Dark Nantucket Noon (10 page)

“Makes me seasick,” said Homer, looking around. “Not a straight line anywhere. Which way is up?”

“Well, I love it. Mr. Flakeley tells me it belongs to an old man named Obed Biddle. He got too old to go on living in it by himself, so he had to go and live with his married daughter. He used to be a fisherman, and according to Mr. Flakeley he remembers the last days of whaling on Nantucket, and after that he went whaling in the Azores, where they used to do it the same way, and then he came back home. Look, aren't the trees wonderful? And there was a deer! A deer in my front yard this morning. I wish I had some cracked corn. I want him to come back. What do deer eat anyway?”

“Damned if I know. I know what I like, though. Lunch. How about it? I could eat a horse.”

“Well, I'm sorry, Homer. I've just moved in. I went out to get some groceries this morning, But when I started around that First National things got pretty bad, and I just abandoned the cart half full of food and ran. I've got to go back and try again. I'll just have to get used to it.”

“Used to what? What did they do—stare at you?”

“Well, if it was just that I wouldn't mind. It was the way they pulled their children aside, as if I might pick up a jar of pickles and bash their baby with it. But what really undid me was the lady who called me a slut. My first impulse was to stop and explain myself and say I was just an innocent bystander, and my second impulse was to cry, so I obeyed my third impulse, which was to run. Oh, here, look what I found in the cupboard—a tin of sardines. And there's a can opener in the drawer. Sit down.”

There was one backless chair and a cracked table in Kitty's kitchen. Homer sat down on the chair and looked at the warped surface of the table. “Kitty Clark,” he said, “it's time you told me about the dog.”

Kitty started violently. The can opener in her hand clattered to the floor. “What dog?”

“The dog you killed.” Homer reached for the can opener and gave it back to her.

“Oh, that dog.” Kitty punctured the sardine tin and wrenched her way around the edge. “Who told you about that?”

“I got a complete report on you from my old friends in the East Cambridge Courthouse, so we'd know what the prosecution might be thinking of holding against you. All they had was this dog. The Humane Society had heard about it and filed a complaint. I gather you explained it to their satisfaction.”

Kitty dumped the sardines on a cracked plate, found a fork with one broken tine, and handed plate and fork to Homer. “Yes, I did kill a dog. It was trying to kill me. It attacked me.” She went back to the sink, where her collection of shells was soaking in a dishpan of water, and began scrubbing sand out of the crevices of the big whelk.

“You killed it with a knife. Was it the same knife? I'm told you thought your life was threatened?”

“Yes, it was the same knife. Yes, I thought my life was threatened. What do you think these scars on my neck are?”

“You still haven't explained why you were carrying a knife in the first place.”

“I've told you. I just feel a lot safer.”

“You've told me and told me. But most girls don't carry a knife to make themselves feel safe. Why should you? What makes you so different? Anyone would think you'd been raped or something.”

To Homer's astonishment, Kitty's shoulders suddenly began heaving. She was crying into the sink.

“You don't mean,” he said, “that you—you mean you
were
raped?”

Kitty nodded. She was bawling so hard she couldn't speak. Homer stood up and put his arm around her. “My God,” he said. “You poor kid. My God.”

Kitty's crumpled face began to straighten out. She wiped her sleeve over her eyes and let herself be pushed down into the backless chair. “I've never told anybody before,” she said.

“You mean, you didn't even report it to the police?”

“Oh, Homer, I don't know why not. It wasn't that I felt my virtue had been stained or anything like that. I just didn't want people feeling sorry for me. I knew I wasn't pregnant because I'd just had my period. I just wanted to forget it.” Kitty had the big shell in her hand. She was wiping it dry with her skirt.

“But seriously, honeybunch, getting raped is a perfectly sound reason for carrying a knife around afterwards. And it would arouse the sympathy of the court, whereas now a girl like you carrying a knife and an oilstone and all that crap—she looks like some kind of a nut.”

Kitty jumped up, and the shell fell to the floor with a jarring crash. “You can't use it, Homer. I won't let you. It's some kind of primitive sense of privacy or something.”

“Look, you dumb girl, would your sense of privacy feel less hoity-toity being convicted as a murderer?” Homer turned melancholy. “Well, if the worst comes to the worst we can always plead insanity. Everybody keeps telling me you must have been out of your mind. Temporary insanity. Your special lunacy stormed your general sanity, like Ahab's.”

Kitty picked up the shell and thumped it on the table, shouting, “Never!”

“Look, it would be easy. Everybody expects poets to be off their rocker anyhow. And say, speaking of poetry, tell me about that Sappho piece of yours, the one about the moon. Somebody told me it means you think of yourself as the moon, and therefore when you said, ‘The moon did it,' what you meant was that
you
—”

“Arthur! Arthur Bird! That
idiot!”
Kitty burst out laughing. “It was his idea, wasn't it? He's talked with me about that poem before. He's such an absolute
nincompoop!”

