Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
“Did you know Miss Hamor?”
He said, “To speak to. Everybody did. She was pretty ancient.
She taught my father Latin at the Academy.”
“Really?”
“I don’t believe he shone, at Latin.” Something about this
thought made Conary smile to himself.
I asked him why the house was empty for so long, just to see
what he would say. We were drawing into town.
He said, “
I
heard it was haunted. Now . . . where can I set you
down?” As he asked, he pulled in at the post office. I thanked him for
the ride and got out, wishing the way had been twice as long.
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The Civil War
TheHaskellplacewasonthesoutheasternshoreofBealIsland,
with a wide view of the outer passage to Frenchman’s Bay. Claris knew
this when Danial brought her home on their wedding day; what she hadn’t
exactly understood was that Danial’s mother and brother, Leonard, were
to go on living in the house with them. Danial had merely said that his
mother would welcome her and all necessary things had been arranged,
and Claris had assumed that things would now be for her as they had
for her sisters. When Mary had married, Jonathan Friend’s family built
a house for them. When her sister Alice married, Byron Crocker took her
all the way to Boston on a honeymoon.
Claris’s honeymoon consisted of having an ancient coverlet quilted
in a wedding knot pattern produced from a chest in Mrs. Haskell’s bed-
room and spread on the bed where Danial had slept since boyhood.
Additional arrangements were that Leonard moved downstairs to sleep in
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the buttery, and that for her night soil Claris was given a rather grand
china commode with a lid, from England.
In her first island winter Claris lost a child, a stillborn daughter.
This was a terrible blow; her mother and sisters all gave birth to healthy
babies at the drop of a hat; why should she alone suffer such loss, such
failure? The brief dark days of that winter for Claris were endless. Ten
months later she lost a second baby, also a girl. Her mother-in-law said
very little about this (or about anything) but peered at Claris with ap-
parent dislike from under her bonnet.
It was during this lonely passage in her life that Claris first began
to doubt that behind Danial’s silence lay a mind that divined her thoughts
and a heart that beat in sympathy with hers. She was living in a thick
atmosphere of paralyzing bleakness, waiting for Danial to show that he
knew how it was with her, how it felt to have longed to be a mother but
instead produced only death. When he merely came and went as usual
and expected her to do the same, it finally began to occur to her that
behind Danial’s stolid silence might be . . . nothing she understood.
When her mother-in-law died the third winter, Danial brought the
Baptist minister out from the main, along with the few old friends who
remained, to pray for the soul of the inaccurately named Solace Haskell.
While Reverend Tull was with them, he said prayers for the dead at the
tiny graves of Claris’s daughters, both named Sallie. The ground was
frozen too hard to dig a hole for Solace, so Claris sewed her into a
sailcloth shroud weighted with rocks, and Danial and his brother took
her far out onto the ice, cut a hole, and buried her at sea.
Solace had been almost completely silent during her last year, and
nearly bald, and so nearly dead it was hard to tell she was breathing. But
her ways ruled the house both before and after death. In her house they
did no work on Sundays, could read no books except the Bible and play
no games of any kind. Solace opposed music, cards, and any form of
alcoholic drink. Danial seemed distraught at his mother’s death in a way
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that frightened Claris; it was nothing like his reaction to the deaths of
her babies. Next, Leonard Haskell left to marry Ellen Gott, who lived
around the tip of the island, and Claris finally found herself alone with
her husband.
The family had chickens, sheep, a pig, a cow, and two horses at
the time of Leonard’s marriage. Leonard took one of the horses and half
the sheep, and Danial bought out his share in the pig and the cow. The
chickens they reckoned were Claris’s, since she had taken on care of them
when Solace stopped leaving the house. Danial butchered his sheep, froze
the meat, and in the spring sailed into the main with most of it to trade
at Abbott’s store. When he came back he brought barrels of flour and
molasses, some bright new cotton dress goods, and the most extravagant
present: a whole stem of green bananas brought round the Horn from
the Sandwich Islands. It seemed, at last, like the real beginning of their
life together. Claris hung the fruit in the dark cellar to ripen, and it was
the first and last time in her life that she had all the bananas she wanted.
When Claris went into labor for the third time in the spring of
1862, Danial sat alone in the kitchen while the midwife attended her
upstairs. Twice in this marriage already there had been pain and blood
and then silence. This time, after only two hours, Danial heard a sur-
prisingly loud wail, and he took the stairs two at a time. He burst into
the room to find Mrs. Duffy holding a long purplish baby boy by the
heels. The baby was roaring, and with each lungful of air he took, his
color became more human, white and pink. Meanwhile a coiling cord of
an astonishing gray-purple color stretched from the baby’s middle to be-
tween his mother’s legs. Claris crouched on the edge of a chair, gripping
the arms and weeping with relief, and Mrs. Duffy said, “Please, Danial.
We’re not quite ready for you here.”
For the first days and nights of the baby’s life, Claris wouldn’t
sleep; she wouldn’t even lie down. She sat in the chair beaming and held
him, sang to him, nursed him, while Danial looked on, proud and smiling.
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Amos Haskell grew into a healthy and bright-eyed baby, the image of
Claris’s brother Leander. When he was sure the baby was going to live,
Danial sailed into Dundee and came back out with Claris’s mother, who
stayed several weeks with them, sewing diapers, cleaning and baking, gos-
siping with Claris, and paying a round of calls on the island folk, getting
to know her daughter’s neighbors. Claris had never done this on her own,
and some of the neighbors were quite surprised to see the Haskell wagon
pull into their dooryards. They were happy to see Captain Osgood’s wife,
though, whom they knew at least by reputation, and glad to get to see
that Claris was not so standoffish as she appeared.
