The Brides of Rollrock Island (6 page)

Finally the socks arrived back at me, everyone having had their fondle and wonder over them. I smoothed them on my knee, imagining them lying on the sunlit snowdrift awaiting me, trying to see the shape of the person who had come along, perhaps before dawn so that no one else would spy them, and left them there and hurried away.

Fisher’s great-grandfather was a little wizened man who sat blanketed by the fire in the store. I idled nearby. It was hard to get him alone, for everyone who came in made chat with him—but if I had chosen a quieter time, people would have remarked on my visit.

He farewelled Granger’s dad. His gaze fell to me, but skimmed straight past, for I was of no account to him, some staring girl-child.

There was a good disguising noise of Missus Fisher making hearty talk with Blair Gower at the counter, and for the moment no one else was in the shop. “I was wondering,” I said, standing forward.

The old man set his jaw, his face showing none of the cheerful
creases he had presented Mister Granger with. “You were wondering? Yes, these are all my own teeth. That is what most children wonder, whose old ones keep their teeths in a jar, or manage without.”

“I wondered if you knew anything about seals and seal-people.”

Only now, when he went still, did I realize how much all of him had been tinily, busily moving. He ceased blinking; I looked into his staring gray eyes and thought he must have blinked most of the blue from them. In them I saw a Fisher I’d never suspected was there, from the time before he knew everything, when he could still be surprised or frightened. Just for a moment I saw that Fisher, before the granddad-Fisher covered him up, blinking several times to make up for the pause before.

“I am not
that
old,” he said.

“I didn’t mean you were,” I said. “Only, things you may have heard, from
your
old folk.”

“Oh no,” he said quickly. “I was never privy.” He pulled his blanket higher on his lap. “Missus Fisher!” he cried out, and I stepped back from him, startled.

“Yes, Pa?” came from the counter, and Missus Fisher and Gower glanced across, patience in both their faces.

“Some tea, if you’d please, when you have the time.”

When Gower had gone out the door and Missus Fisher to the back room, old Fisher shafted me a look and said in a low voice, “I know nothing, girl, about any of that, nothing.”

I did not believe him; nobody so old could know
nothing
. I waited in case he should say more, but he ignored me, and then I must stand aside to let Missus Fisher through with the rattling cup
and saucer. There was an amount of fussing to do, to set the tea where the old man wanted it, and warn him of its hotness, and be told not to think him a fool, and during this I lost heart, and eased myself away along the rows of sacks and barrels.

Bustling back to her counter, “Girl!” called Missus Fisher. “Here.”

She unlocked the money drawer and took out a coin; it shone silver. “He says you’re to have a shilling.”

“A shilling?” I was so astonished that I all but forgot what a shilling was. The word’s sounds flew out of my mouth; the thing shone in the air. I felt a crashing shame. How would I hide the coin from Billy and my sisters, from Mam and Dad? And now Missus Fisher knew too. She might not know why her great-grandfather-in-law was being so generous, but she would know that he did not give shillings out to every child who came by. I had marked myself; she knew there was something odd about me—and how many other people would she tell?

I shook my head.

“He’s quite insistent, my darling,” she said unfriendlily. “Come, take it.” She shook it. She neither smiled nor frowned, but her eyes worked on me. If I refused or ran away, she would think me even more peculiar. “It won’t bite you. There.” And the thing, all cold except where Missus Fisher’s fingers had held it so long, was in my hand. “Now run along and put it somewhere safe.”

Slowly, numbly, I walked up the town through the fine gray rain. What had I done, what had I brought on myself? Back home, I slid the shilling into the toe of one of the Cordlin socks; it was as if I had stolen it, the uncomfortable feelings that clustered around
it. I was confused by its very shillingness; farthings and ha’pennies were all I had ever bargained with. Such a quantity of sweets was available to me now, I could hardly do the sums of it, and when I attempted them, I knew that I could never hide so much, or eat it all myself. And if I shared, everyone would ask me how I came by such a feast, and hear about Mister Fisher’s favor, and wonder aloud what kind of nuisance I had been, that he had paid me so handsomely to keep away from him.

I had not been down to Crescent Corner in a while. After Ambler’s visit and the Cordlin bun and the socks and the shilling, I was too conscious of the town’s eyes on me.

But I did miss seeing the seals, however embarrassed I had been by their pursuing me into town. Whenever I took off the bands to wash myself, in among the earth’s up-pouring and the sea’s I felt the knowledge that the herd was there, an itch upon my mind; this faded in the autumn as they left on their great migration, but the following spring it returned when they assembled at the Crescent again.

When the sisters suggested walking down to the seal nursery, I thought I might risk going too. I dawdled along behind them on the field road, careful not to seem too eager. I stood along the cliff top with them, and closed my lips on the suggestion that we go down to see the seal babs closer. Grassy uttered it, though, and down we went.

