THE GLASS EYE by Rachel Rose
Three weeks after he started grade four, Cedar Wisen came home from school and took out his sister’s left eye with a screwdriver. I was in the bow of The Dreamer when I first heard Rose scream. Everything happened very slowly and very fast. Cedar brought the screwdriver closer so he could study Rose’s eye, dark and wet as a grape. Nia, their mother, appeared–Cedar! Red was leaking everywhere, and Rose’s screams flew into our clothes, into our ears, like hornets–Jesus Christ, Cedar!
Then as Rose continued to scream, Jack, their father, emerged, and then my mother, Grace, and finally the helicopter, landing in the feedlot of the cow pasture. Rose was put on a stretcher, and she and my mother were flown to the mainland. The eye and the screwdriver flew with them in a bag of ice. Just that fast, they were gone, lifting over the bay, saplings bending back and forth in its wake–Good-bye, Rose, good-bye.
We were alone with the echo of Rose’s screams, which had been drowned out by the helicopter’s roar. As the trees stopped swaying around us, the screams seemed to return. We all stood there on deck, not knowing what to do with ourselves, except for Cedar, who was sitting at the wheel of The Dreamer, pretending to steer.
Sometimes I can tell what’s going to happen before it does, and I knew Nia was going to go after Cedar. She charged across the empty feedlot, bounded up the ladder to the deck and cuffed her son so hard she knocked him down. I exhaled; I’d been holding my breath waiting for her to do exactly that. She kicked him, hard: his back, his head, his legs. Cedar folded in on himself, protecting his glasses, which were always getting broken. He grunted with the impact but did not cry out. Jack just stood there watching, his arms held slightly away from his sides, as though he had been burned. Nia got Cedar square in the face with her foot. His nose burst into blood, his lip flared open. Another kick–crack went his glasses, and Jack moved in to wrestle Nia away.
“Bastard!” she screamed, as Jack pinned her arms. “You monster! You took Rose’s eye out!”
Cedar didn’t look back as he jumped down the last few rungs of the metal ladder to the ground and took off, leaping like a bobcat through Nia’s big garden. He left a trail of blood across The Dreamer’s deck. Time was still rubbery. I remember Jack going below for a sponge. We kids all stayed very still, trying to make order from chaos. Jack wiped down the deck as Nia started their rusty pickup and drove off in a swirl of dust.
That was the last time any of us saw Cedar. He was gone, and Rose’s eye was gone, and that was it. Nobody could find him, which didn’t make sense on an island the size of Arbutus.
Nia blamed everything on Cedar’s difficult birth. She and Jack and the kids (Gaia, Forrest, Echo, Cedar, Dawn and Rose, plus one or two babies I can’t remember) lived on a fishing boat set on a timber cradle in the woods behind our house. I could see their boat from my bedroom window, surrounded by alders. The Dreamer was purple, with blue waves painted around her waterline. On misty mornings she looked like she was at sea. Jack had planned to build them a house, but then he never did. Jack was an American AWOL from Vietnam; his older brother had been killed there, though I didn’t know that then. I knew Jack well, though. Every morning he sat at the front of his boat, smoking marijuana in a brass pipe shaped like a mermaid, and looking out across the pasture as though he were checking for stormy seas, while Nia served porridge to the kids or worked on her loom or led Alice, the goat, around to graze on alder buds and nettles.
Jack spent his time cutting old magazines into collages that he hung from the trees all around the boat. Sometimes he’d let us help. When it rained he brought the collages inside the boat and shouted, “All you short people, time to hit the road!” because there wasn’t room for us and art. He taught me that boats were always referred to as “She.” I worshipped him.
Once, when Jack was terrifically stoned, he spent seven solid hours carving and painting a board into a sign that he hung from The Dreamer’s bow. The sign said: This Is The Boat That Jack Built. Then, even though the sun was shining, he yelled, “All you short people, OUT!” climbed into the upper berth, zipped the sleeping bag around his sad, unwashed body, and cried himself to sleep. We could hear him from on deck, the frightening, deep bellow of a man sobbing.
