Out of the Wind

== OUT OF THE WIND ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
Molly was hardly a year old when her sister Ray was
born; they might almost have been twins. As they grew the one was light, the
other dark. Molly's eyes, under the golden drift of her hair, were the gray
eyes of fathers watching the ocean's rim for whales that came; Ray's eyes had
in their dark- ness the bedeviled vigilance of mothers watching the ocean's rim
for ships that never came. 
These two were sunshine and shadow hand in hand. Like
the whiteness of sheep on the dark mat of the island moor that was their
playground, like the slowly tumbling arabesque of little cloud shapes drifting
across the sand cliffs on a summer wind, neither was any- thing without the
other. It was the other that was pretty as a picture. It was the other that
made play fun, that brought dolls to life, sweet- ened the breath of the
arbutus in springtime and reddened the huckleberry brakes in the fall. It was
the other, when their swift quarrels were dissolved, that had been the harmed. 
They lived out of town, to the southward, on Candle
Hill. All they could see of the village from Candle Hill was the tower of
Center Church and the masts of vessels lying at the upshore wharves. Their
father's house was plain, square, and high to the eaves, in the fair
proportions of the days when boys had killed their whales off Chile, danced
with the maidens of the Marquesas, and seen the moun- tain of Africa, before
ever they had set foot on the continent of America, visible on a clear day
across the Sound. 
Behind the house and on either side of it were locust
trees and poplars, and a wistaria vine, as big around at the base as a man's
thigh, climbed to the chamber windows at the front. In leaf time all this
arborescence kept up a rustle like another and airier surf even in the stillest
night; in the winter, when the winds rushed in from the dark Atlantic, trunk
and bough and twig, the trees made harps, and the harps made a giant and wild
and mournful music that came through the clapboards to the girls hidden in the
walnut bed in the southeast chamber, their hearts thrilled, their arms about
each other, safe. 
This room of theirs was big and square, like the
house, and plain and uncrowded. Paper with figures of little flowers on it
covered a portion of the walls, but the greater part was done in paneling, ex-
panses ivory white and serenely subdivided in low relief, solid-look- ing, and,
were an ember left to redden on the hearth, warm-looking, so that though the
sound of the gale came in to the sisters nothing else of it could come; nothing
from the outside could get them once the shutters and the doors were closed and
the four strong walls complete around them, the comfort pulled up dark over
their heads and their secrets told. 
Here they were secure not only from the world of the
wind out of doors, but also from the world of the father and mother (or when
their father had died, of their mother alone), who sat down- stairs. And this
is no little thing. 
Ray was seventeen, Molly was eighteen, Eddie Franklin
was twenty. Eddie's grandfather, starting around the globe as third mate in a
nor'westman at seventeen, had returned at Eddie's age her mas- ter in
broadcloth and buttons and beaver hat, with a roll of money, a chest of hyson,
a set of Canton, and a wooden leg. Eddie, gone as far south as the Delaware
Breakwater in a mackerel netter, was home with a roll of money, a hairline
serge, a derby, and a crocheted four- in-hand. 
Times and styles may change, but never the light of
stars and never the heart of youth. The same stars that had shone on the broad
shoulders of one sea conqueror shone on the shoulders of another now, as Eddie
leaned on the post of the steps at the house on Candle Hill, content in the
eyes of the pretty Coffin girls. 
It was Maytime, Maytime. On the clapboard rise of the
house the wistaria, looking black in the little light, gave off a perfume of
flowers that got into the throat and into the heart. And Ray, when she had sat
there for a long time on the top step, her fingers locked tight in Molly's and
her eyes wistfully on the strong, adventurous beauty of the man, decided, and
bit her lip, and turned her face. 
She turned her face and looked at Molly, the elder,
the lovelier, the first, the golden girl whose stillness was like the earth
that bore the two of them secure through space. Tears, sudden and burning hot,
filled the black eyes under the black lashes. Taking her hand out of Molly's,
she got down the steps and walked to the corner of the house, leaving the
princess and the prince alone. 
"Where you going, Ray?" 
"I just remembered, Molly, I didn't shut the
chicken pens tonight." 
Once out of sight she ran, a sob in her throat and
salt on her lips. She ran through the shallow grove of locusts and poplars; she
ran on out across the open plain. 
But then she was astonished; her pulse leaped with
dismay. "But no!" she began to cry to herself. For where there should
have been only the whisper of wind-bowed grasses behind her she heard the
footfalls of Eddie following. "But no, no, no!" She should have had
the swiftness to fly on a wind he could never follow; bewildered, she had no
strength at all. "But yes, yes, yes!" 
