Far Cry, page 17
“Hush, Kitty-cat. He’ll come back, won’t he, Andy?”
I met her look, unsure. “Of course he will.”
And of course he did. Not swimming but lying in the bottom of a company skiff, a Wardell’s Cannery flag shivering on its mast.
Dan Pike looked too thin to row the three miles up-inlet from Wardell’s. Delivering Skygge was a kindness, but Pike also had a tale to tell. That was a late night in the store, the fleet back in and the counter turned bar, empty bottles lined up on the floor.
Pike waited for a good crowd before he began. His bitch, Harebell—half malamute, he had us know, a blue-eyed beauty with a wolf’s winter coat—this Harebell had paced the dock at Wardell’s all morning, her muzzle lifted to the wind.
“That’s right, Viken, your boy there’s not the only one with a nose.” He had blue eyes himself, Pike. They stood out in his freckled face. “I thought maybe a seal carcass had washed up someplace until I seen him come paddling. Oh, the word went round then. The dock was never so crowded, except when the boat was in. They cleared a path for Harebell, though. She ran to meet your boy where he come scrambling up the rocks. What’d you say you call him?”
“Skygge.”
“Right. Well, fair play to old Shaggy, he shakes out his coat and he’s on her then and there.”
Those gathered gave a cheer, your father among them. Even Knox held up his glass. He had smelled a gathering and followed the boardwalk from his house on the point. Was that where your mother was, Kit, sitting with Orpha Knox? I know she was in the store to begin with—I remember your father standing close beside her and, later, walking her to the door. Perhaps you and she were next door with Skygge, the three of you reunited and relieved.
It was a slow Sunday just past the season’s close when Pike came rowing back. This time he had a crate in the skiff. The children seemed to know—you were waiting on the long dock with half a dozen others whose families hadn’t yet moved on. Bobbie heard the excitement and stepped out onto the porch. She stuck her head back inside the cottage with a grin. “Come on, you two, never mind your game.” Skygge lifted an ear. “You too, Skygge, you lazy bugger. Come see.”
We found Pike on the dock, kneeling by his crate in the crowd of kids. He rose and stepped toward us. “Andy. Frank.” Your father stood at a little distance while I shook Pike’s hand.
“Hello, Dan,” Bobbie said.
“Missus.” He cleared his throat. “Harebell’s had her pups. Got a couple left.”
She moved past him for a look. “Oh, aren’t they beauties!”
I saw them then—one on its hind legs in the crate, front paws braced at the rim, the other in one of the Jensen boys’ arms. And I saw you, Kit. Standing at the edge of the group, a look on your face as though you were holding your breath.
“Black-and-white one’s a dog,” Pike said. “Little grey’s a bitch.”
The cries they made. Skygge pushed into the group to smell them—the grey stretching up to lick his muzzle, the other wriggling in the boy’s arms. Did they know him for their father? Surely he, at least, understood. The nose that had caught wind of their mother from three miles off must have recognized them for his own.
“Thought you might like one, Andy,” Pike added. “What with your boy there getting long in the tooth.”
Something inside me went cold. Long swim or no, Skygge was spending more and more time on the rug. A decade had passed since he had been a puppy himself, a long life for a dog his size. A spawning salmon gives up eating at the river’s mouth—might not a dog take a new life in the house as a signal to let go of his own?
“Thanks,” I said. “But we are fine as we are.”
“Lars! Lucas!” That was Agneta Jensen, calling her boys. When the one with the pup in his arms turned and saw her standing at the head of the dock, he placed it back in the crate and ran after his brother to follow her up the stairs. A blessing for Ida’s three. They got the black-and-white in the end.
Pike pushed his cap back, rubbing at the line it left. “How ’bout you, Missus? Wouldn’t your girl here like one?”
Was that what did it, him showing he’d taken notice of you both? Or was it the smile your mother flashed, unguarded, even warm?
“What do you think, Frank?”
Your father looked past her to Pike. “Dog’s a lot of trouble.”
“Honey, for Kit—”
“Kit’s fine.”
Your mother fell quiet.
“Come on, Missus,” Frank said. He took hold of her hand as he had in their early days and led her away. At the stairs, he gestured that she should go first. She mounted them with him close behind, neither one of them looking back.
“I will take her,” I heard myself say. “I will take the grey.”
But grey was not quite right, was it? Silver, you have said, and so she is.
We returned to the cottage to find the cribbage board abandoned, your parents gone home. So it was the three of us—you, Skygge and I—left to watch the silver pup explore.
“What will we call her?” I said.
You thought for a moment. “What does skygge mean?”
You knew the answer, Kit. I told you again. “Shadow.”
You nodded, watching the puppy follow her father, light after dark.
“Ah,” I said, understanding. “Lys.”
* * *
—
It was selfish of me, I know, keeping Skygge’s passing for myself. Perhaps if I had found him by daylight. If Lys hadn’t woken me in the dark.
“Hush,” I said. And then, as sometimes happens when I am half-asleep, the old language drifted up. “Stille.”
