The Seasons Hereafter (23 page)

Then she heard a soft thump and a stir of the water below her. She knew at once it was the seine dory from which the net had been set out across the harbor mouth, and now the men in her would make her fast to some special spruce, and then would be picked up by another dory. She wondered if it were the two boys down there, or if one of the men were Owen, and her heart seemed to get out of rhythm, as if even his unseen presence could cause the muscles to jump or contract.

To calm herself she imagined how the herring appeared to the silent men, a silver cloud rushing through the black water, shooting off single arrows of light. A pocket of net would be formed off the running twine, and the herring should be driven inside and securely enclosed before the moon rose and distracted them. Then silence wouldn't matter. But for now it was a time not only for silence and sure movements, but for instinct and intuition.

As the night blackened she watched the phosphorescence around everything that moved, the light splashings of white fire around the stern of the dory as glowing ripples broke; the luminous string of networks stretching away across the harbor. Out there a mysterious repeating pattern was the motion around a moving dory and softly dipping oars.

An outboard motor started up all at once, and the speeding boat was picked out of the dark by the shimmering curl of the bow wave and the bubbling light of the wake. She circled, then slowed, and bits of voices sounded above the idling rhythm. Suddenly the outboard exploded into full life; the water flashed high along the dory's side as she shot forward into a long wide turn. There was a faint, small cry above that ripping and snarling. From somewhere a searchlight went on, swept the harbor, and picked up the dory. There was no one aboard. Frantically the light searched the water and the dory kept swinging through the beam in drunken circles.

Philip Bennett's front door opened and people stood against the light. Someone ran out onto Terence Campion's wharf with a flashlight. Van saw all this as objectively as she listened to the shouts and cries. She thought, Owen was in that dory. Now he isn't. That's it. That's all there is to it.

She got up and began to make her way carefully down over the rocks, keeping her face turned away from the harbor and her hand over the ear on that side, though nothing could keep out the hideous racket of the outboard motor. She wanted to be in bed, pretending to be asleep, when Barry came home to tell her. He would wake her up, but she could act dazed, and keep her arms over her face.

She had just reached the corner of the house when the outboard suddenly stopped, leaving a yell in the pounding silence. “. . . Over here!”

She felt her way around the house and in at the back door. She went upstairs and into her room and began to undress in the dark, her back to the window. They must have found the body, she thought calmly. They'll be using artificial respiration by now, but it won't help. It'll be like when that boy Alec died. They'll work hard on him for a long time.

She got into bed, arranging herself carefully, flat and straight. She folded her hands on her stomach and looked at the ceiling. It had to be this way, she thought. Just when I came to The Day.

Voices outside, Kathy's high and clear over the men's. Feet tramping on the wharf. Barry was coming home. He was telling Terence and Kathy how it happened. Kathy made a funny sound, like laughter; it would be the hysterical bursting into tears. I wonder if someone's already gone to the true-blue manager of the girls' varsity basketball team, Van thought.

Downstairs the back door crashed open. “Van!” Barry shouted. “Wake up! Come down here!” She didn't answer and he said loudly, “Take a chair. I'll go up.”

“Don't wake her if she's sleeping that hard.”

“Let her sleep through
this
?” He laughed wildly.
Laughed
. She got out of bed and began to dress. Her hands were cold and shaking. That wasn't Owen's voice that answered him, it was one of the other Bennetts. That wasn't Owen, she repeated it deliberately. That wasn't Owen. Barry is laughing because he's hysterical. He and Kathy and maybe the 4-H girl. I am simply going down there to shut him up and send this other man home.

She ran down the stairs and into the kitchen. “Here she is!” cried Barry with drunken delight. He was taking off his shirt. Owen stood by the sink ladling water into the teakettle. In her dazzled sight he seemed to give off all the blaze of light in the room, rather than the lamplight glancing off white and yellow paint. He gave her a serious sidewise glance, then put the cover on the teakettle and set it on the gas stove.

