She looked around at Vera and Hattie, to see what the discussion was.
“No, I didn’t hear,” Hattie said. “What did Freddy say?”
They were talking about Freddy Dinsmore, the oldest man on the island (two years
younger’n me, though, Stella thought with some satisfaction), who had sold out his store to Larry McKeen in 1960 and now lived on his retirement.
“Said he’d never seen such a winter,” Vera said, taking out her knitting. “He says it is going to make people sick.”
Sarah Havelock looked at Stella, and asked if Stella had ever seen such a winter. There
had been no snow since that first little bit; the ground lay crisp and bare and brown. The day before, Stella had walked thirty paces into the back field, holding her right hand level at the height of her thigh, and the grass there had snapped in a neat row with a sound like breaking glass.
“No,” Stella said. “The Reach froze in ’38, but there was snow that year. Do you remember Bull Symes, Hattie?”
Hattie laughed. “I think I still have the black-and-blue he gave me on my sit-upon at the New Year’s party in ’53. He pinched me that hard. What about him?”
“Bull and my own man walked across to the mainland that year,” Stella said. “That February of 1938. Strapped on snowshoes, walked across to Dorrit’s Tavern on the Head, had them each a shot of whiskey, and walked back. They asked me to come along. They were like two little boys off to the sliding with a toboggan between them.”
They were looking at her, touched by the wonder of it. Even Vera was looking at her
wide-eyed, and Vera had surely heard the tale before. fr you believed the stories, Bull and Vera had once played some house together, although it was hard, looking at Vera now, to believe she had ever been so young.
“And you didn’t go?” Sarah asked, perhaps seeing the reach of the Reach in her mind’s eye, so white it was almost blue in the heatless winter sunshine, the sparkle of the snow crystals, the mainland drawing closer, walking across, yes, walking across the ocean just like Jesus-put-of-the-boat, leaving the island for the one and only time in your life on foot —
“No,” Stella said. Suddenly she wished she had brought her own knitting. “I didn’t go with them.”
“Why not?” Hattie asked, almost indignantly.
“It was washday,” Stella almost snapped, and then Missy Bowie, Russell’s widow, broke into loud, braying sobs. Stella looked over and there sat Bill Flanders in his red-and-black-checked jacket, hat cocked to one side, smoking a Herbert Tareyton with another tucked behind his ear for later. She felt her heart leap into her chest and choke between beats.
She made a noise, but just then a knot popped like a rifle shot in the stove, and neither of the other ladies heard.
“Poor thing,” Sarah nearly cooed.
“Well shut of that good-for-nothing,” Hattie grunted. She searched for the grim depth of the truth concerning the departed Russell Bowie and found it: “Little more than a tramp for pay, that man. She’s well out of that two-hoss trace.”
Stella barely heard these things. There sat Bill, close enough to the Reverend McCracken to have tweaked his nose if he so had a mind; he looked no more than forty, his eyes barely marked by the crow’s-feet that had later sunk so deep, wearing his flannel pants and his gum-rubber boots with the gray wool socks folded neatly down over the tops.
“We’re waitin on you, Stel,” he said. “You come on across and see the mainland. You won’t need no snowshoes this year.”
There he sat in the town-hall basement, big as Billy-be-damned, and then another knot
exploded in the stove and he was gone. And the Reverend McCracken went on comforting Missy Bowie as if nothing had happened.
That night Vera called up Annie Phillips on the phone, and in the course of the
conversation mentioned to Annie that Stella Flanders didn’t look well, not at all well.
“Alden would have a scratch of a job getting her off-island if she took sick,” Annie said.