On the Same Page

by N. D. Galland

  As if convinced of the perils of maternity, the hen stood and paraded out of the box with an alto warble. The other two sitting hens, both Silkies, decided to join her, giving Joanna sour looks.

  “Don’t forget to check under Brunhilde!” Hank called from the porch. Brunhilde was the little red Bantam hen, Hank’s favorite. She was cuter than the others. Also, he had decided her petite eggs each only counted as half an egg, which allowed him to ingest more cholesterol than the doctors wanted him to, while convincing himself he was doing no such thing. Joanna had stopped arguing with him about it.

  Brunhilde was already outside and the nesting boxes revealed no Banty egg. “Nope,” Joanna called back.

  “Are you sure?” he said. “She hasn’t laid an egg in about three days, that’s not normal.”

  Joanna found it touching that he was concerned about a chicken.

  “I’ll check again this afternoon,” she promised.

  “You might as well bring some wood in while you’re outside,” he said, and pivoted back toward the back door. “Split some kindling while you’re at it. Hang on, I’ll get the axe.”

  Her inner child winced in anticipation of an earful. “I left it by the woodpile last time,” she said.

  He hinged back around on the crutches, leaning against the wall for balance. “Anna! The head’s going to rust.”

  “If you kept it oiled, it wouldn’t r—”

  “If you brought it inside, I wouldn’t have to oil it! You know you’re supposed to bring it in, like you have been doing since the age of five!”

  “If I’d been using an axe to chop kindling when I was five, social workers would have removed me from the property for my own safety,” she snapped back. “And since Jen was a social worker, I seriously doubt I was using an axe at the age of five.”

  “Six then! Maybe you were six. Just put the damn thing away. I like that axe, I don’t want to have to buy another one just because you were being neglectful.” He turned and hobbled back into the house. It was nearly noon, so she guessed he was about to open his first beer.

  “Who keeps an axe by the door, anyhow?” she grumbled to the chickens as she closed the coop.

  After nesting the eggs in a carton inside the back door, she exited again to the woodpile, chopped an armful’s worth of kindling, and brought that—along with the axe—in, as Hank retreated into the recliner to lambast CNN. She went out again, loaded the wheelbarrow with logs. The bark and dead lichen had a mossy stink and left organic grit on her leather work gloves. She thought of how delicate she’d recently been about a smear of grime from a subway turnstile dirtying her city gloves, and laughed at herself. She pushed the wheelbarrow back to the porch. Armful by armful she carried the logs across the room and stacked them in the woodbox, leaving a trail of bark and lichen and sow bugs to commemorate her path of travel. Once she’d emptied the wheelbarrow, she vacuumed the debris with the Dust-Buster.

  The house had propane heat as well, but if the wood and the woodstove were on-site, it was a cozier heat, and cheaper. Hank had culled from the undeveloped parts of his property, which had been densely wooded with young oaks when he bought it more than forty years earlier. He had also, over the decades, struck temporary acquaintanceships with the seasonal property owners he otherwise scorned, and proposed that he “open up some vistas for them” in exchange for keeping the wood he felled. Currently there were four or five long, stacked piles of split cordwood within hauling distance of the house, each a different vintage. This winter, they were mostly burning white oak that Hank had felled and split three years ago from the friendly Republicans who had razed the original Hubert’s Bakery.

  After she’d brought the wood in, she went down to the post office before the lobby closed to pick up the mail. It was soothing to her, when she had occasion to go in there, that nearly always people recognized her, even if not by name. Just the face being familiar enough to warrant the kind of smile and hello that is saved for people you recognize. In the brief walk from the truck to the door to the counter and back out again, on every visit she was likely to encounter a familiar face in the lobby, even after all those years away. The lack of anonymity had been claustrophobic when she was younger. Now it felt soothing, reassuring. Now she needed it. Wondrous, how so small a thing as a neighbor at the post office could set things right again when they felt off. When she had first returned in January, the people who’d recognized her had looked startled at her presence. It had been pleasing to startle people a little. Now it was pleasing to be part of the scenery.

