The Brides of Rollrock Island (10 page)

And my gaze fell to the weed that straggled from the fresh-piled tide wrack. The kelps and dabberlocks lolled like shining tongues on the rock. Perhaps that strappier stuff would do, or the egg wrack higher up, with its bubbles? Then there was that other kind, harder to see in the stark dim light, like furred string, finer than the others. I laid the bundle of sleep that was my little prince in a hollow in the rock and unraveled some weed clots and tangles, some long lengths. And I began a loop-and-looping, which, when I turned after a certain length and went back along the loops, pulling more weed through and through them, became one edge of a small blanket.

Before too long my fingers tired of being the wrong instruments for this task, and I cast up and down and found the perfect bone of some fish or seabird, with a broken-off end making it a hook, which I smoothed on the rock so it would not catch in the weed. I collected more makings, and I sat there piled about with them, taking here the fine-furred weed that sparkled wet under the moon, and now and then a strand of bubbles, and back and forth, back and forth, I knitted and knotted my son’s peacefulness up out of the night and the sea-stuff. When I had finished a perfect
square of blanket I covered my bab with it, and wrapped him around and gathered him up, and walked wearily home through the beginning dawn.

The seaweed blanket achieved its end, for a time, but as it dried, it soothed Ean less—though I could revive it, I found, by sprinkling it with fresh seawater or, even better, by soaking it in a bucket of the same.

But my little one’s distress grew, and though I knitted up another blanket, so that one could soak while the other kept him calm, still he began to be never quite comfortable, never quite comforted. He drank and drank from me, all my milk and more. I was worse than slender now; women stopped me in the street to ask what ailed me, to scold me for not eating. And still the little prince of my life would not grow, but only slept or lay awake listless, making his small speaking-sounds, as if remarking, low and constantly, how this was not his world, however hard he might labor to exist here.

I could see all too clearly what I must do. Deep in my deeps I felt the dread of it, the knowledge I fought against with my soaking of blankets, my wringing of breech-cloths, my hours of feeding him. I knew we could not go on this way.

Finally it came time to do the impossible. Mam had come by that afternoon, throwing about orders for me to begin spring cleaning. The only door she had not flung open was mine; if she had, she would have seen the little prince in a nest of damp weed on my bed, the clean breech-cloths beside him where I’d pitched them, having snatched them from the fireside when I heard Mam greet Pixie Snaylor outside.

Spring was coming. If I did not act, others would have to
know of this bab; Mam would have to know, and my sisters, and the town. Ean had lain unhappy for weeks, his little face creased with pain. His body would not strengthen itself by moving anymore, would not lift its own head; he only lay close, his miniature arm around my neck, only lay still, dreaming of better places, his tiny nostrils breathing the sour air off the seaweed around him.

Night fell and the full moon rose. I unfastened my crossed bands, rolled them up and pocketed them. I picked my boy up, and I wrapped him close, and I took him down through the teeming night to Crescent Corner. Only a few seals greeted me as I came down the cliff path, but more bobbed out in the water, their heads like shawled women’s.

I knelt with Ean, unwrapped him and kissed him. Fresh weed I took from the lip of the sea, fine as lace. I bound this round him as he gasped, around his tiny goosefleshing chest that would not breathe enough, that would not broaden and fatten like my niece’s and nephew’s. Two
X’
s I made on him, front and back, to make sure he always fled witches and men, to keep him safely in the sea.

I kissed him again, and then I wrapped him head to toe in clean breech-cloths like a shroud; he moved inside them, inside his sleep. Around the cloths I wrapped a weed-blanket, freshly wetted. I sang all the while, one of the odd-tuned lullabies I had made for him without intending—it had come up out of me, as they did, one long winter night or day, just for this little one and no other. The song and the sea-sound came together; the seals waited and watched, bobbing. I sang and I sang, and I tied him
into the blanket. And as I tied, the leaves of the weed clung and clamped to the white cloths underneath, and the woven stalks sank in; my singing and my weaving and the seal-gaze and the moon and water all worked together to combine the weed, the cloth and the bab. Magic rose from the rocks and the sea like locusts from a summer crop; power welled up in me like tears, and was held in check as tears must be held, for this business must be done right. I must make of myself a pure channel for the magic to tumble along at its right pace, in its right depth exactly.

