The Seasons Hereafter (12 page)

If it was something that involved Owen she wanted to know about it; she wanted to know with such greed that she was afraid she was going to blurt out some incoherent and inexcusable question. When the two men went over to the next wharf and aboard the boat, she was relieved. She turned to leave the place, and Barry shouted at her from the fish-house doorway. The whine of the saw drowned his words and she walked closer.

“I said wait a minute,” he said. “We'll be through here in half a tick, and I'll be going home.”

“I f-feel sick,” she began. “I—” He was looking past her, mouth gaping in shock. Rob Dinsmore had appeared around the corner of the fishhouse; she saw his fish-belly pallor, and the bright red glove he was holding out. He fell on his knees, swaying, and said, “I've cut off my hand.”

The glove was dripping. Steady drops splattered on the pebbles. “Phil!” Barry yelped, rushing forward. Philip came out past Van and at once Rob was hidden from her. She stood thinking, I want to be away from here, but she wasn't able to move.

“All right, Robbie,” Philip was saying. “Just let me get this bleeding stopped, huh? The rope'll do it. Come on, boy, hold on, you haven't lost it yet.”

Between them they raised him to his feet, Philip supporting the arm with the injured hand. “Give the others a hail, will you?” he called to Van. “We'll go to my house.”

She ran between the buildings and out onto the Sorensen wharf. The men were crowded around the engine down forward; Steve squatted on his heels in the small companionway, looking in. “There's been an accident with the saw,” Van called down.

They came swiftly up over the side of the wharf, passing her on both sides. Owen was the last one out. Like the rest he had to thrust his shoulders and head forward to come out, and when he straightened up in the cockpit she was alone on the edge of the wharf. He stared up at her as if she had no right whatever to be there. Then he pulled himself up over the side of the wharf.

“How bad is it?”

“I don't know, but Rob thinks he's cut his hand off.”

He shook his head and went after the others. All at once the place had the ringing emptiness that follows on catastrophe. In the Sorensen fishhouse the saw was still quietly running. It was like the one Mr. Bearse had, so she knew how to shut it off. When she came out, Joanna was crossing from the Binnacle to Philip's house with her arm around Maggie Dinsmore. The smaller child stood on the doorstep howling while the dog leaped at her, trying to lick her face.

“Darling, be good, Mama'll be right back,” Maggie implored her. The child threw herself down, screaming. Mag's freckled face contorted as she struggled between husband and child. “Oh, dear God—.”

“I'll stay with her.” Van heard her own voice, cold as if in disgust at all this display of passion.

“Thanks, Van,” Jo called to her, and hurried Mag along. Van wished she had gotten away before Rob showed up with his blood splattering on the stones. She strode to the Binnacle doorstep, gathered up the screaming and thrashing child, and carried her inside. The dog bounced officiously around her. There was a rocking chair in the kitchen and she sat down and began to rock, strongly pinning the wiry child against the convulsive arching of its back. She sang the first thing that came into her head, wondering dispassionately why in hell she'd picked that one and where it had been all these years.

Her voice was hoarse and low. It went on steadily under the child's gasps and sobs and occasional shrieks. She sang of the red deer, the black steer, the lamb from the bracken and doe from the glen; of the stream in the starlight and the red wine, of the bold Highland men who ranged on the heather with bonnet and feather. Suddenly the child gave up and lay limp, staring up at Van's face. Van didn't return the look. She kept on rocking after she had finished the song and gazed off across the kitchen. The dog lay watching her with pricked ears and shiny eyes, a small chunky red fox.

“Daddy was bleeding awful,” the child said in a quavering voice. Her small chest rose with a long breath. “Is he dead?”

“Of course not,” said Van. “He cut his hand on the saw. But everybody's helping him. What's your name?”

“Tammie. Mama was scared,” she said accusingly.

“Weren't you ever scared? But you got over it, didn't you?”

Tammie thought, then admitted with a sigh, “Ayuh.” She reached out wanly toward the dog and said, “Here, Tiger. He sprang joyfully at her fingers. Feet pounded across the doorstep and the older girl burst in, as white under her carroty bangs as her father had been. “She's Diane,” murmured Tammie.

“What's happened?” she cried. “The other kids told me—told me—” She couldn't speak, but gulped. Van put out her free hand and took hold of the skinny shoulder, holding the child still.

“Your father cut his hand on the saw. He's not dead. He's next door. Your mother's there too.”

“But I saw all the blood, on the stones by the fishhouse and on the road, and on the steps—” She gagged and retched, and vomited past Van's arm onto the floor. “We'll have to tend to Diane,” Van said to the younger one, who sat up and slid off her lap. Van washed Diane's pallid face with a cold washcloth and put her into the rocking chair with her mother's sweater around her, then cleaned up the floor with old newspapers the five-year-old brought in from the entry. She put them in the stove and washed her hands. “There,” she said. “You should feel better to get rid of all that. What did you have for dinner, for heaven's sake? Now I think we all need a good cup of tea.”

“Oh boy!” Tammie, recovered, danced around the kitchen.

“Diane, did you ever have a nosebleed?” Van asked the silent one in the rocker.

“Sometimes,” she answered languidly. The dog leaped into her lap and licked at her chin.

“Well, you know what a mess that can make. A little blood goes a long way.” Her voice was cold with authority.

“The cups are in the cupboard over the water pails,” Diane offered feebly. “Show her, Tammie.”

