West Sound
By Ken Ely

"Well, he can't stay here!" Grandmother Benson had declared emphatically - which had caught me completely unawares, to say the least; and I think it had rather surprised Grandfather Benson, too. After all, I had stayed with them the previous three summers. Moreover, I had been made welcome, at least for lunch, by Grandmother B, not three hours earlier.

After eating that meal together (the three of us, entirely without disagreeable incident) I had brought my 1958 Ford wagon - with one side entirely crumpled by the previous owner - to rumbling life and driven over to West Sound where I renewed my acquaintance with the marina's proprietor, Mr. David Hutchins. As this was the third trip I had made to see him, he had apparently become convinced that I would bother him forever, had bowed to the inevitable, and had given me assurance that he would put me to work as soon as I could be on his premises at the end of the school year. Returning in triumph to the Vicarage, I had announced my success and good fortune to the Bensons and received from Grampa his expected and gratifying congratulations. From Gramma had errupted the startling pronouncement of my banishment even before the subject of my prospective lodgings had come up for consideration.

And so it was that I found myself down below the house, sitting all friday-faced upon a boulder overlooking the water, awaiting the arrival of Mrs. Kangley. Mrs. Geraldine Kangley. Mrs. Geraldine Kangley with whom I was to lodge for the summer, thanks to the celerity and resourcefulness of Gramma Benson.

The name "Geraldine" did not conjure up grace, delicacy, refinement, or beauty in my seventeen year-old mind. Part of this was due to the name's association with an outlandish character played by comedian Flip Wilson; but, in part, it was due to my having previously met Mrs. Geraldine Kangley. She was part of Grampa Benson's summer congregation. Often she came to tea at the Vicarage when she was "on island." Some of the time she was invited, I suppose.

Mrs. Kangley's home was in Seattle. She came to Orcas only when the weather was clement enough to make a protracted ferry ride tolerable - and this was mostly in the summer. The ferry service in those years was not to be enjoyed as it is today. The largest ferry on the San Juan Islands run at that time was the Evergreen State, which still services the islands - as the smallest ferry on the route. Vashon, which one can visit in Seattle as a museum piece, was the work-horse of the fleet. Chetsemoka, positively the slowest vessel I have ever traveled upon, and the oldest, was still in operation among the islands - under steam, I believe.

She was refined, in a larger-than-life manner, one might say. Mrs. Kangley, I mean; not Chetsemoka. Her manners were quite proper. Her grammer impeccable. In bearing, she was discretely haughty. In society, she artfully maintained herself on the irreproachable side of forward. She spoke in a remarkable falsetto, as though a man were speaking to imitate a woman.

In frame, she was the suggestion of a woman seeking to imitate a man. Her eye-glasses, wire-rimmed and of an antiquitous style, magnified her eyes to proportions appropriate to whales. Her gray hair was pulled tight behind her head and knotted in a bun - a bun which approximated the apparent size of her eyes. My personal assessment, before I went to live with her, was that she bordered upon madness. By the time she told me to leave her house, I was convinced she was mad.

When she arrived at the Vicarage, Mrs. Kangley precipitated the inevitable tea. I was invited to partake, which I did not mind, for it had gotten to be that time of day and I was, at least, called in off my rock. My living arrangements were concluded with head-swimming alacrity. I would arrive at Mrs. Kangely's residence on the road above West Sound two days after my final exams. I would occupy the only finished room in the upstairs portion of her hundred year-old unfinished house. My rent would be twenty-five dollars a month, payable on the first of each month. My board would be computed according to my consumption: I was required to write down on a pad, which Mrs. Kangley would provide, every morsel of food, with its price, that I ate, if it was eaten independantly of our evening meal together; whatever was partaken in common she would record, divide according to relative portions, and account for along with the slips I turned in to her.

" How will I know the prices?" I respectfully (and reasonably) asked.

" Will you have tags on all the food?"

