The Island Walkers (2 page)

One Saturday in the summer of 1965, Joe and Alf Walker climbed onto the roof and spent the better part of the morning stripping the
old shingles. By eleven they were busy nailing down the new ones. Joe, who had turned eighteen that July, worked on the slope overlooking the backyard. He sat shirtless, on his duff, and hammered sullenly between his legs, aware of the sun-baked expanse of tarpaper stretching up the slope behind him. From beyond the peak, his father’s hammer thundered without rest. It seemed crazy to try to keep up.

He shifted his weight, placed the next shingle, and looked across the yard with its picnic table and apple tree, its narrow lawn and rows of vegetables — beyond the flood-dyke blooming cheerfully with his mother’s flowers, to the Atta, flowing through the shadow of Lookout Hill. Under its far bank — a dim cave of limestone and darkly rippling water — it looked cool and inviting: another world. He was labouring under protest, under a sense of injustice that drove him on in angry spurts then dragged him into a sloth so deep it was like a spell. Why were they doing this today? Today — as he’d mentioned to his father last Wednesday, he was sure — he and Smiley were planning to go hunting with Smiley’s new .22. His friend had gone on without him. A few minutes ago he’d heard a shot echo down the valley.

He dipped into the bag beside him and the sharp nails bit his fingers. For weeks the shingles had sat beside the house in their paper wrappings, under a paint-spotted tarp. A dozen times at least his mother had said, “Alf, I am getting so tired of that
heap
out there. You’d think we were living in the Ozarks.” His mother’s idea of the Ozarks came from television, but she used the phrase to convey a sense of social embarrassment, of appearances that were not up to the mark. He always thought it sounded funny in her English accent. His mother was a war bride. Hearing the words as a young boy, he had imagined her striding off to battle in skirts and helmet. The vision had made him slightly wary of her, as if she could lay claim to secret, irresistible powers. Yet there had been nothing but weary exasperation in her complaints about the roof, the mechanical recitation of an old war cry that no longer frightened anybody: an act for tourists. She had grown up in a finer house than this: she’d told him many times about the books, the grand piano, the holidays in
Normandy. “Your father’s uniform fooled me completely” — this was another of her stories — “For all I knew he was a millionaire’s son.” It had become a family joke, told at the right time at parties: her coming down in the world was a mistake, based on her inability to read his father’s status by his accent or his clothes. It was not until after she’d arrived in Attawan in the spring of 1946 that she realized what she’d done. She hadn’t given up, though: getting the roof shingled was only one in an endless series of assaults on their rough edges — on their house that, by her standards, was too small and, despite their relentless improvements, still too shabby, not to mention situated in the wrong part of town. Joe looked back to the river. Such thoughts were troubling, leading to shadows, sadness. Better to hunker down like his father and pretend he wasn’t affected.

Yet his father wasn’t impervious. His wife’s complaints might seem to sink into him without a trace, snow into dark water, but they could achieve a critical mass. This morning he had roused Joe early and announced that today they were shingling the roof. But why today, Joe wondered, the hottest so far of the whole summer? At breakfast, over a trembling forkful of fried egg, he dared to question the decision — maybe they should wait till it was cooler, he said, thinking the whole time of Smiley’s gun, of the wafer of silver light at the end of the scope and even of the word “scope” itself, so pleasing and final, like a bullet smacking into mud. “It’s gonna rain,” his father said, and when Joe said, “It’s rained before,” meaning
and you never bothered then
, his father had said quietly, looking at him with those ice-blue eyes the colour of Lake Erie in spring, “No arguments.”

