There was a tremendous birthday cake. Hattie had made it with her best friend, Vera Spruce. The assembled company bellowed out “Happy Birthday to You” in a combined voice that was loud enough to drown out the wind… for a little while, anyway. Even Alden sang, who in the normal course of events would sing only “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and the doxology in church and would mouth the words of all the rest with his head hunched and his big old jug ears just as red as tomatoes. There were ninety-five candles on Stella’s cake, and even over the singing she heard the wind, although her hearing was not what it once had been.
She thought the wind was calling her name.
“I was not the only one,” she would have told Lois’s children if she could. ‘ ‘In my day there were many that lived and died on the island. There was no mail boat in those days; Bull Symes used to bring the mail when there was mail. There was no ferry, either. If you had business on the Head, your man took you in the lobster boat. So far as I know, there wasn’t a flushing toilet on the island until 1946. ‘Twas Bull’s boy Harold that put in the first one the year after the heart attack carried Bull off while he was out dragging traps. I remember seeing them bring Bull home. I remember that they brought him up wrapped in a tarpaulin, and how one of his green boots poked out. I remember…” And they would say: “What, Gram? What do you remember?” How would she answer them? Was there more?
On the first day of winter, a month or so after the birthday party, Stella opened the back door to get stove wood and discovered a dead sparrow on the back stoop. She bent down carefully, picked it up by one foot, and looked at it.
“Frozen,” she announced, and something inside her spoke another word. It had been forty years since she had seen a frozen bird—1938. The year the Reach had frozen.
Shuddering, pulling her coat closer, she threw the dead sparrow in the old rusty incinerator as she went by it. The day was cold. The sky was a clear, deep blue. On the night of her birthday four inches of snow had fallen, had melted, and no more had come since then. “Got to come soon,” Larry Me Keen down at the Goat Island Store said sagely, as if daring winter to stay away.
Stella got to the woodpile, picked herself an armload and carried it back to the house. Her shadow, crisp and clean, followed her.
As she reached the back door, where the sparrow had fallen, Bill spoke to her—but the cancer had taken Bill twelve years before. “Stella,” Bill said, and she saw his shadow fall beside her, longer but just as clear-cut, the shadow-bill of his shadow-cap twisted jauntily off to one side just as he had always worn it. Stella felt a scream lodged in her throat. It was too large to touch her lips.
“Stella,” he said again, “when you comin cross to the mainland? We’ll get Norm Jolley’s old Ford and go down to Bean’s in Freeport just for a lark. What do you say?” She wheeled, almost dropping her wood, and there was no one there. Just the dooryard sloping down to the hill, then the wild white grass, and beyond all, at the edge of everything, clear-cut and somehow magnified, the Reach… and the mainland beyond it.
“Gram, what’s the Reach?” Lona might have asked… although she never had. And she would have given them the answer any fisherman knew by rote: a Reach is a body of water between two bodies of land, a body of water, which is open at either end. The old lobsterman’s joke went like this: know how to read y’compass when the fog comes, boys; between J one sport and London there’s a mighty long Reach.
“Reach is the water between the island and the mainland,” she might have amplified, giving them molasses cookies and hot tea laced with sugar. “I know that much. I know it as well as my husband’s name… and how he used to wear his hat.”
“Gram?” Lona would say. “How come you never been across the Reach?”
“Honey,” she would say, “I never saw any reason to go.” In January, two months after the birthday party, the Reach froze for the first time since 1938. The radio warned islanders and main-landers alike not to trust the ice, but Stewie McClelland and Russell Bowie took Stewie’s Bombardier Skiddoo out anyway after a long afternoon spent drinking Apple Zapple wine, and sure enough, the skiddoo went into the Reach.
Stewie managed to crawl out (although he lost one foot to frostbite). The Reach took Russell Bowie and carried him away.
That January 25 there was a memorial service for Russell. Stella went on her son Alden’s arm, and he mouthed the words to the hymns and boomed out the doxology in his great tuneless voice before the benediction. Stella sat afterward with Sarah Havelock and Hattie Stoddard and Vera Spruce in the glow of the wood fire in the town-hall basement. A going-away party for Russell was being held, complete with Za-Rex punch and nice little cream-cheese sandwiches cut into triangles. The men, of course, kept wandering out back for a nip of something a bit stronger than Za-Rex. Russell Bowie’s new widow sat red-eyed and stunned beside Ewell McCracken, the minister. She was seven months big with child—it would be her fifth—and Stella, half-dozing in the heat of the woodstove, thought: She’ll be crossing the Reach soon enough, I guess. She’ll move to Freeport or Lewiston and go for a waitress, I guess.
She looked around at Vera and Hattie, to see what the discussion was.
“No, I didn’t hear,” Hattie said. “What did Freddy say?” They were talking about Freddy Dinsmore, the oldest man on the island (two years younger’n me, though, Stella thought with some satisfaction), who had sold out his store to Larry McKeen in 1960 and now lived on his retirement.
“Said he’d never seen such a winter,” Vera said, taking out her knitting. “He says it is going to make people sick.” Sarah Havelock looked at Stella, and asked if Stella had ever seen such a winter. There had been no snow since that first little bit; the ground lay crisp and bare and brown. The day before, Stella had walked thirty paces into the back field, holding her right hand level at the height of her thigh, and the grass there had snapped in a neat row with a sound like breaking glass.
“No,” Stella said. “The Reach froze in ’38, but there was snow that year. Do you remember Bull Symes, Hattie?” Hattie laughed. “I think I still have the black-and-blue he gave me on my sit-upon at the New Year’s party in ’53. He pinched me that hard. What about him?”
“Bull and my own man walked across to the mainland that year,” Stella said. “That February of 1938. Strapped on snowshoes, walked across to Dorrit’s Tavern on the Head, had them each a shot of whiskey, and walked back. They asked me to come along. They were like two little boys off to the sliding with a toboggan between them.” They were looking at her, touched by the wonder of it. Even Vera was looking at her wide-eyed, and Vera had surely heard the tale before. fr you believed the stories, Bull and Vera had once played some house together, although it was hard, looking at Vera now, to believe she had ever been so young.
“And you didn’t go?” Sarah asked, perhaps seeing the reach of the Reach in her mind’s eye, so white it was almost blue in the heatless winter sunshine, the sparkle of the snow crystals, the mainland drawing closer, walking across, yes, walking across the ocean just like Jesus-putof- the-boat, leaving the island for the one and only time in your life on foot—
“No,” Stella said. Suddenly she wished she had brought her own knitting. “I didn’t go with them.”
“Why not?” Hattie asked, almost indignantly.
“It was washday,” Stella almost snapped, and then Missy Bowie, Russell’s widow, broke into loud, braying sobs. Stella looked over and there sat Bill Flanders in his red-and-blackchecked jacket, hat cocked to one side, smoking a Herbert Tareyton with another tucked behind his ear for later. She felt her heart leap into her chest and choke between beats.
She made a noise, but just then a knot popped like a rifle shot in the stove, and neither of the other ladies heard.
“Poor thing,” Sarah nearly cooed.
“Well shut of that good-for-nothing,” Hattie grunted. She searched for the grim depth of the truth concerning the departed Russell Bowie and found it: “Little more than a tramp for pay, that man. She’s well out of that two-hoss trace.” Stella barely heard these things. There sat Bill, close enough to the Reverend McCracken to have tweaked his nose if he so had a mind; he looked no more than forty, his eyes barely marked by the crow’s-feet that had later sunk so deep, wearing his flannel pants and his gumrubber boots with the gray wool socks folded neatly down over the tops.