Stern Men

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  She was sharing Mrs. Pommeroy’s home with Webster and Robin and Timothy Pommeroy, and with Robin’s fat wife, Opal, and their big baby, Eddie. She was also sharing it with Kitty Pommeroy, who’d been thrown out of her house by Ruth’s Uncle Len Thomas. Len had taken up Florida Cobb, of all desperate women. Florida Cobb, Russ and Ivy Cobb’s grown daughter, who rarely said a word and who’d spent her life gaining weight and painting pictures on sand dollars, was now living with Len Thomas. Kitty was in bad shape over this. She’d threatened Len with a shotgun, but he took it away from her and blasted it into her oven.

  “I thought Florida Cobb was my goddamn friend,” Kitty said to Ruth, although Florida Cobb had never been anyone’s friend.

  Kitty told Mrs. Pommeroy the whole sad story of her last night at home with Len Thomas. Ruth could hear the two women talking in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom, with the door shut. She could hear Kitty sobbing and sobbing. When Mrs. Pommeroy finally came out, Ruth asked, “What did she say? What’s the story?”

  “I don’t want to hear it twice, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

  “Twice?”

  “I don’t want to hear it once out of her mouth and once out of mine. Just forget it. She’ll be staying here from now on.”

  Ruth was beginning to realize that Kitty Pommeroy woke up every day more drunk than most people would be in their entire lives. At night, she would cry and cry, and Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth would put her to bed. She’d punch them as they struggled with her up the stairs. This happened nearly every day. Kitty even clocked Ruth in the face once and made her nose bleed. Opal was never any help in dealing with Kitty. She was afraid of getting hit, so she sat in the corner and cried while Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth took care of everything.

  Opal said, “I don’t want my baby growing up around all this yelling.”

  “Then move into your own goddamn house,” Ruth said.

  “You move into your own goddamn house!” Robin Pommeroy said to Ruth.

  “You all are just like brothers and sisters,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Always teasing each other.”

  Ruth couldn’t see Owney. She hadn’t seen him since the wedding. Pastor Wishnell was making sure of that. The pastor had decided to spend the fall on a grand tour of the Maine islands, with Owney as his captain, sailing the New Hope to every dock in the Atlantic from Portsmouth to Nova Scotia, preaching, preaching, preaching.

  Owney never called Ruth, but how could he? He had no number for her, no idea that she was living with Mrs. Pommeroy. Ruth didn’t so much mind not being called; they’d probably have had little to say to each other on the phone. Owney wasn’t much of a conversationalist in person, and she couldn’t imagine dallying away hours with him over the line. They’d never had all that much to talk about. Ruth didn’t want to talk to Owney, anyhow. She wasn’t curious to catch up with Owney on local gossip, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t missing him or, rather, craving him. She wanted to be with him. She wanted him in the room with her so that she could feel again the comfort of his body and his silence. She wanted to have sex with him again, in the worst way. She wanted to be naked with Owney, and thinking about that filled up a good bit of her time. She thought about it while in the bathtub and in bed. She talked to Mrs. Pommeroy again and again about the one time she’d had sex with Owney. Mrs. Pommeroy wanted to hear all the different parts, everything the two of them had done, and she seemed to approve.

  Ruth was sleeping on the top floor of the big Pommeroy house, in the bedroom Mrs. Pommeroy had first tried to give her when she was nine—the bedroom with the faint, rusty blood spatters on the wall where that long-ago Pommeroy uncle had taken his life with a shotgun blast in the mouth.

  “As long as it doesn’t bother you,” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth.

  “Not a bit.”

  There was a heating vent on the floor, and if Ruth lay with her head near it, she could hear conversations throughout the house. The eavesdropping brought her comfort. She could hide and pay attention. And, for the most part, Ruth’s occupation that autumn was hiding. She was hiding from her father, which was easy, because he wasn’t looking for her. She was hiding from Angus Addams, which was slightly more difficult, because Angus would cross the street if he saw her and tell her what a dirty little whore she was, fucking around with a Wishnell, trash-mouthing her father, slinking around town.

  “Yeah,” he’d say. “I heard about it. Don’t think I didn’t fucking hear about it.”

