John Casey: Compass Rose

She couldn’t go inside, not yet. Her panic had shrunk her. Inside she would stay pressed into herself. She realized she was rocking forward and backward. She filled her lungs several times until she could sit still.

She touched her legs. She couldn’t tell if she was bleeding. Of course she couldn’t. She was still wet from the pond, still a little stupid.

She lifted her head as if she saw or heard something. It was here, exactly here on this doorstep, where she’d been nursing baby Rose when Dick had got out of Eddie’s truck, when he’d stood awkwardly in front of her and said, “Here we are,” and waved his hand to take in South County from Narragansett to Westerly. Poor man, seeing her with baby Rose, Rose who’d fallen out of the sky. He hadn’t known what to say. Even with Rose in her arms and her breasts full of milk, she should have made room to consider what she’d done to his life.

And then how slow she’d been when they were lying under the evening star in Eddie’s backyard and he’d said, “We live in South County.” She’d kept on trying to say, “We live in nature,” while he was working his way to saying, “I’m sort of an awkward father.”

She’d tried to think it might be no more than one of his moody turns, that she’d descended on him so fiercely that he had to push back to get his balance. She was wrong. It was too tightly woven and finished, as hard as one of his cable splices. She understood and she didn’t understand. It was like the word cleave —to split, to hold together.

At least she was a desire he was forbidding himself, a desire strong enough to need forbidding.

Now she would forbid it, too, for him and Rose.

Would it be harder when Rose went off to college? For an instant she saw herself alone in her house, but she veered off to see Rose lugging a duffel bag into her dorm room, meeting a roommate. Oh, Rose, you’ll have to go through your story all over again. You’ll be on your own, no Mary Scanlon crooning songs into your ear, no May doting on you, no father to build you a skiff.

And when you come back, will you be changed?

Elsie imagined Rose in front of the house. A car door closed. Rose was standing next to someone from her new life. Rose said, “This is where I grew up.”

What? Elsie sifted Rose’s voice out of the fog again. How did Rose say it? Over her shoulder? And then tilt her head and point with her chin? What? That’s it, Rose? That’s your little nod to where you were everybody’s darling?

No. She would be the Rose who smoothed the back of Captain Teixeira’s black suit coat before they went into the graveyard to bury Miss Perry. She would be the Rose who said to Captain Teixeira and her, “You two should go in together.” When Captain Teixeira told Rose what the priest would say—“The earth and the sea shall give up their dead”—Rose nodded once and touched his arm, another womanly gesture. Elsie herself had needed that warning; perhaps he’d had her in mind, too. What would women do without the comfort of old broad-backed men?

She hugged her knees. She felt the cold fog on her back, cold breath of the sea. She’d been conjuring little ghosts out of it, snippets of Rose and everyone around Rose; she’d been rattling Miss Perry’s bones … as if the fog were taking part in her story. Too big for a story, it was part of the same thing over and over, the sun heating the surface of the ocean, vapor rising into clouds and fog, blowing over the land, turning back into water and running back into the sea, carrying bits of earth, the earth made of cracked and crumbled rock and the dead matter of everything once so busily alive.

She let go of her knees and stood up. She smacked the sides of her legs to warm them. She needed some of her old sassiness, too. Okay — here’s an answer to Miss Perry’s unanswerable question, “Do we stand inside nature or outside it?” In the end, inside it. But not yet.

She went back inside. She looked out the big south window. The fog was still thick, but in the east a faint gray light was pushing into it. All the people who’d come to her in her vigil were asleep, asleep in their houses along this bit of coast between the hills and the sea. Rose, Dick and May, Mary Scanlon and JB, the Tran family, old Mr. Salviatti, and even older Captain Teixeira.

Here we are. We live in South County.

The chief acknowledgment is to Anthony Winner, who gave careful criticism and encouragement from the beginning of Compass Rose and for years before and after.

Christopher Tilghman, who read the next-to-last draft and helped define the large triangle of time.

My assistants over the years (and fellow writers and artists): Will Boast, Tara Yellen, Kimberley Stromberg, Hannah Holtzman, and Memory Blake Peebles (who discovered the cover and co-suggested the title).

My agent, Michael Carlisle, peacekeeper.

My editor, Carol Janeway, necessary challenger and longtime friend.

Stephen Jones, Lenny Chesney, and Wiliam Tongue for information about the sea.

Sam Droge and John Rowlett for information about birds.

Robin Fray Carey and Carolina Reid for information about social media.

The University of Virginia and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for employment and collegiality.

Peter Taylor, Kurt Vonnegut, Vance Bourjaily, William Maxwell, and Hubert Butler — mentors.

My wife, Rosamond Casey; my daughters Maud Casey, Nell Casey, Clare Casey, and Julia Casey — the basis of my life.

John Casey was born in 1939 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. His novel Spartina won the National Book Award in 1989. He lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is a professor of English literature at the University of Virginia.