Bright Island

by Mabel L. Robinson

  She watched her compass with steady eyes and crept through dark rain-shattered water toward an island she could not see. Now and then she blew an old fish horn, but nothing else was stirring on a morning like this. The slicker kept her warm and she liked the rain in her face. The gull cooled off a bit from his adventure and she covered him with an old poncho. He went to sleep. “Hard morning, my lad,” she said.

  When the noon whistle of the factory sounded like a faint foghorn miles out, she chugged into the cove. “Not an inch out of the way, straight’s a cable. Better’n Dave could do with all his pilot’s exams.”

  Limpy stretched his head out of the poncho. Thankful paid no attention to him. She fastened the spray hood down to keep the rain out and pulled the dinghy, afloat inside and out, to the edge of the powerboat. “Come on, you fake, get in there.” Limpy rolled his head up and looked at her. “All right, stay here.” She stepped over the edge, watching him, slipped on the wet seat, balanced wildly, and went down like a plummet. The clumsy slicker held her under longer than she liked but she knew how to fight deep water. When she came up Limpy was screaming like a banshee and fluttering back and forth from the boat to the dinghy.

  “Best have done that first,” she choked at him. “Hey, give me room to get off this slicker.”

  She held the boat with one hand and pulled out of the heavy coat with the other. It wouldn’t do to lose it. She hoisted it aboard and then could pull herself after it. “Now, sir,” she said fiercely, “you get over here into this dinghy.”

  Limpy had settled on the deck of the big boat. He did not move. Thankful was cold now, and hungry. She reached over and picked up the great bird. When she set him down on the wet seat, she slapped his long wet wings. He flapped them gently away from her.

  Dinner was hot on the table. “Must be raining harder than I thought,” said Mary Curtis, mildly surprised at the trail of water left on her kitchen floor.

  “Is,” said Thankful and went for dry clothes. After all she often had two swims in a day.

  She rubbed herself down with a hard rough towel. Even her young circulation was slowed by this chill. “Dave’s fault. He knocked Limpy off. Would be dry as a bone if it hadn’t been for Dave.” Then as the blood glowed warm under her skin, she grudged him a point, “Well, I guess I am anyhow. And I do feel pretty good!”

  She looked as if she felt just that way, setting her room to rapid rights. The water darkened her hair and fitted it like a cap to her head. She ran her fingers through it to dry it and it broke into rough tendrils pale on the ends. She was not unlike a fawn, tawny-coated, swift, dark-lidded. Long and lean with health.

  Her father was back in his rocker, dinner finished. His foot was nearly well, but there was no outside work to call him out in the rain. “Gone a long time,” he remarked.

  Thankful nodded, too hungry for explanations.

  “Dave late?”

  She shook her head.

  “Like it over there?”

  Thankful shot him a surprised glance. “I didn’t land. Just let Dave off at the wharf.”

  “Be nice when you can stay over there and get acquainted.”

  Thankful did not answer.

  “Won’t it?”

  “No, it won’t,” she said. She looked with distaste at her plate.

  “Now let her alone,” soothed Mary Curtis, “she needs a good dinner.” She heaped some hot golden carrots on the slice of pot roast. It smelled good. Thankful bent a glowering look under her brows at her father who stirred uneasily. His father had too often looked at him that way. She ate silently and resentfully.

  Her mother had the dishes washed when she took hers to the kitchen. She handed Thankful a dish towel. “Don’t mind your father,” she advised, “he only wants what’s best for you.”

  “Well,” said Thankful, “how’s he know what’s best for me?”

  “He’s your father, isn’t he?” asked her mother reasonably.

  Thankful wondered what that had to do with it. “Anyway,” she said hotly, “Gramp never would send me over there to live with those girls. He couldn’t stand ’em!”

  “Tut, tut!” But Mary Curtis looked curiously troubled. “He was an old man. He couldn’t know what a young girl ought to do.”

  He was the only one who did know, Thankful thought drearily, and he wasn’t here to help her.

