Soon the Light
Gina Ochsner
Honorable Mention
In the old Clatsop story, God pinched the mud of the north Oregon shore into mountains, carved rock to jagged crags. That's how he cut his hands and his blood stained the flats of the north plains. Every autumn, as if remembering this event, the soil north and east of Astoria pushes forth blood-bright cranberries. That's the way Jaska heard Indian Jennie tell it, anyway. Because God suffered, those who work the north plains harvest suffer. This part Jaska could vouch for. Thirty years of hauling fishing nets had pulled his chest toward his hips and put a thick hump between his shoulders. Thirty years of work had turned his bones to chalk. That's the reward of hard work, Mother says in her many letters, but he knows fear has stove him up as much as the work.
Not hospitable waters, these. Forty gillnetters were lost this year alone and it was only May. Forty reasons to content himself with his single net tied to a piling and his weir set along the quivering flats. "Set-netters don't drown like the gillnetters do," his spinster sister, Kaari, had said on his fifty-fifth birthday. They kept house together. She cooked and cleaned, did laundry. Gave advice. And so, from that day on he fished the flats where the sand bars glistened at low tide and he could look north and west and watch the gillnetters fishing the mouth where the river water met the ocean. He could look and thank God he wasn't out there with them.
"It's women's work, what you're doing," his friend Lasse teased. Lasse had lost a leg somewhere in France during the war and now anything other than war or gillnetting was women's work.
"I'm not so young," Jaska said.
"Yes. But you're a Finn. How can you live with yourself?"
"I don't. I live with my sister," Jaska replied.
Kaari. Mother wrote to him every other week, asking about her. Jaska, is she eating regular-like? Is she working? Any unattached men showing interest? Yes. Yes and no. He never wrote to Mother about that trouble in the woods some thirty years ago. Typical trouble single girls working a kitchen camp might get into. But they were Finns and Lutherans; Kaari should have known better. She should not have been surprised when she got pregnant or when her man—Bucky or something like—didn't rush to the altar. About the man's untimely death: cut from crotch to crown by a haulback, he never wrote. Nor did he remind Mother that Kaari was fifty, well past the notice of men, that she'd been measuring sugar, salt and flour at Gunderson's for nearly twenty-some years. Instead he wrote to Mother about the forty men lost, the desperate search by Peacock's spit, the treacherous sand bars that shift without warning. He wrote about a man who had lashed himself to the boards of his boat with leather straps. He washed ashore on a single beam. His tongue hung out of his mouth, and his eyes had been pecked out. Mother possessed the unflappable Finn nature. Little shocked her. She lived through the lean years, she liked to remind him. The hard years in Finland that drove so many of them to Minnesota and North Dakota where, she assured them, the living was easier, the winter lighter, the cold warmer.
It was this Jaska thought of as he threaded through the dark toward his single net and weir. The easy living in Astoria. Twenty-seven canneries, fifty-two saloons. Twelve churches, two of them Finnish Lutheran. A movie theatre, a union hall, four saunas. This abundance would kill a woman like Mother. All those houses painted in bold blue, rose or yellow, set like thumbtacks pinning the fir-covered hillsides. An excess of cheer, Mother would say.
Jaska picked his way through the bull kelp. Behind the eastern hills a long silver wrinkle widened, throbbed with light. That would be dawn. Beside the piling his lone net lay flaccid. But the weir, the hoops of which jutted from the sand like ribs, rocked, wriggled. Thrashed. Too strong for an eel or salmon, these movements. And the noise coming from the weir? Too human to be anything but a child.
Jaska hurried for the weir, flung open the lid. Inside, mired up to the waist in mud, was a boy. In an hour the tide would have taken him. "Stop flailing about," Jaska said. He dug at the mud around the boy's waist and thighs, scooping with his trowel, cursing under his breath. A minute, two, and then he freed first one leg and then the other to the shin. "Grab tight," Jaska said. The boy wrapped his arms around Jaska's neck, his one leg around Jaska's waist. With a grunt Jaska pulled. A loud slurp and the mud released its hold. Jaska tumbled heels over head and the child laughed. Laughed. Jaska's first thought: how shall I write about this to Mother?
