THREE
Across the island, on Yarkie’s east shore, Reed Brockshaw was waving his two children out of the ocean. “Chow time, kids!” Six-year-old Kim and nine-year-old David came splashing and giggling out of the slapping waves in the noon sun. They shook themselves like puppy dogs and pounded up the sand to Doreen Brockshaw, waiting for them with large bath towels. Her embrace was fierce in its intensity. It was almost a year since fire—an ever-present island hazard—had consumed the house Reed had built. Only the man’s heroism had saved the children. Before the volunteer trucks arrived, he had plunged heedlessly through the wall of flame. Miraculously, none had suffered more than minor burns.
It was a miracle Doreen Brockshaw daily held in her mind beneath her long red hair. Each morning she went quietly down to the kitchen at dawn. In her white nightgown she brushed her hair back, lifted her green eyes to the coming day and sent up the meditations of her thankful heart.
Reed Brockshaw once came upon his wife in her praying. He withdrew silently, comprehending her need to be private in this. It was a measure of the couple’s devotion that no words were needed. Reed and Doreen Brockshaw had an other-century marriage appropriate to an old-fashioned island.
Reed himself had sailed with Elias Johnson on many charters but now he was working as a carpenter on a marina being built by another selectman of the island, Stephen Scott. Reed missed the ocean trips, but the land pay was better, and building his new house was costing more than even he had planned for.
Doreen was saying, “We need more firewood, kids.” Reed had carefully built the small cooking fire on the side of the dunes away from the forest. The trees came close to the shore at this spot, and he knew they were tinder. He half rose to go himself, but remembered his father’s saying: Shared chores mean shared family. The Yarkie way. In the winter they called gathering firewood “going wooding.” Let David and Kim go wooding now.
Something made the father turn to look after the two small figures stamping gaily into the trees. On impulse he got to his feet and started to follow.
His wife laughed at him. “Don’t be such a fusspot, Reed. We know every inch of this place and there isn’t a blessed thing in there that can hurt them.”
Brockshaw didn’t answer his wife, and he didn’t stop. Doreen held her peace. She knew the constant anxiety for the children her husband harbored. If her own answer was her morning prayers, his was this special vigilance. He was tactful, she appreciated. She didn’t think the children were aware how closely he kept them in view.
In the forest, David, as the older child, took charge. He pointed to a thicket on the right, in the direction of the distant village dump. “You go that way,” he commanded his sister. He himself had spotted a pile of broken branches on the opposite side and intended to gather its riches alone.
The little girl went obediently into the thick copse, though she could see nothing but the crowding bushes. She had trouble getting through even with her small and agile body, but she was intent on bringing back as much wood as any old officious brother. Kim dropped to her knees and wiggled on. She heard her father calling and flattened herself in the leaves so he would not spy her.
In the quiet she heard an unfamiliar sound. It was coming from behind a heavily leafed bush before her. It was a rustling of leaves accompanied by a hissing Kim had never known before. With curiosity, the girl spread the bush apart with her hands, wincing at sharp thorns that drew spots of blood.
Kim peered into the gloom. The noise might be a baby bird fallen from its nest, or a baby rabbit, or a chipmunk caught in a crevice—though she had never heard such hissing from any of those friendly animals.
She decided she would go back and tell her father when she heard her brother calling triumphantly through the trees, “Hey, Dad, betcha Kim can’t beat this load!”
The bravado of it stung Kim with an anger that steeled her purpose. She lowered her head and butted her way obstinately toward the sibilant sound. She came to a half clearing where there was a little more light. It fell on a gleaming jewel lying in the leaves before the child’s astonished eyes. Directly on top of a heap of leaves there was an iridescent shell, longer than her longest finger, which scintillated like treasure in a ray of sunlight.
It was unlike any shell she had ever seen on the beaches. The delighted girl leaned over, her face near the object. Her lustrous eyes, wide with guileless curiosity, were scarcely an inch above the shining shell when she sensed that it was alive. She bent more closely, studying it intently. It was hard to make out in the shifting light, but from the front of the thing there emerged two antennae, like those she’d seen on crabs and lobsters, though smaller.
The shell shifted slightly in the leaves, and the antennae, thrust in her direction, seemed to be reaching up toward her eyes. She moved her head back quickly.
What kind of creature was under the pretty shell, Kim wondered. As she reached her fingers out to turn it over a sharp hiss issued from whatever it was. Her hand jerked away. Fear prickled her spine. “I just want to see,” the child murmured indignantly. “I’m not going to hurt you, you know!” She reached for the shell obstinately. This time something flashed out so quickly she hardly saw it. But she felt the sting, and tumbled away. Lying in the leaves, she stared at her hand and saw blood running along her finger.
Angry now, Kim crawled forward once more. The tarnation thing had dared to bite her! She bent to examine it again, but more cautiously now, ready to hop back if it pulled any more tricks. Then she realized that another “whatever-it-was” had appeared through the leaves. And another, and another. There were antennae waving all about, encircling her.
At once, the child was tingling with a primal fear. This wasn’t a game she liked! She started away, then decided to go back. She would take one of the things to show her parents, and put David in his place. She reached down determinedly with the hand that had not been stung.
When she lifted the thing into the ray of sunlight to observe it more closely, it seemed to go dead.
With her small fingers, Kim gently stroked the shiny shell, and saw the iridescent color came from the folded wings. This creature didn’t look like a beetle at all. It was—she couldn’t believe her eyes—a roach! She said it aloud: “Cock-a-roach!”
But so big!
Nobody in the world had ever seen a cock-a-roach this size! It was a giant! It was a cock-a-roach from the kitchen of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk!
Kim began to giggle as she made up a story about the strange bug climbing down the beanstalk and getting lost in the Yarkie woods.
She wondered why it was so still: Had she stunned it picking it up? Was it afraid of the sunlight? She knew that cock-a-roaches liked to stay in the dark cracks at home.
The girl looked at the great insect with growing curiosity. Had this bug bitten her? It looked so nice, not at all anything to be afraid of. She lifted it higher, closer to her eyes to see it better.
“Kim!” It was her father, angry-sounding. His voice startled her and the bug dropped out of her grasp.
“I found something, Daddy! Come and see!”
Reed Brockshaw grabbed his daughter in his arms. “Are you all right?”
Kim pointed at the leaves. “Look at the shells there!” But before her father could turn his eyes, the girl saw the glinting surfaces vanish. She pouted. “They’re down in the leaves!” She didn’t want her father to think she hadn’t told the truth. “Cock-a-roaches! Look at my finger!” She lifted her incontrovertible evidence. “It even bit me. See the blood?”
The man started away with the girl against his chest. “We’ll put something on that. Does it hurt, honey?”
“No.” Her father smelled of sun and tanning lotion, and love, and she hugged him hard.
To his wife, Reed Brockshaw said, “Kim stuck her finger on a thorn. Put a Band-Aid on it . . .”
Kim spoke indignantly. “It wasn’t any thorn! A cock-a-roach as big as a house bit me!”
“Oh, you,” her brother said predictably, “always making things up!”