Red Clocks(77)

Lead gone. Food and gear dragged onto a floe, tents pitched by the sledges. Cook fills mugs with pea soup and boiled bacon.

We woke to the floes rafting up around the ship. Massive blue-white shelves, thrust vertical by wind and tide, jumped roaring out of the water and smashed at the keel. To my hoard of knowledge I may now add the sound ice makes when it destroys a ship. Booming gun cracks, then a smaller yelping; and from the vibration the ship’s bells began ghoulishly to ring. Within hours, says the captain, Khione will be sunk.





THE MENDER


After her motionless weeks in jail, the walk to town feels awful. Her knees are buckling by the time she reaches the Acme.

She keeps her head down against the lights, the stares. One box of licorice nibs. One bottle of sesame oil. Is she inventing the stares? Maybe her mind is buckling too. She hasn’t been sleeping well; the memory of bleach keeps waking her.

When they released her, the lawyer was there to take her home. “Hold on to my arm, okay?” he said. “Don’t let go.” They came out of County Corrections into a chattering snarl of cameras and microphones, and all the microphones were being pushed into her face. Some of them hit her face.

“How’s it feel to be free, Ms. Percival?”

“Are you angry at your accusers?”

The lawyer put his mouth on her ear: “Don’t say a word.”

“Do you plan to sue Dolores Fivey?”

Clicks and flashes.

“What’s the next step for you?”

“Any opinion on the local seaweed infestation and the economic losses it’s caused?”

“Have you ever provided an abortion?”

Click flash click flash click flash.

“At your accusers?”

“To be free?”

Click. Flash.

“Hello? Gin?” A bright voice behind her.

The mender stops in the aisle. Canned tomatoes make loud red suns across her vision.

“It’s me—Mattie.”

She turns and blinks at the girl, who is steering a shopping cart; and her mother, who has long gray hair, big teeth when she smiles. The mender has watched them together on Lupatia Street.

“Mom, this is Gin. Gin, this is my mom.”

“Pleased to meet you,” says the astonished mother. She holds out her hand and the mender shakes it; the skin is dry. “How do you two …?”

“We met at the library,” says Mattie Matilda.

“Oh.” The mother’s eyes relax a little. Kind brown eyes. She has kept the girl safe and well.

“Hello,” says the mender stiffly.

She glances at the girl’s midsection: flat in a close-fitting sweater. Her hair: less lustrous. Her skin: no darkening patches. How and where did she take care of it? She managed not to get caught. She went a different path. She won’t be wondering and forgetting, forgetting and wondering again. Or she will wonder—but not the same way the mender did.

“I’m so glad about your verdict,” says Mattie Matilda.

The green of her irises is not the same green as the mender’s.

Mine and not mine.

“What a terrible thing to go through,” says the mother.

The mender nods.

“They fired Principal Fivey,” says Mattie Matilda.

The mender nods.

“We should be on our way,” says the mother, “but it was nice to meet you, Ms. Percival.” Her cart starts rolling.

“Bye!” The girl waves.

The mender waves back.

Soon it will be February fifteenth: the Roman festival of Lupercalia. And the girl’s birthday.

She and Cotter started the girl. The mender, with her body, continued the girl. For a time her clock was full of water and blood and a kicking fish. Which is both important and not important.

He may figure it out himself, once he sees her enough times in town. But he may not. Should she tell him? All that Cotter does for her. The bread on her step each week; the nutmeg pie at Christmas. Hauling Temple’s plastic-wrapped body in his truck bed to the harbor, hoisting the body onto a borrowed boat, maneuvering the boat in darkness out of the slip and past the breakwater and into open ocean. Without hesitation he did these things.

The girl is continuing herself. Has no need of Cotter, or of the mender.

But if she ever returns to the cabin of her own accord, she will be welcomed in. Given tea that tastes good. Introduced to Hans and Pinka and the halt hen. (She is already acquainted with Malky.) The mender pays for the nibs and sesame oil.

Walks back to the forest.

When the track narrows to a footpath, canopied by chain fern and rhododendron and Oregon manroot, she looks for the silver fir with the hourglass resin blister.

Hello, Temple.

Alive in the women who’ve swallowed mixtures made with her skin, her hairs, her eyelashes.

Buried in the sea.

The mender rubs leopard’s?bane salve into her burning calves. Lies in the dark with the cat on her chest. No more human voices the rest of the day. She wants only Malky’s growl and the mehhh of Hans and Pinka. The bleat of the owl, chirp of the bat, squeak of the ghost of the varying hare. This is how Percivals do.





She packed her rucksack with the anemometer and aneroid barometer, a flask of tea, two biscuits. Informed a tentful of card-playing crew she would be back in a few hours.