The Brides of Rollrock Island (18 page)

I took both her hands. “Gladly,” I said. “It means nothing to me, that mad isle. I’ll sell the house tomorrow, and buy you a ring with the money.”

She examined my eyes, saw how serious I was behind my smile and smiled back with relief.

Well, it turned out not to be so straightforward, of course. No one in Cordlin wanted a Rollrock house. Men laughed, and women looked at me sideways at the very suggestion.

“Twenty years ago, maybe,” said Aunty Ames, “you might have sold it. But no one wants to take their family there while all the wives are those sea-madams.”

“I should say,” said my employer Mister Bryce, “that your only hope would be to go to the isle yourself, and see if there is any young man about to make a marriage who could use it.”

“I could write to Fisher, I suppose,” I said to Kitty, “and have him ask about.”

“Yes, do that,” she said, and moved on to talking of the arrangements for our betrothal supper.

I sat to write that letter with hardly a thought, and I wrote swiftly, laying out my greetings to Neepny Fisher, who I’d heard
had taken over the store from his father, Jodrell, and to his wife and family, and moving briskly on to frame my request. It was only as I watched the words
and all its contents
fall out of my pen onto the page that I felt a tremor of doubt. I sat there and stared at them awhile, and then I wrote on, to the end of the page and the end of the matter.

I put the letter in the post next day, and when I had finished work I went by the market’s office. “Wife-to-be?” I said in the door.

Kitty looked up from her calculations and smiled with happy surprise, and blushed a little.

“A quick word?” I said. “I’ll not disturb you long.”

She pulled up another chair for me to perch on near to her.

“I have sent the letter to Fisher.”

The happiness vanished from her face, and she was all business. “Good. How soon will you hear back, do you think?”

“Maybe Tuesday night’s boat? I’m not sure. Neepny may not be as ready to do a favor as his dad was. But I wanted to ask you. There are two chairs in that house, armchairs, my mam’s and my dad’s. I remember we covered them with sheets as we left. It’s not that they are valuable, and they’re probably not improved from years of sitting there unused, through winters and summers.”

“Can you have Fisher send them, perhaps? Crate them up and put them on the boat?”

“I thought of that. And then I thought, what a clumsy lad Neepny used to be, and a grubby one, and would I want him manhandling them? And I thought, perhaps I should look the place over—the old house—for anything else we could use in our married life? And also, my dad’s grave has gone untended all these
years. I should like to visit, I think, just to tie off these ends in my mind, do you see? Also, if I go and look Neepny in the eye, he may take better care on the sale, in getting me my price. I would only go a day or two, and then I would be finished with the place forever. And we would have those armchairs, brought across carefully. I don’t even know if we could use them, but to have them in our home, Mam’s and Dad’s side by side … I think I would like that.”

I had bent farther and farther forward in my seat, so that now I must look up to see Kitty’s face. She regarded me most soberly awhile. “Two days,” she said. “Two chairs. Yes,” she said. “It is nice to have some keepsakes.” She examined her lap, turning the folds of her skirt there and smoothing them. She looked up; she nodded. I loved her in that moment. I saw how easily our married life would run, how agreeably. “When would you go?”

“Wednesday morning is the next boat. Mister Bryce would give me the time off, I’m sure. It is his suggestion, this arrangement, after all.”

“Saturday is our supper. Can you be done and back by then?”

“Oh, I should wait until next week, then, so as to help you here with the supper!”

“No, no,” she said. “Get it over and done.” And she flashed me a cautious smile.

On Tuesday at the market I bought some mainland flowers to put on Dad’s grave, kinds never seen on Rollrock, I was sure; they would have bemused him, but that was partly the point of them, to show him how far I had moved on from the isle, from our little lives there.

On Wednesday morning, I and my flowers boarded the
Fleet
Fey
, and I sat before the wheelhouse as we chugged across the harbor, and out between the Heads top-gilded by the rising sun. As the land fell away behind, the breadth and depth and mystery of the ocean struck me as it had not for a long while, and the tininess upon it of people, and people’s crafts. The waters heaved and rolled and sank beneath me, and I remembered how, when small, I had regarded the sea as a single vast beast, many of its moods and intentions hostile toward us on our little island, or in our little boats.

