The Island Walkers (4 page)

“Don’t!” he cried suddenly, jabbing his elbow at his sister.

“I didn’t touch him,” Penny complained to Alf. The ten-year-old’s eyes — pale blue like his — were huge with protest. In her pink T-shirt, her shoulders jerked up, declaring her innocence.

“Come on,” Joe urged, “the sandwiches are getting stale.” Alf’s older son had put on a shirt, at Margaret’s insistence. Beside his place was a paperback, turned face down. Another book about the war, Alf noted wearily, glancing at the flaming swastika on the cover, the Moloch head of a tank swivelling among ruins:
The Anvil of Stalingrad
.

“I don’t like tuna fish,” Jamie said to his mother. “Do I have to —”

“There’s peanut butter for you,” Margaret said coolly, sounding very English. She was wearing her seersucker housedress, the one that left her slender arms bare. Her dark hair, still damp from washing, clung to the side of her head, leaving the tips of her ears exposed and, to Alf’s eyes, oddly vulnerable. She was singing at a wedding that afternoon at the church. “And anyway, you don’t have to thank God for individual items.”

Penny snorted, which brought another murderous glance from Jamie. But he went on with his Great Enumeration. High overhead, a cicada drilled through the heat of noon. Alf looked over at his wife. Her closed eyelids were trembling, as though animated by a subtle electric current. Her face with its pale forehead and fine brows was lifted slightly as she listened to Jamie’s prayer.

“Make us truly thankful, in Christnameweaskit —”

“Thank you,” Joe said dryly, reaching for a sandwich.

“Wait!” Jamie’s brown eyes — copies of his mother’s — struck out at his brother. “I’m not done.”

“I don’t believe it!” Penny cried.

“Penny,” Margaret warned. The girl looked at her father, her court of last appeal. Alf had always felt they shared secret, unspoken things about the family, which were rarely made specific:
they understood
. He looked tactfully away.

They waited again with bowed heads, stoically. The cicadas whined, and in Lions Park across the river, the merry-go-round screeched with a sound of metal on hot metal.

“Amen,” Jamie said finally.

“I think I’m going to kill him,” Joe said.

“He did very well,” Margaret said as she drew the platter of sandwiches towards Jamie. On her own plate was a lone scoop of cottage cheese and a slab of beefsteak tomato, red as blood. Another of her diets, Alf thought ruefully. She was thin enough, he felt, hardly heavier than when he’d first met her twenty-three years ago, that evening at the servicemen’s dance in Henley-Under-Downs. It was something people remarked on. “If only I knew Margaret’s secret! I think she’s made a deal with the devil!” Her skin seemed nearly as clear as it had been in 1942. Her hair, which she wore in the same style as then, brushed away from a central part, was as dark and wavily vigorous. All the same, he knew she had changed. There was a hint of sallowness in her face. In her eyes, he glimpsed what he feared was disappointment.

Yet all that week she’d been bubbling around the house, in a much better mood than usual. Jack Ramsay, he thought. Jack Ramsay was the new minister at the Anglican church. Jack was from England, like her, a tall young man of thirty or so, with a brightly boyish face and an affable manner Alf found a bit glib. He had a fine tenor voice, though. That afternoon he was not only going to officiate at the wedding, but was going to sing with Margaret. All week Alf had heard her rehearsing her part, the words of the duet wafting through the house in her clear soprano.

The sparrow hath found her an house,

And the swallow a nest

Where she may lay her young:

Even thine altars

Oh Lord of Hosts …

Alf supposed she was in love, after a fashion, with Jack Ramsay. He was used to her falling in love — with men and women both, or with singers or authors or symphony orchestras. It never lasted for more than a few days, or a few weeks, and while it was happening she was effervescent and pleased with everything. He had tried to be philosophical about Jack Ramsay — after all, nothing but high spirits came from these infatuations, and her high spirits were a good deal easier on all of them than the grim patches she fell into at other times.

“I think you’re an atheist at heart,” Joe was saying, looking at his brother.

“No I’m not.”

“You don’t even know what an atheist is.”

“Yes I do.”

“What is it then?”

“He doesn’t know,” Penny said with scornful certainty, biting a pickle.

“I
do
,” Jamie insisted, his eyes bulging at his sister. They had been at each other all morning.

