The Dawning of the Day (13 page)

“I sort of outgrew it,” Rob mumbled. “Almost everybody did. Edwin, he'd get so riled up he'd go down on the beach and heave rocks at everybody. Mad enough to go out of his head. It scared me. And Rue never did anything but stare back at you with those funny eyes of hers.” He looked at Philippa defiantly. “But I never did anything
bad
. Just to tease.”

“But somebody must have done something really bad.” Suddenly Philippa saw the Webster children running silently through the woods, and Perley Fraser behind them. She said the name into the quiet schoolroom.

“Perley?”

Ralph nodded. “He's dirty,” he said with violence. “He was bigger than all of us. And what he did was worse than anything we ever did.” The flush ran into his face again, and he stared stiffly past Philippa. “He could think of things like bending back your little finger till you was down on your knees crying and begging. . . . He's had me down, and Rob too. We know all about it. And taking you by the back of your neck and digging his fingers into those soft places under your ears—” He winced, and tenderly felt his neck. “And knocking your books out of your arms into mud-puddles, and stepping on your hand when you grabbed for them. And punching you in the belly when you wasn't expecting it. He could make us all holler,” he confessed defiantly, “all of us but Rue. But when he'd make Edwin croak out in that funny voice, Rue'd get feather-white.”

“And we couldn't do anything!” Rob burst out. “He'd just as soon knock you dead. Kathie flew at him once, and he like to broke her arm, twisting it behind her.”

Philippa folded her hands on the desk and looked at her thumbs. “Why didn't any of the parents do anything?”

Ralph gazed at her with wonder for her ignorance. “Nobody told. The little kids was off by themselves. They most always had a different recess-time, anyway. And the older ones—like us—well, they never tell at home. You get the grownups mixed in, and it's an awful mess. It could even lead to a lobster war, or something.”

“It seems to me it was a dirty mess anyway,” said Philippa dryly. But it was too late now to lecture. Besides, she had come up against this before, this obstinate code of silence that amounted to a conspiracy against the entire adult world. Even the victims joined it, seeking their own way of escape. “And Mrs. Gerrish didn't know anything that was going on?”

“She never looked out the windows that I know of,” said Rob.

“Couldn't some of you have ganged up on Perley?”

“There was just Ralph and me to do it,” said Rob. “Maybe Kathie. She's a good fighter. But even if we could lick him, we didn't want it to get to Foss. You know—Perley's stepfather.” He glanced anxiously at Ralph. “O.K. to say why?”

Ralph shrugged and looked at the floor. “Go ahead.”

“Ralph's father owes Foss a pile of money. If Foss ever decided to collect, Ralph's father would be in awful trouble. He'd lose his house, boat, gear, everything. So Ralph couldn't do anything or say anything about Perley, see? Even if Perley wasn't so big, we still couldn't do anything.”

His eyes were bright on hers, begging her to diminish the guilt he felt. Philippa nodded.

“I see why you had to stick with Ralph,” she said. “But why shouldn't Foss Campion have known what was going on? He could have stopped it.”

“Some people,” said Rob witheringly, “think everything that goes on in the schoolyard and in the bushes out back is just
pranks
.” He stood up, a slim gangling boy whose expression at the moment was curiously mature. “I guess it's time to ring the bell.”

Philippa looked at her watch and simultaneously became conscious of voices and activity outside. “All right, Rob.” She smiled at them. “Thank you both. You've been a great help to me.”

Ralph got off the organ stool. “Are you figgering on telling this to anybody?” He wet his lips nervously.

She shook her head. “Not unless I have to use it in some big emergency, which I hope will never arise. I wanted to know why the Websters left school, because I'm going to get them back. Perley's out of school now, and busy lobstering. And I like to know what goes on in the yard at recess. So we'll start from scratch and leave the past behind us. . . . In any case, Ralph, nothing that I ever say will make trouble for your father.”

His smile came back. “And we'll be good to those kids—you wait and see.” He climbed over desks as if his spirit had suddenly been restored to him, and there was a scuffle in the dark entry just before the bell began to ring.

