More Than You Know

BETH GUTCHEON

a n o v e l

MOR E TH AN YOU K NOW

F o r W e n d y W e i l

Contents

Begin Reading

3

Acknowledgments
270

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Beth Gutcheon

Credits

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Somebody said, “True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks

about and few have seen.”

I’ve seen both, and I don’t know how to tell you which is worse.

MychildrenthinkI’mmadtocomeuphereinwinter,but

this is the only place I could tell this story. They think the weather is

too cold for me, and the light is so short this time of year. It’s true

this isn’t a story I want to tell in darkness. It isn’t a story I want to

tell at all, but neither do I want to take it with me.

If you approach Dundee, Maine, from inland by daylight, you

see that you’re traveling through wide reaches of pasture strewn

with boulders, some of them great gray hulks as big as a house. You

can feel the action of some vast mass of glacier scraping and goug-

ing across the land, scarring it and littering it with granite detritus.

The thought of all that ice pressing against the land makes you un-

derstand the earth as warm, living, and indestructible. Changeable,

certainly. It was certainly changed by the ice. But it’s the ice that’s

3

B E T H

G U T C H E O N

gone, and grass blows around the boulders, and lichens, green and

silver, grow on them somehow like warm vegetable skin over the rock.

Even rock, cold compared to earth, is warm and living, compared to

the ice.

For miles and miles, the nearer you draw to the sea, the more

the road climbs; I always think it must have been hard on the horses.

Finally you reach the shoulder of Butter Hill, and then you are tipped

suddenly down the far slope into the town. My heart moves every time

I see that tiny brave and lovely cluster of bare white houses against

the blue of the bay.

The earliest settlers in Dundee didn’t come from inland; they

came from the sea. It was far easier to sail downwind, even along that

drowned coastline of mountains, whose peaks form the islands and

ledges where boats land or founder, than to make your way by land.

In many parts of the coast the islands were settled well before the

mainland. This was particularly true of Great Spruce Bay, where Beal

Island lies, a long tear-shaped mass in the middle of the bay, and where

Dundee sits at the head of the innermost harbor.

Not much is known about the first settlement on Beal Island,

except that a seventeenth-century hermit named Beal either chose it

or was cast away there, and trapped and fished alone near the south

end until, one winter, he broke his leg and died. Later, several fam-

ilies took root on the island and a tiny community grew near March

Cove. Around 1760 a man named Crocker moved his wife and chil-

dren from Beal onto the main to build a sawmill where the stream

flows into the bay. The settlement there flourished and was some-

times called Crocker’s Cove, or sometimes Friends’ Cove, or Roundy-

ville, after the early families who lived there. In the 1790s, the

4

M O R E

T H A N

Y O U

K N O W

town elected to call the place Sunbury, and proudly sent Jacob

Roundy down to Boston to file papers of incorporation (as Maine

was then a territory of Massachusetts). When he got back, Roundy

explained that the whole long way south on muleback he’d had a

hymn tune in his head. The tune was Dundee and he’d decided this

was a sign from God. “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders

to perform: He plants his footsteps in the sea, and rides upon the

storm” went the first verse. The sentiment was hard to quarrel

with, though there were those who were spitting mad, especially

Abner Crocker, who had to paint out the word SUNBURY on the sign

he had made to mark the town line, and for years and years

faint ghosts of the earlier letters showed through behind the word

DUNDEE.

There are small but thriving island settlements on the coast of

Maine, even now. On Swans, Isle au Haut, Frenchboro, Vinalhaven,

the Cranberry Isles. But no one lives on Beal Island anymore. Where

there were open meadows and pastures a hundred years ago, now are

masses of black-green spruce and fir and Scotch pine, interrupted by

alder scrub. Summer people go out there for picnics and such, and so

do people from the town, and so did I sixty years ago, but I’ll never

go again.

Traces of the town have disappeared almost completely, though

it’s been gone so short a time. Yet the island has been marked and

changed by human habitation, as Maine meadows inland were altered

by ancient ice. Something remains of the lives that were lived there.

When hearts swell and hearts break, the feelings that filled them find

other homes than human bodies, as moss deprived of earth can live

on rock.

