More Than You Know (15 page)

sand beside them where we’d dug, and beside each of us where we

knelt was a pile of clams like strange gray eggs. I had struck a mother

lode of huge ones, and they made a proud heap, with their fat yellow

bodies forcing the shells open a crack. I gathered mine in my hands

and, making several trips, carried them to my bucket. The bucket was

almost full of clams and seawater, and I was lazy with sun. I decided

it was better to go to it than to lug it to me. Conary’s hod was full

too, which meant he’d dug about three times as many as I had. I’d

felt pretty good about my future as a clam digger until I noticed that.

Conary looked at my catch and said, “That ought to be enough

for lunch.” I thought he was teasing that we could eat that many, but

he wasn’t, and he didn’t miss by much.

He carried the hod down to the waterline to keep wet. On his

way back to me he stopped by poor listing
Frolic
for the cooler and

the cook pot he’d brought. Then he carried my bucket to the water; I

went with him to guard my booty. He poured out their water, and a

few of the clams escaped.

“Jailbreak! Run for it, boys!” Connie called. I pictured them

slipping into their element and burrowing madly into the bottom with

their black rubbery necks, but of course they just lay there like fools

in clear shallow water, so I scooped them up again. Conary rinsed the

clams and replaced the water several times. Back at the top of the

beach, he got some cornmeal from the cooler and threw that into

the bucket.

“They don’t care for it. Makes them spit, and they spit out sand.

We should leave them overnight to really clean out, but if we do we

won’t have any lunch. I don’t guess a little grit will hurt us.” He started

off to look for firewood, and I followed.

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“Can they live in a bucket overnight?”

“They can live for days like that. They just shrink some.”

“What if one dies and you eat it by mistake?”

“It’ll kill you.”

I noticed Connie wasn’t dead yet, so perhaps the odds were not

as bad as they seemed. We soon had all the wood we needed in tinder-

dry driftwood. The big pieces, thick as my leg, were amazingly light

to carry. We used pine twigs for kindling, and the fire took hold easily.

We sat side by side in the sun, leaning against the driftwood log

and drinking a cold beer we passed back and forth. The hair on our

arms was white with salt, and white seagulls wheeled overhead. Oc-

casionally one would drop down to investigate our clam holes. Conary

told me the way gulls eat clams. They fly high into the air with them,

drop them onto the rocks to smash the shells, then swoop down to

pluck out the bellies. I said that sounded like tool use. I thought man

was supposed to be the only tool-using animal. Conary looked at me,

surprised. He wasn’t used to girls caring about the same things he did.

He said, “Man’s got company.” We sat in the sun watching the sea-

gulls. Our arms touched.

When the fire was ready, hot and steady, Conary put a few inches

of water in the cook pot and got it steaming. Then he put in the clams

and covered them. While they cooked, the steam inside the pot rattled

the lid and made it jump, as if it were chattering at us. We talked

nonsense back to it, and laughed. Connie had no watch, but when he

took the lid off again, they were done. He poured a cup or two of

cooking liquid into a little enamel bowl, and he put some butter to

melt in the overturned lid of the cook pot. (I had wondered why the

handle was burned.) The clams he dumped out in a steaming heap

onto a broad piece of weathered driftwood.

Once in a while I’d feel the sun or breeze on my scalp and

remember that this morning I had cut my hair off. That felt just right.

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This day felt like the beginning of a new life, a life that could be spent

in sunshine in some new world, where it didn’t feel so dangerous to

be a motherless child. Oh, Conary. Beautiful wild boy.

I didn’t know how to eat steamed clams. Connie could have

teased me, but he didn’t. He just showed me. I felt that he wasn’t

showing me something that was his to own and mine to visit; I felt

he was showing me it was mine. My real place. He showed me the

same way he let me sail out of the harbor.

The steam had relaxed the muscles that hinged the clamshells

closed. They had opened in the pot. A clam lay inside the shell in a

thin web of something, like a shroud. Conary picked a fat clam, eased

it from the shell, and peeled the shroud off over the clam’s black neck,

like pulling a turtleneck sweater over your head. He dipped the yellow

belly into the bowl of cooking broth to rinse it; then he dipped it in

butter and held it to my mouth. I bit. He threw the neck away. I

laughed with surprise at how much I liked it. He watched as I cleaned

and rinsed and dipped one of my own. It was easy.

“The neck is like a handle.”

“Yuh. You can eat it if you want. It’s chewy.”

I did another one and fed it to him. Then we settled down to eat

in earnest. I told him I felt like a raccoon, eating with my clever little

animal fingers; again he gave me that surprised look. He did an un-

canny imitation of a raccoon eating and made me laugh with surprise

and happiness. He must have spent hours sitting in patient silence

watching wild animals to know how to do that. He certainly hadn’t

learned it by going to the zoo.

Conary came to a clam that hadn’t opened. He held it up to

show me, then lobbed it out onto the beach.

“You don’t eat any that are closed. That’s why you won’t eat

dead ones and die.”

I picked up one that was a little open, questioning. He said heave

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it, and I did. It sailed through the air, and a gull followed it down and

pounced.

We ate until we were stuffed, but we couldn’t finish all that we’d

cooked.

“I wish my stomach were bigger. I hate to waste them.”

Connie pointed at the gulls. “They aren’t going to be wasted.” I

thought this was the best way to eat I ever heard of. The seagulls

wheeled above us and squawked,
scree, scree scree.

We took the pot to the water and scrubbed it with sand, and we

washed the butter and clam broth off ourselves while we were at it.

