Shining Sea (13 page)

He's not one to judge others' lifestyles, but how Georgina managed to hold so many drugs in that slight body mystifies him. In London, it no longer seemed like holiday fun. She was still lively and wry and, of course, pretty, but she became something else, too. Dangerous. The smooth walls of the room where he sleeps on Iona, the tiny square window facing onto the sea and the stone fragments of ancient grave markers stored under the gables; if he's going to thank God for anything, it's that he managed to get out before there was real trouble.

Tomorrow, however, he'll bundle up his things and say good-bye to Iona. Better to leave before the Community has run out of need or space for him, struggling to tell him to go, with a lot of coughing behind fists and embarrassed glances. He'll ride the ferry back to Mull, hitch across it to the larger ferry for the mainland. From Oban, he'll hitch again or hop on a train. He is sure to have enough money in his pockets to pay for a ticket and a couple of weeks in a room somewhere until he picks up another job or meets a nice lady. Maybe he'll go to Glasgow—it's supposed to be a scruffy town with a decent music scene. So far, Scotland has been good to him.

He digs his shaving kit out from his duffel and, pouring water from a pitcher into a porcelain-covered bowl, mows the stubble from his face, nicking the slight cleft in his chin in the process. He dabs at the blood with a towel, slaps on some oil to guard against midges, and slides into a clean shirt. He's been shaving since he was sixteen but for some reason has never grown hair on his chest. Some women ask whether he shaves it; at least one asked whether he waxes it.
Like a swimmer?
Nah. Then I'd have to shave my head, too.
Of course, she took it as an invitation to run her fingers through his wavy shoulder-length hair. Well, fair enough. Although he didn't enjoy her calling him Goldilocks.

Maybe he should head north when he leaves instead of east to Glasgow, up to the Isle of Skye. According to legend, selkies guard the Isle of Skye's shores. Jethro Tull has moved up there. Or was it just Ian Anderson? He slides his canteen into his jacket pocket and picks up his guitar.

He stops in at the abbey kitchen. He tucks a fistful of warm oatcakes and a scrap of cheddar cheese into a paper bag and fills his canteen up at the tap, the clear, cold water spilling onto his fingers. He writes a swift note for the cook:
I won't be eating at the abbey tonight, thank you. Francis.
If he eats with the Community, the groundskeeper may mention a task for tomorrow or the day after, and then he'll have to say he's leaving, and then there will be the need for good-byes. Better to leave quietly.

And then he'll be gone, and they will swiftly forget him. Someone who actually belongs here, someone of faith, will take his place. He made his peace with not being at peace with God or even knowing whether there is a God years ago, maybe when, as a nine-year-old boy, he saw his father die right before his eyes. Certainly when he watched his brother's coffin being lowered into the ground beside the mound over his father's body.

And then Eugene's, two years later, in unconsecrated ground because the son-of-a-bitch priest at the Catholic cemetery said they couldn't take him.

One thing is certain. If there
is
a God, he wouldn't turn Eugene away. Not any God he could ever believe in.

A soft northeasterly wind is blowing, rustling the new wildflowers in the machair. White-bellied, long-beaked oystercatchers and flocks of small black starlings pass overhead, as though leading the way to Saint Columba's Bay. He hasn't taken the long hike down to the southern tip of the island since shortly after he arrived, although some in the Community make the hour-and-a-half pilgrimage over rocky hill and sheep-strewn meadow every Sunday afternoon, regardless of the weather. After rowing across the open sea from northern Ireland, with the help of his twelve acolytes, Columba pulled his wooden currach up onto the shore here in the sixth century and effectively established Christianity in Scotland. Spiritual seekers on the island consider the bay sacred.

No one much walks down to the bay during the week, however. Maybe in the summer, when the number of overnight visitors with more time to spend on the island picks up, but today the bay should be a good place to play music and enjoy some sunshine undisturbed and disturbing no one, a good way to spend his last day on the island. He hasn't brought his guitar outside much here for fear of it being damaged by rain or the heavy mist that often veils Iona. Other than the guitar, the sum total of his possessions is the shaving kit, a wallet, a US passport, a knife, his boots, the leather jacket Georgina gave him, a rugged sweater a Norwegian girl made for him, a few changes of clothes, a bandanna, a belt, the two books he always carries, and the canteen. Georgina gave him stuff during the five months they were together, but he left everything except the jacket behind. He had to take that because she'd ruined the one he had, throwing up on its shoulder outside the Wag on a cold January morning. This new jacket—warmer and softer leather than any he's ever owned—appeared two days later, with a note saying:
So I don't have to lean my head against my own sick. Your G.

Ah, lovely Georgina.

He likes his guitar, though.
Don't get some dumb, lousy one,
Eugene said after they'd fried enough fish sticks and poured enough sodas for him to afford it.
Get one you'll want forever
.
Cause you are going to want it forever.
Well, Eugene is gone, but he still has the guitar. He'll busk on the street in decent weather, but he'd go hungry before exposing its rosewood curves to snow or rain.

There've been some hard times in Paris, one very difficult winter in Amsterdam. But something or someone has always come through. When not caught up in wars, the world is a pretty hospitable place.

By the far end of the machair, the relentless beadlike rattle of the corncrake call is almost deafening. He heads up over the hillock, past the tiny heather-ringed loch, and down toward the bay, almost stepping on a nest containing four large eider eggs. The sea opens up before him, a deep blue seething expanse ringed by an orange-, green-, and black-pebble beach divided in half by a large rocky outcrop jutting into the sea. He settles into a nook on the eastern side of the outcrop, out of the wind and not too far from the water's edge, knocking a couple of carrot stubs out of the way with his boot. The remains of someone's picnic, maybe the rest carried off by the seabirds swooping overhead. Maybe the picnicker was carried off by the birds as well. Or a mermaid or a selkie. It feels wild enough here for that.

