Clelland and Russell Bowie took Stewie’s Bombardier Skid-
doo out anyway after a long afternoon spent drinking Apple
Zapple wine, and sure enough, the skiddoo went into the
Reach. Stewie managed to crawl out (although he lost one
foot to frostbite). The Reach took Russell Bowie and carried
him away.
* * *
The Reach
23
That January 25 there was a memorial service for Russell.
Stella went on her son Alden’s arm, and he mouthed the
words to the hymns and boomed out the doxology in his great
tuneless voice before the benediction. Stella sat afterward
with Sarah Havelock and Hattie Stoddard and Vera Spruce in
the glow of the wood fire in the town-hall basement. A going-
away party for Russell was being held, complete with Za-Rex
punch and nice little cream-cheese sandwiches cut into triangles. The men, of course, kept wandering out back for a nip of something a bit stronger than Za-Rex. Russell Bowie’s
new widow sat red-eyed and stunned beside Ewell Mc
Cracken, the minister. She was seven months big with child—
it would be her fifth—and Stella, half-dozing in the heat of
the woodstove, thought: She’ll be crossing the Reach soon
enough, I guess. She ’ll move to Freeport or Lewiston and go
fo r a waitress, I guess.
She looked around at Vera and Hattie, to see what the
discussion was.
“ No, I didn’t hear,” Hattie said. “ What did Freddy say?”
They were talking about Freddy Dinsmore, the oldest man
on the island (two years younger’n me, though, Stella thought
with some satisfaction), who had sold out his store to Larry
McKeen in 1960 and now lived on his retirement.
“ Said he’d never seen such a winter,” Vera said, taking
out her knitting. “ He says it is going to make people sick.”
Sarah Havelock looked at Stella, and asked if Stella had
ever seen such a winter. There had been no snow since that
first little bit; the ground lay crisp and bare and brown. The
day before, Stella had walked thirty paces into the back field,
holding her right hand level at the height of her thigh, and
the grass there had snapped in a neat row with a sound like
breaking glass.
“ No,” Stella said. “ The Reach froze in ’38, but there was
snow that year. Do you remember Bull Symes, Hattie?”
Hattie laughed. “ I think I still have the black-and-blue he
gave me on my sit-upon at the New Year Eve’s party in ’53.
He pinched me that hard. What about him?”
24
Stephen King
“ Bull and my own man walked across to the mainland that
year,’’ Stella said. “ That February of 1938. Strapped on
snowshoes, walked across to Dorrit’s Tavern on the Head,
had them each a shot of whiskey, and walked back. They
asked me to come along. They were like two little boys off
to the sliding with a toboggan between them.’’
They were looking at her, touched by the wonder of it.
Even Vera was looking at her wide-eyed, and Vera had surely
heard the tale before. If you believed the stories, Bull and
Vera had once played some house together, although it was
hard, looking at Vera now, to believe she had ever been so
young.
“ And you didn’t go?’’ Sarah asked, perhaps seeing the
reach of the Reach in her mind’s eye, so white it was almost
blue in the heatless winter sunshine, the sparkle of the snow
crystals, the mainland drawing closer, walking across, yes,
walking across the ocean just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat, leaving the island for the one and only time in your life on foot—
“ N o,’’ Stella said. Suddenly she wished she had brought
her own knitting. “ I didn’t go with them.’’
“ Why not? ” Hattie asked, almost indignantly.
“ It was washday,’’ Stella almost snapped, and then Missy
Bowie, Russell’s widow, broke into loud, braying sobs. Stella
looked over and there sat Bill Flanders in his red-and-black-
checked jacket, hat cocked to one side, smoking a Herbert
Tareyton with another tucked behind his ear for later. She felt
her heart leap into her chest and choke between beats.
She made noise, but just then a knot popped like a rifle
shot in the stove, and neither of the other ladies heard.
“ Poor thing,” Sarah nearly cooed.
“ Well shut of that good-for-nothing,” Hattie grunted. She
searched for the grim depth of the truth concerning the departed Russell Bowie and found it: “ Little more than a tramp for pay, that man. She’s well out of that two-hoss trace.”
Stella barely heard these things. There sat Bill, close
enough to the Reverend McCracken to have tweaked his nose
if he so had a mind; he looked no more than forty, his eyes
The Reach
25
barely marked by the crow’s-feet that had later sunk so deep,
wearing his flannel pants and his gum-rubber boots with the
gray wool socks folded neatly down over the tops.
“ We’re waitin on you, Stel,” he said. “ You come on across
and see the mainland. You won’t need no snowshoes this
year.”
There he sat in the town-hall basement, big as Billy-be-
damned, and then another knot exploded in the stove and he
was gone. And the Reverend McCracken went on comforting
Missy Bowie as if nothing had happened.
