A note from the author: Congratulations on your Bicentennial issue in which I am delighted to have a part. It will surprise you to know that at 91 I am perhaps your oldest contributor ever (perhaps before any of you were alive!), not a new one. I appeared in l966 with "The Moment" and in l967 with "Summer Is the Suffering Time Here." It was ever a delight to appear in your pages.
Here is an excerpt of Francis's story "Hog Island" from issue 300.3, Summer 2015.
You must know first that Hog Island is the island nearest the town shore. You can see it from Thames Street or Hope or from any high point along the coast; and farther out in the harbor, long and low, Prudence Island; and farther off, almost out of sight, the other two, Hope and Charity Islands. The Pilgrim Fathers, looking out and seeing it all, named them.
The ferry—sharp white gliding serenely back and forth all day long—bound Hog and Prudence and town, fifteen minutes to Hog Island, thirty to Prudence, then back. Much of the year you caught glimpses of the island through the town’s thick trees, but in winter you could see it clearly through the webs of naked branches: a tiny thing no more than a blot in the harbor, a rough irregular clump of earth and rock outcrops and berry bushes and shrubs and low trees deformed by winds; the scrubby soil could nurture no tall, graceful trees like those which so distinguished the town. And you could see the scattered modest summer cottages which people retreated to weekends or stretches of summer to escape, change the view, indulge…
Our house on Hope Street faced the harbor. All my early life I looked out toward Hog Island and beyond. But my family had no cottage there. For the long summer vacation ours was the grandparents’ on Long Island, so we’d go from town as if to another country and return in the fall for school. I might have missed Hog Island but for the church and our Sunday school teacher.
The Congregational Church was a rare beauty, stone with upward climbs of ivy and with Gothic deeps within—high recessed, stained-glass windows which cast all the richest color of heaven and hell over the congregation. Above the nave, a Gothic design led the eye high up to a tiny point of light, as if the church had been built around that light—it made that tiny glow infinite. Whenever interest in the sermon flagged, I could not resist following the nave’s intricate web up to that light. When I lowered my eyes, they brought down that white spot in reverse and it lingered black, as optical images will, before clearing. Something of our church’s generous view of humanity seemed to reside in the rich extremes of the church structure, in the light the sun cast and in the dark deeps. Beside but set back from the church—connected to it by a passageway to an anteroom—was the Sunday School, the same stone and ivy, but filled with ordinary daylight.
It was the Sunday school which took us out on our first forays: summer picnics on the shore, Easter services as the rising sun blazed the bay gold, bivouacs, youth treks up Mount Hope to bring King Philip and the Narragansett Indian wars to life, berrying excursions to Prudence, and—when we got into Mr Bennett’s class—the once or twice-a-year weekend at his cottage on Hog Island.
His mother and father were, when I entered his classes, getting too old and ailing to go through what for them was the arduous task of preparing, carting, and unloading a weekend’s or especially a summer’s needs—dependent on a constant traffic between the island and town—so Mister B, who thought the island was a miniature paradise, delighted in filling his cottage with us. There would be beds set up in all the rooms, including a cot in a corner of the kitchen and cots on the back screened-in porch. He would keep us running. He had a meticulous system, an order of entertainment tantamount to exercises—breakfast, hike, bird and sea curiosity (study), lunch, interlude (when we could wander unguided), swimming, games, supper, table games and then radio, early bedtime.
Interlude and early bedtime were the richest experiences. We were enjoying the early agonies of maturing puberty—hot nuts, blazing balls, hard gonads (we had a dictionary of descriptions)—and hoped Mister B, whatever he might have heard, would be discreet enough to retreat behind his partial deafness so we could indulge in whispering, in talk which gave us the illusion of becoming experienced. One or two of us or a small group sneaked together to enjoy vicariously the experience of Everett Wood, the tallest, most developed of us all, homely, daring—plenty of gall, in fact—who could boast experience and told it, evoking wonder, tension, mystery, occasionally even the illusion of ecstasy, by nurturing in his nearness the possibility of promises fulfilled. (Everett? Why not us? And after, surely the others—no different from me—must have fantasized alone and in silence). And in our eyes would materialize those images from class, the cafeteria, the school grounds—they would stand, almost touchable, in the center of our circle, or between us, made visible so that if we raised a hand we could touch them at last—Helen, Yvonne, Louise, Lucy. Our hands could travel slowly down long black hair (Edna’s), blonde (Jo’s) red (Beatrice’s), along chins, down necks, over breasts, waists, hips, our bodies even at this moment trembling and about to die as we imagined pressing at last against those thighs, our fingers at last running along the soft quivers of flesh in the most delicate invisible places, in visions which no filthy name could make less enchanting, blight, soil. So, together, each of us would nonetheless be touching his own dream and, soon, or finally, somehow, all the disparate images would blend like images in the kaleidoscopes all of us had when very young, flicks of one bit of glass, glimmers of separate colors, now Lucy, Edna, Yvonne, etc., in a kind of passionate juxtaposition as one’s hand turned the cylinder so that suddenly—as if one had said her name—all the bits made a beautiful and perfectly balanced ideal image, a stylized rose, a stained-glass image—and so we would fall for the briefest moment into silence in which at last someone would whisper softer than the finger of desire subtly touching flesh: “Rita.”