When the girls were in bed that night, the lamp out
and the fra- grance of the vine under the sills of the open windows hanging
like a sick oppression in the room, they both lay quiet and straight for a long
while. By and by it was Molly that spoke. 
"Did he kiss you?" 
"Why, Molly! As if — " Ray lay as still as
ice. "What a thing!" 
It was the first time in their lives that a lie had
crept into that bed between them. 
Oh, for one thing! Oh, that it weren't spring; that it
were deep in winter, with a cold gale blowing, and the four walls whole around
them to shut it out! 
It was more than Ray could bear. One lie wants another
lie, and another. "I don't like him very much, Molly. They do say he's a
wild kind; you've heard that yourself. I like fellows like George Dunker
better. They've got some manners and some sense." 
All this time Molly was saying nothing. Presently,
still wordless, she slid an arm under Ray's neck and made a pillow of her
shoulder for the hot, dark head. 
"There, go to sleep." 
It was Molly's arm that went to sleep. And the pain in
Ray's neck that came from holding her head just so, so long, grew almost in-
tolerable. But neither one, for her life, would have let the other guess. 
The next time Eddie Franklin came to Candle Hill,
Molly wasn't there, and Ray, waiting and waiting, felt her cheeks growing dark
with shameful happiness when it became plain he wasn't even think- ing of
asking where the absent one kept herself. 
Maytime, deeper Maytime than ever under the flowering
vine; and a cool little silver shallop of a new moon riding above the fires of
sunset beyond the western sea. 
Molly was out there, not near the shore, but on the
broad empti- ness of the commons, where the trillion new green things pressed
up from the earth, where evening birds delighted, two by two, weaving bright
circles away overhead in the last red heights of day, and where, flat on the
plain to the east, the road from town came past. 
When she saw George Dunker come out from behind Ginny
Silva's windbreak, sitting bolt up on his bicycle, a tiny figure far off in the
dusk, she came to a stop and for a moment laid the palms of her hands over her
closed eyes. Then, letting the deep breath out of her breast, taking her hands
down and opening her eyes, she walked at a pace unhurried but unlagging in the
direction of the road. 
George left his machine beside the ruts and came
toward her. 
"Good evening, Molly; I'm glad I saw you. I see
you're out for a pleasant evening stroll." 
He was a good-looking fellow, spare and above the
medium height, almost as blond as Molly, and grayer, if smaller, eyed. He had,
as Ray said, "some manners and some sense." He never swag- gered, and
he never laughed out loud. In his early twenties he was already able to look
out for himself; already they were saying, "The man that gets the best of
old man Dunker's young 'un'll have to stay up all night." It was technically
his father who owned the hardware store and the third interest in the bank, but
the old gentleman was failing; the blood in the business was the son's. 
A curious thing happened when, two weeks later, George
put his arm around Molly and kissed her on the cheek, saying, "I want you
to be my wife." It seemed to change him in her vision. Looking at him in
the lamplight thrown out beside the steps from the parlor window, Molly saw him
transfigured and magnified. 
Eddie Franklin! What was an Eddie Franklin, after all?
A thought withered to a ghost, a little wistful in disdain, saying good-by for-
ever to her soul. 
Here before her was the man of men. Where in another's
sight there might have been a look of hardness about those eyes, she saw only
their resolution; in the economy of his word and gesture she discovered a grave
reticence; in the line of his thin lips there was nothing so plain as the
promise to cherish and protect her indomitably. She perceived all this with the
clairvoyance of a love that seemed to have waited only for that caress of his
to spring full- grown and to pass out from her and enwrap him, a garment woven
of a woman's tenderness, a girl's inchoate hunger, a child's depend- ence and
loyal faith. 
It was a strange thing, after clearing their secrets
in the dark under the covers each night of their lives for seventeen years, the
enormous secrets of their engagements the sisters told each other only after
days and through a third one's ears. And their mother, when she had heard them,
and when she had sent them packing upstairs at last to their oddly unfamiliar
room and their shrunken bed, sat for an hour of the night, the lamp behind her,
her eyes, clouded with years, fast- ened on her own shadow on the wall. In her
hand she held tight a hand, but it was only her other one. Alone at one stroke,
she felt creeping toward her a harm against which she had no longer the power
to defend her own. 
She knew more than they thought she knew, those girls
of hers. She had heard more than they had imagined an old isolated woman would
ever hear. But day before yesterday there had been an un- pleasantness in town,
a fist fight in a twine shed between two boy- hood enemies, young Franklin, the
netter, and young Dunker from the hardware store. What it was all about the
little bird had neg- lected to tell her. Which one had beaten the other she
hadn't learned either, but this was because, unfortunately, neither had won. 
