Jacob swore then. He said words I didn’t even know he knew, bad words, that would have had Father cuffing him around the head, bad ear or no bad ear.
“That motherfucking son of a bitch,” he said, and when I tried to say something, he pushed me away, and I saw that he was crying, though whether with rage or grief at being left or at fear for Cain, I didn’t know.
I was too numb to cry. I still could not quite believe that Cain was gone. Because where would he have gone to? To the mainland, with the fires still burning from the bombing, to scavenge a life among the debris of what was left? What was left for him there? And he hadn’t taken the gun or the bulletproof vest, which was still hanging from a nail in Father’s room. How would he survive?
“I don’t understand,” I kept saying, over and over, as we stacked rocks onto the bier. “I don’t understand. Where did he go?”
The hardest thing was telling Father. In the end, Jacob chickened out, and I didn’t blame him altogether. When Father looked up from the plate of stew I was ladling out and asked where Cain was, Jacob coughed and stood from the table, muttering something about shutting up the hens.
I glared at him, but I knew he was probably right. Father does hit girls, or at least he hits me. No one hits May. But he doesn’t hit me as hard as he hits the boys.
“Where the hell is he?” Father repeated, and I could tell he was actually worried. Accidents happen all the time on a farm. Last year Cain hit his head on a gate when a cow barged at him, and he was there in the field alone for more than two hours before Jacob went to see what was keeping him. “Has someone been down to the barn to check on him?”
“He’s gone, Father,” I said, and I took a step back involuntarily.
“Gone?” Father’s face was blank. I could tell he didn’t understand what I meant. “Gone where?”
“I—I don’t know. B-but he’s taken the boat.”
He didn’t hit me. But he pushed past me so hard that I stumbled against the wall and splashed hot stew all down my arm. He snatched the lantern as he went, and I stood in the doorway, rubbing my scalded hand and watching the little flame disappear into the darkness as he stormed down the track to the bay. I knew that it wasn’t that he didn’t believe me. He just needed to see for himself.
He didn’t come back until late, and when he did, Jacob and I made sure to be in bed. Jacob had pulled his mattress into the room with me and May, and I heard his sharp intake of breath as the door of the cottage slammed back against the wall. Beside me May flinched.
“Is Father angry with us, Leah?” she whispered.
I shook my head. “Not with us, May. With Cain.”
“What did he do?”
The truth, the unsayable truth, swelled inside me like something evil. He has left us. He has left us to deal with whatever is coming by ourselves. He is never coming back.
I could not bring myself to tell her.
“He took the boat out,” I said at last. “After Father said not to.”
“Oh.” I felt her relax beside me, because that was not something she had ever done or would ever do. “Will Father whip him?”
“Maybe,” I said. My throat felt dry and tight because I knew in my heart that it was not true. Cain would not be back. Not ever. And now we could not leave either.
Father did not mention Cain the next day. It was as if we woke to a world in which he had never existed. Instead Father let me and Jacob do our chores, and then he told us it was time to work on the wall.
“But the crops,” Jacob said, and I knew that he was thinking, as I was, of Cain’s unplowed fields, and the potatoes and turnips we would be relying on for the long, hungry winter. Without Cain to plow and weed and harvest, what would we eat when our supplies came to an end? But Father just glared at him.
“There’s things more important than your stomach, boy,” he said. “Now hop to it.”
That day we hauled rocks until our backs screamed and our hands bled, and when at last Father let us inside for rabbit stew, cooked to mush in the embers of the breakfast fire, we were too tired to eat much.
But Father—Father did not come inside at all. And long after Jacob and I had crawled up the stairs to bed, we heard him hauling the cart up the rutted lane in the darkness and the crack and tumble of rocks being heaved into position, higher and higher.
When we woke the next day, Father was already up and building, and the wall was higher than our heads. Father had to stand on the cart to put the rocks on top of the wall. When would he stop? The only way in and out of the house now was through the barn, which acted as part of the wall and which had a thick wooden door with a peephole in it.
“What are you trying to keep out, Father?” I asked, and my throat was tight and full of fear as I said it.
“They’re coming” was all he said.
Was it true? Was that why Cain had left? Did he know something we didn’t?
I wanted so badly to say, Who? But I didn’t know if I could stand to hear the truth from Father’s lips.
Because in my heart, I thought I knew who.
The men. The soldiers who had shot Mother.
“Get to work,” Father said, and I looked down at my hands. They had always been calloused, ever since we came to the island and I first picked up a hoe and drew a line in the thin, rocky soil. Calloused fingers, blisters on my palms, and dirt beneath my nails—they weren’t the soft hands of a prewar child.
But now they were unrecognizable. They were cracked and bloody, with splinters I couldn’t even feel, and so rough that when I braided May’s hair, she winced and pulled away.
“Get. To. Work,” Father repeated, and there was a dangerous note in his voice, a note I hadn’t heard since those nightmarish first days on the island after Mother’s death.
For a minute I thought about saying no. I thought about walking down to the sea and wading into the waves to follow Cain.
But I could not do it.
Father raised his hand in a threat.
I dropped my head in a nod, and I picked up the cart.
It was May who saw them first. I woke in the predawn, and she was not beside me. When I turned, I saw her standing at the window, looking out through the morning mist to something far across the ocean. Woof was beside her.
“Birds,” she said and pointed. But the noise was like no bird I had ever heard.
I got out of bed and stood beside her, shivering with cold, and that’s when I saw them.
Not birds.
Planes.
“Jacob,” I whispered, pushing him with my foot, and he stirred on the floor and flung out an arm, but he did not wake. “Jacob.”
I shook him, and this time he blinked and raised his head. My heart hurt, he looked so tired, and there were shadows beneath his cheekbones that had not been there a month ago.
“Wha?” he said, yawning.
“Planes.”
He sat up.
“Going to the mainland? Bombing?”
“No, coming here. Two of them. Little ones.”
He was out of bed before I had finished the words, peering out across the silvery sea.
“Fuck,” he said, and May laughed and put her hand over her mouth.
“Go tell Father,” I whispered to Jacob, and he nodded and pulled on his shirt and trousers, then ran silently next door.