The Seasons Hereafter (16 page)

“Here's your cards.” Owen slung the pack across the table, and they slithered and spread out. Gathering them up, Barry said, “You playing, Cap'n?”

“I'm not much of a card player.” He tilted back in his chair and looked restlessly around the kitchen; his gaze skipped Van, whose face began to burn. Willy came out, blinking and forlorn. He sat down without speaking and stared at his knobby hands.

“Come on, son,” Barry said with a benign twinkle. He began to shuffle the cards. Owen swung his chair around till the lamplight came from the side, picked up a magazine, and began to read. Gina maneuvered her chair until she was elbowing the back of Owen's and cozily leaning her head toward his.

Van got out a plate for the sandwiches of canned luncheon meat and relish, put out mugs for the coffee, and sat down to knit from a cuphook screwed into the edge of the dresser. The scene around the table lacerated her nerves, and yet she could not bear to go away from the oblivious black head. . . . He could at least look in my direction once, it's his trapheads ruining my hands. . . . Choosy, is he? The bouquet from that one should be strangling him. I don't think her hair's been washed since she was born. I wish all their damn boats would come ashore at once. Then you'd see some hopping and swearing. And I'd sit here and laugh. I'd laugh myself sick and I'd never stop. That's what Gina said. Sisters under the skin. What a nauseating thought. . . . She drove the needle hard through the loop and gave a vicious pull. A good bit of nylon around the neck and twisted just right would get rid of that giggle. Gigglotomy. And that Willy. He makes me want to puke too. The pair of them.

“Tell me what to do,” Gina commanded, waving her cards around in front of Owen's face.

“Well, good God, get 'em off the end of my nose.” He turned in his chair, hooked one arm over the back of it, and studied her cards, then touched one. “Play that.”

She hunched up a shoulder and moaned, “Ooh, your breath is warm. Makes me feel all funny.”

Willy put down his cards, pushed back from the table, and stumbled out through the entry. Barry looked around, and Owen said, “He's sick.”

“I better go see,” said Barry, getting up.

“Oh, let him heave and get it over with,” Gina said gaily. “He's not used to drinking. He's an awful baby. I don't know what I married such a green kid for. I coulda had an older man.” She gave Owen an oblique glance from under heavy green eyelids. “I go for older men, you know?”

“Is that so?” Owen grinned at her. “I wonder why.”

“Experience,” she breathed. “They know how to give a girl a good time, you know?”

“Well, it takes two to tango,” said Barry, and doubled over the back of his chair in appreciation of his wit. I might join Willy in the back yard and we could vomit together, Van thought. Outside Willy yelled something, and then came crashing in, spattered with rain.

“Hey, they're tearing around Foss's wharf! Looks like a boat's ashore!”

Barry seized his big light and ran into the other room. “Ours are all okay!” he shouted back. Owen was already hauling on his rubber boots and Willy was scrabbling around for his in the entry Barry got his from behind the stove. Owen moved the fastest. Without stopping for oilpants he took his oiljacket and went out pulling it on. The others slammed out behind him, and when they were gone the kitchen was still full of them; it vibrated with the urgency and confusion of their departure. Gina, who had stared at it all without expression, threw down her cards and said in a flat voice, “Well, how do you like that? And it's not even one of their boats.”

“You ought to know how fishermen operate,” said Van. She began to clear the table of glasses and the remaining sandwiches, then gathered up the cards.

“Yeah, I know how they operate,” said Gina. “These Bennett's Island bastards.” Then she giggled. “Hey, that was some poker game. I was doing good, in more ways than one. Boy, I didn't know anybody could have so much fun out here. That Owen's right ready for it, isn't he?”

“Ready for what?” Van asked, neatly squaring the pack.

“
You
know. You been watching him. Well, I suppose he's getting to the age. They start liking 'em younger and younger, kind of works them up more, you know? Now Willy,” she went on complacently, “he's always ready. He don't need any working up. It's because he's young,” she explained.

