Colony (27 page)

“I know what I saw,” Micah said, and I knew he did.

“What does it mean?” I called after him, not loudly.

Somehow I did not want to raise my voice.

“Means war,” floated back to me from his retreating shape.

“Means we’re right before getting in the damned war. And high time, you ask me. We’ve been letting England twist in the wind by itself long enough.”

Amy and I watched him out of sight, saying nothing. I felt fear bloom in a spot somewhere under my ribs and flow like molten lava through my arms and legs; felt my breath stop with it. I felt the change then, the great black pterodactyl shape of change and loss and never-again, off at the edge of the dark. I could almost see the bulk of it. I could almost feel its breath on my face, smell it in my nostrils.

“Oh, my God in heaven,” I whispered. “That can’t be right.

We aren’t going to get into this war. Everybody says so.”

Amy did not answer, and I did not speak again. In another half hour or so, the women of the colony began to gather on the dock, coming silently out of the black woods behind the yacht club in their cardigans and scarves, rubbing their arms against the chill of the night and looking, as we were, for lights out over the bay. We nodded to one another, and exchanged a few words, but it was by and large a silent group.

In another fifteen minutes most of us who could leave their cottages were there. I thought of Petie, out on that black water, and of Happy, sleeping in Petie’s old nursery back at Liberty, Christina Willis beside her reading her novel. I thought of Peter coming up the dock, laughing, and a built-up fire and perhaps a snifter of brandy, and deep-piled quilts on the bed upstairs. I did not mention what Micah Willis had seen that morning under the Deer Isle bridge.

Suddenly there were running lights far out on the water, one or two sets at first and then a blossoming of them, far out past Fiddle Head, like a flotilla of fireflies. In a few moments we heard their voices, far away, calling back and forth between boats, laughing. The voices sounded very young, and by some alchemy of night and water and distance, as if they were going away from us, instead of approaching.

And then, as if in a perfect vision, I saw it and knew it with absolute certainty, and nearly fell to my knees under the weight of it: we would have war, and women would gather at the edge of water, as we women were at that moment, and hear over its empty reaches the voices of their men. Voices over water, heard from the edge of water.

Voices going away.

And women watching.

We did have war, of course; Micah had been right about that, even if some of us had our doubts about Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill aboard the yacht off Deer Isle. I myself did not doubt it. Later that month we heard the two met aboard a destroyer in Placentia Bay, off Nova Scotia and very near to Campobello, to begin informal drafting of what became the Atlantic Charter. But even if we had not heard, I would not have doubted Micah Willis’s story. He seldom spoke until he knew what he was talking about, and as he said, he knew what he saw.

So when we heard, on a sleepy Northpoint Sunday just after lunch in the dining hall, the terrible news of Pearl Harbor, it was not shock that struck me white and breathless but the fear that had lain cold and heavy in my heart since that night on the dock the previous August.

“Petie,” I whispered, my nails digging into Peter’s hand. “I cannot let Petie go to war.”

“He’s only sixteen, Maude,” Peter said, staring at the fretted vent of the big Capehart. “It will be years before he can go even if he should want to.”

“But what if it goes on and on?”

“It won’t. We’ll come in fighting mad now; even old Willie Hearst and the isolationists will be behind Roosevelt. We’ll be back home inside a year.”

“No, we won’t,” Petie cried in distress from the rug in front of the hearth, where he was immersed in
Jane’s Fighting
Ships.
He had been perusing it since Germany had begun to bomb England, sure that the war would take to the seas any day. It was his fondest dream to command a fighting ship.

He flung
Jane’s
away from him.

“It’ll last till I turn eighteen; I know it will! They take eighteen-year-olds in the RAF, sometimes younger, if they don’t know…. I’ll lie about my age. I’ll enlist. I’m not going to miss this war!”

“Why don’t you just buy a gun and point it at your head and pull the trigger?” I cried, and ran from the living room and locked myself in the bathroom and cried until I could cry no more. When I came out, the living room was empty and the fire had burned low, and there was a note on the gate leg table by the front door saying that Peter and Petie had gone over to Commons to get the late news.

