“Get on or I’ll swat ye!” Stella had answered, raising a hand to her gray-haired son, who ducked, mock-cringed, and cried: “Don’t, Ma! I take it back!”
Yes, she had eaten hearty, not because she wanted to, but because she believed (as many of her generation did), that if you fed the cancer it would leave you alone. And perhaps it worked, at least for a while; the blood in her stools came and went, and there were long periods when it wasn’t there at all. Alden got used to her taking second helpings (and thirds, when the pain was particularly bad), but she never gained a pound.
Now it seemed the cancer had finally gotten around to what the froggies called the piece de resistance.
She started out the door and saw Alden’s hat, the one with the fur-lined ear flaps, hanging on one of the pegs in the entry. She put it on — the bill came all the way down to her shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows — and then looked around one last time to see if she had forgotten
anything. The stove was low, and Alden had left the draw open too much again — she told him and told him, but that was one thing he was just never going to get straight.
“Alden, you’ll burn an extra quarter-cord a winter when I’m gone,” she muttered, and opened the stove. She looked in and a tight, dismayed gasp escaped her. She slammed the door shut and adjusted the draw with trembling fingers. For a moment — just a moment — she had seen her old friend Annabelle Frane in the coals. It was her face to the life, even down to the mole on her cheek.
And had Annabelle winked at her?
She thought of leaving Alden a note to explain where she had gone, but she thought
perhaps Alden would understand, in his own slow way.
Still writing notes in her head — Since the first day of winter I have been seeing your father and he says dying isn’t so bad: at least I think that’s it — Stella stepped out into the white day.
The wind shook her and she had to reset Alden’s cap on her head before the wind could
steal it for a joke and cartwheel it away. The cold seemed to find every chink in her clothing and twist into her; damp March cold with wet snow on its mind.
She set off down the hill toward the cove, being careful to walk on the cinders and clinkers that George Dinsmore had spread. Once George had gotten a job driving plow for the town of Raccoon Head, but during the big blow of ’77 he had gotten smashed on rye whiskey and had driven the plow smack through not one, not two, but three power poles. There had been no lights over the Head for five days. Stella remembered now how strange it had been, looking across the Reach and seeing only blackness. A body got used to seeing that brave little nestle of lights. Now George worked on the island, and since there was no plow, he didn’t get into much hurt.
As she passed Russell Bowie’s house, she saw Missy, pale as milk, looking out at her.
Stella waved. Missy waved back.
She would tell them this:
“On the island we always watched out for our own. When Gerd Henreid broke the blood vessel in his chest that time, we had covered-dish suppers one whole summer to pay for his operation in Boston — and Gerd came back alive, thank God. When George Dinsmore ran down those power poles and the Hydro slapped a lien on his home, it was seen to that the Hydro had their money and George had enough of a job to keep him in cigarettes and booze… why not? He was good for nothing else when his workday was done, although when he was on the clock he would work like a dray-horse. That one time he got into trouble was because it was at night, and night was always George’s drinking time. His father kept him fed, at least. Now Missy Bowie’s alone with another baby. Maybe she’ll stay here and take her welfare and ADC money here, and most likely it won’t be enough, but she’ll get the help she needs. Probably she’ll go, but if she stays she’ll not starve… and listen, Lona and Hal: if she stays, she may be able to keep something of this small world with the little Reach on one side and the big Reach on the other, something it would be too easy to lose hustling hash in Lewiston or donuts in Portland or drinks at the Nashville North in Bangor. And I am old enough not to beat around the bush about what that something might be: a way of being and a way of living — a feeling.”