Reprisal (27 page)

"Sorry for your trouble, Mrs. Reed," the boy said, and handed her change from her ten, and the paint and brush in a small brown paper bag.

Joanna nodded and smiled ... but out on the sidewalk she wondered which trouble he'd meant. Frank? Last night's adventure and fright--or simply her broken window?

She put the small sack into her tote bag, and walked on to Barkley's. The vegetables grim as usual, the fruit fairly good, but except for the apples, expensive. The beef was excellent--Asconsett people, routinely fed on fish, were choosy of beef, pork, and lamb as delicacies. The chicken was local, yard hens raised on feed, salty grass, and sand bugs.

As Joanna and a few other women shopped, Mr. Barkley, tall, elderly, and sullen, drifted through his small store keeping an eye on them as if, at a signal prearranged, they intended to plunder his counters and bins and run out into the street with vegetable booty, quarts of milk, and live lobsters from the ice tub.

Joanna shopped carefully, buying for one, moving with the others through the market in slow circling hunt-and-gather. An ancient feminine pleasure of small discoveries and decisions. ... And considering there was no man, no Frank to please with red meat, she decided instead on chicken--a small fryer. She brought her basket to the counter and paid Mrs. Barkley, a shadow retired behind her cash register, for the chicken, a bunch of slightly wilted spinach, a half-dozen early yellow pippin apples, one pound of new potatoes, and a bottle of Gallo Hearty Burgundy--Barkley's only habitual wine.

Her groceries just fit into the red canvas tote bag. Joanna lugged that back along Strand to Ropewalk, then went down the alley to dockside parking. The Volvo was where she'd left it. She unlocked the car, put her tote bag into the backseat, and opened the driver's-side door to get in--then paused and stood looking up the alley. Manning's warehouse seemed higher in its three stories than it had last night, when much had been lost in shadow. At the third story, just under the eaves, the farthest vent window was still canted open ... space enough for a mistaken heroine to have slid through on her quest.

Two couples, tourists, came walking down the alley. One of the women was carrying a large sketch pad under her arm, prepared to capture fishing boats along the wharf, their complicated reflections. ... These tourists would stroll past Manning's--its big basement loaded with black bales of green cargo--then go on along the docks, perhaps imagining harsher and more colorful days, whaling days ... harpooners, ape-armed sailors with their palms tattooed by ground-in tar, and the no-nonsense captains, with voyage shares and faces grim as any arctic sea.

The couples walked past her--Southern accents, Southern people up to see gray cold Yankee water, hear swallowed down-east speech, notice the men whose great-great-grandfathers had manned the Federal fleets blockading their Confederacy from Charleston to the Mississippi, starving them of grain, guns, and victory.

... Except for Whitman and Stephen Benet, who had written the poetry of that war? It had been too big, too much of a matter for minor poets. A family feud--richer, more tragic than struggle between nations, so Homer's verse was needed, or Shakespeare's plays. The scope and wry oddness of those armies of strong, humorous farm boys fighting ... sewing a landscape quilt of banners, gunfire, band music, and blood.

The tourists went on their way. There was little doing at Manning's wharf.

Joanna saw no loading or unloading--top dock or basement dock beneath it.

Nothing doing at Manning's this morning. ...

She drove up to the cottage, pulled into the drive, and climbed the kitchen steps to put the groceries away, all but the chicken and potatoes.--She'd forgotten milk. Should have made a grocery list. ... Food. It would take a while before she settled on what groceries, what meals only she enjoyed-preferences that had been set aside for Frank's taste over the years.

She really didn't know yet what she wanted to eat. Breakfasts, of course, would be easy. But dinners ... once this chicken was gone, what next?

Joanna went upstairs and changed to old jeans, sneakers, and a blue work shirt, for possible window-frame painting. Then she came down to the kitchen, unwrapped the chicken, put it in the sink, and began to cut it apart, clean the pieces in running water. She had to use a small utility knife. The other knife--the fillet knife--was out on Sand Hill. Probably findable, if she searched. ...

The chicken came apart in the rubbery light-pink helpless way birds had under a primate's steel. "These are all my parts," the pieces seemed to say. "See? I keep nothing from you--except my bowels and odd feet, my narrow witless head and lidded eyes. And those you do not want to see. They are too much me; my head would spoil your appetite."

