Off Season (37 page)

“You never did know when to keep your mouth shut,” I said to Cam.

It was a strange summer, even to a woman who chatted with her husband in her pocket and argued with an old cat. There was a radiance to it, a kind of light around everything that seemed to come from within. Sound carried clear and pure for miles around; I heard the cries of eagles, the soft coughing of deer, the strange little barks of foxes in the night, the neck-prickling cry of many loons out on the night bay, usually when it was foggy. There were a far greater number of loons in the little cove at Edgewater than I ever remembered. Seven or eight pairs, at least. I remembered having only one pair at a time in the other summers. One pair came several years; we named them Arthur and Clare de Loon, and grieved when Clara said she’d heard a fisher had gotten one of them. We never saw the other again.

But this summer’s loons were sleek and verbal and many. I never tired of looking at them, their strong, thick necks and the red eyes and natty black-and-white-checked plumage.

I mentioned the largesse of loons to Laurie one morning.

“Yeah,” she said. “We’ve got them over to the cove, too. It’s a two-moon year. You’ll probably be seeing some mighty strange and wonderful things.”

“A two-moon year?”

“Supposed to be an old, old Indian belief. I’ve heard it goes all the way back to the Red Paint people. The year of two moons—it’s when two moons are visible in the sky in one month, the Wolf Moon, and the next moon, the Snow Moon. That doesn’t happen much. Powerful magic, so they say. Last one I remember was when I was a little girl, about eleven.”

Laurie was the same age as I. Yes, my eleventh summer at Edgewater had been full of magic. Some of it the darkest kind of magic, but magic nevertheless.

“What else can I expect?”

“Well, you never know. Wild things come closer to people and don’t seem to be afraid. Carlisle saw a young moose behind the library right up in town the other night, and they don’t hardly ever come this far south, and never in the summer.”

Carlisle was Laurie’s son, a silent, industrious, talented carpenter, and an avowed teetotaler. If Carlisle Halliday said he saw a moose behind the library, he had indeed seen a moose.

“You keep watching,” Laurie said. “You’ll see some of the critters we usually just don’t see. I’ve seen young foxes dancing in the moonlight around an old apple-tree stump in the front yard. Lots of bear sightings too. You don’t want to mess with the bears in case some of them have young nearby, but in a two-moon year they’re supposed to be tame as house dogs. The deer will almost come up and let you pet them, though they’ll eat your flowers and shrubbery, too. Awful nuisances, but nobody shoots them in a two-moon year. And porcupines, and battalions of skunks, and every kind of seabird—quite a gift, don’t you think?”

“Have you just sort of always heard about the year of two moons, or what?” I said. “I’ve read a lot of the New England myths and legends and I’ve never heard of it.”

“I don’t wonder. Some folks say it’s been passed down in their families since forever, but most of us first heard about it in a book a crazy lady from Boston wrote and published, forty years ago. She claimed to be a folklorist who had discovered some wonderful old tales and legends from hereabouts, but most of us had never heard of them, and it’s common thinking that she made half of them up. Went naked out there in the woods when the moon was full, and made these god-awful noises, said she was communicating with the old spirits and elementals. She was mental, all right. Her daughter from Providence came and got her when she took to wandering up around the old Comfort Chapel on choir night, as naked as a jaybird.”

“Wow,” I said, laughing. “Maybe I’ll take to shucking my clothes and dancing around the flagpole in the moonlight. Thank Toby for putting the flag up, by the way.”

“His pleasure. No, you keep your clothes on. And stay inside at night. You can watch the sky stuff from the porch just as well as from the top of that old cliff yonder.”

“Sky stuff?”

“Great August and September meteor showers in the two-moon years. And if you’re going to see the aurora borealis, this is the year you’ll see it. That would be later, though. After it’s gotten good and cold.”

“Oh, God, Cam would
love
that!” I said “Maybe I could manage—”

“No.” Laurie wasn’t smiling anymore. “You need to get on out of here before the cold comes and the dark drops down. It’ll be early this year; always in a two-moon year. I want you good and gone back to Virginia beside your own fireplace, with your own girls, by then.”

