Spit Delaney's Island (7 page)

“A kid's game,” she said, and looked away.

But did not miss his look. She'd hurt him, and driven him inside to eat
his lunch alone.

He'd recover. He always did. He didn't even know about the mess
she'd unearthed, but when he did it wouldn't frighten him a bit, he'd have
an answer for that too. Sometimes it was discouraging to see how he could
so easily handle just about any situation you could hand him. But right
now Charlene was ashamed to tell him she didn't know what to do with
the discovery she'd made yesterday.

Because yesterday afternoon she had gone calling on Mrs. Starbuck. To
pod peas again, perhaps, or just to talk. Or maybe just to be there and listen to the summer sounds in company.

But there was no sign of Mrs. Starbuck at the house. The door was open
to the flies and no one answered her call. Back at the barn, she thought.
Because her funny old car was home, like a fat brown chicken sunning
itself in dust. Back in the fields maybe, admiring her cows. While flies and
neighbours can step right in and take over.

And did. Just one step in at first, to see if Mrs. Starbuck's boots were
inside the door, to listen for footsteps in the bedroom or upstairs. Then a
second step to be sure. She wasn't being nosy yet. Mrs. Starbuck had always
made her feel at home.

But had never taken her upstairs. The steps were worn in the centres,
covered with rubber treads. And upstairs (just her head above the floor at
first, as if expecting someone there) was a huge sewing room, a treadle
machine in the very centre, surrounded by heaps of cloth and paper patterns, boxes of clothes.

Clothes for who? she wondered, and moved on to discover a small shirt
and pants. Boy's clothes. Some new, some old and patched, some not even
finished yet.

This far into forbidden territory already (listening hard for sounds of
Mrs. Starbuck's return below and ready with an excuse: “I was sure I heard
your voice upstairs but it must've been wind”) she tried a door and opened
it and looked into the other half of the upstairs floor, unfinished, a storage
room for old books and magazines, a broken table, an old-fashioned
mirror.

Nothing else. Not a thing else except a hole in the ceiling and the slightest sound, no louder than a page being turned, a leaf being stirred. She
walked on the ceiling joists across the room to the ladder, set the ladder
upright, and climbed up until her head was above the hole.

“Mrs. Starbuck, what are you doing way up here?” she said, but saw
nothing. A black triangular room under the rafters. She had seen cages
this shape for brood hens, to hatch their eggs.

Then she saw something human huddled up against the farthest wall.

She crept forward on her hands and knees, heart pounding, knees itching from the sharp pieces of ceiling insulation between the joists. About
half way across the space she stopped and concentrated all her energy into
her eyes, trying to see clearly through the half light and pick out features
in the face that looked back. It was a boy. “Well for heaven's sake, why did
you want to scare me like that?” A boy in shirt and jeans, hunched against
the wall. “What are you doing up here anyway?”

But he didn't answer. When she lifted her hand to move forward a bit
more he made some kind of hissing sound at her and pulled his feet right
up under himself, hid his face from her sight. Then she put her hand
down, unseeing, into a dish of cold food.

And fled. Scrambled back to the hole and rushed down the ladder, hoping to make it outside before she was sick.

Which was another one of her failures. Being sick, she told people, who
could never understand anyway, was against her religion. She could remember her father being sick only twice in her life and both times he was
able to snap out of it in a very short while. She had learned all the principles, knew how, but it always seemed harder for her. And failure was
worse when there was someone like her father around.

Charlene and her father were the only members of their religion in Cut
Off. There was no church in the nearest town, either, but this didn't matter too much as the weekly lesson was published and they could study it at
home. “And maybe it's better this way,” Mr. Porter said. “We can try practising it every day instead of saving it up for an hour-long session on Sundays.” He taught her all she needed to know, a definition of man: God is
Truth and Love, and man his perfect reflection. His perfect idea. Each lesson was different but eventually came around to the one essential point,
that every human being is a spiritually perfect idea, incapable of sickness
or inhumanity or fear.

