by Noreen Doyle
But even before then we’d seldom talked on the phone. You said it would destroy the purity of our correspondence, and refused to give me your number in Seattle. We had never seen that much of each other anyway, a handful of times over the decades. Glasgow once, San Francisco, a long weekend in Liverpool, another in New York. Everything was in the letters; only of course they weren’t actual letters but bits of information, code, electrical sparks; like neurotransmitters leaping the chasm between synapses. When I dreamed of you, I dreamed of your name shining in the middle of a computer screen like a ripple in still water. Even in dreams I couldn’t touch you: my fingers would hover above your face and you’d fragment into jots of gray and black and silver. When you were in Basra I didn’t hear from you for months. Afterward you said you were glad; that my silence had been like a gift.
* * *
For a while, the first four or five years, I would go down to where I kept the dinghy moored on the shingle at Amonsic Cove. It had a little two-horsepower engine that I kept filled with gasoline, in case I ever needed to get to the mainland.
But the tides are tricky here, they race high and treacherously fast in the Reach; the Ellsworth American used to run stories every year about lobstermen who went out after a snagged line and never came up, or people from away who misjudged the time to come back from their picnic on Egg Island and never made it back. Then one day I went down to check on the dinghy and found the engine gone. I walked the length of the beach two days running at low tide, searching for it, went out as far as I could on foot, hopping between rocks and tidal pools and startling the cormorants where they sat on high boulders, wings held out to dry like black angels in the thin sunlight. I never found the motor. A year after that the dinghy came loose in a storm and was lost as well, though for months I recognized bits of its weathered red planking when they washed up on shore.
The book I was working on last time was a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The manuscript remains on my desk beside my computer, with my notes on the nymph “whose tongue did not still when others spoke,” the girl cursed by Hera to fall in love with beautiful, brutal Narkissos. He hears her pleading voice in the woods and calls to her, mistaking her for his friends.
But it is the nymph who emerges from the forest. And when he sees her, Narkissos strikes her, repulsed; then flees. Emoriar quam sit tibi copia nostri! he cries; and with those words condemns himself.
Better to die than be possessed by you.
And see, here is Narkissos dead beside the woodland pool, his hand trailing in the water as he gazes at his own reflection. Of the nymph,
Several months ago, midsummer, I began to print out your letters. I was afraid something would happen to the computer and I would lose them forever. It took a week, working off and on. The printer uses a lot of power and the island had become locked in by fog; the rows of solar cells, for the first time, failed to give me enough light to read by during the endless gray days, let alone run the computer and printer for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. Still, I managed, and at the end of a week held a sheaf of pages. Hundreds of them, maybe more; they made a larger stack than the piles of notes for Ovid.
I love the purity of our relationship, you wrote from Singapore. Trust me, it’s better this way. You’ll have me forever!
There were poems, quotes from Cavafy, Sappho, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin. It’s hard for me to admit this, but the sad truth is that the more intimate we become here, the less likely it is we’ll ever meet again in real life. Some of the letters had my responses copied at the beginning or end, imploring, fractious; lines from other poems, songs.
The first time, air traffic stopped. That was the eeriest thing, eerier than the absence of lights when I stood upon the granite dome and looked westward to the mainland. I was used to the slow constant flow overhead, planes taking the Great Circle Route between New York, Boston, London, Stockholm, passing above the islands, Labrador, Greenland, gray space, white. Now, day after day after day the sky was empty. The tower on Mars Hill fell silent. The dog and I would crisscross the island, me throwing sticks for him to chase across the rocky shingle, the wolfhound racing after them and returning tirelessly, over and over.
After a week the planes returned. The sound of the first one was like an explosion after that silence, but others followed, and soon enough I grew accustomed to them again. Until once more they stopped.
I wonder sometimes, how do I know this is all truly happening? Your letters come to me, blue sparks channeled through sunlight; you and your words are more real to me than anything else. Yet how real is that? How real is all of this? When I lie upon the granite I can feel stone pressing down against my skull, the trajectory of satellites across the sky above me a slow steady pulse in time with the firing of chemical signals in my head. It’s the only thing I hear, now: it has been a year at least since the tower at Mars Hill went dead, seemingly for good.
One afternoon, a long time ago now, the wolfhound began barking frantically and I looked out to see a skiff making its way across the water. I went down to meet it: Rick Osgood, the part-time constable and volunteer fire chief from Mars Hill.
“We hadn’t seen you for a while,” he called. He drew the skiff up to the dock, but didn’t get out. “Wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I told him I was, asked him up for coffee, but he said no. “Just checking, that’s all. Making a round of the islands to make sure everyone’s okay.”
He asked after the children. I told him they’d gone to stay with their father. I stood waving, as he turned the skiff around and it churned back out across the dark water, a spume of black smoke trailing it. I have seen no one since.