  “Such a wet day we might as well redd up the attic.” Mrs. Curtis wrung out her dishcloth and hung it over the stove. “Most time to dry herbs and not a inch of space to spread them. Want to help?”

  Thankful followed her mother up the narrow stairs to the garret under the roof. The rain drummed steadily on the shingles so close to her head. A roof is good, she thought, remembering the sea. The kitchen underneath had warmed the air, and light enough filtered in through the small end windows and the skylight. A pleasant place for a rainy day. Thankful carried down armsful of old newspapers and odds and ends which her mother saved for a year and then cleaned out ruthlessly. When she went through the kitchen it seemed to belong to another life down there where things were used all the time. It still smelled of fresh baked cookies and Thankful ate one, leaning against the table where they cooled.

  When Mary Curtis was satisfied that she had room to dry her herbs, she sat down on a broken rocker and folded her hands. “Try it on now,” she said. “You may have grown to it this year.”

  Thankful opened the small leather trunk in the low corner and brought out to the light a sheet-wrapped bundle. She laid it on the old spool bed and folded back the sheet. The bright tartan plaid spilled through her fingers in the dark attic. She held the Highland suit up to her experimentally, and nodded. “I’ve grown to it,” she said and stripped off her dress.

  She stood a moment in her knickers like a tall boy while her mother watched, inscrutable. Then she was a real boy, Scotch, in kilts which settled above her bare knees as they should. After years of dragging up from ankles like a little old lady’s skirts.

  “Yes, you’ve grown to it,” said Mary Curtis, and she sighed.

  Thankful dove for the cap and set it down into hair so unused to captivity that it flew up instantly around the edges. “Now I hope I’ve not forgot the Highland Fling.” She had not. The boys had taught it to her when she was five. The loose boards shook under her light feet and Mary Curtis looked suddenly tired. “Well, that joukery-poukery is over. You looked like Robbie.” She went downstairs to get supper.

  Thankful called after her, “Is it mine now?” and bent over the dark stairwell to hear the faint impatient, “Oh, aye. You’re grown to it.” Thankful strode up and down the creaking boards, fingers on imaginary pipes, pleats swirling against her legs. It would be something to be a Highlander. Robbie must have hated to die. She sat on the edge of the spool bed and thought about it. And then she looked at her legs, straight and strong, and felt how she had grown so suddenly into this suit of his. He was sixteen, she thought, and now his suit is mine.

  She took it off slowly and put on her girl’s dress which felt loose and light. Then she hung the kilt over her arm and took it down to her room. It should not be wrapped up again. Unless—until—her heart squeezed itself into a little hard knot. She refused to think about going off, but she couldn’t prevent a flashlight of Ethel’s sitting room crowded with things and people. There was no place for her, no place. And here was her complete world. She hung the kilt in her closet, patted it absently, and went downstairs.

  Holding the Summer Captive

  Thankful thought that she had never seen a summer go so fast. There was no August at all! That long slow month which usually crept by, windless, with a pale flat sea only fit for a motorboat, became suddenly a time to shackle and hold. Better to drift with a flapping sail than to scud under a September wind this year. She tried ignoring the calendar for a while, thinking to lighten the shadow of each passing day. But then the date would leap black from the newspaper which she thrust under her driftwood fire, and her shocked sense that three more days
were gone would turn her beach supper into a dreary rite. She discovered that her mind had a relentless way of refusing to dodge the truth. You can’t live on an island, she thought sadly, and fool yourself about much of anything.

  She put her calendar back on the wall then, and decided to fill each day of it so full that it would count as two. She was out in the morning as soon as the sky began to pale over the still, dark sea. She watched the moon grow old until one morning it was silver thread in the clear amber of dawn. I’ve seen the new moon a’borning, she thought, and put the lovely thing away to take out later when—ah, what could she do with young moons in those noisy crowded rooms over on the mainland. From Bright Island, high in the sunrise light, she looked across at it lying still dark and huddled under the mountain.

