The Young in One Another's Arms Read online

  “I don’t want us to be poor,” Gladys protested. “I want us to be good.”

  There was no cynicism in the shouts of laughter, but some people—and Gladys was certainly among them—were better off not worrying at goodness the way she did, wanting it not for herself so much as for everyone else on her terms, grand and impossible. Ruth knew what Gladys really needed was more to do. Since Ruthie was everyone’s child, motherhood was not a full-time job. The café didn’t need Gladys in the slow winter months, and work on the place would be finished with the last fall cleanup. Mavis found occupation for herself; it was her nature to. Gladdy would racket around with suggestions for other people until someone provided her with uses for her energy.

  “There’s so much just to see,” Clara said when Ruth raised the question with her.

  “I know, but she’s not like you. She’s like me.”

  But Clara was absolutely absorbed in the fall migration. “It’s a question of robins again. They have such weak instincts. You’d think that would be incentive to develop intelligence, but it only makes them indecisive.”

  Clara did, in her heart, prefer birds. Ruth went to Mavis.

  “Is that the trouble?” Mavis asked.

  “Everybody’s happier with enough to do.”

  “You know, there are several women on this island with really little kids and nobody at all to help them. Why don’t we start a nursery school?”

  “It wouldn’t pay at all, would it?” Gladys asked when it was suggested to her.

  “You said you wanted to be good,” Mavis reminded her.

  “Maybe when Ruthie’s older and needs somebody to play with …”

  “The kids need you now. One of those women is so zonked out on drugs most of the time she doesn’t know whether the kids have eaten or not. Another’s living on about fifty dollars a month, trying to raise enough to feed her kids.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Gladys demanded.

  Three days a week Gladys rode the school bus with Mavis to collect and protect her five small charges against the aggressions of the older children, who, under Mavis’ direction, now did more singing than fighting, in the seats up front anyway, but they couldn’t be trusted beyond that. When the little ones got over their fear of the noise, they began to enjoy the songs. With Gladys in the back, willing participation increased, and before a couple of weeks had passed, the children had graduated to singing rounds, which were more competitive and easier than harmony.

  Once she and Mavis brought the little ones home, they were busy bathing, washing and mending clothes, feeding. There were sore throats, earaches, infected cuts.

  “It’s more like a clinic than a play school,” Gladys complained.

  But gradually there was more time to take the children for walks down to the beach or up into the woods. On rainy afternoons Mavis told them stories, and Gladys set up projects, finding good supplies from the trash at Jonah’s, cans and boxes, tinfoil. Tom hammered together a low table so that they could all sit around it on the floor, eating the leftovers from the café in Tom’s invented soups.

  As the weather worsened, Tom and Boy often came home by seven in the evening because there were no customers after the six-ten ferry, and, though the women were glad to have them, the men fretted over how little the café was bringing in.

  “Tell you what we ought to try,” Boy said one night, “hot dinners at home, just down here at the south end, maybe three times a week. Lot of these old folks just won’t come out after dark.”

  That project, on the surface of it, was an instant success. They had twenty-five subscribers at once. The difficulty was that only some could really afford to pay even the carefully low cost, and Boy began to discover some of the problems confronting eighty- and ninety-year-olds.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” he’d say. “But there she is just back from the hospital and chopping her own wood. I said to her, ‘You crazy, lady?’ and she said to me, ‘No, cold.’”

  The days Gladys and Mavis didn’t run their nursery school, they began to make day calls on Jonah’s shut-in customers, warned in advance that this one was stone-deaf, that one proud as sin, this one suspicious, that one poison neat. “That old man just stink!” Boy would say, and Gladys would discover he was also an old goat.

  “Oh, Gladdy, everybody’s an old goat where you’re concerned. I’ll go,” Mavis said, but, when she came back, she confirmed, “He’s an old goat.”

  “Got to admire him,” Boy said. “No teeth. Can’t hardly see.”

