by Sarah Blake
Lying there on her back, she put a hand up to her forehead and felt the sweat. Her eyes adjusted to the dark in the room, and the shape of Ogden’s body beside her rose like a soft wall between her and the drop of the bed, the window beyond. A comforting dark. A quietening one. She lay there. But this dream had been different, somehow. She tried to pull it back as her heart slowed. It hadn’t been Neddy. It had been someone else. Some other child she must get to. Some other child who needed help. She lay there, a breeze coming up from the water pulling through the window at the foot of their bed, blowing the shade forward toward her. Who? She couldn’t recall.
She knew if she slid off the bed to lift the shade and look, there would be no light in the sky. During the moonless nights of the month here on the Island, night was pitch-black and fathomless as if colored by a child.
But full of sound. Trees shifted in the wind, and their boughs sighed. On windless nights, when the trees were still, one could hear the tide pulling back and forth, combing over the black rocks in the cove. The only animals on the move, full of the same silent sound as the rocks and trees, were bats winging in tight circles above the barn.
The sweat cooled and she pulled the comforter up closer around her neck and chest. Ogden rolled over and put his warm hand on her collarbone. “All right?” he murmured, half-awake.
“Yes,” she whispered, “go back to sleep.”
He grunted, already gone.
Moss. That was it. Had it been Moss? It must have been. Something she had seen last night must have set off this panic. Something so small, she wasn’t sure she could find the word that would haul it up to the surface so she could think about what she had seen, understand it somehow. Name it. It was his toast, wasn’t it? Or it had happened before the toast, something he had said in the middle of a conversation?
It was the way he had stood from the table, wasn’t it, the way he had stood as if—she searched, thinking of Moss moving off toward the swinging door, nodding Sure, Dickie politely before disappearing outside. What was outside that couldn’t be found in here? Kitty turned on her side, away from Ogden, so she could think in the dark.
As if he wanted to flee. Flee the table. Why? A dinner like that, with so many old friends who’d shared so many meals up there, and then again down in the city, carried the world in it, carried the ease of the world and all the givens. Ogden at one end of the table, herself at the other, the guests ranged around the sides, the plinths. She liked to ask a question from her end and watch the men take off. She liked that she knew enough to follow where they led, to make sure the conversation stayed its course, to divert it when the course was fraught. She’d never take up the argument, but she rode it, she made certain it kept up its paces. When a man refused to take up the bit, it shook her. When a man neglected his duties, failing to fill someone’s glass when it was empty, failing to be the host, it was the sign that something had gone off. Something had slipped.
And Moss had stepped out of the circle round the table. Moss had ducked the halter. She sat up. The faintest glimmer of light rimmed the shades. The flashlight on the nightstand was heavy and cool in her grip, and she pointed it to the floor and stood up in its beam. There would be no more sleep tonight.
In the mudroom downstairs, she fished a wool coat off its hook and a hat and pulled on the tall rubber boats she used to pick mussels. It was still night outside, though a paler shade of dark. Softly, she made her way through the dining room and the pantry and toward the dim glimmer of the pilot light under the burners of the stove. She turned the knob, and the flame thrust its blue claw above the iron burner. In the big dormitory room over the kitchen, Moss turned in his sleep.
She reached for the kettle, set it on the flame and picked a teabag out of the canister, setting it into a teacup. Kitty pulled the coat closer around her nightgown, waiting for the kettle to boil.
The urgency on Moss’s face had frightened her last night. He had seemed almost—desperate. And that smile, that crooked grin that stole over him, had been all Dunc, she realized, standing there. Moss had never quite taken, never gelled. He had a gift for people, a gift for gathering strangers together; he always had. But there was something missing, a rope that had never found its ring.
She folded her arms over her chest. Moss was not Dunc.
The kettle started the roll before it squealed, and she snapped the flame off, reached for the cup, and set it on the counter, pouring the hot water. Now the pale glow of the big rock began to show through. It would be dawn soon. There was something coming, something she couldn’t fully see yet, an argument whose words she couldn’t quite make out behind closed doors and felt, therefore, powerless to affect.
Overhead there was a quiet thud, then another as two feet climbed over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Kitty waited. Moss would be coming down the narrow stairs, most probably to find the bathroom at the end of the hall. She picked up the teacup and headed for the kitchen door as the footsteps crossed. The door opened, and she pushed through the screen and out into the morning.
A low, dense fog hung above the lawn, heavy with dew. Ogden’s clear day, the promise of the day offered by last night’s star-struck clarity, had shrouded. She walked forward into the paler gray that was the air, distinguished from the dark shapes of the spruce at the water’s edge. The first of the engines hummed just past the point, as someone hauled his pots in the thick damp.
When fog wrapped the trees and stalled in the air like this, it used to frighten Moss so. He used to see people flashing in and out of the dark trunks. No, you don’t, Kitty had tried to soothe him. Of course you don’t. But he would stand there, patiently stand in the upstairs hall looking out the single frame window, her boy in his short pants, his hair combed, his teeth brushed, his back straight as he waited for the ghosts from the woods, as though by watching he could protect them all.
