Lighthouse Island (28 page)

 

Chapter 39

T
hey had to carry him in through the storm on a stretcher. Another man ran behind with the wheelchair and made hollow footstep noises in the empty house. Farrell bent over James on the narrow bed asking, Do you know me? James, can you hear me? But he did not, and Farrell at last took James's hand and gazed into his blank unoccupied face and said, Good-bye, brother. Until we meet again.

Farrell tore himself away and on his way out of the bedroom brushed past Nadia who stood at the door with round, alarmed eyes. He turned to her.

He took hold of her lapel in a wet heavy hand with something angry to say impounded in his head. He gathered up her coat in his fist almost enough to pull her off her feet so that she had to take hold of the door frame. Then finally Farrell really looked at her for a long moment with his hazel eyes. The other men impatiently blundered around the kitchen shaking off rain. He didn't say what was in his thoughts after all. He only said, Take care of him. And then he dropped his hand and walked away and they left, to catch the tailwind that would speed them back south, saving fuel, riding on the nose of the locomotive storm winds.

I
f only. She sat up beside him all night, watching water running from the join of the French windows. The house sang like an oboe in every crack and seam. Her breath fogged out in front of her face and condensed on her tangled strands of hair. By the light of a candle she watched his lean face for hours, the shadows of his eyelashes. She lay one hand on the coarse blanket over his heart. She counted beats. The dusty curtains lifted and fell, lifted and fell, as slices of wind slipped through the window joints.

It was a long night in which the wind and rain fell upon the steep-roofed house, having come from enormous distances. She listened to the peculiar sounds of water running uncontained everywhere. She felt the rise and fall of his breathing and took in the sweet smell of rain and wet wood and all this made her deeply happy, despite everything. Small traveling elements of joy passed through her like x-rays and lit up all her bones.

T
hat next day she searched the house looking for food, medicine, matches, fuel. The house was empty, unused. She screamed when rats fled with stinking feet into holes chewed in corners. A long central hall that went up to the steep inverted V of the roof made her steps echo. On one side was James's room, next to it another she took as her own, for now. The first room she had ever had. She set out the photo of her parents, her garnet earrings. Next to that was a bathroom. On the other side, some kind of storage room and the kitchen. Rotted curtains at the windows and grease marks on the door frames. At the end of the central hall one of the windowpanes was blown out and water streamed over the wood floor.

She piled all the blankets she could find over James but he threw them off and lay with legs like those of a starved person, sticks with no muscle, wasted thighs in his loose shorts; his heavily muscled torso and arms. He was hot and scarlet and his hair stood up in sweated tufts.

She tried the faucets but they gasped and nothing came out so she set out buckets under the eaves of the porch and from there, through the pelting rain, saw a shed behind the house and ran to it. Fuel pellets in steel bins with a layer of dust and fir needles on top. She ran in through slashing rain with a bucket load, and filled the stove. It was called a Storm King, written in brass letters on its side. She found a jerrican of kerosene under the sink. She poured three cups of kerosene onto the pellets from a brown mug and set them on fire, then filled the kerosene heater in James's room.

Before long she had two rooms warm and hot water on the stove, a collection of tins of oysters and meat paste of some kind and pilot biscuits; more scavenging in the cabinets produced aspirin, cough medicine, earwax remover, and corn plasters. Flatware in a drawer, rusted, with
Celebrity Cruises
etched on the handles.

And now if only he would stay alive to greet her one of these days and call her by her name and turn his head with that mild intelligent look to ask her how they came to be here in this howling Russian folk chalet. If only they were together it would be all right and all their confused and unlucky lives would be redeemed and everything would come true. It could happen, it could happen, she said with a cup of hot weak tea in her hands.

James, could you drink this?

