The Brides of Rollrock Island (26 page)

I went through the day unmoored from what I had known and believed, pushed to and fro by bewildered thoughts. I had not known that people could choose to end themselves. A new danger was abroad—who might take into their heads this senseless idea, if smiling Amy Dressler had been able to? Which other mam, weeping or only quietly enduring under her weed-blanket, might remove herself from us? Why should not, indeed, my own mam do it? For we had beams across our kitchen ceiling too, if that was all that was needed.

The boats were in when school finished that day. Mam was not about when I reached home, but my dad was in his garden, digging over the beds for his spring planting. “Hup, day-up!” he said when I came out the back door.

“Missus Dressler,” I said.

The near smile fled his face. “It’s a very sad thing.” He went back to slowly digging.

I ambled across the yard to him. “How would you do that, hang yourself?”

He looked me up and down. “Never you mind,” he said eventually. “If you ever need to know, you will find a way. Your mam, though, she’s upset about it. They all are. All gone down commiserating.” The spade huffed into the packed dirt; the lifted dirt broke up most satisfyingly. “And when she comes back, we won’t talk of this, do you hear me? We’ll not mention Dresslers, living or dead.”

I nodded and watched him work, and after a while I began to help, picking stones out of the turned earth and piling them up to one side. It seemed as good a way as any to hold my mind in place, just to move from stone to stone, and think about seeds and sprouts and growing things.

Mam came home while we were out there; we saw her at the kitchen window, but she did not wave to us or come out to greet us. When we went in for tea she was quieter than her usual quiet self, and around her eyes was puffy, but not red; she had wept today, but quite some hours ago. Dad was perhaps the tiniest bit fonder in his touches of her as he passed, but no one but me would have seen the difference from their usual evenings, except perhaps in the strength of wide-eyed watchfulness with which their son regarded them, fearful with what had happened outside their home this day, and itchily uncertain what it might bring about tomorrow.

In the days when we ran about among our mams’ skirts, they took us with them when they gathered in this house and that. At first there would be greetings and tea and sitting upright and eyes everywhere. They would talk of their men and their men’s tempers; they would talk of us, and how we were coming on, how we ate and grew.

Then one of them would sigh and cross from table to armchair or settee or fireside stool, or even settle to the floor. All the mams’ movements would suddenly change, slowing and swaying, and their voices would lower from so bright and brittle,
and someone might laugh low, too. As we ran in and out we would see more of them gather at the seated one, leaning on her or pulling her to lean on them. Hairs would be unpinned and fall, and combs brought out and combing begun, and there is nothing nicer than a mam’s face so free of care while her hair is being combed. When we were littler we would run in from our play and lie among them, patted and tutted over and our own hairs combed and compared, the differences in wave and redness. Sometimes we were allowed to comb theirs, but our arms were never long enough to do it as well as they did for each other, long slow silky sweeps from scalp to tips, comber and combed both dreamy.

Their talk would grow less proper, and have more sighs in it, and more seal: the high crooning, whistles and coughs of their attempts were always followed by laughter, or a shaking of the head. They loved when the littlest boys, learning to speak, would try these noises; nothing amused them better than a tiny trying to loose a bit of seal-song, and a mam singing back to him.

These gatherings were the only times we heard these songs, these attempts at seal-talk among the mams. When I was still quite small it occurred to me that as we grew into men, it must happen that we grew to not like the sounds, that men did not want to learn the sense behind them, and did not want to hear them senseless.

I remember lying with my mam in the sun on a rug on the sand at Six-Mile, and the thought coming out my mouth: “When I have a wife, I will let her speak seal in our house.”

“Oh yes?” she said, surprised. “Why will you do that, my Daniel?”

“Because when wives talk seal they are happy, and I want my wife to be happy.”

I lay there pleased with myself for this wish, pleased with my own kindness uttering it to my mam, pleased with my plan for my future self, who would become a kind and admirable man. All was well with that day, the warmth of the sun and my mam and me on our island of blanket, other mams at a distance, other boys running and kicking up the water.

Mam turned toward me, propped her head on her hand. “My darling,” she said softly, “if you want your wife to be happy, and to speak the seal-tongue truly, you will not take her as your wife.”

For a moment our conversation ceased to make sense. I frowned up at Mam, hands behind my head still, the little leisurely gentleman.

Then, “Oh,” I said. “I should leave her as a seal?”

She nodded. “Leave her as a seal,” she almost whispered, as if testing the words in her own mouth.

I laughed at her solemn face with the sky behind it. “But who will cook my dinners and do my laundry? Who will sweep my house?”

She poked my middle. “Why, you could do all that your own self. You are a good little sweeper, very thorough.”

“But who will be mam to my boys?”

“A woman,” she said. “A woman of the land, your own kind. She could give you girls as well, that woman. I hear they are a great comfort, daughters.”

I pitched myself at her, instantly jealous of those daughters she did not have, the comfort they did not bring. “
Sons
are a great comfort!” I clung on and kissed her bossily, kissed away that solemn
look and made her laugh at me, pushed all that talk of the future
into
the future, where it belonged.

“It’s true. They’re a great comfort!” And looking in my urgent face she laughed some more. “My son particularly, my Daniel!”

