Twice Loved (copy2) (37 page)

Bass and bluefish were feeding off Rip Point, where the tides surged over the shoals, gouging and sucking at the shore in a froth of white water. John Durning, Tom Morgan, and others like them braved the elements daily, toiling at the nets until their chilled hands became bluer than the blues they caught.

Their boats, coming into the slips at the end of day, often appeared like spectral visions, gliding through the fog like silent ghost vessels. Then a voice would be heard calling hello, and another in answer, but it seemed no man ever stood in the spot from which a voice came, for the fog distorted the sounds and made them reverberate hollowly through the murky whiteness, like the disembodied utterances of wraiths.

During these bleak days, which Rye shared with Josiah, he thought about the coming of spring and the possibilities presented by the Michigan Territory. More and more he contemplated starting a new life there with Laura and Josh at his side. But would she truly leave Dan as she’d promised? And if so, could she possibly be legally divorced by that time? Perhaps she wouldn’t consider leaving the island where she’d been born. There was no doubt in Rye’s mind, however, that DeLaine Hussey would venture forth as his wife. Did he want her, though? Rye had the entire winter to answer that question for himself, but supposing he courted DeLaine and decided to marry her, there was the question of his father, who’d overtly demonstrated his distaste for her. Could the old man be persuaded to go to Michigan even if it were DeLaine going along as Rye’s wife instead of Laura?

Rye and Ship took a walk one day to the house on Crooked Record Lane, but as they stood on the scallop-shell path, he knew it would be imprudent to knock on the door. He studied it, his hands buried deep, his hair covered by a woolen knit cap. Laura was inside, he knew, for the windows glowed through the gray day. But Josh was undoubtedly there, too, and as Rye studied the house that had once been his home, he felt again the pain he’d known that day the boy had flown at him, pummeling, crying, “You ain’t neither my papa!” How many times since then had Rye wondered if Josh had accepted the truth yet? Countless times he’d cursed his own temper for flaring on that day Laura had come to order the lid, for he’d been so incensed, he hadn’t even asked after the boy’s wellbeing.

The wind shuddered through the barren leaves of the apple trees and sent the tall arborvitaes swaying against the linter, scraping the edge of the shingles with an eerie screech. Rye shivered.

Suddenly, he realized the foundation of the house had not been ballasted for the winter. So Dan’s drinking was now affecting the way he carried out his responsibilities. Every house on the island was fortified against the drafts that seemed to creep and seep into every available crack during the cold months, and he was sure Dan had seen to it every winter during his absence. What an irony that it was Rye’s turn to see to it in Dan’s “absence.”

With another glance at the window, Rye turned on his heel and made his way down to search out Cap’n Silas and ask if he knew someone who’d do the job.

***

The first snows fell; sleighs and bobsleds came to replace carriages and wagons. Across the undulating heathlands, ponds froze and small children skated with wooden runners strapped to their boots. Sometimes at night, fires could be seen near the frozen ponds where young people held skating parties. In keeping rooms, knitting needles clicked, turning out warm wool stockings.

A horse and bobsled delivered a load of kelp one day, much to Laura’s relief, for though she’d piled the beds high with feather ticks, by morning the drafts had frozen the water in the bowl and left noses in nearly as bad a shape.

There came a day in early December when the fog rolled off across the Atlantic, leaving behind a churlish sky of clouds so gray they seemed to make dusk of day. The winds keened out of the northwest, delivering a stinging slap to the island.

Laura had set aside her bayberry-candle making until just such a day as this. When she rose that morning to the lowered clouds and blustering winds, she thrilled Josh by announcing that this was the day they would begin the task. Since Josh had patched up his friendship with Jimmy, he had softened toward Laura, too, and was now under foot, “helping” with the candle making. He sat at the trestle table with his mother, sorting through the first batch of berries, picking out twigs.

When they had enough, he begged, “Can I scoop ’em in the kettle, Mama?”

In the process, bayberries dropped to the floor and rolled into hiding, followed by Josh, who scrambled on hands and knees to find them.

It was a slow, time-consuming process, making candles, and as Laura stirred the kettle over the fire, she was grateful for Josh’s chatter.

“Will Papa be home tonight?” he asked from his perch on a sturdy stool beside the crane.

“Of course Papa will be home. He comes home every night.”

“But I mean for supper.”

