Touch (18 page)

When I reached for the fish I gagged at the stench. I could smell rotten meat and disease, as if the fish had been dead for a day already in the heat of August. As I knelt down and tried to grab the wiggling fish, fighting against my urge to be sick, I heard the ice creak again.

I looked up to see the creature—I could not tell if it was a man or a woman—standing above me, its scaly skin fish-pale
and bumped, mottled like it had been submerged under the water for a very long time. It had a large pouch on its back and stringy hair, and despite its milk-white eyes, the creature stared directly at me.

The creature took a step toward me with unmistakable menace; it grabbed my wrist and dove into the water, pulling me after it.

It was like being pulled into the air. Despite the ice and the current, I felt no colder than I had a moment before, perched on the frozen shelf above the river. The creature’s hand stayed tight upon my wrist, dragging me down beneath the water, and I was so surprised at not feeling wet that I almost forgot to panic. And then I tried to take a breath.

It felt like someone’s hand was clamped firmly over my mouth. Eyes wide, I could see bubbles of air escaping through my nose, and I started to feel a mounting pressure in my chest. I tried to pull its hand away, but the creature did not let go. Though I remained dry, I could feel water coming down my throat, choking me, filling me with liquid instead of the air I craved.

I kicked and pushed but the creature seemed undisturbed. And then I stopped fighting. I realized that I did not want to fight. I realized that if I let this creature keep its hold on me, if I let it pull me under the shelf of ice and drown me, I would be able to join my father and Marie. And I wondered if this was what it felt like for my sister, this combination of weightlessness and burning, as if I were in heaven but had to breathe the sulfurous air of hell.

And then I heard a voice, one that was familiar even though I had never heard it before, and I saw a woman floating in
the river in front of me. She was older than me, but I recognized something of myself in her. She smiled at me in a way that made me fear that she would cry if she were not already under the water. She reached her hand out to me but was too far away to touch my hand. Then she turned to look at the creature holding me.

“It’s too much,” she said. Her voice flooded me, familiar and filled with light. “It’s too soon for this, too soon,” she said. Her words expelled the water and filled me with a sudden burst of air. This was what it felt like to be held by my mother, to be rocked to sleep, to be comforted and loved, I thought. For a moment it was as if I were above the river again, but then I saw a second creature beside the first, felt another hand grasp my ankle, and then a third creature appeared from the dark of the water, moving closer.

“You’ve taken enough,” the woman said. “Please.”

I looked toward the floating woman and tried desperately to touch her, knowing that if I could only grasp her hand I would be freed. But she looked back at me with terribly sad eyes and drifted backward into an inky darkness, the current taking her away. As she disappeared, I felt the rough grip of the creatures’ hands on my ankle, my wrist. My eyes bulged and I looked at the creatures, thinking of my father and Marie, thinking of my mother, warm and dry and waiting for me at my stepfather’s house, sewing or chopping vegetables, my skates neatly put out on my bed. The creatures looked back at me, and though the crushing weight and burning in my lungs and my throat started to turn everything black, I thought, just for a moment, that I could see something that had once been human in these creatures, a look akin to pity.

And then my head smashed against the ice and I felt the blooming taste of blood and bone. I gasped in the cold air, the sudden relief of being on the surface. For a moment I thought I felt a gentle touch upon my head, the way my mother used to stroke my hair when I was taken with fever, but then the feeling disappeared and I felt the ache of my forehead. I touched my head expecting to see blood, but my fingers came away clean. Beside me, the three dead fish lay neatly arranged, while the fourth fish—the one I had just caught—still danced and knocked against the ice. There was no smell of rotted meat, and my clothing was dry. I must have slipped, I thought, smashed my head into the ice, dreamed a moment of the sea witches bringing me down. I had listened too often to my grandfather and his stories of the woods.

Wincing at the pain in my head, I quieted the fish with the handle of my knife, slipped it from the hook, and then strung all four fish together. As I stepped off the ice and onto the snow-covered gravel, the shelf of ice gave a last, loud creak and then collapsed into the water, a jumble of chunks and sheets. Too late, I realized that I had left Lawrence’s fishing pole sitting on the ice. It was gone now.

