Western Wind (2 page)

Now and then, on a rainy day, Elizabeth would go up to the attic that Gran had used for a studio when she had lived in the farmhouse. There were two old steamer trunks there, a battered easel near the big north-facing window, and a few canvasses propped against an unfinished wall. Some pencil sketches were still tacked to a rickety screen. One was of Elizabeth as a tiny infant. At times she thought it looked like her, but at other times it could have been any infant in the world.

There was one finished painting among the canvasses. It was a winter landscape. Two crows sat on a fence that slanted across snow-covered corn stubble in a long field that reached to the horizon. Elizabeth liked that painting and told Gran so.

“It looks just like what I see out the window in winter,” she'd said.

“Do you only like what you can recognize?” Gran asked her. She seemed really curious.

“How can I like something I can't recognize?” Elizabeth asked after thinking a moment.

“Why do you have to like everything?” Gran asked.

Elizabeth was speechless.

“I mean,” Gran went on in an unusually gentle voice, “can't you just be interested in things? And forget about liking?”

She'd brought Elizabeth a small pearl ring one Christmas. She'd found it in a shop on a shabby boulevard in Paris.

“One of those places you can't imagine surviving from one week to another, like some of the little stores you see here in town. The owner had a few rings in the window, a cameo or two, a boring gold chain, and the ring I got you. The shop was no bigger than a closet, but when I went inside I saw that the walls were covered with photographs of a beautiful chestnut racehorse. It turned out the man owned that horse. It had won two races for him. Suzerain was its name, and it was what he most loved in the world. He kept the shop to support the horse, not himself. I found out he was originally from Algiers. Your little ring is connected to all of that, Elizabeth. Do you know where Algiers is?”

“Sort of,” Elizabeth had replied.

“‘Sort of' won't do for geography,” Gran said. So very soon, she'd found an atlas in the house and shown Elizabeth just where Algiers was, and told her a few things about colonies and revolutions.

Gran was an encyclopedia of her own interests.

But she didn't know much about music of any kind. As for books, all Gran read was poetry, or the diaries and letters of painters. She could see why people liked stories, she told Elizabeth, but after a few pages of a novel, she'd find herself dropping the book and going to a window or a door to look out at something, a bird winging its way across the sky, or a tree branch, or even some tourist on the street below her living-room window in Camden, pausing a moment to stare around blankly and scratch his bottom.

What poetry told her, Gran said, was “about the hidden and true life inside yourself,” about longing and hope and sorrow. In that conversation, Elizabeth had felt oppressed by Gran's words, her intent expression. She'd felt a powerful impulse to shout something rude.

Once, Gran had read to her a few letters a painter named Vincent van Gogh had written to his brother, Theo. It seemed to Elizabeth that they were all about not having any money and needing to buy paints.

“What do you think?” Gran had asked her when she'd finished reading. “Did you notice that he didn't even mention he was half-starved?”

Elizabeth didn't know what she thought. But she felt a small thrill of pleasure, as she always did when Gran spoke to her that way—as if she could think if only she would.

During these exchanges, Elizabeth didn't feel Gran was paying attention to her so much as she was paying attention to what most concerned her. She never asked Elizabeth about schoolwork or grades, or what she wanted to be when she grew up. Elizabeth had to admit to herself that it was a relief that she didn't.

Yet despite all the things about Gran that made her fun to be with, unpredictable and ungrandmotherly, she was the last person on earth Elizabeth wanted to spend a whole month with.

She knew exactly why she was being sent away. It was because of Stephen Lindsay Benedict, one week old on July 19, her brother, around whose bassinet her parents stood as though it held a holy object, and whose raspy kitten cries woke Elizabeth all night long.

Mom and Daddy were old, in their forties. What kind of a thing to do was that—at their age? By the time the baby was as old as Elizabeth, they'd be using walkers.

“We didn't really plan him,” Mom said to Elizabeth, her face rosy and smiling. Elizabeth shuddered. “But that's life,” Mom said, as she pressed the wrapped-up bundle with the red moony face close to her chest.

When Elizabeth first told her friend Nancy that her mother was going to have a baby, she was embarrassed. She could barely get the words out.

