The Island Walkers (14 page)

“This will teach you not to tease him,” Margaret said to her.

“I
never
,” Penny said and burst into tears.

Alf shot a glance at his wife. “This isn’t the time for a Sunday-school lesson.”

“Well, I’m just
saying
, this will teach us
all
,” Margaret said defensively. She could change directions as swiftly as a politician.

Alf nearly said, That’s not what you meant. But this was not the time for a game of deny and accuse. He could never beat her at that game anyway.

“What about Red?” Joe said. “Maybe he could find Jamie.”

The big dog had been trotting up and down the yard in a frenzy of impatience, whining and yelping, his ears pricking and laying back.

“More likely to find a skunk,” Alf said. “Better tie him up.”

He went into the house for his flashlight. When he came back out, Margaret urged him to call some of the neighbours. At first, Alf resisted. The prospect of a search party made his fear seem melodramatic. He didn’t want to look a fool in front of the Island men. “At least call Pete,” Margaret said.

“We’re losing time,” he said, still irritated with her.

“Alf, there’s so much ground to cover out there.”

“Call him,” Penny said. Everyone looked at her, startled by something in her voice. She was staring with perfect calm at Alf, and for that moment she had more authority than anyone in the family.

Alf went in to phone Pete. They hadn’t spoken since their quarrel.

“Pete,” he said, starting right in, “we’ve lost Jamie. I think he might be up the river.”

“I’ll be right over.”

They gathered in the backyard. Their neighbour, Bill Olmstead, had arrived too, drawn by Margaret’s shouting from the dyke, and Bill’s oldest son, Dick. Alf disliked both of them, fleshy, overtalkative men, the son a taller copy of the father. They were brimming with high spirits, and gave the impression that hunting for Jamie was some kind of adventure. Pete, though, was subdued. He had brought a rope.

Margaret and Penny came with them as far as the footbridge. They were going to stay at the house in case Jamie showed up. “Or if someone calls,” Alf said. He wouldn’t let himself think too clearly about who might call or for what reason. He knew the police wouldn’t call, they would arrive at the door.

“We’ll get him,” Alf said, and for a moment met his wife’s gaze. It was too dark to see her clearly, but something in her face seemed to reach towards him, and in an instant his hostility towards her evaporated. More than anyone, she — the two of them — knew what was at stake.

At the edge of Wiley’s farm, the men split up. Alf took the low trail, which followed the bends of the Atta through the woods. Over the high pasture to his left, the sky carried a last faint streak of iodine. He lashed his beam at the shrubs on the bank and out over the river, unable to resist the call of his fear. Of course, he wasn’t going to see Jamie floating down the middle of the Atta (he told himself), but it was the river that worried him. A night in the woods wouldn’t hurt the boy, but the water was the unknown factor here, the water jumping now in his beam, hurrying on with a purpose of its own. High in the south, a chalky, flat-sided moon had escaped the clouds.

He could hear the others shouting out Jamie’s name from the hills of the farm. He resisted shouting it himself, though the word “Jamie” kept rising in his throat. To shout seemed an act of desperation, and he was fighting desperation as though, once set loose, it might generate what he feared most. Then he heard Pete shout again, and almost as an echo, he shouted too: the word “Jamie” broke from him, leaping into the night sounding hoarser than he’d intended. He collected himself and shouted again, as his beam penetrated the saplings that had grown up at the edge of the dam. There was no response, or at least none audible over the steady bass hush of the water. For a few minutes he explored the neighbourhood of the dam, playing his light over the wide sweep of concrete, shiny with the water that skimmed
down its steep face, and into the mildly boiling pool at its base. He found the dam disheartening. It was so huge, the volumes of dark water packed behind it so great, that he was glad to continue on up the trail. In a grove of dead saplings he darted his light at a sudden gleam and saw the metal basket of an abandoned shopping cart.

