The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (145 page)

he called it.) He had no plans for the top floor of the building, which was an abandoned threeroom apartment where the manager of the general store had lived with his family. But the downstairs was all accounted for. The Senator was planning to dedicate an entire room to the “display and discussion” of maps. As far as Ruth could see, the display itself was not coming along very quickly. The discussion, though, was well advanced.

“What I wouldn’t give,” Senator Simon told Ruth that afternoon in August, “to see an original copy of the Mercator-Hondius map.” He showed her a reproduction of that very map in a volume he’d ordered years earlier from an antiquarian book dealer in Seattle. This insistence of the Senator’s to show Ruth every book he handled, to talk over every interesting illustration, was slowing down considerably the preparation of the museum. “Sixteen thirty-three. You can see they’ve got the Faroe Islands right, and Greenland. But what is this? Oh, dear. What could that land mass possibly be? Do you know, Ruth?”

“Iceland?”

“No, no.
That’s
Iceland, Ruth. Right where it should be. This is a mythical island, called Frislant. It shows up on all kinds of old maps. There’s no such place. Isn’t that the strangest thing? It is drawn so distinctly, as if the cartographers were certain of it. It was probably a mistake in a sailor’s report. That’s where the mapmakers got their information, Ruth. They never left home. That’s the remarkable thing, Ruth. They were just like me.”

The Senator fingered his nose. “But they did get it wrong sometimes. You can see Gerhardus Mercator is still convinced that there’s a Northeast Passage to the Orient. He obviously had no idea of the polar ice factor! Do you think the mapmakers were heroes, Ruth? I do.”

“Oh, sure, Senator.”

“I think they were. Look how they shaped a continent from the outside in. North Africa’s sixteenth-century maps, for instance, are correct around the edges. They knew how to chart those coasts, the Portuguese. But they didn’t know what was going on inside, or how big the continent was. Oh, no, they sure didn’t know that, Ruth.”

“No. Do you think we could take some of these boards off the windows?”

“I don’t want anyone to see what we’re doing. I want it to be a surprise to everyone once we’re finished.”

“What
are
we doing, Senator?”

“Making a display.” The Senator was paging through another one of his map books, and his face was soft and loving as he said, “Oh, for the love of mud, did they ever get that wrong. The Gulf of Mexico is
huge.
”

Ruth looked over his shoulder at a reproduction of an ungainly, ancient map but couldn’t make out any of the writing on the page. “We need to get more light in here, I think. Don’t you think we should start cleaning this place a little, Senator?”

“I like the stories about how wrong they got it. Like Cabral. Pedro Cabral. Sailed west in 1520 trying to find India and ran right into Brazil! And John Cabot was trying to find Japan and ended up in Newfoundland. Verrazano was looking for a westward passage to the Spice Islands and ends up in New York Harbor. He thought it was a sea lane. The risks they took! Oh, how they tried!”

The Senator was in low-level ecstasy now. Ruth started to unpack a box marked SHIPWRECKS: PHOTOS/PAMPHLETS III. This was one of the many boxes containing items for the display the Senator planned to call either “Wages of Neptune” or “We Are Punished,” a display entirely devoted to accidents at sea. The first item she pulled out was a folder, labeled
Medical
in Senator Simon’s remarkable, antique script. She knew exactly what it was. She remembered looking through it when she was a little girl, peering at the ghastly pictures of shipwreck survivors, as Senator Simon told her the story of each man and each wreck.

“This could happen to you, Ruth,” he’d say. “This could happen to anyone in a boat.”

Now Ruth opened the folder and looked at each familiar old nightmare: the infected bluefish bite; the dinner plate–size leg ulcer; the man whose buttocks had rotted away after he’d sat on a wet coil of rope for three weeks; the saltwater boils; the blackening sunburns; the feet swollen with water bite; the amputations; the mummified corpse in the lifeboat.

“Here’s a lovely print!” Senator Simon said. He was looking through another box, this one marked SHIPWRECKS: PHOTOS/PAMPHLETS VI. From a file labeled
Heroes,
the Senator pulled an etching of a woman on a beach. Her hair was in a loose bun, and a heavy length of rope was slung over one shoulder.

“Mrs. White,” he said fondly. “Hello, Mrs. White. From Scotland.

When a ship wrecked on the rocks near her home, she had the sailors on board throw her a rope. Then she dug her heels into the sand and pulled the sailors to shore, one at a time. Doesn’t she look hale?”

