The Island Walkers (34 page)

After a while, Joe noticed that his father had left the game. Jamie hadn’t been able to keep up with the older boys and men, so Alf had taken him off to the side and was laying soft passes on his stick. Jamie was working hard at it, digging along for the puck on ankles that barely seemed able to support him, falling down and bouncing up again with wild determination. Watching his brother, Joe felt a poignant stab of recognition. His father had once fed him passes in just the same way, and now, seeing Jamie, he was seeing himself, so eager to please the man, to best the man, who was both his god and his nemesis. But where was Penny? On the other side of the river, where some alders showed red against the grey of willows, he saw her, in her pink hat and mitts, pushing herself along with abrupt, erect strokes among her friends. Dipping, she opened her arms, extended a leg behind her, and became a gliding swan.

Later, tired of the game, Joe gave his spot to a new arrival and skated upstream. It seemed less cold under the high cliffs, out of the wind, and he pushed steadily along, gripping his stick in one hand at his side as he passed islands and the great, leaning trunks of the willows, all floating past with a dreamlike smoothness, to the rhythmic swish of his blades. The bottom grew more shallow and he began to glimpse weeds and rocks under the glass of the ice. It was a bit spooky, to be gliding above the water, the fish, and he was soon out of sight and hearing of the players. At a bend where he had once caught a half-dozen bass, he met Penny and her friends, returning from upstream. They were laughing and gossiping — skating with the short, quick strokes demanded by their burred blades. Penny, he noticed, was eating snow out of her mitt, though when she saw him she tossed it down. A few seconds later, as the girls fell away behind him, he heard them burst into giggles that finally died out around the bend.

He heard the rapids before he saw them. A soft, rushing sound that touched him with a faint fear. It was a reminder that the river was still alive beneath him, that this afternoon of skating was only a temporary gift, a kind of illusion.

Most of the rapids had frozen over. But the biggest wave was still visible, flowing like the smooth, darkly glinting body of a serpent amid jumbled crusts of ice. Water had spilled over the ice below, where it had hardened in a yellowish mantle, like wax. He stood at the rapid’s edge, looking up to the swift coursing of black water, wondering if he dared bypass it by climbing up one side. At that moment, he saw the fox.

It was watching him from the smooth ice above the rapid. He was
sure
it had not been there a few moments ago, and yet he had not seen it appear. It was standing almost broadside to him, head turned inquisitively, the fantastic orange plume of its tail tipped with white, stretching straight out, nearly as long as its body, and, except for a stir of breeze in the thick fur, motionless. The fox lifted its muzzle, trying to scent him; it turned its head a little more, and for a second Joe’s heart leapt as he met the fox’s unblinking stare.

Then the fox trotted off, without haste, followed by the great, level plume. Something in the fox’s movement seemed unusual. Joe saw that half of its right hind leg was missing: the thigh tapered into a dark stump. He just glimpsed the end of it, swinging uselessly below the fox’s belly.

That night he fell ill with a high fever. He lay shivering and sweating while a small, cold moon moved over the house. Shining between the curtains, it seemed to be seeking him out, like a flashlight whose glare hides whoever is holding it. Twice he threw up. The first time he didn’t quite make it to the toilet, and his vomit hit the hall floor with a sound like a mess of chains spilling. Then his mother appeared, and it seemed he was about four years old again, helpless before her tender scolding. She put him back to bed with extra blankets and a hot water bottle that in his delirium seemed to be a part of himself he couldn’t quite incorporate into his body. He dreamed he was in a bare white room that had no door. He had climbed up to a ledge, and was balancing there, precariously, while the fox with three legs kept jumping up at him from the floor below, showing its sharp teeth in a kind of smile.

The next day, a Monday, he was still running a fever and vomiting, so there was no question of school. But he was conscious it was the day Anna Macrimmon was scheduled to come back. What he feared — what he was powerless to do anything about — was the reception he knew she would get from Liz. He could imagine Liz telling her, with an air of coy triumph, that she and Joe were steadies. Yes, she would somehow let Anna know that they were sleeping together, and this prospect seemed to expose him to the worst injustice of all — the injustice of being misunderstood, though exactly
what
would be misunderstood he did not let himself think too clearly about. Groaning, he turned violently in the bed and struck his fist into the wall.