But she would not be quiet. When I reached a hand down to push her from the bedside, she took it gently in her teeth. That way they have of using their mouths as hands. I was awake then. I knew.
He had become lighter with age. Leaving Lys crying in the cottage, I carried him with ease along the back headland path. It troubled me, laying him down on the pebbles while I dragged the Coot down the short slope of the beach. I feared I might lose him in the dark.
I rowed out farther than need be—it was March, the water as clean as it ever gets. Out past Squid Island, to where I could feel the falling tide keenly against the hull. No sense lingering. I touched the fur at his brow, the dry sponge of his nose. I heaved him overboard.
Rowing back, I saw the headland lighten and take shape with every glance round. How long were you standing there, I wonder, before I made you out?
* * *
With the wind tearing up the inlet and the sail no longer any use, Kit sees what her boatpuller’s made of. Steady, the best rowers are, a fluid, seemingly endless strength. His face untroubled, Jimmy sculls through the whistling sound at the top of a wave, the thud as they drop into a trough. Kit relaxes into the ride.
In time he brings them round into the Carmen Island channel. It’s quieter here, only one other skiff down the far end. Hanevold, it might be, that green cap of his—hard to be sure in the failing light. Either way, she’ll take care to stagger the set so there can be no talk of cutting a fellow fisherman off.
Jimmy works wordlessly beside her, letting out the net. Later, when the coffee’s coming to a boil, she’s almost surprised to hear him speak.
“I can’t get over the smell.”
She breathes in through her nose: coffee, yes, and woodsmoke, but mostly ocean, the cold, ongoing clean.
He shakes his head. “In the city it’s always smoke and horseshit. False Creek has the swamp and the slaughterhouses, the mills. You ever been?”
“Once.”
“You know the Main Street Bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, so on the south side, down on your left, there’s a dairy ranch.”
Kit pictures it—the boxy brown bodies, the startling grass. “Yeah,” she says, “that’s right.”
“Far edge of the paddock, there’s a creek there, Brewery Creek.”
And so there is: beyond the grazing beasts, a cut of water, sparkling, dark.
“This old guy,” Jimmy says, “one of the regulars at the restaurant, he used to let me and a couple of the other kids borrow his boat. We’d row across to the creek for eels.”
“Eels?”
“You never had them? They’re good.” He pushes a stick of wood into the flames. “I always loved it in the boat. Your head feels better.”
Kit nods. “And your chest.”
He looks at her. The stove’s heat plays on her face; she must be lit up like he is, flickering. She wraps her hand in her sleeve and lifts the pot off the fire. Jimmy holds out his cup.
* * *
Knox was here earlier. All these years and still the man has not learned how to drink. I keep a special bottle for his visits—did you know? The good stuff, he thinks, and so it was before I watered it down. Even so, he gets loose-tongued after one, and clumsy after three. More than once he has stumbled out to be sick over the porch rail into the salal bushes below.
I suppose it is not such a high price to pay, the occasional cribbage game. Even your father managed it most of the time. In the early years he would sometimes catch my look and let the boss win. It was something between the two of us, a game within the game.
Things were better once Knox had his bride to keep him home—weeks would pass without his footfall on the boardwalk, his face at the door. Nights when he did show up, he was always crowing or moaning, or both—full of having won himself a Woodley girl, even if she was the runt. That is his word, Kit. All the same, it seems hard-hearted copying it down here.
“You don’t know your luck, Starratt,” I remember him saying one night when he and Orpha had been married a few years.
“Luck?” Frank said, skipping his peg down the track. “Try skill.”
“No, not—” Knox gestured to the board. “Your wife. And your girl, just as bonny as her mother.”
Frank winked at me. “If it’s kids you want, there’s not much of a trick to it.”
Knox looked up. “My Orpha, she—she’s not strong.”
You might feel sorry for the man, reading that. I almost do, writing it. And then I recall the look on his face. Even then, drunk as he was, there was that twinned intent he was never without. Never a word, never a thought without its shadow riding along.
Take tonight. He took his time working round to it. We were well into a second game before he mentioned your father’s name.
“Won’t be the same without him.” A pause to pick up his hand. “Too quiet by half.”
I nodded, throwing two low cards to the crib.
“Out of his misery, though,” Knox added.
I looked at him.
“Well, he was never quite right after the war, was he? And then, when his missus up and left…”
What could I say to that? He laid his discards over mine. I waited for him to cut for the starter card.
“I still can’t believe it,” he said. “A woman like that going off with a—”
“Married, you mean.” I cut the deck myself. “A married woman.”
“Sure, but you know what I mean. She could’ve had her pick.”
“Frank,” I said. “Frank was her pick.”
“I know, that’s what makes it so hard to believe.” He kissed his knuckle before sniffing it, then laid the first card of the play. “You never know, though. Maybe things weren’t so rosy in the old log cabin after he got back.”
Did he notice my stillness? Just how many drinks had he had?
