Pastor Wishnell set up Mrs. Pommeroy to cut hair in his back garden, right in front of a white trellis of pink roses. He had brought out a stool and a small side table, where she placed her scissors and combs and a tall glass of water in which to dip the combs. Kitty Pommeroy sat on the low brick wall and had herself a few cigarettes. She buried the butts in the soil under the roses when she thought nobody was looking. Owney Wishnell was sitting on the steps of the back porch in his strangely clean fisherman’s clothes, and Ruth went to sit beside him. He kept his hands on his knees, and she could see the curling gold filaments of hair on his knuckles. They were such clean hands. She wasn’t used to seeing men with clean hands.
“How long has you uncle lived here?” she asked.
“Forever.”
“This doesn’t look like a house he’d live in. Does somebody else live here?”
“Me.”
“Anyone else?”
“Mrs. Post.”
“Who’s Mrs. Post?”
“She takes care of the house.”
“Shouldn’t you be helping your friends over there?” Cal Cooley asked. He’d come up behind them on the porch without making a sound. Now he lowered his tall body and sat next to Ruth so that she was between the two men.
“I don’t think they need any help, Cal.”
“Your uncle wants you to head back over to Fort Niles, Owney,” Cal Cooley said. “He needs you to pick up Mr. Ellis for the wedding.”
“Mr. Ellis is coming to this wedding?” Ruth asked.
“He is.”
“He never comes over here.”
“Regardless. Owney, it’s time to push off. I’m going with you.”
“May I go with you?” Ruth asked Owney.
“You certainly may not,” said Cal.
“I didn’t ask you, Cal. May I go with you, Owney?”
But Pastor Wishnell was approaching, and when Owney saw him, he quickly jumped off the steps and said to his uncle, “I’m going. I’m going right now.”
“Hurry,” said the pastor as he walked up the steps and onto the porch. He looked over his shoulder and said, “Ruth, Mrs. Pommeroy is going to need your help.”
“I’m not much help cutting hair,” Ruth said, but the pastor and Owney were gone. One in each direction.
Cal looked at Ruth and lifted a satisfied eyebrow. “I wonder why you’re so eager to hang around that boy.”
“Because he doesn’t annoy the fuck out of me, Cal.”
“I annoy the fuck out of you, Ruth?”
“Oh, not you. I didn’t mean you.”
“I enjoyed our little trip to Concord. Mr. Ellis had a lot of questions for me when I got back. He wanted to know how you and your mother got along, and if you seemed at home there. I told him that you’d both got along swimmingly and that you seemed very much at home there, but I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you about it. Come to think of it, perhaps you should write him a note when you get the chance, thanking him for having sponsored the trip. It’s important to him that the two of you have a good relationship, considering how close your mother and grandmother have been to the Ellis family. And it’s important to him that you get as much time off Fort Niles as possible, Ruth. I told him I’d be happy to take you to Concord at any time, and that we had a good time traveling together. I do enjoy it, Ruth.” He was giving her his heavy-lidded stare now. “Although I can’t get out of my head this idea that someday the two of us will end up in a motel along Route One having filthy sex together.”
Ruth laughed. “Get it out of your head.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because Old Cal Cooley is such a funny man,” Ruth said. Which was not at all the truth. The truth was that Ruth was laughing because she had decided—as she often did, with varying degrees of success—that Old Cal Cooley was not going to get to her. She wouldn’t allow it. He could heap upon her loads of his most insidious abuse, but she would not rise to it. Certainly not today.
“I know it’s only a matter of time before you start having filthy sex with somebody, Ruth. All signs point to it.”
“Now we’re going to play a different kind of game,” Ruth said. “Now you leave me alone for a while.”
“And you should keep yourself away from Owney Wishnell, by the way,” Cal said as he walked down the porch steps and wandered into the garden. “It’s obvious that you’re up to something with that boy, and nobody likes it.”
“Nobody?” Ruth called after him. “Really, Cal? Nobody?”
