The Island - Part 1, Page 2

My name is William Hill. I’m forty-two. Like most people, I have a middle name. I’ve never cared for it though. My father insisted on William as it’s something of a family name. Look back along my line and for as many generations as there are records, you’ll find a William tucked away somewhere. When it comes to the moniker sitting in the middle, well, he liked history and folk heroes. The day might come when I’ll shoot an apple off my son’s head and live up to the legend. I doubt it though, seeing as how I’m about as accurate with a bow and arrow as a politician is with the truth.

  This is the part of the story where you get to suffer. It’s not that I want you grimacing while you work your way through, but what follows couldn’t have happened without the background. So, that’s where we’re going.

  I have no brothers or sisters, a fact I attribute to my father having celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday three days before I came into the world. He, of course, laid the blame at my feet for the lack of siblings, joking that after two years with me, he and Mom both swore off ever having another. I believed the story for a while, up to the point where I could put thirty-eight and eighteen together and realized how old he’d be at graduation.

  At some point along the line came the understanding that I hadn’t exactly been planned either. All joking aside, I guess one accident proved enough for both of them.

  My dad could do anything. That’s not stretching the truth, nor is it a son’s blind adoration. Put anything broken in front of him, he could fix it. He’d never attended college and didn’t even make it out of high school. Yet the man could quote Shakespeare and work differential equations. He carried a legendary status in the neighborhood. People brought him everything from personal problems to busted TVs and somehow, everyone went home with a smile. He fixed things for everyone. Everyone, that is, except me.

  I can’t remember when he started helping rather than doing. That’s how far back he insisted I think on the problem and work at it before he’d step in. Most of the time, I felt like a dolt, like God had put something in his head that he’d mistakenly left out of mine.

  Sometimes I actually hated him for it. I could go to any other kid’s house, see him slip a chain on his bike or break some toy, and watch his father waddle out to fix it for him. My dad would hand me a wrench or a screwdriver or whatever tool he thought would do the job and then leave me standing while he headed off to his own projects. I learned quickly to at least attempt the fix myself before tracking him down. He never resisted or said anything when I did, but watching him work so easily through what had kept me baffled accomplished little except to highlight that feeling of not-smart-enough, like I stood low enough on the intelligence ladder that I needed to look up to see double digits.

  Then came the Saturdays and weekends, the summers when he decided I could help him on his projects. I can’t remember more miserable days. They lasted from breakfast to dinner, endlessly long days when other kids played, swam, watched TV, and generally acted their age. Instead, I mixed concrete or tore down a starter motor to change the bushings or framed in walls for a new addition on someone’s house. The laundry list of projects had no end. When he checked one off, he started another and took his favorite assistant along for the ride. I didn’t realize at the time that the work boiled down to Dad’s way of teaching me to be a man. Even if I’d understood the intent, I’m sure the days would have sucked just as bad.

  I also didn’t comprehend that the time involved a higher concept, one that skirted his disdain for most social structures. John Walker Hill loved people, but carried a deep dislike not so much of society, but how it functioned. He saw most people as encircled by technology and products they were taught to use rather than understand. More than once I heard him express the idea that generation by generation we were devolving to a level where we existed like vultures, feeding off a few bright minds without ever learning to exercise our own. The value of that lesson didn’t make itself apparent until much later in life. When I finally understood what he had given me in those years, what had been passed from father to son, I should have thanked him. I never had the chance. By then, we stood at odds on another subject, one too emotional to ignore.

  My father also hated paying taxes. The words behind the lament varied from year to year, but the message and feeling behind it remained consistent.

  “Damn it, Maggie,” he would rail at my mother. “I’m paying these people to turn the country into a land of zombies and idiots.”

  At the same time, he insisted I join the very structures he so despised, advising me in no uncertain terms that I would walk the stages at both high school and college graduations and that, by God, he would be there to watch me do it.

