Leaving Lucy Pear (3 page)

“And who is
we
?”

“My family. The Murphys. Of Leverett Street, sir.”

“Josiah,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Will you say it?”

“Is that necessary? My family includes myself, my husband, and my children. I've nine.”

Josiah went to the window. The children stood against the wall in a tight line, their hair as pale and thin and blown as their mother's, except for one girl in the middle whose hair was nearly black. To an onlooker, her dark eyes appeared dense and unfocused, but in fact she was calculating the number of jugs of perry they would have to sell before she could siphon off enough money to buy a train ticket to Canada. And Josiah was thinking about how Emma Murphy, clearly, was not a stranger to infidelity.

“I count only seven,” he said.

“The others are grown, sir.”

“And does your husband know you're here?”

“He's fishing, out at the Grand Banks.”

“So he doesn't know?”

“He will.”

Josiah returned to his desk. He searched her face for coyness or deceit but found neither, only a frank nervousness he wanted to soothe.

“And his name would be?”

“Roland Murphy.”

“Roland Murphy the fisherman, out on a long trip. And you're an aspiring cider woman.”

“Perry. Sir. We intend to wet the cape in it. We can give you ten percent.”

Josiah nodded, trying to appear calm, though her words aroused him. He tried to focus on the 10 percent, hoping money would bring him back to his role. He laughed, as he was supposed to. “Forty,” he countered.

“Fifteen?”

“Thirty,” he said, frowning. He snapped his mind back to Susannah, who would be preparing to eat her lunch now, fully dressed and alone; this afternoon, if it was the right time of month, she would pull back the coverlet on their bed and lay down a fresh towel as a rag—Turkish cotton, bought at Stearns—in preparation for his coming home. Susannah, who was a better businessman than him and who would tell him not to be sorry for Emma Murphy, not to go lower than 40 percent, not to frown but to smile when he negotiated. He focused on Emma Murphy's overbite and said, “Last offer.”

She nodded. Then she surprised him by smiling. Her smile wasn't happy but matter-of-fact, obligatory, exposing a tall, pink gum line. “Thirty,” she agreed, and it took all his strength to stop staring at her mouth.

“And your boys out there. Would they like jobs in the quarry
this summer? Twenty hours, maybe thirty? That's the most I can get away with these days, for kids. We don't usually hire them at all anymore. But yours—are they as bright as they look?”

Emma Murphy narrowed her eyes. “That's very generous. I'll consider,” she said, in the exact tone his mother had always used to pretend to consider turning down help.

“Okay, then,” he said, instead of
Very well, then,
which was what he'd learned to say from his father-in-law. “I'll see that you get what you need, for the press.”

She stood. She was older than he'd realized, maybe eight or ten years his senior, and taller, too, and he was struck, looking up at her (her mistake in standing before he'd stood irritating and attracting him), at how completely unknown she was to him. He loved Susannah. She was as essential, as inextricable from his life as his own hands or feet; it was the roll of her body toward him each morning, her long, horsey braid in his face, her Lady Esther Four-Purpose Face Cream–scented skin that righted him and sent him out into the day whole. He loved Susannah as much as he ever had—it wasn't the amount but rather the nature of his love that had changed. He felt for her now what he imagined one might feel for a sister. Most days, that passed in his mind as enough.

“I may come myself,” he said to Emma Murphy.

“You oughtn't.” Finally, she looked away.

“True,” he said, opening the door and showing her out with a sweep of his arm that would appear dismissive to an onlooker. “But I may.”

W
ashington Street wound through Lanesville as close to the coves as a road could run, rearing up with the hills, skidding this way and that as the stone walls dictated. The earliest walls had been built before the road. You could still see where they had been taken apart to make way for the new lanes that climbed from Washington Street to the woods. These—among them Leverett Street—were not so new anymore, though many of the houses lining them still looked temporary: built hastily for quarrymen, their walls were thin, their doorsteps missing roofs to shield a person from the rain, their roofs cheap paper requiring frequent patching, lending the houses a disheveled appearance, even if they were well cared for.

