Dark Nantucket Noon (11 page)

“Hello, Jupiter,” said Kitty.

They turned and started after Homer, who was walking up to the door, shouting for Alden. The Doves' house was a low one-story shingled structure surrounded by sheds and outbuildings. There was Alden, throwing open the door, hailing them all inside. He was a big man, not as tall as Homer but broader, with a large nose and curly black hair and brown eyes snapping like firecrackers. He complained loudly when Homer introduced Kitty. “Paper said she was voluptuous. She's not voluptuous, she's just fat. Just a little fat girl. Well, I must say I'm disappointed.”

An empty place inside Kitty suddenly filled with air, and she laughed.

“Fat?” said Homer, looking at Kitty. “Well, maybe you're right. Okay, then, Alice, don't give her anything to eat. But I'm a starving man. Where's that bucket of soup you promised me?”

Silently Alice lit the gas burner under a big dented pot, while Alden let in a stream of barking dogs and a couple of cats with large donging bells around their necks. Kitty studied Alice's back. If that face had not opened up a crack a moment ago and let out that streak of light, she would have seemed angry now, and cold. But Kitty guessed it was the way she always looked. “Shall I take these things off the table?” said Kitty.

“Just shove them down to the other end,” said Alice.

There were books and notebooks and charts, a dead bird in a shoebox, a heavy marble paperweight with the initials AD, a china dog with a cactus for a tail. “What kind of bird is it?” said Kitty, looking in the shoebox.

Alice's face opened up, transformed once again. “It's just a catbird. It flew against the window. But it's banded, do you see? It was one of Mrs. Lord's. She banded it eight years ago. That's a record.” Alice began ladling out soup, and they all sat down.

“Were you out scalloping this morning, Alden?” said Homer.

“Oh, sure. End of the season, though. Scallops getting scarce. Lucky to get three bags a day, even though you're allowed six. Of course the Japanese moss doesn't help. Stuff that grows on them, suffocates 'em.” And then from Japanese moss Alden went on to the turpentine beetle that was endangering the pine trees. His voice was high-pitched and energetic. And Alice told about seeing a dead deer, killed by a hunter out of season and abandoned to the hawks and crows.

Homer and Kitty ate her split pea soup hungrily, and had seconds and thirds, while Alice talked of mute swans and hares, of bats and turtles, of scaups and goldeneyes, of the habits of fiddler crabs. She kept getting up to run her fingers over the map of the island that was mounted on the wall, or to reach for pamphlets or books that were piled on chairs and all along the mantelpiece, books by horticulturists and ornithologists, books about Nantucket, about the life of the seashore. Homer had still another bowl of soup, and glanced at Kitty, smiling, as if to say,
You see.

Kitty sat back, relaxed, full of soup, a little sleepy, only half listening, admiring the room they were sitting in. Two small chambers had been made into one large one, and there were Lally columns supporting the dividing beam. The room was dark with ancient wallpaper. One end of it was the kitchen, with an enormous refrigerator standing on curving legs. An old grandmother dog lay asleep in a collapsed upholstered chair beside the fireplace. The walls were crowded with glass-fronted bookcases full of Indian artifacts, seaweed mounted on sheets of wrinkled paper, shells, rocks, coral, birds on wooden stands with plastic bags tied over them, a huge dusty egg. There were seedlings in flats in front of a window and a glass jar gushing with forsythia, blooming ahead of its time indoors. A brilliantly lit toilet was visible from the table, and a bathtub and a pink bathmat. Two small bedrooms opened on either side of the bathroom. One bed had been made up, the other was a sea of tumbled blankets (Homer's, decided Kitty).

Homer was pushing his bowl away at last, rapping his fist on one of the books. “I don't know why you people give a damn what happens to your island anyhow,” he said. “The sea's going to wash the whole thing away in a couple thousand years. That's what this book says.”

Alice turned a fierce face upon him. “But don't you see? That makes it all the more—”

Homer patted her arm and laughed at her. “There, there, now, Alice. I know, I know.”

“How big is this farm of yours, Mr. Dove?” said Kitty.

