Off Season (8 page)

From the muddy shingle beach of Sunderson’s Island much of the shoreline of Eggemoggin Reach was visible, from the rusted green Deer Isle Bridge down to the rocky shores of Center Harbor that jutted out to the end of the sweep. If not for those pitted glacial boulders, you would have been able to see all the way to Naskeag Point, where the reach became Jericho Bay.

“That’s why they call it a reach,” I said to Jon as we tossed the Beetle Cat’s anchor overboard and sloshed through the shallow, freezing water to the beach. “If you set your sail down at the bridge, you can sail all the way to Jericho without resetting it—that is, if the wind is right. It’s supposed to be one of the best sailing lanes in the world.”

“Wow,” Jon said. “I’d love to do that.”

“One day we will,” I said.

He smiled at me but did not reply. I felt the dreaded fuchsia burn start again. Would he think I was assuming we’d be together all summer long?

“It looks like a movie,” he said, pointing to the line of tiny cottages on the far shore with the dark woods behind them.

“I know,” I said. “It looks like we’re miles away, but it’s only about a mile. See, there’s your house.” I pointed to the old gray cedar-shingled pile of the Poston house, where Jon’s family was staying. Even with the blue station wagon parked in its driveway and the window shutters open, it still looked empty. For some reason I felt a small shudder.

“And there’s the canon’s house, and our house, and on down to Mr. Forshee’s cliff. That’s where we were this morning. With no people around, it looks like a toy village, doesn’t it? Oh, I take that back. There’s the famous Peaches Davenport coming out on the canon’s porch.”

Jon shaded his eyes and looked at her.

“Why’s she got on a dress?” he asked. Peaches wore a soft green sundress and sandals to match. Her flaming hair was tied into a ponytail by a silly scarf. I thought she must have hundreds of pairs of sandals.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess she doesn’t want anybody to forget she’s a girl.”

“That would be hard to do,” he said. “She looks like she’s pretty from here.”

“Oh, she
is
pretty,” I said. “And she’s had a great tragedy. Her parents were killed in an automobile accident last fall, and she’s living with the Davenports now. I don’t think she wants anybody to forget the tragedy.”

He looked at me.

“You don’t like her, do you?” he said.

Briefly I considered lying, but knew, without knowing how, that he would know I was.

“No,” I said finally. “I’m really sorry about her folks, but she’s . . . sneaky. Or something. She doesn’t mean what she says, and she’s always batting her eyelashes at the boys and ignoring the girls. She really doesn’t like me. And she had such a screaming fit when she saw Wilma that we had to shut him up in the house. It’s not fair. Everybody up here knows Wilma has never hurt anybody in his life.”

Hearing his name, Wilma, who had been happily nosing in the unfamiliar detritus along the tide line, came prancing up to us with a decaying crab in his mouth, grinning his wide white grin and wagging his tail. It was hard to tell which smell was worse, wet dog or dead crab.

Wilma laid his crab down at Jon’s feet and jumped up and put one gargantuan paw on each of Jon’s shoulders and licked his face exultantly.

“God, Wilma!” Jon protested, but he hugged the dripping dog to his chest and rumpled the floppy ears. Wilma dropped to the sand at Jon’s feet and rolled on his back in an excess of love and pleasure. “It’s hard to see why anybody would be afraid of him,” he remarked, ruffling Wilma’s wet stomach. “Maybe she just got a whiff of his breath.”

“No,” I said. “I have never seen such a fit. Daddy says we’re going to have to keep him in the house when Peaches is around, which is almost always. Poor Wilma doesn’t understand. Nobody’s ever penned him up before. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I wish he’d bite Peaches. Then maybe they’d take her home.”

“Tell you what,” Jon said. “There’s a big fenced-in place behind our cottage. I think somebody said the lady who lived there raised Rottweilers—it’s really huge. Our dogs love it. They’d love Wilma, too. They love everybody. Why don’t I take Wilma home with me when he’s not with you-all? He can come in the house and sleep in my room, and I’ll play with him outside. Then when it’s time to go to bed I’ll bring him home.”

“That would be wonderful,” I said, almost in tears with gratitude and deliverance. “But wouldn’t your parents mind? And what if Peaches starts coming to your house?”

“My mother and dad love our dogs,” he said. “They’re Bernese mountain dogs. They make Wilma look like a Chihuahua. And Peaches isn’t coming to my house. I can promise you that.”

