And they would say: “What, Gram? What do you remember?”
How would she answer them? Was there more?
On the first day of winter, a month or so after the birthday party, Stella opened the back door to get stove wood and discovered a dead sparrow on the back stoop. She bent down
carefully, picked it up by one foot, and looked at it.
“Frozen,” she announced, and something inside her spoke another word. It had been forty years since she had seen a frozen bird — 1938. The year the Reach had frozen.
Shuddering, pulling her coat closer, she threw the dead sparrow in the old rusty
incinerator as she went by it. The day was cold. The sky was a clear, deep blue. On the night of her birthday four inches of snow had fallen, had melted, and no more had come since then. “Got to come soon,” Larry Me Keen down at the Goat Island Store said sagely, as if daring winter to stay away.
Stella got to the woodpile, picked herself an armload and carried it back to the house. Her shadow, crisp and clean, followed her.
As she reached the back door, where the sparrow had fallen, Bill spoke to her — but the cancer had taken Bill twelve years before. “Stella,” Bill said, and she saw his shadow fall beside her, longer but just as clear-cut, the shadow-bill of his shadow-cap twisted jauntily off to one side just as he had always worn it. Stella felt a scream lodged in her throat. It was too large to touch her lips.
“Stella,” he said again, “when you comin cross to the mainland? We’ll get Norm Jolley’s old Ford and go down to Bean’s in Freeport just for a lark. What do you say?”
She wheeled, almost dropping her wood, and there was no one there. Just the dooryard sloping down to the hill, then the wild white grass, and beyond all, at the edge of everything, clear-cut and somehow magnified, the Reach… and the mainland beyond it.
“Gram, what’s the Reach?” Lona might have asked… although she never had. And she would have given them the answer any fisherman knew by rote: a Reach is a body of water between two bodies of land, a body of water, which is open at either end. The old lobsterman’s joke went like this: know how to read y’compass when the fog comes, boys; between J one sport and London there’s a mighty long Reach.
“Reach is the water between the island and the mainland,” she might have amplified, giving them molasses cookies and hot tea laced with sugar. “I know that much. I know it as well as my husband’s name… and how he used to wear his hat.”
“Gram?” Lona would say. “How come you never been across the Reach?”
“Honey,” she would say, “I never saw any reason to go.”
In January, two months after the birthday party, the Reach froze for the first time since 1938. The radio warned islanders and main-landers alike not to trust the ice, but Stewie McClelland and Russell Bowie took Stewie’s Bombardier Skiddoo out anyway after a long
afternoon spent drinking Apple Zapple wine, and sure enough, the skiddoo went into the Reach.
Stewie managed to crawl out (although he lost one foot to frostbite). The Reach took Russell Bowie and carried him away.
That January 25 there was a memorial service for Russell. Stella went on her son Alden’s arm, and he mouthed the words to the hymns and boomed out the doxology in his great tuneless voice before the benediction. Stella sat afterward with Sarah Havelock and Hattie Stoddard and Vera Spruce in the glow of the wood fire in the town-hall basement. A going-away party for Russell was being held, complete with Za-Rex punch and nice little cream-cheese sandwiches cut into triangles. The men, of course, kept wandering out back for a nip of something a bit stronger than Za-Rex. Russell Bowie’s new widow sat red-eyed and stunned beside Ewell
McCracken, the minister. She was seven months big with child — it would be her fifth — and Stella, half-dozing in the heat of the woodstove, thought: She’ll be crossing the Reach soon enough, I guess. She’ll move to Freeport or Lewiston and go for a waitress, I guess.