Part 8 (2/2)
Of course Alex believed that Kent had started that nonsense not because he was really thirsty but because he was crudely excited by the sight of Sally's breast. He thought it was high time Savanna was transferred to the bottle-she was nearly six months old. And he thought Sally was far too casual about the whole procedure, sometimes going around the kitchen doing things with one hand while the infant guzzled. With Kent sneaking peeks and Peter referring to Mommy's milk jugs. That came from Kent, Alex said. Kent was a sneak and a troublemaker and the possessor of a dirty mind.
”Well, I have to keep doing those things,” said Sally.
”Nursing's not one of the things you have to do. You could have her on the bottle tomorrow.”
”I will soon. Not quite tomorrow, but soon.”
But here she is, still letting Savanna and the milk jugs dominate the picnic.
The Kool-Aid is poured, then the champagne. Sally and Alex touch gla.s.ses, with Savanna in their way. Sally has her sip and wishes she could have more. She smiles at Alex to communicate this wish, and maybe the wish that it would be nice to be alone with him. He drinks his champagne, and as if her sip and smile had been enough to soothe him, he starts in on the picnic. She instructs him as to which sandwiches have the mustard he likes and which have the mustard she and Peter like and which are for Kent who likes no mustard at all.
While this is going on, Kent manages to slip in behind her and finish up her champagne. Peter must have seen him do this, but for some peculiar reason he does not tell on him. Sally discovers what has happened sometime later and Alex never knows about it at all, because he soon forgets there was anything left in her gla.s.s and packs it neatly away with his own, while telling the boys about dolomite. They listen, presumably, while they gobble up the sandwiches and ignore the devilled eggs and crab salad and grab the tarts.
Dolomite, Alex says. That is the thick caprock they see. Underneath it is shale, clay turned into rock, very fine, fine grained. Water works through the dolomite and when it gets to the shale it just lies there, it can't get through the thin layers, the fine grain. So the erosion-that's the destruction of the dolomite-works and works its way back to the source, eats a channel back, and the caprock develops vertical joints; do they know what vertical means?
”Up and down,” says Kent lackadaisically.
”Weak vertical joints, and they get to lean out and then they leave creva.s.ses behind them and after millions of years they break off altogether and go tumbling down the slope.”
”I have to go,” says Kent.
”Go where?”
”I have to go pee.”
”Oh for G.o.d's sake, go.”
”Me too,” says Peter.
Sally clamps her mouth down on the automatic injunction to be careful. Alex looks at her and approves of the clamping down. They smile faintly at each other.
Savanna has fallen asleep, her lips slack around the nipple. With the boys out of the way, it's easier to detach her. Sally can burp her, settle her on her blanket, without worrying about an exposed breast. If Alex finds the sight distasteful-she knows he does, he dislikes the whole conjunction of s.e.x and nourishment, his wife's breast turned into udders-he can look away, and he does.
As she b.u.t.tons herself up there comes a cry, not sharp but lost, diminis.h.i.+ng, and Alex is on his feet before she is, running along the path. Then a louder cry getting closer. It's Peter.
”Kent falled in. Kent falled in.”
His father yells, ”I'm coming.”
Sally will always believe that she knew at once, even before she heard Peter's voice she knew what had happened. If any accident happened it would not be to her six-year-old who was brave but not inventive, not a show-off. It would be to Kent. She could see exactly how. Peeing into the hole, balancing on the rim, teasing Peter, teasing himself.
He was alive. He was lying far down in the rubble at the bottom of the creva.s.se, but he was moving his arms, struggling to push himself up. Struggling so feebly. One leg caught under him, the other oddly bent.
”Can you carry the baby?” she said to Peter. ”Go back to the picnic and put her down and watch her. That's my good boy. My good strong boy.”
Alex was getting down into the hole, scrambling down, telling Kent to stay still. Getting down in one piece was just possible. It would be getting Kent out that was hard.
Should she run to the car and see if there was a rope? Tie the rope around a tree trunk. Maybe tie it around Kent's body so she could lift him when Alex raised him up to her.
There wouldn't be a rope. Why should there be a rope?
