Out in the clearing the gull sat with folded wings waiting for her. “Come on,” she cried, “let’s have a fight!” It was their old battle cry that had not challenged him for weeks. He lifted his great wings and dashed at the arm she held out to him. She flung him off with a wide sweep. He fluttered in the sunshine and swept back at her. Off and back again instantly! She suddenly discovered that now she was no match for him. So strong and swift had he become in these last few weeks that the victory was his. She sank down into the tough meadow grass breathless with laughter, and rolled over just in time to escape a tweak at her hair. The junipers pricked at her and filled her hair with their pungent scent.
“Don’t tell me you limped way up here,” she said. “You waited until I was out of sight and then you flew like a regular gull. Limpy, are you getting ready to go away, too?” And all at once going away seemed to be the thing for gulls and girls to do. She lay still in a kind of peaceful torpor after the strain, and let the warm sun shine through her closed lids. Finally she sat up. “Thanks, Gramp,” she said aloud. And fell to picking blackberries with such rapidity that Limpy realized the game was up and settled back on his tail to preen his feathers. A song sparrow scolded halfheartedly at him, caring little because her brood had flown.
Mary Curtis accepted the change of plans as Thankful’s responsibility, not hers. “I wouldn’t have decided that way myself. Seems too bad to let all that money go out of the family,” she said judiciously, “but then you’re only half Scotch. Though ’twas your father’s idea, not mine. You must take after your Gramp, not us. Well,” she added cryptically, “perhaps you’ve no call to fash yourself about the future anyway. Oh, aye, I’ll tell the girls when they come over.”
Thankful wondered fleetingly what she meant, but felt nothing but gratitude for her offer to face the girls. “It might be better,” she said, “to wait until after I tried the clothes on.” Her mother caught the glint in her eye and sent it back to her. “I’ll do that,” she agreed.
The dinner with the girls was a thing not to be dreaded. They were detached from her now. She could think with a kind of ecstasy of the future when she would not have to live with them. She felt quiet inside, resting something which was very tired. Soon she would begin to see some of the new hurdles waiting for her, but not yet. Only the lazy peace of one problem solved.
“Would you wish to see some of the Academy catalogues?” Mary Curtis held out three of them to her as she sat dreaming on the doorstep. “Found them in the drawer of Gramp’s workbench.”
Thankful reached for them. Why did he have three? And then she saw that they bore the dates of the past three years. For as long as that Gramp had been planning her future when he should leave her! Her eyes stung. She opened the catalogue blindly at the calendar page. In a minute she felt better. The school did not open until the first day of October! Here were two whole weeks handed out to her as another gift. She felt as if a fog which had been shutting her in closer and closer had moved away to a wider horizon. “Another two weeks,” she told herself, “and I’ll probably not mind leaving Bright Island at all.” But she knew she would.
The rest of the catalogue left her dazed. She was still trying to find out what it meant beyond bringing sheets and towels when she heard the distant putt-putt of Jed’s powerboat. She flew to her room to brush some kind of order into her mop of hair. Stockings, too, she decided, and a clean gingham dress. She ran downstairs just as the platoon marched into the kitchen, Gladys leading them with a last year’s Blair Academy catalogue in her hand.
“Found this on the steps,” she announced. “For goodness’ sake don’t let her read about that highfalutin’ place.” She passed the book to Mary Curtis. “Put ideas in her head.”
Thankful’s horror lasted only an instant. Just means they’ll argle-bargle about it all through dinner, she thought, there isn’t a thing they can do. They were looking at her as if they expected her to say something. Well, she would. This was, after all, her job, not her mother’s.
She reached for the catalogue. “I was trying to get some ideas out of it,” she explained, “because I’m going there.”
Now it was out! Mary Curtis looked pleased. Her father scowled and led the way into the dining room.
