seemed that the storm window was talking to her, but she turned her face away from its words. And did not cry.
“But Gram,” Lona would press (she never gave up, not that one, she was like her mom, and her grandmother before her), “you still haven’t told why you never went across.”
“Why, child, I have always had everything I wanted right here on Goat.”
“But it’s so small. We live in Portland. There’s buses, Gram!”
“I see enough of what goes on in cities on the TV. I guess I’ll stay where I am. ”
Hal was younger, but somehow more intuitive; he would not press her as his sister might, but his question would go closer to the heart of things: “You never wanted to go across, Gram? Never?”
And she would lean toward him, and take his small hands, and tell him how her mother and father had come to the island shortly after they were married, and how Bull Symes‘s grandfather had taken Stella’s father as a ’prentice on his boat. She would tell him how her mother had conceived four times but one of her babies had miscarried and another had died a week after birth—shewould have left the island if they could have saved it at the mainland hospital, but of course it was over before that was even thought of.
She would tell them that Bill had delivered Jane, their grandmother, but not that when it was over he had gone into the bathroom and first puked and then wept like a hysterical woman who had her monthlies p’ticularly bad. Jane, of course, had left the island at fourteen to go to high school; girls didn’t get married at fourteen anymore, and when Stella saw her go off in the boat with Bradley Maxwell, whose job it had been to ferry the kids back and forth that month, she knew in her heart that Jane was gone for good, although she would come back for a while. She would tell them that Alden had come along ten years later, after they had given up, and as if to make up for his tardiness, here was Alden still, a lifelong bachelor, and in some ways Stella was grateful for that because Alden was not terribly bright and there are plenty of women willing to take advantage of a man with a slow brain and a good heart (although she would not tell the children that last, either).
She would say: “Louis and Margaret Godlin begat Stella Godlin, who became Stella Flanders; Bill and Stella Flanders begat Jane and Alden Flanders and Jane Flanders became Jane Wakefield; Richard and Jane Wakefield begat Lois Wakefield, who became Lois Perrault; David and Lois Perrault begat Lona and Hal. Those are your names, children: you are Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault. Your blood is in the stones of this island, and I stay here because the mainland is too far to reach. Yes, I love; I have loved, anyway, or at least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and I cannot cross. Godlin-Flanders-Wakefield-Perrault ...”
That was the coldest February since the National Weather Service began keeping records, and by the middle of the month the ice covering the Reach was safe. Snowmobiles buzzed and whined and sometimes turned over when they climbed the ice-heaves wrong. Children tried to skate, found the ice too bumpy to be any fun, and went back to Godlin’s Pond on the far side of the hill, but not before little Justin McCracken, the minister’s son, caught his skate in a fissure and broke his ankle. They took him over to the hospital on the mainland where a doctor who owned a Corvette told him, “Son, it’s going to be as good as new.”
Freddy Dinsmore died very suddenly just three days after Justin McCracken broke his ankle. He caught the flu late in January, would not have the doctor, told everyone it was
“Just a cold from goin out to get the mail without m’scarf,” took to his bed, and died before anyone could take him across to the mainland and hook him up to all those machines they have waiting for guys like Freddy. His son George, a tosspot of the first water even at the advanced age (for tosspots, anyway) of sixty-eight, found Freddy with a copy of the Bangor Daily News in one hand and his Remington, unloaded, near the other. Apparently he had been thinking of cleaning it just before he died. George Dinsmore went on a three-week