The Shortest Season



The Shortest Season

Our town is not long for summer, not kind to gardeners or the things we dare to grow. Potatoes, carrots, turnips: vegetables that cozy together beneath the soil will survive a late freeze, even if their greens grow stunted, crisp and pale yellow, above ground. A tomato is a delicate plant. Its roots recoil from the ice crystals underground. The vines that survived our last frost stretch eight inches high, frail and few as they are. They may yet live, and don’t I hope for it, after reading up on what to plant in my new garden, promising my husband I’d bring something worthwhile from the ground.

“It’s no use,” I tell Violet. She’s scratching at the ground with one hand, bending to where my knees won’t let me. “It’s too late for planting.”

Up here we might miss spring and summer altogether but for a few signs. This morning there was a man driving his long brown car down this road to an empty farmhouse, a city man by the shine on that car. He wouldn’t be here except to use Maine for his summer, and he’ll be turning that car around so soon that to me it might as well happen tomorrow.

“Says here to plant when it’s cool, so they’ve got time to root before poking up in the warm season,” she says. “It’s still cool, Sarah.”

“Yes, and before they grow a foot up summer’ll be past and it’ll be cool again. Put the seeds away before you drop them, Vi.” I hate to disappoint her, holding that pharmacy bag full of seeds, poised over the row we have just finished digging. The soil is hard with cold, but it melts easily in my fingers.

Violet folds the bag into a fan and slips it into her jeans pocket.

Plenty into June, and this weekend Violet’s kids have joined the older children to drive further north and west for a ski trip. They’ve piled into a single car, their skis lashed to the roof with the sturdy lines of their fathers’ old fishing nets. Perhaps it will be the final trip this year, and we can finally call it summer. All year long I look forward to the morning when – even if the grass stands stiff encased in frozen dew – the sun sits high and long in the day. Summer evenings there’s television news of hurricanes swirling over the water, hitting land further south. Men who don’t think twice about leaving the dock in the dead of February are landbound in summer. They gather outside the warehouse, drinking beer, smoking, waiting for Coast Guard reports on the radio, debating the sky whether there’s time enough to bring in just a few nets, put out just a few more, and still make land. “Damn Reagan,” they mutter, angry for the year he closed the shoreline, for the invisible wall he built between our water and Canada’s. Curse the president, but they don’t dare curse the water or the wind for landing them.

“Don’t you want to put something in?” Violet persists. “Potatoes?”

“Too late for this season, too early for next. Another month, maybe.”

“Joc says the potatoes here get salted as they grow. He says the farmers pull water straight from the dock.”

“Joc doesn’t know a thing about farming,” I say.

But Violet, she’s learned to throw her body into a shovel, and isn’t shy about crumbling the dry fertilizer by hand. She agrees, it’s the best way to spread it. Joc’s her husband and all she’s got, plus a few kids less grown than they think, itching to leave. Both parents dead, like mine, and her brother washed right off a boat some years back. It was to be his final trip before joining my husband’s crew. What with that union never going through, I took Violet on myself, let her share in my garden.

It is a corner cut from a feed corn field, a farmer’s gift, bound by crumbling gray wood fencing above ground, wire rat mesh one foot deep below. Good I’ve got myself a hobby, though my husband isn’t yet convinced. Because of him I’m no longer a fisherman’s wife with a chest of cod to trade at the common market, carefully inspecting each potato from the farmer’s wife and expecting rot. My husband learned to like the ground beneath his feet while the shoreline was closed. Instead of returning to a sea with borders set by faraway men who don’t know how water moves, he traded his father’s boat for a clipboard. That puts me nowhere except in between, like the baker, or Meghan Cashen Selucca, married to the pizza man and hostess at his restaurant, directing farmers and fishers alike into the red cushioned booths with her laminated menus, full of misspellings.

If I can’t be a fisherman’s wife I might as well become a gardener. I’ve got seeds, shovels, books, a bit of land past the church, on the way to farm country. All for opening up the church door for the children last winter while they waited for the school bus. Just an idea I had, getting a spare key to the church, bringing a jug of hot chocolate on the days the cold had nowhere to go but into those children’s throats. Ten years since the government closed our K through twelve and started sending the children three towns down, and it takes a woman with only her husband to look after to think of unlocking that church and keeping those children warm. Will those grateful farm mothers make me one of them, I wonder.