“Get over here, you big old man,” Kitty Pommeroy said to Cal when she saw him. Cal Cooley turned on his heel and walked stiffly in the other direction. He was going back to Fort Niles to get Mr. Ellis.
The bride, Dotty Wishnell, was a likable blonde in her mid-thirties. She’d been married before, but her husband died of testicular cancer. She and her daughter, Candy, who was six years old, were the first to have their hair done. Dotty Wishnell walked over to Pastor Wishnell’s house in her bathrobe, her hair wet and uncombed. Ruth thought this was a pretty relaxed way for a bride to walk around on her wedding day, and it made Ruth like the woman right away. Dotty had an attractive enough face, but she looked exhausted. She had no makeup on yet, and she was chewing gum. She had deep lines across her forehead and around her mouth.
Dotty Wishnell’s daughter was extremely quiet. Candy was going to be her mother’s maid of honor, which Ruth thought an awfully serious job for a six-year-old, but Candy seemed up to it. She had a grown-up face for a child, a face that didn’t belong anywhere near a child.
“Are you nervous about being the maid of honor?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked Candy.
“Obviously not.” Candy had the firm mouth of the aging Queen Victoria. She wore a most judgmental expression, and those lips of hers were firmly set. “I was already a flower girl at Miss Dorphman’s wedding, and we aren’t even related.”
“Who’s Miss Dorphman?”
“Obviously she’s my teacher.”
“Obviously,” Ruth repeated, and Kitty Pommeroy and Mrs. Pommeroy both laughed. Dotty laughed, too. Candy looked at the four women as if she were disappointed in the lot of them.
“Oh, great,” Candy said, as if she had already had this kind of irritating day and wasn’t looking forward to another. “So far, so bad.”
Dotty Wishnell asked Mrs. Pommeroy to take care of Candy first and see whether she could give her thin brown hair some curls. Dotty Wishnell wanted her daughter to look “adorable.” Mrs. Pommeroy said it would be easy to make such an adorable child look adorable, and she would do all she could to make everyone happy.
“I could give her the cutest little bangs,” she said.
“No bangs,” Candy insisted. “No way.”
“She doesn’t even know what bangs are,” Dotty said.
“I do so, Mom,” said Candy.
Mrs. Pommeroy set to work on Candy’s hair while Dotty stood and watched. The two women talked comfortably with each other, although they’d never before met.
“The good thing is,” Dotty told Mrs. Pommeroy, “that Candy doesn’t have to change her name. Candy’s daddy was a Burden, and her new daddy is a Burden, too. My first husband and Charlie were first cousins, believe it or not. Charlie was one of the ushers at my first wedding, and today he’s the groom. Yesterday I said to him, ‘You never know how things are going to turn out,’ and he said, ‘You never know.’ He’s going to adopt Candy, he said.”
“I lost my first husband, too,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Actually, he was my only husband. I was a young thing like you. It’s true; you never know.”
“How did your husband die?”
“He drowned.”
“What was his last name?”
“It was Pommeroy, sweetheart.”
“I think I remember that.”
“It was in 1967. But we don’t need to talk about that today, because today’s a happy day.”
“You poor thing.”
“You poor thing. Oh, don’t you
worry about me, Dotty. What happened to me was a long, long time ago. But you lost your husband only last year, right? That’s what Pastor Wishnell said.”
“Last year,” Dotty replied, staring ahead. The women were silent for a while. “March twentieth, 1975.”
“My dad died,” Candy said.
“We don’t need to talk about that today,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, forming another perfect ring in Candy’s hair with her damp finger. “Today is a happy day. Today is your mommy’s wedding.”
“Well, I’m getting another husband today, that’s for sure,” said Dotty. “I’m getting a new one. This island is no place to live without a husband. And you’re getting a new daddy, Candy. Isn’t that right?”
Candy did not express an opinion on this.
“Does Candy have other little girls to play with on Courne Haven?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.
“No,” Dotty said. “There are some teenage girls around, but they aren’t too interested in playing with Candy, and next year they’ll be going inland to school. Mostly, it’s little boys around here.”
