The Dawning of the Day (9 page)

“Nils Sorensen says that when his grandfather was alive he had all the kids on the island, and some of the grownups too, scared foolish of the Little People. He swore he'd seen 'em, and he was an awful religious old fella, so the kids believed him. Even Nils.”

“I believed in fairies for years,” said Philippa. “I felt cheated when I finally realized I didn't believe any more.” Whichever way she looked through the dark columns of the trees, there was the warm mysterious gloom spangled with sun. “There should be
something
here,” she insisted. “A deer or a fox or even a rabbit—” Her voice broke off abruptly, but the memory of it hung in the stillness. Something had moved at the edge of her vision. She stopped walking and turned around, searching down the long corridors of spruces for another flicker of light and action, but there was only the deepening shadow.

“There is something here,” she said softly. “I saw it.”

“Ghosts,” suggested Charles.

“All right. Ghosts. They've scurried off into the underbrush, over the way, I think.” She pointed. “By that fallen tree.”

Charles did not look where she pointed. He was staring at her with an air of wild discovery; the words seemed to tear themselves out of him against his will. “Your eyes are—are green. Like the water, in the shade of the woods—” He stopped abruptly.

She felt a twist of pain. Without knowing it, conscious only of his own angry, embarrassed longing, he had spoken to her in pure poetry. “Charles,” she said, putting out her hand to touch his shoulder as if he were Eric. But he was not Eric, and she drew her hand back. “Charles, it was a lovely thing to say to me. It makes me proud, for once, of my green eyes. It wipes out all the nasty, teasing things that were ever said about them. And now will you believe me when I say I saw something over there among the trees?”

The intensity ebbed away like the red leaving his brown cheeks. “It was one of the Webster kids, most likely.” He took out his knife and began chipping at a blob of spruce gum on the nearest tree. “They've got a camp down here somewhere.”

“Webster?”

“Don't you know 'em?” He worked carefully at the spruce gum. “Looks like more than Rob and Sky played hooky if Jude's kids haven't showed up at school yet.”

“Maybe they don't know school's started yet. Aren't they supposed to be mentally deficient?”

Charles shrugged. “If you mean a little slow, mebbe Edwin is. He's a crazy-acting kid, but they're not foolish enough to
look
foolish. They're more like a bunch of scairt rabbits.”

Philippa gazed off toward the woods; the darkness was flowing in like a tide under the trees. “Could you find their brush camp?”

“No more than I could find a bird's nest. Look here, we've got to be high-tailing it for home, or they'll have a posse out looking for us, and it'll be a real fancy scandal.”

She walked along reluctantly. “I'd like to see these children. I'm curious about them.”

“Well, you'll see 'em, don't worry about that. Jude's set on his kids learning—he's always holding forth down to the shore about education. . . . We turn here. Careful of that swampy place.” He took her hand, his fingers hard and impersonal, and let her go quickly when they reached firm ground again.

They walked rapidly, without conversation. Why can't I be a realist, she asked Justin in her mind, and think placidly that every boy falls in love with an older woman, that it's just growing pains and he'll get over it? Why can't I accept it with amusement and a little vanity because he could have his choice among the girls ten years younger, and fresher, than I? He is making poems for me, Justin, and I can only feel pain for him because I am so tired from eight years of trying to keep on an even keel without you.

Suddenly they came out of the woods above Goose Cove. The cove lay like a dark mirror below the high wall of trees, but the chimneys of the Homestead, on the high land opposite, caught the last red light of the sun. The westward windows seemed to hold fire.

“That's a lovely house,” Philippa said, wanting to break the silence. “Why doesn't someone live there?”

“If my old man ever goes back to lobstering, we'll live there. He and my brother Owen have a dragger now. They go out of Port George.”

“You don't like dragging?”

He shrugged. “I'm an islander. If my aunt Jo wouldn't have me, I'd rent me a shack to live in or move into the Binnacle with Gregg.” Standing there looking across the cove at the Homestead, he seemed as securely rooted in his environment as the trees behind him, and suddenly he acquired, without knowing it, new stature in Philippa's eyes.

