Strawberries in the Sea (3 page)

When she and Con were married she thought, I hope Papa knows, and he's happy that everything turned out all right; better than all right, even if we were married by a justice of the peace in Belfast and not by Mr. Murray in church with everyone there.

Now tears squeezed slowly into her eyes, not for Papa but for her own incredulous happiness that night in Belfast. She kept her vision clear for the last mile into town by blinking furiously, but when she turned in under the cold shade of the maples in the driveway, the open barn doors shimmered before her and salt drops began to run down her cheeks.

A good long bawl, that's what you need, she thought. Get it over with and then start packing.

She went in the side door between the eave-high white lilacs, handbag under her arm, shoes in her hand, stockings trailing. We never did make that special trip, she thought. There never was a pretty Sunday all that summer, and in the fall Papa was dead. He hadn't expected that.

She dropped her shoes in the short hall and went into the kitchen unbuttoning her dress.

Con was there. He sat on a stool at the counter drinking coffee, eating pie, and reading
The Down-East Fisherman
. He looked around with mischievous appreciation and she began struggling to button her dress again, but her fingers had no strength.

“Why all the modesty?” Con asked. “We're still married.”

“Damn you!” she said. “You've got one hell of a nerve! That's the cherry pie for the Brownies' cooked-food sale!”

He had a soft, surreptitious, snorting laugh that always used to make her laugh just to hear it. It maddened her now. She went across the kitchen into her room and shut the door, remembering not to slam it as that would only amuse him further. She stripped off her clothes, hurling the damp girdle viciously across the room, and went into the bathroom and took a cool shower. She returned to her room and put on fresh underwear and a cotton dress, and went back to the kitchen in her bare feet.

“Coffee, love?” Con invited. “Or how about a cold beer?” He went toward the refrigerator. The new penny, Jude called him, and that was the color of his hair, crisp and glittering on his tanned neck.

“Never mind the beer,” she said. “What are you here for?”

He turned, hands outspread in innocent surprise. “I came in to load that last batch of traps to set out tomorrow morning, if it doesn't come in thick of fog. You knew I was coming.” He was hushed with hurt.

“What are you doing in my house? That's what I mean. Walking in here as if you still had rights. And cutting into that pie.”

“The best cherry pie I ever ate, by God. Listen, love, you wouldn't take me on as a boarder, would you? Strictly business? Geneva Rowland's the worst cook in three counties.”

She went to the cupboards and began assembling materials for a new pie. She had to form an image of each item and say the word to herself.
Yellow bowl. Shortening
. . . . “It's all under way,” she addressed the flour can. “They'll serve the papers on you at Geneva's. Sometime in August you'll be off the hook. Goodbye, and I mean it.”

“Ah, Rosie, don't be so bitter,” he said in a low voice, close behind her. “You've never once talked to me like a human being since that day.”

“There was nothing to say. There's nothing now.” She opened cupboard doors, glared blindly inside, slammed them shut. “You said it all.”

“Not all.” He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. She could have resisted, and was ashamed because she didn't. His face was close to hers, tenderly earnest. “Don't hate me, darlin'. I can't stand having you hate me, after what we've been to each other for three years. You gave me my first real family, my first real home. You think I'm happy about this, but I'm not. Somebody should've knocked my brains out with a club before I ever got that close to Phyl!”

She lifted first one of his hands off and then the other, gingerly, as if they were repellent to the touch. “But you love her,” she said, making her eyes big. “You can't live without her, remember? You couldn't help yourself. And didn't I want you to be happy? If I really
loved
you, I'd want you to be happy, no matter what. And besides, there was the little feller, he had to have a name. Could I take it out on an innocent child?”

“Sure, I said all that because I was half out of my mind! You know what hell is? It's not what somebody does to you, it's the day when your own foolishness catches up with you. Goddam my wandering eye, you're enough woman for any man.”

“Will you go now?” she asked stolidly. “I've got another pie to make.”

