【英文短篇小说】The Reach（1）

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"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 whittling¹. It was Sunday, and Alden wouldn't take his boat out on Sundays no matter how high the price of lobster² 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 slippers³ bumping placidly⁴ 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 swirling⁵ down out of a sky the color of white chrome, Stella celebrated⁶ 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 Dodge⁷ came, Richard moving slowly up the path on his cane⁸, his arthritis⁹ 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 bellowed¹⁰ 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 "Onward¹¹, Christian¹² Soldiers" and the doxology in church and would mouth the words of all the rest with his head hunched¹³ and his big old jug¹⁴ 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 tarpaulin¹⁵, and how one of his green boots poked¹⁶ out. I remember..." 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 bent¹⁸ down carefully, picked it up by one foot, and looked at it.

 

"Frozen," she announced, and something inside her spoke¹⁹ another word. It had been forty years since she had seen a frozen bird—1938. The year the Reach had frozen.

 

Shuddering²⁰, pulling her coat closer, she threw the dead sparrow in the old rusty²¹ 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 sagely²², 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 jauntily²³ off to one side just as he had always worn it. Stella felt a scream lodged²⁴ 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 Ford²⁵ and go down to Bean's in Freeport just for a lark²⁶. 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 rote²⁷: 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 mighty²⁸ long Reach.

 

"Reach is the water between the island and the mainland," she might have amplified²⁹, 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 hymns³¹ and boomed out the doxology in his great tuneless voice before the benediction³². Stella sat afterward³³ 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 stunned³⁴ 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.

 

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 retirement³⁵.

 

"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 thigh³⁶, 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. Strapped³⁷ on snowshoes, walked across to Dorrit's Tavern³⁸ 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-putof- 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, braying³⁹ sobs⁴⁰. Stella looked over and there sat Bill Flanders in his red-and-blackchecked 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 grunted⁴¹. 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 flannel⁴² pants and his gumrubber boots with the gray wool socks folded neatly⁴³ 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.

 

Annie liked Alden because her own son Toby had told her Alden would take nothing stronger than beer. Annie was strictly⁴⁴ temperance, herself.

 

"Wouldn't get her off 'tall unless she was in a coma," Vera said, pronouncing the word in the downcast fashion: comer. "When Stella says 'Frog,' Alden jumps. Alden ain't but half-bright, you know. Stella pretty much runs him."

 

"Oh, ayuh?" Annie said.

 

Just then there was a metallic⁴⁵ crackling sound on the line.

 

Vera could hear Annie Phillips for a moment longer—not the words, just the sound of her voice going on behind the crackling—and then there was nothing. The wind had gusted⁴⁶ up high and the phone lines had gone down, maybe into Godlin's Pond or maybe down by Sorrow's Cove¹⁷, where they went into the Reach sheathed⁴⁷ in rubber. It was possible that they had gone down on the other side, on the Head... and some might even have said (only half-joking) that Russell Bowie had reached up a cold hand to snap the cable, just for the hell of it.

 

Not 700 feet away Stella Flanders lay under her puzzle-quilt and listened to the dubious⁴⁸ music of Alden's snores in the other room. She listened to Alden so she wouldn't have to listen to the wind... but she heard the wind anyway, oh yes, coming across the frozen expanse of the Reach, a mile and a half of water that was now overplated with ice, ice with lobsters⁴⁹ down below, and groupers, and perhaps the twisting, dancing body of Russell Bowie, who used to come each April with his old Rogers rototiller and turn her garden.

 

Who'll turn the earth this April? she wondered as she lay cold and curled under her puzzle-quilt. And as a dream in a dream, her voice answered her voice: Do you love? The wind gusted, rattling⁵⁰ the storm window. It seemed that the storm window was talking to her, but she turned her face away from its words. And did not cry.

 

' 'But Gram," Lona would press {she never gave up, not that one, she was like her mom, and her grandmother before her), "you still haven't told why you never went across." ' 'Why, child, I have always had everything I wanted right here on Goat."

 

"But it's so small. We live in Portland. There's buses, Gram!" ' 'I see enough of what goes on in cities on the TV. I guess I'll stay where I am." Hal was younger, but somehow more intuitive; he would not press her as his sister might, but his question would go closer to the heart of things: "You never wanted to go across, Gram?

 

Never?" And she would lean toward him, and take his small hands, and tell him how her mother and father had come to the island shortly after they were married, and how Bull Symes's grandfather had taken Stella's father as a 'prentice on his boat. She would tell him how her mother had conceived four times but one of her babies had miscarried and another had died a week after birth—she would have left the island if they could have saved it at the mainland hospital, but of course it was over before that was even thought of.

