Strawberries in the Sea (12 page)

“Well, I'd better row Mr. Bennett's skiff back to the car,” she said. “Will you give this to your son, please?”

“I shall do so.” He put the check in his shirt pocket. “Thank you.”

Nobody was on the lobster car when she tied up there, but there was conversation in the store so she walked quickly by, and turned off onto the lane, wondering if she could borrow a ladder from Ralph. The trouble was, he'd probably want to patch the roof for her, unless she was lucky and he had no head for heights. Con couldn't even stand getting onto the shed roof at home. Poor Con. . . . Poor Con
hell
.

There was an aluminum extension ladder out behind Ralph's shed, but no sign of Ralph. She went home and painted the toilet seat with gray deck paint. The door needed re-hanging but that wasn't an emergency. She decided to putty the front downstairs windows instead, and she could reach most of their upper sashes by standing on a lobster crate. She worked through sunset, when she suddenly realized she was hungry. After a can of soup for supper it was easy to fall into bed and drift off to sleep.

In the morning everything was too wet with dew for her to go back to puttying, and the traps would have to soak for a few days. So she began tackling some of the darker corners of the house, beginning with the back entry. Everything went out into the yard, to be inspected for potential worth or destruction. There were some tattered flannel shirts that would make good cleaning rags, and a couple of earthenware crocks. One of these held the shrunken remains of mackerel salted so long ago there was not even a smell left. And behind the crocks, under a rickety shelf (which Jude had never built), she discovered what every house should have.

“Well, we are certainly off to a good start today,” she said, hauling it out into the open. It was a dust-furred, mouse-visited wooden box bearing the dim words Common Crackers.

It held a lavish jumble of nuts, bolts, screws, nails ranging from threepenny fines to wharf spikes; hooks and eyes; washers; twists of wire, little balls of twine; a faucet for an oil drum; padlocks and keys, rusty drills, unmatched hinges, parts of door latches. There were also a hacksaw, wrenches of different kinds, half a folding rule, several chisels, a hammer, and a screwdriver. Treasure indeed.

She remembered seeing a shelf of empty preserve jars in the cellar, and she opened the bulkheads to the sun and brought up an armful of jars. With a mug of coffee beside her on the doorstep she spent an absorbed hour sorting out the small hardware into containers. She was able to match up some of the keys and padlocks. Anything rusty but still good went into a jar of kerosene to soak.

She swept the entry clean of cobwebs and mouse dirt, washed the small window, reinforced the shelf, and arranged her jars on it. She washed a thick pelt of dust from the cracker box and put the tools back into it, and anything else that was too big for the jars but which might come in handy.

With that done, satisfactory as it had been, she felt one of those wild, restless, forlorn spells coming on, that incredulous waking up to the facts. So she went out to Barque Cove and down onto the beach with an idea of going all the way to Sou'west Point, driving the devils away by a strenuous hike, if that was the only thing that worked.

She'd been so busy until now that she hadn't even been down on the beach yet. It was a narrow, steep, stony stretch between the pink eastern wall and the black western side where the rocks were like a flow of petrified lava. Wild rosebushes and beach peas grew up through the tidal detritus at the top of the beach, and in a wet, tussocky area behind it blue flag grew in thick sheaves, boneset, swamp candles, snow bedstraw, bindweed. The beach was so cluttered with driftwood that she had to pick her way, and the first whole board stopped her.

She carried everything good back to the foot of the track and then up to the top of the pink wall. The sun was hot down here, it dazzled off the pale smooth stones, and drew up a moist enervating air from the ground. If she wanted exhaustion she'd found it. After she'd struggled up the track with a fifteen-foot hardwood plank, still partly water-soaked, she collapsed panting in a hollow full of buttercups and lay supine until she realized she was sharing the hollow with ants as well as buttercups.

Groaning, she got up and looked at her loot without much enthusiasm. The thought that every beach along the west side must have held an abundance of driftwood only filled her with fatigue. Being a compulsive beachcomber could be as bad as being a compulsive eater, except that it wouldn't add weight.

Well, there it was, and like everything she'd sorted through this morning, it might come in handy. My motto, she thought sourly. Is that what I thought about Con?

