The Island Walkers (71 page)

Gradually, by day, a kind of normality settled on the house. But at night came the sudden cries, the drumming of his brother’s or sister’s feet down the hall to their mother’s room. Jamie wouldn’t go to sleep unless someone was watching him. To help his mother, Joe often took on that job. One night, while Jamie tossed and kept opening his eyes to check if his brother was still there, Joe sat on the bedroom floor with his back to the wall, rereading Anna’s letters by flashlight. In August, she had written to say she was sharing rooms with two English girls, revelling in the fact that each morning they awoke to the smell of fresh bread from the shop below. As for Joe’s standing with her, it seemed ambiguous at best. She wrote that she missed him, but her obvious pleasure in her new life made him wonder.

He had written to her about the fire, omitting anything too specific. Of his father he said only that he had died while attempting to save another man. In one way, he was glad to have miseries to report. He felt he had earned the right to her affections. At the same time, these events filled him with shame, and he feared he would lose caste with her.

Two days after he had sent his letter, he had found another of her blue aerogrammes waiting at the post office. Her father, she said, had written her about what had happened.
Oh Joe, my dear Joe, this is terrible!
Immediately the warmth of her sympathy flooded him. She had written him a poem, which, like all her poems, he soon memorized. It was about their last evening together: the churchyard where they’d walked in the wind. She’d been more aware of the poignancy of that moment than he’d realized.

He went to the post office every day. In early October, another letter from her arrived. He took it to the little park, at the end of the main street, where the war memorial was. Sitting on the step behind the monument, his back to the cool stone, he read her news. She was studying German, she told him, and she’d just made a weekend visit to Chartres. After several paragraphs about the cathedral, she mentioned Doug, an American friend.
He’s a philosophy major, very interested in Sartre. You know, you can actually see Sartre almost
any day here, walking to his favourite café. He looks like a garden gnome. He has a walleye. It seems to be looking at things no one else has seen, that have scared one part of him witless. Doug’s trying to get up his nerve to speak to him
.

I should tell you, Joe, it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get to Attawan for Christmas. We can’t afford it, and of course with the mills gone, my father is making arrangements to come back to France. They’ve promised him his old job again. But I want you to know how much our time together meant to me …

He looked up from the pages, at the scarred side wall of the old Capitol Theatre, where fading advertisements for long-ago films were just visible, including the image of an immense tiger with a red tongue. He had no idea who Sartre was.

That evening after supper, he took a walk along the Atta. Moving slowly, he reached the dam, and for a while sat on the ancient concrete at its edge, looking out over the thin skim of water racing down its long, sloping face. Above, the deep water of the millpond approached the lip with a glassy stillness, before it slipped over. He had been thinking of Anna. But as he gazed across the pond, where a late dragonfly skimmed, he had an awareness of his father so powerful he stopped breathing. This was a place his father had known — he had swum and skated here as a boy — his father had been saturated with this place, as Joe himself was. He felt he knew what his father had seen and felt here, because he was able to see and feel it too. Spellbound, he looked out over the water.

But then, a cold breeze rising from the Atta, everything changed. What did he know about his father, really? What could he ever know, now, about what lay behind his father’s eyes, behind his silences? Joe looked downstream, where the current surged over a rusted weed-clogged bicycle, and felt the chill of unrecoverable loss.

Over the next few days, a weakness infected his body. He only wanted to lie in bed, not reading, not listening to the radio, but
drifting in and out of shallow sleep. The yellow trees of Lookout Hill filled most of his window. His gaze kept drifting to a spot of delicate orange-pink — a young oak perhaps — about halfway up the hill. He would look for this tree first thing in the morning, upset if mist hid the hill. In the evening, he watched it with feverish interest as it dissolved in darkness. He had no idea why the tree compelled him so; but when one morning he discovered that a big wind had stripped most of its leaves, he was distraught.

His mother usually came in after work, to give him the news of the day. And Penny liked to bring him his meals — what little he was able to eat. She’d begun to adopt Margaret’s manner of brisk cheerfulness and would sit on the edge of his bed chatting about school. One afternoon she brought him a little figure, carved in yellow soap. It was of a young man with a hockey stick in his hand, about three inches high. Joe turned it over in his hands. Penny watched him closely. “It’s
you
,” she cried finally, piqued that he hadn’t guessed. “You remember, when we all went skating above the dam!” And he remembered the hockey game: that day of blue-sky freedom. She had carved him skating alone upstream, his head bowed, his stick held idly upside down. She had caught the stoop of his shoulders, and his old jacket with the torn sleeve, and something else, some indefinable thing that was him. He was astonished — she had just turned twelve — and he remembered Penny and her friends, their chiming voices, as he skated up to the rapids. And again he saw the fox, its long, floating tail.

