Folk Page 11

  Vina looks up from her clay when Galushen throws his hat down on to the window seat and slumps beside it. ‘No kills?’ she says, eyeing the slingshot. ‘Nobody has ever died from spending a few days out in the woods, you know. Your daughter is tough.’ She digs her thumbs hard into a hump of clay and splits it.

  Has nobody ever died, sent by Quayle to find their spirit? It’s a fine day, but the weather could change any hour of day or night. He remembers the Great Storm, Pike Lightfoot washed to his death in the shore cave, and that daughter of his, the same age May is now, out in the wind and rain. He shudders, and gazing out through the window, he asks the sky to stay bright. Then he pulls his knife from his pocket and digs a notch in the edge of the window seat to mark the passing of one night. Eight more, and she will be home.

  Vina wipes the grey slick from her fingers and comes to lean at his shoulder. ‘You’ve brought the forest back with you. I can smell beasts.’ She lets her hair rain down on his face as she sniffs at his neck. ‘We’re alone.’

  Galushen hears the silence in the house, louder in his ears than the dance of May’s fiddle every morning.

  ‘Isn’t it pleasant?’ Vina says. ‘Nobody here but us.’ She bends to kiss him but he turns away, and looks out through the glass.

  ‘She could be anywhere out there,’ he says. He gets up, leaving her in the window seat, and hears her knock his slingshot to the floor as he retreats from the room.

  On the second day, the morning is sweet with sunshine. Galushen finds Vina sitting on a chair by the oak stump. Freckled by sunlight through the shade, his wife looks like a silver nymph.

  ‘That’s May’s chair,’ he says. It is the one he had carved to match their own at the table, when his daughter was grown enough to sit with them.

  ‘But she’s not here. And this is my house. Ours,’ she adds. ‘Bring your own. Join me.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried for her?’

  Vina stretches out her arms, and beckons him, the rings on her fingers gleaming. ‘She’ll be loping around at Quayle’s workshop, or sneaking to see her friends. Why don’t you just enjoy this? I’m all yours. You’re all mine.’

  He does not believe this. He does not want to believe anything Vina has said to him the last few days.

  ‘You’re lying,’ he says. ‘And I want to tell my daughter the truth, tell her about Oline.’

  ‘Why do you still harp on?’ Vina’s smile has become a snarl. ‘Your life is full, and rich, and sweet, and you want to sour it. You’re even more of a fool than I thought.’

  Galushen turns his back on her and looks, again, to be sure that May has left no sign for him on the stump, before retreating to the house.

  Later, when Vina goes to the village, he picks up one of her sealed pots from the mantelpiece and blows the dust from it. When he shakes it, he hears something slide inside. He squeezes, but the round form resists, so he cracks it against the wall and splits it open. A bead falls into his palm, red glass. It nudges a memory but he cannot grasp it before it sinks again into the dark.

  How will May really know when her hunt is over, he wonders. If she must feel something wholly new, he wants it to be a joyful feeling. Not like the exquisite ache he heard in Quayle’s playing, so like the ache that began in him when Oline died. He finds himself standing in front of the mottled mirror, rolling the red glass bead between his fingers. The ache has muted a little, perhaps, in the passing years, but never gone. Is it because we never said our farewells? he asks Oline’s picture behind the glass. Even when Vina wept and told the story, how her sister had slipped, how she herself had been rooted there on the bank, frozen, while Oline was swept downstream; even when she said that by the time she shook sense back into her limbs, stripped off her skirt and tried to step into the cold water, it was too late; the knowledge of how it ended did not help him. And nobody had ever found Oline, who would have floated white as a swan in that brutish water.

  On the third day, Quayle comes to the house. When Galushen opens the door, fear tolls in his heart.

  ‘No news,’ Quayle laughs. ‘I was wandering nearby, and thought I might come and play the minstrel.’

  Galushen wants to shut the door in his face, but Vina comes flitting, bright and alert as a bird, blushing as Quayle kisses her hand. She laughs when he jokes that May must be jealous, to have such a beautiful mother.

  When Quayle gets out his fiddle, Galushen leaves and goes back to the oak stump. He does not know what his daughter would choose to leave as a sign for him. A feather, perhaps, which has blown away.