That night Vera called up Annie Phillips on the phone, and
in the course of the conversation mentioned to Annie that
Stella Flanders didn’t look well, not at all well.
“ Alden would have a scratch of a job getting her off-island
if she took sick,’’ Annie said. Annie liked Alden because her
own son Toby had told her Alden would take nothing stronger
than beer. Annie was strictly temperance, herself.
“ Wouldn’t get her off ’tall unless she was in a coma,” Vera
said, pronouncing the word in the downeast fashion: comer.
“ When Stella says ‘Frog,’ Alden jumps. Alden ain’t but half-
bright, you know. Stella pretty much runs him.”
“ Oh, ayuh?” Annie said.
Just then there was a metallic crackling sound on the line.
Vera could hear Annie Phillips for a moment longer—not the
words, just the sound of her voice going on behind the crackling—and then there was nothing. The wind had gusted up high and the phone lines had gone down, maybe into Godlin’s
Pond or maybe down by Borrow’s Cove, where they went
into the Reach sheathed in rubber. It was possible that they
had gone down on the other side, on the Head . . . and some
might even have said (only half-joking) that Russell Bowie
had reached up a cold hand to snap the cable, just for the
hell of it.
Not 700 feet away Stella Flanders lay under her puzzle-
quilt and listened to the dubious music of Alden’s snores in
the other room. She listened to Alden so she wouldn’t have
26
Stephen King
to listen to the wind . . . but she heard the wind anyway, oh
yes, coming across the frozen expanse of the Reach, a mile
and a half of water that was now overplated with ice, ice with
lobsters down below, and groupers, and perhaps the twisting,
dancing body of Russell Bowie, who used to come each April
with his old Rogers rototiller and turn her garden.
Who ’ll turn the earth this April? she wondered as she lay
cold and curled under her puzzle-quilt. And as a dream in a
dream, her voice answered her voice: Do you love? The wind
gusted, rattling the storm window. It seemed that the storm
window was talking to her, but she turned her face away from
its words. And did not cry.
"But Gram, ” Lona would press (she never gave up, not
that one, she was like her mom, and her grandmother before
her), “you still haven’t told why you never went across. ”
“Why, child, / have always had everything I wanted right
here on Goat. ”
“But it’s so small. We live in Portland. There’s buses,
Gram!”
“I see enough o f what goes on in cities on the TV. I guess
I ’ll stay where I am. ”
Hal was younger, but somehow more intuitive; he would
not press her as his sister might, but his question would go
closer to the heart o f things: “You never wanted to go across.
Gram? N ever?”
And she would lean toward him, and take his small hands,
and tell him how her mother and father had come to the
island shortly after they were married, and how Bull Symes’s
grandfather had taken Stella’s father as a ’prentice on his
boat. She would tell him how her mother had conceived four
times but one o f her babies had miscarried and another had
died a week after birth—she would have left the island i f they
could have saved it a t the mainland hospital, but o f course
it was over before that was even thought of.
She would tell them that Bill had delivered Jane, their
grandmother, but not that when it was over he had gone into
The Reach
27
the bathroom and first puked and then wept like a hysterical
woman who had her monthlies p'ticularly bad. Jane, o f
course, had left the island at fourteen to go to high school;
girls didn’t get married at fourteen anymore, and when Stella
saw her go o ff in the boat with Bradley Maxwell, whose job
it had been to ferry the kids back and forth that month, she
knew in her heart that Jane was gone fo r good, although she
would come back fo r a while. She would tell them that Alden
had come along ten years later, after they had given up, and
as i f to make up fo r his tardiness, here was Alden still, a
lifelong bachelor, and in some ways Stella was grateful fo r
that because Alden was not terribly bright and there are plenty
o f women willing to take advantage o f a man with a slow
brain and a good heart (although she would not tell the children that last, either).
She would say: "Louis and Margaret Godlin begat Stella
Godlin, who became Stella Flanders; Bill and Stella Flanders
begat Jane and Alden Flanders and Jane Flanders became
Jane Wakefield; Richard and Jane Wakefield begat Lois Wakefield, who became Lois Perrault; David and Lois Perrault begat Lona and Hal. Those are your names, children: you
are Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault. Your blood is in the
stones o f this island, and I stay here because the mainland
is too fa r to reach. Yes, / love; I have loved, anyway, or at
least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and
I cannot cross. Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault. . . ”
That was the coldest February since the National Weather
Service began keeping records, and by the middle of the
month the ice covering the Reach was safe. Snowmobiles
buzzed and whined and sometimes turned over when they
climbed the ice-heaves wrong. Children tried to skate, found
the ice too bumpy to be any fun, and went back to Godlin’s
Pond on the far side of the hill, but not before little Justin
McCracken, the minister’s son, caught his skate in a fissure
and broke his ankle. They took him over to the hospital on
28
Stephen King
the mainland where a doctor who owned a Corvette told him,
“ Son, it’s going to be as good as new.”
