The Seasons Hereafter (13 page)

There was some talk going on, and out of it Laurie's husky voice said, “Owen's having one of his spells where he can't sleep.”

Van ran a needle into her finger and exclaimed. The blood drops welled out. There was a little wave of exclamations, and somebody handed her a clean tissue.

“I'm not very good at sewing,” she apologized, “but I'm willing.”

“You can knit trapheads,” said Philip's wife, “and around here that's a priceless talent.”

“I should
say
so!” Mrs. Foss Campion was the stout florid woman who had tapped on the window at Van one day. “I tried to learn when we was first married, but Foss said it took him more time to get out my slipknots than to knit the heads himself.”

“I'll tell you one thing,” Nora Fennell said, “your husband bragging that you knit all his heads has got my husband looking at me with a hard eye.” Everyone laughed; everyone began talking about experiences in learning, or refusing to learn.

“I wonder if Owen knows you knit,” Laurie Bennett said to her. “I try to help him but I'm not at all fast, and right now he's trying to get three hundred new traps ready for the water as fast as he can. He lost a lot in that really bad storm in March.” Van made three beautiful stitches. Owen's wife said tentatively, “
Would
you knit for him? He'd be glad to pay whatever you ask, and he's in such a hurry.”

Yes, he is, Vanessa thought. She said, “I charge four dollars for a ball of nylon. Yes, I'd knit for him.”

“What a relief! He's been really worked up about those heads. I think it's why he can't sleep. He gets up and knits at two or three in the morning.”

“Owen always did things harder than anyone else,” his sister said. Vanessa basted with careful neat stitches, her head bent, trying to keep from smiling.

He came the next afternoon when Barry was around the harbor somewhere. She had been waiting for him with such intensity, waked up at dawn by it, that when she actually saw him coming past Foss Campion's she felt scattered with panic, absolutely blank. He had two children with him and she thought in bitter relief, Well, we couldn't talk anyway. Yet when the children stopped off next door and he came on alone she considered hiding upstairs and not opening the door. In a paralysis of doom she heard him coming and waited for the imperious rap of knuckles; stiffly, with great effort, seeing herself a scarecrow come to life, she went to open the door.

“My wife said you'd knit for me,” he said at once. She nodded and stood back. He had three two-pound balls of nylon under one arm, and he put them on the table and took two meshboards out of his hip pocket. “This one's for the big heads and this for the little ones,” he explained, showing her the B and L burned into the ends. The meshboards were polished with use, and warm from contact with his body.

He was so curt that the children could have been safely in the room with them. As he started to give her instructions for the heads, she said, “Wait a minute, I'd better write everything down.” She went into the sitting room. But she could find neither pencil nor paper, and she got very hot and her eyes stung. “Oh, damn it,” she wailed softly, pawing without sense at magazines, and he called to her, “Never mind, I've got something in my pocket.” When she went back to the kitchen he was sitting at the table writing on the back of an envelope. She stood looking at the bulk of his shoulders and the back of his neck, at the way the wiry black hair grew down on it and at a small puckered scar—a white seam against the burnt-dark skin. She lit a cigarette after several futile attempts to scratch a match because her hand was infuriatingly unsteady.

“There you are,” he said, reading the figures off the paper. “And knit them in sets, will you? Got plenty of needles?”

“Plenty,” she said.

“All right, then.” He pushed back from the table and the moment was over. She had to reclaim it somehow, her mind dashed wildly about as she'd searched for paper and pencil. “Oh—do you want the rings knit in?”

“No, I'll put them in myself.” He looked at her then. “I guess I'll get used to it.”

“To what?”

“Your hair.” Before she had time to warm to that he was on his way out; then he stopped abruptly halfway through the door and said, “A man's so drove up this time of year he can't think.”

“Or sleep either,” said Van, marvelously, drunkenly warm now as if wine were running through her veins and flushing her skin.

