Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (7 page)

The intoning went on, its bulk bloating and bloating so that Turner thought the very ceiling might be pushed up. It went on, pressing on his eardrums. It went on, threatening the very roof. It went on, until the last thing Turner thought could ever happen—the very last thing—happened.

"Buckminster, stop it!"

It took Turner a moment to figure out who had just spoken. He saw that his mother had stood, that she had one hand against her face, another clenched into the checks of her apron. Since there was no one in the room but the three of them, it had to have been her. But that couldn't be.

Turner looked at his father, who was coming to just about the same conclusion.

"Turner," his mother said quietly, "go upstairs and change into something you can hit a baseball in. And I'll stop by Mrs. Cobb's this afternoon."

Turner stood.

"Go on now," she said tightly.

He wondered what might happen as soon as he left the dining room, and he was more than a little tempted to dawdle. But his father's face—which no longer looked as if it were facing only the seraphim—was convincing enough. And the prospect of wearing something that had not been made for church was too good for him to wait any longer, so he sprinted upstairs.

When he came back down, he was in a shirt and trousers he had found lying at the foot of his bed, a shirt and trousers that would never have marked him as a minister's son. After just a single stealthy moment of listening at the closed dining room doors—there was absolute silence—he leaped out into the free air, and headed straight for the haymeadow, the memory of the driftwood in his hands.

But a storm was boiling up in more places than in his dining room. Dinner had taken long enough for thickened thunderheads to swell off the coast. Turner felt the heavy air they dropped, heard their rumbling like the distant chariots of the Assyrians. He ran to the shore to see them come in.

Before he reached the haymeadow, the first big raindrops were plopping down and exploding in the yellow dust. They fell sudden and cold on his back. The wind bucked up, shifted once, and then again, and set the buoys out in the Kennebec bowing toward him. When Turner looked over the river, he saw an iron sheet of rain coming toward him, lit up from behind through a rip in the dark purple of the clouds.

He thought suddenly of Lizzie on the shore and flung out his arms and opened his mouth as the sheet came upon him. If Mrs. Cobb had seen him just then, she would have thought he was grinning like a loon and would have scampered off to tell the new minister that his son hadn't the sense God had given him, that he was standing out in the middle of the storm with his arms spread out and his mouth open. And she would have been right—about him grinning like a loon.

T
HE
rain passed Turner, swept across Thayer's haymeadow, charged up Parker Head, and swirled around First Congregational, ripping off some of the still-green maple leaves and sending them in whirling cones against Mrs. Cobb's grandfather's fence and up onto Mrs. Hurd's porch. By the time Turner had started to feel the chill of it, the rain had already run down through the cedars, over the shore, and across the New Meadows, and had begun to scatter on Malaga Island, where Lizzie was just running into her house before it soaked her.

It rained all night, and Turner up in Phippsburg and Lizzie down on Malaga Island lay in their beds in the deep dark, their arms up behind their heads, listening to the play of the drops on their roofs. The drops played long after Turner and Lizzie had fallen asleep, and they played while Turner's mother and father lay still and unmoving in the dark, and they played while Lizzie's granddaddy sat quietly at his door, an unlit pipe in his mouth. They played across the coast all through the night, until the soft new day shrugged itself awake, tried on amethyst and lavender for a while, and finally decided on a pale yellow.

The day was brighter by the time Turner finished his breakfast, and a whole lot brighter when he ran out of the house, his bat over his shoulder, his glove slung onto it, and the other tossing a baseball up and around, behind his back and over his head. He left in a shirt that he had hung carefully up to dry the night before, that was not white, and that Mrs. Cobb probably would not approve of It surprised him that he felt a little bad that his father would not approve, either—but not so bad that he would change it. Still, he hurried by Mrs. Cobb's, trusting that maybe the Lord would get things right today and she wouldn't be out by her grandfather's fence.

She wasn't out. But Mrs. Hurd was, sweeping the leaves off her porch. When she saw Turner, she waved at him with a merry hand. She was still dressed all in white, her hair tied tightly into a bun. Turner wondered if she had ever looked any other way. Maybe God had created her just like this, plunking her down old and white and with her hair tied back, without any preliminaries at all.