I remembered our boat ride, Mam’s and mine, from Rollrock to Cordlin, as a great sea voyage, at least a day long, so it surprised, even alarmed me how soon the island rose from the sea, how quickly Potshead spotted and sprouted on the slopes, and then grew thick in the cleft of them as we rocked around the western headlands. I hardly felt ready. But what was I afraid of? I was a Cordlin man now. I would transact the business of my house and the chairs and then be gone again.

The town seemed smaller and poorer than I remembered it, more beaten into the hill by the weather. Clancy Curse detached himself from Fisher’s wall with exactly the same idle-seeming movements as I remembered from my childhood, and caught the ropes and wound them about the bollards in the old familiar way. He was quite a small man—they were all shortish, the men who met the boat, though I remembered them as giants, their heads among the clouds, full of wisdom and weather and long-gotten experience. But no, they were little nuggety fellows, and some of them bowlegged, their skin gone to leather from years of wind and cold aboard the boats.

“Is that you, Dominic?” one of them said. It was Shy Tyler, my own age but crease-faced from work and weather. He smiled and shook my hand heartily. “What brings you back?” He eyed my flowers. “Have you come a-wooing?”

“These are for my dad,” I said. The strange bright things shook in their cone of newspaper.

“Of course they are. And you’ll see to the selling of the house while you’re here?”

“Why, yes! You know of that already?”

He grinned. “You want to keep things secret, you don’t tell Neepny Fisher. No, we’ve several young fellows squabbling over your place, don’t you worry. You’ll want to catch up with Neepny now, I daresay?”

“I might visit Dad first, and see the house for myself, before I talk to Neepny.”

“You’ll stay over? Come and have supper with me tonight. I’ve a wife and son now: Fametta, loveliest ever to step out of the waves, and little James, spit image of my old dad.”

I suppressed a shiver on Kitty’s behalf. I knew what I should answer.

“Are you married yourself, Dominic?”

“Nearly.”

“Oh, it’s grand being a married man.” Shy slapped my arm. “And having a boy, there’s nothing like it.”

“I’d be very happy to meet him,” I said. What harm could it do, congratulating a man on his son? And I might hear some stories to take back to Kitty, to make her laugh, and marvel at island life.

I went up through the town. Everything was so much as I remembered, and yet so much littler, that I was charmed and horrified both. Kitty would certainly hate it here, how cramped it was, how quiet, how empty of bustle. And she would see as odd, rather than as pleasing in their familiarity, the sea-wives’ touches on the houses. Stones and shells and tiny dried-weed baskets, useless for anything but decoration, lay arranged on many windowsills. The curtains the wives favored were swept aside one way; a Cordliner would laugh at those, how the houses seemed to be looking slyly sideways. Cats stalked about everywhere, or lay curled on steps or fence tops or in windows, patched strange colors from their interbreeding. And little gardens grew in pots and sheltered corners, crammed with the plants that the seal-women liked, which were not airy and flowery like mainland potted plants, but brought to mind coral, or oyster clumps, or other kinds of sea-growth.

The church was a relief, absent of any of these unsettling details. My father’s grave, instead of the raw wound in the turf that Mam and I had left those years ago, was now the gentlest-grassed mound, and the headstone was speckled and patched with lichen. I took my flowers from their wrapping and laid them at the foot of the stone; the breeze buffeted their fragile heads, and their colors and shapes were just as odd and overly bright for this green and gray place as I could have wished. I crouched beside the mound, never one for praying and unable to speak to a Dad transformed into mound and stone. The wind wagged the cypress trees at the graveyard gate, and a blackbird happened by, as neat as the Cordlin undertaker, but with a curious eye, a bright beak and a cheerful spring in his step.

I crossed the town to our old house. I turned the key, remembering it in Mam’s hand as she locked up the day we left, and I pushed open the door. Look, I must duck my head now, just like Dad, to avoid the lintel!

Inside, the air was so dead and yet so aswarm with memories that my knees almost gave way. I wished, momentarily, that Kitty had come; if I had had to show and explain all this to her—this town, Dad’s grave, this house—it would never have affected me so strongly. As it was, the house embraced me, immediately and completely. Cordlin, it seemed to say, had been only a distraction, all noise and color and rushing people. Cordlin had beguiled me and built extra layers of talk and work, money and society, onto me, that were now stripped away. Here on Rollrock was the stillness I remembered from before, the small silence of the house within the quiet of the small town within the vast airy wordless limitlessness of weather and water. At heart, I was not a Cordlin man, betrothed and businesslike; I was a carefree boy following my fancies around Rollrock’s lanes and field walls, too young to realize that anything was amiss.