“Tell him then,” she sang. Jamie stared hard at Joe, as if by ferocious willpower he could force the answer to appear in Joe’s face. Jamie had his mother’s clear, open face, a believer’s face, it seemed to Alf. The boy worshipped his brother, and considered him a source of impeccable truth.

“It’s somebody who doesn’t go to church.”

“Close but no cigar.”

“Perhaps you could just
tell
him what an atheist is,” Margaret said impatiently while sawing at her tomato. A couple of weeks
before, Joe had announced he was no longer going to church. Alf knew his withdrawal had hurt her.

“An atheist …,” Penny began.

“I want
him
to tell me,” Jamie insisted, pointing to Joe. Alf noticed that Bob Horsfall had appeared in his garden next door. It never failed, whenever they ate outside, Horsfall or his wife would come out and hang around, pretending to be busy, like children hoping to be asked to play. Horsfall — a small man in baggy shorts — scowled at Alf (his face was set in a permanent scowl anyway, he only needed to darken it a little) and gestured violently to something in his garden: some tomato that had rotted, no doubt, or some broken stem, more evidence that the world was going to hell. Alf looked away. Both Horsfall and his wife were deaf. They could speak only after a fashion, in grunts that scarcely resembled human speech.

“… is somebody who doesn’t believe in God.”

Jamie’s eyes slowly grew bright. He looked at his sister, his quarrel with her forgotten. He looked at his father.

“
I
believe in God,” he said almost in a whisper.

“Of course you do,” Margaret said, trying to hurry him past this crisis. “We all do.”

“I don’t,” Joe said flippantly. He was staring at his book.

“You
don’t
?” said Jamie.

“Some nice big guy in the sky,” Joe said.

“That’s enough,” Alf said.

“The great white father who thinks it’s fine if people die of cancer, or starve to death —”

“
I said, That’s enough!
” Alf couldn’t stand his son’s moralizing, that narrow, superior tone he fell into sometimes, telling them all what was good for them.

They continued eating in silence, in a heat pierced by the whine of cicadas. Jamie’s shocked gaze kept returning to Alf. Alf winked and the boy’s face twitched, but he kept looking at Alf, unappeased. Alf sensed he was hoping for some reassurance in the face of the strange, bleak sense of aftermath that had settled on the table. It wasn’t just
that he had yelled at Joe, it was what Joe had said, about not believing in God. What do
I
know about God, Alf thought. He went to church, but this was mainly a social thing, a seconding of Margaret’s great involvement there. Occasionally he prayed. But to Whom, what Power? Waist deep in his tomato plants, Bob Horsfall grunted at him, his face twisted with emotions he couldn’t speak. Alf stared at his plate. He couldn’t imagine Horsfall’s life of total, enveloping silence, a life underwater. Sometimes he heard Horsfall’s wife shrieking in the house like an animal in pain.

A large ant crawled up Red’s tongue. He gulped wetly: gone.

Margaret said, “Joe tells me you had a visitor?”

Her tone, at least on the surface, was casually interested. But Alf knew her too well. He heard buried criticism, alarm.

For a moment their eyes met. Some recognition was there, some quickening, beyond the scope of their daily lives. But it was unsustainable. He looked away and frowned at Joe, who kept reading
The Anvil of Stalingrad
. Why had he told his mother about Doyle’s visit? Surely the boy had some notion of the trouble he would cause.

“From a union?” Margaret persisted, in her tone of cheerful innocence.

“Ah, just doing his rounds,” Alf said, reaching for another sandwich. “He’ll be on to some other town by now.”

As he said this, he realized it was probably not true: the man would not retreat so easily. But he wanted to placate her.

“I was surprised you talked to him.”

“You’d prefer me to throw my hammer at him?” Alf said, and was gratified to hear Jamie laugh.

“Well,
no
,” she said, as if he actually might have. “I just thought, with the foreman’s job still up in the air …”

“I think that’s why Dad took him down to the river,” Joe said. Alf glanced at his son, not his usual ally in these quarrels.

“To keep him out of sight,” Joe added.

Margaret cut into her tomato.

“I just think we have to be careful,” she said.

“I
was
careful, Margaret,” Alf said in a soft voice, suppressing his anger. She did not meet his stare. He looked down at his plate smeared with crumbs and pickle juice. The cicadas drilled through the heat, his brain. Some large emotion, who knew what it was, seemed in the offing, but distantly, immured in ice, shining like a sea he could not reach. He was sorry he’d told his wife about applying for the foreman’s job. It clearly meant as much to her, perhaps more, than it did to him. Sensing he was being watched, he looked up and saw Penny gazing at him with infinite seriousness, her eyes locked on his. She might have been reading his mind, reading some obscure current of thought he could hardly make out himself.

