The Hearth and Eagle (25 page)

Hesper did not move. Her head with its heavy weight of red braids held rigid as if she was sitting for a tintype.

“Let’s get her some brandy—” said Bushy, and poured out a nogginful from a bottle he found under the counter. But Hesper would not touch the brandy; she shook her head and continued to stare at the little gold ring with the diamond chip in its center. Bushy drank the brandy himself.

George picked up his peaked blue cap. “We’d best let her be. Though I wonder if her pa—”

The door bell tinkled and both boys sighed with relief, for the Pastor came in.

“She’s heard the news about Johnnie Peach, sir—she won’t speak—” The young men sidled past the Reverend Allen and escaped.

The minister was himself at a loss, in the face of the girl’s immobility. He touched her on the shoulder. “Hesper, I’ve come to bring you God’s words of comfort.” He spoke sternly, knowing that best in shock. “Stand up and come with me to your parlor. This is no suitable place.”

She raised her gaze from the ring and let it rest on the black frock coat in front of her, her eyes moved upward over the white stock to the bland middle-aged face above it.

She put the hand with the ring in her lap, and turned her head away.

“Child, you must rouse yourself!” The minister sat down staring with distaste at the stained table. “You’re a good Christian. You know that death is but the gateway to a more beautiful life—life everlasting. And those that die gloriously for their country, like young John Peach, I’m sure that the Gentle Shepherd gathers those lambs very quickly to his loving bosom.”

Hesper’s lips quivered and the minister leaned forward.

“Johnnie wouldn’t like that, being a lamb,” she said. “He’d want to be on the sea.”

The minister swallowed. These Marbleheaders, Especially the old stock. You never knew where you were with them. Trouble ever since he’d come here from his quiet Maine town.

“I make allowances for your grief,” he said coldly. “But you must bow your head to the will of God, and you’ll find solace. Your church and Holy Writ alone can give you comfort. And if you cannot accept this yet, rest in the memory of all those who have suffered in the past and found help in Jesus. Your own forefathers—”

Hesper raised her head and her eyes rested again on his face. “My forefathers didn’t come to Marblehead for religion. They came for fish.”

“Really, my dear Miss Honeywood!” His face flushed and he stood up. “I believe you have no feelings at all. I’m wasting my time. I’m amazed, that you—a regular communicant, should receive me like this—I don’t know what to think.”

Hesper seemed to listen to him, and as he stopped she nodded. “You see, I don’t care what you or anybody thinks. With Johnnie—” she paused, went on in the same measured voice, “With Johnnie killed, it doesn’t matter.”

“There child—” said the minister, slightly mollified. “Try not to think about it. I shall pray for you, and return in a day or so, when you’re more yourself.”

Hesper rose. She was as tall as the minister, and he involuntarily stepped back from her, startled by the chalk white of her face, the forehead glistening with tiny beads of moisture, and above it the burnished red hair—like a patch of blood against the pine wall.

“Don’t come back—” she said.

The Reverend Allen picked up his round black hat and went out with no further word.

Hesper wadded the corner of her apron and wiped her forehead. She walked through the parlor to the front staircase. Since the war, months went by without foreigners in town. There was nobody in the house, even Roger had gone to the stationer’s.

Hesper mounted the staircase and opened the door to the Yellow Room. It was in here that she and Johnnie had thought to start married life. It received her with the listening stillness peculiar to longshut rooms.

She parted the frayed yellow damask curtains and looked out of the east window, toward Little Harbor. The Harbor was nearly deserted since the war, the fish flakes empty.

Across the shipyard she could see the monument on Burial Hill, and below on Orne Street the brownish roof that was Johnnie’s house.

Hesper let the curtain fall. She walked across the room to the great four-postered bed and threw herself on it. She lay on her back looking up at the frayed golden canopy.

Susan found her there in the dark, hours later, and was frightened. The girl wouldn’t answer or move. She just lay there staring up, and she looked like death, her cheeks fallen in and her eyes sunk back.

But she started when her mother touched her, and allowed Susan to coax her off the bed and downstairs. She ate a little chowder for supper, but she didn’t mention Johnnie’s name, or speak except to ask Susan if she’d had a good trip to the farm, and her voice was tiny and polite like a talking doll.

All over Marblehead they said that poor Hes Honeywood was acting awful strange.

