Lady (14 page)

The end of the story was Porter Sprague's end -- a sore one too, for it turned out the gun was loaded, not with buckshot, but with rock salt, and he had to sleep on his stomach for a week. As for the setter, Mr. Sprague never got her back. Lady kept her, renamed her Honey, and at last she had a dog again, to replace the little one that Miss Berry had given her years before. Lady and Honey were affectionate companions for many years. Colonel Blatchley's admiration of Mrs. Harleigh increased. Porter Sprague failed to press charges. Lady never mentioned the incident again.

"What d'you suppose has got Nonnie so happy these days?" Harry wondered.

Lew said, "I think she knows something we don't know."

"Like what?" I asked.

"That's what we don't know." Lew had brought the matter to its furthest possible conclusion, logical if unenlightening; then, it not being polite to discuss family matters in front of others, we changed the subject.

There were six of us: Lew (with Patsy, his dog), Harry, and I; the Harrelson brothers, Jack and Philip; and Rabbit Hornaday; and we were on a camping trip. It was further proof of Nonnie's new amiability that I was permitted to go along on the outing, Ma having objected to my being away from home overnight. But Nonnie had stood firm in my defense, and so I found myself with the others on Hermitage Island. The island, situated some four miles below the town, was a low-lying shoal, covered with scrub and alders, and poplar and basswood trees. Nobody ever went there much, except an occasional hunter or fisherman, but in our hot month of July the Hermitage was like a small secret pocket of the world, and at night you could lie with your arms under your head, looking up at the sky (the "starry feermameent," as our teacher Miss Bessie called it), and you felt the island was almost rocking, like a boat, and that it was taking you somewhere, anywhere; a little piece of safe space belonging to you and no other.

We had rowed there in the leaky scow Lew had traded a stack of bubble-gum cards for, and we had built huts and made camp. Each morning two members of the expedition would row back to town to do the day's food shopping, the menu consisting mainly of hot dogs and things from cans, with bakery doughnuts or jelly rolls for dessert. The first afternoon, we found the huts too stifling to use and, abandoning our labors, we flung ourselves into the river. Rabbit Hornaday cut himself a pole, to which he hitched a line and a hook, and went off fishing. Though we had invited him along, we regarded his presence among us as something of a curiosity; he was such a strange fellow, with his constantly perplexed look behind his thick glasses, as if he couldn't really see what was going on in the world and, what was worse, couldn't understand it. But, having barkened to Lady, who'd hinted that Rabbit "might be smarter than we knew," and to Jesse, who'd said he would be a handy fellow to have around, and that "he was on to some tricks we weren't," we now were offered instances of his handiness. Everyone said he'd never get any fish with that old pole, but an hour later back he came with four catfish on a stick. When the sun started sinking, we built a fire, and he took his jack-knife and without a word went about gutting the fish.

"You gonna eat 'em?" Phil Harrelson was astonished. "I wouldn't eat a catfish ever." Patsy trotted over for a sniff; she didn't like catfish, either. She had canned liver for supper, and Phil ate what we ate, a couple of tins of beef stew warmed in a pot, and yams roasted in the fire. But Rabbit savored his catfish, saying we didn't know what we were missing.

Next day, instead of fishing, he went hunting. That is, he hunted without even stirring from where he sat, whittling on a stick at the riverbank. His eye had been more or less riveted on the branch of a tree, and at a certain point he grabbed up Lew's BB gun and popped off a shot.
Bang
! and something fell; he ran to retrieve his quarry, a squirrel, picked off neat as you please. You wouldn't have thought Rabbit could see that well, with his sweaty glasses. But in no time he had the body skinned and eviscerated; we would have squirrel for supper, he announced. Phil turned green. "No, sir. I wouldn't eat squirrel ever." Rabbit paid him scant attention, taking the skinned carcass to the river where he tied it in a bag to keep it cold.

