Читать книгу Once, Two Islands - Dawn Garisch - Страница 15

Chapter Nine

Frieda was putting out food for the ancestors: some potato soup. She hadn’t been able to help fight the fire because of her small charge, but she also hadn’t been able to sleep until she’d heard via the children’s network that the fire was out and no one badly injured. Exhausted, she had gone to bed, but Gulai had woken early, and shouted and laughed and sang from her cot until Frieda gave up and got up. She’d fed the little mite her breakfast, then set about making the doctor’s lunch, knowing he would come home from the hospital tired and hungry. And now, in the garden, she stood a while quietly, thinking of her father, lost at sea; mindful of her mother, silenced by a stroke; her paternal grandfather, diabetic, infected; her paternal grandmother, who went to sleep and never woke up; her maternal grandmother, lost to a cancer that flowered in her breast; her maternal grandfather, yellow with liver failure; her own husband killed in an accident on an oil rig, and one of her sisters taken suddenly one afternoon with headache. And Angelique, Angelique. She said a prayer to them all, made supplication on behalf of the living, gave thanks that the alarm had been raised timeously, that only one boat had been destroyed and no lives, for health and food and shelter, for her niece’s recovery, and for her place in the weave of things.

She had not yet heard about the crowd that had congregated in the early hours at Sophia’s cottage; she did not yet know about Astrid’s death.

She poured a little soup out onto the ground in the customary manner, to give thanks to the ancestors and to the earth from whence all life comes.

“What the hell are you doing?!” The doctor, bearing down.

Frieda stepped back, startled out of prayer. “Giving thanks . . .”

“Thanks!” Behind him stood Sister Veronica, her mouth pulled tight.

“It is our custom . . .”

“It is your custom to throw food away, to lie and steal!” Orion’s rage erupted red and raw from deep inside the well of him. He had been hoodwinked – why, the whole village knew about the betrayal! They had all been laughing behind his back these months. “I will not be made a fool!”

“But . . .”

“I know what you’ve been up to with that . . . that charlatan! Your problem, you know what your problem is? You like undermining authority! That’s the last of it. Pack your bags right now. You’re a bad influence, you stay away from now on!”

That is how Frieda moved out and Veronica moved in; how the motherless child of many mothers lost two more, gained another.

On the other side of the village, another woman was forcibly brought home and told to pack and leave. They say she fought like a wild animal, refusing to go until she had seen Astrid’s body in the mortuary and had prepared her charge herself for the spirit crossing. A needle quietened her. Thereafter, the doctor accompanied the mayor and Officer Bardelli across the channel to Impossible Island in the police launch with Sophia, drowsy and shackled.They released her there to live in a fisherman’s hut with the basics for survival.

A notice was posted at the police station by the council that thenceforth Impossible Island was to be used for exile purposes for miscreants and outcasts. No landing would be permitted save for the regular guano- and penguin-egg-gathering expeditions; fishermen were only permitted to land if forced by inclement weather. No one except the authorities were to have contact with the exile. Anyone found breaching these rules and orders would be fined a month’s wages.

There were those who read the notice, made the sign to ward off evil and nodded their heads, satisfied that the witch had been exorcised. For who but a witch could produce milk when she was near the change of life and had never had a baby of her own? Who but a witch would harbour and encourage an arsonist? And when she gave birth to a son eight months later, they made the sign again. Must be the devil’s child, they concluded. It was unnatural to bear a child at her age, and with no man in sight!

There were also those who shook their heads, appalled, but they did not dare to question. After all, look what happened to those who did.