And no more sailors had come in from the boat that evening to explore the waterfront or eat in the inn. But the boat still sat on its maroon reflection in the sounds – waiting, apparently, for a party of women to return from the Rulvyn, where they had gone to trade.
Norema and Jori walked back on the irregularly cobbled lane that sided the backs of the poorer houses; nets and laundry and ropes and bird cages hung in the trees between black, daub-and-wattle huts. The thick, sandy grass that would grow anywhere save on the salt beach had pushed aside stones Norema had watched men and women set in place when she was younger than Jori.
As they reached the shaggy bark fence that was the back of her father’s yard, the gate ahead swung forward on its wide, leather hinges and half a dozen men tromped out, leaving her father looking after them, one hand on the log bolt he had just pushed back to let them leave. His cheeks were wrinkled in concentration above his beard. He rubbed the curly red hair on his jaw with two sap-stained fingers.
‘Father, what did they want?’ Jori demanded with more boldness than Norema dared (it signified less real curiosity, at least that’s what the older girl had always thought).
The wrinkles fell. But he still stared after the men.
‘Father …!’ Jori insisted.
‘Nothing. Nothing you need worry yourself about.’ Behind him, across the yard, between the high and half-hulled ribs, a horizontal thread of light blistered with silver – and was the sea.
‘Does it have to do with the red ship?’
Their father frowned down at the two girls. ‘They asked me for my word that I would sell the ship no supplies nor offer them any services should any of its wicked women or its accursed captain sneak in to shore after sunset.’
‘What did you say?’ Jori demanded.
‘Well, I couldn’t very well refuse.’ Her father’s smile spoke vaguely of indulgence. ‘Big Inek’s daughter is one of the girls they took out to their boat; and he works for me.’
‘What did they do to her?’ Jori demanded on.
‘Nothing.’ But the vague smile became a vague frown. ‘Or so I hear – and we should all be thankful for it. It’s not what they did do, but what they could do.’
Norema asked, ‘What could they do, Father?’
‘Look, I’m not going to stand here in the road and be interrogated by my own children about things I have no wish to discuss.’ The frown hardened. ‘If girls want to talk about such unpleasant things – and I can’t see any reason for it, myself – they must do so with their mothers. Not me. Now run home and stop dawdling here on the road. Go on now, run.’
And Norema, who was distinctly too old to go dashing home before an irrational father, felt uncomfortable and embarrassed – and walked quickly after Jori, who was indeed now sprinting down the dusty highway.
Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended.
Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.
Various cultures make the transition at various ages, which transition period lasts for varying lengths of time, one accomplishing it in a week with careful dances, ancient prayers, and isolate and specified rituals; another, letting it take its own course, offering no help for it, and allowing it to run on frequently for years. But at the center of the changeover there is a period – whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion – where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless.
Norema was at such a point that afternoon. ‘Talk to your mother, indeed,’ she thought, and started off to do so. (It was because she was at that point that she chose to talk to her mother about it in the particular way she did.)
Tadeem was going out the door when Norema barged in. Her mother, alone now in the kitchen, was pulling at the ropes that came through the wooden collar in the sandy wall beside the fire. Somewhere, baffles creaked and scraped.
Norema went to the table, and with her fingernail pried at the dark line on the plank that she thought might be a loose splinter. ‘Mother?’ It wasn’t. ‘You know the red ship anchored up in the sounds?’
Her mother tugged; baffles clashed.
‘What would you do –’ She ran her nail again along what she now knew was just a particularly deep grain – ‘if I said I had shipped aboard as a sailor?’
‘What?’ Clashing ceased. ‘No – you’re not that thick-skulled. But why would you even want to suggest such an awful thing?’
‘Why is it awful? What have they done, and why is everyone upset about them?’
Her mother stood up. Upset? A boatload of women, half of them girls hardly older than you, with a strange man for captain, combing the port for more girls to take off from our island – and you ask why people are upset?’
‘Yes,’ Norema said. ‘I want to know why.’
Her mother raised her eyes, then turned back to the baffles. ‘…this fireplace. Really!’ Baffles clashed again.
‘Two summers ago –’ Norema leaned against the thick table plank – ‘Fevin was the only man working on Beaio’s boat. I went out with them for three days and you didn’t complain.’
‘Fevin was not a foreign, black captain combing our port for women to snatch away forever. Norema, suppose this captain sells these women for slaves. And who knows what he does with those girls at night, when the day’s watch is ended.’
‘It couldn’t be too unpleasant,’ Norema said. ‘There’re more of them than there are of him.’
Her mother’s humpf mixed contempt with frustration. ‘You just don’t understand anything, do you? We try to bring up our children so that they are protected from the world’s evils, only to find we’ve raised a pack of innocents who seem to be about to stumble into them at every turn just from sheer stupidity! Girl, when you look at that scarlet hulk, floating out there in the sound, can’t you just feel how strange, unnatural, and dangerous it is?
‘Oh, Mother!’ Norema said. ‘Really!’
Then, because she saw her mother start to tug at the baffle ropes again – which, by now, were perfectly well set – she realized just how upset her mother was. So she sat down at the table and hulled the speckled nuts in the clay bowl that Jori had collected the previous afternoon.