  “Leave me alone, Angus,” Ruth would say. “It’s none of your business.”

  “You slutty little slut.”

  “He’s just teasing you,” Mrs. Pommeroy would tell Ruth if she happened to be there, witnessing the insult. This made both Ruth and Angus indignant.

  “You call that teasing?” Ruth would say.

  “I’m not goddamn teasing anyone,” Angus would say, equally disgusted. Mrs. Pommeroy, refusing to become upset, would say, “Of course you are, Angus. You’re just a big tease.”

  “You know what we have to do?” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth again and again. “We have to let the dust settle. Everyone loves you here, but people are a little worked up.”

  The biggest portion of Ruth’s hiding occupation during August involved Mr. Ellis, which meant she was hiding from Cal Cooley. More than anything else, she did not want to see Mr. Ellis, and she knew Cal would someday fetch her and bring her to Ellis House. She knew that Lanford Ellis would have a plan for her, and she wanted no part of it. Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon helped her hide from Cal. When Cal came to the Pommeroy house looking for Ruth, Mrs. Pommeroy would tell him she was with Senator Simon, and when Cal asked for Ruth over at the Senator’s, he was told she was at Mrs. Pommeroy’s place. But the island was only four miles long; how long could that game last? Ruth knew that when Cal really wanted to catch her, he would. And he did catch her, one morning at the end of August, at the Ellis Granite Company Store building, where she was helping the Senator build display cases for his museum.

  The inside of the Ellis Granite Company Store was dark and unpleasant. When the store was closed, almost fifty years earlier, everything had been stripped from the place, and now it was a gutted, dry building with boards over the windows. Still, Senator Simon couldn’t have been happier with Ruth’s strange gift to him, after the Wishnell wedding, of the key to the padlock that had kept him out of the place so long. He couldn’t believe his fortune. He was so excited about creating the museum, in fact, that he temporarily abandoned Webster Pommeroy. He was willing to leave Webster down at Potter Beach alone to scour the mud for the last elephant tusk. He had no energy these days to worry about Webster. All his energy was devoted to fixing up the building.

  “This is going to be a splendid museum, Ruth.”

  “I’m sure it will be.”

  “Mr. Ellis really said it was fine to make the place into a museum?”

  “He didn’t say that in so many words, but after I told him what you wanted, he gave me the key.”

  “So it must be fine with him.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “He’ll be delighted when he sees the museum,” Senator Simon said. “He will feel like a patron.”

  Ruth was beginning to understand that a major part of Senator Simon’s museum was going to be a library for his vast collection of books—books for which he had no more room in his house. The Senator had more books than artifacts. So the Senator had to build bookshelves. He’d already planned it. There was to be a section for books on shipbuilding, a section for books on piracy, a section for books on exploration. He was going to devote the entire downstairs for his museum. The storefront would be a gallery of sorts, for rotating exhibits. The old office rooms and storage rooms would have books and permanent displays. The basement would be for storage. (“Archives,” he called it.) He had no plans for the top floor of the building, which was an abandoned three-room apartment where the manager of the general store had lived with his family. But the downstairs was all accounted for. The Senator was planni
ng to dedicate an entire room to the “display and discussion” of maps. As far as Ruth could see, the display itself was not coming along very quickly. The discussion, though, was well advanced.

  “What I wouldn’t give,” Senator Simon told Ruth that afternoon in August, “to see an original copy of the Mercator-Hondius map.” He showed her a reproduction of that very map in a volume he’d ordered years earlier from an antiquarian book dealer in Seattle. This insistence of the Senator’s to show Ruth every book he handled, to talk over every interesting illustration, was slowing down considerably the preparation of the museum. “Sixteen thirty-three. You can see they’ve got the Faroe Islands right, and Greenland. But what is this? Oh, dear. What could that land mass possibly be? Do you know, Ruth?”

  “Iceland?”

  “No, no. That’s Iceland, Ruth. Right where it should be. This is a mythical island, called Frislant. It shows up on all kinds of old maps. There’s no such place. Isn’t that the strangest thing? It is drawn so distinctly, as if the cartographers were certain of it. It was probably a mistake in a sailor’s report. That’s where the mapmakers got their information, Ruth. They never left home. That’s the remarkable thing, Ruth. They were just like me.”

