in this life.
“ If it’s what you want, Bill,” she fretted in the silence.
“ God knows I don’t . ”
But the wind spoke other words. She did want to. She
wanted to have this adventure. It had been a painful winter
for her—the arthritis which came and went irregularly was
back with a vengeance, flaring the joints of her fingers and
knees with red fire and blue ice. One of her eyes had gotten
dim and blurry (and just the other day Sarah had mentioned—
with some unease—that the fire-spot that had been there since
Stella was sixty or so now seemed to be growing by leaps
and bounds). Worst of all, the deep, griping pain in her stomach had returned, and two mornings before she had gotten up at five o ’clock, worked her way along the exquisitely cold
floor into the bathroom, and had spat a great wad of bright
red blood into the toilet bowl. This morning there had been
some more of it, foul-tasting stuff, coppery and shuddersome.
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31
The stomach pain had come and gone over the last five
years, sometimes better, sometimes worse, and she had
known almost from the beginning that it must be cancer. It
had taken her mother and father and her mother’s father as
well. None of them had lived past seventy, and so she supposed she had beat the tables those insurance fellows kept by a carpenter’s yard.
“ You eat like a horse,’’ Alden told her, grinning, not long
after the pains had begun and she had first observed the blood
in her morning stool. “ Don’t you know that old fogies like
you are supposed to be peckish?’’
“ Get on or I ’ll swat ye!’’ Stella had answered, raising a
hand to her gray-haired son, who ducked, mock-cringed, and
cried: “ Don’t, Ma! I take it back!”
Yes, she had eaten hearty, not because she wanted to, but
because she believed (as many of her generation did), that if
you fed the cancer it would leave you alone. And perhaps it
worked, at least for a while; the blood in her stools came and
went, and there were long periods when it wasn’t there at all.
Alden got used to her taking second helpings (and thirds,
when the pain was particularly bad), but she never gained a
pound.
Now it seemed the cancer had finally gotten around to what
the froggies called the piece de resistance.
She started out the door and saw Alden’s hat, the one with
the fur-lined ear flaps, hanging on one of the pegs in the
entry. She put it on—the bill came all the way down to her
shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows—and then looked around
one last time to see if she had forgotten anything. The stove
was low, and Alden had left the draw open too much again—
she told him and told him, but that was one thing he was just
never going to get straight.
“ Alden, you’ll bum an extra quarter-cord a winter when
I ’m gone,” she muttered, and opened the stove. She looked
in and a tight, dismayed gasp escaped her. She slammed the
door shut and adjusted the draw with trembling fingers. For
a moment—just a moment—she had seen her old friend An-
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nabelle Frane in the coals. It was her face to the life, even
down to the mole on her cheek.
And had Annabelle winked at her?
She thought of leaving Alden a note to explain where she
had gone, but she thought perhaps Alden would understand,
in his own slow way.
Still writing notes in her head— Since the first day o f winter
I have been seeing your father and he says dying isn 't so bad;
at least I think th a t’s it—Stella stepped out into the white day.
The wind shook her and she had to reset Alden’s cap on
her head before the wind could steal it for a joke and cartwheel it away. The cold seemed to find every chink in her clothing and twist into her; damp March cold with wet snow
on its mind.
She set off down the hill toward the cove, being careful to
walk on the cinders and clinkers that George Dinsmore had
spread. Once George had gotten a job driving plow for the
town of Raccoon Head, but during the big blow of ’77 he
had gotten smashed on rye whiskey and had driven the plow
smack through not one, not two, but three power poles. There
had been no lights over the Head for five days. Stella remembered now how strange it had been, looking across die Reach and seeing only blackness. A body got used to seeing that
brave litde nestle of lights. Now George worked on the island, and since there was no plow, he didn’t get into much hurt.
As she passed Russell Bowie’s house, she saw Missy, pale
as milk, looking out at her. Stella waved. Missy waved back.
She would tell them this:
“On the island we always watched out fo r our own. When
Gerd Henreid broke the blood vessel in his chest that time,
we had covered-dish suppers one whole summer to pay fo r
his operation in Boston—and Gerd came back alive, thank
God. When George Dinsmore ran down those power poles
and the Hydro slapped a lien on his home, it was seen to that
the Hydro had their money and George had enough o f a job
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33
to keep him in cigarettes and booze . . . why not? He was
good fo r nothing else when his workday was done, although
when he was on the clock he would work like a dray-horse.
That one time he got into trouble was because it was at night,
and night was always George’s drinking time. His father kept
him fed, at least. Now Missy Bowie’s alone with another baby.