“How'd you know?” Without waiting for her reply he went on, “I'll have to use up tomorrow afternoon going around the shore in a dory looking for traps of mine gone ashore. This morning I saw three down in Ship Cove.”

“I'll bet your youngsters will enjoy going with you.”

“I'm not taking them. They'll still be in school.”

“Oh.” The syllable floated between them, a leaf or a feather borne on light capricious air currents, and they were bemused by watching it sail first toward one, then toward the other. Van said, “I must know Ship Cove by sight but not by name. I've been all over the island, I think.”

Like someone asked by a passer-by for directions, he said, “You know the deep cove over past Mark's point on the west side? You can see Fennells' from there. That's Barque Cove. Next is Wood and then comes Ship, the third one. You know the place where the woods rise up steep from the shore, all great old spruces straight as masts?”

She realized how intensely she was staring at him. She nodded. “Yes. It's beautiful down there. You could be a thousand miles away from the world.”

But he was already going off the doorstep, not looking back. He met Terence Campion coming from his wharf and stood there talking. The children eddied around them in some foolish, giggling game. Terence looked down with an absent smile once or twice, but she noticed with a queer relief that Owen was like a rock amidst splashing surf, impervious even when his daughter put her arms around his waist and leaned her head in a proprietory manner against his middle. The boy, about ten, and the image of his mother, climbed up his back like a monkey; Terence, as if noticing the sudden loneliness of the Dinsmore children, rumpled Tammie's head and drew Diane against his leg where she leaned quietly as a cat. But Owen, garlanded and even half-strangled by his children, appeared still separate from them.

When he and they had gone, she went to filling needles with the white nylon twine, and while her hands worked automatically she purposely drove tomorrow from her mind, knowing that if it should rain or blow she would be physically sick. She did not dare examine her feelings closely for fear of reasoning herself out of them; or, like Maggie Dinsmore, being visited by signs and portents.

She set a cup-hook in the sill of a sunporch window so she could watch the harbor as she worked. When Barry came home he was grinning with satisfaction, “Knitting for Owen, huh? Well, from now on you'll have all the work you can handle. They use a lot of baitbags out here, too.”

“I'm not going to make a thing of it,” she warned him. “So don't you go drumming up trade for me. His wife cornered me at their damn sewing circle and I couldn't get away.”

“All right, all right.” He was good-natured about it, talking on and on about his day's work as he got himself a mug-up. She went on knitting, looking out at the molten boil of the harbor under the wind. The rhythm of the twine pulling taut and the creak of the small rocker were hypnotic, putting her into a familiar state in which her mind moved free in suspension between dream and reality. The difference from her knitting in the past was that these heads belonged to Owen Bennett and that soon they would be handled with careless expertise by those brown hands with the long thumbs which she could see so clearly as they wrote, gestured, lit a cigarette, and held out the meshboards.

I
t did not rain or blow, and almost everybody went out to haul. Toward noon she washed herself carefully and put on a new yellow shirt, called “gold” in the catalog, and new slacks and sneakers. She found a lightweight cotton jacket of Barry's to wear. Her raincoat hung on a hook in the entry, and she hadn't worn it for so long that it had become like something dead; she felt a twinge of revulsion and then guilt when she brushed against it. It had been her companion for a long time; she couldn't remember the exact moment when she had forsaken it.

Outside it was quiet and empty, except for the birds. Older children had gone back to school, and younger ones were having naps. So were some of the women, who had got up at daybreak when their husbands did. She had a thrilling sensation of invisibility as she walked through the village and then across the lower meadow toward the woods.

With the sun almost overhead there was a strange light among the spruces, and the sun's heat brought a resinous scent that spoke of summer. Her feet moved without sound on the thick floor of old red-brown spills and dense moss. She could have been utterly alone on the island, in the world, except for the flock of crossbills that at one time accompanied her, unseen in their progress among the spruce tops but communicative.

