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).