The Seasons Hereafter (11 page)

“Because I'm too old for a pony tail,” she said. “Because it made me stick out like a sore thumb.”

“So what?” His eyes were shiny with tears.

“You don't like me to stick out like a sore thumb. You've done nothing but tell me I should be like the rest and not shame you.”

“That didn't have anything to do with your hair, for God's sake! I was proud of
that
. Hey, let it grow again, will ye? Come on, Van, let it grow.”

“I like it the way it is,” she said. “I was getting tired of it.” She turned her head back and forth before the kitchen mirror, not complacently but as gravely dubious as a scientist. At that she might have done wrong to cut her hair; he might have been looking at that when he came in the other night. Some men were funny about long hair. Look at Barry now, blowing his nose and sulking. She smiled at his reflection and said, “Can I go to haul with you?”

“You mean it?”

“I certainly do. This is your first day on your own. And I haven't been to haul with you since before we got married.” Her eyes held his in the mirror. “Remember that time?”

The resentment went out of him, he wore a grimace of ecstatic anguish. “Ayuh, I remember,” he whispered. “Kee-rist!” He moved closer behind her, pressing her body against his, his hands gripping her waist. “I remember. There was nothing ever so perfect before or since.”

“Maybe whoever said it's better always to court and never to marry had the right idea.”

He didn't want to talk. He was flushed and urgent. “Come on upstairs right now.” His hands couldn't stay still, but she was motionless.

“You've got traps to haul.”

“But today I'm by myself and I don't have to punch a time clock. . . .
Annie
.” His fingers didn't know whether to creep up or down. He pressed harder against her and pushed his face avidly into her neck.

She felt kindly toward him, not cruel as she said, “Not in the morning. Night is best.”

“I might have known! You won't do it at night, you'll have some goddam excuse, pick a fight, say you're too tired or under the weather— I know all about it!”

“Do you want me to go to haul with you or not?” she asked calmly. “I've made a double lunch.”

“Oh, to hell with it. Sure, come along, I don't give a damn.” He went slamming out of the house. She gathered up extra clothes and the lunchbox. Kathy Campion called to her when she went out, and Van exchanged enthusiastic greetings with her, snug in her frame as a woman going out to haul with her husband on a fine spring day.

The boat was the
Liza Jane
, short, sturdy, and broad. Working on his own for the first time, and able to show off before her, Barry began to cast off his bad mood. He told her the name of coves and ledges and invisible shoals; he pointed out the other boats and named them. He told her where there was always a tide rip to watch, and the spots where the lobsters crawled thickest but where the traps could be completely demolished in a southerly blow. He was almost poetic about the size and number of lobsters he took from the traps. He was nonchalant about hauling in the deep swells that broke high against a rocky wall on the deserted back side of the island. “This is flat-arse calm compared to the way it is sometimes. Of course if the engine stopped all of a sudden we'd likely end up plastered against that cliff.”

“But it wouldn't dare stop,” she told him. “It belongs to a Bennett.”

He grinned. “Some day you'll forget yourself and give 'em a good word. Wow! Look at that old soaker! If he doesn't go the measure I'll break down and bawl.” The lobster just fitted, the big claws were plugged, and he was laid reverently in the crate. “In you go, Baby mine, Daddy needs a fifth, and you'll just about see to it.” There were two other counters, not as spectacular, and a crowd of little ones. “Run back home, Sport, Sonny, Junior, Peanuts,” he called as he tossed them overboard. “See you next year for the Fourth of July!”

They ate lunch anchored to a trap on the southeast side of a high ledge of red rock; the light wind was from the northwest. The sun broke strongly through the thin clouds and it was summer-warm in the lee. Across a brilliant blue sparkle of water the island climbed in a giant fall of black volcanic rock toward the everlasting spruces. There was about its height and solitude a sort of poetic grandeur which, if she remained dispassionate, she could appreciate. It was a good day to be on the water; relaxed by the mild air, food, and the return to a once familiar and beloved element, she was taken unaware by delight and by something at once deeper and sharper. She could understand the Bennetts' pride of place, though she did not like them for it but resented them all the more because their pride was unconscious—not the hard-won arrogance of those who have clawed their way up from nothing.

