Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert
“I’m very sorry, my dear,” Dr. Ellis said to his only natural-born daughter. “I’m sorry indeed, but Jane is gone. It is pointless for anyone to search further.”
Miss Vera set her face in a stubborn scowl. “At the very least, can’t someone find her body? Can’t someone dredge for it?”
Miss Vera’s youngest brother scoffed. “One cannot dredge the sea, Vera, as though it were a fishpond.”
“We shall postpone the funeral service as long as we can,” Dr. Ellis assured his daughter. “Perhaps Jane’s body will emerge in time. But you must stop telling the servants to find Jane. It’s a waste of their time, and the household must be tended.”
“You see,” explained Vera’s eldest brother, Lanford, “they will not find her. Nobody will ever find Jane.”
The Ellis family held off on a funeral service for Jane Smith-Ellis until the first week of September. Then, because they had to return to Concord within a few days, they could delay the event no further. There was no talk of waiting until they returned to Concord, where they could put a marker on the family plot; there was no place for Jane there. Fort Niles seemed to be as good a place as any for Jane’s funeral. With no corpse to bury, Ruth’s grandmother’s funeral was more a memorial service than a funeral. Such a service is not uncommon on an island, where drowning victims often are not recovered. A stone was placed in the Fort Niles cemetery, carved from Fort Niles black granite. It read:JANE SMITH-ELLIS
? 1884-JULY 10, 1927
SORELY MISSED
Miss Vera resignedly attended the service. She did not yet accept that Jane had abandoned her. She was, in fact, rather angry. At the end of the service, Miss Vera asked some of the servants to bring Jane’s baby to her. Mary was just over a year old. She would grow up to be Ruth Thomas’s mother, but at this time she was a tiny little girl. Miss Vera took Mary Smith-Ellis in her arms and rocked her. She smiled down at the child and said, “Well, little Mary. We shall now turn our attention to you.”
5
The popularity of the lobster extends far beyond the limits of our island, and he travels about all parts of the known world, like an imprisoned spirit soldered up in an airtight box.
—Crab, Shrimp, and Lobster Lore W. B. Lord 1867
CALCOOLEY made the arrangements for Ruth Thomas to visit her mother in Concord. He made the arrangements and then called Ruth and told her to be on her porch, with her bags packed, at six o’clock the next morning. She agreed, but just before six o’clock that morning, she changed her mind. She had a short moment of panic, and she bolted. She didn’t go far. She left her bags on the porch of her father’s house and ran next door to Mrs. Pommeroy.
Ruth guessed that Mrs. Pommeroy would be up and guessed that she might get breakfast out of the visit. Indeed, Mrs. Pommeroy was up. But she wasn’t alone and she wasn’t making breakfast. She was painting her kitchen. Her two older sisters, Kitty and Gloria, were helping her. All three were wearing black garbage bags to protect their clothes, their heads and arms pushed through the plastic. It was immediately obvious to Ruth that the three women had been up all night. When Ruth stepped into the house, the women lunged toward her at the same time, crushing her between them and leaving paint marks all over her.
“Ruth!” they shouted. “Ruthie!”
“It’s six o’clock in the morning!” Ruth said. “Look at you!”
“Painting!” Kitty shouted. “We’re painting!”
Kitty swiped at Ruth with a paintbrush, streaking more paint across Ruth’s shirt, then dropped to her knees, laughing. Kitty was drunk. Kitty was, in fact, a drunk. (“Her grandmother was the same kind of person,” Senator Simon had once told Ruth. “Always lifting the gas caps off old Model Ts and sniffing the fumes. Staggered around this island in a daze her whole life.”) Gloria helped her sister to stand. Kitty put her hand over her mouth, delicately, to stop laughing, then put her hands to her head, in a ladylike motion, to fix her hair.
All three Pommeroy sisters had magnificent hair, which they wore piled on their heads in the same fashion that had made Mrs. Pommeroy such a famous beauty. Mrs. Pommeroy’s hair grew more silvery every year. It had silvered to the point that, when she turned her head in the sunlight, she gleamed like a swimming trout. Kitty and Gloria had the same gorgeous hair, but they weren’t as attractive as Mrs. Pommeroy. Gloria had a heavy, unhappy face, and Kitty had a damaged face; there was a burn scar on one cheek, thick as a callus, from an explosion at a canning factory many years earlier.
