"Yes. ..."
Early went to the kitchen door, seemed anxious to be gone. "--Young girls, young women are delicate that age, they bruise so easy. I had a girl myself, then a granddaughter. You catch them one way, they're strong as iron. Catch them another ... if they're already troubled, some female stuff bothering them--and they break."
Joanna tried to think of something to say, but she couldn't.
"So ... so I'll be on my way. I'm sorry to have brought all this up again, but I thought you should know we went back and double-checked everything, just in case."
"I do appreciate that, Mr. Early.--And remember to thank Mrs. Early for the banana bread."
"Will do."
"... Good-bye." Joanna watched the old man go out the door--relieved to be going--and down the steps to the backyard. He'd wrinkled his suit jacket, sitting down. Early's age, concealed by his neat movements when seated and stable, was betrayed in the almost tentative way he'd descended the steps ...
the slight hesitation for balance down each riser.
She watched his handsome head--white hair gilded faint gold by the sun--as it passed the kitchen window ... then listened to his footsteps along the drive.
A few moments later, she heard his car's engine starting in the street.
Joanna sighed with great relief--and to avoid any recalling of what he'd said, all reminders, she picked the small paring knife up from the counter, and stuck it ... pushed it through the skin and down into the muscle of her left forearm. Dull-pointed, it didn't want to go in--but she made it, and a blurt of blood came out as if it had been waiting, then ran down to her wrist.
It was a sickening feeling, but so specific-and the blood so bright, even in the kitchen's shadows --that it left little room for remembering. Even less, when she tugged the paring knife free and dropped it in the sink. ... How dreadful, when men had fought with edged weapons. How personal an invasion, when the steel went in. ... Tom Lowell had felt that when she'd stabbed him.
Now, they both had sore arms.
She stood holding the wound out to bleed in the sink. It was a small steady welling flow--not broken jets of blood coming--so she'd only stabbed through muscle and little veins, not sliced an artery. But it had helped tremendously, though anyone watching wouldn't think so. It was keeping everything in three dimensions ... instead of flattening to two, like folded pieces of paper.
Joanna let the cut bleed awhile under running cold water. It hurt and felt pleasant at the same time. There was gauze, medical tape, and antibiotic ointment in the upstairs bathroom cabinet, but she didn't want to go up there.
The kitchen was far enough into the house, where those other people used to be.
She dried her arm, and wrapped it tightly with a clean dish towel--the second dish towel used as a bandage in her kitchen. She wondered if it had felt good at all to Captain Lowell, when he'd been injured. ... Probably not.
And since she was in the kitchen, Joanna felt she might as well eat some banana bread, and drink a lot of water. She opened the wrapping, and cut a piece of banana bread. When she picked that up to eat, she saw a slight smear of blood on it from the paring knife, but she ate it anyway, since the blood was hers. She chewed that piece, swallowed it, and drank three glasses of water at the sink.
Then she was very reluctant to go to the bathroom, even though the first-floor toilet was just off the hall. She was reluctant, but she did it, and was surprised to see what she looked like in the bathroom mirror.
She came back through the kitchen, and went out into the backyard. Outside seemed where people should spend most of their time. ...
Joanna gardened through the long hours of the day, weeding, clearing beds, her wrapped dish towel marked maroon with drying blood. She slowly worked her way, troweling and uprooting, crawling across the yard and back again, hands raw and aching, sore arm very sore. She wove through passing time, and only paused now and then to lie still and rest awhile, before resuming.
The sunset, after so long a time of light and heat, came as great relief ...
and weary, reluctant to go inside just for banana bread, Joanna wrapped herself in her blanket, lay down in the grass, and went to sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
"What are you doing? What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Joanna first thought she was dreaming, then was roughly shaken.
"What the fuck are you doing out here?" Rage in a woman's voice. "Get up! Get the fuck UP!"
Her sheltering blanket was pulled away to morning light, and Joanna saw a gold-and-ivory Medusan mask--fury--and Charis hauled her up to her feet and shook her. Strong girl. ...
