by Jane Langton
But she wasn’t. And Gwen seemed preoccupied, when Homer appeared suddenly in the kitchen, with a great windy slamming of doors. Her mind was somewhere else. She supposed that Mary was still at the library. “Tell her to come home, will you? It won’t be safe out on the road much longer. Or else both of you just stay there.”
Homer climbed grimly back in his car, and hurtled back down the road toward town. A big branch had fallen across Lowell Road at one place, and a bunch of men from the lumber company by the Red Bridge were tugging at it. Homer fumed. He got out of the car and helped. Nothing to it. What had they been stalling around for? He got back in his car and made a jackrabbit start. One of the men from the lumber company looked at the other and flexed his biceps, “Muscleman,” he yelled.
The library looked shut up tight. Damnation. Mary’s car was nowhere in sight. Just to be sure, Homer got out and dodged around to the back. He had to climb up on the wall beside the delivery ramp to look in the office window. There was no one in the office. What was that pink thing on Mary’s desk? Like a hat? It was a hat. It was that crazy hat Alice Herpitude used to wear.
There was a cracking sound above the roar of the wind, and the feathery top of an elm tree went sailing past, sliding and bounding up the street. Where in the hell was Mary?
Homer teetered on the top of the wall and looked again at Alice’s hat. Mary wouldn’t have gone down to Alice’s place, would she? Yes, she might very well have gone to Alice’s, to ready it for the storm, because it was her own house now. There would be things a property owner would want to lash down, to take care of. Homer made a run for his car. His was the only one on the road now, the wind was so high. It was behind him as he flew along Sudbury Road, turned on Fairhaven and crossed the turnpike. It was a mad business, charging down a narrow wood road with trees tossing right and left. Twice he had to stop his car and drag branches out of the way. At last he came down the steep descent at the edge of the river and pulled up at Alice’s house. There was Mary’s car. Thank God. He would find her in the house, and in a moment she would be safe again, safe in his arms. Leaning forward against the wind, Homer struggled up the steps and banged on the door. No one answered. He peered inside. All dark, the door locked. Where in God’s name was she? Homer turned wildly and looked out at the river. There was no little boat at the landing, but there was something else. Homer’s heart jumped into his throat. He ran to the landing. There were her shoes, in the lee of a big rock. One of her stockings was fluttering in a tree, the other had blown away.
The river had gone wild. The wind stormed over the black bay, hurling up quick frightened waves, with white spume threshing from their tops, rushing away from him. There was no sign of Mary, not anywhere. But there was something there in the water, way out in the middle of the bay near the island. It was—oh, God—it was a boat, overturned, upside-down. It must be hers, it could only be hers. Homer stumbled along the shore, looking for something to go out in, a rowboat or canoe, or something, anything. He shouted “Mary,” but he couldn’t even hear his own voice. Then he cursed himself for a fool, and turned and struggled in the other direction. Teddy’s house was on the other side, and there would be some sort of canoe in his boathouse, if the police had only left it there.
They had. There were two of them, a canoe and a rowboat, resting upside-down on sawhorses. Homer hauled on the canoe clumsily and dragged it to the water’s edge, righted it, stepped into the boggy ground, shoved off and climbed in. He was instantaneously swamped. The waves twisted the canoe sideways and washed over it. It tipped over, dumping him into the river. He grabbed at the paddle and doggedly sloshed out of the river again. Turn the canoe over, dump out the water and try again, only you’ve got to do some fast work with the paddle.
This time it was better. Homer dug choppily with his paddle, and managed to keep headed across the wind-torn waves. The spume streaked past him. The sun had gone out, and it was raining. Before he knew it the gale and the gale-driven water had carried him as far as the middle of the bay. Chop, chop, quick now, the other side, chop, chop. Nearly had him that time. Homer blinked the deluge out of his eyelashes and tried to see ahead. It was impossible to do anything but try to keep abreast of the waves. Any other kind of steering was out of the question. He was being carried to the east side of the island. The little boat was nowhere in sight. Homer glanced to right and left, fearfully, half expecting to see Mary’s poor drowned face floating above the water. Why had she come out in this, the crazy fool girl? Then something caught Homer a terrible blow across the left shoulder, and he cried out and nearly lost control. A giant object hurtled past him, turning end over end, and foundered in the river a few yards away. It was the wooden slat-backed swing from Miss Herpitude’s place, torn from the ground by the savage strength of the tempest. Branches went scudding past him. On the island the cracking trees sounded like tiny snaps of a scissors above the locomotive roar of the storm.
Suddenly the water quieted a little. He was in the lee of the island, and he could stop plowing at the water for a minute and look around. Water streamed from his hair down across his face. His shirt clung to him. His lap was full of water. If he didn’t bail the water out of the bottom of the canoe it would sink. There was nothing to bail with. He had better try to land. Homer looked over his shoulder at the island.
There she was! She was running along the shore of the island, bowed over, stooping, racing, looking like a child, her hair loose and blowing in front of her, her feet bare. Oh, thank God, thank God. What was the matter with her foot? Homer shouted at her, but his words were blown back in his mouth. He lifted his paddle and tried to turn the canoe, but it wouldn’t budge. It was those buttonbushes, damn them. The water between the island and the mainland was thick with them, and what had looked like a clear channel was a sunken morass of bushes. Homer looked for Mary again. Where was she? And who was that? Someone with a great heavy spade in his hand was struggling from one tree to another, moving in pouncing rushes, ducking across the point to cut her off. It was Howard! Oh, God, it was Howard! Homer clawed with his hands at the bushes, tearing at them, inching forward. Too slow, too slow! Why in the name of God didn’t he have a gun?
The storm had passed its height, and the force of the wind was abating slightly. For a moment the squalling winds died. But deep down in the muddy roots of the giant pine that stood in the clearing the thickened clods supporting the last clinging root-strands began to be waterlogged by the rising watertable, and slowly—slowly—the old tree began to tremble loose. It leaned a little way toward the clearing, where there was nothing to stay its fall, and began to topple.
Mary stopped in the clearing. She dropped the notebooks and put her face in her hands, breathing in great sobs. In snatches between her indrawn breaths she began to mumble and pray …
Homer saw her. He stood up in his canoe and roared at her, with a shriek that tore his throat—“Jump, Mary, jump!”
She heard it, and looked at him, her white face blank. Then she looked up and stood frozen for a second. Then she jumped. The pine tree caught her a glancing, scraping blow, and she fell. But it caught something else, too, and destroyed it …
And the thing that it killed had once been worthy and good (one of those dependable people that everyone turns to and relies on)—the best fellow in all the world.
Chapter 59
… And we went on to heaven the long way round.
HENRY THOREAU
“Hoy there.” It was a tiny sound. Homer, dazed, turned toward it. Someone was pulling strongly across the water, looking back over his shoulder at him, pulling with his oars and heading his prow firmly across the churning waters of the bay. It was Teddy Staples. He was nearly at the island.
Homer stared at him vaguely and started scrabbling at the bushes again. But then Teddy maneuvered carefully among them and pulled Homer’s canoe free by stretching an oar to him. Then they landed together on the shore. Homer, his knees weak and nearly folding under him, struggled to the place whe
re Mary lay. Teddy strained at the limbs of the tree, and Homer lifted her tenderly. She was unconscious. “I think she’ll be all right,” said Teddy. “The trunk just missed her.”
The triumphal arch was founded on the sea, and through it, looking far away, Mary could see her distant blue peninsula. There was someone standing on it, and her eyes were so miraculous that she could see right past the columns and the arches and the moldings and the coffered barrel vaults, way across the water, with its dolphin-drawn shells and seagods, to the very texture of the cloth on the person’s sleeve. There were long telescopic feelings in her fingers, too, and she could reach out through the arch, far away, and feel the cloth. And her ears were like conch shells that amplified the sound, so that she could hear what the person was saying. He was saying her name, and cursing.
She woke up and smiled at Homer. He stopped cursing. But he went on saying, “Mary, Mary.” He was kneeling beside her bed with his arms around her. How lovely, how lovely.
