Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (17 page)

Until when another ball was thrown out from behind the backstop, Deacon Hurd called back,"How many more you got in there?"

"That's the last one."

"You lost twelve balls on us," said the not-chuckling Deacon Hurd.

"I won't lose this one," answered Turner, and he swung his bat, and put his leg out, and waited for the pitch from Willis, still and quiet.

Willis roughed up the ball again. He stepped off the mound for a moment, turned and motioned his center fielder to go out some more, and waved his left and right fielders out against the lines. By now the whole field was in a dusky shadow and the sunbeams were level and tree-high above them. When Willis began his windup, Turner couldn't see his face at all. But the ball, the ball was as big as the moon, floating up into the light, then back down into the shadow, spinning in a way that didn't matter, and ready to cozy up to his bat and then streak on out.

And so the ball came down, down, spinning, spinning, and Turner gripped his bat, brought his front leg in ... and then stepped back from the plate just as the ball dropped, smacked the granite, leaped up, and then rolled to his feet.

"Strike three!" hollered Deacon Hurd.

For a moment, no one else said anything. Then Turner heard his father call out, and Willis's friends, and probably most every other soul in Phippsburg, telling him that he should have swung, that he should have straightened his swing out and hit the ball, that he should have homered. Straw hats were thrown on the ground, and heads were shaken.

The only one who said nothing was Willis. The only one. When Turner picked up the ball and threw it to him, Willis caught it and turned his face so that the shadow was not so dark—and he saw that Willis was smiling.

Turner did not play the rest of the game, which was just as well, folks figured, since they were down to their last baseball. He went back to the parsonage with his mother, walking a lit— tie ahead of her. They didn't talk all the way up to the front steps, where they both paused at the top and turned to looked across at the church—now only the steeple was quickened by the light—and then on down Parker Head. Turner shivered in the shadows, but he wasn't ready to go in yet, not while the light was still on the steeple, so he sat down on the stoop to watch it fade, and his mother stood above him and laid her hand on his head, playing with his hair.

"You know, Turner," she said quietly, "you may have embarrassed your father."

Turner considered that for a moment. "Maybe," he said finally.

"Not that I'm so against it—embarrassing your father, I mean. It's good for ministers to be embarrassed now and again. Helps them to remember who they are."

"I'm not sure the Reverend Buckminster would agree," said Turner.

"Of course he wouldn't. That's when he needs it most."

The light on the steeple began to pink. Malaga, Turner thought, would already be in deep shadow, lying low in the water as it did. He had never been there in the dark, but he imagined it now, him standing on the shore and making out the waves only when they broke. Up above, the sky would be spangled, and he could sit side by side with Lizzie and watch the stars fall out of their places in sudden shrieks of light. The gulls would be quiet. The light from Lizzie's house would throw a yellow column onto the sand. And they would move closer together when the sea breeze got into mischief.

That's how it would be at night on Malaga Island.

The light began to disappear by the far end of Parker Head. The houses were still mostly dark, everyone being down to Thayer's haymeadow playing with their last baseball. Soon they would come home in groups, talking quietly beneath the naked maples, the striped blankets they had used to sit on now wrapped around their shoulders. The lights would come on and throw their columns across from one house to another, and the coal stoves would be stoked against the coming cold of the fall night as the town settled into evening.

That's how it would be at night on Parker Head, where folks knew that, come winter, their houses would still be on Parker Head, not floating down the New Meadows.

Turner wondered what it would be like to float down the New Meadows with his house on a raft, floating to where he did not know. Suddenly, he wasn't so sure about lighting out for the Territories. Suddenly, he wondered if having a house wrapped around him wasn't something he wanted a whole lot more.

It was sure enough what Lizzie Bright wanted.

Turner heard the first group coming back from the game. His mother took her hand from his head and backed up a bit into the darkness of the porch. "Don't stay out too much longer," she said. "It gets cold so quickly here."Turner nodded, listening to her as she closed the door on the town and disappeared into the house. The group passed, did not wave to him as it went on down Parker Head, hushed.

