The Island Walkers (44 page)

At that moment he heard a sound like the report of a gun. He staggered sideways, and when he recovered, not knowing what it was, he froze in a state of hyper-alertness. His heart seemed to be beating in his whole body. Peering through the chainlink mesh of the safety fence, he saw the river moving under him, a huge white snake moving its rough back slowly through the land. Now repeated gunshots came, and a rumbling like a train on the Shade Street overpass. Climbing up the mesh, he looked down and saw great blocks of ice shifting and climbing over each other’s backs. Underneath him, the bridge banged and hummed as the cakes of ice struck the abutments.

As he watched, one particularly large cake climbed into the air. It reared straight up in front of him, taller than he was, taller than the bridge, and it was coming on slowly, towards the rail. He gazed up at it, unable to move.

In its underside, many stones and bits of weed were imbedded like eyes. It advanced within a silence of its own, bobbing slightly. It was like a creature he’d seen in the Christmas Parade, a giant leaning its huge, grotesque head over the crowd.

“Mommy,” he whispered. It was almost on top of him. And still he couldn’t run.

It’s all right
, the voice said.

“All right?” he echoed, mesmerized. He watched as the creature sank. Just before it reached the bridge, it bowed its great, dripping head, sweeping so close to him he felt the chill of its icy body as it slipped beneath the bridge. He climbed down from the mesh and
hurried to the opposite rail and watched it re-emerge, a giant spearhead of white ice, descending among its smaller brothers under the ghostly mass of Lookout Hill.

39

PENNY CAME DOWNSTAIRS
with her soap carving. She felt elated, yet nervous, the carving — which she had been working on for weeks and shown to no one — cupped carefully in her right hand. When she saw her father in his chair in the living room, gazing into space as if into another world, she caught her breath. But she had come down
hoping
to find him: he was her favourite for showing her artwork to. Discovering her, his eyes blued.

He held the little soap dog in his fingertips.

Penny writhed with suspense at his knee. “It was supposed to be Red, but I think it’s — it’s just a dog,” she said, her heart falling. The yellow soap dog was too thin for Red, the legs too short: it seemed a mess now, no good at all.

“It’s terrific,” her father said.

He turned in his chair and put her carving on a book lying on the windowsill. Beyond, boys were playing road-hockey in the cul-de-sac. It was still light outside, but in the room the weak, silvery daylight had been hollowed by shadow.

Penny climbed into her father’s lap. “Aren’t you getting too big for this?” he said, and she said, “Nope” and settled in with her head against his shoulder while he swivelled the chair a little, back and forth. They both looked at the dog. She had made its ears prick, like little tents, like the skunk-cabbage sticking above the mud in Wiley’s swamp.

“Reminds me of Queenie,” her dad said, his dog when he was a boy. Immediately she felt hopeful. “Sure, that tail. That’s Queenie to a T. And he’s almost the same colour!”

They were quiet for a while longer, looking at the dog, which was looking out the window at the boys running up and down.

“Am I your girlfriend?” she said.

Her father said nothing.

“Hey you,” she said, panicking a little. She poked him in the chest. She had felt so funny saying Am I your girlfriend, as if she’d dressed up in her mother’s shoes and jewellery, something she did do sometimes, but only in secret. She didn’t want to say it again.

“What’s up?”

“Am I your girlfriend?” She was blushing now, with a sense of touching on forbidden matters.

“Darn right,” he said, giving her knee a squeeze.

They were silent a while longer. She was not appeased, not quite. She waited, hoping he would say more.

“Absolutely,” he said, bouncing her a little.

“Am I your
only
one,” she said. Her face hot now.

She felt him pause, in a little shock of surprise, and in that moment, her own heart seemed to fail, on the edge of things she did not want to know. But he said, “Well, there’s your mother. She’s really girlfriend number one.”

Penny let that sink in, and it seemed all right. Or almost all right. Looking at her yellow dog, against the moving heads of the boys outside, she sensed that there was something, still, that did not quite fit. But it was so small, smaller than a speck of dust, that she was able to brush it aside.

“Tell me a story,” she said. Her father seemed not to hear. She nudged him with her elbow. “Hey you! Tell me a story!”

“Oh I don’t know —”

“Tell me about Johnny North.”

“I think you’ve heard all my Johnny North stories.”

“Tell me the old ones then. Tell me
all
the stories.” Yes, she wanted them all, a flood of stories to carry them both away.

For a long time her father looked towards the street. Penny glanced up at him, and when he began, she snuggled back in, idly watching her yellow dog, with its pricked ears, that was watching the street. The dog was all right now, it had found a home. Her father’s hand gently gripped her leg.

Her father had known Johnny North when he — her father — was a boy. Johnny North was a man but in some ways, her father said, he had stayed a boy. He lived in a shack on the banks of the Attawan River. He had worked for a few years as a mechanic in the mill, but one day, her father said, using the words he always used, “He just walked away from all that.” Johnny made a paddlewheel boat powered by a bicycle, and he would sit up on his bicycle seat, pedalling his passengers along, passengers who paid a nickel for a tour to the rapids. Sometimes he’d recite his poetry to these people. He wrote long poems about fires and train crashes and recited them dramatically, waving his arms as he guided the boat among the islands. In the newspaper he was known as “Johnny North, Bard of the Attawan.”

Johnny North was quite a character, her father said, chuckling a bit as he remembered. “I don’t think he ever took a bath, unless you count swimming in the river. The fellow stank — well, Pete used to say you could smell him coming around the corner.”

