Compass Rose (39 page)

The juice came to a boil. May set the timer and wiped her hands on her apron. May found herself nodding, not because she agreed but because she should have figured that Phoebe couldn’t help herself.

“How good you
are,
” Phoebe said. “And I never would’ve dreamed … I mean, think of all the people who know you and … For example, I’m sure Mary Scanlon talks about Rose to her new boyfriend.”

“Mary Scanlon has a right to.”

Phoebe put her palm to her cheek as though she’d been slapped. She sat up very straight and said, “Oh dear.”

That was Phoebe, too—she might run on and on or she might just give a little peep. To put a patch on Phoebe’s hurt feelings, May said, “Mary’s as close to Rose as I am.” She felt herself going blank. She wasn’t tired, she’d just had enough of going round and round. She said, “What’s done is done.” Her voice sounded far off. “I know you mean to help.”

“Of course I do. And I understand how much stress … I mean, it’s been one thing after another—Charlie’s accident, Dick’s boat, and now your house. I’m not surprised you’re on edge.”

There Phoebe went again. But this time Phoebe wasn’t really
present to May. What Phoebe said was sharp for a half second, then blurred, then gone—like the trail left by a fish swimming through phosphorescent plankton.

May said, “I guess it’ll be all right so long as the next time you see Mr. Salviatti you make sure to tell him what I told you. I don’t want Rose talked about, not in the argument about this house.”

Phoebe floated to her feet. “Yes, of course. I’m on my way there now. And don’t worry, Piero is very understanding. I’d trust him with any of my problems.”

Phoebe went to the downstairs bathroom and came back with her hair brushed to a shine. After she went out the door there was a trace of perfume. May closed her eyes and saw her things—no, more like ghosts of her things—the canning jars, the kitchen table, the cedar chest, Rose’s skiff. There they went trailing in Phoebe’s wake, up the hill and drifting through the bars of Mr. Salviatti’s gate, then disappearing into the swing of Phoebe’s skirt as she climbed the front steps.

The timer buzzed. May turned off the burner. At first she thought her little daydream was about whatever tomfoolery Phoebe got up to. But then she felt peaceful, as if whatever was to happen with people wanting this or that didn’t matter all that much, as if she’d been waiting for something to shake her loose from her fretting and her disapproving. She’d been right and she’d been wrong, and either way was just more trouble for somebody. It’d be nice if she could figure out just how she got to this quiet. Now she was content to sit and wait for the juice to cool off enough to pour into the jars. She might tighten up again, but for now she was unfolding, easy as that.

Y
es, I’d like to,” Elsie said, “but look, there’s a sort of crisis going on and I’m pretty much … I’ll give you a call when things settle down.”

She’d never heard Walt’s voice on the phone. He sounded like his father.

“Yeah. I heard Phoebe talking to Dad. So you’re into all that, too. Wait. Dumb of me. I guess you’re right in the middle. I’m used to thinking of you off in the woods on your own.”

“In the woods—don’t I wish. But right now I really do have to get going.”

When she hung up she kept on pressing the phone down as though that would seal him off. The afternoon in the tower room could have been years ago, should have been years ago, shouldn’t be a piece of the puzzle in her mind. She’d been trying to think about who could have some influence on Jack. Sally was still away with Jack Junior. Johnny Bienvenue had returned her phone call. He’d said, “It sounds ugly, but I can’t jump in without some homework. I’ll send someone down to the township office to see what they say. At least that’ll let them know I’m taking an interest.” A dime when she’d asked for a dollar. Johnny might not have sold his soul to Jack, but he might worry about crossing him. It could also be that Patty Scanlon was rationing his help to an old lover.

Could Captain Teixeira do anything? Not with Jack but maybe with Johnny—promise him every vote in his extended family, speak up for him in the Portuguese community.

Rose had fired her one shot, but Mary Scanlon had convinced Rose—and May agreed—that Rose should go ahead and sing.

May had told Elsie that Phoebe Fitzgerald was persuading Mr. Salviatti to work on Jack. Elsie felt a pinch of competitive envy. Elsie
felt bad about this envy, then felt an even more alarming envy that Phoebe, whom she’d dismissed as a giddy flirt showing her pretty legs to the boys, had turned out to be the hardheaded one, while she herself had nothing to offer but outrage and a day of fruitless phone calls. And now that she’d just got off the phone with Walt, she might as well cut a switch and lash her own bare legs.

