The Young in One Another's Arms Page 15

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Here we are!” Boy shouted from the cab of the U-Haul truck. “Spat out of the belly of the whale at last.”

  “That ferryboat scares you,” Tom observed, as he eased the truck over the speed-control ridges on the dock.

  “Shitless, man, shitless,” Boy admitted.

  Ruth between them pondered Boy’s loyalty to the enterprise, given that fear. Perhaps what was fearful in each of them was a measure and an offering, like the child Gladys carried, driven with nervous care by Mavis in the car behind them. Then, as they drove past the café, its grounds untended, some of its windows broken, the simple sign CAFÉ badly weathered, her concern shifted to the thing they had bought, more derelict than she had remembered.

  “What are we going to call it?” Tom asked.

  “Jonah’s,” Boy said at once. “And then every time I make it back here with the hot dogs, I will be assured that I’m about the Lord’s business.”

  “Well, it’s better than Ma’s,” Mavis admitted when Tom tried out Boy’s suggestion, “or Pop’s.”

  “Who the fuck was Jonah anyway?”

  “A reluctant radical who ran away the first time he was supposed to preach death and destruction. Then, when he finally did and God didn’t kill everybody, he sulked in the sun under a gourd,” Mavis explained.

  “And the Lord, he say, listen, man, I can’t kill a bunch of poor sods who can’t tell their left hand from their right hand, now can I, not when they’s already running around in sackcloth and ashes.”

  “What about Sodom?” Gladys demanded.

  “That’s a different story, child. He couldn’t get nobody to repent buggerin’ angels.”

  “It’s all so much bullshit,” Gladys said impatiently.

  Nearly the first thing they did, however, once they had settled the house, was to paint the new signs for the café on huge gray pieces of driftwood, in the spirit more than in the shape of the whale, to greet Clara when she arrived, brought from Queen’s Court by Mavis and Ruth. Her delight in the name, in the place, renewed their energy. While Clara sat for hours in her new wheelchair in the corner window watching the birds, sometimes through the field glasses Tom had set up on a stand for her, the others worked around her.

  “I’m grateful it’s too late to put in much of a garden this year,” Ruth said at the end of the first week. “There’s so much else to do.”

  There were daily crises: bashed thumbs, flat tires, broken pipes, unbudgeted-for expenses, forgotten essentials which could only be purchased on the mainland. Then Coon Dog strayed, and, because the postmaster had warned them that farmers shot dogs to protect their sheep, Mavis spent nearly twelve hours looking for him before he turned up on his own. Tied up, he howled; so Clara kept him indoors with her until one of the others found time to take him out for a run.

  “So much for the happy myth of big dogs in the country,” Gladys said.

  “Walking’s good for you,” Mavis said.

  “Good for the baby, you mean.”

  Gladys was testy any time either Tom or Mavis tried to spare her work or suggest what she should eat or how she should behave because she was pregnant.

  “I’m not sick, you know. Peasant women just drop their kids between the rows of beans.”

  Gladys had, in fact, never looked lovelier or stronger. It was Tom who needed to be watched, still convalescent and forgetful of himself. He didn’t take the sun as both Mavis and Gladys did, and often in the evening there were pale shadows of tiredness on his face. He was determined the café would open on the first of June. It was Boy who watched him and manipulated him into taking breaks by sitting him down with a new financial problem or complicated question about ordering. He persuaded Tom that it was his responsibility to make first contacts with the wholesalers and to pick out the bus they needed, which would require a day in town away from the hard physical labor of remodeling the café.

  “Actually running this place is going to feel like a holiday,” Gladys said as she and Ruth stood together painting.

  “Maybe,” Ruth said, “but we’re going to take a day off before it opens, all of us. There’s no point in living in a place like this and working ourselves to death.”

  “But it’s fun, too, isn’t it?”

  Ruth smiled at her paint-spattered young companion. “Yes, yes, it’s fun.”

  “Boy’s not going to name the baby,” Gladys said fiercely, going back to work.

