Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
I took my hand and wove my fingers between his. Shyly he
turned and kissed my shorn forehead. We sat like that in silence for I
don’t know how long. Connie stroked my hair now and then. I was
tired. And sad. And hungry. And falling in love.
Conary said, “Look at the water.” I did. It had a silver texture,
no longer as glassy still as it had been at sunset. “Breeze is coming.
By the time the moon is up we’ll be able to sail.”
We waited, and slowly the waning moon slipped out of the trees
on the far shore and filled the bay with shimmering light. We were so
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hungry for it after all that blackness that it seemed to us the difference
of night to day. For the first time since sunset we could see the shapes
of rocks and trees beyond the circle of firelight. We both stood up,
and Conary started piling sand onto the fire.
“Is there enough breeze to sail?”
“Yes. Not very fast, though.” Quickly we loaded our gear onto
the little sailboat. In the moments it took Conary to return the blanket
to the fishing hulk, I was terrified something would happen before we
could leave. But then he was back, beside me. We climbed into the
sailboat and with the paddle poled ourselves out into the cove. Conary
pulled up the anchor; the wet line spattered freezing water as he reeled
it in and coiled it. The anchor had to be dipped and dipped to rinse
off the black sandy muck before he would bring it aboard. There was
no way to recover the clam hod. It was many feet down in water as
black as ink.
I let down the centerboard and unstopped the main. We hoisted
sails. What breeze there was seemed barely to be whispering across
the water, but the sails softly filled to the north, and as soon as we
had way on to come about, we turned and started up the reach for
home.
We were well out onto the bay, gliding directly before the
breeze. Our sails were all the way out like motionless wings, and we
moved softly and silently in the silver moonlight. You could barely
even hear the licking of water against the hull. Conary leaned against
the coaming, holding the tiller. His hair fell across his forehead, and
there were dark shadows around his eyes. He was worn out. I sat down
hugging my knees for warmth, but Conary held out his arm to me,
and I went to him and settled in, leaning back against his chest in the
warm circle of his arm. We watched the stars.
Somewhere down the bay we heard an engine cough to life. It
could have been miles away. Gradually the sound grew stronger. It
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was coming toward us, indeed at that hour could only have been com-
ing
for
us. Thoughts of what was now ahead of us began to crowd
into my head. It occurred to me that Conary and I would be separated.
I reached up and took his hand, and he squeezed it hard. We ghosted
along, waiting.
I don’t know exactly when I understood that the boatman was
Conary’s father. The boat was an old lobsterman, white with scarred
pink paint on the cockpit housing, and
Ruth E
written in script on the
transom. It roared up the bay and made a circle around us. The driver
stared without expression at Conary, who met his gaze, and the fact
that he circled at undiminished speed, throwing a huge wake, was the
only sign that he was furious. Neither he nor Conary said a word.
When we stopped rocking wildly in the wake, the
Ruth E
pulled up
beside us and slipped into neutral.
Mr. Crocker stared at me awhile and then at Conary. He said,
“Are you Hannah Gray?” I admitted to it. He said to Conary, “Her
mother’s looking for her.” Conary nodded. Well, he’d said they’d be
looking for me. What he hadn’t said, but of course knew, was that he
would be blamed.
Conary got up and made to drop the mainsail. I went forward
to take down the jib. Mr. Crocker tossed me a towline, which I cleated
to our bow. Then he pulled
Frolic
in to him and reached a hand to
me. . . . I understood. I was to ride with him. I looked at Connie, and
caught a flash of something dreaded, unhappy, in his eyes, but then it
was gone. He said nothing and gave me no sign. So I left him.
Mr. Crocker took off the lumber shirt he was wearing and made
me put it on. It didn’t make me any warmer; there was no sense that
it was given out of warmth. Mr. Crocker was a big man with a deeply
weathered face and the same weirdly light eyes as Conary’s. This I
noticed during the brief moment he stood looking at me as if to say,
So you’re what a smart girl from Boston looks like? I wondered all
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the way home how cold he was, and how much he resented me. I tried
to imagine by what transaction he had learned that I was missing, and
that Conary and I were together.
He pushed his engine back into gear. He watched carefully,
expressionless, for the moment when the towrope grew taut before
he accelerated. He was too good a boatman to snap the line by start-
ing up too fast, though I felt fairly sure that his care was out of
pride in himself, not concern for Connie’s comfort or safety. We
picked up speed and I watched from the stern as Conary, ten feet
behind us, set about furling and stopping his mainsail. Then he
flaked and bagged the jib and coiled all his lines. When all was se-
cure, he stood holding the boom to steady himself and the tiller to
hold
Frolic
in line, and looked at me. I watched the air stir his dark
hair. I reached a hand to my own hair, abruptly remembering what
it looked like; my reaction must have showed on my face because
Conary smiled. His smile seemed to say, Courage, buddy, this is
only the beginning. So I smiled too, as well as I could, to say,
Courage to you too.
As we pulled into the town anchorage, there was not a word, or
even a look, between father and son. Mr. Crocker slowed down and
made for a mooring with a little rowboat on it. Conary tied his tiller
long enough to go forward and, at just the right moment, to cast off
the towline. From the stern of the
Ruth E
I reeled it in and coiled it,
watching as he glided on to his own mooring. We circled around to
ours. I wanted to pick up the buoy for Mr. Crocker, but he never even
acknowledged the offer; he just went about doing what he did every
day in exactly the way he liked to do it. He picked up the buoy from
the cockpit, stopped the boat by throwing the engine into reverse, cut
the motor, and then walked himself forward to secure the mooring line
on the bow cleat. Then he brought the rowboat around and held it for
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me to get in. I could feel him waiting for me to do something stupid
like sit in the bow.