She loaded up with what she could carry and went slowly and awkwardly home along the winding path. At least it was cool in the woods. She wished for a pail of fresh cold water at the end of the trail, but she'd have to get it for herself.

She came into the yard and could have sworn aloud. There were four girls this time, just coming across what should have been her lawn. The Sorensen girl was ahead, carrying a plate wrapped in a dish towel.

What in hell do they think I
am?
Rosa cried silently. Some kind of
freak?

The girls seemed startled at the sight of her. Linnie's “Hi” was a little breathless. Rosa dropped her load with a crash and said, “All I need is a good long trunk and then I could be my own work elephant.”

They giggled and became ordinary kids again, not young sadists come to stare at a woman who couldn't keep a man. “I
love
beach-combing,” the Shetland pony said fervently. “We've lugged home so much stuff the barn's getting full and Daddy keeps threatening the biggest bonfire we ever saw.”

“Did you ever look for ambergris,” Linnie asked Rosa, “and keep thinking how rich you'd be, and what you'd do with all your money?”

“I used to get all fussed up trying to decide how to spend it,” said Rosa. “I'd have exploded if I ever found any. But I was always looking.”

“Now I bet it isn't worth anything,” the new girl said, sounding cheated. “They do everything with chemicals.” She had a strong resemblance to Holly Bennett, the Shetland pony, except that her hair was cut short like a black lamb's fleece. Linnie introduced her as a cousin, Betsey Bennett. Holly had gone back out of sight around the corner.

Linnie held out the plate. “Yeast rolls. My mother's baking bread today. She says she won't call till you want callers, but this is a kind of hello.”

“Hello,” Rosa said to the towel. She breathed deeply of the scented steam and said, “Gorgeous. Thank your mother.”

Holly appeared carrying a guitar. “We were wondering—”

“You mean
you
were,” said Vic. Holly was flustered but persistent.

“All right, me. I was wondering if you'd show me a little about it. I can play some, but not much.”

“Well now, listen, I'm not so hot,” said Rosa.

“But you've been playing so long, you must know an awful lot more about it than we do.”

“I can't think of anything,” Rosa stalled, “until I have a drink. I'm dryer than a cork leg and there's no fresh water in the house.”

“I'll go!” Holly pushed the guitar at her cousin. “Where's the pail?”

Rosa went in and got it, pouring the stale water into the wash basin. Holly went off at a run, swinging the pail. Rosa sat down on the doorstep, and Betsey sat on the bulkhead, cuddling the guitar. Vic was always in motion, hands fidgeting, bare toes wiggling. Now she was loudly inhaling lilac scent. But Linnie, standing perfectly still, had a quality of concentrating her entire being on one object, and right now it was Rosa.

“Jamie Sorensen must be your brother,” she said.

“The Golden Fleece,” said Vic. “I could eat him. I keep wearing my sexy perfume I got for Christmas, but he doesn't even look at me unless I can make him trip over me.”

“I told you how Jamie was,” Linnie said.

“Sure, but I believed all those stories my mother told me about movie stars making it with freckles and buck teeth, so I was brainwashed into thinking I'd knock him dead when I stepped off the boat.”

“You haven't got buck teeth,” Linnie objected.

“Oh yeah? Well, I've got an awfully short upper lip, then. That's great, if a man's crazy about rabbits.” She burst out laughing and so did Linnie, but Rosa wondered what Vic's self-ridicule really covered. She reached for the guitar and began to tune it. Linnie sat down cross-legged, graceful and erect. Vic fell down like a gangly pup, all elbows.

“When I get to college,” she said, lying on her back and pointing a leg at the sky, “I'll probably turn into a real sexpot. Then he'll go mad with desire and I'll laugh in his face. ‘Burn, little Jamie, smoulder smoulder,'” she sang to
Glow Worm
. “ ‘You'll really burn before you're older—' ”

Rosa played along with her. Vic sat up, grinning in surprise and delight, but couldn't think of anything more to sing, filled out with
dahde-dah
and a finish of great power if not melody; “Darn it, I've gone blank!”

