Spit Delaney's Island (6 page)

Mrs. Wright looked at him. How tolerant could you be? “I'm surprised
to see a man with a teenage daughter so free and easy about them,” she said.

“Don't be crude, Millicent,” Mrs. Starbuck said. “You'll make Charlene
blush.”

“Well,” Mrs. Wright said. “As soon as we see how many stitches John
Porter is going to need in that hand we can get busy and haul your calf
out.”

Mr. Porter levelled his cool green eyes to hers and held out both his
hands. “There's not a thing wrong with it,” he said, and showed her they
were exactly the same, not a bump or a scrape.

“Then get back under that truck with the rope and hitch it good and
tight. This calf may disappear from sight if we don't get a move on around
here.”

And it
had
slipped a little. It looked to Mrs. Wright as if it had dropped
a few inches farther into the well, probably from kicking and banging
with its back feet. It puffed and snorted from the effort of hanging there,
its white eyes running wild, waiting for help.

“It'll be bloated,” Mrs. Starbuck said. “We may have to puncture it.”

“Don't be silly,” Mrs. Wright said. “They get bloated when they're on
their backs. This one's just scared, and probably scraped up a little. Bull or
heifer?”

“Bull. It's marked for fall slaughter.”

Mr. Porter got into Mrs. Wright's pickup and started the motor. He
drove ahead slowly until all the slack in the rope had been taken up, then
he eased ahead while the two women and the girl watched the rope tighten
around the calf's chest.

“Wumph,” was the noise the calf made, and Mrs. Starbuck screamed.
“Stop! For Christ's sake stop the truck. You'll break him in half.”

Mr. Porter stopped the truck and came back to see what was wrong.
Mrs. Starbuck was down on the ground with her arms around the calf's
head. She looked as if she were trying to pull it out of the well all by her
herself. “You can't do it that way,” she said. “It has to go up. Up. Pulling
it
along
like that will only break its bones.”

Mrs. Wright would like to have kicked her out of the way, a big heavy
woman like her down there acting so immature. “I'm sorry, Edna Starbuck, that my pickup doesn't fly so I could pull your stupid calf up the way
you want.”

“Don't you stupid-calf me. You come over here to help and end up running the whole show, bossing everybody. Maybe there's something wrong
with your eyes, Millicent, but most people could see that if you drag a calf
along the ground out of a well something's going to snap.”

“I think it already has,” Mrs. Wright said. “I think your mind has
snapped. If you could just see yourself right now, you look like a know-nothing bohunk straight off the boat. Screaming and hollering like a fishwife. Get up on your feet.”

“All we need is a pulley. To hang up in one of those trees. We could run
the rope through it.”

Mrs. Wright hardly ever raised her voice. When she did she suffered for
it a long time after. She thought of what Percy Larkin said about her being
a little fox terrier, yapping, but she pushed the image aside. “Get up,” she
said. “Get up. Get up. Get up. John Porter, you drive that truck ahead.
We're getting that calf free.”

Mr. Porter looked from Mrs. Wright to Mrs. Starbuck and then backed
off. “We better all just cool down and do some thinking,” he said. “We're
not getting anywhere this way.”

“Then
I
will,” Mrs. Wright said. She marched over to the truck, got in,
and put it into low gear. If Mr. Wright were here he'd just shake his head
at the way they were carrying on. If I acted like that, he'd say, where
would we all be? If a lawyer acted like that, what a mess we'd have.

Mrs. Starbuck shrieked. As Mrs. Wright let the clutch pedal out and
felt the truck begin to move she glanced out the back window and saw her
lifting Mr. Porter's axe. She swung with both hands well over her head
and brought it down on the rope. The truck leapt ahead and stalled.

Mrs. Wright was tempted to start the truck up again and drive home,
just drive straight out of here with rope dragging behind like a tail and
leave the stupid woman to solve her own problem. But it wasn't in her to
leave a job undone. She got back down to the ground and turned to give
Mrs. Starbuck a piece of her mind.

