At last, Lem arrived to carry Ezra’s trunk of clothes to the Bethel.
“Care to come along?” he asked Ida, surprising her.
“Yes,” she said, surprising herself. She’d been wanting to see Rose Amaral but had never found it in herself to make that effort, had in fact been a little fearful of what she might find in a meeting with the apparently fierce Rose Amaral. This would be a safe way to do it—a brief exchange with the excuse on the ready of Lem’s wagon waiting to take her home again. Ida climbed into the wagon beside Lem.
They bumped along saying little, so little that Ida felt the weight of the silence. “My bicycle rides smoother than this wagon,” she offered.
“This wagon won’t dump you out on the ground spread-eagled,” Lem said. The way he said the word spread-eagled made it sound like something Ida had done on purpose.
“You don’t approve of my cycling, do you, Lem? At first I thought it was just my bicycling with Henry you disapproved of, out of respect for Ruth’s view on the matter, although why you should care so much what Ruth thinks I don’t know. But it isn’t Henry, is it? Or maybe it is Henry, but even without Henry, you don’t think women should exhibit themselves like that in public.”
“It doesn’t show you to advantage.”
“Whose advantage?”
“Yours. You’re not planning to stay a widow forever, are you? Someday you’ll want to find a decent gentleman—”
“‘Decent’ meaning one not divorcing. ‘Decent’ meaning one who doesn’t let his wife go off bicycling.”
“In trousers. Knees flashing in the wind. Knees and whatever else turns wrong side up. I’m not going to tell you what I saw that day on the track.”
“I was in a skirt that day. If I’d been in trousers you’d have seen a lot less.”
Lem sat silent. He rattled onto the wharf and pulled up in front of the Bethel, coming around to help Ida out, but Ida didn’t move.
“When I came here with Ezra, you were the first person I met. You stepped out of the barn as if you lived there, and you didn’t even smile at me, but there was something in the way you looked at me, at the way you came up to me and took my bag, that told me I might find a friend in this godforsaken place after all. I knew—I already knew—that I was going to need one. Aren’t we friends anymore?”
Lem blinked. “To my way of looking at things, I’m the best friend you’ve got.”
“No matter the—”
“No matter anything, Ida. That’s just how it works. I might get disappointed in you now and again same as you get disappointed in me, but that’s also how it works. Now are you going to come in or you going to sit there?”
Lem went to the back of the wagon, hoisted the trunk, and carried it into the Bethel. He’d hoisted it all the way down the stairs at home without effort but now he paused halfway to the door, set it down, took a couple of breaths, hoisted it again. Ida scrambled out of the wagon and followed him in.
By the time Ida caught up, Rose Amaral had already opened the trunk. When she saw Ida she came around and grasped both her hands.
“Mrs. Pease. I’m grateful for this. You can’t know the need. I’m so sorry about your husband. Such an old story on this island, and yet each time I hear it, especially perhaps this time, since I don’t know you . . . but here, we can fix that. I have a pot on; come and sit and we’ll have that talk.”
Sit and we’ll have that talk; such a gentle suggestion and yet it caused Ida’s chest to tighten. But what was she to do? Rose Amaral had already started across the room, assuming Ida would follow her.
Ida turned to Lem. “Thank you for the transport. I’ll walk home.”
“You’ve suffered such a loss,” Rose began. “I’ve many times thought how ill-equipped I am to comfort anyone widowed—my fisherman husband has tempted his fate more times in that boat of his and every single trip—”
“Five,” Ida said.
“I . . . five?”
She’d lost five. She could no longer hear the word loss without taking the full count; Ezra was the last and least, but the number was five. Five. The room began to recede; Rose began to recede. Ida needed to shift the subject, fast. She looked around the enormous kitchen and spied a poster tacked over the sink:
For the work of a day
For the price we pay
For the laws we obey
We want something to say.
VOTES FOR WOMEN!
Ida pointed. “You’ve heard of Julia Ward Howe?”
Rose’s eyes, already warm, grew warmer. “I’ve read of her.”
Ida relayed her conversation with Howe in Boston and watched warm turn to flame. “I’ve wanted to get up a group here for the longest time. This is all I needed—someone like you to egg me on. We start by asking everyone we know. I have several who would do it; you must know some. We could meet at the library, write up a piece for the paper, maybe get Mrs. Howe to speak to us.”
