Elizabeth Gilbert - Stern Men

“Really? What happened? How did they get here?” Ruth asked, knowing exactly what he was about to say.

“They brought ’em over here.”

“Who did?”

“Courne Haven people! Threw some pregnant raccoons in a sack. Rowed ’em over. Middle of the night. Dumped ’em on our beach. Your great-uncle David Thomas saw it. Walking home from his girl’s house. Seen strangers on the beach. Seen ’em letting something out of a bag. Seen ’em row away. Few weeks later, raccoons everywhere. All over the goddamn place. Eating people’s chickens. Garbage. Everything.”

Of course, the story Ruth had heard from family members was that it was Johnny Pommeroy who had seen the strangers on the beach, right before he went off to get killed in Korea in 1954, but she let it slide.

“I had a pet baby raccoon when I was a little girl,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, smiling at the memory. “That raccoon bit my arm, come to think of it, and my father killed him. I think it was a him. I always called it a him, anyway.”

“When was that, Mrs. Pommeroy?” Ruth asked. “How long ago?”

Mrs. Pommeroy frowned and rubbed her thumbs deep into Mr. Cobb’s neck. He groaned, so happy. She said innocently, “Oh, I guess that was the early 1940s, Ruth. Goodness, I’m so old. The 1940s! Such a long time ago.”

“Wasn’t a raccoon, then,” Mr. Cobb said. “Couldn’t have been.”

“Oh, it was a little raccoon, all right. He had a striped tail and the cutest little mask. I called him Masky!”

“Wasn’t a raccoon. Couldn’t have been. Wasn’t a raccoon on this island until 1958,” Mr. Cobb said. “Courne Haven folks brought ’em over in 1958.”

“Well, this was a baby raccoon,” Mrs. Pommeroy said, by way of explanation.

“Probably a skunk.”

“I’d like to shoot a raccoon!” Mrs. Cobb said with such force that her mouth actually moved, and her silent daughter, Florida, actually started.

“My father sure shot Masky,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

She toweled off Mr. Cobb’s hair and brushed the back of his neck with a tiny pastry brush. She patted talcum powder under his frayed shirt collar and rubbed oily tonic into his wiry hair, shaping it into an excessively curved pompadour.

“Look at you!” she said, and gave him an antique silver hand mirror. “You look like a country music star. What do you think, Ivy? Isn’t he a handsome devil?”

“Silly,” said Ivy Cobb, but her husband beamed, his cheeks shiny as his pompadour. Mrs. Pommeroy took the sheet off him, gathering it up carefully so as not to spill his hair all over her glaring green kitchen, and Mr. Cobb stood up, still admiring himself in the antique mirror. He turned his head slowly from side to side and smiled at himself, grinning like a handsome devil.

“What do you think of your father, Florida?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “Doesn’t he look fine?”

Florida Cobb blushed deeply.

“She won’t say nothing,” Mr. Cobb said, suddenly disgusted. He plunked the hand mirror down on the kitchen table and dug some money out of his pocket. “Never says a goddamn word. Wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful of it.”

Ruth laughed and decided to get herself a piece of pie after all.

“I’ll take those curlers out for you now, Ivy,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

Later, after the Cobbs had gone, Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth sat on the front porch. There was an old couch out there, upholstered in big bleeding roses, that smelled as if it had been rained on, or worse. Ruth drank beer and Mrs. Pommeroy drank fruit punch, and Ruth told Mrs. Pommeroy about visiting her mother.

“How’s Ricky?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s just, you know… He flops around.”

“That was the saddest thing, when that baby was born. You know, I never saw that poor baby.”

“I know.”

“I never saw your poor mother after that.”

Yah po-ah mothah… Ruth had missed Mrs. Pommeroy’s accent.

“I know.”

“I tried to call her. I did call her. I told her to bring her baby back here to the island, but she said he was much too sick. I made her describe what was wrong with him, and, I’ll tell you something; it didn’t sound too bad to me.”

“Oh, it’s bad.”

“It didn’t sound to me like something we couldn’t take care of out here. What did he need? He didn’t need much. Some medicine. That’s easy. Jesus, Mr. Cobb takes medicine every single day for his sugars, and he manages. What else did Ricky need? Someone to watch him. We could have done that. That’s a person’s child; you find a place for him. That’s what I told her. She cried and cried.”

“Everyone else said he should be in an institution.”

“Who said? Vera Ellis said that. Who else?”

“The doctors.”

“She should have brought that baby here to his home. He would’ve been just fine out here. She still could bring him out here. We’d take care of that child as good as anyone else.”

“She said you were her only friend. She said you were the only person out here who was nice to her.”

“That’s sweet. But it’s not true. Everyone was nice to her.”

“Not Angus Addams.”

“Oh, he loved her.”

“Loved? Loved? ”

“He liked her as much as he likes anyone.”

Ruth laughed. Then she said, “Did you ever meet someone named Owney Wishnell?”

“Who’s that? From Courne Haven?”

“Pastor Wishnell’s nephew.”

“Oh, yes. That great big blond boy.”

“Yes.”

“I know who he is.”

Ruth didn’t say anything.

“Why?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing,” Ruth said.

The porch door swung open, kicked by Robin Pommeroy’s wife, Opal, whose hands were so full of her huge son that she couldn’t operate the doorknob. The baby, on seeing Mrs. Pommeroy, let out a crazy holler, like a delighted gorilla toddler.

“There’s my baby grandson,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Hey, Ruth,” Opal said shyly.

“Hey, Opal.”

“Didn’t know you were here.”

“Hey, big Eddie,” Ruth said to the baby. Opal brought the child over and bent down, heaving a bit, so that Ruth could kiss the boy’s enormous head. Ruth slid over on the sofa to make space for Opal, who sat down, lifted her T-shirt, and gave a breast to Eddie. He lunged for it and set to sucking with concentration and a lot of wet noise. He sucked at that breast as if he were drawing breath through it.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Ruth asked.

“Yeah,” said Opal. She yawned without covering her mouth, showing off a mine of silver fillings.

The three women on the couch all stared at the big baby locked so fiercely onto Opal’s breast.

“He sucks like a regular old bilge pump,” Ruth said.

“Bites, too,” said the laconic Opal.

Ruth winced.

“When did you feed him last?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked.

“I don’t know. An hour ago. Half hour.”

“You should try to keep him on a schedule, Opal.”

She shrugged. “He’s always hungry.”

“Of course he is, sweetheart. That’s because you feed him all the time. Builds his appetite. You know what they say. If the mama’s a-willin’, the baby’s a-takin’.”

“They say that?” Ruth asked.

“I just made it up,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“It’s nice how you made it rhyme like that,” Ruth said, and Mrs. Pommeroy grinned and punched her. Ruth had missed the delight of teasing people without being afraid they’d burst into tears on her. She punched Mrs. Pommeroy back.

“My idea is, I let him eat whenever he wants,” Opal said. “I figure if he’s eating, he’s hungry. He ate three hot dogs yesterday.”