“You don’t want to put them in for next year?” she asks. She’s kept her hand on that pocket, like instead of tomato seeds they’re magic beans, ready to leap out.

“If they’re only just stalks when it freezes, next year’s already done for. Can’t you wait?”

Violet brushes off and sits on the ground, holds her chin in her hands. She’s disappointed, more than seems right, over an empty row in a garden that isn’t even hers. Overhead the sun is sinking, falling on us. In that light, she looks not a day over sixteen, as if the twenty years in between, of raising children and minding Joc had never marked her face. “Seems so far away,” she says.

“I don’t know. I make my days long as I can,” I tell her, “and even then, don’t the years go by.”

“The years sure drag on for me,” Violet says.

Just a few years younger than me, and still so young she doesn’t know herself from what she reads in the aisle at Woolworth’s. My husband’s taught me age, when all Violet’s does is keep her moody like a teenager. “So what if they do? You should call yourself lucky.”

For years my husband took his boat out early, when light first rose on the water in some distant place I had to squint to see. After so long waking before the sun, I rise with the fishermen; my husband, nearly a businessman, stays behind, asleep. In the winter, I leave the house in wool socks, and stomp into boots outside where noise matters less. In the summer I need only a sweater over sleeping flannels. I walk only to the church, telling time by the color and slant of the light. My husband likes me back for a few minutes’ nap before he begins his day. Inside I step out of my shoes, toss my sweater on the banister, and slide back into bed. My husband grunts with sleep, and with one strong arm, locks me tight against him.

On my walks I’ve seen a barn burning. It was so far off the road I mistook it for candles in the windows. Every few weeks there’s Judy O’Tomlin, chasing that sow of hers down the middle of the road, wearing nothing but a thin white nightgown and waving a stick broom over her head. Once I rose just after an ice storm, first to see that blanket over gravel, dirt, and dead grass alike. I’ve seen a caravan of pickups heading south with crates of chickens, and a flatbed towing a crippled crop plane. It tipped to one side, its lower wing barrels bent and coughing fertilizer dust over the choppy gravel road. Just this morning I saw that shiny car, that man who looked like he’d live anywhere but an empty farmhouse. Days like that, when something more than dust gets kicked up the road, Violet expects me to fetch her, and she’s sore each time I don’t. Joc growls about chinks in the windowpanes from the pebbles I toss at it, but theirs is one of the last houses before the church and fields, and she doesn’t want to miss anything.

“You’re lucky,” she says. “You already have everything. Then you get to see more.”

“Next time I’ll get you, if there’s anything to miss,” I promise. Truth is, that car skidded on the paved road. It paused, backed up, then angled down the gravel road instead. I untied the church keys from my boot, unlocked the door, and climbed stairs to the organ alcove. From there I saw the car turn off where the road turns to dirt, and park in the farmhouse drive. A man stepped out of the car, grasped the “For Lease” sign with both hands, and rocked it from the ground. “It wasn’t much more than this turned out to be.”

She arches her back, and peers in the direction of the newly occupied house. It’s just visible from my garden, close to the road. Down the other way, she might almost see the wharf. Saturdays the men return from fishing the islands for beer trucked down from Canada that morning. After my husband puts the final catch on the same trucks, continuing south to Boston, he walks home. He trades his clipboard for a beer mug, and joins the men at the pub, where they spill into the street. A fisherman once again. Violet and I, we walk back from the garden to join them.

My husband’s spread the news about our new neighbor – twenty times I’m asked the color or the make or the sound of his car. Did it groan when it backed up, Eddie Malley wants to know, or was it more of a whine. I tell him I couldn’t say, and he wanders off in disgust, mouthing off how it’s just a matter of time before he trades in his father’s boat for an auto-mechanics course down in Portland. Meghan Selucca wanders over while her husband closes up the pizza shop for the night. She waits for her turn at the tap, then sways against an outside wall, foam swirling thickly over the top of her mug.

“I seen him,” she says. She looks around, as if her eyes are a magician’s wand, and she’s silencing us. “At the restaurant. Ordered a small pizza, with sausage. To go.”

I hold it in my mind, try to imagine this man with the brown car, slipping by us long enough to get a pizza. Meghan’s husband uses Portuguese sausage. Too sweet, my husband says, and too spicy for a man raised on whitefish and potatoes cooked in salt and water, though I don’t mind. Meghan says the man waited by her hostess chair, asking questions about the northern coast, the mild summer, how a nice Irish girl like herself wound up in a pizza joint.