I had not even turned when I heard my grandfather calling to me. Jeannot came running across the open bank, stumbling a little over the uneven ground. He ran close enough to grab my arm above the elbow, and though my grandfather was breathing hard, like he had run a far way, he gasped, “Away from the river. She told me to take you away from the river.”

I nodded and let my grandfather drag me up into the woods until we came across the path that I had cut barely an hour earlier. Jeannot moved quickly, and once or twice I stumbled
following, but Jeannot did not relax his grip on my arm until we were already walking back toward the village.

We walked in silence until we were past the abandoned mines, and then I spoke quietly, afraid my grandfather would hear the quaver in my voice.

“It was her, wasn’t it? Marie, grown to be a woman,” I said, though I already knew that it must not have been.

“Your sister?” My grandfather glanced at me but he did not stop walking. “No,” he said, and he gave a moment of pause when he heard me sob. We stood there until I had quieted myself, and then he put both hands on my shoulders while I stared at him.

“I’ve already said I can’t bring your father or your sister back, Stephen. It was your grandmother. She came to warn me. To tell me to get you away from the river, that the qallupilluit had called you to them.”

“Why didn’t they take me?”

He kicked at the snow and then started walking toward the village again, a little slower this time, secure in the knowledge that he had taken me back from the river.

“There’s not an answer for everything, Stephen. I don’t know why they didn’t take you, just like I don’t know what I need to do to get your grandmother to return to me.” He stopped again suddenly, and then he rubbed at his eyes. “Didn’t know, I should say. I think I know now.”

“What did she tell you?”

My grandfather did not look at me, but he answered immediately. “She said it was darker than she had expected. She asked me to bring her some light.”

T
HE ARE SOME THINGS
I have to take on faith. A funny thing for an Anglican priest to say, isn’t it? My whole life is, in some ways, about faith. And I do have faith in these stories about the history of my family. I would not be back here if Father Earl had not asked me to return, but I have faith that there is a greater reason why I am back here in Sawgamet, raising my daughters in a place that has taken so much from my family and me: I have faith that there is something that I can reclaim. And I do still have faith in the Church, even if it is sometimes shaken; unlike my grandfather, every test seems to reaffirm my faith.

That winter, the winter that Great-Aunt Rebecca and Great-Uncle Franklin were married and then buried under the snow, might have been the last time that my grandfather had faith in a kind and merciful God. It had already been snowing for a week by the time Rebecca walked down to the store and kissed Franklin, and then another week of accumulated snow—some light, some heavy, but no stopping
it—before Rebecca and Franklin were married at Jeannot and Martine’s house.

Two weeks of snow, and by the day of Franklin and Rebecca’s wedding, Xiaobo—the Chinese miner who peddled in herbs and later worked as Franklin and Rebecca’s servant—had come and gone from Jeannot and Martine’s house, informing the couple of what they already suspected: Martine was pregnant. Facing the loss of Rebecca’s services, Jeannot contracted with Xiaobo to come on as their servant the day after the wedding, but by the state of the small man at Franklin and Rebecca’s wedding—the last Jeannot had seen of the Chinese man, he had been standing on the piano and singing along to Pearl’s playing—Jeannot did not expect Xiaobo to arrive at the house ready to move in and begin cleaning anytime soon.

The morning after the wedding, when my grandfather came downstairs, he stopped for a moment to pick up three half-full glasses on the landing, thinking he would straighten a little. Any thoughts of cleaning were dashed when he came completely downstairs: the dining room table was still littered with empty plates and champagne bottles, and that was not the half of it.

He left the mess on the table for Xiaobo—sooner or later the Chinese man would come back to the house ready to start in his role as hired man—and stepped into the parlor, which was as much of a disaster as the dining room. It looked like the winds had blown through the house unabated.

