Bright Island

by Mabel L. Robinson

  To Thankful’s embarrassment the school treated her as its hero for nearly a week. When they had forgotten the reason for their conduct, they still kept shreds of the new pattern toward her. Thankful had no lack of companionship these days. Indeed, with the Dinkle Saturdays gone she felt a desperate need sometimes to escape what she called their yammer and yawl. She liked them but the need of healing quiet was her island heritage.

  When a letter from her mother proposed Thanksgiving day at home, she sat over it mute with joy while Selina chattered words which she did not hear. Jed had to come up the coast the day before and he would bring her over in his powerboat. Her father would take her back the next day. Mary Curtis was brief but she made it possible for her daughter to come home. Bring someone with you if you wish, she had added in a postscript, but Thankful paid it no heed. She was going home to Bright Island. She would see it brown and bare in the November desolation which she loved. She would lie under the eaves in her cold little room, and look out at stars higher and in great numbers. She would hear the plash of the small waves in the cove, and smell their saltiness, clean, unbreathed.

  She drew a long deep breath as if to catch their scent and looked up from the page in her hand to find Selina staring at her. “Someone just left you a diamond ring?” she asked with familiar tartness.

  Thankful folded up her letter. “Best one I ever had.” She kept herself absent from Selina. It was the only way to do.

  Selina made a queer noise in her throat. Then the words tumbled by her anger. “You make me mad! You never tell me anything. I run on and on, and all you ever do in return is to shut up tight and leave me guessing. You just keep yourself to yourself.”

  Thankful’s astonished eyes watched her. Does she think I want her to go on and on? Doesn’t she know how I have to stop listening? Does she want me to tell her about me? She flinched under the impact of this idea. Keep yourself to yourself? Of course, or not keep it at all! But Selina wouldn’t understand that.

  “It’s only a letter from home,” she said gently. After all, Selina seemed to be trying for friendliness after these hard weeks. “I didn’t know you’d be interested.”

  Selina’s flares of anger were always brief. “Well. I’m not, really. But I’d just like to have you tell me.”

  “Oh. Well, I got a letter from home and I’m going back to Bright Island for Thanksgiving.” Even telling it made her eyes shine again.

  Selina tried to prove how much she appreciated this confidence. Each day the island Thanksgiving increased its glamor in her imagination. Thankful’s happiness and Selina’s urge produced details which Selina seized and nursed. Thankful didn’t mind. It was a special day at Bright Island, a festivity, not a sharing of her real life there. And her talk about it stopped Selina’s incessant mourning that the school did not allow time for her to go home. Thankful forgot her weather-wise ways and paid too little heed as to how the wind was blowing until it was too late for her to change her course. Selina would not let her go about!

  Thankful hardly knew how it happened when she thought it over in cold despair. She had been absently sympathetic. Ready and waiting an hour early for the bus. “Too bad you can’t go home. I wish you could …”

  And then the interruption of swift words seizing upon her unfinished sentence, giving it astounding significance. “Oh, Thankful, I could! I’d love to! You don’t know how I hoped you’d ask me! Oh, won’t we have fun!” and an ecstatic hug.

  Thankful stared over Selina’s shoulder at the wall. What had she done? Her day at Bright Island shattered by her own clumsy motion. Selina knew, she must know how little Thankful wanted her. What had she said? She couldn’t remember, and as she thought about it, Selina’s excitement covered her stony silence. She already had her suitcase out of the closet and was plunging about in her search for proper clothes. I’ll have to stop her! I’ll have to tell her! “Selina!” but Selina had disappeared.

  In a moment she was back with Miss Haynes. “Of course, Thankful. I am so glad that you invited Selina to go with you. I’ll help her to get ready. You run down to the door and hold the bus.”

  No time to notice her stricken face. No chance given her to escape. She had a moment’s desperate plan to leap into the bus and hurry it away. But after all, Mary Curtis had brought her up.

  When Selina flung herself and her suitcase into the bus Thankful had settled herself into its corner, curiously white and grave for one who was off on a holiday. Selina was so busy trying to make Robert wave to her that she had no attention for Thankful’s pallor.

