Whirl Away (14 page)

I knew that didn't mean they weren't at the cove. Madeline might have them all playing “Indian,” making their way across the barrens without ever setting foot on a path, carefully erasing anything like a human mark behind them. They might even be hiding along the spine of the next hummock, sighting at me with their hands over their eyes, seriously silent while I stumbled ignorantly towards them. They'd wait to the last moment and jump out at me, shouting “Surprise!”—all three of them, and they expect me to act surprised—which I
always did, until they got so good at hiding that they would actually startle me, over and over again. The game stopped being even close to fun a long time ago. After a while, it just made me mad—in fact, angrier each and every time. I'd know they were out there watching me scrabble around, looking, and they'd all be up somewhere laughing to themselves.

Anyone could get mad about that, right?

Once, I came across all three of them walking backwards along the dust of the road, brushing away their tracks with scraps of spruce bough. They had walked straight down the middle of the road, avoiding the tire tracks so that it looked like our car had been the last thing to pass, walking lightly on the available patches of gravel and carefully obliterating any sign of their passing in the powdery dust.

Madeline had looked up impishly, a co-conspirator, dirt smeared on both sides of her narrow face. “You were lucky this time,” she said. “We were almost out of sight.”

Frustrated, I picked up a small rock and flung it hard at the ground. It took a strange carom, perhaps hitting another rock buried there in the dust, and it spun up off the ground and into her leg, opening a small cut above the point of her ankle that bled surprisingly freely. Looking up quickly at her eyes, I saw the flicker of pain, and then watched her eyes go pebble hard and shiny, like some sort of hidden shark's eyelid had come down.

“Like I said,” Madeline whispered. “Lucky this time.”

I'd had enough of the game. I turned and walked back to the tower.

Another time, I watched their bright shirts, two green, one red, from up on the catwalk around the tower where I was wiping the heavy salt spray off the glass, until, suddenly, when I looked over my shoulder, they were irretrievably gone. It was the kind of thing that makes you feel almost completely alone, makes you reach for the fridge and beer, even if it is barely afternoon on a Wednesday.

Arnold Cove is caught between cliffs, grey crumbling stone on one side, browning sheets of shale on the other. When the swell is just right, the waves roar directly in from the open ocean, shoulder high and cruel, the water collapsing and snatching itself back under. The small bay catches anything the ocean chooses to give up. There are plastic bottles up high at the tide line, discarded shoes, and the regular storm refuse of smashed lobster pots and buoys, along with the pieces of boats battered apart somewhere on distant and angry seas. Lost rubber red-orange Fireball work gloves, hopefully without hands inside, often lie palm up on the sand, begging attention.

As I made my way down the steep incline, there was no sign of Madeline and the boys. If they had somehow been transformed into white bleach bottles, I would have seen at least a dozen of them.

Once down on the beach, there was no real way to see if they were around. The tide was in, the water right up at the point where sand turns to fist-sized, jumbled round stones, and I couldn't see anywhere they'd left anything like a track. There were ash pits where old bonfires had been, but they
were cold and smokeless, and when I dug my hands down into the ashes, they were rain wet, at least a few days old.

They probably weren't there. Bonfires were almost a given. Once down on the beach, Madeline likes to get the boys playing Cornish wrecker, and they need to get the bonfires big enough, they'd told me, “to lure the sailors to their watery deaths.” Sometimes I can see huge clouds of smoke from the tower—big grey and black pillars of smoke. When I go down to see what they're doing, I can hear their whoops and shouts while I'm still far away on the path. They always stop as soon as they see me, and stand seriously warming their hands as the salt-dried sticks spit and flare and burn impossibly bright and hot. The wood is stripped by the salt and burns like rage; it's all fury and sheer flying-apart. Throw water onto one of their big beach fires and even the rocks underneath hiss and crack and explode in protest.

More than once, when I've started across the beach towards the fire, I've seen David move away and start skipping flat rocks out into the maws of the breaking waves, as intent on the surf as if counting the number of skips had become his full-time career. Keiran moves away then too, but not as far, leaving Madeline alone at the edge of the blaze, responsible for the pyre, her chin stuck out as if daring me to do something, her hair smelling of smoke.