*
Jaska figured the child to be seven, maybe eight years of age. Not from these parts, he was sure of it. "How do they call you?" he asked in Swedish, English, Spanish, and Finnish. A chunk of horehound candy lured the boy into the metal washtub. The boy squirmed beneath the pitchers of warm water Jaska poured over him, as if the fresh water were acid. "Settle down," Jaska murmured, pouring with one hand, holding the boy in the tub with the other. Layers of bladderwrack and seaweed clung to his back, torso and limbs. More warm water, more candy and a good long sit before the greens peeled away and the boy beneath the mud slowly emerged.
Jaska rested on his heels, blinked at the creature before him. Hard to believe this was the same child pulled up from the marl. So beautiful now to behold. A cherub, like something from a fine painting that belonged on the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral somewhere. If God existed, he existed in this boy, that's how beautiful the child seemed to Jaska. And yet, he could not discount the otherworldly quality of his alabaster white skin, hair white as dry clouds, eyes an odd cornflower blue. Well. Did not Jonah step out of the open mouth of the whale, his skin blanched blister white? Did he not stumble upon that shore, dumbfounded and disoriented? The boy, Jaska decided, must have suffered a similar fate. We do, after all, still live in the age of miracles.
Jaska pulled the boy out of the tub, rubbed a towel gently over his shoulders and back, his skinny legs. His feet. Only his feet were imperfect. One foot twisted inward at the ankle, the other foot had no arch. Kaari squinted at the boy from her perch by the hearth. He could read the look in her eyes. He brought the child in; this was a mess she wouldn't clean up.
Kaari approached the boy. So white, the child, like he'd been drawn up from a big vat of bluing. And the eyes! Dull and oddly non-reflective. Like they would swallow her up in darkness. Kaari bent and ran a finger along the boy's bony shin, touched the twisted foot. "Someone put him in your nets. He's not right and they wanted to get rid of him."
Jaska gave the boy more candy. "Does not every creature bear the image of God?"
"Surely they do," Kaari glanced at the hard light in the boy's eyes. Not dark now. Light as if a twilight sky full of stars, icy cold and distant, passed through them.
"We cannot fathom the mind of our creative God," Jaska continued. "Did not St. Paul say we are made perfect through our imperfections?"
That's a question she's spent thirty years tiptoeing around. Better to turn her hand to what can be touched, gathered, cleaned. Kaari gathered the wet towels. "If you're going to keep him, you ought to fit him for shoes. Like those special ones they make in Portland."
"He's fine just the way he is." Jaska scooped up the boy, flung him over his shoulder. The boy shrieked with delight as Jaska plodded up the stairs. Laughed and ran his hands over Jaska's hump.
*
In Mother's most recent letter she made requests. Tell me the untellable story. Tell me a story that outstrips time.
She wanted a love story. She wanted joy. Those are stories Kaari can't tell. About love she never wrote. About Bucky she never wrote. She wrote about the woods, the way they swallowed her up. The darkness brewed within them—that was her meat, her milk. Her music. Darkness, she wrote, made a clean heart in her. About her own child who lived for only a day she never wrote. Only Indian Jennie and Liila, the pastor's wife, knew about the infant she put into the water down by the docks. Liila said, God understands all, but the look on her face said that's what you get for chippy-ing around with men in the woods. And sure, she was forgiven on Sunday, but Monday through Saturday nobody wanted a thing to do with her. Those were the bad years, thirty of them to be exact, consisting of calendar days, tide schedules, letters from Mother.
Mother writes: Bolsheviks. They creep through the wheat fields. At night. Singing Soviet hymns. Good songs, lousy lyrics. Those godless Bolsheviks; they ruin all that is right and beautiful. Are there Bolsheviks in Astoria?
