Otherworldly Maine (34 page)

“Hallo, my dears.”

The woman's daughter sat down on the edge of the bed. “Mother, we've a frost! Might we
please
row out to Little Sorrow and pick the cranberries? They'll now be ripe.”

Susanna Hayford looked from one eager child to the other. Much as she would have liked to keep them there at the house, safely in her sight at all times, she knew she could not.

“If you must, but heed to caution and should the sea be unruly, hasten back.”

The hand under the blanket impulsively squeezed what it held.

“Thank you, Mother!” Prudence gushed, and her brother, hovering behind her, echoed the sentiment before they both rushed from the chamber. Susanna listened to them flying down the stairs, their steps and voices defying the silence that had overtaken the house in the last six months.

Not so long ago the humble structure had been filled with spirit and company. There had been a shifting family of occupants, from hired girls and hired men and boarders, to her widowed cousin Jennet (complete with three daughters). Susanna's maiden aunt Polly, as well an ailing grandsir, had also made a home of the place. And, of course, there had been her Abel. He had survived the fight against the French and Indians only to be lost in the rebellion.

But now the place was owned by shadows and painfully infused with memories. Life, about its inexplicable courses, had swept all but Susanna and her surviving children from the place. Her husband's grandfather had gone to his maker the previous winter. Jennet remarried and went to housekeeping in Machias; the spinster aunt had left to live with another relative, and there was not enough money to keep hired help. The last boarder, a Mr. Eaton, had moved out at the end of August, and the little west room behind the formal parlor had sat empty since.

Susanna pulled her fist out from under the blanket and opened her fingers. In her palm was a lock of hair curled up like a small sleeping thing. It was the hair of a six-year old child, blond, like Abel's had been. “Winter fever” had taken her Betsy in March.

Others in the village had remarked on Susanna's strength, praising her for tending the farm on her own, caring for two children after the loss of her husband and youngest daughter. They encouraged her to trust in God, to find comfort in her faith. But, she did not feel as strong as she appeared on the outside, and while the local Reverend Goodwin remained a dear friend, the force he served no longer garnered her devotion. Only days earlier, in her diary, she had written:
I lately see God in no thing. They speak of His mercy and compassion and His mysterious ways, but little mystery do I perceive. If there be a God then He puts thorns on flowers and allows that musket balls fly and the poor to starve and disease to whither. He has taken my child and my very heart with her
.

Susanna waited until she heard the back door shut, as the children headed out, before allowing herself to weep.

The sky was September blue, so clear and crisp that if one could hurl a stone high enough they would shatter it. Warm sunlight countered the chill air and made a strangely elongated shadow version of the house. The building itself looked smaller and plainer for the textured terrain rolling around it, a landscape shaped by a patient and astonishing violence. Stark rail fences conformed painfully to these rocky surroundings, defining crop fields and grazing land and orchard.

There was nothing pretentious about the house itself, little to make it stand apart from others in the vicinity. It was a one-story shingled structure with a substantial center chimney, the main door bordered by windows on the long side, facing the road.

The outbuildings were in need of repair. Samuel, who was not so handy when it came to carpentry, was outmatched by the effects of wind and temperature and gravity. Besides, much of his time was spent working at the shingle mill. There had been plenty of helpful men coming by following Abel's death, men from miles around (the majority of them married), men eager to assist with this or that task around the farm, but they soon vanished when they found that the pretty widow—unalterably clad in her black mourning gown—was not disposed to their desires to “console” her.

The Hayford children had dressed for a frosty morning, Samuel in a dead uncle's oversized coat and Prudence in her dull blue cloak and riding hood. They walked from the house and made their way along the cow path, cutting between cultivated fields and stony pasture. They passed leafy expanses that denoted sleeping turnips, and ripening pumpkins hunched amidst browning foliage. A dark wood waited at the end of the trail, its tall pines and solemn spruce crowded together, all but obscuring the oaks and reddened maples. The children looked small as they approached this wall of trees.

