She hoped she'd go around, and not over, but knew too that humble was not her best pie.
“Faith, whatever are you thinking about? You have the most peculiar expression on your face—sort of like the two corners of your mouth can't decide whether to go up or down,' Pix commented.
“That's about it, Pix. I was thinking about good and evil,' Faith replied, not realizing until she said it that that was what she had actually been considering.
There was silence for a moment as they all looked at her. Then Elliot Frazier asked, 'Is this in light of the auction? I ask that because the day triggered many thoughts for me, starting with the whole event. Was it good or evil of Matilda to separate things that way? We knew her well, and I am still puzzled that she wanted to have the house dismantled after she died. The things in it were as much a part of the house as the structure itself for her.'
“I hadn't connected my thoughts to the auction, but you may be right. I certainly have been restless since yesterday. There seemed to be so much tension, and I don't even know all these people.' Faith looked at him with a feeling of respect. An insightful man.
The Fraziers had moved to Sanpere almost forty years ago. They were in their early thirties then, with two small children. Elliot had had a serious heart attack and they had wanted to get away from the stress of life in Washington, where he had built up a thriving accounting firm. At about the same time, Louise had inherited enough money from her family to enable them to buy their lovely old house on Sanpere. Elliot never had another heart attack. He had retired years before from the job he got the first year they were here—postmaster of Sanpere Village. They were the exception to the rule—most people on the island had forgotten the Fraziers weren't born on Sanpere. They moved comfortably among all the groups on the island. Sanpere had few secrets the postmaster and his wife hadn't heard—and kept.
“I think I know why Matilda divided things,' Louise offered. 'She might have felt slightly guilty about leaving the house to Roger and Eric, but more likely she wanted to get everything cleaned out. Have someone start fresh, which I'm sure she wanted to do herself at times, much as she worshipped those ancestors of hers.'
“You could be right,' Pix said. 'The end of an era.'
“Exactly.' John closed the gate on the conversation, and Faith realized it was getting late. She resisted their attempts to convince her to stay for dinner and set off through the woods with Benjamin in tow. The path led close to the shore at times, and Faith could glimpse the sunset through the trees. The sun was a fiery-red rubber ball making a straight path across the water, the clouds streaming out along the horizon like purple and scarlet kite tails. Life with Ben was reducing her to kindergarten imagery.
The rocks that sloped down to the water were already in darkness, and on the other side of the cove she could see a few lights at Prescott's lobster pound and the houses to either side. Bird's tiny cabin stood out against the sky. There were no lights on, and Faith wasn't sure Bird even had electricity.
She had seen her with the baby on the shore again and this time had received a brief nod and slight smile in answer to her greeting. The baby, who appeared to be under a year old, still looked pale, and whether this was from the macrobiotics or lack of sunshine penetrating the sling Bird carried it in Faith didn't know.
The porch light at her own cottage blinked a welcome as she emerged from the woods carrying Benjamin, who had suddenly decided he wanted to be picked up and was now sound asleep.
She had no trouble sleeping that night either. Her last semiconscious thought was that she had never realized Nature was quite so noisy—crickets, owls, bullfrogs, and always the sea, just close enough so she could make out the faint rhythmical lappings of the waves on the rocks.
The next morning Faith was up virtuously early. If she was a jogger, she'd go jogging, she thought. It was that kind of day. Newborn and sparkling. She packed a lunch in one of the two or three hundred knapsacks hanging from nails in the barn and set off with Benjamin for the beach at the Point. She had her bathing suit on under her shorts and shirt and thought they might even go wading, which would be something to tell Tom when he called next.
By the time they got to the beach, she was worn out. It wasn't that Benjamin didn't keep up. He could match her pace for pace, but he was stubbornly determined to forge his own trails, and it took all her energy and patience to keep him on the track. Now he could roam at will over the beach and had already found a little stick with which he was furiously digging his way to China or whatever was directly below. Faith opened the knapsack and spread out a towel next to him. She sat down and looked at the water. The tide was out and had left a wavy line of seaweed, shells, odd pieces of wood, rope from traps and buoys, and other assorted flotsam—bleach bottles, which people cut to use as bailers, a waterlogged shoe, a sardine tin. The beach itself was arranged in layers. Farthest from the sea, near the wild roses, sea lavender, and spreading junipers, the sand was covered with stones and broken shells, pushed up by the waves. A line of dried, blackened seaweed separated this layer from the sand that had recently been underwater and still glistened in the sun. When it dried, it would be soft and almost white. Down near the water's edge the rocks started again.
One of the big schooners sailed by, and Ben jumped up and down waving excitedly. 'Wanna ride! Wanna ride!' He was actually beginning to make sense these days, and the next step might be conversation. In a way it was nice to concentrate on Ben, although a few days would have more than suffIced. Before he was born, she hadn't realized that there would be times when husband and child would pull at her from different directions. Like that poem of Robert Frost's that compared a woman to a silken tent with 'ties of love and thought' binding her to the earth. They were either holding her up or pulling her down, depending on the day, or as Frost pointed out, the movement of the wind.
Faith and Ben ate their sandwiches and wandered out to the receding water. This wasn't a clam flat and there was no mud. Faith held tight to Benjamin's chubby little paw. He was racing toward the water crying, 'Swim! Swim!' Faith stuck her big toe in and promptly lost all feeling. She decided her shoes would fit better if she did not get frostbite and managed to steer Ben away from the beckoning deep, over to the tidal pools that had been left behind in the warm sun.
“Sweetheart, we'll go look for little fishes and shells in the pools, okay? We'll swim another day.' And in another place, Faith added to herself.
She helped Ben climb up onto the flat ledges that stretched around the Point, and they began to explore the endlessly fascinating pools. At first Ben wanted to jump in or at least stick his hand in right away, but Faith was able to get him to pause and look first—to see the busy world of tiny fish darting among the sea anemones and starfish, small crabs making their way across the mussels and limpets clinging to the pink and orange algae that lined the bottoms of the pools. They went farther away from the beach, carefully avoiding the sharp remains of the sea urchins the gulls had dropped on the rocks and the lacelike barnacles that covered the granite.
“What's that, Ben?' Faith looked up from the life in thepool she had been studying. It looked so arranged, so deliberate, like the pine cones she had found in the woods placed on a mat of gray moss in a star shape with a feather in the middle.
“Wait, honey, I'm coming.' She made her way across the flat rock and stood next to Ben, who was crouched and gazing intently at something in a lower pool.
“Man swimming,' he said. 'Ben wanna swim.'
“What man?' Faith started to say before she looked and the question was answered for her.
It was Roger Barnett, draped over the rocks and secured with thick ropes of brown kelp. Small waves were systematically covering and uncovering his head, filling his slackly opened mouth with sea water, fanning his long brown hair against the rockweed. His shirt was gone, and the dark kelp stood out against the unnatural whiteness of his bare arms and chest. His eyes were open and staring straight into the sun. Roger wasn't swimming.
Roger was dead.
4
Faith opened her mouth to scream, remembered Benjamin, and swallowed hard. Then she grabbed him and started to walk quickly back to the beach. Her legs felt as rubbery as the kelp that lashed Roger to the rocks, and she had trouble focusing. She stepped on a sea urchin, the sharp tines puncturing her heel, and for a moment the pain was a welcome distraction.
There had been no point in investigating closer. Roger was beyond any resuscitation attempts. She felt extremely nauseated thinking about trying.
In with the good air, out with the bad.
And she knew she wouldn't be able to move the body herself. She had to get help before the tide came in and carried him away. Faith didn't read the charts, but she could tell when it was out and when it was in. It was out
