The Dawning of the Day (2 page)

Now the captain was part of the dream. He was secure, this boat was all the world he needed; for him and the lanky, expressionless deck hand she was not a person, she was only freight.

A sudden need for her child cried out sharply in her. She pressed the palm of her hand against the sun-warmed curve of the mast's side, remembering how, early this morning before she left Eric at her sister's home, she had dampened his fine mouse-brown hair and tried to comb his cowlick flat. She remembered the shape of his head under her hand and the smell of him as he hugged her good-by. It could have been a month ago.

The boat seemed to be rising up and up without stopping, up and forward, and Philippa's head spun. Holding tightly to everything and moving in cautious steps like someone very old, she went aft then and down into the passengers' cabin. The fear of seasickness began.

From that time on, the trip lasted for an eternity, yet curiously there was no time to think. She must hold herself on the narrow locker, pick up her typewriter case when it was hurled across the cabin, rearrange her luggage, and try to keep her balance at the same time; when the nausea came, she went up the steep ladder and slid back the hatch cover, and stood there breathing the cold salty air and trying not to watch the ceaseless forward rush of seas now at eye level. If she looked at them, their motion was duplicated in her stomach. When a shower of icy spray broke over her, she went below again. She found herself thinking in time to the chugging of the Diesel engine. She had found out at the first that it was a Diesel; Eric had told her to ask. She must know the length of the boat and the captain's name, all this for Eric. He would be in school now but thinking of her and envying her this fabulous adventure; he had hoped, for her sake, that it would be rough. She laughed and shuddered at the same time.

Once, when a brutal jolt caught her off guard and she cracked her head sharply, she almost burst into tears, and she was amazed to discover how thin the veneer of adult self-assurance really was. Her sense of loneliness was perilously close to the surface. She held her throat rigid until it ached, and by then the danger was past. She put her sister's steamer rug on the floor and sat on it, bracing her feet against one locker and her back against the other, and shut her eyes.

I know now, she thought, what the other teacher meant when she said that teaching on Bennett's Island had put ten extra years on her. They're on me already.

She felt an unwilling sad-edged humor, and suddenly she could visualize her husband appearing at the top of the companionway and gazing down at her as she sat on the floor of the cabin, her hair on end, her long legs jackknifed under her chin.

“Why, Philippa.” She could hear his gentle amazement. “Whatever are you doing? You look drunk.” There would have been a glimmer of mirth behind his glasses. His strong mouth would have twitched in a mild smile.

“The teacher should personify poise and dignity at all times. You'd better mend your ways before your new employers get a look at you and think they've been had.”

She burst into laughter, and the sound of it was bold in her ears and drove off her megrims as the cold wind had blown away her nausea. At the same instant the whistle shrieked over her head, and she lurched to her feet and looked through the salt-misted portholes. To the left a high craggy island bare of trees rose from a ring of white surf. A row of unfamiliar dark birds perched along its ridge, their wings outspread.

She looked out the other side and saw a long natural bastion of tawny rock, with pale glistening seas breaking continually against it and sending sparkling showers of spray into the air. There was a high clamor of gulls, and she saw a lobster boat rolling in the tide rip like a clam shell, heading past the end of the tawny ledge with the gulls following. The boat disappeared beyond the ledge, and the
Ella Vye
, whistle shrieking, veered in the same direction.

Philippa sat down on the locker and opened her handbag, her fingers stiff and chilled, her whole body trembling. If only Brigport were the end of the journey; then, in a few moments, she would be on land, with the firm ground under her feet, the warm ripe smell of autumn in her nostrils, and the sun striking through her aching flesh. But Bennett's Island was three miles beyond. Still, three miles would be nothing to her after this nightmarish twenty, and perhaps it wouldn't be rough between the islands. Of course not, she thought with assurance. It will be sheltered, and I can stay out on deck and really enjoy it.