I don’t know who or what Jack blamed when Cedar went missing; he kept to himself. But Nia wouldn’t shut up. Even after the search had been called off, even after the RCMP helicopters had stopped flying daily circuits low over the island’s treed backbone, after charges had been laid against Jack and Nia, then dropped, she kept talking about it. At first she had good company; everyone wanted to talk about it. Women brought her pies, and men organized their own private searches. But when they realized there was to be no dead child at the bottom of a cliff, no funeral and mourning and returning to normal, people got tired of their own questions. Only Nia kept on. She’d corner anyone, even me, to talk about Cedar. She’d lean over me, stroking the inside of her arm, where the skin was softest, and say, her face slack with grief, “I miss him.”
We let her talk, we gave her that. “It was the birth that did it,” she said. “Strangled by the cord.” My mother, Grace, her mouth tight with compassion and opinions she was trying to keep to herself, patted Nia’s arm.
Grace blamed herself. My mother wasn’t an islander, not really, though she’d lived there for more than a decade. She was a British-trained nurse-midwife, and Arbutus Island’s only health care worker. Because the islanders were so glad to have someone to look after them after so many years of having to go to the mainland for everything, I grew up feeling cherished, not just by my mother, but by all the islanders, especially Nia and Jack. I was D. B., Grace’s boy, and I was allowed to go everywhere with her. None of the farm boys touched me, though in other circumstances I know I would have been their punching bag.
Grace had delivered Cedar. She blamed herself for not forcing Nia into the hospital. But Nia never blamed Grace. Once, Nia turned to me and said, “Your mother is a saint, D. B. I don’t know what we would have done without her. We had nothing to eat that year. I was boiling the goat’s oats three times a day until your mother got me on the prenatal food program.” I didn’t say anything. I was used to people telling me my mother was a saint.
As a kid, I spent more time on The Dreamer than I did at home. My mother was busy being a saint. My dad, Dan, who lived in a dome on the other side of the island, was preoccupied with his sculptures and needed space. Nia and Jack always had room for me, even though they lived in a space the size of a bathroom. Their kids were like my sisters and brothers. Forrest was the one closest to me in age, but Echo was my best friend. Echo had a moon-shaped face and white-blond braids and she was always eating toothpaste for the sweetness. The corners of her smile were chalky white. Everybody said how cute, that we were in love. But the thing is, don’t laugh, we really loved each other.
There was nowhere to wash on The Dreamer. Once a week, Nia and all the kids, from Gaia on down, would come over and bathe at our house. Nia washed first, and by the last baby, the tub water would be a filmy grey. Afterwards, Nia drank tea with my mother, combing out her long hair while it dried.
Jack washed at the pond behind their house all year round. He used soap-on-a-rope for everything, even his hair.
Echo had Barbies, loads of them. I still remember their feet, high-stepping as unicorn hooves, forever ready for tiny strapless shoes. I can still picture their dirty, smiling faces and the homemade Barbie clothes that never stayed on. Echo and I used to make them kiss, and then we’d rotate Barbie’s legs into splits and make Ken hump her. But even more fun was sticking our own tongues out, touching them together.
“Your tongue feels funny, D. B. Hot and cold at the same time.”
“Toothpaste-tongue!”
We couldn’t get enough of each other, that year. I woke up in the morning thinking of Echo, went to sleep planning what we’d do the next day.
Echo and I avoided Cedar. We all did. From the time he could crawl, Cedar had two moods: intense concentration and rage. When he was frustrated with something, which was often, he screamed longer and louder than any kid I’d ever seen, his angel face twisted into a rictus of rage, curls damp with tears, spinning around wildly for something or someone to hurt.
