Compass Rose

by John Casey

  “He knows we can’t afford it.”

  “I’m saying if it looks like a fight. As it happens I’ve asked around, tried to find some help. Unfortunately the groups that are fighting this sort of thing are stretched thin. But Jack Aldrich doesn’t have to know that. If we can make enough of a show, he’s likely to make you a better offer. You could end up with an equivalent house and something more toward a new boat.”

  May was glad this lawyer was talking to Dick in a way that seemed to settle him down. Easier on her if Dick was mulling things over instead of stomping around. This lawyer said “new boat” and got Dick looking out to sea. She said, “Mr. Aldrich said something about a little house in Snug Harbor. It doesn’t have but a scrap of a yard, let alone a place for a garden.”

  “Okay. Phoebe told me about your garden. I can see you’d miss that. What else would you miss?”

  May squeezed her hands together and looked away from the men. The lawyer said, “Just give me some idea. It’ll help me if I have some sense of the place.”

  “It’s where everything is. It’s where Charlie came to get better after he got hurt. It’s where I cook. I’m pretty much either in the kitchen or in the garden. It’s where someone like Phoebe comes to visit. It’s where Mary Scanlon used to bring Rose when she was little. It’s where Rose and Tom came to visit Charlie. And we were all there together when Charlie came to tell us Bom Sonho picked up Dick and his crew.” She stopped when Dick shifted in his chair and scraped his feet back. She said, “It’s where Dick keeps his logbooks and his accounts. And there’s his gear, some of his bait barrels and pots and harpoons. So it’s a workplace, too. I expect that has more to do with what you’re asking.”

  “No, it’s good. It helps to have the family story. Jack Aldrich tells a story about public benefit. We’ve got a story about a family place. Where your son came home after his accident, where your family gathered to wait for news of a ship lost at sea. It has some weight. Jack Aldrich has to have some concern about how this’ll play out in the court of public opinion.” He got up. “Let me know if you’d like me to represent you. I can’t promise to rectify the situation, but I think I can improve where you come out.”

  Dick didn’t say anything on the ride home. When they got there Dick didn’t get out, just stared straight ahead with his hands on the wheel.

  May said, “What did you make of that?” Dick bobbed his head a couple of times but didn’t answer. May said, “I’m not so sure I like that it’s all going to be a story. I thought I was just talking to him. He said ‘court of public opinion.’ That makes it sound like he’s going to put us on a float in the Fourth of July parade.”

  Dick said, “I was there. I was thinking what it would all cost, where the money would come from. And I heard your story. Charlie, Tom, Rose. Kitchen, garden. Charlie, Tom, Rose. And, oh, yeah—it’s where Dick keeps his gear.”

  May closed her eyes, couldn’t think straight. That wasn’t what she’d said, was it? She certainly hadn’t said it like that.

  “You can get out here—I’ve got to get going,” Dick said. “A guy saw Rose out in that boat I built for her. He wants one just like it, willing to pay pretty good money. I’ve still got the plans over at Eddie’s. Might as well be doing something to earn a dollar.”

  May said, “Will Rose mind?” The words just popped out.

  “I talked to Rose. I guess you think I don’t talk to Rose. She said it’s okay as long as I paint her a different color. I got to get going.”

  chapter seventy-five

  Phoebe started talking before she was through the front door. “I’m getting the old heave-ho, too, so I can totally relate. Of course, I knew the school was going to get my house sooner or later, but still … Anyway, now I’m going to roll up my sleeves for you. I don’t care if Jack Aldrich never speaks to me again. Oh, I know I dreamed of buying a Sawtooth cottage, but there we are—some things matter more than others.”

  May said, “Let’s go into the kitchen. I’ve got to keep an eye on a pot that’s boiling.”

  Phoebe followed her, sat down at the kitchen table, and pulled out a notepad. “I’ve made a list of people who’ll be on your side, and we’ll get a committee together and then we’ll plan a bigger meeting. I thought it might be a little awkward for you, so I’ve already talked to Elsie. She told me that Rose is going to drop out of her show, so that’s a start.”

  “I don’t want that,” May said. “I want Rose to sing.”