Turner wondered what Darwin might have said about the evolutionary advantages of being silent. He figured they might be considerable. He figured he might give it a try the next time he met Willis Hurd.

Four more groups came by, one after another, laughing as they passed by the parsonage. The last group held Reverend Buckminster, who separated from them and came up the stairs, then went by Turner silently into the house. The purple darkness had rolled farther and farther up Parker Head, rolling in front of it thin, wispy lines of silken fog that hovered chest high over the ground, like ribbons waiting for racers to part them.

When Parker Head quieted and it seemed that there would be no more laughing groups up from the haymeadow, Turner jumped off the stoop and strode with giant strides down to the street, breaking one ribbon after another, leaving them swirling and re-forming behind him, leaving his house deeper and deeper in the purple night, and coming finally to the darkened, empty house of Mrs. Hurd—and seeing someone standing on her porch. He stepped closer, and closer still, until he was close enough to see who it was who stood there.

It was Willis. He was painting the shutters yellow.

Turner walked up the porch steps. "Willis, it's dark as all get out. What are you doing?"

Willis spun around at the sound of Turner's voice, but then he turned back to the painting. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

"Painting shutters."

"Gee, you know how to hit a baseball and you're smart, too.

"You're painting in the dark."

"I'm painting in the dark."

"Because you don't want your father to know."

"I told you you were smart."

"It's for your grandmother."

Willis did not answer. He went on with his painting, covering the green shutters with sunlight yellow.

"You have another brush?" asked Turner.

Willis stopped painting. "Why didn't you hit that last pitch? You could have hit any one of those twice as far as the center fielder, but you didn't. Not even the last one. So why didn't you hit it?"

"Because everyone expects green shutters."

Willis stared at him. He stared at him for a long time. "There's another brush in the pail in that corner. There by the strawberry red. Are you fast?"

"Not especially."

"That's all right," said Willis. "You can hit a baseball so high that God can catch it without stooping. You don't have to be fast at painting shutters."

Turner took the brush and dipped it in the paint can. He moved beside Willis, painting in the dark. Heaven only knew what the shutters would look like come morning. But they would be yellow again. Just as Mrs. Hurd had kept them.

He began to paint, while behind him the stars glittered for all they were worth—which was considerable—and every single one of them held its place in this night's sky without falling. Every single one.

A round and golden moon rolled low along the horizon for the next few days, too huge and weighty to rise up any higher into the sky. When it finally began to shed its weight and loft higher, it lost its golden hue, and the light became grayer. The air began to frost every night, and the stars to glitter more coldly, and so October came upon Phippsburg and Malaga Island. The cold snapped the tethers of the last leaves, and they fell straight down onto Phippsburg's roads and over the gravesites of Malaga. Even the pine trees down to Thayer's haymeadow put on their darker green and hunched their branches closer as the mornings came in colder and colder. It would not have surprised anyone to see the first flakes of snow.

Turner ran to the shore every day now, the
forbidden
having been silently lifted—or at least not imposed. From the granite ledges he could count twenty, sometimes more, plumes of white woodsmoke rising from the houses on the island, but each time he went, there seemed to be fewer, though the days grew colder. Slowly, little by little, souls were drifting away from the island, their own tethers snapped. And the houses, left soulless, died—windows glassless, doors hanging on single hinges, some of the clapboard already pruned.

Usually, Lizzie would be watching for him. He would wave from the top of the ledges with both his hands over his head, and she would run down to the dory, push off, and be across by the time he had climbed down. Once over on Malaga, they would go up to her house to see her granddaddy—he was always propped up on his elbows and waiting for Turner—and then they would go down to the shore until the sea breeze turned too cold for them to sit by the waves. They'd walk across the island, through the quiet green cemetery, past the foundation of the Tripp house, and then around the whole island, hardly talking, hardly needing to. Everything was as quiet as quiet could be.

If Lizzie wasn't there waiting for him by the shore, Turner would figure her granddaddy needed her, and he would wait, hoping she might come around the turn. If she didn't, he would walk home with his coat wrapped about him, a tang of salt in his mouth.

