“I assume you have preserves,” she said while Miss Augustastared ponderously down at the lump of cloth.
“Of course,” Miss Augusta said. “Of course I do. Comeinside. This is such a lovely surprise. Really, just lovely.” She led hervisitor through the narrow foyer to the crowded little kitchen. Mrs. O’Neillseated herself while Miss Augusta filled the tea kettle and slathered a thickgreyish paste across two slices of bread, scraping the sides of her last jar.Harvest would not come again for months, but she would not let Mrs. O’Neillthink she needed to scrimp.
“It’s lovely to see you,” she said, her back still facingthe woman. “You know, Evelyn is such a wonderful student.”
When Miss Augusta turned with the tea-tray in her hands,Mrs. O’Neill’s face was hard. “Evelyn tells me you haven’t been teachingBranaugh’s history for the past two weeks.”
Miss Augusta forced herself to set the teacups down withoutspilling. “That’s true,” she managed, adapting the same steadfast posture shetook with the unruly older boys in the back of the classroom. “I’ve been payingattention to their reading. A few of them—Evelyn included, I’m sorry tosay—have fallen behind.”
“The lighthouse-keeper’s girl is quite a strange littlething, I hear,” Mrs. O’Neill said in the decisive tone of one barreling past asmall and insubstantial obstacle. “I knew as soon as I heard she was enrollingin school that she would be trouble, and I am only surprised it took so longfor me to be proven right. Did her mother protest? Was that the trouble?”
“Not at all,” Miss Augusta said. “I’ve never met the woman.”She could not, in fact, even think of the lighthouse-keeper’s wife withoutseeing her wild dance, her bare feet, her disheveled hair. Whatever Mrs. Eisnerhad been before she had come to Branaugh, she was not quite that thing anymore.“I haven’t met the father, either,” she continued. “And Lilianne Eisner isperfectly well-behaved.”
Mrs. O’Neill seemed to take pity on her, then. “I know,” shesaid, “what a sense of duty you must feel to help that child. How, beingchildless yourself, you must develop some, well, attachment to a girlwho is not being well-mothered. But you know as well as anyone that thechildren of Branaugh must be taught how to care for their island. Even if itfrightens the Eisner girl. Even if it upsets her. She is not the subject ofthose lessons.” She leaned across the table and laid her hand on MissAugusta’s. “Dismiss her from your classroom, Augusta. Don’t let this gofurther.”
“I’m afraid I have an errand to run,” Miss Augusta said,standing abruptly and wrenching her hand out from under Mrs. O’Neill’s. “I’m sosorry to run out on you like this. It really isn’t like me. So few visitors.I’m very grateful. I suppose I’ll see you around the grocer’s very soon.”
Mrs. O’Neill remained seated. Miss Augusta was clearing thethreshold of her own front door when she heard the woman say, “Branaugh willcome back to life soon. And what will you say to the Eisner girl then?”
◊
All the children of Branaugh knew that the island changedsometime between February and May. If they were too small to remember thepreceding year’s changes, they at least remembered the bright insipid littlerhyme whose words they intoned sometimes with ritual solemnity, other times ina succession of joyful screams:
Thickening, thickening, filling the crack,
The sun comes out, the water goes back.
White stars in the night, red rain in the day
There’s grass on the shore, there’s fish in the bay.
The children reincarnated the song each year before the endof January, and never let it rest until each line had come to fruition. MissAugusta had sung the song in her own schooldays, clasping hands with the othergirls in the schoolyard; she could not do anything besides bear it patientlynow. Yet she was sorry to see how Lilianne Eisner absorbed the words withterror and bewilderment, making the same face that she made during historylessons. By mid-February, she had begun avoiding the schoolyard in order toavoid hearing the song. At midday recess, she sat prodding at her food untilMiss Augusta called the class back to order. At the end of the day, she hungback to help clean the chalkboard or the slates, whatever she was permitted todo, as long as she could stay until all the other children had gone.
Miss Augusta dispensed these unnecessary after-school choresto Lilianne in a show of sympathy, because she had no power to do anythingmore, because she thought Lilianne was getting pale and sickly-looking, herglossy dark abundance of hair thinning. Lurid theories about thelighthouse-keeper’s domestic life circulated Branaugh, staples at the grocer asreliably as salt or flour. Some believed the wife was a violent hysteric, andher misbehavior had forced the family into exile from wherever they’doriginally come. Others blamed the father, with his dark-lensed littlespectacles and over-fine clothes, certain that he must harbor pretensionsbeyond lighthouse-keeping, that he must be continually shoving his work offonto the poor frail-nerved wife and daughter.
Miss Augusta had not wanted to credit any of those storiesbefore. Now Lilianne’s eyelids sagged wearily, and she wore her hair indisheveled plaits that unsuccessfully covered a coin-sized bald spot on thecrown of her head. When Miss Augusta dismissed the girl each night, she alwaysfelt morbidly certain that she had seen the last of Lilianne: that somewherebetween the schoolyard and the lighthouse, the girl would simply crumple intothe earth like a wilting flower.
Miss Augusta did not want to see Lilianne wilt. At the veryleast, she did not want to feel responsible for the wilting. If shecould interfere in some way, she would feel that she was guiltless in thematter, whatever happened. But she did not want to be dragged in too deeply.She waited to make her overtures of concern until an afternoon when Liliannescrubbed the chalkboard with unusual strength and quickness, appearing at leasta little revived. “Lilianne,” Miss Augusta said, coaxingly, “would you tell me,if you had trouble at home?”
The question had been framed carefully, to avoid receivingany answer besides yes, miss or there’s no trouble, miss, oranother suitably benign substitute. But still Miss Augusta stood in a fugue ofterror while she waited for the girl’s answer, knowing