When my boy was quite sewn away, down I carried him—already he was heavier—to the narrow curve of sand that showed here at the lowest tide. The seals had nosed a little closer through the water; I sat and took off my shoes and hailed them: “Are you ready, beautiful women, to take charge of my Ean?” I knotted up my skirt, lifted the bundle, waded out.

I laid him on the wavelets, held him there awhile, unable to move for fear of what I was about to do. I glanced up from my armful, the sea rocking cold about my knees, lapping at one elbow and one hand. The seal-mothers were still some yards off, but I could hear their breath, and I could smell it; I could see their whiskers bristling; I could feel their attention to my song and my activities, like cords stretched tight between us, heavy with seawater, drenched with starlight.

I gave Ean a little push toward them. I let him go, and he sank, and I could not see him below, only water-shine. In a panic, I bent and wet the front of my dress, reaching down. I pushed him again, and he was smoother, and at once livelier. At my fingertips moved all the vigor I had longed for him to show while he
lived with me. This heartened me to strike up my song again. Ean wriggled; he sprang away from me; two of the seal-women dived to meet him. I straightened and stepped back, my cold wet hands to my mouth. I imagined their meeting underwater, the two large beings and the one tiny.

I backed from the wavelets, watching. The water busied as they brought my son into the group of them. His round head bobbed up among their larger ones, and his sleek side shone as he threw himself over in the water in a game, to their amusement. He broke my heart with his celebrating—how little he needed me, how perfectly happy he was now, as he had not been before, in my house, at my breast! I was glad of his gladness, and that he would be cared for, but how would I live without him, the little prince who had ruled my days and nights?

Empty-handed, empty-armed, I watched my son play among his new mams and be taken away. It was heavy toil to watch, the heaviest I had ever done, yet I felt I had to stay and see all there was to see. He grew littler and littler, leaping among them, till he was no more than water-gleams on the darkness. They too shrank, until they were only mistakes of my eyes among the waves. Then I crouched and hugged my bare knees, and laid my face on them, and I was incapable, for a long while. All the years to come crowded into that time, and I lived them, long and bitter and empty of him. The rightness of what I had done, and the wrongness both, they tore at me, and repaired me, and tore again, and neither of them was bearable. I did not know how I would ever lift myself from that crescent of sand and that water’s edge, and make my cold way home.

I spent a wretched spring. I did not go down to the Crescent; I did not want to recognize my son among the young and to remember that I had had him, that I held him no longer, that I never would again.

I cared for Dad; Mam seemed to despise him now, and did very little for him. When he slept, though, and I had got the house more or less in order, I went to my bed and hid away in sleep, for to be awake and unoccupied was to be filled with a leaden and unending sorrow.

“At
this
time of the day!” Mam cried, throwing open the door to my room one afternoon. “What kind of lazy lump lies abed midafternoon?”

“A tired one,” I said.

“Tired? What have you got to be tired for? Come up to Grassy’s and Horace breaking through a new tooth and you will know what tired is. Your bab’s the peacefullest of all this lot, and the least bother. You should be ashamed!”

She could not embarrass me out of bed, though; I was too sunk in mourning. I hardly knew which I missed worse, my son or the solitude in which I’d enjoyed and suffered with him. I hid my head under shawl and bedclothes, and readied my sticklike arms for if she should try to drag me out bodily, as she had done before.

Instead she only stood closer. “Are you dying of something? Are you ill?”

“Perhaps I am,” I said dully. “Perhaps this is what dying is.”