  Music bleeds from the house. He tries not to listen, but the sound is bewitching, a song that seems to come from under the sea. It is the same song Quayle played at the workshop. He creeps back towards the house, drawn by the strange sorrow, the longing that matches his own, but refuses to let it take full shape in his heart. Quayle draws the song to an end when he enters the room.

  Vina is still as a stone on the window seat. ‘Will you play another, a different tune?’ she asks.

  ‘Whatever I play, the song, the essence of it, will be the same,’ Quayle says.

  ‘Why is that?’ asks Galushen.

  ‘The fiddle took something from the sea cave, when I made it from the pieces I found there. It tells that tale.’

  ‘And do you know what it means?’

  Quayle gives him a quizzical look. ‘You’ve only to listen,’ he says. And while he plays again, Galushen sees the girl weeping in the cave, the father lost to the waves. He understands the loss that is not his own.

  ‘What a tall tale,’ Vina smirks, when Quayle has gone. ‘I suppose he thinks it’s romantic.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear it?’ Galushen says.

  ‘It’s just music. Just clever music,’ says Vina, and she hums the song, again and again through the afternoon, turning it into an empty tune that grates at Galushen’s ears.

  That evening, May’s chair is not back at the table. He eats hastily, thinking about the dried meat he put in May’s bag, whether it was enough. He refuses to stroll with Vina at dusk. When she has slammed the door and stalked away, he goes to cut the third notch into the window seat, then marks where he will put the next.

  On the fourth day, the red glass bead is gone from his pocket. Galushen skulks through the house, shaking each of Vina’s pots, gathering those that rattle. He cracks them one by one, emptying out more red beads, an ochre one, and two a kind of silvery blue. He arranges them along the line in his palm. The memory does not fall back into the dark this time. He sees Oline’s black hair tangled with her necklace of these beads, one day when they lay together on the headland, breathing the rich scent of the flowering gorse.

  What does she mean by this? he asks the mirror. If she has kept a necklace of yours, why does she hide it, when I would love to share in this remembrance? His face is twisting in the glass. He is ashamed to see himself weep. Was Vina as jealous of these beads as she was jealous of her sister, of his love for Oline? He has given Vina a mine’s worth of precious stones, far more beautiful, more valuable, than a few glass beads. It is a strange kind of remembrance, to seal them away, but perhaps that’s all it is. Perhaps by doing this, Vina has done what he has not, and found a place to lay her grief, and let go. If he cannot yet undo the secret and speak to May, he can at least do this. He will let Oline go too, and live with memory, not grief. His heart might then love wholly again.

  His feet pounding with purpose, Galushen marches down the hill, into the wood. He cuts a straight path through, and squints at the sun as he steps out from between the trees on the other side and starts along the riverbank. The water glints in the clear, strong light. It is still running fast, even though the weeks of rain are over. He squeezes the handful of beads in his pocket. Somewhere here, Oline slipped. Somewhere, she struggled and was swept down. He follows the river further, towards the bend where a willow tree stands. The kind of place two sisters might linger. The roots of the tree are like twisting steps down the bank. He flinches to think
of Oline’s feet on slippery bark, and goes on, following the current down, past the bend.

  There on the rippling, ridging surface of the water he sees a dark mass, long black hair flowing. As he stares, it vanishes, and he looks up, to be sure it was not a bird shadow. After a few moments he sees it again, further downstream. He stumbles along the bank, his eyes on the rag of black, and is certain he sees a head rise from the water, as if to breathe, before diving down again. ‘Oline,’ he calls, as it vanishes, but the rough thrum of his own voice makes him stop in shame. He must look like a man losing his mind. As he watches, the head rises again, and turns. He sees the pale face beneath the black hair. So like Oline, his daughter. She is swimming back, strong against the current.

