The walk back is longer. It could be I'm reluctant to go home. Seamus drank most of the brandy but I suppose I'm a little drunk myself; everything has an unreal clarity; the sky is close against my shoulders, wind loud in my ears. He is whipping rocks into the brush and has resumed telling me stories of places he's been. I'm lagging a bit behind him. He cuts his hair himself, I notice, and the left side has suffered for it.
"I'd lied and told them I was eighteen so they'd take me on. Hadn't ever been on ship that far north before. It was an icebreaker. My first. A beauty. I didn't speak a word of Russian then. So I couldn't understand what they were shouting one morning when I came up and they were all pointing over the rail. I go up an look. I could'n believe it. We're close enough to see what it is, an' it's a man. He's in a tiny kayak made of skins. All the way up there," his voice softens, and in it I hear a kind of joy, "at the very top of the world. Just passing by in this little thing you can barely see. Like he's sittin on a leaf. Nothing around for miles. All by himself! They call to him, course. Figured he was lost. Scared to tip him. Up there, anyone that goes in the water, they don't come back out. There's ice, you know, and-," he stops, abruptly, blowing air out his nose, making a sweeping motion with his hand, and in that moment I see a shard of what he is trying to depict. A grey sky. A relentless green-grey sea so vast your eye can't hold it. Nothing in any direction. The world's end. But there's a warmth in his voice. This brutal landscape- he loves it.
"And he's waving at us, he's shooing our ship away with his hands, he's mad! We're botherin him. So we take up course and let him be. I watch him until he's a speck." He shakes his head. "We were botherin him. He was just hunting. I'd no idea there were men like that."
"No?" I ask, foggily, thinking in a blur of all the hunters in the world, every different language and custom, all plying the original trade. I think of the hunter hiding inside myself. But he means something else.
"So at home in the sea," he answers, simply. "So peaceful. I'd never seen it before. Of course I've known every sort of sailor. I've been everywhere. But never seen nothing like that. It was- ," he pauses, and there is a forlorn quality in his voice I don't understand, "- like losin' your coat, and you're goin down the lane in the cold and you see some other fellow wearin' it."
I've no idea what he's talking about. It makes no sense. But I am guessing from the way he clamps his mouth shut and juts his chin in sudden anger that this metaphor holds a truth for him, and that he hadn't intended to disclose it to me.
.
We are late returning. Agnes takes one look at us from the hall and her face darkens, compresses into itself like a little dried-apple doll. I wash quickly enough to seat myself at the table just after she does but I can still feel her eyes needling me. Rosalind sets a steaming platter between us and it takes everything I have not to attack it. I keep my gaze down at it while Agnes glares.
"You've dirt in your ears."
I open my mouth but stop myself, just in time, from telling her of our discovery. To Agnes, Sea Cliff only means Row. Instead I fall back and manage, idiotically, "Well, it rained." She shakes her head at me and delivers a perfunctory grace, which settles over the table like pollen. I prefer the taste of unblessed meals but I've gotten used to it.
While I am shoveling roast potatoes into myself I learn that my mother is at war with my brother's new wife again, the dreary circumstances of which I barely listen to until Agnes sighs and puts down her spoon.
"Henry, please."
"What?"
"Please control yourself."
I look down. There is a knife and fork in my hand and an embroidered napkin in my lap. I'm not on the floor. I am fully dressed and nearly clean. I look back up at her and make a face.
"You are being that way," she says, which is unfair. The essential problem between us, and if I am honest, between me and myself, is that that way is innate. I am not being it. I merely am it, and the effort of performing otherwise is often overwhelming. As now. I would rather be on the floor. I would rather be back in the cave. I would rather a great many things. She lowers her head and regards me narrowly from under her sparse grey brow, to cow me.
I drag my top lip up off my teeth. It isn't a smile.
She slaps the table, hard. Her spoon rattles, her soup whirls in the bowl, the candles shiver, and somewhere down the mile of table a wax apple rolls out of a cornucopia and hits the floor with a dusty thud. Neither of us blink.
The door opens and Rosalind's flaxen head ducks in, looking for the spill. Agnes and I don't move. Our eyes stay locked on one another's, and the door gently closes.
"I suppose I am," I say, distinctly.
"Finish your dinner and then please go up to bed. You're tired."
I stare at her.
"I can't imagine it still works," I say.
She blinks at me.
