Strawberries in the Sea (28 page)

Aboard the boat she knew it wasn't so; she was neither dull nor forgetful in attending to both boat and gear. Ashore she carried on reasonable conversations with anyone she met. But the reassurance was cold comfort at best.

Jamie stayed away, and she didn't see much of him at the shore; between hauling and herring, he was always in motion when he wasn't getting some sleep. Sometimes she heard him whistling. He was giving her time, but he was still positive.

She had begun walking out to Barque Cove every night at dusk, when there was no chance of meeting sunset viewers. She went without a light, and at first stubbed her toe, skidded on damp moss, once scraped her shin bloodily on a sharp edge of rock. But after a while she knew where all the hazards were. Being without a light, even when clouds obscured the stars, gave her that familiar sensation of invisibility.

Sometimes she became aware that she had been crouching for a long time in a turfy hollow staring toward the intermittent flash from Ram's Head Light, and she would not know what she had been thinking or if she had been thinking at all. This was always a little frightening, enough to stir up her senses and speed her heartbeat. But blankness was far better than the scarifying visions of Con and Phyllis making love.

The thing was always there, but as long as she didn't look directly at it she was safe. It was only in her sleep that she was vulnerable, so she tried to get on with as little sleep as possible. She stayed out late in the evenings if it wasn't too foggy or rainy. There was seiner activity to watch, the lighted carriers coming and going past the end of Brigport, lying off the shore over there waiting to load, or following the seiners that set outside Bennett's Island. The seiners jogged slowly by, their strings of dories like shadows behind them, wearing frills of phosphorus. She came to recognize engines. The
Triton
had a peculiar high note.
Centurion
's overhaul had left her with a soft voice, unheard if there was any surge on the shore; she slipped silently by, keeping her distance, as if the furious words earlier had done away with the need for furious deeds.

Jamie's outfit was out and at work by sunset, standing off Bull Cove or Goose Cove as a warning to
Centurion
or any other boat. But sometimes Rosa saw and heard them coming home late, having given up for that night.
Valkyrie
sounded different in the dark, coming slowly up the west side to avoid hitting pot buoys. She could imagine the young men tired and yawning, without much to say.

She would wait until the sound and the wake died away, and then go home. It would be late, midnight perhaps, and she would set the alarm for five in the morning. She took naps in the afternoon, saved from sinking too deeply because of the children next door, and the dogs.

Marjorie Percy came over one day to ask if Tiger's barking bothered her. “Times when he drives me crazy. But he goes everywhere with Maggie's youngsters.”

“I don't even hear him half the time,” Rosa said.

“Come on back over with me and have a glass of iced tea. I've got lemon and mint in it. Gorgeous. Or hot tea. Beer. Rosé on the rocks?”

“Are you running a pub over there?” “How about Kool-Aid? Home-made popsicles? I could even stir you up a jug of switchel. I just learned how, back in Vermont.”

“Now that really grabs me. But I guess I'll pass it up.”

Marjorie hesitated, her tongue touching her upper lip, as if she were trying to make up her mind. Finally she did.

“You don't look very good,” she said. “I know it's none of my business, but most of us around here don't like to think of someone all alone and not feeling well. . . . If people thought you'd accept, you'd have plenty of invitations out.”

“I know that,” said Rosa, “and I've had some.” She tried to sound grateful as well as civil. “But there are times when you just have to be alone to get over things.” It was more than she wanted to say about herself, but Marjorie's nod of understanding was worth it. She didn't really understand, of course; she thought Rosa was trying to get over Con, and that was what she would pass around.

Had any of them here, Rosa wondered, ever tried to live with a dead self?

S
ometimes now there was a crisp morning, and somebody at the shore was bound to say, “Feels fallish.” Sometimes a quiet, windless chill moved in at sunset. The blackberries were ripening, and noon in the lane smelled of apples from the wild trees along there. There was a tree of yellow transparents in Rosa's woods, the windfalls rotting with a cidery fragrance and attracting bees and wasps; the apples still ripening on the trees glowed as irresistibly among the thick leaves as golden Christmas balls. Something out of childhood too poignant to be ignored was conjured by their sight and scent, and she would have to pick one just for the snap of the bite through the taut waxy skin and the first sweet-sour taste of the juice.