Out of the house. Not down the hill to Miss Perry’s. Straight into the woods. Plenty of daylight left. A good hard hike until she owned her own body, until she was her own motion. Nothing splendid about this neck of the woods, close-packed second growth fighting it out for a hold in the rocky soil, a few pines pushing up fast and spindly to get to the light. She had to circle a patch of barberry, damn foreign barberry, even more bristly and thorny than the native. On the other side was a bit of surviving meadow—all these hills were cleared of old growth by the colonists so sheep could graze. In the twentieth century it had gone back to scrub. The beautiful trees were pets of the big houses.

She felt better being sour about the woods than sour about herself.

She felt even better in the middle of the small meadow, seeing the blue summer sky. There were a few black locusts that had managed to grow tall on the edge of the clearing. She saw a bird flit out of a hole in the trunk. Female bluebird, just the tail blue. It swooped down and around the tree, then fluttered back up to its hole. It did it again, and this time Elsie saw what it was up to. A blacksnake was climbing the locust, taking advantage of the deeply ridged bark. How did the bird know? Did it hear something? Did it smell something? Had it just come out of its nest by chance? For that matter, how did the snake know there was a nest up there? Did the snake actually calculate that a hole was likely to have a nest in it? It was a long way to climb just to see. Or did the snake keep an eye out for birds bringing food back?

The snake was moving slowly, inching up. Hard to tell its length, since it was curving and recurving. Now only a few feet from the hole. The bluebird was fluttering, peeping near the snake’s head. The snake kept climbing.

Elsie threw a stick at it. Way short. She found a rock. It hit the tree above the hole. It frightened the bluebird more than the snake.

When she watched a mayfly struggle out of its case in a streambed and swim to the surface, she didn’t root for the mayfly more than the trout coming after it. What was the difference? Pretty bluebird, ugly-ass snake? What was in the hole, anyway? Eggs or nestlings?

Too late, anyway. The snake was in the hole, only six inches of tail hanging out. The bluebird fluttered up and down. Why didn’t it start pecking at the snake’s tail? If it wasn’t going to do anything but chirp and flutter, to hell with it. Elsie looked around the sky, hoping a hawk might show up and spy the snake’s tail. But even to a hawk’s eye the tail might look like another ridge of the soot-gray bark.

Elsie sat down. After a while the snake pulled in its tail. The bluebird perched on a twig, certainly tired out after all that frantic swooping and hovering. Elsie wondered what it felt. Was grief a word that translated? Resignation? Did the bird picture what was going on inside? Elsie herself wasn’t altogether sure. Did the snake bite the three or four nestlings to death and then unhinge its jaw to swallow them at leisure? Or did it eat one while the others squirmed? Did the live ones know what was going on?

The snake was successfully doing two things at once—finding a meal that it would take days to digest
and
a place safe from hawks, owls, or feral cats. Did it feel clever? Or was it no more reflective than a clam worm that gnawed its way down a quahog’s siphon, ate the meat, and then curled up inside the shell to take an armor-plated nap? Predation and refuge in one move. She remembered going through a bucket of quahogs she’d forked up (okay, she was a predator, too) and finding a loose-shelled one. She’d opened it up with her thumbnail and seen the perfectly coiled clam worm. She’d had an instant of revulsion and then a longer moment in which she recognized the elegance—the elegance of what she saw and the elegance of the clam worm’s endgame.

She was pleased to have put the snake and the clam worm together in a single sentence in the language of mute creatures. She had a tick of longing to know the whole language, but she was happy to see what she saw, and if what she saw linked to something
else she’d seen, she was a little bit happier. A vanity but an okay vanity that in this part of her life she was modest and severe.

The male bluebird showed up. The two bluebirds perched on a branch. After a while they flew off together. Had the female somehow told him? Given a warning? Given a twitch of courtship that reset the nest-building and mating cycle?

