After the Fire (3 page)

He drove off to park in lane one before Karen could ask him why or express sympathy. She was used now to these off-hand personal remarks, tossed like empty beer cans out of car windows by young men who seemed to think of any reply as in the nature of a fine. Their lack of ordinary civility often annoyed Karen, but this morning the young men of the island were made of very vulnerable flesh, and she felt protective, concerned.

The next car was the island’s only taxi, driven by a pale, hardly awake young man. The ancient Miss James was in the back seat, holding out her three dollars for a foot passenger ticket.

“You don’t need to pay this morning, Miss James,” Karen shouted. “It’s Thursday.”

“I forgot,” the driver shouted in his turn. “You’re a senior. You don’t have to pay on weekdays.”

“Of course not,” Miss James said, impatient with herself as she stuffed her money back into her wallet.

The cab moved down onto the dock to deliver Miss James to the waiting room, built on the east side of the dock just short of the loading ramp, welcome shelter on a windy morning like this one …

The first light of dawn came like a bucket of dirty water thrown across the southeast edge of the sky.

Henrietta Hawkins was next in line. She, too, was over sixty-five, but Karen had to collect twelve dollars for her car.

“This car’s old enough to travel free on weekdays,” Henrietta said as she handed over the bills.

It was a joking protest she often made, but she never complained frankly of the cost of traveling back and forth a couple of times a week to see a husband who no longer recognized her. She always looked cheerful, partly because she always wore a series of brightly colored scarves which lit her face and set off her handsome head of white hair. Karen wished she could make some acknowledging comment, like sending her regards to Mr. Hawkins, but he had been taken off the island a couple of years before she had arrived.

“Karen,” Henrietta said, as she accepted her ticket, “the funeral for Dickie is going to be at my house tomorrow. Red will be there getting it ready today, and Milly’s organizing, the food. I was wondering if you could speak to a few of the young men and find out if one of them wants to give a eulogy, or maybe several of them would just like to say a few words. There isn’t to be a service, prayers or anything of that sort. Sadie said Dickie, hated that sort of thing.”

“I’ll ask them,” Karen said. “I’m working at the pub tonight. Riley’s on this sailing.”

“Good. I’ll speak to him myself. It’s going to be at noon; so the men can come on their lunch break.”

“Oh,” Karen said as Henrietta’s car started forward, “Miss James is going in this morning.”

“Fine. I’ll take her. She’s probably going to her dentist. It’s on my way.”

The bus service into Vancouver, once adequate, was now intolerable. It had taken Karen some months to learn which drivers of cars going onto the ferry were comfortably willing to accommodate foot passengers. There were some drivers—Dickie had been among them—who made a point of driving so recklessly that they wouldn’t ever be inconvenienced. But young men like Rat and Adam were surprisingly amiable about it, even if they were taken out of their way. Riley was reliably unreliable. This morning nobody would be safe with him.

Karen couldn’t have believed in summer when she had first been hired that she’d ever like this job, the huge lines of tourist traffic, people too late to pick up their car reservations, whole families of tired kids and frustrated parents left behind with nobody but Karen to blame and nowhere to spend the night. She hadn’t known the islanders from the tourists, which ferocious dogs in the backs of pickup trucks were just bluffing, which might lunge for a patch of uniform and flesh. The troubles of winter—getting up in the dark, the wind blowing, ferries often delayed by rough seas, sometimes even cancelled—were experiences she shared with people she now knew.

After selling the final several tickets, Karen took her keys to unlock the ramp controls and walked down the short line of cars, smiling. She signaled Riley, first in line, onto the dock and then followed him. The wind was fresh and the heavy sky was now washed with modest pinks.

In the pass the ferry sounded, and the sea gulls parading on the dock railings rose up in noisy anticipation, for some of them would also choose to ride the ferry across the strait. The pigeons paced and racketed about the ramp, full of fretful cooing. Out on the lightening water rode several varieties of ducks.

Lights were now on in most of the houses around the bay, and smoke from their chimneys made a layer of grey underneath the layer of cloud. Karen wondered when she had learned to distinguish between island mists and smoke.