Once in the woods, Samuel led the way on a line of worn earth that was narrower and more crooked than the cow path. The air was moist, heavy with the scents of vegetation and dark soil, and it added to the sense of being enclosed. There was moss and shadow, and birds that were heard but not seen, and small red squirrels that chattered their agitation.

Prudence was prattling on about what she wanted to do with the cranberries once procured, inventing recipes as she maneuvered the ruts and roots and half-hidden stones that would have proved treacherous for the unfamiliar. She swung her empty basket like a pendulum. Samuel tired of her voice and began to whistle to himself.

“You would be well to save your vigor for the picking and less so for blathering,” the boy cautioned over his shoulder.

This stirred the girl to defense. “I would blather and pick all at once, should it suit my fancy,” she said, swatting away a little yellow leaf that had snared in the lacey trim of her day cap. “I would blather in my sleep as well, if it please me.”

Samuel chuckled.

There were few indications that the young Hayfords were approaching the Atlantic, only quick glimpses of water through dense boughs.

“You sound a squirrel with that tireless tongue of yours,” Samuel prodded.

“Were I a squirrel, I should bite you,” Prudence returned.

The shaded spruce forest came to a sudden end, and there, startlingly expansive, was a glittering blue ocean. The border between water and trees was a steep jumble of overlapping pinkish boulders. They were smooth and jagged, broken and whole, randomly studded with periwinkles, and here and there cupping tidal pools lined with drowned green hair.

This rough crescent of granite shaped a small cove where the water, calmer than the open sea beyond, was an inscrutable gray. It was an inlet where ducks were known to bob and dive, and loons were apt to winter, away from their summer lakes. Betsy made her way down toward the waterline, beyond the hem of grass and scrub-plants, across a slanted swath of pebbles and shells, past the bleached remains of fallen pines like great broken antlers, over a crunching layer of dried brown seaweed. There was a gap in the natural stone rampart, allowing for a small area of gravely beach where a boat could gain access to the water.

Samuel's father's skiff was upside down, with oars beneath it, placed safely above the reach of high tide. Despite its worn appearance, the vessel was capable of floating, and so the boy flipped it onto its keel and pushed it down toward the surf, grunting the whole way.

“In with you,” Samuel panted to his sister.

The girl climbed into the boat—so as not to soak her feet and skirts—and the boy gave it a shove. The skiff sloshed into the water with Samuel pushing behind it, until he himself scrambled in. The boat rocked as he took up position, setting his oars in their rowlocks and leaning back, dunking the blades, taking control. The tide was on its way out, which was to Samuel's favor, and just lightly caressed the stones along the shore.

A small island stood between the rowboat and the infinite Atlantic. Little Sorrow, they called it. The covering of trees gave it the look of a furred animal floating off the coast. It was the color of spruce, but for a rough line that dared above the blue water, a granite ridge the color of salmon. There were no homes or human residents on Little Sorrow.

It took only a short while to row across, and soon Samuel was dragging the skiff up a pebbled slope, slick with rockweed. Gulls had left pieces of ruined crabs about—a pale orange leg like a crooked skeleton finger, a hollow carapace, upside down and holding water; teacup for a mermaid.

The young Hayfords left the boat and marched up into the woods with their baskets, away from the cool air sighing in over the water. Autumn had preceded them, bringing its colors, and these showed brighter for the contrasting shadows under the spruce. Many of the small birches and maples appeared to be dead or dying, perhaps starved for light, their roots no rival for towering evergreens. Their branches were emaciated, and bore scratchy clots of ghostly-green moss instead of leaves.

The tree cover thinned and the children came to a marshy tract of land, thick with cranberry bushes. The plants were shrubby and low, with small green leaves and stark red fruit. Even from a distance the children could see that it was a good year for the berries.

Samuel and Prudence looked to one another, smiled, and went to their task. There was salt in the air and September in the air and the earthy scent of the shrubs as the children knelt in damp vines, eagerly plucking. Some of the elliptical fruits were still white, while others were blushing softly, but a good many had ripened to a deep red. Prudence sampled one of the tart berries, biting it in half to reveal its four hollow chambers.

