by Ann Swinfen
‘I’ll work a rope pattern in the borders, I think, to link the pictures together,’ said Miss Susanna, who was leaning on Miss Molly’s arm.
Sandy took the thick pencil she offered him and sketched a single-engine plane, filling one of the frames. He added the RAF emblem of circles on the wings and put a few wiggly clouds behind it.
‘How’s that?’
‘Just what I want. Now sign it with your initials.’
He wrote a flourishing ‘A.F.’ in the corner and passed the pencil to Wayne. Encouraged, Wayne stuck his tongue out between his teeth and produced a workmanlike drawing of a trawler. He signed it too, and gave a sigh of relief.
‘That’s excellent, Wayne,’ said Miss Molly. ‘I didn’t know you were an artist.’
Wayne turned red and shuffled his feet.
One by one they filled in their frames. Tirza did her best to draw Stormy Petrel. Sergeant Klinsky, unexpectedly, drew a vase of flowers, which leaned a little to one side, but Miss Susanna said, ‘Good. Let’s not have transport in all of them.’
Danny attempted to draw the gun, but it might have been a stick of celery; Jim carefully outlined an American flag.
‘About the only thing I kin do,’ he muttered to Danny.
Captain Tucker pondered a good deal, then he produced quite a passable likeness of Flamboro church, although the weathervane was almost as high as the spire. Tommy, over six feet tall, with muscles like a wrestler and tattoos on the backs of his hands, drew the rear view of a rabbit. He reddened as he leaned back and looked at it.
‘Teacher taught me how to do that in kindergarten,’ he mumbled. ‘Don’t reckin I’ve drawn nothin’ since.’
That left Irvine and Simon to complete the last row. Irvine sucked the pencil, then began to draw a series of arcs. ‘A rainbow,’ he explained. ‘I calculate that’ll let you use plenty of colours. And I guess we’re all looking for the pot of gold when peace comes after this durn war.’ He handed the pencil on to Simon.
Simon writhed with embarrassment.
‘I can’t, Miss Susanna,’ he said. ‘I can’t even draw a straight line in math. Using a ruler.’
‘No need to worry if your lines aren’t straight. Hooking along the weave of the fabric will make them come straight.’
‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Oh, go on,’ said Wayne. ‘Do something.’
‘You could draw the farm,’ said Tirza, oddly insistent, as if this was important. ‘The cow barn.’
‘Aw, Tirza, it’s a peculiar shape. All those angles the roof makes.’
‘Here,’ said Miss Susanna, ‘I’ll help you get started. If we draw the front, where the big double doors are...’ She took his hand and guided it. ‘Now, just run some lines back from that to make the side.’
Awkwardly, he did as he was told. It was no work of art, but it was unmistakably a cow barn. Encouraged, he drew a tree with a stick-like trunk, a lollipop top and little circles all over it.
‘An apple tree,’ he said triumphantly, throwing the pencil down.
Tirza opened her mouth to say that the orchard trees were a long way from the cow barn, then she shut it again.
‘Initials,’ said Miss Susanna.
After their artistic efforts, the soldiers began to relax. Yes, they could just manage another piece of cake and some more coffee, and when Miss Catherine brought in a strawberry shortcake smothered in cream, the Boston ladies’ first party for the visiting heroes came to a satisfying climax.
After they left the Penhaligons’ house, Tirza and Sandy went round to Schoolhouse Lane and started up the rough ground towards Christina’s wood. Sandy seemed rested after sitting and was only limping a little.
‘Are those blueberries?’ said Sandy, pointing to a cluster of growth below them, where the ground was green and boggy.
‘No, those are cranberries. Haven’t you ever seen cranberries?’
‘I don’t think they grow in Britain.’
‘Those are OK, but we have much better ones in our marsh. They’re not ready yet. These are blueberries, just ahead of us.’
‘Right, I see. They’re like the ones on the island.’
He stood still, breathing heavily. ‘Is it far to Mrs O’Neill’s house?’
‘Not far. But here, you better lean on me.’