“How do you know?” I said, feeling something very like adoration swell in my chest.

“Because nobody who doesn’t like you and Wilma is,” he said, and smiled again.

“Come on,” I said, not trusting myself to look at him. “Let’s go find the ospreys.”

Sunderson’s Island lies about a mile from our shore down toward the Deer Island Bridge. I don’t know if anybody remembers who the Sundersons were; even Seth and Clara Anderson professed not to know precisely.

“Seems to me like there were some Sundersons over at Stonington once, but that was a time ago,” Clara said. “I don’t think there are any of them left around here. They may still own the island, but nobody’s ever seen anybody over there much but you colony kids.”

This was true. Sunderson’s was a great dome of rock, almost perfectly round, that thrust out of the still-shallow water of the reach. It was one of the really enormous boulders left by the petulant glacier, my father said, and there was no telling how large the bottom of it was. Because it was rock, not much except scrub undergrowth and a few small valiant pines could grow in its thin topsoil. One of these was the lone pine at the top that the ospreys chose for their nest. Pretty smart, my father said. Nothing much could surprise or ambush them. The rest of the dome was covered with velvety moss of a vivid emerald I had never seen anywhere but on the island. It was about four or five inches deep, and so soft that the temptation to take a nap on it in the sun was all but irresistible. You paid the price in vicious chigger bites, but on a still, sunny afternoon with no sound but the soft breathing of the reach, many of us kids were willing to pay it. You could combat the vicious mosquitoes and the satanic blackflies with a thick, evil concoction the lobstermen and clam diggers brewed. “All of you will have deformed children,” my mother said once, but she used it too. But there was nothing to be done about the chiggers except the application of colorless nail polish over the fiery red welts, and that was after the fact. Still, we sprawled in the sun on the moss, and I suspect that the older ones of us did more than sprawl. Furtively scratched behinds invariably drew lifted brows from adults. I don’t think I ever noticed.

I had brought the mosquito and blackfly repellent with me, and Jon and I slathered it on.

“We smell at least as bad as Wilma,” Jon said, his perfect golden nose wrinkled.

“You’ll be glad we do,” I said. “Blackflies actually take little chunks out of you when they bite.”

We neared the top and found the ospreys’ tree and the new nest, but there were no ospreys to be seen. We could hear the babies, though. Frantic, shrill, insistent, their cries pierced the still afternoon like tiny silver blades.

“Wow,” Jon said. “What if you had to listen to that all day?”

“Maybe to their parents it’s beautiful,” I said, “like any parents would think their babies’ sounds were.”

“Where do you think the big ospreys are?” Jon said.

“Off getting dinner,” I said. “They’ll be back soon. They don’t stay gone long.”

“I’d be on my way to Miami by now,” he said, and I laughed. I laughed a lot when I was with Jon. I didn’t think about it then, but he was funny almost like an adult is funny: wry, smart, interested. Not just interested for a little while. Jon was interested in everything. Somehow I knew he would never give me a frog on my bicep, or a snigger, or pull a mean trick on me and bawl with laughter.

“Let’s sit down and wait,” I said. “If we’re still and quiet we won’t spook them when they come.”

We sank down into the velvety moss and in one accord lay back and stretched out on it. It was sun warmed, but a little cool wind had sprung up, and the warmth was soothing. Wilma came from wherever he had been foraging, covered with a thicket of sticky green burrs and grinning his foolish grin. He sprawled down beside us. In less than five minutes we were all drifting toward sleep.

I had been born with what my mother called the Unfortunate Hostess gene. I could be peacefully silent with people I knew well, but I felt an irresistible urge to chatter in the presence of newcomers. Silent, dead air seemed wrong, insulting. But with Jon I felt no urge at all except to slide into warm sleep beside him. Sleep came as it often does outdoors: the sun hammered down on you, sounds faded out, insect drones grew stronger and lulled, you began to breathe in their rhythm, and that of the sea under it, and then all sound was gone.