This inquiry she rebuffed as impertinent. "That would be preposterous. Everyone knows the price of a dozen eggs, or a half gallon of milk. You simply divide."

" Same for toast?" I ventured.

This she declined to verbally answer. Instead, she pursed her lips momentarily and trained her magnified eyes round on Gramma Benson, who was engaged in placing her own tea cup and saucer on the small table beside her chair while managing her cat (who habitually liked to snuggle at tea time), all the while safe-guarding her crumpet, which she held aloft in a refined, victorian style. "I must confide to you," and here Mrs. Kangley leaned forward to stress the confidence, "the manner in which Mr. Olzendam signed the register at the Empress Hotel in Victoria." " With a pen, I daresay," I thrust in, with my best Charles Lawton British. "Blood from a pricked fingah would be entirely too messy." To my amazement, Mrs. Kangley swivelled her leviathan gaze to include me in her counsel. "Yes. And wrote, 'Lord and Lady Olzendam.' Can you imagine it?"

I could. No one looked more the part of an English lord than Roddy Olzendam. He could talk like one, too. I knew him to be Dutch, though, and very proud of it. In fact, he had related to me that, as a young man, he had met Teddy Roosevelt, who, taking note of Roddy's surname, had said, "You're Dutch! So am I! Isn't it great to be Dutch?"

Mrs. Kangley was Dutch, too, for that matter. She had notified me of this distinguishing fact at some earlier encounter (in the parish hall of the church, no doubt) and had pronounced herself to be the blood and bone of Holland's history. In its entirity, I had no doubt.

In the course of time, I arrived at Mrs. Kangley's summer house on the road above West Sound to take up my lodging. My old '58 Ford had been replaced, to the good, by a sharp 1951 Chevrolet 4 door sedan, complete with wheel skirts. I parked it proudly beside Mrs. Kangely's 1959 Buick, which, actually, she had maintained in excellent condition. It was a very nice car. The year was then 1967. It was mid-afternoon.

" I hope bats don't bother you," she said, holding open the door to the stairway leading to the second floor of the house.

Pausing with my luggage under both arms, I inquired, "Is there a possibility that they might?"

" Well, they usually don't get into your room, you understand - if you keep the door closed. But they are in every other part of the second story. You will only see them in the morning and in the evening, however. If at all." As I began my ascent of the stairs, she added, "And you may hear them scratching around in the walls during the night."

Coming down again, after putting my things away, I was treated to tea. For a Dutch lady, she was particularly fond of this English custom, and this I observed to her. Her reply was to render me a singularly detailed, and maybe even accurate, history of the invasions of the east coast of England by the peoples of the low countries (mainly the Danes) during Alfred the Great's reign and of the traffic back and forth between the two regions in later times. In truth, her fine falsetto with its supercilious intonation was well suited to this sort of discourse, making it amusing rather than dry, and I passed an hour or so with her in a very comfortable manner.

Before five o'clock, I drove down to the marina to let Mr. David Hutchins know that I was in the island and available to work as soon as he needed me. He needed me the very next day, in fact. Camp Orkila's sheet-metal boat house roof was waiting to be painted in red and white alternate sections. Candy-striped, as it were. It (the boat house) was anchored in the lee of Sheep Island (Picnic Island, it's called on the charts) and he would take me, with the paint, out to work on it as soon as the dew was off it.

" How'd you get it round to here from Camp Orkila?" I asked him.

" That's over on the west shore."

" Towed it," Dave blew cigarette smoke, "with that," and pointed to an twenty-foot, hard-chined inboard launch with a cuddy cabin, tied at the foot of the brow leading down to the floats. "You know Camp Orkila?"

" Uh-huh. Thought that boat belonged to the two lady teachers from Seattle."

" It did. They bought that Cheoy Lee sloop out there," he pointed again, " and I bought the launch from them. You know many of the boats in this marina?"

" Some of 'em," I replied honestly. "I used to come down here with Grampa Benson when Ray VanMoren owned the place. We double planked Royal Cross over there by the old shop, where Jess's boat is now."

