The Wooden Shepherdess Page 4

  Off the Jersey coast that weather had blown itself out. It had then turned southerly, bringing them drifts of summer fog which meant that they had to feel their way blind with the lead all along that submarine gorge where the Hudson River continues under the ocean. They carried no lights now at night and sounded no foghorn or bell as they nosed in-and-out all the blazing and blaring legitimate traffic converged on New York.

  One night a four-pipe Naval destroyer lately transferred to the coastguard had loomed on them suddenly out of the midnight mist, herself blacked-out and showing only her chimney-sparks. Then all at once they’d arrived in waters which teemed with shipping which all—like themselves, and the harrying coastguards—was blacked-out and silent, whatever the darkness and fog. Yet these had been only the fringes of Rum Row’s fleet, that seemingly endless and almost motionless belt of shipping which wallowed twelve miles off-shore—blind-eyed and silent year-in and year-out and in parts nearly nose-to-tail from Florida right up to Maine—either anchored, or barely idling along, or adrift with their ground-gear gone and crew paralytic (when on look-out, you had to guess which). There was shipping here of every flag under the sun except the American: all ages and classes of sail, steam and diesel: some ripe as pears and wholly un-seaworthy, others as smart as a dream—and all of them loaded down to the scuppers with drink.

  Apart from the constant risk of collision, danger out here came less from the Law than from hijacking pirates in speed-boats armed with quick-firing guns. For, unlike the Law, these couldn’t be bribed; they wanted your cash entire or your whole consignment, and killed you first to save argument. Contact-boats suffered worst, being small and perforce having thousands and thousands of dollars with them in currency: sometimes, however, small rum-ships themselves were attacked, unless alert and well armed. So (with a shrouded gun on her foredeck now and a shrouded gun on her poop and her lifeboat kept at the ready) Alice May had stayed just as clear as she could of all comers while nosing along the low-lying Long Island coast to her final berth off Montauk.

  *

  As Augustine tossed on his sweat-soaked bed, with a sudden qualm his stomach recalled being shot at: skedaddling into the dunes and crab-grass caught in the beam of a searchlight, guns pop-popping behind in the dark and bullets that horribly pinged and plopped in the darkness around, while he wished himself safe back on board till he nearly burst with the wish.

  The Gilberts of this world only cross oceans in liners, with visas and all the right introductions: they pass through Customs, and never neglect to sign Embassy books. They would surely take it amiss if they learned of one of the family landing as he had one pitch-black night on a lonely Long Island beach from a sinking launch with a gunwhale-high load of the stuff under gunfire, and knocking a coastguard for six.

  7

  The effect of fear his first time out on a topsail yard had been near-paralysis, causing the strength to run out of Augustine’s muscles like water out of a bath. But the night that unlucky beach-landing fell straight in the arms of ambush, fear caused catalysis rather: it lent him the strength of ten, and his muscles themselves took charge. His fist had shot out of its own accord, and before that unfortunate coastguard surfman could up with his carbine, had caught him precisely on point in the dark—the smiter was gone twenty feet ere ever the smitten had slumped to the ground.

  Then had come searchlights and shouting and shooting; but self-propelled legs which jinked like a hare’s in-and-out the leaping shadows of seven men after him carried him into dead ground in a two-three seconds, and dropped him flat on his face well below the beam of the light. Thus pursuit had blundered right over him....

  Only then did his brain wake up and begin to inquire what all this was about. It had plenty of time to wonder: for dawn was a long way off, and his trousers were soaking.

  All night he had lain in a berry-bush, longing for Alice May. Then morning came, and he crept out at last. Since the contact-boat he had come in was sunk and its skipper in clink, he’d got to find other means somehow to get back on board; but the gunfire and general brouhaha had so scared the locals that no one would run him back to his ship. This guy who alleged he belonged on the Row.... He wasn’t a Rum Row type— and these men were born suspicious. Clearly that Coastguard Patrol knew more than they ought; and word started getting around that maybe this was the unknown stooge of the coast-guards.... On which Augustine had had to make himself scarce pretty slippy.