“It was the same thing with Ruth when she was little! All she had were my boys to play with.”
“Is that your daughter?” Dotty asked, looking at Ruth.
“She’s practically my daughter,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. My daughtah . . . “And she grew up with nothing but boys around.”
“Was that hard on you?” Dotty asked Ruth.
“It was the worst,” Ruth said. “It ruined me completely.”
Dotty’s face collapsed into worry. Mrs. Pommeroy said, “She’s teasing. It was fine. Ruth loved my boys. They were like her brothers. Candy will be fine.”
“I think Candy wishes she could be a girly-girl sometimes, and play girly games for a change,” said Dotty. “I’m the only girl she can play with, and I’m no fun. I haven’t been much fun all year.”
“That’s because my dad died,” Candy said.
“We don’t need to talk about that today, honey,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Today your mommy’s getting married. Today’s a happy day, sweetheart.”
“I wish there were some little boys my age around here,” said Kitty Pommeroy. Nobody seemed to hear this but Ruth, who snorted in disgust.
“I always wanted a little girl,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “But I had a whole bunch of boys. Is it fun? Is it fun dressing Candy up all pretty? My boys wouldn’t let me touch them. And Ruth always had short hair, so it wasn’t fun to play with.”
“You’re the one who kept it short,” Ruth said. “I wanted my hair to be just like yours, but you were always cutting it.”
“You couldn’t keep it combed, sweetheart.”
“I can dress myself,” Candy said.
“I’m sure you can, sweetheart.”
“No bangs.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “We’re not giving you any bangs, even though they’d be beautiful.” She expertly circled the puff of curls she had created on top of Candy’s head with a wide white ribbon. “Adorable?” she asked Dotty.
“Adorable,” said Dotty. “Precious. You did a great job. I can never get her to sit still, and I don’t know anything about styling hair. Obviously. I mean, look at me. This is about as good as I get.”
“There you go. Thank you, Candy.” Mrs Pommeroy bent over and kissed the little girl on the cheek. “You were very brave.”
“Obviously,” said Candy.
“Obviously,” said Ruth.
“You’re next, Dotty. We’ll do the bride, and you can go get dressed, and then we’ll do your friends. Somebody should tell them to start coming over. What do you want me to do with your hair?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just want to look happy,” Dotty instructed. “Can you do that for me?”
“You can’t hide a happy bride, even under a bad hairstyle,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I could wrap your head in a towel, and if you’re happy, you’d still look beautiful, marrying your man.”
“Only God can make a happy bride,” Kitty Pommeroy said very seriously, for some reason.
Dotty considered this and sighed. “Well,” she said, and spat her gum into a used tissue she’d fished out of her bathrobe pocket, “see what you can do for me. Just do your best.”
Mrs. Pommeroy set to work on Dotty Wishnell’s wedding day hair, and Ruth left the women and went to look more closely at Pastor Wishnell’s house. She could not make any sense of its delicate, feminine style. She walked the length of the long, curving porch, with its wicker furniture and bright cushions. That must be the work of the mysterious Mrs. Post. She saw a bird feeder, shaped like a little house and cheerfully painted red. Knowing that she was trespassing, but overcome by curiosity, she let herself into the house through the French doors that opened from the porch. Now she was in a small parlor, a sitting room. Brightly covered books lay on end tables, and doilies covered the backs of the sofa and chairs.
She walked next through a living room papered in a print of pale green lilies. A ceramic Persian cat crouched next to the fireplace, and a real tabby cat reclined on the back of a rose-colored couch. The cat looked at Ruth and, unconcerned, went back to sleep. Ruth touched a handmade afghan on a rocking chair. Pastor Wishnell lived here? Owney Wishnell lived here? She walked on. The kitchen smelled of vanilla, and a coffee cake sat on the counter. She noticed stairs at the back of the kitchen. What was upstairs? She was out of her mind, to be snooping around like this. She’d be hard put to explain to anyone what she was doing upstairs in Pastor Toby Wishnell’s house, but she was dying to find Owney’s bedroom. She wanted to see where he slept.