“Thanks for the compliment,” said Alden. “It isn't much of a farm. All we raise around here is a bunch of good-for-nothing animals, crippled swans and so forth. We've just got a couple of acres, running down to the road. All the rest of the land around here belongs to somebody else.”

“But it's safe now, isn't it?” said Kitty. “It will stay just woods and fields, won't it? I mean, with this new town bylaw?”

Alice picked up the soup plates.

“It's that Mr. Holworthy,” she said, shaking her head. “He's going to try to get the superior court to upset the bylaw, so he can sell his lovely land to that terrible man Mr. Flakeley.”

“I met Mr. Flakeley,” said Kitty. “He was the agent for my house. He was really angry about the new law.”

“It's not Flakeley and Holworthy I'm worried about,” said Alden. “After all, Flakeley's been here all his life. He has some feeling for the island. And he's right out in the open, blundering around. If he's going to do something stupid he lets everybody know ahead of time by putting his big foot in his mouth, and then we can all get together and stop him. It's that other real estate agent. She's the one that worries me. That Wilhelmina Magee. She's crafty. All sweetness and light, that's what she is, and then,
wham!
you discover what she's been up to when it's too late. That salt marsh she bought at Monomoy. Said she wanted to keep it for the wildlife, and before you know it she had it all dredged out. That's against the Wetlands Act, but somehow or other she got around one of our congressmen, and now she has a marina in there and a big swimming pool and a lot of cottages. And she's after the old Biddle place at Quidnet too, there on S'achacha Pond.”

“Biddle?” said Kitty. “That's not the old man who owns my house?”

“That's the one. Obed Biddle. He owns that land at Quidnet on the east side of the island and he's living there right now with his daughter. Mrs. Magee keeps hovering around the place like a vulture, waiting for him to die. Keeps sending in surveyors who pretend they're just fishing. Fortunately the old fella still seems to have a lot of spark, goes to Friends Meeting and speaks up, works at the Whaling Museum some of the time. Plenty of life in the old geezer yet, thank goodness.”

“Look here, you two,” said Homer. “Can you tell me how many people stood to gain by keeping things the way they were before? How many of them might have thought of Helen Green as an enemy to their own personal interests?”

Alden's face was red. “Who knows?” he said. “There's plenty of black hearts in that crowd, if you ask me. I hate them. I hate their grasping money-grubbing souls. They'd betray you. They'd betray everything they pretend to stand for.”

Alice had turned around from the sink to look at Alden, her eyes flashing her agreement. They were thinking of someone real, Kitty could tell.

“What about Richard and Letty Roper?” Homer asked. “Were they like that? I understand they voted against the bylaw.”

Alice turned back to the sink, and Alden shook his head. “Oh, no, they're not like that. They're just very much mistaken. They keep saying Nantucketers should trust each other to have the best interests of the island at heart, that it shouldn't take a law to make them do what was right. And of course the Ropers won't try to sell their land, I suppose. But what about the children they'll have someday? Their kids might do anything with the property thirty or forty years from now. Oh, we've argued back and forth with them about it, but we never get anywhere.”

“If they feel as public-spirited about their land as they say they do,” said Homer, “why don't they do what Helen Green did with hers, and give it to some kind of conservation organization?”

Alden shrugged his shoulders and said nothing, and then Homer began talking about evil. “There are two kinds,” he said. “And the worst kind isn't black hearts. It's a failure of the imagination. Blandness and blindness. That's the horror of it. It's some upright Christian soul, some bumbling bureaucrat who refuses to see the truth, who washes his dainty hands of the poverty and misery around him, who signs his name routinely to some damnable bland blind piece of paper, ten copies, please, Miss Blah. That's the worst kind.”

There was a pause. Then Alden spoke up softly. “But what about crimes of violence?” he said. “Like murder. Premeditated murder. That's not bland and blind.”

He was not looking at Kitty, but she flushed just the same, and felt the hollow place in her chest draining empty again.

“Well, of course there is such a thing as a crime of passion,” said Homer. “That's something else again.”

“Passion?” said Alice Dove dreamily. Kitty looked up. Alice was standing at the window, looking out. The word “passion” had sounded so strange, coming out of her prim expressionless face.

