The Boatmaker (2 page)

“Is he going to die?”

“Of course not.” The woman is off the bed, sweeping the girl up, moving her into the other room, tucking her back in bed. Hushed words pass between them, protests, then murmured agreement.

When she comes back, he is asleep. She pulls the covers around him, goes downstairs, refills the basin and balances it up the stairs. Sits on the edge of the bed wiping
his forehead, trying to keep him cool. If the fever doesn't break soon, she will have to call the doctor. Like asking for the man in the town, fetching the doctor will require her to overcome her embarrassment.

In his sleep he turns and almost upsets the basin. He begins to speak, a word at a time. She can tell it is a conversation, that others are present. She hears his mother's name, his father's, another name she doesn't recognize. She leans forward, holding the basin, trying to bring her ear close enough so that she can hear everything.

Then she hears the knock on the front door: two soft, one loud, the tone demanding.
Valter.
It's been a while since he's come, and she knows a visit from her husband is due. Since she moved to this little house from the big house Valter's family owns in Harbortown, he has come to see her from time to time, usually at night after he's been drinking. He says he comes to see his daughter, but that's not it. He comes to see her and have his way with her, short and sharp, with no preliminaries. To show he can. To show that, even if she's left his house, some things don't change on Small Island. She has never even thought about divorce.

Usually when he comes to her door, she lets him in. It's easier that way. And if she is honest with herself, it is also because Valter's brutal way occasionally still excites her the way it did in the beginning. Valter comes from one of
Small Island's rich families, although on Small Island the distance between rich and poor is not as large as it is elsewhere. The people of the island are close to one another and close to the sea. Everything they do goes into the sea or comes out of the sea. And they all share the experience of the sea and the unceasing wind and cold in winter.

She wraps herself in an old blanket, plaid on a red ground, and goes down the stairs slowly, thinking her way through it all: Valter at the door, the man in her bed in his fever, her child awake in the dark watching the moonlight on the ceiling. She stops in the kitchen and picks up a long boning knife, folds the blanket over it. The man upstairs has sharpened her knives to a fine edge. She runs a finger over the blade, cuts and licks, enjoying the salty flavor of her own blood.

She opens the door and stands, not inviting Valter in or moving aside so that he can pass. Her husband is large and red-faced, two heads taller than she is and much heavier, smelling of whiskey. The moon over his shoulder is almost full. Covered in moonlight, Valter is dark and bulky, his coat of black fur, his hat the same stuff, fine and broad-brimmed. He is prosperous and hard. Life submits to a man like Valter. Three fat salmon, strung through their silver gills, dangle from a gloved hand.

“Not now, Valter.”

“And why not, Kipfchen? You have a visitor?” He laughs, a brutal laugh that echoes like a voice in an empty barrel. Among the things Valter's family owns is a prosperous fish business. Much of what they sell is herring, pickled, packed in barrels and sold all the way to the Mainland.

She runs her thumb along the blade under the blanket, makes another small cut. “It's not a good time.”

“I brought fish for her.”

“Thank you. She's already asleep. You can't come up.”

As if he hadn't heard, he takes a step toward her, his boots squeaking on the hard-packed snow. She pulls the blanket tighter, holding the handle of the knife. Since they were children, the woman has always felt a current of fear when she faces Valter. It ebbs and flows, but it has never gone away completely—until this moment.

Like a bear, Valter can smell danger. It is an unfamiliar sensation. He is used to ownership, to wearing a heavy fur coat and hat, the weight of it keeping the cold away. Used to well-made boots that come all the way from the Mainland on the Big Island steamer. He is not used to being even a little bit afraid. But he won't force things. Valter is patient. He can afford to be. He is rich.

Before what's happening has even registered in her mind, Valter has turned and is moving away. From the big dark form comes a song. Valter is famous on Small
Island for the number of drinking songs he knows. The fish, string quivering through their gills, lie in the snow where he dropped them, filling the prints of his expensive Mainland boots. She closes the door of her house, leaving the fish lying outside like visitors waiting for permission to enter.

In the kitchen she puts the knife down, washes the blood off her cuts, bandages her fingers and goes upstairs. The girl is asleep, golden curls covering her arm, thumb in her mouth. She tucks the blanket around the girl, turns down the lamp, goes across the hall and stands in the doorway. The man is asleep, quilt falling from his shoulders.

She stands looking at his lean form, thinking that he drinks too much. She never drinks. On Small Island, some drink all the time, others never. And it affects everyone differently. Valter drinks just as much as this man. But it never alters his bearlike nature, only expands it. This man, it undoes. As she watches, he begins to move, turning from side to side. His jaw clenches and unclenches. She leans in, but she can make out only fragments.

His dream is beginning again where he left it when he woke. The eyes of the wolf told him what he needed to do. Now he is doing it, and taking his task very seriously—more seriously than he has ever taken anything. He has never been able to take himself or what he does
seriously. It is one of the reasons he drinks so much. He is a wonderful worker in wood. Every piece he works on comes out right, with nothing wasted. But this skill came to him without effort. And because it came with no effort he has never respected it—or himself for it.

In the dream, it's different: Every step matters. He is following the wolf's instructions carefully, taking the path through the woods. His parents' house is the same as always, with the sloping roof, wooden walls, joist-and-beam construction of every house on Small Island, except for those of one or two wealthy families, such as Valter's. A few pines overhang the house, making it seem dark even though it stands by itself on a bluff overlooking the sea.

