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Cadence

1942

T he morning the soldiers came to the farm, Bess and I stood out in front of the cottage, snipping flowers for Gram’s farm stand, lilies and foxglove that grew along the low white picket fence, the bees still buzzing in some. I tried to brush off the sting of the reality that I wouldn’t be meeting Winnie’s publishing friends anytime soon. After Mr. Wespi kept Bess and me under house arrest the day before and watched us reclean his ice cream machine, we rode our bikes home and staggered into the cottage, our aprons streaked with chocolate. The Wesp had withheld my one phone call, claiming Edgartown was a toll call, and by the time I used the drugstore’s phone to reach the yacht club, Winnie and the Putnam ladies were long gone. I’d missed the possibility of a high-paying New York job in exchange for a paycheck of three dollars and sixty-three cents.

I breathed a lungful of sea air and took in the hazy view, the morning fog still burning off the slope, baring one shoulder of the beach beyond. How lucky we were to live in that heavenly spot, Copper Pond shimmering down below, our young turnips planted along the lower field. Not a terrible place to be while I awaited my life in New York. But what would my parents have said about the rusting tractor and the blue paint peeling off the cottage’s front door? Though it was August, we’d even gotten used to the coal buckets of rock salt left on either side of the front door, complete with metal scoops, which we used to melt ice and snow on the front walk. Chances were, they’d probably stay there until next winter. All I needed were more hours in the day and a steady income to get that place back in shape.

Gram was inside, cleaning up after breakfast, during which she’d performed one of her bizarre soothsaying rituals, predicting our futures “in the cup.” It was too hot to drink warm tea, but Gram brewed loose oolong, poured some into one of her mismatched flowered teacups, and drained the water back into the pot.

Gram was either a gifted clairvoyant or just committed to the role. She held the cup high and circled it around her head three times, then peered into the bottom of it and announced her prophecies. As embarrassing as the ritual was, Gram had foretold some important events. My parents’ fatal auto accident. And Briar’s broken rib from falling out of her tree. Briar claimed Gram was 85 percent correct in her predictions. But, like all of Briar’s assertions, they were only loosely factual.

“Will the Gazette like my latest column?” I’d asked Gram. My weekly column was due later that morning.

“They love every column,” Bess said. “Ask a better question.”

I crossed my fingers. “Will I ever move to New York City?”

Gram avoided my gaze. “Ask another time.”

Why does she always deflect that question? “You can be very annoying, Gram.”

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” she replied with a smile, her pat answer to anything.

Gram stepped out into the sunshine on the grassy bluff at the side of the house and hung her wash on the line, her stockings sagging over ankles thick as soup cans. She wore her black oxford church shoes everywhere, whether she was weeding potato plants or taking in wash for islanders who couldn’t fend for themselves. As good friends often do, Gram had come to look like her church friends and was often indistinguishable in that hardy flock of New England women her age, with their topknotted gray hair and ample bosoms, which had long ago succumbed to the effects of gravity.

A breeze puffed the skirt of Gram’s good dress, a faded flowered cotton she washed every day, her work apron tied at the waist. I’d saved almost three dollars toward the blue shirtwaist she’d admired in the window of Lillian’s dress shop on Main Street. One more thing I can help with once I get a publishing job in Manhattan. I’ll buy Gram a whole closet of dresses.

Gram took down some dry sheets and then pinned Briar’s brown corduroy pants to the line—my sister’s favorites, even in ninety-degree weather. Tom had tried to get Briar to wear one of my skirts once, but she wouldn’t budge. I worried about her ghoulish strategy of watching the newspaper for the obituaries of older people, usually men on the smaller side, whose wardrobes she admired, full of good moth-free cashmere and wools, and then shopping Vineyard Thrift Shop exactly ten days after they passed, when their clothes typically wound up there. It didn’t help her social life to dress like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Gram had just gotten to the chorus in the church hymn she was singing—my favorite one, where the willful young boy drowns in a water-lily pond—when we heard the sound of pounding footsteps along our little dirt road. Bess and I lobbed our flower nippers into the tin bucket.

“My God,” Bess said, pulling off her work gloves. “Men.”

The soldiers came, running in unison, two abreast. We watched them approach, an endless stream, tanned and fit, dressed in Army green shirts and shorts, each with a fully loaded pack on his back. For an island with a winter population of five thousand, it felt like a glorious avalanche of males ready to defend our little island, so vulnerable out there in the sea, nothing but ocean between us and Europe.