Molly and Ray were aware of it, naturally, but neither
would have known that the other knew. Its effect was only to draw them to-
gether in a nervous, outward closeness; for a few days it was as if they clung
to each other's fingers with a grip so fearfully tight that their hands and
arms grew frozen, without any feeling any more. But they loved each other so.
Molly, brooding over her strange young sister secretly, cried to herself:
"Poor Ray, poor Ray! My man has had to give your man a thrashing. I'm so
sorry, dear!" 
And Ray was hiding this from Molly, "Poor Molly,
I'm so sorry; Eddie has given George the beating of his life." 
Nothing had happened; that was agreed without words.
But being women and in love, still without words they set themselves to the
desperate task of salvage. It is extraordinary how much can be done without
common scheming, when there is a common will. And if George and Eddie were not
by any stratagem to be brought together on the same calling night at Candle
Hill— then what if the Coffin sisters, in town of a summer evening themselves,
each with her lover's arm secure in hand, chanced upon each other innocently
just before the door of the ice-cream place? 
Four sundaes in a row on the marble bar, two
pineapple, two chocolate. Rollicking, carefree voices, Molly saying this, Ray
that, Ray trilling, Molly laughing in her melodious contralto, bending her
neck, soft at the nape with a faint golden down, over her dainty. "Isn't
that right, George?" "Now, Eddie, wouldn't you say so?" 
Eddie wouldn't say anything till the cream was low in
the plates. But then, rising from his stool in a large and careless way, a
prince- ling eye on George down the line, "Take it out of that, Harry, my
boy!" he cried to the fountain tender, slapping down on the counter a
yellow-backed bill. 
"You think you mean the whole of it?" said
George. "All four?" 
"Gosh, yes! What you think?" 
George shook his head, his lips flat on his teeth.
"Not on your tintype; not my share you don't pay. Harry," he turned
with a quiet emphasis, "don't you take but two out of that bill; put my
two down to profit and loss." And after that, fair Molly a little
bewildered on his arm, he stalked out of the shop with his head in the air. 
Left behind him, Eddie was red with fury and white
with rage. "Harry Foggar, if you don't take the whole of them sundaes out
of that there piece of money — " 
"Golly, Ed, I dassent, if George Dunker says no.
I ain't the boss here, remember. Him and his pa took title to this prop'ty
yesterday afternoon." 
Turned back to back in the walnut bed that night, with
the dis- tant surf and the gossip of nearer leaves mingling in what ought to
have been a lullaby, the sisters lay as still as sleep. But on the one pillow
the blond head was thinking, "Poor Ray, she must have been mortified to
see him making such a big show of himself with his money— trying to set up a
man like George." And the dark head, hot and hurt on the other pillow, was
thinking, "Poor Molly, if I'd been her I'd have given him a slap, the
strait-laced, stingy old smart- Aleck stick-in-the-mud!" 
Both weddings were in the fall. Old Mrs. Coffin died
soon after Ray's, leaving the house on Candle Hill to the girls. 
George Dunker, who didn't need the money, advised his
wife to sell it. And Molly thought that that was wise. Eddie Franklin, who did
need the money, swore from the bottom of his chest that the property could
tumble in on itself before he would see "that slick-haired bloodsucker
feel the heft of one red penny of it in his hand!" And Ray adored him more
than ever for just that. 
One day the girls got together to go out and clean and
close the house. It was early December, but the island autumn still hung on,
making a broad world and a high sky. They had been parted for little more than
nine weeks, but already, walking each in her rut of the wheel track, in each
there was half a sense of embarrassment. It was almost shame. No, it went
deeper than that; in each loyal heart there rankled a hurt. 
It didn't come out until they had let themselves in
and stood in the hall, at the foot of the stairs leading to the chamber where,
waiting through nearly eighteen years for their lives to come and take them,
they had slept in each other's arms in peace. And now, amazingly, it was Molly,
the mild, that began it, a frown like George's on her brow. 
"But, Ray, Eddie didn't need to do that." 
"Do what?" 
"Say that— tell that lie of his— that led up to
the fight. About it was lucky for the storekeep the sailor didn't ask me
first." 
"Lie, you say? Lie?" 
"Oh, Ray!" 
"Oh-Ray me all you want to, it's true. What the
lie was— and you can say it to your husband as coming straight from Edward
Frank- lin's wife— was what George said about its being lucky for you the
sailor didn't, then, seeing's you'd hardly have been very gay on the living a
mortgaged roustabout tvas ever apt to make. So there!" 