We didn't do much for the rest of the morning, just swam and lay around in the sun, talking. Inevitably the conversation veered toward Lady. Rabbit said, "Huh, Porter Sprague sure got what he was asking for." Though we'd hoped that the explosive event would bring Lady back into our midst again, we had shortly discovered that this was not to be. The playing cards were in use a lot, and once, sneaking up for a peek in her dining-room window late one evening, I could see through a crack in the drawn shade, and there were the three, Jesse, Elthea, and Lady, playing pinochle at the cleared table. Lady was flicking out the cards like a movie gambler, and they seemed to be having a high old time, just like anybody might do in their house after supper. During the day you could hear the radio, and we supposed she was back at her calisthenics, and Elthea would bring fresh crullers out to us on the Green on baking days, and the house seemed to be enveloped in its own shared life, but to our sorrow it was a life unshared with us.

Everyone was at a loss to explain her mysterious behavior at the magic-lantern show, and while Mrs. Sparrow mourned "Poor Lady" from her
piazza
, we on our island mourned, too; we weren't even halfway through July. Lew took to throwing a stick for Patsy to fetch from the river, and she'd come back dripping and shaking out her wiry coat all over us. Later, when Lew chased Patsy up to the end of the shoal, I nudged Harry, and out of earshot of the others I finally confided my secret about the red-haired man's face appearing on the sheet, and that his name was Mr. Ott, and he'd come to the door the previous winter, had frightened Lady, and that I'd found her crying. That was all I had to tell, and though we mulled it over between us, there seemed no adequate solution to the circumstances.

Along about noontime, we heard a whistling off behind some alders and Blue Ferguson appeared with his gun. He'd docked his boat at the tip of the island and was out to see what he could shoot. He admired our huts, and then the squirrel Rabbit had gotten, and spent part of the afternoon swimming with us, treating us not like kids but as if we were his friends.

I have said that Blue Ferguson was our hero, but I think he was more than that, a kind of demi-deity. I used to try to imitate him in his various particulars, his walk or laugh or the way he had of cocking his head at you -- "Hey, kiddo" -- practicing these effects in the mirror of the boy's room at school or in our bathroom at home, later using on people what I considered the "Blue" look, but succeeding only in making myself ridiculous. The girls, including the waitresses at the River House, were crazy about him, and he knew this, too, but I could see that he mostly had more serious things on his mind, and wasn't interested in capitalizing on his glamour.

He took us into the woods and showed us how he used his rifle, a beauty of a Winchester, and though he said he ought to be getting back to town he seemed to want to linger on into the evening, and we persuaded him to stay and eat with us.

We got the fire going and Rabbit and Blue quartered up the squirrels they'd shot, and soon had them cooking in the pot, while Jack Harrelson
and
Harry prepared the rest of our meal, salami sandwiches and potato salad. We were sick of salami sandwiches, and the salad, having been put with the squirrels to cool in the river, was swamped and watery, more like greasy potato soup. We all tried some of the squirrel, eating it from the bone like chicken and saying it was okay, but it wasn't much of a meal for the lot of us, so our appetites were hardly appeased.

Later, almost without our noticing it, it grew dark; the entire sky had filled with stars, and the moon had risen. Our talk continued meandering and desultory when suddenly we sat up, hearing the soft slip of oars in the darkness. We hushed and listened. Far off on the water came the unmistakable sound of dipping oars, and then we recognized the low sibilances of Jesse Griffin's voice, and next the light sound of laughter that could be only one person's -- Lady Harleigh's!

We all jumped up and halloed, and I ran and got my flashlight and shined it out on the water. Soon we could make out the prow of the skiff, and Jesse's white-shirted back as he bent over the oars, and then Lady herself, a bright scarf tied around her hair, and Honey, the setter dog, beside her in the stern.

"How are all the Huckleberry Finns doing?" she called gaily as, with a final lunge on the oars, Jesse beached the craft. I waded out and helped her from the bow onto the shore. Shipping his oars, Jesse carried onto the shoal an enormous wicker hamper, holding it aloft on the top of his head like a safari porter. Honey sprang out and began making joyful circles with Patsy.

"And there are some blankets, Lew," Lady called, seating herself on the log near the fire. "Who's that -- Blue? It's nice to see you. Jesse, here's Blue Ferguson."

Blue showed his teeth in the firelight as he took Lady's hand. "Good evening, Mrs. Harleigh."

"Are there mosquitoes? No? Thank heavens -- I never saw the Connecticut River without mosquitoes, what can have happened to them? But fireflies -- look, so many. What have you had for dinner, more hot dogs?"

