The Seasons Hereafter (28 page)

“No,” Owen said. “Not unless you're born a gull.”

The woman turned on Van a fierce penetrating gaze that was like a gull's. “You watch his blood pressure, if he won't do it. Gramp was hauling traps at eighty-five, and building traps for Tom when he was ninety. But Tom took after his mother. Them big handsome folks with the fine complexion.” She shook her as if in irritation. “Well, the outboard should go all right, one of my grandsons had it out yesterday, but if she don't, likely you can row, and you'll have a fair wind back.”

Vanessa spoke, to her own surprise. “Could you sell us something to take along to eat and drink?” Owen grinned at her. “Good thinking. How about it, Mrs. Jessup? Bread and butter, something like that?”

“I got some good store cheese, plenty of sardines and crackers too, she said. “That's what the young ones take with 'em when they go off there. And I can give you a thermos of coffee or tea.”

“It all sounds perfect,” said Vanessa. “And we'll have coffee.”

“I'll keep the sugar and milk separate from the coffee.” Mrs. Jessup went into the house. They looked at each other and smiled.

“I'm glad you didn't tell her this was the next best thing to her island,” Vanessa said. “She knows better and she'd have told you.”

“She's like you. Doesn't want any buttering-up.”

“Maybe that's a compliment.” She leaned down to pat a cat that leaned against her legs. “She's mad with Tom for having a stroke. How is your blood pressure, by the way?”

“Stow that,” he said, as offended as if she'd questioned his virility. She laughed and went back to the car to change into sneakers. Owen didn't follow her, but wandered toward the barn. Bennetts never have high blood pressure, she mocked him silently with a tinge of the old hostility. She was not concerned; she never wasted thought on physical defects, and if she had ever developed a chronic condition that demanded time and attention, she would have been more irritated by the inconvenience than worried.

The way out to Jessup's Island was a broad glittering avenue that flowed spaciously among smaller islands, some little more than nesting ledges. The morning was clean, brilliant, and empty; lobster buoys spangled the water, but it was Sunday and no one was working.

Jessup's Island was a high island of woods and fields. The wharf and fishhouse were in a sheltered cove facing back toward the main-land, but the house stood on a rise with its front door facing open sea. It was a low house with a steep pitched roof and clapboards dark with weathering; it seemed as natural as gray rock rising out of the flowered turf. They left the lunch basket on the shady back doorstep, and went exploring. Since yesterday Owen had been one stranger after another to her, and now he was still another, eager to explore, missing nothing, impressed by things she wouldn't have seen: the construction of the wharf, a hand-made iron bolt set into a rock to tie skiffs to, the stone walls enclosing an alder-grown pasture, a bank solid with clamshell, the antiquity of the workshop, and fishhouse. She followed him contentedly. She could almost see the light about them both.

The house was roughly furnished. Apparently the grandchildren sometimes used it, sleeping on cots in the bedrooms under the steep eaves, cooking on the black range in the kitchen or roasting their frankfurters and marshmallows in the parlor fireplace. Sunlight lay across wide floor boards once painted pumpkin yellow. There was a clean dry scent in the house, a serene silence of which the falling sunshine seemed the visible manifestation. The bare windows held water and sky, a white cove, three spruces on a point, a wave of tall grass about to break into a surf of daisies. In the kitchen an old square table was drawn up to two windows facing seaward; they held infinity. Early in the spring someone had picked pussy willows and put them in a mayonnaise jar on the table, and there was a litter of purple mussel shells, small bits of driftwood, and colored stones. A branch holding a bird's nest was tacked against a wall. There was in the house a queer fusing of the ages; the past was not distant here but present, and
now
overlay it in a transparent glaze.

“I don't want to sound like Maggie,” she said, “but it feels as if we've stepped back two hundred years in time.” Then she waited to see if he would look disgusted with her, but instead he nodded.

“We have,” he said. “And I like it. Jesus, I like it. It's another world.” He hugged her to him and kissed her. “Poor old house,” he said, still holding her. “I'll bet when Tom left it was the first time it had been empty in a good many years.”

“The grandchildren must love it, though.” She put her arms around him. She had never felt so unself-conscious with him before. “They'll hate her for selling this to rich summer people.”

“Their folks are probably telling her to do it, and she's so damned scared of being a burden she'll sell it,” said Owen. They stood holding each other and looking around the room. “She'll put the money in the bank and then they'll inherit it and build over their kitchens.”

“All electric,” said Van, “with those up-high ovens. And get a color TV. The kids can watch that instead of coming out here to sleep on the island.”

“Sure. Who wants to catch cunners off the rocks, anyway? Come on, let's get out of here, or all the ghosts of the old folks'll be on the prod.”

The breeze was springing up. Light surf broke over the long scalloping terraces of rock that ran down to the sea. They ate on a shelf here, their backs against a convenient rise, the wind putting an edge on the heat.

“I don't know when anything ever tasted so good,” Van said.

“It's been a long time for me too,” he said somberly.

“It's been all my life, and I'm not saying that for pity. Owen, this is our first real meal together, because I don't count that one in the restaurant yesterday, and for me it's like the first meal ever.”

He grinned at her. “What's that stuff about a jug of wine and a loaf of bread?”

“‘And thou beside me in the wilderness,'” she said. “I love you. I'm saying it out loud. I love you.” She leaned back and called to a hovering and hopeful gull. “Did you hear that? I love him!”

The gull made a small cynical sound, and they both laughed. “Are you going to move over or am I?” asked Owen.