When they reached the cabin there was a thin wisp of smoke rising from the chimney, but Christina was sitting outside in the clearing above the cliff shelling peas. Tirza introduced Sandy, and Christina set aside the bowl of peas before she took his hand. She looked keenly into his eyes.
‘So you are the young man from Scotland. My father came from the Highlands. I see you are in pain. Won’t you come inside?’
She led Sandy into the cabin, still holding him by the hand, and made him sit on the edge of the long cedar linen chest which she kept covered with a rug to make a seat. While Tirza wandered around picking up books and examining the latest pressed wildflowers, Christine took him through the details of his injuries and the treatment he had received.
‘Well.’ She tossed her greying braids over her shoulders. ‘I’m going to have to look at both those legs. Get your pants off.’
Sandy looked startled, and glanced at Tirza. Christina laughed.
‘Tirza has spent half her life on the farm; bare legs won’t worry her. But if you’re over-modest, go into my bedroom. There’s a towel there you can wrap around yourself.’
Sandy did as he was told, and came limping back, clutching a towel around his hips.
‘Lie down there,’ Christina commanded, ‘and stretch out your legs.’
Tirza, stealing a glance sideways, was shocked by the terrible red gashes across Sandy’s legs, puckered as if gathering threads had been run through them at irregular intervals and drawn tight. The new skin, fragile as petals, was shiny.
‘It was the torn metal that did this, I suppose,’ said Christina.
Sandy nodded, looking awkward and uncomfortable lying there. ‘And the impact broke bones in several places, though the last X-ray showed them healing all right.’
Christina knelt down on the floor beside him. She closed her eyes and ran her hands over his legs from thigh to calf, probing the muscles and bending each knee. Then she cupped each heel in the palm of her hand in turn and rotated the ankle. Sandy winced occasionally, especially when she massaged the muscles at the back of his calves.
With a click of her tongue, she got up and took down some bundles of dried leaves which were hanging from pegs in the rafters.
‘Put the kettle on, will you, Tirza? And pick me some fresh sage from the garden.’
When boiling water was poured on to a selection of leaves Christina had pounded in an earthenware bowl, an aromatic steam filled the cabin. Sandy breathed it in deeply. Even the smell made him feel better. He was not sure what he was expecting – rattle dances, mumbo-jumbo? This dignified, middle-aged woman was not at all what he had pictured. Her only eccentricities seemed to be a habit of going barefoot, like Tirza, and her decision to live alone in the woods. He lay back, less tense now than when he was waiting to see what she was going to do. Much of the cabin was lined with bookshelves, he noticed. It was clear where Tirza had caught the habit of reading.
‘Now,’ said Christina. ‘This has cooled a little, but we must lay it on as hot as you can bear, just so long as we don’t scald you.’
She began to coat his legs with the pulpy mass, which felt unbearably hot at first, but soon imparted no more than a comforting, deep-penetrating heat. Over the poultice she laid moss, and then took a length of surgical bandage from Tirza and wound it round everything to keep it in place. Sandy started to wonder how he was going to make his way back to the hotel wearing nothing but his shirt and underpants, a towel and two huge, white-bandaged legs.
As if she had read his thoughts, Christina fixed him with a humorous eye.
‘Don’t worry. It would be better if you kept these on all night, but I’ll take them off when they’re co
ld, and give you some salve to rub in when you go to bed tonight. You can stay long enough to eat supper with us, can’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Sandy, sinking back and enjoying the warmth and softness of the dressings. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
Christina pinned the end of the last bandage in place and wiped her hands on a towel. She looked down at the young, strained face.
‘Put a blanket over him, child,’ she said to Tirza. ‘I hope he’ll sleep for a while. Then come outside and help me finish those peas.’
Tirza fetched a blanket from Christina’s bedroom. Sandy’s trousers and socks were lying neatly folded on the bed. The blanket was one of the old Indian ones, frayed at the corners but rich with patterns which held meanings hidden from her. Sandy was breathing deeply, his dark lashes lying still on his cheeks. Tirza felt an unexpected rush of tenderness as she tucked the blanket carefully over him. People looked younger when they were asleep. He might have been no older than Simon. Then she went outside to help Christina.