  I shouldn’t make it sound as if Dad ruled with an iron fist or demanded all waking time be spent between work and study. He believed a well-rounded physical education necessary for a healthy mind. When I went through the sports phase, he sat in the bleachers and cheered along with the rest of the parents. About the time I turned twelve, he introduced me to an old man down the street who’d spent his life in a gym teaching both kids and parents everything from workout routines to martial arts.

  He went by the name of Virgil and had to be at least seventy years old when I met him. He was totally bald and sported a perfectly white Fu Manchu mustache. The old man stood about my height, but looked thirty pounds leaner and wiry, like a snake. I’d seen him before, heard Dad talk about him, but never dealt with him myself. I’ll get to Virgil a bit later, but suffice it to say that where my father took on the task of teaching me to be what he considered a contributing member of the society he shunned, Virgil taught me how to walk through it without being afraid.

  At sixteen, the first real break with my father occurred—a good one. Up to that point, I’d functioned as the follower in virtually every aspect of our relationship. On a warm and sunny afternoon three weeks before school let out for the summer, I settled down at the kitchen table, grumbling and muttering curses under my breath, all of them directed at Juanita Whatley, my scowling and diminutive gnome of a science teacher. Homework assignments had fallen to a school-year low in my other classes, with most of the instructors as tired of grading the papers as we were of slaving over them. Not so with Juanita, or Wacky Whatley as we called her.

  She stood maybe five feet tall, if that, wore a buzz cut that would have made any Marine proud and started the school year promising each and every one of us would learn to hate her. She was right. We did. She also promised that we would learn much more than physics.

  On the first day, she sent chills through the entire class. Banging on her desk with a ruler and glaring out over the room, she uttered a prophecy that would have scared the hell out of anyone with a brain.

  “By the time you leave, you will never look at a word problem with fear again.”

  She was right on that account as well. We had no choice. She bombarded us with them. Academic life under Wacky Whatley turned out to be a live or die proposition. You either learned to assimilate equations from wordy and rambling descriptions or you failed miserably. My father, of course, approved of her wholeheartedly.

  In any case, I ended up in a chapter called “The Physics of Sound.” We’d skimmed through that section earlier in the year. I can’t remember what pulled me back to flip through the pages, but situated in the middle of a long and utterly dry narrative, unfettered by the usual scattering of Greek symbols that left many equations looking like hieroglyphics, lay a simple formula for calculating frequencies in an open pipe. Like a cartoon character, the idea that blossomed felt like a light bulb suddenly clicked on inside my head.

  Two days before, I’d dropped a socket from my father’s toolbox onto a concrete floor by accident and had been amazed at how that simple piece of steel sounded just like a tiny bell. The instant I saw the equation, the image of extra water pipes stored in the workshop transformed into a wall of music.

  I took hacksaw to hand at the first chance. What should have tolled
wonderfully soft notes, however, clanged and clunked. I scratched my head over the reasons and reworked the formula for each note, but came up with the same lengths. I remember staring at the paper, wondering what I missed.

  The next day, after Wacky had dismissed class, I walked up to her desk with textbook in hand. She glanced up, managing to look both annoyed and curious at the same time. Neither emotion took me by surprise. Few possessed the courage to approach her unless they damned well had to. A student standing in front of her desk neither sweating nor summoned must have taken her aback. As for the annoyed expression, Juanita Whatley always looked pissed and ready to wallop someone across the head—if for no other reason than to knock the ignorance out the other side.

  I laid the open book on her desk and told her what I’d tried to do.

  “So you want to make wind chimes,” she said and leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowing into a withering look that primed the sweat glands even though I’d approached her on my own.

  “You’re close,” she said finally. “Quit thinking about pipes though. Chimes are bells, even if they look like a pipe. Find a reference for casting bells. That should help with the dimensions.”