The passing fishermen would see her sitting on the rocks at the tip of Peach’s Point staring out to sea. One day little Snagtooth Foster went over on the Neck to hunt for Indian arrowheads, and he saw her on Castle Rock, hunched up on a big stone right down by high-water mark where the spray blew over her. He said she didn’t hear when he called to her, and she seemed to be writing something in a book she had on her lap. Once she tried to borrow Johnnie’s dory from the Peaches, but Johnnie’s younger brother had taken it out flounder fishing, and the Peaches would never have let her go out alone in it, as she seemed to want to. “ ’Twouldn’t be safe, my pore gur-rl—” said Tamsen Peach. Her own eyes were reddened with weeping for her son, but in them there was a look of patience and resignation. “Go home, Hes,” she added, “and try for rest. Yore lookin’ mighty peaked.”

Hesper nodded to Mrs. Peach, without saying anything more, and walked back down Orne Street. Later that day she borrowed a skiff in the Little Harbor and set to rowing out towards Cat Island.

Fortunately Susan who was cleaning an upstairs room at the Inn saw her go. She came down to Roger and found him out of his study for once and prowling uneasily around the kitchen.

“That girl’s rowing out to sea like the Old Nick was after her,” she said. “I don’t like it. I’ve kept hands off, like you wanted me to with all her pixillated comings and goings, but I think someone should keep an eye on her. Wind’s blowing up.”

“She knows the water roundabouts well as anybody—” said Roger, “let her be, she’s working it out her own way.” But his voice lacked conviction; he went to the window and stared through it.

Susan made a sharp sound, and turned her back. The door bell jangled and she welcomed the customer with relief. “Cap’n Ireson, you got your dory handy? Our girl’s rowing purty far out to be alone, might have trouble getting back ’gainst the tide.”

The old skipper nodded, replaced his tarred canvas hat, and rebuttoned his oilskins.

“Wait—” said Roger, “I’ll go with you.”

His wife’s mouth fell open.
“You,
what hasn’t set foot in a dory over thirty years!”

Roger’s nostrils indented. He reached to a peg behind the door for his great coat. “I believe I can still row.”

Susan said nothing. She went to the cupboard and bringing out his muffler put it around his neck. Her rough, fat hand lingered for an instant on his shoulder.

The men went out the back through the garden patch and along the weedy path to Little Harbor.    .

They found Hesper an eighth of a mile outside of Gerry’s Island fighting her way back. The little skiff bobbed over the mounting waves and disappeared in the troughs, and against the racing ebb tide she was making no headway.

Captain Ireson grunted, came alongside, and both men pulled the girl over the gunnel into the dory. She was trembling with fear and exhaustion, but she had properly shipped the oars and she had the skiff’s painter tight in her hand. Roger made it fast for towing.

“Glad to see you’ve sense enough not to lose Davie’s skiff for him anyhow,” said Captain Ireson severely. “Fool gur-rl, puttin’ out so far. Women don’t belong on water—”

Hesper did not hear him. She lay flat on the floor boards. “Pa—?” she said wondering—“
you
came—”

“Worried about you—”

Neither Honeywood spoke again until they rounded the island and came to calm water in the harbor. By then Hesper had recovered, and she helped her father from the boat, for his muscles, long unused, were trembling, and his face grown moist and green from nausea.

“I’m sorry—Pa—” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to—” But she didn’t know what she had meant in that frantic escape toward Cat Island. A groping, a yearning for that other night so long ago.... Johnnie, where are you—ah, it had been easy gliding out, easy as the ride out had been hard that night. Easy to go on, on and on past the island to the open sea, and forget, find Johnnie there. And then halfway across the channel her dreamy apathy had been shattered by a bolt of terror, I must get back. Oh, you fool, you fool—Johnnie isn’t out there. He isn’t any place. Turn back. She had struggled, panting, with the light oars, and the tiny skiff that twisted and trembled in the wind’s clutch.

She clung to her father as they entered the house.

Susan’s worry, and relief at seeing them, resulted naturally in anger. She seized Hesper’s shoulders and administered a good shaking. “You crazy loon, what do you mean by such daft behavior! Troubling Cap’n Ireson here to go out for you, and look what you’ve done to your pa, his death o’ chill most likely, and him green with the seasickness. You know he could never abide a boat.”