Bess linked her arm in mine, releasing her rich-girl scent of Arpege and cold cream. “I think those are the Cape Cod Commandos. Over from Camp Edwards. Tom told me they’ve been training up at Peaked Hill.”

“They must be lost,” I said. “Probably don’t realize this is private land.”

“There goes our nude sunbathing,” Bess said. “Though maybe it’s our duty to the troops to continue.”

I brushed the dust from my overalls and stood taller, hoping for at least a smile from one of the soldiers, but they only snuck a few glances at us.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Bess said. “Any one of them could get you off this island.”

“I suppose.” I searched the boys’ faces and felt more sorrow than anything. Some looked barely out of high school and were training to battle the Germans. Or the Japanese. Half of my graduating class had already gone. One day they were out floundering and checking lobster pots; the next they shipped out. I could barely think of our Tom arriving in Europe soon. At least that was what Gram had seen in the cup.

“They’re the ones with the good-looking commanding officer—Major Gilbert,” Bess said. “Sue Mayhew said she saw him at Larsen’s, and a woman there thought he was so handsome that she got dizzy and had to sit down and apply a cold pack of fish ice.”

Gram came around to the front of the house, blinding-white sheets billowing in her arms, and joined us to watch the men. “Poor boys. Most of them won’t see Christmas.”

The soldiers turned, nimble as a flock of birds, and headed down the hill to the beach.

With growing alarm, I watched the troops head toward the newly planted turnip field.

I called to them, “No, stay up here on the road—you’ll kill the plants!”

A jeep brought up the rear of the procession, the driver wrangling a large map, which flapped around on his lap like a trapped seagull.

I stepped into the road and waved my arms. “You there!”

He braked suddenly, the scent of burning rubber in the air. “Do you always stand in front of oncoming cars?”

“Do you always read maps while you drive?” I asked.

“Get the fish ice,” Bess murmured.

“Kindly move aside, miss,” the driver said. “While it’s still daylight?”

From Bess’s reaction, I assumed this was Major Gilbert, of Larsen’s fame. He wore the light-brown uniform all the Peaked Hill officers did, and he seemed older than me, perhaps twenty-five to my nineteen years. My first impression was that he certainly seemed good-looking enough, perhaps the handsomest man I’d seen in my life, with his wide-set light eyes and nice chin, somewhat lanky and well-built from what I could see with him sitting down. But his smug air ruined the whole thing.

Bess had left out the part about him being British. I approached the driver’s side of the jeep. “You must be lost. This property is private.”

He turned to Gram. “Are you the owner, ma’am?”

Gram nodded. “I am. Virginia Smith. Most call me Ginny. This is my granddaughter Cadence and her friend Bess Stanhope. I have another granddaughter and a grandson, Tom, off in the Army.”

He returned the nod. “Major Gilbert. Peaked Hill. Under different circumstances I’d be fascinated with the intricacies of your family tree. But right now I need beach access.”

The way he drove matched his cocky attitude. While we civilians drove so carefully, under the thirty-five-mile-per-hour “Victory Speed” to preserve rationed gas and precious, old rubber tires, he drove at a breakneck pace.

I shook my head. “So you just run across our land willy-nilly?”

He looked down at me. “Worse luck, I’m afraid. My orders are to seize any property I see as vital for military training. We’ll be here awhile.”

I took a step back. “The whole farm? This is how we earn our living. You can’t do that.”

“As your new neighbors to the north, I regret to inform you that it’s a fait accompli . A done deal, you might say.”

“ I know what a fait accompli is, Major. Who can we call to appeal this? Your men can’t simply kill our new crop.”

He folded his map. “If you write to Washington double-quick, you might hear by the new year.”

Gram draped her sheets over the fence and walked up to the jeep. “We’re happy to do our part for the war, Major, but perhaps your men could use the road to get to the beach? That way they wouldn’t run right across our fields.”

“Sorry to push in, Mrs. Smith, but we need the most direct route.”

I leaned closer to him. “I don’t think you understand. We depend on those crops to survive. And we can barely run this place as it is, with my brother gone. He just shipped out. He’s an Army Ranger. So we rely on that income more than ever.”

