Strawberries in the Sea (11 page)

She slid a trap along the washboard and took out the coiled warp, toggle, and buoy. These traps had bricks for ballast, built right into them. They were not the heavy traps that Con had built in the winter, and they would need some loose ballast to hold them on bottom. She picked two roundish rocks out of a lobster crate that Con had filled the same day he had piled the traps on board, and laid them in the bottom of the trap, speared a filled bag with the bait-iron and threaded it onto the baitline. She fastened down the door by twisting the baitline around the cleat on the top of the trap. Spitting on the trap for luck she said, “Get in there and do me proud, baby.”

She slid the trap overboard, watching it become indistinct through sun-shot green depths as she paid out the line. As it disappeared completely she tossed over the gin-bottle toggle and the blue-and-yellow buoy.

“There we are,” she said to the boat. “Now we'll find out about these famous Bennett's Island lobsters.”

She began to get another trap ready. As the boat swung in a leisurely arc, she caught motion from the corner of her eye. Bait-iron in her hand she watched the boat come full tilt across the cove. She didn't recognize it from the direct head-on view, until she saw the green-and-white buoy mounted on the canopy roof.

Captain Goldilocks. Head of the Bennett's Island Gestapo. . . . She went on baiting the trap. Just as she slid it overboard, he slid alongside, gaff out to keep the boats close but not touching; his paint job was so new it looked like fine white china.

I'll bet he's nasty-neat, she thought. She tossed over the buoy and turned to him with a broad, dazzing smile. “
Good
morning, Skipper! I want to thank you for putting my boat off the other night.”

“That's a nice boat,” he said coldly. “I'd hate to see anything happen to her. I don't know what you've got at Seal Point, but around here you just can't leave a boat tied up at a wharf and forget all about her, especially with low green tides.”

“I wouldn't have forgotten her, ordinarily, but I—” She stopped herself. What the hell business is it of yours? she thought. She slid another trap into place and began taking out the warp and buoy, conscious of his eyes. They had the pure almost dazzling blue of shadows on fresh snow. They made her defiant and flourishy in her motions.

“When's your man coming with the rest of his gear?” he asked

“He's been and gone, Herr Kapitan. Don't tell me you never noticed.”

He ignored that so well she wondered if she'd said it aloud. “How many more traps will you be setting after these?”

“Your uncle told me there'd be no objection.”

“My uncle isn't a lobster fisherman, he just buys our lobsters. He doesn't speak for everybody.”

She rested her hands on the top of the trap and looked at him. “I take it you're registering an objection here and now.”

“Maybe not to these forty traps, if that's all, though they could be a hell of a nuisance. Did he tell you about our limits?”

Her neck was as stiff as his. “He did. No more than two hundred traps apiece in to the rocks. Listen, I'm reasonable. I'll go by the rules. Right now I've got only these, and you won't find any of them near yours.”

“Thanks,” he said. There was a faint change in his face, she couldn't tell whether it was amusement or anger. In any case, it couldn't get by the ice.
What if your face froze that way?
they used to say when she was small and pulled her mouth around in a sulk or a squawk.

“By the way,” she said breezily, “your uncle says you've got a skiff for sale. How much do you want for her?”

“If I sell her, fifty bucks.”

“
If
you sell her, will you sell her to me?”

“I suppose your money's as good as anybody's.”

“You never can tell. I might have printed it up in my cellar just last week.” She felt like telling him what he could do with the skiff, but he must have known what she was thinking. She waited while he gazed off toward shore, and finally she looked too. The two boats were being carried on the tide gently but inexorably toward the steep inner bank of the cove. The girls were descending a long flight of wooden steps to the pebble beach. The long fair hair; Linnea Sorensen. Of course.

“You can have her,” Jamie said abruptly.

Nearly killed you, didn't it? she thought.

“I'll bring a check to your fishhouse when I see you're in this afternoon. Okay?”

He nodded, turned back to his wheel, and put his engine in gear. He slid past
Sea Star
's stern and spun away in a wide circle toward the mouth of the cove. He didn't look back. “Adios, muchacho!” she called after him.