  Amagansett was hopeless; and even the quiet East Hampton (where last night’s fleeing trucks had rattled the birds from the sleeping elms as they streaked through the streets) had proved too hot for him. More by chance than anything else he had legged-it across to Sag Harbor, and there had written that only letter to Mary (no wonder it hadn’t said much!) while waiting the plush old Shinnecock’s pleasure to ferry him over the Sound to New London.

  Reaching New London, at first he had still had hopes that he might get back to his ship; but he soon abandoned all such, for the place was full up then for the boat-race and lousy with coastguards. Indeed it had seemed too risky to linger about near the sea any longer, and so he had taken the inland road with nowhere to go in particular—just thumbing lifts. This had brought him in turn to Hartford, Torrington, Litchfield and lastly the New Blandford fork, where a rustic sawbones bound for some kitchen-table appendix had finally dropped him. So here he was now at New Blandford—and much good it did him! For even here lying low in the woods he reckoned the Law must sooner or later catch up with him. Even taking the commonsense view that the police had so much else on their minds they were hardly likely to bother with him, he was in effect an outlaw: he hadn’t a passport, nor without telling his tale any hope of getting one—therefore no hope at all of escaping out of the country.

  As for money.... Thank heaven the Captain insisted he took some earnings with him “in case!” But now, with his rent paid up for three months, there were only very few (ill-gotten) yellowbacks left in his wad with the (equally ill-gotten) greenbacks; and no one would give you a job—he’d rightly or wrongly been told—if you couldn’t show papers and looked such an obvious alien.

  In short there seemed nothing else to be done but to sit here and wait for the end. Of course, when the blow did fall.... Well, Gilbert would certainly go up in smoke. Even Mary: how would she take it? And all his civilized friends.... Just imagine Douglas’s moue when he heard of Augustine in jail for resisting arrest with violence! Even young Jeremy’s wry “Old Augustine to think he’s a he-man and start knocking coastguards about: can’t he ever grow up?”

  But that wasn’t all, for now he’d a friend over here to consider as well—that innocent child....

  Soon after parting with Ree at the pool, Augustine had feared he might never again see this “nearest approach to a friend he had made since he landed.” However, he needn’t have worried: the very next morning he’d come on her mooching around on her own (and quite near to his shack, as it chanced). Since then, he and Ree had become fast cronies: her company solaced the lonely present although it couldn’t expunge the past, and they spent nearly all their time in each other’s company. Ree at least seemed quite unaware of their difference in age. Age-groups are largely conventional placings in terms of society, scarcely apparent (it can be) between two people alone by themselves; and these two only met tête-à-tête. Like a closed “binary system”—a star-couple floating in space—they would flit in and out of each other’s lives as if neither had other attachments, and never saw each other against a background of company.

  Each for their separate reasons, meeting with nobody suited them both. So they seldom went near the village, and even then they were careful to keep out of sight like a couple of redskin spies. Indeed they seldom came out into open country at all, but stuck to the woods where the going being so slow disguised the fact that Ree had never been used like him to regular pounding mile after mile—for even exploring the woods they tried to avoid frequented buggy-roads. Ree indeed showed such a marked predi
lection for lonely and hidden places to take him that mostly they probed the deepest and darkest thickets they could, worming their way by overgrown paths where the trees in some inaccessible gully had never been cut or cleared since the Dawn of Time: primeval haunts where the foot didn’t even touch ground, but sunk thigh-deep through leaves and rotting or rotted wood....

  Ree seemed to adore to creep into caves and cracks in the outcrops of rock, where together they’d squeeze in some secret hole like a couple of badgers setting up home. Although she was nimble most times as a monkey, at others she seemed to go strangely helpless and asked to be lifted over or out of things—not that Augustine minded those times, for it gave him a kind of “motherly” feeling towards her.... And as for talking—nineteen-to-the-dozen they talked! So what about Ree, when she found that the hand she’d so trustingly held belonged to a wanted criminal? Not very nice if she happened to see him arrested....

