The Island Walkers (49 page)

He reached the end of the park and entered a grove of cedars, following the flinty main trail that kept closest to the Atta. Ahead, Bannerman’s Number One dam made its hushing sound as the river thinned across its wide apron. He was directly across from the hosiery mill. With its mansard roof, the tall building had a graceful presence above the dark river, and for a few moments he stopped to look at it. Several windows had been propped open, and he could see people working inside — people who had jobs now, but who in a few months, he remembered, would be unemployed, when Intertex shut the mill. Soon you’ll be footloose and fancy-free, he thought bitterly, just like Pete and me.

Red had reappeared beside him. He sat down and his ears pricked as he watched something across the river. Following his gaze, Alf saw a heron, standing motionless in the shallows. Very slowly, the tall, grey bird lifted one leg and planted it forward. Then its entire body flashed out on the horizontal and crashed in a belly flop among the stones. But it had caught a little fish, a wriggling flash of silver across its rapier beak. Alf watched, transfixed. He’d never seen a heron fall before, never imagined one
could
fall. Standing upright again, the bird put back its long throat and, with a couple of tosses, the fish was gone.

Beside him, his tongue hanging out, Red seemed to be laughing.

He went on, a little more enlivened, past the dam and into the woods that bordered the millpond. The dog trotted ahead of him now, his curled tail bobbing above the trail. Occasionally he paused to look around at Alf. The trail had been hardened by generations of use, and nothing would grow on it, though in the empty woods to his left and right the first green flames were licking among the tree trunks. He caught the chirpings and wheedlings of invisible warblers and, from a distance, the tongueless cry of a crow forever saying what could not be understood. He knew exactly the grove of pines it was probably sheltering in, crows had sheltered there when he was a boy.

By two that afternoon he and Red had walked to Devil’s Cave by the high woods trail. Alf had always loved the place where the deepening Atta flooded the basin below the cave. As he stood looking at the river, Red disappeared. For a moment, Alf felt a stab of panic, as if he’d been abandoned by some loyal guide, though he knew the dog would eventually turn up at the house. He returned across the river-flats dotted with wild fruit trees just starting into blossom. In the woods beyond he found the white, shy stars of trilliums, motionless among their leaves. The woods were still and warm. The sand-coloured duff, soon to be smothered with new green, crackled under his feet as he left the trail.

He sat in the empty woods, with his back to a large beech, listening to the birds. There was one song in particular — he had never known what bird made it, though he had heard it all his life — that had a curious spiral quality, as though the notes came curling down a long pipe. The song was fascinating, too strange to be called simply pretty, and somehow it gave a greater depth to the woods. But at the same time it left him feeling far away from everything. There was a melancholy in the close air now, a threat of rain. His limbs seemed weighted. He felt he never wanted to move again: to remain under the tree as the woods sank into dusk.

He might have been sitting there for an hour when he heard a new sound, far to his left. At first he thought it was an owl, hooting in its sleep. Or a duck or a goose, blundering inland from the river. It faded, then came on again, growing stronger with each minute. Then he glimpsed a black coat moving among the tree trunks. A man was walking along the trail, weeping. Weeping openly and unselfconsciously, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to be shuddering and sobbing and howling as he plodded through the trees. Alf froze against the beech in a kind of horror. He didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to interrupt or embarrass the man, and though the man’s way lay not sixty feet in front of him, Alf guessed his best chance of remaining invisible was to stay where he was.

And so the man passed him, on the slightly elevated trail, appearing and disappearing among the trunks of the beeches and maples. Alf did not recognize him, though he seemed familiar. He was in his sixties or seventies — wiry and stooped, with a deeply tanned face and a shock of white, unruly hair that for a moment put Alf in mind of his own father — except that this man’s hair was patched with black, as if he had been painting a ceiling black (this thought actually occurred to Alf) and spilled some. He was wearing a bright-red tie that stood out sharply, like a long wound that had opened inside his coat. Just as he came opposite Alf, he stopped. Afraid he’d be discovered, Alf lowered his eyes, and at that moment the man blew his nose with a terrific honk, followed by several minor honkings and snifflings. Then he continued on his way, weeping.