I don't find it surprising that they have more in common with each other than they have with me. The cliffs are high and dangerous, and because of that, Madeline has spent virtually every waking minute with them, certainly every minute when they step outside the fence—supposed to keep the foraging
sheep away from the tower and the house and the weather sampling station—and into the dangerous ground beyond.

The weather station is what takes most of my time. Other keepers didn't have to do as much with it, but several times a day I have to measure wind speeds and fog density and the thickness of freezing rain on the guy wires for the big signal tower. I have to log temperature and wind direction, even before making sure everything is running right, servicing the big triple foghorn and keeping the equipment in the tower in proper condition.

Once, I came down from working on the light's gears, cleaning out the old black fouled grease from between each tooth and packing in new lube with the grease gun, and found all three of them in the garden, Keiran little more than a toddler, David maybe five, collecting cabbage worms in empty paper drinking cups. Madeline was talking, telling the boys she was amazed how the cabbage white moths could find their way so far across the barrens to eat our cabbages, and I was struck for a moment by how much the fluttering, seemingly directionless flight of the moths reminded me of her.

Later, heading out to set the caterpillars free on the barrens, they left the gate open and the sheep got in and ate all the small plants right down to the ground, leaving only insolent black buttons of manure behind. I was furious when I found the gate swinging open and the plants—cabbage and carrots and potatoes—all gone, but Madeline just laughed and laughed and said, “Cabbage worms come in all sizes and some of them are woolly,” and then started laughing at me,
because I couldn't stop being angry, even when she put her hand up and ruffled my hair and said, “Woolly sheep, woolly sheep.”

I pushed her then, a hand in each of the dips inside her shoulders, knocking her backwards into the fence and then down hard, flat on her back.

Afterwards, I said I was sorry.

I searched up and down the tide line, but they weren't there. I even went back up the brook behind the barrisway to the spot where they had had a lean-to earlier in the summer. The lean-to had fallen over, but there was still an apple juice can standing next to the firepit, its top cut off and a strand of heavy wire stretched across it to make a primitive tea kettle for boiled tea, all the paint burned off the outside and the rust furred and feasting on the burnt metal.

Madeline had spent one summer night alone out there with the boys after I said there was no point to camping when we were practically camping our whole lives anyway. But she had taken them out, all three loaded up with blankets, food and the good frying pan, and I watched them disappear down over the crest of the hill, then spent the rest of that evening drinking beer and throwing the empty bottles off the cliff to watch them tumble in the air and smash on the sharp rocks we were always telling the boys to avoid. When the wind and the angle of the bottle were just right, I'd get one thrumming whistle from the open neck as the bottle fell, coming back up through the air like a voice yelling an elongated and ever-fading “OOOooooo.” Like the quiet version of the surprised sound you might hear if
you came up behind someone and just pushed her quickly over the edge.

The third year we were at the Cape, Madeline knocked on our front door as if she were a stranger—as if there were ever any strangers out here—and I opened it to find her standing on the porch. She was wearing a short yellow summer dress, the wind picking at the hem, her feet and legs bare and scratched by the brush, holding a handful of fans of ground juniper boughs. The smell of the sap burst sharp off the branches, and the black berries made me think of gin.

“Surprise. Buy a bouquet for the lady?” she said, smiling, the words coming out in a put-on British accent.

So I brought her in and sat her down and got the first aid kit, wiping up the cross-hatched bloody lines on her legs and wondering where she had left her shoes. Some of the cuts were deep and jagged, where the thorns from the wild roses had caught and dragged, juddering, across her skin, leaving spots where the blood had risen, beaded and dried black. She just looked at me while I knelt there, cleaning her up. When I looked up, she was staring at me with a distracted, distant, half-smiling look, as if once again I had failed to grasp the point.

In the end, I forgot to put the juniper in water and the needles fell off all at once, leaving the grey and scaly branches looking like the limbs of an animal that had died and then shed its fur.