She would have a great deal to write to Eric. Planning her first letter to him, she worked methodically to remedy her appearance. She was thirty and quite tall, with long strong bones; when Eric was a baby and Justin was living, she had had an appearance of firm and luminous health. But in the last few years she had become very slender, as if the flesh had been chiseled away from the bones, leaving her rib cage hard as armor under her breasts and accentuating her cheekbones and jaw line in a way she would have thought elegant when she was seventeen and had pined for a romantic willowiness.

She combed her hair back hard from her forehead; it was brown hair, neither chestnut nor richly dark but merely brown. It shone after brushing and had a faint wave so that when she pushed it back from her broad forehead, it gave her a softening for which she was grateful. There was one other feature for which she was also grateful. Her eyes, wide set under the gentle curve of her brows, were a clear and penetrating gray-green.

Once again her son's face came sharply to mind. Eric, she thought, we are thankful for this job, I should be thanking God at this moment, I have no right to miss you so.

She took her lipstick angrily from her bag. This was no time for self-pity.

She realized that the boat had been running with a blessed steadiness for the last few minutes, and she put on her beret and her topcoat and went up on deck. They were in the harbor of Brigport, and the rough weather outside the long natural breakwater might have been a cruel joke on her senses. For here inside, the scent of warm spruce blew mildly on her face, the water was the tame blue of cornflowers. The boats lay above their own pure reflections. Children played in dories and skiffs around the wharves built out from the rocky shores. The houses gleamed among the spruces, the fields were golden with approaching autumn, the whole scene spoke peace.

T
he captain went up the wharf with the mailbags, assisted by two barefooted small boys in khaki shorts, and the others on the wharf trailed after them. Philippa was relieved. Some had gazed down at her with curiosity and some with indifference; she had felt exposed and vulnerable, the sole passenger on the mailboat, an outsider and a schoolteacher at that. She had understood their interest, it was a natural thing. But how does one respond? she thought. Do I smile up at them winningly or look haughtily into space?

Now she was alone, even the deck hand had disappeared. She sat quiescent in the hot silence. A little boy rowed out in a big dory from a nearby wharf, and a man who was painting a boat beached in the shade of the wharf spoke after him in a deep patient voice, “Take care, now.”

“Ayeh,” the child piped back.

She thought with pleasurable anticipation of the children whom she was to teach. They would be island children, far different from any others she had known in the cities and suburbs. There would be a wildness in them. She longed to call to the little boy in the dory, to have him come alongside and look up at her so she could talk with him; he could not have been much older than Eric, about eight. His hair is fair where Eric's is mouse-brown, she thought, but he has the same tremendous energy in that thin straight back and those skinny shoulders. She watched him send the big gray dory across the harbor, standing up to row with one knee on the seat, pushing on the long oars. He would not be able to talk as glibly as Eric about turbojets and Roy Rogers and the television he had seen in friends' houses when they lived in Boston. But how wise he must be in the rhythm of the tides, the recognition of sea birds, the ways of seals, in foretelling the wind, in the feel of a boat under him, in the intricate construction of a lobster trap.

She hoped there would be an eight-year-old boy in her school on Bennett's Island. There must be, out of twelve children ranging from five to fourteen. She hadn't asked the island people who had come to her sister's house to interview her; she had wanted the job with such intensity her poise had been alarmingly uncertain, and for almost the first time in her adult life she had been at a loss, afraid of saying too much or too little.

The islanders had come to see her on the recommendation of the former teacher. There had been two brothers, Foss and Asanath Campion, and Mrs. Asanath. Even in their good blue suits and white shirts, the men were marked by their livelihood. Their pale blue eyes were narrowed by folds of flesh finely wrinkled; they were bright and far-seeing eyes, deep-set above hard cheekbones and big high-bridged noses. Their skin was burned to a color darker than their sandy hair, except at the back and temples where it had been newly clipped. They held their hats in knotted brown fingers and their clothes seemed to fit them stiffly. Mrs. Campion was a slight graying woman with small features that appeared indistinct; she didn't speak after the introductions were over but sat without moving during the interview, her gloved hands folded on her bag, her feet close together in neat shoes. Her eyes were a misty hazel behind her glasses, and when she shook hands with Philippa, her hand had been either timid or reluctant. She seemed as without substance as a shadow. Philippa had had no time to wonder. She had been too nervous, amused and angered by her ridiculous trepidation and then fiercely justifying it all in one moment. She had to have this job, to keep Eric in Maine and out of the city life that had been stifling them both.

