The Dawning of the Day (21 page)

“We'll settle the grades later. Meanwhile we'll arrange the seats. No one happens to be using yours, Rue. Edwin—” He was staring past her at the board. There was not the slightest flinch of perception when she spoke.

“Can't he sit by me?” Rue broke in rapidly. “Mis' Gerrish wouldn't let him, because he was in a different grade and all, and she thought he'd act up worse, anyway. But he'd be a lot better if he could sit by me.”

Color streamed into her meager face. Her tired eyes took on a sheen of intensity. Philippa said, “Sit down, Rue. Anywhere. Make Edwin sit down too. And then tell me about him. You know what he can do and what he can't do.”

Rue touched Edwin, and he shook his head and went over to the windows. Rue sat down stiffly.

“Edwin's deaf,” she said.

It was that simple.

Daniel wandered around the desk, sucking a parboiled thumb. Philippa lifted him into her lap. “Doesn't anyone else know?” she asked.

“Just us in my house. I never told anybody before now because I promised my mother I'd never tell. Faith promised too.” Her colorless young mouth trembled slightly. “But I've got to tell now, if we're coming to school. Edwin's been beat enough. I promised him nobody'd strap him any more.”

“That's right, Rue,” Philippa said. “Nobody will.”

“He acts so bad people think he's either a devil or foolish. He started school all right, back on the mainland, and learned to read, and then after he had diphtheria he began to get deaf. We didn't know he was deaf for a long time. We just knew he got to be so awful acting nobody could do anything with him. First we thought he was born to be bad, and maybe took after Mamma's brother that had to be put in Thomas-ton prison. But when we found out he was deaf, it was worse.”

The words came out flat and fast; they had been shut up in her for too long. “Papa's a good carpenter and he could pay a doctor. He wanted to take Edwin to Waterville or Portland, but every time he talked about it Mamma got so sick it scared him.” There was a fierce defiance in her; she was shamed by the thing she hardly understood. “Papa tried to tell her there wasn't anything to hide, but she wouldn't believe him. She thinks because Edwin's deaf, he's tainted somehow.”

Philippa wished she could hold Rue as she held Daniel. The girl must have ached with her rigidity. Edwin stood by the windows looking out.

“Wasn't there anyone else who took an interest?” she asked. “What about school?”

“They put him out, finally, because he acted so, and then when a woman came to talk to Mamma about him, and maybe find out what ailed him, Mamma got scared and carried on till Papa decided to move out of town right off, the next day. He didn't want to go, he had to leave his job, but Mamma wanted it.” Rue spoke relentlessly, neither lifting nor lowering her voice. Red blotched her face. “Edwin never went to school again on the mainland. Mamma told people in the new place he wasn't bright enough to go. She said he fell out of his high chair when he was a baby and hurt his head. . . . I helped him all I could at home. Then Cap'n Charles hired Pa to come out here and work, and Mamma said it would be a good place to hide Edwin.” Her light eyes shifted toward her brother's back. “I took him to school here, but Mrs. Gerrish didn't like him much. The kids plagued him in the yard about the way he tries to talk, but he could keep 'em off by plugging rocks at 'em.”

Her mouth curled in a humorless smile. “Couldn't throw rocks at Mrs. Gerrish, and she liked to work out her strap on him. Now I can feel kind of sorry for her. She was awful tired of this place by Christmas, and she thought Edwin was possessed to torment her.”

Philippa stroked Daniel's back with a steady hand, but inwardly she was shaken with rage. There was no need to ask if Mrs. Gerrish had ever called on the Webster parents. “I don't hold with letting parents get involved in school affairs,” she had told Philippa. “As soon as you call on a mother, she starts telling you how Johnny is different from the rest, and then she'll be dropping in every other day to make sure you're treating him with the proper respect.”

Philippa had laughed at the time. Now she wondered if Mrs. Gerrish would have shown more forbearance with Edwin if she had known he was handicapped. It was not likely. She would still have found him unmanageable. Perhaps he would be a problem to Philippa; she could only try. Now he stood by the window, set free from his tension by something he saw outside, a fish hawk beating its wings in space high over Long Cove. Thus relaxed, he was simply an undersized boy with a pinched, bony face and big eyes that moved with an animal's preternatural swiftness.

