Osprey Island

Eighteen

WWCD?

One July day in 1957, when Great Island should have been a scene of activity with young birds at the flying stage, I scanned the marsh through my telescope. I saw the usual number of adults about—but where were the young? The nesting season obviously had been a failure. The next year confirmed my suspicions. Although young ospreys ordinarily pip the shell in about 5 weeks, many adults sat on unhatched eggs for 60 to 70 days. Other eggs mysteriously disappeared. One bird brought a rubber ball to the nest and faithfully sat on it for six weeks!

—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

WHEN EDEN RETURNED HOME after dropping Peg back at the Lodge, she went straight down to the henhouse. The lamp was on at Roddy’s place and Suzy’s truck was gone. Eden went first to Lorraine’s coop to check on her. They weren’t far from her hatching date now, and Lorraine was viciously defensive about her clutch. Only when Lorraine was off the nest could Eden get in there to make sure she had enough nesting material, stick in a few sprigs of wormwood to deter insects and pests. Eden poked her head into the coop for one, and before her eyes could even adjust, Lorraine was letting out a terrible crrrrrrawk crrrrrrrrrrrawk, loud and screeching. As far back as she and Eden went, if anyone tried to mess with those eggs, Lorraine’d peck their hands into bloody stumps before she’d let them have at her unhatched babies.

In the main coop old Margery lumbered off her roost the minute Eden entered and wobbled over to say hello. She was like a dog. Eden sank down into an old half-broken chair she’d set by the door, and lifted Margery up onto her lap. Eden stroked the hen’s feathers.

Once upon a time Eden had tried to teach Lorna how to care for the chickens, and the girl had been happy enough to cuddle the feather-puff babies but hadn’t really taken to it beyond that. Seemed you couldn’t teach a woman to mother any more than you could make a hen go broody. Lorna’d been willing enough to go walking with Eden, to help out with the osprey nesting platforms. The thing Lorna lacked, Eden thought, was initiative. Then she thought about why it was that people were always trying to figure out what it was that Lorna was lacking. Maybe they felt if they could isolate what made Lorna who she was they could more easily assure themselves that they weren’t like her, couldn’t be like her, that they were immune. It was that easy. There. Done. Eden—a veritable Napoleon of initiative— could look at Lorna and say, There, that’s it, that’s what she’s missing. That’s what she’s missing and that’s what I’ve got in spades! Therefore I am different from Lorna. Therefore I am safe.

It was all so flawed. So inherently and fundamentally and selfservingly flawed. And it helped them all through another day of their problems and kids and strife and grief. It was hard to imagine what the Islanders were going to do without Lorna. Who was going to step in to come up short in every comparison and make them all feel relatively better about their own pathetic lives? It was Osprey’s system of moral certitude. Sure, you could ask, What Would Jesus Do? But that was often a tough question to answer, because Jesus’ life, well, it was pretty different from their own. But at any time you could ask yourself, What Would Lorna Do? and it was pretty much certain that if you could manage to accomplish the exact opposite of whatever that was, you’d probably be just fine.

Now, What Would Chickens Do? That was a question that got you somewhere. Because what they’d do was actually about what you did. If you did what you were supposed to, the chickens followed in turn. You took care of them, gave them everything they needed: food, shelter, vitamins, place to run around, games to play—a head of lettuce in a netted bag on a string, say: tether-lettuce! They loved it!—mates to mate with, a job to do, eggs to lay, babies to raise . . . The occasional egg-eater notwithstanding, if you treated a chicken right, it treated you right in return. And to Eden’s way of thinking about things, that was exactly as it should be, and there was no reason for such a philosophy to stop with chickens. It hurt Eden’s heart to think of the havoc people wreaked through their own offhandedness, their own laxity, their own systems of ignorance and denial and fear. There were ways to live in the world that kept the world spinning! Why couldn’t people see that? And if they saw it—and this was Eden’s greatest heartsickness—if they saw it, why couldn’t they live it? Why wasn’t it cut and dried? If something was wrong with the chickens, you went in and figured out what was causing the trouble—Why were they eating their eggs? Why were they plucking out their vent feathers?—and you corrected the problem! Why—and this was maybe all that Eden had ever really wanted to know—why couldn’t we be more like the birds?

“Ma?” Roddy was calling from outside the coop. Margery hopped off Eden’s lap and flapped back to her roost. Eden pushed herself up from the chair and went outside.

Roddy looked anxious, in a sad way—a way that made Eden want to take her son in her arms—but when he spoke, his voice was flattened out. He kept his eyes down. “They’re leaving,” he said, “Suzy and Mia. She’s going back to New York.”