In time, Joanna thought, she'd learn the mechanics of solitude, how to keep private all she used to share--no shared observations, no shared jokes, no shared memories anymore. And no disagreements; no one would argue with her from one day to another. She would always be right.

She finished the chicken, took the two-pound sack of flour from the pantry, and shook a cupful --and pinches of salt and pepper--with the chicken pieces in Barkley's big brown-paper grocery sack.

She poured four tablespoons of olive oil into the big frying pan--weighty old-fashioned iron--turned up the left front burner, and set the chicken pieces in to brown. Now they'd become food, no longer bird parts. It seemed there was no essential that couldn't be transformed by use and point of view.

... And it might be the same with loneliness.

Joanna washed the new potatoes, scrubbed them with the vegetable brush, and cut each in half ... then peeled and sliced an old onion into chunks. Used a fork to turn the chicken pieces over.

There was one large pot--battered aluminum. She rinsed it with hot water, poured four cups of cold water in, and set it on the stove's big back burner on low. She spooned in two tablespoons of olive oil, added a pinch of dried rosemary, a pinch of dried thyme.

Then she forked out the browned chicken pieces, set them into the pot, and instead of the Hearty Burgundy, struggled to open a bottle of merlot, the last of three they'd brought when they came out to the island.--Uncorking wine had been Frank's job; he'd used an old-fashioned corkscrew, requiring strength to haul stubborn corks free. ... Joanna found this one difficult, had to hold the bottle down between her thighs, then wrench up with both hands on the corkscrew's handle. It was a struggle, took anger to finally get it done with a juicy pop and small spill.

One of the little reminders of his absence. Those would recur through the rest of her days, in one way or another.

She measured a cup of wine into the stewpot, dumped the potatoes and onions in.--It occurred to her then that she hadn't bought mushrooms. She liked them; Frank hadn't.

Joanna stirred the vegetables in restless seething water, then shook in pepper, added two dried bay leaves, and checked the burner heat, turned it lower to simmer.

Then, she had nothing more to do except minor housecleaning. Nothing else to do for the rest of the day. ... She washed her hands at the sink and thought she might go down to the pay phones again, and call Rebecca, let her know that her mother had descended from the heroic to the sensible, which might be some comfort.-But the call would also bring up what didn't need bringing up again--would involve denying everything she'd insisted on before, involve offering explanations for that change of mind that couldn't be complete without betraying the fishermen.

Better to let it go ... let Rebecca rest for a few days from dealing with her mother, the widow's song and dance.

Joanna was considering mopping the kitchen floor when the doorbell rang. She thought of not answering, then went up the hall to the entrance and opened the door.

... Beverly Wainwright, massive in outsized stretch jeans and a yellow cotton pullover, stood on the steps. She was holding out a quart jar.

"Chowder. An' you're not gettin' any better anywhere."

"Beverly, that's really kind. ..."

"Don't mean to intrude on you--"

"You're not. Come in. ..." Joanna led the way down the hall to the kitchen.

The jar of chowder was very warm, almost hot in her hands. Behind her, the old pine flooring creaked beneath Beverly.

"Sit down. Would you like some tea?"

Beverly pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and sat--the chair vanishing beneath her, so she seemed to be sitting in midair. "Don't have time for any tea. I'm catchin' the ferry off to Post Port--just stopped by to bring that chowder. You think you tasted chowder before, but you didn't, not like I make--from diggin' 'em up to doin' 'em."

"It looks wonderful."

"You just stick that right in your icebox. It'll last just fine."

"Thank you, Beverly; I'll enjoy it." Joanna put the chowder in the refrigerator, then sat at the table.

"Guarantee you will." Beverly looked around, examining the kitchen. "Nancy Evanson changed this kitchen--had a woodstove in here, and she took it out.

Her mother, Pauline, used to cook on that woodstove, sometimes ..."

"It's a nice little house. I really like it."

"Evansons always did keep a good house, kept a good boat--but they're gone.

An' now Nancy's more a mainlander. She's the only daughter, married a dentist over in Peabody, had a little boy an' lost him to a disease."

"I didn't know that. I only met her once."

"--Has one brother, an' he's an officer in the Navy."

"You sure you won't have some tea, Beverly, or coffee? I don't have any juice."

