The three Bennetts came back the next day. Rob had survived his trip and was in good condition in the hospital, and Maggie was staying with her aunt. “She won’t come home,” Kathy said. “She still thinks he can die any minute.” Van had at last allowed herself to be cornered, as a matter of policy. It wasn’t too difficult because Kathy liked to talk, and though she was acutely interested in finding out all she could, she was too polite to ask Van questions beyond the obvious ones. She talked more about Maggie. “I don’t think her aunt’s any help. She brought Maggie up to believe the way she does. Everything’s planned out ahead of time for you, and if you’re lucky you get a warning just before something happens. I don’t know if I call it lucky or not. Would you want to know?”
“Well, it would depend on what I found out,” said Van.
“But you can’t change anything, according to Maggie, and it’s always the bad things you hear about, never anything good that’s coming to you, so all you can do is stew around being scared foolish and waiting for the ax to fall.” She looked impressed. “That’s it, the ax. Like kneeling there waiting and waiting for the headsman to drop it. If they’d been going to execute me in the French Revolution they wouldn’t have had to use the guillotine. I’d have died long before I got to it.”
Vanessa laughed and got up to leave. “I’ll see you at the sewing meeting tonight,” Kathy called after her. “Can we walk over together?”
“Why not?” Van said. It was a question to herself as well as an answer to Kathy. It was all an essential part of the fabric. Not that she hadn’t already woven a tight, strong bit of goods, first with Mark Bennett’s child and now with the Dinsmore two. Tiger bounced and wriggled at sight of her, as Louis the cat rubbed familiarly around her ankles if she went to the store. She was branded as someone safe and ordinary; children and animals liked her, and her quietness was being marked as high quality.
At the sewing circle she met Owen’s wife for the first time. She was a youthful-looking woman in her late thirties, with a sturdy body and fine coloring. There was something ingenuous about her, you could see in her the girl she had been, with the firm handclasp and the rosy cheeks, and the burnished hair that curled around her head so becomingly only because it grew that way, and not because she had any knack or patience for fixing hair. She wouldn’t consider it as important as her field hockey game or her student council meeting or, later, her class of fifth-graders whom she’d organized into two softball teams.
She wasn’t aggressively hearty. If she had been, Vanessa would have liked her better, or at least tolerated her more, because one can always tolerate whatever one can laugh at.
She asked Van to come over and call on her, and Van, basting quilt squares together, said without looking at her, “I’d like to.” She knew she would never walk inside his house. How had he ever married this woman? He must have grabbed at her to get away from the family. And she, poor fool, thought it was love. He couldn’t have loved her. It ran him down in Van’s eyes to imagine him passionate and besotted about the sturdy clear-eyed true-blue captain of the girls’ basketball team. No, he’d chosen her deliberately, to run a home for him. Such men always chose women who had neither the courage nor imagination to be anything but virtuous.
There was some talk going on, and out of it Laurie’s husky voice said, “Owen’s having one of his spells where he can’t sleep.”
Van ran a needle into her finger and exclaimed. The blood drops welled out. There was a little wave of exclamations, and somebody handed her a clean tissue.
“I’m not very good at sewing,” she apologized, “but I’m willing.”
“You can knit trapheads,” said Philip’s wife, “and around here that’s a priceless talent.”
“I should say so!” Mrs. Foss Campion was the stout florid woman who had tapped on the window at Van one day. “I tried to learn when we was first married, but Foss said it took him more time to get out my slipknots than to knit the heads himself.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Nora Fennell said, “your husband bragging that you knit all his heads has got my husband looking at me with a hard eye.” Everyone laughed; everyone began talking about experiences in learning, or refusing to learn.
“I wonder if Owen knows you knit,” Laurie Bennett said to her. “I try to help him but I’m not at all fast, and right now he’s trying to get three hundred new traps ready for the water as fast as he can. He lost a lot in that really bad storm in March.” Van made three beautiful stitches. Owen’s wife said tentatively, “Would you knit for him? He’d be glad to pay whatever you ask, and he’s in such a hurry.”
Yes, he is, Vanessa thought. She said, “I charge four dollars for a ball of nylon. Yes, I’d knit for him.”
“What a relief! He’s been really worked up about those heads. I think it’s why he can’t sleep. He gets up and knits at two or three in the morning.”
“Owen always did things harder than anyone else,” his sister said. Vanessa basted with careful neat stitches, her head bent, trying to keep from smiling.
He came the next afternoon when Barry was around the harbor somewhere. She had been waiting for him with such intensity, waked up at dawn by it, that when she actually saw him coming past Foss Campion’s she felt scattered with panic, absolutely blank. He had two children with him and she thought in bitter relief, Well, we couldn’t talk anyway. Yet when the children stopped off next door and he came on alone she considered hiding upstairs and not opening the door. In a paralysis of doom she heard him coming and waited for the imperious rap of knuckles; stiffly, with great effort, seeing herself a scarecrow come to life, she went to open the door.