There are, in fact, a few. The Red Finns, Kaari tells her, meet in the Socialist Hall on Front Street. They even have their own newspaper. Some of them are leaving for Karelia, a Soviet promised land in what was once a part of Finland. They are helped along by cannery bosses, who are only too happy to pay their passage if it gets talk of unionization out of their mouths. Mother describes the ballet in Minneapolis. The way the girls mince about on tippy-toe baffles her. Why don't they just hire taller girls so that they can walk normal-like? Mother asks.
"Heh-a!" Jennie yelled from the porch. "You seen my man? I've looked all over for him." Her eyes roved aimlessly.
Kaari put the kettle on the stove. "He's gone, Jennie."
"Yeah. But I've got supper ready for him. If you see him, tell him I'm looking for him."
Kaari motioned to the chair in front of the stove. "Come in, Jennie."
Jennie dropped a large burlap sack on the porch, scraped her boots on the step and crossed the threshold.
They had to get this conversation out of the way before Jennie would come in and drink the raspberry tea Kaari kept at the scald for her. Indian Jennie. Bucky's Jennie. Kaari wanted to hate her. Bucky had left Kaari for Jennie. But Jennie was so simple these days, childlike and forgetful, and it seems wrong to hate a child. Grief had scrambled Jennie's brains. But somehow she remembered to stand on Kaari's porch at least twice a week and ask after Bucky.
Kaari set a mug on the table.
"Torger was found dead this morning. Someone set fire to his shed with him in it." Jennie reached for the mug. A loud slurp. "And you know old Hans."
Kaari nodded.
"Taken off by a cougar." Jennie set the mug on the table, leaned toward the staircase. "White!"
The child had crept down the stairs and fixed his gaze on Jennie. She shuddered. "The devil is white, white."
White and reeking. The smell of marl, the rank and rot of things that wash up onto the rack line filled the room. And this after a full bath.
"He's lost, I think," Kaari said. "Jaska says he's a prophet. Like Jonah."
Jennie surveyed the chalk-white hair, the misshapen feet. "My mother knew a prophet once. At night he closed his eyes. His body lay on his mat, but his spirit was in the stars. He died twice. Then came back to the living. With messages from bears. Heaven is full of bears." Jennie stood and nodded toward her sack on the porch. "Daffodil bulbs. We could plant them along the cow trail. We could wait for Bucky."
Not the right time of year for planting bulbs. Not on the trails. Not with all the rain. So much of it that the hoofs of the cows have turned up like snowshoes. Their bovine instinct for safety has kept them off the hillsides. Not so for Jennie. The hills could slide right out from under her, the mountains crumble. Nothing will keep the woman from her rituals.
"Let's go," Kaari said to the boy, pulling on his arms. He wriggled away. Kaari tried again. He sank to the floor, a heap of dead weight. Kaari dragged the boy to the door. He could walk. She knew it. This was a game and she was having none of it. "Walk," she commanded and the boy flailed and carried on with a God-awful racket that put the crows to flight.
Jennie scrutinized the boy. Then she hoisted him into her arms as if he were no heavier than a sack of potatoes, carried him up the trail on her short sturdy legs, leaving the bag of bulbs for Kaari. Kaari followed, her gaze on Jennie's stubby legs. Jennie had the strength for hauling nets. Also, she had her own meshboards and could tie good knots. Maybe this was what Bucky saw in her: a woman who would be at home on a boat, would work and work and never stop to ask why.
At the trail's summit they had a regal view of the bay to the south, and to the west and north the shipping channel and the river's wide gray mouth. Behind them was Sugar Loaf Mountain and a scabland of bare rock and scrubby pines.
Kaari hunkered over her knees and pushed bulbs into the soft mud. Daffodils. A ridiculous prospect. Nothing grows well here. The wind and salt and stabbing rain stunted everything, bent all life on the hills to horizontal lines. Everything but the razor grass nattering and whistling, slicing the wind to jagged slivers. The boy hummed. The wildness up here seemed to calm him, but then he spied a Swedish tanker gliding along the lane. He scowled, threw rocks over the cliff.
Jennie crouched in front of the boy, her eyes sparking bright. "What will you do with him anyway?"
