A Map of Glass (3 page)

When he was finished with the primary documentation, Jerome wedged the camera in the groin of the hawthorn, then laughed when he found that its odd appearance in that location made him want to photograph it. He removed the shovel from the drift in order to begin the first of the physical sessions of the project. Using the front edge of the shovel he drew a rectangular shape approximately eight feet long and three feet wide on the untouched surface of the snow, then he reached for the camera in order to photograph the lines he had drafted, which were wonderfully exaggerated at this moment by the angle of the low sun. He returned the camera to the tree and began to dig, creating an inner wall by using a plunging motion at the edges; then, with wide-sweeping gestures, he flung the excess snow away from the center so that it would not disturb the surrounding surfaces. It was not easy going; the ice storms of the winter and every crust that had once been surface had formed a series of tough layers – like strata on a rock face – and often he was forced to turn the shovel around to use the handle as a pick or gouge. When he neared the frozen surface of the earth, he tossed the shovel aside so that he could hunker down and work more carefully with his hands. He wanted everything he was uncovering to remain in place, as it had remained in place since the first snowfall. Unlike some artists who had exposed the roots of trees, he would not call what he was doing “an uncovering,” but rather would refer to the process as a revelation, and would entitle the photographs he would take of this area of the site
The Revelations
. As he was thinking about this title, a shadow near some small willows farther down the shore moved at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he sat back on his haunches to survey the outlying terrain. It was then that he saw the small carved angel emerging like an ice sculpture from the snow, and he tramped across the quarter-mile of white space that separated him from it. An old gravestone, he realized as he approached, most of which was still buried. Perhaps there was a modest graveyard waiting to be revealed by the spring melt. The angel looked like a solemn child, lost in contemplation and surrounded by a circle of fresh pawprints. It had not occurred to Jerome that there would be animals on an island only a mile long and half again as wide, but he supposed that the animal tracks must have been made by a muskrat or an otter, some kind of water’s edge dweller shaken temporarily out of hibernation by the sun and the warmth of the day. Whatever it was, it had broken his concentration, made him aware of the declining light, and the sodden state of his gloves, and he returned to the site, plunged the shovel once again into the drift, and picked up the camera. When he reached the door of the sail loft, he turned toward the shore and photographed the site from a distance. Then he walked inside and carefully climbed the stairs, which were littered with an assortment of old tin cans, some filled with dried pigments, left behind, he assumed, by the previous resident.

Each time he entered the loft he was astonished by the wealth of space around him, the width and length of the enormous pine floorboards, the height of the sloping timbered ceiling. The building had the dimensions of a barn or a medieval granary but without the roughness of the former or the stonework of the latter, though the ground floor had a stone foundation, a barnlike odor, and was used to store all manner of tools and equipment; some old, possibly original, some likely purchased recently by the Arts Council for the convenience of the residents. At the south wall there was a large window, a window that once might have been a door where sails would have been pushed onto waiting wagons. Jerome had read the historical pamphlet left on the table for the edification of those visiting artists who, like himself, would have no real knowledge of the island’s past, and he knew that the sails stored, mended, and occasionally fabricated in this location were made for ships built in what would have been called “the yard” outside and then launched near the spot where the coast guard vessel had deposited him. There was little about the single remaining quay that suggested the size and presence such nineteenth-century mammoths must have demanded. He remembered that, as a child, he had tried to copy illustrations of such vessels, but the time it took to render each line of rope, each board and spar, each of the many sails on the various masts had discouraged him and he had mostly left the drawings unfinished. Thinking of these things, he realized that the disappearance of such huge vessels from Kingston Harbour and from the quays at Timber Island would have resulted in an absence so enormous it would have been a kind of presence in itself. Gathered together at docksides, tall masts made from virgin pines rocking in the wind, the ships would have been like an afterimage of the forests that were being removed from the country. And when the last of the great trees vanished, this floating afterimage would vanish with them.

