Spit Delaney's Island (8 page)

Mrs. Starbuck got out and pried off a hub cap. “Here's all the bucket I
got, so pick. We'll make jam together and I get half.”

They picked three hub caps full before Mrs. Starbuck's back started to
ache. Charlene set them out on the back seat, went back to fill a plastic bag
she'd found, then got into the car and slammed the door. “Too bad I don't
have time to pick another hub cap full for Bysshe,” she said.

Mrs. Starbuck started her motor. “Them three,” she said. “They'll kill
somebody yet. No sense at all.”

“Oh they've got sense all right,” she said. “They just don't know it was
meant to be used. What brought you up this way?”

“Not sightseeing exactly. You should've heard the story I had to tell that
watchman. I ended up doubting it myself. That Bysshe rode into my yard
and right up onto the verandah and said ‘Guess who's just starting down
the side of Handlebar Hill?' I told him I hoped it was doom, heading for
him, but he laughed and said no it was Charlene Porter who was too
scared to ride back.”

“That's a lie. He left me.”

“I figured it was. I thought, well I can't afford to see Cut Off from the
air so why not a bird's-eye view from the hills? Here I am, and look at that
sight.”

They both looked down at the land below, a thick green rug with roads
like worm trails winding through, farm fields like shaved-off squares.
The strait, blue-white from here, looked full and thick and slow. “Let's
get,” Charlene said. “Those blackberries are soft and this sun'll drip juice
all over your back seat.”

The next day she walked over to help make jam but Mrs. Starbuck already had the berries on her stove. “They haven't boiled yet,” she said, “you
can help me scald out the bottles.”

She washed the jam bottles in the sink with hot water and soap, then
set them on a rack and let Charlene pour boiling water from the kettle
over them.

“Bysshe, you're in this bottle, stop screaming. Percy, here you are, here's
your turn, take it like a man. Shelley, don't cry, it'll only last a minute. No
sense swimming, it takes the skin off anyway.”

“I'm surprised at you,” Mrs. Starbuck said. “A person brought up the
way you are shouldn't talk like that. Leave me to do the mean things.”

“There's nothing mean about you,” she said. “I've never seen you mean.”

Mrs. Starbuck chuckled. “Oh, I learned a few things from my husband.
He was an expert.”

“How come you never had any kids?”

Mrs. Starbuck turned away quickly. “Here. Look here. These berries
are started to boil. You take this wooden spoon and stir a while.”

All that morning they worked together (like mother and daughter, she
thought) until every one of those berries, mashed down and sweetened
with sugar, was safely stuffed inside a jar and capped with wax.

Mrs. Starbuck closed her eyes to breathe in the smell. And in the silence
Charlene heard a sound in the attic. A bird has got in, she thought, for it
was nothing louder than a small body hitting once against a board. It could
even have been something knocked over by a mouse or rat. “There's something alive up there,” she cried. “Hey you, come down! Mrs. Starbuck,
you've got bats in your attic!”

Mrs. Starbuck sat down heavily, dropped her body into a chair with a
wumph that knocked her own breath out. “Look at me,” she said. “A fat
cow in these clothes. You'd be ashamed of me for a mother. Anybody'd be
ashamed of me.”

“Not me!”

Oh no, she'd take her out and parade her around and say “my mother”
every second sentence. “I think you're perfect,” she said. Mrs. Starbuck was
about as far as you could get from that pretty little blue-eyed mother she
remembered but she'd do. She'd do just fine. “I'd just love it, Mrs. Starbuck.”

“Well I've had one husband already, all I could bear in this life. And
your father's still married to that other one, up there.” She pointed vaguely
north. “So right now's as close as we'll ever be to related, like it or not.”

“It'll do,” she cried, but listen: “There it is again. You do have bats up
there!”

Mrs. Starbuck slapped her heavy thighs. “I may have bats in my belfry
but there's not one in my attic. Not a thing alive up there. Let's go pick
some peas.”

“There's only one thing I don't like about your father,” Mrs. Starbuck
said when they were outside. “The way he's taught you all that religion
stuff since you were too young to know what it means.”

