Stephen King – The Reach
The Reach
by Stephen King
“The Reach was wider in those days,” Stella Flanders told her great-grandchildren in the last summer of her life, the summer before she began to see ghosts. The children looked at her with wide, silent eyes, and her son, Alden, turned from his seat on the porch where he was whittling. It was Sunday, and Alden wouldn’t take his boat out on Sundays no matter how high the price of lobster was.
“What do you mean, Gram?” Tommy asked, but the old woman did not answer. She only sat in her rocker by the cold stove, her slippers bumping placidly on the floor.
Tommy asked his mother: “What does she mean?”
Lois only shook her head, smiled, and sent them out with pots to pick berries.
Stella thought: She’s forgot. Or did she ever know?
The Reach had been wider in those days. If anyone knew it was so, that person was Stella Flanders. She had been born in 1884, she was the oldest resident of Goat Island, and she had never once in her life been to the mainland.
Do you love? This question had begun to plague her, and she did not even know what it meant.
Fall set in, a cold fall without the necessary rain to bring a really fine color to the trees, either on Goat or on Raccoon Head across the Reach. The wind blew long, cold notes that fall, and Stella felt each note resonate in her heart.
On November 19, when the first flurries came swirling down out of a sky the color of
white chrome, Stella celebrated her birthday. Most of the village turned out. Hattie Stoddard came, whose mother had died of pleurisy in 1954 and whose father had been lost with the
Dancer in 1941. Richard and Mary Dodge came, Richard moving slowly up the path on his cane, his arthritis riding him like an invisible passenger. Sarah Havelock came, of course; Sarah’s mother Annabelle had been Stella’s best friend. They had gone to the island school together, grades one to eight, and Annabelle had married Tommy Frane, who had pulled her hair in the fifth grade and made her cry, just as Stella had married Bill Flanders, who had once knocked all of her schoolbooks out of her arms and into the mud (but she had managed not to cry). Now both Annabelle and Tommy were gone and Sarah was the only one of their seven children still on the island. Her husband, George Havelock, who had been known to everyone as Big George, had died a nasty death over on the mainland in 1967, the year there was no fishing. An ax had slipped in Big George’s hand, there had been blood — too much of it! — and an island funeral three days later. And when Sarah came in to Stella’s party and cried, “Happy birthday, Gram!” Stella hugged her tight and closed her eyes
(do you do you love?)
but she did not cry.
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. ..”