Ruth agreed that Mrs. White looked hale, and dug further through the
Medical
file. She found index cards scribbled with brief notes in Simon’s handwriting.

One card read only: “Symptoms: shivers, headaches, reluctance to move, drowsiness, torpor, death.”

Another read: “Thirst: drink urine, blood, fluid of own blisters, spirit fluid of compass.”

Another: “Dec. 1710,
Nottingham
wrecked Boon Island. 26 days. Crew ate ship’s carpenter.”

Another: “Mrs. Rogers, stewardess of
Stella.
Helped ladies into lifeboat, gave up own vest. DIES! GOES DOWN WITH SHIP!”

Ruth handed that last card to Senator Simon and said, “I think this one belongs in the
Heroes
file.” He squinted at the card and said, “You’re absolutely right, Ruth. How did Mrs. Rogers ever get in the
Medical
file? And look what I just found in the
Heroes
file that doesn’t belong there at all.”

He handed Ruth an index card reading: “
Augusta M. Gott,
capsized, Gulf Stream, 1868. Erasmus Cousins (of BROOKSVILLE, MAINE!) selected by lot to be eaten. Saved only by sight of rescue sail. E. Cousins had bad stammer rest of life; E. Cousins—NEVER RETURNED TO SEA!”

“Do you have a cannibalism file?” Ruth asked.

“This is much more poorly organized than I thought,” said Senator Simon, mournfully.

It was at that moment that Cal Cooley stepped through the front door of the Ellis Granite Company Store building, without knocking.

“
There’s
my Ruth,” he said.

“Shit,” Ruth said, simply and with dread.

Cal Cooley hung around a long time in the Ellis Granite Company Store that afternoon. He rifled through Senator Simon’s belongings, taking things out of order and putting things back in the wrong place. He agitated Senator Simon no end by handling some of the artifacts quite rudely. Ruth tried to keep her mouth shut. Her stomach hurt.

She tried to be quiet and stay out of the way so that he wouldn’t talk to her, but there was no avoiding him on his mission. After an hour of being a nuisance, Cal said, “You never went to see Mr. Ellis for dinner in July, as he invited you to do.”

“Sorry about that.”

“I doubt it.”

“I forgot. Tell him I’m sorry.”

“Tell him yourself. He wants to see you.”

Senator Simon brightened and said, “Ruth, maybe you can ask Mr. Ellis about the basement!”

Senator Simon had recently found row upon row of locked file cabinets in the basement of the Ellis Granite Company Store. They were full, Senator Simon was sure, of fascinating Ellis Granite Company documents, and the Senator wanted permission to go through them and perhaps display a few of the choice items in the museum. He had written Mr. Ellis a letter requesting permission but had received no response.

“I can’t make it up there today, Cal,” Ruth said.

“Tomorrow’s fine.”

“I can’t make it up there tomorrow, either.”

“He wants to talk to you, Ruth. He has something to tell you.”

“I’m not interested.”

“I think it would be to your benefit to stop by. I’ll give you a ride, if that makes it easier.”

“I’m not going, Cal,” Ruth said.

“Why don’t you go see him, Ruth?” Senator Simon said. “You could ask him about the basement. Maybe I could come with you . . .”

“How does this weekend look? Maybe you can come for dinner Friday night. Or breakfast on Saturday?”

“I’m not going, Cal.”

“How does next Sunday morning sound? Or the Sunday after that?”

Ruth thought for a moment. “Mr. Ellis will be gone by the Sunday after that.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because he always leaves Fort Niles on the second Saturday of September. He’ll be back in Concord the Sunday after next.”

“No, he won’t. He made it very clear to me that he’s not leaving Fort Niles until he sees you.”

This shut Ruth up.

“My goodness,” Senator Simon said, aghast. “Mr. Ellis isn’t planning on spending the winter here, is he?”

“I guess that’s up to Ruth,” Cal Cooley said.

“But that would be astonishing,” Senator Simon said. “That would be unheard of! He’s never stayed here.” Senator Simon looked at Ruth with panic. “What would that mean?” he said. “My goodness, Ruth. What are you going to
do
?”