By Thursday, his sickness had turned into a cold, and he was able to go back up the hill to school. In Miss Todd’s homeroom, Anna
Macrimmon’s desk, a sheen of birch veneer under a tall window framing a snowy sky, was empty. And it remained empty, in its various incarnations in various rooms, all morning. Her absence touched a note of hope — perhaps she hadn’t come back yet, and so had not yet been informed by Liz. He still had time to tell Liz they were through, but there was one problem with this: Liz, too, was absent, her empty desk echoing Anna’s in every room. Sometimes the two desks were far apart, but in French they were side by side, a constant reminder of the strange partnership he had made with them and, which in some obscure way, they had made with each other. In the hall after French, he fell in beside Brad Long, drawing him into a conversation about the schoolwork he’d missed. He asked casually if Anna was back yet.

“Got back Monday.”

Excitement and despair rose in him at once. She was here again, but on the other hand, Liz had undoubtedly told her everything. Yet he had to be sure.

“Back here? At school?”

Brad looked amused: “Where else?”

“She sick or —”

“Some bug she caught over there. Some
foreign
bug.”

Brad’s eyes stayed trained on him, lit with mockery, and Joe had the feeling that his whole dilemma was common knowledge, as if Anna and Brad and God only knew who else had sat around a table discussing — having a good laugh over — the lovesick Walker.

As soon as school had finished for the day, he hurried downtown to the florist and chose a small bouquet of dried heather, which he tucked inside his coat in its paper wrapper. Then up the hill again, walking so fast he was soon out of breath and had to stop to spit thick phlegm into the snow. Behind the houses on Banting, the sun sent low beams across the ploughed street.

He mounted the front steps, under the little portico with its white pillars, in a straightjacket of self-consciousness, aware she might be watching. The house itself seemed alive. No light showed in the
windows, yet each object he glimpsed inside — the top of an armchair, a lampshade withdrawing into dimness — seemed to take note of him.

He pressed the bell button. There was no sound from inside the house. An Irish setter trotted alone down the street, its long, matted fur carrying little balls of ice that clicked together. Joe fumbled open his coat and retrieved the small bouquet. The house went on considering him.

Then the door opened, and he saw a woman in a full-length white apron, her hair swept back from her face into an untidy bun. She was middle-aged and rather short, but there was something about the eyes — a distant glint of humour — that was familiar.

“I’m Joe Walker. I’m a friend of Anna’s.”

“Oh, Joe, yes, she’s spoken about you. I’m Estelle Macrimmon. Why don’t you come in —”

Her French accent made “in” sound like “een.” Her warmth gave him courage. He found himself in a small entrance hall, aware of a staircase in dark wood, the smell of cooking.

She shut the door and again stood before him, regarding him in an open, pleased way. There was a pride in her carriage that created an almost aristocratic effect, despite her plump figure. He explained that he’d just dropped by to wish Anna well and give her the bouquet: he held it up almost apologetically.

“Well why don’t you give it yourself? I’ll go up and get her.”

He waited in the hall. The house was much smaller than the McVeys and more sombre, with its dark woodwork and faded Indian carpets. In the living room to his right books were piled loosely on the floor. The walls were green with white trim (oddly, very like the walls in his own house) and hung with numerous framed photos and paintings. Propped on the mantel was a large oil painting of a seated woman with silver hair wearing a dress. Its pale-green folds, beautifully evoked, filled much of the old-fashioned-looking frame. Her lips held a vague smile, but her eyes conveyed a certain wistfulness.

Anna’s mother reappeared on the landing above.

“She wants to see you up here. Come up, Joe.”

He shed his boots and climbed the stairs. Her mother gestured towards an open door.

“Just
entrez
.”

Anna was sitting in bed with her knees up, under a quilted spread. In the window to the left, the molten orange globe of the sun was settling into woods. Books were stacked on the rug beside her bed. A crumpled Kleenex lay nearby, like the head of a ghostly chrysanthemum.