Eden waited, silent. Roddy was packing the ground with the heel of his boot. He said, “Everything I hear makes me more scared for Squee, about what Lance’s going to do.” He looked up at his mother. “Suzy said I should ask you about something, and I’m afraid you’re not going to give me a straight answer, and I need you to give me a straight answer on this. Suzy said you could probably tell me better than she could what happened to her . . . in high school? Out back here . . . down the ravine? With Lance?” Roddy paused to let his mother answer, but he was preparing the further assault of his interrogation. He wasn’t going to let her squirm away.

“She told you that?” Eden was saying, nodding her head in consideration as she spoke, as though this information meant something particular to her. “Suzy told you that,” she said again, not a question but confirmation of the facts as they stood.

Roddy nodded. “She said you’d tell me.” He looked at the ground. “She’s afraid of him, Ma.”

“Well, Christ!” Eden swore. “You’re talking about something that happened twenty years ago, and suddenly she’s so terribly afraid!” Then something struck her. This “fear” they were talking about, this fear Suzy was calling her reason to flee—who knew what was really driving that girl? Suzy could well be leaving to get away from Roddy for all Eden knew, and that thought roused in her a sudden and vicious anger toward Suzy—for being a coward and a conniver, and mostly for not loving Eden’s son the way he deserved to be loved. “I’ll tell you,” she said to Roddy, “I’ll tell you, but I don’t know it’ll shed any light on anything at all.”

They sat across from each other at the picnic table, mother and son, and she talked. It had been some sort of a party, maybe, Eden dimly recalled. There’d been people over, friends, kids from the school. Suzy had come with Chas, but he’d been unable to find her when he was ready to drive home and figured she’d left earlier, walked home. He took off alone. It was Eden who found her, just past midnight, soon after Chas had gone. She was behind the old woodshed, holding her knees to her chest, crying.

“I got it out of her, what had happened, to some degree. Enough to understand it hadn’t been something she’d particularly wanted to do . . .”

“So he did rape her?” Roddy asked cautiously.

Eden sighed. “Sure what I’d’ve called it. Then and now. Now maybe people’d agree with me. Then? Then she was more a girl who got herself in a bad situation. Nineteen sixty-eight, on this island? They’d for certain blame that one on her.”

“She got pregnant?” he asked skeptically. “You said Lance was . . . that he couldn’t, you know . . . so she didn’t get pregnant, right?”

Eden shook her head sadly. “But I didn’t know that—about Lance— for a good ’nother year later from Lorna.” She spoke hesitantly, measuring the words, still trying not to let go of more than she absolutely had to.

“What?” Roddy’s thoughts lurched to words and then broke uncertainly. “What, did every pregnant girl on this island get routed through you? I don’t . . .”

“I don’t think Suzy was ever pregnant then. Though we took precautions just in case—”

“Wait,” Roddy commanded. The even-tempered keel of her voice angered him, made him feel accused, irrational. He was struggling to understand, and every word out of his mother’s mouth confused him further. “Wait,” he said again, “that’s not the point. What do you mean, precautions ? How’d they wind up with you?” All the words were wrong, his thoughts too incomplete for articulation. He was fighting himself.

Eden watched him, her eyes steady. She took a breath. She said, “Things are different now from how they used to be.”

Roddy waited, his leg jackhammering beneath the table.

“We’re talking about nineteen sixty-eight, ’sixty-nine. We’re talking about a very different world here, OK? And then with the chances a girl had to take—” She broke off.

“What? You doing abortions out back to every knocked-up girl on—?”

“No,” Eden snapped. “Not like that. Not like you mean.” She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts, focusing her argument. “There are herbal methods of—”

“Oh Christ, Ma—”

“Wait!” Eden snapped. “You just listen now. Listen to what I’m telling you.”

Roddy closed his eyes and bowed his head. He clasped his hands together between his knees.

Eden began again, slowly. “There are certain herbs that have been used for centuries for certain curative effects.” Her voice was controlled and cautionary. “Certain herbs that have certain effects on different systems in the body. There are particular herbs with beneficial effects on the female reproductive organs. So much we take in in this world is poison to us. Certain herbs help the body to expel and rejuvenate.”

Roddy listened.

“Certain herbs—pennyroyal, for instance, black cohosh—these certain herbs—herbs I take regularly, mind you—they help a woman my age with the troubles of being a woman my age. Many other uses at other times of life, different preparations and doses.

“Now, some of these have been used to stimulate an abortion— stimulate the body to abort. And wait, now, before you say anything: listen to me. These can be dangerous, dangerous things unless you know what you’re doing. And these are procedures that you’ve got to do early on—I’m talking about the first day a girl’s late on her period—once you’re six days late it’s too dangerous. OK? You see what I’m talking about? You see how careful you have to be?”