The next morning, I woke up alone in bed. Madeline said she had been so tired that she'd fallen asleep on the couch. David told me later—quietly, in that small boy's singsong
voice and with his eyes darting back and forth as if he was betraying a confidence—that she had spent the night in his bed, that they were crew on a sailing ship bound for port in France. The gale that came up outside that night had been ripping the sky like fabric, so I told him that any sailing ship near us would have been blasted far, far away by just one breath of savage wind, and would've sunk. All hands lost.

I hit her in the face—hard—on a hot July morning when she was three steps up from the bottom of the circular staircase in the light tower. I just pulled my arm back and waited, and then let it go as soon as she was in range.

Madeline sat down sharply on the metal step.

“Surprise,” I said. I thought I'd made my voice sound light enough, as if I were joking.

I had been standing off on the edge of the stairs, and Madeline had come in out of the bright summer sunlight, blinking in the sudden change from light to gloom. If I'd really meant to hurt her, I would have waited until she was farther up the stairs, so that the fall would have been even worse than the punch.

I watched her nose begin to bleed in the shadows, a dark line running down from each nostril, waiting to hear just one more smart-mouthed word. Instead, I watched all the mischief seep away, right there in front of me. Watched it empty out until she didn't even look like herself. Then I turned and walked up the stairs.

I may have hit her before, maybe a few times, but it was only out of frustration, and it wasn't ever as hard as that, and
she hadn't looked like that afterwards. It hadn't ever been quite like this. But it wasn't my fault.

They had been gone all day on a mission because Madeline had heard on the radio about new fossils found at Mistaken Point, and while they were gone I'd been doing everything. I'd done laundry and dishes in the house, finding my own lunch when they still hadn't come back halfway through the day. Wrestling with the wrong-sized wrenches in the tower, working on the gear train, barking my knuckles when the wrenches slipped, unable to get into town and find the right-sized sockets because I didn't have the car. I had the right wrenches somewhere, but I couldn't find them: Madeline and the boys had gotten tired of hiding themselves, and their new game was hiding things like tools. I'd see something shiny sticking out of the rock wall below the tower and find a pair of Vise-Grips stashed in there almost out of sight. I told them that it wasn't funny, that it was dangerous if anything happened and I couldn't set the light, that there were ships and sailors depending on us, but they laughed, Keiran doubled over, laughing so hard that it looked like he might pee in his pants.

“If they wreck on our beach,” David said seriously, “we'll go on board and steal their shoes and their clock and their bare-o-meter.”

I told him he had no idea what a barometer even was.

They'd gone on their fossil exploration and I was working away, getting more and more angry, waiting for them to come back, knowing I'd probably have my head under something when they all charged in and startled me again. The
more I thought about it, the better idea it seemed to be to have a surprise of my own. That's why I met Madeline in the dark, coming up the stairs, probably hoping to startle me again. It was not the best idea to hit her, but really, it's not all my fault.

When I came up out of Arnold Cove on a long, careful loop, still looking for them, I was miles out of the way and soaked to my knees from crossing the caribou bog. It was hot enough that I at least knew I wasn't likely to get caught in a sudden fog. I could see the tip of the light tower, but that was almost the only familiar landmark.

The barrens are low, rolling hummocks of peat, each hummock hiding more hummocks out behind. It's easy to lose your way, but at least I had the tower far off to my right, and I was pretty sure, wherever they were hiding this time, I had to be far enough out to be clearly behind them. I knew they wouldn't expect that: their little game depended on their knowing the direction I'd be coming from, and I wanted them with their backs to me, stretched out flat on one of the drier, higher mounds, oblivious to the fact that I was close until I was right on top of them.

I had fallen hard climbing up out of the valley, and that was on grey slippery rocks, gashing my shin through my already wet trousers. I went into a boghole, deep treacle-wet peat, and I remember wondering how it was that the caribou that make the barrens home don't break their legs getting around. You see them in the distance regularly, the caribou, ragged white and light brown cotton tufts gathered together
in groups of twenty or so, like scarecrows with their clothes coming apart and their stuffing coming out. Usually there are ten or so down on their chests; the others are up and feeding, but there's always one or two that are alert and looking around, making sure that nothing is sneaking up on them. It's like they set up their own broad perimeter, watching out in all directions for any unexpected movement. They don't care if you can see them, as long as they've already seen you first. And then they always move off as soon as you try to get too close.