Stern Men (23 page)

“X-ray vision?”

“Before I open the present, you know? When I’m looking at the box? He always says that. ‘Don’t go using your x-ray vision on it, Ruth.’ He’s pretty funny.”

Mary Smith-Ellis Thomas nodded slowly, without looking the slightest bit less concerned.

“He gives you nice birthday presents?”

“Sure.”

“That’s good.”

“On my birthdays when I was little he used to stand me up on a chair and say, ‘Do you feel any bigger today? You sure look bigger.’ ”

“I remember him doing that.”

“We have a real good time,” Ruth said.

“Is Angus Addams still around?”

“Oh, sure. We see Angus about every day.”

“He used to scare me. I once saw him beating a child with a buoy. Back when I was first married.”

“No kidding. A child?”

“Some poor boy who was working on his boat.”

“Oh, not a child, then. His sternman, probably. Some lazy teenager. Angus is a tough boss, that’s for sure. He can’t fish with anyone these days. He doesn’t get along with anyone.”

“I don’t think he ever thought much of me.”

“He doesn’t like to let on that he thinks much of anybody.”

“You have to understand, Ruth, that I had never met people like that. You know, it was the first winter I was on Fort Niles that Angus Addams lost his finger while he was fishing. Do you remember hearing about that? It was such cold weather, and he wasn’t wearing gloves, so his hands got frozen. And I guess he caught his finger in—what is it?”

“The winch head.”

“He caught his finger in the winch head and it got twisted in some rope and was pulled right off. The other man on the boat said Angus kicked the finger overboard and kept fishing the rest of the day.”

“The way I heard it,” Ruth said, “he cauterized his hand with the lit end of his cigar so he could keep fishing all day.”

“Oh, Ruth.”

“I don’t know if I believe it, though. I’ve never once seen Angus Addams with a cigar in his mouth that was actually lit.”

“Oh, Ruth.”

“One thing’s for sure. He’s definitely missing a finger.”

Ruth’s mother said nothing. Ruth looked down at her hands. “Sorry,” she said. “You were trying to make a point?”

“Just that I’d never been around people who were so rough.”

Ruth thought to point out that many people found Miss Vera Ellis pretty rough, but she bit her tongue and said, “I see.”

“I’d been on the island only a year, you know, when Angus Addams came over to our house with Snoopy, his cat. He said, ‘I’m sick of this cat, Mary. If you don’t take it off my hands, I’ll shoot it right here in front of you.’ And he was carrying a gun. You know how big his voice is, how angry he always sounds? Well, I believed him, so of course I took the cat. Your father was furious; he told me to give the cat back, but Angus threatened again to shoot it in front of me. I didn’t want to see that cat get shot. Your dad said he wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t be sure. She was a pretty cat. Do you remember Snoopy?”

“I think so.”

“Such a pretty, big white cat. Your father said Angus was playing a trick on us, his way to unload the cat. I guess it was a trick, because a few weeks later Snoopy had five kittens, and those kittens were our problem. Then I was the one who got angry, but your father and Angus thought it was a big joke. And Angus thought it was clever of him to trick me like that. He and your father teased me about it for months. Your father, you know, ended up drowning the kittens.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It was. But I think there was something wrong with those kittens, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Ruth said. “They couldn’t swim.”

“Ruth!”

“I’m just kidding. Sorry. It was a stupid joke.” Ruth hated herself. She was amazed once again at how swiftly she reached this point with her mother, this point of making a cruel joke at the expense of a woman who was so fragile. Despite her best intentions, she would, within minutes, say something that hurt her mother. In the company of her mother, Ruth could feel herself turn into a charging rhinoceros. A rhinoceros in a china shop. But why was her mother so easy to wound? Why was her mother such a china shop in the first place? Ruth wasn’t used to women like her. She was used to women like the Pommeroy sisters, who strode through life as though they were invincible. Ruth was more comfortable around tough people. Tough people made Ruth feel less like a . . . rhinoceros.

Mary rubbed her son’s legs and gently rotated each of his feet, stretching the ankle. “Oh, Ruth,” she said, “I was so hurt the day the kittens were drowned.”