On the way to Barque Cove after sunset one night she picked an apple and walked along eating it. She threw the core overboard as she crossed the beach and climbed up the black, rocks on the opposite side.

A sea lustrous as glass was darkening from blue through purple to a blurring gray, and under the slatey clouds in the west the last red light was fading.
Valkyrie
and her dories were anchored a little way offshore; there was just enough light for Rosa to recognize her. The cabin lights shone warm orange. Someone was rowing a double-ender, standing up and pushing on the oars, the strokes as soundless as if the oars were sheathed in velvet. She couldn't make out who it was, but she knew he was watching over the side for the movement of herring.

It was darkening so fast that the double-ender kept dissolving into the twilight. Out of habit she looked across to where Ram's Head Light should be, and saw the first visible spark of light. She wondered if Con were seining tonight, or if he and Phyllis were on the trip he and Rosa had planned out, visiting every harbor possible from here to Quoddy Head. The raging pain seemed to have died out long ago and taken everything else with it, except the taste of apples, and the chill creeping through her clothes to her skin. She turned around and went back to the house, sure-footed in the dusk.

She sat in a rocking chair with her feet on the stove hearth, reading one of those cold-war espionage novels with too many characters to keep straight even with your full attention. The only sounds in the kitchen were the creaks of the chair when she shifted her weight, the fire's small noises, the turn of a page. She stopped reading sometimes to listen.

The silence seemed to grow and surge in her ears, as if she were holding shells to them. It didn't make her nervous, but she thought of a dog's toenails or a cat's purring; some creature to talk to at these moments when you wondered what would happen if you spoke aloud, if your voice would come at all. You tried it, and it came too loud and you felt foolish and embarrassed and looked around quickly as if to catch sly watchers.

It was in one of these intervals that she heard from far off the shotgun. Almost instantaneously she was on her feet, the book bouncing away from her, the chair rocking wildly. She went out the back door and listened; the night had an autumnal cold scented with apples, the stars sparkled in the tops of the spruce trees. There was another shot, followed by shouts. She pulled her loden coat off the hook in the entry and went out to Barque Cove.

She was not so much excited by the shots as by the fact that she had reacted so quickly; it showed that she was still capable of being moved.
Centurion
must have come along while they were waiting for the herring to move in, and these were the warning shots, fired high to alarm and warn, not to do injury. She wished she had binoculars with coated lenses so she could see at night.

She crossed the beach at Barque Cove and climbed the other side to where she'd been earlier. All the way she could hear gabbled, fragmented shouting and it sounded like a riot. As she came over a rise the sight of the lighted carrier burst on her vision like an explosion of fireworks. The tall white vessel was illuminated from stem to stern, she could plainly see the men on her decks, and the low dark seiner alongside her.
Valkyrie
lay where she had been before. Spotlights from carrier and seiner swung erratically across the water between boats and shore; objects flashed into existence and disappeared as quickly. A gray dory, with glittering yellow oilskins in it, light glancing off wet oar-blades; a face caught in mid-shout; orange net floats strung across water shiny as black oil. Reflections from the lighted carrier completed the dazzling confusion.

Were they fighting from
dories?
Swinging oars at each other? One voice rose breakingly high above the others. “Hey, look over there! Is that him?”

A dory shot forward, there was a groan. “Christ no, it's a log.”

“Miff, you called the Coast Guard yet?” someone called.

“What in hell can they do that we aren't doing?” a man shouted back from the carrier. “Maybe he's crawled ashore somewhere. Row in close along the rocks.”

A dory came Rosa's way, silhouetted in perfect detail against the blaze of the carrier. One man was rowing, standing up and pushing on the oars. Another stood up in the bow.

“
Jesus
.” Matt Fennell's quietly despairing voice came up to her. “How long can he stay up in hipboots?”

