Blaze Island Page 5

  As for Cape House, he wasn’t sure how she felt about that either. She’d come out there with him a scattered time. She’d brought out herbs to burn and cleanse the air of the place — of sheep stink and ghosts. It was to the girl that he’d told the story of the old house’s origins, how it came to be built in such a remote spot, even more isolated than where her little white house stood on the near side of Green Cove. More than a hundred years ago, a ship’s captain named Aeneas Green claimed to have had a vision of a house standing up on the rocks of that shore. With the money he’d made whaling, he spared no expense when building the house, solid beams for the joists, nine panes of glass in the upstairs windows. In those days you paid for glass by the pane. The more panes, the richer you had to be.

  Some said the old captain had built his house in such a remarkable location in the hopes of wooing a wife. Yet no wife materialized. For years, old Ane Green lived alone by the sea with no company but his faithful dog. At night, from town or across the cove, people saw his oil lamp shining. In the end, he closed off every room but the kitchen. Cracked. Possibly. He was buried in the town cemetery, Caleb told the girl, alongside all the Greens and Borders and other families who’d come across the sea and lived in Pummelly for centuries.

  He had to get out there. Not by car. Could he ford the brook? Or take the quad, go the long way, around Green Cove Pond? Paths through the barrens would be marshy after so much rain, but with luck they’d be passable. How were people elsewhere on the island faring, Caleb wondered: in Tom’s Neck and Harbour Islands and Shallow Bay, across the high barrens in the town of Blaze, in Caribou Harbour and Western Tickle and Never Come By, the villages over on bayside?

  Usually, if travelling by road, he’d have to pass the turnoff to the old man’s place on the way to Cape House. From his uncle’s words, it sounded like that house had avoided damage, which relieved Caleb, for the girl’s sake. Was the stranger who’d crashed his car one of the men who’d arrived by air yesterday? They had no car. If not, then another American. Odd. Why would any visitor be driving across the island in the middle of the night in such a howl? Unless he was cracked. Or some kind of storm chaser.

  “I’m off to Cape House,” Caleb told his mother, “to see how she held up.”

  “Are you planning to fly?” Her voice was light but pointed.

  “My wings are a bit out of practice so I thought I’d take the quad.”

  “Stock up on gas now, boy, because without a road, we won’t be getting any more for a spell,” said his uncle Leo. “Can’t go far, true, though we’ll need it for the generators.”

  Caleb’s great-aunt had the frying pan out, intent on feeding all of them scrambled eggs and toutons.

  “Christine, my dear, I need to be on my way,” said Leo, dropping his mug into the sink and tugging his cap across his brow. “I’m off to Mary’s with some two-by-fours for Pat and Brian. Then on my way to the cove.” There was vigour in his uncle: he wanted to be out there, doing things. The storm’s aftermath only intensified that urge.

  “Why not wait till later,” his mother called to Caleb. “Land’s soaked, brook’s up. Go with Leo, fetch some gas for Aunt Christine.” And to Leo, “Tell Pat and Brian and Mary herself if you see her that I’ll walk around the harbour with a tincture for her.”

  To Caleb these were heartening words, since his mother hadn’t been taking much interest in her tinctures lately.

  “I’ll follow Uncle Leo on the quad. And fly home first and get the gas cans.” He hoped, for now, these words would satisfy her.

  Plenty of people were out and about on the harbour road early this bright morning, men in their trucks, others on foot. It was almost a procession, everyone caught up in the release from the usual that a fierce storm can bring. Beneath his helmet, wind pressed across Caleb’s scalp. He and the old man were the only two men in the village who didn’t own a truck. He’d taken the old man’s advice: You don’t need a truck, get a car solid enough for winter, all-wheel drive if you can afford it, take the quad when you need to go off-road, hitch up a wagon to haul things about. His uncle Tom had offered him a rusted half-ton when he got his full licence, one that neither of his own sons wanted, and Caleb had said no, proud of himself.

  I’m thinking of the future and you should, too, the old man had told him. Need to get our fossil-fuel use down as much as we can. In those days, Caleb took pride in doing exactly what the old man said.