  “He’s so queer nowadays.” She flounced down beside Thankful. “Ever since he wrecked me on his old boat, he’s been offish.”

  “Is that so?” murmured Thankful.

  “Yes, it’s so. And what’s more, he can’t seem to talk about anybody but you.” Her anger started to flare, sputtered out under sudden recollection of her new relation to Thankful. “He was crazy to come too.”

  Thankful felt the first small flicker of something alive since she had killed her island holiday. Robert thought about her. That he envied Selina was beyond her belief, but she had a swift vision of him on her island with her in the places she cherished. Ah, that would be a Thanksgiving.

  She turned toward Selina, suddenly warm again. “That fur coat will feel good on the boat,” she said. “Jed has a cabin but I always like to sit out on deck. He’ll bring my slicker.” And at the thought of Jed bringing her slicker, and the boat rushing through the waves to Bright Island, her heart began to sing. Underneath the song was Robert.

  Jed liked Selina and tucked her up in the warm shelter of the cabin. He and Thankful sat together by the wheel in companionable silence. She thought she might never have been away. The spray stung color back into her face and felt cold and right on her bare hands. Bright Island came up over the horizon and gleamed through her wet lashes with rainbow radiance. “The spray,” she muttered and rubbed them dry that she might miss no small detail.

  There it lay, this outer island which held all her heart, blue water touching it, blue sky hanging over it, and the silver-gray house at its edge. There was in the whole world never anything so lovely.

  Mary Curtis flung open the kitchen door, waved, and disappeared. Then Thankful knew that something had gone into the oven, and suddenly she was hungry. The door flew open again and her mother ran down the beach. Thankful’s spirit rushed over the water but her hands somehow helped Jed. So slow, so slow he was! She longed for a swift dive and swim ashore. She forgot Selina until she heard her in a small helpless voice, “I’m scared of small boats since the wreck. Please help me,” and Jed helped her carefully into the dinghy.

  Click, click, the oars, and Thankful in the stern, the forward cant of her body pushing them on. A long leap when the pebbles grated, and Bright Island was under her feet. In the low afternoon sun it lay in the peace she remembered. It took her home again.

  Selina had to be introduced to her mother, hospitable, friendly, to her father, stiff and shy, to the house though she didn’t know it, to all of Bright Island that she could see. Thankful found sudden relief from too great pressure in whisking Selina about. She saw her mother’s amused glance and remembered her exact tone, “She’ll chitter like a finch when she’s lived with the girls awhile.” Never mind! Never mind! She fought on against the choke in her throat which no one must know.

  She could see Selina’s eyes wander about the rooms. They did look curiously small after those high square rooms. But sweet, sweet. The shabby comfortable chairs, her mother’s books, the old table polished to a golden patina by a hundred years of use, the Franklin stove which filled the summer fireplace, these things that she had always known touched her deeply with their familiar sweetness. Like Bright Island, they took her back. No one knew about that. The talk ran on.

  Then just as the lamps were lighted, she could leave Selina contentedly unpacking in the boys’ old room. She could leave her mother stirring up biscuits in the kitchen spicy with warm ging
erbread, neat, yet full of the business of living. She could leave her father with less ease than anyone because he somehow followed her about. She could run through the cold purple of the twilight, up the path past the pale gravestones settled into the sleeping earth, up and out until the whole island lay beneath her. She stood still under the slow lighting stars and waited. One by one like the things in the house, they came home to her, the darkening mountains, the darkened sea, the brown sweet fern pasture, speared with pointed trees which brushed her knees, they all came gently, quietly, home to her. When she had hailed them all, she raced back to the lighted house, the clean island air sharp in her nostrils.

  The stock and the chickens were housed for the night, yet in the empty henyard Thankful could see the white outline of a great bird moving gravely about with bobbing head. “Limpy!” she called. “Limpy! You beggar!” And the gull rose on wide wings, circled over her head, and slipped effortlessly into the darkness. Her mother laughed when Thankful told her. “He came the first cold spell,” she said. “He gets handouts from the hens. You have to learn to work when you’re young.”