As if awaiting her reply, the boy turned his gaze on Kaari. The directness of that gaze, raw and open, set her teeth on edge.
"I'd put him in the water," Jennie said. "It's kinder to them that way." Then, as if touched by electricity, she straightened. "Did you hear that? Bucky—he's calling me."
Kaari peered down the trail. "Sure," she said as Jennie lumbered down the path.
It's a kind of love, these lies. What harm is there in weaving loose fictions. Bucky's at sea. Bucky's in the woods. Bucky is the wind. "Bucky should have been a wolf," Kaari tells the boy. Well, he should have been given a wolf's name. That's what you do if you want someone to live a long life. What kind of name, after all, is Bucky?
Kaari reached for the boy, who allowed her to pull him up on her back. She had not named the baby. It could not have lived with or without a wolf's name. Sure, she'd said the prayers you were supposed to say for newborns. But what words for an infant turning blue? Then wracked with a jagged breath—one, two—punching the air with tiny fists. Then silence. Gone.
She does not remember the weight of that other child in her arms. The sweet smell of his hair. The color of his eyes. She was tired of tending messy memories. Besides, this boy on her back was here now and needing her. And Jaska was right. He was beautiful. Except for the feet, beautifully perfect. "What will we call you?" she whispered, knowing he would say nothing. The boy dug his heels into her stomach, wrapped his arms tighter around her neck. The heat of his body against hers loosened something below her stomach, a liquid pressure from between her legs. Kaari raced down the trail. Past the hedgerow, the scotch broom, Jaska's old nets. As the boy slid off her back Kaari bolted for the biffy. That pungent odor of ammonia carbide? She knew it was the smell of her monthlies even before she pulled up her dress and sat on the wooden ring. What to make of that thick dark stain on her underwear, she wondered, she a woman who's not had monthlies in over five years?
*
Jaska didn't know socialism from rheumatism. The meetings in the Socialist Hall, what they talked about he didn't know or much care. Not a Hall Finn and not a church Finn. He kept to himself. His hump saw to that. It started as a knot of muscles that wouldn't unclamp. Round like a steel trawl float and anchored between the shoulder blades, it ached when the weather changed, when it rained, when the fogs rolled in thick. Thirty years in the making, this hump, this reminder of a body bent by gravity. His hump provoked perfunctory sympathy from the elderly Finnish women, so sorry, so sorry for him, kindly jokes from the men, unguarded looks of fascination from children. But not from the boy. He licked his index finger and traced the bulging outline. As if to say there. Or now.
Jaska stood before the mirror and lifted his shirt. There. Now. The hump was there. He turned sideways. Now it wasn't. A trick of his changing sight? Jaska arched his back, reached with his fingers. There, but just. He pulled his shoulders back. Always, when he did this, hot searing pain stung from vertebra to vertebra. Now it didn't. Jaska dropped his shirt. And began the longest letter he'd ever written to Mother. He wrote how at low tide sunrise pooled in the litter of clam shells glowing wet and pink. The boughs of Douglas Firs were scythes whittling the sky into pieces. He wrote of the freckled globes of the violet foxglove, how they held an interior light of their own. And yet for all this natural beauty, nothing, he wrote Mother, compared with that of their new lodger, a boy. Such a beautiful child and so light. When he carried him on his shoulders he seemed to weigh less than Gunderson's sacks of meal or salt. When he lifted the boy his back didn't ache a bit. His step was strong and sure. He had the strength of his youth. The boy had given him this, he wrote.
Mother wrote: Are you reading your Bible regular like? Are you training up the child right?
Jaska reads the gospels in their mother tongue. On this he and Kaari agree: Jesus sounds smarter in Finnish. Kaari reads to the boy from the New Testament. Accounts of miracles and healings. Sight to the blind. Strength returned to the halt and the lame. This earns a sly smile from the boy and nothing more. His stubbornness she believed to be evidence of some Finnish in him, though his hygienic habits spoke otherwise. He wouldn't use the outdoor biffy. He wouldn't use a fork or spoon. Though his fingernails were long as claws, he wouldn't let Kaari near them with her file. And of course, he wouldn't speak.
