by Anita Shreve
“My dear, yes. They have no water at all?”
“None. And she said they have five girls with them. You wouldn’t have believed how quickly she ate the plate of food I put in front of her. They’re from one of the mills in the city. Got evicted and came out here looking for somewhere to stay.”
“Good heavens,” Vivian says, sitting.
Honora puts the kettle on and sits at the table with Vivian. Honora studies her sandwich as if it were a foreign life form.
“Eat,” Vivian says. “You’re looking very peaked, if I may say so. You take such marvelous care of everyone else, but sometimes I just wonder if you take care of yourself at all.”
“I’m not sleeping well,” Honora says, taking a bite. “And then, during the day, I seem to want to sleep all the time.” She puts the sandwich down. Perhaps she is not hungry after all.
“Still no word from Sexton? No word from McDermott?”
“Nothing from Sexton,” Honora says. And then, her heart kicking up a notch, “And why would I hear from McDermott?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Vivian says vaguely. “He seems the sort of fellow who would make sure you knew what was going on.”
Honora nods.
“Thought there might be big doings in there this week,” Vivian says, “but Jack Hess says the strike leaders are really trying to keep a lid on everyone’s temper.”
“I hope they do,” Honora said.
Vivian takes a cigarette from her silver case. “Want one?” she asks.
Honora shakes her head. “I hear the owners are bringing in scabs from Dracut.”
“That’ll go over well,” Vivian says, exhaling a long slither of smoke. Honora thinks of opening a window. A headache threatens at the front of her head, and she thinks it must be from the personal squalls she’s been subject to. Her eyes feel swollen and heavy.
“Did they give you any indication when they would all be back?”
Honora watches the mailman pass by on his bicycle. No letter from her mother today, then. “Not really,” Honora says. “McDermott isn’t coming back.”
Vivian tilts her head in considerable surprise.
“He says his work will keep him in the city.”
“That’s a pity,” Vivian says, examining Honora closely. “I like him very much.”
“Yes,” Honora says.
“I hope this doesn’t mean that Alphonse won’t be coming either. Wouldn’t be the same without Alphonse.”
“No,” Honora says.
“He’s mad for you, you know.”
“He’s a sweet boy.”
“I meant McDermott. He as much as said so on Saturday night. When we were talking on the porch.”
“He said that?” Honora asks.
“I think he was feeling quite hopeless.”
Honora peels the bread away from the sandwich. Maybe she could just eat the bread.
“It’s something that can’t happen,” Honora says.
“You have to do what your heart dictates,” Vivian says.
“Do you believe that?”
“Not sure, actually. It’s always annoyingly inconvenient, isn’t it, the thing about the heart?” Vivian stubs out her cigarette. “Frankly, I don’t think he’s at all well.”
“He has an ulcer.” Honora tears a small piece of bread off the slice and experimentally chews it.
“Well, I think he’s a doll,” Vivian says decisively. “I’d snap him up in a minute if he were interested in me.”
Honora manages to swallow a bite before a distinct feeling of nausea sweeps through her. She presses her fingers to her mouth.
“Excuse me,” she says, rising.
She moves slowly at first, then with more speed, through the hallway, up the stairs, and into the bathroom. She flips the lid up on the toilet, bends over, and vomits. She sits back on the tile floor and presses a towel to her face. She must have caught the grippe this weekend from one of the men, she thinks. She tries to remember if any of them wasn’t feeling well. That would explain why she has been so out of sorts, why she has not been herself.
“Bad tummy?” Vivian asks from the doorway.
Honora glances up at her. “I don’t know what it is,” she says, “but I feel as though I’ve had a mild grippe for a couple of days now. Just the sight of that sandwich . . .”
“Oh, my dear,” Vivian says. She reaches for a clean towel and hands it to Honora.
“What?” Honora asks.
“This might come as a terrible shock.”
Honora rises from the floor.
“I think you’re pregnant,” Vivian says.
Honora sits in the kitchen chair, trying to absorb the news.
“What can you eat?” Vivian asks. “What sounds appealing?”
“I don’t know,” Honora says. “Something cold, I guess. Maybe something salty?”
Vivian finds a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter. She pours milk into a juice glass and then sets the plate of crackers and the glass of milk on the table in front of Honora.
“Of course I should have guessed,” Honora says. “I haven’t had the curse in two months. I just wasn’t paying attention.”
“I knew only because I had a friend once who got into trouble with a married man. She looked just like you do now.”
Honora drinks from the glass of milk. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was.
“Well, in that case it wasn’t a very happy realization,” Vivian says, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “I remember she went quite hysterical, in fact.”
Which is not so odd, Honora thinks, because she feels like going quite hysterical herself.
“You’re as pale as a sheet,” Vivian says. “Actually, you’re worrying me. Shall I help you into the front room so you can lie on the settee?”
Honora shakes her head. The last thing she wants to see is ashtrays full of butts.
“Perhaps a cup of tea?” Vivian asks.
Honora thinks of the new life inside her. She should be thrilled. This is everything she has hoped for, isn’t it?
“Vivian,” Honora says. “I’m not sure when I’ll be able to tell Sexton. So let’s just keep this between us for now, all right?”