“He was just so easy to talk to – I felt like a tree just been tapped, my whole life pouring out of my mouth like syrup. He listened to me more than I’ve ever been listened to my whole life,” she says. “Except by my husband.”

I wink at Violet when Meghan’s eyes drift half-closed.

There are more sightings over the weekend. Sunday morning, while the rest of us are at church, he stops by the bakery for half a dozen sweet rolls and a loaf of soda bread. He buys lavender soap, shampoo, shaving foam, and a tube of Colgate at the Woolworth’s, and leaves the liquor store with a brown paper bag, not five minutes past noon. Mrs. Mather sees him outside and reports that he is a gentleman, holding the door for her and wishing her a good day with a bow of the head. She finds the paper bag suspicious; inside she hears several glass bottles, clinking together. At market that afternoon I hear he’s bargained one of the farmers’ wives into parting with milk and eggs every Monday and Thursday through August, and a chicken every Saturday. He asked if she wouldn’t mind killing it for him, offered her another dollar apiece if he didn’t see it till after it had been plucked, gutted, and cooled. He paid forty dollars for twenty pounds of bacon she’d been curing nearly a year.

Monday I follow the paved road away from the water, where it ends in the warehouse loading docks. If I stepped inside, cold, sharp drafts would stab my throat, and the air would smell densely of the Atlantic. Behind the building, “Lucky Penelope” and “Rosie-Marie” lift and fall against the docks like empty cradles. If I continued to the water, I would see those boats fill up with other women’s husbands. I’d stand on the dock, hugging my sweater, and wave as they sailed to the day’s first nets. An hour more and my husband will arrive, sleepy, stumbling, rubbing his eyes, carrying his thermos and clipboard. Each day I set that clipboard beside his breakfast plate so he won’t forget. He’s a warehouse man now and no longer a fisherman. When I think about those summer storms, about Violet’s brother and the men who dare the sea, I wonder how that clipboard has saved him.

I leave the water behind and walk past the houses where the Des Chaumes, the Mathers, and the Conlons sleep behind window boxes of red and white flowers. I pass the diner, the Woolworth’s, the pharmacy, the pizza restaurant. Next is the bakery where I drink in the sweet scent of yeast and cinnamon. Violet’s is among the last of the houses and shops. Just beyond it sits the Congregational Church, its white door a beacon in the dimly lit stone, and there the road seems to turn. It sweeps to the left, south and west, until it dives to an end in the harbor outside Yarmouth.

Really the road splits at the church instead of turning. Tar, sleek and south to Yarmouth, splitting northeast into loops and gravel, lined by gray wooden fence. The organ room at the Congregational is the highest spot on land, and from it I’ve stood eye to eye with the lighthouse that used to wave my husband home. On land I’ve seen past that small stretch of sea I’ve dared to dip my fingers in, and on land I’ve seen past my garden to where the fence ends. It cuts through fields, and crumbles into dust and splinters just before the gravel road dissolves into dirt.

When the horn blows, I expect to see a rig, the ruddy hand of a farmer’s second son lifting in greeting off the open window frame. Instead there’s another blast. Like the large brown car, this truck swerves right to follow the paved road as it glances off the church. Then it, too, stops, chugs into reverse, then continues forward down the gravel road.

I race back along the paved road, my nightgown catching between my knees, until I reach Violet’s house. I feel nearly giddy from taking shallow breaths, tossing two handfuls of sand pebbles at her window, until Joc’s face appears in the window. It is scowling and white, like a man nearing death. His features are heavy; thick brows, a jutting chin, like a mountain face with many holds. No doubt he was awakened by the horn. I hear her behind him, that low voice of reassurance and impatience. Joc’s still up there glaring when Violet leans on my shoulder, balancing as she pulls on her shoes.

“I’m launching long tomorrow!” he hollers. “Be gone for days and you’ll miss me then!”

“I won’t be long, Joc,” Violet shouts back.

“I’m going to want breakfast! I don’t know how you cook eggs so they’re still runny beneath the surface!”

“She’ll be back, Joc,” I tell him.

“I don’t think he even likes them that way,” Violet whispers to me.

We turn our backs on his stare, on the frustration and fear carved into his face. We’ve got the truck to talk about, we’ve got to make our way to the church and climb to the organ chamber.