"I've been sleeping outside," Joanna said, still waking in that grip. "It's
... it just felt better."
"You get in--you get in here!" And Charis, an angry mother with a foolish child, chivvied Joanna across the yard and into the house.
"... Charis, I'm glad you could come back," she said a while later.
No response from a girl pale with anger, lean and beautiful in gray slacks and a man's white dress shirt. The kitchen table was cluttered with scissors, bandage tape, ointment, gauze pads, and hydrogen peroxide.
"Exams went okay ...?"
Charis had nothing to say. Her hands spoke for her, mopping crusted old blood away, squeezing new blood running from the cut ... then wiping that with cool peroxide.
"Strong hands," Joanna said, pleased to be done to, even hurt. "Have you ever done any climbing, caving?"
"No caving." Her first words in some time. "--But I know you do that."
"Well, if you're not claustrophobic ... and not afraid of the dark or falling, you might try it."
"I've rock climbed. Last summer I worked five-two leads in the Shawangunks."
"Then you can come caving with me! If you want to. When I'm better."--Joanna considered what she'd just said. When I'm better. Which must mean she wasn't better now. ...
"If this gets infected, we'll have to go to a doctor. It's deep."
"Accident," Joanna said. "I was prying up a can lid, and the knife slipped."
"That's a lie," Charis said. "Don't lie to me."
"... Okay. I did it because it kept me from thinking about things. Chief Early was here, and he went over everything, and there was nothing new. ... He said he talked to you."
"The old guy? He talked to everybody. ... Must have been great-looking when he was young."
"He is handsome."
Charis finished with Joanna's forearm--handling it gently now--placing the gauze pad, taping it, then bandaging lightly, neatly over that. ... She finished, and sat holding Joanna's hand. "I'm sorry if I hurt you."
"You didn't hurt me."
"You hungry--ready for breakfast?"
"Yes, I suppose I am."
"Good." Charis stood up. "Why don't you go take a shower, and wash your hair.--Try to keep this bandage dry; if you can't, we'll just do it again. ...
Breakfast'll be ready when you are."
"I don't ... I don't really need--"
"Joanna, you need a shower. You need to wash your hair.--What is it? Don't you want to go upstairs?"
"I can go upstairs. ..."
"Then come on." And as if Joanna were a stranger, unfamiliar with the house and reluctant, Charis led her out of the kitchen, encouraged her up the hall to the staircase ... then went up behind her, insisting.
In the bedroom, she helped Joanna out of her dirt-caked trousers and sweated shirt ... sat her down on the edge of the bed to tug off old sneakers and soiled socks. Then she offered her arm for balance as Joanna stood to step out of her panties.
Naked, Joanna put her hand up to cover the scar where her breast had been. "I know I look terrible. ..."
"You don't look terrible; you have a beautiful body.--You look dirty." Charis went into the bathroom, started the shower--tested the water for heat --and folded a clean towel and Joanna's robe on the little white stool.
"Thank you."
"You d
on't have to thank me, Joanna.-Don't forget to do your nails."
"I was gardening."
"I saw you've been gardening. ..."
Joanna came downstairs into mingling odors of coffee, frying bacon, and buttered toast.
Charis was at the stove, forking the bacon strips over in the big iron skillet. She was cooking a lot of bacon.
"Good morning--now you look great."
"Good morning." Great apparently resulting from the shower, washed hair and clean nails, along with moccasins, old khakis, and a short-sleeved plaid summer shirt.
"I had to make a quick breakfast-stuff run into town. We can make a list, do the main shopping this afternoon."
"Okay." Joanna sat at the kitchen table, both uneasy and pleased with such energetic company.
"I know this is really nutritionally incorrect, but I think we need it."
Charis transferred the bacon--eight strips, fat and smoking--onto a plate. And cracking their shells in swift succession, dropped four eggs hissing into the pan. "Got toast going, too--regular, not cinnamon. Butter already on them."
