The Seasons Hereafter (36 page)

Yesterday's wildness was gone. This was the first day after the death, when you begin to live without him. You think,
Yesterday at this time
— and then stop yourself. You mustn't ever think that, or you'll go crazy again.
Crazy
. That was a dirty word. One of those you didn't look at, you pretended it wasn't there, like the body thrust under the bed or into the car trunk.

“Behave yourself, Anna,” she said loudly and sternly. She took a swallow of scalding coffee to emphasize the command, and burned her tongue and lips. She was standing with her back against the sink; the tide was high so that the sun flashed off the water and light reflected into the house. Watching it she suddenly felt a wild upsurge of life. Owen wasn't dead, nothing was dead; all that had passed between them was words, and words meant nothing. She could kill with her own hands the doctor who'd talked to Owen. How did he dare to destroy lives like that, how could anyone be allowed such power? How did he know Owen could die at any moment? He wasn't God or whatever-it-was.

Revived by hope, she didn't know how she could have been so defeated. She began planning at once to see Owen; it seemed as if she could feel a strong communication flowing between them, telling her that today when he woke to the strong pumping of his heart and the warmth and soundness of his body he had been ashamed of that drop into superstitious terror. When they met, their eyes would confirm what they already knew, even if they didn't have a chance to speak.

This afternoon he would be around to help with the herring, as he had done before. Until then she had to keep busy. She decided to do a washing, so she could leave Barry with plenty of clean clothes when she went. She'd do some baking too. Good wives were always baking up a lot of stuff ahead of time when they went home on a visit or to the hospital to have a baby. She wondered what he would tell people at first, before it burst out of the tight Bennett circle that Owen had left his wife and gone with Barry's. She wondered if he'd get a housekeeper; these women were always available when needed, widows or divorced women, or some who called themselves “Mrs.” to explain the children they brought with them. Oh, Barry would have a housekeeper all right, and she'd spoil him because he was so appreciative. I hope he gets a young one, she thought. I wish him well. In a burst of rich sentiment that seemed to curl up from her very stomach she thought, I want him to be happy, if I'm going to be.

She had the washing done and hung out by mid-afternoon. Kathy had taken the children after school to dig dandelion greens, and there was an agreeable sense of isolation around the place. Van took a cup of coffee and went out on the wharf to watch the boats come in. The air had the peculiar stillness that foretells an east wind, when each sound rings with great purity and every object is etched in light. It suited her mood.

She realized after a while that everyone else but Owen had come in. Or else he had sold his lobsters before she came out onto the wharf and had taken the boat home; at this moment he could be walking across the field behind the houses, on his way to her, though everyone else would think it was to help salt herring.

Barry, rowing stern first from his mooring, saw her on the wharf and shouted, “Hi, Beautiful!”, then looked around to see if Terence Campion, up on the bow of his boat, heard this husbandly salute. “You got up, I see,” he said as his skiff came in to the ladder. “You were laid out flat and cold as a flounder this morning.”

“I don't know what got into me,” she said.

“Well, you look real flourishing now.” He came up the ladder wearing his version of lecherous anticipation. “Makes a man have ideas. I had 'em this morning. You might of woke up surprised.”

“I'm dangerous when aroused.”

“I'd take my chances. . . . Well, I'm going up to the house and get a mug-up before we start lugging herring.”

“Is Owen helping, like last time?” She tried to sound indifferently polite.

“Nope. He didn't have to last time, just took a whim. . . . He ain't in yet, anyway. I dunno what's keeping him. You coming?”

“In a minute.” Barry went, whistling “The Road to the Isles.”

She detested and feared the fear, she wanted to wince away from it before it could reach her. It was too late. There was the picture of a boat drifting with no one at the wheel, the light wind and the tide nudging the boat on; she saw it rocking slightly and moving with little swift forward surges. It would travel down past the Rock, and the Coast Guard boys in blue shirts and dungarees would launch a boat and go out aboard. Maybe even at this instant Mark Bennett was hearing the news by telephone, either that Owen had disappeared from his boat or was lying on the platform, dead.