It was out. It was done. They stood in the light of
the pink panes flanking the door, their breasts distended, their fists
tightened, staring at each other in loyal fright. In the mind of each sat
wonder, sat helplessness. "What's happened? We aren't doing this. This
isn't us." They didn't clean the house. They locked the door, and, leaving
it as it was, wilted flowers still in their pickle jars and an undertaker's
helper's gray glove on the parlor floor, they returned by separate paths across
the plain to their husbands' homes in town. 
Ray lived in a house in the lower end, in what used to
be called the Marsh. Here they were near the mooring of Eddie's boat, their
neighbors other fishermen, and more and more with each decade Portuguese
Negroes from the Cape Verde. Ray's house had a picket fence around it, however,
a crimson rambler over the front trellis, and geraniums flowering in the window
boxes— at least for the first few years. 
Molly lived in the Dunker residence in the Brick Walk,
the "little city" where for three generations there had been no room
for an outsider to creep in. Cobbles and brasses and tubbed box trees,
wrought-iron railings at the doorsteps, and fanlights over the doors. When
Father and Mother Dunker had passed on, Molly made an ideal mistress for this
early- Victorian mansion, matching its fine solidity, lighting its shadows with
her serene and luminous presence, and making a grace even of saving, as that
wise man, her husband, would have her save. 
It was a house in a hundred for doing that, saving
pennies grace- fully. Built in the flush days of whaling, of granite, of
never-rusting brick and never-weathering slate, everything sturdy to begin with
and lastingly right, it wanted little a year in the way of upkeep and
brightening; it wasn't like a jerry-built shingle cottage in the Marsh
district, where, between the wind from over the flats and the smoke from the
gasworks, paint stayed decent so short a time it grew hardly worth the labor
and expense of freshening, and where, between the neighbors' children and one's
own, there was no keeping all the pickets always on the fence in front. 
"Poor Ray!" thought Molly, when in the press
of those fruitful days she ventured to think of her at all. 
But Molly was mistaken; Ray was far from poor. Ray was
rich in the thing that mattered, the play of life. Not in boxwood to be kept
clipped, nor brasses to be shined, nor chandeliers to be dusted, not in painted
ancestors to be lived up to, nor in stodgy Daughters of Dorcas to be
entertained at tea— but in the simple things her big, wild, gallant husband
loved she took her joy. 
Better than the clink of silver and the feel of silk
it was to see him striding, admired and feared, across his domain, the Marsh;
or to behold him, back from a trip with the salt rime on him and the smell of
the wind still in his hair, seated on the parlor sofa with his first-born on
his knee, the fairy Meg, whose eyes were as blue and curls as fair against his
swarthiness as had been her grandma Coffin's, for whom she was named. And
braver than anything in a book it was to hear him, whacking fist on thigh, cry
passionately: "If ever once I catch that lily -gutted storekeep not moving
out of my way on the sidewalk again! If ever once I haul off and hand him
one!" 
And gayer than any starched-up social in the Brick
Walk it was when, to forget a poor trip or celebrate a big one, a keg of beer
was tapped in the kitchen, with men who knew how to tell stories telling them
in the parlor and girls who knew how to dance dancing in the shed. But best of
all, better than any easy inherited wealth, was the knowledge that, with
Eddie's brave heart what it was, and her faith what it was behind him, the day
was coming when they would all be saying, "If you please, sir," to
her husband, and George Dun- ker the humblest of them all. 
"Poor Molly, with that life to live," mused
Ray sometimes with a curling lip, "and that dried-up penny squeezer of a
man, and that flounced-up, ailing child." 
The son that was the light of Molly's world wasn't
really ailing; he was simply retiring, stamped from the first with the arrogant
shy- ness of the dreamer, the playfellow of passions and of doubts. Of
fair-skinned parents, he grew up dark, black-haired, and black-eyed —as Molly
would say, like his grandpa Coffin (for whom he was not named; he was named for
his father and his father's father, George). 
The darkling heir of the blond Dunkers. The blond
daughter of the dark Franklins of the Marsh. The two cousins, hardly aware each
of the other's existence, waiting at the two poles of childhood for life to
throw for them with loaded dice. In the years when they might have played
together naturally they were still strangers, Meg in the Western School and
George in the Whittier. By the time they reached the common ground of high
school they knew enough to know that they were enemies. 
It happened like lightning, a crackle out of a cloud
long ago almost forgotten down in a corner of the sky. 
Dunker, the merchant, was standing in the door of his
shop on a slack April afternoon. Franklin, the netter, was coming up the
street. 