She baited and set the trap, but forgot to spit on it. “Oh well,” she said, “Our Leader has given you his blessing. What more do you expect?”

The girls shed shirts, appeared in bikinis, and arranged themselves on the rocks. Some younger children began to wade. Someone saw Rosa, and everyone waved. She waved back, but left the cove looking for more deserted spots in which to set gear. Now she could see why hermits became hermits. Alone, you were all to yourself in one concentrated package. With other people you were scattered around in bits, no two pieces the same. Whatever anyone's image of you was, even in the most casual context, it was something stolen from you. Given enough people, there'd be none of you left; you could disappear after all, leaving only your name.

She went back along the southeastern side the way she had come, and set a few here, a few there, wherever she saw other buoys (except Jamie Sorensen's) but not near enough to be in the way. Then she cruised around the outside islets where gulls and shags had their rookeries, ran halfway to Matinicus Rock to feel the deep-water motion under her, and jogged back admiring the island from afar.

She returned to the harbor by way of the Eastern End, sailing under the Head where there must always be a surge as there was at the other end of the island. When she came along Long Cove she met the mail-boat leaving the harbor. There were a few passengers, who waved, and the captain swung his arm out the wheelhouse window. She felt almost like a native, and came into the harbor singing, until she saw the scattering of women and children around the wharf and the store. Silently she went to her mooring, made fast, and rowed to her own wharf. She was still under the spell of the morning. Nothing had been real out there but herself, the boat, the gear, and the sea. Con had become insubstantial, a fog-phantom burning up in the sunlight. This was going to be easy, she thought. She could hardly believe it, but she'd had the proof.

She started to walk home with the proof intact, and Maggie Dinsmore sang out from a kitchen window, “Hello, there! How've you been?”

“Oh, fine!” She kept on walking but Maggie came out to her, Tiger ahead and the little girls hurrying so as not to miss anything. They stood staring up at Rosa with hardly a blink between them.

“Would you come down to supper tonight?” Maggie asked. “I wanted to ask you before but I haven't seen you, except once when you were to the well and I was doing something I couldn't leave.”

How could you fall so far and still be standing in one place? She was too hot, too tired, too depressed, and too stupid. “Well, I—could I come another time?” she asked, stumblingly. “I'd enjoy it more. I'm so tired at night right now.”

“Oh, sure, sure,” the other soothed her. “Of course! I know how it is. It's so different out here, I always say it's another world, another
planet
really. Like something on that TV show
Star Trek
. You know?” She laughed heartily at that, and Rosa joined her; it was easy, she was so relieved.

“Mama knew you were coming,” one of the children said suddenly. “She saw you in her teacup.”

“It must have been an awful big teacup,” said Rosa. The child put her hand over her mouth and giggled. Maggie let out a robust guffaw.

“In the leaves,” she explained. “I read the tea leaves. Sometimes I hit things right,” she added modestly. “I've got second sight, you know. It runs in the family. My aunt was a medium. I'll read for you sometime, if you like,” she offered.

“That would be fun,” said Rosa untruthfully, determined never to go near the Dinsmore house or even approach a teacup if Maggie were in its vicinity. “So long,” she said to the children, and winked solemnly at the smaller one, who was convulsed with joyful surprise.

In her own yard she sank down on the cellar bulkhead and put her head in her hands. Oh Con, she thought wearily, what in hell am I doing out here, away from you?

Now that she had actually set the traps, everything she had done so far seemed incredible. She was stuck in the glue of a dream that wouldn't release her, and she could partially move within its tiny radius, able to make only feeble, crippled motions and never escape again.

She couldn't endure it. Dearest Jesus, she prayed with the fervor she'd had as a religious child, what's happening to me? I can't die, but I can't live either. Help me.

