The Ravener's Night

The launch had a locker, and the locker had a toolbox, and the toolbox had a hacksaw, and at first light I was on the graded road with the saw in my hand, because the launch could not take us and the Meridian was four days out and the island was sorting itself out and the only boat left was the one we would have to build.

Corbett came after me at the fence. The outer gate stood open, and the path beyond it was empty, and the village was empty, and the huts were open, and the yard was covered in feathers and blood, and one hut stood with its door open and a cloth doll lying on the threshold, and I stood at the edge of it and understood that the village had not gone over the fence. It had gone through it, in the dark, and the dark had not kept any of them.

"The fence line," Corbett said. "The posts are steel. The mesh is welded. But the mesh is only a fence if it is attached to the posts, and Kato had a bolt cutter, and the attachments were the first thing he cut." He pointed at a long low section of mesh lying in the scrub like a dropped sail. "The fence is not a wall, Owen. It is a suggestion, and the suggestion has been withdrawn."

We worked all day. We cut the fallen mesh into strips, and we lashed the strips to the launch's rail, and we sealed the locker with tarpaulin from the fuel shed, and we did it with the rifle leaning against the dock and the island's new sound coming and going on the wind, and I understood that we were building a boat out of the Warden's boundary, and that the boundary was the only material on the island that had ever held anything.

At dusk the sound changed. It had been a sound of many things moving, and it became a sound of one thing moving, and the one thing was coming down the graded road from the shed, and it was on four legs, and it was the Ravener.

I saw him at the fence line. He had grown somehow, or the dark had grown around him, or the difference was in the seeing: he was not a made thing anymore. He was the thing the made thing had been holding down, and the holding down was over, and he moved the way the inner side moved, fast and flat and certain, and his mouth was open, and his eyes were the last eyes on that island that understood anything, and what they understood was the old sentence, and the old sentence had only one verb.

Corbett raised the rifle. I have thought about that moment more than any other on the island, because I saw what he did before he did it: he looked at the Ravener, and he looked at the fence line, and he looked at the sea, and then he handed me the rifle and walked down the dock to the launch.

"Get aboard," he said. "We go now, or we don't go."

"There's no fuel."

"There's a sail in the locker," he said. "There has always been a sail in the locker. The Warden believed in boats that did not need him." He looked at the Ravener, coming down the road with the last light on him. "Get aboard, Owen. This is the part of the keeping that belongs to me."

I went aboard. I do not remember deciding to. I remember the dock moving under me and the launch moving under me and the sail going up and the wind taking it, and I remember looking back and seeing Corbett on the dock with his hands empty and the Ravener coming down the road and the fence lying in the scrub like a dropped sail, and I remember understanding that Corbett had been right about the whole shape of it, and that the keeping had never been about the fence. It had been about the man who stood in front of it.

The Ravener took him at the end of the dock. The launch was thirty yards out, and the wind was taking it, and I saw it happen the way you see a thing happen in a photograph: the two shapes coming together, and the shapes not separating, and the dock empty, and the rifle lying where Corbett had set it down, and I have not stopped seeing it since, and I have not stopped understanding that Corbett gave me the rifle so that I would have to watch, and that the watching was the last thing he kept for me.

The island went dark behind me. The launch carried me out through the channel, and the sail was the only light on the water, and I stood at the tiller with the wind in my face and the Ravener's night behind me, and I did not look back again, because there was nothing left on that island that I could keep.