  “Oh, May. I really think … I mean, we need every bit of pressure we can think of.”

  “Not that.”

  “Honestly, May, I’m as big a fan of Rose as anybody, but—”

  “No.”

  Phoebe frowned and shifted her notepad on the table. “Well, we can revisit that. I’ve talked to Mary Scanlon—”

  “I’m sure she’ll want Rose to sing.”

  “This was on another subject. Mary wouldn’t say exactly, but she has something in mind. Maybe it’s about Mr. Bienvenue—he is her nephew-in-law, and he is running for Congress. But the main thing is to get out and beat the drums. I know that’s not your cup of tea, so I’ll do as much of it as I can, but you’ve got to get in a fiercer mood.”

  “I don’t know what good a mood’s going to do. Dick and I talked to your lawyer, and he as much as said the whole thing’d cost more than we’ll ever have.”

  “That’s if it goes on and on. If you just show you’re ready to fight … Eddie and I can lend you enough for the first round.”

  “That’s generous of you, but I can’t borrow money I don’t see a way of repaying.”

  “Well, then, we could start a defense fund, get some donations.”

  “I can’t see going begging, either.”

  “Really, May—there are perfectly good people out there who just don’t want to see something unfair. If you let your scruples tie you in a knot, you won’t have a chance against Jack Aldrich. He’s already out there claiming he’s a public benefactor. We have to be proactive; we have to get our story out there, too.”

  Phoebe was being as emphatic as ever, but she’d slowed down. May got up and stirred the pot of rose hips and apple slices. She fitted her jelly bag in a sieve over another pot and poured the fruit in. For a moment she listened to the juice trickling through. She said, “What kind of a story do you have in mind?”

  “This is your house. This is where you raised your two boys. Not to mention Rose.”

  “That’s the part I don’t want getting out all over.”

  “What part?”

  “Rose.”

  “But as far as you and Rose go, it’s all to your credit.”

  “Credit or not, I don’t want people saying things about Rose. Not unless it’s about how she sings.”

  Phoebe sighed. “I guess we can work around that. At any rate let’s have a little gathering, just a few people you know well. Of course, I’d like to invite Piero, too. He’s still a shareholder in Sawtooth—a minority shareholder, but he’s someone to be reckoned with. He’s a great admirer of yours, he knows you and I are friends, and he and I are very simpatico these days.”

  “I thought that statue of yours was all done.”

  “It is, but he’s teaching me Italian. I’ve always wanted to pick up a little Italian.” Phoebe knitted her brow. She said, “I think I may have made a mistake.” May was afraid she was about to learn more than she wanted. Phoebe said, “Piero and I are plural, so I should have said simpatici.” Phoebe laughed. “Oh, May. You looked stricken. I hope you’re not … He’s a dear, dear man, and that’s really all there is to say. Of course, his daughters are grown up and his wife spends most of her time in a convent up in Worcester—Piero has been very generous to it—so he’s rattling around by himself in that big house. Oh, he has his garden and his business interests—he’s still very vital. But the essential point is that he can help us, and I’m in a position to ask him.”

  May lifted the sieve off the pot. The juice looked about right
for a half-dozen jars. She turned the burner on. Warm as the juice was, it wouldn’t take long to come to a boil. She looked at Phoebe, who seemed to have plumped up. May didn’t want any more of Phoebe’s darting this way and that. She didn’t want to be curious, let alone suspicious. What was Phoebe up to, telling her these things—“he’s rattling around in that big house,” wife and daughters gone?

  Did Phoebe want her to get wide-eyed at how she made men go weak at the knees? Did Phoebe want her to admire what a friend she was to go up there and trade on her charm? May said, “If Mr. Salviatti wants to talk to Mr. Aldrich, seeing as how they’re partners, I guess that’d be all right. But just as a matter of what’s fair and what’s not. I’d as soon you didn’t talk about anything private.”

  Phoebe wrinkled her forehead. “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, May. It’s not as if Piero isn’t involved—Jack has already called him to have a talk about all this. Maps and financing and who’ll make a fuss and what Jack means to do about it. We’re just lucky that I happen to be on such good terms with Piero.” Phoebe took a breath. “And I may as well come right out and say that of course Piero and I talked about Rose. One of the reasons he admires you so much is that I told him how good you’ve been with Rose.”