“Oh, to hell with the pie!” he shouted. He was red. “I still love you, Rosie, that never stopped! Sure, I'll admit she turns my guts inside out by just looking at me, but so do you in your own way, despising me with that cold eye, you that was always so warm.”

“I love little Rosie, her heart is so warm, and if I butter her up enough she'll do me no harm.” She laughed loudly, “It wasn't only your eye that wandered, was it?” She turned her back on him, reaching for the two-cup measure. “Look, you better stop using this wharf and fishhouse. I thought for a while it'd be all right, but I've changed my mind. She's got a decent wharf over there in Birch Harbor.”

“I can't start tying up there till I'm married to her!” He sounded actually shocked.

This time her laughter almost got away from her in wildly spiraling hoots. “With every fisherman in Seal Point seeing you tied up there when you were supposed to be hauling, with everybody from here to Limerock knowing she was in the family way before I did? Oh, go away, Con!” she gasped. “Get out and don't bother me any more.”

His arms enwrapped her from behind, his fingers pressing into her breasts. His lips brushed her nape. “Listen, Rosie, if it wasn't for the kid I'd call it off in a minute, I swear it.”

She wrenched his arms apart and moved away from him with a twisting thrust of her shoulder. “What do you want me to do for you? Tell you it's all right, I know you can't help it so go along with my blessing? Salve your conscience for you? Well, I won't.”

His head jerked and his eyes widened as if she had slapped him, and she grinned maliciously. “You mean it, don't you? You can't stand to have anybody mad with you. It does kill you if anybody gives you a hard eye, no matter what you've done to deserve it. Has everybody got to love Conall Fleming? So he'll feel safe and happy?” She remembered the weight and warmth of his head against her breast in the long winter nights. “Now go on. You're through with the wharf and fishhouse, remember. I'm not having you run in and out as if you still had a right to, and I don't think she'd care for it either, not that I give a hoot in hell what she likes.”

“You want to watch it, you're turning sour, Rosie,” he said sorrowfully. “You'll be spending the rest of your life alone, and there's no need of that. Even if you've got no more use for me, there's other men in the world.”

“When did you come to that conclusion? Put the boat back on the mooring when you go down to the fishhouse to pick up your stuff.”

“What's the harm in leaving her at the wharf for the night? I won't come near you in the morning.”

“I don't trust that promise, and I don't want you within a half mile of me. It could upset the divorce and I don't want to take any chances on that. I can hardly wait to get shed of you.”

He turned abruptly and walked away. At the sight of his back going out the door she felt his name rise in her throat like something to be compulsively spewed out, and she put her hand over her mouth to hold it in.

She half-turned toward the sink window to watch him going down to the wharf, but instead she bolted for the back stairs, and was up in the attic chamber pulling bags out when the diesel engine started up. She stood staring up at the familiar shreds of bark left on the old hand-hewn beams but not seeing them, listening to
Sea Star
's progress among the moorings until the soft pulse was drowned out by a nearer outboard motor.

B
y now she was beyond tears, she felt parched and barren, and in this desert she made the new pie for the Brownies. While it was in the oven, she picked up some things to take away with her. This was Friday, and the mailboat wouldn't go again until Monday, but she wanted to pack so she would feel she was moving forward all the time. She had a sleeping bag, and clothes were no problem, just an assortment of shirts, slacks, sweaters, underwear, and a change of sneakers; her oilclothes in case she wanted to walk in the rain. She'd always liked that, but Con was like a cat about getting wet. At work was one thing, but for
pleasure?

There'd be all those shores foreign to her, the gray seas rolling in and the scent of wet rocks and fresh-pulled kelp, the drenched woods on one side of her and nothing out there in the rain and the mist but the ocean. Papa was always quoting about the surf,
Break, break, break, on they cold grey stones, O sea
, from a poem he'd learned in school, but he never could remember anything more than that. But he'd said it so often that she always thought it when she was on the shore in certain weathers. Now it meant Bennett's Island in the rain, and it filled the house with storm-swept seas while the June day moved into burnished evening outside the windows. When the timer rang for the pie, she came back to the moment with a slight shock of disorientation.