" You know Jess?"

" Sure. He's Grampa Benson's godson."

" Why doesn't he replace that plank above the chine and shove his boat back in the water?"

" Because he doesn't know how to spile the plank. He tried two times, got discouraged, and said to hell with it. Threw the planks under the boat and hasn't touched 'em since."

" Can you spile a plank?" Dave asked.

I shrugged. "Dunno. I know how it's done. I've never done it. Just helped Dwight Kryder double-plank Grampa's boat. Jess wasn't around for that. You know Dwight Kryder and Surprise?"

" I know him. You've scraped and painted the bottoms of boats, though."

" Enough of 'em," I assured him. "But a dummy could do that."

" Good. 'Cause after you finish the boat house roof, that's what most of your summer is going to be." He grinned at me around his cigarette. " Dummy."

When I returned to Mrs. Kangley's, she congratulated me on arriving just in time for dinner. She was just in the process of laying it on. I must say, to her credit, it was a very good dinner. Roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans have never discouraged me. If this was to be the bill of fare all along, the summer promised to be a good one. Going upstairs to bed showed me the flip side of summer's prospective coin, however. Every bat in Orcas Island must have lived in the top of that ancient house. Dodging my way to my room was like walking through a swarm of fat, jerky-flying mosquitoes. Why the bats did not frequent my room was more than I could understand. While one could not accurately say that the space beneath the door was big enough to throw a cat through, it was certainly large enough to accomodate bats - flyig formation, even. And they did scratch in the walls during the night. A great many of them scratched. You must know that sounds magnify in the dark, especially when made by disagreeable creatures like bats. I had a hard time sleeping that first night, for it sounded as if the entire host of bats was determined to scratch through the lath-and-plaster walls and enter in upon my sanctuary.

I was up long before Mrs. Kangley. In fact, I am not certain I even went to sleep that first night, what with the bats and all. Moreover, at seventeen, I was not certain of when the dew would be off the boathouse roof - it might depart even while it was still dark - and I didn't want to be late for work. I made my breakfast as quietly as I could, writing out every article of food I consumed, and its divided-out price, on the pad Mrs. Kangley had left beside the toaster. Then, to the list, I added everthing I packed in my sack lunch.

The morning dawned into a fine clear day, with no wind, and the dew did not leave the boathouse roof until quite late. Dave and I positioned a boat on the grid for scraping and painting later in the afternoon, when the tide would allow me to get under it. I sorted some scrap metal and cleaned some paint brushes. At lunch-time, I picniced with Dave, his wife, and his little daughter, Annalisa. After we finished our coffee, which Dave was to always provide, we put the paint, pans, and rollers in
the launch and motored out to the boat house.

For the life of me, despite all the details I can remember of that first day, I cannot remember how I got myself and my paint stuff up onto the boat house roof. Reason tells me I climbed a ladder. Memory serves me very well, however, as to how hot it was up there, painting. I was wearing bib overalls and a T-shirt and rapidly became soaked with sweat throughout. Along about coffee time, Dave gurgled by in the launch and asked me if I wanted a couple of beers to cool me off. I said I did.
" Bud okay?" he querried, holding the boat under the overhang of the roof.

" Bud's fine," I assured him. I was no stranger to Budweiser as my father preferred it to any other sort of beer. Years have broadened my experience of life, and of beer, and I now find little in Budweiser to recommend it to a sweaty kid on a hot tin roof - or to a paunchy, middle-aged man sitting at a computer, either - except that it was very cold and I was very hot. At any rate, Dave pitched two beers, the tall cans, up to me. I caught them and consumed them immediately, for I knew that they would never stay cool for very long on that hot tin roof . It will suffice to say that painting the stripes on the roof was much more difficult during the ensuing hour. This must have become evident to Dave, as well, for he came out in the lauch and brought me back to the marina office for an additional coffee break before I went to work on the boat we'd placed on the grid. I cannot recall him offering me any more beer after that.

