Lucy Treloar [Treloar - Wolfe Island

About Wolfe Island

Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation...

Until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept herself to herself with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her granddaughter, no one is more surprised than Kitty to find she will fight to save her as fiercely as her name suggests...

A richly imagined and mythic parable of home and kin that cements Lucy Treloars place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.

PRAISE FOR LUCY TRELOAR

A capacious talent The Australian

Deeply moving The Age

This lovely, atmospheric book sings of the inherent human drama, rising fragility of home-country and the recurrent need to flee and to protect. The journey told in this book is so evocative it will stay with the reader as an important literary fable of our period of history, in which a fraught world threatens all of us with flight, exile and bewilderment. Tom Keneally

Chapter 5

There was a low mist one morning, what my mother would have called a simmerin mist. Its surface seethed and spread, while a smotherin mist lay waiting to stop your breath. Watching it from the landing window was like floating above the clouds. The second storey of Shipleys rose like a fairytale, shadowy figures moving about or gliding past windows. One of the windows flew up. Luis thrust out his head and looked around, and shut it. At another window Cat and Josh appeared and disappeared from the square of light. Theyd be downstairs, like birds in a cloth-covered cage. Smoke began rising from its twin chimneys. The low cloud above began to glow grey and then white and pale gold and fell away, and finally the sun broke through and hit the mist, striking through it in places and lighting up bushes and boats and the Watermen above the docks, and finally melting it away.

Luis came up, quite friendly, relieved that the mist had gone. Freaky, wasnt it? he said.

I love the sound. Did you hear it?

I didnt hear anything.

Thats why. It soaks it up. Kind of eerie.

He scanned the horizon. He seemed to breathe easier when he could see what was coming. He went in to use the computer and I went to my kitchen window seat to work on my notebook. He came out in a while and told me someone thought they had a trace on his mother, or someone like her. I could see how he didnt want to get his hopes up. Well see, he said.

Thats a good sign, I said.

I guess it is. It is, isnt it? Times like this I could see how he was still a boy.

It was the beginning of winters end. Over the week that followed the air softened a little more each day, and buds blushed and the days suddenly seemed longer. In the kitchen one afternoon, I set the kettle to boil and leaned against the counter, considering the pale room. Maybe another chair or a sofa and a few cushions by the fire would make it more welcoming, just in case. I didnt think the Shipley household was going anywhere soon. They were waiting for more news. I went and looked at the vegetable garden, which was sheltered against a rickety shed, and bordered on the other side by a stand of pomegranates (hopeless gaunt things in winter) and surrounded by trodden paths. If Wolfe was a book, I was the only one who could read it. The wisps of corn that clung to verges, the remnant mulberries and pomegranates from when they were going to make us all rich, the overgrown ossuaries of animal bones, and the white shell paths that threaded the island were all that was left of its seas of corn, its orchards, its meadows of livestock, its teeming seas.

Rising salt was the new crop. It had arrived in my garden a few years back after a decade creeping in from the shore. Things began to grow stunted: the corn no more than waist high, the tomatoes and peppers spindly and wan-leafed. I sweetened the soil with grass clippings and vegetable peelings, fallen leaves, and goat manure too, when I still had them. One beautiful year I believed I had it beat and bought an orange tree, the winters being milder by then. I loved that tree, the waxy sweetness of its blossom and its bright leaves. The flesh from the one small orange I got from it was as dry as shed snakeskin and tasted of nothing and I wished Id left it on the tree. The fruit stopped setting after that, bees having disappeared, perhaps blown out to sea, and after that there was nothing for it but to hand pollinate a tiresome task that went on all summer. Each year I built the beds higher, and mounded hills within walls, anything to keep ahead of the rising salt.

There was nothing new in worrying about crops and vegetable gardens, but people had always paid more attention to the island being whittled away. Seawater coming up your hallway is disconcerting, I suppose. Every once in a while, right up until a few years before the last islanders left, there would be campaigns for a new jetty when the old one failed, and people ran fundraisers and sold cakes. Islanders watched the tattered shores and kicked at them and said, Shell turn around again, just you wait. Its always been changeable.

TV people used to do reports on the situation. Theyd put some folk in a room watermen mostly, ten-year-old Tobe once as a representative of the future and some pretty young girl would say, How do you feel about your world disappearing?, and Tobe would shrug in that way of his. Like, how do you think, sweetheart? I wanted to say. Theyd act like something might come of it but nothing ever did. We were the island that time forgot, then theyd go right ahead and forget us again. A politician claiming some importance rang the mayor once and told him not to worry; everything would be fine. Believe me, he said, and most islanders did. Thank you , mister. He turned out to be the biggest liar of all. The world wouldnt stop for us. Some believed in the power of prayer. Others were waiting for the rapture. Theres no reasoning with such people, my mother used to say.

So a few years ago when a documentary filmmaker emailed to ask if I would care to be part of a project I thought it was the same old thing. His name was Chas Dartmouth. You might have heard of him. Perhaps he thought me a relic of an old way of life. People couldnt get enough of the way we spoke, like it was a birdcall or scat that must be analysed. But it turned out Chas Dartmouth was interested in my art, which he had seen at a recent show in Escher, and the ideas of decay and renewal in my work and my environment his words, not mine. He thought it symbolic or metaphorical or resonant something like that. That was the second time in my life someone took me seriously, and it was a strange feeling. So we made that film and it was shown around and things went well for my work. I quit making jams and preserves, except for my own pantry. People came to Wolfe to talk to me about my makings. If they were artists or sculptors or assemblers I would offer them cake and coffee; if they were not, I told them not to touch anything, went inside, and kept an eye on them until they left. That died down after a bit. Word spread that I was not easy company. A few people said I was a recluse. It was not true, but it suited me for people to think so. I worked on another project with Chas a couple of years later and he became a friend.