It was a good dinner and Thankful enjoyed it more than most food shared with the whole family. She sat very quiet, her eyes out of the window where Gramp was, while she thought things over with him. Once she smiled at his trenchant comment as Gladys had flung a bitter inquiry at her. Gladys was so annoyed that it seemed best to pay attention to her for a while. After all what was an hour when she had been released for the whole year! Gladys remained irritated. But somehow nothing that she, or the other girls who hated to see the board money go elsewhere, could say seemed to penetrate Thankful’s remote civility. She had suddenly acquired immunity against them.
Even with the gift of two extra weeks, Thankful could not bear to stay indoors today when the first gold of September made the bay shine. Her boat tugged at its moorings with the expectant gull tilting on the bowsprit. Though how he got out there without flying, she thought, the fraud! But the clothes waited to be tried on. Without any glouring or glunching, either! You had to have clothes no matter where you went, away from Bright Island.
The girls found satisfaction in delaying the time when they needed Thankful, though her mother suggested that they leave the dishes until the clothes were settled. No, they said, we must not feel rushed. The lovely day slipped by while they did this and that, and Thankful mourned at its passing. Days were shorter now, much shorter.
At last the women all went upstairs to Thankful’s room where the bed was covered with boxes. She followed them, head bent, feeling all soft inside from dread. Clothes, even one at a time, made her unhappy. And now she must twist and turn for them to stare and comment. Thankful who could run and swim in a rag of a bathing suit and mind no one, dragged her dress over her head with her very skin turning to goose flesh.
“Sort of skinny, ain’t she?” observed Ethel with relish.
“You do it with exercise,” Mary Curtis comforted her stout daughter-in-law.
Thankful shot a delighted glance at her mother. It might not be so bad with her on your side. She reached for the stiff pink cube which Ethel handed her and stopped smiling. “Put the girdle on first,” Ethel commanded briskly.
Thankful passed it back. “I’ll need none,” she said.
Ethel referred the matter at once to authority. “If she’s going to wear the clothes we went to great pains to get her, Mother Curtis,” she pronounced, “she’ll have to wear ’em over something besides her skin.”
Mary Curtis looked doubtful. “Losh!” she muttered. “Well, pull it on you.”
Thankful pulled it on. Her mother had failed her, too. She felt as if an iron clamp was gripped about her waist. Did people who wore girdles always have to stand up? You couldn’t sit down. Oh, well, she knew what she could do. And she waited secure in that knowledge.
The underwear was not bad, there was so little of it. And stockings, if she must wear them, might better be this sleazy kind. But the dresses! One after another Thankful pulled them on and off, and knew without exactly knowing what had happened, that she had lost all color and grace.
“Makes her look sort of washed out,” commented Gladys over a red and black plaid. “But she needs a little rouge. I’ll show her how to put it on. This is really very smart. The newest thing for young girls.”
Thankful felt sick. Her mother looked at her, pale and tall, but trembling a little like a young birch. “Enough’s enough,” she pronounced. “It’s wearfu’ business. We like them fine, and if you come down to the kitchen I’ll settle for them with you.”
They left the room regretfully. Thankful listened until their voices sounded at the foot of the stairs. Then she stripped off the trumpery down to her slim body, the tender skin marked with red lines from its pressure. In a minute she was in her old gingham, out the front door, and down to
the dinghy where Limpy had returned for an impatient snooze. She rowed sharply out through the water golden with late light, and hoisted her sails.
As the boat slipped out into deep water, well away from the island, she lifted a long hard cube from the seat and dropped it overboard. She watched it sink, pink and stiff to the last glimpse, down, down; she doubled far over the edge as the boat swung over it. “Let a mermaid try wearing a girdle awhile,” she said. With a great sigh she straightened and felt her body grow light and supple again.
Mary Curtis never asked about the girdle. When Thankful got home after a quick sail through the amber twilight of the fall, the house was empty and quiet. Her room was orderly with its own homely things as usual. A quick look in the closet showed her that the new clothes had taken themselves away, temporarily at least. She shuddered at the memory of them. Downstairs her father smoked his pipe in the kitchen while her mother set out the cold chicken and bread and butter for Sunday night supper. “Bring the milk from the well-house,” Mary Curtis said.