 

She would tell them that Bill had delivered Jane, their grandmother, but not that when it was over he had gone into the bathroom and first puked and then wept like a hysterical⁵¹ woman who had her monthlies particularly bad. Jane, of course, had left the island at fourteen to go to high school; girls didn't get married at fourteen anymore, and when Stella saw her go off in the boat with Bradley Maxwell, whose job it had been to ferry the kids back and forth⁵² that month, she knew in her heart that Jane was gone for good, although she would come back for a while.

 

She would tell them that Alden had come along ten years later, after they had given up, and as if to make up for his tardiness⁵³, here was Alden still, a lifelong bachelor, and in some ways Stella was grateful for that because Alden was not terribly bright and there are plenty of women willing to take advantage of a man with a slow brain and a good heart (although she would not tell the children that last, either).

 

She would say: "Louis and Margaret Godlin begat Stella Godlin, who became Stella Flanders; Bill and Stella Flanders begat Jane and Alden Flanders and Jane Flanders became Jane Wakefield; Richard and Jane Wakefield begat Lois Wake-field, who became Lois Perrault; David and Lois Perrault begat Lona and Hal. Those are your names, children: you are Godlin- Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault. Your blood is in the stones of this island, and I stay here because the mainland is too far to reach. Yes, I love; I have loved, anyway, or at least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and I cannot cross. Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault..." That was the coldest February since the National Weather Service began keeping records, and by the middle of the month the ice covering the Reach was safe. Snowmobiles buzzed and whined⁵⁴ and sometimes turned over when they climbed the ice-heaves wrong. Children tried to skate, found the ice too bumpy⁵⁵ to be any fun, and went back to Godlin's Pond on the far side of the hill, but not before little Justin McCracken, the minister's son, caught his skate in a fissure⁵⁶ and broke his ankle. They took him over to the hospital on the mainland where a doctor who owned a Corvette told him, "Son, it's going to be as good as new." Freddy Dinsmore died very suddenly just three days after Justin McCracken broke his ankle. He caught the flu late in January, would not have the doctor, told everyone it was "Just a cold from goin out to get the mail without m'scarf," took to his bed, and died before anyone could take him across to the mainland and hook him up to all those machines they have waiting for guys like Freddy. His son George, a tosspot of the first water even at the advanced age (for tosspots, anyway) of sixty-eight, found Freddy with a copy of the Bangor Daily News in one hand and his Remington, unloaded, near the other. Apparently⁵⁷ he had been thinking of cleaning it just before he died. George Dinsmore went on a three-week toot, said toot financed by someone who knew that George would have his old dad's insurance money coming. Hattie Stoddard went around telling anyone who would listen that old George Dinsmore was a sin and a disgrace, no better than a tramp for pay.

 

There was a lot of flu around. The school closed for two weeks that February instead of the usual one because so many pupils were out sick. "No snow breeds germs," Sarah Havelock said.

 

Near the end of the month, just as people were beginning to look forward to the false comfort of March, Alden Flanders caught the flu himself. He walked around with it for nearly a week and then took to his bed with a fever of a hundred and one. Like Freddy, he refused to have the doctor, and Stella stewed⁵⁸ and fretted⁵⁹ and worried. Alden was not as old as Freddy, but that May he would turn sixty.

 

The snow came at last. Six inches on Valentine's Day, another six on the twentieth, and a foot in a good old norther on the leap, February 29. The snow lay white and strange between the cove and the mainland, like a sheep's meadow where there had been only gray and surging water at this time of year since time out of mind. Several people walked across to the mainland and back. No snowshoes were necessary this year because the snow had frozen to a firm, glittery crust. They might take a knock of whiskey, too, Stella thought, but they would not take it at Dorrit's. Dorrit's had burned down in 1958.

 

And she saw Bill all four times. Once he told her: "Y'ought to come soon, Stella. We'll go steppin. What do you say?" She could say nothing. Her fist was crammed⁶⁰ deep into her mouth.

 

"Everything I ever wanted or needed was here." she would tell them. "We had the radio and now we have the television, and that's all I want of the world beyond the Reach. I had my garden year in and year out. And lobster? Why, we always used to have a pot of lobster stew³⁰ on the back of the stove and we used to take it off and put it behind the door in the pantry when the minister came calling so he wouldn't see we were eating 'poor man's soup.'

 

"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 plow⁶¹ 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 calves⁶² for the last time, and wrapped her bright red woolen⁶³ 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 vestiges⁶⁴ 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 mite⁶⁵ 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, standing⁶⁶ about halfway⁶⁷ between the island and the Head, standing on the Reach just like Jesus-out-of-the-boat, beckoning⁶⁸ 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 vengeance⁶⁹, flaring⁷⁰ the joints⁷¹ of her fingers and knees with red fire and blue ice. One of her eyes had gotten dim and blurry⁷² (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 exquisitely⁷³ cold floor into the bathroom, and had spat⁷⁴ 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?"

 

"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 hearty⁷⁵, 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 helpings⁷⁶ (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.

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