“You mean stubborn, don’t you?” I said, and then felt my eyes fill and my mouth contort treacherously. “Oh, Micah,” I said simply, when I knew I would not cry. “I am truly very glad to see you.”
“Well, I’ll have to ask you to pardon the darky makeup,” he said. “I’m the official patrol for this part of the cape, and it keeps my ugly face from shining out and startling the Nazis.”
Then, seeing Happy’s face, he smiled, and the teeth flashed again. “Figure of speech, dear. No Nazis in these parts, not with me and Bruno on the job. I’ll bring him in to meet you in a bit, big old Labrador, he is, not good for anything but riding around in my truck looking official. But he’d scare the devil himself, with those big yellow eyes. You like dogs?”
“Yes,” Happy said, staring at him in fascination. “I have a Scottie named Fala. He couldn’t come.”
“Fala, hmmm? Well, in good company, he is. Tell you what. Why can’t Bruno be your part-time friend till you get back home to Fala? Would you like that?”
She smiled, the sudden, sweet smile that had spawned her nickname. I hadn’t seen much of it lately.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. Then, turning to me, “Got some stuff in the truck Tina sent,” he said. “Some fish chowder, and a blueberry pie, and molasses doughnuts. And a dozen eggs from her own hens, if you won’t tell anybody. We’re not supposed to have them. She’ll come in the morning and turn the place out, and meanwhile I’ll build up the fires in your bedrooms and bring you in some wood. Should be some left in the wood house.”
“Micah, I can’t begin to…thank you,” I said weakly. “I didn’t realize things were so bad up here until the taxi driver told us about the shortages. And of course the famous U-boats and the spies. We won’t lean on you after tonight, I promise. Peter bought an old car last fall and left it in the wood house, so I’ll have that to drive for absolute necessities, and I’ve got my ration cards and things; we’ll manage fine.”
“Well, about that car,” he said. “I’m afraid it isn’t in the wood house. Sheriff Perkins commandeered it in April for his patrol; it does the Brooksville to Castine run every night. I do the shore and the village. Wouldn’t do you any good anyway. Only gas available is for official vehicles. I can pick up some things for you from time to time, and you can walk to the general store. And I brought Caleb’s bicycle for you; it’s in the truck. We’ll see you have what you need to live, but it isn’t going to be much pleasure, I’m afraid. You really shouldn’t be up here by yourself.”
“Micah Willis, you tell the sheriff to return my vehicle immediately or I will have the law on him,” Mother Hannah said coldly, from amid her blankets. “How dare he confiscate it without my permission? And as for being up here, I have never missed a summer in Retreat in my life, and I shall not start now.”
“No, ma’am,” Micah said, looking at her. “I don’t expect you will, at that. But begging your pardon, may I point out that Sheriff Perkins is the law?”
He smiled at her, a bandit’s smile. And to my great surprise she smiled back.
“In that case, Micah, you may assist me to my room,” she said, holding out her arm, and he came forward and took it and helped her to her feet. I watched as he bore her out of the living room as if he were taking her in to a state dinner and then turned to my yawning daughter.
“Okay, Punkin, let’s get you into your jammies, and then we’ll have supper by the fire, like a campout,” I said.
After my daughter and mother-in-law were settled and we had brought in the groceries and put them away, Micah brought blackout curtains from the truck and put them up for me, and then went to the fuse box and turned on the electricity, and the room bloomed into its familiar soft yellow light. I had made coffee and offered him some, and he stood beside the mantel drinking it. He couldn’t stay, he said; he still had most of his rounds to go and another to do in six hours.
“Is it all really necessary?” I said.
“Yes, it is,” he said. “What Clem Peak told you about the spies and the U-boats is partly true, though the old fool had no business scaring you like that. Haven’t had a sighting in a while, but there’ve been some off Rosier, and the sheriff’s patrol did pick up a spy of sorts down on the club beach one night. Young fellow, said he was Dutch, but that was pure hogwash. So the blackouts are serious, and the patrols and the precautions. You follow them, you should be safe enough. Everybody in the area knows we patrol Retreat regularly now, and you aren’t absolutely alone. Miss Lottie is down at the Little House, and Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln at Land’s End, and I think there’s at least one of the Thorne girls and children down in Mary’s Garden. And of course, Mrs. Stallings, over at Utopia.”