At the bottom Ann Jelly and Tatty danced out across the
rocks. The others stood at the foot of the path, Bee calling out warnings and Grassy and Lorel encouragement—“Go up and touch one! Pick up a bab, and we’ll take it home!”

I sat where the path ended in a wide step, and watched the silver-blue sweep of the ocean. When all the sisters had their backs to me, I loosened the tied bands on my shoulder, and took a long, deep look at the seals, and let them see me. Up they reared, ready to surge at me. My nearer sisters screamed at the sudden motion, the sudden attention, which they thought was directed at them, me being behind them. Tatty and Ann Jelly screamed too, and leaped back toward us, dodging the woken seals.

I tied the ties again as they squealed and laughed. I had seen what I wanted to see. Throughout each seal, what I had thought randomly scattered lights, each as bright as the other and all doing the same thing, were in fact different parts, in bud, of the human system. Solider, brighter buds lodged in the seal’s joints. Smaller, paler ones, perhaps for the fine skin and hairs, floated closer to the surface, out to the tips of the tail and flippers, and some even out along the seal whiskers. Middling ones swam about between, and among them ghosted all-but-invisible lights, which must be compressed forms of mind, maybe, of spirit or feelings. With a little more looking—but the herd’s movements would have given me away if I’d watched much longer—I would have seen how they all came together, the paths they must be drawn along if they were to assemble rightly into human form. For now, I only saw that there
was
a system to them—and that it was a complete system, that to make a woman within a seal, every last one of those buds or stars, those flickers or ghosts, must be gathered to the center. I saw the size of the operation, how complicated it would be.

But it could be done. And the very looking had done something to me, calling out some budding thing inside me too, the lights and lines of a braver and steadier Misskaella who floated all potential inside my thickset, unpromising shape. Contemplating the seals and, eventually, bestirring myself to bring those seal-lights together would form that new Misskaella just as surely as it would form the shapes of women from the blubberous matter of seals.

“Look at Missk!” called Tatty from among the sisters. “She is under the spell of these seals.”

“Oh, do you wish you were a seal, Missk?” crooned Bee.

“She’s about the right shape for one,” said Grassy Ella.

“So unkind!” But Lorel was laughing as she pushed Grassy off the rock.

Grassy splashed into a shallow pool and occupied them all with her complaining, which I was glad of, for it took their eyes from me. They did not see, then, the sting of Grassy’s insult, or the worse shame of the truth in Tatty’s words, and the flush both sent across my face. The crossed bands might protect me from seal-enchantment, but they left me as vulnerable to my sisters’ barbs as I had ever been.

For a time, when I went each morning for my visit to the privy I hurried up the side of the house, bending to scuttle unseen below the window. I checked our step for gifts, and most days it was blessedly empty. But I once snatched up a lace-edged handkerchief, the letters
MP
embroidered into its corner with a great
deal of effort and grime. Another time a shining pointed tooth, of a whale by the size of it, stood there as if grown from the step, with a picture scratched into its side and black rubbed in to show it, a rendition of the garth-wall woman coming out of the sealskin.

I hid the handkerchief in my pocket, but the whale tooth was so heavy I must weasel my way back through the house and hide it with the socks and the shilling, up the back of my drawer. When I found a moment to take it out again, in private, I saw that a second woman was carved into the side of the whale tooth, a hooded figure, her face all wrinkles, her hands reaching around the curve of the tooth, clawing toward the seal-woman. A line was incised around the whole tooth, making the horizon. In the sky a full moon hung, and that was the best-carved part of all the picture, the pitted face of it; whoever had scratched it had sat under the moon itself, and by its light had matched it mark for mark.

Some time elapsed then, with no further gifts arriving. I told myself hopefully that the tooth’s magnificence and mystery meant the end of the gift-giving, because nothing could be more exotic or expensive. And I ceased my morning ritual.

But in late spring a bunch of cornflowers was left, tied with a blue ribbon.

“Ooh, ooh!” said the girls as Bee turned with the flowers from the morning door. “Misskaella’s sweetheart has been by again!”

“Take them, take them, Miss! They’re for you! See? They have an
M
on them, for
Misskaella
.”

But I clasped my hands together behind my back when Bee thrust the flowers at me. The shaky curls of the old-fashioned
M
, penciled on a paper scrap tucked under the ribbon, looked like a
thread of my own fear unraveling; the flowers bristled at me. “I don’t want them.”

“Take them!” Tatty said louder. “We must get on!”

“And do what with them!”

“I don’t care—trample them underfoot if you want!” And she strode out past me and glared back from the lane outside.

The noise brought Mam, and she snatched the bothersome bunch from where Bee was using it to press me to the wall and enjoy my discomfort. “She won’t take them!” Bee whined.

“And neither she ought. Presents from strangers.” She frowned at the initial, examined the back of the paper, the
M
showing like the curled legs of a dead spider between her fingers.