Hesper bowed her head and said nothing. Susan poured a glass of grog for the two men and whipped up an eggnog for Hesper. Captain Ireson said “Thankee mum” and withdrew to the taproom where Susan followed him.

Hesper and Roger were left in the kitchen. He sat down in the Windsor armchair, before the fireplace. “You want to rest, Hesper?” She shook her head. “Then I want to talk to you.”

She fetched a log from the back porch and threw it across the andirons, above the smoldering embers. “You don’t feel crimmy, Pa?”

“No, not now—Sit down child.”

She sank to the little stool which had been the favorite seat of her childhood. Just within the great ten-foot fireplace. She leaned her head against the bricks and watched the new log catch.

“I want you to stop fretting for Johnnie, Hesper.”

She lifted her hand and let it fall to her lap. “I can’t.”

He leaned forward and spoke with a sharpness she had never heard from him. “Do you think you’re the first to feel sorrow? Right here in this house, how many times do you think sorrow’s been met, and bravely.”

“I don’t know—” she said and there was sharpness in her tone too. “Thinking of the past’s no good to me. All the Honeywoods that were killed or drowned. What good’s that?”

“You’re to think of those that were left and lived and went on; that’s why we’re here.”

She was silent, turning her head from him so that he saw only the fire reflected on the fire of her hair.

“Perhaps—” he said slowly, “you think I’m not one to talk. I’ve been a failure. Yes—I have. I’ve not met life fair and square. But I want you to. The rest of them did.”

The rest of them, she thought, and a sullen resistence rose in her. All the memories of Honeywoods imprisoned in this house. They were gone, but their possessions were not. Phebe’s andirons, Isaac’s table, Gran’s hooked rug, and in the new part, Moses’ staircase, Moses’ foreign wallpaper. The new part—a hundred years old. And what did they ever do anyway? Those dead Honeywoods. Fishing, innkeeping, making a little money, losing it again. Racing off to war if there was one, getting killed. Going off to the Banks and getting drowned. In either case the women staying home and suffering. No sense to it. Nothing to be proud of.

Roger got up and came over to the fire so that he could see her face. He sighed, went back to his chair and sat down.

“You’ve been writing some poetry, lately, Hesper?”

She moved her shoulders. “A little, it helps some.”

“Of course it helps,” he said. “Let me see some of it, won’t you?”

“Maybe, Pa. Sometime.”

For an instant the bitter yearning lifted. She saw herself sitting with the ladies of the Arbutus Club, saw them look up from their sewing and bandage-making, eyeing her respectfully, whispering—“Hes Honeywood has had a poem printed. Of course talent runs in the family, her father...”

The banjo clock whirred and jangled out the first of six notes. Hesper released her breath. She got off the stool, and went to the peg behind the back door for her apron. She dumped water off peeled potatoes, and began to chop them on the sink board with vicious little jabs. She knew what they said at the Arbutus Club. “That Roger Honeywood—never did a lick of honest work in his life ... and that queer gawk of a girl, never could see what poor Johnnie saw in her....”

Roger shambled across the kitchen. “You’ve cut your finger, Hesper.” She nodded impatiently, pumped cold water from the spigot over the welling blood.

He touched her shoulder. She gave him a quick, blind smile and moved away. She shook down the little pot-bellied stove, set a greased frying pan and a battered coffeepot on top of it. She went to the great fireplace, swung the crane and its dangling iron pot over the fire.

Roger cleared his throat. “What are we having for supper, my dear?”

She turned, startled for a moment. Pa never cared what he ate, then she saw his anxious eyes trying to reach through to her, pleading with her, and she answered.

“Fried potatoes and fish brew, same as dinner, same as yesterday, Ma can’t seem to get anything else.” She took an iron ladle and stirred up the mixture of salty codfish, beets, and dried peas.

“Guess I’ll do a little work, till supper’s ready.”

“Yes, do—Pa. I’ll call you.” She scooped the sliced potatoes from the drainboard into the frying pan, set them back on the stove. He took a step towards his study door and paused. “Hesper, you won’t go off like that alone again—on the water?”

She stiffened, bending over the stove. He saw her hand with Johnnie’s ring, clench on the handle of the frying pan. “No, Pa.” She bent lower, and added in a whisper, “Thank you for coming out there to me.”