5

B E T H

G U T C H E O N

*

*

*

When my children were little, they used to pester Kermit Horton,

down at the post office, to tell about the night he was riding past

Friends’ Corner and the ghost of a dead girl got right up behind him

on his horse and rode with him from the spot where she died till he

reached the graveyard. I’d heard Kermit tell that story quite a few

times. When someone asked him who the girl was, and how she died,

he usually said that no one knew, though once he told a summer visitor

she’d been eaten by hogs.

I didn’t know Kermit when I was very little and made brief visits

to my grandparents. But I remember him well from that summer Edith

brought me and my brother back to Dundee. And I remember Bowdoin

Leach. Bowdoin liked me; he always told me he had been fond of my

mother. I was seventeen that year, and I needed the kindness. Bowdoin

was bent with arthritis, but he was still running his blacksmith shop

out in the shed behind his niece’s house. There were some who didn’t

care to talk about Beal Island, where he had grown up. Bowdoin

seemed to like to, if asked the right way. I remember him saying, the

older he got, the more his thoughts ran on the years when he was a

boy, as if life was a circle and as he got to the end of it he got closer

and closer to where he began.

I got to know Bowdoin well because the people of the town

liked to visit. Many still lived without electricity in those days, and

those who were on the telephone shared a party line with half a dozen

others; you couldn’t hog the line. When they came to the village they

wanted to have a good natter, see what all was going on. No one

seemed surprised if I wanted to spend hours mooching around the post

office or the library, or the blacksmith shop. They did a good bit of

that themselves. No one needed to know how many reasons I had for

wanting to be out of that house of Edith’s.

6

M O R E

T H A N

Y O U

K N O W

The summer I was seventeen, Boston was pinched and stricken

by the Depression, and there had been a polio epidemic the previous

year. My father wanted us children out of the city. I don’t know but

what he wanted to see less of Edith too; I certainly could have done

with less of her. Edith was the only mother I’d ever known, but she

was my stepmother. My real mother died when I was a baby. Edith

and I did pretty well together when I was little and cute, but things

changed when Stephen came along. Now that I’ve raised my own

children I have some sympathy for Edith, and I can imagine there’s

nothing like having your own little chick to make you want to kick

out the great foreign cuckoo who lives in your nest. Whatever the

reasons, for her and for me, that summer was the worst.

I’d been to Dundee for a week here or there when I was small.

We never stayed long because Edith didn’t like staying with my

grandparents. My real mother’s parents. At the grocery store, at the

post office, when I came in total strangers would say to me, “Don’t

tell me who you are, young lady. You’re the image of your mother.”

They’d have the mail all ready to hand over to me, or the groceries

Edith had ordered. It’s a rare thing, to feel you belong like that,

and I think it brought out the worst in Edith, who was from away,

and who anyway had felt like an outsider from the day she was

born.

When Ralph and I had children of our own, and began to have

a little money, we started coming back to Dundee in the summers. We

camped out on an island Ralph’s family owned back on Second Pond.

We always had a fire, and after we’d scrubbed the dishes with sand

and brushed our teeth in the lake, and Randall showed us all which

star was Betelgeuse, they used to love to hear a ghost story. Ralph

would stoke the fire and tell the story of the monkey’s paw or Schalken

the Painter. It’s good sport to tell tales like that and raise the hackles

on your neck for the fun of it. It doesn’t matter if anyone really be-

7

B E T H

G U T C H E O N

lieves them or not. It isn’t so much fun when the story you’re telling

is true.

Ralph was a good man and I loved him, but he wasn’t the great

love of my life and he knew it, though we never spoke of it. The first

love, the one you never forget and never get over, was a boy from

down on the Neck named Conary Crocker. That’s the other reason I

never told this story while Ralph was alive, that it was Conary’s story

as much as mine.

I’ll visit Ralph’s grave while I’m here. It will be a year ago he

joined the Silent Majority, as Grandfather would have said, on January

twelfth, his birthday. As if
his
life was a circle, and he closed it by

dying on the day he was born. Ralph led a charmed life in that way,

finishing what he started. He was a soul at peace, in life and in death.

An old soul, and a restful one, with no wild strains to haunt him and

no invisible burdens to carry. You can’t mourn for a life like that.

You can mourn for a life like Conary Crocker’s.

For a long time the thought of that summer made me sick and

sad. Then when I married Ralph and we lived a different life, away