Mrs. Kangley's oddities amused Dave. He usually reserved time during our morning coffee breaks for my report on anything noteworthy. "Life at the Bat House," as Dave came to call it, proceeded along in a fashion that was, if not idyllic, at least congenial. However, this state of affairs was, in the course of time - and not a very long course of time - overturned by small events which, I must conclude, served to exaggerate the inherent imbalance of Mrs. Kangley's mind.

The first of these events, although I only recognize it as such in retrospect, was a tumble into the water I took, the result of an effort to help Dave right a power boat that had fallen over on the grid. The owner of the boat had positioned it upon the grid himself, - would have it no other way - and had fastened her there by lines calculated to be slack enough to let the boat down upon the grid timbers with the tide. In fact, the owner had left too much slack in his lines, for one thing; and had, for two, left the boat trimmed in such a manner that she listed away from the grid pilings rather than toward them. The tide receded, the boat canted over in a direction which offered nothing to lean upon, and
ultimately she fell outward onto her bilge.

Now, Dave had a small, unpowered barge with a crane on it that had come with the marina in its purchase from Ray VanMoren. The crane was a narrow A-frame affair which supported a shiv in its apex. Through this shiv was reeved a wire cable with a ball and a hook on its end. The full length of the cable was wound upon a hand-operated winch mounted at the other end of the barge. The barge with its crane had an infinity of uses around the marina and could be moved from place to place by means of the launch, but the most spectacular use it was put to was its deployment to right boats that had fallen over on the grid.

To right a boat, a bridle was rigged under its hull. To this we would attach the hook from the barge. By this purchase, the hull was then winched to an upright position. The procedure had to be accomplished before the tide was completely out, of course, or the barge could not be floated in close enough to distressed boat.

Dave and I brought the barge around to the grid. The wind was blowing, not much, but enough to make the barge balky. The idea was to lay the barge close enough aboard the fallen boat to grab the bridle with a long boat hook. Then the barge could be pulled by hand (with the launch's help, of course) until it was near enough to make the hook on the end of the cable fast in the bridle. All that remained, then, was to crank the boat upright. With the cable on the bridle, the launch, perhaps with the aid of an anchor, would have no problem holding the barge in position.

We made two unsuccessful approaches with the barge but the breeze put us in danger of grounding both times. On the third approach, I decided that three had to be a charm, and that I would take matters into my own hands to insure that it was. Estimating my inverted trajectory as best I could, I made free the amount of cable I required. I climbed to the cross-bar of the crane, stepped aboard the ball, and swung myself outward at the calculated moment. Outward and downward. The water was waist deep where I plunged beside the grid. Dave grinned and called around his cigarette, " Mighty fine! Now, climb up and hook onto the bridle!"

After we had winched the boat upright and made her fast, I slopped below to shift everything I could to the piling side of her so that she would naturally lean that way. Then, I went home to change.

Mrs. Kangley was at the house when I arrived. Of course, she was surprised to see me at that time of the day. My soggy state presented her with a bit of a choice to make: she could either have me come into the house wet and track water onto her floors or I could undress outside, hang my T-shirt and overalls on the clothes line to dry and go along upstairs in my jockey shorts to get some more clothes. As she had raised a son, she had seen plenty of jockey shorts; so, she chose the latter option, avowing that she would avert her gaze at the proper moment to avoid embarrassing me. I replied that I was not easily embarrassed, thanked her for her consideration, stripped down, hung up, and marched upstairs to get more clothes. She politely took an interest in her cracked wall paper as I passed. I thought no more about the incident. Not many days later, after supper, Mrs. Kangley paused in her ambulations around the house and asked me what I was watching on TV.

" It's called 'Men From Atlantis' and it's really stupid. The people have gills and can breathe under water."

" Think of it!" she replied in her supercilious fashion and lumbered off to the kitchen. When she returned, she had in her hand the slips documenting the food I had helped myself to since I had taken up lodgings with her.

" Mm. Do we need to settle up?" I asked innocently.