By the time supper was ready and the smell of grilled herring and corn stirabout filled the cabin, Sandy began to wake up. Tirza came over with a cushion in her hand and smiled at him.
‘Now you’re just to sit up carefully.’ She wedged the cushion at the end of the chest where it met the wall, and helped him into a sitting position so he could lean against it.
‘Why, Mrs O’Neill,’ he said, ‘I believe I’m feeling better already.’
Tirza passed him a tray of food and he started to eat hungrily.
‘Please call me Christina.’ She had wound her braids at the nape of her neck and looked more formal now. ‘I hope it will give you some relief and start the healing process. Your muscles were very tense and knotted. And there are torn ligaments that will take some time to heal. I’m afraid you’ll be limping for a good few weeks yet. I think you should come back in a couple of days. Come in the morning, so we can leave the poultices on for longer.’
‘I always wondered whether there was something in this herbal medicine.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said dryly. ‘Herbs have wonderful therapeutic powers that most people have forgotten in this modern age of chemical medicines. Did you know that the properties of aspirin were known to the Indians? They derived it from the bark of the silver birch. I wish I knew more about the uses of herbs and other plants. Pennyroyal, bergamot, thoroughwort – they all have excellent properties. Arnica. Camomile. But I’m ignorant about so many of them. Southernwood I know only for its lemon scent, which lasts for months, folded amongst linen. And of course it was given as a pledge of love.’
She grinned. ‘Whether for its permanence or for its astringency, I’m not sure. My mother taught me what little I know, but I’m afraid that, like so many youngsters, I was rather scornful of my parents’ skills and heedless of what they could teach me. I thought my future lay elsewhere.’
‘Tirza tells me you studied law at Vassar.’
‘I did. That was enough to show me that I’d been following a naive daydream. I thought I would be able to fight for the cause of justice and protect the innocent. But when I came to realise I might just as often be called upon to defend the wicked, and exercise persuasive arguments on their behalf, I lost the taste for it. By the time I came back here, both my parents were dead, so I had sacrificed a great deal for a misguided ambition.’
After their meal, Christina removed the poultices from one leg and Tirza from the other. Tirza noticed that the skin was a better colour. The newly healed scars were no longer so red and angry looking, and the flesh seemed firmer and more healthy. She laid her palm against Sandy’s thigh, where the worst of the scars cut a jagged line down to his knee. The skin felt pleasantly warm now.
‘Does it feel better?’ she asked.
‘Much better.’ He grinned at Christina. ‘You may not be a tribal medicine man, but you seem to have healed me.’
Tirza was afraid her grandmother might be offended, but she only laughed.
‘Go and put your clothes on, you young rascal, and Tirza can take you home.’
12
Maine: Summer 1942
The morning before Independence Day, Tirza got up as usual at five o’clock, dressed, and let herself quietly out of the house on the wharf side. However, she did not go as usual to pick up her bucket of baited crab line and row her dory round to the cove below Christina’s forest. Instead she climbed the path over the promontory south of Flamboro and took the cliff path alongside the Tremayne place towards Libby’s Beach. Had anyone observed her, they might have noticed a certain furtiveness about the way she glanced over her shoulder at the sleeping town before she disappeared from sight behind the clump of birches at the point where the path levelled out and followed the narrow strip of rock between the Tremaynes’ land and the precipitous cliffs.
No one, however, was watching. Danny and Jim, who were coming to the end of the most wearisome watch at the gun platform, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., had a desultory eye on the sea, but the lack of activity offshore had robbed their spells of duty of any interest and they spent their time in somnolent inactivity. There had been light enough for them to scan the ocean through their binoculars for about an hour now, though looking east into a sun rising through sea mist dazzled their eyes and confused their perceptions. What seemed to be likely black shapes on the horizon reproduced themselves on the front of Flett’s Stores below them on Shore Road, or danced elusively from the schoolhouse roof to the sloping garden of the Penhaligon house, betraying themselves as negative spectres of the sun imprinted on their eyeballs.
