Strawberries in the Sea (8 page)

“Thanks very much,” she said to them at the foot of the overgrown lawn.

“Oh, that's all right,” young Holly assured her handsomely.

Almost to the store Rosa realized she hadn't had a chance to wash up after her work, or even comb the twigs and leaves out of her hair. Well, too late now.

Only Mark Bennett was in the store, a solid dark man with graying temples. He was working at his desk in the post office section, and looked out at her with a preoccupied stare.

“Jude Webster wants you to call him. You know his number?”

“Yes.” Not Con. Still hoping for miracles, she jeered.

“Dial one first,” Bennett said. He tapped his pencil, still gazing at her through the little window, but as if he were thinking of something else.

Thirty-five miles away the telephone was ringing in Jude's kitchen. Jude answered, grave and moderate, and when she said, “Hi, Jude,” Bennett's swivel chair creaked. He walked through the store and went outside and down the wharf. She could see him going away through the long shed and then out into the sunlight, where he disappeared down the ladder to the lobster car.

“Now whatever possessed you to do a fool thing like that, Ro?” Jude asked with asperity.

“Like
what?
. . . Damn it, I just felt like it, that's all! Everybody else is doing what they feel like, so I thought I'd try it for a change.”

“Well, it was a fool thing—”

“You've already said that. Funny, whenever I do anything it's always a fool thing. Maybe I should sit in a closet with my face to the wall for the rest of my life, so I don't do any more fool things.”

“Now hold on, Ro,” Jude said. “Come on down off your high horse. This is costing you money, so stop talking and listen. Con called me up yesterday morning all in a sweat because you and the boat were both gone in thick o' fog. He thought maybe Edwin might know something, when he saw the car there the night before.”

So he'd driven by, maybe intending to come in till he saw Edwin was there.

“Are you still there, Ro? You hear what I said?”

“Sure!” she said belligerently.

“No, you didn't. Anybody mentions that feller's name, you go into a trance. Listen, I had to tell him where you are. I couldn't do anything different, he was all for getting the Coast Guard out.”

“Well, I'm here, anyway. I came out through fog thick as dungeon and hit the Harbor Ledge buoy bang on the nose. What do you think of that for navigation?”

“You're a chip off the old block. How is everything?”

She tried for enthusiasm. “The house is nice and dry, Jude. And it's so quiet out here I've been sleeping like a pig and trying not to eat like one.” Her chuckle was fairly successful. “I think I'm going to have a great summer. Oh, I started cleaning the toilet this morning. The Wylies left everything pretty good, but I don't think they ever shoveled that place out. What are you snickering at?”

“Nothing, Ro, nothing at all. Well, I dunno what'll happen about the boat. You told me yourself it was still his to use, and you've gone and taken her and a load of traps besides. He was some mad. He sounded feather-white.”

“Probably he was, to think I wasn't drowned and the boat wrecked, and him having all that insurance to play with. That reminds me, I'd better change the beneficiary on my life insurance. If anything happens to me I don't want to be paying for the honeymoon.”

“Don't talk like that, Ro.”

“It's better than bawling, isn't it? And it's being practical, isn't it? Well, I've got to get back to my digging, if I can locate a spade.” She snorted. “See, I've reached the point where I can call a spade a spade.— Jude. Thanks for telling me the news. I'm sorry if I've made a mess for you.”

“Good Lord, girl, you haven't made a mess for
me
. Be careful now. When Con comes for the boat, don't fight with him. Let him take her, and then you settle down and enjoy the place and get over him. He's not worth the powder to blow him up State Street.”

“So long, Jude. Give my love to Lucy and the boys. And thanks for calling.”

She was trembling after she hung up, and leaned against the wall in the dim, empty store looking out at the bright harbor beginning to flash under a northwest wind.
Sea Star
was steady at her mooring. So Con's coming for you, she thought. Why didn't I ask Jude
when
, so I wouldn't have to see him? But she wouldn't call Jude back and ask, she couldn't be sure of keeping the shakiness out of her voice.