At our new neighbor’s house the truck is open from the back, and the brown car has been moved out of the way. Our new neighbor stands aside with another man, and even at a distance it’s easy to tell who’s who. It’s him wearing tan pants instead of jeans, a white-collared shirt, a sweater; him with the short hair which, from here, looks as molded as plastic. Three men in blue jeans and white undershirts carry large boxes into the house, and furniture draped with carpets. There isn’t much – perhaps twenty boxes, a dozen chairs and a long table, an upright piano for which the fourth man leaves our new neighbor’s side. He follows the other three carefully, his arms spread and hands out, as if he’s ready to catch either the piano or one of his workers.

“I’ve never seen anyone like him,” Violet murmurs. “Not in person.”

I look down. Her face is smooth from that angle, like one of the local children. It’s as those children grow that I’ve thought to love that smoothness again, like a memory from a time before I knew words. Perhaps it’s seeing so clearly in their faces the hard features I know in their parents. Like my husband’s face, veiled from the saltwater that, over time, has scoured my skin. After so many years of hangnails, calluses, and rough edges that to me were signs of strength, my husband’s hands will never recover. Beneath the shined-over surface are webs of scars that do not give, even to my touch.

“You can’t possibly see that far.”

“I can see enough,” she insists. “Just look at him.”

And I do. I watch him, glance at Violet, out the window, then back at her. Her own gaze never wavers. Out the window I see just a man, his clothes too formal for real work.

The following day, we have a name: William Chapman. Violet discovers this herself, Tuesday, at the post office. She tells me about it that afternoon, as we examine the first tomatoes – no bigger than my pinky nail, their skins so hard and green they slip through my fingers.

She doesn’t need encouraging. “He was very friendly. He said good day, I said good day, and I asked him how he and his wife were settling in.”

Not a single sighting of our neighbor has included a wife. Mr. Chapman has done all the errands himself. He didn’t send a wife to market, but made arrangements himself, ahead of time. I thought he might not have a wife, he might be a bachelor, a writer of factual books, or an inventor. Someone who would suffer well a life as solitary and remote as this.

“And what did he say to that?”

“He laughed. He has the most lovely smile, Sarah, like I’ve never seen.”

And then Violet’s own smile becomes something I’ve never seen. As she talks I imagine them together, standing in the corner of the post office, letting their voices and laughter echo over the empty room. With no customers, perhaps the clerk pushed a bell onto the counter, shut his window, and retreated to the back office. To count stamps, or the seconds on the clock before he could reasonably walk home for lunch, or some such, Violet would have laughed with Mr. Chapman. By the time she’d thought to check her own watch, it was past eleven, they’d been talking nearly two hours, and Violet was afraid Joc would already be home, waiting for his last lunch on land.

“All that time you spent with Mr. Chapman? Just the two of you?” I ask.

That strange smile stays on her face. “We were at the post office. It’s a public place.”

“Hardly, the way you describe it, Vi. So what did he say about the wife?”

“He says she’s not well. She complained about the air and the noise in the city, and now she complains about the air and the noise in the country. He doesn’t know what to do for her.”

Perhaps she reassured him. Placed a hand on his arm, smiled with her ear reaching toward her shoulder. Maybe he placed his other hand over hers, smiled back before turning to leave. And this Violet tells me herself: that before he left, he cleared his throat as if he were a shy man speaking importantly, asked if she might show him where the blueberries grew.

Violet’s confessions begin days later. She isn’t a liar, exactly, but she weaves such stories over the weeks that I wonder if she doesn’t embellish, if only to make her life, and my own, more interesting. To add some bit of excitement to track our days. We trade off buying a book at Woolworth’s once a month, and we both know what happens after the hero carries his girl off the pages and the story claims to end. She tells me she’s been meeting Mr. Chapman. How one day they walked in the woods and when they came into the light her shoes were wet with moss and mud, how another day he lifted a flower from the ground and brought his hand to her face, still wet with earth. Once he brought her the nearly whole shell of a robin’s egg, baby blue, drier and more necessary than anything she’d ever felt. He cupped it in both palms, walking so slowly and watching it so carefully he nearly tripped. He calls her “Violetta.” I blush at that, only imagining what might occasion the invention of a nickname. She tries out “love,” as a word.