I must tell Owen all this, Van thought. He should know that he's just a lecherous old man. She leaned against the sink, shuddering with the attempt to control her laughter, then overcome by it she reached for a towel to wipe her streaming eyes, and then was shaken by new convulsions.

“Hey, what's so funny?” Gina demanded angrily. “
Me
? Well, let me tell you, your own husband's just as horny, and—
Hey
, are you all right? I mean, are you having high strikes or something.” The vicious edge had given way to the shrillness of fright. “Maybe I better go get Barry—” She was halfway to the door.

“No, don't go, I'm all right,” Van assured her. Still gasping, she pumped cold cistern water into the basin and splashed it several times over her face. “It's something I can't share, but I wasn't laughing at you,” she said through the sloshing. She straightened up and dried her face.

“You scared me,” Gina accused her. “I've heard people go off their heads like that and they ended up in Bangor.”

Vanessa thought of telling her she'd already been in Bangor for committing a gigglotomy with a carving knife, but it was too much work. She lit a cigarette, supported one elbow in the other hand, and gazed placidly at Gina, who began to fidget. Suddenly her small claw sized the huge handbag and groped for the compact, in whose mirror she gazed at her reflection with the concentration of a scientist cooking up a miracle mixture. Then, as if she had found the reassurance she needed, she put the compact away and said, “It sounds like it's slacking off. I guess I'll go see what they're doing and then go home.”

Van watched her getting into her red rainclothes. She was frankly in a hurry now. . . . I suppose it'll be all over the place tomorrow that I acted like a crazy woman, or that I
am
a crazy woman. . . . But it didn't matter any more.

S
he was in bed when Owen came back with Barry to get his oilpants. The rain had stopped and the periods between gusts were long enough so that when she went to the head of the stairs she heard them talking quite clearly. They both sounded subdued, voices slow and interrupted by yawns, but whatever boat had been threatened had been saved. There was a brief discussion about the whiskey, and finally Barry agreed to keep it.
That
was a hard decision, wasn't it, old boy? Van thought. “You'll need it in the morning,” Owen told him. Oh, take your patronizing bullshit out of here, Van thought and for God's sake, Barry, don't thank him again. . . . Then she remembered Gina and she was almost overcome again. It was rich, rich—it paid her for almost everything. What a fool he'd look when she told him, and if she never spoke another word to him beyond that, she'd see that he was told, all right.

She went back to bed, feeling so exhausted that she didn't know when Barry got into bed. He was gone in the morning when she woke up. She rose on one elbow and saw by the slant of the sun it was mid-morning, and a mild one; the song sparrow was going it again, and she was overcome by a crushing homesickness for her bedroom on Water Street. A song sparrow used to sing in one of the old syringa bushes, starting early as March. Funny, she'd forgotten it yesterday morning, when the song sparrow had meant something quite different. Yesterday morning or yesterday year. It had been a long time. She squeezed her eyes shut, and then opened them and got quickly out of bed.

She dressed and, oblivious to her un-brushed hair and unwashed face, went out, taking her raincoat and a book but nothing to eat. When she came to her place inside the edge of the woods, she threw down the raincoat and lay on it and opened the book. But it wasn't the one she'd reached for, a novel borrowed from Joanna. It was her high school poetry anthology. She threw it from her. It hit a tree and fell at the bottom, open, its leaves fluttering. She felt sudden grief and shame, the way she'd felt once when she'd hit a bird with a stone.

She had not allowed herself to consciously remember the incident until this moment, seeing a page flicker as the dying bird's wing had flickered. I committed murder at an early age, she thought now, trying for cynicism, but she ran to the book and picked it up and brushed it off. She had read all the poems so many times that most of them she knew by heart, or knew snatches of . . .
Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the
black. . . . Whenever
Richard Cory went downtown
. . . .
When I consider Life and its few years
. . . .