“My wife said you’d knit for me,” he said at once. She nodded and stood back. He had three two-pound balls of nylon under one arm, and he put them on the table and took two meshboards out of his hip pocket. “This one’s for the big heads and this for the little ones,” he explained, showing her the B and L burned into the ends. The meshboards were polished with use, and warm from contact with his body.
He was so curt that the children could have been safely in the room with them. As he started to give her instructions for the heads, she said, “Wait a minute, I’d better write everything down.” She went into the sitting room. But she could find neither pencil nor paper, and she got very hot and her eyes stung. “Oh, damn it,” she wailed softly, pawing without sense at magazines, and he called to her, “Never mind, I’ve got something in my pocket.” When she went back to the kitchen he was sitting at the table writing on the back of an envelope. She stood looking at the bulk of his shoulders and the back of his neck, at the way the wiry black hair grew down on it and at a small puckered scar—a white seam against the burnt-dark skin. She lit a cigarette after several futile attempts to scratch a match because her hand was infuriatingly unsteady.
“There you are,” he said, reading the figures off the paper. “And knit them in sets, will you? Got plenty of needles?”
“Plenty,” she said.
“All right, then.” He pushed back from the table and the moment was over. She had to reclaim it somehow, her mind dashed wildly about as she’d searched for paper and pencil. “Oh—do you want the rings knit in?”
“No, I’ll put them in myself.” He looked at her then. “I guess I’ll get used to it.”
“To what?”
“Your hair.” Before she had time to warm to that he was on his way out; then he stopped abruptly halfway through the door and said, “A man’s so drove up this time of year he can’t think.”
“Or sleep either,” said Van, marvelously, drunkenly warm now as if wine were running through her veins and flushing her skin.
“How’d you know?” Without waiting for her reply he went on, “I’ll have to use up tomorrow afternoon going around the shore in a dory looking for traps of mine gone ashore. This morning I saw three down in Ship Cove.”
“I’ll bet your youngsters will enjoy going with you.”
“I’m not taking them. They’ll still be in school.”
“Oh.” The syllable floated between them, a leaf or a feather borne on light capricious air currents, and they were bemused by watching it sail first toward one, then toward the other. Van said, “I must know Ship Cove by sight but not by name. I’ve been all over the island, I think.”
Like someone asked by a passer-by for directions, he said, “You know the deep cove over past Mark’s point on the west side? You can see Fennells’ from there. That’s Barque Cove. Next is Wood and then comes Ship, the third one. You know the place where the woods rise up steep from the shore, all great old spruces straight as masts?”
She realized how intensely she was staring at him. She nodded. “Yes. It’s beautiful down there. You could be a thousand miles away from the world.”
But he was already going off the doorstep, not looking back. He met Terence Campion coming from his wharf and stood there talking. The children eddied around them in some foolish, giggling game. Terence looked down with an absent smile once or twice, but she noticed with a queer relief that Owen was like a rock amidst splashing surf, impervious even when his daughter put her arms around his waist and leaned her head in a proprietory manner against his middle. The boy, about ten, and the image of his mother, climbed up his back like a monkey; Terence, as if noticing the sudden loneliness of the Dinsmore children, rumpled Tammie’s head and drew Diane against his leg where she leaned quietly as a cat. But Owen, garlanded and even half-strangled by his children, appeared still separate from them.
When he and they had gone, she went to filling needles with the white nylon twine, and while her hands worked automatically she purposely drove tomorrow from her mind, knowing that if it should rain or blow she would be physically sick. She did not dare examine her feelings closely for fear of reasoning herself out of them; or, like Maggie Dinsmore, being visited by signs and portents.
She set a cup-hook in the sill of a sunporch window so she could watch the harbor as she worked. When Barry came home he was grinning with satisfaction, “Knitting for Owen, huh? Well, from now on you’ll have all the work you can handle. They use a lot of baitbags out here, too.”
“I’m not going to make a thing of it,” she warned him. “So don’t you go drumming up trade for me. His wife cornered me at their damn sewing circle and I couldn’t get away.”
“All right, all right.” He was good-natured about it, talking on and on about his day’s work as he got himself a mug-up. She went on knitting, looking out at the molten boil of the harbor under the wind. The rhythm of the twine pulling taut and the creak of the small rocker were hypnotic, putting her into a familiar state in which her mind moved free in suspension between dream and reality. The difference from her knitting in the past was that these heads belonged to Owen Bennett and that soon they would be handled with careless expertise by those brown hands with the long thumbs which she could see so clearly as they wrote, gestured, lit a cigarette, and held out the meshboards.