“Why on earth? I mean, I’m sure I will be; I’m going home right after we have the . . . the ceremony for Cam. But what would hurt me here in the cold that won’t in the summer?”

“Nothing but yourself. But you listen to me, Lilly: The long, cold nights are not the times to be alone. Your head gets full of stuff you don’t need in there, and if you got a sorrow it’ll eat you up. Now it’s all right with me if you want to handle your sorrow the way you are right now, riding that bicycle everywhere and kayaking and singing and talking to that old cat—it’s your way. But the long dark will change that. Toby and I are going to send you home, ready or not, if you’re still here when winter starts.”

“Well, don’t worry. I’ll be home listening to my girls boss me around and Silas grump at me, trying to find a way to live, before the first frost.”

“You’ll find a way to live, dear,” she said. “Look at how well you’re doing now. I could swear you’ve been happy.”

“I have, Laurie. It doesn’t make any sense. I guess it’s denial or something. But this place and this house just seem to care about me. Take care of me. I feel . . . loved.”

“You are loved, baby. Not a soul in the village but doesn’t think of you as one of their own. Your family has always been one of us. So was Cam. And so are you. When you come back in the summers you’ll be coming home just as surely as if you were coming back to Virginia.”

“I’ve always felt this was home way more than Washington or Virginia. Cam used to say that Virginia was the place he went to wait to come to Maine.”

“Well, we’ll always have part of him, won’t we?” Laurie said, her eyes gleaming with tears. “Both in our hearts and in our bay. I love it that you’ll be scattering his ashes there. Toby was so touched when you asked if he’d sail you out on the Friendship.”

“It was always a toss-up whether Cam loved me or Toby or the Friendship or the bay more. He’s getting the whole deal,” I said, hugging her.

“When are you thinking about?”

“Oh, gosh. I’m not sure, Laurie. I wanted him to have one last summer here—”

I broke off and looked at her. She looked back at me levelly.

“I guess I mean I wanted one last summer while I still feel him so near,” I said lamely. “I won’t have that anymore when I come back next summer.”

“I know.”

Later, when I thought of high summer at Edgewater, the word
numinous
always came into my mind. I knew that it meant, roughly: spiritual, supernatural, beyond understanding, and that was indeed part of it, surrounded as I was by my loving dead. But the word sounded in my ear like
luminous,
too, which the air and light certainly were, and somehow always brought to mind the hypnotic, trancelike state that the phrase “bee-loud glade” evoked. Or the old, clichéd “music of the spheres.” That summer was never silent: Eagles called and the bay breathed and songbirds warbled, especially a wood thrush that came each evening and poured his gold over us; ducks honked, seals splashed, deer huffed, and the katydids sang and sang and sang in the trees at night. They were so loud once that I went down from the porch and followed their song into the little clearing above the driveway where, I believe, Cam was going to put my studio, for it had been partially cleared. And there, in the white moonlight, I saw the young foxes, four of them, leaping, playing, barking softly.

Dancing.

I stood there a long time, crying for joy. And then I went home.

“Thanks,” I whispered into the dark of my bedroom.

“Don’t mention it” came back. I more felt it on my ears than heard it, and might have thought I imagined it, except that Silas raised his craggy head, cocked it, looked at me, and tucked it back into my backbone.

I didn’t hear Cam so much now. Instead, I felt him. He was often so near that I thought if I turned quickly, he would be there. I never did; I did not want to startle him. Cam sat beside me on the dock when I dangled my feet in the water, as I drank my morning coffee there, watching the plumes of mist and fog curling around the islands like dragon’s tails in a Chinese painting; when I sat on the old sofa at night reading, with Silas in the bend of my elbow. He was never not there. It was a peaceful, dreamlike feeling; I was never alone, he was there; he would be there. Talking could wait.

For about a week I had been hearing the shrill piping of the ospreys, so close overhead that I thought they must be fishing our cove, but I never saw any.

One morning I asked Laurie if she thought Toby would get out the old Beetle Cat we had bought for our girls, which had been stored for the winter.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll ask him at lunchtime. Where you planning to go?”

“I thought I’d go over to Sunderson’s Island,” I said. “I’ve heard the ospreys every day, lots of them, but I never see them. I thought I’d check in on the nest. I used to love to do that.”