Dunker still stuck to his store these years, weighing
nails and counting cod hooks over the counter early and late, as though his
next day's very bread depended on it. The thin green shadow of the leafing elms
fell on his head today without affecting him with its vernal virus; he was
thinking of next winter's stock, and the head was bald. Franklin's head wasn't
bald, but the hair was grizzling over the ears, adding the last touch of
romantic weight to his bigness, his open-handed, open-throated exuberance, his
devil-may-care. 
There was blood under his skin as he came to a stand,
fists on hips, in front of Dunker in his door. 
"You keep your brat away from my girl!" 
There was no blood under Dunker's skin. 
"W-h-a-t?" 
"You keep your brat away from my daughter!" 
"So, eh? Well, you can bet your bottom dollar I
will" 
Thus Canute to the tide. 
When a girl "gets in trouble" in a town that
size it's not long hidden. It's the kind of news that can fly in the air or
swim in the water or burrow underground. "Hear about Ed Franklin's
girl?" "Not Meg, don't tell me!" "They do say, yes,
Meg." 
Franklin was away at the Block Island grounds,
swordfishing, when this came to light. This time it was the mothers that faced
each other. 
Again it was surprising. It wasn't the injured Ray
that went up with her wild black hair and her wilder and blacker heart to call
a Brick Walk to the reckoning, as one would have thought to see. It was mild
Molly that came down. Standing before Ray's gate, as strange an intruder as
ever the Marsh denizens saw (from behind their hen houses and wash lines where
they listened and watched), she put a question three days old to her sister in
the yard: 
"Where's my son?" 
"Where's my daughter?" But Ray's voice was
no lady's voice; it came out tearing. "Where's my girl?" 
"Where is my boy, I say?" 
"What do I care where your boy is? In the devil's
pit, I hope. And another thing I hope is, I hope your brave husband is
satisfied, now he's got back at Eddie Franklin the only way he dared, sicking
his dirty pup on to smirch a better man's pride, while the better man's
away." 
For answer to such as this the lady of the Brick Walk
only turned her head slowly, to the right, to the left, on her proud white
neck. Surveying the blistered shanties and their unkempt, half-bred spawn, the
look on her face said: "If anything here can be smirched, I'm surprised.
As well try to say that the hand dirties the clod it picks up in the road, when
in truth it does no more, honoring the clod, than very slightly to dirty
itself." 
Turning her face back to her sister, she reopened her
lips. 
(But even between that and the words a thought ran
like queer lightning through the back of her mind: "What are we doing, Ray
and I? What are we doing here?'''') 
She reopened her lips and said: "I came to you
simply to ask for information. Be so good as to tell me, where is my son?"
Ray ran and put her hands on the posts of the gateless
gate, her eyes murderous, her voice almost soft. 
"You can go to hell and find him for yourself,
Mrs. George Skin- flint Dunker. And while you're there you might ask him what
he's done with my daughter, and when you find out you might send me word by a
messenger; don't come yourself. And don't let your husband come; Edward
Franklin might be here to wring his neck. Now turn your back and go!" 
(And presently and weirdly, to herself, "Molly,
you look so strange; you act so queer!") 
The reason the children weren't to be found was that
they had left the island. They had stopped long enough in Taunton on the
mainland to be married, before going on, wherever they were bound. That word
coming back was the last one the island of Urkey was ever to hear of them. 
George wasn't the only child Molly had; she had a
daughter, Beatrice. Besides Meg, Ray had young Eddie, young Ray, Harriet, and
Paul, life finding her flesh more usable than her sister's as in the ratio of
five to two. But neither the one nor the four that remained filled the torn
place in either mother's heart left by the first-born that had deserted her.
Wounds, those were, wrapped from sight perhaps, but kept open under their
wrappings with a salt compounded of sorrow and anger, of chagrin and jealousy. 
The twelve years following were different from the
eighteen that had gone before. Little by little as the children grew up and the
need of her lessened, each woman was given time and leave to open her eyes. 
When Ray opened hers and looked at her husband,
aswagger with his hat on the back of his head and a laugh on his lips, across
the dowdy stage of their existence, she saw him not its hero, but its buffoon, its
time-licensed windbag. A slovenly worker and a spend- thrift, she saw him now
not marching up the years, but drifting down them, poorer in spirit and in
pocket with every one. But what was worst of all, she saw the fire breather a
braggart, the daredevil a poltroon, so that sometimes when, with a flashing
eye, he would thunder, "If ever I haul off and hit that dog a lick!"
she had work to keep from crying, "Why don't you ever do it, then?" 
Because of this secret shame she began to feel lonely.