  Ahead of him, Ed McGrath was leaning in the window of his uncle Leo’s truck. Stearins speared themselves across the sky, preparing for their autumn flight to the other end of the Earth. Seaweed lay plastered against the harbour rocks, puddles at roadside. Caleb checked his phone again. No signal. He wondered again how bad the lashing down on the Avalon had been. Funny to have no way of finding out how his aunt Mona and great-aunt Magdalene were, the phone a slim bit of uselessness. Likely there were text messages out there, wandering through the air. Up in the Alberta oil fields, where his cousins worked, they’d be fine, though they’d been plagued by forest fires all summer and must be anxious about everyone at home. Perhaps they knew more about what was going on than he did. Then there were the things no text could tell him: how the caribou had made out in the storm, hunkered together in the lun of the hills, how foxes had fared and rabbits and birds and whales and fish.

  At the gas pump outside Vera McGrath’s general store, Vera’s husband Dan had a generator going already to power the pump. Cash only. Voices flew in all directions, no need for phones after all. Did you hear Ned Pratt lost a whole wall of siding? Gerard Pratt was up on his roof in the worst of it, banging nails into his shingles so they didn’t rip off. Must not have used enough tar to stick them down in the first place. My goodness, the cats were galing around the house. And Mary Green? Cyril Foley found her in the kitchen in her nightgown, ready to haul a pair of buckets upstairs where there’s no roof left. When he told her to stay where she was, she insisted he go up and rescue two things: the portrait of her son Joe who was lost at sea and her extra set of teeth.

  “More lives than a cat, that one,” said Dan McGrath.

  When his turn came, Caleb pulled the quad up alongside the pump, fixed the nozzle inside the mouth of the first can before pushing up the metal lever to start the flow of gas manually, black numbers on their little white tabs ticking over to count the price. Dan was already rationing gas. Caleb could fill up one can but not the other. He’d leave the filled can for his great-aunt in Leo’s truck and ask his uncle to deliver it.

  Along the road, Pat Green, angular and grey-haired, waved at Caleb from the roof of his mother’s house. A blue tarp flapped in the breeze from the far side of the roof. Leo was passing two-by-fours up to Pat’s younger brother Brian, stocky, hair buzzed short. High above, a black-back circled. A mattress leaned against one wall, rugs on the clothes line. Caleb pulled off his helmet.

  “Caleb, you’re the giant one, help us nail the tarp to the roof beam before this breeze yanks it off,” Pat shouted.

  Being, in fact, the smallest one, therefore useful, Caleb was best able to balance high on a roof ridge. At least up there he’d be able to ask Pat himself about the washout.

  The tarp was temporarily held in place by nails through the corner grommets, a southwesterly rippling the tarp. As soon as Caleb reached the top of the ladder, Pat handed him a hammer and a pouch of roofing nails. “Down in Green Cove, is the road really gone?” Caleb asked.

  “Yes, boy,” said Pat, pulling a nail from between his teeth. “Brook sawed a hole right through it.”

  “Water’s high?”

  “Yes, you’ll not be driving through that.”

  “Did you by chance get a peek at Cape House?”

  “Now, Caleb, couldn’t see much from where we were, other than that the house is standing and your roof looks to be on.”

  A year and a half ago it was, in the spring of the year he turned eighteen and a few months before he finished school, Caleb had gone to visit his uncle Charlie, h
ome in the harbour on one of his spells between oil-sands shifts. Five years since Charlie, the youngest of his mother’s three brothers, trim and small and wiry, had left the fish plant and gone to work out west, driving a great rig across the tar sands because, for the moment, that’s where the money was. Standing in the kitchen of Charlie’s big new house built with the oil money, Caleb, already nervous, wasted no time: “I’d like to buy your old sheep shed from you.”

  With a wink Charlie said, “Now what do you want with that old palace? And what’ll you pay me for it? Bottled rabbit or fish? And are you hoping for sheep to go along with it?”

  Caleb said, “I fancy living out there.”

  “Is that right?” Charlie laughed. His handlebar moustache jiggled when he spoke. Was there derision in his laugh? He handed Caleb a mug of instant coffee. “What does your mother think about that?”

  “She thinks it’s a fine idea.” This was far from the truth, which Charlie probably intuited. His mother knew nothing of his plans. But Caleb wasn’t intending to live with his mother forever.