" Settle up?" she countered in amazement. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean. In fact, I want to ask you what these are, and what you mean by them." She proffered the slips.

Now I was amazed. "What do you mean you want to know what they mean? They mean what you meant them to mean from the very first day. They are what I have eaten and what I owe you, as best as I can determine, since you wouldn't put prices on the food!"

" Prices on the - no one puts prices on the food in their own home! That is the most irregular suggestion I have ever heard! Your conduct becomes stranger by the week! This is almost insulting. Look - 'one egg, five cents.' Who do you take me for, Silas Marner?"

In the instant, casting about in my mind for the name of some famous lunatic to take her for, I drew a blank. My inability to form a rapid reply she appropriated to her own advantage, adding, "No, you cannot answer to your behavior, can you! I should wonder at it if you could! Now, let there be no more 'one egg, five cents,' or anything like it!" With that, she rounded to, stumped to the trash burner in the kitchen, and ceremoniously chucked the lists under one of the lids.

It was not long after this altercation that a generation of bat children must have been born within the walls of my room. I can give no other account for the fact that, in a very short space of time, the scratching increased ten fold. One very still night, it rose to such a pitch that it became almost maddening, destroying in me all disposition to sleep. Now, sometimes, with crickets and other pests, tapping near them will make them quiet for a while. Thinking it might work with bats, I got up and thumped along one wall. This tactic seemed to work for that section of wall and I was encouraged to continue right around the room. Climbing back into bed, I listened. All was silent. Not a scratch - until I was about to nod off. Then it all started up again.

My moderate success induced me to repeat the proceedure - only this time I thumped a little harder, anticipating that it might keep the bats quiet long enough for me to fall asleep. Then, they could scratch to their little bug-eating hearts' contentment. Louder thumping seemed to produce a longer silence but, still, it was not long enough for me to fall asleep. So, for my third effort, I treated them to a regular cannonade.

It worked. I awoke the next morning congratulating myself that I had, at last, found a method of controlling the scratching. To my surprise, Mrs. Kangley was awake and sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea when I descended the stairs to use the bathroom. Her whale-sized eyes (unusually blood-shot, I noted upon discrete inspection) made me halt with my hand upon the stairway doorknob. An unfamiliar, controlled fury was discernable in them, as well.

I ventured a random bow shot. "Up with the birds, are we?" As there was no immediate reply forthcoming, I shot a quick glance out one of the windows. "Making up to be a fine day, I think. And a Saturday, too."

When she finally mustered the control to reply, her falsetto lacked its customary superciliousness and had acquired a constricted, reedy quality. " Last night was your last night here."

" Ah," I said, temporizing, and still holding the doorknob. "Pity. I've just discovered a technique to dissuade the bats from scratching in the walls and keeping me awake."

Without taking her eyes off me, Mrs. Kangley slammed her tea cup into its saucer. "By pounding on the walls all night!" she screeched. "I am only too well acquainted with your technique for handling bats!"

" It works splendidly, but if it disturbes you, I certainly can find some other means to deal
with them. . ."

" I was awake all night!" she said, rising and advancing upon me. Releasing my hold on the doorknob, I retreated sideways toward the bathroom. "You don't say so! That's odd. Unfortunate, to be sure. Lamentable, really. What I mean to say is, once I got the bats quieted down, I went right to sleep."

The bathroom door opened inward and I backed through it; but before I could close it, Mrs. Kangley's bulk occupied the doorway. "It is not only the pounding of walls to silence the bats!" she trembled. "You come home from work early, soaking wet, and parade through the house in your underwear! You leave me lists with prices on them for every scrap of food you consume! Your behavior is so irregular - yes, irregular - that is the only word that describes it - I am convinced that, if you are not mentally imbalanced, you are the next best thing! And that is a frightful thing to have to declare to a person. At any rate, you must leave. Today." And with that, she snatched the door from me and closed it with a finality very similar to the slamming of a pine-board coffin lid.

