The Seasons Hereafter (34 page)

Smiling, she turned to go up the steep beach, and saw Owen standing in the shade at the edge of the woods. She stopped as if seeing an apparition; a blink of her eyes and he wouldn't be there. It was an illusion of light and shade. But he was still there and she laughed, dropped the buoy, and ran, frustrated by the slope and the stones sliding under her feet. He didn't come to meet her but stood with his hands in his pockets watching her. Laughing still, she reached him and slid her arms under his and around his ribs, squeezing, leaning her head back to see his face.

“I've never been in love before you,” she said, “and it's made me over.”

His face didn't change. He took his hands out of his pockets, wrapped her in his arms and with one hand pressed her face into his shoulder. She tried to move her head under that heavy hand until her mouth was against his neck. “I love you,” she said. She could feel a pulse beating under her lips. “I love you.” He didn't answer. They stood tightly holding for a minute. Then he took her by the shoulders and held her off from him. His hands burned hot through her blouse. She had never seen his face so stolid, and it looked darker than usual.

“What's the matter?” she asked him. “Has she sold the island? We can go somewhere else, then.”

“Who?” he asked, his forehead creasing.

“Mrs. Jessup! Didn't you go to call her and s-start buying the island?”

“Christ, no,” he said, letting go of her. “Sit down.” He waved at the uprooted tree and she sat down on it, a visceral apprehension beginning to stir in her. He sat down beside her and began fussing with his pipe. Then he swore softly, snapped the pipe in two, and threw the pieces down the beach.

“It's all off,” he said. “We're not going anywhere. It's finished.” The words didn't really reach her, they sounded outside her ears somewhere. He kept his eyes on hers, and she didn't know them like this, yet there was something familiar about their cold denial.

“It's a rotten joke,” she said.

“It's no joke, Van. I'm not leaving her.” He said it with patience.

“She's talked you out of it. She's weakened you—” Hold back, hold back, be just as quiet, don't shriek. “She's brought the children into it, maybe she's even told them—”

“No. I haven't told her anything. I've just made up my mind.”

“But you promised. You said we'd pick strawberries there.” It sounded whining and childish; she was ashamed, and gave him a quick grin. “Let's talk, if you've got nervous about it. That's the trouble, we need to see and touch each other to get bolstered up.”

His face didn't change. He heard her out, then looked down at the restless dazzling water. “It's not that,” he said tiredly. “I wish it was that simple. But there's no way to say it but to say it. I had the damndest feeling in my chest and arm yesterday and it scared the hell out of me. So I stopped hauling and headed for the mainland and a doctor. . . . Well, it wasn't a heart attack, but it was a warning. I could have one any time and it could kill me.”

“I don't believe it,” she said. “That's all these doctors talk about, all the time. Heart, heart, heart, if it's not cancer. Trying to scare people to death.”

“It wasn't the doctor, that scared me. It was what I felt on the way in. Something I
knew
.”

She remembered the strong beat of the pulse in his neck under her mouth and said loudly, “Well, this is something I know. You aren't going to die for a long time, and not like that.” The sound of her voice reassured her, drove away a tremor that kept trying to possess her throat and lips. Already she was beginning to feel better. She moved closer to him and put her arms around him; it was like embracing a tree. He seemed totally absorbed in something else. “Owen,” she said, “you were scared by something you'd never felt before. And the doctor warned you. Well, maybe you should stop smoking, get more rest, take life a little easier, but everybody should. Owen, it'll be so peaceful there on the island, just us. You needn't run any thousand traps there and you'd still have enough for Laurie and the children, because you and I won't need much—just being alone with each other, that's all we need . . . please, Owen . . .” She tried to kiss his cheek but it was hard to reach. She said in a different tone, coldly, “What's the matter? Did you think God was striking you down?”