  The juice came to a boil. May set the timer and wiped her hands on her apron. May found herself nodding, not because she agreed but because she should have figured that Phoebe couldn’t help herself.

  “How good you are,” Phoebe said. “And I never would’ve dreamed … I mean, think of all the people who know you and … For example, I’m sure Mary Scanlon talks about Rose to her new boyfriend.”

  “Mary Scanlon has a right to.”

  Phoebe put her palm to her cheek as though she’d been slapped. She sat up very straight and said, “Oh dear.”

  That was Phoebe, too—she might run on and on or she might just give a little peep. To put a patch on Phoebe’s hurt feelings, May said, “Mary’s as close to Rose as I am.” She felt herself going blank. She wasn’t tired, she’d just had enough of going round and round. She said, “What’s done is done.” Her voice sounded far off. “I know you mean to help.”

  “Of course I do. And I understand how much stress … I mean, it’s been one thing after another—Charlie’s accident, Dick’s boat, and now your house. I’m not surprised you’re on edge.”

  There Phoebe went again. But this time Phoebe wasn’t really present to May. What Phoebe said was sharp for a half second, then blurred, then gone—like the trail left by a fish swimming through phosphorescent plankton.

  May said, “I guess it’ll be all right so long as the next time you see Mr. Salviatti you make sure to tell him what I told you. I don’t want Rose talked about, not in the argument about this house.”

  Phoebe floated to her feet. “Yes, of course. I’m on my way there now. And don’t worry, Piero is very understanding. I’d trust him with any of my problems.”

  Phoebe went to the downstairs bathroom and came back with her hair brushed to a shine. After she went out the door there was a trace of perfume. May closed her eyes and saw her things—no, more like ghosts of her things—the canning jars, the kitchen table, the cedar chest, Rose’s skiff. There they went trailing in Phoebe’s wake, up the hill and drifting through the bars of Mr. Salviatti’s gate, then disappearing into the swing of Phoebe’s skirt as she climbed the front steps.

  The timer buzzed. May turned off the burner. At first she thought her little daydream was about whatever tomfoolery Phoebe got up to. But then she felt peaceful, as if whatever was to happen with people wanting this or that didn’t matter all that much, as if she’d been waiting for something to shake her loose from her fretting and her disapproving. She’d been right and she’d been wrong, and either way was just more trouble for somebody. It’d be nice if she could figure out just how she got to this quiet. Now she was content to sit and wait for the juice to cool off enough to pour into the jars. She might tighten up again, but for now she was unfolding, easy as that.

  chapter seventy-six

  Yes, I’d like to,” Elsie said, “but look, there’s a sort of crisis going on and I’m pretty much … I’ll give you a call when things settle down.”

  She’d never heard Walt’s voice on the phone. He sounded like his father.

  “Yeah. I heard Phoebe talking to Dad. So you’re into all that, too. Wait. Dumb of me. I guess you’re right in the middle. I’m used to thinking of you off in the woods on your own.”

  “In the woods—don’t I wish. But right now I really do have to get going.”

  When she hung up she kept on pressing the phone down as though that would seal him off. The afternoon in the tower room could have been years ago, should have been years ago, shouldn’t be a piece of the puzzle in her mind. She’d been trying to think about who could have some influence on Jack. Sally was still away with Jack Junior. Johnny Bienvenue had returned her phone call. He’d said, “It sounds ugly, but I can’t jump in without some homework. I’ll send someone down to the township office to see what they say. At least that’ll let them know I’m taking an interest.” A dime when she’d asked for a dollar. Johnny might not have sold his soul to Jack, but he might worry about crossing him. It could also be that Patty Scanlon was rationing his help to an old lover.

  Could Captain Teixeira do anything? Not with Jack but maybe with Johnny—promise him every vote in his extended family, speak up for him in the Portuguese community.

  Rose had fired her one shot, but Mary Scanlon had convinced Rose—and May agreed—that Rose should go ahead and sing.

