“We’re waitin on you, Stel,” he said. “You come on across and see the mainland. You won’t need no snowshoes this year.” There he sat in the town-hall basement, big as Billy-be-damned, and then another knot exploded in the stove and he was gone. And the Reverend McCracken went on comforting Missy Bowie as if nothing had happened.
That night Vera called up Annie Phillips on the phone, and in the course of the conversation mentioned to Annie that Stella Flanders didn’t look well, not at all well.
“Alden would have a scratch of a job getting her off-island if she took sick,” Annie said.
Annie liked Alden because her own son Toby had told her Alden would take nothing stronger than beer. Annie was strictly temperance, herself.
“Wouldn’t get her off ‘tall unless she was in a coma,” Vera said, pronouncing the word in the downcast fashion: comer. “When Stella says ‘Frog,’ Alden jumps. Alden ain’t but half-bright, you know. Stella pretty much runs him.”
“Oh, ayuh?” Annie said.
Just then there was a metallic crackling sound on the line.
Vera could hear Annie Phillips for a moment longer—not the words, just the sound of her voice going on behind the crackling—and then there was nothing. The wind had gusted up high and the phone lines had gone down, maybe into Godlin’s Pond or maybe down by Sorrow’s Cove, where they went into the Reach sheathed in rubber. It was possible that they had gone down on the other side, on the Head… and some might even have said (only half-joking) that Russell Bowie had reached up a cold hand to snap the cable, just for the hell of it.
Not 700 feet away Stella Flanders lay under her puzzle-quilt and listened to the dubious music of Alden’s snores in the other room. She listened to Alden so she wouldn’t have to listen to the wind… but she heard the wind anyway, oh yes, coming across the frozen expanse of the Reach, a mile and a half of water that was now overplated with ice, ice with lobsters down below, and groupers, and perhaps the twisting, dancing body of Russell Bowie, who used to come each April with his old Rogers rototiller and turn her garden.
Who’ll turn the earth this April? she wondered as she lay cold and curled under her puzzle-quilt. And as a dream in a dream, her voice answered her voice: Do you love? The wind gusted, rattling the storm window. It seemed that the storm window was talking to her, but she turned her face away from its words. And did not cry.
‘ ‘But Gram,” Lona would press {she never gave up, not that one, she was like her mom, and her grandmother before her), “you still haven’t told why you never went across.” ‘ ‘Why, child, I have always had everything I wanted right here on Goat.”
“But it’s so small. We live in Portland. There’s buses, Gram!” ‘ ‘I see enough of what goes on in cities on the TV. I guess I’ll stay where I am.” Hal was younger, but somehow more intuitive; he would not press her as his sister might, but his question would go closer to the heart of things: “You never wanted to go across, Gram?
Never?” And she would lean toward him, and take his small hands, and tell him how her mother and father had come to the island shortly after they were married, and how Bull Symes’s grandfather had taken Stella’s father as a ‘prentice on his boat. She would tell him how her mother had conceived four times but one of her babies had miscarried and another had died a week after birth—she would have left the island if they could have saved it at the mainland hospital, but of course it was over before that was even thought of.
She would tell them that Bill had delivered Jane, their grandmother, but not that when it was over he had gone into the bathroom and first puked and then wept like a hysterical woman who had her monthlies particularly bad. Jane, of course, had left the island at fourteen to go to high school; girls didn’t get married at fourteen anymore, and when Stella saw her go off in the boat with Bradley Maxwell, whose job it had been to ferry the kids back and forth that month, she knew in her heart that Jane was gone for good, although she would come back for a while.
She would tell them that Alden had come along ten years later, after they had given up, and as if to make up for his tardiness, here was Alden still, a lifelong bachelor, and in some ways Stella was grateful for that because Alden was not terribly bright and there are plenty of women willing to take advantage of a man with a slow brain and a good heart (although she would not tell the children that last, either).
She would say: “Louis and Margaret Godlin begat Stella Godlin, who became Stella Flanders; Bill and Stella Flanders begat Jane and Alden Flanders and Jane Flanders became Jane Wakefield; Richard and Jane Wakefield begat Lois Wake-field, who became Lois Perrault; David and Lois Perrault begat Lona and Hal. Those are your names, children: you are Godlin- Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault. Your blood is in the stones of this island, and I stay here because the mainland is too far to reach. Yes, I love; I have loved, anyway, or at least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and I cannot cross. Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault…” That was the coldest February since the National Weather Service began keeping records, and by the middle of the month the ice covering the Reach was safe. Snowmobiles buzzed and whined and sometimes turned over when they climbed the ice-heaves wrong. Children tried to skate, found the ice too bumpy to be any fun, and went back to Godlin’s Pond on the far side of the hill, but not before little Justin McCracken, the minister’s son, caught his skate in a fissure and broke his ankle. They took him over to the hospital on the mainland where a doctor who owned a Corvette told him, “Son, it’s going to be as good as new.” Freddy Dinsmore died very suddenly just three days after Justin McCracken broke his ankle. He caught the flu late in January, would not have the doctor, told everyone it was “Just a cold from goin out to get the mail without m’scarf,” took to his bed, and died before anyone could take him across to the mainland and hook him up to all those machines they have waiting for guys like Freddy. His son George, a tosspot of the first water even at the advanced age (for tosspots, anyway) of sixty-eight, found Freddy with a copy of the Bangor Daily News in one hand and his Remington, unloaded, near the other. Apparently he had been thinking of cleaning it just before he died. George Dinsmore went on a three-week toot, said toot financed by someone who knew that George would have his old dad’s insurance money coming. Hattie Stoddard went around telling anyone who would listen that old George Dinsmore was a sin and a disgrace, no better than a tramp for pay.
There was a lot of flu around. The school closed for two weeks that February instead of the usual one because so many pupils were out sick. “No snow breeds germs,” Sarah Havelock said.
Near the end of the month, just as people were beginning to look forward to the false comfort of March, Alden Flanders caught the flu himself. He walked around with it for nearly a week and then took to his bed with a fever of a hundred and one. Like Freddy, he refused to have the doctor, and Stella stewed and fretted and worried. Alden was not as old as Freddy, but that May he would turn sixty.
The snow came at last. Six inches on Valentine’s Day, another six on the twentieth, and a foot in a good old norther on the leap, February 29. The snow lay white and strange between the cove and the mainland, like a sheep’s meadow where there had been only gray and surging water at this time of year since time out of mind. Several people walked across to the mainland and back. No snowshoes were necessary this year because the snow had frozen to a firm, glittery crust. They might take a knock of whiskey, too, Stella thought, but they would not take it at Dorrit’s. Dorrit’s had burned down in 1958.
And she saw Bill all four times. Once he told her: “Y’ought to come soon, Stella. We’ll go steppin. What do you say?” She could say nothing. Her fist was crammed deep into her mouth.
“Everything I ever wanted or needed was here.” she would tell them. “We had the radio and now we have the television, and that’s all I want of the world beyond the Reach. I had my garden year in and year out. And lobster? Why, we always used to have a pot of lobster stew on the back of the stove and we used to take it off and put it behind the door in the pantry when the minister came calling so he wouldn’t see we were eating ‘poor man’s soup.’