Deluded Your Sailors (12 page)

—Would you like me or a nurse to stay in the room?

—For the last time, Gabriel didn't hurt me. I don't think he could.

—You can't be too careful. Here's a card with a number to call if you change your mind. I'll go arrange for your crutches.

She left, and a few moments later, Gabriel rushed in. —Jesus, Dory, you look like someone shoved ya down the stairs. Y'all right, or wha?

Dorinda rested her forehead on her hand and cried. Gabriel rolled up a magazine and quickly, capably, whacked two wasps to death.

Fresh from a binge and preparing to purge, Nichole decided first to call the hospital and check on Seth. She'd been barred from staying in the ER with him, not being immediate family, so she figured this time she'd lie if necessary.
Lie, and say what? ‘Sister' is
no good. ‘Some chick he thought was a hooker,' yeah, go with that.
‘Cousin' is the best you can do, and even that's a stretch.

Why do you even care?

She caught her fierce reflection in the mirror as she laid out her purging tools. The stiffened welts on her hands and forearms made this difficult. She recalled a nurse's advice that her own stings might make her sick and sleepy later.

Should market this as a kit in a pretty box, like a tampon multi-pack.
It's entirely possible to die from wasp venom. I care because I
care. Isn't that enough?

The phone rang.

How to make a boy call? Either get in the shower or get ready for the private and oh-so-intimate ritual of purge-o-rama.

Rang again.

Tip #3: Before you stick your fingers in and out your throat,
drink, like, omg, TONS of salt water… or, like, go inhale the North
Atlantic, you big fat failure bitch… and like, binge on smooth foods,
right? Stringy stuff like beef gets caught in the drain.

Three rings.
Fucking hell.
Nichole threw the canister of salt into the sink and ran for the phone. —Hello?

—I think I remember.

—Hello?

—Out in the graveyard, with the incense. I didn't mean it. Nichole?

—Who is this?

—I am no longer sure. I've so long gone a-roving that my legs fell off, out there in the lamplight. Do you remember lying on top of
Newsbird
's heaped wreckage?

Newsbird
, the little yellow Tiger Moth her great-uncle had loved to fly, had crashed while looking for a girl lost in the deep woods near Port au Mal. Little Sally Saucer, crack goes the breakdown: a few years ago, Nichole drove out to Port au Mal, burning like a fat fire with need and desire to rebuild that plane, make art out of it. So many plans. An elderly man, white hair, white beard, aglow it seemed at the time, talked to her politely, talked her down, called an ambulance but got a hearse.
Charming.
That hallucination earned a Thorazine weekend, but then how else had she gotten to the hospital?

—Nichole, do you remember?

—Reverend Winslow?

Elias Winslow sighed. —Dust on my teeth. Dust closes in. I think I've fallen.

—Are you hurt?

—Could you come?

—Reverend Winslow, my hands – you're a two-hour drive away.

Silence.

—Is there someone else I can call for you, Reverend, someone in the area?

—I think I've fallen. But I can't remember. Do you remember? I know you remember the fierce dream of the knife, how you fought.

The two litres or so of ice milk in Nichole's stomach swished and gurgled. She'd soon lose her purging window. —Damn, I got the order wrong, anyway. Salt water first.

—What about salt water? Nichole? Can you come see me?

—Do you need an ambulance?

—No. I need to talk to you.

Nichole suddenly heard in Winslow's voice what she'd seen in Gabriel's eyes, Seth's eyes, in Claire's eyes as she lay dying.

—I'll be leaving in five minutes, Reverend.

Darkness and coyotes made the rectory seem even smaller. Nichole expected the darkness, despite the electrical wires connected to the little house. The coyotes, brazen but quiet, almost encircling the rectory, surprised her. Slowly retreating as she got closer, the coyotes acted as a wayward escort. Their eyes reflected back her headlight beams, and they seemed to gesture with their heads to the fog in the bay.

Keys spiking between her fingers and reinforcing her fist, Nichole walked like a Wright: head up, shoulders back, stride long. Oh, such purpose. She felt sleepy.

Reverend Winslow spoke from his doorway; he seemed to fill the entire space and yet cringe at the same time. —I am happy to see you.