Freddy Dinsmore died very suddenly just three days after]
Justin McCracken broke his ankle. He caught the flu late in
January, would not have the doctor, told everyone it was “ Just
a cold from goin out to get the mail without m’scarf,” took
to his bed, and died before anyone could take him across to
the mainland and hook him up to all those machines theyj
have waiting for guys like Freddy. His son George, a tosspot
of the first water even at the advanced age (for tosspots, anyway) of sixty-eight, found Freddy with a copy of the Bangor Daily News in one hand and his Remington, unloaded, near
the other. Apparently he had been thinking of cleaning it just
before he died. George Dinsmore went on a three-week toot,
said toot financed by someone who knew that George would
have his old dad’s insurance money coming. Hattie Stoddard
went around telling anyone who would listen that old George
Dinsmore was a sin and a disgrace, no better than a tramp
for pay.
There was a lot of flu around. The school closed for two
weeks that February instead of the usual one because so many
pupils were out sick. “ No snow breeds germs,” Sarah Havelock said.
Near the end of the month, just as people were beginning
to look forward to the false comfort of March, Alden Flanders caught the flu himself. He walked around with it for nearly a week and then took to his bed with a fever of a
hundred and one. Like Freddy, he refused to have the doctor,
and Stella stewed and fretted and worried. Alden was not as
old as Freddy, but that May he would turn sixty.
The snow came at last. Six inches on Valentine’s Day,
another six on the twentieth, and a foot in a good old norther
on the leap, February 29. The snow lay white and strange
between the cove and the mainland, like a sheep’s meadow
where there had been only gray and surging water at this time
of year since time out of mind. Several people walked across
to the mainland and back. No snowshoes were necessary this
The Reach
29
year because the snow had frozen to a firm, glittery crust.
They might take a knock of whiskey, too, Stella thought, but
they would not take it at Dorrit’s. Dorrit’s had burned down
in 1958.
And she saw Bill all four times. Once he told her: “ Y’ought
to come soon, Stella. We’ll go steppin. What do you say?”
She could say nothing. Her fist was crammed deep into her
mouth.
“Everything I ever wanted or needed was here, ” she would
tell them. “We had the radio and now we hae the television,
and that’s all I want o f the world beyond the Reach. 1 had
my garden year in and year out. And lobster? Why, we always used to have a pot o f lobster stew on the back o f the stove and we used to take it o ff and put it behind the door in
the pantry when the minister
came calling so he wouldn’t see
we were eating ‘poor m an’s soup. ’
“I have seen good weather and bad, and i f there were
times when I wondered what it might be like to actually be
in the Sears store instead o f ordering from the catalogue, or
to go into one o f those Shaw’s markets I see on TV instead
o f buying at the store here or sending Alden across fo r something special like a Christmas capon or an Easter ham . . .
or if I ever wanted, ju st once, to stand on Congress Street in
Portland and watch all the people in their cars and on the
sidewalks, more people in a single look than there are on the
whole island these days . . . i f I ever wanted those things,
then I wanted this more. / am not strange. I am not peculiar,
or even very eccentric fo r a woman o f my years. My mother
sometimes used to say, ‘A ll the difference in the world is
between work and want, ’ and I believe that to my very so ul
I believe it is better to plow deep than wide.
“This is my place, and I love it. ”
One day in middle March, with the sky as white and lowering as a loss of memory, Stella Flanders sat in her kitchen for the last time, laced up her boots over her skinny calves
30
Stephen King
for the last time, and wrapped her bright red woolen scarf (a
Christmas present from Hattie three Christmases past) around
her neck for the last time. She wore a suit of Alden’s long
underwear under her dress. The waist of the drawers came
up to just below the limp vestiges of her breasts, the shirt
almost down to her knees.
Outside, the wind was picking up again, and the radio said
there would be snow by afternoon. She put on her coat and
her gloves. After a moment of debate, she put a pair of Alden’s gloves on over her own. Alden had recovered from the flu, and this morning he and Harley Blood were over rehanging a storm door for Missy Bowie, who had had a girl. Stella
had seen it, and the unfortunate little mite looked just like
her father.
She stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the
Reach, and Bill was there as she had suspected he might be,
standing about halfway between the island and the Head,
standing on the Reach just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat, beckoning to her, seeming to tell her by the gesture that the time was late if she ever intended to step a foot on the mainland
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 4