  But another long day was hers and she would waste none of it. She had given up trying to prove to her father that she knew how to do a girl’s work. Little good it had done her to spend those days puttering around the house under her mother’s feet! The decision had already been made with a kind of solid agreement which included everybody but her. It would have slivered into fragments under one swift thrust from Gramp. But Gramp was not here. And she could not beat down that front alone.

  Thankful was torn among the many things she wanted to do before a day closed. A breeze, and she and the gull were off down the bay until, as so often happened in August, the wind died down and she rowed the Gramp wearily home at twilight. A thick quiet day, and she disappeared into the mist toward the south side of the island where blueberries were ripening. Where it was so still that the berries dropping into the pail were loud, she crouched among the bushes stripping them by handfuls. She let the berries run through her fingers liking their velvety bloom. And she took fine care to cover each pail as it filled because Limpy’s great bill had a way of helping itself. Mary Curtis said that she had never had so much fruit for canning in her life.

  She said, too, when Thankful gave less and less time to her meals, even omitting them when it served her purpose, that there was no sense in getting all ramfeezled like this! After all, the world wasn’t coming to an end this summer, and there’d be plenty of time even if you took some of it for eating and sleeping. But Thankful did not agree with her about the end of the world. She saw it coming on the fifteenth of September. And she meant not to leave an empty moment before that time.

  Her father, curiously enough, seemed more concerned about her than her mother. Thankful was aware of his scrutiny during her brief intervals at the table, or while he was behind the Bangor Daily News which he read under the lamp these shortening days instead of on the porch. She moved restlessly away from any prying into the dread which haunted her. Outdoors again, where nothing looked at her but the stars. “Can’t she stay still a minute?” she could hear her father’s testy voice through the open window. “Oh, let her walk it off,” would come her mother’s comfortable response. “She’ll chitter like a finch as soon as she has lived with the girls awhile.”

  “If I never do any more talking than Sparrow does,” Thankful vowed, “I’ll not chitter like those girls.” Somehow the thought of living around with them had made of school such a lesser dread that she scarcely thought about it. Books were easy things to master if they could be made to take their proper place in the world. Mary Curtis had a light touch with learning which left odd, sometimes gay, but never dull impressions behind it. Thankful had rather a shrewd grasp of the relative importance of events and facts. But with people she had had small experience and of those who had come her way, Gramp had proved the only wholly satisfactory one. She had no wish to learn more of them. Especially now when Bright Island was making so many last demands upon her.

  But she was not to escape them so easily. “The girls are getting your things ready for you,” her mother informed her casually. “I knew you’d have nothing to do with clothes yourself, and I’ve no time to see to them. They’ll be over next Sunday with some frocks to try on you. And you’re not to glour and glunch over them, either.”

  Thankful looked at her mother under dark brows. “Or at me, either,” Mary Curtis added. “I’ll need some blackberries for a blackberry dowdy. There ought to be good ones left up at the old quarry.”

  Thankful reached for a pail in the shed and fled. Her mother looked after her commiseratingly. “Too bad to fash herself like that for naught,” she said, and fell to scrutinizing a braided rug for moth holes.

  The one place on the whole island which Thankful disliked was the old quarry. She never went there if she could possibly avoid it. She thought over all the other blackberry locations and knew that only in the sheltered gloom of the quarry would there be any berries left now. She climbed slowly up the slope past the little enclosed graveyard toward Quarry Hill. When had she been there before? Not since her goat, a frisky kid, had marooned himself on a rock in the pool and called her with plaintive bleats. Even the gull turned back today when he saw where she was going. She pushed on alone.

  Just around the quarry the spruces had grown tall and thick since the days when men came over for granite for their foundations. It was years since those great solid slabs had been placed under houses, there to stand when fire and age had razed the wood above them. Huge blocks tilted into the black lake which had filled the heart of the quarry and made it look as prehistoric, Thankful thought, as the pictures her mother had shown her of Stonehenge.

