The Island
Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 02:14AM This story was recently published in the April edition of Portland Monthly Magazine (http://www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/2011/03/april-2011/), but they didn't post the full story online. So here it is..
The Island
Robert Graves
I was nine when I saw the island.
Dad had promised us one last snowmobile trip before the final melt, which in the upper parts of Maine usually comes in March. We’d always get one or two dustings after that, sometimes as late as May, but nothing that would stick. Nickie was four that winter, only a few months before he got sick. He was wedged between Dad and me, his blonde locks exploding from beneath his hat.
The three of us had been sitting motionless for almost a minute, breathing in gas fumes from the idling engine, staring across a field – a logging field, the kind of place that feels haunted with ghosts of fallen trees and men who must by now be long dead.
It was the grandest thing I had ever seen, a field too big to manage in one eyeful. I looked everywhere and nowhere at once. The remains of the trees littered the field like shrapnel after a war. Black stumps peeked through the melting snow as frozen, hooded faces, the holes left by rotted knots their screaming mouths. There was a string of these stumps, arranging themselves as an archipelago across a white sea, and it led my eyes to the island, a small cluster of trees still standing amidst the surrounding ruins. Dad cut the engine and the sudden silence made everything in the field feel closer. I heard a hawk call from the direction of the island, then saw it rise and soar away from us.
“How many acres you think this is, Cass? Five?” Dad asked.
I said sure. I didn’t know. It would slowly crystallize over the years that what Dad meant was not five acres, but five hundred.
“Dad?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t they cut those trees?” I pointed to the island.
“Beats me, Cass.” He stared at it a long while, maybe just noticing it for the first time. I looked too, trying to imagine why the logging men would cut this whole field, but leave only that small group in the middle. There were maybe a hundred trees, huddled tightly together as though it were the place they had gathered and made their final stand against the loggers and their axes.
“Can we drive over there?”
“You see those stumps Cass’? They’d eat this sled alive. You wanna walk back?”
“No!” Nickie whined, squirming between us. Dad chuckled.
“Don’t you worry Nick, I’m just teasing,” he said. “You and your sister aren’t walking anywhere.” I nudged Nickie and he looked back at me. I could barely see his eyes through the blonde mop of curls. His plump cheeks were the color of brick, his lips wet from constant licking. I made a face at him. I wanted to see the island and he was ruining it.
*
Soon we stood before the island, dismounted next to the lifeless sled, our necks arched upward in strained unity. The trees were taller than they had seemed from farther away. The oddity of the island was even more apparent up close, this ancient group of misfit trees that had somehow survived the fate of the forest around them.
I could see light through the other side of the island, just barely. “Stay close in here, alright?” Dad said. “Follow me.”
He stepped into the island and Nickie followed, with me last. I peered behind me and had one final look into the never-ending field, and when I turned back I found myself in a forest. Everything was very much alive here, the crackling of twigs beneath our feet present and close, a stark contrast to the far echoes of hawks and engines rolling across the plain. Maybe the trees on the inside didn’t even know there had been a war just a few feet away from their border.
Dad made his way through the claw-like branches, always turning to check on Nickie’s progress. After only about ten steps, Dad picked him up. Nickie looked back over his shoulder and stuck his tongue out at me, finally mustering the courage to return my gesture. He quickly turned and buried his face in Dad’s neck.
“How long ago do you think the loggers were here?” I asked Dad as we continued our trek.
“Oh…fifty years ago? Maybe more. Your Grampy Owen was a logger, you know.”
“Did he cut these trees?”
“Well, maybe I guess.” It was getting hard to understand him between his breaths. The thin, frigid air was winding him.
The snow was shallower the deeper we transgressed. The branches above us were draped in a thin layer of ice that was once snow, forming a mob of white, icy fingers twitching in the breeze. Dad let Nickie slide down the front of him while he rested with his hands on his knees. I kept walking ahead and after a quick glance or two in either direction, Nickie decided it was okay to follow me. I reached back and took his hand.
~~~
It starts in June with vomiting. At first we think Nickie has the flu. A week passes. And another. He is getting worse, more lethargic with each day. On the CT scan the tumor is almost two inches across a brain that is barely four inches wide. It takes just six months for the cancer to kill him, and I am once again an only child.
