The Summer Book Page 2

  Sophia rolled up in the quilt. She let the whole island float out on the ice and on to the horizon. Just before she fell asleep, her father got up and put more wood in the stove.

  The Magic Forest

  ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE ISLAND, beyond the bare rock, there was a stand of dead forest. It lay right in the path of the wind and for many hundreds of years had tried to grow directly into the teeth of every storm, and had thus acquired an appearance all its own. From a passing boat it was obvious that each tree was stretching away from the wind; they crouched and twisted, and many of them crept. Eventually the trunks broke or rotted and then sank, the dead trees supporting or crushing those still green at the top. All together they formed a tangled mass of stubborn resignation. The ground was shiny with brown needles, except where the spruces had decided to crawl instead of stand, their greenery luxuriating in a kind of frenzy, damp and glossy as if in a jungle.

  This forest was called “the magic forest”. It had shaped itself with slow and laborious care, and the balance between survival and extinction was so delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable. To open a clearing or separate the collapsing trunks might lead to the ruin of the magic forest. The marshy spots could not be drained, and nothing could be planted behind the dense, sheltering wall of trees. Deep under this thicket, in places where the sun never shone, there lived birds and small animals. In calm weather you could hear the rustle of wings and hastily scurrying feet, but the animals never showed themselves.

  In the beginning, the family tried to make the magic forest more terrible than it was. They collected stumps and dry juniper bushes from neighbouring islands and rowed them back to the forest. Huge specimens of weathered, whitened beauty were dragged across the island. They splintered and cracked and made broad, empty paths to the places where they were to stand. Grandmother could see that it wasn’t turning out right, but she said nothing. Afterwards, she cleaned the boat and waited until the rest of the family tired of the magic forest. Then she went in by herself. She crawled slowly past the marsh and the ferns, and when she got tired she lay down on the ground and looked up through the network of grey lichens and branches. Later, the others asked her where she had been, and she replied that maybe she had slept a little while.

  Except for the magic forest, the island became an orderly, beautiful park. They tidied it down to the smallest twig while the earth was still soaked with spring rain, and, after that, they stuck carefully to the narrow paths that wandered through the carpet of moss from one granite outcropping to another and down to the sand beach. Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don’t know – and it cannot be repeated too often – is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies. Eider ducks are the same way – the third time you frighten them up from their nests, they never come back. Sometime in July the moss would adorn itself with a kind of long, light grass. Tiny clusters of flowers would open at exactly the same height above the ground and sway together in the wind, like inland meadows, and the whole island would be covered with a veil dipped in heat, hardly visible and gone in a week. Nothing could give a stronger impression of untouched wilderness.

  Grandmother sat in the magic forest and carved outlandish animals. She cut them from branches and driftwood and gave them paws and faces, but she only hinted at what they looked like and never made them too distinct. They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest. Sometimes she cut them directly out of a stump or the trunk of a tree.

  Her carvings became more and more numerous. They clung to trees or sat astride the branches, they rested against the trunks or settled into the ground. With outstretched arms, they sank in the marsh, or they curled up quietly and slept by a root. Sometimes they were only a profile in the shadows, and sometimes there were two or three together, entwined in battle or in love. Grandmother worked only in old wood that had already found its form. That is, she saw and selected those pieces of wood that expressed what she wanted them to say.

  One time she found a big white vertebra in the sand. It was too hard to work but could not have been made any prettier anyway, so she put it in the magic forest as it was. She found more bones, white or grey, all washed ashore by the sea.

  “What is it you’re doing?” Sophia asked.

  “I’m playing,” Grandmother said.

  Sophia crawled into the magic forest and saw everything her grandmother had done.

  “Is it an exhibit?” she asked.

  But Grandmother said it had nothing to do with sculpture, sculpture was another thing completely.

  They started gathering bones together along the shore.

  Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, and have to be handled with great care. Sometimes they are large, heavy thighbones, or a cage of ribs buried in the sand like the timbers of a shipwreck. Bones come in a thousand shapes and every one of them has its own structure.

  Sophia and Grandmother carried everything they found to the magic forest. They would usually go at sundown. They decorated the ground under the trees with bone arabesques like ideographs, and when they finished their patterns they would sit for a while and talk, and listen to the movements of the birds in the thicket. Once, they flushed a grouse, and another time they saw a tiny owl. It was sitting on a branch, silhouetted against the evening sky. No one had ever seen an owl on the island before.

  One morning Sophia found a perfect skull of some large animal – found it all by herself. Grandmother thought it was a seal skull. They hid it in a basket and waited all day until evening. The sunset was in different shades of red, and the light flooded in over the whole island so that even the ground turned scarlet. They put the skull in the magic forest, and it lay on the ground and gleamed with all its teeth.

  Suddenly Sophia began to scream.

  “Take it away!” she screamed. “Take it away!”