She set the pie out on a bench in the back entry to cool, and called Leona Pierce to tell her where it was. Then she found a box for the clothes she had worn today, emptied her handbag of personal things, and put in all the make-up and the last bottle of perfume Con had given her—she'd always had a suspicion that Phyllis had picked it out—and put the bag in the box too. She loaded the trash and garbage containers into the back of the pickup, set the box of clothes beside her on the seat, and drove out through the village.

At the eastern end of steep Main Street the harbor was as blue as bachelor's-buttons, and the boats, wharves, and sheds were all coated with evening sunshine, thicker and richer than the morning kind. It was suppertime and hardly anyone was in sight. She drove up the hill toward the Civil War monument, the young soldier turned a burning bronze by the long rays of late sun, and followed a silent road past lawns and gardens where no one was. In the curious light and stillness it seemed like a place from which all humankind had been removed by some unspeakable catastrophe out of science fiction. The impression was so strong that when she met two boys on bicycles she was relieved; then she thought, Why should I care if everybody else but me disappears? At least nobody would be looking at me any more. And nobody'd have Con if I couldn't.

Her calm began to thin and waver like dissolving fog, and she braced her jaw and stepped harder on the gas. She took the turn-off by the Advent church and drove through the woods of the Glencoe section, where the dump was. There was no one else there at this hour, only gulls and crows, and she was glad of that. She didn't know which was worse, the concern of the older people who had watched her grow up and thought she'd been victimized by Con, or the greedy satisfaction of those who felt vindicated now, even if none of them was the one to get him. At least Phyllis was a pretty little thing; of course he'd just latched onto Rosa so he'd be set up in lobstering for free, except for the cost of the marriage license.

Ah well, at Bennett's the people would be indifferent to her, not caring why she had come, and indifference would be the balm laid on the blistering burn.

She left the garbage and trash inside the wired enclosure, and the box outside, the shoes perched on top to attract attention. Just as she was getting back into the pickup, a sagging station wagon came cautiously up the hill from the Quarry Road. Children's ragged heads poked out of the windows.

“Mama!” someone shrieked. “Lookit them shoes!”

Feeling slightly cheered, Rosa drove back home.

There was a car in the driveway and it wasn't Leona Pierce's. She swore softly, and was of a mind to drive straight by, but as she hesitated a man came from the shadows of the barn and stood in the doorway looking out at her. It was Jude Webster's son Edwin. She turned into the driveway, grudgingly, not wanting to be civil to anyone. She wanted to hold on to what peace she had left.

As she got out Edwin came toward her, his thin height casting a shadow that seemed as long as a telephone pole. Solemnly he dangled a key ring overhead like a sprig of mistletoe. She remembered suddenly, and made an excited grab for them, and Edwin raised them out of her reach, then relented.

She held the ring tightly in her fist. “Come on in,” she said. “I've got part of a cherry pie.” She was very hungry all at once.

His male presence exorcised Con's for the time being. He slouched comfortably in the armless rocker, smoking his pipe, one foot up on the other knee, gazing around the kitchen as if he were tranquilly glad to be there.

He was thirty-one, two years older than Rosa. They each had light brown hair, fine and thick, and the straight Webster nose. Otherwise they looked nothing alike. Edwin had a long head and a thin but meticulously shaped mouth that seemed sardonic in repose, as if the irony of his situation had become an integral physical part of him. Until he smiled, the mouth discouraged or actually repulsed advances, like the odd-colored eyes; a yellowish tawny that could have been unpleasant or even sinister. But the color became attractive and entirely fitting when one came to know him, as essentially Edwin as his smile or the expressiveness of his hands; just as his enforced silence seemed more profound and significant than the silences of ordinary people.

He wore his clothes well and was always immaculate even in working gear; she suspected it was his chief, or perhaps his only, vanity.