Bright Island

by Mabel L. Robinson

  He stopped but Thankful could not speak. Tears rimmed her lids with silver. Her throat was thick with them.

  His tone lightened when he looked at her. “Don’t do that,” he said. “It’s just that I’m hard put to it to know how to do without you when I go back today. And I’m harder put to it to see how I’d manage for the rest of my life. We could have a better time than most, Thankful.” He sounded wistful in spite of himself. “I’m going back to Oxford for another degree next year. You’d like it over there.”

  Thankful shook her head and the tears dropped, crystal round on her hands. “I belong here,” was all she could say. But she thought, he is so kind, so wise. I would like England. I could never, never follow him around while he lived his life. I belong here. This is my own life, here on Bright Island. Here I know how to live it. She looked pitifully at his eagerness and wished that she could tell him.

  “Never mind,” he said and rose at the shattering of their silence. Around the point swept the thin gray shape of the government cutter. “Doc got it this time,” he said and started down the beach to greet it.

  Thankful stumbled to her feet as if the tide had washed over her and left her unexpectedly breathing air again. Dave had come! Bringing the doctor! Oh, Dave! Dave! Everything would be all right now! And she flew to the house to have dinner for them, forgetting in youth’s implacable way that everything had been made all right by someone else. That dark figure bending over the oars to bring the two men in to her.

  To the Lee of Bright Island

  The warm May sunshine poured over Thankful, and the cool May air blew against her face and ruffled her hair. Couldn’t be better for drying paint, she thought, and drew slow competent strokes across the keel of her boat. The clean smell of wet paint, the new color under her brush, the feel of the boat’s sweet curves, all part of a May morning high and blue over her head, green and soft under her feet.

  Where had the days gone, she thought, that it was May and her boat still on the ways? But she laid the paint on with unhurried satisfaction. The days were full, but time stretched ahead, time undisturbed by dread when it had run its course. A song sparrow in the alders scattered its melody like handfuls of silver, and Thankful’s heart sang with him. Full of cares, and yet carefree, like him, she thought. For the cares were their own, of their own choice.

  She heard the chug of her father’s boat and knew that it was nearly noon and the potatoes must go on. She would go, yet the brush swept its bright track over and over until she heard his step behind her. She laid it on the grass and rubbed her fingers on some dry wisps before she reached for the mail which Jonathan had brought.

  “Looks pretty fair,” he conceded. “Needs a mite more by the rudder.” He dipped the brush into the paint pot. “Want I should finish it for you?”

  Thankful backed away, watched him grudgingly.

  “Might get her off at full tide tomorrow if she’s dry,” he offered. “I’m kinda hungry.”

  Thankful yielded. Up on the bank among the pungent bayberries she looked back at the little boat, straight-masted, shining white in the sun. “Not too much of that copper paint,” she called and felt as if she had done what she could for it. She ran swiftly toward the house where wood smoke already rose from the chimney.

  Mary Curtis rocked comfortably by the window. “Get your boat done?” she asked.

  “Almost. You built up that fire!”

  Her mother looked over the mail which Thankful dropped on the table.

  “Tillie-vallie!” said Mary Curtis. “If I can’t feed the fire with a few birch sticks—” She ripped the wrapper from the newspaper and rocked and read.

  Thankful moved about the kitchen unaware that her mother now and then peered around the paper’s edge at her. What she saw evidently satisfied her. She went on reading. “You take hold pretty well,” she said as if she read it out of the paper.

  Thankful scarcely heard her. Swift, light, intent, she was as surprised as her mother when she stopped to think about it. Something in her must have watched alertly how things were done, must have busily stored its scrutiny for her use when she needed it. The Mary Curtis in her, perhaps, biding her time until she was needed. Gramp must share his kingdom with her now.

  The hash was browning in the oven, the table was set, there was no further reason for delay. Thankful reluctantly pulled out from the mail a long school-stamped envelope. Now her mother openly watched her, dark-browed, anxious, bending over the typed paper.

  “How’d you come out, lass?” but she knew because Thankful chuckled.

  “They think I’m a whole lot smarter than you do.” Thankful passed her the list of marks.

