It is the worst of all sins, envy. It eats away at what’s left of your heart and fills you up with black and bitter thoughts and shrinks your life to nothing, and it isn’t because you’ve been told that envy is a terrible ugly sin that you know it to be true—not like other sins that you’re told are wrong but don’t feel it—it’s because you can feel the way this one eats you up and shrivels your whole life until you’re nothing but a dry envious stick with nothing in your soul but the thought of Bella High and her vast tremendous luck, her great good fortune.
It was Annie who broke down, just as we were getting ready to leave the house; poor scrawny boz-eyed Annie who went up to Bella High and started screaming in her face that it wasn’t fair, the way she was always the one to get everything in this life—how it had always been her that was blessed with the best of everything and now it was the same all over again and Annie held out her long empty hands before Bella High and shook them and wheeled round in front of us and shouted to us all as if we didn’t know it, that the earth was a place of gifts for Bella High, always had been. Everything she wanted it gave up to her in the end. She had always had the earth’s gifts and now she had the sea’s too. “Come, Annie,” said Hannah at last and stepped forward and took hold of Annie’s stringy red wrists and pulled her away and said to all of us that we should go now. So we all went home to fetch our funeral bonnets and came back and with Bella helping this time, we gathered Matthew up onto the door again and carried him to the church and Mary conducted the service and when he was buried we all left Bella with him. At the gate I turned and saw that she had lain down on top of the earth, and perhaps you will tell me that it would make no difference to be able to do that but it seems to me that it would. She has put up a small round stone since then and she visits it often, this firm spot on the earth where she has laid him to rest. When it was all over we took off our funeral bonnets and put them away. We all knew we would not need them again. It is something to do with the current here, the particular way it bends its muscle around this piece of shore. It means that when a boat goes over and is pulled down the men are flushed away and we do not see them again, ever.Even so, a few of us went down afterwards to the shore and stood next to the little pile of greasy flotsam we have salvaged over the years that is ours—the orange buoy, the square of green nylon netting, the spars of wood, the shadows on the water that are nothing but the clouds.