Vivian makes a gesture at her mouth of turning a key and throwing it away. Honora dutifully eats the crackers and peanut butter and drinks the glass of milk. The nausea of earlier is gone now, though the sleepiness that seems to have infused her limbs is still there. She pushes the crackers away.
“Oh, Vivian,” she says.
Honora walks out onto the beach. It is too hot inside the house, and she needs to breathe.
She strolls, keeping her head down, searching the sand for the telltale hints of color, the shapes that look like New York and Kansas and Louisiana. She is sweating beneath her dress and has to pull the rayon away from her body to cool her skin. She walks into the ocean, the icy water sending welcome shivers through her shins.
She remembers McDermott’s face hovering close to hers. The smell of soap and sweat and gum and cigarettes mixed with the low-tide scent of the sea. The tree that sounded like water.
She bends to retrieve a shard of opaque white sea glass, but discovers it is only a shell.
He put his hand under her skirt, and it would not have mattered to anyone except McDermott and herself.
She digs her toes deep into the wet sand as she walks.
She said to McDermott, I wish.
She finds a piece of brown pottery with a ragged edge and drops it into the water.
He said to her that she was afraid.
She surveys the beach and the ocean and the cottages in the dunes, and she knows that she was afraid. Not of physical love, which she longed for. But of who she would become.
It might have been, she thinks now, the single worst decision of her life. Because now . . . because now she can never even think about being with McDermott. She is pregnant with her husband’s child.
In two years or three years, she thinks, she wi
ll have a small companion on her walks. Honora can see, for the first time, an image of a child bending his head to the sand, looking for bits of treasure. He will have Sexton’s dark blond curls, perhaps her own brown eyes. He will glance down and find an azure piece of sea glass, its edges smooth and safe, and will hold the prize up for his mother to see. And she will call him Seth. If it is a boy, Honora will call him after her brother, whose atoms she has imagined all these years floating just beyond her reach. Seth will be reassembled after all.
You got your wish, McDermott will say.
A shudder of regret, deep and obliterating, moves through Honora’s body, as if a small quake were rolling along the beach. She kneels on the sand to let it pass through her.
In another life, he said.
An incoming wave washes itself up the drop-off and then slides out again. A wet speck of color catches Honora’s eye. She staggers to her feet. She runs and puts her foot on the bit of glass. When a second wave has receded, she bends down to retrieve the treasure she has caught with the ball of her foot. She cannot believe her luck. A shard half an inch in diameter and an eighth of an inch thick lies in the palm of her hand. Hardly worth noticing if it were a brown or an ivory. She holds it up to the light.
Crimson.
Scarlet.
Bloodred.
Alice Willard
Dear Honora,
I am so happy about your news I hardly know what to do with myself. I am writing you straight back even though Mr. Pollop just brought your letter this morning. I just knew that when Harold went he was making way for a new life.
I will come to Ely Falls when the baby arrives. I wouldn’t miss it for all the world. Your letter said that you thought you were two months along. Have you guessed at a due date? Will you go to a clinic? I think you should, and so does Dr. Kennedy. I know you said you weren’t telling anyone just yet, but Estelle had Dr. Kennedy this morning for one of her spells (which are just a way to get attention if you ask me) and I could see his car outside, so I went over, and I had to tell him, didn’t I? He said straight away that you should have it in the hospital and that you shouldn’t even think about having it at home because hospitals are so much safer these days. He said the hospital will cost you $45 for ten days, the gas will cost $2.50 and the drugs $1.25. He said that any decent hospital would take $35 and be happy to have it.
I went up to the attic and found some lovely silk and cotton and lawn from which I will make baby clothing for you — little night-gowns and bunting and so forth. I know that it is bad luck to make the christening gown ahead of time, so I will not do that, though I will look at patterns.
Oh, Honora, I cannot tell you how much joy your news has given me.
Now remember, it is very important to eat right when a baby is coming. I had terrible cravings for donuts when Charles was on the way, and if it hadn’t been for your father’s good sense, that’s all I’d have eaten for months.
Please write me often, dear. I am most eager for any news.
Love,
Mother
Alphonse
His breath is tight and there is a pain in his side that he knows will not go away. He sprints along the road that runs through the marshes and he is moving so fast that he keeps surprising birds and ducks, which squawk and leap out of the grasses and flutter for a moment in his face before flying away. It is high tide in the marshes, and he thinks it is amazing the way it can be so beautiful and quiet and calm here at the beach while in the city there was screaming and flying rocks and fires and smoke, and then the shots. And then they were all at Rose Street, and he is pretty sure he will never forget the expression on his mother’s face, or the way Marie-Thérèse stood with her fists to her mouth and whimpered and carried on like it was she who was hurt and bleeding and not some stranger she had never met.
Mrs. Beecher is going to be very, very upset, and why oh why does it have to be Alphonse who has to tell her?
Run, Ross said when they had made it up the stairs, four men carrying the wounded man as if he were a rolled rug, one leg falling against a step and the man waking out of a dead stupor to scream that one time and all the smears of blood on the wooden steps as Alphonse brought up the rear.
