The Nature of Water and Air by Regina McBride

Author:Regina McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

· 19 ·

I WENT THROUGH THE DREGS of My mother’s old china and found a discolored teapot painted with violets, the inside surface etched with hairline cracks. I wrapped it in the paper that Angus Kilheen had wrapped my sugar bowl in and went to the traveler camp to find him.

The early afternoon sky was overcast as I crossed the fields, a smell of rain on the wind. The camp was quiet except for an old woman sitting on a rock near a dead fire, banging with a hammer on a piece of tin. The rhythm of her hammer slowed as she watched me walk to Angus Kilheen’s caravan at the bottom of the hill. The wind shuddered in the flap of black vinyl that served as his window shade. The horse, disengaged from its harness, stood in a clump of grass, switching its ears and tail at me.

I knocked on the caravan door three times and when there was no answer, I opened it. Standing at the threshold looking at the interior, the wind rushed after me, blowing the black shade open and closed on the small unfastened window. Against the farthest wall a bed on a scaffold of boards was covered with a blanket; something Arabian-looking: a fraught pattern of dark reds and black. A dull fleece lay rolled up at the bottom of the bed.

On a wall above the bed hung a holy card depicting the Virgin of the Sea, meek, Spanish-looking, in a crown and a great dress, suspended over the tides. With every gust through the window the picture twisted on its nail and fluttered against the dry wood where it was posted. On a small shelf rigged to the same wall stood a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary missing one of her praying hands, a votive candle in a dark red glass, and a framed black-and-white photograph of a nun with glasses and a wide crooked smile. The presence of all the religious images confused me, not fitting with the man I had imagined.

I looked on the shelves where his things were arranged: an open carton of milk sitting in a bowl of water, a bit of carton with two eggs in it, boxes of matches and tea, a vial of paraffin. On another sat a box full of contraptions and tools, tin bowls and pots, some half made, some dismantled.

The wind blew in intermittent gusts, rocking the caravan on its hinges. Except for the sound of an occasional car on the distant road everything was quiet. My nerves fine-tuned themselves to the place. This far inland I barely heard the sea. I leaned back against an area of wall and watched the horse grazing in the high grass. After an hour of waiting, a light rain began. The horse whinnied and I reached my hand out the door to him. He came up close, pushing his great, sweet head against my chest and stomach. I stroked him awhile and he moved away, looking out into the empty field, resigning himself to the rain.

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