Then she went back to the waterfront.
Wandering between the docks and the storage sheds, the net houses and the small boats pulled up and upturned on the roped logs, she felt the oddest quality to the lazy, evening dockside. Was it, she wondered, the red boat which, from here, was not even visible?
Strolling the violet evening, she suddenly realized that the strange air in the little waterfront streets was simply emptiness. The sailors from the strange boat were, of course, no longer frequenting the inns and docks. And the local waterfronters, though not exactly scared off by the prospect of these same sailors, were still keeping away.
It was too amusing!
She turned toward the door around the side of the inn, when Enin came charging down the steps, saw her, stopped, and whispered (though there was no one else in the gravel-covered alley): ‘Did you hear, they’re going to do it tonight!’
Norema frowned.
‘The ship! The red ship! They’re going to burn it!’
He turned, running, and she saw part of her reflection whiz across his stomach mirror. ‘Burn it to the water line!’ he shouted back toward her – she turned to watch him – and ran down the street.
On the deserted gravel, before the sandy docks, where masts bent together and swayed apart, Norema felt a sudden chill along her left side, under her shift; it was horror – not the complete and stifling horror that encases the body in a paralysis of inaction, but a simple and s
light horror whose only physical sign was a tingling, all on one side, that someone else could have as easily put to the breeze that had cooled the dock some few degrees over the previous minutes.
Certain storytelling conventions would have us here, to point and personalize Norema’s response to Enin’s news, go back and insert some fictive encounter between the girl and one or more of the sailor women: a sunny afternoon on the docks, Norema sharing a watermelon and inner secrets with a coarse-haired, wide-eyed twenty-year-old; Norema and a fourteen-year-old whose dirty blond hair was bound with beaded thongs, sitting knee to knee on a weathered log, talking of journeys taken and journeys desired; or a dawn encounter at a beached dinghy between Norema and some heavy-armed redhead falling to silent communion at some task of mending, bailing, or caulking. Certainly the addition of such a scene, somewhere previous to this in our text, would make what happens next conform more closely to the general run of tales. The only trouble with such fictive encounters is, first, they frequently do not occur, and second, frequently when they do, rather than leading to the action fiction uses them to impel, they make us feel that, somehow, we have already acted, already done our part to deploy a few good feelings – especially when the action required goes against the general will.
Norema, as we have seen, was a young woman who knew the passions of analysis; today we say such people are more likely to place their energies behind an abstract cause than to work at untangling the everyday snarl of things. And though it would not have been all that difficult to say the same in Norema’s time, she was, nevertheless, not that different from you and me.
On the street, before the inn, Norema resolved to do something about the burning – or at least see what the burners were doing and do something about it if there was anything do be done.
She turned away and walked from the inn, spreading her toes wide in her loose, soft shoes, each step. A momentary memory of a morning walk with Venn, with the shadows of the masts across the gravel … Those shadows now lay out on the water, shattered by little waves: and the memory shattered before feet scrabbling on the docks.
A man hallooed.
A younger man hallooed back.
Ahead, two boys jumped off the deck of a boat, ran to the dock’s foot, and peered across the street. From around the corner came a dozen men, Big Inek and Fevin among them.
Norema hooked two fingers on the cord around the high, canvas-covered bale beside her, moved halfway behind it, then moved out again so she could see the ropes tossed back to the dock, see the one mast among the others, swaying and swaying, stalk out on the blue-black water.
Between two houses, Norema could see sunset’s copper smear. Above, the sky was the darkening indigo the calmest ocean can never quite reflect. Children’s voices snarled in the street.
Norema looked down. Three grubby children had run out between the huts:
‘Let’s play red ship!’
‘I’ll be the captain!’
‘You can’t be the captain. You’re a girl!’
‘Are we going to sneak up on it and burn it?’
‘Yeah!’
‘All right. You be the captain. We’ll sneak up and we’ll burn you!’
‘No, come on. You can’t do that, either. Didn’t you see? Only men go out to do that.’
‘You go on and play by yourself, then. I’m not going to play with you!’
‘No, come on …’
‘Yeah, come on. You have to play.’
‘You have to have girls to play red ship.’
‘That’s what the game is all about.’
‘Come on, now. You play.’
The mast moved beyond the clutch of masts. A sail, jerking and flapping, rose, filled, and pulled around toward the sound.
The two boys were running up the dock.
The little girl ran behind. ‘Hey, wait for me! All right, I said I’ll play …’
Norema stepped from behind the bale, frowning, uncomfortable, sure she had just seen something very important and totally unable to say why – a situation which, for someone like Norema, was discomfort.
The children were gone.
The boat was away.
The docks were empty.
She strolled to the center of the gravel and started forward.
The urge to move nearer to the buildings along the street – or to keep closer to the bales and upturned dinghies along the dock – was almost overpowering. Ambling down the center, she smiled at the discomfort and thought: The threat of the red ship …
And watched, while she walked, the threatened streets.