Three weeks ago I turned on the computer and, for the first time in months, was able to patch into a signal and search for you. The news from outside was scattered and all bad. Pictures, mostly; they seem to have lost the urge for language, or perhaps it is just easier this way, with so many people so far apart. Some things take us to a place where words have no meaning. I was readying myself for bed when suddenly there was a spurt of sound from the monitor. I turned and saw the screen filled with strings of words. Your name: they were all messages from you. I sat down, elated and trembling, waiting as for a quarter-hour they cascaded from the sky and moved beneath my fingertips, silver and black and gray and blue. I thought that at last you had found me; that these were years of words and yearning, that you would be back. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the stream ceased; and I began to read.
They were not new letters; they were all your old ones, decades old, some of them. 2009, 2007, 2004, 2001, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996. I scrolled backward in time, a skein of years, words; your name popping up again and again like a bright bead upon a string. I read them all, I read them until my eyes ached and the floor was pooled with candle wax and broken light bulbs. When morning came I tried to tap into the signal again, but it was gone. I go outside each night and stare at the sky, straining my eyes as I look for some sign that something moves up there, that there is something between myself and the stars. But the satellites, too, are gone now, and it has been years upon years since I have heard an airplane.
In fall and winter I watch those birds that do not migrate. Chickadees, nuthatches, ravens, kinglets. This last autumn I took Finn down to the deep place where in another century they quarried granite to build the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. The quarry is filled with water, still and black and bone-cold. We saw a flock of wild turkeys, young ones; but the dog is so old now he can no longer chase them, only watch as I set my snares. I walked to the water’s edge and gazed into the dark pool, saw my reflected face, but there is no change upon it, nothing to show how many years have passed for me here, alone. I have burned all the old crates and cartons from the root cellar, though it is not empty yet. I burn for kindling the leavings from my wood bench, the hoops that did not curve properly after soaking in willow-water, the broken dowels and circlets. Only the wolfhound’s grizzled muzzle tells me how
long it’s been since I’ve seen a human face. When I dream of you now I see a smooth stretch of water with only a few red leaves upon its surface.
We returned from the cottage, and the old dog fell asleep in the late afternoon sun. I sat outside and watched as a downy woodpecker, Picus pubesens, crept up one of the red oaks, poking beneath its soft bark for insects. They are friendly birds, easy to entice, sociable; unlike the solitary wrynecks they somewhat resemble. The wrynecks do not climb trees, but scratch upon the ground for the ants they love to eat. “Its body is almost bent backward,” Thomas Bewick wrote more than two hundred years ago in his History of British Birds:
whilst it writhes its head and neck by a slow and almost involuntary motion, not unlike the waving wreaths of a serpent. It is a very solitary bird, never being seen with any other society but that of its female, and this is only transitory, for as soon as the domestic union is dissolved, which is in the month of September, they retire and migrate separately.
It was this strange involuntary motion, perhaps, that so fascinated the ancient Greeks. In Pindar’s fourth Pythian Ode, Aphrodite gives the wry-neck to Jason as the magical means to seduce Medea, and with it he binds the princess to him through her obsessive love. Aphrodite of many arrows: she bears the brown-and-white bird to him, “the bird of madness,” its wings and legs nailed to a four-spoked wheel.
The same bird was used by the nymph Simaitha, abandoned by her lover in Theokritos’s Idyll: pinned to the wooden wheel, the feathered spokes spin above a fire as the nymph invokes Hecate. The isle is full of voices: they are all mine.
Yesterday the wolfhound died, collapsing as he followed me to the top of the granite dome. He did not get up again, and I sat beside him, stroking his long gray muzzle as his dark eyes stared into mine and, at last, closed. I wept then as I didn’t weep all those times when terrible news came, and held his great body until it grew cold and stiff between my arms. It was a struggle to lift and carry him, but I did, stumbling across the lichen-rough floor to the shadow of the thin birches and tamaracks overlooking the Reach. I buried him there with the others, and afterward lit a fire.
This is not the first time this has happened. There is an endless history of forgotten empires, men gifted by a goddess who bears arrows, things in flight that fall in flames. Always, somewhere, a woman waits alone for news. At night I climb to the highest point of the island. There I make a little fire and burn things that I find on the beach and in the woods. Leaves, bark, small bones, clumps of feathers, a book. Sometimes I think of you and stand upon the rock and shout as the wind comes at me, cold and smelling of snow. A name, over and over and over again.
Farewell, Narkissos said, and again Echo sighed and whispered Farewell.
Good-bye, good-bye.
Can you still hear me?
MRS. TODD’S SHORTCUT
Stephen King
“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.
Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her, but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.
This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.
“She don’t drive as fast as ’Phelia,” Homer said. “I swan I used to think what an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces like she could.”
Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk prefer their own love stories and hate stories and scandals and rumors of scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia Corbridge found that after a week or so she couldn’t even get invited to lunch on her story of how she found him with the pistol still in one stiffening hand. But folks are still not done talking about Joe Camber, who got killed by his own dog.
Well, it don’t matter. It’s just that they are different race-courses we run on. Summer people are trotters; us others that don’t put on ties to do our week’s work are just pacers. Even so there was quite a lot of local interest when Ophelia Todd disappeared back in 1973. Ophelia was a genuinely nice woman, and she had done a lot of things in town. She worked to raise money for the Sloan Library, helped to refurbish the war memorial, and that sort of thing. But all the summer people like the idea of raising money. You mention raising money and their eyes light up and commence to gleam. You mention raising money and they can get a committee together and appoint a secretary and keep an agenda. They like that. But you mention time (beyond, that is, one big long walloper of a combined cocktail party and committee meeting) and you’re out of luck. Time seems to be what summer people mostly set a store by. They lay it by, and if they could put it up in Ball jars like preserves, why, they would. But ’Phelia Todd seemed willing to spend time—to do desk duty in the library as well as to raise money for it. When it got down to using scouring pads and elbow grease on the war memorial, ’Phelia was right out there with town women who had lost sons in three different wars, wearing an overall with her hair done up in a kerchief. And when kids needed ferrying to a summer swim program, you’d be as apt to see her as anyone headed down Landing Road with the back of Worth Todd’s big shiny pickup full of kids. A good woman. Not a town woman, but a good woman. And when she disappeared, there was concern. Not grieving, exactly, because a disappearance is not exactly like a death. It’s not like chopping something off with a cleaver; more like something running down the sink so slow you don’t know it’s all gone until long after it is.
“’Twas a Mercedes she drove,” Homer said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “Two-seater sportster. Todd got it for her in sixty-four or sixty-five, I guess. You remember her taking the kids to the lake all those years they had Frogs and Tadpoles?”
“Ayuh.”
“She’d drive ’em no more than forty, mindful they was in the back. But it chafed her. That woman had lead in her foot and a ball bearing sommers in the back of her ankle.”
It used to be that Homer never talked about his summer people. But then his wife died. Five years ago it was. She was plowing a grade and the tractor tipped over on her and Homer was taken bad off about it. He grieved for two years or so and then seemed to feel better. But he was not the same. He seemed waiting for something to happen, waiting for the next thing. You’d pass his neat little house sometimes at dusk and he would be on the porch smoking a pipe, with a glass of mineral water on the porch rail. The sunset would be in his eyes and pipe smoke around his head and you’d think—I did, anyway—Homer is waiting for the next thing. This bothered me over a wider range of my mind than I liked to admit, and at last I decided it was because if it had been me, I wouldn’t have been waiting for the next thing, like a groom who has put on his morning coat and finally has his tie right and is only sitting there on a bed in the upstairs of his house and looking first at himself in the mirror and then at
the clock on the mantel and waiting for it to be eleven o’clock so he can get married. If it had been me, I would not have been waiting for the next thing; I would have been waiting for the last thing.
But in that waiting period—which ended when Homer went to Vermont a year later—he sometimes talked about those people. To me, to a few others.
“She never even drove fast with her husband, s’far as I know. But when I drove with her, she made that Mercedes strut.”
A fellow pulled in at the pumps and began to fill up his car. The car had a Massachusetts plate.
“It wasn’t one of these new sports cars that run on unleaded gasoline and hitch every time you step on it; it was one of the old ones, and the speedometer was calibrated all the way up to a hundred and sixty. It was a funny color of brown and I ast her one time what you called that color and she said it was champagne. Ain’t that good, I says, and she laughs fit to split. I like a woman who will laugh when you don’t have to point her right at the joke, you know.”
The man at the pumps had finished getting his gas.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he says as he comes up the steps.
“A good day to you,” I says, and he went inside.
“’Phelia was always lookin for a shortcut,” Homer went on as if we had never been interrupted. “That woman was mad for a shortcut. I never saw the beat of it. She said if you can save enough distance, you’ll save time as well. She said her father swore by that scripture. He was a salesman, always on the road, and she went with him when she could, and he was always lookin for the shortest way. So she got in the habit.
“I ast her one time if it wasn’t kinda funny—here she was on the one hand, spendin’ her time rubbin’ up that old statue in the square and takin’ the little ones to their swimmin’ lessons instead of playing tennis and swimming and getting boozed up like normal summer people, and on the other hand bein’ so damn set on savin’ fifteen minutes between here and Fryeburg that thinkin’ about it probably kep’ her up nights. It just seemed to me the two things went against each other’s grain, if you see what I mean. She just looks at me and says, ’I like being helpful, Homer. I like driving, too—at least sometimes, when it’s a challenge—but I don’t like the time it takes. It’s like mending clothes—sometimes you take tucks and sometimes you let things out. Do you see what I mean?’