Snowflakes

Father had brought the cattle over as babies in the boat from the mainland, nearly six years ago now. That was before it became too dangerous to go back there for supplies. I always knew when he was going across, because he would come downstairs with his bulletproof vest on under his sweater, with the gun stuck into the waistband of his ragged jeans. I hated to see it—hated the reminder of what he was facing back there: the men with guns and bombs, the men who had killed Mother and would take Father from us if they could. I remember waiting for him on the beach, hour after hour, holding Cain’s hand and watching the horizon for the little boat to appear, my stomach knotted with fear in case Father had been captured or even killed. Those hours were the longest and worst of my whole life. But the moments when we saw the little boat bob into view, coming closer and closer until finally the shingle scrunched beneath its hull—those were some of the best. And there was always the excitement of seeing what Father had brought. Two little calves tied up in a sack to stop them from scrambling about the boat, their huge brown eyes wide and scared. A coop of chickens. Fishing wire. Ammunition. Grain, pasta, nails, tools, aspirin, antibiotic ointment—anything he could steal or trade for. There were even presents, sometimes, if he could find something in one of the looted-out stores that were dotted across the mainland. A comic book. A doll or some chocolate, buried beneath debris in a long-bombed-out gas station abandoned by its owners. And once—the best time—there was Woof, a little honey-colored puppy with eyes like molten gold.

The worst time was the last. Father did not come back at the usual hour, and we sat on the beach waiting and waiting long after the sun had set and the moon had risen, shivering with a mixture of cold and fear. When the boat finally came into sight, we knew something was wrong even before he docked, from the way he was rowing, all on one side, and then a great heave with the other oar to try to correct his course. As he got closer, we saw that the boat was not full of supplies, as it usually was, and Father was rowing with one arm and had blood all down his front.

“What’s wrong?” Cain asked as we dragged the boat up the beach to the high-water mark. “What happened? Have you been shot?”

Father only shook his head, but it was not in denial—it was his way of saying, Don’t ask me questions. There were some truths too terrible to tell, some things it was better not to know.

That evening we boiled water on the stove and filled the zinc tub in front of the fire, and Father cleaned his wounds. He shut the door, but I saw the water when he sluiced it into the drain in the yard. It was scarlet red with blood, and I felt very scared.

The next day he holed the boat, and there were no more trips.

That had been almost a year ago, and while I missed the chocolate bars, I did not miss waiting for Father on the beach. It was better to make do with what we had here on the island, rather than risk losing him as we had lost Mother.

And besides, we had enough here. We had milk and cheese and eggs and even meat, when one of the cows had a bull calf. Cain plowed the fields and grew potatoes and turnips and kale and a kind of wheat. There were wild raspberries and wood strawberries. Jacob fished off the rocks, and if all else failed, there were always mussels. We ate a lot of mussels that first winter, while we waited for the crops to come in. Mussels and rabbits and nettle soup. That was the winter that Jacob almost died. He got very sick, and none of the pills Father gave him did any good, and he cried out in the night until the blood ran out of his ear.

He got better by and by, but he was deaf in one ear after that, and when he didn’t want to hear someone, he would turn his deaf ear toward them and pretend that he could not understand. But he never did that to me.

 

As the weeks went on, the wall grew higher and higher, but Father didn’t let up; in fact, he drove us harder. When Flick got lame and couldn’t pull the cart, Father took Cain away from the fields and made him haul stone too, and when at last Cain refused, they had a shouted argument, right there in the yard.

“Why are you doing this?” Cain cried in frustration. “You’ve lamed Flick, we’ve got no butter and no cheese because Leah can’t spend any time in the dairy, Jacob’s garden’s overrun with weeds, and the apples are rotting on the trees—”

“I’m keeping you all safe,” Father growled.

“Safe and starved?”

“I’ve had just about enough of your tongue. You will do as I say, boy,” Father told Cain, but Cain didn’t cower away as he used to. Instead he squared up to Father, his hands on his hips, and I saw for the first time what I must have known for a while but never noticed until that moment—Cain had grown taller than Father.

“Or what?” Cain said, and that was when Father hit him.

Father had hit Cain before—hit all of us in fact. When we first came to the island and there was so much work to be done, or starve, he had hit us often, to make us get out of bed when we would rather not or go into the cold fields to pull weeds when our hands were cracked and bleeding.

But once we understood what had to be done, life settled into an easier rhythm. We worked, and Father left us alone, as long as we did our piece.

Now, though, he hit Cain around the side of the head with the handle of the mortar trowel he was holding. Hit him hard.

Cain said nothing. He just stood, looking down at Father, with his hand to his ear, the hot red blood dripping between his fingers onto the ground. He held it until the dripping slowed and stopped. Then he turned and carried on stacking rocks as Father had told him, with his hands still red and sticky beneath the dust.

When he came in for supper, he washed the blood off his hands and ate in stony silence, and I knew that he had not forgiven Father. I thought perhaps that a good night’s sleep would put things right. But the next day, when I called Father and the boys for breakfast, Cain didn’t come.

“Let him sleep,” Father said gruffly. “If he misses breakfast, that’s his problem.”

But when I took May’s breakfast to our room, I went to the attic ladder and whispered up into the loft, very soft, “Cain.”

Cain slept in the attic. He used to share the bedroom next to mine with Jacob, just as I shared with May, but when he got to be thirteen or fourteen, he packed up his things and took them into the rickety loft. Father scoffed and laughed and predicted that he would come down fast enough when the frost set in—but he didn’t. I think he liked it up there. I think Jacob missed him, though he would never have said it, but he liked having the bed to himself.

Cain had said he would skin me alive if he ever found me poking in his things, but something made me slip off my woolen slippers and set foot on the ladder with my bare feet. I climbed silently, up to the loft hatch, and then I pushed it open.

His room was just as normal—work clothes strewn around, the stub of a candle on a saucer, a torn piece of newspaper that May had cut into a snowflake.

But one thing was wrong.

Cain’s bed was empty.

 

I didn’t believe it at first. Not until Jacob and I went down to the bay for stones and the boat was gone.

“But—but it was holed,” I said stupidly, but I knew, even as I said it, that boats could be mended. There was tar paper in the barn that Father used for patching the roofs when they leaked and wood aplenty, and Cain was always handy like that.