by Peter Scott
“We won’t need that one,” Cecil told them. “It’ll take too long to burn. Why don’t you start bringing up some rockweed?”
Approaching the bank of seaweed exposed by the tide, the boys surprised a swimming ribbon of black ducks riding the current in the lee of the shore. The Mattinglys released a salvo of rocks that scattered the swimmers in furious paddle and sent a dozen up into flight.
“Here, cut that out, damn you,” Dwight shouted.
Albert said he wished he had his shotgun.
“We’ll get some next week,” said Dwight.
With long-handled spades, Dwight and the reverend shoveled a pile of coals onto the sand by the pit and began to smooth over the layer left beneath. Cecil and Gus went down to the tide line with bushel baskets to join the boys in collecting rockweed.
Dwight leaned on his shovel, his chin on his hands. “What I want to know is why nobody’s heard from Richard—not even Lucille. They won’t even tell her what hospital he’s in.”
“I talked to Mark Cassady, her pastor, in Stonington yesterday,” said the reverend. “When I went to get the corn. He called Rockland Coast Guard for Lucille, and they said they couldn’t tell him anything; they acted like they didn’t know, but when he pressed the subject they said it was classified. I saw Richard’s boat at Caldwell’s pier; it’s half under water.”
“Bill McDonnell said Friday that federal marshals came and arrested Carl Topp in Blue Hill,” reported Albert. “Wouldn’t tell his wife a thing; just left her standing in the dooryard. Phew, that’s hot!” He fanned his face with his hat.
“You could move to windward,” said Dwight.
“I heard the same thing.” The reverend looked over his shoulder at Cecil and Gus and the boys. “Just who is Carl Topp, anyway? I heard that he and Richard were in America First.” He glanced again toward Cecil. “And it’s rumored that they were mixed up in the German-American Bund.”
“They were,” said Albert with authority. “But they quit it, and they quit America First too, like everyone else did in ’41.” He nodded in Cecil’s direction. “Richard and Carl, they used to talk about Carl’s brother Homer, who got executed by an American firing squad in France. Bitter talk when they were drinking.”
“A spy, eh?” asked Dwight.
“No,” Albert said. “And that’s a lot of the problem. To hear them tell it, he was shell-shocked and couldn’t bear the thought of going back to the lines. He was guarding German prisoners, and he changed uniforms with one to get sent to the rear. They caught him and shot him. Christly thing—his own army.”
Gus and Ernest Mattingly shook a heaping basket of rock-weed onto the bed of coals, which steamed and popped and sizzled as the reverend spread it out with a garden rake. “I love that smell,” he said.
“I’ll like it better when everything’s in there cooking,” Gus said.
Cecil and Vince Mattingly dumped another basket onto the fire, to be spread this time by Dwight, who declared the pit ready for the lobsters. Albert and Gus dragged the crates to the edge of the coals and began dropping lobsters, two by two, onto the smoky seaweed, where they flopped and thrashed in the fearful heat.
“That’s a generous lot of lobbies,” said Dwight wiping his brow. “How many you got, fifty?”
“Half of them is Gus’s,” said Albert.
“It’s very generous of both of you,” said the reverend.
Gus shook the last two lobsters and several shot claws out of his crate, then he, Cecil, and the boys went back with baskets for the next layer.
“Gus knows something we don’t know,” said Albert when they had gone. “And Maggie too, even though they say they don’t.”
“You ought to just forget about it,” Dwight said.
On the next layer of seaweed they spread the clams, eight hods full. Iris brought tall glasses of iced lemonade for Dwight and the reverend.
“It’s fresh squeezed,” she said. “And the mint is from Leah’s garden. Come join us when you’ve got it covered; I hope you’re hungry. Miss Lizzie made her butter biscuits just for you, Reverend. There must be sixty people here by now.”
With the last baskets of rockweed standing by, they scattered the ears of corn. Dickie Hanson, a mug of coffee in one hand and a cruller in the other, came to watch.
“What I want to know, Gus,” said Dwight. “Is why they took you and Maggie to Rockland with Richard, when it was for bootlegging that he got arrested.”