Maybe she ’ll stay here and take her welfare and ADC money
here, and most likely it won't be enough, but she ’ll get the
help she needs. Probably sh e’ll go, but i f she stays she’ll not
starve . . . and listen, Lona and Hal: i f she stays, she may
be able to keep something o f this small world with the little
Reach on one side and the big Reach on the other, something
it would be too easy to lose hustling hash in Lewiston or
donuts in Portland or drinks at the Nashville North in Bangor.
And I am old enough not to beat around the bush about what
that something might be: a way o f being and a way o f living—
a feeling.”
They had watched out fo r their own in other ways as well,
but she could not tell them that. The children would not understand, nor would Lois and David, although Jane had known the truth. There was Norman and Ettie Wilson’s baby
that was bom a mongoloid, its poor dear little fe e t turned in,
its bald skull lumpy and cratered, its fingers webbed together
as i f it had dreamed too long and too deep while swimming
that interior Reach; Reverend McCracken had come and baptized the baby, and a day later Mary Dodge came, who even at that time had midwived over a hundred babies, and Norman took Ettie down the hill to see Frank Child’s new boat and although she could barely walk, Ettie went with no complaint, although she had stopped in the door to look back at Mary Dodge, who was sitting calmly by the idiot baby’s crib
and knitting. Mary had looked up at her and when their eyes
met, Ettie burst into t
ears. “Come on, ” Norman had said,
upset. “Come on, Ettie, come o n .’’ A nd when they came
back an hour later the baby was dead, one o f those crib-
deaths, wasn’t it merciful he didn’t suffer. And many years
before that, before the war, during the Depression, three little
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tened to the faint thud and give of the ice. There was Bill,
further back now but still beckoning. She coughed, spat blood
onto the white snow that covered the ice. Now the Reach
spread wide on either side and she could, for the first time
in her life, read the “ Stanton’s Bait and Boat” sign over there
without Alden’s binoculars. She could see the cars passing to
and fro and on the Head’s main street and thought with real
wonder: They can go as fa r as they w a n t. . . Portland . . .
Boston . . . New York City. Imagine! And she could almost
do it, could almost imagine a road that simply rolled on and
on, the boundaries of the world knocked wide.
A snowflake skirled past her eyes. Another. A third. Soon
it was snowing lightly and she walked through a pleasant
world of shifting bright white; she saw Raccoon Head through
a gauzy curtain that sometimes almost cleared. She reached
up to set Alden’s cap again and snow puffed off the bill into
her eyes. The wind twisted fresh snow up in filmy shapes,
and in one of them she saw Carl Abersham, who had gone
down with Hattie Stoddard’s husband on the Dancer.
Soon, however, the brightness began to dull as the snow
came harder. The Head’s main street dimmed, dimmed, and
at last was gone. For a time longer she could make out the
cross atop the church, and then that faded out too, like a
false dream. Last to go was that bright yellow-and-black sign
reading “ Stanton’s Bait and Boat,” where you could also get
engine oil, flypaper, Italian sandwiches, and Budweiser to
go.
Then Stella walked in a world that was totally without
color, a gray-white dream of snow. Just like Jesus-out-of-the-
boat, she thought, and at last she looked back but now the
island was gone, too. She could see her tracks going back,
losing definition until only the faint half-circles of her heels
could be seen . . . and then nothing. Nothing at all.
She thought: I t ’s a whiteouU You got to be careful, Stella,
or you ’ll never get to the mainland. You ’ll ju st walk around
in a big circle until you 're worn out and then you ’ll freeze to
death out here.
The Reach
37
She remembered Bill telling her once that when you were
lost in the woods, you had to pretend that the leg which was
on the same side of your body as your smart hand was lame.
Otherwise that smart leg would begin to lead you and you’d
walk in a circle and not even realize it until you came around
to your backtrail again. Stella didn’t believe she could aiford
to have that happen to her. Snow today, tonight, and tomorrow, the radio had said, and in a whiteout such as this, she would not even know if she came around to her backtrail, for
the wind and the fresh snow would erase it long before she
could return to it.
Her hands were leaving her in spite of the two pairs of
gloves she wore, and her feet had been gone for some time.
In a way, this was almost a relief. The numbness at least shut
the mouth of her clamoring arthritis.
Stella began to limp now, making her left leg work harder.
The arthritis in her knees had not gone to sleep, and soon
they were screaming at her. Her white hair flew out behind
her. Her lips had drawn back from her teeth (she still had her
own, all save four) and she looked straight ahead, waiting for
that yellow-and-black sign to materialize out of the flying
whiteness.
It did not happen.