  I stumbled away, thinking I had the answer, thinking her words made perfect sense given the sound the socket had produced. I’d just spent months clinging to every word out of her mouth as if each carried a message straight from heaven. Finding a reference sounded simple. Nothing in her terse reply gave any indication that the search for answers might be a little more involved than hunting out the right section in my textbook. We didn’t have the Internet in those days. It took another week of flipping through books at the local library to find what I needed.

  I started building wind chimes that summer with basic materials, easy things I could buy at any hardware store since Dad didn’t seem too happy with me chopping up his supplies. The shopping list consisted mostly of copper pipe that I could transform into bells and redwood planks I could use as base plates and strikers. The lure went beyond simply building them, even beyond the fact that I’d stepped into a world where my father had never ventured.

  The real pull came from the wind, how something so simple, so natural could turn an evening on the deck into a musical interlude as complex and soothing as any set of notes crafted by man. I built them for sheer fascination at first, then for family, with my mother suffering through the trial stages. Her cherry trees sprouted chimes for a couple of months while I worked through pipes, notes, drill holes, and strings. By the time I had the sound and process perfected I’d filled every available branch and draped so many around the deck that they looked like a metal curtain arranged to block out the view of the neighborhood. A simple breeze sent the whole yard into a clattering frenzy.

  She never complained, not once. Mom was like that. Where Dad would go off on tangents, rail at society, and yet happily solve problems for everyone else, Mom kept his world and mine on an even keel. She provided the foundation, the glue that kept us knitted firmly together as a family regardless of how far I wandered or Dad drifted.

  Once I’d reached the point that the early efforts proved sufficiently embarrassing, I cleaned out her trees, leaving only a couple that she liked the best.

  A year later, I put one together for a friend. He happened to live next door to a woman who owned a local hardware store. Two weeks later, he brought the two of us together. She offered a discount on the raw materials and a slice of the profits if I would supply her store.

  My father was absolutely ecstatic with the idea. While my friends marched off to fast-food chains and clothing stores at the mall, I toiled away in his shed, turning out half a dozen a week at first. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d added ten more mom-and-pop building supply stores across six counties and commandeered his shop with jigs set for wood and pipe. I’d also reached the point where the volume kept me working constantly to fill the orders, churning out sixty to seventy a week with little time for any type of social life. Dad came out at night and worked alongside me, peddling the time off as yet another project related to his boat. Listening to him talk about sailing free and clear across wild oceans set fire to a dream of my own.

  When I stared at my chimes, they looked and sounded as good as any turned out by a factory and that was the problem. Nothing set them apart except for the Handmade and Local Craftsman stickers slapped across the strikers. I didn’t want to be a local craftsman. I wanted to work in precious materials, to turn the simple, wind-driven device into a work of art, to mesmerize, not only with haunting melodies, but also craft something so fine and elegant that even those who would never buy one, would long for them.

  The idea stayed with me up through college, up to the point where I met Rebecca Hamilton. Becky was stunning, incredibly intelligent and for some reason that I never fully understood, wanted me. She also possessed a demanding side and quickly impressed me as the kind of woman who would not sit idly by while an unemployed woodworker-turned-artist built his reputation. I majored in business and minored in physics, a combination that fit well into the burgeoning plan to start my own company. They also fit well with her, just in another way. The double major proved equally suitable for life in a suit and tie. Becky set her sights on a master’s degree in nursing. I ended up chasing corporate dreams as a project manager for a software vendor rather than the personal ones that kept me busy in high school.

  Becky and my father never liked each other. We stayed together for fifteen years and for much of it, they squared off like fighters eyeing each other across a boxing ring. She saw him as a querulous old man, an Archie Bunker type, who had too many opinions and too little tact. He thought her flighty and uninteresting, remarking the first time he met her that she reminded him of a replica of a fine painting. She looked good, but beyond that, had little substance. In the end, both of their opinions proved true. He grew grumpier and more argumentative with each passing year. Becky’s constant need for reassurance grated even before we married.