He thought there was something fanatical in his father that came from a place of silence and brooding Joe couldn’t read: something extreme and overbearing and violent that thank God was not there all the time but that could leap up like a blade you hadn’t been careful with and nip you. Now it was his arbitrariness that bothered him most. What gave
him
the right to decide? Why did he have to obey? Why didn’t he just throw down his hammer and leave the roof? He suspected that if he did, he would have to leave the house as well.
He had absorbed some old notion that work was something you did for everybody, without complaint. He had worked for as long as he could remember, washing floors, washing the car, digging gardens, stacking cans at the
A&P
; this summer he was at Bannerman’s. He expected to work, but this morning some remnant of an ancient grievance had surfaced: the need for unquestioning obedience was an injustice and so was the loss of his day. He felt, irrationally, as if his entire future had been torn from him.

The hammering from the other side had stopped. A moment later he heard his father’s heavy, braced steps come down the slope behind him. The pack of shingles slammed into the roof-boards like a body.

Then the labour of his father’s breathing as he surveyed Joe’s work.

“Good,” his father said curtly, and Joe knew he was disappointed. “Pete’s coming after lunch. We should be through by three or four.”

The steps went back up the roof. It was then, as a breeze touched the trees across the river, showing the light undersides of their leaves, that a voice called his father’s name. Joe looked around but could see no one. The voice had seemed to sound from the blue sky, or in his own head: a husky baritone he did not know, calling, “Alf Walker” on a cheerful, interrogative note.

He looked back up the slope. His father stood at the peak, against the burning sky. His greying hair had collapsed from its place over his ears and was hanging down stiffly, like drooping pennons. He was staring into the front yard, at someone Joe could not see.

“Malachi Doyle,” the voice barked, and for a moment it seemed to Joe to speak in a foreign tongue, or a code. Then he realized that the man had spoken his name.

“I’m from the
UKW
,” said the voice, which had the trace of a lilt. “United —”

“I know who they are,” Joe’s father said.

“Like to have a word or two. Only take a few minutes.”

Joe’s father did not reply but went on gazing into the yard as if all that had spoken was an echo.

To Joe, his father’s silence was excruciating. He had never got used to this habit of his — this habit of saying nothing, so that you wondered if he had even heard your remark, or (meeting the candid stare of those pale-blue eyes) if he had found it too stupid or trivial to merit a response. His father dealt in silences. When he spoke, he seemed to rise out of silence as a fish might rise from the water, its natural element, soon returning to it again. Even though Joe had heard him tell stories in his droll way, and laugh and talk as any ordinary man might, these moments seemed exceptional. His father existed at a distance from him, and the distance was reinforced by silence, as though there were simply too great a space for a voice to carry over: only a fool would stand there shouting what could not be heard.

Now his father looked away, over the rooftops of the Island. Joe licked his lips. Mere seconds passed, but to him they seemed like minutes. He was expecting something even more embarrassing to happen. For the last two weeks, at the mill, a rumour had been circulating that an organizer was in town. Joe had heard the other workers talk about him during break, joking about his presence, or alleged presence, with a skittish indirectness, as though it had something to do with sex. He had not heard his father, who was head fixer in Number Six knitting mill, comment on the subject. Then one evening, walking home with his father and Art Johnson, Joe listened as Art began to chat about the organizer. Art had fallen silent, as if sensing disapproval. After a few seconds his father had said (and it was all he had said), “The bastard better not show his face at my place.”

Now here the bastard was, apparently. Joe watched his father briefly touch the back pocket of his trousers, where the bulge of his wallet rode. Then he climbed over the peak and began to sink out of sight: the soiled factory greens, the heavy shoulders in their filthy undershirt, the head with its drooping strands of hair, its bald spot.

When Joe heard the ladder rattle, he got up and climbed swiftly to the peak. Down the steeply sloping roof, he saw the top of the ladder
shake a little. But on the sidewalk that ran past the house, and on the small front lawn burned the colour of straw, he could see no one.

2

THE ORGANIZER WAS WAITING
at the foot of the ladder: a short, thickly built fellow, perhaps ten years older than Alf, with grizzled flyaway hair and a face so red Alf assumed he was a drinker. He wore a madras sports shirt, darkened over the massive chest with sweat, and shapeless trousers of an indeterminate colour. He watched Alf descend with an ironic but not unfriendly glint in his small eyes, as though he sensed some hostility but wasn’t offended. It was part of the game.