Nancy looked grave. “And they call us irresponsible,” she remarked.

“It's disgusting,” Elizabeth burst out, and felt a twinge of guilt.

The worst part of it, now that Stephen Lindsay had arrived to live in the old farmhouse, was a thing she couldn't bear to say out loud. It was that her parents wanted to be alone with the little thing so much that they could hardly wait to get her out of the house.

Then they could eat him all up. Pet him and spoil him. Murmur and croon and smile foolishly while he split the walls with his howls for attention.

2

Elizabeth flew from Boston to Bangor, Maine. It was the first time she had been on an airplane. She sat next to the small, scratched window, looking down on the earth below. Much of the land seemed arranged in patterns so precise they might have been drawn with a ruler. “It will look sort of cubist from up there,” Gran had told her on the telephone when she spoke with Elizabeth about arrangements to meet her. “You'll find it a different view.…”

Last summer, Gran had had a show of her work at a Camden gallery. Despite Elizabeth's faint discomfort at being introduced as the artist's granddaughter, she'd been pleased, too. Gran was wearing small turquoise earrings and a long clay-colored linen skirt and shirt when she arrived at the gallery. She had looked pretty good. But Elizabeth didn't like her new paintings, about which Gran had also said to her, “sort of cubist.”

Fortunately, Gran never appeared to expect her to make comments about her work.

As the plane began its descent to Bangor, Elizabeth felt a kind of anticipation she couldn't account for. She was still resentful that her parents, Mom carrying Stephen Lindsay, ridiculous in a sun hat that made him look like a cream puff, had left her much too quickly at the airport gate.

Gran was waiting for her at the gate. She hugged her briefly, held her arm by the wrist, looked at her steadily for a minute, and said, “Let's get your stuff and get out of here.”

They drove for over two hours, the road following the Penobscot River part of the way, until they arrived at a small settlement, Molytown, whose narrow wooden housefronts, like the faces of old, quiet people, overlooked Penobscot Bay.

Gran parked her dusty, noisy old car in a roughly carpentered garage, where it would stay for the month, near an open shed filled with stacks of lobster pots. She'd gone on and on about the car during most of the drive—how it had cost only three hundred dollars, how Ray, a local mechanic, had done a lovely job fixing it up, how salt air affected cars. Elizabeth had been silent.

Now, as she stood waiting while Gran locked up the car, she sniffed the air. It had a prickling, lively smell, different from the dampish country air at home that she was used to in August. She was suddenly eager to go out onto that vast bay that was like a tray holding bits of land on its metal blue surface.

“We have to call your father and tell him you arrived safely,” Gran said. “I'll pick up a few things at the store.” She pointed down the street that ran past several long wharves standing on tall spider legs, to a small store that bore a sign:
SADIE'S FOOD
. “There's a public telephone just outside. Would you like to make the call?”

Elizabeth shook her head. She tried to smile, aware of how long she had been silent. Gran shrugged and went off along the street, and Elizabeth sat down on a wooden crate near the shed.

She was actually in Maine with Gran. She realized that she'd been hoping for a reprieve at the last moment, even as her parents had said good-bye to her in Boston. It seemed to her, now, that the bicycle she had so often imagined herself pedaling through New Hampshire villages had rolled away on its own to collapse in a corner of the farmhouse cellar. Yet there was another feeling, strong and insistent, that—despite herself—she was about to be happy.

Gran appeared soon, carrying a paper sack.

“Your daddy says hello and love,” she reported. “There's our transportation.” She waved at the nearest wharf, where Elizabeth saw a small boat bobbing at the end of a long rope tied to a piling.

“We're going in that?” exclaimed Elizabeth. “It's like a pea pod!”

“We're going in that,” Gran said brusquely.

They walked out on the wharf, which swayed and creaked beneath their feet. Gran pulled on the rope until the boat was close to a ladder that descended into the water. “It's easier when the tide isn't so low,” Gran said.

Along the bottom of the boat lay a pair of oars, a rolled tarpaulin, and rags. To Elizabeth's relief, a small outboard motor clung like a claw to the stern.

“I'll go first. Then you start down and hand me your suitcase and backpack and the groceries,” Gran said, descending the ladder with sure steps.

Elizabeth handed down the things and stepped into the rocking boat herself. “Do you have to cross over from the island every time you need something from the store?” she asked.

“Oh, no! I'd be at sea all the time. See the launch over there? The one with
El Sueño
written on the bow? That's Jake Holborn's. He brings it over to Pring Island once a week. I give him a list. Next time, he brings me what I asked for, and the mail. The launch was built seventy years ago. It used to carry servants and supplies out to the rich people who once owned many of the islands in the bay. It's a beautiful old thing, isn't it? Like my car. Jake keeps the brass polished.”

A gull flew to one of the pilings and folded its wings. It seemed to stare coldly at Elizabeth.

“But what if you need something in a hurry? Do you have a phone?”

“Put the stuff in front of you, Elizabeth, and sit in the middle of the seat. We don't need a phone. There is a family on the island, the Herkimers.”

The motor roared, then settled down to a modest grumble. The boat nosed its way past the wharf. Elizabeth was preoccupied with the news that there were other people on the island. She didn't even glance up when Gran announced they were passing
El Sueño.

“John Herkimer has a battery-run shortwave radio. And Jake has a receiver on the launch, so we can reach him when he's on it, which is most of the time. When there are storms, John's radio doesn't fail like a telephone might. It's the same for electricity and water. The hand pump in the cottage works no matter what the weather is doing. And as long as we have matches, we can keep the kerosene lamps or candles lit.”

Gran put on a scarf and tied it with one hand, her other on the tiller. Elizabeth's dark straight hair was blown into tangles by a low, brisk breeze. She saw islands everywhere. Some were quilled like porcupines with evergreen trees. Some were large jagged rocks stained with pale green lichen. As they passed one such tumbled, stony place, Elizabeth cried out, “There's a seal!”

“They like to sun themselves,” Gran shouted over the sound of the motor, which had grown loud now that they were out on the bay, away from Molytown's sheltering harbor. “And that's where I found Grace, my cat.”

“How did a cat get there?”

“She'd been abandoned. Someone must have put her off a boat. She was dehydrated and terrified but managed to scramble into my lap. I had to grab on to barnacles to keep the boat steady while she slid down. Fortunately, it was high tide.”

“How could anyone do such an awful thing?” Elizabeth stared at the rocks, trying to imagine the people who could have left a small animal in such a desolate place. What had they thought?

“I don't know,” Gran answered. “I tend to believe in demons. Other explanations for such behavior seem wanting.”

The boat had changed direction. They were heading straight for a heavily wooded island.

“That's Pring,” Gran said.

As Elizabeth stared, the island appeared slowly to emerge from the bay. An uneven ridge along the center of it suggested the menacing rise and fall of a dinosaur spine. Between the ranks of pine, glimpses of sky were like silent explosions of brilliant blue.

Gran cut the motor speed, and they moved slowly past a stone-strewn beach. Beyond it lay a sloping meadow of tall, tawny grass.

Elizabeth dipped her hand in the water and withdrew it quickly. It was like ice.

Gran glanced at her. “A person can't last more than two minutes out here,” she said. “But closer to shore, in the coves, the sun warms up the water and you can swim if you can bear it.”

At the foot of the ridge, Elizabeth saw a large, rambling house. Near it stood a small barn, its roof collapsed, tendrils of vine wound thickly around the walls. Here and there, great patches of bramble sat bristling like indignant fowl.

“Is that your house?” Elizabeth asked.

“It's the Herkimer place. He's a high-school teacher in Orono. She runs the local historical society there. The family has been coming here for twenty years. We're going to have supper with them tomorrow. Hold on now.”

They rounded a point of land that was no more than a splinter of coarse sand and pebbles. At once, they were in a small cove, and the Herkimer house was hidden by a slight rise, upon which stood clumps of oak and pine. Gran brought the boat to a dock, tied up next to a ladder, and said, “Pring.” She smiled at Elizabeth, who was staring at a shell path that led to the door of a ramshackle, dark little cottage.