“I don’t know, Josh.”

“He promised me I could have skates this year, and he said he’d teach me how to use ’em.”

“He did? When?”

Josh shrugged and looked into the brilliant coals beneath the kettle. “Long time ago.”

Laura studied him. Poor darling Josh, she thought. Dan doesn’t mean to disappoint you, and neither do I, but I’m running out of excuses for him.

“Maybe you should ask for skates for Christmas.”

But Josh’s expression was forlorn. “Christmas is so long to wait! Jimmy, he’s already been skating twicet. He says I could go with him if I had skates.”

But Laura had no answer for her son. “Come, would you like to stir the berries for a while?” she suggested brightly.

“Could I!” His eyes widened into blue pools of excitement.

“Pull your stool over here.”

He stood on the high stool with Laura’s arm around his waist, ineptly stirring the gray-green nuggets that were already beginning to separate, sending a heady evergreen scent throughout the house. As the dark, blackish tallow rose to the surface, wax formed. This first rendering of tallow had to be cooled, skimmed off, strained, then melted down a second time, yielding an almost transparent wax ready for pouring into the molds. But long before the refining process was completed, Josh had tired of the activity, and lolled on his belly along one of the trestle benches.

At noon a driving rain began, and Laura looked up from her task of measuring and cutting wicks for the molds as the first droplets hit the window panes.

“A nor’wester,” she remarked idly, happy to be inside in the warm house.

After the wicks were strung and the molds filled for the first time, Laura made a cup of hot tea and took a break before starting with the next batch of berries. Josh stood on a chair, peering out the window, and she wandered across the room to stand behind him. The rain had turned to sleet, glazing the surface of the snow and freezing on the limbs of the apple trees until they trebled in size and shimmered like ice-covered fingers.

“I wanna go skating,” Josh lamented, pressing his nose against the window.

She ruffled his hair and watched the frosted limbs quake with the wind. “Nobody’s skating today.” Josh looked dejected and lonely, and for a moment Laura wished there was another child to keep him company. She wondered, if she’d been married to Rye all these years, how many there would be. “Come, Josh, you can help me sort through the next batch of berries for twigs.”

“I don’t like pickin’ twigs,” he decided now. “I wanna go skating.”

“Joshua! Do you have your tongue on that window?”

He looked over his shoulder guiltily, and though he didn’t answer, there were two melted spots in the ice on the pane. Laura couldn’t help smiling. “Come on down from there. Let’s make another batch of candles.”

***

The weather worsened as the day wore on. The sleet covered everything with a dangerous sheet of ice before giving way to hard, dry snow that snaked ahead of the gale in undulating patterns across the slippery cobblestone streets.

Down in the harbor, not a boat moved. The rigging was draped with icicles that hung aslant, frozen by the winds at an odd angle, as if the earth’s kilter had slipped awry. Gulls huddled beneath the piers, their feathers lifting as the wind buffeted their backs. Shopkeepers hunkered low, gripping their collars as they headed home at day’s end.

Dan Morgan left the countinghouse, turning his collar high, too, and clamping a hand on his beaver hat as the wind threatened to carry if off to Spain. He bent low, making his way toward the Blue Anchor, already anticipating the warming effect of a hot rum toddy on this devil’s day. Down below, the mainmasts of the windjammers rocked wildly as the water churned and billowed. Dan slipped once, caught himself, and shuffled more carefully toward his destination.

Inside the Blue Anchor, the fire roared and the smell of boiling shellfish permeated the air. But Dan disdained an offer of hot chowder, ordering the toddy instead and hunkering over the tankard after savoring the first taste of its welcome contents.

The tankard was emptied and refilled, and the usual gathering of indulgers clustered about the fire, reluctant to budge from their comfortable seats and face the snowy gale outside.

Ephraim Biddle came in, ordered himself a stiff one, and ambled over to Dan, commenting, “Got that load o’ kelp around y’r house, just like y’ ordered.”

It was the first time it had occurred to Dan that he’d neglected to see about the kelp. “You did?”

“Well, didn’t y’ see it there, man?”

“Oh yes, of course.”

Ephraim lifted his drink, swallowed heartily, then backhanded his lips. “Wull, I sh’d hope so. Cap’n Silas, he come on down by the shack and says he had two dollar f’r anybody’d do the kelpin’ around y’r foundation, so I took th’ two and did it.”