“Nobody near us, though,” I said.
“Well, somebody’d hear you if you hollered loud,” he said. “What’s the matter with Mrs. Chambliss, by the way?”
“Arthritis, her doctor says,” I said. “But I don’t know…. She seems to get weaker and weaker. You’re right, this was a bad idea. I hope she sees now that it was.”
“Peter’s not coming,” he said. It was not a question.
“No, there’s just too much confusion at the school, with so many of the older boys leaving to enlist and some of the younger instructors gone. It’s so sad to see boys you’ve known for so long go off to war. I just hold my breath every day for Petie…. Oh, Micah. What about Caleb? Did he…is he…?”
“Went in the Seabees right after the war started,” he said. “He’s in Brisbane now, in the hospital. Got shot up pretty good in the Coral Sea to-do.”
“Oh, God, Micah. But he’s going to be all right, isn’t he? Will he be coming home soon?”
“In about a month. All of him but his left leg.”
I stared and then put my face down in my hands. I felt tears start. I shook my head wordlessly and then whispered, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
In my mind’s eye I saw a small, dark little boy darting across a summer field, his arms full of lilacs, and felt again in my arms his limp, sleepy weight.
“Don’t be sorry,” Micah said. “He doesn’t need his leg to haul. At least he’s coming home. Some aren’t.”
I lifted my head and looked at him silently, feeling my cheeks redden. What he must bear he would bear like a Down Easter; he would not ask my tears and would not welcome them. I vowed that he, like Peter, would not see them again.
“You’re right,” I said. “Some aren’t.”
“Well, I’m off, then,” he said, and started out, and then stopped. “By the by, I think you ought to keep this nearby, just in case,” he said, and fished a thick blunt gun out of his pocket and handed it to me. I looked at it.
“I don’t want a gun in the house—”
“Take it,” he said. “Hide it if you want to, but keep it handy. If you can’t shoot it, I’ll come by tomorrow and show you how. It’s loaded now. Be careful, for God’s sake; a summer lady over at Sedgwick shot the fishmonger in the arse, thinking he was a spy.”
I looked at him sharply, and he smiled. I smiled back and picked up the gun.
“Thank you,” I said. “Just be sure to mind your own arse. I can’t say I haven’t been tempted over the years.”
“Don’t I know it,” he said, and went out of the cottage, and soon we three were alone again in the dark colony. But we slept better that night for his visit, as well as for the provender he brought, though I wrapped the gun in a flannel face cloth and put it under my bed before I climbed into it. Far from making me nervous, it seemed to glow there soothingly like a living coal, and I could sense its warmth through springs and mattress and sheets. I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.
After that I felt safe, even though the rumors of U-boat sightings and spy landings and mysterious lights at sea, and cryptic messages intercepted on lobster-boat radios, flew like gnats around the skeleton colony and the village. Somehow the talk seemed, for the first and only time in my experience in Retreat, to
bring me close to the villagers; it was as if now, in this time of privation and rumored danger, all shades of nuance were dissolved and all social rules off. Mr. Courtney, who ran the store in the Oddfellows Hall in the village, would send one of his legion of taciturn children down to Retreat with a small sack of whatever he had from time to time, and I would send one of my precious, unusable gas rationing stamps back in return, along with my ration book. Mrs. Fellows, who had the farm up the road toward Brooksville, kept out crabmeat and a few fresh vegetables for me when she had them, and old Trenton Percy in the opposite direction smuggled me milk for Happy. I heard from Jane Thorne in Mary’s Garden that he kept her two supplied, too. Micah regularly brought lobsters and clams, and Christina brought bread whenever she baked, and once, when his father shot a deer that was marauding in his green pea vines, Micah brought us an entire haunch of cured venison. I sent roasts and chops to the few others who were in Retreat—older people, for the most part, and a few young mothers with children, like me.