The ferry, brightly lighted, came round the point promptly at eight o’clock. Karen knew that everyone waiting to go aboard would take its being on time as a good omen for their day. She herself felt competent lowering the large ramp onto the ferry deck, raising the barrier, and greeting the ferry hand who came to collect her data. There were no foot passengers coming off and from the adjacent island only a couple of work trucks which would be lined up tonight to go home. Once they disembarked, Karen waved the several departing foot passengers aboard, among them the ancient Miss James who was tall and thin and erect, in a proper town hat and good winter coat.

“Mrs. Hawkins is going to give you a lift into town,” Karen shouted.

“Thank you, child,” Miss James replied. She called everyone under forty “child,” everyone over forty “my good man” or “my good woman,” her solution to her failing memory for names.

When the passengers had crossed the car deck to the stairs that would lead them up into the lounges, Karen switched the light to green and waved the cars aboard, one last time wishing her travelers well.

The only difficulty about a prompt ferry was that it meant Karen had to kill a little time before she could have morning coffee at the store and then pick up her mail. There was a kettle in the booth, but coffee was an excuse to be with people. When she had first taken the job with its odd hours, she thought what a virtue it would be to have most mornings to herself, but, if she didn’t have a specific chore, the laundry or the cleaning, she hated going back to her beach cottage and its silence. She didn’t even like to watch the birds, as she did when she was out here on the dock with so much else to do.

Walking back down the dock, Karen wondered if she would ever get used to being alone. She had lived with Peggy for eight years. Would it take her eight more years to get over it? And if she did get over it, would she be so set in her ways that she could never live with anyone else again?

If Peggy could see her on a morning like this or in the pub at night, she wouldn’t recognize her. For Karen had never had a job in those eight years. Peggy had wanted her to be at home. “I want to be entirely looked after,” Peggy had said. Eventually, for reasons Karen still didn’t really understand, Peggy had felt she was doing the looking after because she paid all the bills. When Karen finally asked, “What is really wrong?” Peggy had answered bluntly, “You’re boring.” It was that accusation Karen couldn’t face in her empty house, for surely that about her hadn’t changed, however busy she had kept herself. In her blank misery, she bored herself.

Often Henrietta stayed in her car for the fifty-minute ride across the strait, sparing herself the long climb up the stairs and the negative social demands of people who wanted to kill time in chatter. How few people could simply watch the sea for a breaking killer whale, the sky for an eagle, the horizon for weather shaping over the mountains. How few people could simply think or read a book. This morning, however, she had to speak to Riley and then find Miss James to offer her a ride.

She found Riley in the cafeteria, head bowed over a large plate of greasy eggs, bacon, and chips. He had not bothered to shave or comb his hair, and he might as well have had a sign hanging around his neck saying Do Not Disturb.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your breakfast, Riley,” Henrietta said, taking a seat across from him.

He looked at her and sighed.

“It won’t take long,” Henrietta reassured him. “I wondered if you had anything you’d like to say at Dickie’s funeral tomorrow.”

“Me?” Riley asked, incredulous.

“It’s very hard on a community to lose someone as young as Dickie.”

“I should think most of you old people would be glad to see the last of him,” Riley said with sullen anger.

“Riley, most of us have known Dickie all his life, saw him lose his father, saw him drop out of school and then gradually pull himself together, building himself that house, getting himself the truck and working hard for it all. He was still a boy to most of us, still figuring out how to live.”

Again Riley sighed, but Henrietta could read an opening vulnerability in his dark eyes.

“You were his friend,” she coaxed.

“I bought him his last drink,” Riley said softly.

“Oh, Riley, I’m sorry,” Henrietta said, and she put a hand on his arm.

After a moment, Riley said, “Yeah, well, I guess maybe I could do something. I’m sort of torn up about it, you know?”

“Of course you are,” Henrietta said, and she stood up. “It will be at noon at my house.”

“Good excuse for a shave,” he said, a hand on his stubbly cheek, and he gave her a rueful grin.

