The Island Walkers (11 page)

“Try to imagine,” Mann said, “another day like this. A hundred, five hundred years ago. Some things don’t change, at least not very quickly. This kind of light. The crickets. This has always been a good place to be. There are springs in the hillside, hardwood trees for timber and shade and fuel. Good soil. This view of the valley where you can see your friends or enemies approach.

“Of course, other people knew this place before Shade did — Indian people. I’ve found arrowheads in the hillside, bits of pottery. We call our town Attawan, after these people, but in fact we have no idea what they called themselves. It was the Hurons who called them the Attawan — the full name, the correct name, is actually Attawandaeron, quite a mouthful. The word means, ‘People who speak a slightly different language,’ and it tells us that the people who lived around here spoke an Iroquoian dialect, not too different from the Hurons’ own. Anyway, these people, the Attawandaeron, disappeared about four hundred years ago. Disappeared completely,” Mann added, and paused. A cricket went on turning its squeaky wheel. Faintly, mournfully, a diesel horn sounded beyond the town. With Mann’s word “disappeared,” some profound absence had been summoned. All felt it, and were held by it.

“What happened to them?” someone said finally, unable to bear the tension. There was a stir among the others, a deepening of attention: they had to know if they themselves had survived this absence.

Mann shrugged, and shook his head. “We don’t really know. They may have been wiped out by disease, or by Iroquois raiders coming up from the south. Maybe they made some bad political choice, you know, allied themselves with the wrong power. Maybe they didn’t keep up technologically — were too slow to get guns or
other things made of iron. In any case, they’re gone, and we’ve inherited these late-summer days of theirs, which they must have found as lovely as we find them.”

Mann paused, frowning at the ground as if slightly chagrined at his outburst of poetic sentiment. His audience remained still. He went on: “When Abraham Shade came here, in the early 1820s, he fell for this place immediately. We have his diaries’ word on that. He always said the place felt haunted to him. He and his family were the first whites to settle here, but he claimed he could sense the people who had lived here before, even though they’d been gone for, oh, two centuries or more at that point. It was his brother, John — John was a bit of a scholar, in an amateur nineteenth-century way — who told him what we know of the Indian people in this region. Shade decided to call the town after them. A lot of people didn’t like it at the time. There was quite a debate. But the name stuck …”

By moving his head slightly, Joe could see Anna Macrimmon. She was sitting on the ground, under an oak tree, with her hands clasped around her shins, her chin lifted a little as she listened.

They crowded into the long living room lined with books and comfortable-looking couches and chairs. Over the massive fieldstone fireplace hung a small, framed painting of mountains falling sheer to a glacial lake. In a corner sat a spinning wheel like some strange, upended wooden bicycle.

It was the first time Joe had been in Mann’s house, the first time he’d looked into the teacher’s private life, and he was alive to every object. At the same time he felt uncomfortable and rushed, aware of his stinking shirt, and of the others who, with no idea how important this all was, crowded around Mann like cattle. He hated having to share Mann’s house with them, hated that Anna Macrimmon had come on this day of all days, when he wasn’t ready for her. He could sense her, somewhere in the hot press of bodies behind him.

Mann said, “If you look down at the floor.”

Joe looked down miserably at the wide, darkly gleaming boards. A drop of his sweat fell.

“Usually, you’d expect pine floors in a pioneer house like this. But this is oak, two-inch oak laid across oak beams. In fact, again unusually, almost all the wood in the house is oak. Can anybody tell me why that might be?”

Silence met his question. The brown eyes in the expressionless face swept slowly over them, challenging. While the pendulum clock ticked from the mantelpiece, a faint nervous urgency spread among the students: they knew the teacher was capable of waiting minutes for an answer.

Joe put up his hand. Mann nodded at someone else.

Brad Long spoke in his deep, pleasant voice, which easily filled the room with its usual hint of happy scorn — surely it was all so obvious! “There was lots of oak around here — it was handy. And also, being the kind of guy he was, he knew he wanted to be number one, so he put in the best.”

“Good,” Mann said.

Joe burned at the lost compliment: he knew as much. But Brad wasn’t through.

“I guess he wanted us to stand here one day and admire him.” Brad raised his large hands and looked towards the ceiling, as if addressing a gallery of ancestors, looking down appreciatively on the scene from heaven. “Great floors, Abe!”

The class laughed. Joe thought he heard Anna Macrimmon’s voice behind him, silver among the rest.

They ate lunch outside. Joe took a sandwich and paper plate from the long table Mann had set out under the locusts and retreated to a shady spot near a concrete birdbath. Anna Macrimmon was still moving through the line. With her were Liz McVey and Sheila Benson, a pretty, sharp-featured girl with bouffanted hair and a hard, snorting laugh. They carried their plates to a little knoll under a tree
and sat on the ground, tugging their skirts over their knees. A few minutes later, Joe watched as Brad Long joined them. He lowered his rangy frame onto the dry grass at their feet, stretching himself out with all the ease in the world — a Roman at a banquet — before the prim statuary of their folded legs.

Brad raised his arm, gesturing lazily to make some point, and Joe saw how the cuff of his pale-blue shirt was turned back with a pleasing yet casual exactness, turned back once and kept there by some magical, gravity-defying power, unlike the cuffs of his own sad shirts, which fell down constantly unless they were rolled up several times. Now Brad’s laugh came, tolerant, self-enjoying, warm. Joe saw Anna Macrimmon shake her head in disbelief or denial, saw the heavy silk of her hair move like something alive. But she was smiling too, or fighting back a smile, as if to say, Go on with you.

A little way off, a group of Brad’s friends — boys from the North End gang — were watching Brad with barely suppressed merriment, as if he were doing what they hadn’t the nerve to try themselves.

Joe picked at his tuna-fish sandwich. Ever since he’d seen Anna Macrimmon that first afternoon on the river, she had seemed to exist for him only. And now she had become the property, in a sense, of everybody who cared to look at her, including Brad Long,
who had no idea who she was, what her true value was, not really
,

“Yugga.”

Smiley. He sat down cross-legged beside Joe, his plate loaded with booty.

“Food,” he grunted, playing the caveman. Joe looked away.

Mayonnaise leaked from Smiley’s mouth. “That new girl,” he said, “I keep thinkin’ I’ve seen her somewhere.”

“How could that be?” Joe said coldly.

Smiley ate with hunched, predatory enjoyment. “I dunno. It’s weird. She’s pretty good-lookin’.”

Joe said nothing. Smiley looked up with staring frankness, his mouth open.

“Don’t you think she’s good-lookin’?”

“She’s all right. I haven’t really noticed.”

“You should. She’s right over there.”

To Joe’s horror, Smiley pointed.

Joe looked off miserably across the lawn, over trembling islands of shade and sun, into a lilac bush. He wanted to start the day, his life, over again.

“Not there. Over there.”

“For Christ’s sake, I
know
where she is. Stop pointing!”

After a moment Smiley said, “I wonder what that thing is on her face — you see that?”

“No.”

“Look at it. It’s like some kind of burn.”

Joe lurched to his feet and started to walk quickly towards the house, picking his way among groups of students. Just then Mann emerged, carrying a pitcher of ice water. Normally Joe was happy to see the teacher. He liked to stop after class to talk with him, finding in his power of listening — that stillness — something that made his own thoughts rise and come clear. But he wasn’t ready for Mann now. He asked where the washroom was.

Mann put down his pitcher and led Joe through the house, which sprawled to the rear through a series of additions. The teacher moved with surprising swiftness, his small feet in their worn, pointed shoes pattering on the tiles. The bathroom was behind the kitchen. “The old summer kitchen,” Mann said, and as he stepped back to let Joe pass, the teacher touched him lightly on the back.

Joe closed the door, fit the bolt, stripped off his shirt, and began to wash his face and upper torso, sloshing up water almost wildly. His face in the mirror seemed an assembly of imperfections. Under his right eye, a pimple raised its minaret of shame. Patting himself dry, he studied a framed photo hanging beside the window. Two young men, both wearing shorts and white shirts, their arms draped loosely over each other’s shoulders, grinned back at him with abandoned smiles of pure happiness. Behind them soared the white, tentlike summit of a distant mountain. He saw with a start that one of the
men was Mann: Mann with dark curly hair, his eyes less pouched, Mann in the bright disguise of youth. The other man had the kind of smooth, almost feminine face Joe remembered from a painting he’d seen in a book: the unearthly face of an angel by Raphael. This is crazy, he thought, breaking suddenly from the image with a sense of alarm. I’ll speak to her. I have to speak to her.

