Strawberries in the Sea (6 page)

The red spar buoy reared up ahead of her as if it had that instant shot up from the sea. Her heart too seemed to shoot up; she felt half-drunk and trembly, her mouth smiling foolishly by itself. That was the Harbor Ledge buoy.

She went well to the starboard of it and then made a turn to the east, and there, rising above her like a hill of gold in the sunlight, were the high yellow rocks of the western point of Bennett's Island harbor.

R
ounding the beacon on the end of the breakwater she reduced speed and went slowly into the harbor. At once it was very hot and still, the motionless water throwing up an eye-burning shimmer, the village and spruce woods very clear and bright against the blue-white glare of fog beyond. It was only a little past seven and she felt as if it should be seven the next morning, her awaking, packing, and hidden departure seemed so far away.

A boat passed her, going out. The man at the wheel stared at her, then waved hastily as if he'd just remembered his manners. All but two of the moorings were empty except for skiffs, showing that almost everyone had gone out in the expectation of the fog burning off. It was too early for the children to be playing, and she was glad of the emptiness, and hoped it would last until she got into the house.

She wondered which was Jude's wharf, and if she could get into it. The tide had been going and was fairly low now. Then she saw the big wharf where her father used to load lobsters, and headed toward it. The harbor was so much smaller than Seal Point that she felt as if she were maneuvering on a chalk line among the skiffs, and she went very slowly, getting out of her wool shirt with one hand while sweat soaked the hair on her forehead and the back of her neck.

As she approached one of the boats left behind, she saw a man's bare blond head just showing over the washboard. The cant of it was familiar; for all her life she had seen men on their knees beside recalcitrant engines. She idled hers and got her gaff ready to keep the boats from rubbing; his paint looked glassy with newness.

“Hello!” she called as
Sea Star
slid alongside. His head came around fast and he looked across the washboard at her with blue eyes, not the greenish-blue sparkling color of Con's. These were a dark and quiet blue under eyebrows lighter than his skin.

“Will you please tell me which is Jude Webster's wharf?” she asked.

He stood up and she saw that he was bigger and older than she'd thought. Still with no discernible expression he said, “Jude sold out?”

“He's thinking about it,” she said. His hair was sun-bleached almost silver. A cold color, like the way he looked at her. She thought of hair red enough so that the sight of it warmed your hands. Her eyes felt scalded from staring so long into the fog, she felt their sick staring and was sure he felt it, but she couldn't stop it; and she was homesick enough to die.

“Thinking about it,” she repeated dully, wondering who was thinking about what.

“Where's your husband? Down below? Coming in another boat?”

“Which is Jude's wharf?”

“You people figuring on fishing those traps out here?”

She hadn't. The traps were just there when she took the boat. But she rose to his bleak challenge.

“What's it to you?”

“How come Jude let you come out here cold? Why didn't he write or call up to see if it was all right to let another fisherman in here? Forgot his obligations, didn't he?”

He didn't raise his voice, which made it worse. She'd been lacerated to begin with, now she was suffering from homesickness and the inevitable let-down after the pride and exhilaration of her perfectly navigated trip. She was astonished by her impulse to strike with the gaff at his stolid face.

She said stiffly, “Maybe he reckoned forty traps wasn't going to put anybody out of business, everybody's so rich on Bennett's Island.”

It got a reaction; at least something flickered across his face, and then he said, “Only forty traps and a boat that size. It doesn't add up.”

“While you check your arithmetic, I could be tying up at Jude's wharf, if I knew where it was.”

“Oh, it's over there,” he said indifferently, pointing to a cluster of wharves halfway around the harbor's curve. “The second one in, with the fishhouse that needs paint.”

“Thank
you
.” She unhooked her gaff. “I'm much obliged.”

“If I was your husband, whenever he gets here, I wouldn't rush to set 'em, only forty or no. People don't just come on here and start lobstering as simple as that.”

“So I can see,” she said. “Especially if you meet them all in the harbor. They must be a year older before they ever set foot on shore. You forgot to ask for my passport, and I'm glad of that because I'm traveling with forged papers.”