There's a song one of his Iona ladies was singing the other night. He asked her to repeat it, slowly, committing to memory the words and melody.

He figures out the chords as he goes: G F…

A cormorant pedals the sky directly overhead, throwing a flitting shadow over his face and guitar. The song itself is a darkness, rumbling with the waves of the sea, skirting its frothy surface, sinking into its opaque depths, at odds with the brilliance of the morning: the seal-like sea creature who can only mate when transformed into human form, the unsuspecting maiden who gives birth to his son, fated to be taken back to the sea by his father, then felled by his mother's new husband, the maritime gunner. The truth of fairy tales is, they rarely have happy endings.

Something dim and spectral has sunk into his heart. Another old ballad he's learned since arriving on the island comes to mind, about a Molly. Not his sweet, funny cousin—wherever she is and whatever she may be doing. It's been years since he's spoken with anyone in his family. About a Molly Bawn, who, shielding herself from the rainfall with a white apron, is taken for a swan by her lover, shot, and killed.

The sea seems to be listening to him. He lays his guitar down on his knees and listens back.

“Well!” a voice says.

A young guy, with a rush of shiny dark curls framing rosy cheeks, is suddenly right there, almost at his side. “The obvious moral being never to play fast and easy with the gun.”

The guy's accent is as posh as Georgina's. Not many people speak like that on Iona. He clasps the neck of his guitar. “I never play with guns, period.”

“No?” The guy drops onto his haunches and sticks a hand out. “Rufus.”

Could Georgina—or her father—actually have sent someone after him? He has to have been as expendable to her as any of the beautiful objects decorating her flat. People like him and Georgina, what could they ever really know about love? After he took off, she undoubtedly spent a few nights in histrionics, drinking to excess, fucking everyone in sight, calling him names they hadn't taught her in her string of fancy schools. But she did that most nights anyway.

Thick blue-jeaned legs tucked into galoshes. A sturdy neck and back, sporting a white scarf and a bright red Windbreaker. So healthy looking. None of Georgina's crowd would look this square.

“No. I'm a pacifist, man,” he says, reluctantly putting his own hand out.

Rufus pumps it. “Conscientious objector?”

Here it's not like in the US, where some people consider conscientious objectors to have been traitors and others consider them to be heroes. Few older Brits get far away from their experiences in World War II, but no Brit his age or younger could care less who fought or not in Vietnam. There's no reason to lie. “No. Never got called up.”

“But you
are
American. I thought for certain from the song you'd be Irish.”

“I learned that song here, in Scotland.”

“Well, it's originally Irish.”

He shrugs. “My father's ancestors were Irish.”

“You look like your dad, then.” The guy picks up a stone and dances it one, two, three times across the surface of the sea. “What are you? About six foot one? One hundred and eighty pounds?”

The questions are weird, but there's something curiously appealing about this Rufus, something strangely familiar. “My dad's dead,” he says. “Twenty-two years.”

“Whew, young. Cancer?”

“He was a POW in the Pacific during World War II. Got to him eventually.”

Rufus hops another stone across the face of the water, bestowing tiny kisses. “My regrets, man. War is hell.”

“Yes.”

“You get seasick?”

Where is this leading? He shakes his head.

Rufus jumps to his feet and claps him on the shoulder. “Ghislaine! Eamon! We've found our man.”

He turns his head to discover a young man and woman, also wearing bright red jackets, standing a little ways down on the edge of the beach, tossing pebbles into the sea.

The trio from the ferry in Mull this morning.

“Hey, wait a minute—”

“We're staying at the inn, the Argyll,” Rufus says. “Meet us in the dining room at seven p.m.”

“Right,” he says, picking up his guitar. People don't decide things for him. That's the one thing he has in his life.

Rufus laughs and twirls a dark curl. “Seven p.m. Dinner is on me.”

They don't look anything alike, other than the dark curls. Rufus is the picture of health, the glowing pink cheeks, the shining eyes.

It's that same boundless enthusiasm.

Eugene was the most cheerful son of a bitch on the planet.

He looks out to the sea, out over that huge body of water, spanning his today and his yesterday. Eugene was cheerful, that is, until that gentle evening when, with a full moon rising, having plowed through three six-packs, Eugene shot himself in the head. He himself having gone off to meet some girl.

If he could cram the memory into a bottle and throw it far out into the waves, send it back to America.

Remember
when we were kids?
Eugene said. They were sitting in his parents' backyard, drinking Buds. Eugene had just gotten off from work at the lumberyard and was still wearing navy blue coveralls with
GENE
written in red script over his heart.
And I never got picked for any teams because I had asthma?

He wasn't wearing work coveralls. He'd just graduated from college, had a little cash in his pocket from his new job stringing guitars in a music shop and a little more from his stepfather stuffed in an envelope by his bed—
It's high time you open an account, Francis,
Ronnie had said—and there was a pretty girl waiting to meet up with him. It was a fine August evening. He laughed.
Back in grade school? Before smoking weed cured your asthma?

Eugene laughed, too, a bitter, dry laugh. No one knew what made Eugene's asthma go away so suddenly at puberty, but it wasn't smoking weed. The big joke was that it cleared up just in time for him to pass the army physical.
Yeah, exactly. Well, those days when I never got picked for teams were the good days.