"This. Treating me as though I were still a child so that you can convince yourself you're not afraid of me. How do you manage it?" I ask, and reach forward to place the spoon back on her saucer.
"Good Lord, Henry," she says, and there's genuine amazement in her voice, "I'm not afraid of you. I've never been. I'm afraid for you. Haven't you any notion how much worse that is?"
For once I don't have a response. I sit, and she sits, and we look at each other and then she says, "And you'll always be young to me, just as I shall always be an old woman to you. Henry, I've raised you. This is simply how it is." She sighs, and taps the spoon. "Well. Eat your dinner before it goes cold."
I shake my head. "You don't understand. I'm having difficulty," I say, "with the charade." Charade is not the right word but it's the nearest one I can think of. Something flickers through Agnes' eyes. When she speaks I am filled with the sudden certainty that this isn't the first time someone has said that word to her, and I think I know who it was.
"Of course you are. This is what I feared would happen when I saw that boy standing on the doorstep. Why ever did you do that? Where did you find him? How could you not guess that this would happen?"
How distinctly do sounds carry through the kitchen wall? I can feel the heat rising up from my throat. "Nothing is happening," I tell her. That's true. Whatever upheaval is inside me will remain there, locked up; it's a skill I've been practicing for years. Nothing inside of me will change reality. It can't. Seamus' tenuous friendship will, at some point, turn from chariness to genuine alarm, and he will leave and I will still be here, and nothing will have happened but that I will be a little older and the days a little longer.
Beneath the lace collar her frail little shoulders pull back. "But it is. Of course it is. Henry, when we feel an attachment to someone, we wish for them to see us. That is what attachment is. But you cannot- you can not- be seen for what you are. Never. Not even for a moment. That is the only rule. It's so simple. And yet you have done this. Why couldn't you let things be?"
I don't have an answer. At least, not one I'd like to say aloud. I look away from her, and I eat my dinner before it goes cold.
Through the wall I can hear Seamus singing, washing dishes.
.
In bed I press my face into the pillow. Under the lye snap of laundry soap the scent of the feathers pushes back up at me. It never fades, this peculiar oily smell of wildness, no matter how often it's cleaned. I close my eyes and imagine myself getting my coat and the lantern. Quiet down the stairs, gentle on the worn edges where the nails creak. Silent out the kitchen door, putting my boots on in the grass. Keeping against the shadow of the fence till I am out of sight. Then the morning's trail showing blurry in the moonlight. The long and quiet hike. The stars in the dome above me moving slow. Before me the grey wall of cliff rising up. Now, the cave. Climbing in through the black fissure. And finally, security; the peace of the den.
I don't really know what I am when I turn into the monster, or what I will do. Only the hunger, then the satiety, the pleasure of running, the kaleidoscope of beautiful color and wind and scent and sound, only each moment after moment; only now and nothing else ahead. When it's over all I can remember is the rush of those sensations like the pages of a book flipped fast. These two halves of myself don't understand one another, but each leaves the memory of its desires behind. So I have tried in my man's life to be gentle because of what my other life wants. But even Rosalind in our garden is a killer, dusting feathers off her apron and tucking the sagging bodies in the crook of her arm to bring in for the oven. What I hate to be, even more than the monster, is a man left behind after the monster is finished. No one, not even the villagers bending twigs into hexes, none of them are as fearful of the monster as I. It isn't Agnes who locks me in the cellar. I push the key out to her, under the door, every time.
But the monster had an opportunity. No one would've ever found Seamus' body in the cave. The hunter in me was wide awake. Something about the cave itself, some memory, some inexplicable thing, brought my monstrous self to the surface just as the moon does. All the man in me had to do was walk back home and answer no questions. After enough time Seamus' bones would dust apart and fly out in the wind to scatter over the sea, and by then, were I still alive, I might have even managed to forget his face.
But. Holding his arm, his heartbeat fast in my palm, his entire life there in my hand and the fur rising just under my skin, everything was clear. I could've buried my teeth in him. Instead I only wanted to carry him out of the trap. Instead I only wanted both of us to be free. How strange, to find my two sides joined.
I get up and draw the curtain shut and crawl back in bed in the pitch-dark to think of him, of him in the cave, his smell, his trembling warmth pressing against me, the sound of his fast breathing. Probably there is, after all, no compromise. What I am doing now in the dark is imagining that I do not need one.