Blaze Island by Catherine Bush

Author:Catherine Bush
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773101064
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2020-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

. . .

Six months after Anna Turi’s visit, Miranda begged her father to drive them across the wintry island to the shop in the town of Blaze where they had once purchased books about rocks and trees and flowers to be her schoolbooks, so that she could buy a notebook of her own. As she slipped the notebook under her mattress, wood stove ticking below, she made a private resolution. She, too, would keep a record of the weather. All kinds of weather.

Like the day two weeks later when, after a fierce sou’easter, all the men in Pummelly including her father walked up along shore to Pummelly Cove, out by the ocean. They walked, didn’t ski or skidoo or snowshoe, because there was so little snow. Only rain had fallen as the wind howled, and not much rain at that, the wind blowing harder than it ever used to do in winter, Pat Green said. The sea, so high and ferocious, had toppled the big boulders that waves had been smoothing for centuries, toppled and cracked them. There were no ballycatters, no blue ice coating the tumbles of rocks, no turquoise pans rafting and reaching in frozen clashes for the sky, cutting off the hard and gnawing waves from the land. Miranda and Caleb and his cousins, who had followed the men, were there to observe their soberness and to be yelled at not to go close to the water. It was unsettling, even for Miranda — where was all the ice that had been there the year before?

Her father came home and wrote in The Book of Storms; he posted photographs of the broken rocks and storm details, including wind speed, to the online weather atlas. No doubt Harry Pratt wrote in his weather notebook, too. The next day Sylvia would walk out to observe the fallen rocks but rather than the rocks it was her father’s moods that Miranda kept an eye on. He had been less morose since Anna’s visit. Alongside the secrets of the past, new secrets were infiltrating their life, and these secrets included Anna, whose voice, by turns gruff and lilting, sometimes drifted from under the door of her father’s study. He must be calling Anna over the internet, Miranda presumed. In the beginning, her father seemed to be trying to convince Anna of something. This was a tone. Most of their conversations took place at the cabin. Miranda had overheard him say as much. I’ll call you from the cabin.

The new secrets pulled him away from the world right in front of him, so that it was up to her to tug him back. Come out and look at the sheet of ice over the cove. Let’s go snowshoeing.

Then there was the day when dark-red blood flowed out of Miranda for the first time, another kind of weather. A Saturday afternoon, her father wasn’t around. Miranda called Sylvia, as Sylvia had asked her to do, and Sylvia came over with supplies and raspberry leaf tea to ease the new throbbing from deep inside.

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