  “There’s no power,” Charlie said, rubbing his moustache. “She’s in a lonely spot. Sylvia will think you’re cracked, boy.”

  “I’ll do like Alan Wells does, with the wind and the solar.”

  “You will, will you,” said Charlie. He paused. “She’s a lot of house.”

  “I’ll turn her into a B&B, I’m thinking. Aunt Christine says someone should take over when she retires.”

  “In the village, boy, not out on a cliff. Why not let me find you a job out west when you graduate?”

  Caleb said, “I want to stay on the island.”

  Charlie’s son Phil was out west and Tom’s son Jim had left the island the year before. His other cousins Danny and Gerald, who were in his class, planned to bolt for the mainland as soon as they could. But no one ever really thought of him, solitary, a mongrel, as being like the rest of them.

  “What do you say I give it to you,” Charlie said. “My boy doesn’t want it. You’ll want money to fix her up. Don’t come after me if she falls down.”

  “She won’t,” Caleb insisted.

  Caleb wasn’t sure Charlie believed he’d do anything with the near ruin. Yet they’d trekked out there, his three uncles, the old man who wasn’t really that old, and himself. They determined that while a wreck, the house was a salvageable wreck, despite the sheep shit and the risk of worsening storms.

  His uncle Leo said, “You’ll want an earthmover out here to deal with the septic.”

  His uncle Tom, the loud one, simply shook his head. Luckily Caleb had his job working for the old man. It didn’t pay a lot but it was something. Steady. On the island. He told the men he’d do as much of the labour himself as he could. It would take time, yes. But what it would be to live out there in that remote spot beside the sea. Despite the storms. You could make a fine and self-sufficient life. Not necessarily alone either. He and Charlie had shaken hands on the deal.

  “Says he has a dream,” Charlie said with a shrug.

  From his rooftop perch, Caleb peered across the harbour. Out at sea, the tiny islands called the Little Fish were barely more than ridges above the horizon, white smudges of foam bursting against them. High pressure shrank them, low pressure made them loom. Lots of power still out in the water.

  A glaucous gull flew overhead, wingspan wide as a flag, and all at once Caleb was higher in the air looking down, only his vision was not his vision. Sometimes this happened to him. Seeing another creature, without warning, he’d lose his own body and enter its skin. How much wider the circumference of his sight, it was like being able to see behind him, the glint of water from the cove back there, the little boxes below, moving figures, an electromagnetic wind stirred up and sailing in grey-blue swoops, the retreating storm a chaos of energy, a tug in the pattern of the air from far off even as it dissipated.

  Down below, the girl approached on her bicycle. Caleb dropped back into his own body, wobbling on the roof beam. She had to have seen him. Was that a wave? As she wheeled her bicycle right up to Mary Green’s house, she disappeared from sight.

  White-haired Cyril Foley was down there somewhere, voice rising. “How was it down in the cove last night, Miranda? No lun where you are. Did the wind sound like it was throwing rocks at you, too?”

  Caleb couldn’t hear her reply. He hammered the last nail in, almost hitting his thumb. He was on the ladder. Careful now. Her father was nowhere around. This was a chance, wasn’t it? Once, when he’d gone to the house to apologize and speak to her about the future, knowing her father to be in at the cabin, she’d run inside. Another time, she’d shut herself in the chicken coop. It wasn’t his intention to distress her further. Another time, out on the shore path between Green Cove and Pummelly, he’d seen her approaching at a distance, and though she’d turned away, there was indecision in her turn. She’d looked back at him over her shoulder, mouth open, as if wishing to speak.

  As Caleb reached the ground, Cyril Foley came around the corner of the house. “Text for you,” Cyril said, holding out an envelope.

  “Where’s —?” Caleb couldn’t bring himself to say her name.

  It was like casting a spell: if you moved too quickly the creature you were trying to entice would vanish.

  Everyone in the village would know that himself and the girl, born mere months apart, who had for so long spent so much time together, no longer did. They had not spoken in over a year. Since the day he took her out in speedboat to see the icebergs.