He had walked on these paths all his life. He had played out here, fished, swum, he had even worked for a couple of summers for old man Wiley, at a dollar a day, weeding turnips, mucking out barns. Yet tonight the place seemed entirely new to him, as if he had never seen its true aspect, the malevolence lurking in a darkness that closed around his beam with a catlike swiftness, as though seeking to hide what he had narrowly missed. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. If the boy was conscious, he would surely hear their cries and call back. And if he wasn’t? Alf’s beam leapt between the trees, combed the undercover of tangled weeds, looking for a small, huddled body. Perhaps Jamie had knocked himself out, trying to climb a tree. Perhaps he had fainted with the pain of a broken leg. He tried to make orderly sweeps with the flashlight, but the density of the woods made a mockery of his system. He trekked through ferns — their brown, dying fronds flattened to the earth — and climbed the little hill to the swinging vines. There were footprints here, made by several shoes. Some seemed about the right size for Jamie, but he couldn’t be sure. He studied them, trying to force himself, unsuccessfully, to remember the pattern on the soles of his son’s shoes. The tracks seemed somewhat fresh, made in the last day or so. A little encouraged, he went on, under huge, leaning oaks. They had been giants when he was a boy. To his left the fields of Wiley’s farm — fields where he had once picked rocks and walked behind the hay wagon — had turned grey in the moonlight.

Again his light swept over the river. Sluggish water gleamed in its covert, alien life. Jamie could swim, but Alf’s father, too, had been able to swim. And so it came back to him, despite all his efforts to keep it at bay: that Sunday afternoon in June of 1952, when he’d looked out the front window and seen Gerry Milton, the Town Yard
foreman, pacing on the sidewalk as if he were undecided or lost, his rubber boots leaving faint, wet tracks on the concrete. They met at the front door. When Gerry told him, his face plaintive under his rumpled hair, his eyes boring into Alf’s as if he, Alf, might save
him
from this distress, it seemed to Alf that he had always known that his father was dead. He had known it for time out of mind, it was part of who he was and who his father was. Gerry was not giving him news, but only forcing his gaze to the side, towards a blackness that had always existed.

He had had to tell his mother. He led her to a chair while she cried,
What! What!
And he understood that she, too, already knew, had always known. Perhaps it was the war that had given her foreknowledge: she had already lost Joe, Alf’s brother. And now she knew, or had come within a hair of knowing, that her husband, too, was dead. He had been dead through all the forty-six years she’d known him, dead through their courtship on these same paths where he, Alf, was walking now, playing his feeble beam ahead of him, dead from the first moment he had taken breath and dead for a billion years: dead was inscribed in the bone, in the minuscule, pushing seed, in the whirling atom.

When he told her, her right arm flailed with a life of its own, as if she might push away the knowledge falling into the light. He had hated life at that moment, and he felt the same hate sickening in him now as he stopped and looked up through the treetops, where a few faint stars pulsed, to calm himself. He was in a rage against life, because this was what it came down to: the fear, and the fear entirely justified, because somewhere out there your own death, and the deaths of those you loved, was waiting for you. Life enticed you to love it. It lured you on with the sweet, terrible music of happiness. Life told you: Love, Get Married, Work, Hope, Pray, Put Everything on My Altar. And in the end it abandoned you without a backwards glance …

He followed the trail along the edge of the woods. He felt calmer now, and ice cold, set against life, determined to pluck his son from
its trap. He would find the boy if he had to die doing it. Beside him, the rough, weedy fields moved past in the moonlight. Then the trail descended to the bottomlands of the Atta. The area had changed since his boyhood. Then cows had grazed here, and kept the land clean and open. Now it was thick with wild fruit trees. Pale, narrow paths ran everywhere, a confusion in the grey, metalled moonlight.

“Jamie!” a voice cried distantly, and hope flared in him. Had they found him?

No one cried again. He went on. The little trees, like rough bouquets, seemed to stand in his beam as if expecting something, stupidly. Then the brush exploded beside him, and he whirled to meet the attack, his heart slamming. His beam just caught the fleeing deer, its white tail uplifted, bold as a placard, as it bounded away among the trees.

“Christ,” he said, and regretted swearing. He felt he had to keep himself pure or Jamie would not appear. He had to be clean, silent, calm. He went on, aware he no longer had a plan. He was simply following his instinct, following the paths to the north, searching in the mud for more running-shoe marks (he found none) through the great plain made by the oxbow, trekking on with a grim alertness. He could no longer hear anyone calling. Perhaps they had found him? “Jamie!” he cried, and his own voice came back to him, a much smaller cry from the wall of the valley.