I don’t cry. I’m sad, but I can’t. I don’t understand why. Mom turns into a vapid, empty shell. When she hugs me I am afraid she might crack into pieces. Dad is better than mom, but they buried a part of him with Nickie, I am sure of it. The part that used to laugh more when we watched a funny movie, the part that smiled even after the photo was taken; that part is missing. I watch him sometimes when he doesn’t know, and I look for that part, because I miss it.
*
At first it is easy to remember Nickie the way he was, before the chemotherapy and radiation took away his golden hair and plump cheeks. I remember him spread on my father’s chest while they napped together on the couch. This is how I see Nickie, at first.
Soon I remember him in the hospital, bandaged after surgery. Then I see him thin and pale and bald. And when I try to think of him on the couch with Dad, it’s wrong. His round cheeks aren’t covered with ruddy splotches like they should be. His ringlets aren’t draping over his forehead in cascading blonde spirals. The image is polluted, my own thoughts and nightmares seeping in and distorting its colors and textures. When I see him sleeping in my father’s arms, he is sick and broken.
I decide to protect that memory by only thinking of it quickly and carefully, like looking at a photograph in the rain – a quick glance, and I put it away
*
A year passes and I am eleven. Mom and Dad decide I should go to counseling. I don’t have a choice. I say okay.
Nickie isn’t real to me now. I wonder sometimes if he had really existed. The pictures everywhere tell me that he did, but I don’t believe them. That is another girl’s brother in those pictures. Maybe they are just the pictures of strangers that come with the frame when you buy it.
I tell this to the counselor. He assures me that Nickie was real, and that I am doing something called disassociating. He tells me I need to remember everything I can about Nickie and write it down. This will help me, he says.
So I write, and I write more. Months pass. It must not be helping because the memories begin to feel like stories, and I can’t remember which parts really happened and which parts I am making up. The stories become shallow to me, uneventful. I write about a night at the movies. I write about a day we went snowmobiling. Nothing happens in the stories, we are simply there.
*
“Cass’?” It is my father, calling from the doorway. I have been scribbling in my notebook, drawing in the margins beside one of my stories where nothing is happening.
“Yeah?” I answer.
“You writing?”
“Yeah.” He comes in and sits on the bed. I realize he’s been crying because his eyes are swollen and red. It was worse before, the crying. Sometimes he would slip in and out of it casually, like you would laughter in a conversation. He’s been better since Christmas, the second Christmas without Nickie. But my favorite part of him is still missing, still buried.
“Your mom…your mom and me were talking. Remember that last trip we had on the sled? Couple years ago I guess? It was about this time of year wasn’t it.” It isn’t a question meant for me to answer. “I was thinking maybe we could go out again. You and me. Before the melt. I know we didn’t get to go out last year, with everything…” He pauses and swallows hard. “…with everything that was going on. We haven’t been out since…you know, since then. Since that last time. I thought maybe you’d like to go again. You and me.”
I tell him yes. Yes I want to go, I want to go tomorrow morning because it’s a Saturday. He smiles at me and says sure. And I think I see it, the missing part, faint and small, a spark flashing in an abyss, but I see it. His smile is real, not just a costume put on for me.
He gets up and hugs me into his side and for the first time since Nickie died I notice my father’s smell, not his cologne or shampoo, just his scent, the way every girl knows her father’s scent. “You’ve been so strong for us Cassie…your mom and me. You’ll never know.”
I nod in silence, standing on the reticence that has been my only solid ground since Nickie left. I don’t mind him thinking I am strong. I don’t want him to know my dead brother is just a concept, something I knew had existed but didn’t believe in, the opposite of Santa Claus, or God.
He squeezes my shoulder and leaves the room without any more words. I think about the snowmobile, the last time Nickie and I went. I think about all the last things Nickie and I did together. And it makes me think of what else Nickie and I would’ve done since he died.
I begin writing and it’s unlike anything I’ve written before, because it’s about what Nickie didn’t do. I write about the girl he would’ve married, I write about whether he would pass his driver’s test on the first try, about what sports he would’ve been good at. I don’t know if it helps me or if it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. But it feels good to me, because it’s different. I finally stop, and get into bed.
*
When I wake my pillow is wet. I’ve been crying. My hair is clinging to my face in a tangled wet mass, pulling every direction. I don’t know if I am still crying, but I am shaking, trembling. For the first time since he died I remember Nickie. Truly remember him, and experience him. There was one memory I hadn’t found, but it found me. It found me in a dream.