Rita.
The word connected all. Rita.
She was small and dark and perfectly shaped. Everything about her invited—light breath, quick eyes dark brown in her white face, the long dark hair we were certain longed to be caressed, her soft slow walk that made her flesh seem to sigh. She. Unlike most girls then, she wore bold touches of makeup. The bold red of her mouth made cries in us, the dark shadows implied mystery, the blued lids the exotic, and her dark lashes Revlon intimacies: and she spread the air with Arabian Nights scents. Most alluring of all, with an air indifferent (who could know what it concealed?), she seldom looked at anyone unless spoken to and then she tuned on you the warmest brown gaze so directly as to baffle, drawing blushes and bungled words, and in turn gave out a soft throaty laughter so palpable we’d feel we’d been brushed against. The air, life, promised…and soon…fulfillment. We could bear classes, band or football or play practice because night would come and…
When it did come, each of us would be alone or with another girl. Perhaps, despite our genuine affection for our date or steady, the haunt of Rita hung over us. Maybe we all thought, as I did, Everett’s with her. Or Mannie. Or Burt. Or Dante. For—truth was—somebody was with her.
Because she would have someone. Already, sitting in the classroom on a Monday morning, there was an aura about her, after the pre-class whispers by whoever had over the weekend lain in Paradise—larger he seemed, swelled with more than pride over his masculine achievement, a kind of marathon performance behind him, more heroic than any four-letter man. It is not frequent in life that one sits in the same room with a living legend. She was legend. The other girls, the teachers and parents surely must have felt the naturalness of what Rita desired and the unnaturalness of her promiscuity; and anyone who discerned Rita’s aura must have genuinely felt an admiration for her beauty and a lament for what it—and living with a divorced mother who had always worked and could not properly raise and accompany or watch over her daughter—could lead to.
“Don’t give me that shit about parents and divorce and poor,” Everett would say. “It’s in her. She was born hungry for it. Drives me crazy You should see her—it’s not just she can tease you into anything—she doesn’t—she just lies there, moves, every little move’s to burn you, set your balls on fire, only you get to knowing she doesn’t even try to excite you, it’s in her, she’s built so’s she got to have it. She can’t be without it, it’s what she’s for—I can’t tell you—you should see her. I think sometimes she doesn’t even know who’s with her, it’s not me Everett Woods, it’s just it happening. She throws her arms back over her head, her arms crossed over her face and moves, jesusgod, moves so even I’m not there anymore, takes me down so’s, after, I want to keep kissing her whole body, I do, she lets me—I mean she doesn’t let me, she just lies there, she could be sleeping—sleeping, fuhchkrissake, while I’m touching and kissing all her body, and her paying no attention like she knows it’s got to happen—jesus, if I could understand!—and I could pick her up and shake her, I could kill her but I can’t stop, just keep my mouth, my tongue, going over her skin, and I don’t know, then it’s morning and she’s gone and me thinking bout it, what the hell’s wrong with me I’m doing these things? What a fool! But in the back of my mind all day’s night coming, only maybe she’ll be gone with somebody else, she doesn’t care if it’s me or anybody else humping her, it’s humping, not us, and all day long thinking it I get crazier, somebody’s there before me, and work goes right out of my head, christ, you can’t know, I’m going out of my fucking mind, she’s make me but I can’t blame her, the bitch, that whore, yes she is, a whore, she was born one, nobody could make herself that good, no, to be that good your blood and bones and heart’s got to be born for it, it’s like something made her that way so she hasn’t got a chance and now me either, I live for it.”
H.E. Francis is the author of six collections of stories and two novels. His collections have won awards and his stories have been frequently anthologized, notably in the Best American, O. Henry, and Pushcart volumes. He lives in Huntsville and Madrid and is the translator of notable Argentine literature.