"Yes," Joanna said, amused by how difficult it would have been to say even an unimportant no to the young woman at the stove, radiating light through a faint haze of smoking grease. The house seemed bearable now, filled, vibrating to this handsome creature ... a distraction offering greater relief than the paring knife had given her.
Charis leaned over the skillet, harassing her eggs as they cooked, poking them into conformity with a steel spatula. She stared down, intent, gave them a few moments more, then ran the spatula under them and served two onto each plate--swift movements--divided the bacon slices four and four, and brought the plates to the table. Then to the oven for four slices of toast--each with yellow spots of melted butter--and back to the stove to pour the coffee.
The coffee mugs came to the table, and Charis sat down, salted and peppered her food, and began to eat.
Joanna recognized the energy and task-concentration, the pleasure in a produced result. It was the way she worked ... when she worked. It was the way she'd handled classwork and grading papers--the way poems came to her, the ideas like stray puppies to be taken in.
"Charis, your classes ...."
"I'm doing papers for them, instead. Professors have agreed I can do that, so everything's okay.--Now, you eat."
Joanna broke the yolk of her first egg with a corner of toast, caught some sunny spill on it, and ate the piece runny. Started with a bite of bacon, then slowly chewed it all, greasing, oiling her throat for more eating, for the rhythms of eating.
Halfway through her breakfast--still an egg left, almost a whole piece of toast and two strips of bacon--Joanna glanced up and saw Charis looking at her, watching her with pleased affection.
"It's very good."
"Eat it all," Charis said, and began finishing her own food. She ate as she'd cooked, swiftly, neatly, absorbed as a hungry child or fastidious animal, only glancing up from time to time. There was no conversation.
A vaporous, uncertain tail to Charis's comet, Joanna sat in the little convertible's passenger seat as the girl rowed through the VW'S gears at the bottom of Slope Street--then took a fast left turn to drive out Beach Road at Joanna's direction.
"This is your island," Charis had said, washing the breakfast dishes. "Take me on a tour.-We'll pee and hit the road."
... They'd peed, and hit the road.
They went out Beach, past the last of the town's weathered gray houses, to ride the slow rise and fall of sandy blacktop along the sea, the morning's heat and cool ocean breeze weaving together over the car's open top. The VW, an elderly metal turtle, its worn black shell sun-dazzled here and there, bucketed over the road's sandheaves past Trudie's, and went on.
"Good food, there," Joanna said.
Charis nodded, smiling. She was hardly talking now, was only present, a companion, as if silent company was the medicine Joanna needed most.
They drove up the beach, past stilted beach houses staggered along the dunes, past drifts of sea grass stirring to sea breezes. Joanna sat with her head back, resting, her eyes half shut to glittering light. She sat moving only to the car's motion, content to be carried and cared for.
They drove all the way to the end of Beach Road, then turned back a mile to go right on Willis ... and continue touring as if the island were Joanna's own estate, its heat and light and beauty enough to recompense any loss, and be bound to heal her.
They drove down through Willis, its sheds and shacks and rusted machinery--came to the Wainwrights', and Joanna saw Percy sitting alone by his tree in the front yard. Slightly smaller, stockier than she'd remembered him, the red dog sat watching as if he'd been waiting for her.
"Percy ...!" Joanna called as they went past, and had time to see the stubs of ears alert, to catch a glimpse of his grim one-eyed stare.
They drove to the Willis marina, where the sportfishers rocked at their moorings, and sailboats--anchored out--seesawed gently to a southwest wind.
"Beautiful," Charis said, pulled in beside Chester's Bait 'n Tackle, and stopped the car. They sat for a while, silent in a glass-and-metal dish of heat, looking out over the channel. The mainland shore was lost in heat haze and sun-mirrors flashing off a slight chop.
"Beautiful now," Charis said, "--and I bet more beautiful in winter, when you have to look for color."
"Probably so."