There was no answer, either in herself or from the kindly big brother she'd imagined Jesus to be in those hero-worshiping days. And she was ashamed of her appeal. It was so conceited and trivial and selfish to pray for salvation from her own foolishness when at this very moment people were dying of famine, war, and fire, and some child was being murdered by its own parents.

The gruesome image bounced her up off the bulkhead and into the house, where she washed up with cold water and a lot of spirited splashing, and began to get a noon meal ready.

A
large damp patch on the ceiling in the front bedroom upstairs showed where the roof needed patching. Reluctantly she conceded that she might have to borrow a ladder for that. She had her heart set on puttying windows, but a soaking rain could bring this ceiling down.— What she really wanted, of all things, was to be out aboard again. If there was one place in this world where she could escape Con, it was with the boat, and that was a funny thing when you considered how much time she and Con had spent aboard
Sea Star
at the first of their marriage. She'd been some happy, and she knew now that he'd been just putting up with it.

With a grimace rather than a sigh, she sat down on a scarred old sea chest under the windows and looked out across the village. At least it wasn't Seal Point. Nobody out here gave a hoot in hell about her and Con; the women taking in their washing, hovering over their gardens, setting out for walks or calls; the children playing around the long harbor beach, small ones climbing over a couple of beached seine dories, older ones rowing out to fish; the men working on gear on their wharves or socializing in fishhouse doorways.

Some little girls were trundling doll carriages across the marshy field past the schoolhouse that faced out to sea across Schoolhouse Cove. They helped each other get the carriages over the tumbled rocks and tide rubble left on the brow of the beach by the last flood tide, and disappeared toward the water. At the far end of the long curve, Wind-ward Point thrust out toward the open Atlantic. She remembered how it looked from the water when she was setting her first traps on the other side of it, which brought her inevitably to Jamie Sorensen.

His boat was on the mooring now, so she wrote out a check to him and walked down to the fishhouse. Maggie wasn't around to hail her this time, but a dark-haired woman at the well called, “Hello!” She seemed about to make more of it, but was diverted when the dark collie with her started to lift his leg against the wellcurb. While she was scolding him, Rosa kept on going.

Someone was building traps in the fishhouse. The door was open and a radio was tuned low to the ball game in Boston. The man who was lathing trap bottoms at the bench wasn't Jamie; braced for meeting him, she started to back away before the stranger could notice her, but as if he had eyes in the back of his fair head he said without looking around, “Don't run off.”

He put down his hammer and turned around to her, his hand out. “I'm Nils Sorensen. I knew your father. Welcome to Bennett's Island.”

They shook hands. With him the blue eyes were a different matter, neither cold nor suspicious. This was a man, not an arrogant kid. “Your son's selling me a skiff,” she said. “I came down to pay him.”

“Jamie's catching up on his sleep right now, they'll be out looking for herring tonight. The skiff's tied to your ladder.”

“Well, would you give him the check?” She took it out.

“Don't you want to look at her before you pay for her?”

“If she'll get me to the mooring and back, that's all I care.”

“Come see her anyway.”

The skiff floated in the shadowy rectangle between the wharves. Her buff paint was clean, and the oars were tucked neatly under the seats. The bottom looked dry.

“She looks solid enough,” Rosa said. “And big enough. I need something a little more than a sardine tin.”

“She's eleven foot, and solid, all right. Jamie built her himself.”

“I shouldn't think he'd want to part with such a good piece of work.”

“Because he likes his new one better. This one's a little too flat-bottomed to suit him. She was an experiment, more or less. The new one's faster.”

“Well, she'll suit me,” said Rosa. “I don't think I'll be rowing in any races.”

“You can't tell what you're likely to get into out here.” There was an aura of kindness about him, and she wondered if he were speaking to True McKinnon's fat little motherless girl. Well, that was a change from being Con Flemming's deluded fool of a wife.

“Maybe Maggie Dinsmore can find out in her tea leaves,” she said.

“Maggie's a great addition to the place. We never knew what we'd been missing till she showed up. But just don't believe that Ouija board of hers. Thing's an unprincipled liar.” They both laughed, and it was a good time to leave.