Colony

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  Peter and I roared around the cape in the Austin Healy so often and so giddily that twice the new sheriff reluctantly ticketed us, and once we actually ran out of gas in the twilight atop Caterpillar Hill, where we had gone to watch the sunset over what is still, to me, the most spectacular vista of sea and islands and sky in all of Maine. We were far from home and probably would have spent the night miserably in the Healy, except that Micah and Tina Willis knew where we had headed and came with a full gas can and takeout clams from the Bagaduce Lunch.

  “How’d you know it was gas and not some gruesome catastrophe?” Peter asked Micah, for Micah had said that Peter drove the little car like a lunatic out on a pass and refused to ride with him.

  “This is not a summer for catastrophes,” Micah said equably. “But it sure was past time for you to run out of gas.”

  We saw a good bit of Micah and Tina that summer, sitting before the fire in Liberty and talking and drinking good brandy. Those nights were as comfortable and companionable as they had always been, and if I sometimes thought of that glorious kitchen of the Willises where I had been only once, I put the thought away. Our worlds could not mingle; Tina had told me that. It was enough for me that she and Micah share ours.

  We made love, Peter and I, like the insatiable children we had been in those first days in Northpoint; almost everywhere in Liberty we could think of, and once or twice out of doors, on nights when the moon was down and the wind off the sea was high. I insisted on the wind; the sounds we made were past indelicate and into the fringe areas of obscenity. Always, they finished in laughter. We laughed as we had not since we were newlyweds in Liberty, stifling the rich, vulgar sounds of love from Mother Hannah’s pitch-perfect ears with our hands, blankets, whatever we could reach in that final transport. Once we went upstairs to the little room that had been our first bedroom in Retreat and Peter’s before that, and made love on the spavined little bed, and it collapsed under us as it had threatened to do that long-ago night, and we nearly choked on our laughter. We climbed off the floor and Peter pulled me into the bathroom and threw the musty old Princeton blanket down into the tub, and we did there, those decades later, what we had done on that first night, and finished up as we had then, weak and breathless with release and laughter.

  “I’ll never throw that blanket out,” Peter said, sitting naked on the side of the old claw-footed bathtub. “When we’re ninety-five some poor bride of one of our grandchildren will be up here getting it on that blanket, and we can pound on the ceiling with a broom and ask if anybody is sick. What goes around comes around. Lord, Maude, just look at you, an old lady with gray hair, and those boobs and butt are still as round as they were then, and they still bounce like rubber, and you still holler like a Comanche.”

  “How perfectly elegant,” I said lazily, stretching out in the bathtub on the ubiquitous blanket, feeling the rich wetness of him still inside me. “And you, my dear old fool, are years older than I am, and you still look like a stork with a hard-on. What goes around comes around.”

  “Sail with me this summer, Maude,” he had said when he first arrived, and I did. For the first and only time in my life I got up with Peter in the chill dawns and followed him down the echoing steps of the yacht club dock and into the dinghy, and we rowed in that motionless pink mirror water out to the waiting Hannah. At first we did not go far out; Peter knew the profound tilting of the deck as the lee rail rode under still sickened and terrified me, and he kept to the shoreline and made only for the near islands. I had told him about the eagles on Osprey Head, and I think he was truly overjoyed that they had come back, but he did not suggest taking the Hannah there and, when I did, said only, “It would be a shame to startle them when they’re just getting established. Next summer I’ll go.”

  And I knew the healing I had found there would not happen for him and was deeply sad about that. But I did not push it. The one thing Peter simply would not speak of that summer was Sean.

  Gradually I grew, if not to like, then to accept the rolling movement of the Hannah and the cant of the teak deck, and we went farther out into the glittering bay. Way out on the water, with the shorelines of Rosier and Islesboro and Deer Isle only cloudlike smears on the horizon, it was better for me: the rush of all that wind-scoured blue and white around exhilarated me to near drunkenness, and I could begin to understand the old, old spell that drew Peter out on the sea again and again. With him at my side, it was a fine sorcery. But alone…I knew that I would always hate and fear the thought of being alone on that sea. Not for Peter; he was as good a sailor as there was on the cape. But for me. For me, to be alone in a boat on the seas of Cape Rosier would be to be alone in the hands of my oldest and most implacable enemy. Even in those light-spilling days of July and August, that sea remained, in its cold heart, my foe.

  On a day at the end of August, when the light around the cape seemed so clear and blue and radiant that the entire world seemed carved of crystal, Peter took the Hannah out past Western Island and dropped anchor off Green Ledge. The wind was down and the sun high and honey gold, and the Hannah rocked on the empty sea like a cradle. We ate our sandwiches and drank our wine, and then we stripped and made love on the deck, twice and then three times, and I really think if Peter had not braced his bare feet against the coaming we might, the last time, have simply thrashed and rolled into the sea.

  “I’m not even going to speculate what anybody sailing past us would think if they’d seen that,” I said, lying still and letting the light breeze dry the sweat off my body.

