Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [106]
• • •
“Miss?”
She startles at the voice, which is that of the carriage driver who left her just a while before. He is standing at the foot of the porch steps, gazing up at her, cap in hand, his body long and slightly stooped.
“I come back to see you were all right,” he says in his slow, unemotional drawl. “Didn’t like leaving you on that doorstep there, with the house all boarded up and looking fearful as it does.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“I see you got in.”
“Yes,” she says.
“You got the water running?”
“I do not know,” she says.
“Then likely you don’t. Your pump is going to need a good priming.”
“Yes.”
She notices that his coat, a rough navy wool, is torn at the shoulder. His arms are exceptionally long and hang like unnatural appendages at his sides. His eyes, an icy blue, shine through the stubble and grime on his face.
“You won’t have the electric or the gas on either then,” he says. “You got somewhere to go for the night?”
“I shall stay here,” she says.
He scratches his beard and looks skeptical. “It is my feeling, miss, that this is not a fit place for a young woman such as yourself,” he says plainly. She tries to guess his age. Thirty-five? Forty? His face, coarsened by constant exposure to the weather, gives nothing away. “And as it is growing late in the day, I suggest you find yourself somewhere to sleep before it gets dark. Most places is full up this time of year, but my sister, Alice, she takes in boarders what are desperate.”
Olympia has not thought of herself as desperate. But, reluctantly, she considers the man’s proposal. He is right: If she has no water, she cannot stay here, however much she wants to.
“Yes,” she says finally. “Thank you.”
“You ready to go now?”
She hesitates. She cannot bear to leave this house so soon. “I . . .”
“You be ready in one hour then,” he says.
“Thank you,” she says. “You are very kind. What is your name?”
“Ezra Stebbins. I used to come by and deliver lobster to the house when your father and mother lived here.”
“I see,” she says. “You are a fisherman.”
“That I am.”
“You live nearby?”
“In Ely, ma’am.”
She turns away for a moment and gazes out over the railing. She wonders if he knows as well why the house has been empty all these years. She draws herself up. This is but one encounter out of many she will have to endure in the coming weeks if she is to take up residence in Fortune’s Rocks. She glances over to speak to the fisherman, but when she looks down at the foot of the porch steps, she sees that he is gone.
• • •
There are no chairs on the porch, only an old stool wedged into a corner of the railing. She dislodges the stool, puts it at the center of the porch, and sits on it, her skirts rumpling all about her knees. Four years ago, she and Haskell met at this porch railing. She can remember only too well the way they greeted each other, with Martha and Clementine and Randall and May in attendance, and the way she, Olympia, seemed already to understand that her meeting with John Warren Haskell was not precisely as it should be, not in any observable manner but only in that she felt, through the body, in addition to a sensation that was a combination of both shame and confusion, the distinct impression that there were layers within layers inside of which their simple, seemingly innocent gestures might one day come to be interpreted. And she wonders now if in every life there are not moments in time, perhaps four or five or even seven such moments, in which the life is transformed utterly