“Doyle,” he said, holding out a large hand.

“Maybe we could go for a walk,” Alf said, aware of Margaret somewhere in the house behind him. Across the street, a sprawled cat twitched its tail; a window looked out with self-effacing curiosity. The whole world was watching while pretending not to.

He took Doyle down the sidewalk towards the dyke at the end of the cul-de-sac. They passed the organizer’s dark-green Edsel — a ’58, Alf thought — its horse-collar grill and protruding headlights circled in rust. Alf chuckled gloomily to himself. It seemed somehow fitting that Doyle should be driving this unholy relic of a car, a car so bad Ford had stopped building it after three years. The UK-whatever-it-was can’t be up to much, Alf thought, sending him out in a car like that. Despite what he’d indicated on the roof, he hadn’t heard of Doyle’s outfit. He supposed it was one of those small, bottom-feeding unions that lived off what the larger ones had missed.

Doyle was chatting away gruffly at his side, as if he were used to being smuggled out of sight like some disreputable relative. “Had a
helluva time finding you,” he was saying. “Went to one place across town there, they told me I had the wrong Walkers. ‘You got the Flats Walkers,’ they tell me. ‘You want the Island Walkers.’ The Island Walkers,” Doyle repeated. “A name like that, I thought I was back in Ireland. Everyone had their queer little monikers. The back-street Kellys, the side-hill Corcorans. I sort of miss it.”

Alf gestured ahead of him, indicating the path that saddled the dyke. Doyle jogged up with a burst of energy, his heavy haunches churning through goldenrod. They descended to a foreshore of loose, clattering rock where puddles of stagnant water lay, frowsy with scum. A few stunted willow bushes sat around watching them like dogs. Doyle walked on a few steps and stood with his thick arms akimbo, gazing at the river. Above, the shelving foliage of Lookout Hill hung motionless in the heat.

“Grew up on a river like this,” the organizer said. He seemed pleased to remember.

“In Ireland,” Alf said wearily. He felt he was taking up a role.

“A salmon river. The fish that used to come up it as long as your feckin’ arm.”

“Well there’s nothing like that here,” Alf said. Downstream, a fisherman was casting into the tunnel under the Shade Street bridge. Alf hoped the man — it was Del Featherstone — wouldn’t turn and see them.

“I remember my dad and I went out this one time, early morning.” Doyle’s red face shone. There was something of the child in him, an astonishingly ugly eight-year-old. “We took our bikes. Oh, it must have been three or more miles we went, to a new river. At least it was new to me. Dim. Dyne. Something like that. We fished for two hours and got nothing. Then my daddy made one last cast — you’d have thought all creation had erupted. I mean, the thing was like a bar of silver …”

His blackberry eyes gleamed, and a kindred memory — fishing, a river coppered by dusk — slipped through Alf’s mind. He let it go.

“Well,” the organizer said. Groping at his breast pocket, he plucked out a sorry-looking pack of Macdonald’s. Alf waved the cigarettes off and waited while the man hunted for his matches, scraped up flame.

“You’re not going to get anywhere here,” Alf said.

“You mean with you?”

“With anybody,” Alf said. “We aren’t in the union way here.”

“And why would that be?” Doyle said, blowing a leisurely plume. He looked as if he had all day. He looked, Alf thought with despair, as if he were in a bar somewhere, with a pint at hand and a small one at the side, preparing to enjoy his companion’s story.

Alf frowned. He wished he was back on his roof.

“Let’s just say we’ve been through it before.”

“Ah yes, the famous strike of ’49,” Doyle said, taking another drag.

“Bugger the fame,” Alf said, with real heat. “It tore this place apart.” There had been a wildcat strike, entirely unsuccessful. The new union had been crushed, wounds had opened that still hadn’t healed. The only way people tolerated them was to keep silent.