  “Nobody out today but the lobster fleet,” Peter said. “And the natives are pretty pragmatic about this kind of thing. You know the old joke about the lobstermen out off the cape who saw a rowboat pitching like a rearing horse with nobody in it, and when they got closer they looked down and saw Clem and Mary doin’ it, and they just nodded politely and hollered down, ‘Nice day for it!’ ”

  We laughed all the way home to Retreat, and when, as we were tying up, stately silver-haired Guildford Kennedy said, from the club porch, “You children been cruising? Nice day for it,” we doubled up on the dock and were unable to speak for a matter of some minutes. “It’s not you, Guild, it’s just…a boring old family joke,” I gasped finally, sure that the unworldly Kennedys would not have heard it. “It was, indeed, a nice day for it.”

  “One of the last we’ll have, looks like,” Guild said serenely. “Saw on the television this morning that there’s a hurricane coming up the coast from North Carolina and Virginia, and it looks like it might smack us one in two or three days. Andrea, it is. The first one this season. At the very least we’ll get a good soaking. Not that we don’t need it.”

  “I’ve never heard of a hurricane on the Maine coast,” I said, frowning at Peter as we trudged up the lane toward Liberty lugging ditty bags.

  “I’ve heard of them, but I’ve never seen it happen,” he said. “There’s a theory that we rarely get them because of the Humboldt current, or some damn thing. And the ones we do get land on the open shore. The bays hardly ever get more than a blow; too far from open water, and too sheltered by all the islands. I don’t like to think of the outer islands getting pounded, though, and I hate like hell to see this weather end. But at least it’ll be easier to leave if the weather’s nasty. I always used to hope for rain on the day we left for home, when I was a kid.”

  “I wish we could stay on awhile this year,” I said.

  “Me too, but it’s just not possible. Next year, after the book’s out and I’ve found a new assistant, we’ll stay. That’s a promise.”

  The Humboldt current cut very little ice with Andrea. The hurricane ground its way inexorably up the coast; we watched as blurry black and white images of spuming storm waves and thrashing trees flickered on the screen of the disreputable old television set Peter refused to replace. It dealt Long Island a smart but glancing blow, flattened portions of the seafront on Cape Cod, took a swirling feint at York Beach far to our south, and then veered right a
nd headed vaguely for Nova Scotia.

  “Looks like Tina’s kinfolks are going to get a little taste of Andrea,” I said to Micah, when he came in with a double load of wood the morning before Labor Day. It was gray and misty, and the wind was behaving queerly: running spiderlike along the surface of the bay and dropping to a dead calm and then doubling back on itself and eddying around the chimneys of Retreat. There was a hollow moaning high in the tops of the firs that I had never heard before, but it was low and not particularly ominous. The buoys off Head of the Cape and Little Deer called, and flocks of silvery seabirds, gulls mostly, wheeled overhead and then headed inland in clouds.

  But still, the earnest weatherman from Bangor asserted that morning, Hurricane Andrea would miss the Maine coast and glance off Nova Scotia before blowing itself out over open water.

  “I’m not worried about Tina’s tribe,” Micah said, dumping the wood into the bin beside the fireplace. “They can roost in trees like the gulls; started out that way, I reckon. I wouldn’t mind seeing you folks head on out of here, though.”

  “But the TV said it’s going to miss us,” I said, troubled.

  “Might be right, might not,” Micah said. “I don’t fancy the feel and smell of that wind, and those gulls know a dite more than that pegpants little fella over in Bangor. Peter button up the Hannah good?”

  “That’s where he is now,” I said. “I’ll tell him you think we ought to go. But Micah, it takes me two days to close up Liberty—”

  “Go on and leave Liberty open,” he said. “Tina and I’ll close her up later. It isn’t as if we hadn’t done it before.”

  “I just don’t think I can get Peter to budge,” I said. “He’s ridden out his share of blows all these summers, Micah.”

  “Didn’t figure you could persuade him,” Micah said. “That’s why I brought you a double load. We’ll likely lose power, but you can cook on the fireplace, if you have to, and heat water. I’d get those kids of yours up here from off the beach, though.”

  By noon the sky had darkened to a kind of white twilight, and spume rose off the surface of the bay like smoke. The moan of the wind had risen to a shriek. Rain blew in sheets across the harbor, stopped, and sheeted in again. Peter went to the phone, to call Petie and Sarah and tell them to bring the children and come on up the cliff path to Liberty, but got no tone.

  “Line’s down somewhere,” he said. “I’ll go get them. Back in a minute. Why don’t you heat up the clam chowder we had last night? Mother always had it for lunch on storm days.”

  He vanished out into the flying gray day in his yellow foul-weather gear, and I went into the kitchen and put the iron pot of clam chowder on the stove to heat. On impulse, I poured myself a glass of tawny port. I don’t know why; I’ve never liked it, particularly.

  “Here’s to you, Mother Hannah,” I said, raising the glass. “Clam chowder for a storm lunch it shall be. And any old port in a storm.”

  I giggled at my own cleverness, and at that moment the lights flickered, sank, flared up again, and died out.

