Books and Reviews

From the Prologue of Snow Island:

    George Tibbits stepped from the 4:03 with a small leather suitcase, the only passenger to disembark in Barton. A moment later the train pulled away and left him alone on the platform. Through the rain-streaked window of the station, he could see the attendant seated in the ticket booth. He envied people who had jobs that required a uniform. When you wore a uniform, people knew who you were without asking. They didn't study your face. George shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other, crossed the tracks, and headed for Front Street. He had not expected rain.
    The narrow streets by the docks met him as they always did, with the smell of salt and fish. George passed lobster boats and quahog skiffs bobbing on their moorings, and the prim ferry waiting for the morning run. He passed Gilley's Bar and Morgan's Fish Market, and turned up the hill toward town.
    He found Mrs. Santos where he had left her a year earlier, in the lobby of the Priscilla Alden Hotel, slumped in an armchair behind the desk with the Philco blaring at her side. Blinking her eyes as if emerging from a long rest, she produced the key to room twenty and set it on the tattered blotter. George climbed the wide stairs from the lobby, listening for footsteps overhead or the creak of a bedspring behind a closed door, some sign of life. The rough static of the radio, crackling when the station was lost, carried from down below, the only sound to be heard as he paused on the landing.
    Cautiously turning the handle, he swept his gaze over the furniture and the faded wallpaper. Room twenty had not changed. The bed was in the same place against the wall, with the bedstand and small, bent rocking chair beside it. The oval mirror hung above the dresser. After setting his suitcase on the floor, he moved the rocking chair by the window, arranging the room exactly as he remembered it that night in 1919 when he came home from the war to sit in the dark without sleeping, staring out at the rooftops and the docks and the black surface of the bay.
    George lowered himself into the rocking chair and watched a woman hurry past the pin factory across the street, a long brick building that took up the entire block on the back side of the hotel. The collar of her raincoat was turned up at the neck, and she walked with her arms folded over her chest, as though trying to keep warm. The last glimpse of the woman as she scurried around the corner only confirmed what he already knew: the world was not the place it had been in 1919. The streets of Barton were not the same streets. Yet, for a night, he could pretend.
    He made the journey every year, and every year it followed the same pattern. He waited through April and May until the weather was right; then, on a day he recognized as the day he would leave only once it had arrived, he went to the station and boarded the train. This year the forecasters had let him down. George imagined waking to the bright morning he remembered, hovering expectantly between spring and summer. Instead there was the rain, turning the docks to thin, fluid lines in the distance. If the rain did not end, he would not follow his plan of spending one night at the Priscilla Alden and taking the morning ferry to Snow Island. He would stay at the hotel until he woke to a clear day.
    George took his coat from the bed, where he had left it neatly folded, and closed the door to room twenty. He was halfway across the lobby when Mrs. Santos looked up from her magazine. "Lotta rain," she said, taking a toothpick from her mouth and rolling it between her fingers. "You might be staying more than one night, huh?"
    George nodded and crossed to the door. Outside, he opened his umbrella and glanced at his watch. Five twenty-four. He turned up Front Street, away from the center of town. There was no one on the sidewalk. He took small steps, trying to keep his pants legs from getting wet, until he came to Nellie Worthington's door.
    "Mr. Tibbits," she said, inclining her head as she stepped aside to let him pass. "Mrs. Santos called to tell me you were coming." She followed him down the hall and into the dining room. George took his place at the head of the table. Some years there were others boarding at Mrs. Worthington's, but this time he ate alone. He sat at the long table while she served ham, fried potatoes, and biscuits with last year's blackberry preserves.
    Mrs. Worthington told him the news, how she had no one eating with her regularly now that Morris Barnes had passed away, poor man, and how the lilac festival was ruined this year with the terrible weather. George finished drinking his coffee. She brought his hat and umbrella from the stand and reluctantly ushered him to the door.
    He was aware immediately of the stillness, drawn close to the bed like a watchful mourner, when he woke later that night. George lay there rubbing the worn sheet between his fingers. Something was missing. Then he realized: the rain. On the other side of the window, there was silence.
    He pushed back the covers and stepped from the bed. The floor was cold against his bare feet. George raised the window a crack. In the morning, he would pull the door to, descend the stairs, and walk down to the docks where he would catch the ferry. He could feel the island out there in the bay, a tiny, unprotected slip of land underneath the clearing sky. It waited for him with its lonely pull, its terrible sameness. If he came back for anything, he came back for this, the remoteness, the vulnerability of the island, the strange quiet strength of the place. Everything else could change, but the island kept its solitary vigil from year to year.
    The islanders who stared as he stepped from the ferry each spring believed he wanted to remember; yet just the opposite was true. He wanted to duplicate that first homecoming as precisely as possible because it was only then that he could forget, for a moment, what had waited for him on the island that day. It was only then that he could make himself believe it might have been different. The return to the island was a piece of his life he kept living over and over, until the day when he came home in 1919 had become like a rock along the shore, shaped into an even surface by the motion of the waves.
    The bell in the church steeple chimed the hour. Four long, slow tolls hung in the air; the last echo faded, and quiet took its place. He would not have long to wait until morning.