Charlene laughed. “I've never believed anything I couldn't turn around
and prove,” she said. “Christ didn't come to start up a church or make
himself into a hero. He came to show what we could all do for ourselves
if we'd just recognize what we are.”

“Just the same, I think a person should wait until he's grown up before
picking a religion, when you're old enough to know what you're doing.”

Charlene stood up from picking and faced the sun. “How old were you
when you made your choice?”

“Me?” she said. “Me, I still don't know what's what. Forty-eight years
old and maybe never will.”

And now, watching her father head down the lane towards the chicken
sheds, Charlene too wondered if she knew what was what. But pushed
that thought aside as quickly as it appeared, because she did know this: it
was sometimes hard to hold on to what you know is real when everything
is trying hard to hide it from you. She'd been betrayed, not by truth but by
a friend. The real Mrs. Starbuck was hiding behind a new and ugly mask,
the mask of a cheat and a criminal.

And yet, behind the betrayal there was a sense of excitement. This was
something that happened only in newspapers, to people in far-off places,
to twisted and warped and violent people, or silent and sneaky people. But
not to them! Not to Mrs. Starbuck and to her and to, yes, to Mrs. Wright.
They were not people who were written up in the back pages of the big-
city newspaper beside stories of two-headed calves and freak drownings
and axe-murder trials. They were three women (she included herself, now,
after this) who lived in Cut Off and passed from day to day through ordinary, growing lives. Happy, mostly happy, and knowing each other so well.

Until Mrs. Starbuck became a monster.

She tried to straighten out her thinking, put it in line with what she'd
been taught. Her father would be disappointed if he knew what thoughts
she'd been allowing in. She tried to see behind that new monster surface,
to insist on the perfection beneath. If she refused to see anything in Mrs.
Starbuck but the truth of her God-qualities, she knew, all this mess would
somehow straighten out and things could go back to normal. Her father
could do it, and so could she.

But she couldn't seem to stick to it. Because there was the boy, too, to
think of. Shut up in that room like an old coat that's out of style, not even
able to see the sun shining out there or the dust rising along the road.
Worse off than an animal. How could she push that picture from her mind
as if it didn't exist?

Maybe Mrs. Starbuck let him out when no one else was around. Maybe
she kept him there only when there was company. But if that was so, why
was he there yesterday? Why wasn't he running all over the house, playing? There wasn't a toy in sight.

And maybe she'd been wrong all along. There was still the possibility
that Mrs. Starbuck didn't even know about the boy, that he'd hidden up
there just yesterday morning and could be gone by now. She'd been told
often enough at school that she needed to learn to control her imagination
a little, not let herself get carried away so easily.

When her father had gone behind a chicken house, she started walking
down the road, felt hot dusty rocks burn the soles of her feet. She would
go over and face the ugly business and get it over with. There was no sense
trying to solve a problem until you knew what it was. Grasshoppers clicked
in the long grass. And somewhere in the trees a cicada's song whirred, high
and thin as the hum of telephone wires. Sing your heart out, she thought.
Seventeen years you've waited underground for this day so sing!

But again Mrs. Starbuck wasn't at the house. Still back at the well, maybe, still sad about the calf and ashamed to come home. She knocked and
called, heard only silence; then ran upstairs, all the way up to the top of
that ladder and crawled into the attic space. Nearly choking on the beat of
her own heart.

And “Come on boy,” she heard herself say. “We're getting you out of
this place.” Because he was still there, still real.

She moved close enough to see his face, which was round and pale as
the top pastry of an uncooked pie, nearly as featureless. No sunlight had
come anywhere near. “You're hardly half my size, we can manage. You're
free. This is your lucky day.”

The child (she guessed ten years old) pushed right back into the corner,
whimpering, and curled up into a ball. “Just hold onto me,” she said. “I'll
get you out of here.”

He put his head down and wrapped his arms around it so he couldn't
see her.

And she, she was St. Joan. She was Miranda when her father released
the spell. “I don't know how long you been up here but it's too long,” she
said. “Get ready to see the world.”