Nia was patient. She tried to keep him from hurting himself, her, or the other kids, and when he was screaming, she’d hold him as long as he’d let her. She’d hold him until he stopped shaking, and then he’d push her away and move on. Cedar was, according to Nia, “just too darn sensitive for this world.”
The first time I was scared of him, really scared of him, was when he was only six. Jack had a burlap sack of kittens that he’d taken to the pond to drown. He meant to do it before any of his kids were up, but he was not an early riser. We were all there. We hung around, begging Jack not to, but he said they’d just starve otherwise, and in they went, all four of them with their eyes still sealed shut, mewing soundlessly, their tiny white claws hooking onto the burlap bag. In went the rock. We were all heartsick, except for Cedar. Instead of crying, like Echo, or throwing pinecones at Jack’s back, like Forrest, Cedar sat on his haunches in the mud, taking it all in. Then he went back to the boat and let Dorothy, the cat, out. She ran from one end of the boat to the other, her distended teats swinging as she searched. Cedar trotted after her.
Where Cedar got the sack I don’t know. When I saw him, he was dragging Rose, who had just learned to stand and was now officially a hazard, across the deck in a big burlap sack. He was talking to her gently, telling her what he was going to do, and Rose was screeching with laughter. “Now first, Rose, we need a rock, and then, Rose, we need this strong string.”
It took all his strength to drag Rose to the rail of The Dreamer. He was struggling to heave the sack over the low netting that Jack had rigged around the deck. “Pretend it’s water, Rose,” he said, peering down at the ground.
“Nia!” I shouted. “NI-A!”
Nia, who on principle never laid a hand on any child, bounded up the ladder from below deck and knocked Cedar flat. Then she kicked him from one end of the boat to the other. Her long blond braid slapped at her hips like a tail, one side and then the other, until Jack grabbed her by the shoulders, turned her to his chest and folded her against him. She was crying hard, still screaming at Cedar. Cedar just stared at her, complete incomprehension in his face. Then he asked the only question Nia could answer: “Mama?”
“Cedar.” It was like throwing a switch. “My Cedar.” Nia scooped him up, rocking him tight, her chin resting on his head, his white face over her shoulder. Both their eyes were shut as they rocked. Rose sat in the open burlap sack and watched them, sucking her thumb, tears evaporating on her hot cheeks.
The thing was, Cedar loved Rose. He collected shells for her, feathers, marbles. He sang to her, and she’d warble back at him, tunelessly. It didn’t make any sense.
When I told Grace she went over to talk to Nia right away. I could hear their voices rising. “There’s nothing wrong with him, Grace! He’s just a kid!” and Grace arguing, “Nia, it’s not normal. You know it’s not,” and then Jack, in lower tones, saying something I couldn’t catch. When my mother came back in, her cheeks had two spots of red in them, and her nostrils were pinched white. “I tried,” she told me. “God knows I tried. I’m writing this in his chart. I warned them, D. B.”
My father and Nia may or may not have had an affair; it depends who you believe. According to my mother, Dan slept with pretty much every female on the island at least once. Grace told me she suspected Cedar was my half-brother. She always liked to tell me things I couldn’t tell anyone else. It’s true Cedar’s hair was red and curly, but that doesn’t prove anything. His eyes were blue, and Dan’s are so brown they are almost black. My mother delivered Cedar anyway, without a fuss, because Nia begged her to, and because that’s the kind of woman my mother is. Infidelity would never get in the way of duty.
One of the reasons I worshipped Jack is that, unlike my real father, he never tried to change me. Jack saw who I was and let me in anyway. He kept me safe.
Once Neil something-or-other called me a girl, and Christopher Elmholm, adding to what Neil had begun, followed me across the playground after school, lisping and flapping his wrists, pretending he was feathering his hair with a comb. Christopher was a big kid with a nose like a pug’s. He picked up a fistful of gravel and chucked it at me. “Hi evewebody. I’m a fag. I used to be D. B., but then I changed my name to Debbie, ’cause I’m tho pwetty. Now I wear a dress ’cause I’m tho pwetty.”