The nurse was touching Homer’s arm. He shrank back in dismay. “Oh my God, I’m hurting you.”
“No, no. Do it some more.”
He did it some more very carefully, while the nurse grinned. “I thought I’d lost you. And you were the only one that would ever do. I knew that right away, the first day I saw you. You spoiled all the others that ever were or ever could be.”
“I did? Oh, I’m so glad. How lovely. Oh, that’s nice.”
Homer leaned back and glared at her. “And, by God, you’re going to marry me right away, before you slip through my fingers again. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Please, Mary.”
Mary closed her eyes. Her head hurt. What was it she had been trying to decide? Had it been something to do with jumping? She had decided not to jump, that was it. Like the Transcendentalists … Then Mary put her head back on the pillow and her mind began slowly to unclench like an opening fist. She opened her eyes. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ll marry you if we don’t have to go away for a honeymoon. Could we spend it in the library? I’ve got a whole new idea—oh, ouch. What’s the matter with my foot?”
“It’s broken. Compound fracture. You had a concussion, too. You’re all beat up.”
“Then that’s why my head hurts. Listen, Homer. You know how Henry Thoreau would jump rope? He wouldn’t refuse. No sir, not Henry. He would just take the rope right away from the two little girls and swing it for himself, at his own pace, with those two strong legs of his leaping up and down. Isn’t that right?”
“Oh, sure,” said Homer, nodding fatuously (humor her).
“And Emily, too. Emily would have a little rope, like a whip, and she’d swing it quickly, jumping in her small white dress, with her little black shoes tripping up and down in a tight rhythm like a verse, skipping all the way to the stars and back.”
“There now, my darling, you just go back to sleep, there’s my good girl. And of course we don’t have to go away. Libraries are my favorite for honeymoons. We’ll live in Alice’s house on Fairhaven Bay, and we don’t ever have to go away at all.”
Next morning Mary woke up feeling a little more like herself. Homer came in again after breakfast, and took a good deal of time kissing her tenderly and telling her exactly why he loved her. Then he helped her out of bed and into a wheel chair and pushed her down the hospital corridor. “There’s someone upstairs who would like to see you.”
“Oh, oh, it’s not Gwen?”
It was Gwen. She was sitting up, eating breakfast, looking wonderfully flat. Tom stood up as they came in, and started to complain. “I wanted to call her Augusta, for Augusta Wind. I mean, how many children do you ordinarily have born in the teeth of a howling gale?”
“No,” said Gwen, “that won’t do. Oh my, isn’t the food good? Just think I didn’t cook it. Do go see the baby. She’s the nicest one yet.”
Homer made a literary suggestion. “What about calling her after Prospero’s daughter, in The Tempest? What was his daughter’s name? Miranda.”
“Oh, good for you. That’s it. Miranda. Miranda Hand. I hope you like it, Tom, because that’s what it’s going to be. You do like it, don’t you?”
“Oh, I do, I do.”
Homer wanted to know what it had been like, getting Gwen to Emerson Hospital in the middle of the storm. Had they had any trouble?
“Oh, no trouble at all,” said Tom. “You don’t call driving seventy miles an hour in a hundred-mile-an-hour gale trouble? The only little mishap we had with the pickup, which was all that was running at the moment, was picking up some broken window glass and puncturing a tube. But we didn’t even stop. We bumped all the way to the hospital and got here on three wheels and a bent rim.”
“Say,” said Homer, “that gives me a good idea. Why don’t you call the baby Tube-blows Begonia? All these Morgan girls look like flowers.”
Mary felt dizzy and silly. “Flat-tirey will get you nowhere,” she said.
“Oh, please don’t make me laugh,” said Gwen. “It hurts.”
Homer pushed Mary down the hall and they looked in the window at the baby, which didn’t look like anything much yet, and then they went back to Mary’s room. Out of the window they could see the Sudbury River, glittering in the morning sun. Down below in the garden someone was tidying up, sawing a fallen aspen into small lengths of firewood.
