Reprisal (28 page)

Joanna Reed and her poetry. Joanna Reed and her breast. Joanna Reed and her husband. Joanna Reed and her father. Too many possessives. After swollen pride of ownership, what room had been left for her poetry, for Frank, for her father--how much room now for Rebecca?

She had gone into the warehouse enraged because someone had been taken from her. A loss that could not be accident; accident had been too trivial, too random a cause of loss for Joanna Reed.-But now she was left with it. Accident

... ill chance ... bad luck. Bad luck and possible blunders were what she was left with--poor clay to turn to tragedy.

She stood, and went down the steps into the yard. The flowers seemed ragged under their summer colors. Sea wind and sandy soil--or the salt sifting from the air--had pinched them, pressed them to produce their blossoms, their pollen, soon as possible. Decorations of the mainland's deep soil, woods-sheltered and gently rained on, here they grew fragile at the sea's apron, in the sea's washed sand.

But they seemed good company for her, providing an example of doing the best one could. Joanna knelt--her knees very sore from chimney climbing --then lay down in tall grasses among the flower stems. She stretched out amid them and closed her eyes, felt the earth firm beneath her, and sighed deeply as if she were weeping. Breathed in ... and sighed again so her bones seemed to slowly settle, clicking into place, her blood begin to run more freely through her.

She felt, lying there resting in the sun, that she could make do with loss in place of a husband and a father--that she could manage loss and learn from it, work through the days alongside it, then take it with her to bed.

She lay resting awhile longer, and almost fell asleep. It was a pleasure to have only ground and grass and sky to consider--the ancient trinity of the natural world. A trinity unconscious, with no interest in time, time's changes, with no interest in itself. ... She lay for a while in a haze of grass stems, small-blossomed flowers, and sunshine ... then she got up, went to the garage, and sorted through rusting tools and implements lying on the workbench and stacked into a corner.

Joanna hadn't liked to garden, though she'd done it to keep the White River house lot neat. The careful attention to witless living things, the responsibility for them, had seemed to be poorly rewarded with only temporary blossoms. ... Now it had occurred to her the work might be reward in itself--the flowers' colors only a sort of seal. She selected a hoe with cracked handle, a trowel, and a small white weed rake with one tooth missing.

There were no gardening gloves.

She walked back out into the yard, and decided to begin at the west corner, where weeds and flowers fought a silent slow-motion battle for a patch of sunlight between sea-grape shadows.

It was heavy hoeing. The sandy soil, moving so easily underfoot, was a different proposition laced with roots and matted undergrowth. Joanna enlisted with the flowers, and fought the weeds. ... Her cave-hardened hands helped.

And the climbing muscles laced through her shoulders took to the hoe as if hacking weeds and rootlets were another sport and adventure. As she worked, she learned one by one the tricks to hoeing--slid her left hand farther down the handle and raised the blade with a scissoring motion of her arms, her right hand levering against the fulcrum of her left, and lifting the cutting head not too high ... only a foot or two.

Only that high, then letting it drop--but drop where she wanted it, no fiddling for position once it was down. Letting it drop, adding a little power, then tugging it back only a few inches through the soil.

And up again.

After almost two hours working, Joanna was satisfied with a section of backyard, roughly three feet by ten, thoroughly weeded and the earth turned at least a few inches down. She had killed several flowers too, at the beginning, victims of friendly fire.--The hoeing in warm sunshine had oiled her with pleasant sweat, made her callused hands only comfortably warm, and eased the muscles of her shoulders, the long muscles of her arms.

The section done, she straightened and stretched in a ghosting veil of summer gnats, then stood leaning on the hoe, considering. It would take three or four days to hoe the backyard into order ... days more to reconstruct the original beds, decide on new plantings, perennials. Hot work in dirt, with green creatures that could never know her--but only sun, water, growth, and death.

The hoe's long handle seemed to keep her too separate from her work, standing away and striking at it. Joanna put the hoe down, went to her scabbed knees, and began to work her border with the trowel and little rake. ... This way, she killed no flowers. It was a closer combat. She saw the small weeds she killed up close, their slender stalks, odd with shreds of greenery along their length, no two nearly alike--and with flowers of their own, small, undecorative, ragged and stippled, useful only for sex. ... If she hadn't already made the accepted choice, she might have championed them, and killed flowers so the weeds could grow.