He couldn't because he didn't see her; he was not looking at this world of storms and broken windowpanes, noisy as something hit a window with enough force to bash in yet another pane. If only we two are together, she said to him, to try to reach him in his fever and unconsciousness, and we will walk along together, because you will walk, and be happy in each other's company, two friends together. It's so simple. It's so simple. That we could be happy together and delighting in each other's company. As long as you are here by me all is well and the world will look radiantly good to us as we walk along. Or is this otherworldly? Can this come to us on this earth? And if not, why do I know of it then, like some lost nation drowned beneath the flood. The phrases came to her as if she had not thought of them herself but had come upon them in some way. They were premade. That we could be happy together, two friends together, and delighting in each other's company.

She sat beside the stove waiting for the hot water and listened to the crinkling fall of fuel pellets burned in their own shape and collapsing and the stars far beyond earth's Venusian cloud cover moved intergalactically on their courses, exploding or imploding or just shining eternally, saying O earth, O earth, return.

I
n the middle watches of the night, nodding beside a candle, Nadia took the towel and wiped James's face and eyelids. Suddenly he said in a clear voice, Let's go for a walk.

Sure, said Nadia. In a little while. She drew the cloth over his forehead.

It's cold. James shivered and with his eyes closed tried to pull up the blankets.

Nadia tucked them around his shoulders and then tiptoed to her own room and took a blanket from her bed to put over him.

What do you want in life? He opened his eyes and seemed to be addressing someone at the foot of the bed.

Let me think about it.

Okay, he said. We need radios. Now his eyes drifted to the left and he seemed to faint into a half sleep.

I'll look. Nadia lifted his hand to her cheek.

Nadia, if I die, you must throw my body into the sea.

And then his eyes closed slowly and a droplet of sweat ran down from his hairline.

Nadia's mouth opened but she could not think of anything to say. She felt the blood drain from her face and a sudden paralyzing dread that he would die in front of her and his hands would open limp and unliving and for a moment tears scalded her eyes. She fell asleep in the chair beside his bed with one hand clutching his striped blanket.

A
bout the Outer Rocks kelp streamed. It slithered in broad taffeta ribbons and bobbing balloon heads and medical-looking tubes that sank and rose in the breaking sea. Northward the headlands went on plane after plane, standing out like Bakelite, and the capes were foggy with the beating surf. Forty-foot waves struck the Outer Rocks in avalanches of foam and a noise like houses falling. Spray was ripped off horizontally over the elevated walkways that ran along the seaward side. Five cleared acres near the house were pooling in a big pond over what had once been a garden and in this floated empty containers and bits of boards.

The great light tower stood on the seaward bluff. It stood against all this visual noise and chaos unmoving, the tower narrow and the wide, glassed-in cupola. It looked very like a chalice, once filled with light, lifted to the storms. It looked out upon illegal fishing and scrapper ships flying past with patched, russet sails. Its rotating light had shone out at ten-second intervals upon the just and the unjust. The light came from the first-order Fresnel lens, a marvel of engineering never to be poured again. A helmet of razored visors three feet tall and inside it the light of a kerosene lamp or even a candle would be magnified thousands of times. When the heavy clockwork mechanism was wound up it would rotate three beams into storms or calm all night at ten-second intervals so that if you or any tourist on credits stood at its base at night you would see three beams like a crown turning on the axis of the tower and sweeping through the night, against the stars.
I am thinking about you,
the light had said.
I will not abandon you
.

But now it was the other way around.

S
he stood in front of the Storm King naked with both hands held out to the warmth and watched with surprise as her clothes steamed where they lay over a chair. All edges were clean and sharp and this was also amazing since she was used to dust everywhere, clouding panes and blurring surfaces and now all surfaces and verges were brilliant. So clean, she said. Everything seems so clean.

She looked up. James stood in the kitchen doorway in his shorts and a pair of socks drooping around his ankles, holding to the frame on each side. Nadia snatched up her soaked coat and held it in front of herself.

His head nodded forward and then he lifted it again and smiled. He had a four-day growth of beard and his tongue was hot in his mouth.

It's all right, he said. We're married. At least nominally. Stay with me, he said. Sleep in my room.