I remember love as a man and a woman meeting on a busy street in Portland. It happened in the midst of so many people rushing past, cars belching forward, red-nosed babies squalling in their strollers, red-nosed men stumbling in and out of alleys. I spotted them for just an instant. I was a child, and remember little about what they looked like, except that they were beautiful. Perhaps she held a shawl around her shoulders, perhaps he carried a newspaper and wore a mustache. I watched their eyes open wider, their chins rise, their hands reach for each other like the most perfectly practiced dance. And yet it seemed by chance that they’d met, their hands touching so briefly that I imagined I was the only one to notice. I could tell by the sweeping movement that those hands were smooth, they didn’t stutter together. Had I dropped my eyes at all, to reach for my sandwich or wipe a napkin to my lips, I would have missed entirely that in a touch so brief, love passed between them.

I looked from my father to my mother. We had paused our shopping trip for lunch at an outside table, although Portland is cold in December. A hamburger on toast cooled in front of me and my lips stung from my first lime rickey. My parents sat across from me, eating silently and looking down at the table, their backs to the street and what I had seen there. I wanted to tell them, but didn’t yet have words for it. The rest of the day I willed myself against licking my lips, though they were cold, chapped with sugar and lime, determined to hold that sweet sting on my mouth until we were home.

I see Chapman in town on occasion, glimpse him on his errands to the bakery and the liquor store. I spy him strolling, tracing the uneven edge of the sidewalk with a walking stick. I enjoy my books, sometimes enough to read at night, by moonlight through the window, after my husband’s sleeping beside me. Chapman doesn’t look like a man in love. There’s nothing to see. There’s been no talk. As the dock manager’s wife I hear the gossip. But if love’s what they have, Violet and Chapman, if that’s what they’re in, then I should be content to leave them there.

Until he comes to me in the garden. Right up the center of the road, as if he’s asking anyone in sight of him to look. His glossed hair looks no less plastic up close, his shirt no less than white. He swings a fat twig in front like he’s waving off the pickups and loadless rigs that bend heavy down the road. I hide behind the tomato plants, four feet high and dense, till he’s in shouting distance. He approaches my garden so certainly, I wonder if he wasn’t seeking me out.

“I know you!” he shouts. “You’re the gardener wife of the dock man.”

I break through the vines and the wires holding them together as if I hadn’t seen him coming. It’s easier that he knows who I am. “Good morning.”

He looks up to the sky, standing in the middle of the road. “Yes, it’s still morning and a good one. To you, too. Especially since they’re so long.”

“What’s long?”

“Your mornings. You’re a walker like me, see. I always thought myself an early bird but I’m hours behind you, and noon isn’t yet upon us. Your mornings must be very long.”

I could toss the Bible or Benjamin Franklin back at him, but how am I to know his acquaintance with either. “I’m glad you find the scenery so pleasant.”

“Do you really think I take my walks to enjoy the scenery?”

“I wouldn’t know why else.”

“Then let’s ponder that together.” He bounces his self-fashioned cane. “Why walk in the morning? Why walk at all?”

Chapman, with his curious staff and his philosopher’s questions, is a man that Violet claims to “love.” She tried the word out again, while young people made love on television. We watched them together by phone yesterday, since Joc’s boat was due. If this Mr. Chapman is something so fine, or so rare, I’m blind to it.

“What compels a person such as yourself to leave a warm bed and step into the cold each morning?” Chapman has staked his walking stick and pulled himself off the road. Now there is only the fence between us. “Where is it you’re trying to go, day after day?”

I can see his shoes weren’t made for mud and saltwater like my husband’s boots. Even now that he’s off the boat, those boots carry my husband through the swill of scales and sand inches deep on the warehouse floor. Those boots carry scars. The edges of Mr. Chapman’s shoes are dull, and off-color. “We were talking about you,” I say, “and what more than the scenery compels you. I enjoy the surroundings myself, I have known them all my life.”

“Is that why you walk every morning, to remind yourself of your surroundings?”

“I’ve lived with them every day I wake up breathing. I don’t need reminding.”

“Every day,” he repeats, “every day of your life. I’m in so many places I never get to remember. I learn. I travel all over the world – I could tell you about it.”

“You want to tell me about the world?”

“I live in Manhattan, of course, and my business has taken me everywhere you might imagine. San Francisco, Miami, London, Lyon, Milan, Hong Kong, West Berlin – I put my ear to the wall and listened for communism.” He cocks his ear to me. “Imagine that sound.”