“Rye,” Dan muttered into his tankard, then added under his breath, “Rye Dalton ... damn the man.” He took a deep draft of his toddy, clapped it down, and ordered, “Another!”

The night settled in, and the elbows at the Blue Anchor pressed more heavily against the trestle tables. Outside, the anchor above the door complained as the wind buffeted and sent it creaking. The snow began gathering on the leeward sides of picket fences, leaving swales of exposed earth to the windward. In protected corners it clung to shingled walls, climbing high, inching up slowly until it rose in delicate spears of white that were oddly anomalous to the raging winds that sculpted such beauty. On the streets outside the pub, snow inched across the cobbles until its white shroud covered the dangerous ice hidden beneath it. In the belfry of the Congregational church, the wind pushed at the bell, sending out a dreary offbeat 
clon-n-ng
 that shivered away toward the bobbing boats on the harbor, where it mingled with the whistle of wind in the rigging.

The hour was half-past ten when Dan Morgan at last stumbled from his bench at the Blue Anchor and went weaving toward the door. Behind him only the alekeeper, Hector Gorham, and Ephraim Biddle wished Dan good night. With his back to the pair, Dan lifted a hand in a gesture of farewell, then stepped through the door into the howling night. He had not negotiated the first step along the street before his beaver hat was torn from his head and went sailing off toward Nantucket Harbor, first in the air, then spinning to earth and bouncing along on its brim as it went.

“Damnash’n,” Dan mumbled as he turned to follow it, trying to focus on the black object that immediately tumbled beyond his range of vision. Giving the hat up for lost, he turned back toward home, battling his way against the wind that clawed at his coat front and sent it flapping open, though he clutched it time and again with one bare hand. “Sh’d’ve brought m’ gloves,” he muttered to himself as he teetered along the streets, where the gale had managed to put out all the street lanterns, leaving the way black except for the shifting patterns of snow that whirled beneath Dan’s feet.

Somewhere through his bleary mind came the realization that he had not buttoned his coat, and he was struggling to do just that when a fresh wall of wind struck him like a battering ram. His feet skidded, and he tried to regain his balance, but the force seemed to lift him as if by magic, flipping his body up, then dropping it to the cobblestones with the carelessness of a child examining a toy, then tossing it aside as if it were worthless after all. His head struck the bricks with a dull crack that made but the merest sound in the stormy night. The greatcoat he’d been attempting to button as he went down was opened by the wind and left to flap against Dan’s thighs, which were sprawled on the icy street. The hands without gloves rested palm up on the ice-covered bricks while snow gathered around his hair and covered the warm splotch of blood that quickly froze into a pool of red ice. Heedless of what it had done, the nor’wester meted out its wrath on the unconscious man and his island home, which had taught him well, through all his growing years, the bitterness of its merciless winters. He lay now supine and exposed, his breathing shallow as the snow hit his face and built up, as it had around the fences, drifting on his leeward side, swaling to the windward.

***

More than an hour later, Ephraim Biddle swallowed his last gulp, made a sound of resignation deep in his throat, and pushed himself off his cozy perch, reaching for the buttons of his jacket. “There’s no help f’r ’it but t’ face th’ long walk ’ome,” he slurred. “G’night, Hector,” he mumbled to the alekeeper.

“G’night, Eph.” Hector followed his last patron to the door gratefully, lowering the bar behind him.

Outside, Ephraim slogged up the street, muttering oaths as he bent low and balanced precariously on footing made all the more doubtful by his own inebriated state. The wind and snow drove down with a fury, and he clutched his collar, stooping even lower to protect his face from its wrath. When he stumbled against the inert body of Dan Morgan, he backed a step away, scanned the unmoving lump at his feet, and mumbled, “Wh ... what’s this?” A closer look revealed the shape of a man, and Ephraim bent on one knee, trying to clear his befuddled vision. “Morgan? ’zat choo?” He shook the limp arm. “’ey, Morgan, git up!” But suddenly Ephraim sobered. “Morgan?” he said with a note of alarm. “Morgan!” He shook Dan harder, but to no avail. The man lay unmoving, unspeaking, while around him the snow already lay in drifts, “Aw Jesus, no ...” Then Ephraim was on his feet again, running back toward the Blue Anchor, managing somehow to retain his footing on the icy cobbles, desperation keeping him upright.