“To testify, like I said. And that’s what we did.” Gus spoke evenly. “We told them what we saw—his boat run up on a ledge and him stove up, his deck awash in rum.”
“Why’d they arrest Carl Topp?” Albert asked.
“I have no idea; I swear to God I don’t,” said Gus.
“There,” said Cecil standing back from the heat and brushing his hands. “We’re ready for the other coals to go on.”
As they shoveled the last of the covering layer, Fuddy and Skippy, each carrying a hod full of clams and dressed for a backwoods funeral, appeared behind Dickie and Cecil. Basil Walker’s starving dog, Bender, collapsed in the sand, his tongue muddy with dust.
“You would wait until we got the whole thing covered with this tarp, wouldn’t you?” Dwight said.
Skippy ducked and hid his mouth with his hand. Fuddy took his partner’s clam hod and set it on the ground next to his. “The truck wouldn’t go,” he said. “Sentiment bulb’s clogged, and we wore the battery down, so we walked it. Basil couldn’t, but he sent his money, and we’re going to take him a supper.”
“Suppah,” said Skippy.
“You’ll want a wheelbarrow to take his supper back,” Dwight said.
“We got one; it’s parked in the school yard.”
“One other thing I don’t understand, Gus,” said Albert. “We heard—”
Cecil, who had started toward the tables, spun around into Albert’s face. “Let it be, Albert,” he snapped. “Gus told you what he knows, and he told you it’s the truth. What the hell are you suggesting anyway?”
“Whatever happened, I say Richard Snell got what he deserved, and my money says that was his last damn rum run.” Dwight drove his spade into the sand and rolled down his sleeves.
“The wages of sin is death, eh Reverend?” Dickie slurped his coffee.
“Well, yes ...”
“Rum ain’t sin,” Dwight said. “The wages of rum is only more trouble.”
The head table, which had a splendid spray of New England asters as a centerpiece, was set a little apart on the lawn, between the flagpole and the serving line. The guests of honor— Vergil and Gus, and their parents—were first through the line. They carried their plates to the table and sat, with Vergil at one end facing the other tables, his parents on either side of him, and Gus at the other, with Cecil and Leah. Two seats were left empty in the center, one for the reverend. They waited in awkward silence until the other tables began to fill, then started eating. The younger families settled in little clusters on the grass to eat picnic style. Dwight and Doris sat apart in the same spot and on the same quilt they had used when they were courting twenty years before.
Ladling iced tea into glasses at the serving table, Iris told Maggie, who was pouring coffee, that Leah looked better—healthier and happier—than she had in months. She was laughing!
Maggie filled Dickie’s cup. “She’s so relieved that Gus is going to school and won’t be on the water, in any way, for another year. I’m relieved, too, though my cheeks aren’t quite as rosy as hers.”
Harvey, who had just been called an “S.O.B.” and had been abandoned when he tried to join the girls on the stone wall, took a seat at a table with Albert and Lorna. He parked his gum on his plate, tucked a napkin into his collar, and began to tear apart his lobster.
Albert told Harvey that they hadn’t seen him in ages and wondered why he didn’t get ashore more often. Harvey squinted when he bit down on the war claw. Lorna said it must get terribly lonely out on that little rock, especi
ally now that the light was out, and she wondered where Chief Gardiner was. Harvey pointed to the serving table, where Jake stood talking to Maggie and Iris.
“They’ve become quite friendly, haven’t they? Maggie and the chief I mean,” Lorna spooned jam onto a piece of muffin.
“I guess so,” Harvey allowed. “They seem to get along just fine most of the time.”
“Most of the time?” she asked.
“The other night when they chased Richard, were you on the radio with them?” asked Albert.
Harvey didn’t look up from his plate. “Sure I was. I was base and relay both, at the same time,” he said cautiously.
“Funny that we didn’t pick up anything, any transmissions, on the church radio—the Coastal Picket. Iris didn’t hear a thing, and she’s particular,” said Albert.