I sat down on the window seat and looked out at the soft gray December campus. Through the diamond panes the quadrangle looked as empty of human spoor as a lunar landscape, totally stopped and still, a place caught outside time. But lights

glowed in the mullioned windows of the old Commons building at the far side, and I knew that inside men and boys huddled together, as they had from time immemorial, drawn away from the world of their women, waiting for news of war. All over the country, all those men, all those boys, waiting…. Softly, hopelessly, I began to cry again. I did not believe that Petie would not have to fight. I did not, then, even believe that Peter would escape it. It was not the last time I wept during that war, of course, but I vowed then that I would not weep again before my husband and son. And somehow, I did not.

Peter did not come to Retreat that summer. Unlike the summer before, he did not even come for weekends; Dr.

Fleming had a second and more severe stroke the day after Pearl Harbor, and with the acceleration of the war and the scarcity of gasoline, there was no question of Peter’s driving back and forth to the colony. Petie set his heels and refused to come too; he insisted on staying at Northpoint and taking naval history, and Peter promised to keep an eye on him. If Mother Hannah had not raised such a fuss, I would have stayed too. But she was adamant and Peter backed her up, so I set off with a truculent five-year-old and an ailing old autocrat, now in a wheelchair, on the grinding, swaying Maine Central to Ellsworth. From there we finally found a taxi that would take us as far as Blue Hill, and once there I quite simply bribed the lone taxi driver to bring us the last leg to Retreat. It was after dark when we bumped down the lane to Liberty, and my heart sank into my stomach. Not a single window in any of the cottages we passed showed a light; not an automobile was to be seen in driveways or garages. We might as well have landed, we three ill-assorted and iron-bonded women, on Uranus.

“Are we the only ones here? Where is everyone?”

Mother Hannah said querulously from the back seat, echoing my own swallowed dread.

“I want to go home,” Happy whined ominously.

“Ain’t many folks here, truth be known,” the taxi driver said, I thought happily. “But it’s mostly the blackout, y’see.

Can’t light your lights without you have blackout curtains.

Patrol’ll get you sure. Up and down these lanes ever’ six hours, they are, checkin’ on lights. Good thing, too. U-boats all up and down this coast, they say. Been seen off Mount Desert and Stonington, and some says they come in under the water, all the way up Eggemoggin Reach from French-men’s Bay to right off your cape here, for a little look-around.

Quiet as death, they say, like sharks; never know they’re there. Main convoy route’s past Mount Desert. Yup. Heard you folks had you a spy landin’ right down there on your yacht club beach month or two ago. No tellin’ where else they’ll be poppin’ up. Must know all the summer men are off fightin’ the war and you women are all that’s left down here. Don’t know why you come, truth be known.”

I was shaking with rage and fear as I paid him and struggled to extricate Mother Hannah and her wheelchair from the taxi. At the word “spy” Happy had begun to cry.

She was convinced that Adolf Hitler was going to come over and personally dispatch her, and she knew in her dark, quick little soul that spies were his outriders. When I did not move to comfort her the weeping rose to a wail.

“Hope you’ve got some stores laid in,” our driver said, leaning out his window. “Heard they’ve got no milk a’tall anywhere about, and no eggs or meat neither. Precious few vegetables, too, and flour’s long gone. Lobsters and fish too; lobstermen all gone to war, like as not. Might be some clams, though, if you care to dig.”

I turned on him furiously.

“Do you think it’s funny to scare three lone women out of their wits? Does it make you feel better?”

“Didn’t feel bad to begin with,” he said cheerfully, and gunned his lightless taxi back up the lane.

“Get that man’s license number and contact his employer immediately, Maude,” Mother Hannah huffed. “I will not be spoken to that way, especially by a native.”

“I want to go home!” bellowed Happy.

“Both of you shut up this instant,” I hissed between clenched teeth, and to my surprise they did, and for the first time in any of our lives we went into a cottage that was cold and completely dark. Peter must have forgotten to write Christina Willis, who always opened Liberty before we arrived and had a fire burning, and the icebox stocked with staples, and something simmering wonderfully on the stove.