Again he reached the river, and stood playing his beam over the grey water. There was something sinister about the water, furtive and scheming and hurrying to escape. A little rapid surfed along like a tribe of small water creatures, making their desolate way upstream. The air smelled of autumn, of decay, a chilling emptiness.

Upstream, a bit of the rapid seemed to detach itself: a scrap of whiteness moving erratically in the dark. He shone out his beam and it stopped. Jamie was there, in his white T-shirt and shorts, his eyes glassy, blinking in the light like an animal caught drinking. In a moment he would vanish.

“Jamie!”

“Dad!”

“Stay there! Jamie, don’t move! I’ll come to you!”

He moved around the edge of the black inlet that separated them, stumbling through thickets and water, the beam of his light darting back to Jamie continually. Then they were together, the boy in his arms.

His beam swept over a second pair of legs, also in shorts, standing about twenty feet away. There was a boy there, a dark-haired boy about Jamie’s age, his arm raised against the light. His little body in its red T-shirt was pulling slowly back, as if he meant to run away.

“Who’s that?” Alf said. He had let Jamie slip to the ground. The other boy, still held by the light, had put a start of fear in Alf, as if he were in some way involved in the danger to Jamie and was a threat yet; as though he had found only half of Jamie, and the other half remained to be brought to safety. He turned his beam back to his son, who was waving the other boy over.

“
Jamie! Jamie!
” voices cried from the hill.

“I got him!” Alf yelled.

A silence, then: “He’s got him! He’s got him!”

“Is that the Boileau boy?” Alf said.

“Billy,” Jamie said to the boy. “It’s all right. It’s my dad.” The Boileau boy was peering to see past the light, his black eyes fiercely suspicious. Alf was surprised to find the two of them together. The Boileaus were tough, poor. The boy’s uncle — or was it his cousin — had been in jail.

“He lost his dog,” Jamie said. “We tried to get it. We went up past the cave. We got lost.”

“Come here, son. It’s all right.”

The Boileau boy grinned a wooden grin and did not move.

The searchers returned in a group, jubilant under the lopsided moon. Jamie rode for a while on Alf’s shoulders. Pete offered to give
Billy a ride, but the boy shook his head and moved away, walking a little way off from the others and saying nothing, though from time to time he grinned that painful automatic grin, as though he thought it was required of him.

Beside Alf, Bill Olmstead was going on about how he had never had any doubt they’d find the boy. He branched into other stories, about lost children and lost dogs and the time he’d got lost himself, in the bush behind some cottage up north. And not one of those episodes had turned out badly, Bill declared, as if good fortune were only a matter of having a positive attitude.

Ahead of them, Pete was walking with his head down, the unused rope swinging in a coil from his hand. The sight moved Alf: the guy had come through for him, without a moment’s hesitation. Well, of course, he’d have done the same. Catching up to his friend, Alf put his hand on his shoulder. “Pete — thanks.” “Okay, buddy,” Pete said, avoiding Alf’s eyes and blurting out the words, as if they sprang from an emotion too powerful to be safely acknowledged.

Alf drove Billy home. The boy sat alertly on the edge of the Biscayne’s front seat, grunting yep or nope to Alf’s questions and watching every turn of the road. His hard little voice sounded trapped in his throat. There was something of a queer little man about him.

The Boileaus lived on the Flats, on the east side of town, in a plaster-and-lath cottage overshadowed by the rail embankment. One of the supports for the front porch had been replaced by the trunk of a birch tree. Pulling up at the curb, Alf looked at the curtainless front window and saw the flickering of a small television, the top of a couch, and a hole in the wall that showed the lath-work beneath. He wondered if Billy had even been missed. But then he saw Lucille Boileau trudging along the street from the direction of the river. When she saw the car, she stopped. Getting out, Alf shouted to her, “It’s all right, I’ve got him,” and watched as she buckled, as if struck in the stomach. She was still weeping when she came up to him.

She crushed Billy’s head against her. Then thrust him back abruptly, giving him a sharp slap on the side of the head. “You had me worried sick!”

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Alf said. “He was with my boy. They got lost up the Atta.”