Helen sinks to her knees in her nursey way and hitches the cloth up his calf. She fingers the burn and, gently, gravely, his boot heel clamped between her knees, applies a compress of snow.
“Who, Mommy,” Carl brays, laughing. “That’s the first thing I felt in yeeears.”
There are two kennels built of chainlink at the boundary of the yard, a doghouse in each, an automatic feeder. The floor of each kennel is so deep in shit you have to walk on your tiptoes to keep it from welting over your shoes. That’s what Grace does — she walks on tiptoes, crawls into the doghouse.
They cannot see her in there. She doesn’t answer Carl when he calls.
Helen wrestles the wheelchair down the steps, bumps it over the walkway.
The windowlight flutters on — Walter is on his rounds. Lights on, speakers off. He toddles from room to room, seeking damage, surveying what is his.
Helen comes upon the ladder at the far end of the house, leaned up against the gutter. She kicks off her shoes and goes up — quickly, tottering on her arches, over the icy rungs. Grace is up there, she thinks, she must be, blundering over the shingles.
Helen feels brave and suddenly useful. She can do this for years to come — clamber onto rooftops, venture out in the dark and snow. A great weakening surge of something bristles her arms and legs.
Grace watches all this from the dog house how Helen bobbles up, hooks a toe. Then she is gone, crept out onto the pitch in the dark.
There is Carl, still, and the sheepdog to watch, the sheepdog circling Carl, snapping at the wheels of his chair. There is the milky beam from the lighthouse, the hum of the turning bulb.
The sheepdog rushes at Carl. He flies it back with his elbow.
Carl hunkers, his chin tucked, snarls, spinning his chair as the dog moves, keeping the dog out in front of him, taunting, he is like that, and Grace sees she is standing now, tiptoeing out to help him — the orbs of mud his chair plows up and hears, sometimes, her name.
She whistles. It will come to her — the sheepdog’s name.
And the light from over the golf course, that will come to her, too. You simply stand just so and wait for it: a beacon, a sweeping pulse, convincing, the light triggered by dark, by weather: needed, that’s the idea.
Nothing is missing, nothing damaged. No bedcover browned by flame.
Walter stands for a time in the doorway of the room that used to be, that would be again — it wasn’t his idea Francesca’s. Francescos—he would insist on that. There were Francescas all through his side of the family, every dead generation.
A few of her things are still here — figurines of horses, a family of porcelain dolls.
Down the hall a short stretch is their bedroom his and Sarah’s, his and Helen’s. Walter tries to remember what it felt like to him to be lonely before Helen, when he was alone.
He has drawers full of places to go. Rivers to fish, famous creeks.
Old age would come upon him in his hip boots.
He pulls the door shut.
The hospitals, the phone calls from distant precincts, all of it, mucking around with lowlifes — it is already back in his hands. She will steal from them. She will drive their cars into lamp posts. She will break her neck at the square dance, lift her skirts for the guards at the gate — for the men you have to check in with before you are allowed to go home.
cougina
I was to marry him. I had no doubt of it. But I saw easily that it mattered to him that I take no notice of his plan.
It was not like him, it was strange of him — to have brought us at all to the island. He had secured a room in the island hotel, a clean place of thickest coquina, the tide gnawing at its heels.
The room, the entire island, even the sea seemed to quiet. He had consulted the gods, I decided. And this unnerved him, it surprised him, I saw, how the moment embarked upon in such quiet came to swagger before us and leer.
We saw no automobiles. We saw none but the crudest wobbling ways for the few mewling carts to run on. No bridge stretched over the inlet; the natives bullied their way by foot as they must, to market, to the city from which we had travelled and to which, bound anew by a mulish faith, we would return to make our home. They went weakly, carting their old in the ebb tide over the oyster beds.
The trip was pleasing, the passage by ferry from the mainland we made over the open sea. The night was soft and damply mooned. He suggested that, once we had settled, we walk; we would take in the night’s salt breeze.
I agreed, happily. I meant no trouble to him.
As we walked, I saw he allowed the box to drop to his feet in the sand. I saw the broad spotted face of a pony as we walked — there were bands of feral ponies — peering out from the bearded trees. The sand was fine and polished. I swung my foot, as we went, through the ruffle of foam — that we might know where we had lingered, that we might, in turning, easily sec where perhaps the box had been.
I confess this much surprised me, it worried me, that he had tossed the box onto the sand. I said nothing; I had decided. He had considered the hazard himself, understand. He is careful, it is his habit; he is thorough, such a man. He would make no failing gesture.
And yet I worried. I thought how easily the box might coast out. They would find it among the oysters beds, some child at her game, some luckie.
It was nothing. The loss of the ring would be nothing. It was his disappointment I dreaded, supposing the plan went askew.
We walked on. I understood I was meant to discover the ring when we had turned to return to our quarters. I saw my surprise, my elation; I imagined, as a kind of practice, that my voice might thicken with joy.
I understood, I believe, the custom well enough — my part in it, and his. I recognized the artifacts, the necessary gestures. He would fall to one knee, as is the custom.
I understood that the box would be velvet, it is velvet, I need not explain. The lid is jointed that I might, as I wish, snap it shut, that he might stand it open.
I saw him kneeling, a plain man, decent, mine, the small box sprung in his hand.
He spun round; he lurched past me, I was walking some distance behind him, poor man. He sank to both knees pitifully and begin to claw at the sand.
The ring was plain, it is plain, this is his habit.
And yet to see it surprised me. I found myself giddy, I was gladdened — to snug it over my knuckle. The long ardor, the looseness of girlhood at an end.
We kissed lightly; we brushed the sand from our knees. The light of our room fell toward us as we went, happily, in our languor; it swam to us from the shadows swung out of the bearded trees.
I meant no trouble to him.
I mean no trouble now.
That we were greeted at the door — this is the custom, is it not? And it is, is it not, the custom to boast, to say, Look, was it not, what has happened?
Besides, I found I wished to hear it — how lovely, such a ring, how lucky for me. I felt luckier still to hear it.
The night was strange to me, it was pleasing, the sea, the sweet wide faces of the ponies as we went, showing themselves in the trees. I was dizzy with it, I was foolish, I suppose, I who so terribly seldom felt — undone — even then, so very timid I was, I was — watchful of him, let me say it — you! Say, Watchful, kind. She was careful, say. She bore him three seemly girls.
The clerk said, “Isn’t that perfectly lovely.”
And I felt it, it had a way in me — the stone in my throat, the habit of love.