Skeleton Crew

Hattie laughed. 'I think I still have the black-and-blue he gave me on my sit-upon at the New Year's party in '53. He pinched me that hard. What about him?'

'Bull and my own man walked across to the mainland that year,' Stella said. 'That February of 1938. Strapped on snowshoes, walked across to Dorrit's Tavern on the Head, had them each a shot of whiskey, and walked back. They asked me to come along. They were like two little boys off to the sliding with a toboggan between them.' They were looking at her, touched by the wonder of it. Even Vera was looking at her wide-eyed, and Vera had surely heard the tale before. fr you believed the stories, Bull and Vera had once played some house together, although it was hard, looking at Vera now, to believe she had ever been so young.

'And you didn't go?' Sarah asked, perhaps seeing the reach of the Reach in her mind's eye, so white it was almost blue in the heatless winter sunshine, the sparkle of the snow crystals, the mainland drawing closer, walking across, yes, walking across the ocean just like Jesus-putof- the-boat, leaving the island for the one and only time in your life on foot—

'No,' Stella said. Suddenly she wished she had brought her own knitting. 'I didn't go with them.'

'Why not?' Hattie asked, almost indignantly.

'It was washday,' Stella almost snapped, and then Missy Bowie, Russell's widow, broke into loud, braying sobs. Stella looked over and there sat Bill Flanders in his red-and-blackchecked jacket, hat cocked to one side, smoking a Herbert Tareyton with another tucked behind his ear for later. She felt her heart leap into her chest and choke between beats.

She made a noise, but just then a knot popped like a rifle shot in the stove, and neither of the other ladies heard.

'Poor thing,' Sarah nearly cooed.

'Well shut of that good-for-nothing,' Hattie grunted. She searched for the grim depth of the truth concerning the departed Russell Bowie and found it: 'Little more than a tramp for pay, that man. She's well out of that two-hoss trace.' Stella barely heard these things. There sat Bill, close enough to the Reverend McCracken to have tweaked his nose if he so had a mind; he looked no more than forty, his eyes barely marked by the crow's-feet that had later sunk so deep, wearing his flannel pants and his gumrubber boots with the gray wool socks folded neatly down over the tops.

'We're waitin on you, Stel,' he said. 'You come on across and see the mainland. You won't need no snowshoes this year.' There he sat in the town-hall basement, big as Billy-be-damned, and then another knot exploded in the stove and he was gone. And the Reverend McCracken went on comforting Missy Bowie as if nothing had happened.

That night Vera called up Annie Phillips on the phone, and in the course of the conversation mentioned to Annie that Stella Flanders didn't look well, not at all well.

'Alden would have a scratch of a job getting her off-island if she took sick,' Annie said.

Annie liked Alden because her own son Toby had told her Alden would take nothing stronger than beer. Annie was strictly temperance, herself.

'Wouldn't get her off 'tall unless she was in a coma,' Vera said, pronouncing the word in the downcast fashion: comer. 'When Stella says 'Frog,' Alden jumps. Alden ain't but half-bright, you know. Stella pretty much runs him.'

'Oh, ayuh?' Annie said.

Just then there was a metallic crackling sound on the line.

Vera could hear Annie Phillips for a moment longer—not the words, just the sound of her voice going on behind the crackling—and then there was nothing. The wind had gusted up high and the phone lines had gone down, maybe into Godlin's Pond or maybe down by Sorrow's Cove, where they went into the Reach sheathed in rubber. It was possible that they had gone down on the other side, on the Head... and some might even have said (only half- joking) that Russell Bowie had reached up a cold hand to snap the cable, just for the hell of it.

Not 700 feet away Stella Flanders lay under her puzzle-quilt and listened to the dubious music of Alden's snores in the other room. She listened to Alden so she wouldn't have to listen to the wind... but she heard the wind anyway, oh yes, coming across the frozen expanse of the Reach, a mile and a half of water that was now overplated with ice, ice with lobsters down below, and groupers, and perhaps the twisting, dancing body of Russell Bowie, who used to come each April with his old Rogers rototiller and turn her garden.

Who'll turn the earth this April? she wondered as she lay cold and curled under her puzzle-quilt. And as a dream in a dream, her voice answered her voice: Do you love? The wind gusted, rattling the storm window. It seemed that the storm window was talking to her, but she turned her face away from its words. And did not cry.

' 'But Gram,' Lona would press {she never gave up, not that one, she was like her mom, and her grandmother before her), 'you still haven't told why you never went across.' ' 'Why, child, I have always had everything I wanted right here on Goat.'

'But it's so small. We live in Portland. There's buses, Gram!' ' 'I see enough of what goes on in cities on the TV. I guess I'll stay where I am.' Hal was younger, but somehow more intuitive; he would not press her as his sister might, but his question would go closer to the heart of things: 'You never wanted to go across, Gram?

Never?' And she would lean toward him, and take his small hands, and tell him how her mother and father had come to the island shortly after they were married, and how Bull Symes's grandfather had taken Stella's father as a 'prentice on his boat. She would tell him how her mother had conceived four times but one of her babies had miscarried and another had died a week after birth—she would have left the island if they could have saved it at the mainland hospital, but of course it was over before that was even thought of.

She would tell them that Bill had delivered Jane, their grandmother, but not that when it was over he had gone into the bathroom and first puked and then wept like a hysterical woman who had her monthlies particularly bad. Jane, of course, had left the island at fourteen to go to high school; girls didn't get married at fourteen anymore, and when Stella saw her go off in the boat with Bradley Maxwell, whose job it had been to ferry the kids back and forth that month, she knew in her heart that Jane was gone for good, although she would come back for a while.

She would tell them that Alden had come along ten years later, after they had given up, and as if to make up for his tardiness, here was Alden still, a lifelong bachelor, and in some ways Stella was grateful for that