I shook my head to get rid of the gravel, but Christopher kept throwing it. Where was Echo? We didn’t play much at school, because already we knew boys and girls were supposed to be natural enemies. Forrest was watching. He wasn’t joining in or anything, though. Just watching. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. Everyone was watching. Where was a teacher? Neil and Christopher were closing in, jumping around me like big dogs.
And then, Neil and Christopher were suspended from Jack’s hands, hung by their shirt collars and suddenly they weren’t fierce dogs any more; they were bad puppies. Jack shook them down to size. Forrest came over and asked if I was alright. I didn’t answer.
“You okay, little buddy?” Jack asked me. I nodded. I couldn’t trust myself to talk, so I looked out the window. “Don’t let those dumb fucks get you down, D. B.” I nodded. Jack rubbed my head with his knuckle, then drew me in. “I’ll be watching, D. B.,” he said. “But you hafta tell me if you need help.”
I nodded. While Jack searched my face, I bent my thumbs back as hard as I could against the back of my arms, to keep from crying.
Jack then turned on Forrest. “I don’t ever want to see you watch-ing a buddy get hurt,” he said. “I don’t ever want to see my son just watching.”
That was it: the only incident from my childhood, nipped in the bud. I had it good. I had Jack. When my lover, Sam, tells me about his school years, I know how easy I had it.
Grace, as I always called my mother, was philosophical about my homosexuality. “I always knew,” she told me, which kind of irked me. How could she have always known when I had only admitted it to myself recently?
“You were obvious,” she says, and won’t elaborate.
What was obvious, growing up, was that I didn’t know how to be a boy. My father made an effort. He tried to drill me in things: kicking a ball, throwing, wrestling. But every lesson ended with me in tears and him stomping off in disgust. Echo would usually be hanging around, waiting until the torture that my father called Making a Man Out of You was over, and she and I could run off again.
I was there when Cedar was born. Grace had trained me well. At deliveries I was to sit in the other room, with my backpack full of toys, and not to bother her for any reason. Every now and then, between contractions, she’d pop out to check on me, and I’d show her what I’d coloured. If I was scared by the noises, the smells, I was expected not to show it.
At Cedar’s birth, I was called in. He was born at our house, because there was no running water on The Dreamer. I’ll never forget it: the hot shitmeat stink of the living room, Grace’s rubber gloves dark with blood, Jack in a heap on the floor where he had passed out. Between contractions, Nia’s white face rose from the mountain of her belly. “Is he okay? He’s never done that before. Bloody hell.”
Grace bent over Jack, inspecting the lump on his head, shoving a towel under as she reassured Nia: “Vasovagal reaction. Happens to men all the time. Stop pushing, Nia. Just pant.”
The blue face appeared, all cheesy, and my mother tried to slip the white cord over its head. I stood there with my hands hanging. There was nowhere safe for my eyes to rest. I glanced at my mother: her hair, falling down around her face, the fireplace throwing sparks. There was not enough air. What was she doing with that horrible protruding head, pushing it back in? I turned to leave.
“Do exactly what I tell you, Dylan. Hold the bowl.” Grace’s voice was like a whip. “A little push, Nia. Just a little one. Now: pant, pant–and baby’s out,” in a whoosh of blood and fluid, still blue, and still I stood there, holding the bowl as the heavy placenta sloshed into it, blood hardening on my hands. It took a long time for the baby to cry, and when it did, Grace relaxed, Nia smiled. Jack got up, rubbed his head, and leaned over as Nia put the baby to her mottled breast, while my mother with needle and thread began to embroider what was torn between Nia’s legs. He hurt her more than the others had, right from the beginning.
So I was there when he was born, and he may have been my brother, though I don’t know what that might have meant. I didn’t want Cedar as a brother. I wanted Jack to be my dad. “If wishes were fishes,” Grace says.