Alphonse ran out to the Ely Road, thinking he could take the trolley, but then he realized that would take too long and so he stuck his thumb out and a rusted red vegetable truck came hunkering along and Alphonse got in the back and sat with the rotting cabbages and jumped off when the truck came to a stop near the beach road.
You could tell all day that something bad was going to happen. Ever since Monday morning, all of the picketers had been in a sulky mood, and last night it was so hot and so sticky you couldn’t even breathe inside the house, never mind move or sleep, and you could just see this morning on the line how hot and annoyed everybody was, as if they’d just been insulted and hadn’t been able to think of a snappy answer back.
First there were a few rocks and then there was some shouting and shoving, or maybe it was the other way around, and Mironson tried to get everyone’s attention and said, Hello there! and Hey! and Wait a minute! and finally STOP! But no one was giving him any mind, and the militia and the police just stood on the other side of the street protecting the scabs, looking like a wall that was never going to move. The crowd was kind of surging forward and backward and growing thicker and thicker as people got the news that finally, thank God, something interesting was about to happen. And Alphonse remembers the girls, teenage girls in their summer dresses and their hats, all trying to get on top of cars and saying, What’s going on? And then Mironson jumped up on the hood of a Model T that wasn’t going anywhere, and this seemed to Alphonse like a very bad idea, making himself a target like that when everyone could see the militia and the police were about to die of heat prostration in their uniforms and wanted to get this thing over with, and that was when Alphonse heard the first shot.
A policeman dropped, just dropped where he was standing, nothing dramatic, no clutching of the heart like you see in the gangster movies at the Emporium, and that shut the crowd up for a second, and then another policeman raised his gun and fired off three or four shots, and Alphonse heard a man scream, and he thought it must be Mironson, but Mironson just looked stunned, as if he’d had a piece of really bad news, and Alphonse saw Tsomides jump up on top of the Ford and drag Mironson off and that was when Ross said, Alphonse, is your mother in your house? And then Ross said, Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, and that scared Alphonse because Ross hardly ever showed any emotion about anything, and that’s when they put the man in the Ford and drove away and the blood got on the stairs and the leg hit the step.
The stitch in his side hurts so much he isn’t sure he can make it, but there, at the end of the road, he can see the house, and there she is, outside hanging up her wash, and Alphonse needs the run to be over because his breath feels like sandpaper in his lungs, but he doesn’t want one single bit to have to tell Mrs. Beecher the terrible thing he has to tell her.
Honora
The wet sheet blows against her dress and sticks like a bit of newspaper flattened in a wind against the side of a building. She struggles with the sheet and lifts it onto the line and secures it with wooden clothespins. She glances up the road, a small movement catching her attention. A cricket hopping, a wheel rolling in the dust. She peers for a moment into the distance and then she moves a few steps closer to the road. A boy is running, his body and head bent forward, his hands slapping the air as if for purchase, the way sprinters swim at the air at the finish line. At first she can’t identify the boy, but then something in the shape of the head, the spindly body, causes her to realize that it is Alphonse. She looks quickly behind him to see if he is being chased.
She is holding a wet towel, stiff from the wringer, when he reaches her.
He bends, gasping for breath, unable to speak. She drops the towel and takes hold of his shoulders and puts her head close to his while he coughs and tries to speak. She gives him a fier
ce hug and tells him to come inside, and he says, “It’s Mr. Beecher.”
She says, “What?”
And he says, “He’s been shot, he’s hurt, and Ross said I should tell you and then go get Miss Burton and she should bring you to where he is because he is calling for you and won’t stop.”
“Where is he?” she asks.
“At my house,” Alphonse says. “On Rose Street.”
McDermott
“He shot a cop,” Ross is saying in the squalid kitchen. From the living room, McDermott hears Sexton Beecher grunting and then being quiet for a moment, and then yelling as if he weren’t quite right in the head.
“What happened?” McDermott asks.
“The asshole had a gun.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“He says he pawned a pair of earrings.”
“Jesus Christ,” McDermott says.
In the corner, a young girl is whimpering. The mother is in with Beecher. “I sent the kid’s brother for the quack,” Ross says. “Beecher’s lost a bathtub full of blood.”
There’s a smear of crimson along the wooden floor, as if someone had dragged a freshly killed deer through the kitchen and into the living room.
“Where were you?” Ross says.
“On our way back from Exeter,” McDermott says.
“I didn’t know a man had so much blood in him,” Ross says.
“Where was he shot?”
“In the leg. In the thigh. Isn’t there some great big artery there?”
“If it had hit an artery,” McDermott says, “he’d be dead by now.”
The screen door opens and slaps shut. Mironson and Tsomides enter the kitchen. The girl in the corner begins to cry louder, as if the men had come to shoot her in the leg too.
“I wish she’d shut the fuck up,” Ross says to McDermott. “She’s getting on my nerves.”
Mironson’s face is white, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He tugs off his tie and opens the first four buttons of his thin shirt as if he were asthmatic and short of air. “We need to get him out of here,” Mironson says. “He’s left a trail on the stairs a blind man could follow.”