Be dark soon.
Well, she had gone wrong. She had slipped off to one side or the other. Otherwise she would have reached the mainland by now. Yet she didn’t believe she had gone so far wrong that she was walking parallel to the mainland or even back in the direction of Goat. An interior navigator in her head whispered that she had overcompensated and slipped off to the left. She believed she was still approaching the mainland but was now on a costly diagonal.
That navigator wanted her to turn right, but she would not do that. Instead, she moved straight on again, but stopped the artificial limp. A spasm of coughing shook her, and she spat bright red into the snow.
Ten minutes later (the gray was now deep indeed, and she found herself in the weird twilight of a heavy snowstorm) she fell again, tried to get up, failed at first, and finally managed to gain her feet. She stood swaying in the snow, barely able to remain upright in the wind, waves of faintness rushing through her head, making her feel alternately heavy and light.
Perhaps not all the roaring she heard in her ears was the wind, but it surely was the wind that finally succeeded in prying Alden’s hat from her head. She made a grab for it, but the wind danced it easily out of her reach and she saw it only for a moment, flipping gaily over and over into the darkening gray, a bright spot of orange. It struck the snow, rolled, rose again, was gone.
Now her hair flew around her head freely.
“It’s all right, Stella,” Bill said. “You can wear mine.” She gasped and looked around in the white. Her gloved hands had gone instinctively to her bosom, and she felt sharp fingernails scratch at her heart.
She saw nothing but shifting membranes of snow—and then, moving out of that evening’s gray throat, the wind screaming through it like the voice of a devil in a snowy tunnel, came her husband. He was at first only moving colors in the snow: red, black, dark green, lighter green; then these colors resolved themselves into a flannel jacket with a flapping collar, flannel pants, and green boots. He was holding his hat out to her in a gesture that appeared almost absurdly courtly, and his face was Bill’s face, unmarked by the cancer that had taken him (had that been all she was afraid of? that a wasted shadow of her husband would come to her, a scrawny concentration-camp figure with the skin pulled taut and shiny over the cheekbones and the eyes sunken deep in the sockets?) and she felt a surge of relief.
“Bill? Is that really you?”
“Course.”
“Bill,” she said again, and took a glad step toward him. Her legs betrayed her and she thought she would fall, fall right through him—he was, after all, a ghost—but he caught her in arms as strong and as competent as those that had carried her over the threshold of the house that she had shared only with Alden in these latter years. He supported her, and a moment later she felt the cap pulled firmly onto her head.
“Is it really you?” she asked again, looking up into his face, at the crow’s-feet around his eyes which hadn’t sunk deep yet, at the spill of snow on the shoulders of his checked hunting jacket, at his lively brown hair.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s all of us.” He half-turned with her and she saw the others coming out of the snow that the wind drove across the Reach in the gathering darkness. A cry, half joy, half fear, came from her mouth as she saw Madeline Stoddard, Hattie’s mother, in a blue dress that swung in the wind like a bell, and holding her hand was Hattie’s dad, not a mouldering skeleton somewhere on the bottom with the Dancer, but whole and young. And there, behind those two—
“Annabelle!” she cried. “Annabelle Frane, is it you?” It was Annabelle; even in this snowy gloom Stella recognized the yellow dress Annabelle had worn to Stella’s own wedding, and as she struggled toward her dead friend, holding Bill’s arm, she thought that she could smell roses.
‘ ‘Annabelle!”
“We’re almost there now, dear,” Annabelle said, taking her other arm. The yellow dress, which had been considered Daring in its day (but, to Annabelle’s credit and to everyone else’s relief, not quite a Scandal), left her shoulders bare, but Annabelle did not seem to feel the cold.
Her hair, a soft, dark auburn, blew long in the wind. “Only a little further.” She took Stella’s other arm and they moved forward again. Other figures came out of the snowy night (for it was night now). Stella recognized many of them, but not all. Tommy Frane had joined Annabelle; Big George Havelock, who had died a dog’s death in the woods, walked behind Bill; there was the fellow who had kept the lighthouse on the Head for most of twenty years and who used to come over to the island during the cribbage tournament Freddy Dinsmore held every February—Stella could almost but not quite remember his name. And there was Freddy himself! Walking off to one side of Freddy, by himself and looking bewildered, was Russell Bowie.
“Look, Stella,” Bill said, and she saw black rising out of the gloom like the splintered prows of many ships. It was not ships, it was split and fissured rock. They had reached the Head.
They had crossed the Reach.
She heard voices, but was not sure they actually spoke: Take my hand, Stella—(do you) Take my hand, Bill—(oh do you do you) Annabelle… Freddy… Russell… John… Ettie… Frank… take my hand, take my hand… my hand…
(do you love)
“Will you take my hand, Stella?” a new voice asked.
She looked around and there was Bull Symes. He was smiling kindly at her and yet she felt a kind of terror in her at what was in his eyes and for a moment she drew away, clutching Bill’s hand on her other side the tighter.
“Is it—”
“Time?” Bull asked. “Oh, ayuh, Stella, I guess so. But it don’t hurt. At least, I never heard so. All that’s before.” She burst into tears suddenly—all the tears she had never wept—and put her hand in Bull’s hand. “Yes,” she said, “yes I will, yes I did, yes I do.” They stood in a circle in the storm, the dead of Goat Island, and the wind screamed around them, driving its packet of snow, and some kind of song burst from her. It went up into the wind and the wind carried it away. They all sang then, as children will sing in their high, sweet voices as a summer evening draws down to summer night. They sang, and Stella felt herself going to them and with them, finally across the Reach. There was a bit of pain, but not much; losing her maidenhead had been worse. They stood in a circle in the night. The snow blew around them and they sang. They sang, and—
…and Alden could not tell David and Lots, but in the summer after Stella died, when the children came out for their annual two weeks, he told Lona and Hal. He told them that during the great storms of winter the wind seems to sing with almost human voices, and that sometimes it seemed to him he could almost make out the words: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him, ye creatures here below…” But he did not tell them (imagine slow, unimaginative Alden Flanders saying such things aloud, even to the children!) that sometimes he would hear that sound and feel cold even by the stove; that he would put his whittling aside, or the trap he had meant to mend, thinking that the wind sang in all the voices of those who were dead and gone… that they stood somewhere out on the Reach and sang as children do. He seemed to hear their voices and on these nights he sometimes slept and dreamed that he was singing the doxology, unseen and unheard, at his own funeral.
There are things that can never be told, and there are things, not exactly secret, that are not discussed. They had found Stella frozen to death on the mainland a day after the storm had blown itself out. She was sitting on a natural chair of rock about one hundred yards south of the Raccoon Head town limits, frozen just as neat as you please. The doctor who owned the Corvette said that he was frankly amazed It would have been a walk of over four miles, and the autopsy required by law in the case of an unattended, unusual death had shown an advanced cancerous condition—in truth, the old woman had been riddled with it. Was Alden to tell David and Lois that the cap on her head had not been his? Lorry McKeen had recognized that cap. So had John Bensohn. He had seen it in their eyes, and he supposed they had seen it in his. He had not lived long enough to forget his dead father’s cap, the look of its bill or the places where the visor had been broken.