Another keg of beer on the kitchen table, then, loud stories in the parlor,
dancing in the shed to break the floor, and the illusion of valor and
aspiration and youth recaptured for a little while. "Eddie, old fellow,
things are beginning to come our way at last." 
But for all the brave beer and dancing there was
something that wouldn't be downed. "Poor Ray," she seemed to hear
Molly whispering with a lifted lip, "I told you so." 
Now how she hated Molly, of the clear gray eyes! 
Clear, yes. The press of her errand in the world let
up, Molly's eyes were quite clear. She looked at the father of her children as
he sat through the empty evenings, his head shining under the lamp, his eyes,
supported by little pouches, half closed over his newspaper, the wheels in the adding
machine in his cranium still going around as he drowsed; and bitterly, there in
the outer shadow with her, she felt the mordant black eyes of another beside
hers; she heard Ray saying, "So now you begin to see." 
One would never have thought that Molly could hate,
but she hated Ray. 
She would set herself to think of George's virtues,
his success. But then she would have to cry in her brain: "What are your
virtues and your success and money, when I'd give them all for one moment in
you of human grandeur; yes, gladly, for one whole, generous ges- ture, were it
only of generous rage?" 
The winter her hair turned (dully, as blond heads do)
she spoke out at last. 
"Why do you, George, let Franklin go around this
town saying the things about you he says?" 
She couldn't let it alone. Oftener and oftener she
reiterated the question, and with deepening venom. But Dunker would never rise
to it with anything more than a dry, deprecatory "Well, we'll see." 
He wasn't the kind to do violence to any man, least of
all to a man like Franklin, broad-shouldered, big-fisted, red-blooded, and full
of fight. There's something in the Bible about turning the other cheek. Dunker
went along quietly, giving Eddie's vessel credit when gear was needed, and
seeing that his more and more frequent little catchpenny notes went through
smoothly at the bank. 
But once (it was at the dinner table on a dark noon in
March, two months after Beatrice was married to Tom Burgess) he gave a fuller
answer to Molly's "Why don't you show folks you've got some spirit? Why
don't you close his mouth?" 
"I guess," he said, "I've closed it
today." 
He hadn't done it himself, of course; that was the
sheriff's affair. Once the court had given the papers, it was the sheriff's
business to "plank 'em on." 
The schooner, the Ray II, ready-painted for going
South, her gear overhauled, and a new engine under her afterhouse, lay at her
moor- ing off the Marsh, the pride of any owner's heart. But Eddie Frank- lin
wasn't her owner any longer; she belonged to the bank. And the house he sat in,
frowning stupidly, belonged to the hardware store. 
It seemed hard for Franklin to understand, and the
whisky ebbing in the bottle before him no longer helped. What had happened was
a shrewder thing than the attachment of his house and vessel; it was the
pricking of the bubble of himself. Now his audacious arms hung down like so
much deadwood, his buttocks clove to the sofa, he was an old man. 
No! Hell, no! From time to time he made an effort to
shake him- self clear of this silly seeming. Like a cast stallion he heaved,
bowing his back and shoulders; the listening neighbors, friends in the kitchen,
and enemies outside the windows, but all bald-necked as vultures today,
trembled with stage trembles to hear him swearing: "That's the end, by
God! By God, if I don't go and show him a thing for this!" 
"When? Now?" 
He had almost forgotten Ray, and there she was alone
in the room with him; there were her eyes, unescapable. No matter which way he
turned they were after him. "When, Ed? Now?". 
"D'you think I'm scared?" 
"Do you, Ed?" 
"D'you think I'll let him put it over me?" 
It was Ray's eyes that put it over him. He fled them
at last. She .hould see. All those bums around there that he could lick with
his little finger, they too should see. Holding his chest out before him and
making it rumble, he swung his deadwood legs up the lane toward town, throwing
his empty bottle into the top of a Brava's shanty as he went. 
"There he goes, be dogged if he don't! "
This was another matter. "Should we get hold the sheriff?"
Consternation! 
In the dusk in front of the hardware store Franklin
stood rocking from side to side like a man on the deck of a ship in an angry
sea. Dunker was alone in his shop, the rat alone in his trap, unconscious of
the disaster overhanging that dry, bright head of his, bowed at its
calculations under the single gas jet in the rear. 
The whisky played with the boy's brain under the
grizzled pate outside. "Thinks he can break me, does he? I'll break
him!" 
It only wanted a rush to carry it off. One rush, once,
at last. 
Franklin opened the door, entered, and shut it behind
him. But already, with the closing of the door, the rush had died. The chest
had collapsed. For there was the truth and you couldn't beat it; Eddie was
already broken. He was an old man. 