Claris and Mrs. Osgood talked for hours over all the news of home
Claris had missed. Both Simon and Leander had marched off south with
the Thirteenth Maine, but both were safe so far. Her sister Alice had a
baby girl, and Mabel was teaching school. Otis was now thirteen and as
tall as his father, and could play the fiddle even better than Leander.
Claris liked having her mother all to herself, although even now, from
time to time, there were strains.
Claris had regained her health quickly once she felt sure the baby
would survive. Baby Amos seemed to take on an aura of gleaming per-
fection for her. He was the coin with which she would be repaid for all
the griefs, slights, and disappointments she had met in life thus far, and
Danial and Mrs. Osgood watched with some surprise the intensity of the
love she shone on the baby.
One night over a supper of fresh fish and wild greens Mrs. Osgood
had gathered and cooked, Claris leaped from the table at the sound of a
tiny mewling noise from the baby.
“Clarie, he’s just dreaming,” said her mother. “Don’t wake him up.
Finish your supper.”
“I think I know my own baby best,” Claris said. She picked the
sleepy child up from his cradle and brought him to the table to nurse.
Mrs. Osgood (who had always retired to a separate room to nurse her
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babies) looked across at Danial, and the two shared a moment of under-
standing. Danial said, “Mother O, did I forget to tell you that that baby
is the first and only baby ever born in the world?”
“I thought he might be the infant Prince of Wales,” said Mrs.
Osgood, smiling at Danial. Claris got up from the table and ran upstairs
with the baby in her arms.
Danial and Mrs. Osgood looked after her, and then again at each
other. Danial shrugged and went back to eating his supper. After a mo-
ment Mrs. Osgood said, “Excuse me,” and followed her daughter upstairs.
Claris sat, weeping, in the birthing chair, with the baby sucking
happily at her breast. Mrs. Osgood came in and closed the door behind
her. She looked around at the pine dresser, the bare floor, the bed with
its thin mattress and wedding knot quilt. The bed linen looked none too
clean.
“Clarie, don’t cry, there’s no need for that. No one meant to hurt
your feelings.”
Claris’s brimming eyes met her mother’s. “You don’t know,” she
said. “You never
do
know how I feel. You never lost a baby as I have or
you wouldn’t mock me.”
Her mother sat silent with downcast eyes for quite a while and
then said, “Actually, I have, Claris. I lost a little girl between Mary and
you. She was strangled during birth by the cord.” Mrs. Osgood’s gaze
held her daughter’s.
Finally Claris said in a flat voice, “I never knew that.” (Mrs. Osgood
couldn’t help thinking that Mary or Alice, even in pique, would have
melted at once, come to her and said, “Oh, Mother, I’m sorry.”)
“No need to talk about it. You were born the next year, beautiful
and healthy, and we were so glad to have you.” The two women sat in
silence for a while, watching Amos nurse.
The next morning Mrs. Osgood said to Danial that, with regret,
she thought she ought to be getting home. Claris stood on the porch with
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the baby in her arms and waved as Danial sailed her mother away, feeling
both sorry and angry.
k
That first year of Amos’s life was mostly a happy one for Claris
and Danial. Danial fished all summer, and the catch was good. Twice a
week he’d sail into the main and peddle his fish, five pounds of haddock
(no hake) for fifteen cents and clams for ten cents a quart. What he
couldn’t sell direct he traded to Abbott’s. Sometimes he’d take Claris and
the baby along with him into town, and Claris would spend the day with
her mother or one of her married sisters. The rest of his catch Danial
dried and salted and sold in barrels to the boats that called in at the
wharf on the south end of Beal.
The winter Amos was three, Danial began work on a plan he’d had
in mind since he was a boy; he wanted to try a sawmill at the mouth of
their stream. He had suggested it years before to his father and been
laughed at for trying to get fancy. There was a gristmill on the Neck and
a sawmill at Dundee, and that was enough, according to Abner Haskell.
Haskells didn’t take wages, and they didn’t go into trade, according to
him. Danial went to study both of the mills on the main, and in the
spring he ordered what parts he couldn’t manufacture, and with Leonard
and two of the Gotts he started building. All summer he worked on the
mill instead of fishing. By fall he was in operation. They were nearly out
of cash and goods to barter, and he told Claris they’d have to live close
to the bone that winter, but by next summer all their hard work would
pay off.
Unfortunately, he and Leonard quarreled over whether Leonard had
worked for wages (still owing) or for ownership, and they stopped speak-
ing with Leonard holding a large IOU from Danial. Business at the mill
was less than Danial had hoped for, and he grew tense and silent. Their
diet that winter consisted of dried apples, eggs, biscuits with salt pork
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gravy, and salted fish boiled in milk. In the spring Danial hired Percy
Grindle to help at the mill, but they too quarreled. Soon after that, in a
moment of pique or inattention, Danial sawed off two of the fingers of
his left hand. Claris doctored the maimed hand in silence, pulling the
bandage strips painfully tight. She had felt the mill was a bad idea from
the start, and unfortunately had said so.
Danial walked away from the mill and never went back to it; he
wouldn’t even sell it. He went back to fishing and saltwater farming, and
let the mill fall slowly down, year by year. Claris said little about this
either, but her manner showed she was disgusted. Now and then she
mentioned the courage and persistence the men of her family were known
to show in good times and bad. She did not mention that in her family
she herself was as famously hard to deflect once she had set her course