He passed through the house with a feeling that he was living under a sentence, a feeling that he was being dragged forward in a kind of dream-state by his decision. And yet, the whole time, he told himself he was free: maybe he’d speak to her, maybe he wouldn’t. He was afraid of his own cowardice, and half-looking forward to its intervention. When he reached the front step he glanced across the lawn and saw with thudding heart that she had got up, that she was moving away from the others with a paper cup in her hand, following the hedge that ran from Mann’s yard into the adjacent property.

And then Mann was there. The teacher held up an old-fashioned-looking camera, with an accordion chamber of black fabric, and asked if he could take Joe’s picture. He’d taken every graduating class for years now, he said, candid shots, it had become a tradition. He positioned Joe against the door, softly gripping his biceps to move him back a little. As Mann frowned into his viewfinder, Joe watched Anna Macrimmon drift down the line of hedge, her head raised and tilted a bit to one side, as if skeptically.

“There we go. Handsomest fellow in the class,” Mann said with a grin. A moment later, laconically: “I see we have a new girl.”

“Yes.” Joe evaded the teacher’s eyes.

“Why don’t you introduce me to her?”

“I don’t really know her. She just came.”

“Then we’ll introduce each other.”

Walking with Mann under the locusts, he was under sentence again, marching out to his execution. They passed Smiley, who looked up from his sandwich. “Yugga,” his friend said quietly. As if he knew.

She was walking along the other side of a large garden, towards a belvedere on the brow of the hill. The untended garden belonged to the old Bannerman estate, which was now a nursing home: a tangled place where the surviving flowers fought silently with the weeds.

Mann was going on about the arrowheads and other artifacts he had found in the hill. Someone from the museum in Toronto was coming to have a look at the site. Joe nodded automatically, scarcely hearing.

Now she was in the belvedere, kneeling with one knee on the narrow wooden bench, looking into the valley. As they approached, she turned. Each time Joe saw her face it seemed new to him, a revelation. Again he saw that dart of amusement in her eyes, as if their arrival were the beginning of an adventure she had half-expected. But there was also a candour that chilled him. He wondered if she remembered him from the river.

Mann introduced himself and shook her hand. “This is Joe Walker, one of your classmates.”

“Yes,” she said, putting out her hand. Joe took it, and was conscious of its firmness in his, and of the coldness of his own.

She looked back to Mann. “I was just thinking about what you said. About how Shade fell in love with this place. Do you think certain places call to us?”

“I suppose it depends to some degree on your individual psychology,” Mann said, “and of course there’s the general human need for shelter. But there’s also something beyond those things. People, at least most of them, don’t like to pitch their tents just anywhere.”

She was watching the teacher with her head a little to the side, ignoring Joe. He stood like a servant, miserable and grateful.

“Take this place,” Mann said, gesturing to the valley behind her. “There’s something about it that satisfies a need.”

“Beauty,” she suggested.

“Yes, maybe it’s as simple as that,” the teacher said, his eyebrows going up.

“Or as complicated.” She was looking at Mann with a kind of fencing irony, clearly enjoying herself.

“Indeed. I wasn’t born here, not like Joe,” Mann said. Her gaze flicked over Joe and returned to the teacher. “But when I came — well, I was rather like Shade — I felt I belonged here.”

“It reminds me a little of Europe,” she said.

“Oh yes? What places?”

“Oh …” She trailed another, idle look over Joe. He had never in his life heard people discuss beauty as a thing in itself, as though it were possible to meet Beauty walking down Bridge Street. “The Dordogne, maybe, bits of Italy. You know, limestone and bridges. That
old
feeling.”

“Yes!” Mann said, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. When he smiled, which he did rarely, his face was radiant. “I’ve often felt that myself. The feeling of lives that have gone before. Of course the spirit is different here, and I’m afraid the food isn’t as good.”

“I don’t suppose,” she said.