Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
hard to eat it slowly, swallowing one bite before ripping off another.
“Hannah?” Edith barked.
I swallowed. “We went for a walk.”
“For how many hours?”
“We went to look for the lost town.”
“What lost town?”
I told them. I was hoping one of them would ask if we found
it, but they weren’t thinking along those lines. Grandma Adele was
thinking, though. She said to Edith, “I really think she ought to have
a good wash right away. Those woods could be full of poison ivy.
Yellow laundry soap.”
Poison ivy. There isn’t any poison ivy on Beal Island. The poi-
son ivy was in some other woods, in someone else’s childhood, but
that didn’t stop either of them.
There wasn’t a laundry in the schoolhouse, and no yellow laun-
dry soap. Our wash was taken to Mrs. Seavey, who had a machine
with a mangle and a jungle of clothesline strung in her yard. Edith
and Adele made me take off all my clothes right there in the kitchen,
where the light was brightest, and watched as I washed all over with
a sponge and a cake of Ivory soap. I could have gone upstairs and
soaked in a hot tub in private, but that way I might have felt warm
again, or been comforted. When they let me dry myself, with a dish
towel, Edith carried my clothes away to the laundry hamper, and Adele
brought me a wrapper. It was her own, a baby blue wool old lady
wrapper with lace on the collar. It was much too short and smelled of
1 7 9
B E T H
G U T C H E O N
bath powder. I felt repossessed by these two, completely. Edith asked
if I wanted anything more to eat, but I was too exhausted and demor-
alized by then to feel hungry. Edith turned out the lights, and we all
three trooped upstairs.
Outside the door to Stephen’s bedroom, Edith stopped and gave
me this dry little kiss on the cheek, as if to say I shouldn’t forgive
you but I’m so tenderhearted I can’t help myself.
Her mother watched. Then Edith said, “Well. We’re just glad
you’re safe. Of course you can’t see any more of the Crocker boy. If
it will make it easier for you, I’ll call and explain it to his father.”
I just stared. I was choked with aching in my throat, tears and
anger, so I turned and went into the bedroom and shut the door. I
couldn’t think what she would do to me for not saying good night or
thank you to Grandma Adele.
I sat in the dark wishing Stephen was awake; I thought of Con-
ary, and wondered what was happening to him at that moment. I
wanted to be near him. I wanted just to see him, so badly it was
sickening. I sat in that lacy wrapper and listened as Adele came out
of her bedroom again and down the hall to the bathroom; then Edith.
When the house was completely quiet I went back out and down
the stairs in the pitch dark. I couldn’t risk turning a light on, and I
was too exhausted and angry even to care what might be waiting,
anywhere, in that inky blackness. I felt my way into the kitchen and
found the laundry hamper. I dug Conary’s shirt out and crept back,
desperate not to bump anything or make a noise that would bring the
two of them down on me. Back in Stephen’s room, wearing the shirt,
I could finally go to bed, and to sleep.
I don’t know how to explain what happened next. It was as if a
high wall I’d been constructing for years had collapsed and buried me
1 8 0
M O R E
T H A N
Y O U
K N O W
under a ton of rubble. What had happened the day before, and in the
weeks since we’d come to the Schoolhouse, seemed like a phantasm.
What was real was that Edith hated me. Edith stripping me naked in
the kitchen. Edith, who was solid flesh and right outside my door, and
was such a poor excuse for a mother to me that I hated her. I really
hated her. I was so angry that I couldn’t wake up, and I certainly
couldn’t get out of bed. I think I was afraid that if I did I would roar
out black flames and say unforgivable things, even hit her. I pictured
myself bringing something sharp and heavy right down on her head,
and the surprised stupid look on her face. I felt motherless, homeless,
and possessed.
I slept and slept and my head was filled with lurid dreams, of
sex and murder, red-tinged black visions. I must have been radiating
something fearsome, because Edith stayed away from me. I heard
voices outside the bedroom door, often, and then I’d sleep and then
there would be knocks, but I never answered. Sometimes Stephen
would creep in and sit on the side of the bed and look at me, to make
sure I was alive. I felt as if I’d been drugged, and all I wanted was to
stay under the covers with Conary’s shirt wrapped around me and stay
asleep forever. Finally Edith started banging on the door to say I had
to get up because my father was there. I was such a problem that with
all his worries he had had to leave his job and take the train all the
way up here to deal with me.
I finally managed to haul myself out of bed, but I felt as if my
body was made of anchors. I thought of wearing Connie’s shirt down-
stairs, but I was afraid they’d take it away from me, so I hid it under
the covers at the bottom of the bed. Without it, I felt so vulnerable
that I didn’t think I could make myself leave the room.
The jury was waiting for me in the kitchen. Edith, Father, and
Adele. If I had had any hope that now, finally, my father would stand
up for me, that he would remind Edith that he and I at least were the
1 8 1
B E T H
G U T C H E O N
same flesh and bone, it didn’t survive my arrival in that room. My
father didn’t get mad often, but when he did, it was not pleasant. He
was mad to be there, and he might have been mad at Edith for calling
him there, but she was a dangerous adversary and I wasn’t. I was
about to become the object of all the things he had to be mad about
in that long hot Depression summer.
Of course first we had to deal, again, with my hair. I’m sure
he’d been told what to expect, but he seemed shocked anyway. He
said I looked as if I’d escaped from Dixmont. (That was the local
lunatic asylum where he grew up. Idiotic and feeble-minded persons,
the inmates were called in the county records.) Father did not think I
looked like Saint Joan.
He asked me what I had to say for myself. I didn’t say anything.
He didn’t like that. He looked worn out and rumpled, as if he’d
slept in his clothes on the train, which I’m sure he had. “Do you want
a good whack, young lady?” he asked me.