At the thought, my grandfather looked through the window and was startled to see a solid wall of white. For a moment he believed the snow had accumulated a half dozen feet in the night, completely covering the glass, but then he saw the subtle
shifting and movement of snowfall. A blizzard. Though the snow was already waist-deep on the ground, the night before it had begun to slow. There had only been a few flakes falling down as Franklin and Rebecca had bidden everybody a good night—among lots of cheering from the guests—and the moon had shone full and brightly above. Jeannot remembered thinking that the snow was ready to stop. Clearly he had been wrong.

Jeannot pulled on his boots and jacket and stepped out to the porch. The roof sheltered him, and there was only a small drift of snow skittering on the planks, but the snow had piled nearly level with them. If the snow had been solid ground there would have been no need for steps. He could see nothing past the edge of the porch.

It was like somebody had drawn a curtain. Even a few days earlier he would have used the word blizzard, but a blizzard was wind and snow until the sky was emptied and the sun came to blast everything with the kind of light that burned his eyes; a blizzard stops at some point. This was not stopping, though. It had been near two weeks of snow, and every time the snow teased as if it were going to stop, it came again, and this time it was even harder.

Jeannot looked at the small pile of wood that was still left on the porch, and then stepped back inside. He took a spool of ribbon from Martine’s sewing box, tied one end to the porch railing, and then stepped out into the whiteness.

As soon as he left the shelter of the porch, he was enveloped. The wind blew through him, sending snow down his collar and biting his face. He closed his eyes against the snow and trudged forward. He took a half dozen steps and then
had to rest. He was actually warmer from his waist down; the snow insulated him from the wind. He took another five or six steps, unspooling the ribbon behind him, and then stopped to rest again. He did not bother to look back toward the house. He knew he would not be able to see it.

He did not even see the woodpile until it was within reach of his hand. He reached out to touch the ax. It hung from a peg under the eaves on the side of the cabin. The woodpile had seemed so close and convenient against the side of his old cabin, but with the deep snow and the wind, Jeannot realized he would have to keep a path cleared. His legs already burned from the few steps he had taken. He thought about going inside the cabin for a few minutes to gain respite from the wind, but instead piled a few logs in one arm, keeping a tight hold of the ribbon with his other hand.

Even with the blasting snow, after walking back and forth, his tracks remained clear, and he took a shovel to clean out a path from the porch to the woodpile. It was hard work. The first layers of snow had come down heavy and wet, and he had to cut a wider path than he wanted so that the snow did not simply fill in behind him.

As soon as he put down the shovel, the blizzard began to erase his work, but that did not bother him. He carried load after load of firewood onto the porch, filling it with enough to last several weeks. He decided to bring some more inside, to make a pile in the kitchen so that Martine did not need to venture outside if she did not want to. Jeannot did not like the idea of his pregnant wife outside in this swirling whiteness.

He was about to turn and head inside, thinking that by now Martine would be up and have some tea ready, when he heard
a snapping sound. At first he thought it was a branch breaking, but it was too close for that. The snow gusted and turned around him, the roof of the porch seemingly offering no shelter, and he realized that he could see nothing past his outstretched arm. The sound came to him again, a sharp crack that carried over the wind. He could not tell where the sound came from.

The wind pitched high and brittle, and the crack repeated, making my grandfather startle. Despite the cold, sweat trickled down the small of his back. He tried to peer into the impenetrable snow, afraid of what he might see, but even more afraid of what he could not see. One of the Indians had warned him of adlets, they way they would come to drink his blood with their pups, and of noise ghosts, shrieking until they drove men crazy enough to come out into the cold so that they could crack their bones and eat their hearts. In the swirling motion of white, he thought he saw a face, and he leaped backward.

Again, the cracking sound ripped near him, but this time he saw the colored fluttering, and he realized that it was Martine’s ribbon snapping in the wind. He felt himself flush and was glad that he was alone on the porch. There was nothing out there. Nothing to be afraid of. He needed to remember that not everything was momentous, that sometimes the wind was just the wind.