“Passion,” said Homer. “Crimes of passion. Premeditated as well as not. After all, what is that great endless tormented journey of Ahab's but his long-premeditated crime of passion? ‘I'll chase him around Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway maelstrom, and round perdition's flame before I give him up,' he said, and then he carried a whole ship full of men along with him to doom and death and destruction. Now I admit that may not be your ordinary garden-variety crime of passion, but it's typical of its single-minded all-encompassing overwhelming power.”

They're thinking of me
, said Kitty to herself.
They think I was insane with some fit of passion like that.

And then suddenly the discussion was over. “Quick, quick,” said Alice, “come outside. Mute swans. Right over the house.” She was pushing Kitty out of her chair, they were all getting up and hurrying out, looking at the sky. “There, there,” said Alice, pointing up over her head. “Hush, hush now, keep quiet. Listen.”

There they were. Kitty saw them, two great white birds, pumping strongly over the roof of the house. Their long necks were extended, their black legs were folded under them, the afternoon sun was turning their bellies gold. Then she heard the sound of their wings, a hushed feathery beating of the air, a rhythmic soft sound,
sssshhhh, sssshhhh, sssshhhh.

And then Alice began to talk, her eyes on the tops of the trees where the swans had disappeared. “That's what I mean, you see. The swans have rights. But they can't talk, they're mute. I think a lot about the fact that they're mute swans, and what it means to be mute.” Alice's hatchet face was alight, her brown eyes were shot with glints of gold. “Those Flakeleys and Holworthys, that Mrs. Magee, they don't care about things like that. They don't see that the
land
has rights. Who will speak for the land? For the bearberry and the pitch pines and the scrub oak? For the dunes and the shore birds? For the wild swans? They're property owners too, and much more rightfully than the people who own those terrible pieces of paper that say,
mine, mine, mine.
Don't you see?”

Homer clapped her on the shoulder. “Attagirl, Alice,” he said. “Talk about passion: that's what I call passion. Alden, why don't you get Alice over there in Barnstable to argue before the superior court? You don't need legal advice. You don't need Helen Green. An ounce of Alice's passion is worth a thousand pounds of rational argument and wherefores and whereases. Take it from me.”

“Well, look here, Homer,” said Alden, “how about you? If the thing does go to the superior court, would you help us out? Even with an enthusiast like my wife, we're going to need somebody who knows the ropes. How about it?”

Homer laughed and shook his head. “No, no, I'm not doing that kind of thing anymore. Oh, a little matter of getting a knife murderess off the hook, I'll do that in my spare time, but holy cow, I'm supposed to be a Melville scholar. Except, goddamnit, I haven't done anything about that wretched article of mine for a week. Women go around stabbing people, keep you running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” Homer smiled seraphically at Kitty. “How you doing, honeybunch? Want me to take you to the grocery store? I'll punch all those people in the nose.”

Kitty smiled sleepily and shook her head. “No, thanks anyway, Homer. I'll just go on home. I'm going to take a nap first and then I'll go out and get some groceries by myself. They won't bother me, those people. Not this time.”

Kitty's bedroom was at the top of the steep stairs in Mr. Biddle's house. She dragged herself up to the second floor and crawled between her clean sheets with all her clothes on and fell instantly asleep.

And then it was her library of blank books all over again. But this time the books had become great organic growths with strange covers of animal skin and horn. They were mossy volumes crumbling at the edges into humus and decayed vegetation, encrusted with fungi, leaning up against one another on shelves that were lined with moss and entwined with vines and hung with twisting green metallic snakes. And the rows of shelves were open to the sky above, and the floor beneath her feet was grass, and when her hand reached out and lifted one of the volumes down, she saw that it was written in hieroglyphs, the trails of snails and the chitinous chalky serpentine patterns of sea worms and the channels and runways of ants. And the paper was manufactured by wasps and hornets, or it was birch bark and green leaves bound together. Into the dim distance the bookshelves led, blue with moisture, hazy with verdure, alive with the screams and cries of the birds that were dipping and soaring among the earth-smelling corridors.