The Murphy house was somewhere in the middle, better or worse cared for depending on the year, and Roland's mood, and how old the oldest boys living at home were at a given time. At this time it was suffering one of its more neglected moments because Emma Murphy and her children were spending all their energies on the perry shack and Roland was away. Seven paces from the house—a few more, if you were a child—in the small yard that separated their house from the next, shaded by an old, swaybacked oak tree and assorted beech and bramble that had grown up alongside it, an outline of a cellar had been knifed into the dirt. Here Liam and Jeffrey dug with their father's big shovels while Janie and
Anne, using the oak's trunk as a vertical sort of sawhorse, measured pine planks for the shack's walls, and the youngest ones, Maggie and Joshua, dug with shells at the cellar's boundary. Their other sister, Lucy Pear, had taken them to Plum Cove Beach to find the shells. She was the one who had measured the cellar's outline and thought of using a knife—their hoe was too dull—and then cut the outline herself. She was the one who had bushwhacked through the trees dividing their yard from the next and asked Mr. Davies if he was planning to use the pile of knotty pine boards behind his house.

The boards were discards from a barn he was done building, and Mr. Davies was kind. Still, the girl's audacity astonished Emma. Lucy had always seemed older than her years, but she had not always seemed capable of brashness. As an infant she had been so calm that Emma worried she would get trampled—for a time, she even convinced herself that Lucy might be dumb, that she had been left because of a defect or injury and that no one but Emma would ever want her. This was when Roland was still telling Emma to find the baby another home:
Drop her at the orphanage at Salem, come on now.
As a mother of five, soon to be six, Emma knew he was right. She was sorry—she saw how hard he worked, saw his daily, degrading amazement: it was never enough. But Lucy's calm, the way she looked at Emma as she sucked, not tugging or bucking, only looking, her fawn-colored cheeks sighing in and out, her dark eyes locked on Emma's until, without warning, they rolled gratefully back, opened up a hole in Emma, a new, bloody tunnel through her heart.

Roland disapproved of the nursing, too. But Emma argued it was cheaper than evaporated milk, and this was true, so she got her way, and soon enough Roland fell for Lucy, too, stopping to watch her suck, tickling the bottoms of her feet. At first Emma's breasts, having weaned Jeffrey three months before, gave only a watery trickle, but then milk began to flow, and Lucy drank steadily, with that strange, almost unnerving calm. Even her fussing was gentle, more coo than cry.

Emma wondered if Lucy was dumb because then keeping Lucy could pass for a kind of selflessness. But Lucy turned out not to be at all dumb, only even-tempered and kind. She had the steady energy of a woman by the time she was eight, along with a boy's knack for physical work, for pieces and parts and how they fit together, how things worked. Now almost ten, she had become a leader among the children. She led them now, pointing with a hammer to show her sisters how to measure straight despite the board's knots. Emma sat on a stump trying to read a pamphlet she'd sent away for—blandly titled
PEAR VARIETIES
, though its real subject was perry—but Lucy's voice kept distracting her. “Like that. No, a little to the right. Yes, there. Good. But now you have to check the angle. . . .” Emma looked to see Janie's reaction—always she watched to see if her other girls would grow tired of Lucy's bossing. But she had her way about her. And Janie, while not a pushover, liked clear direction. She did as Lucy said, then tucked her pencil proudly behind her ear. Emma smiled. She was glad for the distraction. Perry was more complicated than she had thought. It was not simply cider made with pears. Pears had to stand longer than apples before you crushed them, and then the pulp had to stand before you crushed it. There were tannins to clear and possible “hazes” that could ruin it and “gravity” to check and other things Emma didn't understand. She had little memory or patience for such details, or any details at all, really—though the neighbors might have guessed otherwise, Emma had tunneled through the years of boiling potatoes in time for supper and captaining the transfer of clothing from larger to smaller children and overseeing the basic hygiene and nail clipping of nine children perpetually on the verge of chaos. There was little grace involved. And now the perry seemed to require particular perry pears, not eating pears, but they would have to use eating pears because that's all that was grown on Cape Ann, so perhaps the instructions would have to be adjusted—but how? She could not ask the perry maker she had boasted to Josiah Story about.
She knew the man because she had been selling him their stolen pears over the years, but now she would be competing with him. He would not give her a recipe or help her solve yet another problem: their timing was off. The fermentation process was much longer than Emma had realized. The perry would not be ready this fall—not even close. What had she been thinking? Of money, of course. She had not understood.

