Christ, Billy thought, they actually did it.
It was authentically bizarre that Hillsinger would do this thing, no matter how much it had been talked about over the years, and even stranger to have taken Penny with him when he did it.
“And when you see Baffin,” Billy said, “what then?”
“I’ll build a fire.”
And then Penny looked at him with a sadness that was not a child’s, and in that second Billy felt the heartbreak that had carried her here on such a clear day, on a dead run, wearing sandals, while his own lovely daughters jumped in and out of boxes drawn in the sand.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
35
Jim Hillsinger was glad the Quick girl had run away from the houses. If he acted quickly, he could maintain some control over the narrative.
He and James were halfway up the ramp from the dock when he looked down and saw his father, still seated on the folding canvas stool by the wheel. His head was bowed, and he seemed absorbed in reverie or pain. The Old Man reacted badly if one drew attention to his occasional flights of weakness, so Hillsinger said nothing and kept walking.
“Go to the house,” he said to James when they reached the top, “and find Aunt Diana. Ask her to show you something outside—ask her which flowers she saw in the chapel this morning.”
“Why?” James said.
The truth was that Diana’s presence would give the situation here a veneer of drama, which might keep Lila from seeing clearly.
“I need to speak to your mother alone.”
At first, it was hard for James to stay calm when he saw that they were actually leaving Catta on Baffin. He was not used to feeling such waves of joy where his brother was concerned. Their father had not said what his crimes were, and—since James was himself guilty of a wide variety of undiscovered sins—he chose not to ask questions. Whatever it was, Catta deserved what he got. He routinely flouted James’s rules for the Indian Game, which were always set by the oldest boy present. Catta was friendly with the staff girl Sheila and also with their pseudo-cousin Penny. He was a politician, not a soldier. By contrast, he, James, had expertly tied and untied the bowline and coiled it properly, as Cyrus had taught him. He had kept Penny Quick from standing up and causing trouble. He had pushed the boat off Baffin’s beach and gotten soaked in the process, shivering in the wind all the way home. It was painful, but then the public shaming of his brother was fair payment.
But that one word from his father—that he needed to talk to his mother, alone—changed James’s entire sense of the afternoon. If his mother did not know about Catta’s punishment in advance, then it was not an official punishment after all. It was something else. He remembered now that spending a night on Baffin was something the Old Man talked about from time to time as if it were a good thing. What if everything James had done, all his vigilance and sacrifices, had contributed to the greater glory of his idiot brother? It raised the obscene possibility of the greatest possible horror: that Baffin had been, in some way James did not yet understand, not a punishment at all but a gift, just like so many other times when Catta did some ridiculous tap dance and everyone clapped. Still, he would do what was asked of him.
“I have to get a sweater,” James said.
James crossed the rocks toward the Cottage, leaving his father behind.
36
Catta said a quasi-prayer for a massive haul of fish. He was not hungry yet, but soon he would be. He promised to eat everything he caught and leave the inedible parts for the cormorants, which Cyrus said were good luck.
He unwound the small coil of fishing line from his emergency kit, threaded the hook and tied it off, and then turned over rocks by the tree line until he found a night crawler. He speared it on the hook. Catta rolled the foil up, put it in the waistband of his shorts, and started out again along the island’s circumference in the direction of Seven. Soon the rocky beach yielded to fields of kelp backing up to low cliffs. The kelp was so slippery that he had to take very small slow steps to keep from falling down. Off to his right the kelp crawled nearly halfway up a rock cliff, which meant that everything he was walking on now would be underwater at high tide, a small detail pointing to a serious fact: when the tide rose, this path would be cut off.
He came around the next headland and saw Seven in the distance. The channel separating the two islands was a fast-moving stretch of water three hundred yards across. Not so far, he thought, but Edward Peck said that underwater ledges created sharp changes in depth, which in turn made the currents dangerous; he said people had drowned there. Catta put out his line along a pool guarded by two large rocks, which together formed a shallow, protected area where water ran in and out with the small waves.
He looked at the forest behind him: it was almost impossibly dense. He wondered how the woods had come to grow like that—whether the soil or the climate was special or different here. He could see no point of entry at all. Were these woods dangerous? More dangerous than spending the night on the rocks, next to the ocean? He tied one end of his fishing line to a thorn bush by the tree line and let out enough slack to submerge the hook. He wrapped the line twice around a long stick to act as a floater. If he were a fish, Catta thought, he would like this pool. He decided to leave the line out here but keep moving and hope that, when he came back, a bluefish or snapper would be on the hook. He would clean it with his arrowhead and eat it raw.
A shade passed overhead and he looked up, hoping it was a cormorant—but no: just a gull. Behind the gull, though, across the channel, a thin line of smoke rose above the Seven treetops. He followed it down to its base on the shore by the waterline. Figures were close by, although too far away to say who they were. Something bright jumped up and then fell away again—they were building a fire. A pink blur darted out of the woods and onto the headland, and Catta laughed out loud. He saw Penny’s hand in the air, and then he heard a shout. Other voices joined in after a delay. The wind and distance killed the words, but their intent came through. Catta answered back, gathering all his breath into a massive scream.
Catta turned away from the fire, and he felt something new rise up inside him, something decisive. The ocean is here, his father had said, and the woods are there. He had come from the ocean. He would go to the woods. He would cross Baffin on foot.
37
March 1964
Central Park West, New York City