Back at First Congregational, folks were quiet around Turner, though Deacon Hurd had stopped him outside church the Sunday after the game. "Still can't get a hit off my Willis's pitching, can you, Turner?" He had laughed, then stopped suddenly and stared at Turner. "What's that on the tip of your ear, boy?"

"On the tip of my ear?"

"Looks like yellow paint. Have you been painting anything yellow the last few days?"

"Nothing around my house needs painting," Turner said, which was not a lie at all—sort of.

"Then what's that on your ear?"

"It's an old family disease that keeps coming back, no matter what I do."

"Old family disease?"

"My grandfather got it from missionary work. Somewhere in the Galápagos Islands."

That was as out loud as an out-loud lie could be, but it was such a good one that Turner couldn't feel too bad about using it. Especially with Deacon Hurd.

"In the Galápagos, my grandfather shouted, 'Unclean, unclean,' whenever someone came near him."

Deacon Hurd backed away when Turner held out his hand to shake.

"An old family disease?" said Turner's father after the evening service. "You told Deacon Hurd that your grandfather gave you an old family disease?"

"Well, that he might have gotten sick once while doing missionary work."

"Your grandfather did missionary work in Iceland. I don't think people in Iceland call out,'Unclean, unclean!'And how did you get yellow paint on the tip of your ear? No. I don't want to know."

Turner obliged him.

The next Sunday after services, Willis Hurd nodded to Turner as he filed out with the rest of the congregation to shake Reverend Buckminster's hand. (No one was shaking Turner's hand.) "Next time keep your ears out of the paint," said Willis, and went on to the minister. Turner decided he probably didn't hate Willis so much anymore.

Turner was still playing the organ for Mrs. Cobb on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and hoping that Lizzie would come. He and Mrs. Cobb waited together by the back door for her. Usually, she wasn't there, but every now and again she'd run across the backyard and up the stairs, and Mrs. Cobb would sniff and say something about being kept waiting for the only pleasure she had left to her. Then they'd process down the hall and into the parlor, and Mrs. Cobb would sit in her chair, Turner at the stool, and Lizzie on the floor against the horsehair chair, and Turner would begin.

Mrs. Cobb had taken to "Swell the Anthem, Raise the Song," and since it had nothing in it about dying, Turner played it almost every time. All six verses. And Mrs. Cobb would sing along. All six verses. Her silvery voice, dry with gray age, warbled a bit and missed more high notes than it hit. But Turner simply played more loudly to help her out.

She never failed to remind Turner that he was to listen for her last words, and that the paper and pen were atop the organ. She was ready to go whenever the good Lord called her, she said, and so Turner—and Lizzie, too, if she was there—had best be prepared for the worst. Any day. Any hour. Any moment.

Turner tried to look resolute whenever she said this. Lizzie mostly looked panicked—which pleased Mrs. Cobb no end. She would cough through the playing to remind them of the potential of the moment, and shake her head at the frailty of human flesh.

As October turned whiter and colder, Mrs. Cobb turned whiter and colder, too. Walking from the back door to the parlor was more a shuffle and less a spurt, and her singing grew more and more patchy—a line here and a line there, but never a full verse anymore. Her hands lay on top of the armrests as if they needed a place to sit after a lifetime of clenching, and in fact, she seemed to be settling into stillness, quietly and crankily.

The last Sunday in October, she waited in the parlor for Lizzie, too shaky to stand in the cold. She said nothing when Lizzie and Turner came in. She did not pick up the afghan that had fallen from her knees. Turner wondered if she might even fall asleep—so he played soft and low.

"Are hymns always so slow?" she asked after the third one.

Turner looked back. "Not always."

"And so soft? Good Lord, if you're going to play the hymn, Turner Buckminster, play the hymn!"

So he played more quickly, and more loudly, Lizzie grinning the whole time, until Mrs. Cobb told him that he was playing too quickly and too loudly. "You'd think a minister's son would know how to play a hymn with reverence. Wouldn't you think so, girl?"