Gloria, the oldest, had never married. Kitty, the next one, was off-and-on married to Ruth’s father’s brother, Ruth’s reckless Uncle Len Thomas. Kitty and Len had no children. Mrs. Pommeroy was the only one of the Pommeroy sisters to have children, that huge batch of sons: Webster and Conway and Fagan and so on and so on. By now, 1976, the boys were grown. Four had left the island, having found lives elsewhere on the planet, but Webster, Timothy, and Robin were still at home. They lived in their old bedrooms in the huge house next to Ruth and her father. Webster, of course, had no job. But Timothy and Robin worked on boats, as sternmen. The Pommeroy boys only found temporary work, on other people’s boats. They had no boats of their own, no real means of livelihood. All signs pointed to Timothy and Robin being hired hands forever. That morning, both were already out fishing; they’d been gone since before daylight.
“What are you doing today, Ruthie?” Gloria asked. “What are you doing up so early?”
“Hiding from somebody.”
“Stay, Ruthie!” said Mrs. Pommeroy. “You can stay and watch us!”
“Watch out for you is more like it,” Ruth said, pointing to the paint on her shirt. Kitty dropped to her knees again at this joke, laughing and laughing. Kitty always took jokes hard, as if she’d been kicked by them. Gloria waited for Kitty to stop laughing and again helped her to stand. Kitty sighed and touched her hair.
Every object in Mrs. Pommeroy’s kitchen was piled on the kitchen table or hidden beneath sheets. The kitchen chairs were in the living room, tossed on the sofa, out of the way. Ruth got a chair and sat in the middle of the kitchen while the three Pommeroy sisters resumed painting. Mrs. Pommeroy was painting windowsills with a small brush. Gloria was painting a wall with a roller. Kitty was scraping old paint off another wall in absurd, drunken lunges.
“When did you decide to paint your kitchen?” Ruth asked.
“Last night,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.
“Isn’t this a disgusting color, Ruthie?” Kitty asked.
“It’s pretty awful.”
Mrs. Pommeroy stepped back from her windowsill and looked at her work. “It is awful,” she admitted, not unhappily.
“Is that buoy paint?” Ruth guessed. “Are you painting your kitchen with buoy paint?”
“I’m afraid it is buoy paint, honey. Do you recognize the color?”
“I can’t believe it,” Ruth said, because she did recognize the color. Astonishingly, Mrs. Pommeroy was painting her kitchen the exact shade that her dead husband had used to paint his trap buoys—a powerful lime green that chewed at the eyes. Lobstermen always use garish colors on their pot buoys to help them spot the traps against the flat blue of the sea, in any kind of weather. It was thick industrial paint, wholly unsuited to the job at hand.
“Are you afraid of losing your kitchen in the fog?” Ruth asked.
Kitty hit her knees laughing. Gloria frowned and said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Kitty. Get a-hold of yourself.” She pulled Kitty up.
Kitty touched her hair and said, “If I had to live in a kitchen this color, I’d vomit all over the place.”
“Are you allowed to use buoy paint indoors?” Ruth asked. “Aren’t you supposed to use indoor paint for indoor painting? Is it going to give you cancer or something?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I found all these cans of paint in the toolshed last night, and I thought to myself, better not to waste it! And it reminds me of my husband. When Kitty and Gloria came over for dinner, we started giggli
“Honestly?” Ruth asked.
“Never mind,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “I like it.”
“If I had to live in this kitchen, I’d vomit so much, my head would fall off,” Kitty announced.
“Watch it, Kitty,” Gloria said. “You might have to live in this kitchen soon enough.”
“I will fucking not!”
“Kitty is welcome to stay in this house anytime,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “You know that, Kitty. You know that, too, Gloria.”
“You’re so mean, Gloria,” said Kitty. “You’re so fucking mean.”
Gloria kept painting her wall, her mouth set, her roller layering clean, even strokes of color.
Ruth asked, “Is Uncle Len throwing you out of your house again, Kitty?”
“Yes,” Gloria said, quietly.
“No!” Kitty said. “No, he’s not throwing me out of the house, Gloria! You’re so fucking mean, Gloria!”