“Don’t think I could.” This sort of talk would bring chills to poor Violet, who stirs at the words in thick paperback books and on the television, even though Joc’s language is that of fish and birds and other fisherman. “But I know the sting of salt water on rope burn, and how dirt pushes up beneath my fingernails. I don’t guess they’ve got dirt in West Berlin?”

He bows his head, and smiles. It is a pretty smile, smooth on his face, causing no ripples. My husband’s face leaps like waves with every gesture, a new tide in every syllable. He has threaded a thirty-foot whaler through those spaces on the globe marked with broad sweeping loops, and done it with only a compass and starlight and his arms throwing the wheel.

“I suppose I didn’t look,” he says.

No doubt this is how Chapman approached Violet in the post office. Palms smooth as kneaded dough turned up to rise, a smile so self-contained his face would not have recognized the change. Yet it was all in fun, all a game that she surely recognized. I would have a talk with Violet if it didn’t seem so patronizing. Surely her true confessions are like those in the magazines, those which as children we stole into the center of a Woolworth’s dress rack. Tell her or not, there’s no harm to be done.

And so summer unfolds. I let the garden shape my days, watering, weeding, and clipping, morning outings that threaten noon. Mornings I arrive, despite the sun’s rising glare, and there meet Chapman. I teach him to pinch sucker buds from tomato vines, that planting dill keeps the bugs off, to rake fish bones into the dirt with his hands. He wears white shirts and gloves always, wary of getting dirt around his fingernails, and I can’t see if he’s burned any calluses into his polished hands. We speak gruffly when we must at all.

I set breakfast for my husband, and as he eats his lunch I watch the young people on television argue and take to their beds. At commercials I go to the kitchen and report on the flourishing garden, promise tender asparagus through September, cocktail tomatoes that will explode on his wind-scarred lips. When he returns to the warehouse I return to my garden, and until late in the afternoons Violet chatters and works hard beside me. She tells stories of liaisons with Chapman, stories that, for all their scripted passion, all their high drama, might as well have come straight from what we read or see on television. I just listen, smile, glad of the entertainment. Joc is off land days at a time.

It disrupts the ease of things when the Chapmans, finally, decide to act as neighbors, and show up at market. My basket’s nearly full, and I’m thinking would my husband prefer a chicken this week or a steak, when I see Violet lose that late-day light. I follow her eyes to Chapman, and the girl on his arm. She must be a girl, to cling to him so tightly. Chapman’s step isn’t light, and his smile as he greets the people is not as broad as it might be, not as soft as the one Violet claims she’s seen.

As they approach I see she’s no girl, though everything about her looks small. Her nose, her forehead, even her fingers, locked around Chapman’s arm. But her shoulders nearly reach his, her walk is timid but steady, and when she shakes her hair it falls perfectly into place, shining. She has the bearing of a woman who has only recently come to know her own body.

“Good afternoon, ladies,” he says.

Chapman stands before us, his hands entangled with those of his small wife. She is all smoothness, those hands with long and graceful fingers, her hair rippling close to her face, like she stepped right off the television set in my living room.

“Good afternoon,” I reply. They don’t continue the conversation, and Violet, as always, looks to me. She stands stiffly in her body, her arms trembling, pale despite our afternoons of gardening. “Enjoying the scenery?”

“Yes, my wife thought it a nice day to join me for a walk,” Mr. Chapman says. He glances from her hands, to Violet, to me, with a grin so short I can’t read it.

His knuckles seem to change color, red to white and shades in between, as he grips his wife’s hands. He watches them closely, as if they might slide from his own.

I address her directly, because no one else will. “It’s a pleasure. I’m Sarah Burren, my husband’s the dock manager.”

“Of course, the gardener Will sees on his walks. He’s told me all about you.”

I ignore Violet. No doubt she wonders what, if Chapman has told his wife of me, he has told her of Violet.

“How nice to see you out, Mrs. Chapman.”

With ease she slips one hand from her husband’s, and tosses back that hair with a laugh. It falls back into place. “Well, a woman can’t stay inside an old farmhouse all day, not when her husband is out learning new lands.”

Violet stares hard at Chapman’s shoes. I wonder if she’s imagining them damp, marked with moss from the woods.