He turned his back on her abruptly. She reversed
Sea Star
away from his boat and headed toward the wharves. There was deep water off the outer ends, and space between the wharves if she wanted to run Sea Star up inside. For the time being she tied the boat bow and stern off the end, and got her gear onto the wharf still blessedly unobserved, unless it was from some of the houses across the harbor. With everything landed, she stood on the wharf a few minutes to realize that she was actually on Bennett's Island.

The light and the silence and the space were as she had imagined it, the gulls' cries small from the uninterrupted sky. A group of female eiders shepherded their large flock of ducklings among the harbor ledges. The infants made tiny excited sounds and upended ardently in the floating rockweed, the mothers kept up their warnings and their watch on a black back gull paddling greedily back and forth.

“The eider ducklings will be out now,” Edwin had written, and she wondered how many times as a little boy he had stood here, not hearing, but seeing everything.

From the wharves there came the sweetish reek of grassed-over traps brought in to dry out. There was a double rank of them on the Webster wharf, and she carried her things up a narrow aisle.

The shabby fishhouse was unlocked. It seemed to be full of cultch of one kind or another, and at first glance nothing looked like anything except the wheelbarrow, which she took out. She put her food and her sleeping bag on it, stowed the other things in the building and wheeled onto the sand and coarse turf. A rough track ran around the harbor behind the fishouses, and once she had crossed it she wasn't sure where to go. The houses were set haphazard, some back from the water and against the spruce woods, some less than a hundred feet from the wharves. She could hear a radio from behind the kitchen screen door of the nearest one, a woman's voice, children, yet she could not make herself go to the door and ask directions. The encounter in the harbor had shaken her more than she realized; the business with Con had scraped her raw in spots.

And she was tired. The ground rose and fell under her feet in swells like the sea. She blinked, trying to steady either her head or the view, whichever was going out of focus, and with dumb resignation she heard a dog coming at her.

His roaring charge stopped short at the wheelbarrow, where he began amiably sniffing at the load, and then lifted his leg at the wheel. He was only a small red shaggy dog after all, but through her blurred eyes he'd seemed as big as a chow.

“Come back here, you chump!” a man called from the screen door. He came out and clumped down over the lawn in his rubber boots, a round-faced man with a little belly out over his belt. “Kids call him Tiger, he figgers he has to live up to his name.” His smile was shy but friendly. “Saw you coming in. Awful thick chance, warn't it?”

“Pretty thick.” She tried to smile back. “Can you tell me the way to Jude Webster's house?”

“Go right up across the field there by the well, then you go through that clump of spruces and across the path and you'll see it.” He turned around, pointing. “Not that one out in the open there, that's Percys'. You can't see Jude's from here, it's grown up some thick around it.”

Which suits me, she thought.

“Thanks,” she said, reaching down for the wheelbarrow handles.

“I'll go down and give your man a hand,” he said. “He's not there,” she said quickly. “I mean . . . I'm alone.”

“
You
brought that boat out alone, blind?” He marveled, and she felt a slight glimmer of pride. “Well, I'll be cussed. You musta been around the water all your life then.”

“Just about.”

From behind the screen door a young woman's voice called, “I thought you was having a long confab with Tiger out here, Rob.” She came out onto the doorstep, two little girls crowding behind her.

“Somebody for Jude's place, Maggie.”

The wife was skinny and sandy in coloring but she was as ardent as a child in her candid and expectant curiosity. “Oh! Isn't that
nice!
Pleased to meet you. We're the Dinsmores, Rob and Maggie and Tammy and Diane.”

“Hello.” Rosa ducked her head. “I'm Rosa Fleming, Jude's cousin.” Good God, this could go on forever. “Well, my butter's probably melting. Is that the village well, or —”

“Oh sure, that's for everybody,” Rob said. “Never goes dry.”

“Real good water,” Maggie said. “If you haven't got a decent pail, I can lend you one.”