For a long time as a little girl she didn't know that not everyone thought
this way. She believed it and practised it and saw its results but had no idea
that while she was trying to see the people around her as perfect despite
their actions they were seeing her, in return, as anything but. “A smart-alec
brat” was what a mother of a friend called her. Because she had said, when
she wasn't allowed to visit the friend who had a cold, “I won't catch it,
maybe he'll catch my health.” The mother had turned almost purple at
that. And an old man, once, hacking away with his allergy, had called her
a snot for having the nerve to say “If you'd only stop
believing
you're sick.”

So she learned to be careful. She refused to pretend there was anything
reasonable in the way other people took sickness and fear and disasters for
granted and even expected them, but she kept her mouth shut about it.
She watched others sometimes as if they were all mad, the way a child who
had learned to solve problems based on the assumption that two plus two
equals four might feel on discovering that everyone else was building
whole cities based on the belief that two plus two equals five. But she knew
better than to shout warnings.

In school, though, it wasn't always easy to be inconspicuous. Whenever
the school nurse visited and lined everyone up for polio vaccine or inoculations she was the only one left sitting in her desk.

“I suppose you think
you
can't catch polio or smallpox?” one teacher
had said.

“Not think,” she answered, “know. If I only thought I couldn't catch
them probably I would.”

The teacher sniffed, as if to say, “We'll see about that,” and went on
marking some papers she had laid out on her desk.

“It was arrogant of you to answer like that,” her father told her, later.
“That teacher'll think you're a smart-alec.”

“But I told the truth,” she said. “Does speaking truth mean they have
to force you into loneliness?”

“Some people think truth is only what they can see or touch. She didn't
even know what you were talking about.”

She had told Mrs. Starbuck something of her isolation, but what could
she expect? Mrs. Starbuck could add two and two and get five like everybody else. She told Charlene a girl her age had no business being so serious.
She said, “You should be thinking of little-girl things, never mind worrying about religion and things like that.”

And now, it looked almost as if Mrs. Starbuck was throwing a challenge at her. As if saying “
Now
am I so perfect, Miss Smart?” As if trying
to make it impossible for Charlene to think of her as anything else but a
violent mad woman and a lawbreaker.

But some calmer part of herself insisted that she was thinking nonsense.
Jumping to conclusions. Maybe the boy was just some runaway who'd
chosen that attic to hide in. Maybe Mrs. Starbuck didn't even know he was
there. He could be hiding from mean foster parents or the police. He could
be sick or dying. But there was that dish of food. And all those boy clothes
around the sewing machine. And more than once in the past year Charlene
had heard sounds up in that attic which she'd passed off as bird sounds or
a rat. Like it or not, she had to believe that Mrs. Starbuck was guilty.

And didn't even know yet that her secret was out.

Nor did her father know, who stood beside her again, eating a sandwich. He bit off a corner, winked at her, and narrowed his eyes to show
what she was missing. When he'd swallowed he took a good look all
around the front yard and said, “Yessir, she was mad.”

“Just leave her alone,” Charlene said. “She had reason.”

“Oh not her. I mean Mrs. Wright.”

She looked up and saw laughter sitting in his eyes. “Oh
her
.”

“I thought the top of her head was going to go
zing
straight up in the
air. It'll probably take her a week to get over it. I wouldn't be surprised if
she actually expected Mrs. Starbuck to throw that axe at her.”

Charlene swallowed a giggle. “And those Larkins!”

“Well,” he said.

“Calling Mrs. Wright a fox terrier.” She put her hand over her mouth
but the giggle leaked out.

“They're just grown-up kids,” he said. “There's no harm in them.”

“Spreading their low-IQ seeds!” she cried. The giggle was out, had
escaped, was shaking her whole body.

Her father pulled a face, an attempt to look as small and cranky as Mrs.
Wright. “I'm surprised,” he said, as stern as could be, “to see a man with a
teenage daughter so free and easy about such scum!”