  Thankful knew, though, that her fear of the place went back to nothing more prehistoric than the time when she was four and fell into the deep pool from one of those very slabs of granite. She could recall without any difficulty how she had strangled down there in the black cold water, slashing her tender flesh against the rough stone as she struggled to pull herself out. Silas had heard her cry as he had been picking blackberries and had pulled her out and shaken her until her teeth chattered with shock and cold. She knew now that most of his fury was terror because she had been in his charge and he had nearly lost her forever. But although the years had gone by, and every inch of Bright Island had become dear, she still avoided the quarry.

  She sat now at the edge of the pool and stared down into it. Somehow its blackness and threat suited her mood. Swallows, purple dark in its mirror, swooped and dipped into it. She was thinking so hard that she did not hear her father until he stood there under a tall spruce. He was looking at her in a queer startled way, and she rose instantly with her berry pails. “I’m getting blackberries,” she explained and started toward the clearing.

  “Sit down, my girl,” he said, “there’s no hurry,” and he slouched down on one of the boulders himself.

  “Mother wants berries for a dowdy for the girls.”

  Thankful’s voice was stiff with embarrassment and rage at his discovery of her. She held her head high, hoping that her lashes were not wet.

  “She’ll wait.” He motioned her to a rock near him. But then he seemed to have nothing to say.

  Thankful leaned against a boulder, her head turned away from him. The tops of spruces stirred in a sea wind and then were silent. Her fingers twitched at the handle of her pail. She felt her father’s scrutiny.

  He spoke at last as if it were not easy for him. “What you doing up here, Thankful? Thought you didn’t like the quarry.”

  His voice sounded worried, and when she glanced at him his eyes looked anxious. Thankful sighed. Did people really think that you would tell them what you were thinking about? “Just cooling off after the climb,” she offered. “Guess I’m ready to pick now.”

  Silence again. Thankful’s quick motion to leave startled her father into speech again. “You—you don’t want to go to school, eh?” he felt his way awkwardly.

  Thankful considered. There was nothing to lose now, no matter what she said. “It’s not the school so much. It’s the girls, living with the girls.” She tried to keep her voice even.

  Her father passed this off with, “Good for you to see folks.”

  Thankful’s thin veneer of control disappeared
and resentment boiled over. She looked at her father under deep brows. “Gramp would never have made me go,” she said.

  Her father moved uneasily as he always did when she looked at him that way. But he was ready for her. “Wrong,” he said, “it was your Gramp who said you were to go.”

  Thankful felt as if a last support had pulled out from under her and that she was slipping into a pool as sinister as the one beneath her. Gramp, her Gramp, was reaching back from where he had gone to do this thing to her. She might have faced it with the knowledge that he was with her to support her. But now … “Did he”—her voice was thin—“did he tell you that he wanted me to stay with the girls?” He couldn’t, he couldn’t, she thought, when we felt the same way about them. She still bent her unwavering look on her father.

  He stirred the deep mat of spruce needles with a twig. “Well, not exactly.” Her heart lifted a little. “You see, it’s this way. If you’re going to make such a fuss”—he was resentful now—“you might as well decide for yourself. Your Gramp left a sum of money for your schooling. Quite a sum,” he went on cautiously, “enough to last you a good long time if you didn’t spend it all at once. Seemed sense to take the girls’ offer and go over to public school where it cost nothing but your board to them.” He stopped. “Can’t you have sense?”

  Thankful hurried him on. “Not if I can have anything else. What is it I’m to decide?”

  “Spend it all now on the Academy,” he snapped, “or save it for a rainy day.”

  Thankful stood up, straight and tall. “I’ll take it now,” she said. “Maybe it won’t rain!” And when she walked out through the gloom of the woods into the sunshine, she felt as if it never would.

  Her father stared after her, and then looked down into the black water. “Her mother’ll think I’m crazy,” he muttered, “but I guess nobody could hold out against the two of them. They always had things their own way when he was alive.”