Shot-Blue Read online

  ‘Do you know Ransom’s place?’ she said.

  It was awkward for this man to look at her, she thought. Maybe he wasn’t used to looking at women.

  ‘Sure I do,’ he said. ‘It’s through the narrows. You’re alone out there.’

  She wanted him to keep looking so she could figure him out, but he turned back toward the bow. Maybe his eyes were only good for distances. His clothes hung loose, which Rachel understood. She had grown up around men who wore the same set of clothes all year. When it was late summer or fall, the clothes fit well, but after winter into spring, their pants had to be cinched, and out on the water their shirts were sails. She caught herself looking at the lines of his arms and back, sharp and square. They were the kind of lines that tire because we tire, but are unbending.

  He watched the bottom for rocks and asked them to jump to shore from the bow, because there was no dock. Rachel pulled Tristan’s hands off his face. He’d been crying, but she would think about that later.

  Tristan wasn’t the kind of boy who jumped off the bow of a boat, but now he jumped far and landed light, with animal grace, his feet sticking to the wet rock, and he turned back with a smile on his face.

  The cabin was like most cabins that far down the lake. There were three holes cut out of the front wall: a door and two windows. There was another hole in the roof for the woodstove pipe. It had been ten years since Rachel had opened the cabin door, and she was surprised to find not disaster but preservation. No trippers or hunters had broken in. The small bed was made, the quilt flat and still blue. Nothing had changed, which was unsettling but confirmed what she most wanted: if no one had been there, then no one was coming.

  The chairs were pulled out from the table. She pushed them in. A skeleton the length of an index finger lay on the kitchen counter: a row of pine-needle ribs, a tail, and a skull that bore no features, just a pinched bone. A patch, a badge, of thick grey dust blew out from the top of the skeleton, and it took Rachel a second to realize this was the flesh degraded, burned to ash by time. The fur had not survived. Her instinct was to blow the dust off the counter, to see if it would rise. But she didn’t want to breathe it in. It was as if someone had put the mouse there for her to find – why would a mouse climb up on the counter and die under the hanging spoons?

  She poured a bucket of lake water down the open handle of the water pump and janked it up and down but no pressure bore. The pump leathers had to be rotten, which in a way was a blessing – it would give Tristan a job to do, carrying water up the path from shore.

  It was by the way she washed the windowsills, the table, the chair legs, the floor, that Tristan understood she’d been here before. She could only be this rough with things that were hers. She used too much water, maybe because everything felt so dry. But this was not a garden, he kept thinking, as she kept asking him for more.

  Together they pulled out the mattress, beat it with a broom and left it to air. They shook the dust out of the floor rug, dug the ashes from the belly of the woodstove, washed the kitchen utensils in the lake, and dragged the cedar canoe out from under the cabin. The canoe was lacquered in pollen and lichen and looked like it wanted to rot. Tristan watched his mother scrape it clean with the back of a knife, slowly revealing that its hull must have been blood-red once.

  To him everything felt like too much. To Rachel it wasn’t enough, she wanted to do more work to calm down. When the day ended – the sun set without a show and the pines went black – she was too tired to put the bed back together and decided they would sleep outside on the mattress.

  ‘Here we can do what we want,’ she told him.

  She wanted to tell him everything. He wanted to tell her that he was hungry.

  Tristan fell asleep and didn’t dream. There was mercy in exhaustion. Rachel watched his chest rise and fall and couldn’t believe how slowly he breathed with such small lungs. Moments passed when it seemed he had stopped breathing at all, and so peacefully that she worried that he would yearn one day, or already yearned, for slower breath still, deeper sleep than this. She thought she saw it in him, frustration at the kinds of feeling they were given. Nothing felt quite as it should. His eyelashes were longer and more beautiful than hers, his hair a little darker. Maybe they were the same, or maybe he would have it worse.

