“We haven’t a radio,” Thankful announced shortly. He knew that, he knew that it took electricity to run a radio.
But she misjudged him. He apologized and explained in detail about the kind that ran on its own batteries. “I’ll send you one.” His face lighted with zeal. “I’ll send you one as soon as I get back.”
Thankful warmed at his generosity, and her mother smiled tolerantly. “I’d like it fine,” she said. But meantime there was no radio.
Thankful thought that she had never known so long an evening. Jonathan, sunk behind his newspapers fresh from the mainland, emerged at nine, lighted his lamp, and stalked up to bed. With his departure Robert’s sparkle unaccountably died down. When Mary Curtis followed with, “Better get to bed. The day’s left you well ramfeezl’d,” he remained standing, a little lost.
Thankful watched him drearily. Never once aware of her, she thought. Showing off to irritate her father and charm her mother. And now bored with no audience. He turned back to her and her heart melted at his smile.
“Come over here.” He motioned her over to the old sofa. “Now perhaps we can have a little time to ourselves.”
So he had thought about her, he had wanted to talk to her. It was only his courtesy to older people which had made him ignore her. The room glowed again into warmth and life.
But Robert was tired of talking. He tried to pull her head down to his shoulder which was uncomfortably low. “Now let’s have a little necking party,” he suggested in a business-like tone. He kissed her hard.
Thankful’s head plunged upward knocking his teeth into his lip. In an instant they were facing each other in a fury like a pair of fighting cocks. Thankful calmed first. “Let’s not,” she said, and wanted to laugh at his fallen crest, and to cry at something that hurt her.
“Oh, all right.” His anger petered out. “But what fun can you have here? Anyone would think you’d never kissed a boy except your brothers,” he added in light scorn.
“Well, I don’t know as I have.” Thankful considered it honestly. “Except, of course, Dave.” She thought of Dave with a rush of friendliness.
“Who’s Dave?” Robert was sharp.
“Dave? Why, Dave’s Dave. You know sort of in the family.” She was vague in her confusion. “You’ll see him Christmas.”
“If I’m here,” said Robert darkly.
Thankful turned startled at the foot of the stairs. “Why are you going, Robert?” She must not let it sound like the heartbroken wail it was.
“I didn’t say I was.” The storm was over and Robert’s smile flashed again. “Not till after Christmas.”
She climbed the stairs wondering, because now that it vanished she discovered that a faint relief had been there. Not until she opened her window and looked out at an island under a cold half moon did she realize that she had given it no greeting and the day was gone. She sighed.
The stars marched high and wide as she had expected, but she sighed again because she knew that Robert was not looking at them. She rubbed her lips, and buried her face away from the sky. She was conscious of the faint resonance of the sea, everywhere, as if the very walls of the house were vibrant with it. Part of the rhythm of her breathing. Would it, she was anxious again, would it keep Robert awake?
The Stranger Leaves Bright Island
Unaccountable, that sense of relief, but it was there again fleetingly when Mary Curtis established Robert and his books at her kitchen table after breakfast. He resisted, but only halfheartedly after one look at the weather. He had come downstairs blue with cold though Mary Curtis had early lighted a fire in his stove. He had hovered over the kitchen stove, turning and turning, yet still he shivered. Thankful watched him, regretting for him the suffocating steam pipes. She was cold, too, for she had no fire in her room and missed the warm kitchen where she always dressed in the winter. I’m getting soft, she thought, and shivered too, though more for Robert than herself.
She buttoned up her sheepskin and pulled a dark knitted cap down over her cloudy hair. “Wind’s gone round northa’d,” she observed, “and the barometer’s dropping. May get snow.”
She was not prepared for the effect of her weather report. Robert crashed back from the table to the window. “Snow! Snow!” He sounded doomed. “What’ll we do!”
Mary Curtis turned from the stove, hand on hip. “Do about what?” She smiled tolerantly at Thankful’s disturbed face.
“About getting away, about getting back, about being stuck here—well, you know what I mean.” He broke off apologetically. “I’m due for those exams so soon.”