  Grandmother picked her up and held her but thought it best not to say anything. After a while Sophia went to sleep. Grandmother sat and thought about building a matchbox house on the sandy beach by the blueberry patch behind the house. They could build a dock and make windows out of tinfoil.

  And so the wooden animals were allowed to vanish into their forest. The arabesques sank into the ground and turned green with moss, and the trees slipped deeper and deeper into each other’s arms as time went by. Grandmother often went to the magic forest when the sun went down. But in the daytime she sat on the veranda steps and made boats of bark.

  The Scolder

  ONE MORNING BEFORE DAWN it got very cold in the guest room. Grandmother dragged the rag rug up on the bed and pulled some raincoats down from the wall, but they didn’t help much. She supposed it was due to the bog. It’s a funny thing about bogs. You can fill them with rocks and sand and old logs and make a little fenced-in yard on top with a woodpile and a chopping block – but bogs go right on behaving like bogs. Early in the spring they breathe ice and make their own mist, in remembrance of the time when they had black water and their own sedge blossoming untouched. Grandmother looked at the oil stove, which had gone out, and at the clock, which said three. Then she got out of bed and put on her clothes, took her walking stick, and hobbled down the stone steps. It was a dead-calm night, and she wanted to listen to the long-tailed ducks.

  It was not only the woodyard: the whole island was covered with fog, and there was that special early May silence near the sea. The branches of the trees dripped water, clearly audible in the silence. Nothing was growing yet, and there were patches of snow in sheltered places, but the landscape was brimming wit
h expectation. She heard the cry of the long-tailed ducks. They are called scolders, because their cry is a steady, chiding chatter, farther and farther away, farther and farther out. People rarely see them. They are as secretive as corncrakes. But a corncrake hides in a meadow all alone, while the long-tails are out beyond the farthest islands in enormous wedding flocks, singing all through the spring night.

  Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events – the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves. She thought about migratory birds, and the thrush on a summer evening, and the cuckoo – yes, the cuckoo – and the great, cold birds that sail and watch, and the very small birds that sweep in for hasty visits in large late-summer parties, chubby, dumb, and unafraid, and about the swallows that only honour houses where the people are happy. It seemed remarkable that the impersonal birds should have become such powerful symbols. Or maybe not. For Grandmother, long-tailed ducks meant anticipation and renewal. She walked carefully across the rock on her stiff legs, and when she came to the little cottage she knocked on the window. Sophia woke up at once and came outside.

  “I’m going to go and listen to the long-tails,” Grandmother said.

  Sophia got dressed and they walked on together. On the east side of the island, there were small borders of ice around the rocks. No one had had time to gather driftwood yet, and the whole shore was a tangle, a broad bulging mass of tumbled planks and seaweed and reeds along with posts and fragile wooden boxes that had turned inside out around their steel frames, and on top of everything lay an enormous, heavy log that was black with oilspill. Small pieces of bark and the splinters of old storms rocked in the water beyond the rim of ice, drawn slowly out and in again by a feeble swell. It was very close to sunrise, and the fog out over the sea was already suffused with light. The long-tailed ducks kept up their steady call, distant and melodious.

  “They’re breeding,” Sophia said.

  The sun came up. The fog glowed for an instant and then simply vanished. Out on a flat rock in the water lay a scolder. It was wet and dead and looked like a wrung-out plastic bag. Sophia declared that it was an old crow, but Grandmother didn’t believe her.

  “But it’s spring!” Sophia said. “They don’t die now; they’re brand new and just married – that’s what you said!”

  “Well,” Grandmother said, “it did die now, all the same.”

  “How did it die?” Sophia yelled. She was very angry.

  “Of unrequited love,” her grandmother explained. “He sang and scolded all night for his scolder hen and then along came another and stole her away, so he put his head under the water and floated away.”

  “That’s not true,” Sophia screamed. She started to cry. “Long-tails can’t drown. Tell it right!”

  So Grandmother told her he had simply hit his head on a rock. He was singing and scolding so hard that he didn’t look where he was going, and so it just happened, right when he was happier than he’d ever been before.

  “That’s better,” Sophia said. “Shall we bury him?”

  “It’s not necessary,” Grandmother said. “The tide will come in and he’ll bury himself. Seabirds are supposed to be buried at sea, like sailors.”

  They walked on and talked about burial at sea, and the long-tails sang in dyads and triads, farther and farther away. The neck of land out towards the point was completely transformed by the winter storms. There had never been anything but rocks out there, but now the whole shore was sand.

  “We ought to save it,” Grandmother said, poking the sand with her stick. “If the sea rises and we get a north wind, all of it will wash back out again.”

  She stretched out full length on a bed of whitened reeds and looked at the sky. Sophia lay down beside her. It was growing warmer all the time, and after a while they heard the curiously chilly, somehow veiled sound of migratory birds in flight and watched a whole flock fly in over the island towards the northeast.

  “What’ll we do now?” Sophia said.

  Grandmother suggested that Sophia walk around the point and see what had drifted ashore.