She walked up the steep wooden stairs and, on the next floor, peered into an immaculate bathroom, with a potted fern hanging in the window and a small cake of lavender soap in a dish above the sink. There was a framed photograph of a small girl and a small boy, kissing. BEST FRIENDS, it read below in pink script.
Ruth moved to the doorway of a bedroom containing stuffed animals propped against the pillows. The next bedroom had a beautiful sleigh bed and its own bathroom. The last bedroom had a single bed with a rose-covered quilt. Where did Owney sleep? Not with the teddy bears, surely. Not on the sleigh bed. She couldn’t picture that. She had no sense of Owney at all in this house.
But Ruth kept exploring. She climbed up to the third floor. It was hot, with sloping ceilings. Seeing a partly closed door, she naturally pushed it open. And walked in on Pastor Wishnell.
“Oh,” Ruth said.
He looked at her from behind an ironing board. He was in his black trousers. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. That’s what he was ironing. His torso was long and seemed to have no muscle or fat or hair. He lifted his shirt off the ironing board, slid his arms into the starched sleeves, and fastened the buttons, bottom to top, slowly.
“I was looking for Owney,” Ruth said.
“He’s gone to Fort Niles to pick up Mr. Ellis.”
“Oh, really? Sorry.”
“You knew that very well.”
“Oh, that’s right. Yes, I did know that. Sorry.”
“This is not your house, Miss Thomas. What made you think you were free to wander about it?”
“That’s right. Sorry to have bothered you.” Ruth backed into the hallway.
Pastor Wishnell said, “No, Miss Thomas. Come in.”
Ruth paused, then stepped back into the room. She thought to herself, Fuck, and looked around. Well, this was certainly Pastor Wishnell’s room. This was the first room in the house that made any sense. It was stark and blank. The walls and ceiling were white; even the bare wooden floor was whitewashed. The room smelled faintly of shoe polish. The pastor’s bed was a narrow brass frame, with a blue woollen blanket and a thin pillow. Under the bed was a pair of leather slippers. The bedside table held no lamp or book, and the room’s single window had only a window shade, no curtain. There was a dresser, and on it a small pewter plate holding a few coins. The dominant object in the room was a large, dark wooden desk, beside which was a bookcase filled wit
h heavy volumes. The desk held an electric typewriter, a stack of paper, a soup can of pencils.
Hanging above the desk was a map of the coast of Maine, covered with pencil marks. Ruth looked for Fort Niles, instinctively. It was unmarked. She wondered what that meant. Unsaved? Ungrateful?
The pastor unplugged the iron, wrapped the cord around it, and set it on his desk.
“You have a pretty house,” Ruth said. She put her hands in her pockets, trying to look casual, as if she’d been invited here. Pastor Wishnell folded the ironing board and placed it inside the closet.
“Were you named after the Ruth of the Bible?” he asked. “Have a seat.”
“I don’t know who I was named after.”
“Don’t you know your Bible?”
“Not too much.”
“Ruth was a great woman of the Old Testament. She was the model of female loyalty.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You might enjoy reading the Bible, Ruth. It contains many wonderful stories.”
Ruth thought, Exactly. Stories. Action-adventure. Ruth was an atheist. She had decided that the year before, when she learned the word. She was still having fun with the idea. She hadn’t told anyone, but the knowledge gave her a thrill.
“Why aren’t you helping Mrs. Pommeroy?” he asked.
“I’m going to do that right now,” Ruth said, and thought about making a run for it.
“Ruth,” Pastor Wishnell said, “sit down. You can sit on the bed.”
There was no bed in the world that Ruth wanted less to sit on than Pastor Wishnell’s. She sat down.
“Don’t you ever get tired of Fort Niles?” he asked. He tucked his shirt into his pants, in four smooth strokes, with flat palms. His hair was damp, and she could see the tooth marks from a comb. His skin was pale as fine linen. He leaned against the side of the desk, folded his arms, and looked at her.