The Scent Keeper(3)

I waited, thinking there would be more, but my father just put the mushroom in my basket.

“That’s not enough, Papa,” I said. Even I knew endings were more complicated than that.

“Oh but it is, little lark,” he said, and kissed me on the head. “Now, let’s get going. These baskets won’t fill themselves.”



* * *



Perhaps the best place to forage was our lagoon, an oval of protected water, ringed by rocks and fed by a narrow channel that churned with the tide. You could spend your whole day harvesting there. Along the shore were wild onions and sea asparagus and the grassy stalks of sea plantains; under the beach rocks were tiny black crabs no bigger than my thumbnail. The boulders that lined the shores were packed with barnacles and mussels, and the seaweed came in infinite varieties. My favorite was bladderwrack, with its little balloons that popped in your mouth and left the smell of salt behind.

The best work, however, was hunting for clams.

“There!” my father said, pointing to a spout of water that fireworked up from the beach. I raced toward it, trying to get there quick enough to catch the spray and feel it run through my outstretched fingers. But even though I was small and fast, I arrived to find only the smell of salt and a slight indentation in the sand at my feet. I stuck a small stick next to the spot to mark it.

“There’s another!” I yelled, and ran down the beach in the other direction.

“Good job,” my father said, following the trail of my sticks with a small shovel in his hand. At the end of an hour of running and digging, our basket was full.

Usually, we’d have to save the clams, drying them for the winter, when the dark came and wrapped around us like a heavy blanket. I didn’t like winter; the rain turned into a mood of its own, and the food on our plates faded in color until all that was left were dry things—apples, clams, a crackle of seaweed. My father faded, too, and his stories disappeared almost completely.

“Do we have to dry the clams?” I asked, and that day my father smiled his summer smile and agreed to a picnic. We made a fire and cooked the clams, adding some wild onions and sea asparagus for flavor, and ate out of bowls made of abalone shells, with mussel shells for spoons and berries for dessert. Then we sat on the sand as the sky turned the palest of blues, and my father watched the water snarl its way through the narrow channel.

It always made me nervous, that channel. Four times a day the tide changed, and the water started its rush in or out of our lagoon through the winding, rock-filled passage. It was an angry, dangerous thing, eager to chew up anything that came near its mouth.

My father saw the way I was studiously avoiding looking in its direction and lifted his mussel shell spoon in a toast.

“Here’s to the channel that keeps us safe,” he said.

It did, that much was true. Except for the lagoon, our island was entirely steep sided, its edges a vertical plunge down to the water. Evergreen trees clung to its steep rock walls, their lowest branches sheared off in a perfect horizontal line denoting high tide. The only way to access the island was through the channel. I had seen pictures of castles, towering things, impervious to all below. Our island was a castle, its angry channel our drawbridge.

“It’s scary,” I said.

“But it keeps out pirates and bears,” my father noted.

I had seen pictures of both in my books. I had no desire to confront either.

“Here’s to the channel,” I said, and raised my spoon.



* * *



Every once in a while, we arrived at the lagoon to find the beach wildly scattered in seaweed, all the way to the high-tide mark.

“Mermaid party,” my father declared, and it made sense. The sand was decorated with such abandon that only the most fanciful of creatures could have done it.

“Let’s see if they left us anything,” he’d say. We’d check behind the rocks and search the huckleberry bushes that lined the beach. Sure enough, we’d find treasure. Black plastic boxes with heavy closures that snapped shut tighter than a scent bottle. Inside were the most marvelous presents—rice and flour, chocolate and coffee. Sometimes there were even books or shoes or clothes.

One day, when I was nine or so, we discovered a particularly wonderful treasure trove—two black boxes, one of them containing a new pair of boots and a blue rain slicker, just my size.

“How do the mermaids know what we love?” I asked my father.

“They’re magic,” he said, and it made sense, for only magic would be able to find a way through our channel.

We hoisted the boxes in our arms and carried them triumphantly back to the cabin. Jack might hunt little flowers, but we had scored big and heavy game. We feasted that night, but carefully, putting most of our plunder in the pantry. We knew the ocean was a fickle thing, its mysteries unpredictable. It could take as much as it gave. The lingering scent of the runaway’s pipe tobacco was a never-ending reminder of that.

After dinner, my father and I read books to each other, as we always did. My father loved the science books, and he would teach me about the weather or the stars or the names of the trees around us. We spent hours looking at drawings of peculiar sea creatures, and flowers and animals that seemed to come from another world.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a picture of a brown animal with slender legs and a little beard on its long chin.