A man who’s lost a leg, or even two, can still be bobo for marrying — it’s his third leg that makes the lovin’, and the babies too
The afternoon Mair Rodrigues Lestrange McCrae watched a pair of giant albatrosses soaring across the blue sky in their mating dance, she knew she could no longer put off clambering the rocks around Big Henry Island to find herself a husband. The storm petrel chicks had already hatched on Birdie Island. Her arms and heart had been empty for too long.
Mair Rodrigues Lestrange McCrae was twenty-one years old. If she wanted a man in her bed, a cauldron above her fire and pickins of her own to love and give her grandchildren, the sea must send her a beachie, and a bobo one.
She set off early the next morning when the sun was pushing its gold through the pink haze on the horizon. The waves curled and crashed and spat froth onto her boots as she clambered across the boulders flung down long ago by the volcano towering above the island. But no boulders fell today, nor had they in the memory of any Islander. Big Henry had grumbled last night, sending the crockery shivering, but this morning its rocky black caldera simply sent up its normal spire of smoke, so clear it was just a ripple among the blue.
Birdie Island floated in the early mist two miles away, the waves crashing on its rocks looking like they were tipped with wisps of fleece. Far beyond both islands the thin black horizon line divided sea from sky. Beyond that lay the Outlands, where only the migrating birds and the island’s sailor men ventured.
The Islanders called Mair’s quest ‘walking the beaches’ but, in truth, the island had only one beach big enough for even a fishing boat to pull up on. Half of the island was edged by a black cliff, so sheer it gleamed mirror-like at midday, the rocks about its base exposed only at low tide. The rest of the island was circled by turquoise sea so shallow that no boat could approach, except through the narrow passage to the landing cove.
Mair’s mami hadn’t walked the beaches to find a husband. There’d been boys aplenty growing up on the island waiting to go sailing when Mami was young. Mami had married one of them, Mister Terry Jones Nkumbo McCrae.
Mair could not remember him. Terry Jones Nkumbo McCrae had been lost at sea when she was three years old, though she had been five before the letter arrived to say her da would never return to his island.
Gran’s man was a beachie, though. He was on a battered ship’s boat that had survived when their vessel was broken up by the great storms of the south Atlantic, with only three sailors left in it after weeks of sun that sucked the life from a man and thirst that drove them mad.
Two men were unconscious. Only Rob Murphy had still had the strength — and luck — to row the boat through the narrow channel, missing the rock teeth under the water on either side. He’d even pulled the boat onto the sand before collapsing.
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