They sat watching a while longer, then Charis started the car and drove out the only road east of Willis--South Sound Road. And as they traveled along that hard-shelving stony coastline --so different from the island's north--the ocean came in booming, fetched for three thousand miles to foam and fountain against the rock.
They stayed on South Sound around the island's southeast tip--the lighthouse, built of blocks of granite, the last object off the Point--then drove almost two miles north into Asconsett Town.
... At Barkley's, carrying one of their two baskets, Joanna trailed behind as Charis shopped. Cans of tuna and sardines. Cans of corned beef. Saltine crackers and cans of pork and beans. Oatmeal, bran flakes, raisins and prunes.
Peaches, a dozen lemons for lemonade, and three grapefruit--spelled greatfruits at Barkley's.
"I'll pay today, then we can start splitting the bills. ..." Charis shopped very directly, no wandering; she sliced through the other women to the counters and bins she wanted, and picked out quickly. Two small yellow squashes, two yams, a bunch of carrots, string beans, six onions, a garlic bulb, broccoli, and the best head of romaine.
Two women--one Joanna recognized, had spoken to coming out on the ferry once, though she couldn't remember her name--these two women were stealing constant quick little glances at her as she followed Charis from one side of the store to the other. Quick looks, as children watched frightening movies, glancing, then looking away. The women were curious what catastrophe accomplished in a woman's face, what sores marked such a leprosy of loss.
Other women must be looking at her too, but Joanna kept her head down as she followed, so as not to notice.
"What the fuck are you staring at?" A clear snarling cavalry trumpet. The bustle and conversation stopped in Barkley's. A plastic blue basket swinging from her arm, Charis glared past others at the two women ... and they did as Joanna had done, and looked down as if for something in the sawdust, a dropped plum. "You keep your fucking eyes to yourselves!" It was the kind of order that promised enforcement, and prolonged the silence.
Then Charis said, "Lamb chops," to Joanna in an ordinary voice, and went over to the meat counter. Other women there, all silent, were examining the trays with great attention. The lamb looked very good, beef very good. Pork less attractive.
... At home, Charis set a kitchen chair in the backyard, then brought out the string beans in a big blue plastic bowl to be snapped, stripped of their small threads, and put into a smaller blue plastic bowl, part of the set.
"You do this," she said to Joanna, "while I put things away and make lunch.
Then we can garden."
"Okay. ..."
Joanna sat in the sunshine, snapping string beans; she needed a paring knife to cut the sharp little ends off. She was listening to her heart--could barely hear it thumping, moving her blood around-and sat listening until Charis brought the paring knife from the kitchen as if Joanna'd called for it.
They had sardine-and-chopped-onion sandwiches for lunch. Peeled peaches, banana bread, and glasses of milk. Charis enjoyed the banana bread, had two slices. "But coconut cake is really my favorite. ..."
Joanna had been anxious to lie in the backyard grass--see what she'd done, what she had left to do ... see how the weeds were managing. She hurried her lunch and tried to leave some of her sandwich and the peach, but Charis asked her to eat them, so she did. Then she had to wait while Charis finished--eating in that neat, deliberate way, and looking up from time to time as if to prevent surprises.
It was such a relief, afterward, to change to clean caving clothes--then go outside and lie down in the grass, feel things she might remember draining out into the ground ... and then the hot sun slowly putting something back into her, something simpler and more bearable.
Charis came and crouched to work beside her, using a foot-long flat pry bar and large screwdriver --both rusty from lying on a garage shelf--to dig out the weed roots so she could pull them, since Joanna was using the trowel.
"I'll get my gardening tools in the morning," Charis said, and seemed happy to join Joanna in this safari--giants laboring over a miniature jungle more savage than the Mato Grosso, a patch where a thousand thousand hunters roamed, six-eyed spiders, searchers and small spinners and more tens of thousands of others less theatrical ... smaller and smaller. The grass was full of deaths dreadful beyond consideration, but none with malice. Deaths innocent as ice cream.
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