Sometime later, she noticed that the day’s bright whiteness
had begun to dull to a more uniform gray. The snow fell
heavier and thicker than ever. Her feet were still planted on
the crust but now she was walking through five inches of
fresh snow. She looked at her watch, but it had stopped.
Stella realized she must have forgotten to wind it that morning for the first time in twenty or thirty years. Or had it just stopped for good? It had been her mother’s and she had sent
it with Alden twice to the Head, where Mr. Dostie had first
marveled over it and then cleaned it. Her watch, at least, had
been to the mainland.
She fell down for the first time some fifteen minutes after
she began to notice the day’s growing grayness. For a moment she remained on her hands and knees, thinking it would
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Stephen King
be so easy just to stay here, to curl up and listen to the wind,
and then the determination that had brought her through so
much reasserted itself and she got up, grimacing. She stood
in the wind, looking straight ahead, willing her eyes to see
. . . but they saw nothing.
Be dark soon.
Well, she had gone wrong. She had slipped off to one side
or the other. Otherwise she would have reached the mainland
by now. Yet she didn’t believe she had gone so far wrong that
she was walking parallel to the mainland or even back in the
direction of Goat. An interior navigator in her head whispered that she had overcompensated and slipped off to the left. She believed she was still approaching the mainland but
was now on a costly diagonal.
That navigator wanted her to turn right, but she would
not do that. Instead, she moved straight on again, but stopped
the artificial limp. A spasm of coughing shook her, and
she spat bright red into the snow.
Ten mirihtes later (the gray was now deep indeed,and she
found herself in the weird twilight of a heavy snowstorm) she
fell again, tried to get up, failed at first, and finally managed
to gain her feet. She stood swaying in the snow, barely able
to remain upright in the wind, waves of faintness rushing
through her head, making her feel alternately heavy and light.
Perhaps not all the roaring she heard in her ears was the
wind, but it surely was the wind that finally succeeded in
prying Alden’s hat from her head. She made a grab for it,
but the wind danced it easily out of her reach and she saw it
only for a moment, flipping gaily over and over into the darkening gray, a bright spot of orange. It struck the snow, rolled, rose again, was gone. Now her hair flew around her head
freely.
“ It’s all right, Stella,” Bill said. “ You can wear mine.”
She gasped and looked around in the white. Her gloved
hands had gone instinctively to her bosom, and she felt sharp
fingernails scratch at her heart.
She saw nothing but shifting membranes of snow—and
The Reach
39
then, moving .out of that evening’s gray throat, the wind
screaming through it like the voice of a devil in a snowy
tunnel, came her husband. He was at first only moving colors
in the snow: red, black, dark green, lighter green; t
hen these
colors resolved themselves into a flannel jacket with a flapping collar, flannel pants, and green boots. He was holding his hat out to her in a gesture that appeared almost absurdly
courtly, and his face was Bill’s face, unmarked by the cancer
that had taken him (had that been all she was afraid of? that
a wasted shadow of her husband would come to her, a
scrawny concentration-camp figure with the skin pulled taut
and shiny over the cheekbones and the eyes sunken deep in
the sockets?) and she felt a surge of relief.
“ Bill? Is that really you?”
“ Course.”
“ Bill,” she said again, and took a glad step toward him.
Her legs betrayed her and she thought she would fall, fall
right through him—he was, after all, a ghost—but he caught
her in arms as strong and as competent as those that had
carried her over the threshold of the house that she had shared
only with Alden in these latter years. He supported her, and
a moment later she felt the cap pulled firmly onto her head.
“ Is it really you?” she asked again, looking up into his
face, at the crow’s-feet around his eyes which hadn’t sunk
deep yet, at the spill of snow on the shoulders of his checked
hunting jacket, at his lively brown hair.
“ It’s m e,” he said. “ It’s all of us.”
He half-turned with her and she saw the others coming out
of the snow that the wind drove across the Reach in the gathering darkness. A cry, half joy, half fear, came from her mouth as she saw Madeline Stoddard, Hattie’s mother, in a
blue dress that swung in the wind like a bell, and holding her
hand was Hattie’s dad, not a mouldering skeleton somewhere
on the bottom with the Dancer, but whole and young. And
there, behind those two—
“ Annabelle!” she cried. “ Annabelle Frane, is it you?”
It was Annabelle; even in this snowy gloom Stella recog
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nized the yellow dress Annabelle had worn to Stella’s own
wedding, and as she struggled toward her dead friend, holding Bill’s arm, she thought that she could smell roses.
“Annabelle!”
“ We’re almost there now, dear,” Annabelle said, taking
her other arm. The yellow dress, which had been considered
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 5