The three were sitting at the table solemnly drinking their tea when a shadow passed the window, and the dog flew barking at the door. Owen came in. “Hello, Tiger,” he said to the dog. “You plan to take my leg off?” He looked across at Van. “They've gone in Phil's boat,” he said. “Steve went along, and Jo's holding Maggie's hand. They got the bleeding stopped, but they knew enough to leave the glove just as it was.” He dropped into the rocking chair and took out his cigarettes. “Phil's kitchen looks like a—” He glanced at the children's faces. “Well, no call being so fancy with the details. You having a tea party?”

“Yes, we are!” said Tammie. Diane gave him a small smile.

“Mind if I join ye? Don't get up, I know my way around.” He made instant coffee in a mug and sat down at the table. “I should've baked a cake and brought it along.” The children burst into giggles.

“What's the matter, don't you think I can cook?” he asked them. They sputtered into their cups. He folded his arms on the table and looked at Van. “Would you mind telling me why in hell you cut your hair?”

“I don't think that's any of your business.” He lifted one eyebrow and then paid attention to his coffee, watching the motion in the mug as he stirred. The children talked across the table to each other. As he reached for the can of milk she saw with a shock of astonishment that three fingers were gone from his right hand. As if he felt her fascinated eyes he glanced up with a malicious smile. “Yep, today has a kind of nasty familiarity about it. That's my war wound.”

“What branch of the service were you in?”

“None. I wasn't fit, old rounder that I was. Nope, this was somebody else's war. I picked up something on the shore to see what it was and it blew up in my hands.”

She kept wanting to look back at his hand; it seemed as if she could look nowhere else except with a great effort. The mocking grin stayed around his mouth and his eyes watched her as if for signs of some sort of disintegration. She said very breezily, “What about the children tonight?”

“Oh, they can go over to Kathy. She gave me a hail. How'd you like that, kids?”

“Oh boy,” shouted Tammie. Diane said, “What about Tiger?”

“Take him too. You go get your nightdresses now.”

“We wear
pajamas
,” Diane said primly. “And we better take our toothbrushes.” When they'd gone into the bedroom he said in a low tone, “Maggie had a dream last night that meant death, she says. You should have seen her. She's prepared for him to the on the way in.”

“Will he?”

“I hope not.” His voice followed her as she carried the dishes to the sink. “Do you believe in omens? Are you plagued by dreams?”

“Sometimes,” she said indifferently. “Isn't everyone?”

“Have you had any lately?”

“Maybe a hallucination or two.”

The children came out, Tammie carrying a grimy plush rabbit, and Diane got a paper bag from under the dresser and stuffed their things into it. They and the dog looked expectantly at the adults. “Well, I guess we're ready,” said Van. Without glancing toward the man at the table she led the way toward the door. She knew as they left the doorstep that he had come out behind them, but she still didn't look around. She wanted to, but she was afraid. That she had been afraid all the time he was in the kitchen with her, she knew by the way she breathed now, out-of-doors and away from him, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time.

T
he three Bennetts came back the next day. Rob had survived his trip and was in good condition in the hospital, and Maggie was staying with her aunt. “She won't come home,” Kathy said. “She still thinks he can die any minute.” Van had at last allowed herself to be cornered, as a matter of policy. It wasn't too difficult because Kathy liked to talk, and though she was acutely interested in finding out all she could, she was too polite to ask Van questions beyond the obvious ones. She talked more about Maggie. “I don't think her aunt's any help. She brought Maggie up to believe the way she does. Everything's planned out ahead of time for you, and if you're lucky you get a warning just before something happens. I don't know if I call it lucky or not. Would
you
want to know?”

“Well, it would depend on what I found out,” said Van.

“But you can't change anything, according to Maggie, and it's always the bad things you hear about, never anything good that's coming to you, so all you can do is stew around being scared foolish and waiting for the ax to fall.” She looked impressed. “That's it, the ax. Like kneeling there waiting and waiting for the headsman to drop it. If they'd been going to execute me in the French Revolution they wouldn't have had to use the guillotine. I'd have died long before I got to it.”

Vanessa laughed and got up to leave. “I'll see you at the sewing meeting tonight,” Kathy called after her. “Can we walk over together?”

“Why not?” Van said. It was a question to herself as well as an answer to Kathy. It was all an essential part of the fabric. Not that she hadn't already woven a tight, strong bit of goods, first with Mark Bennett's child and now with the Dinsmore two. Tiger bounced and wriggled at sight of her, as Louis the cat rubbed familiarly around her ankles if she went to the store. She was branded as someone safe and ordinary; children and animals liked her, and her quietness was being marked as high quality.

At the sewing circle she met Owen's wife for the first time. She was a youthful-looking woman in her late thirties, with a sturdy body and fine coloring. There was something ingenuous about her, you could see in her the girl she had been, with the firm handclasp and the rosy cheeks, and the burnished hair that curled around her head so becomingly only because it grew that way, and not because she had any knack or patience for fixing hair. She wouldn't consider it as important as her field hockey game or her student council meeting or, later, her class of fifth-graders whom she'd organized into two softball teams.

She wasn't aggressively hearty. If she had been, Vanessa would have liked her better, or at least tolerated her more, because one can always tolerate whatever one can laugh at.

She asked Van to come over and call on her, and Van, basting quilt squares together, said without looking at her, “I'd like to.” She knew she would never walk inside his house. How had he ever married this woman? He must have grabbed at her to get away from the family. And she, poor fool, thought it was love. He couldn't have loved her. It ran him down in Van's eyes to imagine him passionate and besotted about the sturdy clear-eyed true-blue captain of the girls' basketball team. No, he'd chosen her deliberately, to run a home for him. Such men always chose women who had neither the courage nor imagination to be anything but virtuous.