They went down toward the shore, skirting the beach, and climbed over the stile into the meadow. A marshy coolness rose up around Philippa's legs. The crickets and sparrows were already quiet for the night; the gulls were flying homeward to their ledges by two's and three's. She felt anxiety stirring in her, as if Eric were lost in the woods. The Webster children had better go home soon before it was really dark. They couldn't be very big children.

She and Charles had reached the place where the path down to the Sorensen place joined the one that crossed the meadow toward the marsh and the schoolhouse.

“We've had a good walk,” she said. “Thanks for coming along and showing me the way home.”

“I'm taking you to the door,” he protested.

“There's no need of it . . . I may stop at Foss Campion's,” she lied.

“O.K.” He shrugged. “I liked the walk, too. So long.” He swung toward his path without looking back.

“So long, Charles.” What shall I do with him? she thought, going down the road. But the Websters, formless and elusive, came like the fog, blotting him out.

I
n the morning the fog was thick and wet. Philippa walked through the lane to the schoolhouse after breakfast. Sitting at the desk in her raincoat, she studied the attendance records for the last year, and Mrs. Gerrish's rank book. She found what she had missed in her first quick survey of them; she had not noticed, that other time, that the Webster children's names did not appear after a date in early April, last spring. Before that they came with scarcely an absence, Rue, Edwin, and Faith. There was no explanation of their sudden departure, no note in Mrs. Gerrish's handwriting.

As she read the marks for the past year, she became first puzzled and then angry. She could not say at first against whom her anger was directed, but it was there, forceful and inescapable.
Not foolish enough to look foolish
, Young Charles had said. There was nothing about Rue's marks to show a retarded child. She had been in the sixth grade. Faith, a third-grader, had done adequate work. It was only Edwin whose ranks were consistently bad. It was quite possible that Edwin, who wasn't even honored by a grade number, was mentally deficient; but surely the girls were not.

She sat there looking at the records for a long time, her anger growing at what she termed a senseless, unnecessary mystery. Mrs. Gerrish should have given her some explanation of these children. Perhaps her dark hints and forebodings had meant the Websters. It was strange, too, that apparently none of the adults on the island knew that the Websters had left in April. Only the other children knew; but none of the other children had told.

Afterward she locked the schoolhouse and went out to stand on the old sea wall. The Bennett meadow was invisible in the fog. Unseen waves crashed on the shingle beach a few feet away from her, and there was the rhythmic moan of the foghorn at Matinicus Rock Light. She smelled the clean salty scent of deep sea water and fresh rockweed. The dampness curled her hair round her face and made her skin feel cold and smooth. She should have been enjoying it, she knew, but she kept thinking of the Webster children in the woods, hiding from her and Charles like small wild animals. She had dreamed of them last night; the trees had seemed alive and tortured, and she had seen one of the children with a clarity that had awakened her; it had Eric's face.

Not foolish enough to look foolish
, Charles had said, dropping the crystalline lump of spruce gum in his pocket.

She would not be satisfied until she had seen them for herself. She walked home slowly, meeting no one in the fog. The life of the harbor was at a standstill, but a whiff of wood smoke blowing down on the thick wet wind meant that work went on in the fishhouses. She passed Foss's shop on the way home, and he called to her cheerfully from the doorway. Perley, ripping broken laths off a trap outside the door, didn't look up. Asanath and Terence were working in their fishhouse with the door shut. She wondered what they talked about when they were alone, or if Asanath talked and Terence painted buoys or patched pots in silence.

Viola Goward, Asanath's sister, was in the kitchen with Suze, sitting down but still wearing her coat as a token that it wasn't a visit, she'd just run in. Ellie Goward, nine years old, sat at the table eating gingerbread. She was a shy, plain child who had none of her mother's tart assurance. When she saw Philippa, she smiled uncertainly.

“Hello, Ellie,” Philippa said. Ellie blushed, and stared hard at the rope-company calendar over the table. Vi gave Philippa a fast, shrewd survey. “
Somebody's
got nice red cheeks from the fog. Unless maybe she met somebody over in Schoolhouse Cove.”

“Now that you've driven me to confessing,” said Philippa, “there was a perfectly fascinating seal. Such acrobatics in the surf.”