Well past noon, she stood, brushed sandy soil from her jeans and work shirt, and put the hoe, trowel, and small rake away. Then she went up the steps into the kitchen and turned the burner off. The coq au vin--or almost coq au vin--smelled very good ... lacked only mushrooms.

Joanna made space in the small refrigerator, used washcloths to hold the stewpot's hot handles, and fitted it in. She was hungry, but didn't want to spend the time indoors to make a lunch; the sunshine had been such a pleasure for her.

She took her purse from the kitchen table, then went down the back steps and around to the car, started it, and backed down the drive and out into the street. The Volvo's tires rumbled down Slope Street's cobbles to Strand--and Joanna turned left, to follow Strand around the end of the harbor, then along Beach Road, out of town.

Trudie's Hotdoggery--a shabby plywood shoe box, and painted pink--was perched at a slight tilt on the slope of a dune along Beach. Trudie's had been built on the sea side of the road, but a combination of savage storms, sand slides, and island road repair had resulted in its relocation to the other side of the street.

Trudie, very old, freckled, thin, and apparently frail, was still competent to run her restaurant, aided by mirrored sunglasses and a nasty temper. The restaurant served only milk shakes, Cokes, hot dogs, peach pie, hamburgers--seared half-pounds of round steak ground--and lobsters steamed out back and presented, huge and whole, on too-small paper plates with large paper cups of peppered melted butter. Nutcrackers were loaned with the lobsters, and Trudie kept a close count of them, reacting with a snake's rattle of insults if one proved missing.

Joanna parked among motorcycles and dune buggies waiting in Trudie's small sand-and-gravel lot, got out, and went through the front screen door to a row of broad tanned bikers' and beachies' backs, ranged along a twenty-foot counter covered with nailed-down burnt-orange laminate. There were plywood booths along the right wall, but Joanna looked for counter space, and saw an opening large enough to stand in by the cash register.

Trudie permitted no music in her place, so the noise was loud voices, loud laughter, food orders and demands for payment over the sea's soft thudding reminder down the beach across the road. Sea wind, drifting through wide windows' rusted screens, cooled the grills' heat, dried the sweat on the foreheads of the three girls serving. All three were Trudie's grandnieces, as sweet as she was sour.

Joanna, wedged into her space, waited for a girl to ring up a biker's bill, then shouted her order. "One hot dog. One Coke. No fries. To go." The girl nodded, went back to place it at the grills, and Joanna saw Trudie stop her and say something.

A young surfer with fisherman's tattoos was sitting on the first stool beside her, his girl to his right. The boy--long hair red-blond, his skin coffee'd by an early-summer tan--seemed to radiate the perfect heat of youth.

He and his girl were talking as they ate, and Joanna could almost understand what they were saying amid the noise of all the others--their minor melody threading through. The surfers, the bikers, were almost all from Asconsett or the other islands. Trudie's was a local place; the tourists usually ate at Bucanne's, in town, or the Lobster Trap at the Willis marina.

... Trudie's grandniece, sturdy and smoothly fat, brought Joanna's order in a large brown grocery sack, stained with grease along one side.

"Looks like too much," Joanna said, then had to raise her voice. "--Too much.

I don't think it's my order."

The girl checked the ticket. "Strawberry shake, two hot dogs, fries, one piece peach pie."

"Not my order. Not my order."

"Yes, that is your order." Trudie, in mirrored sunglasses, had stepped behind the register.

"No, I just ordered one hot dog and a Coke."

"I said, that is your order. Now you take that food an' make room for another customer there, if you're eatin' out."

"But I didn't order this!"

"You're gettin' it just the same," Trudie said, plucked the ticket out of her grandniece's hand and tore it in half. "No charge for this lady.--Now honey, you go out and give us some room here at the counter, and you eat all that good food and God bless you." And was gone with a turning reflection of light in her mirrored glasses.

The girl made a face of astonishment for Joanna. "That's a first, for sure,"

she said.

