The Island Walkers (23 page)

“God, isn’t this
awful
,” Brad said happily. No one answered him. A Sunday bleakness had settled in; it seemed a mistake to have come.

Just ahead, across an area of parkland, the tops of the two great Falls came into view: a shredding whiteness, slightly unreal amidst the clouds of mist rising from the gorge and filling the air with moisture. Brad set the wipers going.

“Stop!” Anna cried suddenly.

“There’s no parking here,” Brad said, grinning across at her.

“Stop, stop!” she ordered. Sitting forward, she was pounding her hand on the dash like a child in full tantrum.

“Brad, stop!” Joe shouted. He thought she was going to be sick. When Brad pulled over to the curb, Anna got out immediately. Joe followed.

“Joe, please, I have to do this alone —”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Please — I have to see the Falls alone.”

She hurried across the road without looking back, the collar of her camel-hair coat up, and passed among a series of shrubs wrapped head-to-toe in burlap: a procession from the land of the dead. On the far side of the park, she crossed another road and disappeared behind a tour bus.

Her sudden desertion left them stunned. “We should wait for her,” Joe said, but when after several minutes she had not come back, or even reappeared, Brad suggested they go and park. They drove on, behind the dolorous thump of the wipers, to the public lot near the Canadian Falls.

A few minutes later, Joe looked down the length of the stone safety wall, which snaked along the rim of the gorge through the mist. He could see tourists, gathered here and there on the wet pavement, peering over the railing that topped the wall, but there was no sign of Anna Macrimmon. On the other side of the wall, the shallow water of the Niagara raced over limestone towards the brink. There, the edge of the bedrock was a wavering shadow under the turning water. The river at this crucial juncture was green, an extraordinary, livid green, shining and flickering like a living jewel, and for a moment it cleansed his mind of all but itself. Far down, on the black
shifting marble of the basin, the
Maid of the Mist
looked like a toy, its decks crammed with yellow-suited ants.

Desultorily, they debated whether they should look for Anna. Above the Falls, the wide river descended through its rapids, where a rusting barge had stuck on a reef: a pivot for circling gulls. In Anna Macrimmon’s absence, the Niagara had grown cold and desolate. They had come here to show her the Falls, and without her, the water seemed to lose its meaning.

“If she wants to trek around out here, that’s fine,” Liz said. She hadn’t bothered to look into the gorge, and she appeared miserable, her hands buried in the pockets of her fur jacket. The mist and cold and raging river seemed an affront to her, an unnatural habitat she had to endure between the comforts of more sheltered places. “I’m going into the restaurant.”

“I’ll go have a look for her,” Brad said, gazing down the gorge.

“She hasn’t had enough time,” Joe said, meeting Brad’s eyes.

“Oh really?” Brad said, bemused. Joe found his air of superiority maddening.

“She’s never seen the Falls,” Joe said. “This is important to her, seeing them for the first time. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

“I’m not gonna stop her looking!” Brad laughed.

“She’s a poet,” Joe said, with real anger. “She can’t look at something if you’re there jabbering beside her.”

“Who says I’ll jabber?” There was a knifing seriousness in Brad’s look now — he didn’t always play the joker.

“Come on, boys,” Liz pleaded, a bit wearily. She took Joe’s arm and tried to draw him towards the restaurant. He broke away.

Joe was prepared to do anything to keep Brad from going after Anna. He knew he looked ridiculous, knew that, in the end, he couldn’t stop Brad, but he hung on stubbornly, with his hands jammed in the pockets of his new coat, glaring at everything that moved.

“Joe,
please
,” Liz begged softly.

“You don’t know the concentration it takes, to make a poem,” Joe said and felt colour flood his face, to find himself defending
poetry. “She has to really look at the Falls. She’s told me about it,” he added, half-lying. She had told him about “looking exercises” she did, when she’d stare for minutes at a time at a leaf or an insect, to train herself to see what was actually there. But he didn’t really know about the connection between this activity and the making of poems. “It’s important that she be alone, because even to have another person around distracts her.”