A
fterward, when Philippa looked back, she remembered it as a quiet week. The weather was unbroken in its mildness. One day melted into another as the sea melted into the sky in a lilac haze. There were sweet, mournful scents in the air, a heat like summer in the sun at midday and a frost-flavored chill at morning and night.

It was a week of waiting. The island waited, in its farewell to summer, for the winter to begin. Philippa waited for the chance to find the Webster children. There was nothing she could do until the end of the week. There was no chance of finding them in the woods in the late afternoon after school was out. Perhaps she wouldn't be able to find them on Saturday, even if she began in the morning and searched all day. But she had to try. And when she found them, how could she talk to them and tell them she knew what had frightened them and that it was safer for them in the schoolyard than in the woods? Against her will she retained the picture of Perley crashing down the steep dark path under the spruces, bursting out into the sunlight. The frightening thing about it was not so much Perley himself, but the power of the instinct that drove him to commit his acts of cruelty. And when she thought of Rue, as fragile as a stalk of silverrod, it was impossible to be dispassionate, not when one senseless explosion on Perley's part could destroy the child utterly.

Indeed, the whole business of the persecution that began in the schoolyard, the scenes conjured up for her by the boys' admissions, carried a nightmare atmosphere with them, as if deep within the shell of experience that had made her adult, there still existed the lanky, vulnerable child who had been everybody's game.

She tried to talk to herself like Justin. Don't become too passionate over these children. Don't let them turn your life inside out, as Eric's cat did. Get them into school, see that they're protected, but don't identify yourself with them. You aren't really Phil, you know. She's dead, actually. Consider her a sort of ancestor of yours, and forget her.

It was easy enough to say. But she spent most of Saturday tramping around the Western End and saw nothing, not even the flicker of a pale head or a dress; and she was too oppressed with foreboding to enjoy the sheldrakes and coots feeding in quiet coves or the unexpected sight of a dozen seals taking the sun on a long ledge. She remembered them dutifully, to describe to Eric, but where was her own gusto? She felt resentful to be thus cheated, but it was inevitable. She could quote Justin or use her own hard-earned logic, but the Websters were too strong for her in the end. She went to bed early, and wrote to Eric while the Campion brothers and their wives played Sixty-three in the sitting room downstairs. Whenever she heard Helen's peculiar exuberant laugh, she thought, How much does she know about her son? How much does she guess or suspect? Or does she see Perley simply as a projection of the baby she fed at her breast?

She looked down at her letter . . . “The sheldrakes have cowlicks like yours,” she had written. “Except they look more uncombed than you, if possible. . . . Two of the seals kept slapping at each other with their flippers. The men around here say a baby seal is easy to tame . . .” She saw Eric reading the letter, the expressions constantly changing across his narrow face, the thin wiry hand going up unconsciously to smooth his cowlick, his mouth quirking in amusement as he caught the gesture. What if, she thought, there is something wrong with Eric that I don't know? What if I am as ignorant as Helen Campion, who laughs at the men's jokes, and preens herself on her children, and loves her food and relishes her gossip as if she were the wealthiest, most fortunate woman in the world?

She felt chilled, and too tired to write, but she read her sister's last note and felt her world—the world of herself and Eric, and no one else, no Websters—take on its normal climate again. “Eric is such a sensible child,” Jenny had written. “Not too good to be true, but both Roger and I agree he has a sturdy core of common sense.” Common sense, Philip-pa thought gratefully. Such a splendid pair of words.

She went to sleep prepared to think no more of the Websters or of Perley until tomorrow. But when she awoke on Sunday morning, her heart was beating in a hard heavy rhythm as if she had just experienced some sort of terror. She lay there trying to recollect the dream, but it belonged in darkness and could not be called up into the bright room with the ripples of light flowing endlessly across the ceiling, the windows full of blue light in which the gulls flew, crying, with sunlight on their wings.

When she went downstairs, Asanath was alone in the kitchen, sitting on the woodbin smoking, and looking out across the field to Long Cove. His nose with its thin, high-humped bridge and the sharp rake of his jaw had a curious distinction. The yellow tom was stretched along his leg.