  May had told Elsie that Phoebe Fitzgerald was persuading Mr. Salviatti to work on Jack. Elsie felt a pinch of competitive envy. Elsie felt bad about this envy, then felt an even more alarming envy that Phoebe, whom she’d dismissed as a giddy flirt showing her pretty legs to the boys, had turned out to be the hardheaded one, while she herself had nothing to offer but outrage and a day of fruitless phone calls. And now that she’d just got off the phone with Walt, she might as well cut a switch and lash her own bare legs.

  Out of the house. Not down the hill to Miss Perry’s. Straight into the woods. Plenty of daylight left. A good hard hike until she owned her own body, until she was her own motion. Nothing splendid about this neck of the woods, close-packed second growth fighting it out for a hold in the rocky soil, a few pines pushing up fast and spindly to get to the light. She had to circle a patch of barberry, damn foreign barberry, even more bristly and thorny than the native. On the other side was a bit of surviving meadow—all these hills were cleared of old growth by the colonists so sheep could graze. In the twentieth century it had gone back to scrub. The beautiful trees were pets of the big houses.

  She felt better being sour about the woods than sour about herself.

  She felt even better in the middle of the small meadow, seeing the blue summer sky. There were a few black locusts that had managed to grow tall on the edge of the clearing. She saw a bird flit out of a hole in the trunk. Female bluebird, just the tail blue. It swooped down and around the tree, then fluttered back up to its hole. It did it again, and this time Elsie saw what it was up to. A blacksnake was climbing the locust, taking advantage of the deeply ridged bark. How did the bird know? Did it hear something? Did it smell something? Had it just come out of its nest by chance? For that matter, how did the snake know there was a nest up there? Did the snake actually calculate that a hole was likely to have a nest in it? It was a long way to climb just to see. Or did the snake keep an eye out for birds bringing food back?

  The snake was moving slowly, inching up. Hard to tell its length, since it was curving and recurving. Now only a few feet from the hole. The bluebird was fluttering, peeping near the snake’s head. The snake kept climbing.

  Elsie threw a stick at it. Way short. She found a rock. It hit the tree above the hole. It frightened the bluebird more than the snake.

  When she watched a mayfly struggle out of its case in a streambed and swim to the surface, she didn�
��t root for the mayfly more than the trout coming after it. What was the difference? Pretty bluebird, ugly-ass snake? What was in the hole, anyway? Eggs or nestlings?

  Too late, anyway. The snake was in the hole, only six inches of tail hanging out. The bluebird fluttered up and down. Why didn’t it start pecking at the snake’s tail? If it wasn’t going to do anything but chirp and flutter, to hell with it. Elsie looked around the sky, hoping a hawk might show up and spy the snake’s tail. But even to a hawk’s eye the tail might look like another ridge of the soot-gray bark.

  Elsie sat down. After a while the snake pulled in its tail. The bluebird perched on a twig, certainly tired out after all that frantic swooping and hovering. Elsie wondered what it felt. Was grief a word that translated? Resignation? Did the bird picture what was going on inside? Elsie herself wasn’t altogether sure. Did the snake bite the three or four nestlings to death and then unhinge its jaw to swallow them at leisure? Or did it eat one while the others squirmed? Did the live ones know what was going on?

  The snake was successfully doing two things at once—finding a meal that it would take days to digest and a place safe from hawks, owls, or feral cats. Did it feel clever? Or was it no more reflective than a clam worm that gnawed its way down a quahog’s siphon, ate the meat, and then curled up inside the shell to take an armor-plated nap? Predation and refuge in one move. She remembered going through a bucket of quahogs she’d forked up (okay, she was a predator, too) and finding a loose-shelled one. She’d opened it up with her thumbnail and seen the perfectly coiled clam worm. She’d had an instant of revulsion and then a longer moment in which she recognized the elegance—the elegance of what she saw and the elegance of the clam worm’s endgame.

  She was pleased to have put the snake and the clam worm together in a single sentence in the language of mute creatures. She had a tick of longing to know the whole language, but she was happy to see what she saw, and if what she saw linked to something else she’d seen, she was a little bit happier. A vanity but an okay vanity that in this part of her life she was modest and severe.