A
ll she had to read was the old
Girl Scout Handbook,
1957 edition. She lay on a camp cot and listened to James's regular breathing and lifted the book and opened it at random.
It is fun to send messages to your friends in all sorts of ways
.
This book is full of fun,
thought Nadia.
Do you know the types of signaling used by other people in their work, such as railroad men, sailors, aviators?
And following was a chart of Morse code. She whispered to herself and carefully worked out her name: _. ._ _.. .. ._ N-A-D-I-A. James would get well and walk and they could become Argonauts or astronauts flashing Morse to each other. Using the flashlight and some other flashlight that they would find somewhere.

Rain struck the window as if it had been blown from a firehose and James suddenly threw aside the covers. He turned to her.

You are reading, he said. You are pondering. By candlelight.

Yes. She sat up in her sloppy boy's shirt and smiled. In the wavering candlelight his lean face was alert, his voice was stronger. She wadded the blankets around herself and said, I was wondering what “naut” was. As in argo and astro.

Sailor, probably. Boat, vessel. James swung his legs out from beneath the covers and put his feet on the floor and grasped the bedpost. As in “nautical.”

Don't, she said. She sat up and swung out one leg, one bony knee. What are you doing?

I am in my right mind, he said. Leave me alone. Don't help me. He stood up and then with disjointed movements he made his way to the bathroom next door. She lay back with her hands clasped listening. After a while he came back in, holding first to the door frame and then the wall and then fell into the bed. He put his hands each to one side, taking deep breaths.

I can't look, she said. She lay back with both hands over her eyes.

Good. Don't. It will just unnerve you. It is unnerving me. He slid under the covers again and shivered. Then he said, Actually, I feel great. Is it the middle of the night?

She turned and they lay regarding each other in the dim candlelight, where the kerosene heater stank of unburned hydrocarbons making the flames dull orange. Their breath clouded in the cold.

She said, Close.

You know, you don't have to bring in buckets of rainwater. In regard to the bathroom. There is piping, faucets. His eyes began to shut, opened, shut again.

They don't work.

Then the cocks have to be turned on the collection tanks outside. They are probably rusted. He subsided. He was sinking into dreams or sleep. Get me some vise grips.

Now?

No. In the morning. Go down and check on the stores.

First thing, she said.

Reach into the briefcase and get my medication.

And so she did. It was what was destroying his immune system. But it was allowing him to walk, or at least begin to walk, and there was only one left. So she got up to make him yet another cup of sweet tea from the kettle simmering on the kitchen woodstove and he threw the last tablet into his mouth and drank down the tea and fell asleep again.

I
t was a strange feeling to be wet all over. Her plastic cape drained and her red canvas shoes squelched gouts of water at every step. Her hat drooped and streamed. She explored what she could of their island in the needling rain; near the light tower the wind turbine spun off a daisy wheel of water, and close by she found concrete steps going down to the sea and on the north end a beach made of a billion broken shells that rolled in a coarse orchestration around a small boat shed. Inside the shed an elegant small skiff rocked on its painter as wave after wave boiled up under the trackway, impatient, as are all craft, to be at sea.

A rocky, overgrown path led through the forest to the south end, where the tiny companion island lay across a narrow chute. Through this chute the sea roared like a millrace and she realized it was natural. Human beings had not cut this slot; the power of the sea had done it by itself.

She hung over the rail of the elevated walkway to see the dotty little black oystercatchers dance up and down on the rocks with their long red beaks pecking away like sewing machines. Pink and blue starfish wallowed in stone saucers of salt water and the seaweed was thrown far up on the rocks, along with debris; shoes, a floating tea canister.

She stood beneath the great light tower. Everything smelled good; it smelled of wet and damp and pure water, of salt spray and cedar needles. Mussels grew like chain mail on the rocks. They were living in a noble ruin in an unmanaged world. Something that had survived inside her as a dry kernel now took on moisture and lived and throve. She was competent and smart and efficient. She could do stuff. She had more space to live in than she had ever thought possible, an island for just the two of them, and she had a photograph of her own parents on a packing crate in her own room. She was married and an adult. She was Nadia of All the Islands. And because she loved him James would live. She was sure of it.