More Than You Know (19 page)

He looked at me in surprise. “Damn,” he said and skipped an-

other one. I skipped another and beat him again.

“Wouldn’t anyone come looking for
you
?”

“Don’t change the subject.” Conary skipped another stone. I

didn’t really want to change the subject, of course; I skipped another

and beat him again.

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

“My daddy.” I skipped one behind my back. Showing off.

“I’m going to beat you if we have to stay here all night,” he

said.

The fire of the sunset had hit the water and was flaring across it

like spilled paint; the reach was still. Not a boat stirred. The whole

world had gone to supper, and out here where once an entire village

had hummed there was only the sound of a loon once in a while, and

our stones whispering
plink plink plink
across the water.

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1884

Inthewinterof1884,coldclosedinearlyonBealIsland.There

was heavy snow on All Saints’ Day, and the night before, All Hallows’

Eve, a couple of boys out making mischief claimed they saw a strange

light moving in the graveyard. They said their dog had barked and barked

and then tried to dig a hole at one of the graves. The story was soon all

over the island, and it spooked Claris Osgood Haskell. For a month she

didn’t want to go out for wood after dark or to the backhouse by herself.

Danial laughed at her. Sallie didn’t. Patiently she went out with her

mother.

Christmas came and went. The Osgoods on the main wouldn’t

come out to visit in winter because Danial was ugly to them, but they

sent presents by way of Virgil or Bowdoin Leach. Claris and Sallie would

see the cousins in the summer. Relatives and friends came out for berrying

and picnics on the beach at March Cove and, when they arrived, sent one

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of the children to bring Sallie and Claris, and Danial too if he would

come. Once in a while he did. He would never admit it, but people

thought even he wished for more company, and some of the life and

bustle of the town, even if all he did was stand at the edge of it and

watch. But things were at such a pass between the two families that he

was trapped on the stand he had taken, and Claris with him.

Sallie understood all this, though it wasn’t spoken of. Her mother

had chosen to lock herself to Danial, but Sallie had not, except to the

extent that she had chosen to bear her mother company. Sallie hadn’t yet

stopped hoping that her mother would finally find that a dutiful living

daughter was true consolation for the lost perfection of the favorite. She

did what she could to protect her parents from each other, while growing

bolder at defending herself as she saw more of the ways of the world.

Sallie was finished with school, and in fact sometimes helped Miss

Pease teaching the little ones. She liked being up in the village; there was

a lot going on now that the quarries were flourishing. There was a second

store open, and a boardinghouse full of quarry workers, and there were

often parties in the evenings. Island people didn’t dance, since that was

considered, if not sinful, thoroughly unwise, but there was music, and

there were blueberry festivals and lobster boils and bean hole suppers, and

plenty of sled riding, sleighing, and skating in winter. Sallie was a popular

high-spirited girl, and several of the village boys had courted her at one

time or another. At the moment she was taken with a young man named

Paul LeBlond from Vermont, a fancy cutter up from the stoneworks at

Barre. His people were French Canadian, and he had strong arms and

high color, and could sing songs in English and French and was not afraid

of dancing, though he had to do it with other boys from the boarding-

house. They could do a noisy dance with lots of stamping, called clog

dancing, and something called the schottische, as well as square dances

from Virginia. Sallie in her reckless mood had asked him to teach her,

to the mildly scandalized surprise of her island friends.

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On a Saturday evening in January, a group of young people, boys

from the quarries along with boys and girls from the island, came to the

door to ask Sallie to go out with them. They were going to have an ice-

skating party with a bonfire, and afterward Mrs. Gott had invited them

for doughnuts and hot cider. Frank and Winnie Horton came in to speak

to the Haskells since they had known them all their lives; the rest of the

young people waited outside.

Danial said, “No.” He was sitting in the kitchen knitting an eel

net. Claris and Sallie had been sitting across the table with the work

basket between them, darning. Sallie was already on her feet, going out

for her skates, when her father spoke.

Claris looked up and stared at her husband, and Sallie stopped in

the middle of the floor. The Hortons said afterward that the color rose

in her face and she seemed to get bigger as she stood there over her father

in his chair.

“Why not?” she said in a voice like a rasp against a metal burr.

“A gadder comes to grief,” Danial said calmly, not looking up.

“That’s Grandmother speaking,” said Sallie sharply. “That’s my

grandmother speaking right out of your mouth. I don’t have to listen to

a dead woman.”

“You could do worse,” said Danial just as sharply. The young

Hortons didn’t know what to do. They felt as if they’d put matches to

a pile of tinder without knowing what they were doing, so intense were

the emotions crackling through the room.

“I’m going out,” Sallie declared.

“You are
not,
” said Danial, suddenly standing up. Now he was

standing taller than Sallie. They looked amazingly alike, with broad shoul-

ders and black eyebrows. Winnie said she believed at that moment it

would come to blows, though she had never seen a man strike a woman,

nor a woman strike a man for that matter.

Claris rose from her chair. Without a word, she went out of the

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kitchen to the ell, where the outer clothes were hung, and came back with

her own heavy black wool cloak. She ignored Danial as she crossed the

room and put the cloak around her daughter’s shoulders. She put a hand

on her back, as if to say, Go. Sallie looked at her, threw a look back at

her father, and went out. The Hortons followed her, closing the door

behind them.