When their baskets were full and bulging, the children started back for the skiff. They passed through the wooded expanse they had crossed to access the berries, but found a less steep route down toward where the boat awaited. Had they come this way initially, they would have seen what Prudence now spotted.

“Samuel, look there!”

The boy stopped and stared. “Do you suppose wasps fashioned it?”

It was gray and long and loosely shaped like a man, or more a shroud containing a man.

Samuel put his basket down on the grass above the rocks and, forsaking the path of smooth descent he had been on, made his way across undulating ledges to where the strange object lay wedged against an outcrop. He knelt by the gray object, which in size and shape was indeed suggestive of a man, all the more so for the rough shoulders and head. He reached down with his hand.

“Samuel!” Prudence called, “You mustn't touch it!”

Samuel touched it. He pressed his palm against the coarse slate-colored skin, which, though it looked as if it could have been some kind of stone, was not. It felt dry and somewhat yielding, like parchment hardened in layers, the outermost of which was flaking and frayed. He rapped his knuckles against the chest, then looked over at his sister.

“It seems hollow,” he said.

“Leave it be, Samuel,” Prudence pleaded.

The boy took the shape by the shoulders and gave it a shake. Whatever it was, it was relatively light, for it rocked with his effort, and he thought that he heard rattling.

“There is something within,” Samuel reported.

He picked up a length of driftwood, which lay nearby, and stood above the form. The first blow crunched through the chest, making a hole as big as a fist, and dust puffed out. The encasing crust was hardly an inch thick. The second blow widened the opening, revealing some of what was inside. Birch branches, he thought at first.

“Have a look, Prudence,” Samuel called, “there are bones!”

“I shouldn't like to look, Samuel. I am cold and I wish home.” The girl had her hood pulled tight against her day cap, and held her cloak closed at the throat.

Samuel's fascination possessed him. He tore at the sides of the broken chest with his hands, and higher up to the featureless face of the cocoon, removing chunks, so as to get a better look at the dingy disheveled skeleton lying there in its womb of dust and shadow. The skull, the size of a man's, was tipped to one side, all teeth and pitted stare.

A flurry of thoughts went through the boy's mind. Whose bones were these? How did they get there? Had waves flung their container up onto the boulders? How old were the bones? Why were they sealed in that strange gray encasement? He wondered if maybe Indians were responsible, but then he had never heard of Indians tending to their dead in such a manner.

“There is something more,” Samuel called.

A lumpy black cloth sack was tucked into the ribcage of the skeleton. The boy had to reposition himself, pressing his chest against the broken chest of the coffin, in order to angle his arm in to reach the bundle. Stale odors drifted up into his face and he snared a button on the sleeve of his coat while pulling the sack out through its tunnel of ribs. His prize secured, Samuel sat back on his heels and opened the cloth.

“I'm for home!” Prudence snapped, turning and walking off with her basket.

Samuel only half-noticed his sister's departure.

“A heart. . .” he said to himself.

It was a petrified heart, or a faithful carving of one, fashioned from pink granite and veined with cracks.

Samuel put the heart in the pocket of his coat and made a daring dash over the treacherous ledges, grabbing his basket of cranberries before rejoining his sister down below the tree line, where the boat awaited. Prudence was standing there shivering, her knees imprinted on the skirt of her frock like damp shadows.

“May we now go?” The girl whined.

Samuel pulled out the heart and showed her. “See what I have found, Prudence . . . is it not a wonder?”

The girl frowned. “You mustn't take it, Samuel. To thieve from one's grave is improper.”

“Mustn't take it? Silly! Those old bones have not a need for it.”

With that Samuel stuffed his treasure back in his coat and loaded the baskets of berries into the skiff. Prudence was cold and in no mood to argue, knowing how stubborn her brother could be. She sat quietly in the back of the boat, hugging herself as Samuel rowed for the mainland.