From Chapter One of Snow Island:

    In the winter, the men left at dawn, walking out across the ice that circled Snow Island. They chopped holes in the surface and lowered their quahog tongs into the water, and brought up wire baskets filled with clams. Alice Daggett imagined she could see them now, still figures in the early light, breath leaving their bodies like steam. One morning she had gone out with her father, the two of them inching over the ice, her hand circled tightly by his. When he pulled up the clams, she grasped the end of the quahog tongs with him, feeling his strength. The quahogs live all winter under the ice, he told her. Alice had wondered if the sand where they burrowed was cold, and whether a clam could feel such things.
    This morning the men were out in boats, around the west side of the island, and Alice had a clear view across the bay. She watched as the sun rose into the sky, touching the rocks along the island's shore. She had dreamed of her father again. He was rowing in after a day of work, steering the boat into a small cove. It might have been Gooseneck Cove, except the place in the dream was different, a landscape she recognized but did not quite know. He dropped the oars and raised his cap the way he had so many times in life, as though she were a grown woman and they were meeting on the streets of some town. She was about to call to him when the foghorn had sounded, its long blast jerking her out of sleep.
    The foghorn continued to sound now, blanketing the island every sixty seconds, though the rain had finally ended. Alice made her way down the ferry dock and sat with her feet dangling over the water, trying to hold on to the memory of her father's face. He was alive again in the dreams, so real that she woke expecting to find him at the side of the bed. Sometimes the sense of his presence stayed with her all day.
    Footsteps sounded on the dock's wood planks. Alice turned to find Owen Pierce shuffling toward her. He took his pipe from between his chapped lips and stared at it, as though the thing might remind him where he was headed. "Morning," he said gruffly. "Store open yet?"
    "I was just on my way to open up." Alice got to her feet and, trying not to walk too much faster than Owen, turned back up the dock.
    "Rain finally stopped. Ground ain't gonna dry out for planting for I don't know how long." Owen gripped the pipe in his mouth, so his words were muffled and his brown teeth showed. "One year we didn't plant till after the first of June - the year of the '96 blizzard. That was a storm now. We had snow up to the roofs. Didn't get the roads cleared for a week."
    Alice forced herself to take small steps, matching his slow and awkward gait, as they walked the length of the dock. At eighty-two, Owen was the oldest person on Snow. He had gone out quahogging until his late seventies, when the arthritis curled up his hands so badly he couldn't work any longer. Now he spent most of his time seated by the stove at the store.
    "We don't get winters like that anymore. My grandfather walked from here to Barton one time. Bay froze solid. Winter of 1857 that was. Ain't hardly anybody remembers winters like that now."
    "The bay froze the year my father died."
    "What's that?"
    "The winter my father died. The bay froze that year."
    Owen gave her a confused glance and moved his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other. "We don't get the snow like we used to anymore. I know that much."

From Chapter Four of Evening Ferry:

When Rachel had stepped from the ferry that day, the islanders assembled in front of the store parted for her, giving her uneasy glances and whispering their condolences. She climbed the hill to the house and found her father in the yard, his head beneath the open hood of a two-tone Chevy Bel Air. Rachel guessed it was a '56 from the shape of the grille, though it could have been an earlier model. She did not remember now when the full-width grille was introduced, one of many features of car styles on which her father had quizzed her over the years.
    Nate brought his head out from under the hood at her approach. She had not seen him since Christmas. Grease covered his work pants and hands, his chin was dotted with stubble, and a cigarette hung from his mouth. He dropped a wrench onto a pile of other tools on the ground. "She's inside," he said.
    Rachel expected him to follow her up the steps, but he wiped his hands on a rag, pressed his lips tightly together, and walked off.
    Phoebe lay on the bed with her hands at her side. She was wearing a dark blue dress with a high collar, the one she had bought for Easter. He had even done her hair. It was coiled on top of her head the way she had always worn it, the thin hairpins set in a circle against the scalp. Rachel had to stop herself from pulling the hairpins out, one by one, and doing it over again herself. The face was Phoebe's, just the same, and yet it had the stillness of something unnatural, inhuman. She was no longer human. What was she then, what had she become? There was a smudge of grease on her forehead, Nate's mark. Rachel placed her hand on the spot and drew back, frightened by the coldness of the skin. She took a tissue from her pocket and wiped the black grit away. She would have to call the funeral home in Barton. The newspaper, too. They would need an obituary and an announcement about the funeral. She toyed with these thoughts, stray details, while she sat on a straight-backed chair beside her mother's body and watched darkness fall.
    "She ain't leaving this island," Nate said when he returned.
    Rachel regarded him warily.
    "I already dug the grave."
    "Where?"
    "In the cemetery."
    Rachel had to think for a minute what he meant, to realize he was referring to the old cemetery in the woods at the island's center. No one had been buried there in years. She told him they could not bury Phoebe in the cemetery because it was closed.
    "Says who?"
    "I don't know. The police in Barton. It's closed — everybody knows that. It's got that historical marker on it."
    "She ain't leaving this island, that's all I know."
    Rachel wondered where she could turn. In the past, there was always her mother to make him see reason. "That's not a Catholic cemetery. She has to be buried in a Catholic cemetery."
    ""I don't think it makes any difference to God."
    "Where are you going to have the funeral?"
    "Our Lady of Snow. I called Father Slade. He said he'll come over."
    Rachel hadn't heard the priest's name in a long time and was surprised. She thought Father Slade had been sent to a parish in Chicago, but her father informed her that he lived just a half hour from Barton, in Havendale.
    "Father Slade will do this? He'll bury her in a cemetery that's not Catholic?" Rachel asked.
    "That's right," Nate answered.
    So it was settled, as most things were settled with Nate. He built the coffin himself and helped the undertaker, who came over on the ferry to finish the preparations, slide the body from the bed into the wood box. Father Slade conducted the funeral Mass at Our Lady, the island's Catholic church. He did not look the way Rachel remembered him. White hairs lay across his forehead like forgotten pieces of string, and a bulging stomach shook gently up and down beneath the robes as he recited the prayers. After the Mass, Nate loaded the coffin into the store's old delivery truck with the help of Eddie and Joe and Brock McGarrell. Rachel rode beside her father in the front seat, leading a procession down the dirt road.
    The grave was off in the far corner of the cemetery, surrounded by chipped slate markers dating back to the 1700s that leaned precariously forward or tipped over on the ground, the names and dates barely visible. The men carried the coffin through the crowded plot, making their way uneasily between the stones. Rachel stood back. They lowered the coffin into the ground, and she wondered if her father had made the hole deep enough. Afterwards there was a reception at the Improvement Center, organized by Gina Brovelli, Joe's wife, who had made meatballs in gravy and egg salad sandwiches. To Rachel's surprise, the Brovellis said nothing about the irregularity of burying Phoebe in the island cemetery and having Father Slade consecrate the ground. Perhaps they thought such details didn't matter because none of them saw her mother, a convert, as truly Catholic. Rachel clutched a paper cup full of lemonade and nodded as people mumbled "I'm so sorry" and moved away. Later that afternoon, she boarded the ferry with Father Slade. The old priest stood outside on the deck throughout the crossing. When they reached Barton, he took Rachel's hand, tears in his eyes, and said, "Your mother was an extraordinary woman."
    Rachel reached beneath the bed now, dragging the broom over the uneven floor boards. She was rewarded with a pile of mouse droppings and shredded paper, which she swept into the dustpan before going on to her father's room. Empty beer bottles sat by the double bed, next to a disorderly stack of newspapers and magazines. Gray sheets which might have been white once lay in a wadded pile in the middle of the mattress, and a plaid blanket with unraveling hems hung over the bedpost. She retrieved another paper bag from beneath the sink and loaded the beer bottles into it, holding them gingerly, trying to keep the stale beer from spilling onto her fingers.

From Chapter Eight of Evening Ferry:

    August 29, 1930
    I sat on the porch in the sun yesterday, shelling the beans Mrs. Brovelli gave Nate. I thought of all the times I searched for the outline of the island across the bay when I was a girl. The island was the place I went to in my mind when I wanted to get away. I remember going to the window at night and imagining I could see the island out there in the dark. There was a magic about it — the little rise of land in the water, the white ferry making the trip out and back. I guess it's true with everything, but the real place is different from what I imagined. I hadn't thought of it being so quiet here, so empty. There's nothing but sky and water. But I love the wide open feeling of this place. I love letting my hair go loose and wearing old clothes and not caring what I look like. I love living by the sun's rhythms instead of the clock's. Nate and I fall into bed at nine or nine-thirty and lie there listening to the sound of the waves breaking on the rocks. I don't know how I lived without this sound all my life. Or how I lived sleeping alone. It is wonderful to wake in the middle of the night and find him there beside me. I'm still surprised. I have to remember all over again that we're married, that this is our bed, that I live on Snow Island.