  SHE SAW ORION the next day. They went on an impromptu muddy hike through a woody Land Bank property in Chilmark.

  The scent of loam was everywhere, permeating everything. Even the moss and the sinuous, tangled roots of beech trees. Last year’s pale copper leaves still clung to the twigs, shimmering in the breeze, adding light and texture to the soggy gray woodland. Rarer than beeches was the occasional lone holly tree, usually young, eternally robust and glossy in its muted surroundings. But most of these woods were just gangling oaks with rough bark, boasting barely even any branches but their leafless canopies. Everywhere was thigh-high underbrush of scraggly, leafless huckleberry and blueberry, underlain with the russet carpet of fallen oak leaves. Endless acres of this. The arboreal monotony calmed some part of her like a visual lullaby, soft and familiar from childhood.

  They trooped up and down the wooded hills, the paths strewn with a confetti of twigs. The cloudy sky and raw breeze left everything feeling damp. In a streambed, frazil ice protested the rocks. Much of the trails hugged lichen-stained stone walls that were as bland as the oaks and the sky. These marked fields, but also ran throughout woodlands that had been meadows once.

  “Those are called lace walls,” Joanna said, nodding to a mossy stretch of the one to their left, half-hidden in the heap of dead oak leaves that lay along it.

  “Lace, because of all the gaps.”

  “Yes—the Vineyard’s stone walls are unique—”

  “Of course they are,” said Orion. “Everything about the Vineyard is unique. Everything is special. Nothing is ordinary like on the mainland. You guys are relentless.”

  “No, seriously, everyone knows this—”

  “Everyone who’s an Islander, you mean.”

  “No, even landscape historians and—”

  He stopped abruptly and stared at her with a teasing expression. “You’re all so desperate to maintain your status quo as the most special place on earth that you have to stoop to calling in landscape historians for backup? What the hell is a landscape historian?”

  “See how they’re made up of unshaped granite rocks?” she said. This was a recitation from her sixth-grade earth science class. “Not only is there no mortar or cement between the rocks, there’s actually deliberate gaps.”

  “I’ve always assumed that’s because the earlier settlers were too cheap or lazy to build solid stone walls, but now you will tell me that I’m wrong about that.”

  “You’re wrong about that.”

  “Of course I am. Tell me what an ignorant wash-ashore I am. Tell me why they’re so special.”

  “The Island used to be almost treeless, because the white settlers cut all the trees down for pastureland, and so the gaps are to let the winds rip across the fields unencumbered. The way big banners have holes cut in them so the wind doesn’t tear them apart.”

  He considered this and shrugged agreeably. “That’s as good an excuse as any to not bother building a proper wall,” he said.

  “They’ve held up for centuries without maintenance—that’s unusual for stone walls. And there’s a serious craft to building them, because they’re all relying on the pressure of their neighbors—you take away one rock and three others fall out of place. It’s all interconnected.”

  He gave her a slightly mocking smile. “Let me guess, that’s a metaphor for how the Island community works, and the lace walls are your totem animals?”

  “It’s an art form. Take
a good look.”

  He took a good look. “Okay,” he said after a meditative moment. His tone was softer. “I see it.” And then in a respectful, solemn tone: “Thank you for admitting me to the cabal of people who cavort with landscape historians.”

  She’d chosen this trail, so far up-Island, because she wanted to avoid running into anyone she knew who might recognize Orion Smith. He agreed to it because he wanted to survey more of her childhood haunts. Her childhood had more of a romantic patina for him than it did for her.

  They walked for an hour under bleak skies, the persistent nothingness of Vineyard spring seeping into their coats and boots and gloves. Each skirted the details of sundry memories and youthful misadventures. He described a relentlessly manicured childhood, including summers in the house he now inhabited. They were about the same age but had never met during those summers, “Because you were busily being trained to be a proper rich kid, right?” she teased.

  He laughed once, softly, a smiling hmph, and said, “If you insist.”