“Okay, okay,” Brad said, raising his hands in sarcastic surrender. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll walk along here — is that okay? I’ll walk along here, and when I see her, I
won’t go up to her. I’ll hang back, okay?
”

When Brad trailed off along the wall, Joe was tempted to go after him. For a furious moment, he wanted to grab him, start a fight, throw his joking, lanky body into the gorge. But Liz was tugging at his arm again, and this time he allowed himself to be led into the restaurant. They sat at a linen-covered table behind tinted glass, which made the Falls outside seem doubly gloomy, like an old photograph. A waiter brought them water. Liz ordered soup and a sandwich. Joe, who was not hungry, and who was still conscious enough of his surroundings to be appalled by the prices, ordered soup. He was furious with himself for exposing the depth of his feelings about Anna. What had he gained but the mockery he’d seen dancing in Brad’s eyes?

“Anna’s a strange girl,” Liz said dryly. The soup had left a red mark at the corner of her crimped mouth.

Joe mucked with his spoon in his bowl.

“I guess you’ve seen her poetry,” she said, trying again. “She never shows it to me. Is it good?”

“It’s better than good,” he said. “She’s a poet: it’s what she wants to do. It’s what she
does
do,” he added defiantly, pushing bits of cracker around. Anna had told him one afternoon when they were sitting together in the school library that she hoped to publish books one day. She had said, “I think my life would be well spent if, at the end, there were a hundred pages of poems that people still
wanted to read when I was gone.” He remembered the iron wistfulness of her voice, the sun falling across their scattered books, remembered how the inside of his foot had accidentally brushed hers. Remembered, too, the strange wave of sadness that had overwhelmed him, when she’d revealed her ambition: as if giving your life to poetry were some heroic but ultimately doomed act, like setting off to cross the Atlantic in a boat too small. He had experienced the same feeling while defending her to Brad by the barricade. Her task seemed hopeless, and yet it made him want to protect her all the more. Her ambition was her place of vulnerability, and there, somehow, he felt he could help her.

“So tell me about it — this poetry of hers —”

He met the overly frank gaze of those violet eyes. Liz had made poetry sound like some childish indulgence.

“You can’t tell somebody
about
poetry,” he said angrily. He was quoting Anna,
If you could say what it was about, there’d be no need to write it
. He looked away, to the sepia Falls, toiling unreally past the distant safety wall. He felt half-drugged by the warm restaurant, and half-furious with frustration. His body needed to act, to dispense its seething energies. He kept tearing open packets of crackers and crumbling them in his soup while Liz watched.

“You like her, don’t you?”

He blew out dismissively and looked past her to the Falls.

“Because I’ll be straight with you, Joe, she’s with Brad. She’s in love with him. And anyway, I don’t think she’s really for you. You’re too much like her. Too moody. She needs someone like Brad, to keep her spirits up. I mean, Brad makes her laugh.”

He looked into Liz’s cool, almost beautiful face, and hated her. He felt she had put long, cold fingers inside him and grasped some essential organ and squeezed it. But he sat perfectly still, not speaking while she ate her sandwich and sipped her coffee. He looked again past the dark, curly mass of her hair to the distant Falls. A dreariness was overcoming him, an exhaustion. The world was not
as it should be, and yet the world was here, as unchangeable and formidable as bedrock. He went on watching the shredding water, sitting in his restaurant chair. It was as if he and she had been together for years: she, his wife, calmly eating, accustomed to his sullen refusal to talk, his wandering eye.

A few minutes later, Brad and Anna came in, their faces pink with activity and excitement.

“She wants to go everywhere now,” Brad announced triumphantly. “The
Maid of the Mist
, the whirlpool —”

“I’m drunk on this place!” Anna said, stripping off her coat as Joe, suddenly self-conscious, grinned at the tabletop. “It’s cured my headache.”

Later, they drove to the whirlpool, where the Niagara coiled against itself in a great elbow of the gorge, about a mile downstream from the Falls. A steep, forested path led down through a break in the gorge wall. At the edge of the water, Anna stood on a low rock and looked out over the wide, green pool, where whitecaps charged this way and that and chewed-up logs circled endlessly, unable to escape the sucking power of the whirlpool. Beyond, where the river entered, were rapids: white giants in perpetual frolic.