She came out beyond the deep rock slash of Barque Cove and went along a rough trail above the black volcanic shore to Wood Cove. Here she sat on a boulder and smoked, watching two boats working close to a ledge that occasionally threw up an explosive burst of spray. She did not allow herself to think of what might or might not lie ahead in Ship Cove, but concentrated on externals: birds, boats, scents, and the long-drawn-out rattle of shingle being dragged out by the light surf.

Then she walked on, climbing up and inching down among the jagged peaks of dark rock. At last she came to Ship Cove, a gleaming slant of pale sea-smoothed stones and a great jumble of driftwood; she saw the splintered half of a skiff enmeshed in a wiry brown tangle of last year's beach peas. She saw the fresh colors of a buoy in the rockweed, and went down to it. It was Owen's, and the trap was nearby. She set about freeing it, working with all her strength, yanking, skidding, soaking her feet and the bottoms of her slacks. Finally she had the trap cleared and the warp unsnarled, coiled up, and put inside. She looked for another buoy; he'd said three. She found one in a crevice. She had to discard her jacket now; she was warm from her struggles. But at last she had this warp untangled from a water-soaked derelict spruce. In sodden squelching sneakers she was climbing about the rocks looking for the third buoy when all at price Owen was there. She hadn't heard the outboard.

Suddenly lightheaded, she realized that she had hardly believed he would come. Yet he nodded up at her as if he, at least, had never been in any doubt of
her
.

He came to the two freed traps, each with its buoys and coiled warp tucked inside. He stood looking at them, his hands in his pockets, his head canted. Then he grinned. “Your work, by the looks of you.”

She saw then the smears of crushed rockweed on her new slacks and shirt, the wet patches, felt the stickiness of sweat on her neck and forehead. She felt ridiculous standing there, mute and dirty. But as if he didn't notice he said, “Come on down and rest from your labors and have a cigarette.” Without watching to see if she obeyed he went up the beach and sat down in the shade. She could have disappeared while his back was turned and she felt the temptation like a great sea trying to knock her off her feet. But it receded, leaving only its roaring in her ears, and she was on her way to Owen. She saw everything with fierce clarity, and even stopped to pick up a piece of glass turned amethyst. When she sat down on the log beside him she held up the glass to her eye and looked at the sea through it.

“Better that way ? “ Owen asked her.

“A change.” She laid the glass on the log between them and took the cigarette he offered her. She had got steady again. She could even lean forward to the matter.

“You like change,” he said.

“Doesn't everybody?”

He picked up the glass and studied her through it. “Gives you a hell of a complexion.” They both laughed. Her confidence increased. They smoked without speaking. Behind them the wood was silent except for the small twitterings that came and went. They sat in its shadow, lost in it to anyone out on the water.

“What did you come here today for?” he said suddenly.

“For a walk. I often come down this way.” She played with the glass again, watching a gull through it.

“Why just this time? Why not earlier, or later?”

“I came out when I had my work done—oh, all right,” she heard herself saying. “
All right
. Why were you so damned explicit about where you were going to be, and when?” She started to get up but he grabbed her forearm and pulled her down again.

“All right, you're here. Sit still. I was explicit, as you call it, because I'm a goddam fool. I went to sleep last night knowing it, and I woke up this morning knowing it. What's your excuse?”

“Curiosity. Did I get the message or wasn't there a message?” They looked at each other, she steadied by the violence of his outburst against himself. “Oh, there was a message all right, but last night wasn't the first one.”

“You said something the night you came looking for Barry to help you shut off the harbor.”

“What?”

“That Barry never knew where I was. What did you mean by that?”

“Just that. He never does know, does he? I don't mean right now I mean even when he's looking at you he doesn't know.”

She moved away from him out into the sunshine, sitting on the warm stones with her back to him and began unlacing her soaked sneakers. That's too deep for me,” she said.

“You don't want to admit it, do you? But you give him a hell of a hard time. He praises you up to everybody. My wife this, my wife that. But underneath he's puzzled and sometimes he's scared foolish. He's a nice little guy, but a nervous little guy.”