  “Are you sure you won’t be bored?” Sophia asked.

  “Absolutely sure,” Grandmother said.

  She turned on her side and put her arm over her head. Between the arm of her sweater, her hat, and the white reeds, she could see a triangle of sky, sea and sand – quite a small triangle. There was a blade of grass in the sand beside her, and between its sawtoothed leaves it held a piece of seabird down. She carefully observed the construction of this piece of down – the taut white rib in the middle, surrounded by the down itself, which was pale brown and lighter than the air, and then darker and shiny towards the tip, which ended in a tiny but spirited curve. The down moved in a draft of air too slight for her to feel. She noted that the blade of grass and the down were at precisely the right distance for her eyes. She wondered if the down had caught on the grass now, in the spring, maybe during the night, or if it had been there all winter. She saw the conical depression in the sand at the foot of the blade of grass and the wisp of seaweed that had twined around the stem. Right next to it lay a piece of bark. If you looked at it for a long time it grew and became a very ancient mountain. The upper side had craters and excavations that looked like whirlpools. The scrap of bark was beautiful and dramatic. It rested above its shadow on a single point of contact, and the grains of sand were coarse, clean, almost grey in the morning light, and the sky was completely clear, as was the sea.

  Sophia came back, running.

  “I found a floor grate!” she hollered. “It’s big; it’s from a ship! It’s as long as a boat!”

  “You don’t say!” her grandmother said.

  It was important for her not to stand up too quickly, so she had time to watch the blade of grass just as the down left its hold and was borne away in a light morning breeze. It was carried out of her field of vision, and when she got on her feet the landscape had grown smaller.

  “I saw a feather,” she said. “A piece of scolder down.”

  “What scolder?” Sophia said, for she had forgotten the bird that died of love.

  Berenice

  ONE SUMMER SOPHIA HAD A GUEST OF HER OWN – her first friend to come and visit. It was a fairly new friend, a little girl whose hair she admired. Her name was Herdice Evelyn, but everyone called her Pipsan.

  Sophia explained to her grandmother that Pipsan was scared of being asked her real name, and that actually she was scared of everything, so you had to be very careful with her, and they decided not to frighten Pipsan, at least in the beginning, with things she had never seen before. When Pipsan arrived, she was dressed wrong and had shoes with leather soles. She was too well bred and terribly quiet, and her hair was so beautiful it took your breath away.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” Sophia whispered. “Naturally curly.”

  “Very lovely,” Grandmother said.

  They looked at each other and nodded slowly, and Sophia sighed.

  “I’ve decided to be her protector,” she said. “Couldn’t we have a secret society to be her protectors? The only sad thing is that ‘Pipsan’ doesn’t sound aristocratic.”

  Grandmother proposed that they call the child Berenice, but only within the society of course. Berenice was a queen, renowned for her hair, and also a constellation.

  Surrounded by this secret imagery, and the subject of much serious conversation, Pipsan wandered about the island, an unusually small and timid child who could not be left alone. As a result, Sophia was always in a hurry. She didn’t dare leave her guest to herself for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Grandmother lay in the guest room at the back of the house and heard her coming. She puffed up the stairs, burst into the room, and sat down on the bed.

  “She’s driving me crazy,” she whispered. “She won’t learn to row because she’s scared to go o
ut in the boat. She says the water’s too cold. What are we going to do with Berenice?”

  They held a short meeting on the subject, without deciding anything for the time being, and Sophia rushed out again.

  The guest room had been a later addition to the house and therefore had a character of its own. It clung tightly to the back of the original building, and its inner wall was tarred. On this wall hung the nets, along with ringbolts and rope and other items that might come in handy and had always hung there. The roof, which was a continuation of the regular roof, was very steep, and the room rested on posts, because the rock on which the house stood dropped straight down into what had once been a bog between the building and the woodyard. There was a pine tree outside, which restricted the guest room to an area not much longer than a bed. It was, in effect, nothing but a short corridor, painted blue, with the door and the nail kegs at one end and a window that was much too large at the other. The window was large because it was left over, and it slanted on one side because of the roof. The bed was white, with ornamentation in blue and gold. Underneath the guest room, they stored lumber, empty cartons, picks and shovels, cans of coal tar, petrol and wood preservative, plus some ageing bait boxes and other odds and ends still too good to be thrown away. In other words, the guest room was a very pleasant place, quite distinct from the rest of the house. The details don’t really matter.

  Grandmother went back to her book and more or less forgot about Berenice. From the southwest came a steady summer wind that whispered sleepily around the house and on across the island. She could hear the weather report on the radio inside the house. A corner of sunshine edged across the windowsill.

  Sophia banged open the door and came in.

  “She’s crying,” she said. “She’s afraid of ants, and she thinks they’re all over the place. She just keeps lifting her feet, like this, and stamping, and crying. She’s scared to stand still. What are we going to do with her?”