“If either one of you says one word, I will walk away from here and leave you,” I said, tears trembling in my voice, and I felt in the dark, thick air the nods of both their heads. Shame flooded over my loneliness and fear, and I groped my way to the old writing desk on the sun porch and felt in its top drawer for the matches that always rested there in their little tin. I used nearly all of them lighting the hurricane lamps and candles, but finally we had small pools of shimmering yellow light in the airless gloom, and the living room, its furniture shrouded in white sheets, leaped into life. I whipped the sheets off the sofa in front of the fireplace, and sat Happy and Mother Hannah down on it, and lit some reasonably dry birch logs that had been mercifully left in the fireplace, and looked at my charges. They looked back at me, silenced for the moment, eyes wide and waiting for deliverance.

I know who I want, I thought clearly and fervently. I want Micah.

And as if I had rubbed a lamp, I heard the unmistakable growl of his truck in the lane, and its tires

crunching onto the driveway gravel, and his quick, soft steps up the walk. In a moment the front door eased open and he was there.

He was dressed in a dark fisherman’s sweater, dark pants, and boots, and his face was smeared with something that looked like a minstrel’s blackface. In all that darkness his eyes and teeth flashed bright.

“Evening, ladies,” he said. “Thought it might be you when I saw the Blue Hill taxi go past. Couldn’t think who else might be…determined enough to come up here, way things are.”

“You mean stubborn, don’t you?” I said, and then felt my eyes fill and my mouth contort treacherously. “Oh, Micah,”

I said simply, when I knew I would not cry. “I am truly very glad to see you.”

“Well, I’ll have to ask you to pardon the darky makeup,”

he said. “I’m the official patrol for this part of the cape, and it keeps my ugly face from shining out and startling the Nazis.”

Then, seeing Happy’s face, he smiled, and the teeth flashed again. “Figure of speech, dear. No Nazis in these parts, not with me and Bruno on the job. I’ll bring him in to meet you in a bit, big old Labrador, he is, not good for anything but riding around in my truck looking official. But he’d scare the devil himself, with those big yellow eyes. You like dogs?”

“Yes,” Happy said, staring at him in fascination. “I have a Scottie named Fala. He couldn’t come.”

“Fala, hmmm? Well, in good company, he is. Tell you what. Why can’t Bruno be your part-time friend till you get back home to Fala? Would you like that?”

She smiled, the sudden, sweet smile that had spawned her nickname. I hadn’t seen much of it lately.

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. Then, turning to me, “Got some stuff in the truck Tina sent,” he said. “Some fish chowder, and a blueberry pie, and molasses doughnuts.

And a dozen eggs from her own hens, if you won’t tell anybody. We’re not supposed to have them. She’ll come in the morning and turn the place out, and meanwhile I’ll build up the fires in your bedrooms and bring you in some wood.

Should be some left in the wood house.”

“Micah, I can’t begin to…thank you,” I said weakly. “I didn’t realize things were so bad up here until the taxi driver told us about the shortages. And of course the famous U-boats and the spies. We won’t lean on you after tonight, I promise. Peter bought an old car last fall and left it in the wood house, so I’ll have that to drive for absolute necessities, and I’ve got my ration cards and things; we’ll manage fine.”

“Well, about that car,” he said. “I’m afraid it isn’t in the wood house. Sheriff Perkins commandeered it in April for his patrol; it does the Brooksville to Castine run every night.

I do the shore and the village. Wouldn’t do you any good anyway. Only gas available is for official vehicles. I can pick up some things for you from time to time, and you can walk to the general store. And I brought Caleb’s bicycle for you; it’s in the truck. We’ll see you have what you need to live, but it isn’t going to be much pleasure, I’m afraid. You really shouldn’t be up here by yourself.”

“Micah Willis, you tell the sheriff to return my vehicle immediately or I will have the law on him,” Mother Hannah said coldly, from amid her blankets. “How dare he confiscate it without my permission? And as for being up here, I have never missed a summer in Retreat in my life, and I shall not start now.”

“No, ma’am,” Micah said, looking at her. “I don’t expect you will, at that. But begging your pardon, may I point out that Sheriff Perkins
is
the law?”

He smiled at her, a bandit’s smile. And to my great surprise she smiled back.

“In that case, Micah, you may assist me to my

room,” she said, holding out her arm, and he came forward and took it and helped her to her feet. I watched as he bore her out of the living room as if he were taking her in to a state dinner and then turned to my yawning daughter.