Con’s fingernails were ragged, like mine. In fact, our hands looked

strangely alike in the clear water. We both noticed it. Connie held his

right hand up, palm facing me, as if he were taking an oath. I put my

left palm against his, and we stared. They were almost exactly alike.

Narrow palms, long curved thumbs, very short littlest fingers, knobby

middle knuckles. We turned them, palm to palm, this way and that.

He even had a curved scar on his index finger like mine where I had

cut myself with a jackknife when I was ten, trying to peel a golf ball

to see what was inside. I showed him the scars. Our eyes met.

I put my left hand up to the light just now and looked at it. The

scar is fainter; it’s an old woman’s hand. Would Conary’s still match

mine if we could lay them against each other? Two old friends and

lovers who had shared a life?

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1883

SallieHaskellhadgrownintoahandsomegirl,withherfather’s

heavy black eyebrows and brown eyes, and large hands and feet. She

looked as much a Haskell as her lost brother had looked an Osgood. But

she had her mother’s quick imagination and intuition, especially the knack

with animals. She was always bringing home hurt raccoon kittens and

birds to raise, and once she raised them, they never went back to the wild,

so the barn was full of beasts that hid in the rafters when Danial was

about but came down to nuzzle and perch on her shoulders as soon as

Sallie came in. She needed the animals for company. After Amos died,

cold anger had settled between her parents, dark in color and in the shape

of silence. Her father was ashamed and grief-stricken and incapable of

admitting it. What her mother felt she never said to a living soul, but

Sallie knew it was hard and bitter. Claris never saw Danial as a man who

was paying a terrible price for a mistake. She saw only her own loss of

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her angel boy, an endless unrequited sorrow that left her surviving child,

who was a real child and not an angel, in the cold quite as much as it

did her husband. That was the way things were, and there was no point

waiting for the horse to give milk. Sallie had life to get on with.

She loved school, and was good at it. There was warmth and life

at school, and the teacher, Miss Pease, made a special pet of her. The

village was growing too; a man from Boston had opened a granite quarry

and built a great long pier out into the reach from which the stone could

be loaded onto the boats that called for it. Men came over from the near

shore of the Neck every day to work, and some fancy stonecutters from

away, some from as far away as Italy and Scotland, came to live in the

new boardinghouse. One or two brought wives and children, and the

children came to school. It was wonderful to hear the way they talked

and to see the strange food they brought in their lunch pails. Sallie’s lunch

was always the same, mostly cold beans, except on winter mornings her

mother would give her a hot boiled egg and a fresh-baked potato, and

she would hold one in each mittened hand inside her pockets as she ran

to school, and at lunchtime eat them.

Sallie’s mother went on as she always had, tending the chickens,

carving fancy buttons from bones, teaching music at the school to any

who wanted it, since Miss Pease was tone-deaf. When the minister came

out to hold services and baptize, he always stayed with Mrs. Haskell, and

on those occasions they would have roast hen for dinner, a special treat

that came otherwise only on birthdays, Amos’s and Sallie’s. On these days

Mrs. Haskell killed her hens by wringing their necks. She taught Sallie

that that was the test of your womanhood. Girls used the ax, but a woman

broke the chicken’s neck in one swift movement of the hands. Sallie

couldn’t bear the feeling of the beak struggling against her palm or the

look in the birds’ eyes; she used the ax.

One thing had changed. Sallie’s mother didn’t want to go to the

main anymore. She always asked Danial if she could go in with him, to

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put him to the trouble of denying her, but Sallie felt she had no real

wish for it. Sallie didn’t know why, unless it was that she feared her

family would say to her, “We told you so,” about the man and the life

she had chosen. Sallie never stopped hoping Claris would change her

mind, show an appetite for color and life again. Take some pleasure in

the child she had remaining.

One spring morning when she was sixteen, Danial was making ready

to go into town, and Sallie said, “Father, Mother and I want to go too.”

Danial grunted. He stood in the doorway as if he were thinking it

over. Claris had all the doors and windows open, airing the stale winter

air out; there was a smell of green buds and a strong scent of balsam in

the air. It was going to be a lovely warm day.

“I don’t have room for two more,” he said to Sallie, finally. “You

can come.” He went out and down to the dock, carrying a wheel rim he

needed to have mended, and the setover for the pung he’d broken at

Christmastime. Claris left the room as if she hadn’t heard him and soon

was back with an armful of bedding she carried out to air on the clothes-

line. She was standing on the rock ledge outside the kitchen with her

mouth full of clothespins hanging a quilt when Danial and Sallie cast off.

As the little boat caught the spring breeze and moved lightly off onto

the bay, Sallie looked back and saw that her mother was standing, head

bent in the sunlight, weeping. It hurt her terribly.

Once in Dundee, Sallie went to Abbott’s first with a pail of eggs

to sell, and after she’d bought two pennies’ worth of rock candy, she

hurried up Union Street to see her aunts and gather news for her mother.

Grandmother Osgood had died the winter Sallie was ten, and Mary and

Jonathan Friend lived in the Osgood house now, with their children and

Uncle Leander and Grandfather Osgood, who lived in the parlor as he

could no longer climb stairs.

William was there when she got there, home from Bowdoin College

for Easter vacation. Grandfather was sleeping, and all the rest had gone

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to pay a visit to Aunt Alice’s in-laws in Orland. They would be back

midafternoon. Sallie knew her father would be at the blacksmith’s for

hours, so she decided to take a walk. The air was soft and fragrant and

the sun warm after a long winter. Also, like all islanders, she loved the