The ocean had changed entirely by the time Margaret returned to the overhang with Jackie and Franklin. The rising light had carted off the lead and left its sheeny residues of blues and greens. The water seemed to have withdrawn, leaving a deeper beach with fringes of green-black weed, and there were yellow banks of sand offshore that she had not noticed previously.
“What do you make of it?” she asked. “It’s frightening, it’s beautiful…”
Franklin shook his head and laughed, that laugh again, those hands, those dipping knees. “It isn’t frightening from here,” he said. “But heaven’s glory, see the size of it. Who’s to say how long you’d need on board a ship before you reached the other bank? All day, I’d say.”
“All month, and then another month. That’s what I heard in Ferrytown.”
“Two months?”
“Can you see anything? I’ve not the eyesight to be sure. Can you see any specks of land?”
They put their hands up to their brows and peered into the sunrise. No, nothing. There was nothing there.
These off-track cabins were the perfect place to camp for a few days and hide from any search parties, though only the smokeshop, too cluttered and smelly for sleeping, was built to withstand the cold or snub the worst of the wind. The wooden buildings were not intended to be lived in. They were just storage sheds, made from a framework of heavy poles with their stumps embedded in the earth and banked on the windward side with sand. The roof was rushes secured by bags of hardened sand hauled up from the beach.
Franklin guessed correctly from the long-dead embers in the grates, the poor condition of the water in the trough, and the bone-dry state of the nets and fishing gear stored there that visitors were rare and seasonal. The smokeshop was probably worked only once a year, in the fall, when what could not be eaten or sold in the summer was invested in the smoke for the leaner months.
A daylight search of the buildings resulted in a disappointing haul of casks and creels, boxes and baskets, fish traps and crab pots, all smelling of the sea. There was a chest of salt, rock hard and encrusted with an orange fungus, and some good lengths of rope with which they could loosely tether the horses in the lee of the buildings and let them graze unhindered, though out of sight of any passersby.
The only food that they could find, to their alarm, was a flagon of sugar liquor that smelled too dangerous to drink and some pressed fish oil that might be good for cooking or for burning in a lamp if only they could conjure up some fire. Outside the smokeshop, at its back, was a stand of logs, used for smoking and curing, and a reeking pile of glossy boulders, evidently employed as weights to press oil, brine, and blood from casks of salted fish.
It was Margaret who spotted the chest resting on the roof beams of the smokeshop. It was heavy to lift down, but it was only a fisherman’s toolbox. Inside were a gutting knife, a fillet blade, fire rakes, a mallet, and a skillet that must have been ten ages old, as well as implements they could not recognize. Few of these things could be of any use to them. There was no firestone or anything that would provide an easy spark.
But there was a leather container, not quite a pouch, not quite a box, and old enough to have been machine-tooled. There was wording on the lid, a looping example of the forgotten text that had survived on so many relics of the old country and that for some reason always begged to be touched. Both Margaret and Franklin ran their forefingers over it as tradition required, feeling its embossment but sensing no new wisdom. Inside, and almost bonded to the damp leather, was a useful spy appliance that the fishermen must have used for generations, watching boats or looking out for shoals. It had two eyeholes, protected by circles of degraded rubber, and a pair of glass disks set into each end. Its twin barrels, like two black bottles, were connected by a wheel that would not turn and a stiff hinge fashioned out of some material too unnatural and perfect for anybody to make or find anymore.
Franklin had seen something similar before. His uncle Meredith had owned an appliance like it. He used to claim it was a thousand years old already, older than America. His appliance was longer and had just a single barrel. A spy pipe, it was called. It was meant for only one eye at a time. Hold it properly — if Meredith would let you — and it could rush the world closer, make it bigger but fitfully distorted, like an amberwing reflected in a pond. Franklin could remember looking through it at his brother, Jackson, working in the top field of their land and having no idea, when he stopped to piss and shake himself, that he was being seen and snickered at.
Franklin took the apparatus to the water trough and cleaned the windows of the spy pipes with the dampened edge of his shirt. He greased the stiff wheel and the hinge with a little smoky fish oil. It took a bit of forcing, but soon the parts were moving, and Franklin could widen the barrels to fit his eyes. Now, despite the scratching on one of the glass disks, he could make the reed grass as far as sixty paces from the cabins seem like a forest of thick, tall trees. The chickadees among the branches were like turkeys. He could see the intimate detail of the ground more than a stone’s throw away, each pebble, each twig, each snail shell. He merged the twin images into one circle and, fixing the wheels so that the far approaches to the cabins were clear to see, he checked for men transformed into giants and horses enlarged into monsters. He tried but could not put Jackson in the circle. Jackson relieving himself. Jackson in his goatskin coat. No Captain Chief. He tried but could not put his mother there, sitting on the homestead stoop, her old hand raised. He held his own hand up in front of the barrels. His fingers seemed both huge and far away.
“It fools your thinking,” Franklin said, handing over the new toy to Margaret.
At first she could see nothing, but soon she discovered that she could revolve the wheel to its farthest, tightest point and view the distance sharply. The horizon had a bulk she’d never known before and a clarity that she had lost in childhood and had thought was irretrievable. “It’s strange to think how many eyes have looked through this,” she said. “Imagine everything that’s happened at the fat end.” She tapped the glass as if it were the top of a container. “Dead people would’ve been in there. And sky-high buildings from the history. All sorts of ships and strangers.” She put the spy pipes to her face again and focused on a single bird, black-winged and rafting on the wind. Her eyesight was as good as new. “That hawk’s seen something on the ground,” she said. “It might be carrion.”
“I’ll go and look,” offered Franklin, but he returned scratched and empty-handed. Not even a morsel of gull-picked rabbit meat for supper.
It was their second day without a proper meal. The novelty of the spy pipes and the pleasures of each other’s company could not drive away their constant nagging hunger and their tiredness. As time passed, their fear of horsemen diminished somewhat, but they felt nervous of the open air. The rustlers might still flush them out. Other strangers might bother them. All Franklin and Margaret could do about that was to be watchful and careful, keeping the horses out of sight and the noise down. It was a pity that Jackie chose that day to show her irritation and the power of her lungs. What was the point of their nervous vigilance if the girl was declaring their whereabouts so loudly and with hardly a break? Margaret and Franklin did their best to silence her, but songs and games and fingertips to suck were not enough for her. She was implacable. She seemed to have thinned and darkened, losing volume in body but gaining it in voice. Her lips were sore and dry. She showed little interest in anything but wailing.