Roddy nodded dully. It made sense. Someone on-island had to have been helping those girls; it figured it’d be Eden.

“But back then,” Eden was saying, “an herbal abortion was the safest way there was. It might still be.” She should have been a politician: such conviction. Except that her conviction was never about anything that anyone else on Osprey supported.

“You said Suzy wasn’t pregnant,” Roddy said, his tone more accusatory than he intended. “I thought she wasn’t—because of Lance . . .”

Now it was Eden’s impatience that showed. “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if we all toiled with the power of hindsight! What I knew then was that Suzy Chizek was sixteen years old and might have been on a nine-month course from virginity to motherhood because of a boy who had about as much right to be a father then as he does now!

“She was lucky. Suzy. What I could get from her then, she knew at least that she was due on her period soon, and that, that was just lucky. God, she was scared. And I tried explaining what it was I knew we could do. I don’t honestly remember what I gave her. There’s lots of things to take into account—a person’s health, everything. Honestly. I don’t remember. But we did it. Started her on infusions— nothing easy for a high school girl to manage, but she did it, went through with the herbs, and a few days later she was bleeding normal, and that was that.” Eden stopped.

“And that was that? No wonder you’re such a friggin’ outcast on this island! Did Dad know? Did everybody know? What, so when Lorna got pregnant you did the same thing then too?”

“No!” Eden snapped. “No. And don’t you dare blow this into something it was not. I helped people who needed help at a time when their government would have rather seen those girls die than let them—”

“Please, not the protest rally—”

“I helped individuals in individual circumstances that they needed help getting out of.”

“Yeah? So why’d Lorna need out of her situation?”

“I did not help Lorna then. Not like that,” Eden said, and there were years of bitterness in her voice. “I did not help Lorna. And she turned around and she threw it in my face. It was after Lorna I stopped everything. Nineteen sixty-nine. After that, the girls who came, I gave them the name of someone off-island.”

“Why wouldn’t you help her? Why was it any different? You’d help Suzy but not Lorna—how’s that fair?”

“How it’s fair,” Eden shrilled, “is that Suzy was a sixteen-year-old virgin who got raped out back of my house. And Lorna was a calculating young woman who got herself knocked up on purpose so she could marry Lance Squire and get the hell out of Art and Penny’s house. And then once she’d gotten what she wanted she decided she didn’t want it. Because it wasn’t Lance’s baby. And she got mad at him for something, and told him that. Just to hurt him, I’m sure. Told him that she’d been trying to get herself pregnant by him as long as they’d been having sex and it just plain didn’t work, and she had to see was it him or her or what? So she did what she had to do. And she’s saying to him, hadn’t she gotten it so they could get married? And didn’t they have a good deal there now at the Lodge, with a place to live and a job that took no work and how she’d done it all for him and he wasn’t even grateful, and she didn’t want a baby, she just wanted him, and to marry him and to be with him, and she’d done everything it took to make that so, and look how he showed his gratitude . . .”

“Whose baby was it, then?” Roddy asked.

Eden stopped and just stared at him as if she couldn’t rationally comprehend what he was asking. Was he a moron? Had he not heard a damn word she’d said? The look on her face was of utter disbelief. “Bud,” she said. “Bud.”

Roddy’s face bulged like he was going to vomit into his hands. “Bud got Lorna pregnant?” He spoke as if to lay those words out in plain sight and see if they evaporated like figments or had the weight to sit and submit to scrutiny.

“I’d say she got herself pregnant, by Bud,” Eden countered. “I’d say Lorna Vaughn got that man through the worst spring of his goddamn life. Chas was dead, killed over there . . .” She paused, as if mere mention of that war rendered her exhausted beyond speech. “That news,” she said, “it came pretty damn close to killing Bud and Nancy themselves. On Nancy you could see it—I mean, she very near lost her mind. But with Bud it was all on the inside. And maybe that’s no excuse—I’d never heard him do anything like it before and I’ve never heard about anything since . . .”

“Did he . . . ?” Roddy cut in, then stopped, sat on his hands and shook his head to stop himself from speaking.

“The thing is,” Eden said, as though in reply to the question he hadn’t asked, “it was Lorna who went to him. I’m not excusing. She was seventeen; he was a grown man. I’m just saying. Here’s a man whose son is dead. Again, I’m not excusing, but to lose a child . . .”

And Roddy knew that for Eden such a loss did not excuse, but it did perhaps explain something.

“Here was a man out of his mind with grief. Not right, not seeing the world through right eyes. And here was this beautiful girl. You remember how Lorna was then? Just a sprite, you know, a little spirit. Oh she was so pretty.”