Although it was Saturday, I was obligated to work half the day. We had a boat on the grid that had to be ready to go off with the afternoon tide. During our coffee break, I recounted the morning's confrontation for Dave and asked him if he knew of anyone from whom I might rent a room. He denied any such knowledge but freely admitted that the amusement my sojourn in "the Bat House" had afforded him would be terribly missed. After lunch, I drove into Eastsound, to consult Grampa Benson at the Vicarage. When I arrived, Mrs. Kangley's Buick was in the parking strip.

Upon entering the kitchen, I found her seated with a tea cup, in a very similar array to the one in which I had discovered her at first light - only in this instance, she was dressed in more than a colorless night gown and a faded pink terrycloth robe. Her topic of conversation was unchanged, however: underwear, bats, walls, pounding, lists, prices, food, mental imbalance. As best I could ascertain, no element of the litany was omitted. I made one or two stabs at self defence but Mrs. Kangley, warmed to her subject as she was, was about as stoppable as the Car of the Juggernaut.

Grampa Benson beckoned to me from the living room and I abandoned the ladies to join him. "Mrs. Kangley will be leaving shortly," he assured me. "Then we can talk."

" She's twisting everything around to make it sound as if I'm crazy," I whined, "and Gramma is believing her."

" Gramma has known Mrs. Kangley for many years. So have I," he added, pensively, almost as an uncomfortable afterthought. "Besides, you are going to live with the Burkheimers. Do you remember them?"

" The Burkheimers," I reflected. "Yes. I met 'em at church. Marion. Early fifties. Tan. Nice looking. Loves to talk. Wears broad-brimmed hats, like Scarlet O'Hara. Charlie is her husband. A bit older than she. Big man.

White hair. Bald on top. Very sparing of words. Rather athletic. I don't know what he does for a living but I'll wager his house is not unfinished and that there are no bats in it."

" There are no bats in it," Grampa confirmed. "But it holds a great many house plants. And you are going to live in the mother-in-law appartment above the garage and keep the plants watered. The outside plants, too." " Where will the Burkheimers be?" I wanted to know.

" Charlie spends four days a week in Seattle, at his surplus business. Sometimes Marion stays on Orcas, sometimes she goes with Charlie. Where- ever they are, you take care of the plants."

" Do I go there tonight?"

" Where's all your stuff?"

" In my car. I'm a displaced person."

" I'll call Marion again as soon as Mrs. Kangley leaves."

The Burkheimers lived in a house that sprawled along the eastern cliff overlooking Deer Harbor. The front of the house sat upon stilts that had their footings bedded deep in the rock itself. The gravel road leading up to the place was Charlie's interminable construction project and it reminded me, for steepness and narrowness, of photos I'd seen of the mule trails in the Grand Canyon. As I urged my Chevy up it, following Marion's car, I wondered how they had got the trucks loaded with materials up it to build the house, it was that narrow.

Grampa had called Marion after Mrs. Kangley had swept herself grandly from the Vicarage, having expiated her horror of my lunacy by apprising Gramma of my erratic behavior in a detail that bordered on the roccoco. Marion drove down after dinner and escorted me personally to my new home. She had been afraid I would not be able to recognize Charlie's driveway for what it was the first time I saw it; or, if I did, she had feared I might not have the courage to drive up it without first being shown that it was, indeed, passable.

Dinner with the Bensons had passed quietly. I had expected Gramma to be on the war path, since I had gotten myself thrown out of the "Bat House." But Gramma exhibited no vexation with me, at all. This was probably because Grampa had assured her that I would not be living at the Vicarage and that he had already made provision for my habitation which would not inconvenience her in any way.

Grampa Benson knew his parishioners pretty well and he knew that Marion Burkheimer could not stand Mrs. Geraldine Kangley, in the abstract or in the flesh. Anyone booted out by Mrs. Kangley was a prize to be whisked off by Marion Burkheimer, on that basis alone. Add to this the virtue of the thrown out party being the Vicar's "grandson," an acolyte of the church, working locally at a summer job to go to college, and a good-looking, well-mannered boy, besides. Why, my strategic value to Marion among the various ladies' circles at church was inestimable, even if I were to let all her plants die.