“He says he’ll throw her out of the house if she doesn’t stop drinking,” Gloria said, in the same quiet tone.
“So why doesn’t he stop fucking drinking?” Kitty demanded. “Len tells me I have to stop drinking, but nobody drinks as much as he does.”
“Kitty’s welcome to move in with me,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.
“Why does he still get to be fucking drinking every fucking day?” Kitty shouted.
“Well,” Ruth said, “because he’s a nasty old alcoholic.”
“He’s a prick,” Gloria said.
“He’s got the biggest prick on this island; that’s for sure,” Kitty said.
Gloria kept painting, but Mrs. Pommeroy laughed. From upstairs came the sound of a baby crying.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.
“Now you’ve done it,” Gloria said. “Now you’ve woken up the goddamn baby, Kitty.”
“It wasn’t me!” Kitty shouted, and the baby’s cry became a wail.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Pommeroy repeated.
“God, that’s a loud baby,” Ruth said, and Gloria said, “No shit, Ruth.”
“I guess Opal’s home, then?”
“She came home a few days ago, Ruth. I guess she and Robin made up, so that’s good. They’re a family now, and they should be together. I think they’re both pretty mature. They’re both growing up real nice.”
“Truth is,” Gloria said, “her own family got sick of her and sent her back here.”
They heard footsteps upstairs and the cries diminished. Soon after, Opal came down, carrying the baby.
“You’re always so loud, Kitty,” Opal whined. “You always wake up my Eddie.”
Opal was Robin Pommeroy’s wife, a fact that was still a source of wonder to Ruth: fat, dopy, seventeen-year-old Robin Pommeroy had a wife. Opal was from Rockland, and she was seventeen, too. Her father owned a gas station there. Robin had met her on his trips to town when he was filling gas cans for his truck on the island. She was pretty enough (“A cute dirty little slut,” Angus Addams pronounced), with ash-blond hair worn in sloppy pigtails. This morning, she was wearing a housecoat and dingy slippers, and she shuffled her feet like an old woman. She was fatter than Ruth remembered, but Ruth hadn’t seen her since the previous summer. The baby was in a heavy diaper and was wearing one sock. He took his fingers out of his mouth and grabbed at the air.
“Oh, my God!” Ruth exclaimed. “He’s huge!”
“Hey, Ruth,” Opal said shyly.
“Hey, Opal. Your baby’s huge!”
“I didn’t know you were back from school, Ruth.”
“I’ve been back almost a month.”
“You happy to be back?”
“Sure I am.”
“Coming back to Fort Niles is like falling off a horse,” Kitty Pommeroy said. “You never forget how.”
Ruth ignored that. “Your baby’s enormous, Opal! Hey, there, Eddie! Hey, Eddie boy!”
“That’s right!” Kitty said. “He’s our great big baby boy! Aren’t you, Eddie? Aren’t you our great big boy?”
Opal stood Eddie down on the floor between her legs and gave him her two index fingers to hold. He tried to lock his knees and swayed like a drunk. His belly stuck out comically over his diaper, and his thighs were taut and plump. His arms seemed to be assembled in segments, and he had several chins. His chest was slick with drool.
“Oh, he’s so big!” Mrs. Pommeroy smiled widely. She knelt in front of Eddie and pinched his cheeks. “Who’s my great big boy? How big are you? How big is Eddie?”
Eddie, delighted, shouted, “Gah!”
“Oh, he’s big, all right,” Opal said, pleased. “I can’t hardly lift him anymore. Even Robin says Eddie’s getting too heavy to carry around. Robin says Eddie’d better learn to walk pretty soon, I guess.”
“Look who’s gonna be a great big fisherman!” Kitty said.
“I don’t think I ever saw such a big, healthy boy,” Gloria said. “Look at those legs. That boy’s going to be a football player for sure. Isn’t that the biggest baby you ever saw, Ruth?”
“That’s the biggest baby I ever saw,” Ruth agreed.
Opal blushed. “All the babies in my family are big. That’s what my mom says. And Robin was a big baby, too. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Pommeroy?”
“Oh, yes, Robin was a great big baby boy. But not as big as great big Mr. Eddie!” Mrs. Pommeroy tickled Eddie’s belly.
“Gah!” he shouted.