  The mattress, the blankets, and their clothes were wet with dew in the morning, and so was their skin, but the quiet of night was in them and they woke happily, smiling at each other. His mother was beautiful, Tristan knew. The hurt part of her face made the rest look more perfect, so he looked back and forth. When they were fully awake, she showed him the mist on the far shore, how it looked like smoke, like the mainland was on fire. The smoke didn’t cloud but clung to the land like breath reluctant to leave the mouth and the warmth of the body. She kissed his hair and brushed it with her hand, kissing where she brushed, telling him with her affection that this was where they would try to live.

  §

  He was told not to touch the mirror on the sill. It was a rear-view mirror snapped out of its shell, something she’d done as a teenager after her face was hurt and she wanted to see. She’d seen it shining on a wrecked car at the garbage dump, a cleared field near town that was scattered with trash and the bristly bodies of hungry black bears. In a hurry, with the nearest loose rock, she’d numbly struck the mirror’s casing over and over, until a good piece of the glass spat out on the ground. She’d swept it up. Rachel didn’t have any money then and couldn’t have asked her father to buy her anything, never mind something as useless as a mirror.

  Tristan wasn’t listening. He tested its edges to see if they were sharp, the same way he saw the fishermen test their cleaning knives, brushing his thumbnail across the edge at a slight angle, producing a thin white shaving.

  Rachel never explained the mirror to him, how she’d taken it everywhere with her, how it had never told her anything she didn’t already know. She kept it to resist the habit of looking into it. She didn’t talk to him about the past, because she couldn’t explain things she’d lost her feelings for. She couldn’t begin a story when there was no way of drawing any kind of conclusion. It wasn’t time for stories anyway. Spring was breaking and here they were.

  Spring was not gaudy on Prioleau Lake, with its stands of pine and lowlands of cedar. There were no flowering trees, no stashed bulbs, no crop of sudden colour. Transplants from the south died. Bulbs and seeds that were not native never broke, only softened and rotted in the ground. Spring was marked instead by the quiet unfurling of ferns with leaves that spread like a thousand maps of places Tristan imagined might exist.

  The one shock was the pollen. It came suddenly and late in the season, for a day or two days, spit in concert by ten million red pines. It was no dusting; their windowsills and the threshold of their door were splashed yellow. ‘We could butter our toast with it,’ Rachel teased him. ‘Would you like that?’ No, he wouldn’t. It was the pollen that first drew him down to the rocks, where Rachel would find him sitting all summer long.

  At shore was a pollen spill. The surface of the lake was rimed in a finch-yellow film. Where the water churned, it looked like milk tea. He liked it, it was disgusting, and after finding a dead baby bird in the muck, it was rapture: he would save the next one, and he did, lifting and flicking it out of the sludge with a cedar bough. In a trance, he watched the waves reach the shore, until trance became stupor. If he sat long enough, following each wave as it rolled forward and broke, bristled and dissolved, he forgot himself, he disappeared, and there was only the water wide across and deep at shore. Tristan liked that feeling. It was not like falling asleep. It was not like dreaming.

  Soon the pollen was gone, leaving the water clear fifteen feet to the bottom. Where it was deeper than that, the water was black. Tristan kept his post at shore, watching the waves erase each other. Then one day he jumped in, though not far out or with a cry. He was so small that the hole he broke in the surface closed over his head quickly. Rachel held he
r breath with him, watching from the slope. He wasn’t a strong swimmer yet. There were so many things she needed to teach him. But he wasn’t the kind of child who wanted to be taught. Anyway, she thought, you learn for yourself. Which wave would he break through? Which one was he holding out below? When he resurfaced, they could both breathe. She took a breath for his face, one for his neck, one for his shoulders, and one for his chest as he pulled himself out, his skin twice lit by the sun and cold wind. I love you, she thought, my baby, watching him slip out of the water. His knees were bruised, but he was otherwise perfect, and as if he could hear her thoughts – maybe he could, what did she know – he found her eyes and smiled at her, closed his eyes and seemed to be saying thank you.