"I would, I would have some tea, but I got to get goin'. The old man--Mr.

Wainwright, Senior?--he's stoppin' in the nursin' home over at the Port, an' I guess he's stoppin' for good. So I'm goin' for a couple of weeks to see him settled."

"Oh, I'm sorry. My husband ... Frank liked old Mr. Wainwright."

"Well, Senior's mean as a serpent, but folks like him anyway. Like the old fool myself ... damn if I know why."

"Well, it's nice of you to visit."

"Wouldn' have bothered you, Mrs. Reed--"

"Joanna."

"Well, wouldn' have bothered you, Joanna, except for an item of business."

"What business?"

"Business is, Mr. Wainwright, Junior, and I discussed payment for the loss of our boat, takin' account of the meager, real meager insurance ... and the long an' short is, we will not require any payment from you on the Bo-Peep."

"Well, that's ... that's very nice. That's a relief."

"Mmm. ..." Beverly smiled, her harsh face transformed. "Not all that much of a relief, considerin' you wasn't goin' to pay nothin' anyhow. But we figured to set your mind at ease from worryin' about it."

"I know, and it's kind of you. Will you please thank your husband for me, tell him I appreciate it?"

"Yes, I will. ... You bearin' up?"

"Yes, I am."

"That's good, that's what you have to do. Bear up, or go under--that's what we all have to do." Beverly grunted with effort, and stood.

"Sure you have to leave, don't have time for a cup of something?"

"I'd like to stay, honey, but the ferry's not goin' to wait--not as long as that jackass, Andy Ford, is capta*'."

Joanna got up, walked with Beverly down the hall. "And how's Percy?"

"Oh, God--that dog. He is eatin' us out of house an' home, an' not bringin' in a dime."

"So, one-eyed dogs can't fight."

"Now, you said that, Joanna, an' I didn' say a word, don't know what the hell you're talkin' about."

"You interested in selling him?" Joanna opened the front door.

"Honey, I would love to sell him--but not to a lady. That is no lady's dog."

"Just thinking about it. ..."

"You're "thinkin' about it" because Percy likes you--and that is the weakness of women: anybody likes us or comes to love us, and we melt soft as butter.

That's our weakness." Beverly went down the steps. A big black pickup, loaded with fishnet and floats, was parked at the sidewalk, her son behind the wheel.

The boy looked at Joanna, nodded politely.

"Bear up!" Beverly called from the walk, climbed into the truck, and was driven away.

... Joanna went out back and sat on the kitchen steps in sunshine. The backyard--fenced from the hillside dune by thick seagrape shrubs and, on one side, a short remnant section of ancient sagging wood palings--was an enclosed little meadow grown wild. The mixture of flowers and weeds, clustered where beds had been, looked even so early in the season like weary soldiers, worn with battle in soil too sandy for them. ... Nancy Evanson's mother-Pauline--had lived here and been a gardener, busy with tiger lilies and other bulb plants that needed seasonal culling when winterkill became spring's recovery. There'd been no culling now for several years, and the summer had brought a tangle of overgrown grass, odd lilies, dwarfed tulips, and what looked like asparagus greens.

Tom Lowell had trampled through them in darkness and rain, with her over his shoulder and ready to bite.

Ready to bite, and had bitten. Had stabbed the man and bitten him, a terrified cat with a kitchen knife. Recalling, it seemed clear now that Lowell's mild reaction to all that--patient with pain and bleeding, calm at the notion she might have killed him, hacking in the dark--now it seemed clear that he and the other captains had had no intention of murdering her.

... As it was, there'd been only a chase and brawl that seemed to have happened some time ago, not last night. Seemed to have happened a month or two ago, and have nothing to do with her now, sitting on her kitchen steps and looking out into the backyard. ...

Frank would have loved it, would have thought it wonderfully funny, once she was safe. If amusement could bring back the dead, then he would have appeared this morning, laughing. ... The poetess in arms, full of swagger and tragic self-importance, clanking with gear to climb into a fish-processing plant--to discover the illegal last sad hope of the locals, and not a damn thing to do with her or hers.

Was there an end to vanity, to vanity's foolishness? How badly had her poetry been marred by it over the years, how much damage had she done to her work?--and not even noticed self-regard smearing the words, altering a poem's tone to self-congratulation and the satisfied second-rate.