Charlie had come from Seattle that evening, but not before Marion and I had had the opportunity to sit over a cup of coffee and discuss my stay with Mrs. Kangley. Marion was most sympathetic. We also had an enjoyable chat just talking about things in general. And, surprisingly, her review of my duties toward her plants had been rather cursory. "Do you know how to take care of plants?" she had lanquidly inquired.

" Certainly." I did. I was seventeen. Seventeen year-olds know everything." Good. The ones that need a lot of water, give a lot of water. The ones that need only a little, give them just enough."

And that was it. From there, we proceeded to discuss my job at the marina, and how, exactly, I was related to Fr. & Mother Benson.

On her side, we talked about her affinity for evening life and Charlie's disinterest in it, her first marriage, and her enjoyment of the company of men in general. It had occurred to my extravagant seventeen year-old mind that I might have been being sounded for the possibility of an affair, for I think Marion was lonely with Charlie, to a certain degree.

He did not like to dance and he did not talk much. But she was content with him as he was kind and considerate to her and maintained her in a fashion that she enjoyed. She allowed he could be romantic in a straight-forward, common way; and this she could respond to; but she confessed a longing for some of the glitter she had know when she was younger.

For my part, while I liked the company of women of all ages - so long as they were not demented - I had no desire for the hazards of an affair, if one was, indeed, in speculation. Being seventeen, I was afraid, literally afraid, that an affair might possibly be within Marion's scope. Now, from the perspective of four decades later, I am rather amused by my healthy but overweening anxiety in that regard, as I expect Marion was amused, even then. I had not the morality for an affair. Such a thing was just too far out of bounds; something to be read about, perhaps, but never engaged in. I was what my own children now hilariously refer to as a "geek," you see.

As it fell out, our lines (Marion's and mine) were drawn along mutually satisfacory positions. I would live above the garage in the mother-in-law appartment, maintain the foliage, have coffee and conversation with Marion, and be rustically ornamental. She and Charlie would leave their house safely with me in their absence, assured that the plants would survive. Marion would enjoy my company, conversation, and confidence when she was "in residence" and be gratified in whatever innocent pleasure she might derive from having a teen-ager about the place. (After living with my own teen-age boys, I am tempted to wonder about Marion's rationality. Perhaps she was manifesting the beginning signs of drifting off into " Mrs. Kangley Land." If she was, she didn't show it, though, and on our agreed basis, she and I got on famously.)

Marion was very solicitous of my comfort. Perhaps it was an effort on her part to make up for the rigors I endured in the "Bat House." At any rate, the little refrigerator in my appartment was always stocked with soda pop and snacks, and Marion tried to anticipate any imperfections the apartment might have. One of its deficiencies was a lack of pictures on the walls. I had not noticed this so very much, but Marion made me aware of it. Then, in the course of some conversation over coffee, she asked me if I liked Twiggy. As Marion was blessed by a good deal of margin before she even bordered upon being overweight, I thought she, herself, might be a fan of Twiggy's; so, I said I thought Twiggy had a certain charm - mentally reserving that charm for the survivors of shipwrecks and other starvation-producing events. Several days later, I came home from work to find a larger than-life poster of Twiggy tacked to the expanse of wall in my room that had been lacking in pictures. This wall, as luck would have it, was opposite the foot of my bed. Twiggy's baleful, outsized eyes became the last thing I saw at night and the first thing I saw in the morning. And in that capacity, they were a bit too much like Mrs. Kangley's eyes had been. If Twiggy's poster had contained a tea cup, I doubt I could have endured its hanging there more than five minutes. As for Charlie, he was a prime fellow. He treated me with good natured indifference. I think he had a natural ability to read people and I believe he sized me up for the difficult but tolerable seventeen year-old that I was in no more time than it took for us to have dinner together. He was possessed of a subtle sense of humor and the entire business of Mrs. Kangley, my experience with her, and his wife's social jockeyings where Mrs. Kangley was concerned, seemed to amuse him, moderately. But then, Charlie appeared to be moderate in all things.

