Strawberries in the Sea (20 page)

After lunch she went to work scraping and painting on the outside of the house. High on Ralph's ladder she whistled softly as she worked. Marjorie Percy, who had come home last boat-day, was working around a flower bed below her porch. “I wish I could hire you!” she called. “Ralph fusses over painting his boat as if he was Rembrandt, but he never has time to do the house.”

“Sure, I'll do it,” said Rosa.

“Heavens, I was just kidding!” Marjorie came over to the foot of the ladder. “But are you serious?”

“Why not?”

“Gosh, I may just take you up on it. . . . When you're feeling dry, come on over for a cup of tea. The kids are all at Schoolhouse Cove and I can hear myself think for a change.” She went back across the path; from the back she looked like a teen-ager, and she was as limber as one. She had plain features redeemed by a kind of humorous sweetness. From the moment of meeting she had behaved as if Rosa had always lived next door. This afternoon they drank mugs of tea on the porch, talking like neighbors who had nothing new to discover about each other, and then Rosa went back to her stint.

In the late afternoon five boatloads of islanders left for the celebration at Brigport. Silence took over a deserted village. No evening ball-game, no generators started up for television. She had no intention of wasting this luxurious solitude. In the amber light of sunset, with her shadow long before her, she set out to walk across the inland to watch the moon rise out of the sea.

The Sorensen dog barked desultorily behind the gate, and Tiger picked it up from inside his house. Otherwise everything was coated by the golden quiet that seemed to drip from eaves and branches in soundless showers. But when she was passing the harbor beach, she heard an engine. The splendor was shattered as the bow of the still-invisible boat was shattering the chrysoprase sea on which this gilded island lay.

One instinct was to hurry across the flowering marsh and be out of sight before the transient dragger or haker came into the harbor. The other, equally strong, was to stay and see what sort of boat it was. While she was standing there, wanting to run but still wondering why the engine sounded familiar, the boat came in around Eastern Harbor Point with a rushing and ruffling of waters.

It was
Valkyrie
.

Rosa still could have disappeared, but she had waited a moment too long. Jamie saw her and waved energetically, whistling. Her heart began to beat in a heavy cadence and her throat seemed to be paralyzed. He had a message for her; nobody was in the store here to answer the telephone, because Mark's family had gone to the celebration, so someone had called Brigport. About what?

She turned to walk back to the wharves, and she could hardly move her legs. Something had happened to Con. He was still her husband, so of course they'd call her. She'd have to take charge. He'd been drowned, or it was some terrible road accident. Last year a woman had been beheaded. . . . Con's head. Red curls an aunt used to twine around her fingers.

By the time she turned in between her fishhouse and the Sorensens, her legs wanted to give away and salt water was running in her mouth. She heard the clatter of oars, dimly saw Jamie's fair head in the cold shadow between the wharves, and then he was coming up the ladder.

“Hi!” he called. “Were you going or coming when I whistled?” Trying to think of a way to break the news. She said quietly, because she hadn't the strength for vehemence, “Did you have a message for me?”

“Nope. Why? Oh, you mean the whistling. Hell, I was just trying to get your attention. Did, didn't I?”

The bloody picture of Con vanished, leaving her lightheaded. She braced herself as if on a tilting deck. “What did you want me for, then? What did you come back for?”

“What are
you
doing?”

“I was just going for a walk to watch the moon rise.”

“Then that's what I came back for,” he said. “Come on, let's go.”

“Wait a minute—”

“What's the matter?” He barred her way. “You scared to walk with me? I wasn't planning to make a pass at you, if that's what you think.”

“No, I didn't think
that!
” He made her feel ridiculous, as if she were afraid to be alone with a man. “I don't know why I said it, to be frank. I just object on general principles. It was born in me, the way it's born in you to make a legal case out of everything.”

“Not quite everything,” he said.

“No, you didn't when you hauled me out of the breakers, and you could have skun me good.” She smiled. “Let's go, then.”

