The Shore (31 page)

Wol was yet abroad when I scattered our kids'n'chooks and slipped back into our hut. Ours was a small hut, and that might have been enough of a reason in itself for Trower Bell to deny me his quicksilver daughter. But our hut was made of goat hides beaten soft and oiled thick, and though it was small the rain stayed out, and when the kids'n'chooks huddled in with us when the snows came down it was near too warm. I kenned the making of it too: Da had showed me how to work the hides to rabbit softness and stitch them together with the ends clamped in my teeth and trapped under my foot. It isn't a skill most men have mastery of, though they have use of both hands. I laid my bones down into our heap of skins and hefted the shining gourd above
me. It was an odd and beautiful thing, as long as my arm and fat, but I didn't know the first thing to do with it.

Didn't take much studying before I lit on taking it to Wink. He may have been eyeless'n'loveless 'n' have the hands of a woman dancing quicktime through the nets, but he's the Keeper of all our memories, and it's his business to puzzle out what's been forgot. The Keeper before him was born with no legs nor arms, just feet'n'hands set stumplike into his body. That's the way of it, with Keepers: their bodies are broken so they use their heads, and get admired no end for it. Some say they charm the skies, pull the clouds to keep the worst of the storms away and bring us rain in drought, and that makes people more careful of them. Trouble is, there can only be one Keeper at a time, so all the other broken Halfmen fall by the wayside, and worry out their days at someone else's hearth, or else come to grief early on, on account of a father or brother what doesn't want the burthen of feeding them. Wink got lucky; the old Keeper was brother of his mam, and raised him up from his walking year to know our secrets.

I caught up my gourd in an old poke and went shuffling off to Wink's hut. He could have set up anywhere, in the center of the village or deep in the trees where the grapevines grow, but he'd chosed to raise his hut twixt a creek and the sea, in amongst the dunes where the winter wind blows fierce. That's no nevermind to him: the Islandmen raise the Keeper's hut from silvered wood they've caught off the back of the sea, and keep it covered with the softest kidskin and bind the cracks tight. The women lay the floor thick with rugs in all manner of colors, so he's set up sometime better than the Bigman for comfort, but mostlike all alone'n'loveless. I lit upon him set cross-legged afore his doorway,
face up to the sun, someone's net spread across his lap and gliding through his hands quick as sand'n'water.

“Lo, Sim,” he sung out when I'd got close enough for him to hear me walking.

“Lo, Wink,” I answered and settled down next to him slowlike. I'd brought a bottle of sour applemilk, and I pulled it out then and gave it over. He sipped it slow, and I sipped it slow, and we felt it swimming inside us spicy-warm for a breath. Even Trower Bell treads careful around him, but when I was too small to know better I used to bring him applemilk and ask for stories of the byandby, and when I got some bigger I'd come not wanting aught at all, just company, and now I know better I can't do any different. The Islandmen hold a powerful fear of him, for what he knows and what he do, but I never learned that fear. When we may we sit like brothers, and he's never chased me off.

We sat'n'breathed, hearing the water slap the sand, but I could feel Wink waiting on me to talk. Eventual I started in on Jillet, how she looked'n'moved'n'breathed 'n' how my arms just ached to touch her all day long, and other parts ached with strange dreams of her all night long. Wink nodded through it all. We'd talked on such before, and as we knew that neither of us would ever have a love we'd sighed over it together.

And after I'd talked all there was about that girl, we set silent again. Then I fetched out my gourd from its wrap, twitched the net away, and set it in the hollow of Wink's crisscrossed legs. He ran his soft brown hands over it gentle-quick, and started grinning all over his face.

“You be knowing what you got here, Simian?” he asked me, and I shook my head afore I remembered that he couldn't see it.

“Not the first idea,” I answered.

He turned it over slowlike in his hands, and said, “This little bit of copper, you take your applemilk or your wine or any bit of brew sieved fine, strike a fire underneath, and the very tears of the gods will drip out its stem. Burn like fire, they say, and bend a man's mind till he don't know hisself.” He handed it back to me careful-like. “Takes a mite of work to make it run the way you like, but once you figure it, you'll be master of an art that most men would give their souls to know.”