  “You admire him,” Gladys said. “I’m glad it’s mostly an island of widows.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Mavis said, “is why so many of these people choose to live alone and why their families let them. I do admire them, but it’s so hard a life, and, you know, a lot of them don’t have to. There’s Pioneer Village over on SaltSpring for pensioners, and some of them have the money to live in town.”

  “‘Oil heat?’ she said to me. ‘Terrible for the complexion!’” Boy laughed. “That old lady is near as pretty as Miss Clara and vain about it, let me tell you.”

  “Three generations on this island,” Gladys said. “The stories! Someone ought to be writing them down. You know, I’m getting to know everybody in the graveyard, too.”

  “We just got a letter from her son in Winnipeg,” Tom said, “with a check for five hundred dollars. He says to help subsidize what must be the lousiest business venture in western Canada.”

  “Hey!”

  “I wish I didn’t have to agree with him,” Tom said ruefully.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter about the time. We’ve got plenty of that, so we don’t have to price it, but it sure is hard to pass on costs, and now we don’t have to quite so much.”

  They were, in fact, making just enough to pay their bills, which was more than Ruth had expected. If business held through the winter, they could use last summer’s profits to begin to buy a boat or a generator.

  “We’ve got nothing but good worries, Tom,” Ruth said to him, resting a hand on his shoulder.

  He smiled at her with an expression both older and more vulnerable than she had seen before.

  Preparations for Christmas this year began well in advance, this time without sorrowing irony, without need to give the lie to the dying year. The groaning of the foghorns there in the blanked-out sea, the first brush of snow reminded them.

  “We can cut our own tree this year,” Tom said.

  The filmstrip for Ruth was a snowy street, she and Tom returning snowball fire against hilarious children, then running together, laughing. “All right, it’s obscene, barbaric, commercial, and all things unholy, but it happens to be the only thing we’ve got.”

  “Are we going to church this year, Boy?” Mavis asked.

  “We’ll all have to go, won’t we?” Gladys asked.

  Ruth heard Willard’s voice saying, “We aren’t all still here now,” but Clara sat contentedly in the window, and the baby played with her feet on a lamb skin by the fire.

  “Makes a big difference, living inside a Christmas card,” Boy said.

  Mavis and Gladys were collecting arbutus berries with the children, finding green, yellow, and orange as well as deep-red ones, for making necklaces. Tom fashioned Santa Claus, snowman, and Christmas-wreath cookie cutters out of used cans and brought home extra pounds of dough from the café. He candied orange and grapefruit peel in slices and chips for the children to use for decorations on the cookies. On his dinner rounds Boy delivered holly wreaths which Clara had made and also took orders for Christmas shopping in town. The day of the Christmas sale at the community hall, Jonah’s was closed so that Boy could take as many as were able to go in the bus, so that Tom could supervise the serving of refreshments. Clara did not go to that, but she went to the children’s carol service, chiefly prepared by Mavis on the school bus, and also down to the dock to meet the Christmas ship from Seattle which toured the islands with gifts for all the children.

&n
bsp; “I thought the bus driver would get a holiday,” Mavis said, nearly as busy delivering children to celebrations as she had been getting them back and forth to school.

  Boy took his last trip to the mainland three days before Christmas, a huge list on his clipboard, his cap riding comically high.

  “One of us should go with you,” Ruth said.

  “I’m not taking nobody over there,” said Boy firmly. “You want to see Father Christmas in his riot helmet, the latest roadblock, and the Salvation Army, just turn on your TV. I’ll be home for cocoa.”

  But he was not on the night boat.

  “I knew he had too much to do,” Ruth said.

  “Or maybe he wanted to treat himself to the steam baths. It’s Christmas, after all,” Gladys said.

  “He would have telephoned,” Mavis said. “I don’t like it.”

  “The traffic, the roadblocks, he probably just missed the boat,” Clara said. “He’ll phone in a while.”

  “The roadblocks,” Mavis said. “Why don’t we ever think about the fact that Boy doesn’t have a legal license?”

  “I’ll call Tom,” Gladys said.