Alex had reached him. He bent and lifted him. Kent gave a beseeching scream of pain. Alex draped him around his shoulders, head hanging down on one side and useless legs-one so oddly protruding-on the other. He rose, stumbled a couple of steps, and while still hanging on to Kent dropped onto his knees. He had decided to crawl, and was making his way-Sally could understand this now-to the rubble which partly filled the far end of the creva.s.se. He shouted some order to her without raising his head, and though she could not make out a single word she understood. She got up off her knees-why was she on her knees?-and pushed through some saplings to the rim where the rubble came to within perhaps three feet of the surface. Alex was crawling along with Kent dangling from him like a shot deer.
She called, ”I'm here. I'm here.”
Kent would have to be raised up by his father, pulled to the solid shelf of rock by his mother. He was a skinny boy who had not yet reached his first spurt of growth, but he seemed heavy as a bag of cement. Sally's arms could not do it on the first try. She s.h.i.+fted her position, crouching instead of lying flat on her stomach, and with the whole power of her shoulders and chest and with Alex supporting and shoving Kent's body from behind they heaved him over. Sally fell back with him in her arms and saw his eyes open, roll back in his head as he fainted again.
When Alex had clawed and heaved his way out they collected the other children and drove to the Collingwood Hospital. There seemed to be no internal injury. Both legs were broken. One break was clean, as the doctor put it; the other leg was shattered.
”Kids have to be watched every minute in there,” he said to Sally, who had gone in with Kent while Alex managed the other children. ”Haven't they got any warning signs up?”
With Alex, she thought, he would have spoken differently. That's the way boys are. Turn your back and they're tearing around where they shouldn't be. ”Boys will be boys.”
Her grat.i.tude-to G.o.d, whom she did not believe in, and Alex, whom she did-was so immense that she resented nothing.
It was necessary for Kent to spend the next half year out of school, strung up for the first while in a rented hospital bed. Sally picked up and took back his school a.s.signments, which he completed in no time. Then he was encouraged to go ahead with Extra Projects. One of these was Travels and Explorations-Choose Your Country.
”I want to pick what n.o.body else would pick,” he said.
Now Sally told him something she had not told to another soul. She told him how she was attracted to remote islands. Not to the Hawaiian Islands or the Canaries or the Hebrides or the Isles of Greece, where everybody wanted to go, but to small or obscure islands n.o.body talked about and which were seldom if ever visited. Ascension, Tristan da Cunha, Chatham Islands, and Christmas Island and Desolation Island and the Faeroes. She and Kent began to collect every sc.r.a.p of information they could find about these places, not allowing themselves to make anything up. And never telling Alex what they were doing.
”He would think we were off our heads,” said Sally.
Desolation Island's main boast was of a vegetable of great antiquity, a unique cabbage. They imagined wors.h.i.+p ceremonies for it, costumes, cabbage parades in its honor.
And before he was born, Sally told her son, she had seen on television the inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha disembarking at Heathrow Airport, having all been evacuated due to a great earthquake on their island. How strange they looked, docile and dignified, like human creatures from another century. They must have adjusted to London, more or less, but when the volcano quieted down they wanted to go home.
When Kent could go back to school things changed, of course, but he still seemed old for his age, patient with Savanna who had grown venturesome and stubborn, and with Peter who always burst into the house as if on a gale of calamity. And he was especially courteous to his father, bringing him the paper that had been rescued from Savanna and carefully refolded, pulling out his chair at dinnertime.
”Honor to the man who saved my life,” he might say, or, ”Home is the hero.”
He said this rather dramatically though not at all sarcastically. Yet it got on Alex's nerves. Kent got on his nerves, had done so even before the deep-hole drama happened.
”Cut that out,” he said, and complained privately to Sally.
”He's saying you must have loved him, because you rescued him.”
”Christ, I'd have rescued anybody.”
”Don't say that in front of him. Please.”
When Kent got to high school things improved with his father. He chose to study science. He picked the hard sciences, not the soft earth sciences, and even this roused no opposition in Alex. The harder the better.
But after six months at college Kent disappeared. People who knew him a little-there did not seem to be anyone claiming to be a friend-said that he had talked of going to the West Coast. And a letter came, just as his parents were deciding to go to the police. He was working in a Canadian Tire store in a suburb just north of Toronto. Alex went to see him there, to order him back to his education. But Kent refused, said he was very happy with the job he had now, and was making good money, or soon would be, as he got promoted. Then Sally went to see him, without telling Alex, and found him jolly and ten pounds heavier. He said it was the beer. He had friends now.
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