*
Of Jaska's love for the boy there is no limit: this is the enchantment of children. They reveal a capaciousness we didn't know we had. With the utmost care, he mixed flour and glue to make a mold of the boy's feet. For hours he boiled leather to render it soft and supple. With infinite patience, he sewed strips of leather to fashion shoes with a long firm tongue running from the heel to the calf. That the boy shows no interest in these proceedings bothered him not a bit. It is a kind of love to do for someone what they don't know or care needs doing: washing him, speaking gently, showing him the mesh and how to work the wooden tongue and meshboard. He loved to surprise the boy with gifts. He brought him floats from Soviet Russia and Japan and sweets of all sorts from Gunderson's, like double salted black licorice, ribbon candy, sticks of striped horehound. "Who you buying this all for? You got a girlfriend?" Gunderson liked to joke and Jaska, not a smiler by nature, could not help laughing. Yes, laughing.
One night, Jaska dreamt the town shook loose from its moorings. The hills turned liquid. The canneries, houses, docks—all heavy as granite—slid into the muddy water. The walnut-sized stone between his shoulder blades grew. Small scales of flint wrapped his ribs, crept over hip bones and along his groin. For a few glorious seconds he lay flat on the water, marvelously buoyant in his flint skin. And then his body which was not a boat, but a coffin, sank. Save me! Jaska gasped, bolting upright. The boy, sitting on Jaska's legs, stared calmly at him. A puddle of rank seawater pooled beneath the bed.
"Where do you get to at night, Boy?" Jaska whispered.
And the child, turned alabaster in the moonlight, merely smiled.
*
Though it was well into spring, the sky didn't know it yet. Darkness rained in long silver needles. Darkness rolled over the clouds in thick tufts of storm. The wolves' anguished melodies knocked from hill to hill, tree to tree.
"The wolves are in the walls," Kaari said to Jennie during her customary visit. "The wolves make all this wind." At the sound of her voice the boy, sitting in the metal tub, laughed and splashed about in the soapy water. She'd given up on him, left him there to bathe himself.
"No," Jennie said, "it's him," and pointed to the boy. "This is what happens when something is brought to a place where it shouldn't be." The boy, naked and dripping wet, now sat at the kitchen table stroking the shiny scales of a salmon Jaska had been keeping alive in the kitchen sink. Spellbound, they watched his hands. Flick. Flick. His long fingernails, sharp as knives, flashed. Scales flew through the air. They could not take their eyes off of him, even as he boiled the fish, its body jackknifed in the water and the head sticking out of the pot. He ate it like that, one half of the fish cooked, the head still alive.
At last Jennie spoke. "If he were mine, I'd pour vinegar in his eyes. If he doesn't blink, then you'd know for sure."
"Know what?" Kaari asked.
"If he's really a devil or not."
That night Kaari wrote to Mother. What is happening to us, oh Mother? Kalle's horse shattered Kalle's back with a single kick. The crows have augured themselves into the windows of the canneries, driving their beaks into their brains, dying even as their wings flapped powerful strokes. Each night the wolves come down from the hills and choir their sad canticles. Their forlorn ululation pierces the fogs. We are changing, Mother.
*
They awoke the next morning to bad news: all the milk at the dairy had gone on the blink, curdled even as the cows stood in their stanchions. The Chinese at the cannery were on strike. Pastor Juha's horse had been houghed. But it was the news about the twelve men lost at sea that put everyone on edge. From the Bible Jaska read to the boy about storms and seas and Jesus who calms such things. Kaari looked at the boy. In his eyes she discerned a preternatural coolness, a distance that suggested indeed, they were of two separate worlds that were only just now intersecting.
A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. "Mother," he said. One word. What cruel power that word wields. How it tugged on a thread from a deep dark center of herself where she is wilderness, empty and wild. "Mother," he repeated.