Alf listened to the sound growing distant in the trees. All the birds had fallen silent, as if listening too. A light rain pattered on the duff, among the great trunks. Again came the sound of the man honking. Then the woods were silent.

43

“
I’M NOT SAYING IT’S BAD
,” Mann said with a sigh. “It’s just not up to your usual standards.”

Joe was glad the lights had not been turned on in the deserted classroom. His face, his traitor face, was heating. He and the teacher were sitting side by side, in two student desks. Before Joe lay the twenty foolscap pages of his essay, “Hobos and Handouts, A Study of Charity in the Great Depression.” Mann had filled its margins with blocks of criticism, in his tiny, sawtoothed script. He’d given Joe a B, the worst mark he’d ever had for a history project.

“Sorry,” Joe managed, not looking at the teacher.

Mann waved his hand.

“Don’t apologize. It’s nothing personal. It’s just something, well — when you’re writing papers in university, you’ll have to use better sources than just your required reading. You didn’t use any of the books I recommended. Couldn’t you find them?”

“No,” he lied, feeling his embarrassment increase.

“I asked Miss Keynes to put a number of books aside.”

“I guess I didn’t look hard enough.”

Beyond Mann’s severely angled face, through the window, the narrow thicket of a Lombardy poplar burned orange. In the hall outside the classroom, the janitor’s broom hissed.

“What happened? Didn’t you leave yourself enough time? It felt hurried.”

“I guess it was.”

Mann waited. He gazed at Joe with unreadable calm. The teacher had said this matter wasn’t personal, yet Joe knew he was disappointed. And now his silence, a silence Joe felt Mann was perfectly comfortable with, had filled the room. In the corridor, the janitor’s wide broom hissed by again. A locker slammed. But here, the silence waited. Joe felt he owed this silence something: another apology, maybe, or some kind of explanation. He frowned, and pushed his essay around a little. As Mann had guessed, he’d written his whole essay the night before. He hadn’t thought it was so bad at the time. In fact, he’d congratulated himself on how smoothly and quickly it had gone. He’d made some clever points, he thought. But Mann had told him that “Hobos and Handouts” (how proud he’d been of that title, and Mann hadn’t even mentioned it!) contained far too few useful facts. As a result, he’d had to depend on speculative arguments that chased their own tails.

And the thing was, he’d
known
this at the time. In his rush to finish the paper, and even in the midst of his self-congratulation, he’d had an uneasy perception, he now recalled, that “Hobos and Handouts” was a bit of a con job. But he’d crashed on, drunk on his own forced optimism, ignoring the knowledge standing just outside
his vision. He knew the truth was there, all he needed to do was turn his head and look at it. But he wouldn’t turn: he had fallen into the habit of living dishonestly.

He was still with Liz McVey. In spite of having promised himself, scores of times, that he would break up with her, he had drifted on as her “steady.” “Joe and Liz” had become one of the ongoing features of the school’s social life. They were coupled in the same breath by their friends in the North End gang. Even the teachers had grown used to seeing them come down the halls together, Liz with her head back, and Joe at her elbow, playing his role, but so much of the time secretly critical of her. He couldn’t stand the way she called him “darling” in her fake accent, or looked into people’s eyes as if they were more important to her than anything. She pretended an interest in history, or in poetry, but her opinions always sounded cobbled together, he thought, as if she had lifted them from a bin of approved opinions. She only grew truly impassioned when she was talking about herself.