For my part, I began asking Micah and Christina to come in the evenings after supper and listen to the radio with me, or to the old albums of classical music and operas that Big Peter had cherished and kept carefully shelved in his study. We three sat in the firelight after Happy and Mother Hannah had gone to bed, curtained against the intruding night, drinking coffee and sometimes brandy from one of the few dusty bottles left from Big Peter’s prohibition cache, talking little of the war or of ourselves but much of such unweighted things as travel and art and music and gardening. I felt close to both of them in that strange, suspended time. I felt as if the three of us were voyagers on a small snug craft in a limitless black sea, unable to see the shore behind or ahead of us, not knowing our destination, and therefore somehow content, for the moment, just to be. It was an oddly pleasant summer: tense but, below the tension, soothing to near somnolence.
“Strangely enough, I’m enjoying this summer very much, and so are Happy and your mother,” I wrote Peter in late July. “In a way it’s by far the most peaceful time I’ve had here. I’m glad now that we came. I haven’t heard anything about U-boats or spies since the week we got here.”
“I’d be awfully surprised if Sheriff Perkins caught himself a live spy,” Peter wrote back. “From what I hear of his extracurricular activities, he’s far more apt to catch himself a wandering agent of the Alcohol, Tax, and Firearms Division. Parker Potter used to buy home brew from him all the time.”
The night before Labor Day I sat long on the porch with Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln and Jane Thorne, watching a meteor shower in the black sky above the firs and spruce. All three of them were leaving early on Tuesday, and Peter was coming for us the day after that. I was in the process of closing the cottage. Boxes and bundles and suitcases sat about in the living room, and some of the furniture was already shrouded. I had made a stew from leftover venison and what vegetables I had, and Christina had made Blueberry Fool, and we were sleepy and full of food and nostalgia, all of us reluctant to leave the safe harbor of Retreat and go back into the world, “In harm’s way,” as Dr. Lincoln put it.
I kissed them all lightly on the cheek, the standard Retreat leavetaking, and told them I would see them before we left, and went upstairs to look in on Happy and Mother Hannah. My daughter slept on her side with her thumb in her mouth; none of Mother Hannah’s dictums and scoldings had had any effect on her thumb sucking, and I had long since given up. But she looked sweet and peaceful in the wash of starlight, her brow clear and high, her mouth relaxed around the stubby finger. I pulled her covers up higher and went down to Mother Hannah’s room. Sometimes she read late into the night, but tonight her lights were off, and I could see the slow rise and fall of her breath under the cutwork coverlet. When had she lost so much of that imposing bulk; when had she become such a slight, small woman? Awake, she took on substance and presence like a swelling turkey gobbler, but asleep she was simply a sick little old lady in a narrow old-fashioned bed.
I closed her door and tiptoed away and went into the kitchen to pour myself a glass of Trenton Percy’s illicit milk. I did not turn on the light, because I had not drawn the blackout curtains. Outside, moonlight poured down on the porch, white on the wide old boards. Not even the normal night sounds of the northern forest pierced the thick quiet, not even the small sucking rattle of the tide on the beach. I’ll miss this quiet at home, I thought.
I saw the shadow then. It fell suddenly, grotesquely, across the moon-white boards of the porch, a long, thin, wavering shadow, unmistakably that of a man, unmistakably freighted with menace real enough to prickle the hair at the nape of my neck and draw my lips back from my teeth in a wild animal’s snarl. The shadow was still and then took a long, flickering step and held it, and another. I froze, flattened against the kitchen door. My heart hammered. There was no mistaking it: a man who was not in any way one of us was creeping across the porch of the cottage, waiting and listening between steps for some sign that he had been heard. He moved an arm and I saw the grotesque, unmistakable outline of a gun in it. It could not have been anything else. Any thought that it might be one of the sheriff’s patrol, or even Micah Willis, left me. No one not intent on harm would steal onto a darkened porch with a gun at the ready. I did not move, and the shadow did not either.