  Next morning, to drive so sorry a picture out of his mind as well as to ease his nostalgia, Augustine started at last on a cautiously-worded new letter home:

  “Dear Mary,” he wrote: “This village stands at a cross-roads....”

  8

  The “cross-roads” Augustine wrote of were really only cross-buggy-roads, woodland trails that had never been metalled or oiled. Hardly anything used them today, apart from some local flivver or summer-girl on a saddle-horse—or sometimes, even, still a horse-buggy or two. You were five good miles from the State road where through-traffic went and the all-night liquor trucks roared with their lights out down to New York. Moreover apart from the church (and a few scattered shacks in the woods), Augustine’s “village” had very few buildings to boast: just the Big Warren Place, the Little Warren Place, and a smithy.

  He wrote of the church—which was tiny and old, looked nearly disused and stood half buried in trees. Its proportions were naïve and lovely (Ree said “somebody British called Wren” had sent over the plans, but if so it was Wren in unwontedly simple “Shepherdess” mood). All wooden she was, that little deserted shepherdess; and barring her shingles, her green copper vane and her bell which nowadays couldn’t be tolled, all white—apart from peeps where the weathered white paint had peeled and showed her shell-pink undercoat. Along-side the church stood abandoned an ancient and gaunt Tin Lizzie (a T-model Ford) without any engine: it looked (he wrote) “like a giant black daddy-long-legs in widow’s weeds” with its height and its tatters of canopy. Standing so long it had sunk in the earthen road right down to its hubs.

  Next he described the empty “Big Warren Place.” Behind nearly impassable bushes, buried in trees and against a solid background of trees, it reared the top of a lofty Doric façade with most of the architrave missing. This too was all wooden of course, and once painted white like the church. It was huge (by New England standards), and haunted, and half fallen down.

  The “Little Warren Place” had doubtless been built as its dowerhouse. Now it lodged the Neighborhood Store, selling everything: boots and canned-beef and hairnets and axes and cough-cure, as well as those 95-cent blue canvas work-shirts which everyone wore—even girls. There were staybones and lamp-wicks, and whisky-stills (leastwise the parts for one, listing each separate item merely as “Useful for Various Purposes”). Old Ali Baba slept up above his cave in all that was left of a handsome Colonial bedroom: “I went up with him once to look for the right size of nails, and three legs of the big brass bedstead had gone through the floor.” The neighborhood stock of kerosene stood in a powder-closet. Home-made Infallible Cattle Cure too was dispensed from a one-legged object that once was a Sheffield-plate urn; and, this village store served also as Club, where everyone met whether wanting to buy things or not....

  All this seemed to be perfectly safe to write home (though the letter would have to be mailed in New York, for Augustine knew all about postmarks). And yet he paused. To Augustine himself it was just the place’s forgotten and tumble-down look which seemed so attractive, compared with the cared-for and handsome “Colonial” villages all-dolled-up-to-the-nines which he’d seen on his way here; but what of the Mary he wrote for? The English in general only cross oceans with all the right introductions and go to the usual places: it wouldn’t be easy to make her believe such a scene could exist over here, for this New England corner was certainly fifty years more out of date than anything left in the Olde one. The Wadamy circle’s American travels were all so strictly confined to skyscraping towns and exclusive resorts, and the oh-so-hospitable gilded chain of the friends of their friends....

  The smithy, alas, was in an even worse state and provided one nothing at all picturesque to write home because it had burned down too often (Ree said of the smith that fires were the principal source of his livelihood). This year’s edition had merely been thrown together from second-hand galvanised sheets already lacy with rust or gone into actual holes. The smith mended farm machines—when he could (which was seldom); and jobs which defeated him just stayed standing around “Which at least,” said Ree, “gives the vines and poison-ivy something to grow on” (all those long, sticky, tendrilly things that Augustine so much disliked; and the burrs big as rats). He also sold gasoline—canned, for he hadn’t a pump—which “helped no end with his fires.” Also this smith, Ree alleged, had a terrible crush on someone called Sadie who wouldn’t look at him “spita she’s kinda his niece....”