She saw that there was no way she could get him out of this attic without his co-operation. Even if she managed to drag him over to the hole, he
would have to go down the ladder by himself. “Look, I'm going to show
you what you're missing,” she said. A thick piece of cardboard was nailed
up against one end wall, covering a small window she had noticed from
outside. She would rip it off. “I'll let some light in here and you can look
out and see how pretty it is. Hear the grasshoppers. Smell the roses. See
everything so pretty in the sun.”

She tore the cardboard away from the wall and, yes, there was a window. A small square hole without glass, facing Mrs. Starbuck's flower gardens and up the driveway to the road.

“Just look at that,” she said. “You've never seen anything so pretty, I
bet.”

But the child was still curled up, face hidden. She laid hands on him for
the first time, grabbed both arms and dragged him closer to the hole in the
wall. “Look!” she said. “Just look at that! Don't you want to go out there
and be free?” She put fingers in his hair and yanked the face up so he
couldn't avoid the view. “There. That's the world you're missing. A beautiful place, and the middle of summer too!”

The boy opened his eyes, jerked back, and screamed. The pastry face
split, fell apart, became one huge gaping mouth that screamed so loud she
had to cover her ears.

And fled, ran down ladder and staircase, ran out of the house, ran with
that scream still loud behind her down the lane to the barn (past Mrs.
Starbuck at the gate, holding it open, mouth ready to say “What's the matter with you, Charlene?”) and didn't stop until she was in her own house,
under the heavy comforter that lay on the top of her bed.

“Look,” her father said, “you could be mistaken, see. It could all be just
a mistake. The world hasn't fallen apart.” He smiled, to show her he meant
it. Creases ran out from his eyes all the way to his ears.

But, “It has!” she said. “I tried to set him free.”

Her father ran a hand around his jaw, squinted his eyes even harder
than before, sucked a hole in his teeth. “You took too much on yourself.
You didn't stop to think or wait to find out what it was all about. It's
thought that solves problems, not just action.”

Charlene pulled the blanket even tighter around her neck. She wished
she could slip right down inside and disappear altogether. “All I wanted
was to show him how pretty the world is.”

“And scared him,” he told her. “Maybe to you it's a pretty day but to him
it's blinding and horrible. You ought to known that, how our senses are
only beliefs we're educated to.”

She nodded. Her father sat on the edge of the bed and put one finger
into the curls by her ear. In another room a radio droned on, a bored male
voice reading news. “We'll work on it,” her father said. “Mrs. Starbuck will
be needing our help so we'd better start giving it some thought.”

But she didn't care about his words. She knew only that there was no
disappointment in his eyes and she was grateful for that.

III

That evening Mrs. Starbuck lay on her sagging bed, flat on her back, and
cursed her luck. There was no use in doing anything else, as far as she
could see, because no matter what she tried it was bound to turn out wrong.
She kept her eyes closed against the dying light, waiting for dark. Her fingers counted off the keys in her hand, one at a time, slipping them around
the key ring to drop, clinking, against the others: ignition key, trunk key,
house key, ignition key, trunk key, house key.

Once, she had known how to hope, too, like everybody else, how to
dream and plan and scheme. Now, though, she could plan all she wanted,
work all she could, hope all she dared, but she knew that it took only one
nosy girl to wreck everything. What was the use? Mrs. Starbuck's face on
the white pillow looked as if it had gathered in all the day's burning sun
and reflected it now, red as a fiery peony, deep almost as blood.

And up in the attic, two floors above her in the crotch of the roof, the
child was whimpering. Her child. Her son.

Mrs. Starbuck groaned. Now, now she was in trouble. Up to her bloody
eyeballs in it. This time that girl had really poked her big nose in where it
wasn't wanted. Why hadn't she just taken her father's axe and walked up
to Mrs. Starbuck and bashed in her brains? That would have been a lot
easier, and maybe even what she deserved after this morning. Or why
didn't she just push her down the well or burn her to death in this old
house? It would have been more merciful. Because Mrs. Starbuck was
sure that if she had been given just a few more days she might have got
around at last to doing something about getting herself out of this mess.