I studied on the gourd a bit, turning it about in my hands. “How'd it come to be lost, you reckon?”

“Dunno, rightly. No copperworkers, I suppose, and anyone with knowhow of the art died off eventual. Used to be a secretlike thing, some said it turned men's minds too far and they smashed them all to stop it. No knowing how thisn got hid away, but you're in luck having found it.”

We set for a time then, not talking, just being companion-like, but I was thinking on how I could turn what I had into what I wanted.

I started at it the next morning, after Wol had driven the kids out to pasture. Laying up applemilk'n'wine is women's art, they keep it secret, but Mam showed me how when I was small, and I make enough for Wol'n'me, not the best but hot enough. I cast about and found a vine all heavy with fruit, and took and mashed it as for wine, and did the same with a measure of corn'n'oats, and whilst they worked I played every whichway with the copper gourd. Burned myself right smartly the first few times, and near cried with the frustration of it all, but every time I thought
on quitting, up cropped a vision of that lovely girl again, naked on the beach and smiling at me, so I kept on. As time run along I figured the trick of it, slowsome, and as Wink had said, out dripped the tears of the gods. They clumb all up in my head and made me feel like a river of warm honey, it was that good. I took him the first fair measure I got out, made from applemilk, and he sipped it down satiny and smiled his square-toothed grin, and that's when I knowed that I had what I was looking for.

Time had run along smart while I was playing with that boiling gourd back in the trees where Wol wouldn't see, and the dams had dropped their kids again by the time I'd made a fair measure of the stuff. Jillet had grown some, not uplike but outlike, as women do, and as I'd been working on my boiling gourd I'd been working at her too, like a body works at a bashful kitten he wants a chance of petting. I'd started settling down near her, when she was weaving on baskets or rugs or pounding corn fine, and talked sweet and low to her. Her mam had passed on, so there warn't anyone to chase me off—Floss was there with her, whose mam and da both had passed on, leaving her to the keeping of the Bigman, but as soon as she saw me she scurried off, and for once I was glad of my shriveled side, if horror of it bought us some privicy. Floss hadn't spoke a word since her da died, so Jillet was lonesome. Wasn't a thing usually seen, man'n'woman set together during the day with work to be done, but most saw me as more woman than man, so no one gave it no nevermind if I worked my hides or wove my baskets while keeping company with her.

She laughed me away at first, saying she wasn't a dam to be cooed at like I wanted milk out of her, so I tried a different tack, and made her laugh until her belly ached. When they hatched,
I brought a basketful of my bantie-chicks with their mam for a visit, and as I'm the only man on the Island what bothers with banties—they being so small and all—she'd never had a lapful of happy hen afore, and that alone near turned her head. Soon she didn't stare at my arm'n'leg no more, and looked all bright-like when I came to sit by her, and I found that she was a sharp-some thing, and made me laugh harder than I made her. And then, I asked her, teasinglike, which of the young men she had her eye on, and she wouldn't answer. As I named them out one by one she laughed me away with a sideways grin, but when I named myself she doubled over with laughing, and though I knew she would, it tore me some to hear.

But I kept at it just the same, bringing my sitting work to keep her company with, and talking on this or that, till one day she reached out her hand while we was arguing on some point and rested it on my shriveled arm. Was like being hit with a lightning bolt, though she didn't let on that it was anything un-usuary. No one'd touched that side of me since Mam died, and that made me just the more set that I would have her. I kept on teasing her about what Islandman she fancied till she didn't laugh so long when I said it, and looked at me thoughtful-like instead. Till one day I asked her what would make her say yes to a man, but all she would give me was that when her father said yes, then so would she.

Course, I never let Trower Bell know the first of these goings-on, as it would shoot my planning all to flinders. But the afternoon of the first day that frost silvered the ground, after I'd figured the secret of my boiling gourd, I went out to find him. He was down by the mud flats on the fringe of the Island, where I expected, looking over his oysters careful-like. We've all got
ourselves a bed of them, and keep them thinned'n'tended 'most like a garden, and when the tide's low they poke up from the slick black mud'n'rock like the ugliest flowers you ever saw. The shadows were growing long when I sung out to him.

