The Island Walkers Read Online Free PDF Page A

a whisper.
    “Of course you do,” Margaret said, trying to hurry him past this crisis. “We all do.”
    “I don’t,” Joe said flippantly. He was staring at his book.
    “You don’t ?” said Jamie.
    “Some nice big guy in the sky,” Joe said.
    “That’s enough,” Alf said.
    “The great white father who thinks it’s fine if people die of cancer, or starve to death —”
    “ I said, That’s enough! ” Alf couldn’t stand his son’s moralizing, that narrow, superior tone he fell into sometimes, telling them all what was good for them.
    They continued eating in silence, in a heat pierced by the whine of cicadas. Jamie’s shocked gaze kept returning to Alf. Alf winked and the boy’s face twitched, but he kept looking at Alf, unappeased. Alf sensed he was hoping for some reassurance in the face of the strange, bleak sense of aftermath that had settled on the table. It wasn’t justthat he had yelled at Joe, it was what Joe had said, about not believing in God. What do I know about God, Alf thought. He went to church, but this was mainly a social thing, a seconding of Margaret’s great involvement there. Occasionally he prayed. But to Whom, what Power? Waist deep in his tomato plants, Bob Horsfall grunted at him, his face twisted with emotions he couldn’t speak. Alf stared at his plate. He couldn’t imagine Horsfall’s life of total, enveloping silence, a life underwater. Sometimes he heard Horsfall’s wife shrieking in the house like an animal in pain.
    A large ant crawled up Red’s tongue. He gulped wetly: gone.
    Margaret said, “Joe tells me you had a visitor?”
    Her tone, at least on the surface, was casually interested. But Alf knew her too well. He heard buried criticism, alarm.
    For a moment their eyes met. Some recognition was there, some quickening, beyond the scope of their daily lives. But it was unsustainable. He looked away and frowned at Joe, who kept reading The Anvil of Stalingrad . Why had he told his mother about Doyle’s visit? Surely the boy had some notion of the trouble he would cause.
    “From a union?” Margaret persisted, in her tone of cheerful innocence.
    “Ah, just doing his rounds,” Alf said, reaching for another sandwich. “He’ll be on to some other town by now.”
    As he said this, he realized it was probably not true: the man would not retreat so easily. But he wanted to placate her.
    “I was surprised you talked to him.”
    “You’d prefer me to throw my hammer at him?” Alf said, and was gratified to hear Jamie laugh.
    “Well, no ,” she said, as if he actually might have. “I just thought, with the foreman’s job still up in the air …”
    “I think that’s why Dad took him down to the river,” Joe said. Alf glanced at his son, not his usual ally in these quarrels.
    “To keep him out of sight,” Joe added.
    Margaret cut into her tomato.
    “I just think we have to be careful,” she said.
    “I was careful, Margaret,” Alf said in a soft voice, suppressing his anger. She did not meet his stare. He looked down at his plate smeared with crumbs and pickle juice. The cicadas drilled through the heat, his brain. Some large emotion, who knew what it was, seemed in the offing, but distantly, immured in ice, shining like a sea he could not reach. He was sorry he’d told his wife about applying for the foreman’s job. It clearly meant as much to her, perhaps more, than it did to him. Sensing he was being watched, he looked up and saw Penny gazing at him with infinite seriousness, her eyes locked on his. She might have been reading his mind, reading some obscure current of thought he could hardly make out himself.
    Sickened by the hatred and violence boiling through the town (one worker had died of a heart attack after his family had been threatened), Alf had left the strike a few weeks before it finally limped to its ignominious conclusion. Margaret had inherited a few thousand dollars from an aunt, and she urged him to use it to start the carpentry