And I was so occupied with obtaining these assurances, and pressing my need for them upon her, that it did not occur to me even to wonder, let alone to ask her, why at all, in the first place, she might require comforting.

I was idling outside Grinny’s place. He was ill in the armchair inside, and we were talking through his cracked-open window. It was the grayest darkest cold day, with lamps lit in most houses, though it was barely past midday.

A white ghost went by down the hill, but running harder than any ghost would run—its feet slapped and its breath sobbed. By the time I looked there was only the back of her to see.

“What!” said Grinny and pushed the window wider, though his mam had forbidden it.

Her hair spilled down her back like black paint, her poor feet ran, all warped and bunioned from shoe wearing, their soles gray with dirt.

“That was Aggie Bannister,” Grinny said in flat wonder.

“Aggie Bannister?” I said stupidly.

She floated away down the town, as pale in the dimness as a falling flare. She had been shut away from us for some time. Aran had hardly come out to play since that day up at Wholeman’s—or Timmy or Cornelius either, any Bannister boy. Bannister himself
we’d barely seen since last spring when they’d had to put their girl-bab in the sea. He’d been mourning so hard, it was all he could do to fetch himself to the boats and back.

“Follow! Go after her!” said Grinny. “Come back and tell me!” He waved me away and brought down the window, nodding, bright-eyed.

So down I ran, and other boys ran too. There were enough people out, coated and hatted and pinch-faced with cold, to make noise to bring out others—our running left a path of opened doors behind us, a path of
What’s up?
and
Where are you lads off?

I didn’t slow to answer. Aggie ran around Low Corner. I thought she would slip and fall there, and I picked up speed. We slid into the corner ourselves; she had fallen just beyond. Men started toward her to help her, then did not know what to do because she was naked—one began to take off his coat. Their wives had hardly time to cry “Aggie! Oh!” before Aggie blundered up, and ran off again, shaken off course by the fall, nearly smacking into a house front, like someone’s cow got out, not knowing about towns and how to pass through them.

She steadied and ran off. Some mams went to go after her, but their men stopped them. “It’s clear enough where she’s headed,” said Robert Dunkling, pulling his wife by the hand to the head of Totting Lane. All the others, realizing his sense, went too—our little clump of boys poured ahead of them down Totting and Fish-head with windows opening and people crying out above, reached the cross lane and slipped down to the seafront under the rail of it, staggered out staring to the south where Aggie had not yet appeared.

And then she had, a shining slim streak of person, determined, churning into the beginning rain. Several mams ran for her, never minding their husbands.

“They’re not fast enough,” said some man up on the ramp.

“Aye, she’ll give ’em the slip easily.”

She was already across the front. She saw the mams, decided she would not make for the steps or they would catch her, began to clamber down among the boulders of the south mole.

“Oh, ho!”

“She’ll hurt herself in there. She’ll break herself—Oh!” as Aggie slipped and fell among the rocks.

“But up she is again. She’s bleeding.”

We boys were down at the sea-rail now, grown-ups hurrying to lean along beside us, the whole town lining up to see. Younger men turned their faces aside, hiding embarrassed grins from each other. Older men watched, composed. The mams held their hands to their fraught faces; they spoke not a word, to the men or to each other, and their eyes didn’t leave Aggie for a moment.

Somehow she had reached the beach. Bloodied at knee and hip and elbow, she went at a limping run out across the stones. Now some men, my dad among them, took it into their heads to start down the stairs and catch her that way, but when she saw them she turned straight for the water, staggering, clumsy, as if she were transforming to seal right there, and might have to heave herself legless and armless the rest of the way.

“Where’s her man?” said someone. “Is he so gone in his grief he is
letting
her swim away?”

And then Aggie was a naked back and bottom in the middle
of a white fan of water. The green-white froth passed over her, streaking and swallowing her blood, pasting her hair flat to her head. “So cold!” moaned a woman behind me, but Aggie embraced the waves, swimming strongly; she was not clumsy there, and the cold did not bother her.

“She wants to stay in the lee of the mole,” said Prentice Meehan above me. “It’s dirty farther out.”

“She is not out swimming for her
health
,” said his wife. “She doesn’t want to
stay
anywhere.”

The mams in pursuit were stranded along the south mole, begging, waving their arms. The men had strung themselves out along the shifting brink of the water, trying to see her, seeing and calling out uselessly. I remembered Rab Wholeman that day at the inn, alone in his guilt, us shrinking away as if the very touch of him were poison. Here was a very different thing, everyone forcing forward, crying out help and worry, and still Aggie went, striking out as if none of us were here, laboring away through the cold sea.

“She would rather drown,” said Missus Meehan, with a mix of certainty and disbelief, into the little silence that had fallen on us. We could only watch Aggie’s smallness in the edge of the sea, beyond the waves now and crawling forth across the great wind-plowed field of it, waking the green from its grayness with her splashings, drawing her messy white line out and out.

“She’ll tire fast in that cold,” a man whispered.

A howl of the wind turned into the howl of a man—“Aggie!”—and Bannister ran out at the far end of the house row.

“He has her coat!” It flapped around him; it looked as if it had blown against him by accident, and he was trying to fight free.