Chapter Seven #2
My mind slips deeper, wondering at the last time someone touched his skin, the last time his wife laid her fingers against him with hunger in her eyes. It’s been over seventy years since his wife died, since that awful night. But how long has it felt for him? Two years, three? All too recent.
He is a solemn, unknowable man, with skin like sap. A man who has lost too much.
He takes another sip, then turns. I snap my eyes away, but it’s too late. He knows I was watching him.
Ten days gone.
He heads outside just after sunup, even when it’s raining.
I stand on the front porch watching the waves, the gray sky, hoping for a bit of green, for the Faroes to appear against the horizon. But the waiting starts to feel like madness. Like I’m pushing the land away with my eyes.
So I find a broom in the kitchen and I sweep the house.
I dust the windowsills, pulling away cobwebs from the corners.
I lock myself in the bathroom and cry—anointing myself with tears, feeling the full weight of this whole fucked-up situation.
Then I brush away the despair and step back out into the hall.
Because there is no relief in the tears.
The bathroom is mostly useless anyway, without a toilet.
The clawfoot tub still holds water for a bath, but Clay explains that buckets of water need to be heated on the stove, then carried up one at a time. And he hasn’t offered to do as much.
I distract myself, daydreaming that tomorrow we’ll see land. Tomorrow I will return home and sleep in my own bed. Tomorrow I will see Nana and James, and I’ll begin the work of repairing the life I left behind.
I organize the kitchen cupboards—anything to keep the hours from feeling like years—where plates and mugs have been stacked haphazardly, without any order.
I learn how to crank water from the faucet into the sink—it can be finicky in the cold of early morning—and I boil water for tea when Clay comes inside in the evening, shivering and wet.
He tells me that the well that once ran deep underground no longer works—since the island broke away from the mainland.
But he built a series of gutters along the eaves of the house to collect rainwater, diverting the runoff into a metal cistern in the cellar below the kitchen.
Water is precious, saved and used sparingly.
I made the mistake of washing my face in the sink one morning, letting the water spill greedily through my hands, wasting most of it, and he rushed over, slamming his palm against the faucet handle to shut it off.
“Nae,” he scolded, shaking his head, explaining that each drop must be rationed.
I wanted to reply that rain is always streaming over the house—surely we’ll never run out of water.
There’s always plenty more falling from the sky.
But I kept my mouth shut, because what do I know of water conservation.
My period starts. I cut up pieces of fabric I find in the hall closet—remnants I imagine his wife saved to be used later for mending shirts. In the evening, I wash the strips of fabric and hang them to dry on the laundry line outside, hoping he won’t ask what they’re for.
The days rise and fall.
The hours slippery, hard to grasp
I chop vegetables from the garden to make stew, I collect eggs from the wooden henhouse at the end of the dirt path, then carry them back to the kitchen in a small basket.
I notice him watching me… just like I watch him. Both of us creatures the other doesn’t quite understand. We are wary, untrusting, yet we have found ourselves in a pattern of existence. Of survival. Counting the days.
It’s late, near midnight, if I had to guess. And I hear Clay stirring downstairs, pulling on his boots.
“What’s wrong?” I ask from the stairwell, a blanket pulled around me.
“Lamb about to be born,” he answers as he opens the front door.
He stares at me, and I stare back, just before he steps out into the night.
I hesitate, before my legs carry me down the stairs. I make a cup of tea in the kitchen—thinking he’ll need it—then pull on a coat from the hook beside the front door: the one he said I could wear.
I make my way up the path, the moon swollen, shading the island in indigo. Before I’ve even reached the barn, I can hear the cries of the mother sheep, and I wonder if this is the sound that woke Clay.
Stepping through the doorway, I can see the sheep near the far wall, separated from the others, and Clay is on his knees, feeling the sheep’s swollen belly.
“Anything I can do?” I ask. Certain I’ll be no help.
“Best to let the rhythm of her body see this through.” He slides his palm up to her neck, assuring her, whispering words in a language I don’t understand.
Watching him—he’s gentle, patient—I see a softness I hadn’t expected.
But things move quickly and the mother sheep begins a pattern of lying down, baaing softly, then standing up again.