Mrs. Starbuck was facing her with the axe held up once more over her
head. She's going to kill me, Mrs. Wright thought. She's going to throw
that axe and it will land right in the middle of my chest and kill me. She
dragged me over here to help her with her calf and now she will slaughter me in cold blood.

Mrs. Wright had never before seen such hatred as there was in the
woman's eyes. In that stunned second they were staring at each other Mrs.
Wright had a vision of her husband visiting Mrs. Starbuck in jail and
offering to be her attorney.

Then Mrs. Starbuck brought the axe down square on the calf's forehead, raised it and brought it down again. The head dropped forward
between its forelegs, chin on the ground, and shuddered. Pink froth bubbled from its mouth. Mrs. Wright couldn't help but think of the way Edna
Starbuck, halfway across the field, had stopped with her head down as if
to say I just can't go on, just like that calf.

Mrs. Starbuck raised the axe again. She hissed. She looked at Charlene
Porter cowering under a fir tree, and at Mr. Porter with one foot ahead as
if he wanted to come closer and take his axe away, and at Mrs. Wright
standing at the side of her pickup truck wishing there were some way she
could write all this up for the paper and knowing she couldn't. Then she
said “Go home” to them, hissed it at them as if they were a herd of balky
cattle. “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

Mr. Porter lifted his hat and put it back on again. Then he stepped up
and released his axe from Mrs. Starbuck's grip. His daughter put her hand
in his and they started walking up past the stumps and blackberry bushes
towards home.

Mrs. Wright didn't move. She wasn't budging. She trained her eyes on
Mrs. Starbuck's and held them steady. No screeching fishwife was going
to beg her for help and then tell her to go. She stared straight into those
two round eyes until Mrs. Starbuck looked away and sat down beside her
dead calf. She took her baseball cap off and ran it under her nose and
wiped her forearm across her eyes.

“Edna Starbuck,” Mrs. Wright said, “I think you must be insane.” And
she swung around to get back inside the cab of the pickup truck.

By the time she had the engine started Mrs. Starbuck was at the window. Her big face, a brighter red now than ever before, shone through a
smear of tears. “Don't tell Mr. Wright,” she said.

Mrs. Wright stared. She knew there were people who were afraid of
her husband but it had never passed through her mind before that Mrs.
Starbuck was afraid of
anything
. “He wouldn't be interested,” she said.
“You can do whatever you want with your own livestock.”

Mrs. Wright wanted to go home. What was she doing over here anyway, with all the work
she
had to do at home? “Step back,” she said, and
when Mrs. Starbuck had taken her hands off the truck she started up the
hill away from the well, away from that calf, and rode the bumps and hollows with impatience. At the barn she was careful to close the gate behind
her. She didn't even want to think how much trouble there'd be if Mrs.
Starbuck's cattle got off her farm and out onto the road, stopping traffic
and eating up other people's lawns.

II

Charlene was already sitting on the verandah chair and watching the
gable of Mrs. Starbuck's house when her father came up out of the bush
and headed across the orchard towards her. She leaned ahead, elbows on
her knees, and rested her chin in the palms of both hands so she wouldn't
be tempted to glance his way. Here, though the verandah roof hid her
from the sun, she felt as if the warm heavy air she breathed had just been
exhaled by someone else.

Out in the front yard hot air wrinkled upward from the short green
orchard grass, making the apple trees and plum trees seem to waver a little, as if they'd been dipped in water. Along the path that led to the picket
gate and the gravel road, the oyster shells were a white so harsh that it hurt
her eyes to look. A big lazy cat, somebody's stray, stretched and settled to
sleep at the base of a honeysuckle bush.

Charlene sighed at her father's approach. She had run ahead and left
him on the trail up from the back of Mrs. Starbuck's farm. Well, let him
walk alone if he couldn't be bothered to do any more than he had to help
Mrs. Starbuck. She was in no mood for new disappointments.

Ordinarily Charlene would have stood up to anyone and defended Mrs.
Starbuck, would have said her behaviour back at the well just showed she
was upset about something and didn't realize what she was doing. Charlene liked to see the best in everything if she could. And anyway, she
guessed Mrs. Starbuck had earned the benefit of a thousand doubts. But
after yesterday, when she discovered not quite by accident what that woman had kept locked up in her attic for who knows
how
long, she didn't
feel quite so sure.