After an eternity, while my ears rang and my heart choked in my throat, the shadow withdrew. I took a long, deep, shuddering breath and moved to the bottom of the stairs, to go up to my child. And then I heard him at the front door, heard him ease the creaking old screen open and slowly, slowly, rattle the old brass doorknob. I had locked it; Micah had made me remember to lock up each night until it became habit, but I knew he could force the old knob if he wished, or simply break out one of the glass panes and reach in and unlatch it. All conscious thought flew out of my head like bats streaming from a cave at evening, and when I came to myself I was standing at the top of the stairs outside Happy’s room, Micah’s gun in my hand, pointing it straight down the stairs at a dark shape that stood still as death midway up, looking at me. I could see only his outline, but I saw that clearly. His own gun hung straight down by his leg, in his hand. I could not remember running up the stairs and scrabbling the gun out from under the bed. I could not remember hearing the intruder enter the downstairs. I could not remember hearing or seeing him start to ascend. I heard nothing, no sound from him, no breathing except my own, tearing in my throat. Then, behind me, Happy said sleepily, “Mama?”
“Turn around and go back down the stairs very slowly, or I’ll shoot you in the head,” I said, and my voice sounded as high and pearly as that of a castrati. He said nothing, did not move.
“I mean it,” I said. “Get out of here right now. This gun is loaded, and I will truly kill you.”
He said something, softly, almost under his breath. I could not understand it. He took a step up, and another. I pulled the trigger of the pistol.
The black world exploded into flame; red-shot whiteness battered at my eyes and sound ricocheted around the narrow stairwell and roared in my ears. I did not lower the gun; I could not hear or see, but I felt the vibration of his footsteps stumbling back down the stairs. I shot again, and again, until the gun would not shoot anymore. Then I dropped it on the top step and went into Happy’s room and locked the door and pushed her bureau against it, and caught her into my arms and held her. She was screaming by now, the high, thin shrieks of a terrified child. Dimly I heard my mother-in-law calling out from downstairs, over and over, but I did not get up and go to her. I simply sat there holding my child, my eyes closed. I could not have risen if a panzer division had rumbled into the cottage.
Micah was the first one to get there. I don’t know how long it was before he came; I do know that Happy had almost wept herself out. Later he told me that Dr. and Mrs. Lincoln had heard the shots and the doctor had run down to Mary’s Garden and used Jane Thorne’s telephone to phone Micah, who had just been leaving on his eleven o’clock patrol. He called to me through the locked
bedroom door, and at his voice I went to it as stiffly as an automaton and opened it, and when I saw him standing there, I said, almost conversationally, “Micah, I think I might have shot somebody,” and then sat down hard on the floor, my head spinning. Behind me Happy began to cry again.
The Lincolns sat up with me in the kitchen all the rest of that night, after the doctor had given the outraged Mother Hannah a sedative and Mary Lincoln had soothed Happy back into sleep. One of the sheriff’s men stood guard on the porch outside. Micah had roused some of the village men, and they and the sheriff’s two deputies spread out through the woods and along the shore with dogs and guns. Dr. Lincoln said, sometime during the long night, while we drank coffee and waited for whatever would come, “I expect they’ll have no trouble finding him. He won’t have been able to go far or travel fast. There was…ah, considerable blood on the floor at the foot of the stairs and on the porch outside. It should be quite easy to track him.”
I made a small, wordless sound, and Mary Lincoln patted my arm and said, “Don’t you worry, my dear. I got it all out of the carpet with the milk in your icebox. It came right up; milk is wonderful for blood-stains. There’re none left at all on the porch.”
“Mary,” Dr. Lincoln said, “perhaps you would look in on Hannah. If she seems restless, give her another of the powders I left on the night table.”
“Oh, Ridley, really,” she chirped, but she went.
The doctor looked at me, and I noticed only then that under his overcoat he wore the only real old-fashioned nightshirt I have ever seen. I must have smiled at him, because he said, “That’s the spirit, my dear. You need have no remorse for anything that has happened this night.”
I thought of telling him that I felt no remorse at all, only horror and weariness and simple disbelief, but I could not make my mouth work. We sat in silence, we three, until the cracks around the kitchen blackout curtains began to lighten, and I got up stiffly and went and raised them. Outside, on a low bough, a blue jay cawed cheekily at me. I rubbed my eyes and, when I opened them, saw Micah Willis coming up the lane with Bruno on his leash, a shotgun in the crook of his arm. I watched as he crossed Liberty’s lawn and came into the house and back into the kitchen. We looked at each other, he and I, but for a time we said nothing.
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