  Dad used to say that life was a learning process. I ignored him for the most part, equating his vague, pseudo-psychological mumblings with the scores of hapless people who frequented the talk show routes. God knows, the TV offered enough of them—people who managed to come across as both tearful and fidgety while rationalizing incredibly dense decisions to one sympathetic host or another. I should have listened to him. Becky offered a few lessons that I could have avoided if I had, with the main one simple, clear, and infallible:

  If someone doesn’t like who you are, trying to change for them is rarely successful and doing so carries even more remote odds that you will end up being happy yourself.

   He survived Becky by a year, a fact I attributed to an obstinate determination to outlast her. The doctors had warned him about his heart for years. Twice I’d been summoned to the hospital for what amounted to a death watch. Both times he emerged as ill-tempered as ever. It wasn’t that the fight left him when Becky piled her belongings into a moving truck. He just seemed serene, as if he had reached the end of a long and difficult journey and could finally relax. As much as Becky and I needed to be apart, her leaving stung more than I cared to admit. With the barbs still flying between us, I had little desire to support my father’s smug and suddenly pleasant demeanor, particularly since it rode high on my own discomfort.

  Of course, I’d planned to deal with him eventually, except eventually never came. He died sitting on his deck, a half-burned cigar in one hand, a bottle of rum in the other, and a peaceful look on his face. I thought his heart had finally failed. His doctor said no. It appeared Dad had simply stopped breathing. Maybe he just ran out of fight. Maybe it was just his time. I don’t know. We hadn’t talked for weeks.

  The breaking point for me came on a Sunday night, no more than a month after he passed. I walked through the shop I’d started in the same house I’d built for a wife I no longer had. My footstep echoed across a concrete floor that bore scuff marks from hard soled shoes a
nd tread patterns from dirty tires, but not one ounce of sawdust. When Becky left, she left the house and the bills with me. I didn’t mind. I’d spent months building a good part of it, including a version of the workshop. The saws were nearly as clean as the day I’d bought them, gleaming under the fluorescent lights like a scene from a Black & Decker commercial.

    I stood looking at them, running my fingers across blades still shiny and sharp, thinking about my dad and the nights when he worked the teak rails on his boat while I sanded redwood. In a way, we were both building dreams. His was to sail the U.S. coast from one end to the other. Mine hinged on teaching the wind to sing for me.

  The simplicity of those years called to me in a way I couldn’t explain, but one I knew I needed again. I turned in my notice the next day, put the house my father had left me and the one I’d built for my ex on the market. They sold quick enough, even in a depressed market. I started shopping the day I signed the last of the paperwork.

  I bought a piece of land in eastern Tennessee, an hour and a half from the hills of Western North Carolina where I’d been raised and where Becky still lived. The property ran along county lines between Washington and Sullivan and skirted a lake that snaked through both. A similar plot near the tourist and retirement havens that had blossomed in North Carolina would have cost three times what I paid for it. Situated four miles out from Interstate 26, the sprawling section with its tall firs and spruce trees looked like a scene reminiscent of postcards at Christmas.

   That’s how I ended up with a parcel of land straight out of heaven and how I heard the news at midday with sleet rattling off the windows like ice clinking in a glass. The set of bells in front of me had no buyer. The pipes had been crafted in solid silver, the notes driven by minors and the sound both clear and soothing. I’d cut the wood from American cherry stock, sanding and staining it to a rich luster so dark the surface looked like blood pooled under moonlight.

  I never sold the chime. As far as I know, the bells still hang in the shop, silent and destined to gather dust rather than compose symphonies in the wind. I hate leaving chores unfinished. Time hadn’t been on my side though. The Fever turned a lot of lives upside down, changing both priorities and plans for many. By the time I found an interested buyer, my outlook had evolved, migrating away business and art and toward simple things like a warm sun, a light wind, and time where I could reconnect with my past, where I could remember life before it became so complicated. Something inside needed those days again, days when I could walk in the house and find Mom in her apron washing dishes while dinner steamed on the stove, when waking hours meant hearing Dad bang away at one project or another out in the shed.