“You had to feel for her,” he added. “The girl, too.”
That set my teeth on edge. He had known you all your life—why not call you by name?
“How’s she doing, anyway?”
“Kit?” I said. “Fine.” I played a card for fifteen—enough to turn his expression sour.
“Can’t be easy, her mother running off like that. Then, what, not even a year later, she loses the old man.”
He poured out the last of the watered whiskey. I rose for a fresh bottle. So what if he ended up sick.
“You know she’s got this boatpuller now.” He gave a snort. “Didn’t know the buggers could row.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
We played to the go and gathered back our hands. He sucked his knuckle as though it was the knob on a chicken leg.
“You’re not worried?” he said. “The pair of them out there day and night?”
I met his look. “Kit is a sensible girl.”
“Sure.” A pause. “I just wonder if she should be out on the grounds at all.”
“She has been fishing all her life.”
Setting down his cards, he took up his pipe and lit it, the coal fizzing. “I could always train her up in the office.”
He could feel me watching him, I know he could.
“How is Mrs. Knox?” I said finally.
“Orpha? Not so good.”
“She will be missing you, down in the city on her own.”
“Yeah, well, this place doesn’t run itself.”
At long last, he counted his hand. I counted mine along with the crib, pegging my share of points. I wonder, Kit, will you learn to play when the season closes down? It will be just the two of us then, and Lys if she lasts.
16
Kit was ten years old when the world came to blows. When it began, the war moved like a deep-sea current, distant and unseen. By season start-up, it was coming into shore.
“Heard about Memryk?” her father said one evening over the cribbage board. Kit was curled up on the rug, her head resting on Lys’s back.
Bobbie looked round from the basin. “Fedor?”
“You know some other Memryk?” When she said nothing, Frank added, “Bugger’s gone. The whole family, sent to one of those camps in the interior.”
“I wondered,” said Uncle Anders.
“What camps?” said Bobbie.
“Internment.” Uncle Anders looked across at her. “They are all going, Galicians, Hungarians, Austrians. Germans too.”
“Best place for ’em,” said Frank.
“Frank.”
“There’s a war on, Bobbie. Enemy’s the enemy.”
“I know, but…”
“I suppose I should count myself lucky,” said Uncle Anders.
“How’s that?”
“Norway is neutral.”
Her father made a noise. “No such thing.”
“Frank,” Bobbie said again.
“This is my country,” Uncle Anders said. “I left Norway over thirty years ago.”
“Yeah, okay. I’m just saying, a man has to stand up for something. Fight for what’s his.”
Bobbie dried her hands and came to lay them on Frank’s shoulders. “Don’t you go getting any ideas. Married men need the wife’s say-so, remember?”
Kit saw her father’s face harden.
Her mother must’ve sensed it. She swung round and dropped into his lap. “How would we get on here without you?” She looped a hank of her hair around his wrist. “Hm? How would I get on?”
Frank’s mouth softened, a release Kit felt in her chest. As she worked a hand into Lys’s ruff, Uncle Anders pushed his chair back and stood. She thought he would speak, but it was only a fresh bottle he was after. High in the open cupboard, it sent back the light of the lamp.
* * *
I told myself it was a surprise, but looking back, I can see the steps your father took—one after the other, like stones laid out across a stream.
I remember when they began printing the casualty lists, all those names framed in black. Your father asked me to read them out.
“Frank.” Bobbie shot a glance your way.
“You don’t think they deserve our respect?”
I see now how I played a part—bringer of bad tidings, teller of chilling tales. The news reached us late, but it still reached us, copies of the World piled on the table to be read in order, day by day. There are those who skim the week’s headlines, eager to bring time back in line. I prefer to make my way through each edition, building on the stories that came before.
Your parents trusted me to read anything of interest aloud. Names and the numbers of lives lost. Mons into Marne, Ypres as 1914 wound down, then again with the coming of spring—this time under clouds of killing gas. Weeks later, a U-boat’s torpedo sent the Lusitania to the sea floor. Do you remember, Kit? Many children and little babies still lie in the morgues like so many dolls.
Your mother stood up from the table when I read that line. “Come on, Kit, planting to do.”
Lys followed you out—to lope ahead to the cabin, I suppose. Nose out voles while the two of you worked on Bobbie’s tub garden in the sun.
Frank watched the door for a moment after you were gone. He shifted his gaze to meet mine. “Go on.”
I finished the article, then turned the page to read about the trouble down in Victoria, Germans beaten, their shops destroyed.
“Serves them right,” he said. “Sons of bitches.”
“You think so?”
“Don’t you?”
How did I answer, Kit, a conciliatory nod? Or did I just read on?
Bobbie was the one to speak up when I read the latest about Minister Hughes. He was still refusing to replace the Canadian-made Ross rifles—never mind that our soldiers were snatching up the sturdier Lee–Enfields from the British dead.
“God,” she said, “he really is a mad bastard.”
Frank flinched. “It takes a hard man to lead.”
“Yes, but—”