  Tom was too busy at the café to worry. Boy would phone in a while. He’d be all right. The others did not have Tom’s distractions. Their own last preparations couldn’t begin until Boy got back with the supplies.

  Boy. Boy Wonder. Little, illegal, loving Boy, so indifferent to his own vulnerability that he could make you forget it yourself. Once the Christmas roadblocks had gone up, they should never have let him off the island. Ruth was now bitterly suspicious of one of the few police services she had been grateful for, keeping drunks off the holiday roads.

  At nine forty-five the phone rang, and Ruth reached for it.

  “Ruth? It’s Stew.”

  “Well, Stew!” she said and felt the others relax again into waiting, unfocused worry.

  “We’ve been meaning to call, meaning to come over to see all of you, but with school and all …”

  “It’s a busy time for everyone.”

  “Yes, but, Ruth, I’ve just had a call from Boy. It’s about your bus.”

  “Is he all right? What’s happened?”

  “He dodged a roadblock, said he didn’t have a license and couldn’t have got through, but he’s sure the police saw him and probably got the license number of the bus. He’s left it out on the grant lands and wants me or one of you to pick it up.”

  “Why didn’t he call us?” Ruth asked.

  “He said, once the police started checking … he said it was only a matter of time for him anyway. He didn’t want to cause trouble over there for you. He wanted me to give you all his love and wish you a merry Christmas and be sure the bus and all the supplies got to you safely.”

  “But what’s he going to do?”

  “Disappear.”

  “Disappear?”

  “Ruth, I really would like to help out. I mean that, but it’s sort of awkward for me. If the police are wanting to check the bus and I don’t own it, and they maybe already have a line on Boy … with law school and all …”

  “That’s all right, Stew. Somebody will go if you know just where it is.”

  “I wouldn’t wait past tomorrow,” Stew said.

  “No, somebody will go over in the morning.”

  “Joanie and I sure want to get over there one of these days. We really do, and anyway we wish you a very merry Christmas.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “Merry Christmas.”

  “That bastard! That fucking bastard!” Gladys shouted when she heard what Stew had said. “He deserves to be a lawyer!”

  “Where will he go?” Clara asked. “Where will Boy go?”

  “Well, anyway, now he has a choice,” Mavis said quietly. “He’s always known how to hide in a city. Now he knows a little bit about the bush.”

  “They won’t catch him,” Gladys said confidently. “Not Boy.”

  Tom, late in getting home because he’d been doing Boy’s deliveries, whitened at the news, swore, said he would go in in the morning and find not only the bus but Boy and bring him home. “We can hide him in our own woods if he has to be hidden.”

  “You’re not going in,” Mavis said firmly. “If the bus gets stopped, they could just as easily hijack you across the border.”

  “I’m a landed immigrant. I’m here perfectly legally,” Tom answered haughtily.

  “So fucking what?” Gladys demanded. “Don’t you remember about being on TV about just that little issue?”

  “Mavis will go,” Ruth decided, “on the morning boat.”

  “Why didn’t Stew talk sense to him?” Tom demanded. “Why didn’t he help him?”

  “He wished us all a merry Christmas,” Mavis said dryly. “How much goodwill do you expect?”

  “We can’t get along without him,” Tom said.

  “I’ll look for him, Tom,” Mavis said.

  “You won’t find him,” Gladys said. “Not if he doesn’t want to be found. Nobody will.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mavis had no trouble retrieving the bus, supplies stowed carefully down to the last item, nor was there a roadblock to delay or detain her on her way out of town. She was home on the afternoon ferry.

  “No, he hadn’t checked into the steam baths, and, after that, I realized I didn’t know where else to look.”

  “He’ll come back,” Gladys said, “when he’s sure it’s all right, in a month or two, or get in touch with us. He’s not like Arthur or even Tom. He’s been running all his life. He knows how.”

