Now the Senator put the tips of his two index fingers together. “OK, Ruthie. Cut the pickle,” he said.
Ruth made scissors of the fingers on her right hand and snipped through his fingers.
“Get the tickle!” he exclaimed, and he tickled her ribs. Ruth was too old for this game, but the Senator loved it. He laughed and laughed. She smiled indulgently. They sometimes performed this little routine four times a day.
Ruth Thomas was eating supper with the Pommeroys that night, even though it was a funeral night. Ruth nearly always ate with them. It was nicer than eating at home. Ruth’s father wasn’t much for cooking a hot meal. He was clean and decent enough, but he didn’t keep much of a home. He wasn’t against having cold sandwiches for dinner. He wasn’t against mending Ruth’s skirt hems with a staple gun, either. He ran that kind of house and had done so ever since Ruth’s mother left. Nobody was going to starve or freeze to death or go without a sweater, but it wasn’t a particularly cozy home. So Ruth spent most of her time at the Pommeroys’, which was much warmer and easier. Mrs. Pommeroy had invited Stan Thomas over for dinner that night, too, but he’d stayed at home. He was thinking that a man shouldn’t take a supper off a woman freshly grieving the funeral of her husband.
The seven Pommeroy boys were murderously glum at the dinner table. Cookie, the Senator’s dog, napped behind the Senator’s chair. The Pommeroys’ nameless, one-eyed dog, locked in the bathroom for the duration of the Senator’s visit, howled and barked in outrage at the thought of another dog in his home. But Cookie didn’t notice. Cookie was beat tired. Cookie followed the lobster boats out sometimes, even when the water was rough, and she was always very nearly drowning. It was awful. She was only a year-old mutt, and she was crazy to think she could swim against the ocean. Cookie had been pulled by the current once nearly to Courne Haven Island, but the mail boat happened to pick her up and bring her back, almost dead. It was awful when she swam out after the boats, barking. Senator Simon Addams would edge near the dock, as close to it as he dared, and would beg Cookie to come back. Begging and begging! The young dog swam in small circles farther and farther out, sneezing off the spray from the outboard motors. The sternmen in the chased boats would throw hunks of herring bait at Cookie, yelling, “Git on outta heh!”
Of course the Senator could never go out after his dog. Not Senator Simon, who was as afraid of water as his dog was inspired by it. “Cookie!” he’d yell. “Please come on back, Cookie! Come on back, Cookie! Come on back now, Cookie!”
It was hard to watch, and it had been happening since Cookie was a puppy. Cookie chased boats almost every day, and Cookie was tired every night. This night was no exception. So Cookie slept, exhausted, behind the Senator’s chair during supper. At the end of Mrs. Pommeroy’s supper, Senator Simon caught the last morsel of pork on his plate with his fork tines and waved his fork behind him. The pork dropped to the floor. Cookie woke up, chewed the meat thoughtfully, and went back to sleep.
Then the Senator pulled from the canvas sack the book he’d brought as a gift for the boys. It was a huge book, heavy as a slab of slate.
“For your boys,” he told Mrs. Pommeroy.
She looked it over and handed it to Chester. Chester looked it over. Ruth Thomas thought, A book for those boys? She had to feel sorry for someone like Chester, with such a massive book in his hand, staring at it with no comprehension.
“You know,” Ruth Thomas told Senator Simon, “they can’t read.”
Then she said to Chester, “Sorry!” thinking that it wasn’t right to bring up such a fact on the day of a boy’s father’s funeral, but she didn’t know for certain whether the Senator knew that the Pommeroy boys couldn’t read. She didn’t know if he’d heard of their affliction.
Senator Simon took the book back from Chester. It had been his great-grandfather’s book, he said. His great-grandfather had purchased the book in Philadelphia the only time that good man had ever left Fort Niles Island in his entire life. The cover of the book was thick, hard, brown leather. The Senator opened