  Galushen dodges behind a tree, not daring to look lest she see him. He remembers Vina standing waist high in the gentle pool not far from here, teaching the young May to swim, holding her in the water, coaxing, fierce when May whined at the cold. No wonder she wanted her daughter to know how to float, how to hold herself up against a flow. He peers around the tree and sees the pile of May’s belongings on the far bank, the russet cape, the fox-fur hat. When she has swum past he lets himself watch her for a little while. He should stay and make sure she is safe, in this flooded, swollen river. When she is far enough away upstream, he goes to watch the black smudge of her head, bobbing, dipping. He takes the glass beads from his pocket and holds them, ready to drop into the water, then puts them back.

  When he reaches home, Vina is pacing by the oak stump. The shards of the pots he smashed are gathered in a pile amongst the roots. She has not seen him, and he waits for her to turn. When she does, she gives a little yelp.

  He kneels in the grass among the clover flowers and pot fragments, and reaches out his hands. ‘Forgive me,’ he says, ‘for breaking them.’ He hangs his head and waits for her to come to him. When she does not, he looks up and sees that she has covered her face. Her shoulders are shaking. ‘But I’m glad, Vina, to know that you have not really forgotten. That you miss her as I do.’

  She peers at him between her fingers. Her breathing slows. He goes to embrace her, his beautiful wife, and she falls against his chest, silent.

  That night, while his wife is sleeping, he takes a candle to the mottled mirror. His face in the glass is tired, but peaceful. Vina had been so happy, and so hungry, when he let her lead him to their bed, that he had not fully undressed before she was sliding against him, pulling his heat against her coolness, whispering his name until it sounded like rushing water. Still, he woke afterwards from a dream of Oline. He wants to love his wife.

  He sets down the light and lifts the mirror from the wall. The nails in the frame come loose with no more than a tug, and he prises up the backing. The picture of Oline falls in fragments to the floor. He tries to piece them together but the image has mouldered. There is no longer any face or imprint of black hair. When he hangs the mirror back on the wall and holds the candle up, there is a shadow now, where patches of silvering have come away from the glass. Perhaps he will get rid of it, and put a picture of his wife and daughter in its place.

  On the ninth day, Galushen wakes entwined with Vina. He creeps from the bedroom and makes his way down to the village in warm sunshine. By the path and field edges, may blossom is turning the hedgerows to white froth. In the village, the door of the workshop is open and there, at the workbench, is May. She is sliding a plane, and he listens to the soft rasps, sighs from the wood.

  ‘At work already?’

  May turns. Her face is shadowy, her lips pale, but she smiles. ‘I’ve been here five days. I found what I needed, and I wanted to begin on the fiddle right away. Quayle gave me a bed in the loft, and I’ve worked, all night sometimes.’

  He goes to join her at the workbench but she holds up a palm.

  ‘Let me finish it before you see. Quayle says I’ll be done in less than a week if I keep on like this.’ Even though she is tired, there is a dark light in her eyes.

  ‘But you’re well?’

  She nods, and turns to the bench, sweeping a blizzard of wood shavings to the floor. ‘I’ll come home as soon as it’s ready,’ she calls, picking up the plane.

  Galushen thinks of little except how best to welcome his daughter home. He is careful not to let Vina see how much it fills his head. She has been so contented, so loving, the last few days like a honeymoon delayed. He chooses the best of their meat and wine for a feast. He roams the hillsides, as far as Murnon’s sheep fields, where the hedgerows are high. When he is sure nobody sees him, he cuts branches of may blossom to fill his hunting sack.

  When the day comes, he stands at the window with a view of the path up from the village, and waits. Clouds roll across the sky and by the time the rusty red and black figure appears it is raining, grey sheets that billow over the slope. May climbs the hill slowly. He roots himself to keep from running down to meet her and to take the box she is carrying, held tenderly against her chest.

  Finally, his daughter is home, standing in a room filled with white sprays. Her cape drips on to the floor, which is already dotted with fallen blossom. He embraces her, the box still in her arms, and feels her tremble. She is wan, her face dark and her lank hair tangled, and Vina stares when she comes to greet her daughter.

  ‘Drink some wine,’ Galushen offers her a cup from the table, but she shakes her head.

  ‘Let me play first,’ she says, looking at Vina all the while.

  ‘If you want, but then you must eat.’ His daughter’s solemn eyes pain him.