  “Who is?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to have a look at the baby first. It’s not so long now, not much more than three months. Once the café’s ready, Tom wants to fix up the nursery.”

  Gladys and Tom had taken the two rooms which had once been storage sheds and were now attached to the house. Ruth worried that they wouldn’t be warm enough in the winter, but Tom and Gladys had insisted, and there were two extra bedrooms in the house which they could use if and when they needed them. For this time, there was a tactful physical distance between Tom and Mavis, who had chosen one of the three back bedrooms upstairs. Space and their common preoccupation with work seemed to have eased what tension there had been among them.

  “A whole day off?” Tom repeated dubiously when Ruth confronted him with her proposal.

  “Tom, do be serious enough about this project to live to see it,” Mavis said. “You need a break more than anyone else does. We could open tomorrow if we had to, and we’ve got five more days.”

  “Miss Clara,” Boy said, “you and that wheelchair are coming with us in the new bus. We’re taking you down the boat ramp at Montague and launching you onto the beach. How about that?”

  “Sounds to me like turning play into work,” Clara said doubtfully. “I’m perfectly happy here, perfectly.”

  “If you go, old lady,” Tom said, “I will.”

  On a weekday in May, even though the beach was part of the only public campsite on the island, they had it to themselves. Once Clara was settled and braced on the flat rocks next to the boat ramp, the others set off to explore, except for Ruth, who settled herself comfortably against a log, and Gladys, who stood near Clara’s wheelchair, skipping rocks into the flat sea.

  “Do go off with the others,” Clara urged. “I’m fine right here by myself. It’s such a lovely place.”

  It was, and Ruth wanted to share it with Clara in quietness, a rare luxury in these busy days. They could not really rest their eyes on the serene distance of mountains on Vancouver Island with Gladys like a restless child in the foreground. She had stayed behind for a purpose, however; that was clear. So Ruth and Clara waited. After Gladys had skipped at least a dozen rocks, she turned toward them.

  “Why didn’t you marry Hal’s father?”

  Ruth would have liked to protest the question, given the mood she wanted for the day, but to do it she would have had to deny Gladys’ need to ask it.

  “I thought at the time because he didn’t want to,” Clara said, “but I’ve come to believe I didn’t want to either.”

  “Did you live with him?”

  “No. We didn’t … in those days, not as easily as now anyway.”

  “Tom won’t say it, but I know he thinks that our not being married is going to be bad for the café. There seem to be plenty of women on the island with kids and no husbands, but that seems to be okay; people can feel sorry for them.”

  “Do you maybe want to many Tom?” Ruth asked.

  “If only anything were a clear choice! I don’t want to marry Tom because otherwise the churchgoers won’t eat our hamburgers. That’s fucking ridiculous!”

  “What I think,” Clara said, pulling a sweater a little closer around her, “is that people really do what they want, and one excuse for it is as good as another, unless you regret it, of course.”

  “If the hamburgers are good enough …” Ruth said, smiling.

  “But what if they’re not? We’d never know, would we? It might be my fucking language or my fucking bastard.”

  “O
r my bastard, or Boy’s blackness, or Ruth’s one arm, or Tom’s draft dodging,” Clara said. “If business is good, Gladdy, it will be because the café is run well and thoughtfully for the people who need it. If somebody wants to do the café harm, indigestion is all that’s necessary, and with the number of people my age on this island, there will be plenty of that, no matter how you cook.”

  “You aren’t any help,” Gladys protested, “either of you. I want an excuse.”

  “Then you have loads of them,” Ruth said. “Now, go find the others. They’ll be missing you and we won’t.”

  Ruth and Clara said not one word to each other after that. They watched Gladys amble away down the beach, then break into an easy run. Then they turned to the large view of the sea, the mountains, and the sky. Ruth did not have to say, I wasn’t much good with them alone. They need both of us. And I need you. As long as you’re here, nothing will fall apart. That’s silly, I know. I mean, I won’t fall apart. The song of contentment she felt was a melody so familiar between them they had only to be still to listen to it.