She unwrapped the bouquet. He noticed that her upper lip was chafed.

“Heather! How did you know?”

Her voice had thickened, with her cold.

“Well, with a name like Macrimmon —”

“The hills go purple with it,” she said, trying to smell the little dry flowers. “Have you ever seen it?”

He said nothing. He was standing beside the bed, feeling a bit like a servant who’s delivered a message and will soon be asked to go. He could hardly believe he was here, in her room. Happy that he had pleased her, he stood secretly drinking her in, her pillow-flattened hair, the smocking of her flannel nightgown over her small breasts, her red nose. He could scarcely believe that
she
was here. She had been over there, and now she was here. She had been sailing on the Mediterranean, the actual blue, wet Mediterranean. Yes, just a few days ago, she had been in Europe — fabulous, distant Europe that he knew only from books. And now she was sitting in a bed in front of him, with a cold.

Her illness seemed part of her trip and its aftermath, as if going to that other place and back again, as if breaching the mysterious boundary between these two different worlds (for where did one end and the other begin?) was a stressful thing. It had worn at her health. Her illness was the cost she paid for accomplishing the miracle of existing in two places.

She told him to bring the chair from the desk. Picking it up, he glimpsed something of her private life. On a sheet of paper,
half-covered by a book, he saw what seemed to be a poem — a ragged, narrow column of language in her familiar, jabbing hand. In the two seconds his attention lingered there, he saw the phrase “a mask of bees,” and in the same glance he scanned the framed photo standing by itself to one side. Anna, her hair bound under a kerchief, was seated in some kind of boat — he could see water in the background, the arch of a bridge — beside a handsome man with blond, slick-backed hair and intense, serious eyes; his arm circled her shoulders with a confident possessiveness. Joe saw this in a flash, with a sense of excitement and grief, as if he had at once embraced her life and lost it.

He sat beside the bed while they talked. It was all he could do to contain himself, to make his limbs behave and not go jumping around the room in a mad dance. He kept shifting positions in the hard-backed chair.

“Your letter was terrific,” he said. This seemed lame, a cliché — sometimes he felt he offered her nothing but. “I mean, I could almost smell those hills —”

“It’s funny, I felt more like writing to you than to anyone. I have this feeling that you hear me better than other people.”

“I do,” he said.

“I’m serious. You seem to make the thoughts come. To draw them out somehow. You’re a good listener.”

“Well that’s something.”

“It’s a lot,” she said. The fading sunlight now left the room entirely. They sat in the dusk, not speaking. On her bureau, a clock ticked slowly. He felt as if his life were yearning towards its fulfillment. Everything he had ever wanted was here, so close at hand that all he had to do was — what? If he went to the bed and kissed her, he would spoil everything. She had made it clear they were to be friends only.

She blew her nose.

“Listen to me, a regular duck!”

She sniffed and said, “Liz tells me you’ve been seeing a lot of each other.”

He had no doubt she knew everything and was being tactful. He felt fixed in his chair.

“We’ve gone out a few times.”

“I’m glad you asked her to the dance.”

“Well, I did it for you.”

“And are you still taking her out for me?”

There was laughter in her voice. She blew her nose again. He said nothing.

“Sorry, that wasn’t fair.”

“I don’t know why I’m taking her out,” he said. “I’m not sure I like her very much.”

She was silent, but he could feel her attentiveness, holding him, holding the entire room with its books and ticking clock, in the mild grey light. His confession, its edge of bitterness, seemed to float between them, not fading at all, something they had no choice but to consider. He felt a sad falling away, as if he had come to sobriety. A clarity. She was with Brad, and he was with Liz. And this was the basic architecture: his fate. Out the window, he could see the white fields of Wiley’s farm, the thickets that bordered the Atta. “Sunday I went skating on the river. Just down there,” he said. “It was incredible. Everything was frozen solid. There wasn’t any snow so you could skate for miles. At the first rapids, I saw a fox.”

He told her, as best as he could, about his strange sense of the animal as it looked back at him, the way their eyes had met and he had felt as if he were being given a privileged glimpse of life in its depths.