Roddy nodded silently. He watched Eden’s eyes well up for the first time since the fire. And he watched as she swallowed, ordered the tears back down their ducts. “She just showed up one day—and I know this from after. She only told me later, years—I didn’t know at the time. It was only after when she came to me. Otherwise maybe I’d have been able to stop—oh, I don’t know. Anything’s easy to say now, I guess . . .

“She went to him.” Eden picked up her pace. “Showed up one day that spring after Chas died, this girl Bud’d known since she was in diapers showing up one day asking, Mister Chizek, could I have a ride out to Scallopshell Beach? I’m sure it’s where I lost my necklace in the parking lot last night . . . or some such thing . . .”

Roddy breathed in audibly. He squinted, as though in pain.

“I’m sure Bud knew the whole time it wasn’t right. But he’d been angling toward something. Something bad and wrong. Like he could get back at the universe that killed his son. Something like that, you know?

“Lorna’s a smart girl. You look at what she did. She had a plan how she was going to get out of her folks’ house, and if it was going to take her being pregnant to do it . . . And she’d been trying with Lance—not that Lance knew . . .” Eden scowled. “Not that the idiot took any protection against knocking her up! Look what she did: she didn’t go to some high school boy—someone who wouldn’t be able to keep his trap shut about it. No: she found someone who couldn’t tell. Bud was married, had children—OK, a child, then—he was grieving. She got him at his weakest.”

“That sounds a hell of a lot like an excuse to me,” Roddy said, and his voice was not without disdain.

“I’m not saying he was innocent,” Eden said quickly, “just that she was smart. I’m saying she knew what she was doing. Bud had money . . . But when it turned into Bud, I’m pregnant, it wasn’t money for an abortion she wanted—which is what he thought, of course—it was just his word that he’d never try to make a claim on that baby.”

“But that was . . . that wasn’t Squee . . .”

“Way before,” Eden said. “It must have been spring of her junior year. She knew she was pregnant early as a girl can know. She’d been waiting on it for months. And don’t think Penny Vaughn didn’t have her daughter into Doc Zobeck for a test the first morning she heard that girl retching in the toilet. They had her married off to Lance Squire before she was eight, ten weeks gone. It was a few weeks more before she came to me asking could she have some of the special tea— but it was too late for that. I wouldn’t do it past three weeks. Well, now. Back then I did. Six weeks at the latest, even then. Never any guarantee it’s going to work, and if it doesn’t you pretty much don’t have a choice but for a surgical abortion, what with how likely it is you’ll have birth defects from trying to do it with the herbs. It was after the wedding that Lorna came to me. She needed the pregnancy to get herself that far. She came to me when she didn’t want to go any farther.”

“And you said no . . .” Roddy prompted.

She was nodding. “And I said no. And we talked about it,” Eden spoke bitterly; she still castigated herself over the events that had followed. “And then Lorna—and I do blame myself for this, I do, because I had it there, in the house, I shouldn’t have, I was too easy about it . . . Lorna let herself in one day when your father and I were out, helped herself to what she needed, and did it on her own. That was the last. I got rid of everything. That was it.”

“So she did it herself?”

“Except it didn’t work,” Eden said. “And god knows what she’d done, how much she took of what . . . But the risks of birth defects— it’s not even risks, it’s guarantees. I’d told her all that. Before, I mean. And then she came to me hysterical. Confessed what she’d done. Begging me for help: What do I do? What can I do?” Eden paused. She stared down at her hands on the picnic table. “And I did feel responsible. I was angrier than I think I’d ever been at a living person in my life—I swear to you I could have strangled her, I could have—but it felt like my fault, or responsibility, at least. I got her to a doctor on the mainland. Someone to do it surgically.” She paused again. “We didn’t speak for years, me and Lorna. Embarrassment. Anger. We didn’t speak until she got herself pregnant again—with Squee—and she came asking for my help. She said she knew I knew what was right, and all she wanted was to do right by this baby. This miracle baby that she swore up and down was Lance’s, which I believed for all of five minutes. About as long as Lance believed it, I’d guess. But she wanted to do things right, take care of that baby. And that’s when Lorna and I got close, then, when she was carrying Squee. Until he was a year or so and she was back to drinking, and everything else, and avoiding me like the plague since I was the only one who’d say right out, Lorna, what the hell are you doing to yourself?”

Roddy sat at the picnic table a long time, even after his mother had gone up to the house to finally start dinner. He held his head in his hands as if everything inside might come cracking out if he let it go. This was everything he’d tried to steer his life away from. In high school geometry they taught about how parallel lines never intersected, and he’d tried to run his life on that principle: everything on its own separate track. But Osprey Island had too many tracks and not enough acreage to spare each its private orbit.