And that struck us silent. Quite cheered, I was, at the thought of an end to my suffering, and I closed my eyes ready to welcome it. From Mam’s breathing I could tell that she gazed on me less happily. Perhaps she wondered how her world would be without me, how much work she would have to take on.

Summer rose to its peak, and fell away, and still I did not die. Indeed, I found myself able to sit in the sun against the laundry wall for longer and longer each day, without too great a pain descending on me. The time came in the autumn when, unbandaging myself, I knew that all the seals had left Crescent Corner on their great migration. I washed, and tied the bands on again, and stood a long while staring at nothing. Next day, midafternoon, I escaped the house and walked a little, out into the town, unpropelled by any particular errand.

“Look at you,” said Moll Granger. “Hardly more than a bundle of sticks.”

I gave her a wan smile and kept walking, so as not to be scolded again, or questioned, or given recipes for sustaining foods.

I was leaning over the sea-rail, lost in the sight of the sea, which seemed to have grown wider, and greener, and more mysterious in my absence, when a child’s voice piped behind me: “Oh, look, Mam; she’s not fat anymore!”

It would have been wise to pretend I had not heard, but I seemed to have forgotten whatever wisdom I’d once had, and I turned to see Mattie Kimes, her hand out toward her son, who had paused in his running to stare at me. “Come, Donald!”

“Does that mean she’s not a witch anymore?” said the little boy, gazing at me as if unaware that I had ears or feelings.

“Oh, Donald, you daft one. What a thing to say!” She went to him and seized his arm, all but pulling him off his feet. At the same time, her face fired up with blushing, she sent me a terrible smile, mortally embarrassed, begging me to ignore him.

“But you
said—
”

She snatched him up, so violently that he cried out, but it did not stop him.

“You
said
you could tell she was a seal-witch, because she was fat like a—”

Mattie cut him off with a hand over his mouth, swung him around out of my sight, strode away.

As if determined to hurt myself, I glanced about, at two small girls smirking at me on Trumbells’ step, at the curtain whisking across Havemeyer’s upper window, at a woman scurrying away along the seafront, both hands to her mouth, in search of someone to tell what Donald Kimes had just said—Fisher’s wife, perhaps, for the tale would travel fastest that way.

I strode off, myself, not caring where I went, deciding no more than to move myself on from that place and moment. By the time I was able to see anything but Donald’s bright face or Mattie’s red one, to hear anything other than the little boy’s sharp, innocent voice, I was well out on the field road.

Along to Crescent Corner I went, empty though it was of seals, and down the cliff path. I loosened the bands as I stepped out onto the flat rocks, and I searched the sea around, but no seals came up to me, none came out; only the usual wings beat about me, the wings of the earth, the wind of them. I paced about, wishing that wind would take me up and away. I unlaced
my boots and kicked them off, hoping to make myself lighter for the rescuing.

No scorch or smudge showed on the rock where I had lit my fire last spring; no special power blazed up where I had lain and loved with the nameless seal-man. I had been such a fool in my momentary bliss, thinking that things would change for me! All I had known since then was grief; to pay for that night’s pleasure, my heart had been cut out and thrown into the sea, to be grieved after forever. I had thought myself all-powerful, above caring what others thought in this town, but look at me now, shrunken, miserable and stinging at an insult from a child’s lips, parroting his mother—parroting, perhaps, the whole town. I was not above caring; I was not above longing for relief from this unending shame, from this relentless loneliness.

My rage grew cold, and I sat to the low shelf of rock above the fire site. I could not stay still; I reached out and plucked tiny black periwinkles from the damp rock seams around me, and began to lay them in a design. If I’d been crossed, this would have been only idle play, but with earth-breath flowing up into my foot-soles, out from my shoulders like wings, it took on a different force; each little shelled animal I laid down in a line or curve or corner set a knot in the rock beneath, from which trailed a trembling strand in the upflow. This knot and strand remained even when the snail wobbled away; it was as if I burned this design into the rock, and the smoke of the burning trailed forever into the air above.