“How old is Edwin?” she asked.

“Eleven.”

“And you're sure you can take care of him in school?”

Rue's smile was faint but proud. “Last year he'd have been all right if she'd let him sit by me. The way it is in a school like this one, after the teacher gets through with your class, you've got plenty of time to get your own lessons and still help somebody else. We'd have made out fine if—” Her eyes shifted to a point past Philippa's head. “If they'd let us.”

“Well, I think you'll have a chance to show me how well you can manage, Rue. We'll put Edwin by you and move Peggy back a seat. And Daniel can be the whole preprimary.” She sat the little boy down at the table in the corner beyond her desk.

“Look, it's just your size!” she exclaimed in creditable surprise.

Daniel was amazed at the coincidence. He wriggled around to look at the back of his chair and bent over to look under the table. He came up giggling. Philippa found a box of wooden beads in the cupboard and started a string for him.

“Don't forget me!” Faith burst out of the silence she had kept long enough. “I'm in the fourth grade now!”

“That's no way to speak to the teacher,” Rue said sharply. “Her name's Mrs. Marshall, and don't you forget it.” She went to Edwin and touched him. He followed her to his seat.

“You'd better hang up your sweaters,” Philippa suggested. But Rue, without looking directly at Philippa, pulled her sweater sleeves down hard over her wrists.

T
he return of the Websters was accepted with equanimity by the rest of the students. The Websters had left; now they had come back. It was not an earth-shaking event. It would cause not the faintest tremor in the island alone.

Ralph Percy gave Philippa an oblique glance that was oddly adult. Peggy Campion, at finding her desk moved, showed no emotion. She ignored the Websters as if their scrubbed poverty were repellent to her. Meanwhile Edwin and Rue, alike in their immobility, turned the pages of their new books. Daniel strung beads, gloating over the varied shapes and bright colors. Faith switched about in her seat in an excess of happiness. The younger children stared at her, and most of them returned her eager smile. She reminded Philippa of one of those homely white kittens with pale eyes and unbecoming splotches of fawn, who make up for their plainness by exuding a humble, ingratiating friendliness toward all the world.

Kathie was the last to come in. She was always the last unless she felt in a sociable mood and wanted to chat with Philippa before the others arrived. Now she tossed her jacket at its hook and went to her seat, her thumbs tucked in her cowboy belt. She wore a bright blue-green silk kerchief knotted under the collar of her white shirt, and the wind had blown her yellow hair into its usual wild halo. She grinned across the schoolroom at Philippa, as one friend to another.

Suddenly she saw the Websters at the other side of the room. She lifted an eyebrow at Philippa and called out, “Hi, Rue!” Rue turned and smiled, and for an instant there was something shyly humorous and wise in her.

Steve did not come that evening. He had promised to give her time to think. He had no doubts about himself. In another man it might have been complacence, but complacence didn't go with Steve any more than it had with Justin. She thought of Justin with affectionate detachment; she had often wondered, in the calm fashion of one who is certain such a thing will never happen, how she would consider Justin if she should ever become interested in another man. But her theories had not gone very far. Now it had happened, and the matter was taking care of itself, which should prove the absurdity of theories, she thought.

She went around the harbor in the early evening to drop Eric's letter through the post-office slot. The store was open until nine o'clock, a place for the men to gather and talk; the women often made a little ceremony of walking to the store in the evenings for ice cream or candy. An island was no place to take such things casually. Philippa had fallen into the mood and looked forward to her after-supper strolls around the harbor.

Tonight some men were torching herring from a dory in the harbor, and as they put more fuel on the dying torch, it flared up in a burst of glory. Wharves and fishhouses and the black squares of unlit windows were turned red and fiery gold by the great shaking, streaming, glare. The dory raced across water illumined to a bright, translucent green. The men in oilskins, two at the oars and one standing in the bow with a dip net, were like anonymous figures in a painting, and thus were touched with a sort of primitive radiance. Philippa stood outside the store watching until the cold breeze across the harbor drove her indoors.