Cedar didn’t come back, not that night, not ever. When the moon came out, Jack called the volunteer firemen’s association and organized a search. Nia was also missing, though Jack said that she’d most likely taken the ferry into town to be with Rose.
My father came and got me and Echo. We drove across the island in his battered blue van. He never said a word. At his dome: my father made us Campbell’s chicken noodle. He let Echo ride on his bronze horse sculpture, something I’d wanted to do for years. We slept on his foam mattress, side by side. Echo whimpered in her sleep like a puppy, waking me. She smelled sweetly minty. I picked up her limp hand, held it while she slept. I was eleven years old, and she was the only girl I would ever love.
The next day Cedar was still missing. Fireweed Lake was searched with nets and a diver. And so was the island’s only mountain. And the beach and the spring and the gravel pit and the caves at Clearwater Cove. Cedar was nowhere.
All that autumn there were rumours: kids said that Cedar was a werewolf and had gone back to the woods. Women complained that their eggs were disappearing, that their cows and goats came home from pasture already milked. Any series of footprints left in the mud that might have belonged to a barefoot ten-year-old warranted a call to the authorities. Over time, the rumours and stories did what they were supposed to do: they replaced the boy until he was just another island legend, something that had happened in the past, not a boy, missing.
After a few days, Nia reappeared with Rose. Rose wore a black patch across her face. In a short time, she got a glass eye, and she used to take it out for us. Sometimes when she got older, just to scare us, she’d take her index finger and tap, tap, tap it against the hard blue and white glass, unblinking. She lives, I think, in Regina.
Two years after Cedar disappeared, my mother recruited a young nurse to take her place on the island. She sold the house and we moved to Victoria. I kept in touch with Echo until high school, where she dropped out in Grade Eleven to marry a Jehovah’s Witness and moved to Kelowna. Her religion forbids an association with people like me. I don’t hold it against her, not really.
I try not to go back to Arbutus Island, but my father won’t leave, ever, so when I want to see him, I must go to him. I never go alone. I bring friends, co-workers, whoever. This time I go with my boyfriend, Sam, and Sam’s idiotic Dalmatian, Franklin. Franklin sticks his big head out the window on the ferry and drools and grins, and Sam puts his hand on my thigh and squeezes. “Relax,” he says.
Sam thinks my father is a great artist, which I find hard to take. But they get along. Sam knows how to act like a man, and it reassures my father, I guess, that we’re not both, as Grace says, obvious. It’s always awkward, though. I spend as much time as I can outdoors, hiking around the island, and I keep my visits short.
When Sam and I walk Franklin along the trail behind Dan’s dome, as we do every morning, I do not listen to the wind as if it might answer my questions: it’s just the wind, blowing across the island, polishing the smooth red bark of the Arbutus trees, drying the red berries until they give up their scent. I guess I’ll tell Sam all that I know one day, but not yet. All he knows is that a kid I once knew here disappeared.
That morning I ask Dan about Nia, whether they’d had an affair. He says, “Nia deserved better than she got, Dylan. She’s really a fine person.” That’s the way he is. He’ll tell you what he wants to tell you, and if you want to know something else, the hell with you. When I press him, he walks out.
Sam and I have planned on a hike across Cougar Mountain, the island’s only peak; so after Dan leaves, we make a couple of sandwiches and head out. Sam is working on a calendar of photographs of the Gulf Islands, so, at every scenic point, he stops and shoots. Franklin runs back and forth on the trail, barking, his whole body trembling in rapture. Sam takes my hand. Although I’m known as an activist in Vancouver, it does something to me, coming back here. I give Sam’s hand a squeeze, then I stride ahead so it looks like I let go just so I could stride ahead.
