The Lace Reader. Brunonia Barry

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СКАЧАТЬ me drive the Whaler. When we get to the island, the tide is dead low and the ramp is up. We could land at the float, but we’d have no way to get onto the island with the ramp up like this. For just a minute, I consider trying to land at Back Beach, which is impossible at low tide and hardly possible at any other time. The tide would have to be turning high and the sea dead calm to even attempt such a landing. So I figure I’ll just have to land at the float and sit there waiting until someone notices us and lowers the ramp.

      People who live on islands like their solitude. I don’t mean islands like the Vineyard or Nantucket. People on those islands are so far from shore that they need to attract tourists just to survive. But people on these border islands generally like to be left alone, and they pull up their ramps because they are vulnerable. An island is a landing point for anyone who happens by. People assume that islands are public property: They picnic, they litter. They walk up to your front door and ask to use the phone, never considering for a moment that you probably have neither phone nor electricity. And so island people learn to pull up their ramps. Usually it’s only a few feet, but it makes all the difference. At high tide the difference between the float and the ramp may be only five or six feet. Most people could make it, if they are willing to take that leap of faith, but few will. When the tide is dead low, the ramp is another ten feet down, and that’s when you really feel your privacy.

      Yellow Dog Island is more private than most. The whole square-mile figure eight of it is set high on a granite plateau with spires of rock shooting up from the surrounding water, giving the impression of an ancient fortress. Unless you know about Back Beach, the island is impenetrable. Because of the sheer drop of the cliffs, the dock was built about forty feet in the air, which makes the distance from the ramp down to the float even longer. It takes a hydraulic winch to lower the ramp, and this is one of the only spots on the island that has a generator, which also runs the saltwater pump to the houses for the plumbing, such as it is. When we still attended school on the island and my mother would give us a reading assignment, I would sit in the pump house and read by the one lightbulb on the island until the generator ran out of gas or I fell asleep. That one bulb represented all of civilization for me, and I took good care of it.

      There are several outbuildings on the island, but only two real houses, one on each end, belonging to May and to my Auntie Emma Boynton, who is Eva’s daughter, May’s half sister, and my sister Lyndley’s legal mother. My aunt’s house is the larger of the two Victorians, but May’s is the only one that is winterized. Until Emma’s “accident,” while she and Cal were still married, Auntie Emma and her “daughter,” Lyndley, were summer people, and I guess my Uncle Cal was, too, if you want to count him, which I don’t.

      These days the women of the Circle all live at May’s house. They catch rainwater in cisterns for drinking. They grow vegetables for food and flax for the lace, and they even have a cow, which, according to Eva, had to be airlifted onto the island by the coast guard. They tried for a while to keep sheep on what used to be a makeshift baseball diamond, but the dogs kept running the sheep, so they had to give that up. Now they get by on vegetables and the occasional rabbit, and, of course, fish and lobsters. I don’t know what they do in the winter. I’ve never asked. I know as much as I do only because Eva has written me letters about it.

      Beezer and I have been sitting on the float for about twenty minutes before anyone comes to lower the ramp. Finally it is my Auntie Emma, and not my mother, who shows up. She walks with her head bent forward, moving more slowly than I remember, partly from her infirmity and partly from age. She is much older than the last time I saw her, almost fifteen years older, come August. My heart catches when I see her; and though she cannot see me, she suddenly realizes I am there. It’s like the take Melanie does in Gone with the Wind when she sees Ashley come back from the Civil War and suddenly recognizes that beaten-down man as her beloved husband. My aunt doesn’t rush to me—she cannot do that—but her feelings rush forward, and they knock the breath right out of me.

      By the time we reach her, she is crying. We stand there for a long time, hugging each other. She is crying and saying things like, “I knew you’d come,” and “I told her so.”

      My heart sinks for a moment. She is so happy to see me that I wonder if she thinks I am her daughter, Lyndley. In a way it would be more likely. Because even though I know the physical laws of this strange planet and the impossibility of such a thing, I also know that it would be less of a miracle for my sister, Lyndley, dead more than fifteen years now, to come back here than it was for me.

      We walk together up the ramp in slow motion, frame by frame. She’s too weak to walk fast anymore, and I’m having so much trouble catching my breath that I can’t even speak. But that’s okay, because I wouldn’t know what to say if I could. Ahead of us, at the top of the ramp, some gulls knock over one of the garbage cans. It rolls several feet, then stops just before reaching the edge of the cliff.

      “May is waiting for you,” Auntie Emma says, pointing to the old schoolhouse at the crest of the hill. She starts to walk with me, then takes Beezer’s arm. She rests her head on his shoulder and cries softly.

      “I’m so sorry about Eva,” Beezer says.

      I am surprised to realize that she knows and understands what has just happened to Eva. The “accident” that blinded her also left my aunt with brain damage.

      Sometimes Emma knows who I am, sometimes not, Eva told me more than once.

      The door to the red schoolhouse is open. I can see the Circle. They are sitting with their lace pillows on their laps. Some are working hard, passing bobbin over bobbin, winding their lives into the patterns as they go. Others are barely working at all but are listening, staring off at something not quite there, captivated by the reader’s voice, my mother’s, strong and clear. Quoting from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience:

       Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And dews of the night arise;…

      Her voice catches when she sees me in the doorway. It is so slight she doesn’t miss a single beat but goes on…

      Your spring and your day are wasted in play, And your winter and night in disguise.

      As May closes the book and takes a step in our direction, I hear another voice, one that’s even stronger than my mother’s.

      “There are no accidents,” Eva says as Beezer and I step through the door.

      What distinguishes Ipswich lace from all other handmade laces are the bobbins. The colonial women could not afford the heavier decorative bobbins used by European women. Like everyone else in the Colonies, the lace makers had to make do with what was at hand. And so the bobbins they wound the thread upon were lighter, sometimes hollow, fabricated from beach reeds or occasionally bamboo that came in on the Salem ships as packing material, or even from bones.

      —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

       Chapter 7

      WE’RE ALL AT MAY’S HOUSE NOW. Beezer’s fiancée, Anya, got here last night. They were supposed to leave for Norway tomorrow, for the wedding (which is only a week away). However, the trip has been postponed for a few days, until after Eva’s funeral. Anya is clearly not happy about it; really, why should she be? I think she’s being a pretty good sport about things, under the circumstances. I know how uneasy this place makes her. She told me that when she accompanied Beezer to California on a lecture tour that included Caltech. I have a certain respect for Anya’s honesty, but I still don’t like her. I think СКАЧАТЬ