I said, “Oh sure, why not?” I saw his hands twitch. He really
wanted to hit me. He had never hit me in his life, but this day, he
wanted to.
“Keep it up, Hannah,” he said. His voice was cold. Then he
asked me what I thought I was doing, disappearing for something like
twelve hours with some hoodlum and worrying my mother half to
death. I said I thought I was going clamming. It failed to amuse him.
Edith gave him a look that meant, See? See what I mean?
“I don’t understand why ‘clamming’ takes twelve hours, Han-
nah.”
I thought about it awhile. What did it matter what I said? Prob-
ably not at all, so why not just tell him the truth? I tried to, but no
matter what I said, with them all staring at me, it sounded like lies.
A silence followed my recitation. I gathered that by now Adele
1 8 2
M O R E
T H A N
Y O U
K N O W
had been brought up to date on my summer vacation, because she
didn’t say anything. Daddy’s voice changed then. He began using a
very mild tone, the sort of tone you’d use on a mental defective who
had taken a few hostages and was threatening to shoot them all in the
head. Talk sweet, boys, and she’ll never figure out that as soon as she
gives up her guns we’re going to mow her down.
“Tell me, Hannah. Is this ghost you saw the same one that’s
supposed to be in this house?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Well, can you tell me, how does it manage to be here
and out there at the same time?”
“I don’t know that it is. Was it in this house on Tuesday at four
thirty in the afternoon?”
Nobody answered.
“I guess it wasn’t, then. So it wasn’t here at the same time. It
was there.” Surprise, I thought. Even a mental defective can be a
smarty-pants. I wanted so badly for him to understand me, defend me,
but we were going from bad to worse.
He said, “Hannah. Why would a ghost from Beal Island come
all the way into Dundee to make trouble?”
He in no way wanted an answer, so I didn’t bother to give him
the obvious one: Because the town on Beal Island is gone. There’s
nobody there to haunt. Out loud, I said, “This house used to be the
schoolhouse on the island. I don’t think the ghost cares that it’s been
moved.” That stopped them for a minute.
My father was surprised and asked Edith if it was true about the
house. She didn’t know. He asked me how it got here, and I told him.
He was pretty interested. He seemed to remember, briefly, where he
and I had met before.
He said, “So. You think there’s some connection between this
1 8 3
B E T H
G U T C H E O N
house and whoever this ghost is supposed to be?” He made it sound
as if it were a cartoon ghost, something cuddly and white with pop
eyes.
“We think so, yes. Ghosts have their places. Maybe we found
the house where it lived, maybe we found the old schoolhouse foun-
dation; we don’t know.”
“We?” Oh, what a patient smile he gave me. I almost fell for it.
“Me and Conary.”
That was all they needed to hear. They were all over me like
wet blankets trying to smother a fire. What was the matter with me.
What would happen to me if I so much as spoke to young Mr. Cracker
again. (My father deliberately and repeatedly called him Young Mr.
Cracker.) I was rude. I had bad morals. The whole list of my crimes,
plus the kitchen sink.
I stopped listening.
When my father was gone, back to Boston, Adele gave me a
bowl of graham crackers in milk for supper. I ate it, and was suddenly
so hungry I could have eaten the box, but she put it away. I tried to
read a story to Stephen while we waited for his mother to come back
from taking Father to the train, but I kept crying. Stephen leaned
against me and looked frightened, so I told him I was sorry and went
back upstairs to bed.
Edith, or someone, had searched the bed and taken Connie’s
shirt. I never saw it again. She must have burned it.
*
*
*
1 8 4
M O R E
T H A N
Y O U
K N O W
Late that night, or in the early morning, I had finally cried so
much and slept so much that I couldn’t do either one anymore. Lying
awake in the dark room listening to my brother breathe, I was visited,
most unwillingly, by thoughts of the Haskells. They began playing on
the screen behind my eyelids, like a movie I didn’t want to see but
couldn’t turn off. On a Sunday morning, when the meeting house bell
was tolling for worship, something unthinkable happened. Someone
walked into the parlor with an ax. I saw that much—I saw the ax
raised, then I saw it fall, then I saw it again, a figure walking sound-
lessly into the parlor with an ax.
According to Phin Jellison, it had been going on noon when
Virgil Leach called in to borrow something and found that someone
had lost a battle against anger and split Danial Haskell’s head open
like an acorn squash, wrecking at least five lives with one stroke.
Six, if you count Sallie’s lost brother, and you might as well since
he was certainly part of the toll. They all would have been dead by
now in any case, but one of them refuses to have it. One of them
walks and grieves for its life so relentlessly that it wouldn’t mind
sucking the life out of you or me, as if that would give it another
chance.
I thought about them all—Danial, Claris, Sallie, Mercy, Amos—
and I began to be angry at
them
as well as at Edith for blaming me
for her own unhappiness, at my father for not protecting me from her,
at Grandma Adele for that sugarcoated malice that made Edith the
way she was. People made their own choices and mistakes and then
shoved the consequences onto other people, and I was mad at all of
them. I was furious at the ghost. I thought about what little I’d learned
about the Haskells from this one and that one, from Bowdoin and
Nella and Phin Jellison’s gory pamphlet. I thought people were fools
to make such a mystery of it. Sallie was young and passionately in
love and she wanted a chance to live her own life. Her father said no
1 8 5
B E T H
G U T C H E O N
to her once too often for no good reason and she bashed his head in.
Why would they have tried her twice if it wasn’t that? But Paul
LeBlond had left her anyway, and she was weeping weeping weeping,
the tragic heroine, except when she ran across living people, who
didn’t think that life itself should stop because of what she was feel-