More Than You Know (34 page)

accident or arson. (There was no doubt that the burn was a great con-

venience to the blueberry growers who were harvesting out there those

summers.)

By the time the wills were settled, it seemed awkward to Mr. Da-

vidson to mention that he had the Bible. He had learned by then how

much it was worth on the rare book market, and it was too much for

him to either keep or sell without explanation. He did some research on

the early Haskells whose births, marriages, and deaths were listed in the

front, and found that an Efraim Haskell had gone to Harvard in 1688.

He wrapped the Bible in brown paper and mailed it off to the university,

with a note declaring an anonymous donation from an old Harvard family.

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WhenIwaswellenoughtomakethetrip,Edithdroveme

and Stephen home. Boston was hot and loud and felt as if it had a

disease that brought fever. Our apartment had been shut up since my

father left, with dust sheets over the furniture. Something had rotted

in the icebox, and the smell soaked into the corners of the house and

could not seem to be aired out. Edith had tense conversations on the

telephone with Father, but he did not come back. I was still Edith’s

prisoner. Or her charge. I needed help dressing and bathing and going

to the bathroom, and she gave it as kindly as she could. Stephen was

my comfort. He sat in my room by the hour, and we listened to the

radio or played Parcheesi. One weekend Father came home to be with

me, and Edith went to her mother’s. When she came back she was in

tears over Grandma Adele and a silver pitcher that was given to Aunt

Hester, when everyone knew it was Edith who had always wanted it.

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B E T H

G U T C H E O N

My injuries healed, but my sickness at heart was no better. I

couldn’t eat properly and stopped having my monthly. At first I be-

lieved I was pregnant, and it gave me the most unholy glow of hope,

but the doctor told Edith I was in danger of beriberi, and after that

she made me eat three meals a day and cooked everything in lard.

Once I wrote to Conary’s father. It took me a week, writing and

rewriting. I wanted to tell him I would love Conary all my life and

was sorry for his loss. It didn’t matter how hard I worked on it, it

came back marked REFUSED. Much later we used to run into each other

in Abbott’s now and again. Toward the end of his life when he

couldn’t fish anymore he worked for a time at the Esso, pumping gas.

He even filled my tank once when he couldn’t avoid it, but he never

spoke a civil word to me. He believed that if I had kept to myself,

with my big city ways, and obeyed my elders, his son would be alive.

That was hard. It was hard when we met, and it’s hard now.

At Christmas my father came home and Edith packed her bags

and Stephen’s and left for good. Father kept saying everything would

be all right again, the bad time was over. I couldn’t figure out what

on earth he meant; I didn’t think the bad time would ever be over,

and I missed my brother. It turned out he meant that he and Edith

were getting a divorce. He thought all my wildness that summer, my

“summer fling with the town rebel,” was all about him and Edith.

Stephen was having nightmares too and a rash, but now all that would

stop, according to Father. He had a new “friend,” a widow who worked

in his office. He’d known her quite a while, and he was sure I would

like her.

I thought Stephen had plenty of real things to be having night-

mares about, but I didn’t say so. I made sure I wrote to him, and most

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weekends he was allowed to come spend a night with us, though it

seemed strange, him arriving with his little suitcase. Edith lived with

her mother briefly, then got a job as a hostess at the Chilton Club,

where they also gave her a room, so for a while Stephen moved back

with us. Then Father married his “friend,” a fattish woman with no

children of her own and no interest in them. Edith, who was furious,

lost her job, so off Stephen went again to live at Grandma Adele’s

with her.

It’s all pretty much a daze to me. In fact, the bad time did end,

as most things do. I never did go back to school, but it didn’t matter.

I didn’t want to anymore. It was looking more and more as if a war

was coming, and everyone was worried about whether we’d be drawn

into it. I took a course in typing and got a job in an office which I

liked quite well. I gained some weight back and began to care about

things I hadn’t for a long while.

My grandmother died in the spring of 1940, in mud season. I

went up to Dundee with my father for the funeral. Mr. Davidson did

the eulogy, and I thought it was fine, though my grandfather com-

plained that the landscape had done something to Mr. Davidson, that

he wasn’t a Christian anymore. “Listen to him preach; he never men-

tions our Lord or the Trinity. We pray about rocks and trees and the

eternal sea.” Grandfather called him the Druid.

I’d seen Ralph Ober at my grandmother’s funeral, and when he

came through Boston on his way to the war, he looked me up; a lot

of the boys from the county had enlisted. Soldiering was a paying job.

Ralph and I wrote to each other while he was in the service, and when

he got out we got married, and in the summer started coming back to

Dundee.

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G U T C H E O N

*

*

*

The Schoolhouse is gone. One of the volunteers in the fire bri-

gade told me that the night it burned he saw a figure in the window

upstairs just before the roof fell in. Scared him so much he quit fire-

fighting. They never found anything human in the ashes though.

Conary’s sister, Mary, is still alive. I used to see her sometimes.

She’s gotten immensely fat and is thought never to leave her house. I

know she does, probably at night, because when I go to visit Conary’s

grave, there are often flowers there. She plants primroses on it in the

spring, and when they need it, I water and weed them. It’s like a secret

message going back and forth between us, like the notes she used to

leave in the book for me.