Even in the short time that she had been indoors, the darkness had fallen. The bright amber had all gone out of the west except one clear line. It looks like a new moon sky, she thought, and turned to see the thin thread curving the sky. She bent her head back, back, to the star-studded arch above her. Where could she ever see sky from earth-edge to earth-edge except on her island? Her throat ached and the stars blurred. She reached into the blackness of the well-house and felt around in the damp for the milk pail.
Migrating Time
The frosts came early that September, hurrying everybody into activity. The stinging smell of piccalilli and chili sauce was pungent through the house as Mary Curtis filled her jars for the winter. The fruits were already in labeled rows in the cellar. The vegetables as they had ripened, peas, beans, greens, were added to the shelves for the long months when the island must be self-contained. Even jars of young chicken stood ready for the days when the fowl must be kept for eggs and meat was hard to get. Mary Curtis saw to it that her family was well fed during the cold winters, though she found it hard nowadays to cut her provisions to the needs of so few of them. Always the spring saw rows of jars still full of good food. And then the daughters-in-law had a way of drifting into the cellar and admiring its provisions knowing well that a basket of the jars would go back in the motorboat with them. After all, Mary Curtis thought, it was the boys’ appetites which had got her into the habit of oversupply and they might as well eat what was meant for them.
Thankful liked best the apple picking. The orchard was so old that even Gramp had not been sure who planted it. But perhaps because it had been kept clean of mainland pests by the wide bay, or because each owner had trimmed and cared for it, it still flowered into fragrant blossoms each spring and ripened into fragrant fruit each fall. Thankful hardly knew when she liked it most.
The Hubbardstons were ready for picking and by the look of the sky, a wind might take them off by tomorrow. They were Thankful’s favorite apple and her father had promised her a box to take to school if she would gather them. She picked one and bit into it, cold, juicy, and wondered how it would taste in a strange room shut away from this blue windy sky. She began to pick, hard, fast, that she might not know.
In the alders beyond the orchard a young peabody bird tried his notes, quavered, stopped, tried again a faint sweet whistle. Thankful stopped to listen, and thought it was the loneliest sound of the fall. It felt its way so patiently, so touchingly, toward the full-throated whistle of spring. And when she thought of spring, the road to it seemed lonelier than the whitethroat’s whistle. Again she fell to picking the apples.
The barrel was nearly full when she heard the putt-putt of her father’s boat returning. She followed idly the sounds of the mooring with the splash of the oars as he came ashore. But she did not turn until she heard steps coming over the grass toward her.
“Why, Dave, where’d you come from?” she cried. “You couldn’t have said a word all the way in! I was listening.”
“Your Pa’s no talker.” Dave lifted an apple from the top of the barrel, and Thankful took it away from him. “All right, I’ll pick my own.” He bit into one which hung high, even with his head. Thankful laughed. They went on picking together as if they had never stopped.
“Going to stay over Sunday?” Thankful asked comfortably.
“Mmm.” Dave left the apple so that he could talk. “Had a stroke of luck. Met your Pa just as I was taking some boxes down to the dock for him. For you, I mean.”
“Me? What was in ’em?”
“Didn’t open ’em. But Gladys mentioned they were hats.”
“Hats!” Thankful scowled under her brows at Dave and he fended off her look with his spread hand. “What do I want of hats?”
“I wouldn’t know about that.” Dave peered at her behind his hand. “But she seemed to.”
“She would,” growled Thankful.
“Come on,” said Dave reasonably, “you don’t have to wear them picking apples. I’m not Gladys. Don’t try to scare me with that look.”
Thankful laughed reluctantly. “I’m not. I’d know better.”
They picked again in companionable silence.
“Haven’t seen you since you ditched the girls. They told me!” Dave grinned reminiscently. “Makes it swell for you, but how you think a feller is ever going to see you again?”
“Well, I don’t know. You’ll be going off yourself if …”
“Know what I came over to tell you?” Dave interrupted.