Mark Bennett sat on the counter, smoking his pipe. Randall Percy, a stocky red-headed man with a weak good-natured face, was playing checkers with Syd Goward. Syd was slight and graying, his hands tremulous from his last bout, called by courtesy migraine. Nils Sorensen sat beyond the stove, his chair tilted back against the shelves and his hands behind his head. They all spoke to her pleasantly.

“Quite a sight out there, isn't it?” Nils said.

“It's spectacular,” she answered. “It should be in a painting. I want to write to my son about it, but it just can't be told in ordinary words.”

“You'd ought to be a poet,” said Syd Goward, shyly ducking his brindled head. He had a small, meek face. “Then you could write it up like old Shakespoke.”

Nils smiled. “Wonder if the old boy could've written something elegant about the fragrance of those herring six months from now?”

“The only poetry that sinks real deep into his heart,” Mark said to Philippa, “is the number of lobsters that good corned herring tolls into his traps.”

“I don't notice you getting low in your mind when the lobsters are crawling,” said Nils. “You can stand on the wharf and earn your money while the rest of us are out pounding around.”

“Who the devil looks out for the lobster car nights when it's blowing a gale through this harbor and you're snoring under the kelp? I've been down on this wharf sometimes and seen sights that'd make you suck wind, son!”

“Oh, sure,” said Nils mildly. “You slave to make your millions. We know you do.”

“Why, Mark.” Randall Percy tilted his glasses downward and looked over them. “I didn't know you was the family Croweesus.”

“What's that word?” demanded Syd. “Sounds like somethin' nasty.”

Randall's king took three jumps. His fat, freckled face was sad. “Just because it rhymes with Jesus is no sign it's swearin'.”

Philippa dropped her letter hastily into the slot. Mark caught the quirk of her mouth and said, “Songs and patter. Hear 'em free almost any day in the week.” He went to peer through the low window at the harbor.

“Looks like Steve's struck it rich out there,” he said. “Well, he's a good man with a dip net. Those bean poles always are. Randall, here, he'd have a stroke if he had to move that fast.”

“I never see you out there strainin' your gizzard,” said Randall. Philippa said good night to them and went out. She moved to the corner of the store where the path began up the hill to the house, and stood there watching the harbor. No one could see her from the store. Steve's name had been cut out from the other words to stand before her in a burnished solitude; she had been unprepared for its effect, the sudden violent wish to see him, to be near enough to touch him, to reaffirm their intimacy. She had wished urgently for him to come into the store, in rustling oilskins spangled with herring scales. They would glitter on his dark face, too, and among the fine black hairs on the backs of his hands. He would talk with his brother and brother-in-law about the torching, and she would study the candy counter indifferently. But their knowledge of each other, unsuspected by the men, would lie strongly between them.

The wind was beginning to stir through the spruces on the hill and the torchlight danced wildly. The sound of water splashing under the wharf was louder. She didn't know anyone was near until Kathie spoke behind her.

“What are you doing, out alone in the dark?”

“Looking and listening,” said Philippa. Her poise, lost for a moment, flooded back. “I'd never seen torching, or even heard of it, before I came to the island. There's something tremendously exciting about it.”

“Oh, sure,” Kathie agreed with more politeness than conviction. “But there's more to see and hear, if you know where to look and how to keep quiet.” She chuckled. “Not as much as there used to be. I wish I'd been here in the old days! My lord, the things that happened when they were hanging May baskets!”

“How do you know what went on then?”

“Mark tells me about it. Then they all get talking over coffee up to Joanna's.”

“I suppose you live a pretty tame existence,” said Philippa, “compared to the good old days.”

“Jeeley Criley, yes! Thirty years ago there were all sorts of actions going on. There was a woman used to live in the Binnacle—” She sighed. “Well, all they do now is talk. But some of 'em can do the simplest fact upon in red ribbons and holly berries so you'd hardly recognize it.”