  Down on the beach, after the old man had heard the girl’s version of what happened, he’d shouted at Caleb, told him he was to have nothing more to do with his daughter. No more going inside the house on the cove. Now it was as if there were thorns around it. When necessary, the old man asked him to step into his study, housed in a shed across the yard. Or they met at the old man’s cabin. Despite all this, the old man hadn’t fired him. The separation was a test through which Caleb had to redeem himself. He’d turned the boat in the wrong direction, yes. But he could atone for that. He’d upset the girl. Yes. But he had apologized. One day they would go back to the way things were before. Only better. He had the best possible future to offer her. How could the old man and the girl herself not see this? Once more he would be able to speak to her softly and share his deepest thoughts. Only in the future, they’d do more than speak.

  “Miranda’s gone to see Mary,” Cyril said, as Caleb took the envelope.

  Caleb knew how much the girl loved Mary Green, and Mary herself had always taken an interest in the girl, who helped her in house and garden now that Mary’s hands had grown arthritic. Planted potatoes for her in old plastic fish tubs, lettuces in Mary’s small, glass-walled greenhouse. A painting the girl had made hung in Mary’s parlour. Not from watercolours, as Caleb had first thought, but inks concocted from wild substances: lichen and moss and berries and plants and seaweed and tree bark.

  When he reached the road, the girl was wheeling her bicycle farther around the harbour. Splintered pieces of wood and shingle, likely from Mary’s roof, lay strewn at roadside. The girl was not as tall as his mother, but her body rippled with firm and fluid movement, that kind of grace, her hair falling long and dark across her back. She’d knit the blue wool cap that clasped her head. One day he’d peel it off so gently and run his fingers through her hair. Caleb knew her to be shy but she wasn’t always studying herself like the other girls they’d gone to school with. Everyone at school had treated them like some kind of couple.

  There was nothing on the outside of the envelope. Caleb ripped it open. When a couple of bills fell out, he stooped to catch them. The folded note inside was from her father.

  What had he expected?

  He would call out. Before he could, the girl turned. Saw him, frozen as he was, gave a true and unmistakable wave.

  . . .

  Mid-morning: Miranda had delivered her father’s message. She’d stopped for a cup of tea with Mary Green, who, from the roc
king chair in her daughter Susannah’s kitchen, seemed stubbornly unrattled by her night’s adventure. Ahead, as Miranda cycled over the hill leading out of town, lay her small white house, alone at the end of its lane. Her heart surged towards it. The blades of their wind turbine, which her father had switched on earlier that morning, spun in the field near the road.

  Down in the watery cove, where the swollen brook cut the road in two and churned into the tidal water that had stolen the beach, a black truck was pulled up, three figures gathered at the jagged edge of the washout, two in coveralls and a third in a lime-green jacket. The big black truck belonged to Leo Borders. At the turn into her lane, Miranda hesitated. The men gestured to the remains of Frank’s car, still submerged in the torrent. A wheelbarrow with a handful of logs tossed into it stood abandoned by their roadside woodpile. Above all this, the sky swung big and wild, thin clouds like the white ribs of a great creature spanning it. The thought of Frank’s crash juddered through Miranda once more. She listened for any sound of her father’s quad returning from the cabin along the track that led into the barrens, heard nothing.

  The wind, soft out of the west, carried another sound across the cove to her. Was that the buzz of a drill? From Cape House? The sound rose and faded.

  The black truck left the cove, making its way in her direction. Caleb’s uncle Leo, who had an uneven, gap-toothed smile and still sometimes went duck hunting with her father, waved. Her father and all three of the Borders brothers had gone hunting together ever since she was a child. In those days, Caleb and his cousins sometimes went with them. She’d never gone, nor had Sylvia, Caleb’s mother, though Miranda was content to eat the duck. By now Caleb’s cousins had all left the island. A year and two months since she and Caleb had last spoken. How did it feel? It felt like a part of her had gone missing. There’d been relief, after the initial shock wore off and the bruises on her chest faded. Then came the loss. The contours of the loss kept changing — shifting between guilt and anger, regret and unease. All these feelings slipped through her in pulses. When she saw Caleb, which was as little as she could manage, or heard him, which was more often, when he came to get instructions from her father, something stirred in Miranda. Restlessness. Longing? It was perplexing. Why couldn’t the wind carry the feelings away?