Kaari lunged, her hands circling his neck. Jaska leapt from his chair and shoved her, hard. Kaari fell to the floor and stayed there. Pretended to be more hurt than she was. But it was the boy Jaska looked after, making him tea and speaking to him in soothing tones as he hoisted him on his back and headed out into the widening night. That's the way it is between some brothers and sisters. Washed with different waters, that's how different they are. She was surprised it took this boy to show her that.
Kaari pulled herself from the floor. She would apologize later. Blame it on her monthlies. Outside the clouds had thinned. The moon bobbed timidly in the black sea of sky. Kaari pushed through the underbrush for the footpath. Outside Jennie's place, she stood and hollered. Waited. Then knocked on the door. Long tongues of water stood in the troughs of the cedar planking of the porch, which struck her as odd. It was not laundry day and the cedar shake overhang, though wobbly, was sound enough to keep the porch dry. "Jennie," Kaari called as she pushed open the door. From within the interior gloom she spied a small fire guttering in the grate. It was not like Jennie to leave a flame unattended. Kaari took a few steps toward the fire. The stench of marl overwhelmed. And this too was odd. Jennie might be simple, but she kept her place clean. "Jennie!" Kaari crossed for the kitchen. And there she was, sprawled on the floor, her face in buried in a thick slick of mud.
*
Every night darkness knocks on my windows. It wants to build a house inside of me one splintered stick at a time. Like the turning and lengthening of a lock's tongue finding rest in its ward, darkness turns and lengthens. Closes. I am quite shut in now.
P.S. There is something wrong with the child and I do not mean his feet. What are you going to do??
Kaari set the letter aside. Jaska sat by the fire with the boy. So much trouble, this boy. And now Jennie. Dead and it made no sense. Nor did the riot at the cannery or the murder on the docks. Kaari looked at Jaska. "We are changing," she said.
The boy found a stash of Mother's letters, had them spread out, had folded them into shapes. His hands danced through the letters. Which ones, his hands seemed to say, shall feed the fire?
Jaska sat watching the flames rise and fall, rise and fall. A letter sailed into the grate. Then the leather shoes and straps. The boy laughed.
"Do something. Do something," Kaari said. Once to herself, the second time to Jaska. Jaska nodded slowly though she could see that his eyes were wet with tears.
*
They agreed they would take him to Seaside. They'd go early the next morning. They'd say they found him, abandoned. They would say he was touched, one of God's simples, in need of aid. Perhaps an orphanage in Portland would take him. Surely a child this beautiful would be adopted.
Kaari rose first. She listened to Jaska and the boy breathing quietly beside each other. So beautiful, so beautiful, this boy. In the weak light, his skin seemed to glow translucent. Jennie was right. Better to put such creatures back where they came from. Mother, she would like to write, did Christ our Savior forgive us of every sin? And did he, Mother, forgive us of wrongdoing we knew we would commit and were not in the least bit sorry for?
Kaari bent over him, her shadow clothing his body. She put her mouth near his, took in the sweet breath. His dark eyes snapped open. "Mother," he said. Kaari fell back on her heels, scrambled down the stairs and out the door.
*
When Jaska woke the fire had burned to glowing coals. Outside the kitchen window the moon bobbed luminous on the dark water of the bay. In an hour the water would swallow it. Dawn would break in a grey wash. Take me, pull me out or under. I'm ready. He'd tell the boy they were on a journey. They'd make a special visit for horehound candy in Seaside. Be it right or wrong, a crime or an act of kindness, he would not let himself think.
"Boy?" he called. The child liked to sleep. Sometimes in the bathtub, sometimes under the bed. "Boy?" Jaska hoisted himself from the chair, up the stairs, down again. To the porch, yard. "Boy?"
What new trouble he would or had already caused, this too, he did not want to think about. Kaari's voice rang in his ears: Do something. Do something.
*
Kaari groped through the waist-high swordfern, plodded along in darkness over the trail and toward the cliffs. The caviling of the owls wobbled low and ominous. Nattering rattle, whickering wind, how to harvest this darkness? She'll put it on her tongue, like castor oil. Swallow it down. That's what she'll write Mother. The brittle fog gloving the trees, she'll write about that. And dawn. How it draws darkness to itself. Neither a blessing nor a curse, it simply happens; their only job is to navigate it.
