The Seasons Hereafter (35 page)

“Is that what you think?” His eyes had a queer shine to them and she saw for the first time a faint twitching in one eyelid. “That it's nothing to me? I can forget it! Oh, my God,” he groaned, “I want you so much that when I turn my back on you it's like canceling out my whole life, saying it was a failure, a big nothing, fifty years of bullshit that's fouled every thing I've touched, and all I can pray for is for that big one to come down on me like a sledge hammer next week. Maybe that way my kids will escape something, I dunno.”

“The big one won't come,” she said. “You'll wait and wait but it won't come, and the years will be wasted. And what will become of me?” She smiled at him. “I may go insane, like my mother. Maybe that's what did it.” She burst out laughing at his expression. “Now you're glad to get rid of me, aren't you? Any old excuse so you won't be stuck with a crazy woman.”

He slapped her lightly but enough to startle her into silence. “Shut up. You don't know if she was insane or not, and even if she died in a straitjacket that wouldn't make any difference to you and me.”

“No, what makes the difference is that you never told your wife you loved her. So at this late date you're going to start. Too bad Mother's Day is past, you could have got her breakfast in bed.”

He put his head in his hands and said, “Shut up, shut up, shut up. Or go home.”

She stood up, looking down at his black head and the nape on which her hand had lain so often. What will become of me? she had asked, and she knew already; she was turning into a skeleton as she stood there, flesh burning off into the sun and the wind but the passion and resentment still fiery in the bones, never consuming them so that for always, even in her grave, the little torturing flames would lick and lick.

“I have no home but where you are,” she said in a low voice. “I came home to you, don't you understand?” He didn't move or answer. She went across the thick muffling forest floor and down onto the beach, blinking in the flashes of light. The cove was choked with a heaving mass of rockweed, driftwood, odd buoys, and green bottles that clinked against the rocks. Each time the water withdrew a little, there was a loud rattling of the beach stones. She went down the steep, careful about her footing, her eyes fixed as if she were a tight wire walker. She walked into the water and at the edge of the surf it didn't feel cold, having to get through her socks and slacks first. It pulled at the stones under her feet, then surged in again with a great strength around her knees, at once pushing and dragging. When she stepped again it seemed as if the land dropped sharply away from her, but her foot struck something solid. A plank bumped against her, and rockweed caught her legs in a bronzy swirl. She kept her eyes narrowed against the seething and smoky silver outside, braced herself as the water struck at her thighs and rocked her. Then the force below the surface withdrew with a great pull, and her footing was being sucked out from under her soles. A peeled pulpwood stick nudged her and she staggered backward and went down; for an instant she saw level with her eyes another sea rolling into the cove, cresting toward her with deliberate speed. Then she was tumbling backward, the cold surprising in her ears and strangling in her nostrils, and she tried to think, This is what you want, don't fight, don't hold your breath. But when the oncoming sea broke over her head, and she felt herself dragged and tumbled and saw the red light against her eyelids, and her flailing hand found nothing but smooth cold stones that came away in her grasp, there was no reason in her.

The planks and pulpwood sticks were knocking her around and she fought them, shot right side up and was blinded by the world. She let her breath go at last, took in a cold and nauseating mouthful of sea water, and began to fight again at whatever new thing wouldn't let her alone. Something struck her on the side of her jaw. She felt no pain, and barely the impact, but had no time to think about it.

She sat with her head between her knees and threw up salt water. The sun was hot on her back through the wet jersey. She lifted her head slightly and turned it and saw Owen's feet. He had put on his moccasins again but his pants steamed gently in the heat. They're probably made of drip-dry cotton, she thought foolishly. They'll be dry before he gets home. She turned back to contemplation of the rocks between her raised knees. There was a stiffening soreness along one side of her face.

Nobody spoke. Through the swash of water she heard the plinking alarm note of the thrush.

“What were you trying to do?” Owen spoke from over her head. “Kill us both off quick?”

She hadn't drowned but she felt as soggy and exhausted as if she were speaking from the bottom of the sea. “I don't know what I was trying to do. Stop thinking, I guess. I'm sorry. That you saw me, I mean. Another minute and I'd have let my breath go, and that would be it. . . That thrush wishes we would go away.”

