Snow Island

First Chapter

In the winter, the men could be seen 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. Once her father had taken her with him. She had held his hand tightly as they slipped over the ice. When he had pulled up the clams, she had grasped the end of the tongs with him, feeling his strength. The quahogs live all winter under the ice, he had 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 from the end of the ferry dock. She had woken early even though it was a Saturday, longing to be outdoors after the days of rain. Dangling her feet over the water, she watched as the sun inched into the sky. She was wearing only a sweater over her skirt and blouse for the first time that spring. Her bare legs felt deliciously naked in the warm air.

When the sun cut a path across the water, Alice got to her feet and made her way down the dock. Owen Pierce was waiting on the porch of the store with an unlit pipe in his mouth. She climbed the steps and unlocked the padlock over the door.

"You know quahogs can live longer than people," Owen Pierce said. "That's what the Indians said. Claimed quahogs could live more than a hundred years."

Alice pushed open the door and smiled. Owen Pierce was famous on the island for beginning conversations with this observation. He shuffled into the store after Alice and followed her to the counter.

A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. Alice reached for the string attached to the bulb and turned it on. Molly the cat let out a loud mew, emerging from the shelf where she slept in the back, pressed against cans of cleanser. She rubbed her head against Alice's bare leg as she bent down to pet her. "Breakfast's coming," she said. Molly cocked her head as though she understood and leapt up next to the cash register.

Owen rested both hands on the counter and breathed heavily. "I'm 'bout out of tobacco."

Alice reached into the case beneath the cash register and removed a pouch of tobacco. Molly followed her movements, ears erect.

"Mark that down now," Owen said as he slipped the pouch in his shirt pocket.

Alice opened the ledger and wrote the price in a long line of figures below Owen's name, though she knew he would never pay for it. He leaned over the counter and squinted at the ledger. "I'll be good for it come summer."

Alice nodded.

"We're getting a fair price for quahogs now, and it's bound to go up when the summer people come. I'll be heading out soon, I expect."

Alice shut the ledger and rubbed the top of Molly's head. At eighty-two, Owen was the oldest person on Snow. He kept up the fantasy, in his own mind that he still went out quahogging, though he had given it up in his seventies when his hands curled up with arthritis. In those awkward moments when it was clear even to Owen that he was not out on a quahog skiff, he would offer a quick excuse. "Can't work as long a day as I used to, you know."

Alice watched as he walked haltingly toward the chair by the stove. She thought of her father, who had always stopped to talk with Owen when they met on the road or down by his dock. Once her father told her that Owen Pierce knew more than anyone else on the island. "I didn't say he was smarter, mind you, but he knows more."

Owen filled his pipe and lit it. He leaned back in the chair and puffed for a few moments, his legs stretched in front of him and feet crossed. "Rain finally stopped. Ground ain't gonna dry out for planting for I don't know how long. 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."

He kept the pipe gripped between his brown teeth as he spoke, so the words were muffled. Alice knew most of his stories by heart anyway. She went to the stove and tossed in some bits of driftwood and wadded newspaper. There was enough coal left that it might catch. She lit a match and held it to the paper. It caught slowly, the edges curling. The cat mewed. "Alright," Alice said.

"We don't get winters like that anymore," Owen went on. "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."

Alice knelt by the stove, watching to make sure the fire caught. "The bay froze the year my father died."

"What's that?"

"The winter my father died. The bay froze that year."

Owen 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."

Life had gotten soft, he said, what with having electricity since they laid the cables from the mainland after the hurricane, and deliveries of milk and meat, and even vegetables out of season. They didn't used to have things like that on the island. Any milk they had came from their own cows and meat from their own chickens, and that wasn't often. You didn't just have a chicken every Sunday when he was growing up. He shook his head and rose from the chair. "I better be getting to work then," he said.

Owen patted Alice on the shoulder and slowly crossed to the door. "Much obliged," he said.

She listened as he walked across the porch and settled on the bench. After a moment, the heavy scent of his pipe smoke came wafting through the screen.

Alice's mother and her brother, Will, arrived minutes later.

"Hot in here," Evelyn Daggett said as she took off her straw hat and set it on the counter.

"I thought you'd want breakfast," Alice said.

"Will, what do you have in that basket?" Evelyn asked.

Will peered beneath the bit of cloth that covered the basket hanging from his arm. "Three eggs."

"Three eggs. That's your breakfast. Those two hens still aren't laying."

"There's some bread left," Alice said.

Alice went to the back room and returned with a frying pan. She spooned a bit of grease from a can beneath the counter and cracked the eggs into the pan.