  “Shit,” I said, and went to throw another log on the fire Micah had lit. We lost power fairly regularly out on the cape; almost any sizable wind could topple a rotting pole or snap one of the ancient lines that Bangor Hydroelectric kept promising to replace and never did. I had coped with meals in the dark, sometimes for a day or two, and could certainly do it again. But I did not like the moan of this wind; it prowled the sky like a mad thing, and the pointed firs just outside were thrashing nearly to the ground and back, and I could not even see the little birch thicket off behind the tennis court. I hung the iron pot on the old swinging arm in the fireplace and got out candles and oil lamps and sat down and waited for Peter and the children.

  They came in presently, in a swirl of rain and a howling of wind, soaked through and pinched-looking. I found towels and blankets and they went off to change into dry clothes from the trunk of assorted castoffs and left-behinds we kept in the pantry, and Peter came and sat down on the sofa and looked at me.

  “The bay down there looks like Thunder Hole,” he said. “And the water was up on the porch. I never saw it like this. I think we may really be in for something, Maude.”

  “Could we make a dash for it in the big car, do you think?” I said. “Get into the village, at least, off the water?”

  “No,” he said. “There’s a monster spruce down across the lane. That’s what took out the power, I think. We couldn’t get out, except on foot, and nobody can get in until it’s over and the county gets a crew in here. I think we’ll be safe enough; you can tell a big difference in the wind up here from down on the beach. It’s lots stronger down there. Braebonnie is shielding us directly, and the trees look like they’re holding. The old spruce that’s down has been dying for two years now. There’s lamplight in most of the cottages, and smoke from the chimneys, so nobody much has left. We’ll just keep the fire going and maybe play some parcheesi or something. There’s a whole box of old games around here somewhere. Who knows, maybe we’ll sing. The one thing I wish we had is a battery radio; I kept meaning to get one, and I just never did.”

  “Well, if it doesn’t get any worse than this, I think we can manage,” I said. “It’s almost an adventure, isn’t it? At least it is until the roof flies off.”

  “This old pile has stood for a hundred years,” Peter said. “It’s not going anywhere now. That chowder getting hot?”

  It was not an unpleasant afternoon and evening, looking back. The dark fell early and was total, and the wind prowled and howled, and smoke blew back down the chimney, and once or twice we heard a heartbreaking creaking and snapping and then the long dying crash of a tree going down, but that was mainly in the birch grove, among the fragile silver army I had always loved. The larger trees held, and the wind did not seem to get any higher, and by six o’clock that evening its keening had become a kind of white noise to us, a sort of wild lullaby that underlay the waterfall rush of the rain.

  I fried bacon and eggs on the iron griddle over the fire for supper, and Sarah made toast on the old toasting fork, and we made what Petie called Pioneer Coffee, and in the lamplight, with the flickering of the firelight and the shadows playing over the old living room and the faces of the five people on earth closest to me, I felt a sudden surge of love and gratitude so strong that it was almost an epiphany. There seemed more of us in the room than there were, and my love reached out and overpoured them, too. I saw the brace of heavy old crystal decanters in their silver cradles that had been Big Peter’s; Petie was pouring brandy for us from them. Peter sat on the swaybacked old sofa that his grandmother had brought from Boston by packet, with a cracked leather volume of fairy tales that had been his as a child; he was reading them to Sally. Maude Caroline wore the vivid Spanish shawl that had been Mother Hannah’s, which she had wrapped me in that first summer when I had received the colony on the sun porch, after the incident with the fawn. Sarah poured coffee from the old blue speckled pot Peter’s grandmother’s housekeeper had brought from Boston, refusing to use the heavy silver one that so quickly went black in the damp. Over the mantelpiece, on the brick chimney breast, the firelight danced on the varnished transom from Sean’s Osprey. Peter had hung it there in silence before we had left last summer, and I knew it would remain there until Liberty itself was no more.

  Thank you, Mother Hannah, I thought. It was for this, wasn’t it? So that all of us could come together in Liberty and ride out the storms—all of us, the living and the dead. Somebody has to know how to do it, don’t they? And they have to teach the next ones, and they in their turn teach the next….

  “I love you all,” I said into the fire-shot darkness.

  Everybody laughed, and Petie said, “We look pretty good by firelight, don’t we?”

  And we laughed some more.

  “Mother.” Maude Caroline’s voice came from the back of the house, where she had ventured to the bathroom. “Come here a minute. There’s smoke coming out of Braebonnie,
and a kind of light…I think maybe it’s on fire!”

  We looked at each other for an instant, and then Peter and Petie leaped to their feet and grabbed oilskins from the coat rack and dashed out into the storm, pulling them on. Sarah and I and the children ran to the back windows that overlooked Braebonnie; we could see it ourselves, the smoke pouring through the slanting rain and the leaping shadows in an upstairs window that meant a flame. Dear God, I thought, there’s no way to call the volunteer fire department, and they couldn’t get in anyway; why doesn’t the damned rain put it out? How in the name of God could it have started? There’s been no lightning—