  There was a certain confidence that came of knowing how to swing tennis rackets and golf clubs by the age of eight. And that confidence could—in his case, did—extend to a glowing sense of agency and self-regard in other particulars of one’s life. She could find no way to express it that wouldn’t be rude, but the country-club gloss was his least agreeable quality. He was a handsome man, certainly, and she was taken with his particular charisma, but he would have been immeasurably more compelling were he not so Teflon-coated. She found him more alluring for having learned to bake with his grandmother, and less alluring for having learned to sail simply because that is what his kind of people did. Especially as his grandmother sounded like the most interesting person in his family: she had the public affect of a 1950s housewife, he said, but she was a card shark and smoked clandestine cigars, and generally sounded like somebody Joanna would have sold a kidney to interview, were she still among the living.

  By the end of their ramble, it was drizzling hard enough to be called a proper rain, and with noses and fingertips red and nearly numb, they hied themselves back to his house for tea and biscotti to defrost and defog. Once they’d shed their soggy outerwear and the kettle was heating up, Joanna threw a couple of dollars on the smooth granite counter, her gesture of refusing to accept a gift of any size. He grinned at her and then swiped it, shoving the bills into the hip pocket of his jeans. “This friendship is costing you a lot of money,” he said. “You must really like me. How about a Scrabble rematch?”

  She won. He was impressed.

  Then she hurried home to take care of Hank and polish her stories for both papers. The Journal needed an update on the proposed moped ban; a profile of a Brazilian business owner; mini-features on the lacrosse and baseball coaches, whose seasons were opening at the high school. Lewis at the Newes had asked Joey Dias to write about a study of erosion at Squibnocket Beach and do an “On the Same Page” profile of a newly reinstalled local cop who had returned home after quitting his post with a federal law enforcement agency because he found their treatment of immigrants so hostile. This was on the same page as an article from the earliest years of the Newes about the salutatory economic impact of the recent wave of Azorean immigrant seamen.

  The cop, she discovered when she interviewed him, was young, lived in Oak Bluffs, and never read either paper, so there was no danger of his realizing who she was.

  She got her copy in to both papers by Wednesday afternoon, in time to kibitz during the floating potluck-poker game.

  This was the second time it had been at Hank’s since the accident, but the first time that he could help prep for it, despite being nearly immobile—something he felt the need to point out twice. She jury-rigged a cutting board so that he could safely keep it on his lap to slice cheese, and he was pleased to be useful. He was allowed up for longer periods now, but still he could only walk with the crutches.

  Celia and her soft-spoken boyfriend Ted attended, as did Helen and Paul Javier, and Everett, who had grown up with Hank. Nearly all the conversation was about either Orion Smith or the upcoming Annual Town Meeting.

  The rule was always to eat and drink before playing poker, because it was easier to trick people when they were sated and tipsy. Celia set a loaf of warm corn bread on the table, a new recipe she was developing. There was appreciative cooing. The cooing grew in decibels when Ted plunked a gallon of homemade ale beside it, making the old wooden table shudder. Joanna had chowder reheating. Everett had brought signature cheeses from each of the four island dairies. The fire was blazing in the woodstove and Helen was mulling cider in a ceramic pot sitting on it. Gathered around the table, they all looked like the establishing shot for an indie home-for-Christmas-in-New-England movie. With mud outside instead of snow.

  “I can never sit through a Town Meeting, because they’re four hours long,” said Celia, cutting the corn bread. “And Wednesdays are my early mornings. Why the hell are the Town Meetings always Tuesday nights?”

  “Same reason Election Day is,” said Hank, who always liked to know the answer to things. He was in the recliner, with his leg up on pillows. His beer rested on the battered Scrabble box on the side table. His holding-forth tone suggested she should start to count his empties. “Back in the day, back before cars and paved roads, it gave people time to get to the meeting place, or the polling place, or whatever. You couldn’t travel on the Sabbath, right? No, you couldn’t. And this time of year, the thaw is finished but not all the mud and muck has dried up, and travel was a pain in the butt. It took a full day for some people to get to the meeting, and they couldn’t start the journey until Monday morning, so that’s why it’s a Tuesday.”