“We was on a different frequency.” Harvey cracked the carapace and looked down at the green tomalley that had splattered onto his shirt.
Iris joined them. She complimented Lorna on the little gourd centerpieces, declaring them “some cunnin’.” She looked at the wad of gum on Harvey’s plate, then at him, and tried not to pucker her lips but must have.
“It’s my last piece,” Harvey told her.
“Even funnier is that Maggie and Gus said they didn’t hear the explosions,” said Albert. “Christ, they woke up half the town, here on the far side of the mountain. Ba-boom. And you didn’t hear anything?”
Elbows on either side of his plate, roasting ear held aloft, Harvey ate down a double row of kernels, slid the furrow across his front teeth, and nibbled down a second row.
“Didn’t hear a damned thing,” he said, and winked so only Albert could see.
When Jake brought his empty dessert plate to the serving line, Maggie suggested that he try a slice of Leah’s lemon meringue. Jake said he couldn’t take another bite; he hadn’t eaten so well in months. “I’m going to need to walk it off.” He patted his belt line. “Or else lie down on the ground and sleep it off like those boys are doing.”
“You ought to see our Columbus Day mural at the school,” she said. “I’ll come with you.”
By the old blacksmith shop, where the road rose toward the town hall and school, Jake offered her his arm, which she took.
Barbara Brown waved from the doorway of her tidy cottage, and Maggie waved back.
“You hear that?” he asked.
“The rivers of wind in the trees, you mean?”
“No. The nudging and winking and whispering going on behind us,” he said.
She laughed. “It’s just the wind,” she said. “See how it bends the tall grass and goldenrod.”
“Makes me sneeze,” he said.
“How long do you think it will be before you get your orders? Weeks?” she asked. “You’ll both be missed.”
He looked away, then at her. “Months maybe,” he said. “Would you ever think of living any place but out here?”
“I thought about it every morning, like a man giving up smoking, for years until about ten years ago,” she said. “Now I think of it, though not nearly so often.”
“Why not so much any more?”
“I once believed that when Leah married, I would move off to Bangor to finish college, perhaps to live. I have several good friends there; one is especially dear. I missed the culture, movie theaters, music, telephones, the train to Boston.” She shut her eyes and smiled. “But I stayed. This is home. I’m tied here, moored.”
“To Amos or to the island?”
“To both, to one as much as the other.”
Skippy was sitting on his swing, eating what looked to be a brick from a plate in his lap, shoveling with a spoon held knuckles up. Maggie recognized Doris’s carrot cake and guessed that he had half of it. Fuddy sat against the base of the big maple, his legs splayed. In the wheelbarrow were two clam hods, one filled with ears of corn, the other with packages wrapped in waxed paper. Next to it Bender lay on his side, his pink belly so swollen with scraps and gurry that he couldn’t lie flat.
She held the school door for Jake and showed him in. The late afternoon light shone on the far wall, illuminating the Nina and Pinta and Santa Maria as they rode on cut out waves of ocean blue. Beneath the water, in letters cut in various colors, were the words “God Bless the Coast Guard.”
“It’s very nice,” he said.
“I should thank you for not asking why a woman like me never married—someone who is so devoted to children and hasn’t any of her own.”
“I’ve wondered for that reason and others.”
“And you,” she asked. “Did you ever marry? I’ve heard that you are a widower and heard the story that goes with it, but it sounds like something concocted to make summer ladies’ eyes rheumy and make you ...”
He laughed. “Romantic?”
“Yes, and inaccessible in a very attractive way.”
“Like you?” he asked.
She smiled and walked to the window. Fuddy and Skippy were making their way up the town hill, headed home. Fuddy carried a clam hod in each hand; behind him Skippy pushed Bender in the wheelbarrow.
“Poor Skippy,” she said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BEFORE THEY COULD HAVE ANY WORK DONE ON THE REST OF THE house, the Harpers had to have the sills replaced. The building had to be jacked up, and the old timbers, which had rotted because of the detritus that had settled around the foundation, had to be dug out and replaced atop the block granite walls of the cellar. When they bought the house, the Harpers joined the Point Lookout Association; this allowed them to hire the summer colony’s maintenance crew, which was skilled at remodeling old homes.