  The question on my mind had nothing to do with what I needed to do to survive, but where I wanted to die. I’d suffered every respiratory infection known to medical science as a kid. With The Fever airborne, the options for survival seemed limited and gloomy. I didn’t choose the island as a place to escape. I chose it because I’d gone there with my father the only time his boat ever sailed in saltwater.

  He’d towed it into the driveway when I was fifteen years old after rescuing it from a barn in Ohio and walked around it like he had just pulled the Queen Elizabeth home. My mom offered a noticeably cooler stance toward the broken-down contraption he’d dragged back home.

  I could understand why. The boat was filthy, the rigging frayed, the sails limp, dirty, and full of holes. Water had gotten inside at some point, leaving most of the interior either rotted away or chewed by rats and mice. A quarter inch of dirt, hay dust, and manure coated the trailer. The unlikely mixture had dried brick-hard on the frame over the years and looked as if my father would need a jackhammer to knock it loose. Where shit and dirt failed to gain a foothold, flakes of white paint stained brown along the edges clung listlessly to a thick patina of rust.

  None of that mattered to my dad. To John Walker Hill, the twenty-three feet of fiberglass and cloth encapsulated a life-long ambition to sail the coast of America. As long as I could remember, he’d kept boats around the house. Sailboats, motorboats, canoes: if it floated, Dad owned one at some point. He took them in trade, pulled them out of junk yards, and even bought one new now and then. Some had been bigger, some smaller, but none ever suited him. I’d grown up on the decks of a dozen different types of craft, most of which never made it out of the mountains. A couple of lakes, both within an hour’s drive served as the proving grounds in his search for something big enough to haul him and his gear, versatile enough to sail coasts and bays, and small enough to hook up to the back of his truck.

  “This is the one, Maggie,” he had told my mom proudly. She ‘d sniffed, wiped her hands on her apron, and pointed to the kitchen.

  “Well, you can set sail after dinner.”

  Thus began another two decades of the boat mostly sitting. My father may have sailed her half a dozen times and only once in the ocean. The rest of his trips were relegated to weekenders on local lakes. The sailboat turned out to be everything he wanted. Dad simply never had the time or the money to take half a year off and go wander the coastline. That didn’t stop him from rebuilding, resurfacing, repainting, shining, and polishing every square inch. By the time he died, the dilapidated old hull he’d dragged out of a barn gleamed bright enough to sit on a showroom floor. He named her FantaSea.

  When he passed away, I had to go through his things. My father hadn’t been one to leave chores undone or strings hanging. His will insisted that the house be sold and whatever contents I didn’t want donated to charity or put up for auction. At the time, his last wishes came across as cold and unfeeling. It took months for me to realize how thoughtful they were. No one wants to put away the people they love or their memories. I’d have hung on to that house forever and never used it. He knew that.

  The will—read by his attorney, a gaunt old man by the name of Gavin Franks—might have sounded heartless, but in reality saved me the anguish of letting go and the guilt associated with doing so.

  What I found when I flicked the light on in his garage was an unnamed craft with a newly painted stern and a note in the cockpit. I hadn’t spent much time with him in his last couple of years, the distance borne of emotions torn between a failed marriage and his unbridled happiness that the doomed union had finally ended. He hated my choice of profession and my choice of wife, predicting in his sometimes harsh but accurate way that both would suck and neither in a good way. While his prediction held some insight, he’d also spent a good bit of effort pushing the relationship toward that final cliff. I figured I had no reason to forgive or to make apologies. I kept waiting on him. I should have known better.  

  When you look back on choices, some you can recognize were the best you could make at the time. Some leave you wondering how you could have been so stupid.  Distancing myself from him the last few years of his life, when it was obvious he had so few years left, fell into the less than intelligent category. Dad hadn’t helped, but he was my father and a lot of good years stood behind those that seemed so miserable.