“Thanks, I'll take you up on the offer if I need to,” Rosa said. The ground had stopped heaving and the wave of weariness had receded. She began wheeling again along the path that passed the Dinsmore house and cut diagonally across the field by the well. When she passed into the cool wet shade of the spruces and went onto another path, full of small birds flashing back and forth, relief gave her the impetus to shove the heavy wheelbarrow up the ledgy little track among the trees to the Webster house. She went around to the back door through tall grass and daisies, and then the house was between her and the place next door, between her and the whole village. Otherwise she was surrounded by woods.

There were unpruned lilacs under the kitchen windows, an enormous thicket of them bent down with heavy purple blooms; the yard was full of their scent, something of home and yet not of home. She unlocked the entry door and went in.

The paint was shabby, the paper peeling in spots, the house smelled mousy, spiders lived in all the corners. Sunshine sliced through the emptiness. It was the emptiness that she cherished, like the pocket wilderness outside. When she walked through to the other side of the house, she found that more spruces diminished the house next door to a glimpse of white clapboards and a glimmer of windows through sweeping boughs.

The place was clean except for dust and insects. A pair of galvanized pails had been left upside down beside the sink; it was a black sink, and rusty, but she could soon fix that with kerosene. She took one of the pails and went down to the well. She didn't worry about eyes now. She was excited about her house and could only think of getting back to it.

There were two lamps under paper bags, and odds and ends of dishes in the cupboards, a few battered pots and pans under the counter. A little wood had been left in the wood-box and she built a fire to heat water. There was a gas stove and refrigerator, but no gas. She didn't care. She opened the cellar bulkhead and an earthy coldness came up to her. There were no wild animals here bigger than mice to take a cellar over. She could keep her food cool down here, all right.

When the water was hot she made tea and took her lunch out onto the back doorstep, and ate gazing into the woods and watching the birds that lived out their lives without caring how she lived hers. Gulls circled far over head in wide leisurely arcs. She could hear the bell buoy clanging desultorily to the southwest of her.

Gradually she became aware of the wash along the shores somewhere beyond the belt of spruces, perhaps breaking in the cove Edwin had mentioned. She wanted to walk out there and see, but she could not move. She leaned her head back against the scaly clapboards and looked up at the circling gulls. Her hands and feet were too heavy to move, and her eyes kept closing.

She staggered up finally and went into the kitchen, undid her sleeping bag with slack, fumbling fingers, and spread it on the dry floor where the sun had been. She took off her sneakers and outer clothes and zipped herself in. For a few minutes as she lay there with her eyes closed she heard the wind beginning to blow through the trees, chickadees loud and strong just outside a window, a fly buzzing against a pane, a mysterious ticking, creaks in the house, a little scurrying somewhere. . . . Good thing I'm not scared of mice, she thought drunkenly, and slept.

S
he woke to darkness and silence, and lay stiffly still, fearfully seeking something familiar, and finding only alien forms: the gray oblongs of the windows too far above her, the hardness beneath her, the foreign hush—no clocks, no harbor or road sounds. This, as if she had suddenly gone as deaf as Edwin, panicked her.

“Con,” she said with the thick, labored utterance of nightmare.

As if his name were a signal for her brain to wake completely, she knew at once where she was. Then she heard through the night the strange foghorn, and close at hand a faint fine dripping from the lilac leaves outside the windows, and inside the little creakings and tickings of the house.

She unzipped the sleeping bag and sat up groggily, her mouth dry, her back and hips lame from the floor. Quarter of ten. The tiny illuminated face of her watch was friendly and reassuring. At least it could have been, but she felt anything but befriended and reassured. She crawled around on her hands and knees, feeling through her scattered dunnage for her flashlight.

She went up to the little toilet discreetly set among spruces. The door was hanging off the hinges, and the place needed a good sweeping down and cleaning out, but it wasn't foul. Afterwards she didn't want to go back into the house, so she walked along the edge of the woods flashing her light among the wet black trunks. It picked up a well-beaten path winding away from her in the general direction of the foghorn.