  The Senator fingered his nose. “But they did get it wrong sometimes. You can see Gerhardus Mercator is still convinced that there’s a Northeast Passage to the Orient. He obviously had no idea of the polar ice factor! Do you think the mapmakers were heroes, Ruth? I do.”

  “Oh, sure, Senator.”

  “I think they were. Look how they shaped a continent from the outside in. North Africa’s sixteenth-century maps, for instance, are correct around the edges. They knew how to chart those coasts, the Portuguese. But they didn’t know what was going on inside, or how big the continent was. Oh, no, they sure didn’t know that, Ruth.”

  “No. Do you think we could take some of these boards off the windows?”

  “I don’t want anyone to see what we’re doing. I want it to be a surprise to everyone once we’re finished.”

  “What are we doing, Senator?”

  “Making a display.” The Senator was paging through another one of his map books, and his face was soft and loving as he said, “Oh, for the love of mud, did they ever get that wrong. The Gulf of Mexico is huge.”

  Ruth looked over his shoulder at a reproduction of an ungainly, ancient map but couldn’t make out any of the writing on the page. “We need to get more light in here, I think. Don’t you think we should start cleaning this place a little, Senator?”

  “I like the stories about how wrong they got it. Like Cabral. Pedro Cabral. Sailed west in 1520 trying to find India and ran right into Brazil! And John Cabot was trying to find Japan and ended up in Newfoundland. Verrazano was looking for a westward passage to the Spice Islands and ends up in New York Harbor. He thought it was a sea lane. The risks they took! Oh, how they tried!”

  The Senator was in low-level ecstasy now. Ruth started to unpack a box marked SHIPWRECKS: PHOTOS/PAMPHLETS III. This was one of the many boxes containing items for the display the Senator planned to call either “Wages of Neptune” or “We Are Punished,” a display entirely devoted to accidents at sea. The first item she pulled out was a folder, labeled Medical in Senator Simon’s remarkable, antique script. She knew exactly what it was. She remembered looking through it when she was a little girl, peering at the ghastly pictures of shipwreck survivors, as Senator Simon told her the story of each man and each wreck.

  “This could happen to you, Ruth,” he’d say. “This could happen to anyone in a boat.”

  Now Ruth opened the folder and looked at each familiar old nightmare: the infected bluefish bite; the dinner plate-size leg ulcer; the man whose buttocks had rotted away after he’d sat on a wet coil of rope for three weeks; the saltwater boils; the blackening sunburns; the feet swollen with water bite; the amputations; the mummified corpse in the lifeboat.

  “Here’s a lovely print!” Senator Simon said. He was looking through another box, this one marked SHIKPWRECKS: PHOTOS/PAMPHLETS VI. From a file labeled Heroes, the Senator pulled an etching of a woman on a beach. Her hair was in a loose bun, and a heavy length of rope was slung over one shoulder.

  “Mrs. White,” he said fondly. “Hello, Mrs. White. From Scotland. When a ship wrecked on the rocks near her home, she had the sailors on board throw her a rope. Then she dug her heels into the sand and pulled the sailors to shore, one at a time. Doesn’t she look hale?”

  Ruth agreed that Mrs. White looked hale, and dug further through the Medical file. She found index cards scribbled with brief notes in Simon’s handwriting.

  One card read only: “Symptoms: shivers, headaches, reluctance to move, drowsiness, torpor, death.”

  Another read: “Thirst: drink urine, blood, fluid of own blisters, spirit fluid of compass.”

  Another: “Dec. 1710, Nottingham wrecked Boon Island. 26 days. Crew ate ship’s carpenter.”

  Another: “Mrs. Rogers, stewardess of Stella. Helped ladies into lifeboat, gave up own vest. DIES! GOES DOWN WITH SHIP!”

  Ruth handed that last card to Senator Simon and said, “I think this one belongs in the Heroes file.” He squinted at the card and said, “You’re absolutely right, Ruth. How did Mrs. Rogers ever get in the Medical file? And look what I just found in the Heroes file that doesn’t belong there at all.”