“A Ranger? He must be quite a soldier.” He paused for a moment. “I’m sorry he had to ship out, but during wartime, things like this cannot be helped, can they?”

I wiped the sweat from my temple. I loathed that crisp British way of speaking that so often ended with a question, as if anyone else had a say.

Bess stepped to the gate. “Cadence writes a column in the Gazette. Delivering one today, in fact. It would be a shame for your general to read how you drove a local Vineyard family into poverty.”

The major barely looked at Bess. “She can write whatever she likes.” He turned to Gram. “What’s the quickest way down to the beach? The roads here are confounding, I must say. South Road. Middle Road. No rhyme or reason to this place.”

Gram set one hand on my shoulder. “Cadence gives an excellent tour of the island—though most men have a hard time keeping their eyes on the road when she’s the guide.”

“Gram, please.” I willed myself to melt into the dirt.

The major glanced at me. “I’m sure there’s rather a queue for your charming granddaughter’s tours, but right now I need to get to the beach, before my men decide to swim for the mainland and escape me.”

“Who would blame them?” I asked. Though I thoroughly disliked Major Gilbert, something about his dismissal still wounded me.

I hurried to the front hall and brought back a carton of books I’d been collecting. “You can at least bring these up to the base and distribute them to your men.”

He glanced at the box. “My men don’t have time for literature and aren’t exactly clamoring for books, except comic books. They’re Americans, after all.”

“Yesterday one of your men borrowed a book from our farm-stand lending library. He left a very nice note. You could at least take the books up there and offer them.”

He turned to Gram. “The quickest drive to the beach?”

“Just follow this road down,” Gram said. “Mind the potholes, but you’ll see the beach soon enough.”

“Don’t drive on the sand, though,” I said. “Birds are nesting.”

“All right, then.” He prepared to drive off.

“Do come back for tea sometime, Major,” Gram said. “I can make you a Cornish pasty if I have enough flour.”

“No offense, Mrs. Smith, but I shudder to think of the poor pasty coming out of an American kitchen.” He glanced at the cottage, the broken gate, the rusty tin bucket, the sheets draped over the fence. He probably thought we ate squirrel and pulled our own teeth.

“My mother was a Killigrew from Cornwall,” Gram said.

“Is that right?” the major asked, clearly skeptical.

“Buried beneath the floor of the altar at St. Budock Church.”

“I know St. Budock’s well,” he said. “If you have to die, there’s no better place to do it than in Cornwall.”

“She made Cornish pasties for the miners to take in their lunch pails, and she baked their initials into them. In case they didn’t finish half, they could save it for later. The men fought over those little pies. You should come for tea, and I’ll make one for you.”

He smiled at Gram. “Good day, Mrs. Smith.” He glanced at Bess and me and drove on. “Ladies.”

The jeep rumbled off down the hill, as hot dust sifted onto us. I set down my carton of books and kicked the rusty bucket into the road with a clatter. “I can’t believe this,” I said to Bess. “How could he be so rude to Gram? And how could Gram be so nice to him? If he ever did come, he’d be a most annoying guest. Certainly turn up his nose at her tea-leaf reading.”

“I’m glad you spoke up,” Gram said.

“What the heck, Gram? He basically just took over our farm and you stood there and let him.”

“Well, I was trying to appeal to his sensible side.”

“He doesn’t have one.” I tracked his jeep as he made his way toward the beach. “How are we supposed to get by without the turnips? Tom would have a fit.”

Gram gathered her sheets from the fence. “Well, if you can’t move heaven, then just raise hell.”

“I certainly will.” I watched the men on the distant beach, running with full packs. “He works them to the bone. And they’ll be here every day. Ruining the place.” I still had time to add the major’s little visit to my column.

“We’ve still got the potatoes,” Bess said. “And he seems like the perfect man for you, Cadence. Except for the horrible, pompous part. He’s pretty funny, actually, and the best-looking man on this island right now by far.”

The major’s jeep had made it to the beach, and he sped along the shore on his fat new tires, leaving deep ruts in the sand. Would he kill all our birds? “I’d never date such a foul human.”

Gram smoothed back my hair. “Well, that’s terribly inconvenient, since you’re going to marry Major Gilbert.” She turned and stepped toward the house.

“Please, Gram,” I called after her. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Oh, no, it’s not,” she added with a shrug. “I saw it in the cup.”