So why was he still with her? Was it sex? There
was
something in her slim, round-shouldered body, and yes, in the searching of her babyish lips that he couldn’t get enough of. Sex with Liz always felt slightly off-colour and somehow desperate and illicit. But it was never satisfying. It only
promised
to be satisfying, endlessly. Whenever they finished one of their trysts, it seemed to him that the world had drained of meaning. He barely had the energy to put on his clothes — and at the same time, he couldn’t leave her fast enough. It was then that he felt most like telling her they were through: but he could never summon the nerve. It would have been unconscionably cruel, he thought, to make love to her and then announce he was going for good. So he postponed the moment for another time — and when the time came, his desire to make love to her superseded his desire to leave. And so he went in circles, like a goldfish in a bowl. He hated himself, for his weakness, for his inability to spare her from himself.

So he went on being cheerful and helpful, to all appearances a contented young man. People remarked on his thoughtfulness to Liz
McVey. What other boyfriend touched his girl’s hair so thoughtfully as they went down the hall together, or reached up to pick a bit of lint from her sweater. He had the reputation, even among the teachers (though he wasn’t sure about Mann), of being a real gentleman.

He went on enjoying the privileges Liz’s company brought: driving the Lincoln, lounging about her fine house, being one of the “in” crowd, the North End gang. There were solaces, after all, for being with Liz McVey, and not the least of them was seeing a great deal of Anna. He and Liz went out frequently on double dates with Anna and Brad. They travelled in the Linc, or in Brad’s Oldsmobile, to movies in Johnsonville, or to concerts in Hamilton or Kitchener. Every hour of those outings was sacred to him, because he was close to Anna. He felt they had entered an understanding. They were closer to each other, friends and perhaps more than friends, with a secret communication that cut below their loyalties to their respective partners. When they were out with Brad and Liz, he felt his actual pairing was with Anna. And perhaps she shared this view. “Oh, Joe and I are leaving,” she’d said once, in disgust at something Brad had said and Liz had seconded. And she’d put her arm through Joe’s and drawn him off a few steps, laughing, while Joe’s heart pounded. It was as if she was letting him know that she was waiving her old requirement that he keep a certain distance. Often he felt on the verge of asking her where he stood. But he was afraid of another rebuff.

His dishonesty with Liz had infected him. He could sense it, just below the surface of his life. He had caught himself adopting some of the same airs he disliked in her: calling her “darling,” and referring in bored, familiar terms to “the Linc” or to “J-ville,” her family’s name for Johnsonville. Increasingly he lacked patience, and rushed from one thing to another without finishing anything, almost angrily. He had developed a mania for speed. On the nights when he
should
have been working on “Hobos and Handouts,” he was driving the Lincoln down the highway, pushing the needle of the speedometer into the nineties, while Liz nuzzled beside him, saying languidly, “Be
careful, Joe. You’ll kill us both,” and stroking his thigh as if she were half-attracted to the idea.

And now he saw the reflection of his entrapment in Mann’s gaze. Yes, the teacher knew. He had caught Mann watching him and Liz intently — disapprovingly — in the hall. And he was ashamed before his gaze, as he was ashamed before his own weakness. Now the teacher seemed to be waiting for him to confess all.

Mann broke the tension by looking away. “The important thing now is getting ready for the finals,” he said, frowning. “You’re going to have to prepare a lot more material than what’s covered in your history text. They’ll be looking for some kind of depth. I was thinking, if you wanted to brush up on the Depression, or any other topic — the two wars maybe — I’ve got some books I could lend you.”

“That’d be great.”

“Why don’t you come home with me now?” Mann said, bestirring himself. “I’ll see what I can root up.”

They went together down the hall, past the ranks of massed dull-green lockers. Exiting at the rear of the school, they found several students unloading cartons from a van. “Hot off the press,” said a boy with a high forehead and premature widow’s peak: John Butler. He had ripped open a carton and was holding out a folded copy of
The Poet’s Quill
, the school literary paper. While Mann examined the gift, John handed another copy to Joe. Anna had told him she had a poem in this issue. He was more eager to read it than if he’d written it himself. He tucked the paper among the books under his arm and strode off with Mann, momentarily lifted by the thought of her.