After a week or so, he began to make small forays around the house. One Sunday morning, when the others were at church, he ventured outside. Everything was strange and bright — almost painful to look at — the green of the yard, reviving after a summer of drought, the sun glinting off the Lions Park footbridge. He still felt frail, unsure of his legs, and also frail in another way, as if what little courage he had for this walk might disappear in a moment. Soon his mind was racing with a nameless panic. It seemed that the future had ceased to exist. When he put out his foot, he half-expected it to fall
on nothing. He had to be alert, he had to concentrate, to keep from being swept away.

That first day he got as far as the bandshell in the park, where he sat relaxing, or at least pretending to, before he retreated to the house. Some days later, feeling much stronger, he dared a longer walk. He passed the dam, following the edge of the woods that curved around the fields of the Wiley farm. Though a bit lightheaded, he began to move more quickly, lengthening his stride, throwing out his arms. But then, pausing for breath under a grove of pines, he broke into a sweat. All his fear had come back, full force. He glanced around. The sky was too huge, every distance too vast.

He looked up the long hill, to where the fields crested against the sky.
That
was the shortest way home, he realized — straight across the fields and over the hill — much shorter now than retracing his steps by the woods. The fields had not been ploughed for some time, and were covered with wild grasses, with outcrops of goldenrod and chicory and other weeds. As he looked across these fields, thinking he could never cross them (it was too far, too exposed), a wind came down the hill towards him. It pressed over the dry grasses and weeds, making their heads bend, until it reached him. And this wind, to his amazement, was warm. It was a cool day, but a warm wind was coursing over him, touching his face, wrapping him in warmth, moving the plants and branches around him. In his chest, something seemed to break.

He did not know what happened next. In his whole life, thinking of it, he never would understand what happened next. But the next time he was conscious of anything, he was on the hilltop, two hundred yards from where he had just been standing. He had no idea how he had got there. It was as if he had crossed the fields in a dream, or as if some power — the wind itself perhaps — had picked him up and deposited him on the high, bald hilltop, on the grassy edge of an old lane.

He realized he was weeping, gladly and without stint, sobbing like a child. He was sitting with his legs stretched out on the
ground, like a child in a sandbox, amazed at everything he saw. Far down by the river, a few isolated poplar leaves glittered. Galleon clouds sailed overhead, a scattered fleet with emblazoned sails, swelling to the west. He saw the erect, white tail of a deer, disappearing over the hill. Normally, he would have been surprised to see a deer, but just now, everything was a miracle equal to it, everything surprised him. A flock of starlings pulsed by with a thrumming of wings he felt in his breastbone. A lone heron launched itself from the water’s edge, its wings rowing the deep air as it laboured over the town.

He was rocking, in some ancient, vital movement of self-comforting, though the comfort seemed not to come only from him. Looking down the slope to the river, he knew he was part of it all still. It held him still. He knew he would go on whether he wanted to or not, because he would be carried on, by whatever had carried him onto this hill, by whatever it was that moved the clouds and the birds and the leaves swirling off a nearby tree. But also, he wanted to go on. It was in him again, the desire to go on, however weak or unhappy or afraid he still was, and this was as much grief as joy, because he knew, now, where life was headed. And yet he wanted it anyway, he wanted it because he wanted it, there was no more reason than that. He was alive.

John Bemrose’s first novel,
The Island Walkers
, was a national bestseller and a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. It was also longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Bemrose is also well known as an arts journalist whose articles and profiles have appeared regularly in
Maclean’s
, where he is a contributing editor. In the past, he has written for
CBC
Radio’s
Ideas
, for the National Film Board, for the
Globe and Mail
, and for numerous other publications. He has also written a play,
Mother Moon
, produced by the National Arts Centre, and has published two poetry collections. Bemrose grew up in Paris, Ontario, the place that inspired the setting for
The Island Walkers
.

Bemrose has lived in Toronto since 1970. He is at work on his second novel.