  No, perhaps the smithy and smith were both of them better left out. So he took a fresh sheet, and started instead to draw for Polly a mother skunk with her little ones—queer little black-and-white creatures all feathery tail and no head, as he’d watched them once with bated breath on his porch. As he did so, he wondered what sweet-hope-in-hell he’d got that he’d ever see Mary and Polly again—quite apart from the new one....

  If only he’d had the sense to give himself up straight off when he landed, and tried to explain! For Augustine well knew what a fool he had been: it was no use pretending he hadn’t, and any day soon he was likely to pay for it dearly. But yet ... Even now, as he feathered the tails of his skunks with elaborate flourishes—plumed them indeed like Victorian hearses, so black seemed his future—something from under his mind was struggling up towards daylight but couldn’t quite make it, like bubbles in mud. For the fact was that though he hadn’t one bit enjoyed being shot at, now it had happened he wouldn’t have had it unhappen again for all the gold in the world. That unbridgeable chasm at Oxford between the men who had fought in the War and the boys too young for it.... Now he too had been shot at and might have been killed; and for-crying-out-loud, what a load of guilt that took off one’s shoulders—even admitting one’s “War” had lasted for only six seconds (or seven at most)!

  When at last Augustine looked up from his drawing he saw that excited face at his window.... He dropped his pen, and jumped to his feet with a sense of relief so intense it took even himself by surprise that a grown-up man (one who had fought and been shot at and might have been killed!) should have come to depend on a child to quite the extent he had come to depend on this Ree. For he had to admit it: time spent in her company sang with a whole new octave of notes.

  Yet who was this Ree? It had puzzled Augustine the way she had never once mentioned her parents, or said where she lived—let alone shown signs of wanting to carry him home and exhibit her prize, as most children would. Was she native? Or was she a summer migrant, one of that youthful holiday crowd from the country outside, which sometimes invaded the store like a flock of starlings then vanished again in a flock—like starlings?

  As well as its woods the “township” included some four or five miles of small stony hills with scrub on their tops, and stone-walled fields lower down where grass fought a losing battle with sumac and rocks. Here there were small scattered farms built of timber and weather-board: long left unpainted and grindingly poor, there was hardly a building apart from the house—just an outside privy, a rusty old pump in the yard, the fag-end of last winter’s woodpile and mostly not even an ice-house. Th
e old Yankee stock which had built them and farmed them had long been dwindling: for generations, Yankees go-getting enough had all gone West leaving only the rather more feckless and pleasanter characters—men not over-given to work, so that one little struggling farmstead after another had given up struggling. Empty, some of these tumble- down houses had tumbled right down or caught fire; but others had lately begun to be bought up cheap on mortgage as family holiday-places by painters and writers not quite arrived enough yet to make Provincetown, followed by other adventurous small-income city-folk.... That seemed the likeliest background for Ree. Down in the valleys the much more prosperous farms had thriving fields of tobacco and slatted tobacco-barns, herds of black-and-white Holsteins in huge metal byres, towering tubular silos and clanking wind-pumps raised on legs taller even than silos; but most of these nowadays seemed to be owned by Swedes—and she certainly wasn’t a Swede!

  But anyway here the mysterious creature was, dancing about on his porch and agog with a plan she had formed....

  9

  Ree hadn’t been consciously secret about her home: it was just that with so much else to be talked about “home” seemed a waste of her precious time with Augustine. For nowadays parents and even sibs had shriveled away in her eyes to the veriest “things,” like the dull old tables and chairs. Even her father, to whom she had once been so close, was now little more than a weekly lingering smell of five-cent cigars.