And perhaps Joe’s argument with Brad bore some fruit after all, for without speaking of the matter, the three of them left Anna alone. But Joe watched her: she was more fascinating to him than even the surging water, though in a way she seemed part of it, its focus and intelligence. She stood absolutely motionless, with her head a little down, her sunglasses pushed back onto her hair, her hands in the pockets of her coat, confronting the whirlpool. He wondered what she was experiencing, and was moved to think that this was her work. It was her job, as a poet, to open herself to the river. He was envious that, already, she was practising her calling. She was older than he, she was farther down the road that led on through life.

He could feel the force of her concentration. Once, she reached up to keep her glasses from falling. But otherwise she was still. She had forgotten her friends completely, she had forgotten
him
. He watched
her deep gaze travel out, across the powerful river, the shifting slabs of water, the eruptions of liquid bedrock, and at the same time in, as if the whirlpool were inside her. At that moment, perhaps sensing his attention, she looked over at him, though he was not at all sure she actually saw him. Her eyes, he thought, seemed oddly blind.

18

ANNA FELL ILL AGAIN
— her headache coming back — and on the way home lay in the back seat with her head in Liz’s lap and Joe’s new coat pulled up to her chin. From the front seat, Joe could sometimes hear her let out a long sigh, or a whimper of pain. Mostly though she was silent, and this silence suggested an act of concentration, as if she were trying to accomplish some delicate, difficult task, like threading a needle in the dark. He had never witnessed such a severe reaction to a headache before, his mother simply took an Aspirin and turned grim. But this, it was as if Anna Macrimmon had been flung violently to the perimeters of existence. Yes, for all her calm, all her maturity, she harboured a sensational vulnerability, a secret dialogue of extremes. In some way he could not fathom, her headache seemed connected to her excitement in the gorge, to the way she had looked so steadily at the river. It was as if she had looked too long at the sun.

The headlights of the 98 ploughed up the highway, briefly illuminating the windows of anonymous villages. Everyone had fallen silent, out of respect for (and perhaps oppressed by) the suffering in the back seat. Joe felt he had failed the promise of the day. Perhaps Anna Macrimmon had taken something from their trip; perhaps she kept some precious fragment that might become a poem. But he felt his outburst at Brad had corrupted their time together, encasing him in an isolation and jealousy from which he was unable to fight free.
Only one thought consoled him: his new coat on her body, as if he were secretly holding her. When Brad let him out at the end of Water Street, he left it in the car.

She was not in school the next day, Monday, nor the day following. As in the past, her absence had a palpable quality, as though it were part of her, the part she was showing him now. In phys. ed., he stopped on the playing field to watch some sparrows blow downwind, the whole flock pulsing and flooding along almost merrily, their tiny lives somehow at home in the vast, stone-coloured sky. In a few seconds they were gone, vaporized by the distances over the empty fields. Her absence was there too, in the brown fields stretching towards a distant stand of pines; in the dreamlike progress of a white truck, making its way down the Golf Links Road. All this purified him, in a lonely way, of his sense of failure around Anna. Away from her, he gradually felt ready to meet her again. Each time he saw her she was new: but so was he.

On Wednesday, she was back. She seemed under the weather still, Joe thought, pale and a little remote, but warm enough as she smiled at him and touched his arm. Clearly she considered him a friend; and though he thought friendship a dead end, he was reanimated by her touch. In English class, Mrs. Fraser asked her to read her essay on the Romantics, which the teacher said was the best work she’d seen in years. Joe watched as Anna stood hesitating beside her desk, frowning at the loose sheaf of foolscap in her hand. Two rows over, Elaine Brown lifted her small head and gazed stoically into space. Until Anna Macrimmon’s arrival, she had been accounted the best English student. Now, it seemed to Joe, with every essay returned to them, with every answer Anna made in class — though she never volunteered one and always had to be asked by Mrs. Fraser — Elaine seemed to be mourning her fall into second place.