“Same seal who took you walking around Sou'west Point yesterday?” asked Mrs. Goward. Suze, rolling out cookies on the dresser, glanced around with an apprehensive and yet eager motion, fixing her glasses on Philippa. Vi's lips curled back, smiling, from her strong, faintly yellow teeth. “Nobody can keep anything secret on Bennett's Island,” she said. “Not from me.”

“I didn't think there was anything secret about my walk,” Philippa said mildly.

“It's a good thing you feel that way. Then you won't ever be surprised at what folks know about you.”

“Or what they guess.” Philippa smiled back at her. “No, I shan't be surprised. I've lived in small places before.” And I know all about the local Gestapo, she finished silently. There had been a time when she would have said it aloud. She looked at the little girl. “All set to lick that spelling test Monday, Ellie?”

“I guess so,” Ellie said in a hoarse whisper and continued to stare at the square-rigged ship on the calendar. Philippa touched lightly one of the sandy curls. “Ellie's the best speller in the fourth grade,” she said.

“I was always the best,” Mrs. Goward snapped. “Nobody's ever spelled me down yet.”

As Philippa went into the hall and up the stairs, Mrs. Goward's dry resonant voice began again.

“Syd was coming in from hauling yesterday, and he saw her and Young Charles Bennett fooling around on the shore, and then start up in the woods. You know how all those Bennetts are about women.”

That was meant for me to hear, Philippa thought. She had a moment of anger, but she kept climbing steadily toward her room. You're fair game, my dear, Justin would have said. You knew what it would be.

In her room she turned on her portable radio softly to a record program and began to prepare her next week's work.

O
n Sunday afternoon Philippa sat under an apple tree in the orchard, a book open in her lap. The little plantation of fruit trees was ringed around with big spruces, but when it had been first laid out, some seventy years ago, it had been part of the Bennett meadow. Now the woods had come down in silent possession, making of the orchard on this windy day a hidden lake of heat and light. Here there was the somnolent richness that belonged particularly to the beginning of autumn, a warm perfume of rotting apples from the windfalls in the tall grass, the silent hovering of the big black and orange butterflies over the asters that banked the path.

Philippa put her head back against the tree trunk and shut her eyes. From far off, soft but insistent beyond the crickets and the birds, there came the rote. It was always there. She could never forget the sea; it was as if the island were like one great shell held to the ear.

Sundays were difficult for Philippa because she and Eric had always done something together on Sunday afternoon. These days in the early fall had been among the best, when it was not too hot to go by subway to the zoo or aquarium or museum. She did not want the city now, but she wanted Eric. What a splendid thing they could make of a long Sunday on the island! She wondered if he missed her and decided that he didn't. Jenny and Roger would be driving out in the countryside today, and as one of the carful of children, eating apples bought at a roadside stand, Eric would be too busy to want or remember anything else.

She was satisfied with this and would not have had it otherwise. A boy of eight should live in the moment or in his heroic plans for a future as a surgeon or a space pilot. Eric was all right; it only remained for Philippa to conquer the sensation of emptiness with which she awoke on Sunday morning. It was not a sentimental feeling. She had no desire to cry a little, imagining Eric dressed for Sunday school with someone else tying his necktie. It seemed to be a purely physical manifestation, as if on Sunday she became conscious of a missing limb.

Sometimes chunks of the past came to her with a startling lucidity that was more than memory. It had to be when she was as relaxed as this, lulled by the buzzing and humming warmth around her, eyes closed against the sun. Then she was set free of her body and all that had happened to her; all experience became as constant as the rote; whatever had happened to her once kept on happening again and again.

Now she could be fifteen years old, sitting immobile under the grape arbor at home, with the sun falling hotly on her face through the flickering leaves, and the perfume of the Concord grapes in her nostrils. If she opened her eyes, she would see her tanned bony hands, large and boyish, clasped over her knees that were scraped from a recent fall on the tennis court. Her book lay open beside her on the grass. She could remember the words she had just read; she had tilted back her face toward the trembling green roof of the arbor and shut her eyes to say them over to herself: