Western Wind (6 page)

“Where are you going?” the little boy shouted.

“None of your business,” said Mrs. Herkimer. She smiled distantly at Elizabeth. “He has to know everything,” she said.

“I want to
know
everything,” Aaron said.

“It's okay. I'm going to take a look at the little cemetery Gran told me about,” Elizabeth said.

“You have to take me with you,” said Aaron.

From beside the barn, Mr. Herkimer called, “Aaron, don't be always telling people what to do.”

Aaron's dark eyes were fixed on Elizabeth's face as though to read it.

“I can be of help,” he said seriously. “I know the way.”

The Herkimers were silent. Elizabeth had the impression everything was up to her. She hesitated, not wanting the company, or the responsibility, of a small boy, especially such an unpredictable one. The Herkimers were watching her closely now. She felt as though they were resting their combined weight on her.

“He can come with me,” she said at last, thinking to herself—just this one time.

“You'll have to watch him every moment,” Mrs. Herkimer said, her fingers constantly catching and letting go of her pearls. “He likes to scare one. He likes to jump off high rocks just to startle. He doesn't look where he's going.”

Elizabeth had not heard a parent speaking in front of her child as though he wasn't even there. She felt a faint indignation for Aaron's sake, and was glad she had said he could come with her.

“I'll let you watch me,” Aaron said. “I'm calm today—easy to watch.”

“Go ahead, then,” Mrs. Herkimer said. “And behave yourself—”

“Or else!” Aaron cried gleefully. “I know all about
or else.
Come on, Elizabeth!” And he bounded around the house, under a wash line, past a woodpile, and into a grove of slender trees whose white trunks glowed like straight chalk lines among the surrounding pines. Twigs crackled as Aaron ran ahead of her.

“Wait up,” she demanded.

He paused to look back at her. His face, dappled in sunlight, then shade, glimmered briefly like a face in a dream. He went on.

She emerged from the little wood to see him streaking across another long, narrow field, bound on one side by the bay, on the other by the slope that led to the crest, bare of trees here, and steeper than it was at the other end of the island. It was forbidding, too, with fanglike black rocks rising from the earth in clusters like the remains of prehistoric creatures.

Aaron stopped beneath a tree whose upheld branches formed the shape of a goblet. He was smiling. A few feet away from where he stood, Elizabeth saw three mossy gravestones, all awry, tumbled like blocks. Aaron put his finger to his lips. “We have to whisper,” he said softly. “We mustn't wake them.”

“They're dead,” Elizabeth stated.

“Dead, but not gone,” he retorted.

“You mean, ghosts? Are you trying to scare me?”

“Why? What for?” Aaron asked. “If you got really scared and started screaming, I'd go mad! I'd have to part the waters and escape to the mainland!” He skittered around, searching the ground until he found a stick. He held it up.

“Do you know about Moses' parting the waters of the Red Sea?” he asked. “If the wind was right to help me, I might do the same. After all, Aaron was Moses' brother. Then we could walk across the bay to Molytown.”

Elizabeth knelt to look at the gravestones. There were very faint indentations on two of them. On the third, she could make out the dates: 1859–1864. She touched the stone with one finger, tracing the numbers.

“Here's someone who was only five,” she said pensively.

“Indian massacre,” Aaron declared. “And if it wasn't for us coming, they'd still be here in their swift canoes, hunting giant otters and lobsters as big as dogs.”

“You don't know if it was an Indian massacre,” she said. “It could have been a disease.”

“I'm right,” he said. “My uncle Fred told me and he knows all about history and Indians. I'd be with him now if he hadn't gotten sick. They leave me with him every summer, you know, because they think I'm safer there. They don't know Uncle Fred takes me to Mount Baxter. We climb a lot worse rocks than the ones here. Well, what they don't know won't hurt them. Except they'll find out someday. My mother will. She always finds out.”

“Why would the Indians have bothered with a tiny island like this?” asked Elizabeth.

“Don't argue,” Aaron said. “We can just have our own thoughts.” He slid to the ground and leaned against the child's gravestone. “Let's sit here. It's cozy, in a way, and the sun makes me sleepy.”

Elizabeth, irritated yet amused, sat down beside him. She hadn't paid attention to young children for a long time, especially small boys, who seemed senseless to her with their running about and shouting and knocking things over.

“Your gran is a spy,” Aaron said suddenly.

“What a dumb thing to say!”

“Maybe it's dumb. But I'm right. She spies on us and then goes and draws and paints us when we're not there.”

“But she's a painter,” Elizabeth protested.

“She made fun of us … though I liked the way she painted Deirdre all twisted up, wearing that ugly pink dress.”

It was pleasant to sit there in the sun, gulls sailing over the bay, bugs ticking in the grass, a breeze stirring the leaves of the tree.

“Now I'm thinking about how hungry I am,” Aaron said.

“I'll give you something else to think about, a poem that's right for this place.” She recited the lines about Prudence Baldwin and the purple violet, and was rather pleased when she'd finished.

Aaron was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “If you say ‘here let' fast, it sounds like a flower, too. Also, toilet.”

She looked at him apprehensively. Was he about to explode into the silliness little kids went in for when they heard certain words, like toilet?

But his expression was serious. “You can do anything with words,” he said. “Except eat them. Deirdre says to me, ‘I'll make you eat those words.' I can't do that. You can't take them back, either. They sit there like big damp frogs. Why did you come to Pring, anyhow?”

“I was sent away by my parents,” Elizabeth replied, and she was startled at the harshness of her own voice.

“I wish my parents would send me away,” Aaron said drowsily. “I'd take my canoe a thousand miles from here and build a tepee in the forest.”

He had slipped sideways so he was leaning against her. She gazed down at him. His eyes were closed. His dark lashes rested against his pale skin. She moved slightly but he didn't open his eyes. He'd fallen asleep, just like a baby does, suddenly.

For a long time, Elizabeth sat there. Aaron grew heavier as her thoughts grew vaguer. She looked at small clouds on the horizon, at the bay, at the distant line of the mainland. Below her lay the bones of people who had been alive over one hundred years ago, who must have sat in the sun as she and Aaron were doing this day. There had been houses on the island, boats on the shore, the rattle of china, wood smoke from a chimney, a child's voice crying out, perhaps the voice of the child who now lay beneath them. Maybe Aaron was right—dead but not gone. After all, she was thinking about them.

“Say another poem,” Aaron demanded as he sat up, yawning.

“That's the only one I know by heart. I'll have to memorize another.”

“Bring it tonight,” he said. “Else I'll die of boredom.”

She laughed.

“It's true. You'll see! Unless Deirdre has a tantrum and throws dishes at me. You're going to have chicken for supper. It's one hundred and twenty years old. Mama never throws anything away. She's crazy.”

“You ought not to talk like that about your family,” Elizabeth said self-righteously.

“Ho, ho!” cried Aaron, springing to his feet. “You ought to hear the way they talk about me! All night long … whispers from the bedroom …”

He began to dance around the gravestones the way he had last night when Elizabeth had seen the Herkimers through her bedroom window.

Suddenly, he cried in a falsetto voice, “Settle down, Aaron!”

Elizabeth felt a chill of fear. Maybe he would dart up the crest of the ridge and fling himself into the sea. What if he refused to go home? Would she have to carry him all the way back?

“I'll wake the dead,” he said in a tone of voice that suggested he was imitating words he had heard. He sighed then and looked vacantly at the bay.

“Let's go home,” he said. “It's time I had my milk and cookies. I'm tired of talking.”

He was silent on the way to the Herkimer house, and after he'd opened the screen door and gone inside, he didn't glance back at Elizabeth.

Mrs. Herkimer called from a window, “Thank you for looking after him, Elizabeth. I hope he didn't act like a beast.”

“He was fine,” Elizabeth answered her crisply. Really, they did behave as though he were a freak! She passed Deirdre, who was lying in the sun on a shabby quilt. A straw hat covered her face. She must have overheard Elizabeth and her mother speaking, but she gave no sign or greeting.

When Elizabeth arrived at the cottage, the big room was empty. She guessed Gran was still resting. She took one of the soft little apples from the basket and ate it, standing next to the sink. Grace came to her and touched her ankle with one paw. She bent to pet her. After a moment, the cat went back to the sweater and curled up. Gran came down the stairs.

“Did you write home?”

“Yes. And I found the cemetery. I took Aaron. The Herkimers sort of made me take him.”

“Did you mind?”

“Not really. He's funny. You never know what he's going to say.”

Gran nodded. “That may be part of what puzzles his parents,” she said. “He speaks what's in his head.”

“Grace just touched my leg with her paw to make me pet her. Maybe animals do think. They just can't change their minds.”

“Some people would say that if you can't change your mind, you can't think,” Gran observed. “It would be better for Aaron if the Herkimers could change their minds about him.”

“Don't they love him?” Elizabeth asked.

“They love him because he's theirs,” Gran said shortly.

Elizabeth recalled Aaron had asked her for another poem. It made her feel cranky to have to ask Gran to write down “Absence,” but she did, if grudgingly.

Gran said she'd do it later, before they left to have supper at the Herkimers'. “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked. “I feel chilly. The wind is rising.”

The sun had disappeared behind gray clouds. Gran began to make a fire in the stove.

“Don't you get tired of having to do that every time you need to boil water?”

“I do,” Gran answered. “But if I had a real stove, there would also be electricity and a telephone and sofas. Another good thing out here, there's so little to forget. In Camden, I never can find my keys. I'm always afraid I'll leave a gas burner on, or the lights … things like that. It's a part of being old I really hate.”

Elizabeth hoped she wouldn't say anything more about being old. It made her uncomfortable in somewhat the same way her friend Nancy did when—as she was given to doing—she sang all the words of a love song, and Elizabeth couldn't make her stop or even look away from her blissful gaze.

Gran put a dish of ginger cookies on the table. “They're damp. Everything gets damp on the island. I wonder how your little brother is doing. He'll be starting to smile. That makes parents crazy with joy even when they know it's indigestion. I recall your daddy's first smile. He must have been about six weeks old. I was carrying him to the sink to give him a bath.”

Gran carrying Daddy! It seemed impossible. But the effort to imagine such a thing distracted her from the pictures of Stephen Lindsay that Gran's words had evoked. Then she thought of Deirdre, mad as a snake, stalking around the place while her parents ceaselessly watched over Aaron.

“Things are not what they seem,” she stated, and realized that was something her mother often said.

“You can say that again,” Gran agreed.

Elizabeth did. Gran laughed.

Later, she put on one of her cotton dresses. She went to Gran's room to ask her if it was the thing to wear to the Herkimers'.

Gran was standing in front of her little mirror. She was trying on different scarves, holding them close to her face and muttering to herself. She suddenly saw Elizabeth reflected in the mirror.

She smiled in an embarrassed way. “You'd think I'd have gotten accustomed to the way I look,” she said. “But I don't seem to have.”

Gran was vain!

She took a slip of paper from the bureau and handed it to Elizabeth. It was the poem, “Absence.” She read it silently, then held it out to Gran.

“No. I won't take him that,” she said. “It's too lonely.”

Gran touched her hand without speaking.

6

Against the red glow of the setting sun, the mainland and its scattered villages appeared to be moving, a night train in which passengers, growing aware of the dark, flicked on lights, one by one. It was low tide. From the exposed wet earth rose a powerful smell of mingled salt and iodine. The water made intimate sounds as it withdrew, as if consoling itself.

Gran was wearing the olive and rose scarf she had settled on and was carrying a flashlight. Across the meadow, the Herkimer house glimmered like a cluster of fireflies. The barn was a black shape, already moved into night. It was still easy to see the path through the meadow. Gazing toward the spine of the ridge, Elizabeth saw a yellow bar of sunshine like the light at the bottom of a closed door.

Mr. Herkimer was waiting for them outside. “Welcome,” he called in his matter-of-fact voice, and held the door open.