Free Little Gale Gumbo by Erika Marks Page A

up, facing the frigid view, her fine features fixed in an expression of serenity and quiet determination, her hazel eyes flashing.
    When they stepped off the ferry onto the town landing, the trio felt as if they’d landed on the moon. All around them, islanders marched head down against the icy evening air, wrapped like packed china in scarves and hats with earflaps, thick gloves, and boots fattened with woolly linings.
    Even the smells of the island were different, Josie thought, drawing in a long, cold breath: smoky, salty air, burning wood, and gasoline. No curling vines of star jasmine with tiny white blossoms so fragrant you might walk off the curb from their scent. They would no longer hear the click of the streetcar, the wail of a jazz band spilling out of open bar doors into the humid night, or the electric whir of the cicadas in the oak trees. Cicadas couldn’t possibly live in such a frigid, quiet place. Josie was certain of it.
    But none of that mattered. This was their home now, they agreed silently as they climbed the steep trail of Ocean Avenue, arms linked to steady one another when they slid on the slick slush that dotted the street. They found an inn at the top of the hill where the wallpaper was spotted with sailboats and seashells, and they inquired about a room. They had some available, the proprietor admitted begrudgingly, forced to do so when a dozen room keys hung in plain view. But there was a three-night minimum, and housekeeping didn’t come but twice a week, and, oh, yes, there was an extra charge for a third person. Camille smiled pleasantly and handed over enough to cover the next four days.
    They unpacked their few belongings into a dresser with crooked drawers and left to explore the town, settling eventually on a restaurant with short red curtains and paintings of whaling ships on the wall. The waitress was young and cheerful and wore her hair parted down the middle. When Camille explained that they had only just arrived from New Orleans and were looking to stay, the girl remembered overhearing Ben Haskell in the restaurant just a few hours earlier, bemoaning his lack of a tenant. His vacancy had been going on two years, she said, and he was worried that the plumbing would fail if left unused too long. While the waitress wrote Ben’s name and address on a napkin, she said something, almost too quietly but not quite, about how awful it was, the way that Midwestern woman had run off and left him with a young boy to raise on his own. Camille took the napkin, folded it neatly, and slipped it in her coat pocket.
    Back in their room, bathed and warm and tucked in, the girls in the beds, their mother in a roll-away between them, Camille said they would pay a visit to Ben Haskell in the morning.
    The island seemed like a pleasant place, Camille said, a safe place to stay through spring. As soon as they found an apartment, she’d phone the beauty parlor and tell them where to forward her last check. Besides, she had her cards and her candles and her oils. She could put an ad in the local paper, give readings and work spells like her mother used to. Make them some money, and by summer they could move on.
    Of course, she would never leave.

Eight

    Little Gale Island
    Fall 1977
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    Ben Haskell leaned his head under the kitchen sink, squinted through his glasses at the hissing drainpipe, and cursed quietly. He loved the old house, but it never ceased to exhaust him. As a growing boy tracking mud through the maze of its cold, colorless rooms, he’d imagined its frame as stone, having been oblivious to the weekly battles his father had waged, and usually lost, with the cottage’s decaying parts. When Ben had inherited the house sixteen years ago, he had never imagined the patchwork of repairs he’d find behind its plaster walls, but of course, he’d not been in a position to refuse it. He and Leslie had needed a