He waved back at her. "Morning, Mrs. Hurd."

"Morning, Turner III. Did you enjoy the rain last night?" Yes, ma am.

"Me, too. Did you go out in it?"

"Yes, ma'am, I did."

Mrs. Hurd leaned over her porch rail."Me, too." She smiled like a conspirator. "You know why you got whipped, don't your?"

"Ma'am?"

"You know why you got whipped?"

"Whipped?"

"You were supposed to hit that boy in the eye."

Turner went to the bottom of her steps. "I thought I got whipped because I shouldn't have been fighting."

Mrs. Hurd sighed a mighty sigh. "Don't be such a Christian. You got whipped because you got only the first part right—when you're fighting someone bigger than you are, you've got to break his nose first, and you did that just fine. But then there's the second part. You have to figure he's going to be mad, and so you have to hit him in the right eye to shut it. After that you're even."

Turner stood, stunned. Mrs. Hurd went back to her sweeping. "Don't you know about these things, Turner III?"

"I'm sort of surprised that you do, Mrs. Hurd."

She smiled, a smile as beautiful as the yellow day, and came down the steps, leaving her broom against a post. "What a lovely thing to say," she told him, and she reached up and kissed him lightly on his cheek. "But remember"—she balled her right hand into a fist—"first to the nose, like this, and then a left up to the eye, like that."

"First to the nose, then to the eye." Turner was smiling, too.

"Now go on your way. The day's too bright to spend it fighting with an old lady."

He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

"And it won't do to go courting an old lady, either."

"I'm not courting you,"Turner said. "I just figure it would be smart to stay on your good side if I don't want to get my nose broken and my right eye shut."

"You learn quickly, Turner III. Go on now."

He went on now.

It had been dry too long for even an all-night rain to leave the dirt of Parker Head muddy, and Turner ran down the road and up into the woods. By the time he began to clamber down the ledges, he was wet through with the rain the branches had swiped at him, and he did not care, not wearing a shirt a minister's boy would have to be particular about. The day was bright and the sea blue and the salt air clear. It was all so perfect that Turner was hardly surprised when he reached the shore and found Lizzie was waiting for him, her dory pulled up by the chin onto the rocks and bucking a bit with the tide.

He tossed her the ball, and she caught it with one hand. "No more rocks!" he called.

"I don't know," Lizzie said. "You were getting on with rocks. You think you can hit something like this?"

"I think I can hit something like that." He tossed her his glove. She caught it and held it like a dream that had dropped right out of the bright blue sky into her outstretched hand. She tossed the ball back to him and then, slowly, as if it were a ceremony, she put the glove over her hand. She flexed it, held it up over her face and smelled it, then held it out again. She punched her right hand into it.

"Throw me the ball," she said. And he did. "Harder," she said, throwing it back. "Harder still," she called. At first she caught the ball down in the palm, but soon she had the trick of catching it up in the webbing, and she began to giggle with the pleasure of it, catching the ball and then whipping around and throwing it back to Turner. "You know," she said, "I never caught with one of these before." And Turner, watching the smooth flow of her arms and hands, the fine long fingers that twirled the ball just before they released it, the eyes that in the clear air shone with all the brightness of the day, thought that maybe he wouldn't need to light out for the Territories after all.

They never did use the bat. All Lizzie wanted to do was to catch the ball, for him to throw it harder, or higher, or off to her left, or off to her right, and she would snatch it out of the air, sometimes even leaning out over the water, and she would look as happy as the yellow-robed day, and she'd toss the ball back and flex the glove.

When they had thrown the ball back and forth about a million times, they sat down together on the stones, the glove between them, watching the ripples the tide was sending closer and closer in, watching it slurp up the seaweed beds and start to cover...

"The mudflats," Lizzie said. "I promised my granddaddy I'd dig up clams enough."