I left the front door open. I opened all the windows. The same ones stuck as had always stuck, and I knew just where to apply the force to lift and lower them. At the back, I opened the door to the yard—the grass had grown high out there, and then been beaten down by rain or wind. The air drawn through the house by my opening it up felt like the first deep breath I had taken since Dad died and we left the island. I closed my eyes. The distant sea-sound only made the quietness quieter.

The small rooms echoed unfamiliarly without their rugs. Back
in the front room, I pulled the sheeting off my father’s armchair. How small it was, how modest, when once I had thought it a throne, and had had to
spring
from the floor to board it! Now I lowered myself to sit there, and the dead fireplace sat with me, and my mother’s chair dreamed beside me under its own dust sheet.

It’s not that they are valuable
, I heard myself saying to Kitty, of these two pieces of my innermost soul. Look what I had become: a chattering busy townsman with a childhood I only laughed about, and encouraged others to find amusing, this backward isle I had come from, these unworldly folk! My dad had loved it here; my mam had loved the place along with the man; I had lived my first twelve years here, and the island’s cobbles and wall flints had left their imprints on me, its hills and dales, its moles and beaches, and the peaks and hollows of the sea all around. Now in the silence, the armchair’s wings dampening even the sound of the sea, the voices came back to me, woken by Shy’s accent down at the quayside. Dad and Mam sighed and admonished and laughed, and the bright chipper cries of my playfellows cut through the different airs of crisp winter mornings, and blowsy summer afternoons. And I was glad Kitty hadn’t come, for if she had, I would not have heard those voices; I would have gone on not knowing who I truly was, and the place I truly came from.

I stood up out of my father’s chair and left the house, closing but not locking the door behind me. I climbed the hill slowly, taking in everything, remembering everything, reawakening to the childhood I carried within me, but had long denied.

I reached the highest house, the witch’s mansion. There the grass was grown up and beaten down just as at home. The windows
were closed and curtained, and many of the curtains were pressed to the glass in square-cornered shapes of furniture, as if someone in their madness or terror had piled up the house’s contents to keep some force from breaking in. The garden, that I remembered as so neatly laid out and kept trim, was now a thicket, trees and shrubs burst well beyond their borders, clotted with fallen flowers and ornamental fruit and underclothed with weeds.

A man climbed into the street, walked along it toward me. It was Emmett Marshall, dad of Risby Marshall that had been my pal in school; Risby and I had saved each other from many a beating by the bigger boys.

“Well, if it’s not wee Dominic Mallett!” said Emmett. He laughed and stuck out his hand to me. His teeth were longer than I remembered, and his hair was entirely white. “How are you, my boy?”

“I’m well, Mister Marshall. Just across from Cordlin a little while, to visit my dad and do some business on the house.”

“You want Misskaella?”

“Oh, no. I only happened up this way. She’s passed on, I take it?”

He looked puzzled, then laughed. “Why, no, she’s in as fine a fettle as ever she was, the old gooney,” he laughed. “Only she’s not lived here since a good year now.” We looked up at the ivied walls, the furniture pressing at the windows. “Filled it to the rafters with treasures, she did, brought from the mainland—furnitures and pictures and a kitchen of pans, a great oven never been lit. No more room in there for her own self! She lives down Shore Cottage now.”

“What, the old boat on the beach, below McComber’s place?”

“Oh, she has made it good, a neat little bothy sodded over the top. Spread it round with her rubbish, mind—she cannot seem to stop with the collecting, wherever she resides—but she’s comfortable enough. Comfortabler than she ever was here; this conjured the worst in her. There-awhile she was bringing foods across, none of us had heard of them. Fish eggs from Russia. Some terrible vegetable from Siam that she could not eat; she put it on her rubbish pile, and the seeds took, and it ran all over her back field. Down in the bothy she is calmer, and now that her sisters are died—though that last one visited but once a year from Cordlin—she has less reason for that show-offery, that throwing of money at silliness. It sits now, her wealth; she still asks it of a man, to bring up his wife, but she cares less about spending it.”