“Now don’t fash yourself about that,” she reassured him, “snow makes no drifts on water. And the storm, if there is one”—she looked warningly at Thankful—“has days enough to make and break before you go.”
Robert rubbed a finger on the frosted window. “Of course,” he said, “I have to allow some time to get to Cambridge. Perhaps I ought to leave before Christmas.”
Thankful sat down suddenly. She unbuttoned her coat feeling a little sick. Even those three days until Christmas he could not stand. Over there by the window, alien, remote, as if they were jailers holding him on the island. She could feel him searching for some way to escape. She would help him.
“I could run him over to the mainland.” She looked carefully at her heavy boots. “And then”—she thought her way along—“he could stay overnight at Pete’s. And there’s that early local to Smithtown. And I think a bus there which ought to connect with something …”
“Tut, tut, my lass!” Mary Curtis broke into the itinerary. “What tillie-vallie! You and Robbie are a pair! Just hunting for trouble. What if it does snow a whiff or two? Did you never see snow before? We’ll get you there for those examinations, my lad. And now you’d do well to set yourself to the business of getting ready for them. Out with you, my girl, we’re at work.”
Thankful stumbled to her feet. As she closed the door she heard the amazing sound of Robert’s lighthearted laughter. “I wouldn’t trust my precious neck in that little motorboat with her anyway.…”
“You couldn’t have a better pilot,” her mother said soberly. “We’ll start with the Latin.”
At first the day seemed unalterably spoiled. She toiled up the path, stopping at the little graveyard to brush the dead leaves from Gramp’s stone. She had a sudden vision of him with Robert and put the vision away as suddenly. But the thought of Gramp stayed with her and little by little edged away the image of Robert. Her barometer rose in spite of weather. Here was the island, free and open, when it might have been piled high with drifts. And would be yet, she thought with a grin, if she knew what those ragged spitting clouds meant. She couldn’t begin now, after all these island years, to worry about the weather. They’d get Robert back somehow. And let it blow and drift and freeze them in solid after he was gone! The spring would be soon enough for her to get out.
She put away one of the sweet secret plans which she had made lying wakeful after the dance. By afternoon Christmas greens might be covered with snow. She ignored the surmise that Robert would be unlikely to leave the warm room. Mary Curtis always liked the house hung with ground pine and fragrant with the pungent moss which grew at the far end of the island. Thankful would see that she had it. Though a shadowy boy which should have been Robert moved all the way by her side.
Down through the crooked paths of the empty sheep pasture, toward the end of the island where the great white rocks piled their beacon. The wind stung her face and she knew that it must have veered a point to the east. The crash of surf would have told her anyway. She crouched in the shelter of a boulder and saw indigo dark water all around the island, creamy-crested here, sending fine mist of spray into her face. It was freezing on the smooth boulder, and soon she felt that it was freezing on her. She stamped her feet and ran down into a sheltered hollow where the moss grew soft and thick, all its pungency chilled out of it.
The moss filled her arms so that the ground pine had to trail aroun
d her neck. She covered herself well with it, for by now the light gusts of flakes had begun. She found scarlet branches of black alder, and small hidden partridge berries and wintergreen, and bound them into bundles with ropes of ground pine. As she gathered them, cold, rich with color and fragrance, she became a part of each bright berry, each green streamer. She was as much the island as they were.
She burst into the kitchen frosted with snow, hung with green and scarlet. Her arms were numb with their cold burden and she covered the kitchen table with it just as Robert swooped it clear of books and papers. With her entered a great gust of snow-freshened air, which Mary Curtis breathed deeply. Robert leaped back to the stove and stood there, hands behind him in its warmth, smiling at her.
“She’s a pretty gal, isn’t she?” he said confidentially to her mother.
Mary Curtis was mopping up the dust of snow. “Better help your father haul up his peapod before you take your things off. Full tide tonight.”
Robert sprang into action. “I’ll help him. Wait till I get my coat.”
But Thankful could not wait. He was gone too long. She could hear the scraping of keel on pebbles. The boat rested well above high water mark when Robert crashed down to them.