    September 9, 1930
    Nate came running up to the house yesterday afternoon and said I wouldn't believe what came on the ferry. A huge crate, addressed to me. I went down the hill with him, trying to think what it could be, but as soon as I saw the crate, I knew — the Steinway spinet. My heart sank as I watched the men get it on a dolly and roll it down the dock. I knew what Mother and Father were saying to me with this gift, if you can call it that. They are telling me that I am gone from their house completely. The men got the piano into the back of Walter Johnson's Model T truck. I followed the truck up the hill, feeling thoroughly useless and thinking that everyone was staring at me, the woman who had caused so much trouble and for what — a piano. Needless to say, the islanders don't see much use for a piano on Snow. It was quite a job to get it into the house. They removed the door and carried the piano through sideways. But once it was inside and they set it up in the corner of the main room, I was overwhelmed with joy at the thought I could play again. I've been waking in the night from dreams that I was playing the piano, my fingers moving back and forth. Nate stood over me and said to play something for him. I felt suddenly exposed, uncomfortable. I told him I would have to practice first, to get used to it again. My fingers are rusty, like the fingers of some old person with arthritis. He laughed and said, "It's just a piano." True, but the piano is such a personal thing for me. You don't just bring your fingers down on the keys. There is more to it than that, but I have never been able to explain this to anyone. Finally I played a bit of the Mozart Sonata in F Major. Nate kissed me and said it was pretty, then carried me into the bedroom. We are still on our honeymoon, he says. We drew the curtains and spent the rest of the afternoon in bed. Scandalous! Wonderful!

    September 11, 1930
    I wrote a letter to Mother and Father yesterday morning, thanking them for sending the piano. I have heard nothing from them since Father's letter, though I write at least once a week. I have kept my letters cheerful. I tell them how I am getting on and say that I miss them. My hope is that they will relent in time. I will try to go back for a visit, maybe this month or next. But first there is the matter of paying for the piano. Nate came home last night and came stomping through the door and flung his jacket on the sofa. When I asked him what was the matter, he said my parents didn't pay to have the piano sent over on the ferry. They simply put it on the ferry and said we would pay on delivery. Now Captain Tony wants five dollars from us.
    "That's five dollars we don't have," Nate said. "For a stupid piano we don't want. I'd send it right back to them, but then we'd have to pay for that, too." He called Father a cheapskate. He's right, but I was hurt to hear him say it anyway. Just when I was feeling so happy to have the piano, when I was thinking perhaps it was a goodwill gesture, though there was no note that came with it. Nate went out after supper without telling me where he was going and didn't get back until after ten. I sat waiting for him, too miserable to play the piano or do much of anything else. He went straight to bed when he came back. I told myself to be patient and understanding, but I lay there listening to his snoring for a long time, wishing I had somehow managed to bring more money with me.

    October 1, 1930
    Nate came home yesterday the way he does, tired and quiet. I followed him into the bedroom when he went to change his clothes, anxious to tell him about going over to Mrs. Cunningham's. Maybe I should have waited, but I was so happy. She wanted to know about my music and the composers I liked best. I did not have to explain — she knew all the composers, even some of the piano compositions by name. I felt that we had found each other here on Snow, compatriots. She must be close to sixty, but the difference in our ages doesn't seem important. I was going on, telling Nate all this, when I realized he wasn't listening. He was sitting on the bed, tugging off his wet socks. I put my arm around him and asked what was wrong. He moved away and said nothing was wrong. I knew he wasn't telling the truth. I asked again. He yelled then, said he just wanted to change his clothes without being chattered at. I was terribly hurt. I could not even look at him. I left the room and went to play the piano. While I was playing, I heard him go out of the house. He did not come back until after dark, and we ate supper in silence, like two people who didn't know each other. Before bed, he said he was sorry. He put his arms around me and we kissed, and I couldn't think how this had happened. We were both surprised and ashamed. We fell asleep with our arms around each other. I think we both felt that we never wanted this to happen again.

    October 6, 1930
    The silence is overwhelming. I have never known such quiet. There are whole days when no cars go past on the road below. Then there's Walter Johnson, with his grunted "good morning." My mind gets strange and loopy. I think of God. I wonder if He's watching me. God is more real here than on the mainland. At home I dismissed the idea of God. I was smarter than that, I told myself. Here God is around every corner. The days are cooler now. No more swimming. I have been playing the Debussy Arabesque over and over. It is not an especially difficult piece, but it is so delicate that the timing must be just right. That, of course, has always been my downfall. I rush through the music, anxious simply to master the notes, without thinking of the thing as a whole, how it moves. Each time I play a piece like the Debussy, it's different. I hear moments in it, nuances I haven't heard before. It's incredible that human beings can create works of such beauty. What would it be like to compose music? I can't imagine creating something so perfect.