She tried to bark like Mrs. Starbuck: “Don't be crude, Millicent!” but
she collapsed instead in a fit of giggles and had to put her face right down.
Oh, why did people have to take anything seriously?

But her father was still Mrs. Wright. “Some day, Mr. Porter,” he invented, “your daughter may just end up married to one of those morons if
you insist on being so tolerant.”

“Oh no, not that,” she laughed, “I'd rather die.”

Because she nearly had, anyhow, the one time she had let them close,
had nearly died of fright. “Those three,” she said. “ought to be locked up
somewhere.”

“Now now,” he said, a warning, a hand on her arm.

And she understood what he meant. Yes, even those three, with their
warped sense of humour and limited intelligence, were people too and just
as true as she.

Try telling her that the day last year when she went into their back yard
for eggs (mud and feathers right to the floor) and the two men rode motorcycles around and around her getting so close to her toes she cried out at
last for Shelley. Try telling her they were perfect reflections of God too
like everybody else when they tried to get her on their bikes. (“Too scared,
eh C.P.? Too scared to sit a motorbike.”)

“Not scared, just sensible. I got this funny ambition, I want to grow up
alive.”

And Shelley too, on the front step combing her long black hair and
singing, “She's only fourteen,” as if it were a crime or an affliction that
couldn't be helped.

“There's fourteen and fourteen,” she said.

“And you're the scaredy kind,” Shelley said. “If I ride one will you the
other?”

So she had sat on Bysshe's seat, arms clamped around his chest, a voice
inside saying “He might not have much brains but he's kept himself alive
on this thing, maybe I have a chance,” and rode that black machine four
times around the yard (chickens scattering at every turn). And was just
breathing easy that it would soon be over when he turned left instead of
right and went out onto the road, spraying gravel like chicken feed in every
direction, and speeded up.

“Go back,” she cried, and would have pounded his back if she could
have pried her hand loose. “Stop and let me off, I've had enough.”

But enough or not there was more. Twenty miles more up Cut Off Road
at sixty miles an hour at least, then onto gravel and dust for fifteen more
of logging road; down into the ditch and up again to avoid the watchman's
gate (her screaming now and considering her chances if she just let go and
fell), around two small lakes as flat and smooth as corners chipped from
mirrors, and up a dozen switchbacks through newly logged-off mountainside (him rising as natural as a huge black bird up those slopes) until
they skidded to a stop by a river and waited while their own dust caught
up and swirled around them and thinned out.

“Now there's just one thing I want to do,” she said, when her feet were
on the ground, “to show how much I appreciate the ride.” She tightened
her fist, pulled back her arm, and hit him as hard as she could in the middle of his chest.

But he laughed. “You're no fighter,” he said, and took off. Glided down
the slope as if all of this, all this mountainside and sky belonged just to him.

“Caliban!” she yelled after him, but he didn't hear, and anyway he
wouldn't have known what she meant.

She was left, spitting dust and curses, at the top of that hill. When his
brown cloud had settled, she looked down on the road ahead like a
dropped rope leading round-about back to home. She was left with nothing but a noisy whiskey-jack for company and thirty-five miles to walk.

I bet they think I'm scared of a big old brown bear jumping out of the
bush to eat me, she thought, and (glancing behind to be sure) started walking. I bet they think I'm terrified to know I couldn't possibly get home before dark. I bet they're sitting down there in their mucky yard laughing at
me, sure I'm listening for sounds of footsteps behind or cracking branches
in brush.

She sang two verses of a hymn her father had taught her but got too
interested in the wild blackberries at the side of the road to go on. She was
knee-deep in vines, face smeared with red juice, when Mrs. Starbuck's old
paint-peeling car came chugging up the hill and stopped. “Weren't you
even going to try getting home?” Mrs. Starbuck said.

“I forgot,” she said. “I knew someone would come. I just wish I had a
bucket with me though, these berries are too good to leave.”