He walked across the loft to a counter on which rested a hotplate, an electric kettle, and a microwave oven. He poured some water into the kettle, plugged it in, and fished about in his knapsack until he found the green tea that Mira, concerned about his well-being, had given him before he left the city. He would call her once he had a mug in his hand so he could tell her that he was drinking her tea and that he was thinking of her.

Jerome finished making the tea but did not call Mira right away. He stood instead at the window, looking out over the snow toward the frozen lake, wondering, if it might be possible, in summer, to see remnants of the old schooners through the waters of Back Bay, the location of the ships’ graveyard. The wrecks were indicated on the map in the pamphlet as dark markings drawn in the shape of a schooner’s deck. These flat, geometric forms immediately signaled obsolescence, just as the rectangular form he was digging into the snow, once he began to think about it, suggested a human grave. He was toying with the idea of making his excavations in the shape of a schooner’s deck when he again noticed small animal tracks in the snow. Whatever had made these tracks had moved out of the scrub bush near the foundations of an abandoned, wooden house some fifty feet from the sail loft, had advanced in a westerly direction, then had changed its mind and looped around toward the junipers near the door of another abandoned building, which Jerome was able to identify as the old post offce. Here a skirmish had evidently taken place and Jerome believed, even in this fading light and from this distance, he could make out traces of blood, traces of a kill.

How wonderful the snow was; every change of direction, each whim, even the compulsion of hunger was marked on its surface, like memory, for a brief season. He told Mira all of this when he called her, but forgot to mention the green tea and how it made him think of her.

That night Jerome was awakened by the noise of a tin can bouncing slowly down the stairs, followed by a dull, steady thumping. When he opened the door to the stairs, he found he was looking directly into the green eyes of a large orange cat whose fur was matted with burrs and whose expression was hostile. The animal hunched its back and exhaled a long hiss in Jerome’s direction, then strolled calmly into the vast space of the loft and disappeared. Too filled with sleep to fully believe in this apparition, Jerome staggered back to the cot and did not open his eyes until morning when, sensing that he was being watched, he turned his head and again met the animal’s angry green eyes. “Hello, puss,” he said and was greeted with a low growl. He reached out a hand and the cat promptly attempted to bite him, despite the fact that it clearly had no intention of leaving his bedside and did not pay any attention to Jerome when he rose from the cot and dressed himself. Neither did it refuse the bowl of milk that Jerome offered while he was putting together his own breakfast.

Jerome pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Mira again. “I’m drinking your tea,” he told her, “and thinking of you.”

“Good.”

“And there’s a cat that’s come into the loft. Dirty orange. It’s feral, I think, growls a lot.”

“A cat on a deserted island?” said Mira, her tone almost skeptical.

“Summer people left him here, I suppose, so he’s likely to have been on his own for less than a year. He would have some memory of being tame.”

“And also a memory of being abandoned.”

Jerome was silent.

“The lion,” Mira said suddenly. “Saint Jerome in the wild with his lion.”

Along with a tiny plaster figure of Krishna, Mira had tucked into his pack a small poster of Joachim Patinir’s sixteenth-century
Saint Jerome in the Wilderness
, an image she always insisted Jerome take with him when he disappeared into what she called “the wild,” which, to her mind, was located anywhere beyond the city limits. Brought up as a Hindu, she was fascinated by the Christian saints and their stories that were, for her, as distant and compellingly exotic as the various Hindu gods and warriors were to him. When they began to get to know each other, she had been delighted to discover that his mother and father had given him the name of a famous saint, though he assured her that religion would have been the last thing on his parents’ mind.