Sickened by the hatred and violence boiling through the town (one worker had died of a heart attack after his family had been threatened), Alf had left the strike a few weeks before it finally limped to its ignominious conclusion. Margaret had inherited a few thousand dollars from an aunt, and she urged him to use it to start the carpentry business he’d been talking about for years, talking about, in fact, from the first weeks of their courtship, in England. Walking with her on the downs above her house (the air trembling with the drone of bombers setting out for Germany like a swarm of dark bees flooding towards the distant Channel), he had discovered his calling. “I’m going to build houses,” he told her in a rush of excitement. In Attawan before the war he had apprenticed with the town’s finest builder, Bute Erikson. He’d learned how to build houses from scratch: he could do carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, cement. But it was not until he met Margaret that he glimpsed his future whole. “I’ll build
you
a house,” he promised her. “We’ll pick out the best lot in the North End. Whatever your little old heart desires.”

In France, sitting with his back to some ruined wall, with black smoke leaning off the horizon, he had amused himself by sketching out various versions of their future house, tucking the sheets into
letters he sent to England. Margaret made drawings too and mailed them on. The house became part of their mutual dream, a shield against the war.

Back in Canada, he found there wasn’t enough money to set up on his own, not right away. And Bute Erikson was dead, so he went to work in the mills. To save money, he and Margaret lived with Alf’s parents, in their brick cottage on the east side of the Island. But Margaret and Mabel – both of them English, but from different classes — got along like oil and water. His nerves strained by the war, Alf thought he would go mad with their bickering. He and Margaret soon moved out to a rented place around the corner, at the bottom of West. In 1948, he got involved in the movement to bring a union to Bannerman’s — involved with Cary Winner, the organizer from Montreal who charmed him into thinking that socialism was the only way forward. Yes, he’d bought it hook, line, and sinker — the vision of a world where all were equal, all shared. But after months of preparations, the strike had faltered in just a few weeks. (“Nothing worse than a strike gone bad,” Cary had told Alf, not long before the organizer washed his hands of the whole business.) Margaret’s money arrived in the nick of time.

Alf bought second-hand tools, and a Ford pickup truck with a stake box he sanded and varnished to make look like new. On the doors, he stencilled
ALF WALKER AND SON, BUILDERS
. (Joe was just a baby at the time, but Alf had been thrilled to include him, as though he were creating not just a business but a dynasty.) He papered the town with advertisements. But the business had not come. His part in the strike had sabotaged him, he believed, his reputation as a troublemaker had ensured that no one with enough money to build a house would hire him. After two years he’d built only one — and been left holding the bills for more than five thousand dollars when his client skipped town. The bank took his truck and most of his larger tools. He managed to keep a few screwdrivers and saws. They still hung in their neat, graded rows above his basement workbench, a reminder of his failure. There were other reminders, like the plans for the Cape
Cod-style house he’d never built for Margaret. They’d had them drawn up by an architect in Johnsonville, in the first heady days of the business. He’d noticed them the other day, rolled in oilcloth and stuck up in the cellar joists with his father’s old fishing rods. He hadn’t had the heart to take them down.

A manager at Bannerman’s — a fishing crony of his father’s — had wrangled Alf’s old job back for him, and he climbed again to the sixth-floor knitting room where the tall machines waited for him in a familiar, mocking stillness. For all his efforts, it seemed, nothing had changed.

Thirteen years passed. The previous summer, his mother had died of cancer. They had buried her, a stick-woman with an expression of long-set unhappiness the undertakers had not been able to soften entirely, under the red granite stone where twelve years earlier they had buried his father. George Walker had drowned in 1952, while fishing from Bannerman’s dam. There were no buffers now, between Alf and the place where time, his time, simply stopped, like a field that stops in the distance, its sheer edge cutting the blue of the sea. He could see that sea’s blue haze getting steadily brighter. Where had his life gone? It had gone up in war, in anger, in hope, in the years of raising children, in the churn of knitting machines, in the lick of water on stone. And now he was forty-seven, with a sore back, and less than half his hair, and only one chance left, maybe, to prove to himself, to Margaret, that he was more, better, than a fixer in Bannerman’s mills.