He made some sound and dropped down beside her, took her into his arms and rocked her against his chest, his face in her soaked hair. “Oh God,” he said in a low voice. “Listen to me, if I thought there was anything to pray to, I'd be crawling on my hands and knees begging. If there was a devil I could sell my soul to, I would. Just to be there again on that Sunday and have the chance to choose not to come back here, and
not come
.”

She tried to struggle up to look at him, saying, “We could go back tomorrow. Today! We could just go, and pretend nothing happened in between.” She tried to get her hands free to take his head between them, thinking that if they kissed it would work, but he wouldn't let her. He got up and pulled her up, but held her off.

“Now go on,” he said. “We'll get over this. I think we will. You've got guts, more than I have. It'll be like what they tell alcoholics—live one hour at a time.”

She wrenched herself from his hands, hurling herself away from him in savage repudiation. She ran up over the rocks in her squelching sneakers, and kept on running without looking back.

S
omeone spoke to her. She jumped and her surroundings suddenly leaped at her from all sides; she was menaced by something arched head-high at her, red-scaled; she blinked and it became a fluke of the big anchor sunk in the marsh where the road came out at the harbor beach. “I said, what happened to you?” said Philip Bennett. Big in his oil clothes, he was tying his skiff at the head of the beach. He straightened up, his smile changing. “Are you all right?”

“I was trying to salvage a buoy and fell in.” All at once her teeth began to chatter. She looked wildly along the beach. He was the only man in sight. “Is B-B-Barry in?”

He kept coming past the graveyard of old hulls. “No, I got a warp in my wheel and had to jog home. Come on along to the house, my wife will have the coffeepot on. We'll put the brandy to you too.”

He made a gesture toward her, as if to take her arm, and she backed off, trying to laugh and wondering if she looked like a wild woman. “N-no, thanks, I'll g-get right into b-bed and that'll w-warm me up in no t-time.”

She turned and fled along the boardwalk. She
was
cold. It was in her spine, in her stomach. It was a cold at once nauseating and empty. It surrounded her so that everything outside looked the same and yet was not the same. The anchor had reared up before her, Philip Bennett had been a threatening apparition, Helen Campion, calling to her from the clothesline, wore a leering fright-mask. Kathy's youngest, sitting by a sandpile with his trucks, was like a ventriloquist's dummy propped up there. When his head suddenly turned and he stared toward her with round blue eyes, she felt pure horror. With a final effort she flung herself toward her own house; if Kathy should stop her she might disintegrate, she felt like it now, ready to shatter like ice. And she was as cold, as cold.

Upstairs she pulled off her clothes, an agonizingly long business with her fingertips gone dead white and numb, and wrapped herself in blankets. She lay down, pulling herself into a tightly knotted bundle. She couldn't tell if the cold was a physical phenomenon; she wanted it to be the beginning of some swift lethal pneumonia. For the moment it kept her from thinking.

No sounds reached her inside the cocoon of blankets but the thudding of her own blood in her ears, like footsteps that never retreated or advanced. When finally the voice broke through to her she had the feeling that it had been calling for quite some time. “Are you all right, Van?” It came from the foot of the stairs. It was Kathy. “Shall I come up?”

“No!” She sat up in terror, then modified her shout with a gust of comradely laughter. “For heaven's sake,
don't
. The place looks as if it was suddenly called for and couldn't go.”

Kathy's echoing laughter floated up; she was relieved but still doubtful. “I saw you run by. You looked sick or scared, and there are no bears or mad rapists in the woods . . . at least not that I know of.”

“I was frozen. I tried to get a buoy in the rockweed over in Ship Cove and I slid overboard and got soaked.”

“Oh, my
gosh!
You could have
drowned!
”

That, my girl, was the idea. “It wasn't deep enough, I wasn't ever in any danger.”

“Well, want me to make some coffee or bring over another hot-water bottle or something?”

“Thanks, but I'm warm now. I rolled up in blankets and went to sleep.”