  “Better’n you deserve,” grumbled Mary Curtis. “That school doesn’t know what scholarship is. Good mind to send them my judgment.”

  Thankful grinned. To please her mother, who had been deeply troubled because a girl should finish what she began, she had taken the final examinations. Orin Fletcher had sent them to her, and her mother had given them to her, and marked her severely when they were finished. Thankful had scarcely dared send them back to school. Now she felt extraordinarily lighthearted. The year finished, and finished well enough. Now it was off her mind. She would think no more about it.

  She opened Orin Fletcher’s letter while her father scrubbed the paint from his hands. And knew as she read it that you could not cut off a year of time like a yard of tape and discard it. It had woven itself into you and you would have to give it consideration always. Orin was sailing in one week, and under that statement she read his undefeated hope that she would join him. Oxford. His career. And a bitter sentence about the futility of tying herself down to such a limited life. My marks mean to him, she decided, that he made a right choice. And then was sorry. Because she remembered his dark suffering eyes when he said good-bye to her the day that Dave came.

  She thought of Dave, and Orin Fletcher was a shadowy third. She recalled, if you could recall something so pervading that it made her day’s plans, that Dave would be here before supper. And the shadowy Orin dimmed, faded into the folded letter. Thankful put the hash on the table and suggested that she take the powerboat over after Dave since her father had made the trip once today. Jonathan agreed and helped himself largely.

  “Finished up your boat.” His hunger seemed continually trying to repair the ravages of those days which had so nearly wrecked him. “Dave can help you get it off tomorrow. He’ll be here the rest of the week, won’t he?”

  Thankful agreed with a high heart. “Once I get my hand on that tiller,” she gloated, “Dave can be a passenger for once!”

  “Dave’s nobody’s passenger,” said Mary Curtis unexpectedly.

  Thankful wondered what she meant, and said, “He’s going to be mine.”

  “Dave’ll have as much time for sailing as you will, my girl.” Her father cut himself a huge piece of dried apple pie. “We finish getting that garden in while he’s here. Ground’s dry enough for the small seeds now.” He tested the pie. “Not as good as your mother’s yet.”

  Thankful agreed, but her mother flared. “Why would it be? Is nothing to be gained in thirty years of baking? Suits me,” and she ate a piece of valiant size. “Save the rest for Dave. He’ll like it.”

  “Like it myself,” grumbled Jonathan. “Not many ever could make pies like yours,” and everybody was appeased.

  “Doesn’t seem right to make him work at planting when he has so small a time between jobs,” Mary Curtis fretted. But she worried less as she grew stronger.

  “He likes it.” Jonathan pushed back his chair. “Spoiled a good farmer when they made a sailor out of that boy. Ought to be both, b’God!”

  Thankful piled the dishes with a small secret smile. Might be yet, she thought.

  “You, too, my lass”—Mary Curtis rested on the old lounge while Thankful washed the dishes—“from one thing to another the whole day through. You’ll be worn down to the bone.”

  Thankful shook the suds from her han
ds and faced her mother. “I look it, don’t I?”

  Still in her overalls because there was Dave to get in the boat, sleeves high over smooth brown arms, yet in some strange way, more a girl because of the rough clothes of a man. “I’d no longer take you for an underfed boy, it’s true,” Mary Curtis admitted, and sighed as one does over the fulfillment of beauty.

  A fresh southerly wind raced behind the powerboat all the way across. It would be wet charging back into it. Thankful hoped that Dave had sense enough to wear his oilskins. And a sweater under them. The softness of the spring air had sharpened into a crisp wind that bit like the salty edges of the waves. Yet there was still spring’s promise in the high blue of the sky, in the beat of the sun. A few gulls soared airward as if for the pleasure of it. Fleetingly she missed her own gull. She thought, He’s gone housekeeping on Gull Island as a gull should. He’ll be back when it’s cold. And fell to thinking of next winter and winters to come. Until when Dave stood leaning against a wharf post he seemed only to have stepped out of her thoughts.

  She shut off the engine and held the boat still at the slippery ladder. Dave towered above her, buttoned into a new uniform which, Thankful admitted, did set him off. He made no motion toward the ladder.

  “You won’t look like that when you land,” she observed.