He shook her off him then as if she were an old oil jacket and looked at her. “No. And you're wrong on something else too. I have felt this before. A long time ago I passed out with it in the bottom of a dory, when we were out in the harbor trying to get a boat before she went on the rocks. I couldn't get into the war because something didn't sound right in there.” He tapped his chest. “But then I married and cut out the liquor and settled down, and never thought about it again.” His sincerity shook her, as it always could. The visceral fear was back; in another moment she'd be disgustingly sick one way or another.

“But what I said still goes,” she pleaded. “You might never have that—that big one. You've still got your life and it's our life now, Owen. You know what you told me. All the things. You know what I told you. That doesn't change.”

“No, the truth doesn't change,” he said heavily. “It's just the way of looking at it that changes.”

If she didn't question that he might not say it again. She talked fast, winningly, pouring all her passion into” it. “Something could happen to
me
that I don't know about! Or maybe there's a bad accident waiting for us. But whatever it is, six months or a year or ten years, we'd have it together, and—and—I don't know about you, but for me it would make up for all the rest of my life. It would
be
my life. The whole. Because up till now I never had any, you see. It's been like a long waiting to be born.”

His face softened and he put an arm around her and hugged her to him. “I know all that. I've been thinking about it. But I can't do anything different. It's like being struck by lightning. I thought you'd done that to me, blasted my existence to pieces, but yesterday I knew it had been waiting for just the right minute to plough me under . . . Whatever it is.”

“Fate,” she mocked him. “Or the hand of God. You do believe it, don't you? God's punishing you for adultery. Thou shalt not commit adultery, and you've done it so you shall die. That's what you really believe. Never mind everything else you've gone without. You'll go without it for the rest of your life—if you can call it a life—if God will stop being mad with you. You've already made your bargain, haven't you? Without consulting me first, because I don't count. The other woman, the floozy, never counts.”

He held her tight with one hand and clamped the other over her mouth. She fought him wildly, but she had to give up at last and huddled on the log trying to keep from crying.

“I don't believe in God,” he said. “At least not in a God that's watching everything you do and knowing everything you think and chalking it up against you.” This reasonable thoughtful way of speaking was worst of all, because it was so unlike him. Since she had last seen him he had become this stranger, and she put her hand against her mouth and bit at the thumb mound in an effort to hold back a drowning wave of desolation. “If I thought that,” he was saying, “I wouldn't worry much because there's a lot worse bunch of sinners than me to take up his attention. No, what I've come up against is
me
. The plain fact is, aside from all the rotten jokes about it being the best way to go, if I die in any woman's arms it's got to be Laurie's.”

She stiffened as if shot or stabbed, and he held her tighter. “I owe it to her,” he said. “Well, no, not the plain fact of dying in her bed, that's a hell of a thing to do to any woman.”

“A week ago you didn't owe her anything,” she said bitterly. “Not the rest of your life. She's had seventeen years of it. She got you in the first place. She couldn't ever have expected anything so good. She couldn't have believed her own luck. How'd she manage it, anyway? How could you settle for a pink-cheeked kid? Or were you just looking for a way to straighten out your misspent life? Making bargains with God again? Oh, I forgot. You don't believe in God. It's conscience. Or honor. What did you say it was?”

“I didn't say,” he said. “Van, I've got enough hell of my own making without you badgering me.” This sounded, though only faintly, like the Owen she knew. He wasn't completely committed, then.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “I won't interrupt again.” Let him talk, he needs to talk. He will talk the belated guilty conscience right out of existence if you can listen long enough.

“You asked how she managed to get me. How could I settle for a pink-cheeked kid. Maybe because she was a pink-cheeked kid, and I was in a foul frame of mind, at home while my brothers and Nils fought the war for me. She came out here fresh from the egg, all downy and bright-eyed. It was her first school. She didn't look much older than Richard does now.” His smile was cynical and intolerable. “Maybe I should call her a new lamb, not a day-old chick. Because if ever lamb was led to the slaughter, that one was. She never had a chance.”

“Did you rape her?” she asked coldly.