“You look worried.”

Lucy came without warning, swinging her hammer silently against her palm.

Emma removed her teeth from her lower lip, attempted another smile. “No,” she said, “not worried.”

Lucy knelt down next to Emma's stump. “Josiah Story's not coming, is he.”

“He'll come,” Emma said. She reached to ruffle Lucy's hair as if to comfort her, though it was Emma who took comfort in this gesture, the dark mass of Lucy's curls surrounding her hand like a nest. Josiah Story was the other problem. A week had passed but he had not delivered the money, as he had said he would. They had the boards, but everything else they needed his money to buy. And not only the press and the jugs and barrels and paper for a roof but something the pamphlet called a scratcher, to pulp the pears. Emma had not known to mention a scratcher in his office. She had known almost nothing. They had only ever taken pears from the Eastern Point orchard—some for eating, most to sell to the perry maker. Yet here they were, planning to hit four fields in West Parish, three in Essex, and one as far as Ipswich. Emma and Lucy had consulted maps. They even had a Schedule of Ripeness drawn up, based on the exposures of the fields. “We intend to wet the cape in it,” she had said. It made her queasy now, the ignorance of her ambition.

Lucy set down her hammer. She took the pamphlet from Emma's lap and began to page through it. “What're tannins?”

“I don't know,” Emma admitted. “I haven't gotten that far. And they likely don't explain it.”

“What about bacteria?”

Emma shrugged. “We'll figure it out.”

They were quiet as Lucy read. Joshua whined. Maggie laughed. The boys' shovels scraped in rhythm. Emma watched a male cardinal—the first of the season—flit into the fading tangle of a forsythia bush, poke around, and fly off again.

“If you look at this, it seems like they're saying it won't be ready until next year.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I know now. I didn't know before.”

Lucy freed her hair from Emma's hand and stood. “What about Da? He'll be back before we get it in the barrels.”

“I'll handle that,” Emma said, though she had no way of predicting when Roland might return. The boat he had left on was heading for the Grand Banks, but only after it dropped Roland and a couple others in Eastport, Maine. There, they planned to night fish for sardines and herring. More lucratively, they would provide shore watch for the speedboats running whiskey in from the mother ships anchored at the twelve-mile line, just beyond the Coast Guard's jurisdiction. Roland might be gone as many as ten weeks, or as few as six. He would come back on a different boat—they wouldn't know he was coming until he walked in the door. “We'll take the long view,” Emma said. She pulled Lucy into an awkward hug, the girl's hip against her ear. “It'll be okay.”

“Maybe,” Lucy said, standing stiffly in Emma's embrace. Her hip had grown a little curve, which Emma felt against her ear. How, Emma thought, had she not noticed this? “If Josiah Story ever comes.”

“He'll come,” Emma said again, though she wasn't sure at all.

But he did come, the next day, in a butter yellow car half the
length of the Murphy house, with a wad of cash he slipped into Emma's hand. He talked business: Where would Emma buy the press and how many barrels were needed, and didn't the boys want the jobs he'd offered? But when it was time to go he reached into his pocket again and, taking Emma's hand as if to shake it, slipped into her palm a silver chain, one of a dozen or more—they all looked the same to him—that Susannah Story kept in a little box she almost never bothered to open. Emma didn't know where the necklace came from. She felt it shiver coolly against her palm, felt her palm break instantaneously into sweat. She was too surprised to refuse. Even if she hadn't been, the children were watching. All she could think to do as he drove off was wave, and call, “Thank you!” and wave some more, a stilted wave, her hand fisted around the necklace as it wiggled. But the other one was full of money, so she didn't have a choice.