“Lo, Bigman Bell.”

Wink had told me how when the man was barely more than a baby, Trower Bell had stood up and said he would be the Bigman of the Island one day. Most would take that as child's natterings, but he had the stubborn to make it happen. Things were, once, being Bigman was cushiony work, and that's how we reckon the mainland went all to hell'n'flinders. Now it only means anything goes wrong, it's his lookout, for the whole Island. That's where Floss come from—fisherman called Mal passed on not long ago, so Bigman has the keeping of his only daughter, till he can set her up comfortlike in her own hut. If Mal'd had a hut full of babbies and an old, toothless grammy, Bigman would have done the same by 'em as if they were his own, as was his duty.

He turned slow to me. He's got a stiffening in his joints that plagues him something awful in the cold, but he won't let it nevermind him much. “Lo, Halfman Simian,” he sung back, and came slow out of the oyster bed to me, black mud sucking at his legs. He's a short man, but broad in the chest like a pumpkin, and he came right up and took my good hand. “How's the world been treating you?”

“Fair and fresh, sir, naught to cry over.” Then I got to the pith of my business with him. “I heared tell your aches been binding you something fierce with the frost, I been thinking I might've found something that could smooth away the pain of an evening.”

“Who's had reason to say my aches?” he asked sharpish.

“Just the squirrels and the fishes, sir, no one impertinent,” I said quicklike, and he had to know that we'd all seen how his walk had stuttered the past winter. “I'd be obliged though if you'd step on up with me and have a sit before wand'ring back.”

He had to say yes to that, it wouldn't be polite to refuse. We wandered back to my hut, me leading the way and feeling his eye on me. I can move quick or I can move prettysome, but I canst do the same at once, and it felt like he was burning holes in my head as I clumb slowlike up the shore to our hut.

I hadn't the brawn to turf Wol out when I wanted privicy of an evening, but I'd told him that byandby he'd be getting a love, and she wouldn't be wanting me around during their honeymonth, or probable after, either. He'd kenned on that I had a plan brewing right off, and promised to be scarce whenever I asked. I'd brushed out our skins just as he was gone and laid them down smooth, and put my god's tears what I had stored up in hollow gourds where I could reach them easy, with a pair of little cups and some of last year's nuts and this year's berries and some oatcake, and when we got back it was all laid out as nice as if I'd had a love to take care of me. He settled himself gingerly across from me, folded his legs, and set his hands on his knees as polite. I had to crumple down less graceful-like, but he pretended not to notice. I poured him out a cupful of tears—they were Mam's cups, flat-shallow and the best we had—and he held it gentle in his palm while I filled mine, then we raised them to each other and sipped. His face went red. He'd taken too much at once, but he held the cup still and pretended that it wasn't bothering him any. I'd learned by then how hot the tears burned, and barely wet my upper lip, even though my belly was
jumpin' in me and I wanted the whole gourd to give me courage; we'd never had a Bigman in our hut.

“It's like fire, sir, but that one cup will erase all of your aches, for a time,” I said. He sipped it slowly then and settled more comfortlike.

“How did you find the secret of this?” His voice was satined by the tears, and I knew they would be warming his chest.

“I came at it in a sideways-fashion. Blindman Wink gave me the what of it, but I found the how on my own.” He sipped again at the little cup, and I mimicked him to feel the warm slip down my own throat and up into my face, like a mouthful of tea come to life. I was gladsome and fortunate to have him in my hut. Had I gone begging, as a man does when wanting another man's daughter, he maybe could have pressed me for the secret. As a guest, though, he had to leave it at what I would tell.

“Oysters be manysome this year,” he began, and we started in to talking in the slow weaving way men have, of this and that and nothing much. Though I'd listened often enough, I'd never joined in, and found it real comfortlike. It eased my belly inside me till I thought I might start in on what I was really after.

“Bigman,” I said when he'd thrice emptied his cup, “winter's coming on quicksome. It weighs on a man, not having any company in the long nights, wouldn't you say, sir?”