among the mole-rocks an arm lifted and dropped. I worked out a bit of black, which was hair flopping in the wind, and a pale spot that was boy-face. I didn’t care who it was; it was not a mam or a dad or a witch, and greeting this someone would bring me out of my downcast mood. I slithered down the sand to the beach, and walked along beside the mole-rocks to below him. It was Toddy Marten, seated in there
where he could see forever and not be seen unless he chose. He swayed and he sang, wandering in his own head, swimming his own private ocean. Then he lifted something up from between his feet—ah, it was a spirit flask—and drank from it.

“Dan’l Mallett!” he cried as he distinguished me from the other rocks climbing toward him. “What brings you here this fine day, sirrah?” And he put out his hand like an old gaffer from a village seat.

I shook it, cold frog that it was. “What are you up to out here?” I sat my bottom to the wet sand in the cavity next to him and saw the attraction of the place. Potshead might not exist, the mole hid it so well behind us.

“What am I up to? Why, I am drinking.”

“So I see. Won’t your dad thrash you, taking his spirit?”

“Maybe he will,” said Toddy cheerily. “Maybe I will thrash him back—and maybe my granddad too—and maybe my
great-
granddad, for having made the mess we’re all in. Here, Daniel, have a slosh of it. It is like carrying hot coals in your stomach. It warms all of you, right out to the toenails.” He twisted out the cork and offered me the flask.

I lifted and tipped. The air off the stuff rushed out the neck and nipped my nose; the spirit itself ran cold and stinging across my tongue; a little spilled out the side and dripped to my collar, leaving a line of cold burning down from the corner of my mouth. “Wo-hoah.” I gave it back to him, and wiped my chin.

He swigged again. “And it makes you forget. It blurries out your brain. You can just sit here and sing. And then a friend comes along!” He flung his arm about my shoulders and growled
with satisfaction, and we both laughed at his pretending. “And everything is just fine and champion! Look at the lovely—the water, Daniel. And is that an albatross I see? Isn’t that good luck?”

“An albatross is, but that is a gannet.” I was still negotiating the spirit into myself; it felt as if it were eating holes in my gullet, making lacework of it.

“ ’Tis a fine bird, your gannet, no?”

“It is a very fine bird.”

“ ’T’s a
very
fine bird.” He took his arm away, so as to smack the cork back into the neck. Then he collapsed somewhat. “How is this, Dan’l? It is in-
suff’
rable the way things are, do you not think?”

“With the mams, you mean?”

“With the mams, with the dads, with
everyone
.” He spread his arms, as if those people were out there seaward, not behind us, and as if he would embrace them all.

“None of us is happy anymore,” I conceded.

“Was any of us
ever
happy, I’d like to know? It seems to me that Rollrock lads are only happy for as long as we’re too little to see that we
oughtn’t
to be happy. Soon as we find that we might have sisters,
but don’t
, as soon as we see that our mams and grandmams are only our mams and grandmams by witch-work, why—” He shook his head at me impatiently, then waited for his eyes to catch up. “I don’t see why everyone’s fussing so,” he said more pettishly. “Who wants girls anyway? What are they good for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t ever known any besides Trudle’s.” Well, there was that red girl at Knocknee, her hair fizzing and flaming, her inquisitive eyes looking me up and down. But I could not be said to
know
her, exactly.

“And as babs? Gawd, that last one! Yawped all day and night until Mam took her down. Dad was glad to be rid of her as much as I was, the racketing. We could all get some sleep.”

We listened to his cruel words in our shelter there. Then—
doik!
—he pulled out the cork again and thrust the bottle at me, as much apologizing as daring me to drink more.

The second pull of spirit was gentler; it soothed the damages caused by the first. Watching Toddy’s throat jump around his next swallow, I told myself I must not do this again too soon. It was far too pleasant, too warming against the weather. Enough of it, and I should be agreeing with Toddy Marten; I should be agreeing with every Toddy Marten of this town; I should be blabbing out everything about my own mam and how she lived alone in her room under her weed, how we were helpless to help her though we had tried every remedy we knew of, and how
hard
it all was and oh the great
burdens
women were, were they not?

After the third pull I found it in me to take no more; I only kept Toddy company while he overdrank, and stopped him making too bad a mess of himself. When next he could in any way stand, I helped him up and wheedled and carried him home.

When we reached his door, “Just go in,” he said from his hung head. “There’s no point trying to get my mam up.”

