“That is the definition of the term, is it not?”
“That bothers me a little, how a layman can acquire such an objective viewpoint. Maybe some of your basic premises are wrong. How could you be able to tell?”
Her thick brown face turned pale, particularly around the mouth. “You are insolent, Mr. Wing. You should have more respect!”
“For what? Because you dabble in science?”
“Dabble! I had my doctorate before you...”
“You have a degree?”
Her agitation disappeared quickly. “Forgive me. It is just a manner of speaking. I have awarded myself various degrees, as a game, a joke.”
“I see. I’ve often wondered about that slight accent you have, Mrs. Rowell.”
“I have given you three minutes more than I promised. Please telephone me the next time to find out if I am busy.”
“But you are always busy, aren’t you?”
“Extremely.”
She glanced back to the shed and disappeared into it without a backward glance or word of parting. He got into the car and headed thoughtfully back toward the city. There was something invincibly professorial about Mrs. Doris Rowell, something of the attitude of the professional lecturer, plus the austere philosophy of the trained scientist. He had heard no gossip about her, no rumors. She was thought of as merely a very strange and rather difficult woman. For the first time he had begun to wonder where she had come from.
When he had done a series of features on Palm County history, one of his more reliable sources for the Sandy Key area had been Aunt Middy Britt. She lived with one of her sons, a man of sixty, next door to the old Britt fishhouse on the mainland just below the Hoyt Marina. It was still the finest place in the area to buy smoked mullet.
Aunt Middy was dozing in her rocking chair on the shady old screened porch. He looked through the screen at her and coughed. Her eyes opened quickly and she began to rock. “Blessed Jesus, I tole you every last thing I know, and some that I didn’t. But come in anyway, Jimmy, and set. Pretty sunset coming acrosst the bay now, isn’t it?”
He sat with her and talked for a little while and finally said, “What about that Mrs. Doris Rowell, Aunt Middy?”
“Oh, her in the Faskett place way down the key? It set empty eight year ’fore she bought it. No history in her, boy. She’s a come-lately. Nineteen and forty it was. These sorry teeth are getting loose on me again.”
“Where did she come from?”
“Someplace north, where they all come from. Way it looks around here, it must be getting mighty empty up there. I wouldn’t have no idea what special place it was she come from.”
“Didn’t people wonder about her when she first came down, a woman all alone?”
“Guess they did. Let me take myself back now. She wasn’t too bad of a looking woman when she came down. There was talk she was a widow woman. Wasn’t friendly. Nobody seen much of her the first year. Stayed in that house. Must have spent her time eating. Every time you’d see her, she was bigger. End of a year she was the size of a house. Then she was busying herself with plants and bugs and fishes, and the first hell she started to raise was on account of the size mesh in the nets around here, and she’s been raising hell about all that kind of stuff ever since.”
“But you’ve no idea why she came here, or what she used to do?”
“Jimmy, it’s hard to keep up any interest in somebody strictly minds her own business most of the time. Smart woman, I guess. When the snooks got sick in the creeks that time, all rusty red around the gills and hundreds of big ones dying, she was the one traced it down. The Florida State folks took the credit, but Miz Rowell was the one actual found out. Forty-six, it was, back when snooks was a good money fish before the damn fools named it a game fish.”
“Would anybody know any more about her than you do?”
“There’s people know more about everything in the world than I do. I kept telling you that when you were writing up all the old settlers. Let me think, now. There was somebody around here knowed her before she came down. Or knew about her or something. Used to go visit with her, I think. Now who was that? Memory’s as loose as my sorry teeth, boy. Hmmm. Wait now! Ernie Willihan, it was. He was fresh out of college, teaching in the high school. Ernie would be in his forties now. Aida Willihan’s boy. She’s dead now, God rest her sweet soul. She raised that boy single-handed, and did her best by him. Sent him to school way up north someplace, Minnesota, I think it was. Of course he got a scholarship and he worked too, but Aida had to do a lot of scratching, then didn’t live long enough to see him hardly started in life. Never saw a grandchild. And a wicked old woman like me gets to see a full dozen of her grandchildren’s children so far and’ll probably see more. You must know Ernie Willihan, Jimmy.”
“I remember him all right. Where’d he go?”
“Oh, he’s doing just fine. He got out of teaching, and he’s up in St. Pete in some kind of scientific company he’s a partner in. He was a science teacher in the high school. Now, if a person had to find out more about Miz Rowell, I guess that would be where he’d have to go. Why you so interested in her, boy?”
“Oh, Borklund wants to run a series of features on Palm County characters. He made up a list. I’m starting with the tough ones. She won’t talk about herself. You’re on the list too.”
“Who else is on it?”
“You just wait and read the paper.”
“Maybe she won’t talk because she’s hiding something.”
“If I find that out, I’ll have to take her off the list.”
“Look how red that sun is going down, will you? Maybe we’ll get to make a wish.”
“You mean a flash of green? That’s tourist talk, Aunt Middy.”
“I seen it once, boy.”
“You what?”
“Now, don’t look at me like that. I’m telling you a true thing, boy. I’ll even tell you the year. Eighteen and ninety-eight, and I was a twenty-one-year-old girl, feeling older than I do right this minute. My daddy brought us kids on down to this piece of wild coast when I was ten. We were Foleys, you know, and that’s how the crick got named. We put up the homestead on a knoll just a quarter mile south of where we’re setting. But I told you all that before, how I lost a brother to the fever and a sister to a cotton-mouth snake. So I was twenty-one, married since fifteen to Josh Britt, and he’s dead now since nineteen and twenty-two, May ninth, hard to believe it’s so long. It was an August evening, and we were in the fever time again, when folks died. I had only two young then. I’d had three and lost the first to fever the year before. There wasn’t fifty of us in the whole settlement. Josh’s brother was down sick, and he was the one worked the boat with Josh. I had to leave my two with my sister and help Josh on the boat. We were food-fishing that day. My two were both fevered, and I was sick in my heart with worry, wondering if I was put on earth just to carry my young and watch them burn with the fever and die. I was two month along with my fourth, and I did a man’s work that day, helping pole that heavy old skiff and help Josh work the net until my back was broke in half and my hands like raw meat. We were poling back along the shore, coming home with less fish than was needed, and we could see the sun going down red like that, right out through Turk’s Pass. I was as low down in my spirits as a woman can get, and the night bugs were beginning to gather like a cloud around us. We rested from poling to brush away the bugs, and we watched that last crumb of sun go, and the whole west sky lit up with terrible great sheets of the brightest green you ever could see. ‘Make a wish!’ Josh yelled at me from the stern of the skiff. I wished, all right. There couldn’t ever be enough green for the wishes I had, boy. It didn’t last over ten or fifteen seconds. It was dark when we moored the skiff. The fever had eased for my young ones. Life worked better for me from then on, somehow. I raised six young out of twelve, four still living, and that was better than most in that time and place. I’ve seen children die and men killed and women broke, but I never got so low again in all my life as that one day on the net. So don’t say it’s tourist talk, Jimmy. I prayed to God my whole life, and in fairness I got to credit Him with doing good by me. But a flash of green is something you see. We didn’t see one tonight. You act like you need one, Jimmy.”