She walked to the end of the wharf and looked down. Mark Bennett stood on the lobster car smoking his pipe, and watching two small boys who lay on their bellies with their arms overboard.

“I'm through,” Rosa called down. “How much do I owe you?”

“I'll let you know when the bill comes in.”

He came up the ladder, and as he reached the top and stepped onto the wharf he gave her a surprisingly warm and youthful smile. “I know who you are now. Jude told me. True McKinnon's girl, used to sit on a nail keg in the corner and eat ice cream, too bashful to move.”

“That was me, all right.” She nodded at the boys, “What are they doing?”

“Manufacturing excitement. Trying to catch pollock by hand. Stevie's been reading about tickling salmon.”

“
Really
tickling?”

“So he claims. So far they haven't found a pollock who likes his belly tickled.” They began to walk back up the wharf.

“Who put my boat off?” she asked. What else had Jude told him? She tried to decide if he was being exceptionally kind, as to a child or a mental patient. “I meant to come see to her, but I was so dead tired I overslept.”

“One of my nephews, I'm pretty sure. Seems like I heard his father say something about it.”

“I'm much obliged. I want to thank him.”

“You'll see him around. They've got the fishhouse this side of yours.” They came out of the shed and stopped, looking across at
Sea Star
. “She's a great boat. I remember when True first came out here with her. He was like a kid, he was so happy.”

“Yes, he loved her. He had one good year with her, anyway.” She was herself again; it was only Con, or speaking of Con, that could shake her up. “How can I order a couple of cylinders of gas?”

“I always keep some extra on hand, they use a lot of it out here. When Ralph Percy comes in from setting traps I'll get him to haul up two with his tractor, and hitch them up for you.”

“He must be the only atheist if he's out working on Sunday.”

Mark laughed. “Nope, he's just making up for the time he lost last week when he drove his wife and kids to Vermont to visit her folks.”

In the store she ordered a bag of lime for the toilet, paint for the seat, cleaning and washing supplies, and what groceries she could think of without a shopping list. Then she was embarrassed because she'd come without money, but he told her she could pay later, and he would send the heavy stuff up with the gas.

She thought she might be able to borrow tools from him, but she wouldn't ask unless she knew beyond a doubt that she couldn't make do; she hadn't been through the fishhouse yet.

Just as she was leaving, two women came round the corner. There were startled but friendly greetings, she flung back her responses at random and kept on going. She was perspiringly aware of her rear view in the tight jeans, but there was nothing to do but keep going and for God's sake remember to put a dress on if she came down to the store again for anything, which she would have to do if she didn't intend to live on shore greens and mussels.

In the noon quiet, when Sunday dinner occurred on Bennett's Island just as it did everywhere else, she took the wheelbarrow and went down to the fishhouse for the rest of her belongings. The building was so crowded with the debris of years that she wondered how the Wylies had ever had room to work in here. Even the workbench was loaded. She cleared a path through a tangle of old rope, rotten laths, empty paint cans, used shingles saved for kindling in the almost-buried oil-drum stove, cardboard cartons, buoys, broken furniture, and finally reached the ladder to the loft.

After the mess downstairs, the space under the roof seemed extravagant. It hadn't been too handy to throw junk up a ladder.

It was lighted by two gable windows, one giving on the harbor and the other on the island. The light was dimmed through dusty and cobwebbed glass, but she could make out the big pile of soft black nets in one corner, a long-handled dipnet, a flounder trap, and in another corner an old wooden fish box full of glass balls.

She felt something like an upsurge of joy, a faint one to be sure, a mere ghost of the old stab of rapture at finding some unexpected treasure, but the sensation set up a chain reaction so that when she knelt beside the box she was simultaneously discovering mayflowers for the first time in her life; she was carrying into the kitchen a stray kitten found crying on the doorstep; she was finding a small punt on the beach after a hurricane, entwined in kelp, half full of sand and rock-weed, but perfectly whole; and seeing her first guitar under the Christmas tree.