They yawned and stretched and cursed the length of the watch, and sipped at their scummy tin mugs of cold coffee and lit another cigarette from the burning stub of its predecessor, and swore that they had the most God-forsaken duty of the whole God-damned war.
The spots on the horizon which were not a trick of the sun were the now-familiar outlines of the offshore fishing fleet, heading home, but Tirza was long gone before the fishermen were near enough to shore to notice her making her way purposefully towards the foxholes, which drew a dotted line marking the division between the granite ledges of the beach on the one side and the lush grasses, scattered with brackish pools and interspersed with wild cranberries, which formed the marsh on the other.
Nor did any of the lobstermen see her. They were swimming up from sleep, but slowly. On long, easy summer days they could take their time, stretching out the working day with the sun. They yawned and turned over, or groped with bony feet for carpet slippers and wandered down to the smell of bacon and eggs frying.
No one observed her from the Penhaligon house. The three sisters slept more lightly now in old age, but each preserved the fiction of sleeping in order to spare the concern of the others. Miss Susanna kept a thermos of tea in her room, which she measured out sparingly during the night whenever the pain woke her. Miss Catherine, who slept better than the others during the dark winters, found herself restive on light summer mornings, and would creep down to the kitchen before six to start coffee percolating, where she would be joined half an hour later by Miss Molly, who kept up the pretence by feigning surprise at finding Kitty there, at being there herself, at the clock for telling what must surely be the wrong time.
In the Mansion House Hotel, guests and staff were still sleeping, and no one took a quick glance at the morning from any of the few side windows which overlooked the length of the beach stretching away from the base of Todd’s Neck, so Tirza was unseen also from here. In his room facing east toward the ocean, perched above the steep cliff which ended in a tumble of ragged rocks, Sandy had spent an undisturbed night for the first time since his crash. Whatever Christina had put into her poultice and the cream he had applied later, it had eased the pain enough to allow him to sleep.
Even Pierre, in the best of the staff bedrooms, would not wake for another hour. The Mansion House began serving breakfast at the civilised hour of eight o’clock. Unlike the fishermen’s houses in Flamboro and the farm
s inland, the hotel was silent, with no stirring, no early risers.
Tirza could not be seen from the Libbys’ farm, because once she reached the junction of the coastal path with the farm track, she turned away from the fields and followed the sandy path to the beach. It zigzagged down between banks of sweet briar which scrambled over the projecting rocks and were warmed by the early sun to a fine heady perfume. The smooth silver sand of Libby’s Beach was fringed with a scalloped edging of translucent clam shells and the mysterious whorls from the interiors of broken snail shells, and in the low early light Tirza could see bubbles breaking up through the wet strip left by the receding tide. Below the revealing bubbles lived short-necks and blue clams in such profusion that she could have dug them up from the sand with her toes.
No one saw Tirza, which was as well, because she was about to do something she would never have done for herself. She was about to commit theft.
She had made her choice of foxhole. Not at the beginning of the line, and not at the end, because, she reasoned, these were the ones Irvine and Tommy and the others were likely to pay most attention to. Halfway along the line they would be sauntering, lighting a cigarette, busy talking. She had seen them often enough. And there was one particular foxhole... She found it again with satisfaction, climbing up the sharp ledges of granite with the skill of practice. If you placed your foot unwarily, the knife-edged layers of rock could cut into a bare foot like butter. But if you climbed crabwise, placing each foot on familiar small niches and plateaux in the rocks, your flesh met only the ancient flat surfaces of the layers.
The foxhole she had selected had been sited carelessly, too close to the boggy ground, and the marsh was already sucking it away from underneath. Below her feet as she perched on the edge of the hole looking down she could see the sandbagged sides bowing inwards, starting to collapse. On the seaward side the raised parapet was sagging to the left and sliding almost imperceptibly into the hole. She examined the top layer of sandbags. Several were poorly woven, with ugly irregular threads distorting the fabric. Another was marked by a large black stain the shape of Texas. Two more seemed suitable.