“All but. By the time it happened I'd convinced her that was what she wanted, and she wanted it because it would be some great act of faith in me. . . . Oh, I don't remember all the bastardly foolishness I should have been lynched for. I guess I don't want to remember it . . .” He went abruptly quiet and distant, and she was jealous of his thoughts and tried to take his arm. He went on. “I remember she cried because she didn't think she was too good at it but she hoped she'd be better . . . So I dried her tears and walked her back to the Fennells', where she was boarding, and that was that— Good God, when I think now she wasn't much older than my girl in high school . . .”

“You married her.” She tried to sound calm and objective. “Did she come to you crying that she'd missed, or did she go to Joanna? Joanna's a great one for taking things in hand. Or did she go home and tell her mother and they put the law on you?”

“None of those things. I didn't go near her after that night, and sure, Jo had plenty to say about me leading her on. . . . Jo and I have squared off and sworn at each other all our lives, probably always will. And Laurie got a little pale in the cheeks but she never said a word or took down that chin of hers.” Van twisted inwardly, tried to listen, bit again at the base of her thumb as if blood would be some magic restorative. “What happened,” said Owen, “was what you'd call the hand of God.” He held up his own maimed one. “This. I remember thinking that I might have the kind of blood that wouldn't clot, I never saw anything pour out so fast before they got the tourniquet on. Remember Rob that day when he did it with the saw? And I knew she was carrying my kid and it ought to have a name so she wouldn't go home in disgrace.” He shrugged. “Took us a hell of a long time to cross the bay, and all I wanted to do was stay alive till we got to Limerock so I could marry her. Well, I did, there in the hospital, and then I passed out. When I woke up I was goddam surprised to be still alive, and it was fine for about five minutes. Then I remembered. I didn't love her, I didn't want her. And I had nobody to blame but myself.”

“You've paid for it,” she said passionately. “You gave her seventeen years, a good life, a lot of reason to be proud.”

“And I never once told her I loved her. All that I've said to you in a few weeks, all that I've felt about you—what you've done to me—how it's been when we're together—it's never been that way once in the seventeen years with her.”

“Oh darling,” she murmured, nuzzling into his throat. “For me it's been thirty years, ever since I was born . . .”

“And she's not stupid,” he said as if he hadn't heard her. “She knows I've never said it. She's never asked me why. I guess she doesn't want to hear me lie, or tell the truth either. . . . There's a part of Laurie I don't know, the part where she thinks and wonders. Maybe she has some feelings about those seventeen years that would surprise me. I don't know. I don't ask her, and she never troubles me with it.”

She cried eagerly, “Then it'll be easier for her when you go, less brutal than if you'd put on a big act all these years. She might even be relieved. She'll still have her place here, and the name, and the children, and—”

He was shaking his head. “Vanessa, I'm not going. It's on account of the way it's been with her and me. I told you I owed it to her.”

“I know what you told me. But it's a queer thing to me, how you can owe her your death when a week ago you didn't owe her your life.”

“Damn it, I can't make you see it, but it's all clear to me. I've done enough to her without doing this!” he shouted. “Good God, doesn't that make sense, or don't you have any human feelings at all?”

She said quietly, “Yes, I have human feelings but mostly they concern me. Compared to me, Laurie's been rich. And even with you leaving, your kids are like royalty compared to what I was as a child, and what I had. Or
didn't
have, because it was mostly that. Everything I have now is made up or borrowed, even my name. Loving you is the first thing I ever had of my own and now it turns out that was just borrowed too. . . . But I won't give it back.” Her voice was rising. She put her hands around her throat to squeeze it back. The words came out half-strangled. “
I won't give it back
.”

“What are you doing?” He pulled her hands away from her throat and stared into her face in fury; it was like the confrontation between murderer and victim. Then he let her go and she crumpled back against the log.

“What do you care now what I do?” she cried. “I'm out of it now. I'm something gone by, it's over and you'll go safely home—”