They went back to hauling. It seemed as if they had been out here for days, and that night would never come. Rob Dinsmore came alongside once, the men talked a few minutes about the day's progress, and then separated. Foss Campion waved when he passed at a little distance. Philip overtook them about five miles away from the island, and asked Barry how he was doing. “I can see you've been bringing him luck,” he said to Van.

“I've been having to fight her off,” said Barry, “or she'd be hauling the traps and baiting 'em too. She always wanted to be a lobsterman.”

“Well, there's no reason why she couldn't have a few traps out when they start coming in from offshore,” said Philip. “You could set out eight or ten for her outside the harbor later on. I've got a double-ender hauled up you could use,” he said to Van.

“Hear that, Van? Gorry, what more could anybody ask?” Barry's eyes urged her to be nice.

She smiled primly and said in a suitable voice for the wife of the hired help, “Thank you, that would be real nice.” The sleek, high-bowed
Kestrel
sprang away from the short round-bottomed
Liza Jane
, which rolled in the wake like a fat sea pigeon. Barry looked after him and shook his head. “Yessir, that's a man,” he said reverently. “That's a real man.”

Van turned away from him, aching with too much light, aching with everything. Owen was somewhere on these waters. How long would it be?

They went by the Seal Rocks; naturally, since the order had been passed down from Mount Sinai, Vanessa thought. She would have ignored the seals if she could, in order to show her contempt and independence. She hadn't been bought and paid for—she needn't look at anything just because the boss-man told her to. But she had never seen more than one or two seals at a time, hanging about a weir, and she was amused in spite of herself by the sophisticates who remained on the ledges, tails and heads uplifted so that they looked like chunky gravy boats made out of a shiny, mottled, grayish pottery. The more timid seals slid overboard and tumbled in the surf, coming up to gaze at the boat with round eyes. She was leaning over the side, trying to coax one closer with a piece of bread, when she heard another boat coming, but didn't look around. From the corner of her eye she saw the approaching bow, and concentrated on the young seal. You're far more important and more beautiful and everything else than any mere human being, she told him silently. It seemed terribly important for him to respond to her; for him to feel her need of his response. It would be the sort of gift she had never been given and had always longed for without knowing what it was.

Liza Jane
rocked gently as the other boat idled alongside. Suddenly and gracefully the seal sank back into the water and disappeared. Pierced with angry grief, she expressed it in a swift swing of her head on a rigid neck, and a wide hostile stare across the boat at the intruder. It was Owen Bennett.

It was as if their two bodies had collided at great speed. She was thrown off balance, the wind bounced out of her lungs. His face was wooden and very dark. He was looking at her hair, and then his eyes came to hers with what appeared to be a deliberately insulting blankness.

“You two met yet?” Barry was fairly prancing. “Owen Bennett—and this is the wife. Naturally, who else?” He snorted. “Couldn't smuggle out any other woman. She wouldn't let me.”

She leaned back against the washboard, her shaking hands braced behind her. “Hello,” she said calmly.

“Hello.” You could almost doubt that the earlier reaction had occurred. Where his brothers' and sister's smiles were warm, his blazed. Oh, and he knows it! she thought. He uses it. Well, if he thinks I'm
that
simple—

What? She couldn't complete it. He and Barry were talking lobstering, the boats rocked lazily together in the wash from the ledges, and she eased the grip of her hands and turned around as if she were watching the seals again, though she saw nothing from her hot eyes. After a moment Owen's engine speeded up and Barry shouted, “Be seeing you, Cap'n!” She didn't turn to watch
White Lady
leave them.

In two days she had established herself as one of the black blackbirds, no albino freak. After this she would have to maintain the illusion, but she didn't doubt herself. There was something else to be done quickly, and she took the initiative, knowing that if she waited for Barry to make a move his fumbling hints and hands could drive her into temper and send him out of the house hurt, raging, and ready to confide in the first good listener.

When she had finished the supper dishes after the day on the Water, she went into the sunporch, where he was reading by the last light of the sunset. “Saving oil?” she inquired.

“Huh? Oh.” He took a book of safety matches from his shirt pocket and tossed it to her. “Light the Aladdin, will you?”

She didn't move. “I thought I'd go to bed. You still want a lamp lit?”