  Not like the rest of us, who didn’t know we had to or didn’t know we could, drifted instead, snagged, were jarred loose, drifted, snagged again, not knowing the road blasting and the razing of buildings meant to kill, never mind the evidence of dead fish and uprooted trees along the shore. Snapped daffodils, fallen birds’ nests, accidents of progress, like old Weedman, like Willard. We did not know until we were grown, not even Hal, that we had to, if we could, run or fight, the choice on this occupied earth.

  “I’d knitted him a new cap,” Clara said.

  “I’d got him a nearly complete collection of James Baldwin,” Mavis said.

  “If you start hating what hurts and breaks us, you’ll end up hating the waters of the earth. You’ll end up hating the sky.” I just wanted to get us away to a safe place, an island. If we’d kept you on it, if we’d listened to your fear of the water … if, if, if! Make a safe place and a child can die in the womb. There is no place our violent mistakes can’t reach. We plant time bombs in our own flesh.

  “Stop the noise in your head, Ruth,” Clara said.

  “Is it in my head?”

  Mavis looked up, then moved to look out the window.

  “It’s the police helicopter,” she said.

  A moment later Tom arrived, passenger in a police car.

  “If you offer those bastards a cup of coffee this time …” Gladys threatened in ludicrous anger.

  Ruth could not have offered them anything. Fear flowed hot in her bowels and stank in her throat.

  Mavis went out of the house and came back in with Tom and two policemen.

  “They have a search warrant,” she said quietly.

  “Well, they know what they can do with it!” Gladys shouted.

  “Don’t!” Tom ordered sharply, but it was Mavis who went to restrain her because Tom had seen Ruth. “It’s all right, Ruth. There’s nothing for them to find, and I think they know that.”

  The two policemen went immediately up the stairs. Clara, meanwhile, watched the police helicopter land on the lawn by the orchard.

  “What is their business,” she asked Tom, “aside from frightening the birds?”

  “They’re going to search the grounds. It’s not just that he’s an illegal immigrant; he’s wanted for fraud.”

  “Book cooking,” Mavis said quietly.

  Gladys wrenched away from her. “Why don’t you join the bloody pig force, both of you? You’re so cooperative an
d you’ve got perfect qualifications: rape,” and she smiled brilliantly at Tom, “and assault with intent to kill.” The same smile shone on Mavis. “Why don’t you?”

  “Stop it!” Ruth ordered. “Now stop it!”

  Ruthie’s waking cry from the nursery had even more authority. Gladys went to get her, and Ruth moved mechanically out into the kitchen to heat her bottle. They teach us to hate each other.

  “Mrs. Wheeler?”

  One of the policemen stood in the kitchen door.

  “Yes.”

  “This house is rented in your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know Boyd Wonder was an illegal immigrant?”

  Ruth carefully lifted Ruthie’s bottle out of the boiling water.

  “Did you know there’s been a warrant out for his arrest for over a year?”

  Did you know his five brothers and sisters were buried on the day they were born? Did you know God has an ear from one of them?

  “Mrs. Wheeler, I’ve asked you two questions.”

  “The first of my tenants you inquired about was illegally deported. The last of my tenants was shot to death. I am afraid of you, and I want you out of my house.” Her eyes blazed at him, fire in stone.

  Tom stood tall behind the policeman in the doorway. “You’ve searched the house. I’ve answered all those questions. None of us knew.”

  The policeman turned to Tom. “Is she … a little …?”

  Over the policeman’s head, Tom met Ruth’s eyes, and she read in them what startled and gave sharp comfort: he was not afraid; he was laughing. Behind him Ruthie raged.

  “We need to feed the baby,” Tom said, “and I have to get back to work.”

  The policemen followed him docilely out of the door and went to speak with those who had arrived by helicopter. Ruth handed the bottle to Gladys and then hurried out of the room to have not only her house but her bowels emptied of her terror, but, even as it burned out of her, she saw the laughter in Tom’s eyes. Nigger in the woodpile/ Nigger up a tree/ Nigger in the closet/ You can’t catch me! The helicopter racketed into action, vibrating at the window, then rose up off the lawn and hovered a moment before it drifted out over the sea.