  I stood in a cold neon light, looking at the envelope, afraid to open it, afraid I would either lose my composure completely or find another criticism echoing through my brain in his dry, rough voice. What I found was simple.

  “She’s yours, William. Take care of her and she will take care of you. It’s bad luck to rename a boat. I figured mine has run out so I had FantaSea stripped off. I know you always thought it a dumb thing to call a boat. Take her home and think of a good name. Remember the days on the lake. If you ever get a chance, put her in the big water. There is freedom left in life, son. You just have to reach out and grab it.

  We didn’t get along well the last few years, but you’re still my son and I love you. Enjoy the boat. I spent a long time getting her ready.”

  I don’t know if it was the sense of giving up that his words carried, of a dream unfulfilled, or the sudden knowledge that I’d never see him again that finally turned on the emo
tion. Maybe it was all three. Hours passed before I walked out of the garage and most of them filled with tears. I knew what I’d call the boat before left. I had a lot of angels around me. I leaned against the gleaming fiberglass with its new paint and cried for them all, for what I had lost, for lives torn apart that could never be put back together. By the time I walked out of the garage, I’d left enough tears behind to give the boat a taste of saltwater. Not an ocean of it, but enough to leave her decks shining and wet.

  To an outsider, my choices after his death may have seemed angled toward an attempt to both reconcile the space between us in his last years and to somehow find approval when there had been precious little of it while he was alive. Half of that assumption held some truth. The rest, however, fell on barren ground.

  I needed to reconnect with him, but I wasn’t trying to find approval. I just recognized what he had seen in me all along—that William Hill was more like his father than he wanted to admit.

  I don’t want to make it sound as if he possessed some sort of precognitive ability either. Life is about training. Induction into society starts early in learning the basics of speech, reading, math, and simple etiquette like not pitching a fit at the dinner table and throwing your food in the floor, like not wetting your pants after you realize why the potty exists. About the time you start enjoying life, you get to start school, where they spend another twelve years teaching you not only higher concepts, but also instilling all the basics that will enable you to not be a square peg in the round hole that society provides for you. This is the important crap in life, like showing up on time to a place where other people tell you what to do, like obeying authority, like eating on schedules and finding someone to listen to your problems.

  My father had been big on the authority concept, but he raised me to take care of myself. A decade and a half of wearing a suit and handholding clients paid well enough, but left me recognizing why he carried such a dislike not of people, but the structure that held us all together. 

  He and Mom had brought me into the world. Both were dead already. Mom died ten years before Dad, succumbing to a type of cancer for which neither hope nor cure existed. I figured I could spend the last days with them, even if all I had were memories.

  Becky had driven away couple of years before. She had moved on. So had I. She ventured farther, acquiring a new husband, a new life, a new baby. I discovered Jayne, a sometimes girlfriend who came and went as she pleased. We did well together, but commitment proved a sore spot for both of us. She, like me, was still haunted by bitter feelings from a broken marriage and neither of us had any intention of venturing into another for a while yet. Our time together could be summed up in two sentences. We didn’t fight. We had great sex. Beyond that, our time fluctuated between her staying with me a few days at a time and then fleeing back to her own house half an hour away.

  The memory of the last few months with Becky still clung strong enough to not mind. Jayne had a lot of dark aspects about her, dark eyes, dark hair, and occasionally a dark mood. I let her come and go as she wished, choosing to let her work through her emotions rather than try and fix them myself. I would have brought her with me, but she said no with a skittish look on her face as if she could feel the ropes of another binding relationship sliding around her just from the offer.

  So I went, on my own, with nothing but memories and ghosts of the past riding shotgun. I didn’t set out to make enemies, but I did. I didn’t set out to save myself either. I went because the island seemed like a good place to die.

  I just didn’t realize how good.

  Chapter II - Little Things