He wasn't a glib talker. He gave her some island history as they went along, but she had to keep priming him with questions, and wished she had the courage to let silence take over. After all, he'd barged in on her walk and it wasn't up to her to act like some fancy hostess who had to keep the conversation lively. What the hell did he think, that because he'd given her a tow he'd made some kind of link between them? Or did he think because she was apart from her husband and waiting for a divorce that she wanted company or comforting? The way some men came honeying around. . . . Except that you couldn't very well call it honeying around, the way he did it. He'd just taken over her walk, told her Fern Cliff was better than Windward Point, showed her the way off the Eastern End path through ferns and juniper, all but told her where to roost, and now sat with his folded arms resting on his hauled-up knees, staring at the red-gold moon rising out of the sea. He slapped a mosquito on his neck without taking his eyes from the scene.

“I read somewhere that the Japanese have moon-watching platforms,” she said. “They aren't too comfortable, because you're not supposed to be taking it easy. I suppose that's why we have mosquitoes.”

That got no response. She felt like laughing, and wondered if he'd think she was crazy. She might try it. . . . She decided against it. The gold was fading now to silver. The quiet was as immense as the ocean, and the sense of the almost unoccupied island behind them was as strong as a presence.

At the most distant rim of the silence she heard an engine. “That wouldn't be a seiner tonight,” she said. “Not with moonlight.”

“Likely somebody coming home from Brigport,” he said.

“When I first came out here, I heard there was a war on with the purse-seiners. Was that just talk? Because I know the stop-twiners and purse-seiners tangle sometimes at home.”

“Always will, I guess. Yeah, the war's going on. It's been quiet around here for a week or so because
Centurion
's been seining off Pirate Island, but I expect 'em all back here next dark of the moon.” She had uncorked the right bottle. “I've seen as many as five purse-seiners out here at once, with that many carriers standing by to take out the fish. So they don't only break up the big schools before they can get into the coves, but they also ram right through the gear and slice off buoys left and right. Goddamit, this is our own island and they come down on us like vultures.”

“It seems funny that you all can't get together and talk,” she said.

“Talk's been tried, with the men themselves. Look, they're not all bad. Most of the skippers honestly try not to cut off buoys. But Purvis, on the
Triton
—she tends out on
Centurion
—he's just plain mean. Sure, the sardine companies are backing the seiners, and they've got to get fish. But there's other places besides Bennett's Island, and the others do go somewhere else sometimes. But I figure
Centurion
keeps coming back here just to raise hell with us; just trying to prove that nobody, but
nobody
, is going to keep them out of any place they want to go. They're a bunch of pirates. . . . Well, there's a special way to deal with them.”

“And somebody ends up in jail,” she said skeptically.

“Only if they can name names. Who can prove who ran through their nets with an outboard, if they didn't catch him in the act? Who can prove somebody was firing over their heads? If they can't show bullet holes in a boat, how can they say anyone was trying to sink 'em?”

“Well, I don't blame you for being mad,” she said.

“Mad? I'm so sore all the time it's a wonder I don't get ulcers. We could get thousands of bushels of herring without leaving home. Plenty for bait and to sell. But these guys come from somewhere else and we don't have the freedom of our own waters.”

“And it's one of those things that's so unfair and so damned hard to fight,” said Rosa, “unless you do it your own way.”

Suddenly he reached out an arm, pulled her toward him, and kissed her briefly but hard on the mouth. She was more astonished than anything else. “What's that for?” she asked, bracing back.

“For not preaching at me.” He was grinning. “For not telling me not to take the law into my own hands. You know, the older generation on here keeps talking about working within the law. Well, they made their own law out here once. They just don't like remembering.”

“Or else they think you can't manage as well as they did. They never think we're as smart as they were, and, besides, the wardens take to planes these days, remember.”

“At night?” He took her by the shoulders and kissed her again, this time with more obvious enjoyment. He let her go before she had time to object. “That may look like a pass to you,” he said, “but, if it is, I didn't plan on it, so I wasn't lying.”