  May goes to the far end of the long room while Galushen sits, Vina beside him, at the table. She lays down the russet cape and sodden fur cap and, with her back turned, opens the case. She lifts the fiddle to her chin and raises her bow. Galushen grasps his wife’s hand. Still facing away, May begins, drawing the bow slow and hard across the strings.

  Galushen closes his eyes as sound fills the room. It is rich as raven black, as glowing black hair, but with a ghostly light, high notes like glimpses of white. He feels cold. As the music grows it begins to writhe, and as May’s fingers bend and press at the strings, he sees pale hands reaching. The raven black is not feathers, or hair. It is the weight of water, the shock of icy cold in his chest. The notes turn, fast and frantic. Struggle pulses through him. He cannot open his eyes but only feels himself flailing against the hands that catch about his head and push him down. The music is so loud he cannot breathe. The hands grip and push, and he cannot raise his head against their force. He sways in the cruel melody. He is weak in its current, even as it grows muffled and begins to fade. Then he breathes in the last soaring note until it wavers to a hiss, and there is silence.

  After some moments, he senses Vina, rigid in her chair. Her fingernails have dug into his palm and he looks at the four red crescents there, in the crease.

  ‘Bring it here,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ Vina shouts, and she is running from the table, to the far end of the room, where she tries to snatch the fiddle from her daughter’s grasp. May holds it high, out of reach, and twists away from her mother.

  She comes and lays the fiddle on the table before Galushen. The neck is white, a long, polished bone. The pegs that wind the strings are the same: thin, white spindles. He turns the fiddle over in his hands. Embedded in the smooth back of the body is a red glass bead. He places his finger on it, cool in the warm wood.

  ‘Did you give her this bead?’ he calls to Vina. She does not answer, only stands and stares with wild eyes. ‘Then where did it come from?’

  ‘The river,’ says May, ‘where I found my spirit. I swam there, and it was the sound of the water in my ears, how it swept around me and into me like music. I swam until I was very cold, right down where it gets near the sea. I dived under, to listen to the water, and I found these things to make the fiddle.’

  ‘The bead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this?’ Galushen points to the neck, the white pegs.

  ‘All bone. Buried
in the bank.’

  Vina’s hands are gripped in her silver hair. He sees the same hands that pushed through the black of May’s music, the hands that drowned a sister, who pleaded, but could not fight.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ May asks.

  Galushen looks at his daughter, the image of Oline, and then at his wife. Their faces are like two beautiful carvings, one sad, one stricken, as they gaze back at him.

  There are no mirrors in Galushen’s house. When he sits at his table, his daughter on his left side, he tries to enjoy the meat he eats, but tastes only earth. His wine is like brown river water in his mouth. Each meal is a penance.

  He asks May to play for him sometimes. She will be fiddle-master after Quayle, the best player that Neverness has. They like to walk together, along the river, and watch the water swirling against the muddy banks. They sit by the willow tree, and Galushen tells his daughter about his first love. May imagines what love will be like, the warmth that will soften the chill in her heart. She lets her father talk as long as he wants. He has endured so many years of silence. When he has finished, she takes her fiddle and stands beneath the willow’s waving fronds. While she plays, her fingers pressing into the long neck of bone, Galushen closes his eyes and listens to his lost love, calling from the water, calling through the dark.

  Verlyn Webbe has a wing in place of an arm. It is too large, the grey speckled feathers reaching down to his ankle. The weight of it has pulled his shoulders out of kilter. He wears a coat to hide the crookedness in his body that is otherwise strong, the wing filling out one sleeve like a burst bolster with feathers poking from the cuff.

  Every morning, when he goes to the lean-to behind his house to work, Verlyn counts his blessings. The first is his wife, Werrity. ‘I am lucky to have her,’ he reminds himself, as he sweeps the floor, turning the broom in his one, strong hand. He does not use his wing to sweep, though Werrity once said it might be made useful for something, at least, if he did. ‘I was lucky to find her, and to keep her.’ Werrity, the only woman on the island who would marry a man with a wing in place of an arm. She chose him in spite of it. She had her reasons. He does not mind that she makes him sleep with the wing on the outside of the bed, lest it brush against her in the night.