  “Nice try, but that doesn’t hold up,” said Everett. “When my dad was a kid in Chilmark, they had the Town Meeting during the day, and the school kids attended. And it was always on a Monday. In fact, it’s still on Mondays.”

  Hank finished his beer, tossed the can into an open grocery bag near the trash that was collecting the empties, and cheerfully opened another one. “Chilmark is full of rich Jewish folk and they all go to synagogue on Friday nights, so that means they could spend Sunday traveling to Town Meetings, so that’s why it could be on Monday,” he declared.

  They all stared at him. “Hank,” Joanna finally said. “Chilmark was not full of rich Jewish folk back before there were cars.”

  “Obviously,” he said. “Before there were cars, most of the Island Jews lived in Vineyard Haven near the Hebrew Center, so they could walk to Friday night services there.”

  “Probably so,” she said. “And that doesn’t explain why Chilmark has their Town Meeting on a Monday instead of a Tuesday.”

  Hank’s beer intake was significant enough to propel him to a new conversational track. “Hey, Celia! Your folks took me to the Fish Fry at the PA Club last week, and said they were heading off on a cruise soon. So let me ask you: Are they crazy?”

  “No,” Celia assured him.

  “Yes, they are,” Hank corrected her. “How crazy do you have to be to leave a place surrounded by water you’re not going to swim in to pay a ton of money so that you can be someplace else completely surrounded by water you’re not going to swim in. How is that smart? When did they become people who go on a cruise?”

  “I love going on cruises,” said Celia.

  “Inherited stupidity,” said Hank, somehow sounding friendly.

  “Ahem,” said Helen, “Paul and I are about to go on a cruise around the world.”

  “That’s different,” said Hank. “You’re going on real boats—freight boats, and schooners, and I dunno, kayaks. Not cruise ships. Cruise ships are ridiculous.”

  Helen turned her patient gaze from Hank to Joanna. “Speaking of vacations, Anna, do you need one?”

  The gentleness almost undid her. Before she could answer, Hank sneered at Helen: “What are you asking her for? I’m the one who’s stuck inside all day, I’m the one who needs a change of pace. She can go out and about
whenever she likes, wherever she likes! She’s got it easy. Plus she’s not in pain! She’s not racking up hospital bills! She’s not bedridden! Where the fuck, Helen, where the fuck do you get off asking Anna if she needs a vacation?”

  A thick blanket of silence immediately smothered all conversation. Hank did not notice or care. “She’s got it easy, she’s got a free place to live, people are practically throwing food at us, she uses my truck whenever she wants, and all she’s doing for work, if you can even call it work, is showing up every day at the Journal so Everett can tell her what gossip to hunt down for the week.”

  “Hey now!” Everett barked, pulling away from the table. He was too avuncular to get angry at anyone, but he was thrown, almost puzzled, by the sudden outrage. “Hank, jeez, calm down.”

  “That wasn’t kind, Hank,” said Helen.

  “You don’t get to say what’s kind and what isn’t,” Hank bellowed. “You’re kowtowing to Anna about how hard her life is—her life isn’t hard, her life is so fuckin’ easy compared to mine! Who’s the widowed one? Who’s gonna get condescended to in the papers by that rich asshole playboy with the helicopter? Who deserves a vacation? Me, that’s who.” He picked up the Scrabble box and flung it into the corner, just above the television set. It tore open, wooden tiles bursting like kindergarten confetti across the corner of the room. The cats had been napping, curled up together on the couch; they leapt up howling with shock when a tile landed near them, and darted off into the darkness of Hank’s bedroom. The board smacked against the wall and then plummeted awkwardly, bent, to the floor.

  The silence was so perfect, they could hear one log tumble off another within the woodstove.

  “That’s true,” said Helen, effortlessly gracious. “You’re right, Hank, and I’m sorry I didn’t think of you. You both deserve vaca—”

  “No,” he said. “No, that’s such bullshit. Anna doesn’t need a fucking vacation, Anna is on a fucking vacation.”