“I suppose I woke you up. That's the story of my life. Old Fumble-foot. Well, having done my bad deed for the day I'll go home and stick pins in my child, or something.”

“Don't feel bad. I'm glad you came over. It was time for me to get going again. If I sleep too long in the daytime I feel rotten.”

“Oh, you're just being too darn nice,” said Kathy, more cheerfully. “So long.” Her footsteps bounced through the house and the back door shut. From outside she was heard to shout, “Johnny Campion! What have you got in your mouth?”

It was early afternoon, not a week since this morning. She put on pajamas, and neatly remade her bed. She took her damp clothes downstairs and put them in the plastic laundry basket in the entry. She did not want to go out of the house at all, even to her place, which was now tainted for her because Owen had met her there. There was nowhere on the island where she could go. It was as if she feared the sky itself. She found herself walking through the rooms, her hands twisting and wringing each other, saying, “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?” She had no sleeping tablets. Barry's rifle hung on the sitting-room wall, but there were no shells for it.

The sight of the half-finished traphead hanging from the hook was as terrible as seeing Owen himself in the embrace of his wife. He would handle that traphead with the hands that would never again handle her. She stood staring at the lustrous twine, and suddenly thought light headedly that nothing had happened. It was all a nightmare. Even talking to Philip and Kathy had been part of it—one of those dreams so vivid that they become a valid part of human experience. She had dreamed the whole scene with Owen because unconsciously she was afraid of something happening to keep them apart. That's it! she thought with the joyous recognition one feels when someone dead appears alive in a dream and one cries,
But he's back, he's here, he wasn't dead after all!

Now she straightened up and smiled very steadily, as if the smile could wipe out the existence of the wet clothes in the laundry basket. Owen would be back sometime today with news of the island. . . . She had only to wait. . . . The boats were coming in. Two were crossing the harbor now, but neither was
White Lady
. She averted her mind hastily from the image of
White Lady
tied up in Schoolhouse Cove, and from the sounds of children spilling out of the schoolhouse, but it was too late. It was all there. So must it be to have committed a murder and to have come away trying to pretend to oneself that you hadn't done it, while all the time you know the body was where you had left it, but that you'd brought it with you too, if you just happened to look down or behind you. A murder was done today. . . . She saw Barry's boat come bounding past the breakwater, racing young Jamie Sorensen. They're
happy
! she thought in outrage.

She went upstairs and pulled the shades and got into bed.

Barry came tiptoeing up in his sock feet, squinting across the half-light of the room, then coming in when he saw her eyes were open. “You all right? Phil told me what happened, then Kathy did.”

“I lost the buoy I was trying for, too. Well, no great loss without some small gain. I've given the island a real treat today.”

“Ayuh, out here it don't take much,” said Barry. “But they were all worried for fear you could have drowned. You take a chill, or hurt you any?”

“Both,” she answered. “I'm starting to get warm now, I guess, but I feel pretty tired. I guess it shook me up some. And I banged my elbow on a rock. I don't think I'll be able to knit right off, so will you do something about that twine and stuff down in the sun parlor?”

“You mean Cap'n Owen's knitting?” He sat down on the end of the cot and lit a cigarette. “Oh hell, I might's well finish that up. No sense letting the money go out of the family.”

“Suit yourself.”

She shut her eyes and turned her head away. After a moment he said, “Well, you want something to eat?”

“No. Can you find yourself something?”

“Oh sure, I'll make out all right and then I'll catch a wink on the couch. We're stopping off the harbor again tonight.”

He went downstairs. Presently she heard the radio, with some vocal group singing an unrecognizable distortion of an old popular song. She slept, heavily as she used to sleep, heard nothing of Barry's comings and goings, and woke late the next morning. The feeling was familiar, even to the lurch of terror when she wondered if she had slept over a day. She went downstairs in her bare feet, her head heavy and dizzy, and looked at herself in Barry's shaving mirror. Her hair was tangled from the salt water and sleep, but aside from a tendency to stare she looked well enough. She washed her face and hands in cold water, and heated the coffee Barry had left.