  “Well, how do I look now?” Dave asked.

  “Pretty good,” she said judiciously, and her eyes traveled up the brass buttons to his sunburned face. He looked excited, gay.

  “All right, that’ll do for now,” he said and disappeared into the wharf shed.

  Thankful swung at the ladder rail and felt warm happiness flow through her. As if the spring sun were liquid in her veins. The water was quiet under the pier and green. Sea anemones feathered along its piles. A carved sculpin traveled into its shadow. The dank seaweed under her hands smelled of the ocean which had left it. The boat swayed with her gently through a moment which seemed to hold her suspended, like a crystal drop in the deep pool.

  Then Dave was beside her on the deck in island clothes and slicker. He stowed a neat leather case forward, and Thankful knew that her mother was also to have the treat of that new uniform. Then he took the wheel and not until they came in sight of the rocks of Bright Island did Thankful realize that he had not even asked for it. She hoped no one would notice who brought it up to the mooring.

  Dave was huge and splendid in his uniform again at supper. He spoke largely of his new job, and under the shelter of its importance something young and anxious peered out to see how they took it. Just as if he had been their own boy, not intending to spoil him. Jonathan told him about the good farmer wasted, and Mary Curtis said the sea could yield as good a living as the land if you had the wit to handle it, which quieted Jonathan. Thankful sat in the shadow, and by the time the lamp was lighted they talked of other things.

  At five the house stirred, but now Mary Curtis listened to kitchen sounds and Thankful made them. Only wet prints across the floor gave witness of an earlier icy plunge. Dave shook his head at them. He had seen her running through the morning light, but he had no words to speak of the beauty of that flying form.

  Now she set hot muffins before him and he wondered when she had found time to bake them. “Good,” Jonathan said. “Taste like that recipe of your mother’s.” Dave ate four of them. Thankful poured the bacon fat from the frying pan and wished for the smell of the clean black mould waiting to hold the seeds in its warm furrows. Planting was better than housework, she thought, keeping the muffins hot for her mother’s late breakfast, but you couldn’t do both. And there was her boat to be launched in the afternoon. The sun poured into the kitchen and she thought, it needs fresh paint, too. I’ll get it on before Selina comes. Or better, she decided, Selina and I will do it together. It’ll be a change from Bar Harbor for her.

  The tide crept up the beach all day until it touched the beach peas and slid under the ways. A full moon tide. Thankful and Dave sat on the silver gray spar where she had waited in anguish so short a time ago, but now the pain was healed and the dark face comforting her shadowy beyond recollection. Later she would remember, but her own tide was at its full now.

  When the highest reach of the water had wet the ways, they would launch their boat together and sail awhile in the quickened afternoon wind. They sat there in the sun with the fragrance of sweet fern about them, unhurried as the tide. Whitethroats whistled as if the world had just begun. They talked about Dave and his great boat, and Thankful laid a hand on her own small boat and remembered faintly the old promise to Gramp about marrying the sea captain, and the cruise over the world, and the little sailors growing up on Bright Island.

  She had no sense of making a decision, but rather of flowing into a great river where all along she had been headed. An inevitable merging. Not a limited life as she saw it. She felt it whole and rich while they waited, the rhythm of the seasons with hard work and much beauty, the sea around her always, life and death in simple terms as she wanted them. Dave was an essential part of it all, strong to uphold her, dear to love her. She was content, and in the fullness of time would, like Mary Curtis, Rest-And-Be-Thankful.

  About the Author

  In 1951, Mabel L. Robinson wrote: “I went to normal school, taught a while, went to Radcliffe College, and finally took my master’s and doctor’s degrees at Columbia University, where I now teach creative writing. During the process of getting degrees I taught at Wellesley and at Constantinople College, where I taught many nationalities a great variety of subjects. On the side I had a great deal of fun.

  “I live in New York, spending my weekends at our house in Montrose, a place which the birds have taken over, accepting me because I am a good provider. The four summer months are for Maine, where I have leisure to write, to sail, and to do as I please. It sounds very pleasant. And it is!”

  Mabel L. Robinson won two Newbery Honors: for Bright Island in 1938, and for Runner of the Mountain Tops in 1940. She died in 1962.