Mrs. Chapman chatters on, as if we’re all dear old friends, as if we know each other at all. “We usually spend the season in Vermont, outside of Manchester. Our children grew up going there. So much closer to New York, Will could stay in town to work and weekend with us. But this was Will’s idea. Suddenly he was unable to bear our neighbors.”

She laughs again, a startling sound filled with accident more than humor, like glass breaking. “It’s as if we’ve been banished, really. The children off to Putney, me here.”

Her smile stays firm with every word. Later I’ll ask Violet if she saw Mrs. Chapman’s teeth move. But she probably isn’t noticing. Her face is more a grimace. It is as if every word the woman says gives her pain.

“You make it sound like a punishment.” I try to mimic Mrs. Chapman’s deliberated mirth, her broken chuckle, her cold smile.

“But it is! Everything about this summer here is a punishment, isn’t it, Will,” she says. She lowers her voice and leans close to us, as if she has something to confide. “I must be punished. It is to punish me that he wears white shirts to play in the dirt. I must wear my hands away, scrubbing at dirt that won’t come out. He ruins his shirts, because I must be punished. Everything he does is just that. Every small thing.”

Her voice is gleaming and pretty but sharp, begging to be picked up and rolled about in the palm till it draws blood. And Chapman’s eyes are cold, unreachable despite such words Violet says were whispered in her ear. The Chapmans must talk at night, discussing us, perhaps over a supper of fried farm eggs and bacon, he describing our small post office, the Italian pizza shop that uses Portuguese sausage, his hands bare and clean and busy in mockery. The hostess there, he might tell her, is the wife of the owner, silly thing laminated the menus before checking a dictionary.

How would Violet script their conversations? In her imagination has Chapman told his wife of their walks in the woods, that he calls her Violetta? But of course Violet can’t imagine anymore, not when they stand before her, not willing to encourage the fantasies she weaves into her life and theirs, not willing to smile at the pretense. Only I have done that for Violet. I let my head fill with her stories. Her face is red, patched and uneven, as if she has been cut so cleanly, with so sharp a blade, that her nerves don’t yet realize the blood flowing is her own.

Before my husband was my husband, before he was mine at all, he spoke to me so quietly I had to stay perfectly still to hear him. But to me it didn’t sound like shyness. We walked down the main street, then stone, between our parents’ houses, and the distance was too short. He would take both my hands when we sat on the front steps, and hold them in both of his. Then the roughness of them was exciting, I couldn’t have pulled my hands away if I’d wanted. Scraped and blistered and scarred over already, and he was so young. I could feel him holding back the power in those arms, made strong by hauling nets and running pulleys and steering against invisible currents. I thought, if he can hold the water back, he can hold me close.

The next day, Violet rushes off the phone instead of talking about the television lovers. Joc has returned and needs his lunch. The wind carried his boat over that unmoving border into Canadian water, and as penalty he and his crew have been landed for the rest of the short season. Every day for a week he needs his boots scrubbed, his hands bandaged, and Violet. She can come to my garden only in the afternoons while Joc sits onboard his anchored boat and drinks canned beer with his crew, and he forbids her from watching television when he is home.

I no longer see Chapman idling down the center of the road. He doesn’t appear at my garden, arms folded atop the fence. After his wife’s visit to market, Violet’s talk returns to tomatoes and what her husband doesn’t like, and our lives return to what they were. I take my walks alone, and see nothing worth repeating. In the garden I pluck beans and glowing orange tomatoes, dig rows for potatoes that will taste of salt. From the baker I hear Chapman now favors only the rolls, Meghan Selucca tells me he praised her new Hawaiian pizza, Mrs. Mather reports from the entry at Woolworth’s that he remains a gentleman. Seeing him at the farmhouse, small, but visible from my garden, surprises me. The passing weeks have turned August cool to us, but Chapman looks the same.

“What is it?” Violet asks of my stillness, spearing the shovel into the ground, impatient to get at the roots of the plant.

Down the hill, past the ending of the gray wood fence where the gravel road turns to dirt, I see him exit the house, bags in hand. He leaves the front door open, walks to the back of the car, and sets the bags on the ground. While he digs into his pockets, he stares down the road. As if he could see us, digging in the ground, me watching him, Violet with her back turned, he turns skyward, perhaps figuring the patterns in the clouds, or asking some question.

“They’re leaving, Vi,” I tell her. “He must be leaving.”

