Eurydice

The boat came through the reef at half tide, four men at the oars, two more in the bow keeping watch on the rocks to either side. I sat in the stern with my hands loose in my lap. They hadn’t bound them.

There was nowhere to go.

The channel was narrow. On both sides the reef worked constantly, that low continuous sound like breathing, the surge pressing through the rock formations and pushing back out. Salt on the air, strong where the channel kept the water moving through exposed basalt.

The bow ground up onto gray sand and stopped.

They worked without looking at me. A crate of provisions wrapped in sailcloth. Two oilskin bundles. A canvas sack of line. A hatchet with a worn handle. A knife in leather, recently oiled.

A rifle, lock wrapped in oilcloth, set apart from the other supplies on the thwart.

One cartridge on the floorboards beside it.

Not with the other goods. On the boards. Apart.

Glenarvan at the stern rail that morning. His face. The look of a man who had decided this was right while acknowledging, in the tightness around his eyes, that the doing isn’t comfortable. The cartridge was outside the proceedings. The addition that a man of conscience makes when the official and the private aren’t the same.

The man in the shallows held the gunwale and waited. I stepped out over the bow.

Cold hit my feet immediately through the leather. The sand shifted under my feet with each small surge. I stood there while the man stacked the supplies above the tideline.

The rifle last, carried separately, set on the dry sand with the cartridge placed beside it.

The man walked back to the bow and pushed off.

The oarsmen pulled. The boat came alongside the Duncan and the falls came down and the boat rose. The anchor chain came up and the engine turned over and the ship moved. The bow swinging north, then faster as she came onto her heading.

I watched her go.

She grew smaller in stages and then the hull dropped below the horizon and only the smoke of her stack remained, and then the wind took the smoke and there was nothing.

I sat on a flat rock above the storm wrack. The rock still held the warmth of the day.

She would have told me to get up. She would have said: the light is going and you haven’t looked at the island. Get up. Do the thing that needs doing. She would have been right. I sat on the rock anyway.

When the dark was complete I went back and moved the supplies above the storm line by feel. The rifle last. I picked it up and stood with it for a moment.

Good balance.

Before dawn I picked up the rifle and loaded it and sat on the flat rock with it across my knees.

I don’t want to do it on the beach. The beach is where they put me. I want to do it somewhere that’s mine, not theirs. Somewhere I’ve found, not been placed.

I rewrapped the rifle and set it back with the supplies.

In the morning I turned and looked at the island.

From the south beach I could see all of it. I could see the edges of it. The entire extent of the world I was entering, visible in one look.

It was small. I’d known it was small, I’d seen it from the water, but standing on the beach and looking at it in the morning light was different from seeing it from the water.

From the beach I could see all of it. From this position, standing in the middle of the south beach, I could see from the north reef arm to the south reef arm and from the waterline to the summit of the point. I could see the edges of it.

The entire extent of the world I was entering was visible from where I stood, and the entire extent of it wasn’t large.

The world is going to be this. Not what I can see from the ship’s rail or the harbor or the city street. This. All of it visible from this beach at once.

I walked the island that first day.

Not exploring, mapping.

Going over it systematically, the way you go over any space you’re going to be responsible for. I started at the south beach and I went north along the west side and around the north reef and down the east side and back along the south. I noted the spring on the south slope, the grave on the high ground below the point. I noted the places that would be sheltered from the westerly and the places that wouldn’t be.

The island took three hours to walk around. At the end of the three hours I’d seen all of it.

I went to the south beach and sat on the flat rock that I’d later call nothing and I looked at the water. The afternoon light on the water. The reef making its sound on both sides of the channel.

Three hours. The world is three hours around. I’ve been in larger rooms.

I didn’t use the rifle that first day.

I’d thought I would.

I’d come to the island expecting to use it, planning to use it, thinking about the morning I’d use it. The first day I was too busy.

Too much to map.

Too much to understand. By the time I sat on the rock in the afternoon light I was tired in as someone does who has been outside all day doing physical things, and tired wasn’t the right state for what I’d planned, and I put it off to the next day.