She turned around and returned to Barque Cove, thinking that when she was back in the kitchen, with the lights and the noise shut out, the whole scene would have ceased to exist. Someone had been shot, or had gone overboard and drowned, and there was nothing she could do about it. Maybe they hadn't seen him go, hadn't missed him until it was too late, and she couldn't bear to think of the man drowning in the dark, tangled in the net or rockweed, the salt water stopping his shouts. She had to get into the house and lock the doors, build up the fire, drink something hot to warm her, forget she'd been out there, forget what she'd heard and seen. She couldn't, of course; she wouldn't sleep tonight but maybe she'd get warm. She was shivering from the inside out.

As she crossed Barque Cove's beach, she heard a groaning sound, and something moved in the starlight, a long shape at the edge of the water. Once she had found a seal shot by seiners, and this was what she remembered now; her pity and horror for the drowned man merged with that for the dying animal, into a rage against all the men back there shouting and swearing.

She ran forward and knelt, thinking, Someone will have to come and put it out of its misery, it can't be left here to the like this. This is what people do, kill each other and all innocent things.

“Help me,” the thing mumbled. “Help me.”

She grabbed the man in her arms and dragged him up out of the water and entwining weed. “You're the
one!
” she said incredulously. “You're alive! I've got to tell them!” In her arms he shuddered as if he would fall apart just from the vibration. She laid him down and got out of her loden coat and wrapped him up in it. “I'll run now and tell them.”

But he held onto her arms. “Don't go yet,” he said between chattering teeth. “Get me warm first. I've never been so cold in my life. It'll kill me.
Please
.” His fingers tightened as if on existence itself. She couldn't get a hand free to loosen his grip. She had to humor him in order to move.

“All right, I'll get you to the house first. Come on. Can you walk?” With him hanging on to her, she got him onto his feet. He had no boots on, just heavy socks. Water ran off him, off his hair and his face, and he shivered in long convulsive crescendos. He could hardly walk, and she was glad he was not a big man, he felt about the size of Con through the bulky loden coat.

She pushed and hoisted him up the steep climb. The path through the woods was even worse, he tripped and fell several times, and once they fell together. She laughed the way one would to reassure a panicky child.

“Those cussid rocks. I'm black and blue from them myself. Almost there now. I hope you haven't broken a toe.”

“I'm too numb . . . to feel it,” he gasped.

She half-lifted him over the doorstep and into the house. In the warm dark his breath went out of him in a long, trembling sigh. She propped him against the wall.

“Lean there till I get a light,” she commanded.

“You got a place where I can lie down?”

“As soon as you get the wet clothes off.”

She lit the lamp. She saw a white face blood-smeared from scratches, long black hair plastered down over his forehead and into his eyes; lips so dark blue with cold they looked almost as dark as his hair. They were trembling and she could hear his teeth. She turned the gas on under the tea kettle, carried the lamp into Edwin's room, pulled the shades, and then came back to guide him to the bedroom.

“Start getting out of those clothes,” she said. She got towels from the bottom drawer of the chest. “Rub yourself down hard with these.”

She brought down her sleeping bag and laid it out on the bed. He was fumbling with his shirt buttons. “When you're undressed,” she said, “and dried, crawl into that bag and I'll bring you something hot to drink. Somebody around here will supply you with dry clothes.”

She started to leave the room, carrying the sodden loden coat, and he said, “I can't work my . . . goddam . . . fingers. They're still numb.”

His hands were scraped and bloody, the fingertips cut by barnacles. “I'll help you,” she said. “Here.” She got his shirt off him and then a T-shirt, She heard the tea kettle begin to boil just as they'd reached his jeans, and she said briskly, “Everybody's modesty saved by the bell.”

In the kitchen she took out Edwin's bottle and mixed a hot toddy. She could hear the man's grunts and whispers in the other room, and longed with exasperation to strip off the wet jeans as if he were a child and stuff him into the sleeping bag. Finally there was silence.