I hear the pause in her breath, and she stiffens. At the road’s end, he reappears in the open doorway with more bags, every movement neat. He places these on the ground beside the first ones, and lifts the trunk of the car with both hands. He stoops and stands to set the waiting bags in the trunk, one pair at a time. After they’re safely in, he places both hands on the edge of the trunk, once again, and closes it with a snap that echoes as a twitch in Violet’s still elbows. Then he disappears into the black mystery of the open front door.

“I can’t look,” she says. “You’ll do that for me, Sarah.”

True to her word, Violet. She doesn’t turn when he reappears in his front door and shows us his side, reaching into the black and pulling out his wife, that small thing with the steady walk and sharp words. He reaches one hand behind her shoulders, takes both of her hands in the other. Beside me Violet stands so straight that she sways. It is as if everything, the ground we’ve disturbed, the breeze that chills us as we work, even her body, is pushing her towards him. And still she doesn’t give in.

“He put four bags in the trunk. And now he’s putting her up front,” I narrate for Violet.

He keeps his arm at his wife’s shoulder as he opens the car door, letting it slide off only as the car seat replaces his support. He closes the door bent over, as if confiding a secret. Walking round the front of the car he stops. Will he look again in our direction, steal a glance at Violet, if only at her back? Has he seen her differently, at closer range, in moments she would not confide, even to me? No, it is the ground he seeks, shuffling it, disturbing it. He digs his shoes into it, likely the ones that looked so dull. He is showering them in dirt.

“I think this is it, Vi.”

He drops into the car and pulls the door after him, firmly. We hear the engine pant as inside he turns the key, we hear the crunching of dry dirt under the heavy car tires. But Violet, she doesn’t see the car lurching awkwardly out of the drive, straining to turn onto the higher dirt road. She doesn’t see the cloud of dust, swelling toward us. She only hears the engine coming closer like the promise of thunder.

“Violet, just look at him. Just watch him leave.”

The car groans closer, following the gray wooden fence, having no choice but to pass us. And still Violet shows only her back.

“Violet!”

I shout to her over the heaving of the engine, over the dusty cloud kicked up by the car, and at the final moment, I turn for her, facing my whole body to the road, to the car, to the man Violet claimed she loved. Through sunlit streaks in the tinted glass I catch my glimpse of the man, of his black-gloved hands on the steering wheel, of his stone-carved face, his hard cheekbones and unblinking eyes. It surprises me to see so little of what Violet told me in confidence, so little in him that would give beneath her touch. And then he’s gone.

The fog of dust and exhaust shields Violet as she drops the shovel and crumbles, weeping, into ground that’s thirsty enough to swallow the saltiest water. I pull her up with both hands on her shoulders, and fold her into me.

“There, there, now. Sh, darling. Poor little Violet,” I murmur into her ear.

Now, finally, when it is too late, she turns to the road, to me, facing us both. “Poor Sarah!” she snaps, shaking me off defiantly. Her face is certain and smooth, her voice scornful. “Jealous Sarah! You think he’s going, but you don’t know him. He’s coming back. He’ll be back, without her.”

“Oh, Vi.” It hurts, almost, to reach for her again. But for all her electricity, for the sharp shock she might give me, Violet is like a child in tantrum. I can pull her close, rein her in.

She pushes me back, sniffles, smiles prettily, as if ashamed of her little outburst. “He’ll come back for me, Sarah, for me.”

She drops her arms to her sides, giggles once and shakes her head. I have been such a silly girl, she seems to say, now let’s get on with our work. She picks up her shovel once more, and stabs the earth with the full force of her body.

But after a week they haven’t come back, not together, nor he alone. I continue my walks, though the mornings are cooler after Labor Day, though the sun is already high and the air still heavy with salt humidity. I travel more slowly because of it, and barely pass the beginning of that ancient gray wooden fence before the sun tells me to turn back and begin the day. The nights come early and cool.

One bare dawn I stop at the Congregational, and lean against the fence. It sags, threatens to disintegrate beneath me. Long down the road I spot a truck parked at the farmhouse, men in white undershirts loading boxes, chairs stacked in two, the piano draped with a carpet. It is such a sight I nearly go to wake Violet, so she can see what I’ve seen. Instead I cut my walk short, return home, and crawl into bed with my husband, who snuffles in his sleep and pulls me to him, his arm like the heaviest, strongest rope.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download