Western Wind (10 page)

On an early evening toward the end of her third week on the island, she ambled over to the Herkimer dock and sat down, her legs dangling just above the water. It was high tide and the gangway to the Herkimer sailboat was level. The air was cool; in the west, the sky held a tinge of red. Back home, an hour without something to do or someone to talk to had seemed to Elizabeth a waste of time, a kind of failure. She had discovered that she liked to be alone and idle. So she felt faintly disappointed when she heard voices drifting across the meadow.

Shortly, Mr. Herkimer appeared, holding Aaron by the hand.

“He saw you and wanted to come out and say good-night,” he said.

Aaron was wearing bright red pajamas and a large pair of flopping sneakers that must have belonged to his father. He sat down beside her. Mr. Herkimer went over to the sailboat.

“There's the first star,” Elizabeth said. “It's millions of miles away.”

“Maybe it's only one hundred feet away,” he said.

Elizabeth laughed. “Then we could touch it, nearly.”

“No,” Aaron said firmly. “Because we might be as small as sand fleas. We might be the fleas of fleas. We don't know how big or small we are.”

From the sailboat, Elizabeth heard either a groan or a muffled laugh.

“You'd better make up your mind,” Elizabeth said. “We are either big, or we're tiny.”

“I never can make up my mind,” Aaron said. He was quiet for a moment. Then, in a whisper, he asked, “When you go away, will I ever see you again?”

It was a shock to think of leaving the island. Before Aaron had come to sit beside her, she had felt in her right place, like the island itself. But she had been jarred out of place by his question, reminded of time, reminded that the coolness of the air was not merely the weather of evening but a portent of autumn.

“You can't tell,” she said at last. “Maybe I'll come back next summer.”

“If my uncle is better, they'll want me to stay with him,” Aaron said quietly, without resentment.

“We'll have to see,” she said.

He stood up in his abrupt way. “Good-night,” he said. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

Mr. Herkimer was standing close by. “You go ahead to the house, Aaron,” he said. “I'll watch you.”

“Don't watch me!” protested Aaron as he ran off the dock, the too-large sneakers thumping on the boards.

Mr. Herkimer remained. Elizabeth stood up, feeling uneasy.

“We … I … want to thank you,” he said. “It's been good for Aaron … spending these days with you.” He paused a moment. “Deirdre can't help but be angry because of the time we give to Aaron. But we must … we must.”

Elizabeth was mute. What could she say? She didn't want to be thanked. How she wished Mr. Herkimer would go away!

A second later, he did, calling out a faint, sad “good-night” over his shoulder.

She went back slowly to the cottage. She had grown used to being outside in the dark, used to the outhouse with its loop of rustling ivy leaves.

She liked the evening sponge baths, the wait while water heated on the stove, the lighting of the lamps. She had said to Gran that she had grown to love this way of living. But Gran said when you chose it, it was entirely different from having it forced on you. “Only well-off people can afford to be poor for a lark,” she had said, and laughed as though gratified by a joke she had made.

The best things of all were the long, slow talks with Gran as they nibbled on cookies when supper was over, the plates washed and wiped and put away. The smell of Gran's paints seemed to intensify in the evening. A new seascape might be on the easel. Grace would be sleeping on the sweater, or else purring as she wound softly around their ankles like a piece of silk.

Gran's stories of her life, of Elizabeth's father when he was a boy, seemed to spring from an endless source.

“Don't you run out sometimes?” Elizabeth asked.

Gran didn't answer at once. “I like telling you about the past,” she said. “It's as if it is happening again.”

Often, Elizabeth paused in front of the portraits of Will Benedict. “Maybe I overdid that one a little,” Gran had said once when she saw Elizabeth staring at the drawing of her grandfather in his hat. “He was a romantic-looking man. But that one, with the hat, I did from memory. He never looked that desperate. It was me that was desperate, trying to make him come back to life.”

It was entirely dark now. Elizabeth opened the cottage door. The big room was empty. She shivered as apprehension took hold of her, a sense that Gran was nowhere in the house.

On the table, she saw a chocolate bar and, underneath it, a note.

I'll miss our evening together, it read. I got too tired.

Elizabeth glanced at the stairs. She went up them on tiptoe, pushed open Gran's door, and looked in. The glow from the lamps in the room below showed her Gran's shape beneath a blanket, her head on a pillow. Grace was lying next to her. Elizabeth could see a liquid glint as the cat's eyes opened. She stood in the doorway a minute, then went back downstairs to extinguish the lamps.

The next morning, just as Elizabeth and Gran finished breakfast, Deirdre came to the door.

“Deirdre, I'm glad to see you,” Gran said.

“I doubt that,” Deirdre said rudely. She walked right over to the easel and stared at the painting resting on it.

“What's that supposed to be?” she asked.

“What you make of it,” Gran replied. Deirdre shrugged, came to the table, and thrust out a note. Gran took it and read aloud, “Won't you both come for a sail with us in an hour or so?” It was signed Helen.

“Would you like to?” Gran asked Elizabeth. Deirdre marched off to a window. Grace drifted over to her. Deirdre began to bend, her hand reaching out to stroke the cat. Abruptly, she stood up straight and crossed her arms tightly across her chest.

“If you decide to come, don't bring food,” Deirdre said. “Mama's making her usual horror picnic—wet cheese sandwiches and squashed tomatoes.”

“Is Aaron going?” asked Elizabeth.

Deirdre looked at her with scorn. “You think they'd leave him alone? Maybe when he's fifty.”

Gran began to wash the breakfast dishes.

“I'd like to come,” Elizabeth said.

“Be down at the dock in an hour,” snapped Deirdre, and left the cottage at a run.

“She wouldn't let herself pet Grace,” Elizabeth observed.

“She's fighting a war.”

“What war?”

“To show there is nothing in the world that pleases her,” said Gran.

“Why?”

“I don't know why.”

“Is it because they like Aaron so much more than her?”

“What makes you think that?” Gran asked sharply.

“They don't pay attention to her except to tell her to stop whatever she's doing and leave Aaron alone. But they're all over him.”

“Is it your opinion that five pounds of attention equals five pounds of love?”

At Gran's words, a fire seemed to flare up inside Elizabeth's skull, burning her cheeks. “They sent me away when that baby was born!” she cried out. She sat down on a chair so hard it rocked.

“That baby,” echoed Gran. She was drying a cup. After a moment, she spoke. “They did not send you away. They sent you to me,” she said in a steely voice.

The hour, at the end of which she was to go to the Herkimer dock, was nearly up before Elizabeth spoke another word.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

She had been reading one of Gran's art magazines with desperation, trying to blot out a sense that her outburst had let loose some ungainly, mortifying thing that would now inhabit the cottage like a hobgoblin.

But Gran replied genially, as though nothing bad had happened, “Oh, no! I've always hated sailing … all that shouting—‘coming about … hard to lee …' And you have to fling yourself from side to side so the boom won't decapitate you. Oh, no!”

“Well, I'll be going,” Elizabeth said.

“Have a lovely time, my dear,” Gran said with warmth. “I'll miss you.”

By the time Elizabeth arrived at the dock, the Herkimers had gathered. On the top of Mrs. Herkimer's head rose a straw hat like a tepee. Several paper bags were at her feet. Aaron wore an orange life jacket, a sun hat, and long pants. Deirdre watched her father in the small sailboat as he bailed water that had collected in the cockpit with a rusty coffee can.

“This is a family tradition,” Mrs. Herkimer announced to Elizabeth. “Every summer, we have our picnic at Little Bear Island. This will be Aaron's first time. Did you remember to bring the thermos, Deirdre?”

Deirdre, one arm around the mast, nodded.

“And I've made biscuits,” said Mrs. Herkimer.

“For ballast,” said Deirdre.

“Biscuits are traditional in our family,” Mrs. Herkimer continued as though Deirdre hadn't spoken.

“‘Over the sea in a pea-green boat …'” chanted Aaron.

“Ready. Let's go,” called Mr. Herkimer. “Give me the picnic stuff. Where's the blanket? Deirdre, let go of the mast. Helen. You first, then Aaron, then Elizabeth.”

A fresh wind plucked at the loose ends of the sail. As both Mr. and Mrs. Herkimer reached for Aaron to lift him from the gangway, the boat swung wildly.

“No!” he wailed. “Let me get in by myself!” But his protest was drowned out by his father shouting that they wouldn't go at all if Aaron was going to misbehave.

Though they were still anchored, their voices were caught by the wind and flung out onto the bay. Elizabeth felt a sudden excitement. She was glad Gran hadn't come. She was glad the Herkimers were so noisy and crazy.

The sail was let out. With a great smack, it caught the wind. They were off.

“What happened?” Gran asked as Elizabeth burst through the door several hours later, her hair in a tangle, her arms and neck sunburned.

“What a day!” cried Elizabeth. “Oh, those soggy sandwiches! That oily lemonade! Mrs. Herkimer talking about the glory of simple food. The tomatoes must have been sliced with a comb. When we got to this little island, it was rocks and a couple of runty pines and a tiny cove. Mr. Herkimer was mixed up about the tides, and he took this tremendous leap over the side and landed in about two inches of water.

“I thought he was supposed to be the quiet one in that family. He turned into the monster captain … he never stopped shouting orders—‘Shift! Duck! Sit up!' And if Aaron wiggled his finger, they all started screaming at him. Just before we anchored at Little Bear, Aaron yelled, ‘I'm getting off this horrible ship!' and they threw themselves at him so we nearly keeled over. When we got back, Mrs. Herkimer said she hoped I'd enjoyed a day of family sailing. Then Deirdre said, ‘Don't thank her. It will only encourage her.'”

“I knew I had good reasons for staying home,” Gran said, laughing.

“But in a way, it was wonderful,” Elizabeth said. “I had a wonderful time.”

“Life is strange.”

“Like the Herkimers.”

“I guess so. I'm going to make a cheese rarebit for supper, and while I'm doing that, I think you ought to write home. I noticed a pile of letters from your mother on the table.”

Elizabeth glanced at them. They were filled with the astonishing news that Stephen Lindsay could hold his head up without wobbling, and that he really smiled.

She made a little space for herself at Gran's worktable among the brushes and pencils and tubes of paint.

She wrote briefly that she had gone for a sail with Gran's neighbors. Then, for the first time in a letter home, she mentioned Aaron. “He's a thin, little boy with eyes like a panda's. He says whatever he thinks.” Elizabeth realized she was smiling as she wrote these words.

When she was finished, she looked up to see Gran watching her intently. Had she been looking at her all the time she was writing her letter? She turned her face away from Gran as though from too bright a light.

But Gran said, in a matter-of-fact voice, “Come to supper.”

When Elizabeth had sat down, Gran held up her hands. “The weather's changing. I can feel it in my thumbs.”

“I'm sorry I said that—in the morning—about being sent away,” Elizabeth said.

“You said what you thought,” Gran said.

The next morning, Elizabeth awoke to the sound of a heavy rain pounding on the roof. Gran had made a fire in the little hearth. The cottage felt deliciously warm and safe. Gran produced slickers for them to put on when they wanted to go to the outhouse.

After lunch, the rain stopped. By then, Elizabeth had made a start on
To Kill a Mockingbird.
It was a sleepy day. Gran worked on her drawing of
El Sueño
.

Toward the end of the afternoon, Elizabeth glanced at the windows.

“Look at the fog! You can't see outside,” she said.

A few minutes later, she heard muffled voices. There was loud knocking on the door.

Gran went to open it. The Herkimers stood on the threshold, their faces glistening with moisture.

“Is Aaron here?” cried Mrs. Herkimer, looking frantically into the room.

“We can't find him,” Mr. Herkimer said grimly.

Behind them, Elizabeth glimpsed Deirdre, her shoulders bent as though she'd been struck across them.

9

The Herkimers huddled together in the middle of the room, and the posts that had suggested trees or columns to Elizabeth now looked like the stout wooden bars of a cage. Fog swirled through the open door. Grace, her tail down, shot up the staircase.

“Has he been here?” Mrs. Herkimer's voice trembled as she asked this question, and her breathing was audible. She was not wearing her pearls. A loud crack came from the fireplace as a flame-weakened log snapped and fell among embers.

“I haven't seen him today,” Elizabeth said. She wondered if anyone had heard her. The Herkimers continued to stare at her longingly, as though she could free them from fear.