  Thankful set the table with Selina dodging at her heels to see how she did it. “I shall help tomorrow for the Thanksgiving dinner,” she promised. “I learn quickly.”

  She did, Thankful realized. She was at home with Mary and Jonathan Curtis, coaxing them, laughing with them, admiring them with her eyes. Thankful wondered at her quick adjustment, and for the first time found a clue to her popularity at school. She despaired at the certainty of what she would have been in Selina’s family. They could not have found anyone more different than Selina to room with her, she thought, and felt respect for Selina’s difficulties with her. How pretty she was in that simple little dress which Thankful knew had cost more than her whole outfit! Selina told her. Yet Selina did not measure all her values by money. Look at her now, her face gentle in the lamplight, liking their homely supper, eating largely of it. And talking, talking, talking. Her mother and father liked the chatter and Jed had liked it and wished that he could stay to hear more. Thankful began to have a discouraged sense about herself as a daughter.

  But when her mother had lighted them upstairs, and settled Selina for the night, she sat on Thankful’s bed a moment. “She’s a bonny lass”—she nodded toward the boys’ old room—“but too gabby for steady living.” She rose and blew out the light. “I like my own girl,” she said into the darkness.

  The door shut and Thankful sat up in bed. For a moment the stars blurred, but she felt very comfortable. With a queer kind of satisfaction, too, as if for the first time she had been measured against another and not fallen too far short. It was almost worth bringing Selina home for, she thought, and curled softly down under the warm blankets. The day had been mild for November, but the night had a sharp edge. Selina would be glad of those heated bricks. She felt hers, stretching her length, and touching their warmth fell asleep.

  Then suddenly it was morning and Thankful woke to watch blue smoke ascend to blue sky over the kitchen ell. Another mild day, a last breath of fall. A day such as seldom came to the island so late. Warm enough for open windows to let the smell of roasting turkey reach almost to the shore. To make it certain that all the boys and their wives could come over from the mainland. Though that was no advantage, Thankful thought.

  She dreaded the girls for Selina almost as she did for herself. She dreaded them so deeply that she could find small room to be glad at the news that Dave would be with them. He always came for Thanksgiving. Yet when Jed’s big boat chugged around the point it was the sight of Dave in the bow waiting to catch the mooring that made the flutter and fuss of the girls bearable. Thankful sprang for her father’s old peapod and pushed out. It always took two boatloads to bring them all ashore.

  But her boat filled up with fuss and flutter before Dave could leave Jed, before he had time to do more than tweak her hair as he helped Gladys aboard. She ducked under his big hand and shoved her peapod away, looking back at him in his uniform.

  “Aye, what a bonny lad! All in his blue kilties!” She dodged a sponge which leaped from Ethel’s lap to the water where it sank. Ethel brushed and rubbed all the way ashore. He’ll catch it, Thankful thought pleasurably.

  But when Dave made his stiff little bow to Selina, even Thankful could not believe it an intentional sponge. And Ethel said no more about it. The sponge had left no impression comparable with Selina. Pretty as a late dandelion with the sun shining on her yellow dress and yellow hair. They stood around her on the beach and warmed to her, the girls saying this and that in high voices to get her attention. Thankful thought that she could see Dave now and turned to find his eyes on Selina. He was bigger, and—aye, he was a bonny lad! She felt dowdy and dark in her thick wool and hurried up the beach to help her mother.

  A scuffle of heavy shoes on the pebbles and Dave was beside her, hurrying too. “Did you see where your sponge landed?” She would not look at the beautiful uniform.

  But Dave was sniffing the air. “Turkey!” he moaned. “Oh, smell that turkey! Couldn’t we chop the giblets for the gravy, Thankful?” And they were all right again. Mary Curtis always let them chop the giblets. And if they took toll, after all the gravy shouldn’t be too rich for those girls.