I don’t know how long we slept, but the sun was lowering into the west over the Deer Island Bridge when we woke. The reach was a blinding sheet of glitter. I’m still not sure if it was Wilma’s low, eerie growl that woke me, or the shadow. I think they came at the same time. I know only that Jon and I both came awake and sat up in one motion. Somehow it seemed important to be very still and quiet. I had never heard Wilma make a noise like that, and was just turning toward him when the great shadow swept over us, the shadow of huge, flat wings that seemed to block out the sun and go on and on. We looked up and saw the eagle. He was utterly silent, not making the harsh, creaking
kak kak kak
I was familiar with when our own young eagle made his sweeping rounds over the reach. This was not a young eagle; it was enormous, gargantuan. The great wings were making slowly decreasing circles over the nest. The baby ospreys fell silent. So did Wilma. For a long time I could not get my breath, and then I began to scream.

“Get out of here,” I shrieked. “Go on, get away, get away!”

Wilma began to bark fiercely just as the eagle slowed over the nest. I could easily see the massive yellow beak, the silvery white head and tail, the great talons stretching down. For a long moment it seemed to hover in the air. And then, as it beat its great wings downward, Jon grabbed me from behind and turned me into his chest.

“Don’t look, Lilly,” he said sharply. “Don’t look!”

I began to cry loudly, my head pressed into his shoulder. He had put on his sweater, and even as the horror and grief of the nest attack swallowed me, I was aware of the smell of him in every atom of my body: damp wool, salt, wood smoke, sweaty and somehow sweet flesh.

And then he was shaking me and crying, “Look, Lilly! Oh, look!”

I screwed up my eyes and shook my head, but he turned me around and I did look, and my breath left me.

They came out of the dying sun like arrows shot from twin archers, flying fast and low and level, screaming their rage. Two ospreys, so close that we could make out the beautiful autocratic crested heads, the black cheek patches, the black wrist patches on their long, cocked-back wings. The wings were the way I always identified ospreys when they wheeled over the reach; no other bird I knew flew with that graceful crook. That and their cranky, rather annoyed whistles, almost too high for such a large bird.
But they were not whistling now. They were shrieking, a frenzied
cheereek
,
cheereek
. It made your blood thicken and chill to hear them. The eagle stopped his slow downward circling, rode the air, and looked at them. Before he could move his massive wings in another beat, they were on him.

Later Jon and I could not say precisely what we saw, except that in an eyeblink the eagle was out over the reach, beating for the far shore, and the ospreys were diving at him, screaming. One came at him from above, one dived and came from below. They did it over and over again as the eagle picked up speed with his great wings and finally outran them. He vanished into the dark woods behind the cottages. The ospreys turned back over the reach.

They did not come directly to the nest, and I was just saying “I hope he didn’t hurt them. I didn’t see them touch, did you?” when Jon grinned.

“Suppertime,” he said, pointing. And there they were, touching down into their nest, mouths full of wriggling silvery fish. Finally we saw the babies; their scraggly heads and huge, yawning beaks appeared above the nest rim. The parents sank down into it, and sound ceased again, except for soft whistles and the occasional “cheep.” I wept for a long time.

It was late afternoon when we got back to our beach. The sun was just flaring into one of the great fiery Penobscot Bay sunsets when I came into the dock. I knew we were late, and that they were probably worried about us. My father was walking quickly down the dock, and before he even reached us I was saying, “It was my fault, Daddy—you wouldn’t believe what we just saw.”

He looked at me for a moment. I knew that my nose was still running, and my cheeks were streaked with drying tears. He looked at Jon, not smiling.

“An eagle was about to get the baby ospreys, Mr. Constable. The parents weren’t there, and he was just circling down to the nest when they came out of nowhere like they’d been shot out of a gun just screaming, and they dived at him, one on top and one on the bottom, until they ran him clear back over here into the woods. I’m really sorry.”

My father smiled.

“Don’t be,” he said. “You’ve just seen one of the most wonderful things in the world, and maybe one of the rarest. You’ll tell your children about it. I wish I could have seen it. I’m not down to fuss at you. Lilly, you need to take Wilma quickly around the side of the house and put him in the front door. Peaches is getting a little upset.”

I looked up at our seawall. Canon Davenport was on his feet scowling down at us, and Peaches was cowering behind him and beginning to scream.

“I’m taking Wilma home with me, Mr. Constable,” Jon said. “We’ve got these two big old Bernese mountain dogs who love every dog they’ve ever seen, and a great big fenced backyard, and I’m going to put Wilma there until . . . after supper. I’ll bring him home before bedtime. He can stay all summer, if you’d like him to.”