Near the top of the trail Kaari allowed herself to lie on a bed of moss and watch the sky warm from pigeon grey to eggshell blue. All around her green shoots of the bulbs she'd planted knifed through the mossy sward. Kaari rolled to her elbows, stood and peered over the edge of the cliff.
The fog thinned to scraps of cloud and the distillation of light through it, radiant. A drawstring pulled on her abdomen. Wasn't that Jaska down on the flats? He'd not brought his thin planks to walk on, or a pole for balance. Just Jaska ankle-deep in the marl. And the boy! His white hair danced in the wind. He hopped about in the mud farther away from shore, farther from Jaska. Oh, you fool, she wanted to shout. Who is the child here? Take him to Seaside, or give him back to the water, for this land surely cannot abide him. Instead she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted Jaska's name.
*
Tiny sand flies, sharp as grit, hurled themselves at his face. A litter of mussel shells split open glowing lavender, glistening wet like eyes. All that separates us from where we want to be is a bit of water, bits of glass. Mother wrote this in her last letter. We must walk on water, she wrote. Walk into that light. And so light, this silver glass, this water, so strong surely he will walk on it. Before him, in the shallow surf, the child stood. Rising through the platen silver, so perfect and so perfectly needing him.
Jaska's feet moved of their own accord, carrying him closer to the child. The flats shone like a mirror. The child stood gazing at him. Brilliant light everywhere. Jaska shielded his eyes from the glare. Only then did he notice the child cast no shadow. Oh what, Mother, oh what would you say about this? The child beckoned with a hand, urged him into the water. And then a voice, sharp and shrill from the heights: "Jaska—don't!" A dark crease, a crumple to the light, that voice. At the sound of it, he shook his head, as if it was, like these flies, mere irritants.
Jaska took another step toward the boy. The water lapped at the boy's knees, then his thighs, his waist. The water lapped at Jaska's ankles, shins, knees. The trick, Mother wrote, to walking on water has to do with faith. I'm blind, quite blind now. And I can tell you this with certainty. You close your eyes and you keep walking.
Dizzy with light, blinded by the glare off the wet sand and shells, Jaska walked with the hesitant toddling steps of a small child. How far would faith take him? A game, a trick. The child, now past the safety buoy, was playing with him. Beckoning him. Pretending to be caught up in a net, then jumping free, splashing, calling gaily. He'd not figured the boy would be so quick and agile in water. But just as he was about to grasp something solid, an arm, a leg, the boy swam beyond Jaska's reach. Not a good game, not with the tide coming in.
Jaska waded further. The water heaved. The boy plummeted. Then reappeared. Not smiling now, but thrashing and flailing; it seemed now he really was tangled in the net. "Father!" he cried, his voice thin and spectral. "Save me!"
"Hang on!" Jaska called even as another swell lifted and dragged the boy under.
"Jaska!" Kaari's voice again, this time much closer. Jaska turned. She was setting planks, a rope over her shoulder. "Help him," Jaska called. She had the strength of three women now. The boy had given her that. She could get the rope to him, he knew. "Throw!" he hollered, pointing to where the boy's head crested briefly, then vanished.
Kaari looked at the child, gasping and choking, and at her brother, mired thigh-deep in the mud. Oh, Mother! One rope and two in peril. Is it a sin to let go the one you shouldn't have?
Kaari set another plank. One end of the rope she tied around her waist, the other she looped as a lasso. She had lost Bucky because he had wanted to be lost. She had lost her child because he was never hers to have. The boy in the water, he wasn't hers either. But Jaska, to his hips now in the mud, he was a different matter. For what she was about to do, he would not forgive her. That would be her burden to bear. But it's a kind of love to do what must be done because no one else can or will. And it's a kind of love to let go. Kaari swung the lasso once, twice. On three she let it sail where it landed true. Impervious to his noise, his threats, his anguish, Kaari cinched the rope tight. And hand over hand she started the long haul.