  Gladys was the first to return, bringing shells and pine cones for Clara’s identification, but the others were close behind her.

  “You three!” Mavis said. “It’s just like a Fellini movie.”

  “What do it all mean?” Boy asked. “Who can tell my fortune: the sibyl in the wheelchair, pregnant Venus, or one-armed Fate?”

  “The thing about Fellini movies is,” Gladys said, “that they don’t mean anything.”

  Tom and Mavis went back to the bus to get the lunch, deep in earnest talk while Boy and Gladys threw sticks for Coon Dog to be certain he’d be exhausted by the time they began to eat.

  “Is Coon Dog the only one going swimming?” Gladys asked.

  “Have you put a toe in that water?” Boy asked.

  “Sure. It’s not that cold.”

  “You want to give your child a cramp in his own sea before he’s even born?”

  “I’ll go with you,” Mavis called, “if you’ll go right now before we eat.”

  Gladys would not have bothered with a suit, but Mavis, who had seen to it that the suits were in the bus, reminded her it was a public beach.

  “I know, I know, and that’s no way to sell hamburgers. All right, I’ll race you.”

  Only Boy refused to watch, his fear of water overcoming his protective obligations.

  “You can swim, can’t you?” he asked Tom, and the moment he gave a reassuring nod, Boy rolled over onto his face and stayed there.

  Mavis in a bathing suit mildly surprised Ruth. Her shoulders did not seem so square and self-protective. It was a handsome body, only ill served by the convention of clothes which insisted on dividing people in half, and there playing in the water with Gladys, she had graceful strength. Ruth turned and smiled at Tom.

  “She’s going to marry me,” he said, glancing from Ruth to Clara.

  “Yes,” Clara said, “she is.”

  The license arrived in time for them to be married in Vancouver the day before Jonah’s opened, with Boy and Mavis as witnesses. Ruth wanted to spend the day with Clara, but the young people got away only because she could finish the chores that remained. Alone at the café, Ruth worked hard against the filmstrips in her head, Tom not on his way to be married but back there going up the old porch steps, the blood bloom on his shirt, the flowering wound of Willard’s face. Ruth had not lacked an education for catastrophe, but it did her no good. The horrors that took up only a few minutes of actual life had to play and replay themselves until they finally took up the space of dreams. The young people picked her up at the café on their way back from the evening ferry, and it was hard for Clara afterwards to remember that Ruth had not been with them for the wedding.

  Over a hundred islanders responded to their invitations on opening day. If there hadn’t been a power failure for an hour just at noon, the amateur inefficiency of Jonah’s staff might have been disastrously exposed. A power failure meant not only no hot drinks or food, but no water, since the café depended on its own well and pump. Also it was unwise to open refrigerator or freezer since there was never any way of telling how long the power might be off. People shouted out warnings about the danger of spoiling supplies, happily accepted pieces of pie and cake, cooling coffee and un-iced soft drinks. In that slow, visiting hour, Tom and Gladys, Mavis and Boy moved among their customers like diplomats, not one “fuck” or dubious prayer to be heard. If customers were later amused or jarred by verbal eccentricities of Jonah’s staff, today they were making a good impression. Ruth stayed in the background, where she intended to be, for, except on special occasions like this one, her one hand would be more useful at the house, where she thought of Clara enviously in her wheelchair by the window watching the weather and the birds.

  Reading the weather preoccupied them all. Though the weather chart would have denied it, storms seemed to boil and stream up from the southwest off the Olympic range in Washington, or the sun snagged there illuminating those far mountains while a low, flat gray sky hung over the islands. Then a perfect summer day for the whole gulf might not reach Vancouver, a weather trap in a cul-de-sac of mountains. Islanders were always restless for rain. Very few wells on the island could supply enough water for gardens, but, if it rained too much, it was time to fret after the sun so the tomatoes would ripen.

  “I wish people liked the same variety of weather as the vegetables,” Tom said. “Then we could all pray together.”