Opal said, “I can’t hardly feed him enough. You should see him at mealtimes. He eats more than I do! Yesterday he had five strips of bacon!”
“Oh, my God!” Ruth said. Bacon! She couldn’t stop staring at the kid. He didn’t look like any baby she had ever seen. He looked like a fat bald man, shrunken down to two feet high.
“He’s got a great big appetite, that’s why. Don’t you? Don’t you, you great big boy?” Gloria picked up Eddie with a grunt and covered his cheek with kisses. “Don’t you, chubby cheeks? You have a great big healthy appetite. Because you’re our little lumberjack, aren’t you? You’re our little football player, aren’t you? You’re the biggest little boy in the whole world.”
The baby squealed and kicked Gloria heftily. Opal reached out. “I’ll take him, Gloria. He’s got a ca-ca diaper.” She took Eddie and said, “I’ll go upstairs and clean him up. I’ll see you all later. See you later, Ruth.”
“See you later, Opal,” Ruth said.
“Bye-bye, big boy!” Kitty called, and waved bye-bye at Eddie.
“Bye-bye, you great big handsome boy!” Gloria called.
The Pommeroy sisters watched Opal head up the stairs, and they grinned and waved at Eddie until they lost sight of him. Then they heard Opal’s footsteps in the bedroom above and all stopped grinning at the same moment.
Gloria brushed off her hands, turned to her sisters, and said, sternly, “That baby’s too big.”
“She feeds him too much,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, frowning.
“Not good for his heart,” Kitty pronounced.
The women returned to their painting.
Kitty immediately started talking again about her husband, Len Thomas.
“Oh, yeah, he hits me, sure,” she said to Ruth. “But I’ll tell you something. He can’t give anything to me any worse than I can give anything back to him.”
“What?” Ruth said. “What’s she trying to say, Gloria?”
“Kitty’s trying to say Len can’t hit her any harder than she can hit him.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Pommeroy said with pride. “Kitty has a real good swing on her.”
“That’s right,” Kitty said. “I’ll put his head right through the fucking door if I feel like it.”
“And he’ll do the same to you, Kitty,” Ruth said. “Nice arrangement.”
“Nice marriage,” Gloria said.
“That’s right,” Kitty said, satisfied. “It is a nice marriage. Not like you’d know anything about that, Gloria. And nobody’s ki
“We’ll see,” Gloria said, real low.
Mrs. Pommeroy had been a romp as a young girl, but she’d quit drinking when Mr. Pommeroy drowned. Gloria had never been a romp. Kitty had been a romp as a young girl, too, but she’d kept at it. She was a lifetime boozer, a grunt, a dozzler. Kitty Pommeroy was the example of what Mrs. Pommeroy might have become if she had stayed on the bottle. Kitty had lived off-island for a while, back when she was younger. She’d worked in a herring-canning factory for years and years and saved up all her money to buy a fast convertible. And she’d had sex with dozens of men—or so Gloria reported. Kitty had had abortions, Gloria said, which was why Kitty couldn’t have babies now. After the explosion in the canning factory, Kitty Pommeroy returned to Fort Niles. She took up with Len Thomas, another prime drunk, and the two of them had been beating each other up ever since. Ruth couldn’t stand her Uncle Len.
“I have an idea, Kitty,” Ruth said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Why don’t you kill Uncle Len in his sleep some night?”
Gloria laughed, and Ruth continued, “Why don’t you club him to death, Kitty? I mean, before he does it to you. Get a jump on him.”
“Ruth!” Mrs. Pommeroy exclaimed, but she was also laughing.
“Why not, Kitty? Why not bludgeon him?”
“Shut up, Ruth. You don’t know anything.”
Kitty was sitting on the chair Ruth had brought in, lighting a cigarette, and Ruth went over and sat on her lap.
“Get off my goddamn lap, Ruth. You got a bony ass, just like your old man.”
“How do you know my old man has a bony ass?”
“Because I fucked him, stupid,” Kitty said.
Ruth laughed as if this was a big joke, but she had a chilling sense that it may have been true. She laughed to cover her discomfort, and she jumped off Kitty’s lap.
“Ruth Thomas,” Kitty said, “you don’t know a thing about this island anymore. You don’t live here anymore, so you have no right to say anything. You aren’t even from here.”