In conversation, however, Charlie was more than moderate. He was another Calvin Coolidge. We only had one conversation of any length, he and I. It was over breakfast, on a morning wherein I was going to work and he was going to Seattle. Our subject was the herd of sheep that lived in the pasture on the other side of the cove that separated us from the neighbor who owned them.

" That is the second bunch of sheep he's had in there," Charlie laconically informed me in reply to some opener I had made, and terminated his comment with a bite of his toast.

" What happened to the first bunch?" I asked, more interested in the fact that I had actually motivated Charlie to dialogue than I was with the fate of the sheep.

He took a sip of coffee. "They died."

This was good. I wanted to keep it going. "Of what?"

He wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Lack of life." And that was it. He got up from the table.

Humor is an odd thing. It has its basis in absurdity, of course. And Charlie's answer, given the setting and the man, was both absurd and characteristic. I began to laugh. My laughter infected Marion and she started to chuckle. Charlie seemed pleased with the effect his statement had wrought. As he carried his dishes to the sink, he paused to regard us. There was a twinkle in his eyes and a faint smile played about his lips.

The Sunday morning immediately following my installation as resident plant-waterer in the Burkheimer house was proof-positive to me that good news travels swiftly. All the ladies I spoke with during the coffee hour after the service knew that I had hastily departed Mrs. Kangley's and was now the Burkheimers' guest. Marion, of course, was sipping coffee and joyfully disseminating her own history of this event from beneath the broad brim of her flower-bedecked hat to anyone who cared to inquire of her; while Mrs. Kangley, superciliously maintaining her tea cup in the air before her ample bosum like a small Montgolfier balloon, astounded her listeners with her dramatization of my misdemeanors. Gramma and Grampa Benson, I feel certain, made every effort to give an impartial accounting of the whole business when applied to for clarification - which, inevitably, they were, considering the fact that I was regarded as their bona fide grandson. And I cannot imagine that this circumstance produced any up-surge of tolerance for my shenanigans in Gramma's breast . After all, being the wife of the Episcopal Vicar of the San Juans could be demanding enough without the agency for turmoil provided by a " grandson" who had become the arch-weapon of a hen feud.

Mrs. Kangley ultimately lost the contest with Marion Burkheimer. I think Marion simply out-classed her. In a bout between class and absurdity, class will carry the field every time.

After that summer, I saw very little of Marion and Charlie Burkheimer. We met again only once. College and work kept me occupied on the mainland. Any trips I made to Orcas were brief and the time between them was long. Oddly enough, though, I encountered Mrs. Kangley several times during these visits. She was as friendly on these occasions as she had been before I had gone to live with her. And I found I could not dislike her. Her absurdity was too grand for that. It elevated her above the common tide of humanity. And, in a way, it elevated her above even Marion Burkheimer. Mrs. Kangley, no doubt, thought I was as crazy as I thought her. Perhaps this was a mutually understood thing, and perhaps it was the basis for our cordial relations over the next two years.

Dave Hutchins did not employ me the following summer. Sometime during the March preceding it, I had made a trip to the island to tell him I wanted to work at my Uncle Bill's Lincoln/Mercury dealership in Tacoma and that he should be casting about for some one to replace me. Dave smiled around his cigarette and said that he was disappointed to hear this, that he would miss me, and that he had already hired a fellow to take my place.

After my summer working in West Sound, I never returned to Orcas as an "inhabitant" of the island. Life carried me in other directions. I go back now as a voyager, for the waters around the island are my favorite summer sailing grounds. The landfalls we make hold many memories - events and people of thirty years and more ago. And somehow, the memories always make the landfalls seem like going home.

©2003 December 23, 2003

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