“Around
five
corners,” Penny corrected.

“As bad as that,” her father said. And he recalled how Johnny would dress up in funny costumes — women’s dresses, or a Japanese kimono, with driving goggles to keep the dust out of his eyes — and go around town pulling a little wagon with a phonograph on it and a sign that read
JOHNNY NORTH, ENTERTAINER
. A few people hired him to perform at birthday parties, where he’d sing or do magic tricks. Not everybody wanted to hire him, though, because of his smell, and because you could never tell what he was going to do. “I remember this once,” her father said — and this was a story she’d never heard — “when Bob Drummond was killed in a fire, Johnny
turned up at the front of the funeral procession. He was wearing a black dress and he did this strange, shuffly dance. Some people were pretty upset and wanted to get him out of there. But Lila Drummond — that was Bob’s mother — she told them to leave him alone. She told them, ‘Johnny’s just showing how he feels.’ ”

“That was good,” Penny said.

“Yup, that was good.”

Another time Johnny had saved a boy from drowning — this was one of Penny’s favourite stories. Johnny’d seen the lad struggling, from his shack on the bank, and had rowed out to him. The town had given Johnny a medal and held a party, where he recited all fifty-seven verses of “The Wreck of Ninety-Eight.” The mayor’s wife had fallen asleep in her chair.

In the winter, when people went skating above the dam, Johnny would keep a fire going on shore. He’d lace up the skates of the ladies and girls, always doffing his cap and calling each one Miss — “even if they were eighty-two,” her father said. In the summer Johnny rented out rowboats he had built himself. “He only charged a penny, and if you didn’t have that he’d let you have it for free. They leaked like the dickens, usually.”

Penny loved the Johnny North stories: the stories were always there, they were always happening, it seemed, in a sunny corner just out of sight. Hearing them, she felt happy, being transported to a time when her father was young.
She
wasn’t born yet, but this didn’t matter: she felt safe, not being born, knowing that in the happiness of her father’s life she was still to come.

When Johnny North got old, things were not so good, her father said. Penny went very still — she hadn’t heard
this
story. Johnny had arthritis, and in winter, he stuffed his clothes with newspapers that made a rustling sound when he walked. He blacked his white hair with shoe polish. He still wrote poems, though. “I remember this one bit — he must have written it for the town’s New Year’s party. They printed it in the
Star
:

Onward nineteen-hundred and thirty-seven!

I am out of my mammy’s home:

To wander in dark woodlands

Alone, all, all, alone.”

“So sad!” Penny said, on the edge of tears. In the window, her yellow dog was walking with Johnny in his dark woodlands.

“Well,” her father said, jouncing her a bit on his leg. “Some rich people in town took up a collection. They paid for Johnny to go to an old-age home, over in Johnsonville. He wasn’t very happy there, though — didn’t last more than a few months.”

“You mean he died?” Penny said, sitting up. She had never thought of Johnny dying:
that
wasn’t part of his story. It wasn’t part of who Johnny was.

She looked at her father, who seemed startled. He started to smile.

“Well sure, eventually. We all —”

“No!” Penny cried fiercely. She threw herself back down against him. In the street, the boys continued to yell at their game. She clung to her father’s chest while he squeezed and rubbed her shoulder. She didn’t want to hear about Johnny North or about anybody else dying. She wanted Johnny at his fire in the snow, tying the skates of ladies. She wanted him peddling his boat upstream, proclaiming “The Wreck of Ninety-Eight.” And she wanted her father to be with him, a boy still, and safe.

40

THE SNOW FINALLY LEFT
for good, swallowed by the slowly thawing earth. On the northward-facing slope of Lookout Hill, only a few
patches glowed among the bare trees. But the season that arrived was no spring: it was an in-between season of black branches and soaked, dead-looking lawns littered with paper and dog shit. Time had run backwards, it seemed, as though November had begun again.

One day, lying beside Lucille in her unsteady bed, Alf knew it was over. “Maybe we should lay off for a while,” he said, touching her on the cheek. His tenderness was real enough. He felt sorry for her, and guilty, for he knew he was no better than her other lovers, all of whom had left her. Reaching for her clothes, she avoided his gaze. In her eyes was a stoic darkness — a despair that could not or would not rouse itself to anger or condemnation. He would have felt better if she had upbraided him. This way, he felt hopeless himself.

He drove up to the cemetery. The Biscayne passed through the wrought-iron gates that were always propped open, past the red stone where his mother and father lay, following the narrow road into its final loop, where the crop of gravestones petered out in a few acres of yellow lawn. Pete’s grave was here, isolated from the others under the tall gloom of a spruce, as if his death were somehow different from the rest. May had erected a small grey stone with a polished front, where the word “Moon” had been carved, and under it, slightly to the left, “Peter Watson Moon, 1918–1965.”

Alf stood under the spruce in whose branches the faintest wind could just be heard, like the distant hush of water over a low barrier. It was far from the first time he had stood here, looking at the wicker basket filled with plastic flowers May had set before the stone. But this time seemed more vivid, as if it were the first. He felt he had come back to something. What had his fling with Lucille Boileau been really but an attempt to escape this place? An attempt to burn up his guilt in her bed? He plucked a pebble from the half-frozen mud and cleaned it with his fingers. He had never realized, until his friend had gone, how much he had loved him. In fact, he hadn’t really known he’d loved him at all — “love” was not a term he had ever used in connection with his male friends. But now it was a torture to think that
as he picked his way into the fields of death, Pete might have believed that Alf had abandoned him.