“It was the worst hurricane around here since ’38,” said Homer. “Trees are down all over, especially the old diseased elms. There’s a little foreign car wedged between the columns in front of the Middlesex Savings Bank, and a tree fell on the roof of the Rod and Gun Club. One good thing, though: you know that awful fake Colonial Wool worth false-front? It tore off and blew away, like a sail before the wind. It’s probably over Connecticut by now.” Homer looked up. There was someone standing shyly in the doorway. “Oh, Teddy, come on in. I guess we don’t need to tell you how glad we are you came along.”
There was a big bunch of ugly-looking flowers in Teddy’s arms. Mary smiled at him and reached out her hand. “Teddy, you look wonderful. Where have you been? Are you going to try to tell us you didn’t know everyone was looking for you?”
“I sure am. Homer told me the police were after me. But I guess the only way I’d have heard about it was if they’d written it in the sky over Moosehead Lake. I’ve been down in Maine.”
“In Maine? But why? I mean, what made you go off so suddenly, without saying goodby or anything? If you knew how worried we’ve been about you …”
“Well, I told Homer how it was. I had this crazy notion I only had a few more days to live. Did he tell you? And there was something I had to get done first.”
“I know. There was someone you had to meet …”
“Someone?” Teddy looked puzzled. “No, not someone. There was something I had to see—my whiteheaded eagle.”
“Your whiteheaded——?”
“My whiteheaded eagle. You know, our national bird. It was the only bird Henry Thoreau saw that I didn’t have on my lifetime list. I just had to see it. So I went up Annursnac Hill one day, feeling pretty poorly …”
“Yes, I remember. Tom saw you that day.”
“That’s right. And I saw it.”
“You saw it?” said Homer. “What, you mean you saw your eagle?”
“That’s right. He came dropping out of the sky far, far away, just as the sky cleared. I knew it was him as soon as I saw the speck. I hardly even needed my glasses. He just hung there in the sky, banking in a circle over my head. Then you know what he did? He veered off and headed in a straight line to the northeast, like an arrow flying to its target. Heading straight for Maine. And it seemed to me like it was Henry himself, beckoning to me, telling me where to go. It was like he said that Maine was where he’d like to have died, not in a stuffy room somewhere, but out in the open woods, in the forest, with nothing but Indians and the wild creatures of the woods around him. S-so I ran down the hill, climbed in my flivver and took off up north. Didn’t even stop to pack my clot
hes.”
“And then you didn’t die, after all.”
“No, I began to feel revived as soon as I got up past Bangor. I bought some provisions and a little equipment and headed for the wildest part of the woods. And you know what happened? It occurred to me that, now I’d seen all the birds Henry saw, I might as well tackle the plant life. And I got so busy doing that, I forgot what day it was, and before long May 6th was gone by without my even thinking about it. And I got a darned good list. I saw spotted touch-me-not, and spikenard and several kinds of orchis and the hog-peanut. And I made me some lily soup, the way Henry did when he was there.”
Teddy’s clothes were green with rough usage, but he had just mended them and here and there a bright new staple flashed. Homer remembered the staples he had found on the monument at the bridge, and he asked Teddy about it point-blank.
“Was I at the bridge that day? Yes, as a matter of fact, I was. I was paddling around waiting to see if the bluebird would come back to make one more try for her hole, when I saw Ernie there at the bridge, and went over to speak to him, to put in another word for throwing out those golblasted letters. I pulled my canoe up and went up to him. But I never got a chance to say anything. He was huffy, wanted to know if I was the one who had sent him a note making an appointment to meet him there. Seems he’d gotten an anon-anonymous note, offering him a lot of money for the letters, and he was mighty suspicious, thinking it might be one of the members of the Alcott Association trying to put one over on him. You know, get him there with the letters and then get them away by force. But he was too cagey for us, he said. He’d hidden the letters where nobody’d find ‘em, and there they’d stay until someone came along with a real offer or a genuine promise of publication. I said, heck, it wasn’t me sent him the note. And then I left, and got back to my birds and forgot all about Ernie.”
“Didn’t you hear the shot?” said Homer.