"Fried?" Will whined. "I hate fried."

"There's not enough eggs for scrambled," Evelyn said.

The eggs sizzled in the pan, gradually crisping around the edges. Alice took three plates from the shelf under the counter, slid a cooked egg onto each one, and added a slice of bread. Before sitting down to eat with the others, she cut a couple of pieces from the white of her egg and set them in a bowl for Molly, who dove off the counter and followed Alice to her shelf in the back.

"Why's that foghorn still howling?" Evelyn said.

"I don't know." Alice pulled a stool up to the counter and reached for a fork.

"That Ethan Cunningham, staying up half the night and then not even bothering to shut off the horn. He's a poor excuse for a lighthouse keeper. His poor mother. I know she's got no choice now that Phil's gone, but I think that Ethan worries her sick, up there with his paintings all night long. He needs to get married."

Alice shot her mother an amused glance. "You think getting married will solve everyone's problems."

"It's a place to start. Will, stop playing with your food."

"I want cereal."

"You can't have cereal."

"Why not?" Will eyed the boxes of cereal on a shelf down the first aisle.

"Because we can't afford to eat any more of the stock. We don't hardly have enough money to order anything for the summer people."

"But that cereal's been here all winter."

"The boxes ain't been opened. There's nothing wrong with them."

"Except the ones the mice been nibbling on."

"Will Daggett, when was the last time you saw a mouse in here?"

"Yesterday."

Evelyn rolled her eyes at Alice. "I don't know what he's talking about."

Will shrugged. "I'm done."

"No, you're not. Finish that egg." Evelyn pointed to the yolk in the middle of his plate.

Will took his fork and smeared the yolk around.

"Will," Evelyn said in a warning tone. "Eat it, don't play with it." She pushed her plate away and lit a cigarette. "I still say one of those Cunningham girls should have come home to live with their mother. I don't know if that Ethan is even fit to be taking care of her. The way he neglects the lighthouse, you can only guess what he does with her. You know she can't get in and out of bed by herself."

"I know," Alice said, only half-listening. The story of Mrs. Cunningham's troubles was one her mother particularly relished since Mr. Cunningham had dropped dead of a heart attack back in January. Mrs. Cunningham, who had suffered from polio years earlier, could only walk with the help of leg braces and crutches. Ethan had come back from the mainland to take his father's place as the lighthouse keeper and to care for his mother.

After the 1938 hurricane the Coast Guard replaced the kerosene lamp with an electric one that simply needed to be turned on at night and off in the morning. The old keepers had slept fitfully or not at all, watching the kerosene flame to make sure it stayed lit. Now Ethan rolled out of bed whenever he pleased and flicked a switch. Sometimes he left the lighthouse lit and the foghorn braying until eight or nine o'clock in the morning, long after the fishermen had headed out. It was nothing short of a scandal on Snow.

"I bet he leaves her lying there for hours, just waiting for him to come get her up and fix breakfast," Evelyn went on smugly. "Not that Mrs. Cunningham would ever let on. She's too good for that. Never wants to say anything bad about anybody, especially that genius son of hers. But I can tell it's not all light and roses in that house these days. She came from money, just like Phoebe Shattuck. Spent it all on Ethan's education and look where it got her. Poor woman. Phil Cunningham was only fifty-eight, you know."

"I know," Alice repeated.

"You got anything to give Mr. Pierce?"

"Bread and butter."

"You better call him in."

"I already gave him some tobacco."

"Well, we can't let him starve."

Alice collected the dishes and took them to the sink in the back room. Then she went to the door. Owen sat gazing off at the water and puffing on his pipe.

"Would you like some breakfast?" Alice called.

He turned his head slowly, as though he had never dreamed of receiving such an invitation. "That would be fine. A little something before I head out for the day. That is, if you can spare it."

Alice held the door open while he shuffled over the threshold.

Five boxes of safety matches, two balls of string, three boxes of clothespins. Alice marked them down on a pad of paper and went on to the next shelf, taking inventory. They needed more stock than she had figured to get the store ready for the arrival of the summer people. She would have to convince some of the suppliers to give her credit. It was like this every year. By spring, there was almost no money left in the strongbox up at the house.

In the first years when they owned the store, Evelyn had ignored Alice when she went through the books and made changes in the order forms. Then one day she threw the ledger book across the counter and said, "Alright, you do it. You run the store."