Half the tangled roots had pulled from the bank. The leafless tree leaned over the twelve-foot semicircle of sand. Norema and Venn had sat there for an hour once and argued whether the little beach, like a giant copper coin tilted half into the water, was growing or shrinking … how many years ago now? And the beach was the same. Norema sat wedged between the two well-anchored trees, looking out through the branches of the leaning third.
The ship, a-top its reflection, made her think of leaves, stacked one on the other, a breeze making the whole leaf column shiver, dance, but never quite topple.
The ship, dark now on dark water, held it down.
She had been sitting there almost two hours. The sky was blue-black; a few stars scattered the east. One twig of the slant tree lay like a shatter-line across the distant hull (Venn had once taken her to see a puddle of lava high on the mountains, broken by cooling – Venn’s theory – or the mountain goats’ hooves – Dell’s – : some slaggy scar from the fires burning beneath the sea’s floor, whose eruptions – Venn’s theory again – had thrown up all the islands around.) Fire …!
It spurted up the stern. Then it rushed across the waterline. What had happened was that men from the island’s boat (hidden on the opposite bank) had swum up with bladders of oil and smeared the base of the ship (with light oil to the height of an arm), then ringed the ship with a lace (not a single wide ribbon) of heavy oil out to fifteen feet from the hull. (Where had she learned to fire a free-anchored ship? From Venn’s old tale of the Three Beetles and the White Bird; which was probably where the men had learned it, too …) Then you took the cover off a floating tinder-dish in which a lighted rag, rolled in sand and soaked in oil, would smolder for an hour – light the ship at the downwind end, and the lace at the upwind end, then swim for all you’re worth.
Bark bit her hand. Her jaw began to throb. She pushed back against the trunk as leaf after leaf down the column caught, all the way to the base of sand below her.
A story … she thought. The Three Beetles and the White Bird was a tale she had hugged her knees at, leaned forward to hear of its hill-skirmishes and sea-chases, its burnings and battles, its brave feats and betrayals. Reflected there on the flickering waters, it all seemed somehow reversed to … not something horrible. The reason she held the branch so tightly, pressed herself back against the tree, was not from any active fear, but rather from a sort of terrible expectation of emotion, waiting for the sound (amidst the faint crackling she could just make out) of screams, waiting to see figures leaping or falling into the ring of flaming waters. All she actually felt (she loosed her hand from the branch beside her) was numb anticipation.
There are people in there, she thought, almost to see the result of such thought, dying. Nothing. There are women dying in there, she tried again (and could hear Venn making the correction): still it was just a curious phrase. Suddenly she raised her chin a little, closed her eyes, and this time tried moving her lips to the words: ‘There are women in there dying and our men are killing them …’ and felt a tickling of terror; because for a moment she was watching two boys and a little girl playing on the docks. And all the waters before her and the forest behind her were a-glitter and a-glimmer with threat.
She opened her eyes: because something moved in the water … twenty feet away? Fifteen? (In the bay’s center, fire fell back to the water’s surface, with things floating in it aflame.) Several lar
gish pieces of flotsam were drifting inland.
The one just in front of the beach stalled on submerged sands: charred and wet, it was some kind of carton, which, as she watched it, suddenly came apart. For a moment, the dozens of things floating out of it actually seemed alive. Taking up the same current, they continued, tiny and dark, into the shore.
After a while she got up and walked down to the sands’ wet edge, stooped, and picked up … a ball of some sort, perhaps as big as her father’s curled-up forefinger. Wet, black, it wasn’t exactly soft. Many, many of them, she saw, were bobbing in the dark water.
Squeezing it, frowning at it (the boat was craggy, dark, blotched with fading embers), she turned back up into the woods.
She walked away on her soft-soled shoes in the loud underbrush, pondering an unresolvable troubling – till finally, after climbing into the window of her room, and lying on her bed, looking at the shadows on her bare, narrow walls – she slept. The rubber ball was under her pillow.
4
Shortly after that began a period of some five years, which, were one to have asked her after it was over, she would have no doubt said was the most important of her life. Certainly it obliterated the clear memory of much of what we have recounted. We, however, shall all but omit it – at least we shall condense it mightily: four weeks after the burning she met an affable red-haired man from another island who worked (indeed who was a leader of) a twelve-boat fishing cooperative of ten men and two women. Three months after meeting him she married him and moved to his island. Their first child was a son; then, in what seemed to her much less than eighteen months, she had two daughters. Through those years there were moments which, when they occurred, she thought to remember for the rest of her life (in much the same way that the firelight on the night beach she had thought to drop from her memory forever): sitting on the deck with her husband and her children at dawn the way she had sat with her mother and her sister; moonlit evenings on Willow Scarp – her favorite spot on her new island – looking out over the nets of foam that rippled round the rocky point; the afternoons when her husband would be working on his nets, perched on one of the pilings that stuck up about the rush-matted docks, and she would come up silently behind him and look up to see his sunburned back, the curls of coppery hair clawing at the translucent shell that was his ear. She had already begun to do some of the things with her own children that Venn, years ago, had done with her and the children of her island; and was both amused and a little proud that she quickly developed, on her new island, the reputation for being both odd and wise – a reputation which she could never quite understand why her husband so disapproved of.