  He handed Ruth an index card reading: “Augusta M. Gott, capsized, Gulf Stream, 1868. Erasmus Cousins (of BROOKSVILLE, MAINE!) selected by lot to be eaten. Saved only by sight of rescue sail. E. Cousins had bad stammer rest of life; E. Cousins—NEVER ReTURNED TO SEA!”

  “Do you have a cannibalism file?” Ruth asked.

  “This is much more poorly organized than I thought,” said Senator Simon, mournfully.

  It was at that moment that Cal Cooley stepped through the front door of the Ellis Granite Company Store building, without knocking.

  “There’s my Ruth,” he said.

  “Shit,” Ruth said, simply and with dread.

  Cal Cooley hung around a long time in the Ellis Granite Company Store that afternoon. He rifled through Senator Simon’s belongings, taking things out of order and putting things back in the wrong place. He agitated Senator Simon no end by handling some of the artifacts quite rudely. Ruth tried to keep her mouth shut. Her stomach hurt. She tried to be quiet and stay out of the way so that he wouldn’t talk to her, but there was no avoiding him on his mission. After an hour of being a nuisance, Cal said, “You never went to see Mr. Ellis for dinner in July, as he invited you to do.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I forgot. Tell him I’m sorry.”

  “Tell him yourself. He wants to see you.”

  Senator Simon brightened and said, “Ruth, maybe you can ask Mr. Ellis about the basement!”

  Senator Simon had recently found row upon row of locked file cabinets in the basement of the Ellis Granite Company Store. They were full, Senator Simon was sure, of fascinating Ellis Granite Company documents, and the Senator wanted permission to go through them and perhaps display a few of the choice items in the museum. He had written Mr. Ellis a letter requesting permission but had received no response.

  “I can’t make it up there today, Cal,” Ruth said.

  “Tomorrow’s fine.”

  “I can’t make it up there tomorrow, either.”

  “He wants to talk to you, Ruth. He has something to tell you.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “I think it would be to your benefit to stop by. I’ll give you a ride, if that makes it easier.”

  “I’m not going, Cal,” Ruth said.

  “Why don’t you go see him, Ruth?” Senator Simon said. “You could ask him about the basement. Maybe I could come with you . . .”

  “How does this weekend look? Maybe you can come for dinner Friday night. Or breakfast on Saturday?”

  “I’m not going, Cal.”

  “How does next Sunday morni
ng sound? Or the Sunday after that?”

  Ruth thought for a moment. “Mr. Ellis will be gone by the Sunday after that.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because he always leaves Fort Niles on the second Saturday of September. He’ll be back in Concord the Sunday after next.”

  “No, he won’t. He made it very clear to me that he’s not leaving Fort Niles until he sees you.”

  This shut Ruth up.

  “My goodness,” Senator Simon said, aghast. “Mr. Ellis isn’t planning on spending the winter here, is he?”

  “I guess that’s up to Ruth,” Cal Cooley said.

  “But that would be astonishing,” Senator Simon said. “That would be unheard of! He’s never stayed here.” Senator Simon looked at Ruth with panic. “What would that mean?” he said. “My goodness, Ruth. What are you going to do?”

  Ruth had no answer, but she didn’t need one, because the conversation was abruptly ended by Webster Pommeroy, who charged into the Ellis Granite Company Store building with a hideous object in his hands. He was covered with mud from the chest down, and his face was so contorted that Ruth thought he must have found the second elephant tusk. But, no, it was not a tusk he was carrying. It was a round, filthy object that he thrust at the Senator. It took Ruth a moment to see what it was, and when she did, her body turned cold. Even Cal Cooley blanched when he realized that Webster Pommeroy was carrying a human skull.

  The Senator turned it around and around in his doughy hands. The skull was intact. There were still teeth in the jaw, and a rubbery, shriveled skin, with long, muddy hairs hanging from it, covered the bone. It was a horror. Webster was shaking savagely.

  “What’s that?” Cal Cooley asked, and for once his voice was free of sarcasm. “Who the hell is that?”

  “I have no idea,” the Senator said.

  But he did have an idea, as it turned out. Several days later—after the Rockland police came out on a Coast Guard boat to examine the skull and take it away for forensic tests—a distraught Senator Simon told the horrified Ruth Thomas of his supposition.