  Over the giblets Thankful heard what she wanted to know about the cutter, and Dave’s work on her, and how he managed to change his day off with an officer who had no folks near here, and soon the ice breaking would begin.…

  “Break us out here on the island?” inquired Mary Curtis.

  “Keep you open all winter,” boasted Dave.

  “Dar’st I come home Christmas?” Thankful stopped nibbling.

  “Come home as easy as if a train ran out here. Could bring Selina along, too. I’ll see you out.”

  “Oh. Well, Selina goes home herself at Christmas. Guess you’d have to put up with me,” and was sorry she said it.

  Dave grinned. “Done that quite awhile.”

  Mrs. Curtis removed the giblet bowl. “Need a wee taste for the gravy.”

  The two sauntered regretfully away.

  It was a dinner such as only Mary Curtis could prepare with her unhurried competence. No soup, no fish, nothing to take the edge off the great golden bird which she carved herself. Jonathan had refused years ago to touch the Thanksgiving turkey. The management of its details required too fine a technique. Her own herbs, thyme, savory, sage, seasoned the stuffing. Her own cranberries gathered from the lower bog furnished the sweet tart sauce. Winter squash steamed soft and mashed into golden pulp with homemade butter. The late white turnips beaten into mildness with fresh cream. Onions clean stripped and full flavored with only butter and salt to keep their racy taste. No flour sauces here to dilute good food, Mary Curtis always said. And never had she offered them a more appetizing dinner.

  As ever, after her first sharp appetite, Thankful begrudged the long hours crowded under a roof. The girls, she decided, were worse than ever. They ate with fingers crooked, and spoke of the food with high artificial voices, asking Selina about this and that in the school. Dave listened gravely, and Thankful saw that his eyes were always on Selina. To her surprise she heard fine things about herself. It seemed that they had not understood she could finish in one year. Her mother looked startled, and then proud. Dave threw her a swift glance and then attended to Selina again. He seemed hungry to hear all that she could say. Thankful cared nothing for their praise, she surprisingly discovered. She wanted to get away.

  But Mary Curtis had baked mince pies, and steamed a plum pudding with hard sauce stung with sherry, and she was firm about them both. “You get nothing like this at school,” she said. “Now eat.”

  Selina reproached her. “I should say we didn’t! I never got anything like it anywhere!”

  Dave shot her a sudden smile. Thankful couldn’t tell what it meant. But she realized resentfully that he was in no hurry to leave the table. Nor was Selina. She charmed them all by counting on her manicured fingers, Mr.
Curtis, Mrs. Curtis, Mr. Curtis, Mrs. Curtis, all the way around the table with only a provocative look at Dave. Then back again, Mr. Jed, Mrs. Ethel, Mr. Silas, Mrs. Gladys, she had every name right and a smile for each. “Please,” she said, “you are not alike and I can’t call you all by the same name.” Thankful could feel the flattery warm them by its personal salute. Dave looked left out, and she grinned. He caught it out of the corner of his eye.

  The girls washed the dishes as usual, and then they must go, days so short now, children be back from granny’s, such a good dinner Mother Curtis, good-bye Selina, pleased to meet you, come over to see us sometime, Thankful, the school is doing you good. A touching little-girl eagerness to please about them. Then they were gone. Leaving behind them as always the heightened awareness of peace and quiet. Even Selina felt it and yawned quietly in a corner. Thankful left her and caught what remained of the sweet mild day.

  They had stirred confusion in her mind as ever. A need to find that quiet core of herself again. Even Dave—she was a little homesick for Dave with his absorption in Selina. Though she could still feel the quick hard grasp of his hand when he left her. She sighed and dismissed him with the rest. Only a few more hours now and she must leave Bright Island. Why spend the time thinking about people! She pushed through the brown pastures, down into the pointed wood, and out on the bare headland where the waves whished and plashed on the mildest day. Going on and on like this ever since she had left them. They made her feel stretched out, part of something greater than she, unharassed. She stayed there until it was quite dark and she had to feel her way back through the wood.