Compelled yet free, much as she'd felt when Seth landed at her feet on Water Street – just walk away, no, just try to help – Nichole touched Winslow on the shoulder. His boniness shocked her, but at least he felt warm. —And I'm happy to see you're all right.

He led her inside, to the blue glow of his laptop. The only electrically powered item in the rectory, the laptop hummed very loudly. No clock, refrigerator or baseboard heater competed. Accepting an invitation to sit down, Nichole recognized that the laptop sat on the hearth of a crumbling chimney. Old and sour clothes padded the hard seat of the wooden armchair. Dust flew with each human movement, and as Nichole's eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw Elias Winslow wipe the space immediately before his face the way he might wipe an obscured window. Then he clicked an object free of his belt and gave it to Nichole.

A very old knife.

—Dear girl, what happened to your hands?

—Why are you giving me a knife?

—Ever been to sea, Nichole?

She snorted. Yes now, twenty-first century Newfoundlander raised in the city on Canadian and American television, Toronto, Bangor and Detroit. No dialect allowed in the house, fish rarely eaten, let alone ever handled. Out on the water every day, sure. Cue Frank Zappa: townie girl, she's a townie girl. —I get seasick.

—Answer my question.

Just like a kitten a-gnawin fresh fish. We'll rant and we'll roar...
—Once, my grandfather Wright took me out, for a treat. Because I behaved so nicely. Some friend of his had a yacht. Just him and a bunch of other old men.

Socks rolled down. Dirty nails and bad breath. I got so sick. Kept
crying and swallowing back the snot. Only made it worse. But that's
all.

(Let's get you cleaned up down there, Nichole)

—Can you remember, Nichole?

—No.

—Do you remember, Nichole.

(on deck and below)
—No!

—Will you remember?

—Reverend Winslow, I'm really tired, and I drove all the way out here from town –

—Why do you think you dreamt of this knife?

Nichole turned the knife over in her palm, trying to see it better by the laptop's light. Here, in the dark with some strange and quite likely crazy dude sporting a robe of God, it seemed safe to speak.

—Because I had to defend myself. Been fucked-over.

—A nice girl from a family like yours?

Nichole gagged.

Reverend Winslow stood behind her now, holding back her long hair as she leant forward to vomit. Not old bile and curdled ice milk but a clump of old wounded flesh, needles of pine and spruce, and something shiny. Whitish liquid oozed from it, formed a puddle.

Elias Winslow drew an old blanket round Nichole's shoulders. —It's a bezoar. A combination of things you've swallowed but couldn't digest. People once thought them antidotes for all poisons. That one is very old; it has wanted to come up for some time.

Yellowjackets hissed, unseen; Nichole wondered if they'd stuck to her clothes. Gasping, she swatted round her head and finally spoke. —Feel like I just heaved up a rock.

—Very well done, my dear. Now tell me. And be honest. Why did you come out here?

—Not to puke on your fireplace, I promise. I guess because you sounded so sad.

—I think I fell. And then I got lost in a creation story. They're happening all the time. It's no trouble at all to trip and fall face-first into one. I hope I get this right. It began like this. I screamed it. Yes: I watched him to pry her fingers loose from the edge of his kayak, and he spoke through tears. ‘For all that is sacred, daughter, I beg thee, plead with thee, let go. Rape, yes, I believe thee, and I do not blame thee, but thy hunger trails famine behind it. I cannot save thee. Must not.' And suddenly I screamed ‘Let go!' And I fell. Face-first.

My boneblade knife broke – not the one I gave you, no, I stole that from Finn – and mangled his daughter's fingers –
my
daughter's fingers. We murmured to her how the cold salt water would soon numb her past all caring. But her strength, her weight, her fingers, tipping us – did she want to drown me, her own father? The mercy of cold. Her pregnant belly knocked the kayak, but her remaining fingers strained to right it.

My daughter, my beautiful, loyal, violated or willingly ruined daughter, would not drown me, though I would drown her. Seven fingers gone, floating on the grey waves. And on those waves, from the torn muscle and cracked bone of severed fingers, trickled many spheres, tiny and dark, first dull, then glittering. She moaned, just once, as salt water washed over her nine ragged stumps. I, her father, eyed the distance between my blade and her remaining finger. Ice sparkled in her long hair, long and strung out like the night sky, phosphorescence imitating starlight.