Because she knew now; the secret was out: and oh, how she wanted to
tell someone about it! Her father; anyone. Back there she had been aching
to walk right up to Mrs. Starbuck and say “I knew. I saw him!” Maybe
then she might have been given some kind of explanation.

She did not want to believe it. Not any more than she wanted to believe
what her eyes had let her see Mrs. Starbuck do to that poor calf. Because
after all, Mrs. Starbuck had lived next door and been the only grown-up
woman in her life, her closest friend, for two years now. And besides,
hadn't her father taught her to think of people,
all
people no matter what
they did, as made in the image of God? For nearly twenty-four hours she
had been trying her hardest to insist that Mrs. Starbuck, despite all the evidence that seemed to be piling up against her, was still the same perfect
woman she'd known all along, totally incapable of such ugly behaviour.
But it wasn't working; she'd been betrayed.

When she was concentrating like this, thinking hard, her blue eyes
looked as if they were rocketing through the air, ninety miles an hour,
drilling two straight holes through space to another world. It was what her
father called her furious face, put on like a mask whenever she didn't want
to look at him.

And yet she saw. Though her eyes and her mind were on that fake-brick
triangle beyond the fence-line alders, she saw him approach. He was not
a big man, not heavy and tall like some, but he walked as if he were unaware of this fact, put each foot in turn out too far in front—as if he had
all the leg in the world to use—then had to withdraw it and set it down
closer than he wanted. As a result, he came across that orchard in quick
jerky movements like a machine. He reached up and yanked the peak of
his cap down almost to his eyes and ran his free hand over his beard.

To show he was angry.

“I thought I knew that woman,” he said, when he'd reached the step in
front of her, “but I guess you never really know anybody else.”

And disappointed too, just as disappointed as she was, though he still
didn't know the half of it.

She could remember only one time when he had got mad—furious
mad—and that was when her mother had gone off to live in the Queen
Charlotte Islands with a used-car salesman. Charlene was only five years
old then, so a good nine years had gone zipping by with no more than just
the odd hint of that old fury. It took a lot to get him worked up.

Her mother had been pretty: small with black black hair and blue eyes
snapping. A turned-up little nose that belonged on a girl, not a woman.
And Charlene (how she hated that name! She wanted to be a Miranda or
Lorene at least) was probably not going to be the littlest bit pretty, though
maybe people who were content with large blue eyes wouldn't notice. Her
hair, bleached almost white already by this year's sun, floated in soft fine
curls around her head.

“Nothing but temper,” Mr. Porter grumbled. “Just plain bad temper,
like a kid throwing a tantrum and
bang
there goes a yearling bull.”

“Not temper. That was something else, I don't know what.”

Another yank on the front of that cap, and he started up the steps.
“Spoilt-rotten temper. I saw a man once, beat his son almost to death for
throwing a tantrum about something or other.”

“And whose temper was worse?”

“What surprises me,” he said, using his handkerchief to wipe the back
of his neck free of sweat, “is how she thinks so much of those cattle and
then can turn around and knock one on the head.” He turned in the doorway and stood with the outsides of his wrists pressed hard against the
jambs, his favourite trick. “If they're so much better than my Holsteins
how can she do a thing like that?”

Charlene didn't know anything about cows. A Holstein looked the same
as a Hereford to her, except for its colour. She knew her father raised his
for the milk and Mrs. Starbuck raised hers for the meat, but she didn't
really care. What was a cow when there were people who were so much
more important and interesting?

Her father took one step ahead onto the verandah and let his arms rise,
by themselves, until they were level with his shoulders. He looked at her
as if he expected applause.

“That doesn't prove anything,” she said. “That doesn't prove a thing,
except make you look like you're planning to ascend.”

Mr. Porter looked out, first at one horizontal arm, then at the other.
“You could be right,” he said, and let them drop to his thighs. “A pure case
of expectations fulfilled.”