“I fell overboard!” Barry kept laughing. “Right smack out over the stern of that dory and I gave the handle a twist when I went, so she revved up to top speed and started going in those goddam circles! Keerist! ‘
Swim
!' they kept yelling at me. ‘
Swim, you bastard!
' So I swam, oilclothes, boots and all, and they could see me! They said I looked like a seal with all that damn fire in the water—” His chattering teeth stopped him, but he kept on laughing.

“Go change your clothes,” Vanessa said. “Here,” She took a couple of bath towels out of the chest drawer. “Rub down hard.”

He grabbed the towels and started for the stairs. “You tell her about it, Owen. I'll never forget the way that propeller sounded under water . . . and all I could think of was to get out of the way before it caught me . . . ‘
Swim, you bastard
!' they kept yelling at me.” Laughing like a drunk, he went up the stairs, stumbling in the dark and swearing happily to himself. “Hey, Van, that water wasn't a bit cold! Dunno but I'll get me some water wings and go in with the kids!”

“The unsinkable Mr. Barton,” said Owen. “He scared the guts out of us and came up grinning.”

“How'd he happen to fall overboard?” she measured instant coffee into mugs.

“Oh, he was standing up when he gave that starting handle a twist without meaning to. Got a little flourishy with those twenty horses, I'd say.” He sat down at the table and folded his arms on it. His voice sounded heavy and there were deep creases in his face.

“It sounds like Barry,” she said dryly. “Being flourishy and nearly killing himself. And coming up grinning.”

“Has he got any hard liquor in the house? He can use it and so can I.”

“It was probably worse on you than it was on him.” She took out the bottle.

Watching between bottle neck and glass, he said, “And you never-knew a thing about it. Sound asleep.”

“No, I was out there.” Their voices were colorless. “I heard the engine start up, and the shouts. I saw the dory going in circles and nobody aboard. I thought you were the one who drowned.” She went past him to the gas stove where the kettle was now boiling, and he reached out and took hold of her wrist. She half turned toward him and looked into his face.

“Don't,” she murmured. “Look, for half an hour you were dead. I'd had long enough to
know
it, don't you see? Now you're alive, and it's so—well, I can't even feel overjoyed. I'm afraid to.”

He nodded. “How would you feel if we hadn't got Barry?”

“Poor Barry,” she said, and turned away from him to the stove, he let go her wrist. Upstairs Barry was singing in a false baritone, “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep.” “I'd have to leave the island,” she said. “Philip would want this house for another man.”

“Is that all Barry means to you?” Owen asked as she poured boiling water into the mugs.

“At the moment, yes. Though if I saw him lying dead I might feel something different. I don't know.”

He pushed back violently in the chair. “You'd have done better to go to work instead of marrying him.”

“Do housework for somebody with Miss Foster still checking up on me?”

“Who was she?”

“My case-worker,” she said dryly. “I was a state ward. I had no parents. I was found under a cabbage leaf.”

“So that really happens, does it?” His wintry look softened. “How come you didn't turn into a white butterfly?”

“Wrong kind of caterpillar.” Suddenly they were both smiling; the danger, if there had been danger, was gone. “I don't advertise it,” she told him. “Some people think if you were a state ward you must have been a girl gangster, or a teen-age harlot. I didn't mean to tell you.”

“I'm glad you did. I like to think I have a few rights. But don't worry, it's nobody's business.”

Barry came running downstairs like a boy and into the kitchen rubbing his hands. “Nothing like a night swim to give a man an appetite.
And
a thirst!” He poured out a drink. “You having one, honey?”

“In twelve years it must have dawned on you that I don't drink,” she told him. He blinked at her as if the lamplight were too bright.

“Look at her, Cap'n Owen,” he said, waving his glass. “Ain't she some good-looking tonight? Cripes, I dunno but what I might have a beauty on my hands after all.”

“Sit down and have some hot coffee. You'll be going straight up through the ceiling in a minute.”

“No, but look at her,” Barry insisted. “Just look at her and tell me if I don't have a damn fine wife.”