I left him in his front room curled up in an armchair with a cup of water by him and a bowl to be sick in if he needed. The house smelt as ours did, as if a sea-fog had got into its bones, sour and cold. I was glad to leave it, as I’d been glad to avoid my own.

I took myself hill-walking, not wanting to present myself at home with spirit on my breath. Up over the top of Watch-Out I went and down, and right the way across the Spine and
to Windaway Peak, as far as that. I stood in the rain there and listened to the chattering of my teeth. Did my head ache from the drink, or from the cold rain’s drumming? Should I go back to my home, to my town, to those unhappy people, or should I stay here in the weather, the size of it and the cruelty, and the lessening light? The one choice seemed as unpleasant as the other.

In the end I turned without deciding to, and reminded my legs how to walk. It was a trudge home, and more of a trudge, and more. I thought I would never get there. But of course I did, and of course it was no better than outside in the wild, only a little warmer, and without the promise, at the end, of death by freezing.

I woke in the morning knowing what I must do. I ached all over, from my hair ends in to my heart. I sat up and regarded the different ordinarinesses of my room and its furnishings, the spills of light on the wall around my window curtain, as I moved around my idea, considering it from all sides. It held good—as far as anything could be thought good on Rollrock, in Potshead. At the very least, it would move us on into a
different
dreadfulness.

That afternoon I walked home from Wholeman’s hearth with the first part accomplished. Dad had stayed behind with his pipe and pals awhile, to talk that special dreary eldermen’s talk that I could not bear, but that gratified dads so.

Into our little house I broke, the seaweedy silence of it. I hummed part of a twiddling tune that Jerrolt Harding had been whistling up in the snug.

I went in to Mam. She was a low dark dune there. She was awake, though; her breathing was full of thoughts and pauses.

There was not much light; she still had the curtains across. I sat at her pillow edge beside her tear-salty hair. A scooped sea-heart lay in a saucer on the farther pillow, beginning to go rancid; the spoon was licked so clean, you’d mistake it for new-polished.

“Mam,” I said, and not lightly or cheeringly, “I have some news for you.”

She burrowed a little deeper into the blanket.

“Your son,” I said, “has got himself a position, as bottlewash at Wholeman’s.”

I had thought her still before, but now she was properly listening; not a leaf of seaweed moved.

“I’m a good lad, says Mister Wholeman. He says they can trust me. Can’t they.”

The dune quaked and her white face rolled up from under. “Did he take you to task,” she said, “for last winter and that business with the coats?”

“You heard about that?” Which of the boys had spread it among the mams? “He mentioned it,” I said. “I told him I would always show that room the proper respect.”

She crawled up to me. Powerful from under the blanket came her warmth and the smell of the warmed weed. I remembered that sea-smell on me, in the coatroom. Perhaps no boy had blabbed; perhaps the mams had smelt on all of us what we had done.

“Do you have a plan, Daniel?” she whispered. “Are you
scheming
something?”

“I am,” I said. The sight of her so close, so alert, so present
with me, made me breathless. I was frightened of the hope I had woken in her. “But I don’t know yet. I must work and show myself trustworthy, and watch and learn the habits and timings of things up there, and then scheme some more.”

She nodded. “Where is your dad?” she hissed.

“Still up there,” I said.

Mam swayed on her hands and knees. Even with the slight window shine in them, her eyes were unclear, hardly more than holes in her floating pale face. Out of them, her attention poured and poured at me.

“I know I don’t need to tell you,” she said low. And then she whispered, half strangled, “You must not say a word.”

“Not to anyone,” I said to her, as earnest as she could wish. “Don’t you worry. Not even to
myself
.”

She laughed suddenly, and knocked me to the bed, and squashed the breath out of me the way we had always liked to fight. She was still the stronger, but I was grown-up enough to be bottle boy, and I was beginning to see that I might soon have a chance against her. It was all darkness and strain and struggle a little while, and stifled laughter and threats. “You cannot hold me!” “Oh, I can!” “Weakling!” “Land-lad!”

She pinned and then released me, sprang back onto her haunches and the fight was over. “They will punish you, Daniel,” she said. “Not for freeing me, but for showing other lads that it can be done.”

“I don’t care,” I said, panting. “You will be home by then.”

“Foolish boy,” she said fondly, and her thin hand reached through the dimness, pushed my hair behind my ear, tickled down
my neck and along my collarbone. Then she slapped my cheek twice, lightly. “Let me think on this. Out of here, laddie-lad, before your dad comes. Just a glance at us and he’ll know we’re up to something. Go.”