Strawberries in the Sea (5 page)

She hadn't been able to answer; she'd been barely able to think. In shock she was looking back on the months of believing Con's reasons for being so late in from hauling, and his accounts of poker games at the firehouse, and long talk sessions in someone's fishhouse.

Stupefied by pain but not stupefied enough, she heard him say, “You'll be a good sport about it, won't you? I told her you would. I told her you've got the greatest heart in the world. . . . Well, I'll just go tell her you know. She'll be relieved. She's been some sick and nervous, poor kid.”

She stood listening to the pickup back out.

She could not now, a month later, remember anything more of that night.

She took one final tour of the house. It was five now and the day was taking on a faint tint from the sunrise. She checked doors and windows, and at the last minute she decided to take her guitar. She hadn't wanted to, but she couldn't make herself leave it.

“All
right
,” she muttered with a sullen, harassed glance, and rummaged around in the closet under the front stairs until she found the canvas case. She put the guitar into it like an exasperated mother stuffing her child into a snowsuit.

When she had everything on the wharf, she went into the fishhouse and looked around. Con hadn't taken his tools, of course. He'd been too mad yesterday, he'd just put the boat off on the mooring.

“Too bad, Cap'n Fleming,” she said flippantly. “You'll have to see the Websters about getting anything of yours out of here.”

Her dory was there, full of buoys and rope now. She gave her a pat and then went out and padlocked the door, and walked away without looking back. The gull had returned to the spiling. He regarded the wharf as his own, and his favorite corner was littered with crab bodies, broken mussel shells, and white droppings. He stood on one leg watching her with yellow eyes while she transported her dunnage from the wharf to the float. The tide was moderately high and she could stand on a lobster crate on the float and take her belongings off the edge of the wharf.

A green skiff lay motionless beside the float on the pale satiny water. She was broad and high-sided enough to take everything in one load.

Occasionally as she worked her glance met the gull's. It was like an exchange between equals who never speak but who nonetheless respect each other's existence. When she finally had everything balanced fore and aft, she stepped into the skiff and put the oars in the oarlocks. The gull watched her row away. When she was fifty feet or so from the wharf, it and the gull disappeared. Therefore she had succeeded in becoming invisible. At once she felt more free, and slowed her rowing to a steady, leisurely stroke.

Soon the moored boats began to show, first as gigantic shadows and then as familiar stems and sides. She moved among them, at ease and safe, if not happy. On the land a rooster crowed like the last signal from a sinking continent. There was a slow flap of wings over her head as a gull took off from a canopy and made an unalarmed circle back to his perch.

Eastward the fog became suffused with pink and gold. Finally when she looked over her shoulder she saw a familiar dark bulk in the fog, seeming as high as a house, and with a few strokes of the oars she came alongside
Sea Star
. The boat returned to her normal size. She was Nova Scotia-built, high in the bow and broad in the beam. Dry clean traps were stacked across her wide stern and along the port washboard well up toward the bow. Each had its coiled warp and yellow and blue buoy tucked inside. She knew where Con planned to set these; she had taught him the rounds. She permitted herself a small, malicious grin.

“Won't you be surprised when the fog lifts, Cap'n Fleming?” she asked. It wasn't much help but it was better than bawling.

She stood up and began loading her things over the starboard side by the wheel and hauler. The fog was dazzling now with sunrise, and the warmth increasing. She shed her jacket and worked fast. Once everything was stowed in the cabin, she checked the gas tanks and found them full.

“Thank you, Cap'n Fleming,” she said. “You're a mighty obliging gent.”

She started the engine, and while it was warming up she got out the roll of charts from the locker and found the one on which her father had marked the course and the running time for a foggy trip to Bennett's Island. His old boat had been slower than
Sea Star
so he had had to re-time the trip. Reading the figures now put him aboard the boat with her; she saw the ballpoint pen tiny in his big fist, his seamed and rosy face under the brim of the old Swampscott sou'wester bent in concentration over the chart.

“Twenty-one minutes from Seal Point Light to Ram's Head.” She could hear him. “By Gorry, that's ten minutes better than the old lady could do, bless her just the same.” Then the incandescent grin. “And doesn't that diesel sing some pretty song!”

She climbed up forward onto the high bow to cast off the mooring and fasten the skiff, then ran aft, jumped down into the cockpit, and put the engine in gear. Her hand on the wheel started the boat in her slow circle out around some other boats toward the harbor mouth. The compass swung in the binnacle, needle quivering constantly. When Rosa was small she used to think the compass was alive.

The skiff was Con's, and she left it behind on the mooring, dancing a little in the bubbling wake.
Sea Star
went out past the granite hump of Seal Point, where the tower was hardly visible in the fog. Rosa heard the horn above the engine and the wash, and looked at her watch. Now she would run her twenty-one minutes to Ram's Head with eyes, ears, and all pores open for the ledges that made the approach to Seal Point Harbor a horror story for a stranger. She had learned them in childhood, drifting over them and around them at low tide in dead-calm weather while she hung head down over the side of the dory to see everything there was to see. Later, with her first outboard motor, she'd deepened the acquaintance by miscalculating her depth often enough to break at least a half-dozen shearpins.

