He could not deny that the fire was reckless, but Billy told himself it was safer for him to help than for Penny to build it alone. He had initially hoped they would fail quickly and honorably and go home, but instead they had some limited success. The small kindling had caught right away. Then they built a cone of shorter logs above the first, now-smoldering pile, and then on top of that a lean-to of longer driftwood. It was an elegant structure, everything pointing upward. When the outer branches began to catch, Penny ran out on the headland there and shouted. It was Catta: they could just barely see him, a lighter shade against the trees. He yelled back and then they all shouted, Ann and Barbara too. It was nonsensical and wonderful. Defiance became hilarity, and then the girls slipped into mania. Penny ran everywhere, bouncing over rocks and stumps, carrying limbs higher than her head; Ann was laughing, as if unleashed from something; and Barbara fell down over and over again, from all the excitement. The three of them now circled a raging fire. Extinguishing it, Billy saw, would mean open revolt.
Soon enough the whole burning structure collapsed and the girls all shouted again, which for a moment stopped the parade of driftwood. For no apparent reason little Barbara said, “Ashes, ashes, all fall down!” and Ann laughed and screamed it too, and then Penny did, and they all chanted it together, laughing and shrieking. The fire was already huge, and Penny punctuated every “all fall down!” by throwing more and larger wood on it from the pile. This, he thought, is how poetry destroys cities. Some of the branches were so big that the girls had to lift all together just to raise them off the ground and heave them into the inferno. Anything lying nearby that was at all flammable was thrown into the fire, and Billy did not stop or even try to moderate them. Lila would say that overindulgence of his girls was one of his many failures, though he himself would call this a lesson in the contagion of happiness. He hoped to God the wind would keep on blowing out to sea.
40
Catta was five yards deep in the woods, and already he had cuts and scratches on most of his exposed skin. He had clearly miscalculated. Where he was now, close to the channel, was the easiest point of access to Baffin—it would be where every casual picnicker, trail-clearer, and day-tripper would land first and try to forge inland. Here, though, Baffin had defended itself: the trees stood close together, their branches all intertwined, as if the island itself were aware of its own vulnerability and had chosen to blockade the casual visitor. A more remote area might be more accessible. He should try the part of Baffin least likely to make for an easy landing, somewhere wind lashed, a headland facing the open sea, a place where even sailboats could not anchor. Baffin’s northwest corner on the map opened onto the ocean. It was the slot between North and Sisters where a low, natural breakwater extended someway out into the sea.
To make it there before dark, he had a long distance to cover and not much time. Catta pushed into the woods every hundred yards or so to test them, and each time he was painfully turned back. His shirt was ripped; part of it was flapping. He could feel long welts on his back. If there was good news, it was that the tide was definitely headed out rather than in, lessening his chance of being cut off in the next few hours. His hands were sticky from breaking branches, and they smelled like sharp pine.
Last December, while walking on Wisconsin Avenue with his father, there was a line of Christmas trees for sale, and their smell had transported Catta back to Indian Head, as if it were some early morning in the summer. He was greedy. He plunged his head into the middle of them, and the whole row of trees fell down on top of him. The tree man was furious, shouting in a foreign language that turned out to be French. His father calmed down the startled man in his own language; Catta had not known his father spoke any foreign languages. In the end they bought three trees, and the man gave them one for free. One by one, they carried all four back to Avon Place, where they gave away the extras to their delighted neighbors. His father had said Catta should carry the top of each tree since that end was lighter, but instead he carried the trunk end so the sap would cover his hands. That night at dinner his fork kept sticking to his hands and his mother demanded to see them. They were black. She asked him to wash his hands. He refused. She insisted.
Catta was angry and embarrassed, but for some reason his reaction was much stronger than it should have been. He declared a hunger strike. He did not eat or leave his room all through the next day while James described all of his favorite foods in detail through his closed door. When his father got home, he came into Catta’s room and sat quietly at the foot of his bed for what seemed like a long time. Finally, he said that the Constitution guarantees many freedoms, even for children, but that washing hands was not really much to protest. People on hunger strikes were often in jail, he said, and their friends and family were being killed in ways that would give him nightmares. The point was for Catta to know that these are serious things, done for serious reasons, and sometimes people died. Still, he said, the choice is yours. We will not force you to eat, though if you starve yourself now, what happens when something authentically important comes along? Whatever decision you make, his father had said, will be the right one. They had roast chicken for dinner that night, and it tasted better than anything Catta had ever eaten.
On Baffin, the light was failing. The night would be cool, especially by the water. Catta used the three waterproof matches left in his emergency kit to try to light a fire, but the needles and branches here were damp and wouldn’t catch. He knew what hypothermia was, and now there was no hope of a fire. He had to pick an entry point to the woods and live with the consequences. If it was impossible to go more than five yards in, then he had failed: he would curl up at the waterline and suffer through the night. If all his theories were wrong and if on Baffin the penalty for being wrong was death, then he would find a rock to sit on, somewhere open to the sea, a place the Heron would easily spot his frozen corpse when they came looking for him. He would try to die upright like someone keeping watch, with a look of implacable scorn on his face.
41
Lila sat in a wooden chair at the small table in the kitchen, eating cornichons out of a jar. Nearby, Martha and Susan hovered over stovetops, chopping and sprinkling, producing the festive Migration dinner that Lila herself had planned months ago, via letters to Martha. They had called it A Dinner of Saints, from the recondite names of the main courses: Potage St. Germain and Lamb Kidneys St. Lawrence, both specialties of the Old Man’s Boston club that Martha had adapted for the island.
“We need,” Martha said to Susan, “four or five carrots from the garden for garnish.”
“That’s not on the sheet,” Susan said. There was always a written mise en place for Martha’s formal dinners hung on the wall in large print for the helpers. Lila wondered, briefly, if she had just eaten the garnish for tonight’s dinner, which in fact she had.
“Go,” Martha said, and Susan went.