“Huh?” he said again. Then he understood, and dropped his magazine. “Hell, no. I'll be right along.” His voice was uneven. “Soon as I wash up.”

Poor Barry, she thought as if she were standing off at a distance from them both. She was determined to make the evening so successful that he would feel like a hero instead of a victim.

It wasn't difficult. Barry wasn't an overwhelming lover, but he was neither awkward nor inept. In spite of herself she responded, and afterwards as they lay together in the dark she remembered the time aboard his boat before they were married. It was the first time and the last time when she had answered him with all her body and mind; when she had believed that it would work. For twelve years she had pitied the children they had been, and yet perhaps they hadn't needed pity then as they needed it now.

Barry slept, his arm across her, his mouth against her shoulder. She lay awake for a long time gazing upward through the dark.

N
ow everything was ready. From the dissociation of their lives on Water Street they had changed to something that passed, for outsiders and for Barry, as unity. For him that one night had been the symbol. He wouldn't want another one right away; that would be forcing his luck, and Van's generosity. Besides, working as strenuously as he did, he was almost instantly snuffed out by fatigue as soon as he was warmed and fed. But it had been proved to him that he had never lost Van and so he was happy. Now I am one of the wives, Van thought. I observe the proper ceremonials and rituals. I send away to the catalog, I walk to the store on boat day and have a mail order made out by Helmi; I smile at Mark Bennett's jokes, and listen when the other wives talk to me, and sometimes I play a speaking part. And I do housework. God, how I do housework.

But she still sneaked out the back door and ran away to the point or to Long Cove mornings to avoid the moment when Kathy Campion would arrive, coffeepot in one hand and a pan of fresh Finnish coffee bread in the other, for a nice snug getting-acquainted session. She knew she was doomed, that sooner or later Kathy's relentless good humor would illuminate her kitchen, but for now she would fight. The house might belong to the Bennetts, but while she lived in it it was hers, as much as the Water Street house had been hers, and the thought of being cornered in it gave her the old claustrophobic nausea.

She ran away, but she couldn't disappear into a book as she had done. She would wander like a spirit along the shore or through the woods, sitting down long enough to smoke and then restlessly moving on, always wondering what was going on back at the harbor. Barry thought it was a victory for him and the island and the Bennetts that she stayed at home more and kept the place; clean; she allowed him that satisfaction.

On a day when Philip and Barry hadn't gone out, but had worked at Philip's fishhouse on new gear, she walked that far in the afternoon and sat on the chopping block in the sun listening to the familiar rhythm of trap nails being driven. From Nils Sorensen's fishhouse came the spasmodic whine of a circular saw as Rob Dinsmore split laths.
White Lady
was tied up at the end of the Sorensen wharf; Nils, Owen, and the island's best mechanic, Matt Fennell, were working on the engine. Vanessa didn't look that way. This was neither the time nor the place for a meeting. She felt an exhilarating steadiness, as if she were pumped full of adrenalin and could manage anything. Mrs. Philip Bennett and a tall gray-eyed woman introduced as Mrs. Steve stopped for a few minutes, and Vanessa talked with them easily, explaining with a smile how familiar this atmosphere was to her, that she had grown up with it, had built trap bottoms and painted buoys, and had even baited up. She knew they thought she was speaking of her own home, and Barry didn't throw in anything to spoil the illusion. He just gave them his charming little-boy grin as he added another new trap to a stack and went inside again, whistling “The Road to the Isles.”

Swallow it, all of you, Vanessa thought, letting her eyes slant toward the boat at the next wharf. She wondered if he knew she was there.

Next door the saw whined as it bit through spruce, quieted, attacked again. Steve and Charles Bennett, youngest and oldest of the brothers, stopped at the fishhouse and Barry introduced her with ebullient pride. Charles was solidly built, his hair shot through with gray. He was curtly civil, where Steve had a slow-spoken courtesy and an oddly gentle way. He was thinner than all the rest, and it made him seem peculiarly young, though he was at least forty. She remembered what Joanna had said:
I can see Stevie standing there in his wet clothes looking up at me. . . . Poor Stevie, he was only sixteen. I don't think he's ever gotten over it
. Then she'd added
, Or Owen either
.