She looked at me strangely, and then said, “Sit a spell. I never get a chance to talk to you. Let’s have some coffee.”

I sat and accepted the coffee and waited to hear what she had to tell me. I did not think I was going to like it.

“Lilly,” she said, “the ospreys are gone. They’ve been gone a couple of years. Their tree was cut down. I hear they’ve built a new nest over on Little Deer Isle, but I just haven’t had the heart to go see.”

“Cut down . . .”

“Some people bought the island from old Mr. Sunderson’s heirs and are going to put a house there. A real showplace, I hear. Had every crew within fifty miles hired to work on it.”

“A
house
? You can’t put a house on that—”

“I know, baby. But it’s theirs, fair and square. Not anything we can do about it. Nobody likes it. Nobody likes the people who bought it.”

“Who would do such an obscene, awful thing?”

She reached over and put her hand over mine.

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you this,” she said. “A couple named Surrey, from Massachusetts somewhere. They’re planning to live year round on it, if it ever gets built.”

“Surrey . . .”

“You knew the wife as Peaches Davenport, I think,” she said.

My mind was a white explosion. Only afterward was I aware that I had been screaming “No, no, no, no!”

“I know,” Laurie said. “Everybody knows what she did that summer. Not many will speak to her, even at the post office. She doesn’t seem to care. She had one husband die on her, and then, about fifteen, twenty years ago, she married some bishop of something or other and brought him up here to see this place, and they bought the island on the spot. She’s got two grown girls and a boy in school somewhere. When she first got here she asked me to tell you, if I saw you, to give her a call.”

“And you said?”

“I said I didn’t think I’d be seeing you, and she said, ‘Oh, well, I’ll look her up next time we’re here, then.’ They’re not here often. The house has kind of pooched.”

“Did they run out of money, I hope?” I said.

“No. Got plenty of that, I hear. Thing is, no workmen will stay more than a day or two.”

“Why?”

She took a deep breath and looked out over the bay. The afternoon wind had come up, and the rich blue was ruffled and glinting in the sun. The light was lower now. The water had a pewter cast.

“They say they keep getting attacked by ospreys,” she said. “Hear ’em shrieking and diving around their heads, feel the wind of their wings. A couple of men have deep cuts on their necks and arms.”

“But the ospreys are gone.”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“Laurie,” I whispered, “I hear them all the time.”

“I know. I do, too.”

“But if they’re not there, what are we hearing? What are those men hearing? What’s attacking them?”

She sighed and looked away, up into the woods that lay behind our house. Color was beginning to tinge them now; the mountain ash trees, always the first to turn in the fall, had glowing patches among their dense green. Some of the small swamp maples were fiery red and orange. When had fall happened? Why had I not noticed?

“Lilly,” Laurie said wearily, “you’ve been coming here since you were born, and your folks before you, but you’re still from away. When your folks have lived here three or four generations, like a lot of ours, you learn not to ask too many questions, or think too much on things you don’t understand. Maine is a wild place, at least this part of it is. Wild things happen, things beyond ken. Mostly, we don’t question them and just enjoy them. We’re not meant to know all the answers. I think that’s why some people who really love it here, and want to live here year round, end up going somewhere else. The world has got to make sense to them and when it doesn’t, they just can’t stay.”

“I never saw anything I couldn’t understand,” I said. “At least before this year.”
“Two-moon year.” She grinned at me and then grew serious again. “Most of that kind of stuff happens in the fall and the long dark, after you all have gone home.”

“That’s when Maine gets . . . haunted?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Laurie, who never swore. “That’s when it’s too dark and cold to do much but watch TV and drink liquor. I never heard of a haunting that didn’t start with a bottle of Old Forester.”

“It wasn’t cold or dark out on the island when the men heard the ospreys, or when you and I did.”

“Well, that crowd out there was nipping from the first day, with nobody really to supervise them. And then I expect they just got bored. Ghost ospreys are as good an excuse as any to knock off work.”

“But we weren’t drinking.”

“Lilly. Stop fretting and just enjoy the sound. It’s a poor thing if you can only love what you can see.”