“Let's both.” They settled back again against the rock, his arm around her, and drank their coffee. Then they threw scraps to the gulls, talking to the birds and naming them as Barry liked to do; she could hardly recognize herself in this soft foolish mood. “Newborn,” she said.

“Who is?”

“I am.”

“You're a damn long baby. Your mother must've had a hell of a hard time. Like giving birth to a rocking chair.”

“And I had all my clothes on too. That wasn't easy.”

He took her face in his hands and turned it toward him. “Mine,” he said. “Never anybody else's.”

“Too bad I can't say the same about you.”

“Maybe you can.” He let go of her abruptly and got up. “Well, I'm off to answer a call of nature, to be real delicate about it.”

“I think I'll take a walk too.” She watched him start around the shore and then got up and went in the opposite direction.
Maybe you can, maybe you can
. But Laurie? . . . After a while she cut up through the bay bushes and juniper and went toward the house. Poor old house, she repeated Owen's words, recalling the odd tenderness in them; she wondered if the summer people who would inevitably buy the island would keep the old house or tear it down, displacing its familiar spirits, and build something all glass walls and redwood decks. She was surprised at the depth of her animosity toward the unknown. The house, the rock-walled well, and all the other works of the early Jessups, should mean nothing to her, who had no history. It must be because she had come here with Owen and for today it was theirs.

“Ours,” she said aloud. “Yours too,” she said to an alarmed sparrow.

A little distance behind the house, alders had been allowed to grow, and she walked into their leafy and sibilant shade. It was a place for birds. They flashed and called all about her, chipped and scolded. The ground sank down toward a mossy place where new young ferns sprang up and the ground was wet. From the sun-speckled shade, blue caught her eye; she went to it and found a wonder, a river of violets following the course of a narrow brook. When she leaned forward she could see them going far away among the alder trunks. She felt like crying out with delight; she had seen violets growing wild before, she had picked them for May baskets in one of her homes, but this was different. “
Ours
,” she said again. She turned and hurried out of the alder swamp, to find Owen and bring him here.

When she came into the field behind the house she realized suddenly that the sun had moved a long way since this morning; it was as if a hand had spread deliberately over the source of light for a moment and the sudden gloom stopped her, then she wouldn't acknowledge it but hurried on.

He had come back to the place where they'd eaten, and lay on his back, his arms folded under his head and his eyes shut. She stood looking down at him, sure that he wasn't asleep, waiting for the twitch of nostril or eyelid. It didn't come.

She felt giddy and mischievous with love.
“Beware! Beware
!” she intoned. She began to prowl around him.

A hand closed on her ankle and pulled. She collapsed across him, yelping with surprise, laughing like a drunk. She was seized and held against his chest, her wrists gripped in one of his hands, his face close to hers and leering ferociously. “How about a little rape, honeybunch?”

“I'll bet that's your line with all the girls.”

“Sure. That's why they're so mad about me. I'm direct.” He sat up and let go of her. “I'd like to make love to you here and now—maybe up in the field where it's a little softer—but that would be the signal for everybody within ten miles to go out for a Sunday afternoon sail and they'd all head for Jessup's Island.”

“We have tonight,” she said, smiling at him. “Let's take another walk, because I have something to show you, and then eat some more.”

“You know something?”

“What?”

“I like your voice. And I like the way you move. I watched you come down through the field. Quick and swinging, with your head up. You always lead with your chin, don't ye?”

“For you, yes,” she said. She was almost speechless with happiness. She wanted to tell him the things she liked about him, but she was too shy. Finally she said in a tight croaky voice, “I love you. I'll save the catalog till I know you better.”

T
hey left at sundown. The breeze had died, and when they walked up from the wharf, slow with reluctance and tiredness, the house was lighted up and there were two more cars in the yard. “Family's come in for Sunday night supper with Ma and Pa,” said Owen. “Likely telling her to run the price up five thousand dollars more.”

“I won't go to the door,” said Van, unwilling to end the day with Mrs. Jessup's relatives. Owen was better able to brush people off; her adjustment was too new and too fine. “But tell her from me that that lunch was the best meal I've ever had.”

“She'll think I'm some damn poor provider.”

She waited in the car for what seemed a long time. The dusk made her eyes heavy, and she was almost asleep by the time he came. “I had to meet Tom,” he said, “and two of the sons were there. Digging their graves with their teeth, from the looks. She better tell them to watch
their
blood pressure. Tom's a sorry-looking old party. And all of them but her trying to sell me the island, you'd think they were so poor they didn't have a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of.” He had the car backed around and headed down the tunnel of spruces; the lights picked up bright eyes at the side of the road. “I told them I was a lobsterman and it cast a strange silence over the audience. A proper pea-soup fog. But she came out to the door with me and said, ‘I don't care what the rest of 'em think, I'd rather sell it to a lobsterman so there'll be traps piled on that wharf again and an honest stink of bait around the fishhouse.'”

Van said, “She's a gull after all. She'll be full of fight till something brings her down.”

“Ayuh, I like her. I told her we'll come again, even if the island is sold.”

We'll come again
. It had the comfort of a magic phrase. It conjured up a security which lasted, even in her sleep, until she awoke the next morning.

It was very early, and rain drummed on the roof and ran down the windows with a deathly monotony. She opened her eyes to the gray pallor in the room, shut them quickly again, and curled deeper against Owen's back. But it was too late. She was awake, and the night was over. Sometime during that night they had been transported from one country to another, from light to dark, from serenity to squalor. Even the room had changed from last night's warm cave to the poor shelter of refugees; it seemed as if the rain were falling inside it.