She knew the men were not confused. They were as rugged and immovable as their island, unimpressed by her manner and accent that said she was “from away,” though she had been born in Maine. They spoke in the leisurely fashion of men who liked to talk and who took time to choose their words. They were much alike, but Foss Campion was the younger; she guessed he was in his forties. Whenever she glanced toward Mrs. Campion, there was no change in the vague eyes or the prim pale mouth. But Foss Campion always smiled, as if to reassure her, with a slow quizzical narrowing of his eyes in their net of distance wrinkles.

He rarely spoke, however. It was Asanath, the older, who was clearly in command. “Bennett's Island always had its own school, Mis' Marshall,” he explained in a deep deliberate voice. “When the war come along and folks began scattering, why, there warn't enough young ones for a school, so we shut up shop. Now there's more'n enough kids again. We could have the state help us out, which would mean having our books and schoolma'ams chosen for us. But we're islanders, a stiff-necked bunch. We figger we can live without having the state wipe our noses for us.” His mouth twitched in sudden humor, and then the smile grew upward over the craggy face.

“We don't want anything, Mis' Marshall, but to take care of ourselves without outside help or interference for the rest of our days.” He sat back in his chair.

Foss Campion smiled at her. “We choose two to pick a teacher when we need one.” His voice was smoother than his brother's; it had an undertone that was almost a caress.

“Joanna and Helmi Bennett chose Mrs. Gerrish,” Mrs. Campion said unexpectedly. “They come back talking of her college degree like it was Holy Writ—”

Under Asanath's calm gaze she ebbed into silence, her gloved fingers fidgety.

“Now, Suze,” Foss said agreeably, “let's give the devil his due. May Gerrish was all they could get at the time, and after awhile they didn't like her no better than we did.” He nodded at Philippa. “We thought, might be we could do better.”

She felt that he liked her, but she knew he was not the one to consider. Two might be picked for the delegation, but she sensed that Asanath would be the one to make the decision. Fright made her resent him. How quietly arrogant he was, watching her with those bright and calculating eyes.

“Do you have a school committee?” she asked, relieved that her words came out so clearly. “Besides yourselves? Or are you the committee?”

He shook his head. “Not liking interference,” he said, “we figger the teacher feels the same way. School's her business, so long as she knows what her business is.” He placed the tip of his fingers together and over the tent looked at her squarely. “We teach our young ones to be honest and hard-working and God-fearing, Mis' Marshall. We expect the teacher to keep a firm hand over 'em and set 'em a good example. . . . Wages is forty dollars a week and found. You'll board at my house.”

She was lightheaded with surprise, hardly able to believe it was over. Through the short silence she heard Eric calling out from the yard, “Johnny, can I ride your bike?” I can get him his own bicycle, she thought as if in a dream. Aloud she said gently, “I'm looking forward to this more than I can say. I wanted this job very much.” She couldn't keep from smiling, and she turned impulsively toward Mrs. Campion. “It means something splendid to my little boy and myself.”

Mrs. Campion said in a vague way, “If Asanath thinks you'll do—” The words trailed off. Foss Campion, getting up, seemed amused by something.

“I think it'll be mighty pleasant for all of us,” he said. “A real good change.”

“May Gerrish was a mite wearing toward the last of it,” his brother said dryly. He looked down at her from under hawklike lids.

“When can we expect you to arrive, young woman? Boat goes three times a week.”

“How about a week from today?” she said.

“
Good
. Suze'll be glad of a young female in the house.” He looked at his wife and chuckled. “Sometimes she kind of feels she needs moral support.”