... Tears in her eyes over kindness--perhaps to a recent widow, more likely for silence concerning the captains' trade--Joanna went outside, climbed into the Volvo, and put the sack of food on the seat beside her. Too much food.

Trudie's split and grilled their fat frankfurters, toasted the long buttered buns. ...

She ate far down the coast, sitting in solitude amid sea grass where two small dunes met shoulder to shoulder. All the island's other beaches were proper New England--short, shelving, and stony. Only the north shore ran to sand, piled up out of shallows by driving Atlantic storms.

... She looked out to sea and into an afternoon sun, mature and blazing. About half of the milk shake, creamy rich, thick with chunks of early strawberry, was gone--and more than half of the fries, salty and still smoking hot, blistered with fat. She'd eaten one hot dog with mustard and relish, and had started on the second, plain, only the grilled sausage--spiced red meat, juicy and edged with char--resting in the toasted bun.

The harsh sunlight enriched the food, sharpened its colors so they burned. ...

Joanna decided to save the slice of peach pie for dinner, and wrapped it in a napkin. Then she sat eating until only a portion of hot dog and some french fries were left for the gulls and the little shorebirds scissoring along the surf's scalloped hem. ... She stood, brushed sand from her jeans, and went down to the sea's edge to set out the scraps for them ... then walked back up to take her trash and piece of pie to the car.

She left the Volvo, and walked farther north down among the dunes, slowly wending her way through low sand hills whose slopes, when slumped to certain angles, flashed and sparkled under bright sunlight. She walked through patches of sea grass, past occasional sculptural antlers of driftwood, angled and weather-worn soft gray, brought far up by sea storms, and left.

She walked along, then down through the last of the heaped sand, furred with wind-bent grasses, until the damp hardpack of the beach was firm beneath her feet. Then she stretched out to walk herself weary, striding in quick counterpoint to the rollers' slow rhythms as the surf came in. A mile offshore, a white fishing boat rocked sunstruck ... and farther out, a small rust-red freighter sailed south along the horizon.

As Joanna walked, the sea's sound suggested poetry to her--perhaps had provided the primal impulse to poetry and music. "I sing the wrath of Achilles, Peleus's son. ..." The regular crash and murmur of that grand unconscious and its winds indicating an immense imbalance--all the magnificent and witless universe weighed against the living few, and fewer still who could consider it. The living sentient few-temporary growths, collections of trillions of tiny animals that had found, over ages, better feeding in clusters. And these, now glued together in walking watery heaps, believed they thought and were aware, even supposing similar gods to keep them company.

But still, even such self-deluding creatures could observe in a limited way, could speak, scribble down description, and dream of mysteries--their poets'

business.

Joanna began to speak aloud over the sea's sound, walking along ... calling out in her near-contralto. "There are mountains steep beneath the sea, in dark and singing silence, desirous of no company. ..."

But even these, heights and depths at once, vibrated to the distant drumming on the shore. The whales' tunes as melody line, the chirps and grunts of smaller lives, the susurrations of great sharks swimming ... all were measured out by rollers beating beaches far away. There the sea struck at the land, whose air no basic thing can breathe--but only oddities discontented, that had crawled from resonant depths into distant, bright dry days.

Frank had died in the ocean, as so many others --their huge and senseless mother reclaiming them, extinguishing the accidental life she'd allowed so long ago. Holding them dear as ever, floating or sinking, as everything between her green breasts must do.

... Joanna walked along, murmuring pieces of what might become a poem to deep and tide-won water, and its mate, the wind. She walked on--muttering to herself, occasionally calling out over the ocean's toppling noise--walked on until she was weary, then turned and made a slower way back down the long beach to the car, and home.

... In the evening, an almost tropical sunset stretching away over the sea in streaked black, painted rose, and gold, Joanna walked around the cottage, examining its shrubs and stunted flowers ... the light-blue paint checking along its clapboards, the white paint flaking from the palings of the front yard's picket fence.--It seemed to her the cottage required better care. Dumb, helpless in its worn fatigue and solitude, however charming and perfectly set high and apart on Sand Hill's crest, it seemed needy as a child. Nancy Evanson hardly visited the island. ...