No one else had ever found her mayflower patch, she'd been allowed to keep the kitten, the advertisements about the punt had never been answered so it became hers, and the guitar had become her second voice. There had been other discoveries and other gifts, but these had gone deepest in a way to become bone of her bone, so that now, as she knelt by the box, sights, sounds, smells, and textures overlaid each other; mayflower fragrance and cold wet leaves, kitten fur under her chin and the small heart beating under her fingers, the drenched pungence of the storm-torn shore and the long cannonade of surf; the lustrous curves of polished wood reflecting Christmas lights, the smell of fir, and with it the pain in her fingertips from the tight wire strings, so that they almost stung now as they touched the cool dusty surface of the glass ball floats.

The last ones she'd seen had been old Chet Parkin's toggles, and they had belonged first to his uncle. He'd had to take them all up finally and use bottles, because some boys began stealing them, cutting them off the warps in their twine bags, and selling them to an antique dealer out of town.

Here there must be twenty-five or more. They were amber, faint amethyst, and the palest blues and greens; even the clear ones had a tint. She held them up to the light and saw her fingers change color. They were treasure found in a cave, or magic fruit in a forest. She could have made a song about them, but it would have to be sung to herself alone, you couldn't say the word
balls
out loud without someone cackling.

Where had they come from? Did Jude know about them? If so, why had he left them behind? If she bought the place, would they be hers? She hovered protectively over them, until suddenly her elation died. She got up from her knees and bumped her head on a rafter. The pain and surprise put tears in her eyes, and they became tears for something else.
Where your heart is, there is your treasure also
, the Bible said.

What did that leave you?

She blew her nose and wiped her eyes and went down the ladder. Angrily she saw that someone was working on the Sorensen wharf to her left, out of sight behind the barrier of drying traps. It was high tide, and they had brought a boat in and were loading traps on her for tomorrow. Logical, reasonable, part of a lobsterman's work. Only why'd they have to be around right now? And why had she ever believed she'd have privacy?

She remembered what Mark Bennett had told her, that the nephew who had put her boat off had that fishhouse and wharf, and she supposed that she should go around and thank him.

But not while she looked and felt like this, dammit.

She worked doggedly, starting a heap of burnable trash in one corner and sinkable junk in another. Buried under the debris she found a good spade. When she thought the red had gone away from her eyes and nose, she put the spade across her gear on the wheelbarrow and went home.

W
hile she was starting to dig the trench behind the toilet, trying to break through the tough turf, she heard the girls' voices, and froze, but they went by the house and up the lane. She caught a glimpse of them through a gap in the trees, a swirl of hair, a profile clear for an instant against dark spruce. There were more than three this time, some younger; a baby rode on someone's hip. They flowed through the gap like a school of bright fish flashing through a sunray. Their voices were still heard, laughing and calling from further up the lane.

At their various ages she'd been happy too, as long as she could be aboard a boat. Too bad I didn't run away to sea while I was young, she thought dryly. With the right shape I could have disguised myself as a cabin boy.

The spade cut down through roots at last, and with a certain satisfaction she turned the first sod.

When Con walked into the yard, she had no warning. She was hot, and had come out from behind the building to let the breeze strike her, and there he was, grinning at her. He was wearing green bellbottoms, and a green-and-gold striped knit shirt. Phyllis's choice, no doubt.

The first reaction was the hope that he'd identified himself as Rosa Fleming's husband where enough people could hear him and thus be astonished that anything like her had acquired anything like him. However, a swift recognition of her own idiocy was helpful. She said calmly, “Well, Con?”

He looked her over deliberately: twigs and leaves in her hair, her face flushed and sweating, her shirt pulled out, her jeans powdered with dirt. It was as if he were savoring the contrast with his own dapper perfection.

“What do you think you're doing out here, Rosie?” he asked indulgently.

“Digging a hole behind the toilet to shovel the shit into,” she said.

“You would be!” he said in amused exasperation. “Who but you? My God, Rosie, why in hell—”