She saw the fog-swell slither silently over Whaleback to port, and a little farther along the slight turbulence at the edge of the fog to starboard was the Tar Kettle. Glancing at the trembling needle, watching for pot buoys through an open pane in the windshield, feeling the response of the boat to her lightest touch on the wheel, she shed every other concern.

Ram's Head was where it should be in twenty-one minutes; she heard its powerful blare overhead, and got a glimpse of the red rock cliff through a veil of mist, then she was past and the fog closed in behind her. She let her breath go out in a long loud whistle, and realized her neck and shoulders were stiff.

She set her course southeast; it would be so all the way now. She was crossing a lane where the small tankers and cargo ships passed, heading for the mouth of the Penobscot. They picked up their pilots at Monhegan or Mosquito Island, so it would be local men in command now, but that would do
Sea Star
no good in the fog. She was too low on the water to show up on the radar screens. The vessels would be blowing all the way, but when you were listening hard you heard all manner of sounds through the pulse of the engine and the hypnotic hiss of water along the sides.

But it was a narrow lane, she'd be across it in a short time. The circle of sea upon which she moved within the moving wall of fog had become a milky blue with silvery glints from the diffused sun. Back inland, away from the shore, it would burn off to a clear hot day.

Great swells rolled up through the southerly wall of fog and billowed toward the boat, slid under her and coasted away to the north. New ones always came, lustrous and silent. But even with the load of forty traps aboard,
Sea Star
rode with the smooth grace of a whale.

She was away from the shipping lane now and out in the bay, with an hour and a half to run before she picked up her next mark, which should be Harbor Ledge buoy outside the harbor of Bennett's Island.

The fog was so dazzling with sunlight that she wished she had dark glasses. She was hungrier than she had been for weeks, and she ate bread and butter and drank coffee without neglecting her navigation. Bennett's Island was a small target, and she could easily overshoot it. Everybody in Seal Point would have a new laugh if she had to drop anchor somewhere and send out a distress call.

There had been no pot buoys for a long time now, nothing else but herself and the boat, and the endless swells rising up ahead and sliding away behind. The bay in fog bore no relation to the bay in clear weather. If she hadn't trusted her watch she'd have thought she'd been trapped for a day in the circle of white glare. She began to wish she'd meet another boat, some islander coming to the mainland, but none of them would be the fool that Rosa Fleming was, starting out in thick of fog.

Then a gull appeared and circled the boat. She threw out a piece of bread. He swooped and picked it up, then followed her, taking whatever she tossed to him. When she had nothing more he came down to perch on the stack of traps on the stern, and rode with her for a while. She couldn't talk to him because he was behind her, but she liked knowing he was there.

She knew when he took off because he flew up past the canopy, and she hastily averted her eyes so as not to watch him out of sight and put bad luck on him. Now she felt an exhausting wave of loneliness that went into her hands so that one came down too heavily on the wheel, and she had to get back on course. She was excruciatingly homesick for a sight of the other gull, the one who thought he owned her wharf. She saw the kitchen with the sun coming into it now as the fog burned off, the windows full of the harbor's sparkle that danced on wall and ceiling; the catbird exploding with song in the lilacs; Con's red head coming around the door. Maybe he'd throw his cap in first. And, if she smiled at him, or at least looked placid and kind, and said, “Hello, Con,” wouldn't that have been all right? It wouldn't mean she wanted him to put his arms around her again, or that she wanted to go to bed with him; or that she'd have been willing to be one of his two women and be grateful for the chance.

“Oh yes, it would!” she shouted suddenly: “Yes, it would, you're as soft as a turd!” But even in her self-disgust she saw Con rowing out to the mooring and finding the boat gone, and thinking she'd gone crazily headlong out into the fog, maybe in the middle of night and by now had wrecked and drowned herself. Poor Con, what a terrible thing to do to him. . . . “Poor Con, hell,” she yelled. “He's probably
hoping
it's so. No divorce, and he'll inherit the place!”

The sound of her shout was like the alcoholic's first drink. She dragged out words that made her cringe, and used them with savage joy; she insulted and damned half of Seal Point by name, whooping like an Indian. Finally—hoarsely—she settled down to sing in rhythm with
Sea Star
's motion.

She'd learned the odd minor-keyed song in a Nova Scotia harbor one summer when her father was buying lobsters and smacking them to Boston. The man who had taught it to her, skipper of a herring seiner, told her it had been brought from Scotland by his grandfather, who sang it in Gaelic. As she sang it now, it seemed to her that the swells rising and falling beneath the boat belonged to, another sea entirely, as if she had crossed an ocean this morning and was now approaching a foreign land.

She looked at her watch and stopped the engine to listen. After a moment she heard the bell buoy off the southern end of Bennett's. A warm wind blew across the unseen island, bringing her the scent of spruce and grass. She started the engine again and went on singing.