I sit up in bed, leaning back on my hands. My chest starts heaving, I can’t stop it. Fresh tears come. And I remember the island.
~~~
“These bushes are thick!” Nickie said, more playfully than angrily. I tugged him along; he was having trouble marching through the crusted snow.
“Well you should see it up here. The trees are even thicker-” I stopped mid-sentence and froze, for there was nothing else I could say or do when I saw it, the reason the loggers had left the trees here.
*
“Why did you stop?” Nickie asked, bumping into me. I didn’t answer, just waited for him to see. I saw his head swivel, taking it in. “Oh…what’s that? Daddy!” Dad was right behind us anyway. He strode up beside Nickie and drove his hands into his hips.
“Well holy shit then,” he said, his chest heaving slightly. We stood dumbly amongst the trees, surely as a group of weary, superstitious, and confused loggers must have done decades before us, and we shifted on our heels trying to make sense of the three, body-sized mounds that were laid in a tiny clearing within the island.
“Penobscot, I bet. Or maybe some Maliseet. Probably on their way to Nova Scotia.”
“Are there people buried in there Daddy?” Nickie asked, not quite scared, not quite excited.
“I think there are Indians buried in there, Nick. Three of ‘em it looks like.” I scanned the mounds and my eyes landed on the grave furthest away. It was much smaller than the rest. I somehow knew in my heart that this had been a young boy who had died. I had no proof; I simply knew. I fought every urge to peel away the rocks and see him. If Dad had turned for only a second I might’ve done it. But he didn’t look away; his gaze was trained on the mound, because Nickie was walking towards it.
“Nick, you don’t get too close to that now. That’s why these trees are still standing, this is a burial ground or something. Those loggers knew not to mess with it.” But Nickie did get close, almost right up to it. When he stood before the mound I realized how small it really was. Maybe it covered a child only his size. A large branch had fallen across the grave, where it now balanced steadily, half rotted away. Nickie bent, reaching for it.
My father seemed caught between genuine concern and simple wonder as he watched his son clumsily slide the branch off the small mound. Nickie set it delicately next to the grave, and then stood over it a moment, admiring his work.
“Alright now. Come on back over here with your sister and me.”
He begrudgingly slinked his way towards us.
A branch caught his hat in its icy talons, plucking it off his head. Nickie quickly reeled and pulled it from the muddled cluster. He whipped off his mittens and began laboring with his chubby fingers to re-roll the rim of his flocculent cap. Against the frosted ground his eyes seemed to glow blue. Darker roots, the color his hair would’ve become in a few more years, were hiding deep in his blonde serpentine curls. And then it happened, the part in my dream that woke me, the part that I would remember every day after I awoke from it.
~~~
The dream changes, its reality twisting and transforming. I begin to see through everything, the world translucent; the graves, their revealed bodies half-buried in dirt and rock, the last one a child, his bones fragile as glass, the three of them together, yet completely alone in their death. And I see Nickie, without his ringlets, without the piece of skull the doctor had removed; but the tumor is there. It’s black and swollen, pulsing in the small pocket of his inculpable brain.
And I realize the tumor has been there his entire life, part of him, always part of him. It was there while we ate cotton candy at the fair, it was there all those nights I let him into my bed after he’d had a nightmare. It was there when we found the island. I think of how often I had laid my hand on his forehead and almost touched it, this marker, this symbol burned into him, somehow both growing and dying, both still and dynamic, like an inexorable hourglass slowly expiring. And he is finally real to me, because I see him in his completeness, as he truly was.
*
I never go back to the island, never uncover the secrets buried in those mounds. But I often think of them, especially the smallest one, the one I know is a boy. I think of the Indians that had known him, that had loved him and played with him, that had continued on without him. I think about the lives they would have carried out, lives that had been meant to include one more person, a child that would always exist within the island.
Reader Comments (2)
I first read this story months ago. It is as beautifully written as it is emotionally touching. Beautiful work Rob, as always.
Phenomenal read! As I read the description of the blonde curls my mind was swept up in wonderment of the little blonde that I never met. Reye's Syndrome carried her away when she was 4. She came to me years later in a vision, standing watch over my daughter before she came my way. I remember my own mother being so empty around the anniversary and birthday and always wondering what that little girl would have been like had she grown up. Anyway, I don't believe I will ever forget the words I've just read. Truly awesome! ~Lis