Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

They had been a couple for twenty-six months. From May of 1990 until July of 1992. They had met on the steamship on a chilly, miserable, slate-gray day. They had each bought a discolored, overcooked hot dog at the snack bar and were standing together at the ketchup dispenser as the boat lurched like a drunk through the chop. Jeffrey was feeling a little green; he was a man of the land, not the water. He thought maybe his stomach needed food, hence the hot dog, but the ketchup managed to make the hot dog seem less appetizing instead of more. He smiled weakly at Andrea. She was beautiful, raven-haired, robust, surefooted even as the boat rocked. She was confident, a queen. She regally inhaled her hot dog before Jeffrey could even wrap his properly in a napkin.

“Is it your first time on this boat?” she asked. She seemed genuinely concerned for him. He must have looked as bad as he felt.

He nodded. He handed Andrea his hot dog, staggered to the men’s room, and vomited in the toilet.

When he emerged, she was sitting on a bench holding his hot dog gently, like it was a child in her custody.

“You want?” she said.

He shook his head and discreetly (he thought) sucked on a Life Saver.

She said, “Okay if I eat it?”

He nodded.

She said, “Do you talk?”

He whispered, “I do not feel well.”

She beamed at him. “You do talk!”

He was an ag student, newly graduated from Cornell. She was three years out of BC, a championship swimmer, and this summer she was to be Nantucket’s head lifeguard. It was her third summer on the island. Jeffrey had a deed to a farm left to him by his grandmother’s unmarried half-brother-a great-uncle he hadn’t seen in years.

“I thought that kind of thing only happened in the movies,” Andrea said.

“Me, too,” Jeffrey said. The deed to the farm from Uncle Ted had come as a whopping surprise. Jeffrey’s parents had been astounded. Ted Korkoran had been the only son of Jeffrey’s great-grandfather’s second wife; Ted was a bit of a black sheep, declaring himself homosexual and as such escaping duty in World War II. He moved from Fredonia to Nantucket in 1950. He and his partner, Caleb Mills, bought a farm and worked it together. They had cows that supplied 70 percent of the island’s milk, they had chickens for eggs, pigs for bacon and ham. They slaughtered turkeys at Thanksgiving, and made their own goat cheese long before the public had cultivated a taste for it. Jeffrey had heard these stories from his grandmother, and Jeffrey would see Uncle Ted and his friend Caleb every summer at the Korkoran family reunions, Ted and Caleb as sober and grouchy and properly masculine as all the rest of the Korkoran men. But then Caleb got mysteriously sick and died-this was in the mid-eighties, and it was all kept very quiet-and Uncle Ted stopped attending the reunions. And then, five years later, Uncle Ted died and left his farm to Jeffrey. No one could figure out why. All Jeffrey remembered were Caleb’s recipe for baked beans with brown sugar and Uncle Ted’s dead eye in horseshoes. Ted had left Jeffrey the farm because he received a Christmas card from Jeffrey’s mother every year. He knew Jeffrey was an ag student at Cornell, a farmer-to-be in need of a farm.

And here was a farm.

Andrea listened as she polished off the second hot dog, and then a soft pretzel dripping with yellow mustard. She had been an English major at BC; she loved sprawling family sagas. She came from a large and storied Roman Catholic background herself, complete with closeted priests and nuns living in the basement and undercover cops and Mafia ties.

“And when you get a free century,” she said, “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Meeting Andrea had been all bundled up with Jeffrey’s meeting Nantucket. He set eyes on the quaint gray-shingled town first, then took in the scope of the farm that was now his. A hundred and sixty-two acres of fields-his! A greenhouse and barn, tractors, combines, plows-his! A dilapidated little house that had not been cleaned out and hence still contained the day-to-day detritus of a lonely bachelor. Andrea was there with him when he first set foot in Uncle Ted’s house. She saw the dishes in the rack by the kitchen sink, the pie-crust table that supported a rotary phone and the King James Bible, the two single beds side by side in the house’s only bedroom. On the bedside table was a photograph of Ted and Caleb in front of the barn, holding chickens in their arms like babies. Andrea was there because she decided before the steamship even docked that Jeffrey needed her help. What he was doing-seeing the farm for the first time, taking inventory, and uncovering the life of the man who had left it to him-was not something he should do without a friend.

She was right. She helped him find someone to clean out the house, she showed him where the Town Building was so he could register the deed in his name, she drove him around in her black Jeep with the top down, even though Nantucket in May was cold and windy and rainy. (Did anything grow here? Jeffrey had to wonder. Maybe the farm was a joke.) She took him for chowder and steamed lobsters and scallops wrapped in bacon. She let him crash on the floor of her room in the rental house that she shared with two other lifeguards. And then, after a full week of this platonic, almost sisterly help, she invited him into her bed and took his virginity.

Because, yes, Jeffrey had been a virgin at twenty-two. Owing to his girlfriend Felicity Hammer’s love of Jesus and her refusal to make love to him until the day they were married.

Andrea was different from Felicity in every way. Andrea was strong and athletic and dark-haired and capable and Italian and Catholic and confident of her many talents and charms. Felicity was blond and petite and meek and easily frightened; she was shy and God-fearing, she was a small-town Baptist whose father had sent her to community college. She was a baker and a knitter. She wanted six children. Felicity had thought that once Jeffrey got settled with the farm, he would send for her and they would get married.

But meeting Andrea at the ketchup dispenser changed that. Andrea was a storm, a force of nature. He could not resist her any more than he could stop the rain. They fell in love. In October they moved in to the tiny farmhouse, now clean, cozy, and all fixed up. They made love, they made pasta, they made curtains for the windows. Jeffrey made a plan for the farm. He got rid of all the livestock except for the chickens. Chickens and eggs he could handle; everything else was too expensive and beyond the perimeters of his expertise. He wanted to grow things: corn, vegetables, flowers. He had no money. He went to the bank for a loan way beyond what he would be able to pay back in this lifetime, but they gave him the money eagerly, with the land as collateral. Andrea got a job teaching private swim lessons at the community pool.

They were happy. They talked about getting married. They talked about kids. They ate a lot of eggs. They had nicknames for each other. He called her Andy. She called him Peach, which had something to do with sex-how he tasted, or the fact that he’d been a virgin until she took a bite out of him.

Life was weird, right? It was weird because Jeffrey and Andrea had been happy, they had been a couple on their way to matrimony and wedded bliss, until somehow it unraveled. As though a sweater had a snag and he pulled at it, or she did, and one by one the stitches came undone until it was a pile of yarn at their feet. Jeffrey was obsessed with the farm, consumed by it; he could not give Andrea his full attention, he could not give her any attention. She complained, he heard her complaining, but he could do nothing about it. He was single-minded, he always had been, and his mind was on the farm, the fields, the crops, the business of it.