As he approaches, he hears his father and mother, their voices loud and getting louder, clanging as they collide. The conversation is unhurried, as if they have spoken the same harsh words many times before, and each knows exactly what the other is about to say. As usual, they have both been drinking. His mother's voice is like a knife on a whetstone. Underneath it is grief. His father's voice is louder and more violent, but he is pleading.

He climbs the three steps to the front door, trying to avoid making the wood creak so he can hear what his parents are saying. His dream has a silvery quality that enters it from the room where he is sleeping. The
curtains have been pushed back and moonlight pours across the bed. She watches him silently, then goes down the narrow stairs to check the stove.

The door to his parents' house is open. He eases across the threshold into the darkness, making himself small as he listens to the voices from the bedroom where his parents sleep, fuck and tear into each other in their drunkenness.

You killed him.

I never would.

You took him into the sea and he never came back.

I couldn't stop him. You know what he wanted. And he was good at it. The sea was in his nature. You can't change that. Any more than you can change your nature—or I mine.

He could have been anything. He didn't have to be that. He could have left this godforsaken little island and gone anywhere.

You're dreaming. Nobody leaves Small Island.

He could have. He was different. Better than you. Better than you can imagine.

You know I didn't do this. It's no one's fault. Why can't you stop hating me? It won't bring him back.

Stop hating you? You're asking me to forgive? Forgive you? You half-man. Quarter-man. Less than that. You—nothing.

Everyone on Small Island has lost someone to the sea. Many families have lost more than one. You're lucky. You have another son.

That sniveler? He's a little too much like you for my taste.

He's a good boy. Or he would be—if he had a mother who said a kind word to him now and then.

He's a weakling. Weaker than you—if such a thing is possible. He'll grow up to be a sack of whiskey just like you. The other one was beautiful. He could have been anything in this world, if he hadn't gone in your filthy boat, stinking of seaweed, and never come back. You killed him. And you know it. I hear it in your voice every time you speak. You're guilty. You're weak. You're hollowed out with dry rot. And nothing you do can ever change that.

The boy hears silence and then an explosion. His mother has thrown her bottle, and it's missed, smashing and making another mark on a wall that already has many marks. He knows what will happen now. They will fall on each other, hitting each other with anything within reach, couple like beasts, then pass out in a heap of clothes smelling of sweat, salt water, fish and alcohol.

The door of his parents' bedroom is partly open. He makes his way across the boards of the living room floor, laid down by his father and his father's father when his parents were newlyweds, before they lost his brother
and wound up sodden on the floor, clawing each other in rage.

Against the far wall is a huge sideboard: dark, solid and heavy, with glass doors under an arching top. Inside are the few pieces of his mother's china that have survived the years of throwing. When he was little, nothing in this sideboard was ever used. Like everyone else on Small Island his family ate off simple plates and wiped their hands on rags.

The sideboard was made from hardwoods by a famous company on the Mainland. No metal was used in making it, aside from the hinges, lock and key. Every piece is attached by its own shape or by pegs of the same wood. It could be taken apart, piece by piece, and put back together without a single tool. Even on Small Island, where many are good with tools and wood, this piece has always seemed exceptional.

The sideboard has been in the boy's life from the beginning. And it was often talked about. People made fun of his mother for it. To her face, they were not eager to make her angry. Even before his brother's death, her anger was nothing to trifle with. But behind her back they mocked her for the airs she gave herself for owning the finest piece of furniture on Small Island.

The boy knows the drawers by heart; he began opening them when he was small. At first he pulled himself
up by the handles. When he could stand up on his own, he opened the lowest of the three drawers. The stages of his childhood were marked by when he was able to reach the second drawer and look inside, then the third, always careful to slide them back with everything just as it was before the drawer was opened.

He slides the second drawer open with care. There is little light in the house, but he knows everything in the drawer by touch. There are three stacks. In the center, he feels the thing he has been asked to bring. Its texture brings the creamy white linen into his mind's eye.

He pushes the drawer back slowly, even though he's sure his parents have passed out on the floor. He backs away from the sideboard and passes the open door to their bedroom without looking in.

The man wakes clutching the covers, drenched in sweat, the sheet twisted in his hand where the napkin was in the dream. For a moment dream and waking life are wrestling, neither one strong enough to pin the other to the ground. Then he hears footsteps coming up the stairs: heavy, definitive and male. He leans his head back against the pillow, not knowing who is coming, too weak to fight.

CHAPTER 2

Downstairs the woman is waiting, having left her child and gone out into the winter night to fetch the doctor.

When she fell in love with the man upstairs in her bed, she didn't intend to change her world. But her world has changed. When she lived with Valter, the outer world was orderly. The people of Small Island were welcoming and respectful: She was the wife of a big man. But inside her, everything was like a dammed river. Now the river has broken the dam and overflowed, foaming and surging downstream. Inside she has been freed, but the outer world does not give her the respect it once did. Going to fetch the doctor was not easy. Now she waits in her overcoat, snow melting on the green lodencloth and soaking her dark hair, for the doctor to come down the stairs and say words she is afraid to hear.

He descends a segment at a time, like a roundworm emerging from the damp earth in spring. First come black boots. Then trousers, the part below the knees tucked into the boots. Then the bottom of a fur coat, like Valter's, though not as grand. A gloved hand holding a black bag. A belly snug in dark fur. Chest, shoulders. Finally, a round face with pale blue eyes and white hair. The doctor is vain about his full head of hair. He comes out to see people, even late at night in winter, without a hat. He has seen everything—from birth to death and everything in between—many times. None of it has changed him very much. He is the only doctor on Small Island.