Although it was not official Natural Resources policy, a number of officers took to breaking the eggs of mute swans. The mute swans, unlike the whistling swans, were introduced and had thrived, taking over feeding and nesting territory from the native swans and from Canada geese. Smashing the eggs didn’t work. The mute swans laid another clutch. The officers then sprayed the mute-swan eggs with silicone. The mute-swan mother kept sitting on them—in vain, since no oxygen got to the embryos. If the blacksnake had eaten eggs, would it be as easy for the bluebirds to produce another clutch as for the mute swans? All that swooping, all that mother frenzy, erased? But if there were nestlings?

The bluebirds were gone. A minute or two of fluffing and bobbing and off they went.

Elsie let that part go. She jogged back to her house, found a hammer and a flashlight. She filled both pockets with ten penny nails. Back to the locust. She gathered some thick sticks, nailed one onto the tree, stood on it, and nailed another. She climbed up and down until she had the last rung nailed just below the hole. She banged a single nail in, above and to one side of the hole. She dropped the hammer, held on to the nail with her left hand, and worked the flashlight out of her back pocket.

She held still for a moment before she moved her face in front of the hole. All that banging and clambering might have pissed the snake off. She turned the flashlight on, used its flat face to block most of the hole. She peered in. Hard to see at first—the snake’s coils were piled on top of one another, its head turned toward the back of the hole. It didn’t move at first, then raised its head. She saw two tiny claws sticking out of its mouth. The snake rippled, and the claws moved an inch farther into the gape.

She saw a bulge in the snake—was it two or three baby birds? At
the back of the hole was another motion. One featherless nestling still alive.

The snake swung its head, and Elsie dropped the flashlight. It clattered down, hitting the rungs of her makeshift ladder. She lost her grip on the nail but grabbed the topmost stick. It tilted and she slid, hugging the tree with her arms, hitting one rung after another with her feet. She bumped her way down, burning her hands on the bark. She scratched her cheek on something. Her feet hit the ground, and she tipped over backward, a jounce on her ass and a slow roll onto her back. She lay still for a bit, knocked silly. When she stood up a nail slid down her leg. She reached into her pocket and sent another nail through the hole in it.

She closed her eyes. She made a high humming noise that popped her eyes back open. Silly-ass woman. She picked up the two pieces of her flashlight. She screwed the head back on. Didn’t work. Must have busted the bulb. She swished through the grass with her feet until she uncovered the hammer. She stuck it in her belt, shoved the flashlight in her good pocket. She felt her cheek. A fair amount of blood on her fingertips. Some had dripped onto her shirt. She pulled her shirttails loose to wipe her cheek. All the buttons but one were torn off. One knee was scraped and was beginning to stiffen. It loosened up as she started home. She turned around at the edge of the meadow. She spied the hole by following the nailed-on sticks, the top two of them dangling askew. A lot of clumsy fussing to see what she could see. She wondered how the snake would get down. Its stomach was ruffled like the fish-scale bottom of her cross-country skis—slid forward smoothly, gave a little traction to keep from sliding back. Maybe the snake would come down in loops, curving and recurving so that parts of its length pointed up to get a grip. That would be something else to see, but there was no telling when it would come down. A vulnerable time, that zigzag descent—a hawk by day, an owl by night.

She felt a pang at what she wouldn’t see. But what she
had
seen—the slow swallowing of flesh and bones, the peristalsis she’d only read about and imagined in pale abstraction—now it was hers.

She tucked her shirt back in and went into the woods. Long shadows for the first bit, then diffuse light, dim but not dark.

She’d seen what others would call horrible or even frightening, and yes, she’d felt horror and she’d had a moment of fright, but these were pushed aside by the sight, the intense sight, that made the alien intimate.

By the time she got to her house it was almost dark. When she opened the door Rose called from her room, “Mom! Where have you
been?
” Rose came through the door saying, “May’s been trying to find you. Everyone’s …” She stopped and said, “What happened? Oh my God, are you all right? What did you do?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re all bloody; there’s blood all over—”

“I scratched my cheek. It looks worse than it is.” Elsie went to the bathroom mirror. She cleaned her cheek. It was a little worse than she’d thought—an L-shaped cut, a dangling triangle of skin the size of her thumbnail. She washed it and taped a gauze pad over it. She took off her shirt and cleaned her face and chest with a washcloth. Wiped off her knee. Rose was standing behind her. Rose said, “How did you do all that?”