Coe Review

into the ice, the wind ripping at their faces as if they were paper masks. They
had rough hands and rough faces, lines as deep as if the ice had carved them,
like water settling down into a rock where it will stay forever, freezing and
melting and freezing again. That was the way it was with them, and that was
normal. That was right. Lloyd, flapping over the way he was, defeated, was
something entirely different.
He invited me to sit with him, and he told me what happened.
The first thing I noticed was that all the children were gone. The oldest
boy, Thomas, was eighteen and capable. He was sent to Fairbanks with
the children and all the money. That, I suppose, is another story, the story
of what happened to the fourteen children and their new city life among
buildings and telephones, but that is not a story I know. Lloyd set them free
into a world of which they had an incomplete understanding, but he was not
thinking of them anymore.
After that last fishing trip, the one with Dr. Renard, something
happened.
"It snowed all day after you left," Lloyd said. "Just snowed and
snowed."
I watched his lips as he talked, but he didn't look at me.
Dora would not watch the snow falling, and she always watched the
snow. He looked at Dora and her face, and he felt like something had
changed.
Lloyd experienced the change from the inside. Dora became distant.
She grew shrill and irritable and banged his shoulders when he came near
her, yearning to be free of him, of the island. She wanted to be a free
woman.
Lloyd, however, didn't say this. In his simple way, he saw simple things.
Dora stopped putting wildflowers in the jelly jar. Dora no longer came to
bed. Dora walked away from him with her handful of homemade dresses
balled up in a pillowcase, and when he asked her where she was going, she
didn't say anything, but fixed her jaw tight and still and walked out toward
Gut Bay. He caught her three times, running after her, following the trail
of flattened grass. He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder and
carried her all the way back to the cabin. She did not struggle, but she did
not go limp, either. She made her body straight and stiff like a mannequin,
her face turned toward the water.
"She never wanted to leave before," Lloyd said, in his simple way.
The children became afraid. The girls cried and tried to climb into her
lap; they rubbed their teary faces into her breasts. The boys stood in the
doorway, their eyes wide and clear, and asked "Momma? Momma?"
She did not strike them or push them away. She was already changing,
Elizabeth Eslami 107