  “God ain’t always persuaded by lobbies,” Boy said.

  That particular rainy day, he was right. Day trippers swarmed off the ferry and sought the shelter of Jonah’s for coffee courage before they elected one of the trails Mavis had marked on a large island map, and they came back early to dry off, wait for the ferry, and spend money. But, as the rain continued, day after day, people regressed to winter habits, gloomily predicting there would be no summer, recalling another year when mud season lasted until it froze. For two weeks the ferries brought only campers from California and the prairies who had forgotten they’d come to the rain forest to escape the heat and cursed the great leaking shelter of trees, the closed-in sky. Accounts at the end of the first month were not encouraging.

  “Well,” Mavis said, “we aren’t going to be counting on day trippers all winter. Now’s the time to begin training islanders. We don’t have to wait for September for pensioners’ dinners.”

  “You noticed Jonah’s ain’t all that popular with the old folks?” Boy asked.

  “That’s what I mean,” Mavis said. “We have to start encouraging them.”

  “They think we’re hippies,” Gladys said.

  “Then perhaps it’s time I started inviting a few people for tea,” Clara announced.

  “Tea?”

  “Tea. There’s nothing like a good, stiff afternoon to reassure people.”

  Clara’s social strategy worked, though it tired her enough to worry Ruth. The first pensioners’ dinner was a real success without heart attacks or later rumors of food poisoning. When the July sun finally came out, there was no grudging gossip about the clutter of tourists at Jonah’s, open by seven in the morning to catch the early ferry breakfast trade, never closed before nine in the evening, seven days a week. With four of them and Ruth as occasional stand-in, they could do it. August accounts were even more encouraging than July’s, but they did not content themselves with easy business. Boy shopped more and more shrewdly both on the mainland and on the island. If an island price was a bit higher, he commented on it but accepted it, because a farmer who sold his lambs to Jonah’s was more apt to stop for coffee there, take his wife out to dinner. Fishermen began to bring in salmon and cod, and Tom, at first reluctant to be away from the café for any reason, was persuaded to join a fishing party, the catch so good that it was a profitable day as well as a rest and a change for Tom. Boy set up space in the budget for buying a boat after he made it clear he’d get into nothing smaller than a ferry. They could set crab traps, c
ollect clams and oysters, once they had a boat. As the blackberries ripened along the valley road, they had picking parties for pies through the winter. They had their own apple and cherry and plum trees, and Coon Dog finally had a function to suit his name, keeping raccoons and deer from early harvesting. Even without Clara’s insisting, they would have had to share with the birds. There was plenty. The freezers bulged with free crops from the sea and the island.

  They talked of raising their own pigs and chickens, of setting up a smokehouse, of next year’s vegetable garden. The tired strain had gone from Tom’s face. Mavis had stopped looking every day for the mail, and Boy rarely spent a night in town. Gladys was smugly convinced she would have twins, at least.

  Ruth took long, exploring walks, following old lumber roads into the forest, climbing up to Bluff Park, which overlooked Active Pass, crowded with fishing boats, which often had to be herded out of the shipping lanes by the Coast Guard, or climbing higher still to the top of Mount Galiano, the whole of the island beneath her, the mountains of Vancouver Island to the west, of the mainland to the east, the Olympic range making a southern border. Often now she could be several hours alone, her childhood with her in the soles of her feet on earth again. She had nearly stopped smoking for the pleasure of the fragrance of the woods, field grasses in the hot sun, berries. If she didn’t take Coon Dog with her, the deer acknowledged her with soft stares before they lowered their heads again to browse. Even in August, while Jonah’s was crowded with tourists, Ruth rarely met anyone. If she did, there was always a friendly exchange, an offer of a piece of chocolate or a drink of water, the metallic taste of it from a canteen another gift from the past, from her father, a man not much older than Tom. There was no grieving irony in that for Ruth, a looking forward instead to Tom with his own child, giving the gift of place in his turn. She took her discoveries of wild flowers and leaves of unknown trees back to Clara.