“Is she okay?” I find myself fidgeting, hands tensed around the cup of tea.
“Aye, only a matter of time now.”
No more than a few minutes later, he’s helping the tiny lamb emerge into the world, brownish and slick and fragile.
I gasp, air escaping my lungs. I’ve never witnessed a birth before, human or otherwise, and I feel my heart slow—stunned by the raw, quiet abruptness of it.
The lamb trembling for breath, the air cold around us.
Brutal and calm, the whole thing impossible.
Yet performed countless times a day by every species on the planet. Instinctive. Second-nature.
The mother begins cleaning the tiny lamb, and Clay feels along her belly. “Looks like it’s only the one.” He stands, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, and I see him let out a deep breath.
“She’s healthy?”
“Aye, the ewe and lamb look fine.” He moves to the other side of the barn, retrieves a handful of cut grass, and places it beside the mother, running his hand along her neck, before walking to my side.
“I brought this for you.” I hold out the mug of tea. “Might be cold by now.”
“I’ll drink it all the same.” He takes the cup and leans against the door of the barn. There is relief in his eyes, but I find a hint of sadness in his posture. In the drowsy slope of his eyes.
And then I remember.
He lost his own wife and children during a moment just like this.
But instead of new life drawing in its first breath, his wife took her last, and the day ended with a grave dug at the shore.
The grave is still there, at the far edge of the island, just beyond the thicket of silvery-white birch trees, visible from the house.
A place I have avoided. I feel like I should say something, offer some comfort or sympathy, but strangely, I don’t know what those words would be, or if he’d even want to hear them from me.
So I clear my throat and look back at the house. “I think I’ll head back. It’s getting cold.”
He nods. “Aye. I’ll be staying a bit longer yet. Grateful for the tea.”
I walk to the house alone, and when I step inside, I look back through the window to where his silhouette is framed in the barn’s doorway, shoulders bent, sipping the cup of cold tea.
The bedroom is filled with reminders of the wife he lost.
A small, round metal box on the bedside table.
I touch the lid, carefully lifting it. Inside, two tiny pearl earrings, a simple gold band—a wedding ring?
A candle on the bedside table rests atop a hardbound book.
I slide it out, reading the cover: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. A Scottish poet, if I remember right.
Was this her nightly reading? Would they lie in bed, side by side, his hands touching her while she read to him until he drifted asleep? Her voice carried into his dreams.
I close the book, a spike of envy thorning me in the gut.
I miss this kind of intimacy… I miss James.
It’s just a daydream, it might not be true at all, but it nags at me.
I sit at the edge of the bed, the early morning sun making soft patterns across the quilt.
My eyes scan the room: a blanket folded on the wood chair by the door, a painting of a meadow above the chest of drawers—blue wildflowers slightly bent in the wind.
Did she paint it? Or maybe it was a gift, a wedding present, and he placed the nail in the wall while she guided him, telling him to tilt it this way and that until it was straight.
Maybe they laughed, newlyweds who found joy in the smallest of acts; maybe they kissed, made love on this bed, maybe they were happy.
I blow out the tightness in my lungs. Why can’t I be happy?
I’ve always kept some part of myself locked up—even with James. Held captive by the past. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, maybe I’m incapable of this kind of carefree, delirious, fever-filled love. A defect in my worthless, malnourished heart.
I touch my ring, twisting it around my finger, worrying over it.
Day twenty-three.
I walk the perimeter of the island. The afternoon is clear, crystalline and bright, and I look for any trace of land rising in the distance. But there is only the Atlantic and the sunlight and the hateful wind.
I cross my arms against it, looking back at the house, which stands at the highest point of the island.
The walls are a salty white, shutters once a pale blue but now peeling away, windows pushed open to let in the mild afternoon air.
Battered by years of relentless storms, the house endures.
A fortitude, a grit that defies time. The stone chimney spits out ribbons of smoke from the kitchen, and a seagull spears through the blue sky, dipping low, then vanishes out into the glittering daylight.
We can’t be too far from land if a bird is sailing along the island’s shoreline. But I also don’t know the patterns of birds. Or how far they travel.