They all applauded, and Linnie shouted, “Bravo, bravo!” Holly arrived with the water pail, hardly out of breath though she seemed to have ran all the way. The large collie who had tried to desecrate the wellcurb came behind her, switching his stern happily at the sounds of good fellowship. He went to Linnie and she took his head in her hands and they gazed into each other's eyes.

“Thanks, Holly,” Rosa said, taking the pail. “Anybody want a cold drink?” Nobody did. She took the pail into the house, had a drink, and came out again. Linnie was still holding communion of souls with the dog. Vic was now doing push-ups, Betsey chewed grass, Holly played chords and sang to herself some vaguely familiar country-western song.

All those long bare legs, how Con would love it, Rosa thought dryly. And if he should walk into the yard right now, they wouldn't even know I was alive any more. Nor I them. . . . She took the guitar that Holly pushed at her, hunched over it and shut her eyes, shut out the girls. Without singing, she played
Moonlight Cocktail
to limber up, and was transported to the back doorstep at Seal Point, Con lying on the lawn with a cold can of beer beside him, the resident gull on his corner of the wharf, and beyond him the tame harbor cross-stitched with summer's noisy runabouts.

Con liked her music, she could at least say that, though the minute she did she could see how pathetic it was. . . . Applause returned her to Bennett's Island, and she blinked at the girls, playing her part of good-natured simpleton. Holly was on her knees, as close as she could get. She moaned, “I can never,
never
do that. How do you do it?”

“My brother does something like that, but he'd never show us how,” said Betsey.

“Male chauvinist pig,” said Vic. “That's what they all are, besides being absolutely adorable.”

“It's easy,” Rosa told the younger girls. “Like drumming your fingers on the table. See?” She demonstrated on the step and then across the strings. Holly and Betsey tried and were frustrated, Betsey silently scowling. Holly made dramatic gestures of despair.

“Play something else,” she begged. Rosa couldn't resist the admiration. At least it wasn't the sweetness that put weight on. Better than eclairs, wasn't it? Or alcohol? She played and sang a few short simple songs, then gathered the girls in on
The Tavern in the Town
, which they sang with a good deal of energy.

“There,” she said at the end. “That enough?”

Holly asked her about popular songs, and she shook her head. “You can get that stuff on records. Some of it's nice, I'll grant that, but most of it's not for me. I do my own thing.”

“What kind of love songs do you like?” Linnie asked. “Love?” Rosa made her eyes round. “What's that? I just know about the grass growing, and the birds singing, and the fish swimming.”

“Sing just one thing more,” Vic urged. “How come you aren't out being a folk singer?”

“I thought you had to have long hair and a beard for that,” said Rosa. “Okay, one more and then I have to go back to work.” She sang
Strawberries in the Sea
, and they were very quiet. When she finished Vic said, “That's a nursery rhyme but you sing it like blues. I've got gooseflesh.”

“I love it, but it's not long enough,” said Betsey. “Can't you write some more verses?”

“Oh, no, it's perfect the way it is,” Vic objected. “It leaves you wondering all kinds of things.”

Linnie, using the dog for a pillow, said, “Jamie should hear it. Anything that mentions herring sends him.”

“I knew someone once named Marilyn Herring,” said Vic. “If I was Victoria Herring Jamie would be at my feet.”

“He sure would,” said Linnie kindly. “He's so crazy about herring he couldn't resist the temptation to marry one.”

“Is he a seiner?” Rosa asked.

“Sort of. A stop-twiner, really. He's got a crew and they stop off the island coves. They were out last night looking for fish, and I wanted Vic and me to go, but the
Centurion
and a carrier were on their way out, and Jamie kept saying there might be trouble. If you ask me he's
hoping
for trouble. My father says he's a Viking throwback.”

“I've seen
Centurion
in the harbor at home,” Rosa said. “The stop-twiners in there aren't too fond of the purse-seiners, either.”

“No, they break up the big schools or divert them before they get into the coves. And the carriers slice off pot buoys like crazy with their propellers, if they don't have cages, and most of them don't. I don't mean they do it on purpose, but how can they help it, when everybody's set in so close to the island in summertime?” She stood up and stretched; her hair in the sun was more golden than her brother's. “Anyway, there wasn't trouble, but then Jamie never found any herring either.”