“I have seen good weather and bad, and if there were times when I wondered what it might be like to actually be in the Sears store instead of ordering from the catalogue, or to go into one of those Shaw’s markets I see on TV instead of buying at the store here or sending Alden across for something special like a Christmas capon or an Easter ham… or if I ever wanted, just once, to stand on Congress Street in Portland and watch all the people in their cars and on the sidewalks, more people in a single look than then there are on the whole island these days… if I ever wanted these things, then I wanted this more. I am not strange. I am not particular or even very eccentric for a woman of my years. My mother sometimes used to say, ‘All the difference in the world is between work and want,’ and I believe that to my very soul. I believe it is better to plow deep than wide.
“This is my place, and I love it.”
One day in middle March, with the sky as white and lowering as a loss of memory, Stella
Flanders sat in her kitchen for the last time, laced up her boots over her skinny calves for the last time, and wrapped her bright red woolen scarf (a Christmas present from Hattie three
Christmases past) around her neck for the last time. She wore a suit of Alden’s long underwear under her dress. The waist of the drawers came up to just below the limp vestiges of her breasts, the shirt almost down to her knees.
Outside, the wind was picking up again, and the radio said there would be snow by
afternoon. She put on her coat and her gloves. After a moment of debate, she put a pair of
Alden’s gloves on over her own. Alden had recovered from the flu, and this morning he and Harley Blood were over rehanging a storm door for Missy Bowie, who had had a girl. Stella had seen it, and the unfortunate little mite looked just like her father.
She stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the Reach, and Bill was there as
she had suspected he might be, standing about halfway between the island and the Head,
standing on the Reach just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat, beckoning to her, seeming to tell her by gesture that the time was late if she ever intended to step a foot on the mainland in this life.
“If it’s what you want, Bill,” she fretted in the silence. “God knows I don’t.”
But the wind spoke other words. She did want to. She wanted to have this adventure. It
had been a painful winter for her — the arthritis, which came and went irregularly was back with a vengeance, flaring the joints of her fingers and knees with red fire and blue ice. One of her eyes had gotten dim and blurry (and just the other day Sarah had mentioned — with some unease —
that the fire-spot that had been there since Stella was sixty or so now seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds). Worst of all, the deep, griping pain in her stomach had returned, and two mornings before she had gotten up at five o’clock, worked her way along the exquisitely cold floor into the bathroom, and had spat a great wad of bright red blood into the toilet bowl. This morning there had been some more of it, foul-tasting stuff, coppery and shuddersome.
The stomach pain had come and gone over the last five years, sometimes better,
sometimes worse, and she had known almost from the beginning that it must be cancer. It had taken her mother and father and her mother’s father as well. None of them had lived past seventy, and so she supposed she had beat the tables those insurance fellows kept by a carpenter’s yard.
“You eat like a horse,” Alden told her, grinning, not long after the pains had begun and she had first observed the blood in her morning stool. “Don’t you know that old fogies like you are supposed to be peckish?”