They threw the bat and ball and glove up above the tide line, and while Lizzie ran to the dory for her rake and bucket, Turner took off his shoes, rolled up his trousers, pulled up his sleeves, and began looking for a place to dig. He picked out a hole that the retreating ripples left bubbling, straddled it, and set to digging with his hands. By the time Lizzie was back, he had a pile of muddy sand but had lost track of where a clam might be.

"Here," she said, "take turns using this." She set her rake mightily in the mud, pulled back a layer, put the rake in again, pulled back another peel, and then once more, until the tines scraped against a shell and the clam lay like an ornery pearl, spitting at them. Lizzie lifted it. "Sometimes they don't mind their manners much," she said.

"I guess I wouldn't, either, if I was being dug up for chowder."

"I guess. Lately, it seems like there might be a whole lot of reasons for not minding your manners."

Turner nodded. He knew some reasons.

They dug clams until the water covered the flats—actually, as Lizzie pointed out, Turner mostly watched her dig clams until the water covered the flats. He held the bucket, leaning away from it to avoid the spitting, and lugged it full back to the dory. Lizzie knelt and packed it with seaweed, sending little crabs scuttling from underneath each handful she dragged up.

Turner was mindful of his toes.

"You want to come over?" asked Lizzie.

"To the island?"

She put her hand on her hip.

"I'll come over," said Turner. And together they waded out and climbed into the dory—it was floating freely now—and Lizzie, with easy hands, oared the boat around and with a few strokes set its bow and Turner toward Malaga.

He had seen the island from the far ledges, standing with his father and Sheriff Elwell and Deacon Hurd and everyone else important in the town. A stony beach, a stony ledge or two, some pines—a few toppled over with their heads in the water, a few tilted, most of them still straight. There had seemed nothing on the island that would set anyone but a gull to wishing that he could live there.

But coming on it now, from the water, with Lizzie stroking and angling her way to the point, Turner felt as if he was on the brink of a discovery. Ahead of him, the beach was covered with stones, their hard outsides rubbed off and smoothed so that they glowed as the waves gathered them up and down. The granite ledges were streaked by a thousand shades of gray and silver, separated by slices of pink quartz that glowed like happiness. And the pines! The pines threw their roots around the shore's boulders, grappling with the living rocks and wrestling them into position. And out of those rocks they thrust themselves into the air as if they might scratch the blue dome of heaven, and as they stretched back and forth trying to reach it, and as the sea stretched itself back and forth up the beach, Turner felt the world moving slowly and anciently beneath him, and he began to sway back and forth with the waves, with the trees, with the rolling globe itself.

"You're not going to throw up?" asked Lizzie.

"No, I'm not going to throw up."

"Good, because if you were going to throw up, I'd be sure to remind you that you'd best lean out over the side of the boat."

"You have a real way about you, you know that, Lizzie?"

"That's what my granddaddy says: a real way about me."

"What else does your granddaddy say about you?"

"That I'm the closest thing to glory he'll ever see on God's green earth. What does your daddy say about you?"

Turner didn't have to answer, since just then the dory scraped up on the beach a little above the point, and he jumped out the stern and began to push the boat in. (He thought just then that sometimes God could get things exactly right.) The rocks were cold and smooth and slippery under his feet and the water lapped up to his knees, but Turner hardly noticed. He watched Lizzie stow the oars neatly along the sides, saw her twist and reach for the hooked rock she would toss over for the anchor, felt the boat quiver a bit as she stood, balanced lightly, and finally jumped out the bow, her feet sending up a frothy splash. She turned and gripped the dory and pulled it higher, Turner pushing, and then she stood, hands on hips, and smiled.

"You coming?"

I'm coming.

Maybe her granddaddy was right.

He pulled the pail of clams from the dory, and when she reached out a hand to him, he took it, and so stepped onto Malaga Island for the first time: the sounds of the water rushing through the rounded stones, the salt-pine scent of the air, the gaggling cry of a single gull flopping around with its head lowered, the sea breeze coming up suddenly against his back, the warm feel of Lizzie's hand as she led him farther up into it all. Lord, thought Turner. Lord.