Bill was seventy, looked eighty, and could still drink like twenty-three when the mood was on him. Billy and I had taken the Scout in for a fill-up the day after a surprise mid-May storm dropped nearly a foot of wet, heavy snow on the region, covering the new grass and flowers. Giosti had been in his cups for fair, and happy to pass along the Black Spring story, along with his own original twist. But we get snow in May sometimes; it comes and it’s gone two days later. It’s no big deal.
Steff was glancing doubtfully at the downed wires again. “When will the power company come?”
“Just as soon as they can. It won’t be long. I just don’t want you to worry about Billy. His head’s on pretty straight. He forgets to pick up his clothes, but he isn’t going to go and step on a bunch of live lines. He’s got a good, healthy dose of self-interest.” I touched a corner of her mouth and it obliged by turning up in the beginning of a smile. “Better?”
“You always make it seem better,” she said, and that made me feel good.
From the lakeside of the house Billy was yelling for us to come and see.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go look at the damage.”
She snorted ruefully. “If I want to look at damage, I can go sit in my living room.”
“Make a little kid happy, then.”
We walked down the stone steps hand in hand. We had just reached the first turn in them when Billy came from the other direction at speed, almost knocking us over.
“Take it easy,” Steff said, frowning a little. Maybe, in her mind, she was seeing him skidding into that deadly nest of live wires instead of the two of us.
“You gotta come see!” Billy panted. “The boathouse is all bashed! There’s a dock on the rocks ... and trees in the boat cove ... Jesus Christ!”
“Billy Drayton!” Steff thundered.
“Sorry, Ma—but you gotta—wow!” He was gone again.
“Having spoken, the doomsayer departs,” I said, and that made Steff giggle again. “Listen, after I cut up those trees across the driveway, I’ll go by the Central Maine Power office on Portland Road. Tell them what we got. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said gratefully. “When do you think you can go?”
Except for the big tree—the one with the moldy corset of moss—it would have been an hour’s work. With the big one added in, I didn’t think the job would be done until eleven or so.
“I’ll give you lunch here, then. But you’ll have to get some things at the market for me ... we’re almost out of milk and butter. Also ... well, I’ll have to make you a list.”
Give a woman a disaster and she turns squirrel. I gave her a hug and nodded. We went on around the house. It didn’t take more than a glance to understand why Billy had been a little overwhelmed.
“Lordy,” Steff said in a faint voice.
From where we stood we had enough elevation to be able to see almost a quarter of a mile of shoreline——the Bibber property to our left, our own, and Brent Norton’s to our right.
The huge old pine that had guarded our boat cove had been sheared off halfway up. What was left looked like a brutally sharpened pencil, and the inside of the tree seemed a glistening and defenseless white against the age-and-weather-darkened outer bark. A hundred feet of tree, the old pine’s top half, lay partly submerged in our shallow cove. It occurred to me that we were very lucky our little Star-Cruiser wasn’t sunk underneath it. The week before, it had developed engine trouble and it was still at the Naples marina, patiently waiting its turn.
On the other side of our little piece of shorefront, the boathouse my father had built—the boathouse that had once housed a sixty-foot Chris-Craft when the Drayton family fortunes had been at a higher mark than they were today—lay under another big tree. It was the one that had stood on Norton’s side of the property line, I saw. That raised the first flush of anger. The tree had been dead for five years and he should have long since had it taken down. Now it was three-quarters of the way down; our boathouse was propping it up. The roof had taken on a drunken, swaybacked look. The wind had swirled shingles from the hole the tree had made all over the point of land the boathouse stood on.