Gull Island by Anna Porter

Author:Anna Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

22

I WENT UP THE STEPS with my face turned toward the lake because I didn’t want to look into my mother’s room, but I couldn’t resist a glance. The branch of the big oak was leaning in through her broken window, as if it had wanted to visit her. That oak was her favorite tree because, she said, it cast a calming shadow over her space, allowing her to relax quietly even when everyone was noisy. Oaks, she told us, are famous for their endurance. The Green Man of legends was made of oak. She used to watch downy woodpeckers climb up the trunk seeking worms in the crevices of the bark. Yellow warblers used to sit on its branches, waiting for their turn at the feeders—her feeders, as we thought of them, because she had brought them up to the cottage and had climbed up the wobbly ladder to hang them on a branch close to her window. One summer a finch built a nest in the oak and Mother would watch its engineering antics through her binoculars. She took a broom handle to the red squirrel that tried to shove its face into the nest. Of course, she couldn’t guard it all day and night. Something—Father had said the snakes—had eaten the fledglings and destroyed the nest. “Snakes,” he said, “are not particular about what they kill. Birds, rats, mice, and they don’t get emotional about babies. Eat them all.”

I found the screwdriver in Father’s red toolbox. The hammer was where I had dropped it, near the open door to the basement. Determined, I made my way into its murky depths, without a flashlight. I used the screwdriver to loosen the lever and hammered at the piece of wood that was still in place from my earlier efforts. I ran upstairs when I heard the gurgling sound in the pipe, and turned on the kitchen tap. Coughing and spluttering and giant hiccups, but the water finally gushed out, brown, muddy, with reddish pebbles, but it was such a great sight that I celebrated with a full glass of my father’s whiskey.

I couldn’t remember when I had drunk the rest, but it was hardly surprising, with the storm, the cold, the damage to my mother’s room. It had been late and I had needed some solace.

I sat at the puzzle table and examined my injuries. The scratch on my arm was deep and red, but it hadn’t bled during the night, nor had my legs. The back of my head was still tender but not bleeding, and the bandage on my forehead was still in place. The tips of my fingers, which had been scratched by the bits of broken glass, were still sore but not so painful, I hadn’t even been aware of them when I worked on the pump. My right shoulder ached, I thought from the fall off the dock. The old injury on my left hand was sore and raised, as if I had just burned it.

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