“Watch your step.”
This was too much, “Watch your fucking step!”—and he swiped with his cane as though swatting a fly, slashing twice and catching something hard, a protrusion he thought was the handrail, until a moment later the man uttered a strangled cry.
Then the man called out, “Daddy’s all right, Brett! Go back, son!”—warning the child who had preceded him up the stairs.
Steadman imagined the panting boy with red eyes and sweaty cheeks blushing with terror at seeing his father thrashed by a crazed blind man wheeling on the stairs. He had a glimpse of Blind Pew tottering on the road and snatching at Jim Hawkins, and he smiled at the confusion, father and son trying to reassure each other.
“Get the fuck out of my way!” Steadman said, and jabbed his stick at the man’s murmuring.
“Are you nuts?” The man was still gasping, probably nursing a wound, a welt somewhere the width of Steadman’s cane.
He slashed again, cutting the air with the sound of a whip and stepping to a lower tread on the stairs.
“Brett, be careful!” the man cried, his shriek turning womanish in panic. “Don’t come down here!”
And as Steadman raised his stick to strike once more, he was bumped again but softly, and sensed that the man was pushing past him, shaking the wooden stairs with his stamping feet, climbing up toward the road, hauling himself with desperate pulls on the handrail.
The angry energy of the confrontation still shivered in his muscles. He was exhilarated by his sudden aggression. And when he collected himself and resumed his descent, picking his way down, he thought, I can use that. It was why he had come, to collect such asides for his story, to verify impressions. He wanted to prove to himself that he could find his own way.
He wondered whether there was anyone else on the beach. He had been down here only a few times. He knew it was a narrow pocket beach, bouldery, with patches of sand, at the foot of a high vertical bluff, north-facing, of crumbled stone and loose gravel. The secluded spot was approachable only by the long wooden stairway that was like an old-fashioned fire escape at the rear of a tall tenement.
The water crashed and collapsed, the continuous slosh of Vineyard Sound, small lumpy waves that nagged at the shore. Steadman listened for voices and almost tripped when he got to the bottom of the stairs and stepped onto a pillow shape of soft sand. Then he let go of the rail and tapped his cane, whacking rock, poking pebbles, making his way along the wall of the bluff.
“Hello?”
Hearing no reply, he turned to the right, where he knew the widest beach was, but even so, after a few steps he strayed into the water and wet his shoes and trouser cuffs. He stopped again to listen for voices and thought he heard the stairs creak, trodden by weight from high up at the cliff face. He concentrated hard: nothing.
Seeing a blind man, a stranger would say, as all the others had done, “Want a hand?” and would encumber him with insincere assistance. He hated being asked, hated being noticed, being visibly crippled, with a perpetual frown of consternation. He smiled remembering his fury: Get the fuck out of my way! _
“Who is it?” he called out, because the wash of the sea at the shore obscured all other sounds,
He was alone. He had to be, or what was the point? He crawled onward like a dog, using his hands on a stretch of sand, and soon found himself bumping his way through waist-high boulders. They were set in a slope, like a revetment against the bluff. Touching them he was able to trace veins and cracks in the granite, and moving slowly he noticed with his slick fingers that many of them had bunches of kelp pinched between them, or swags of sea-rotted rope.
One slab of ramp-like rock was lying aslant the beach. It was so smooth, so warmed by the sun, he crept onto it and braced himself, and then he lay with his back against it. Its hardness and its heat penetrated his spine and soothed him.
In the rise and fall of the breaking chop just offshore he replayed his story of the blind man’s wife, moving through its current — the narrative seemed to him like moving water — reminding himself of its progress. The reclusive, unsuspicious man of some accomplishment was content until the younger woman tempted him. As though drugged and bewitched he fell in love with her, became possessed, then disenchanted, and finally blinded. Only when he was blind did he see the truth. He had been greedy, he had succumbed to temptation, he had wanted too much.
He liked it for having the rough splintery elements of a folktale. Was this a short story or an episode in a larger narrative of temptation and possession? He posed this question in a dark room — as dark as where he lay now — where two temptresses were teasing each other and tormenting him. He drowsed as these swaggering and tumbled waves, topped with mermaid’s hair, shouldered their way toward shore.
Then he was asleep, and the sound of the water washed away his story and imposed on his receptive mind a dream in which he lay canted on a raft like the black castaway in the Winslow Homer painting that showed sharks’ fins in the water. He was that castaway, and the raft was sliding down the deep and rounded face of a swell as he struggled to stay on board, the wind twitching at one side of his face and his palms and fingers pressing the barnacled edges of the raft. He sensed he was sliding to his death.
Spatters of sea spray reached his eyes, and the tearing sound of the sea became louder until, startled, he awoke as a wave washed across his feet and lower legs. He stood and stumbled in water up to his knees. Instinctively he scrambled, but the wrong way, into the sea, then fell and foundered in the cold water and believed he was drowning. He was too alarmed to cry out. He lost his cane in his fall but felt for a handhold on a rock and gripped it, raising himself for air.
Listening for the shore and slapping the water around him, he found some boulders and braced himself more securely. When he got his breath he hauled himself to the larger boulders that he guessed were part of the sea wall at the base of the cliff. He was soaked, he was in darkness, the sea was loud, and he was trembling. But he was alive.
The water had risen while he had napped. He had forgotten the unforgiving tide. This was to have been a brief foray down the steep stairs below the jaw of West Chop, a search for color, a literary outing, something to give him confidence. Now he was in sodden clothes and heavy water-soaked shoes, and he was gripping a rock, slashing his fingers on the sharp crust of button-like barnacles and periwinkles. The important thing was to remain calm, but he knew he had to find the stairs and climb out of this place, for there was more of the tide to come. High tide took away the beach, washed over the rocks; high tide was a flood of deepening water, way over his head.
“Anyone here?” he called out. Then, reluctantly, in a timid, testing way, “Help!”
He hated his small tentative voice. But he knew he had to call out. He tried again, louder, like a hoarse boy trying to be brave. If anyone had been there and heard him, they would have come to his aid. No one replied.
He moved as quickly as he could across the boulders, but after a few steps he lost his footing and became frantic and fell. Toppling, he went stupid, and he thrashed, twisted his arm, grazed his ear, banged his head like someone at the mercy of a bully. The physical pain made him more fearful. Still he scrabbled forward, crabwise on the boulders. They were slippery now with wet thickened seaweed.
Where were the stairs? The markers he had mentally noted — the boulders, the pebbly patches, the cushions of sand — were underwater, sunken by the tide.
All that was left of the shrunken beach were the boulders massed at the foot of the cliff, a vertical eminence that was the island’s wall. And he kept being assaulted. The brimming tide slammed his back with clouts of cold water.