Old men have wild flurries of hope, like children, and
a little whisky with them does no harm. 
"I'll put it up to him. We were kids together,
Georgie and Eddie. He'll remember that. He'll call off the bank; he'll hold off
on the house another spell." 
Dunker had got up to peer. Seeing who it was, he stood
back a little toward the corner, folding his arms. 
"That windbag," he told himself. "That
overgrown, loud-mouthed do-nothing. We'll see." 
But it was his flesh— the flabby meat of him blanched
by three decades of safe money-hunting, robbed always to pay the head,
undervalued, undisciplined— out of Dunker's flesh there came a squeak. 
The rat in the trap! So, after all! The sound of that
squeak worked magic in the other's heart. This hard, gray-eyed rich man, of
whom Franklin had always stood in secret awe— well, here was the truth— here
was the cat out of the bag at last— he was so deathly terrified of big Franklin
that he squeaked. 
"Ah, now we're somebody! Scared, is he? Well,
we'll give him something to be scared about. We'll pile it on." 
A Portuguese bogman had lately chosen between two
mattocks; the one he hadn't taken still lay on the counter, its handle reaching
out to Franklin's hands. It was good in the hands; it had a murderous balance,
swung aloft as the feet tramped forward. 
Of a sudden the storekeeper fell down on the floor. He
lay quiet there in the shadow of his desk, a Z-shaped string of bones, like a
patent two-foot rule. 
"Dunker's dead!" 
Now what was the whisky doing? The front door was
open, full of people; the windows were spotted with noses, turning blue. Run
for your life, you fool! 
Franklin ran for the door beyond the desk, standing
open to the dark back room, which in turn would give escape to the alley in the
rear. 
When they got to Dunker they found him without a mark
on him. The heart of his spirit had been willing, but the heart of his flesh
was too weak. They found Franklin ten feet below the trap door left open in the
back room, lying on a pile of pig-iron ballast in the cellar, with a broken
neck. Neither man had touched the other, and both were dead. 
Molly sat in the big room in the residence in the
Brick Walk, dry-eyed. Others about her, listening to the words of the minister
over the casket, wept, dabbing their cheeks with their handkerchiefs. The widow
alone had no tears. She was too busy with her thoughts. 
In haste, as it were to keep ahead of the minister,
she reconstructed the man lying hidden in the box. He and she had been happy
to- gether; their years had been fruitful; she was proud of him for his
continence, his patience, his unobtrusive will. None but she knew really what
he had done for the community's ordered maintenance. No man could ask for a
better townsman, no child for a better father, no wife for a better husband
than George Dunker had been. And now he was gone. 
She seemed to realize it for the first time. For the
first time the whole of sorrow forced an entrance into her soul, a weight of
be- reavement, a widow's dismal wonder, a loyal pain. What she didn't know was
that it was for the last time as well. 
For George Dunker was finished. Of a sudden she heard
"George Dunker" as simply a name. On queer impulse she turned her
gaze to the dead man's daughter, Beatrice, a few feet to the right of her,
seated close to her new husband. 
"Beatrice Dunker Burgess." Another name. Not
a few feet, but miles on miles away. It came to Molly with a clearness now, she
had never known that woman; no, not even in the months when she carried her
within herself. "Beatrice," "George," what were they? Ships
in truth that had passed Molly Coffin in the night, and the night a dream. 
And now her eyes, curiously daunted, stole about the
strange, thronged, stately, somber room. "What's it all about? How do I,
Molly Coffin, come to be here? Who invited me? Isn't it nearly over? Isn't it—
isn't it almost time for me to be going home?" 
Among the chairs in the rear, where they dared, one
whispered to another: "There, there, poor thing! The tears are coming
now." 
In the wet wind on the hill Ray listened to the earth
falling on the pine boards in the open hole. "Dust to dust." It was
more like mud. Little by little on the hollow wood it fell, covering up the
human glory that had been; the big, generous, adventurous figure; the man of
whom, even in his failure in the commerce of life, one could be fiercely proud,
as one is uplifted by the memory of a be- loved great soldier dying defeated in
exile. Eddie had been good to her, and Eddie was going. 
Now the sound was no longer of earth on wood; it was
earth on earth; the wood was covered. Eddie was gone. 
Ray's eyes were fixed in space beyond the grave. In
the space there was a row of willows not far away, the windbreak at Ginny
Silva's farm. Beyond, farther and higher toward the sky and blurred by the
water in the wind, there was a square house flanked by naked trees. The
strangest feeling grew in Ray. She passed a hand across her eyes and looked out
over the moor again. 