Squirrel, we said.

"Ooph -- squirrel. Jesse, open the hamper."

And he did, to a feast of Belshazzarian proportions. Passing plates around, Jesse chuckled and said in his husky voice, "Missus and Elthea been cooking. The day long."

Lady was wearing navy-blue slacks, a white blouse, and white beads and earrings, which she'd borrowed from Elthea. She looked -- wonderful!

"We would have been here sooner," she explained, "but Minnie broke down coming back from the store. I must think about getting a new car."

"No!" we chorused; to trade the Minerva in on a Cadillac was unthinkable. Lady laughed, saying she liked the new Packards; she wanted white-walled tires and a radio, and we'd just have to see. She was in her element, playing hostess there on the riverbank as she so often did at home, and while we filled our stomachs with Elthea's good West Indian cooking we listened as Blue and Lady kept the major portion of the conversation going.

"How are your mother and sister, Blue?"

"They're both fine, Mrs. Harleigh. Estelle's working for the WPA now. And Mother's doing pretty well."

"Wouldn't you like another piece of chicken? That squirrel can't have been much of a meal."

He grinned and patted his stomach. "Thanks, Mrs. Harleigh."

"Perhaps you might like to call me 'Lady.' All the boys do."

"I think -- well, if it's all the same I'd rather just say 'Mrs. Harleigh.'"

"Of course, Blue. Is that your nickname or a real one?"

"It's my real one, Ma'am. Not like the color, you know. It's really Ballew -- a family name on my mother's side, but people think it's just plain Blue."

"I think 'just plain Blue' is fine. How are things up at the high school?"

"I'll be a senior next year."

"And then college?"

"
If
I get my scholarship. I've got to earn more money somehow, though." His voice flattened out slightly. "It's tough, making a dollar these days."

When the lid of the hamper finally creaked closed, everyone sat contentedly digesting the meal, nobody saying much, and all of us caught in the spell of the summer night. Lady leaned back on her elbows on the car blanket, looking up at the star-strewn sky. The placid plane of the river gleamed and glinted in the moonlight; somewhere a whippoorwill sounded. Still the silence held, as though all of us were afraid to break anything so grand and fragile. A pale light glimmered behind the treetops, floating up from the horizon like the cold blue-green glow of phosphorous. But try as I might to let my imagination make of it some minor aurora polaris, I knew that the source of the glow was no more than the prosaic city lights upriver.

Harry, who liked to show off for Lady, began picking out the more recognizable constellations, the Big and Little Dippers, the North Star, Orion's Belt. Then Jesse spoke, showing us some stars we didn't know about. There at its zenith, was a diamond-bright Vega, and over there, Arcturus. It was this very star, he told us, whose beam of light, begun over forty years before, had turned on all the lights at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. That gave us something to think about, and Harry prosaically marveled at how it took a star beam forty years to travel through space to light up Sally Rand's bubble dance. Again we lapsed into silence until, moon and water and the night casting their spell, Lady was prompted to say, "Isn't it sad, not having the riverboats anymore? All of them gone."

"Did you ever ride one?" Jack Harrelson asked her.

"Yes . . . I did." She replied vaguely, looking out across the river, and in the firelight I saw the little furrow deepen between her brows. "I took an excursion trip once, from Hartford to New York. With Edward." She looked down and brushed some sand from her foot.

"What was the boat?" Harry asked.

"It was called the
City of Springfield
."

The
City of Springfield
! We'd seen it ourselves, we said, and Lew, Patsy haunched between his bare knees, told the story. The spring we'd moved to Pequot Landing, our father had taken us to the river. It was the first time we'd seen it. How wide it seemed then, swiftly flowing and reaching away from us in three directions, up, down, and across. Pa said "Look!" and there it came: the
City of Springfield
, her tin stack puffing black smoke against the sky, the white prow gracefully cleaving the water as she drove toward us. Coming abreast, the great round paddle wheel was seen, churning up the water and spewing it behind. Up on the deck passengers leaning against the rail waved to us, and higher up, in the pilot house, the captain saluted, then pulled the whistle handle, making sharp toots for us. We ran along the bank, prancing and cutting up, until the boat vanished around the bend. Voices floated after, and there was one final toot as the great craft disappeared from sight.