“B’ar cub!” muttered Jonathan.
“Like to see my boat before she’s snowed in?” Thankful wanted to offer him something.
Their steps made a dark line of prints through the powder of snow over to the sheltered end of the cove where the Gramp was hauled up. Already the island was stirring as if the tumult at the far end had disturbed it. Snow gusts blew in their faces, stung their eyes.
“What in heaven’s name is all that hullabaloo?” Robert shook his head as if to rid his ears of a roar in them. “Went on all night. Isn’t it ever quiet here?”
Thankful was conscious then of sound. The air, the earth, the sea, were filled with it, like herself, and as unaware of it as she was. A great tuning fork, it set them all to singing together.
“Nor’easter,” she explained briefly. “You won’t hear it when the wind shifts.”
“Will it be a bad storm?” Robert was really anxious.
“Tell better when the tide turns. Just a smurr, I guess.”
The neat curves of the hull of her boat on its cradle rose shoulder high before them. Thankful laid a greeting hand on its stanch keel. Robert walked around it with critical eyes.
“She’s a good boat,” he said warmly. “I bet she can make time.”
Thankful gleamed at him under snow-misted lashes. “I’d like to try her against your boat.” He must not see her pride.
But there was none of the sailor’s quick rise to her bait. Robert looked gloomy. “I’m not so crazy about sailing as I was,” he muttered.
Thankful was shocked. “Robert! Your beautiful boat! You wouldn’t give her up just because she capsized!”
“Well, isn’t that enough!” He was growing impatient.
“Handle her right and she wouldn’t.” Thankful was pleading for a friend. “She’s not as seaworthy as this one, but all she needed was a reefing.”
Robert laughed her off. “Tell you what,” he said. “Next spring if I launch her, you shall sail her.”
Thankful thought of spring days with Robert’s boat, bacon over driftwood fires, Robert lounging comfortably with her at the helm, and her heart grew so warm and bright that a sudden slash of snow across her face seemed from another zone. “I’d be glad to,” she said, and realized a faint sense of disloyalty to the Gramp. She moved her mittened hand down the lovely curve of its bow, tested the snugness of the canvas cover, pounded a slat with a beach stone, before she left the boat alone in the gathering storm.
She thought, I wish he wanted to see the surf on the cliff, and knew that he wouldn’t. She followed his hasty retreat back to the warm house. Mary Curtis had broiled a finnan haddie, and its pungent smoke met them at the door. Would Robert eat it? He sniffed appreciatively. “I’m hungry as a—a bear,” and Thankful knew that he had started to say b’ar. But he asked for a second helping of the flaky buttered fish, and ate enough gingerbread to satisfy even Mary Curtis.
The afternoon dragged. Robert dozed on the couch over a required volume of Milton. Now and then he moved uneasily to the window with, “Will it be a bad storm? Is it getting worse?” Each time Jonathan, feet on the oven shelf, grunted from the kitchen. The smell of his wet boots seemed to annoy Robert. Mary Curtis darned stockings in her rocker by the window and looked upon the storm as if she liked it. Thankful moved, restless, from the one room to the other, missing the concord which had somehow cemented them into one.
“Get the corn popper,” her mother finally said to her. “The fire is just right.”
Robert dropped his Milton, and scorched his face over the popcorn. The corn, too, Jonathan grumbled, pushing it around for white kernels. Small pointed drifts rose up the edges of the window sashes. The island deepened its note outside, answering the storm. The kind of day which Thankful loved. What was the matter with it today? Without Robert, she thought, and would have no more to do with the idea.
The dark came early, a kind of white dark filled with misty arrows of snow. Jonathan creaked out to his chores. Thankful seized her coat from the nail, filled with the energy of the long tight day. “Be back soon,” she called, and caught up the wooden snow shovel which Gramp had made her years ago.
Outside, the deep rumble of the sea seemed to shake the very snow. It twisted up as well as down and drove in crazy patterns past the yellow squares of window light. Thankful dashed into it with long vigorous strokes, following the dark prints of her father’s boots which led to his bobbing lantern at the barn. He would not bother with a path until morning when he would know the storm’s capacity, but she could not wait.