We come out of the trail, onto the road where Grace and I used to live. Our former house has changed, but I recognize the door. I don’t want to go in. I came here to show Sam where I grew up, but I don’t want to be here after all. Automatically I look past our house through the alders, and to my amazement, The Dreamer’s still there. Sam whistles and walks closer, and as I follow, I remember Jack telling me that ships are always female. The Dreamer has been made the centerpiece of an extraordinary garden. Pink and white sweet peas grow up her sides, and her mast and rigging is hung with grape vines and purple wisteria. Pots of red geraniums cover the deck. Huge glass fishing floats in palest turquoise are scattered among the beds, and they reflect the garden back at us in gorgeous distortion. Black and yellow swallowtail butterflies dip and swoop. Cicadas hum like electric lines. Near the boat is a beautiful house, all wood shingle and skylights.
“Amazing,” says Sam. I can see he is going to be here for hours, photographing it. “Perfect,” he mutters, already rummaging in his backpack for his tripod.
I am not surprised when Nia emerges from behind a huge clump of raspberries. Once again, I’ve been holding my breath, waiting for precisely this to happen. Franklin, as usual, is the last to notice, but when he does, he starts barking so hard Sam grabs his collar and yanks sharply, muttering, “Franklin, shut up!”
Nia’s hair is short now, and the white wisps touch her cheekbones. Her eyes are blue as the morning glory creeping up the hull of The Dreamer. My discomfort must be obvious, because she laughs and comes toward me with arms outstretched. “D. B. How nice to see you! Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Hi, Nia,” I say, allowing myself to be hugged. “This is my . . . Sam.”
Sam comes up, holding his camera, and shakes her hand, then pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose as he does a hundred times a day. “You have an amazing garden,” he says.
“Thanks. It’s a life’s work.” Then to me, she says, as if we’d just resumed a conversation interrupted the day before, as if fifteen years haven’t passed since I last saw her, “Don’t worry, I won’t talk about Cedar, I know it makes people uncomfortable. I have to move on. I know that.” She swallows. Her thumb goes back to that softness of her inner arm, but she has gardening gloves on, and she stops.
Sam releases Franklin, and he bounds up to Nia and jumps, leaving wet paw prints on her blue skirt. She grabs his big paws and dances with him for a minute, smiling. Her face is creased with lines. Abruptly, still holding Franklin’s paws, she says, “You know, I nursed you when you were a baby. Grace had to evacuate Larry Anderson when his tractor flipped over on him. She asked me to take care of you, because she was busy taking care of poor Larry. She saved his life, you know. Grace was gone for hours and hours, trying to stabilize him, and you were screaming for mother’s milk, so finally I just fed you.”
A pair of ruby-throated hummingbirds hover in the butterfly bush nearby. I don’t know what to say. “Thanks Nia,” I try. Sam catches my eye, and I can tell by the droll compression of his lips that we will laugh about this later.
“People used to help each other back then. People used to trust each other. We all did. Grace never changed, even when everyone else did. Your mother is a saint. Jack’ll be so sorry he missed you.”
I half-listen, alert to Franklin, who has bounded off down one of Nia’s seashell footpaths. I can see he’s climbed into one of Nia’s raised flower beds and is spinning in black and white circles: prelude to a shit.
“Franklin! Get over here!” I run in after him, but I’m too late, and I reach for the plastic sandwich bag in my back pocket.
“Sorry about that.” I can hear Sam speaking as he snaps on Franklin’s lead. Squatting down next to a large glass ball, I can’t see anything but my own weird reflection amid brazenly open orange and black poppies and I can’t smell anything but dog shit. Tall blue lupine tickle my neck as I rummage with the bag, lazily scanning the wooden markers at the head of each row: Iris sibirica. Lilium regale. Euphorbia. Right in the middle of this abundance, hidden from the path, is a mound of stones. At its head is a marker that reads, simply, Cedar. The sun makes me so dizzy that for a moment black spots dance across my field of vision–a flock of birds spinning in the blue–but then I blink hard a couple of times, and they clear.
Rachel Rose is the author of the poetry collections Giving My Body to Science (McGill/Queen’s University Press, 1999) and Notes on Arrival and Departure (McClelland & Stewart, 2005). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.