His grandfather was there. He had a heavy sack over his shoulder and a rod and reel.
“Hullo, Luke,” he called. He swung the sack down hard on the concrete path. “I had a good day,” he said. He gave a crack-lipped grin. “Take a look at this.” He lifted the end of the sack, tumbling its contents in a cascade of shining bodies. Luke was dazzled. Some of them were still alive and flipping their tails on the rough concrete, throwing light.
The boy restored the dagger to its sheath, rested it on the edge of the sink, and stepped down among them. “Terrific,” he said.
“Yairs,” the man breathed, "pretty good, eh? You stoppin’ the night?”
Luke nodded, moving quickly away to catch a fish that was flapping off into the coarse grass. It continued to flutter in his hands.
“Good,” said the man. He went off to fetch buckets and knives. “We'll get started, eh?”
While his grandfather went through into the kitchen to get clean basins, Luke took one of the buckets round to the side of the house and filled it from the tank. He came back staggering.
“Good,” his grandfather said. “Let's get into it.”
They seated themselves side by side on the step and worked swiftly.
It was a job Luke was used to, had been skilled at since he was nine years old. The blade went in along the belly; the guts spilled, a lustrous silver-blue, and were tossed into the one bucket; in the other you plunged to the forearm and rinsed.
The work went on quickly, silently; they seldom talked much till after tea. Luke lost himself in the rhythm of it, a different rhythm from the one he had given himself to earlier. A kind of drowsiness came over him that had to do with the falling darkness, with the repeated flashing of the knife and his swinging to left and right between buckets, and with the closeness of so much raw flesh and blood. His arms and bare legs were covered with fish-scales. His face, neck, chest were flecked with gobbets of the thin fish blood.
At last they were done. The fish, all scaled and gutted, were in the basins. One bucket was full of guts, the other with water that was mostly blood. The doorstep too was all shiny with scales (Luke would come out later and flush it clean).
“Good,” his grandfather said. “We've done well.” He carried in the basins of fish, then took the two heavy buckets and poured them into a dip in the sand where they could be covered. Luke sat, too drowsy to move; but stirred himself at last. He went round to the side of the house and let water run over his legs, and washed the scales from his neck and arms.
It was almost dark. You could hear the sea washing against the rocks below, a regular crashing; but further out it was still, and he stood a moment, clean again, drying off in the breeze, and watched it. He felt oddly happy — for no reason, there was no reason. Just happy, as earlier with the kites. It was like a change of weather, a sudden transformation, that might not last but for as long as it did would fill the whole sky and touch everything around with its steady light. He was back in the stream again — one of the streams.
He went in and began to dress: jeans (not caring that he was still half wet), T-shirt. His grandfather was frying fish for their tea. The fish smelled good and he was hungry.
“Set the table, Luke,” his grandfather told him. “She'll be ready in a jiff”
So he set the two places at the kitchen table, then stood for a moment at the open door and looked out into the dark. It seemed larger, more comprehensible, because it lay over the sea and you saw it as an ocean whose name you knew and knew the other shore of, glittering full under the early stars; though the dark was bigger than any ocean, bigger even than the sky with its scattered lights.
“Right,” the old man called. “We're all set, Luke. You hungry?”
The boy turned back to the lighted table. His grandfather, humming a little, was just setting down the pan.
The Sun in Winter
It was dark in the church, even at noon. Diagonals of chill sunlight were stacked between the piers, sifting down luminous dust, and so thick with it that they seemed more substantial almost than stone. He had a sense of two churches, one raised vertically on Gothic arches and a thousand years old, the other compounded of light and dust, at an angle to the first and newly created in the moment of his looking. At the end of the nave, set far back on a platform, like a miraculous vision that the arctic air had immediately snap-frozen, was a Virgin with a child at her knee. The Michael-angelo. So this church he was in must be the Onze Vrouw.
“Excuse me.”
The voice came from a pew two rows away, behind him: a plain woman of maybe forty, with the stolid look and close-pored waxy skin of those wives of donors he had been looking at earlier in the side panels of local altars. She was buttoned to the neck in a square-shouldered raincoat and wore a scarf rather than a wimple, but behind her as she knelt might have been two or three miniatures of herself — infant daughters with their hands strictly clasped — and if he peeped under her shoes, he thought, there would be a monster of the deep, a sad-eyed amorphous creature with a hump to its back, gloomily committed to evil but sick with love for the world it glimpsed, all angels, beyond the hem of her skirt.
“You're not Flemish, are you,” she was saying, half in question (that was her politeness) and half as fact.
“No,” he admitted. “Australian.”
They were whispering — this was after all a church — but “Ah, the New World" was no more than a breath. She made it sound so romantic, so much more of a venture than he had ever seen it, that he laughed outright, then checked himself; but not before his laughter came back to him, oddly transformed, from the hollow vault. No Australian in those days thought of himself as coming under so grand a term. Things are different now.
“You see,” she told him in a delighted whisper, "I guessed! I knew you were not Flemish — that, if you don't mind, is obvious — so I thought, I'll speak to him in English, or maybe on this occasion I'll try Esperanto. Do you by any chance know Esperanto?” He shook his head. “Well, never mind,” she said, "there's plenty of time.” She did not say for what. “But you are Catholic.”
Wrong again. Well, not exactly, but his “No” was emphatic, she was taken aback. She refrained from putting the further question and looked for a moment as if she did not know how to proceed. Then following the turn of his head she found the Madonna. “Ah,” she said, "you are interested in art. You have come for the Madonna.” Relieved at last to have comprehended him she regarded the figure with a proprietary air. Silently, and with a certain Old-World grandeur and largesse, she presented it to him.
He should, to be honest, have informed her then that he had been a Catholic once (he was just twenty) and still wasn't so far gone as to be lapsed — though too far to claim communion; and that for today he had rather exhausted his interest in art at the little hospital full of Memlings and over their splendid van Eycks. Which left no reason for his being here but the crude one: his need to find sanctuary for a time from their killing cold.
Out there, blades of ice slicing in off the North Sea had found no obstacle, it seemed, in more than twenty miles of flat lands crawling with fog, till they found him, the one vertical (given a belltower or two) on the whole ring of the horizon. He had been, for long minutes out there, the assembly-point for forty-seven demons. His bones scraped like glaciers. Huge ice-plates ground in his skull. He had been afraid his eyeballs might freeze, contract, drop out, and go rolling away over the ancient flags. It seemed foolish after all that to say simply, "I was cold.”