If anyone had asked, Alice might have pointed out that her mother was not an ideal candidate to be the storekeeper. A delegation of islanders arrived at the house a week after her father's death, led by Ernie Brovelli, the island's policeman and game warden. They had it all figured out. Walter Johnson wanted to sell the store. Evelyn could use the money from the sale of her husband's boat as a down payment, and Walter would throw in the old Model T truck and the store's stock. Evelyn agreed in a whisper. She did not have the strength to refuse, and where was she going to go, what was she going to do, with two children to feed?

Alice was eleven when her father died, but she understood the situation only too well. Either they made a success with the store, or they starved. Her mother sat behind the counter in a stupor, gazing at the islanders who came through the door as though she had never met them and couldn't imagine what they wanted with her now. She left the mail sitting in the sack for hours without sorting it, unwilling to believe this was her job, too. Alice took to running as fast as she could from the schoolhouse in the afternoon, so she could sort the mail and put it in the wooden boxes lining the wall behind the counter before the islanders came looking for their letters. The hours at the schoolhouse dragged by while she stared out the window, wondering if her mother was giving the fishermen too much in exchange for their bartered catches or extending credit when she shouldn't. She could not get over to the store fast enough.

Alice was sixteen now, and she had been managing the store's accounts since she was twelve. The islanders came to her with special requests or to settle their bills. When she went down the aisle, counting the cans of baked beans, she felt she had a personal stake in every last item in the store. Through the screen, she could hear her mother out on the porch, talking to Owen Pierce. Their voices rose and fell aimlessly. She had almost finished with the inventory when the door swung open, and Nate Shattuck crossed the floor, whistling.

"Hey sweetheart," he called. "Think you could get me some groceries?"

Alice took the list he handed her, which had been written out by his wife, Phoebe. She knew that Phoebe was ashamed to come down to the store herself because they had paid nothing on their bill for so long. Alice had sworn earlier that week that she was cutting off their credit. Now, glancing at the meager list, she couldn't bring herself to do it. Nate Shattuck might be shiftless, as everyone said, but he had three children to feed.

Alice measured out five pounds of flour and took a bottle of milk from the cooler. She brought a bag of rice and a jar of molasses from the shelf. Nate watched her, whistling all the while.

"Nice day, huh?" he said. "I thought that rain would never end."

Alice nodded and set the groceries in a box on the counter.

"Guess you're looking forward to the summer people coming. Me, too. I've got a lot of work lined up." Nate gestured toward the parking lot beyond the porch, where the summer people left their cars for the winter. "Ain't none of those cars going to start."

Nate grinned as he slid the box from the counter. He could already hear all those engines turning over, dead. "You're a doll," he said. "Thanks, Alice."

Alice watched him go with a sense of misgiving. Like everyone else on the island, she couldn't say no to Nate Shattuck.

The store filled up with people after that, in the fifteen minutes before the ferry was due to arrive. Miss Weeden, the schoolteacher, came in for her throat drops, and Rose Brovelli, Ernie's wife, bought penny candy for her grandsons.

When the ferry's horn sounded, Alice followed all the customers out the door. Tony Mendoza, the captain, was just nosing the ferry alongside the dock. Evelyn had joined the islanders gathered at the foot of the dock. Ernie Brovelli was talking with Nate Shattuck. The only people who were absent were the quahoggers.

Alice paused at the end of the porch, where Owen Pierce stood leaning against the railing. "George Tibbits," he said, gazing at the deck of the boat.

For the people of Snow Island, spring did not begin when the last chunks of ice disappeared from the shore or the first summer people arrived to open their houses. The start of the season was marked by the morning George Tibbits stepped from the ferry, blinking at the light. He came to Snow each year on a warm day when you could smell the water after the locked-in months of winter, when the air was thick with the clotted scent of mud and salt and dried seaweed.

This year George Tibbits was late. It was well into May, past the days that ordinarily mark the start of spring. Owen Pierce and Ernie Brovelli had been speculating for weeks now about when Tibbits would show up, though they were not especially surprised he had not appeared. The winter of 1941 had been a hard one. The temperature fell below twenty degrees and stayed there for most of January, and patches of snow clung to the rocks in the woods until April.

Owen was right. The stooped figure standing at the railing in a brown suit was George Tibbits. Alice should have known this was the day George Tibbits would come, but she had not thought of it once.

Captain Tony set the gangplank in place. George Tibbits reached for the small leather suitcase at his feet, gave a quick nod of his head to no one in particular, and made his way down the plank. The people assembled by the dock parted to let him through. He did not look to the right or left. With his head bowed, he took the path past the store and up the hill to the road.

"I knew he'd come today. That man's a walking barometer," Owen said, watching with everyone else as George reached the road, shifted his suitcase from one hand to the other, and started for the far side of the island.