On the north side of the house, they added a wing with an extra bedroom and a paneled den with a deep stone fireplace, bookshelves, and a leather couch. They bulldozed the decrepit out-buildings, built an insulated generator shed, and wired the house for electricity. The old icebox and kerosene range were replaced with propane appliances. On the south side, which faced the cove, they built a brick patio with kitchen access and formidable granite stairs leading down to the dooryard and meadow beyond. They added storm windows and had the house scraped and painted. They took up the carpeting and had the exposed pine planks sanded and finished. They kept the beds, bureaus, and tables, and they replaced the weaker furniture—all but Ava’s wicker chair, which they left in state by the parlor window.
July 14, 1957
Dear Ruth,
Cecil has died. You were right when you said that he couldn’t last much longer. Even the morphine failed to ease his pain in the last few days, so it was a blessing when he finally succumbed yesterday at noon. Through it all Leah was a model of courage (or should I say composure? Is there a difference?). Though she could not ease his pain, she eased his fear and anger with loving care. I am so proud of her and have told her so. The funeral and service are scheduled for Tuesday. Melvin is with Leah now, and Gus, we are told, is on his way. I doubt he will bring Susan and the children, as she is due to deliver their third any day now. I’d love to see them (it’s been almost a year) but will be happy to see Gus, even in these circumstances.
Yes, it is odd to have strangers in the cove, especially in Ava’s house, though it’s hardly recognizable as hers any longer. The peaceful solitude that I have come to cherish (and that worries you so much) is still mine in the winter months, but in summer I’ll have to get used to sharing the cove. And so I shall—I think with some unexpected pleasure, despite their two boys, both “juvenile delinquents” in coonskin caps. As I told you, Marion Harper and I have had tea together several times, both here and in their kitchen, and I enjoy her company. She has a sharp mind (they are both members of Mensa) and pursues the history of the cove and island with an insatiable interest that I find endearing. I know you can imagine me spinning tales of the old days, creating (by omitting so much) an image of a happier, simpler time, a Currier and Ives history of the cove. (“Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go.” Ne
ver mind that the hag has no teeth, aches with rheumatism, and dreads our arrival.) Marion is making a scrapbook of cove history and is working on a Coombs family tree.
Professor Harper (Ed) is writing a book in defense of Dewey’s theory of pragmatic education. Last Sunday, over a glass of sherry on their patio (imagine me taking spirits not ten feet from Ava’s glaring window—how brazen!), he explained that children do not learn by rote but by experience. I wanted to ask how one experiences one’s sums, but demurred. Though he wears silk bow ties and can be a tad condescending, Ed is a personable and articulate man, and conversation with him is good exercise for my flabby intellect. We exchange magazines, my Scottish Fields for his New Yorker,; and he recently loaned me Senator Kennedy’s very fine Profiles in Courage, fresh off the press. He’s made Walter’s cabin his studio and goes there every morning to work.
How impressive that Michael has been made a partner in Armistead and McClaw! I sent him a note. When I saw the clipping, I didn’t recognize him at first (he looked so severe!), and I imagined a little tear of pride on Jack’s cheek as I read the text. And Sarah a senior at Cornell! You mustn’t scold me for sending her little gifts; they are indeed small, barely enough for a dinner or two in town—pathetic recompense for all the meals I took with your family while I was in school. I can’t wait to see the campus she describes so beautifully and to see her graduate. That will be a day to “lift one’s hat to.”
Did I tell you that I often see Marion on her patio with binoculars? She is an avid bird watcher and keeps one eye on her boys, who run wild in the cove (I forbid them to play on the cliff in front of my house, and they think me a perfect witch for it). On several occasions, however, it’s been quite obvious that it’s me Marion’s watching, as I take out the compost, empty the honey buckets, collect twigs, putter in the garden. It’s an odd and disconcerting feeling; it unsettles me because I feel my privacy violated, and for others reasons that I don’t yet understand.