“Well, maybe he's a blessing. Maybe I can make a fool out of him on the witness stand.”

“Oh, Homer, could you? What a lovely thought. Now look, Homer, you're not going to have to talk about rape, or plead insanity, when you've got witnesses like Arthur Bird, and when”—Kitty stood up and waved both arms over her head—“when I'm innocent! After all! I'm innocent! I only came to this damned island to see the total eclipse of the sun!”

“My dear girl …” Homer paused a moment, then plunged ahead savagely, making the case against her altogether clear. When he had finished, Kitty stood silent, her arms hanging at her sides. “Come on, girl,” said Homer, getting up, clapping her clumsily on the back. “Those sardines are all very well, but all they did was whet my appetite, keep it immortal in me, as Melville says. Come on over to the place where I'm staying. Alice Dove has an icebox as big as Fort Knox.”

Kitty fumbled into her coat and followed Homer out to his car. He slammed the door on her side of it, climbed into the driver's seat and started backing up.

“Wait. There's something I want to ask you, Homer. Before we get there.”

“Shoot.”

“What can they do to me? I mean, what's the worst thing that can happen to me?”

“Well, of course they won't kill you. Life imprisonment—-that would be the worst. The trouble is, you see, it looks like first degree murder. Premeditated. If it were second degree or third degree the sentence would be less.”

Kitty put her hand on the dashboard to steady herself. “Life? You mean forever? I'd be in prison for the rest of my life?”

“Probably not. Maybe only, say, fifteen years or so. Twenty.” With an effort Homer kept his voice flat.

Kitty struggled to keep hers the same. “Twenty years. I won't go. I'd kill myself first.”

Homer shifted gears and headed down the narrow lane to the Polpis Road before he glanced sideways at her. The face of the girl beside him was drained of color and her knuckles on the dashboard were a bony white. The damned girl; she meant it. The jury might think, and the judge might think, and the prosecuting attorney might think that the girl on the witness stand was receiving a merciful judgment for the crime she had committed, but now here
he
was, saddled with the knowledge that he was fighting for this infernal young woman's life. It wasn't fair. Homer felt decidedly put upon. He drove too fast in his distress. The car jounced and bounced on the rutted road.

Kitty stared out at the trees lurching past on either side, noticing in spite of herself the dense twiggy growth of the stunted oaks, silver against the sky. It was the wind that had forced them into those shapes, she knew, into those thick clusterings of branches. They were forced by circumstance into density rather than height. It struck her that she could be like that. She would choose density, having been forbidden height. How long did she have? Until September? Six months. Almost six months. She would pack it with everything she could.

“Six months,” said Homer. “Don't forget, we've got six months. We can do a lot in six months.”

“Yes,” said Kitty, smiling at him, the color coming back into her face. “I was just thinking that.”

“Good girl,” said Homer.

12

“But look, Queequeeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?”

Moby Dick

The Doves' place was only about a quarter of a mile down the Polpis Road, at the end of another long dirt driveway.

“Are they farmers or something?” said Kitty, catching a first glimpse of an untidy fenced-in barnyard, alive with chickens and ducks and a couple of brown goats. “I thought you said Mr. Dove was a scallop fisherman.”

“Only part time. A lot of people on the island seem to have a couple of strings to their bow. Alden is a scalloper this time of year, and then in the summer he works for a landscape gardener and sells eggs and I don't know what else. Alice works part time too, in the Pacific National Bank. But the other part of her life is more important to her than what she does for a living. Wait till you talk to her. She knows everything about the natural history of the island, all the birds and the flora and fauna and such. There's Alice now, feeding her swan. Whoops! almost ran over that guinea hen. Hello, Alice! Brought you a visitor! New neighbor! Meet Kitty Clark.”

In a flurry of squawking hens and barking dogs, Kitty got out of the car and smiled hesitantly at Alice Dove. Alice had been leaning over a fence. She looked up, nodded her head grimly and then went on scattering scratch feed from a pan in her hand. She was a plain woman, gaunt and elongated and drawn out like a poker or a hoe, wearing a man's jacket too large for her. Her gray-streaked black hair was cut no-nonsense all around. Her face was blank and still and thin as a cleaver. Kitty, not sure what to say to her, looked over the fence too. The swan was pecking greedily at kernels of grain. It was a great cob, hideously disfigured with blackened scabs. One wing had lost half its feathers.

“What happened to it?” said Kitty.

“Somebody shot it,” mumbled Alice Dove, throwing down more feed. The swan waddled unevenly on his black feet from one grain to the next, wagging his tail, thrusting out his long neck, moving slowly around his house, which was a big box painted barn red. His pen ran down the sloping ground to enclose a swampy place at the bottom. The great bird was awkward and pigeon-toed and his scars were blackish blots on the whiteness of his large body, but the texture of his feathers was of a complexity and perfection that made Kitty exclaim. Then Alice's still face opened all at once like a door, and she shot an eager rapid glance at Kitty. “I call him Jupiter,” she said.