Kitty shivered. There were the shadows underneath the spots of time.
Or rather, there was a spot in time up here that did not hold sunlight or square dances or weddings or the other children running down the hill to catch the boat. It drifted up to the surface of memory only when a certain present stumbled across the past and called it up.
That morning, Moss had wandered down the hill in the fog toward the boathouse holding Joanie’s hand, following Ogden, and it had seemed to be one minute Kitty had said, Okay, dearie, from where she was bent among the roses, and the next minute, she looked up and there was Ogden carrying the little body in his arms up the hill and Moss was running toward her, dripping wet and sobbing. It was Joanie. Ogden was carrying Joanie in his arms. Water was pouring off his shirt.
“We need a doctor” was all Ogden said.
Kitty dropped her trowel.
“Mum,” Moss cried.
She turned around and held open her arms.
“Come on, love,” she whispered, “we need a blanket.”
“Joanie was shaking.” Moss turned his blue lips to his mother. “She fell.”
“In the water?” Kitty could barely breathe.
“I couldn’t stop it, Mum. I couldn’t stop—she was going under, and I saw her face—”
“It’s all right, Moss.” Kitty pulled open the front door, still holding his hand. And they climbed the stairs together to the linen closet, where she grabbed several towels.
“I couldn’t do anything.” Moss trembled.
She sank to her knees and folded him in a towel. Her proud little boy, her stalwart.
Oh. Kitty paused now, her mind run up against that morning again. It had been so long ago, all that.
She walked through the boathouse and out onto the dock, where the fog hung loose upon the water, upon the dark angle of the roof, running down into the wide granite rock that formed the tip of the cove. Water dripped from the floorboards of the boathouse onto the rocks.
She worried about Joan. Everyone did. The doctors had warned that a fit could take her anytime. She might drown or crash a car, she might fall down in the
middle of a street. She ought never marry—it wouldn’t be fair to ask of a man. Unless it was someone who knew her, unless it was Fenno. Kitty searched for the Welds’ dock across the way, but the fog was in too thick. She had always liked him. Fenno knew all about the fits. Fenno would be kind.
There were footsteps coming through the boathouse, and then on out onto the pier behind her. Someone paused at the top of the gangway, and she turned around.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“Something woke me.” Moss yawned, pulling open the gate and padding down the gangway in his bare feet. “Thickafog,” he pronounced.
She nodded. “Evelyn will be worried about people coming tonight.”
“It’ll burn off.”
“Perhaps.”
They stood together in the quiet.
“I was just thinking how it used to frighten you.”
He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and nodded. “Fog always seems like it’s waiting to get you.”
“Tell me something,” she said after a while.
He looked at her.
“What on earth were you talking about last night?”
“Which part?”
“Looking backward.”
He shrugged. “Why are we here? How did we get here?”
She frowned. “Here? On the Island?”
“No, Mum. Here. To this point in time. The situation with the Negroes. Dad was talking as if it didn’t matter what the television show was called, just that the blacks were sounding off.” He shook his head. “But why are they sounding off? It’s the why that has us here.”
But where was here? she wondered, bewildered. What was he talking about? His row would be harder to till, she thought apprehensively. He was making it more difficult for himself with these interests, these passions. He’d have a harder time slipping into work for Og.
“Enter every room with a smile,” she said. “Speak to everyone, regardless of their place, as another human being, a reasonable person—so as to create an atmosphere of goodwill. That is the best defense against people who haven’t been brought up to know better. You just leave them alone. No one can touch you, then. And you show others the way to be. You lead by that example.”
He nodded, unconvinced.
She paused. “Of course they don’t like being treated badly. No one does. But these things take time. They take patience.”
“Whose patience?”
She wanted to shake him, just then. Hard. He had the same overabundance of conscience as Dunc had. Responsibility was not an absolute. We were kind, we were generous, but we did not owe more than we could give.
“Moss,” she said sharply, “why identify yourself so?”
He shook his head. “What else is there?”
And something in his face, the careless confusion, called back that moment so long ago, the boy who did not see the danger, turning to her in front of that window. She shuddered.
“Moss.” She rested her hand on his arm, frightened. “I mean it.”
“I know you do,” he said, and gave her one of his sweetest smiles and turned away.
* * *
THE FOG HAD come in and sunk down, Joan saw with satisfaction, lying back on the pillow. She loved the fog. She looked up at the ceiling, picturing the men in North Haven right now who’d pulled out their charts and their straightedge and were plotting the course over here. Those who were coming would stay the night, which meant—she rolled over—there’d be mattresses to pull and sheets and blankets to haul up to the barn. It was delicious. A party that would begin with dinner and drinks, move to dancing, and then last and last right through the dark.
Anne lay profoundly asleep in the four-poster next to hers.
Joan pushed the pink covers off and sat up. Her eyes rested on her shorts, folded over the arm of the wicker chair at the foot of the bed, her sneakers pushed in underneath, dutiful as a child. She brushed the floor with the soles of her feet and stood, pulling her nightgown over her head in one long motion. Her nipples rose and she cupped them, imagining Len’s hands on her waist, pulling her into him. Len. She caught sight of herself in the little mirror above the bureau and shivered at the clear longing in her eyes. Len Levy.
