I took deep breaths, battling the stupid coat, and I swung down a path of wet nettles, breathed it all in. Breathed in the salt, the scent of frozen weeds, the briny female odor of ripe periwinkles, the stench from the heads of blue-eyed decapitated fish. And the pine trees. The pine trees were bleeding, freely giving off that rich green fragrance which as a child I had but faintly smelled in the mortuary on Christmas mornings. Just ahead of me, just beyond the growths of crippled pine and still in darkness lay the shore, the erupted coast, and suddenly I the only-born, the happy stranger, the one man awake and walking this pitch-black seminal dawn — suddenly I wanted to fling out my arms and sweep together secret cove and Crooked Finger Rock and family burial mounds of poor fishermen, sweep it all together and give it life, my life. Pitching through brier patches, laughing and stumbling under the dripping pines, I hurried on.
And wet, rubbery, exuberant, I emerged into a clearing and stopped short, opened my eyes wide. I saw only a listing handmade jetty and a fisherman’s hut with boarded-up windows, a staved-in dory and a tin chimney that gave off a thin stream of smoke. But beside the dory — gray ribs, rusted oarlock — there was a boy’s bicycle propped upside down with its front wheel missing and a clot of black seaweed caught in the sprocket. And though there were days and days to pass before I met the boy— his name was Bub — and met also his fishing father and no-good brother — Captain Red and Jomo — still I felt that I knew the place and had seen that bicycle racing in my own dreams. I could only stop and stare at the useless bicycle and at two squat gasoline pumps pimpled with the droppings of departed gulls and wet with the cold mist, those two pumps once bearing the insignia of some mainland oil company but standing now before the hut and sagging jetty as ludicrous signs of the bold and careless enterprise of that outpost beside the sea. I knew intuidvely that I had stumbled upon the crafty makeshift world of another widower. But how could I know that Captain Red’s boat, the Peter Poor, lay invisible and waiting only fifty yards from shore in its dark anchorage? How could I know that we, Cassandra and I, would sail away for our sickening afternoon on that very boat, the Peter Poor, how know about the violence of that sea or about the old man’s naked passion? But if I had known, if I had seen it all in my glimpse of Jomo’s pumps and Bub’s useless bicycle and the old man’s smoke, would I have faltered, turned back, fled in some other direction? No. I think not. Surely I would have been too proud, too innocent, too trusting to turn back in another direction.
So I was careful to make no noise, careful not to disturb this first intact and impoverished and somehow illicit vision of the widower’s overgrown outstation in the collapsing dawn, and staring at bleached slabs of porous wood and rusted nailheads I restrained my impulse to cup hands against the wind and cry out a cheery hello. And I merely waved to no one at all, expecting no wave in return, and gathered my rubber skirts and swept down the path to the beach.
Overhead the dawn was beginning to possess the sky, squadrons of gray geese lumbered through the blackness, and I was walking on pebbles, balancing and rolling forward on the ocean’s cast-up marbles, or wet and cold was struggling across stray balustrades of shale. At my shoulder was the hump of the shore itself — tree roots, hollows of pubic moss, dead violets — underfoot the beach — tricky curvatures of stone, slush of ground shells, waterspouts, sudden clefts and crevices, pools that reflected bright eyes, big smile, foolish hat. Far in the distance I could see the cold white thumb of the condemned lighthouse.
But time, the white monster, had already gripped this edge of the island in two bright claws, had already begun to haul itself out of an ugly sea, and the undeniable day was upon me. I slipped, the coat blew wide, and for some reason I fell back and found myself staring up at a gray sky, gray scudding clouds, a thick palpable reality of air in which only the barometer and a few weak signals of distress could survive. An inhuman daytime sky. And directly overhead I saw the bird, the gray-brown hungry body and crescent wings. He was hovering and I could see the irritable way he fended off the wind and maintained his position and I knew that he would return again and again to this same spot. And against the chopping and spilling of the black water I saw the lighthouse. It was not safely in the distance as I had thought, but was upon me. Black missing tooth for a door, faint sea-discolorations rising the height of the white tower, broken glass in its empty head, a bit of white cloth caught up in the broken glass and waving, the whole condemned weight of it was there within shouting distance despite the wind and sea. I could even make out the tufts of high grass bent and beating against its base, and even through the black doorless entrance way I could feel the rank skin-prickling texture of the darkness packed inside that forbidden white tower, and must have known even then that I could not escape the lighthouse, could do nothing to prevent my having at last to enter that wind-whistling place and having to feel my way to the topmost iron rung of its abandoned stair.
Hovering bird, hollow head of the lighthouse, a sudden strip of white sand between myself and the mud-colored base rock of the lighthouse, little sharp black boulders spaced together closely and evenly in the sand, and then as white as a starfish and inert, naked, caught amongst the boulders, I saw a woman lying midway between myself and the high rock. Vision from the widow’s photography magazine. Woman who might have leapt from the lighthouse or rolled up only moments before on the tide. She was there, out there, triangulated by the hard cold points of the day, and it was she, not I, who was drawing down the eye of the bird and even while the thought came to me— princess, poor princess and her tower — I looked up at the bird, still hovering, and then turned to the strip of beach and ran forward. But I stopped. Stopped, shuddered, shut my eyes. Because of the voice.
“So here you are!”
It was deep, low, husky, strong, the melodic tough voice of the woman who always sounds like a woman, yet talks like a man. It was close to me, deep and tempting and jocular, and I thought I could feel that enormous mouth pressed tight to my ear. It sounded like a big throat, shrewd powerful mind, heart as big as a barrel. And I was right, so terribly right. Except for the heart. Her black heart.
“My God. What are you doing down there?”
Somehow I opened my eyes, looked over my shoulder and raised my eyes from bright pink heart-shaped shell to bunches of weed to jutting hump of the shore to rising tall figure of the woman standing wind-blown on the edge above me. Looked and fought for breath.
Slacks. Canary yellow slacks. Soft thick canary yellow slacks tight at the ankles, cut off with a cleaver at the bare white ankles, and binding the long thighs, binding and so tight on the hips — yellow smooth complicated block of flesh and bone — that she could force only the tips of her long fingers into the slits of of the thin-lipped and slanted pockets. Slacks and square white jaw and great nest of black hair strapped in an emerald kerchief. Great white turtle-neck sweater and trussed white bosom, white breast begging for shields. Shoulders curving and muscular, unbowed. But yellow, yellow from the waist down, the tall easy stance of a woman proud of her stomach — lovely specimen of broad flat stomach bound and yellow and undulating down the front of the slacks — and staring at me with legs apart and elbows bent and eyes like great dark pits of recognition in the bony face. A strand of the black hair came loose and there was a long thick silver streak in it.