It was like this. It was as if there were a young girl
half nodding in a mill, her fingers feeding the moving iron with a mechanical
aptness of habit, her ears gone deaf to the clank of rods and the enormous song
of wheels. It was as if, between two winks, she started up, confused.
"What's happened?" All that has happened is a sudden silence. The
rods and the wheels are still. And it was as if a foreman, moved by a passing
pity, laid a hand on her shoulder, saying: "It's a day, kid. Listen,
there; there's the whistle. Time to go home and play." 
Someone was speaking near Ray's ear. "Look at Ma,
Harriet; she's crying at last." 
They were all about her, when Ray turned her head;
four of them, all bigger than she; six of them, counting Harriet's husband and
young Ed's wife; seven, counting the baby in Harriet's shawl. Seven from far
away, hemming her about with their somber curi- osity. 
She walked down the hill rapidly. They followed her.
They fol- lowed her all the way to the Marsh; they came behind her into the
house. The only time she was free of them was when she was up in her room,
taking off the stiff black veil she found about her head. Seeing a bag on the
closet floor, she stuffed a nightgown into it, and some other things. 
Under their silent compulsion, downstairs again, she
fried them meat and potatoes and brought from the pantry a cold pie. She sat
down at the table with them; they appeared to expect it. 
But presently, despite them, she was gone. They heard
her climb- ing the back stairs. A moment and she was down the other way, a hat
on her head, a bag on her arm, the front door open in her hand. 
"Where you going, Ma, for pity's sake?" 
"I'm just going out a little while." 
"Well, we all. got to be going soon, unless Paul
will stay. Yes, Paul will stay." 
What a queer place for people to want to live, down
here on the cluttered flats! What a funny house! 
The wind had increased with the coming of the night.
In the open beyond the Ginny's farm it passed unbroken from ocean to ocean
across the black plain; or at least but once broken, far out, by an upthrust of
roof and boughs. There, as though the air had been water and the obstruction a
reef awash with surf, it was heard before it was seen in the thickness; and,
hearing it, Ray shifted the bag that grew heavy to her other hand and quickened
her steps for the last time along the ridge between the wheel ruts full of dead
grass. She wasn't tired. They needn't think she wasn't wiry and able. Life had
used her all it wanted to, but it hadn't used her up. There was plenty left. 
Becoming visible, the tree trunks ran about her, and
their roaring passed over her head. In the gale piled up against the windward
side of the house she hesitated. "Look at me; I've come without a
key." But then the queer part was that she couldn't make it seem
important. "If I'd needed a key I'd have thought to remember it."
Passing around the southeast corner of the building, she brought up in the lee.
There was a light in the hall. Without any more
hesitation, with- out wonder even, she mounted the steps, lifted the latch, and
went in. 
Molly, halfway up the stairs with the lamp in her
hand, turned and peered over the railing. 
"That you, Ray? You're awful late." 
"I've been hurrying, though." 
"Had your supper?" 
"I've had a bite. Had enough." 
"Don't take your wraps off there; it's dank as
anything. There's a fire upstairs." Molly held down a hand.
"Come." 
It was warm in their room, and blankets drying before
the blaze. 
"Do you suppose that'll be enough covers,
Ray?" 
"Oh yes. And I got some pillowcases in my
grip." 
"Well, you must get those duds off. Mercy, look
at your shoes! " 
Molly got down on the floor to help with Ray's shoes,
and then Ray's stockings, soaked to the knees. She looked out for Ray because
she always had. The younger, darker, more emotional sister was as impractical
about earthly details as a princess in a fairy tale. That's why they were as
close as shadow and sunshine; as the shadows of little clouds on the shine of
the sand cliffs before the house when summer came. 
Once they were in bed and the lamp blown out, the glow
from the coals in the chimney falling around the walls no longer showed the
mildew; it showed the old white paneling warm and whole. 
There was one strange thing about tonight. In the dark
under the clothes where till now they had always cleared their hearts and told
their secrets before they slept, tonight there seemed nothing to clear their
hearts of, no secrets to be told. There was nothing behind them; everything was
before them. 
"We'll put Canterbury bells and foxglove in the
oval, won't we, Molly, again this year?" 
"And snapdragons too, yes. And we'll put
coreopsis and marigolds out the side way, and nasturtiums in the boxes,
Ray?" 
By and by, the blond one's arm around the dark one's
shoulders, they slept Out of doors, trunk and bough and twig, the trees made
harps, and the harps made a giant music of the wind. But nothing of the wind
but the music could come in. Nothing could get them in their bed.
Category:Published
Category:Steele