“Either you're telling the truth or you've got a damned good line,” she said. She got up. “Well, I've seen the moon rise.

He stood up too, and she wondered if he'd follow up the kiss, but he didn't offer to touch her. “I've got to go back for the kids later, around eleven. Come on with me. A moonlight sail around Tenpound is quite a sight.”

The habitual negative was already in her mouth, but surprising herself she thought, Why not?

“All right,” she said. “Meet you at the wharf at eleven, then. What'll the kids think? They asked me to come, but I said I couldn't stay awake that late.”

“Anybody has a right to change their mind, or maybe have insomnia.” They both laughed. On the way back to the harbor in the moonlight they talked more, and not just about herring, which for a while she had believed to be the only subject that fired him up. The second kiss had proved something different, and though he would never be an easy or fast talker he was entertaining on his family and local history. They swapped anecdotes about themselves as children, and by the time they reached the harbor beach, and she heard herself laughing out loud, she realized that for a little while she'd been feeling like the old Rosa; Rosa B.C., she thought cynically. Before Con.

Several boats had returned, and Terence Campion was just coming in, the bow wave sparkling in the moonlight. They stood watching, both hypnotized by the sight of a boat in motion. The boat slowed down and moved on spangles toward her home wharf; children's excited voices piped clear of the muted engine. Behind her in the harbor she had left flakes and ripples of light, and each moored boat touched by the wake rocked in quick-dying bursts of radiance.

Tiger recognized his children's voices among those across the harbor, and he began to bark. The Sorensen collie joined in. From out of sight up at the Homestead another dog picked it up.

“Ten o'clock news broadcast,” said Rosa. “The place is coming to life. For a little while there was nobody on it but us.”

“When I was a kid,” Jamie said, “ and I'd get mad with everybody, I'd want to tilt the island up on end and slide everybody off. Everybody but the animals, I never got mad with
them
. I'd live here with them like Robinson Crusoe, and keep the Brigporters off with a shotgun.”

“Are you still that antisocial? I thought you were, the day I came.”

“Don't sound so worried. I'm not going to turn into one of those mad snipers. I know I sound antisocial sometimes, but grousing and growling and cussing is as far as it goes.”

“Except for purse-seiners.”

“Except
Centurion
and
Triton
,” he corrected her. “The rest we can live with.” But he was still good-natured, as if the grievance didn't go too deep after all; at least it didn't obsess all his waking hours. “Come on up to the house and have a mug-up with my folks. You'd just get home and have to come out again, anyway.”

It was like somebody not being able to refuse to drink, she thought. She should call off the whole thing now, say she'd changed her mind; anybody had a right to, he'd said it himself.

Behind the Sorensen gate the collie whined and moaned in ardent greeting.

“Hello, Rory Mor,” she said to him to hide a sudden attack of embarrassment. Jamie was ahead, singing out, “Ahoy the house! Got company!” She lingered outside with the dog, fiery, wondering what they'd think of Jamie fetching her home like this. But the dog wanted to go in too, and the voices were welcoming.

Joanna and Nils made little fuss over her. Their hospitality was obviously a part of themselves, nothing assumed for the occasion. It was pleasantly deflating to realize they were used to setting out extra cups and plates innumerable times a day. They had known her father and the Websters; whatever they knew or had heard about her married life, it was her identity as McKinnon's daughter and Edwin's cousin that influenced their interest in her and what she was doing here.

Jamie was alert but not edgy; he seemed at ease as the son of the house. He was like his father in the shape of his month, the curve of nostril, the modeling of eyelids and of the bone around the eye-hollows, the silver-fair eyebrows. But the quick smile taking one by surprise came from his mother's line. Rosa had seen it already in almost every Bennett she'd met, down to Young Mark, in whom it shone all the brighter for coming so seldom.

“All the girls talk about nowadays is your singing and playing,” Joanna said to her. “I gather they're going to unveil you at their show.”