Once outside with her friends and her skates under her arm, Sallie

wept briefly from anger and frustration. The circle of young people com-

forted her. He doesn’t want to lose you, some said. He lost one child,

you’re all he has. He’s afraid you’ll marry and move off island, said others.

They knew. Their own parents had the same fears, or other ones, and

were often unreasonable. He’s not so bad, they said.

I know he’s not; you don’t understand, said Sallie, her voice frantic.

k

Meanwhile, a terrible silence filled the Haskell kitchen. Claris sat

down in her chair, but she did not resume her mending. It was almost

five o’clock and night had fallen. Danial too sat for a long time, not

moving. It was getting on toward suppertime, but neither of them stirred

to get food ready. Finally, Danial rose and found the matches in the near

dark. He lit the lamp on the table. Claris got up and went out of the

room; Danial sat absolutely still again waiting, though he didn’t know for

what. She had gone up the stairs. When she came back down, she was

carrying Amos’s violin, which he hadn’t seen since the day the boy had

died.

Danial went rigid. This was an act of defiance such as had never

happened between them. She couldn’t be planning to play it? Her sitting

in this kitchen, cradling the thing that had caused all the trouble, was like

accusing him of murdering their child.

She had sat back down in her chair across the table. The fire in

the stove was close to embers, since neither had fed it wood, and the

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room was cold. Danial stared straight ahead, his eyes looking past Claris.

Claris stared straight at him, her eyes unblinking, pinning him to the

chair. After what seemed a terrible wait, she put the fiddle to her chin

and, without taking her eyes from his face, she began to play “Black-Eyed

Susan.”

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Later in the summer, I learned a great deal about what was

happening at home that night while we were stranded. I had it from

Dot Sylvester, the village telephone operator, after we became friends.

Mrs. Sylvester was a seamstress; her house was in the center of town,

the switchboard in her living room. She knew everything that was

going on. If you called her and asked her to ring, say, Kermit Horton,

she’d say something like, “Won’t do you no good, dear, I just saw

him going up the street to Abbott’s. I’ll wait till I see him go back

home and call you back.” It was a great convenience.

Sometimes Dot would get busy pinning up a hem and visiting

and fail to notice the red lights on her switchboard; people would have

to send a son or daughter over to knock on the door and tell her they

were trying to put a call through. She was always glad when some

young person at a loose end wanted to hang around and watch the

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board for her. She’d teach you to sit on her swivel stool with the

headset on, and when someone rang to place a call, you plugged cer-

tain rods in and then twirled the crank a certain number of times. Our

number was 496 ring 3. Dot wasn’t supposed to listen in on people’s

calls, but everyone knew she did; we all listened on the party line

ourselves when there was something interesting going on.

When I hadn’t returned by suppertime, Edith was beyond an-

noyed. She was upset and angry. She rang in and asked Dot to put

through a call to Boston. Naturally Dot had to check the line, to be

sure the connection had gone through all right. She heard Edith saying,

“She went up to the village this morning to get the mail and she never

came back. She knew my mother was coming today. We waited and

waited for her; we almost left Mother standing on the platform, we

were so late.”

As it happened, I had forgotten all about the great visit from

Grandma Adele. When I did remember, I knew it was going to do

nothing at all to make my life easier. If there was one thing I under-

stood about Edith, it was that she did not at any time want to get

crosswise to her mother.

I could picture my father two hundred miles away in the thick

heat of a Boston summer night, listening to this rant. What was he

supposed to do about it? He’d say, “I’m sorry.” That was what he

always said when Edith was upset, and it made her just furious. She

couldn’t tell if he meant “I’m sorry you’re upset” or “I’m sorry the

world is so terrible for you” or “I’m sorry you’re upsetting me” or

“I’m sorry I married you.” It always sounded like all of those at once,

and it tended to make her go straight up and turn left. I often wondered

why he kept doing it.

This time she couldn’t blow up at him, because Grandma Adele

would have heard, so she didn’t say anything. He asked her if she had

called Ed and Frances, my grandparents.

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She said, “No, I called you first. I didn’t think I ought to frighten

them, if there’s nothing really wrong.” Father said he was sure nothing

really was. In point of fact, I might have been drowned or murdered

by then and cut up into pieces. Every child in America expected to be

kidnapped every minute since the killing of the Lindbergh baby.

What he would have known was that Edith of course hadn’t

called my grandparents. Edith never did, if she could possibly help it,

and at the moment she was helping it by making him do it. I’m sure

he was pleased at the thought of a staggering long-distance phone bill,

on top of everything else.

Edith began on the litany of my horrible behavior, which Dot

didn’t have to tell me, since I knew it by heart. It went like this: “She’s

been just impossible, Milton. You cannot imagine what it’s been like

here the last two weeks. Thoughtless, disobedient, terrible moods,

screaming in the night. . . . Now her brother is getting frightened that

something filthy has happened to her, and I don’t know what to tell

Mother.”

My father suggested she do something sensible, like ask around

town if anyone knew where I’d gone. Ask who? Edith snapped at him,

as if she was alone on some polar ice cap.

My father told her, “Ask Nella B. Foss. And ask up at Abbott’s.”

“Nella B.’s gone home by now,” said Edith.

“Then ask Dot to ring her at home,” my father said, almost surely

knowing perfectly well that Dot was right on the line at the time.

“I didn’t know Nella B. was on the telephone,” said Edith.