After studying the image for a while, they had eventually come to understand that the several tiny lions in the vivid blue-and-green Patinir landscape they were so fond of – each lion engaged in a particular activity: chasing wolves, curled at the saint’s feet, chumming around with a donkey, or standing in a field filled with sheep – represented only one lion and that the painting was episodic in nature, depicting a number of events from the saint’s life. In the far distance the lion could be seen either conversing with, or preparing to attack, a gathering of people. Mira believed the lion was conversing. Jerome always insisted he was attacking. Mira had asked how he could be so certain that the lion was a male since it was so small it was difficult to tell. Jerome said the lion would not have been permitted to live in the monastery with Saint Jerome had he not been a male of the species. Mira had loved that phrase,
a male of the species
, and had begun to use it herself shortly after this discussion, often in reference to Jerome himself. “Because you are a male of the species…,” she would begin.

Jerome laughed now and looked at the cat. “This animal is as fierce as a lion, anyway.”

“Tame him,” said Mira, “and bring him back to the city.”

Jerome had not given Mira a clear indication of when he would return to the city. He would not be pinned down in that way, wanting to retain both flexibility and control. “I don’t think there is much chance of that,” he said.

“No chance of bringing him back to the city?”

“No,” he said, “not that, exactly. I just don’t think he’s going to cooperate when it comes to taming. Looks like he’s been on the loose for a while. He won’t give himself over so easily to trust, I think. He might feel that he needs to protect himself.”

The cat kept his distance but followed Jerome everywhere. When he was working, the animal either sat on a tall bank of snow watching his efforts with what appeared to be mild disdain, or it coasted back and forth inside the areas Jerome was excavating with its head high in the air and an ominous growl in its throat any time Jerome came too near. These dugouts, as Jerome thought of them, were assuming the shape of a ship’s deck. Sometimes, after he had drawn the outline of such a dugout on the surface of the snow, the cat lay down in the middle of the area he was hoping to excavate and refused to budge, spitting and lashing its tail when Jerome attempted gently to remove it with the shovel. Once, when Jerome became angry, he dug under the cat and tossed it along with a load of snow onto a nearby bank, where the animal scrambled to a seated position and remained in place, scowling. Two or three times a day, without warning, the cat would dash off toward the copse at the east end of the island. It always returned, however, and Jerome was once interrupted in the midst of photographing an excavation by the sound of crunching coming from one of the dugouts behind him where the cat was crouched over the rapidly disappearing body of a bird. Later, while photographing the remains, Jerome determined by the tattered remnants of red and black plumage that the bird had likely been a robin, the harbinger of spring.

By now the ice, both in the river and in the lake, was beginning to completely break up: the water was rising and the floes that were passing the shore of the island looked like parade floats featuring non-representational sculpture. Late one afternoon when the light was particularly intense, Jerome photographed several of these ice forms with a color film. Then, with the cat in tow, he walked back to the loft on the path he and the animal had tramped into the snow. On the stairs the cat was so constantly underfoot Jerome began to feel as if his ankles were being bound in a blur of orange wool. Because of the soundless fluidity of the animal’s movements, Jerome had decided to call it Swimmer.

“Swimmer,” he said now, “are you hungry?” and as he spoke he realized that he had begun to talk to the animal some time ago, that he had explained his work to it, scolded it, and occasionally used terms of endearment. “So this is what solitude does to you,” he said to the animal when it reappeared, “you begin talking to unfriendly cats.”

Swimmer growled in reply, and ran away from him.

That night, it started to snow and Swimmer sat looking almost picturesque near the large window, watching the flakes descend through the beams of the one outdoor light in the yard. Jerome had given him – he had decided that a cat this large must be a neutered male – a portion of the tinned tuna fish he had had for supper and this seemed to have put the cat in a more placid mood. Jerome himself was far from placid and angrily paced the loft floor, glancing now and then with irritation at the snow, worrying about the accumulation in what he now called his
Nine Revelations of Navigation
. He feared that, unless he scraped the interiors out with a shovel, it would take him hours by hand to bring the bottom of each shape back to what it had been earlier in the day. But, having never before broken the surface of the earth in his work, he would do his best to avoid the disturbance a shovel might cause to what he believed was the purity of scattered twigs and blackened leaves.