  Days went by without name for two weeks before a boat came around the front of the island, slowing in a moan of lost momentum. The sound brought Rachel to the window. She knew that she was supposed to go down and help him land. It was the water taxi. It was the same man.

  Tristan was playing with cards at the table. His cards were spread out like he was drawing with them, making a landscape: a spade and club forest, heart and diamond sky. She didn’t think he knew a card game, and she resolved to teach him one, though she’d never liked cards. She had always preferred doing nothing to playing a game, had never been bored – she was too full of feeling for that. Now she couldn’t tell if it was the cards or the man that was making her anxious.

  The pines gave shelter and long shade, but Rachel felt like she was crossing an open field as she left the cabin. She was supposed to know there was no protection, no place to hide, but it was something that had to be learned in variation. There’s no protection, she told herself, forcing her hands open so she might wave, straightening her back, brushing the hair off her face.

  ‘There’s no place to hide,’ she said.

  He thought about it. ‘You’re probably right.’ On his way, he had imagined that she would take relief in seeing him. That’s what people did this far out.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

  For some reason Rachel’s hostility made him comfortable. Maybe because she wasn’t pretending anything. Or because no one had spoken to him so directly in a long time. She stood where the water slid up over the rocks, leaving no room for him to imagine coming to shore or getting past her. It was like she was trying to hide the whole island behind her back.

  ‘Why are you smiling like that?’ she asked.

  Against her will, he made her comfortable too. His face was easy to look at. It had the confidence of someone who lives on the water. He was wearing the same loose clothes as the first day, standing still in the rocking boat.

  ‘I’ve got something here,’ he said, holding out a letter.

  When he let go, his fingers stayed bent. He’d worked them too hard, she could tell. She wondered if they hurt him.

  ‘So you’re Ransom’s daughter?’

  He tried to see her father in her face. The scar on her cheek wrapped behind her ear and distracted him. ‘You must be his daughter. I saw you in the window up there, and I thought that could be him. I know he’s dead and it can’t be. I mean, I know it’s not, it’s you.’

  Rachel shook her head like she didn’t understand, but she did.

  ‘I knew him.’

  ‘I knew him too,’ she said, smiling now. They were familiar to each other.

  When she opened the letter a few days later, it was bad but not awful, a couple of pages and a folded map from Codas. He’d heard that she’d taken up camp at her father’s fishing cabin. She took the map as an insult: like she didn’t know the lake. The letter itself was two pages of small, cloying handwriting. He pressed too hard into the page. Nothing was natural about Codas. It was the longest letter she’d ever received. Did they have a boat? Gas for the boat? Oil to mix with the gas? How would she support herself? Codas told her to come to Treble Island. She should come on Sunday at eleven. If she didn’t, he would come the following week to bring them himself.

  Sunday at eleven o’clock was when Codas held meetings at his father’s old chapel. She’d been to one, about seven years ago, for the memorial of one of the old guys her father used to drink with at the trading post. They’d played the dead man’s favourite drinking game: tell a story and, if it’s good enough, everybody drinks. The dead man had driven his boat up onto a log boom at night, then tried to walk his way out on the logs and drowned. No one had a story to beat that. Rachel was pretty sure people went to the chapel out of habit, and because they lived so alone and knew they’d find each other there. Were they going to church? Maybe, but there was no service. They might only talk about fishing, or the land claim, or they’d throw a birthday party. Had she thought about winter? Codas asked in the letter. Sometimes people didn’t notice the seasons passing. Did she? That wasn’t her problem. The seasons never passed with ease. Fall would come first, bright by day, but brutal at night as temperatures fell below zero. People often think they are doing their best, but they are only doing what they want, he said. ‘Remember you’re not alone,’ as if she could forget. ‘You have a son.’

  §

  On paper Prioleau’s main channels took the shape of a body falling. A body like a cliff jumper. The legs sunk south, while the arms shot over the shoulders and seemed to be reaching for something. The silhouette was headless. Some people said the lake was reaching for its ghost head. Their island was at the heel of the right leg. Treble Island was mid-breast, its outline a dab shape like a heart. Rachel traced their route on her father’s old map. The scale was an inch per mile. From heel to heart, it was six inches, six miles, with two or three miles open to rough water.