“Of course people will come,” she said to Evelyn, who was standing at the bottom of the stairs, staring out the screen door into the fog. Moss and Mum were walking slowly through the gloom, Moss’s white shirt glowing against the gray.
Evelyn turned around and looked at Joan gratefully. “Do you think so, really?”
“I do,” said Joan. “They’re mad for stuff like that over there. A test of valor and all that.” She rolled her eyes, and Evelyn smiled.
“Hello, Mum,” she said.
“Good morning,” Kitty answered. “Is there coffee for the Pratts made?”
“They aren’t up yet,” Joan said, but she picked up the kettle and filled it with water.
Dickie was up and toasting bread over the open burner, watched with suspicion by Jessie.
“Don’t worry,” he said to her cheerfully. “I’m a professional.”
There was much to be done before the party. The rowboats would need to be pumped out and then pulled off into the cove to make room for the boats from North Haven and Vinalhaven. But first, Kitty warned, “We’ll need to figure out about the piano, how to get it up that hill.”
“Oh god,” Moss groaned.
The piano was an upright, a Steinway that one of Kitty’s aunts had left her after the war. They had brought it across on the gasboat and then wheeled it up the lawn on a wooden dolly, getting it inside the house with considerable effort. Kitty had long planned to take it the next distance up to the barn, and the promise of so many young men handy for the job made it impossible not to do, even as it seemed well nigh impossible to push a quarter ton of mahogany, steel, buckskin, and glue up a hill pocked by voles.
The improbability of it made it just the kind of plan Ogden relished, and on a foggy day provided them all a physical challenge equal to, and more useful than, a walk in the woods, which Ogden had also suggested for the morning.
“How were you thinking of doing it?” Moss asked.
“With the dolly, just as before,” she answered.
“The dolly? What dolly? That went over the side of the dock years ago.”
Ogden frowned. “He’s right—do you remember?”
Kitty shook her head.
“It should be easy enough to rig something else up,” Dickie said as he appeared in the dining room, “if you’ve got a wheelbarrow and some boards.”
Ogden turned. “Have you got a plan?”
Dickie grinned. “Always.”
Moss rolled his eyes at Joan.
“Good man,” Ogden said. “Go on, then.”
“We’ll still have to manhandle it onto the wheelbarrow and then down the steps.”
“Manhandle,” Evelyn chirped from the kitchen. “I like it.”
“This is all for you, Ev, you realize,” Moss called.
“Me? This is Mum’s idea.”
“It’s your party. Yours and Dickie’s.”
“Don’t give me that.” Evelyn paused. “You’ll have the whole barn now to play in without anyone listening.”
“I like people listening.”
“Do people?”
“Go on,” Ogden said. “You better get cracking if we’re going to get it up the hill by sunset.”
“We’ll get it up there, don’t worry, Mr. Milton.” Dickie appeared behind Evelyn, towering over her. “I’ll get these guys moving like a team.”
“A manhandling team,” Evelyn tossed at him over her shoulder as he gave her a squeeze and went out. The screen door slammed.
Joan came through the kitchen door with bayberry she had cut from the big patch out back, and Kitty held out her hands to take it.
“I hate bayberry,” Evelyn remarked idly. “Why do you always choose bayberry when there’s so much else out there?”
Kitty set t
he greens down on the dining room table and looked at her youngest daughter. “If you can’t say anything nice—”
Joan took the copper pitcher at the center of the table with her into the pantry, where she filled it with water from the sink.
“Don’t say it,” Evelyn groaned. “I know.”
Joan turned off the tap and dried her hands on her shorts.
Kitty held the cutting shears and motioned Joan to set the pitcher on the table in front of her. Mutinous, Evelyn folded her arms against the silent agreement between her mother and her sister. There was wild yarrow, Scotch heather—anything but the bayberry. But Joan’s ideas were always seconded by their mother. She was the favorite, the pearl.
“But Mum—”
Kitty raised her eyes and looked at Evelyn, who chose to keep whatever else she was going to say to herself.
“Beds?” Joan suggested. “Shall we pull out the blankets and pillows and bring them up to the barn?”
“Good idea.” Kitty nodded, beginning to stuff the bayberry branch by branch into the vase’s narrow mouth. Beneath her hands a green bouquet grew, cantilevered over the lip of the copper, filling the room with the sharp smell. Kitty set the pitcher at the center of the table and then swept the cuttings into the wastebasket she had brought in from the front room.
“There.” She smiled at the arrangement.
Anne Pratt woke at last, and she helped the sisters drag all the bedding they could find out of the linen closet, folding it neatly on the spare beds in the upstairs front room. Hudson Bay wool blankets from Granny Houghton’s camp in the Adirondacks, down pillows, pillowcases, and cast-off sheets from the Ausable Club.
After a little while, the men’s voices snaked through the fog and the open window as they returned from the boathouse and lay boards across the granite steps in the front. Moss was in high spirits, and the girls heard them tramp though the front door and down the hall to the living room.