“I’m sorry,” Ruth said, and she truly was. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, sweetheart. Do you want to help with Ricky? Will you help me rub him?”

“Sure,” Ruth said, although she could think of nothing less appealing.

“You can rub his hands. They say it’s good to keep them from getting too twisted, poor little guy.”

Ruth poured some lotion into her palm and started to rub one of Ricky’s hands. Immediately, she felt a movement in her stomach, a building wave like seasickness. Such an atrophied, lifeless little hand!

Ruth was once fishing with her father when he pulled up a trap with a molting lobster. It was not unusual, in the summertime, to find lobsters with new, soft shells only days old, but this lobster had probably molted an hour or so before. Its perfect and empty shell lay beside it in the trap, useless now, hollow armor. Ruth had held the naked lobster in her palm, and handling it had given her the same seasickness she now experienced in handling her brother. A lobster with no shell was boneless meat; when Ruth picked it up, the limp lobster hung on her hand, offering no more resistance than a wet sock. It hung there like something melting, as if it would eventually drip from her fingers. It was nothing like a normal lobster, nothing like one of those snappy fierce little tanks. And yet she could feel its life in her hand, its blood whirring in her palm. Its flesh was a bluish jelly, like a raw scallop. She had shuddered. Just by handling it, she had begun to kill it, leaving her fingerprints on its thin-skinned organs. She had flung it over the side of the boat and watched it sink, translucent. It didn’t have chance. It didn’t have a chance in the world. Something probably ate it before it even touched bottom.

“There,” said Ruth’s mother. “That’s good of you.”

“Poor little guy,” Ruth made herself say, working the lotion into her brother’s strange fingers, his wrist, his forearm. Her voice sounded strained, but her mother seemed not to notice. “Poor little guy.”

“Did you know that when your father was a little boy in the Fort Niles school, back in the forties, the teachers taught the children to tie knots? That was an important part of the curriculum on the island. And they were taught how to read tidal charts, too. In school! Can you imagine?”

“It was probably a good idea,” Ruth said. “It makes sense for island kids to know those things. Especially back then. They were going to be fishermen, right?”

“But in
school,
Ruth? Couldn’t they first teach the children to read and leave the knots till the afternoon?”

“I’m sure they learned to read, too.”

“That’s why we wanted to send you to private school.”

“Dad didn’t want it.”

“I meant the Ellises and I. I’m very proud of you, Ruth. I’m proud of how well you did. Eleventh in the class! And I’m proud that you learned French. Will you say something in French for me?”

Ruth laughed.

“What?” her mother asked. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing. It’s just that whenever I speak French around Angus Addams, he says, ‘What? Your
what
hurts?’ ”

“Oh, Ruth.” She sounded sad. “I’d hoped you would speak some French to me.”

“It’s not worth it, Mom. I have a stupid accent.”

“Well. Whatever you want, honey.”

They were quiet for a spell, and then Ruth’s mother said, “Your father probably wished you’d stayed on the island and learned to tie knots!”

“I’m sure that’s exactly what he wished,” Ruth said.

“And tides! I’m sure he wanted you to learn tides. I could never learn them, though I tried. Your father tried to teach me how to operate a boat. Driving the boat was easy, but somehow I was supposed to know where all the rocks and ledges were, and which ones popped up during which tides. They had practically no buoys out there, and the ones they had were always drifting off course, and your father would yell at me if I tried to navigate according to them. He didn’t trust the buoys, but how was I to know? And currents! I thought you were supposed to point the boat and pull the throttle. I didn’t know anything about currents!”

“How could you know?”

“How could I know, Ruth? I thought I knew about island life, because I’d spent my summers there, but I didn’t know a thing. I had no idea about how bad the wind gets in the winter. Did you know that some people lost their minds from it?”

“I think most people on Fort Niles did,” Ruth said and laughed.

“It doesn’t stop! My first winter there, the wind started blowing at the end of October and didn’t die down until April. I had the strangest dreams that winter, Ruth. I kept dreaming that the island was about to blow away. The trees on the island had long, long roots that reached right down to the ocean floor, and they were the only thing keeping the island from drifting away in the wind.”

“Were you scared?”

“I was terrified.”