Ruth had no answer, but she didn’t need one, because the conversation was abruptly ended by Webster Pommeroy, who charged into the Ellis Granite Company Store building with a hideous object in his hands. He was covered with mud from the chest down, and his face was so contorted that Ruth thought he must have found the second elephant tusk. But, no, it was not a tusk he was carrying. It was a round, filthy object that he thrust at the Senator. It took Ruth a moment to see what it was, and when she did, her body turned cold. Even Cal Cooley blanched when he realized that Webster Pommeroy was carrying a human skull.

The Senator turned it around and around in his doughy hands. The skull was intact. There were still teeth in the jaw, and a rubbery, shriveled skin, with long, muddy hairs hanging from it, covered the bone. It was a horror. Webster was shaking savagely.

“What’s that?” Cal Cooley asked, and for once his voice was free of sarcasm. “Who the hell is that?”

“I have no idea,” the Senator said.

But he did have an idea, as it turned out. Several days later—after the Rockland police came out on a Coast Guard boat to examine the skull and take it away for forensic tests—a distraught Senator Simon told the horrified Ruth Thomas of his supposition.

“Ruthie,” he said, “I’ll bet you any money in the world that’s the skull of your grandmother, Jane Smith-Ellis. That’s what they’re going to find out if they find out anything. The rest of her is probably still out there in the mudflats, where she’s been rotting since the wave took her in 1927.” He clutched Ruth’s shoulders in an uncommonly fierce grip. “Don’t you ever tell your mother I said that. She would be devastated.”

“So why did you tell
me?
” Ruth demanded. She was outraged.

“Because you’re a strong girl,” the Senator said. “And you can take it. And you always want to know exactly what’s going on.”

Ruth started crying; her tears came sudden and hard. “Why don’t you all just leave me alone?” she shouted.

The Senator looked crushed. He hadn’t meant to upset her. And what did she mean,
you all?
He tried to console Ruth, but she wasn’t having it. He was sad and confused by her lately; she was edgy all the time. He couldn’t make any sense of Ruth Thomas these days. He couldn’t figure out what she wanted, but she did seem awfully unhappy.

It was a hard fall. The weather got cold overly fast, taking everyone by surprise. The days grew shorter too quickly, locking the whole island in a state of irritation and misery.

Just as Cal Cooley had predicted, the second weekend of September came and went and Mr. Ellis didn’t budge. The
Stonecutter
stayed in the harbor, rocking about where everyone could see it, and word soon spread across the island that Mr. Ellis was not leaving and the reason had something to do with Ruth Thomas. By the end of September, the
Stonecutter
was a distressing presence. Having the Ellis boat sitting in the harbor so late into the fall was weird. It was like an anomaly of nature—a total eclipse, a red tide, an albino lobster. People wanted answers. How long did Mr. Ellis intend to stick around? What was he asking for? Why didn’t Ruth deal with him and get it over with? What were the
implications?

By the end of October, several local fishermen had been hired by Cal Cooley to take the
Stonecutter
out of the water, clean it, store it on land. Obviously, Lanford Ellis was going nowhere. Cal Cooley didn’t come looking for Ruth Thomas again. She knew the terms. She had been summoned, and she knew that Mr. Ellis was waiting for her. And the whole island knew it, too. Now the boat was up on land in a wooden cradle where every man on the island could see it when he went down to the dock each morning to haul. The men didn’t stop to look at it, but they were aware of its presence as they walked by. They felt its large, expensive oddity. It made them skittish, the way a new object in a familiar trail unnerves a horse.

The snow began in the middle of October. It was going to be an early winter. The men pulled their traps out of the water for good much earlier than they liked to, but it was getting harder to go out there and deal with the ice-caked gear, the frozen hands. The leaves were off the trees, and everyone could see Ellis House clearly on the top of the hill. At night, there were lights in the upstairs rooms.

In the middle of November, Ruth’s father came over to Mrs. Pommeroy’s house. It was four in the afternoon, and dark. Kitty Pommeroy, already blindly drunk, was sitting in the kitchen, staring at a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces on the table. Robin and Opal’s little boy, Eddie, who had recently learned to walk, was standing in the middle of the kitchen in a soggy diaper. He held an open jar of peanut butter and a large wooden spoon, which he was dipping into the jar and then sucking. His face was covered with peanut butter and spit. He was wearing one of Ruth’s T-shirts—it looked like a dress on him—that read VARSITY. Ruth and Mrs. Pommeroy had been baking rolls, and the shocking-green kitchen radiated heat and smelled of bread, beer, and wet diapers.