“Well, it was what he wanted,” she said aloud in a scraped, tearless voice.

At that moment
White Lady
came into view around the eastern point with a stack of wet traps on the stern. Owen stood with one hand on the wheel, the other in his pocket, his pipe in his mouth. He had an air of solid repose. He was alive.

She pressed her hands tightly together, squeezing her mouth between the fingertips to keep it quiet and in control. That was how close to the surface the savage was; for an instant she'd
believed
. If you ever do go crazy, she said to herself, you'll have only yourself to blame.

She got up and went down the ladder into Barry's skiff and began to row out into the harbor with easy strokes. The water slid away from the oarblades like oil. “Out for a little exercise?” Terence Campion called to her when she passed his mooring.

“I should do this every day.”

“You ought to have a little skiff of your own. That one rows like a wood box. I don't know where she came from.”

She held the skiff in one place for a moment and said, “Maybe they knocked her together out of a couple of sardine boxes.”

“Now that just may be,” he said solemnly. He disappeared into the cuddy. She rowed on among the boats that loomed up around her like large amiable beasts, sometimes stirring slightly but never with menace. But before she reached the other wharf
White Lady
was purring out of the harbor. Owen didn't look toward the skiff, only the lustrous ripples caused by the wake reached it and made it rock gently up and down. She shipped the oars and sat watching
White Lady
go past Eastern Harbor Point so quietly that the wash on the rocks drowned out the engine. When the boat was out of sight Van rowed out around the end of the breakwater. She wouldn't allow herself to be disappointed at not meeting Owen. She felt that he had seen her, and communication had been established. She rowed on beyond the breakwater, along the high shores over the glassy shallows where the bronze-green weed floated until she was abreast of Barque Cove, today an aquamarine mirror for ducks. Then she started back, thinking, Anyone could row all around Jessup's Island in a few hours. I would like a little dory like the one we went out there in. Maybe she would sell it to us. We'll have a dog like Argo and he can go with me. We'll be very self-contained and peaceful, the way I am now. The way I will be forever.

I
n the morning she was positive that she would see Owen today. She ironed Barry's shirts, mended socks, went over her own clothes; she couldn't sit down after that, but washed the sun parlor windows inside and out, and while she was working on the outside Kathy called that she'd just taken some Finnish coffee bread out of the oven. Van was suddenly very hungry—her stomach growled with hunger.

Maggie Dinsmore was there, and the table was half-covered with patchwork squares. “Ain't this nice, though!” Mag cried. “We don't get together often enough. Don't have the time. We'd ought to make time.”

“People are always saying, What do you find to do out on that island?” said Kathy. “Well, I'm busier than a three-legged cat with fleas. There's the butter, Van. Can you reach it?”

“Make a long arm for it, as my father used to say,” said Mag. Van let them talk. If she smiled now and then it was enough, and it was easy to smile; she felt recklessly gay.

Out of the talk about quilt patterns, dandelion greens, Finnish ways of cooking herring, husbands' choices of food, children's idiosyncrasies, birds, this morning's news, emerged one fact that slashed the high wire under her feet. “Went in real early,” Maggie was saying. “The kids are staying with Joanna for the weekend. My, I dunno when those two been off alone anywhere. Of course it's not really alone, getting up to Waterville to see Joss at her school. . . . It's not going on a trip like honeymooners.” She sat back laughing like a mischievous child. “Rob told Owen it was real dangerous staying in those fancy motels. Likely to make a baby.”

“That Rob,” said Kathy. “He's like Terence, never know what these mild quiet ones will come out with. Just the same,” she added, “
I
plan to have a second family when this batch gets grown up some. I think it keeps you young.”

“Barry says you folks'll be starting on a family pretty soon,” Maggie said kindly to Van. “Anything definite yet?”