She sat down crosslegged on the warm greening turf and looked through the pages. It had meant so much and promised so much. It had been precious to her as the empty scent bottle was precious, for what it had once held. She laid her hand on the book and said, “You ought to be burned, like an old flag.” She jumped up and carried it down onto the flat rocks, and gathered up handfuls of dried chips and rockweed. In a crevice she started a fire and then fed the book to it, a few pages at a time. She saw familiar words leap and blacken in the flames. The Traveler's horse that nibbled at the forest's ferny floor died, and the Hound of Heaven, and the Wild Swans of Coole; the soldier-poets, the Brownings, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost. Her face began to feel made of stone, as if she couldn't move it if she tried. At the end she ripped the binding apart with strong hands and watched that burn too. The tide was coming, and presently it would lap at the place where the fire had been, the ashes would float, the essence of the words would go out on the cold salt current. Tonight the scent bottle would join the poems.

She walked home in the late afternoon, in a warm light full of fresh bird song; she was hungry and disconsolate, her raincoat too hot for comfort. When she came through the spruces into the yard, Kathy was hanging out some clothes and called over to her, “What a gorgeous day, and my three stuck in with chicken pox. Aren't you lucky!” she said without malice.

Van gave her a wave and a slight smile and went into the house. Barry wasn't there, but he'd been home and cooked bacon and eggs. She was so hungry her stomach hurt, so she fried bacon and eggs for herself. She was still sitting at the table, her chin in her hands, when Barry came home again.

“Hello, stranger,” he said jauntily. “Long time no see.” The last word ended in an uncertain upward note as he looked around the kitchen. There were no signs of supper, and the dishes from last night and this day were still in the sink. His smile went weak. “You all right?”

“I'm all right.”

“Oh.” If he had been a more violent man he would have yelled at her, “Christ, are you starting this up again?” Instead he accepted it, with just a furtive glance around and a feeble grin.

“Do you suppose Willy tiptoes around Gina?” she asked abruptly.

He was stacking dishes. “Huh?” he said.

“Never mind.”

“You want me to get something at the store for supper?”

“No, I'll fix something.” She pushed back from the table and got up in slow motion, as if her heart were scarcely beating. She took the raincoat from another chair, and when he saw that, his eyes widened briefly and she thought he would say something. But instead he walked into the sitting room, and she heard a chair creak and the flutter of magazine pages.

Supper was a conglomerate of left-overs from the refrigerator. She made a pot of coffee to go with it, and Barry ate noisily. Sometimes she suspected him of chewing, gulping, and smacking his lips to annoy her. Finally he tipped back in his chair, pressed his hand against his stomach, and emitted a long rolling belch. “Thank the Lord for that bite, some folks would call it a meal. Hey, they're getting up a dance for Saturday night. Some of the young ones were cleaning up the clubhouse this afternoon. Anybody been around to ask you to help out on the refreshments?”

“I don't know. I was out all day.”

“Well, hey, a dance'll be pretty good, won't it?” His eyes twinkled. “Way we've all been drivin 'er around here, it's time we shook out some of the kinks. A couple of Charles Bennett's kids are damn good on the accordion and gee-tar, and young Ralph Percy's a hot fiddler, especially on the square dances. They have cake and coffee during intermission, that's why I was wondering if they'd been around to you. Anyway,” he added complacently, “I told 'em you'd make something.”

“Well, I won't,” she said without raising her voice. “You should've known better than to promise. Now you'll look a fool.” She got up and began clearing the table.

“You mean you'll let me down?” he asked.

“Haven't I always? Why is it such a shock?” She ladled water into the dishpan and set the pan on the gas stove to heat. “If you'll get out of the way I'll dean up this kitchen.”

“And about time too.” He came up glaring, shooting out his jaw. “I wondered how long it would be before you went back to your slutty screwball ways, and now I know. It was too goddam good to be true.” He stood in her way, flinging out his hands. “Why couldn't you keep it up? What am I supposed to do? Just tell me, for God's sake, and I'll do it!”

She went on about her work, not bothering to answer or even show by her expression that she heard. Finally, muttering as many obscenities as he could think of, he slammed out.

They didn't speak again that night. The next day she didn't stay home for fear someone would come calling or to ask for a cake. When she went home in the afternoon she laid out clean clothes for Barry, his good pants and shoes, a new white shirt and a cardigan he'd got her to order from the catalog.