Thankful looked up into his expectant eyes. “Dave, you didn’t! The exams! You didn’t really—pass them?”
“Every blamed one.” Dave tried to conceal his pride and gave it up. “And that’s not all either.”
“The job?” Thankful was breathless at the speed that things were going. “Did you get an appointment so soon?”
Dave nodded. “On our own government cutter! Can you beat that?”
Thankful couldn’t. She forgot all her own plans and worries in her honest pleasure. They talked about it until the second barrel was filled and the air grew frosty with approaching evening. Then with a basket of the most flawless apples for her school box, they walked toward the house with it swinging between them. The island was very still. No cricket had ever come across to break its silence. No bird sang now.
Suddenly Thankful stopped. “We’re growing up,” she said desperately. “You are like a man now—and I must go away from the island—and—and”—her voice broke—“even Limpy is growing wild and strong. He’s away every day—oh, Dave—oh, Dave …”
She could not have borne it if Dave had laughed at her. Though it all sounded so foolish. But he was very tender with a big arm around her shoulders and a grimy handkerchief for her tears. She leaned against him comforted. And never lifted her eyes to see the way he was looking down on her fair head against his sleeve.
“Dave,” she said solemnly, “I ought to be entering the school for feeble-minded in Augusta. Don’t mind me.”
Dave drew away from her. “That’s not so easy,” he said.
Thankful moved on, vaguely uncomfortable. She felt for the old footing and found it. “We’re going to have clam fritters for supper. I dug the clams.”
Dave looked worried. “You didn’t know I was coming. Do you think you dug enough?” But they both knew that Mary Curtis never had too little of anything.
Thankful ignored the three square boxes on her bed, but after supper Mary Curtis sent for them. “Now we’ll try on the hats,” she said. Dave brought the boxes down to the kitchen and she took the hats one by one out of the tissue wrappings. Thankful crouched by the fire, glowering at them. “Which one,” she asked Dave, “do you think is the worst?”
Dave couldn’t tell. “The girls like color, don’t they?” he said.
The hard red saucer that was obviously meant to be worn with the red and black plaid Thankful took from her mother and started toward the fireplace. Her father’s gruff “H
ey!” stopped her. It was of course his money. She put the hat down distastefully. Burned or not, I’ll never wear it, she thought. Under the bright blue felt her hair flew out like a dandelion top. And the green one shut down over her like a diver’s bell. To face a new school with one of those things on her head was to Thankful unthinkable. Dave looked puzzled at her transformation, and concerned. Her mother was brisk and interested. “It’s the way they wear them,” she said. “No use fashing yourself.” She packed them away in their boxes again. Out of the gloomy silence Thankful stalked off to bed. Dave stared thoughtfully after her.
The next morning he had finished his breakfast when Thankful came down for her swim. He turned up his collar and shivered. “Every morning until I go,” Thankful announced.
“They’ll have tubs there, crazy.” Dave shuddered down into his coat. “And nice hot water,” he shouted after her as she raced down to the icy bay.
When she came down to breakfast Dave looked pleased with himself. “If you hustle,” he said, “you can go out with me to pull the lobster pots.”
“On Sunday!” she gasped at her father who looked uncomfortable.
“Shut up!” muttered Dave. “Sure, it’s necessary work today. The pots need attention what with this wind and your father off yesterday. I’ll see you down there,” and he started for the shore before Jonathan Curtis could change his mind about breaking the Sabbath.
Thankful ran no risks either after her first shocked exclamation. She buttered two hot muffins, then after a moment’s thought, a third one, and raced down to the dinghy which Dave had just finished emptying. As she expected he took one of the muffins which he put in his pocket while he rowed out to the powerboat. Thankful pulled her overalls out of the sailboat as they passed it, and they were all set.
“A shame to waste this breeze on an engine!” Thankful munched the muffins. “Dave, you don’t need that muffin in your pocket. You had a good breakfast.” Dave took it out and ate it. Thankful sighed.
Bright Island Page 5