The Island Walkers Read Online Free Page A

between what the workers needed and what the company had to do. How he would manage this remained unclear to him, but he felt it was more urgent than ever that his letter be attended to. He felt the new men, whoever they were, needed him.
    “Intertex is doing what they have to,” Alf said, stubbornly defensive. He had lost his taste for argument. The sun seemed to be tightening an iron hoop around his head.
    “You like what they’re doing here?” Doyle said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm.
    “Of course I don’t like all of it — I know these people. But the place was slipping. Something had to be done.”
    “Still making a profit, though.” The organizer had pounced gleefully on “profit,” as if it were evidence that refuted all arguments. His black eyes shone.
    Alf turned to look back towards the stark slope of his roof, floating tentlike above the dyke. His son was there, a slim, tanned figure standing on the peak. The boy seemed impossibly distant, like youth itself. A panel of shingles hung from his hand like a broken wing.

3

    THE FAMILY SAT FOR LUNCH at the picnic table, in the flickering mesh of light dropped by the dwarf McIntosh that leaned from the base of the dyke. Twenty feet away, in full sun, Red, their malamute, layon his side in the dirt, panting heavily, his lolling tongue like a piece of raw meat speckled with dirt. Margaret had asked Jamie to say grace. The eight-year-old was peeking over his clasped hands as he listed the things on the table. His thick, sun-bleached hair stood up here and there in tufts. “Thank you for our milk, and our water, and our pickles —
    “Don’t!” he cried suddenly, jabbing his elbow at his sister.
    “I didn’t touch him,” Penny complained to Alf. The ten-year-old’s eyes — pale blue like his — were huge with protest. In her pink T-shirt, her shoulders jerked up, declaring her innocence.
    “Come on,” Joe urged, “the sandwiches are getting stale.” Alf’s older son had put on a shirt, at Margaret’s insistence. Beside his place was a paperback, turned face down. Another book about the war, Alf noted wearily, glancing at the flaming swastika on the cover, the Moloch head of a tank swivelling among ruins: The Anvil of Stalingrad .
    “I don’t like tuna fish,” Jamie said to his mother. “Do I have to —”
    “There’s peanut butter for you,” Margaret said coolly, sounding very English. She was wearing her seersucker housedress, the one that left her slender arms bare. Her dark hair, still damp from washing, clung to the side of her head, leaving the tips of her ears exposed and, to Alf’s eyes, oddly vulnerable. She was singing at a wedding that afternoon at the church. “And anyway, you don’t have to thank God for individual items.”
    Penny snorted, which brought another murderous glance from Jamie. But he went on with his Great Enumeration. High overhead, a cicada drilled through the heat of noon. Alf looked over at his wife. Her closed eyelids were trembling, as though animated by a subtle electric current. Her face with its pale forehead and fine brows was lifted slightly as she listened to Jamie’s prayer.
    “Make us truly thankful, in Christnameweaskit —”
    “Thank you,” Joe said dryly, reaching for a sandwich.
    “Wait!” Jamie’s brown eyes — copies of his mother’s — struck out at his brother. “I’m not done.”
    “I don’t believe it!” Penny cried.
    “Penny,” Margaret warned. The girl looked at her father, her court of last appeal. Alf had always felt they shared secret, unspoken things about the family, which were rarely made specific: they understood . He looked tactfully away.
    They waited again with bowed heads, stoically. The cicadas whined, and in Lions Park across the river, the merry-go-round screeched with a sound of metal on hot metal.
    “Amen,” Jamie said finally.
    “I think I’m going to kill him,” Joe said.
    “He did very well,” Margaret said as she drew the platter of