Side by side in silence the two men secured their oars and at-
tached their skiffs to their outhaul. They used the same moves. Mr.
Crocker, pulling hand over hand, sent the two little boats bobbing out
to where they would float even at lowest tide. Then in silence we
walked up the hill together. Connie and I moved toward his truck, but
Mr. Crocker marched toward a decrepit sedan patched with spots of
rust.
“I’ll drive her,” Conary said.
“
That’s
a fine idea,” said his father. He opened the door of his
car for me, and stood waiting for me to get in. So, I did. Conary and
I didn’t say good-bye. We didn’t say anything. I sat in the car smelling
the ancient upholstery and looked at my hands. Mr. Crocker backed
carefully up to Main Street and turned his car toward Edith’s house.
He drove twenty-five miles an hour the whole way. He was
pretty polite to me, once Conary wasn’t there anymore. I said we got
stranded when the wind dropped. He said it was true, there hadn’t
been a breath of it. He asked if we’d had anything to eat, and I said
clams for lunch. He said, “Where’d you go, March Cove?” and I said
yes. There was a little edge in that last question, as there is when you
know the answer and mean to be insulting.
I wondered what it was going to be like for Conary when he got
home. His father said to me, “Your mother must be pretty worried.”
I wondered what it was going to be like for
me
when I got home. I
said I was sure she was. We drove the rest of the way in silence.
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Spring 1886
By April the air in the Haskell house had become thickand
charged, like the atmosphere that produces heat lightning. Mercy Chatto
hid in the schoolhouse as much as she could. She didn’t want to be alone
with Danial anymore, and neither did anyone else. When he lumbered in
from the cove, it was like hearing a wounded bear up on the porch,
furious and lonely and unnatural. He could locate his injury but not
reason past it or help himself. In fact his efforts to do so had long since
broken the shaft of the weapon off in the wound, where no one could
get at it.
Venom, which sometimes coursed quietly for months like an un-
derground stream, other times erupted in unexpected places in the house-
hold. Danial roared at Sallie. Mrs. Haskell lashed out at Mercy for boiling
a pan dry when it was she herself who had done it. Sallie and Mrs. Haskell
fought with each other. This shocked Mercy almost more than the con-
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temptible pokings she infrequently suffered from Danial. She’d been
around farm animals far too long for virgin primness, though not for
disgust, since it seemed to her that at the moment Danial wielded his
swollen manhood where it wasn’t wanted, he was most unmanned. She
disliked pitying him but put up with him as you would a badly trained
dog. Mercy was young, but she was not a delicate flower. If she had a
resentment, it was less of Danial than of Claris, for not seeing what turn
things had taken and putting a stop to it.
She couldn’t tell her parents what they had done when they sent
her out to the island to preserve her from the wicked ways of town. She
didn’t want to shame them. This was only what came of wanting your
children to make the same choices you had. Mercy was beginning to think
she would not go back to the Neck when this school year was over. She
was beginning to think she would like to travel to Florence, Italy, the
most beautiful city in the world according to Signor Floro, the island’s
master stonecutter, who came from Carrara, and whose dark-eyed twins
with their long black lashes and shy foreign manners made up Mercy’s
entire second-grade class. These twins had brought her a stereopticon
picture of the Florence Duomo as a present their first day of school, and
she kept it on her desk in the schoolhouse. Out here on the edge of the
island, in sight of open sea, it seemed like the easiest thing in the world
to hop overboard onto a ship and be off to the wide world. It was a
better thing to think about than growing up to a life like Claris and
Danial Haskell’s.
Spring was late in coming that year; the winter seemed to wind on
and on, and the joke going around the village was that when the trees
finally did leaf out it would be in yellow and orange and they’d fall right
off the same day. The hackmatacks were covered in yellow fuzz, but
nothing turned green. What they were having instead of spring was an
endless mud season. Even in April the ground was frozen hard except for
a few inches at the surface. When snow or rain fell, it had nowhere to
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go. The surface mud became saturated with water, and all the roads and
footpaths were the consistency of chocolate pudding. Everyone’s boots
and hems and trouser cuffs were caked with it.
Sallie Haskell’s beau, Paul LeBlond, was talking about Colorado.
Sallie came into the schoolhouse one afternoon when Mercy was there
alone grading a Latin essay.
Pater bonus agricola est,
it began. Sallie had been crying, hard, and her eyes and nose were red and ran with anger. She
couldn’t go home like that. She sat beside Mercy, weeping.
“What happened? Can you tell me?” Mercy asked.
Sallie took deep breaths and shook her head violently, less to answer
no than to shake off some intolerable emotion. “Paul,” Sallie said.
Mercy said, Oh. She had already heard that Paul was leaving the
island. She didn’t know if Sallie would go with him, and Sallie seemed
incapable of saying more about it than his name. That was the way of
the family. There were so many things they had secretly decided must
never be put into words that living with them was like living in a glass
maze. Mercy kept bumping into barriers she didn’t know were there,
although Claris and Sallie navigated them expertly. Mercy had thought at
first that Danial was the jailer, but when she began to see more of how
it worked, she wondered if it was designed by the women, a prison in