“Hello,” Philippa said. “You look like Sunday, the two of you.”

“We always observe the Sabbath, real faithful. No mice, no lobsters. Always glad when Monday comes, ain't we, boy . . . ? Note, for you on the table. Young Jamie just left it.”

As she turned to pick it up, Suze came in, a blue bowl of eggs in the round of her arm. “Terence has gone off in Perley's double-ender,” she said fretfully. “Going to look for what cultch he can find along the shore, he says. I don't like it. A peapod's like an eggshell, and there's a swell around them ledges.”

“Lord,” Asanath said. “Perley goes out in that peapod every day, and he's a dull young one and clumsy as a hog on ice at that. Terence ain't altogether in a dream, old woman. He won't be runnin' aground on any sharp rocks.”

Philippa smiled at Suze. “Good morning. What's prettier than warm brown eggs in a blue bowl, I wonder?” She read her note, written in a dashing and resolute black script and signed Joanna S. Her pleasure was comforting after the formless fright in her sleep. “I'm invited to a picnic,” she said. “And to pick cranberries.” Asanath nodded, looking benign. Suze said distantly, “They're always strammin' around in the boat on Sundays.”

Asanath pointed his pipe stem at the blue bowl. “Suppose you boil up a couple of those new-laid eggs for Philippa and let her get off on her picnic.” He turned to Philippa. “It's too bad you can't have your boy here today. We'll have to figger something.”

N
ils Sorensen's boat swung gently at anchor outside the cove where Philippa had once come with Charles. She realized that the scene had changed since she had been there. The dark green tangle of the beach peas was the same, but rough seas had shifted the ovoid shimmering rocks around the wreck.

She felt a faint regret, and said to Nils Sorensen, “Will the wreck disappear completely, do you think?”

He shook his head. “It's been there almost as long as I can remember.” He watched Jamie and Linnea jumping from one great silvery rib to another, and said, “Every kid on the island has played on that wreck, for twenty years or more.”

“I'd like Eric to see it and know the story.”

“It's nothing very spectacular,” said Joanna. “She was a coaster, loaded with lumber. Nobody was drowned, but the entire population of the island nearly killed itself off salvaging the lumber.”

She held out a shiny two-quart lard pail to Jamie and a tin cup to Linnea. “No, keep your shoes on, honeybunch, for the thistles and thorns.” The children went off toward the woods, and she looked at Philippa and laughed. “I understand most of the island feuds started when the
Martha Ames
went ashore.”

“My grandfather made more enemies at that time than at any time in his career,” said Nils. “He was able to enlarge his barn right afterward. A few small-minded people thought he was a little careless when he was passing by their lumber after dark.” He went over and laid his hand on a silky-grained rib. “But nobody drowned in the wreck. Only the ship, and that was hurt enough for the master.”

They scattered, looking for the sheltered places on the slopes where the first-ripened cranberries grew pink and red in their beds of vines and mossy turf. Philippa climbed up the hillock she called a Viking barrow and looked off, again experiencing the sensation of greatness and insignificance all in one. How tall she stood, how far she could see; below her in the calm water she could see the pale luminous green of sun-flooded shallows and the purple-brown shapes of submerged ledges like sleeping undersea animals. Where other ledges broke the twinkling surface in long dark reefs, there were the gulls and the shags, immobile in the sun. A cock old squaw and his hens paddled in a sort of lagoon, leaving long glittering V's behind them. Their voices rose to Philippa in a sweet, faint bugling.

The horns of elfland, she thought, and looked beyond them to the distant lighthouse on its rocky islet, riding the horizon like a tall, turreted ship.

Here, then, was where the insignificance began. She saw herself standing small and solitary in space, a doll trying to think great cosmic thoughts when it would be better occupied to be filling the empty lard pail. She laughed aloud suddenly, and began looking for the cranberries. When she found a patch, dark red with a purple bloom, she felt a ridiculous excitement. Warm and cool at once in her hands, they made a satisfactory drumming on the bottom of the pail when she dropped them in. If only I could gather in the Webster children as easily, she thought.