So many people these days, without a church to offer some structure for grief, wanted to let the dead go without public acknowledgement. But one of the points of a funeral was to make people take that first step, begin to pull themselves together. Riley would be the better for a shave and he knew it. And, once they were all gathered together, it would be easier for them to realize that, if they felt any responsibility for Dickie’s death, they all shared it, and it became a more honest weight, one with a meaning for the future. She knew. She had buried a son of her own.

Miss James was sitting alone in the lounge, looking out at the somber morning. When Henrietta put a hand on her shoulder, she started.

“Sorry,” Henrietta said.

“I was riding the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco before the Bay Bridge was built,” Miss James confessed.

“You still may want a lift into Vancouver,” Henrietta said loudly.

“Thanks, Hen,” Miss James said. “That woman called me about the funeral.”

“Oh, I hope you don’t think you have to bring anything.”

“Of course I do. I’m past baking, but I can bring a pound of coffee.”

“Worth its weight in gold,” Henrietta said apologetically.

“Well, money’s to spend. Everyone who might have been waiting for me to die is dead themselves, long since.”

“Where are you going today?”

Miss James frowned at her.

Henrietta repeated her question.

“To my ear man,” Miss James answered wryly. “I’m going to ask him if an ear trumpet wouldn’t do better than this gadget.”

“I’ll see you at the car then,” Henrietta said and moved on.

Miss James was the only person on the island who was never called anything but Miss James. Only a few people, Henrietta among them, knew that she had been christened Lily Anne, which probably hadn’t had such a silly ring at the turn of the century in the South where Miss James had been born. There was hardly a trace of it in her voice, except when she pronounced names like Mary or Arthur. In Mary the “r” was pronounced and stretched. In Arthur, there was no “r” at all. It was a nomadic accent with traces of many dialects, its only true country great old age, a flat and windy plain. Miss James wouldn’t thank Henrietta for the stab of pity she felt at that deaf isolation.

In the car Miss James chose, as most deaf people do, to talk since she could not listen, but she was attentive enough to fall silent at the moments when the traffic piled up or Henrietta had a difficult turn to negotiate. Miss James was for Henrietta an ideal passenger.

“There’s something I’d like you to think about, Hen,” Miss James said as they were delivered from the Massey tunnel. “I want to do something for Red. I’ve been thinking about it for some time. She’s too young to have nobody in the world. Oh, she might marry, I suppose, but I wouldn’t like to see her marry for that reason. She
can
live alone. I was thinking of leaving her my house. It isn’t much of a place, but at least it’s got electricity and indoor plumbing, and I think it would suit her. But sometimes I’m afraid I’m going to live forever. When I think of that child dead in his bed …”

For a moment Henrietta didn’t realize Miss James was referring to Dickie, but there was no distance between child and boy in Miss James’ long view.

“If I knew I’d be dead in a year, that would suit me for her, but longer seems too long. I thought of telling her, but she might feel obligated, and I don’t want that.”

“Why not?” asked Henrietta, for whom obligation had been a kind guide. But Miss James didn’t hear the question.

“I give her a bonus at Christmas,” Miss James continued, “but that’s only fair. And to tell the truth, I don’t think she spends the money she earns. She has no rent to speak of. She collects her own wood, grows her own vegetables. She doesn’t run a car. She hasn’t even got a phone. And she certainly doesn’t spend it on clothes. I don’t suppose she knows what a bank account is. It wouldn’t surprise me if she kept her money in a sock under her mattress or buried it in a jar in her garden.”

Henrietta made a mental note to ask Red what she did do with her money. It had never occurred to her to teach Red about banking, but of course she should have.

“But she’d know what to do with a house. She takes care of it now as if it were her own,” Miss James concluded.

For the first time it struck Henrietta that there could be a pleasure in being childless, that someone with even Miss James’ limited resources was free to speculate on generosity, to bestow it where she chose, unlike Henrietta who considered herself in stewardship over what would be Hart Jr.’s and then his children’s legacy. It would never have occurred to Henrietta to give Red anything but her attention.

“We’ll talk about it,” Henrietta shouted just before she let Miss James out of the car.