  On their practice run, the wind had its way with them. Tristan was weak in the bow of the canoe. ‘Turn around and watch me,’ Rachel said to his back, but he didn’t turn around. ‘Do you see how I pull on the water? I get ahold of it and pull’ – no, he couldn’t see – ‘and with my top hand I push.’ The canoe was moving backwards now; the prow and their bodies were slim, but the wind on the water could make a sail of anything. Tristan dipped his paddle like he was dipping his finger into a bowl of batter. ‘Don’t lily dip,’ Rachel told him. ‘Cut in and pull.’ He finally looked back, but not at what his mother was trying to teach him; he looked at her dark hair across her forehead, down her shoulders, and at her face which was calm, like she didn’t care about what she was saying. But all the more reason that he should listen.

  ‘You’re not trying.’

  He put his paddle into the lake up to its hilt, but when he pulled back his low hand pinched against the gunnel.

  Every day she made him practise, like he was learning an instrument. They went out together, and she knelt him down on a ledge at shore and made him paddle in place, his knees rubbing against the rock.

  Tristan’s weakness worked its way out of him like an illness. It persisted strangely, disappearing only to claw back in, until it eased imperceptibly, then one day it broke, for reasons of its own, and was gone. That Sunday, Rachel filled the bottom of the canoe with rocks to set it deep in the water against the wind, and they climbed in, setting it deeper. They put their paddles into the water without talking and pressed the canoe into the bay. The bow cut the water so cleanly the cut closed quickly behind them. They drew a disappearing line, which no one saw in the first place: they didn’t look back, only down at the sky, pitch-blue in the water, or at the black cliffs hanging over their shoulders. When her top arm grew tired, Rachel told him, ‘Switch,’ and they slid their paddles over the gunnels and started over.

  ‘I’m keeping note of you, Rachel,’ Codas told her when she came to the door to show her face.

  ‘And I of you.’

  §

  The day was subdued, the sky a locked blue with no clouds. It was the kind of day there was no rush to go out since nothing would change. They woke slowly, talking at long intervals. ‘We can paddle to the bottom of the bay and look for driftwood. We’ll find good pieces,’ Rachel said. Then they were bo
th quiet and she spent a long time combing his hair with her hand. She reached down to where he slept on a thick blanket on the floor.

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ he agreed.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What will we do?’

  ‘Have you been bone collecting?’

  His hair was getting long and she should cut it, but he looked beautiful and older with long hair curled around his ears and falling roughly at his neck.

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  ‘Driftwood’s like bones. Not just how it looks, that’s obvious. But how it feels. It’s so light. We lift our arms and don’t feel them, right?’

  Tristan didn’t know if he ever felt his arms.

  ‘I used to go and collect pieces to keep. I found that one,’ she said, pointing above the window to a piece of wood like an open wing. The waves and sand had worked on the wood grain to rib and feather it. There were more pieces above the windows and on the wall behind the woodstove.

  Down came the wing. And down came the piece in the shape of a kayak, long and tapered at both ends, with a soft-worn ghost hole in the middle. He couldn’t imagine how the hole had formed. Down came the abstract pieces. Animal and human faces. One face had no nose, one face had no mouth. Tristan took the beaverchew walking sticks at the door and carried them into the woods, where he threw them down, and where, sun-bleached, they spoke out against the dark mottled trunks of the pines. He might have carried two walking sticks at a time, but took only one; two might have touched and rattled as he walked. There were bones in this world, he understood, but he and his mother didn’t have to live with them.

  She liked how the walking sticks looked the way he’d strewn them in the woods. They set a kind of stage and expectation. She also liked the kayak with the ghost hole overturned in a bank of young ferns. The bird wing was missing. When she asked Tristan where it was, he showed her: he’d pinned it under a rock.