The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [15]
She doesn’t like it. She gets out of the water and empties the tub out the door. Still naked, she fills the kettle with snow and puts it back on the stove, sits in the chair to wait for hot water while Bigelow gathers his clothes and dresses, taking his time because the sight of her perched there, nothing on, is one he enjoys. Too proud to cover herself, she’d rather be cold, the dusky skin of her breasts almost mauve, their nipples drawn up in angry, hard points.
The next time he’s at her place he sees that the soap is gone— she’s thrown it away, no doubt. But she’s kept the wrapper. She’s stuck it to the wall as decoration.
So he’s gotten something right after all.
AS IT WOULD MAKE no sense to assemble and disassemble a kite of such complexity and proportion, Bigelow is building a shed for it on the bluff, and, outside the shed, a platform on which to mount a reel. He has lumber left over from the construction of the station house, and he has bought a box of cheap, bent nails from Getz.
On days he does not see the woman, he spends his afternoons on the bluff. He straightens nails with a hammer, striking sparks from the flat rock where he pounds them. He frames the shed and he puts up walls, he pitches the roof steeply to prevent snow from sticking.
Then he carries all the kite’s pieces from the station up to the shed, making two trips with a sledge, first the spars and the wing ribs, and the next day all the rest, muslin and tools and the instruments he wants to send up into the sky.
Inside the new building, protected from the wind, he begins to put the kite together. Crouched under a hurricane lamp tied to a beam, Bigelow is so involved, day after day, with the details of the work at hand—box corners and lock slots, lengths of hemp soaked and tied wet so as not to loosen in flight, spars, three of them, that crack under tension and have to be replaced, a seam so crooked it has to be resewn—that he doesn’t see the whole of what he’s making.
Not until it’s done, ribs tight, stitches knotted. Bigger somehow than he expected. Grander and more beautiful, with a grace that drawings can’t convey.
He walks around and around the kite, squeezing to fit between the taut muslin panels of the cells and the plank sides of the shed, running his fingers over the fabric, touching spars that he sanded, one each night in his station, until they were as smooth as her skin.
He can’t wait to get it outside, into the wind.
ALL WEEK HE HAS no luck with his gun: torrents of rain wash every last bird from the sky, the rabbits are deep in their dens. Soon the mosquitoes will be as fierce as when he arrived. With nothing to offer the woman, and unable to face the idea of a long, wet evening spent alone, Bigelow settles on the idea of some netting for her bed; he walks into town to buy a bolt from Getz’s store.
His purchase held inside his coat to keep it dry, he’s heading east toward her house, when he sees a man crossing Front Street with a mixed brace slung over his shoulder, one scaup and another, bigger bird with a red breast. Bigelow runs through the rain to catch up with him. He wants the prettier one—a merganser, the man says it’s called—but the man won’t sell it for less than a quarter, so Bigelow takes the scaup instead, and then he has two gifts.
He hurries, head down, trying to avoid the deeper puddles, but by the time he arrives he’s soaked through, and she makes him wait by the door, where she sets aside the bolt of netting to strip off his coat and his boots.
“Against the bugs,” he says, pointing at the netting. He pantomimes getting bitten, slaps at his forearm and then scratches the same spot. The woman nods, a brisk gesture, eyebrows raised as if to say she’s not so ignorant—so savage—that she doesn’t recognize mosquito netting.
He stands barefoot on her bed to screw a ring into the ceiling, shows her how to thread the netting through it, how to drape the stuff so the bugs can’t get in. When he mimes using a needle and thread to close