I keep that book up here in the shelf to the right of the fire-

place. It’s one of the reasons I like to be in this house, even in win-

ter. I can see it from my desk here by the window. I can watch it,

as if someday I was going to find it pushed back an inch or two on

the shelf.

It’s been a strange experience, rereading that diary after all these

years. It’s as if the girl I was is still inside me, and the broken-down

old body she carries around belongs to somebody else. Maybe to one

of those old women I knew in my youth who seemed to have been

old always.

Not that I haven’t changed. I have; I’ve had a quiet life, with

much of the kindness and patience I wanted as a child finally coming

to me from my husband. So many things have come to me that never

came to Conary, both good and bad. It’s my hope that Ralph never

knew how much that ache of missing Conary remained with me. I

know it would have made him unhappy, and he was a good man and

never deserved that.

Ralph and I went through a lot with our middle daughter, who

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seemed possessed by some banshee about the time she turned four-

teen. She’s turned out pretty well, but the bad times are not com-

pletely forgotten on either side. There were times I wished I could

have talked to Edith about it, but she never allowed it, and now it’s

too late.

I find myself thinking about Bowdoin Leach, saying his life had

been a circle. I think of mine that way, as if being old and alone has

brought me around again to that moment in my life when feelings

were shimmering and huge, and you felt you were the first person on

earth ever to really be in love. It hasn’t been easy to visit again the

girl I was. Yet it seemed important, not to pretend that the present

changes the past. I believe the past changes the present much more

than we know, but we don’t like to think about what we can’t ever

understand.

I suppose in going back to that time in my life I hoped I might

come to understand where that evil came from. And where did it go?

There’s a sage plant in my herb bed now that winters over. It isn’t an

evergreen, but it doesn’t lose its leaves. They go limp and silver gray

and then freeze and hang there, looking like dead bats hanging upside

down from the rafters. Then spring comes, and the green comes back

into the same leaves and the thing is alive again. I suppose a really

bitter winter would kill it, but nothing has yet.

How does harm pass in patterns the way it does from one gen-

eration to the next? Is there any more sense to it than to that sage

plant? I hoped to find out, but I can’t say that I have. Now that I’ve

done the last thing I could, by telling this story, I suppose I should

study on the most mysterious thing we have to do, that each of us

does alone, and for the first time, and hope that it’s not the end of

understanding.

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I know things about true love and ghosts, but I don’t know the

thing I’ve wanted to know most. I know there are feelings that survive

death, but can they all? What if only the bitterest and most selfish are

strong enough? That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?

I expect I’ll know sometime. I don’t think it will be long now.

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Coda

Dundee, Maine, 1939

TheHamornephewwhoownedtheSchoolhousetriedtorent

it one more summer. The tenants left after a week and made him refund

their money. They complained of bats, but that didn’t make any sense.

No one else had seen the bats, and besides, everyone wanted bats; they

ate the mosquitoes. After that the house stood empty, but for some reason

the field in front of it became the best place in the village for fireflies,

and the children used to go there on summer evenings to catch them in

mason jars.

Then there was the day late in summer when some hikers from

Mt. Desert got turned around and fetched up at Dundee when they’d

been aiming for Hancock Point. They finally staggered into the post

office saying they’d been told that someone there could arrange a ride

for them back to Northeast Harbor. Kermit said he probably could,

but who had they been talking to? There was no one living up the road

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they came in by. The hikers said they’d had a nice chat with a lady in

a flowered dress in the house out on the point, the one that looked like

a schoolhouse.

k

The Hamor nephew grew tired of paying upkeep on a place that

wasn’t earning him any money. He put it on the market, but it never

sold, though the real estate agent said she was sure it would go if he’d

rewire it and put in two more bathrooms. He said he was damned if he

was going to throw good money after bad. He offered it to the volunteer

fire department, and they accepted it gratefully. They always needed

houses they could burn down to practice on.

The night before the Schoolhouse was to burn, Bowdoin Leach

walked down the road to have a last look at it. He had known it on the

island and he had known it on the main. There were not many things

left he could say that about, and he thought he’d just go down there by

himself to say good-bye.

Bowdoin had always said that Sallie hadn’t done the murder, she

just knew who did. But saying it hadn’t made it true, and it bothered

him not to know. The one thing he knew was the person who could

do that murder was a person who would take something of value from

someone else, even though it was useless to her. Killing Danial Haskell

hadn’t given a new life to anybody else. Not a new life anyone could

have wished for. The person who could refuse to see that coming could

refuse anything. It was a thought more frightening than the blade of an

ax, a soul like that, but Bowdoin was too old to be more frightened

than curious.

He stood in the road a good while, looking at the old place. Its

face was dark, as if its eyes were closed and it was ready to go. But after

a while he walked around to the back, and there he could see the light

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in the window. It was very faint, but what was clear and growing clearer

as the sun set was the sound of fiddle music. He listened a long time. It

was an old-fashioned tune he hadn’t heard since his youth, but he knew

it well. It was the sailor’s song Mrs. Haskell used to play with her son,

called “Black-Eyed Susan.”

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A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

I am deeply grateful to friends who have read and responded to

various versions of this story and offered invaluable reactions

that helped it toward its final shape. Tina Nides and Ben Cheever