Ida doubted Mrs. Howe would use up her valuable time with a trip to such an outpost, but Rose’s energy flowed over and through her like a stiff current, reviving Ida, putting the room back where it belonged. As she looked at the animated Rose an idea occurred to her. She would paint Rose’s portrait; this she knew how to do. A lot of burnt sienna in the hair with a touch of purple, a hint of that burnt sienna in the skin, the eyes one of Ida’s darker mixes of complementary colors. She would paint her right there, seated at the Bethel’s stove, the warmth in the eyes reflecting the warmth of the stove . . .
“I’d like to paint you,” Ida said.
“How kind of you to say so, Ida.”
“May I?”
Rose smiled sweetly. “No.”
After they’d talked awhile longer Ida tried again, but there was no shifting Rose. On the other hand, by the time Ida left, she’d not only promised Rose she’d compose a list of women likely to attend a suffrage meeting, but she’d agreed to volunteer at the Bethel.
“What stories?” Oliver asked. He and Ida were standing at the fence watching the sheep; Ida could make a case for some warmth from the sun on her back, but her hands and face were knotted with chill. Oliver had already run in sharp zigzags over the ripening grass to see if Betty would follow him, which she did until he’d fed her, but now she careened after the other lambs with that burst of energy only the first sun and a full belly could provide. Ida knew right off which stories Oliver meant, but the fact of it was that although she’d made her offer in good faith, feeling obligated to replace a long string of fairy tales with at least a few true ones, she couldn’t think of a single story about Ezra that Oliver should hear. Who was Ezra? A fortune hunter, in every sense of the word. An adventurer, she supposed, always ready to sail off in search of the next great treasure . . . Treasure.
“Did you know,” Ida began, “that your father could raise up ships from the bottom of the sea?”
There came the Oliver look. “What ships?”
“Ships that sank in storms. Or hit a rock. Or collided with another one. Sometimes a ship would have an explosion—”
“An explosion?”
“If they carried fuel, like coal. That exploded a lot.”
“How did he raise them up?”
“Different ways. Sometimes he plugged the hole and pumped it out. Sometimes he built a second bottom on top of the first. Sometimes he just emptied the cargo and it floated up to the surface by itself. If he couldn’t raise the ship, he’d just salvage the cargo.”
“What’s salvage?”
“Save.”
Oliver thought. “Was he the only one who knew how to raise up ships?”
“No, there were others.”
“Did they raise up the ship my father was on when he drownded?”
“Drowned. No, they didn’t.”
“Why didn’t they?”
“Well, they never found the ship.”
“Then how did they know it sank?”
“Things washed ashore out on the back side of Cape Cod. A life preserver with the name of the ship on it. The ship’s wheel. Furniture.” Bodies.
Oliver watched the sheep in silence for some time. “Maybe something of my father’s washed up. Maybe we should go look.”
Too late, it occurred to Ida that she should have saved some article of Ezra’s clothing to give to Oliver. She pondered what else of Ezra’s she might have but could think of nothing but the whiskey bottle. Then she remembered. “Wait here.”
Ida dashed inside and up the stairs, into her studio and past her unfinished sketches of Lem, Henry, Oliver, even Ruth and Hattie. She pulled Ezra’s little atlas off the shelf and thumbed through it; a color image of every state and country graced its pages, along with minute notations of its square miles, its topography, its crops and manufacturing, its railroads, its harbors. Would a boy like Oliver find such things of interest? He would, Ida guessed, if it was all he had of his father’s. But would Hattie—or Ruth—take the time to read it to him?
Ida returned to the pasture fence to find Oliver missing from it. She found him at the dog yard, reaching through the slats to allow Bett to lick his fingers. Ida released the dog but stayed close; when Bett ran off after some unseen animal Ida handed Oliver the atlas.
“This was your father’s,” she said. “He’d have wanted you to have it. I know you can’t read the words—”
“I can too!” Oliver snatched the book, opened it. Frowned. “Some words.” But he dropped to his knees and began turning pages. He looked up. “Did he go to all these places?”
“Not all of them.”
“Just the ones with the mark?”
Ida knelt beside the boy and looked where he pointed, to a couple of pencil marks on the page marked Massachusetts, one on the Rhode Island page, others at New York, Connecticut, Maine. “Yes,” Ida said, understanding as some others might not the value of such communication from the dead. “And here’s where he signed his name.”
Oliver stayed bent over the meager little book for so long that Ida contemplated buying a man’s watch and claiming it was Ezra’s just to have something more substantial to pass on to the boy, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—add anything more to the pile of Ezra lies.