The Island Walkers Read Online Free PDF

business he’d been talking about for years, talking about, in fact, from the first weeks of their courtship, in England. Walking with her on the downs above her house (the air trembling with the drone of bombers setting out for Germany like a swarm of dark bees flooding towards the distant Channel), he had discovered his calling. “I’m going to build houses,” he told her in a rush of excitement. In Attawan before the war he had apprenticed with the town’s finest builder, Bute Erikson. He’d learned how to build houses from scratch: he could do carpentry, electrical work, plumbing, cement. But it was not until he met Margaret that he glimpsed his future whole. “I’ll build you a house,” he promised her. “We’ll pick out the best lot in the North End. Whatever your little old heart desires.”
    In France, sitting with his back to some ruined wall, with black smoke leaning off the horizon, he had amused himself by sketching out various versions of their future house, tucking the sheets intoletters he sent to England. Margaret made drawings too and mailed them on. The house became part of their mutual dream, a shield against the war.
    Back in Canada, he found there wasn’t enough money to set up on his own, not right away. And Bute Erikson was dead, so he went to work in the mills. To save money, he and Margaret lived with Alf’s parents, in their brick cottage on the east side of the Island. But Margaret and Mabel – both of them English, but from different classes — got along like oil and water. His nerves strained by the war, Alf thought he would go mad with their bickering. He and Margaret soon moved out to a rented place around the corner, at the bottom of West. In 1948, he got involved in the movement to bring a union to Bannerman’s — involved with Cary Winner, the organizer from Montreal who charmed him into thinking that socialism was the only way forward. Yes, he’d bought it hook, line, and sinker — the vision of a world where all were equal, all shared. But after months of preparations, the strike had faltered in just a few weeks. (“Nothing worse than a strike gone bad,” Cary had told Alf, not long before the organizer washed his hands of the whole business.) Margaret’s money arrived in the nick of time.
    Alf bought second-hand tools, and a Ford pickup truck with a stake box he sanded and varnished to make look like new. On the doors, he stencilled ALF WALKER AND SON, BUILDERS . (Joe was just a baby at the time, but Alf had been thrilled to include him, as though he were creating not just a business but a dynasty.) He papered the town with advertisements. But the business had not come. His part in the strike had sabotaged him, he believed, his reputation as a troublemaker had ensured that no one with enough money to build a house would hire him. After two years he’d built only one — and been left holding the bills for more than five thousand dollars when his client skipped town. The bank took his truck and most of his larger tools. He managed to keep a few screwdrivers and saws. They still hung in their neat, graded rows above his basement workbench, a reminder of his failure. There were other reminders, like the plans for the CapeCod-style house he’d never built for Margaret. They’d had them drawn up by an architect in Johnsonville, in the first heady days of the business. He’d noticed them the other day, rolled in oilcloth and stuck up in the cellar joists with his father’s old fishing rods. He hadn’t had the heart to take them down.
    A manager at Bannerman’s — a fishing crony of his father’s — had wrangled Alf’s old job back for him, and he climbed again to the sixth-floor knitting room where the tall machines waited for him in a familiar, mocking stillness. For all his efforts, it seemed, nothing had changed.
    Thirteen years passed. The previous summer, his mother had died of cancer. They had buried her, a stick-woman with an expression of long-set