But enough! Distant relatives bear the substance of personal madness (I say this having no idea of what it means, but knowing exactly how it feels). Suffice it: Walt Breezer was our first town mayor, at eighteen years old he had been as bold and as firm as an iron bar—and my great great grandfather, so called. A young lively islander of infinite, unwieldy gall.
Anyway, yes, young (men, mostly), Founding island boy Fathers. A remote settlement of high living juveniles, carefree islanders of mixed race and the like. An infant settlement, as many imperial settler communities are, of course. One hundred and fifty new souls stumbling in the rich alluvial soil of the Welsonians (the far mountain to the South: South Welson; the closest mountain: Middle Welson, the far mountain to the North . . . You get the mountainous drift!). This was a period of uncertainty which lasted, by all estimates, several lifetimes.
Everyone, and I mean everyone here in those early days, lived life before they even knew it! Of course, there followed the great plague years which scarred but did not ultimately kill our population. You can see that on Water Street which runs (no pun intended) alongside the main beach and looks not unlike a puzzle, one (now worn) brick angularly placed against another, one line lined up against another, like a series of coded possibilities without a code, so that as you look along Water it does indeed appear as unfathomable as water, points where the lines of its bricks seem to flow fast together and other points where they seem tangled and stagnant, points of clear bright colour and other points of dark cold, and all with the intrusions of the remnant bleached posts of jetties from which the ill were transported in ships to countries way beyond the Communions, and never seen again.
All this is recorded in the most well-known local history books The Communions Islands: the First 150 Years [1962], by T. K. Algebrine, Our Beloved Communions [1964], by the Rev. Horace C. Precious and, though often ignored, the long and complicated history entitled The Trouble with The Communion Islands [1973] by Walt W. Breezer. Yes, him) because it seemed that those who did not leave, who survived all things in their homes, their half-build shacks, their half-built fishing boats, survived, survived and, subsequently, survived some more. Alternatively, those who were taken away never came back. The ships returned empty. So it is from there, from those beginnings, where youth persisted, and from that The Communion Islands were made. We were a population still learning the alphabet of life. We had no place in it for Death.
“An Island of Children!” disingenuous headlines from other, close-by islands declared.
“Child’s Play on the Communion Islands” went others, which a hint of envy, I thought.
“Paedi At Tricks!”
But those envious declarations were beside the point because, once inaugurated as a nation, The Communion Islands entirely made its own way in life.
Until, that is, the arrival of Death.
You can see that early period in the island fishing families, young but with an ocean heritage of “near-Death” experiences (near-Death is a strange term, because they were nowhere near her at all, actually; but, so they assumed when one of their fishing boats sank or a black shark took a hunk from a tuna as they hauled it in); the youthful timber-getting families whose members fell under a falling cocoplum tree but rose again soon after, like saplings; the adolescent orchardists struck by lightning but only singed; the half-grown miners, dusty in search of precious stones, communities and opals and the like, and suddenly clasped by the earth in stones, only to have them crawl out from their collapsed tunnels into the sunlight.
The Communion Islands were raw and so distant, connected by a coral outcrop to each other, and several named but unrenowned seas. And yet living sometimes came with a price. The way an eye of a Communion Islands child appeared, for example, sometimes to have no ending. Not in its shape or size or the color of its pupil. But something else, in its depth, so that as you looked into it you felt yourself slipping from your moorings, coming adrift. Falling inward, as it were.
I should know: I was one of these kids.
Children from families like the Eddins and the Drinkerds, the McOrdles and the Beards, the Yorks and the Blackspikes. It was there. The Hurleys and the Handinos, the Lakehams and the Curbows. To name just a few of the pre-deceased local dynasties. I ask: “How many of these pursued that trait of haruspex desire?” Connections, that is, with the animal kingdom of the Communion Islands. Seeking answers in the ways of creatures. “Plenty!” I answer. Out in the trees, or in the sea, up in the mountains, along the trails of opossum and amper deer, black parrots, and fur mice. “How many seemed to carry no other scent but the occasional scent of ether and antiseptic and gauze and benzoin?” (Home medicine sufficed! That is, you’ve heard the expression “Smells like Death”? Well, they never did!) How many had bones so supple that even after falls from heights—such as the crumbling clay cliffs above Skelton Beach or treed ridges of La Roneo - they continued unscathed.
To those from other islands, who came to discover these islands, the children of the Communions only seemed to become ever stronger, never weaker, only to be ever more healthy never more ill, only to be becoming ever more permanent, never less so.
Alternatively, the visitors themselves felt themselves staggering onto and off these shores. Across their brows grew furrows, furrows appearing as they observed us. Typically (if any of this could be said to be typical) two furrows, above their eyes, and some just below them. Horizontal, and lateral, like crossing train tracks (as many of these long distance travellers bore, none too happily, inscriptions of ordinary, dull, human experience clashing with what they now observed of our lies). And their particular furrows were particularly angular, riding over the cheekbones of these island visitors like the waves of our rising sea swell, up and over. And onwards. And these furrows moved too, they altered, as they discovered more about our ways of living. From initially shallow to soon deep, from light to dark, from narrow (mere lines) to wide (gullies), from short (an inch, maybe, perched over cheekbones) to long, flowing, impossible, heading into the distance, beyond. You might even say that these Communions furrows—which island visitors observed in mirrors as their time on the islands lengthened - reminded our visitors of the tearing teeth marks of something truly enormous.
But back to our history! To cut a long story short: after the Mycean-to-Anthrohalocyn periods, those half-formed primal brutes, then The Communion Islands saw more steady and more concerted growth—devoid finally of the restrictions of potential but never complete malady and disorder that infected the Founding years and borne forward, increasingly, on the fundamentals of minerals, fisheries, wood and fruit. The four pills of Life, perfectly served by The Communion Islands.
The burgeoning 21st Century burgeoned onward. Yippeee! Modernity. Tourism began. . . .
(See there in this, our fine cinematic vista of time, the bright green horse-drawn tour bus of the Communion Islands Private Bus Co Ltd [Thomas Seawell, proprietor], taking adventurous visitors out along Water Street, weekly, and onto the meandering miles of the Gushing Highway [highway in name but not in action; road holes so large as to accommodate towns. Gushing [the name of an island government road builder of yore] it ain’t], on their way to staying overnight at the Toobay Inn, which in later years would be owned by Seawell himself, who had traipsed out there one high season toward the end of the century, taking a gaggle of eager travellers in their leather boots and white flounces, and, for reasons best known to Fate, promptly decided to stay in the room overlooking the small courtyard from which the high green peaks of South Welson can be spied but very little of Toobay Bay - thus why he took the room, to give visitors the best views of blue whales and waterbirds, and the steaming sails of the fishing fleet, in the hope they might understand us. And for this he subsequently stayed eternally without any sight whatsoever of the ocean, for which he had an almost impossible affection)
All the while, growing Communions around it, trees came down—hardwoods, softwoods, apple and orange woods, woods for train tracks, woods for homes, woods so exotic that they were sent to cities in remote provinces or given to Kings by Heads of State, woods that swirled with grainy mysteries, woody contrasts, hardened seams, softened stratums—and as these