Down, up, and over. Down, up, and over. Her body caught the rhythm and delivered it, down, up, and over, to her mind. The restlessness passed. Again she was part of the island, wrestling with it against the storm.
When her father came back down her small dark lane with his steady pail of milk, she felt his pleasure in her. She knew vaguely that it was not the path, but something that she had left behind her there in the house. She fell into line behind him, her shovel over her shoulder.
“Be over before morning,” he said. “Wind’s already comin’ round,” and she listened with him to the storm’s change in key. She felt toward her father a quiet gratitude as if he had saved them from a disaster.
She stepped up closer. “Think the good weather will hold then till after Christmas?” and strained to hear.
Jonathan held the door with his foot for her. “Might,” he said, “or might not.” But she thought he meant that it would. It must. What if they could not get Robert off the island! But they could. Dave would. She comforted herself with Dave.
Again Robert woke up in the evening, and persuaded Thankful to dance while he whistled, sweet and shrill, in her ear. But the floor gritted, and she stumbled under the sardonic eye of her father, and Robert grew impatient and gave it up. Thankful went off drearily to bed, taking care to leave while her mother was still talking to Robert. She had shoveled paths and so she slept, but her dreams were disturbed.
A west wind blew the morning in. Thankful looked out at their own bay, feather white with crisscross waves. Under a ragged blue sky it was turning indigo and green. The deep boom of the outer rote had softened into a murmur that Thankful would not have noticed if she had not been listening with Robert’s ears. Bright Island gleamed so white that her eyes could not open wide to its splendor. But a glimpse of her path showed her that little more snow had fallen. Only today and tomorrow, she thought, and shivered into her clothes.
With the sun, Robert’s spirits rose. Mary Curtis could hardly hold him to his morning’s stent. He had asked, “Will the wind go down?” and when Thankful nodded, had seemed to free himself of all threat of imprisonment. It was, perhaps, the pleasantest day of his visit. He liked the sweet-smelling Christmas greens, and put som
e of his own grace into their order. Thankful thought that the old rooms had never been so lovely. He even persuaded Jonathan to cut a small tree, and hung it zestfully with corn which he managed to keep unscorched, and cranberries which he found in the cellar. He kept busy and happy all through the day which finished up the storm and blew fair weather for their Christmas.
The sun rose so late that Thankful thought it would never creep up over the edge of the island. Then she remembered that the shortest day of the year was over, that now minutes of light would add to their days and shorten their nights, that the year was rolling around to where it would stop in its orbit and release her from the weary round of counting off its days. Short days or long days, they were all filled to the brim on Bright Island. Spring was not exactly in the offing, she thought. Steel cold sky and sea, shifting and darkening into still colder blue, a glittering island rising white and frozen out of it, no yellow warmth in the sun. But the shortest day was over! Though that would be small comfort to Robert, she thought.
Mary Curtis made the day ready for her sons and their wives. “They’ll be here just long enough to eat,” she said practically, “and we must not keep them waiting. It’s luck indeed”—a swift glance out of the window as she cleared the breakfast table—“to draw such a quiet day out of the winter.”
Robert stood by the window. “Looks pretty rough to me. And cold. Isn’t it colder?”
“Aye, a few degrees, and still dropping. But don’t fash yourself, Robbie. Salt water freezes slow.”
Robert looked relieved. “Which one is Pete?” he asked idly, and listened to her brief biographies of her sons. She liked to talk to him and this morning there was no time for lessons. Though Robert said there was no need. “It’s no wonder you know so much,” he told Thankful. “She makes you learn.” His quick light mind had broken restlessly away from her steady penetration. His books were all packed.
Thankful for the first time in her life had plunged into an agony of preparation for a family dinner. She had dreaded it for Robert so deeply that she forgot her own dislike of it. But Robert, his recurring weather problem settled, seemed to have high hopes for the day. Nor would he allow the tree which he had installed to be neglected.
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