“Nothing to be sure of,” said Van. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere else in the room. She got up. “Well, as much as I'd like to sit here, I've got to get back to my windows or I'll lose my momentum. That bread is wonderful, Kathy. So long, Maggie.” It was a small gem of a performance. She even spoke to the children in the sandpile as she went past them, and called Tiger by name when he pranced furrily at her. She went into the house, up to her room, and into bed.

Barry stood over her, talking in a hushed voice. “What's the matter? You sick? Anything to do with you going overboard the other day and it's just catching up with ye?”

“No,” she said to the wall. “And don't talk as if you're standing over a coffin. I'm not dead yet.”

“You got a kink? Kathy told me you were up and down that ladder scrubbing windows. Easy to put your sacred lilac out that way.” He snorted with amusement, and she knew what he'd say next. “As old Ed Bushnell used to call it.”

She sighed without sound and pulled her knees up closer to her belly, shutting her eyes against the obstreperous apple-blossoms on the wall paper. “Sick headache?” Barry pursued. “Bilious?”

“It's too simple for you to understand, I suppose,” she said into the tight-closed dark. “I'd just like to be left alone.”

He said with triumph, “You got a hair crosswise, that's it. Somebody said something. Now what?” He was sternly and yet indulgently amused. It was a new tone for Barry. He was a man who now made more in a day than he'd ever made in a week. He was a Bennett's Island lobsterman. He might not be a Bennett, but he walked in their boot tracks and knew them by their first names. He stood over his wife making protective, slightly bored, husbandly sounds in a pleasant room in a house for which he was paying the rent. She remembered, while his voice came dimly to her as if the dark were beginning to fill her ears, her early fancy that all meaning departed from this place when the men were away from it. She had become a part of the nonsignificance, the nothingness, and Barry had taken on new flesh and blood.

He was no longer talking. He had gone away. He used to leave her like this in the double bed on Water Street. No, not quite like this; he was whistling now, outdoors. He had such an engrossing life apart from her that he would not think of her again until he came back into the house, unless someone mentioned her to him, and why should they?

Later he offered her supper. She refused it. It was an unspeakably long night, and somewhere in it the foghorn at the Rock began to blow. She saw the fog, a wall moving imperceptibly closer, a wall you could put your hand into and through, and still a wall for all that.

The window filled with gray muffling light. Birds began to sing, but no engines sounded.

No one came near her that day. There was no way of telling time as the fog light stayed the same, if you could call it light. It was merely the absence of darkness. She slept and woke, haunted by a line.
And dreaming through the twilight that doth not rise nor set
. . . . Something about forgetting. It was not a day for hauling, and Barry came in at noontime, whistling again. “You up?” he called up the stairs to her, and then when she didn't answer he called in a more subdued voice, “You asleep?” She still didn't answer and he went back to the kitchen.

He made his own dinner and listened to the radio while he ate, and then went out again. Presently she heard the hammer from the fish-house. She could tell when he finished building one trap bottom and started another. She got up and started downstairs, and was genuinely frightened when she became dizzy and thought she was falling forward. If she broke anything, not enough to die of, she'd be at everyone's mercy; she wouldn't be able to keep them away from her, they'd come through the wall, pitying, comforting,
touching
. . . and triumphant. Now we have got her down we will be nice to her and she can't do a thing about it.

The thought got her up and out into the kitchen. “I suppose I should eat,” she said aloud. “Because they won't let you starve to death.” No, if you wanted to die without interference the best way was to make it quick and violent. But she'd been unable to drown herself.

She buttered a slice of bread and made a cup of tea and took the food upstairs, where she ate sitting cross legged on the bed. If only Barry had some shells for his rifle, she could manage it, but she couldn't buy bullets without calling attention to herself.

There was almost a full bottle of aspirin downstairs. If you took it down on Sou'west Point, by the time they found you you'd be good and dead, or close to it. They'd handle you then, but you wouldn't care. . . . Suddenly she rolled over on the bed in a gulping huddle, weeping without shame or caution in an almost voluptuous surrender. She passed from that into new sleep, heavy and dreamless, and woke to a clear red sunset light. Barry was talking downstairs. He seemed to have been talking forever.