One finger.

One daughter. Monstrously pregnant. By a dog, some said. She was so hungry.

The wind quickened. Each sphere – millions of them now – grew, strained, burst like an infected cell spewing a virus, like a star gone supernova. Light and particle and wave, all at the one time, and then thousands of animals running and swimming and flying. Then creatures like me, airless, winged, tailed, naked and confused, spinning, slowly at first, like individual storms seen from far above, then faster. Out here, far from shore, a father dark with honour and murder: I saw it. I remember. Glass shattered, as it would thousands of years later when I dropped a compass.

I slashed and cursed then, afraid of her. I sang to her. I called her a whore. The hairless winged ones spun round us, more of them than stars, however blasphemous the observation, and I grew wings again. It hurt. But as a father, I felt the slap of the water and saved no one. Fortunate Abraham.

And then my daughter smiled and let go.

I spun again, nearly out of pain.
Aurora borealis
shimmered, beckoned me. I felt like wave and particle at once and wanted clarity. So I stretched out and touched snow.

Fell.

The wings clung to my back, tight as lichen. Barefoot on tundra, on ice floes, arm stretched to the sky, I begged God to take me back. Instead, as I bent over in the cold, I hardened. Muscle, blood and skin. Bonecage.

I finished falling.

Bogs. Barrens. Where I – not born, just made aware. Have You not granted me this defiance? Will? Do You not therefore beg me to defy You? I can leap across oceans and do not drown, because time and bones knit.

Now I steal. Back to the island – when did You bring me here? I did not choose to come here myself. An island, crusted round with nennorluks and kraken and fish and gulls?

I stole the sailmaker's secret knife. You hear me? I
stole
it. Because You, o Merciful One, banished me here with Your beloved.

And you, Nichole, your melancholy crowd of Wrights? The first one arrived here in 1750, quite some time before I could fully materialize as a man. I watched John Cannard, watched your Wrights. Fingering that stolen knife and sucking it some nights, the knife and its intertwined players, and that strange woman with her one swollen breast. I stole her knife and drank her misplaced light and anger before I thinned out like fog, because - no! I will
not
die, not yet. This morning I tottered round my parlour, arms warped out like black spruce branches, because I wanted to spin. Why do I study this Nichole girl? What was my name before I chose ‘Elias Winslow'?

Assigned. Assigned to the last of the Wrights. Very good. I shall do battle with Nichole Wright. I must. No, no, this is stupid.

I will, I will, I will.

How shall I greet her?

Reverend Winslow's voice eddied out, and his chin fell to his chest. Nichole watched him a moment, making reasonably sure he'd fallen asleep before placing the blanket warming her shoulders around his. The invisible yellowjackets had gone quiet; the only hiss came from the waves on the near shore. The bezoar still leaked.

How shall you greet me? I think you just did.

Winslow took a deep breath and shifted in his chair. —I hope I've explained myself.

Nichole would have stifled the whole scene – she had a talent for stifling scenes, strangling the newborn breath out of them (
whore, murdering failure whore
) – except she touched the bezoar.

Pricked her finger on a pine needle.

Winslow chuckled.—Waiting to fall asleep for a hundred years?

Nichole sucked the drop of blood from her skin and looked into Winslow's eyes.
Why did I ever fear you?

—Nichole, could you please help me take off my shirt?

And why the hell don't I have the sense to fear you now?

Hand stiff, she lifted his robes up over his head, revealing a white shirt and brown pants, size small, at most. So thin.

Shirt unbuttoned, Elias Winslow shrugged. As he bent forward a bit, the laptop light shone on the tight and translucent skin of his shoulders. Beneath his skin, something the colours of lichen but the shape of many feathers and dormant wasps subtly rippled.

Winslow wept and smiled. —I've fallen. Not Lucifer. Just one of thousands. Struggle and defy. I fell.

—I believe you.

Nichole watched relief take Winslow like an intravenous narcotic taking a pain-wracked patient: rough and artificial grace, but acceptable.