Solemnly Owen regarded her across the table. After a moment he said, “Very handsome, I'd say. Drink your coffee and then you'd better go to bed. We won't need you again tonight.”

“Ayuh, but—” Barry was up again, hurt.

“Four tomorrow morning we'll take the fish out, and if you're not on deck I'll be around to haul you out of bed.”

Barry sagged back into his chair, grinning happily. “Good night,” Owen said to Vanessa. “Oh, his boots are out by the doorstep. They ought to come in and dry out overnight. His oilskins are in the fish-house.”

“I'll get the boots now.” She followed him out through the entry and onto the doorstep. She could see him in the glow of lamplight from the window over the sink as he picked up the boots.

“You know,” he said just above a whisper, “I thought out there, what if Barry didn't come up alive.”

“But there's still Laurie and your kids,” she added cruelly.

As if he hadn't heard her he said, “I
thought
it, but I was about to go in after him when he surfaced by the net corks. Drowning one man in my lifetime is enough.”

“Who was that?” Barry was making a clattering in the kitchen and she hardly heard her own question.

In the ghostly light of the rising moon his upturned face had black hollows for eyes, like a painting of Oedipus she'd seen once. “My sister's husband,” he said. “Because I was drunk. The more you know me the worse I look. What about tomorrow?”

She was trying to place one reality over another and she got a double-exposure that couldn't be sorted out. “What about tomorrow?” she repeated.

“If I get a chance when I come in from hauling I'll come to the place.” He tipped his head toward the dark of Long Cove.

“All right.” She blinked in a sudden attack of fatigue, and in that instant he disappeared. Except for the faint hollow thud of his boots going away around the house, he might never have been there at all.

Borne down by a weariness that made her whole body feel soggy and spongy, she went back into the house. Barry was having reactions too, yawning till his eyes ran with tears. “Go on up to bed,” she told him. “Are you having chills? You want a hot-water bottle?”

“Kee-rist, I never felt a thing from it,” he bragged. “I never even had time to be scared. It was the other three got shook up enough to puke, and Hugo did, I guess.” Gasping in the middle of his laughter with a convulsive yawn, he went stumbling upstairs. Van dropped his wet clothes in the tub in the entry, and stood his boots up behind the stove. She washed the cups and the glasses and wiped off the stove. Then she blew out the lamp and listened at the foot of the stairs. Barry was snoring, like a man knocked out with a drug. She lay down on the sitting-room couch, pulling over her the wool afghan some Bennett woman had knitted. She was too tired to be happily relieved that she could sleep alone. She knew that when she shut her eyes her head would begin to spin and her sodden body go tumbling over and over into the pit that awaited her for such special occasions as these. She forced her eyelids to stay up for a while, staring through the sitting-room doorway at the pallid shapes of the sunporch windows. When she did fall asleep it was all at once. She had only an instant to protest the dizzying fall and it was over.

H
e didn't make it that day. After a while, moving along the edge of the woods like an Indian scout, she came to where she could look across the pasture, and saw him with the children by one of the big bam doors. At once she was explosively angry and jealous and wanted to do something outrageous, like whistling loudly on two fingers to start the children running off to find out who it was in the woods, while he roared after them to come back, and then had a hard time explaining his bad temper. But she knew she wouldn't do it; the thought of his rage with her froze up the will to do violence, and she went sadly away from there. At least he was alive.

That night Barry asked her to go over to the Dinsmores' while he played cribbage with Rob, and to his delighted surprise she went. The fact was, she couldn't tolerate being alone in the house and hoping against all common sense that Owen would come to her. She could no longer forget herself in reading.

She took along socks to darn, and sat with Maggie in the small sitting room while the men played cribbage in the kitchen. “I thought you were awful different,” Maggie said with her boyish, bashful grin, “when I first laid eyes on you. But you aren't. I mean, here you are, doing things just like everybody else. My, that's a beautiful darn. Did your mother make you learn to patch and darn when you were real young?”