“Wasn’t anybody nice to you?”

“Yes. Mrs. Pommeroy was nice to me.”

There was a knock at the door, and Ruth’s mother started. Ricky started, too, and began flipping his head back and forth. He screeched; it was a terrible sound, like the screech of an old car’s bad brakes.

“Shhh,” his mother said. “Shhh.”

Ruth opened the nursery door, and there stood Cal Cooley.

“Catching up?” he asked. He came in and bent his tall frame into a rocking chair. He smiled at Mary but did not look at Ricky.

“Miss Vera wants to go for a drive,” he said.

“Oh!” Mary exclaimed, and jumped to her feet. “I’ll fetch the nurse. We’ll get our coats. Ruth, go get your coat.”

“She wants to go shopping,” Cal said, still smiling, but looking at Ruth now. “She heard that Ruth arrived with no luggage.”

“And how did she hear that, Cal?” Ruth asked.

“Beats me. All I know is she wants to buy you some new clothes, Ruth.”

“I don’t need anything.”

“Told you so,” he said, with the greatest satisfaction. “I told you to bring your own clothes or Miss Vera would end up buying you new things and pissing you off.”

“Look, I don’t care,” Ruth said. “Whatever you people feel like making me do, I don’t care. I do not give a shit. Just get it over with.”

“Ruth!” exclaimed Mary, but Ruth didn’t care. The hell with all of them. Cal Cooley didn’t seem to care, either. He just shrugged.

 

They drove to the dress shop in the old two-tone Buick. It took Mary and Cal nearly an hour to get Miss Vera dressed and bundled up and down the stairs to the car, where she sat in the front passenger seat with her beaded purse on her lap. She had not been out of the house for several months, Mary said.

Miss Vera was so small; she was like a bird perched in the front seat. Her hands were tiny, and she trembled her thin fingers lightly across her beaded purse, as though reading Braille or praying with an endless rosary. She had lace gloves with her, which she set beside her on the seat. Whenever Cal Cooley turned a corner, she would put her left hand on the gloves, as though she were afraid they would slide away. She gasped at every turn, although Cal was driving at approximately the speed of a healthy pedestrian. Miss Vera wore a long mink coat and a hat with a black veil. Her voice was very quiet, with a slight waver. She smiled when she spoke, pronounced her words with a trace of a British accent, and delivered her every line wistfully.

“Oh, to go on a drive . . .” she said.

“Yes,” agreed Ruth’s mother.

“Do you know how to drive, Ruth?”

“I do,” said Ruth.

“Oh, how clever of you. I was never proficient, myself. I would always
collide
. . .” The memory set Miss Vera to tittering. She put her hand to her mouth, as shy girls do. Ruth had not remembered Miss Vera to be a giggler. It must have come with age, a late affectation. Ruth looked at the old woman and thought about how, back on Fort Niles Island, Miss Vera made the local men working on her yard drink from the garden hose. She wouldn’t allow them into the kitchen for a glass of water. Not on the hottest day. That practice of hers was so hated that it gave rise to an expression on the island:
Drinking out of the hose.
It indicated the lowest depth of insult.
My wife got the house and the kids, too. That bitch really left me drinking out of the hose.

Cal Cooley, at a four-way intersection, paused at a stop sign and let another car pass through. Then, as he started to move, Miss Vera cried, “Wait!”

Cal stopped. There were no other cars in sight. He started up again.

“Wait!” repeated Miss Vera.

“We have the right of way,” Cal said. “It’s our turn to go.”

“I think it more prudent to wait. Other cars may be coming.”

Cal shifted into park and waited at the stop sign. No other cars appeared. For several minutes they sat in silence. Eventually a station wagon pulled up behind the Buick and the driver honked one short burst. Cal said nothing. Mary said nothing. Miss Vera said nothing. Ruth sank down into her seat and thought how full the world was of assholes. The station wagon driver honked again, twice, and Miss Vera said, “So rude.”

Cal rolled down his window and waved the station wagon by. It passed. They sat in the Buick at the stop sign. Another car pulled up behind them, and Cal waved it past, too. A red, rusted pickup truck passed them from the other direction. Then, as before, there were no cars to be seen.