The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay (7 page)

“I’m ready. Nobody offered it up before.” Avis got herself a cup off the shelf and held it under the pot. Maddie looked at Idella, who shrugged and went to get down her own cup. Maddie nodded and half filled Avis’s cup.

“Looks like spring mud,” Avis said.

Maddie pursed her lips and frowned. “Too strong you think I make it?”

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t say.” Avis took the cup from her. “Where’s the sweet?” Maddie pointed to the sugar bowl.

The bedroom door opened with a scrape. Bill came walking out, tousled and unshaven and blinking back the light of morning. “That’s the best smell of coffee I’ve woke to in about all my life, Maddie. It smells so strong I don’t even need to drink it. If you keep smells like that in the house, I’ll have to marry you.”

Idella saw Maddie turn red and her head go down. Her hair, still wild and windblown, fell forward and hid her face.

Dad pulled his suspenders up over each shoulder as he walked to the table. “You two are up early. Going fishing?”

“Dalton, he has gone.” Maddie placed a full cup of coffee in front of him and hurried back to the stove.

“He does everything alone.” Dad picked up the mug and held it under his nose. “This here is like a bed of roses to me, Maddie. To wake up and smell coffee. Not since Emma.” Idella watched as Dad took a cautious sip. “Jesus H. Christ!” His eyes sprang open. “Holy Mother of Jesus!” His voice boomed. All three girls froze as they watched him. “Did you add water?” He turned sharply and looked at Maddie. Then he threw back his head and laughed full out so that they could see the buttons of his long underwear rippling up and down like waves coming and going. “Is there new hair on my head?” he asked when he was able. “Did that sip do anything to me yet?”

Slowly, cautiously, the three girls shook their heads. None of them dared go beyond a smile yet.

“You make damn strong coffee, Maddie!” He took a larger swallow. “And it’s damned good!” They all started laughing then, happy and relieved.

 

There got to be a pattern to things pretty soon. Every morning when the girls woke early, they’d know to look out the window if they wanted to find Maddie. There were a few mornings when they could hear voices together out in the front yard. When they looked out, they saw Dalton talking to Maddie before he went down the ladder. Once they saw Maddie clap her hands and laugh at something Dalton said. Another time he was showing her how to do something, but they couldn’t figure out what it was. It might have been something to do with being in the boat, by the look of things, or with fishing. Dalton didn’t get excited by too many other subjects.

The coffee continued strong and hot. Dad got so he asked for a second cup before he’d finished the first and said he didn’t know how he’d gotten on drinking that watered-down piddle piss he used to call coffee. Maddie blushed.

For breakfast she cooked potatoes and then fried eggs in the black pan. Every day. The potatoes were hot and brown and crisp and the eggs all cooked through till the yolks were a crumbly light yellow and the whites mottled brown at the edges. Everyone ate them as she presented them, sliding onto the plate with a slap.

Dinner was potatoes and dried salted fish from the barrels. Supper was beans and salt pork and potatoes.

“Maddie, how come we eat the same thing every day for every meal?” Avis asked one morning after Dalton and Dad had left the table. “We ever gonna have something different?”

Maddie pursed her lips and kept scrubbing a plate. “You like what I cook?”

“It’s good,” Avis said, “but it’s sort of tiring to have the same thing every day.”

“Your father, he is complaining?”

“Not to me.”

“I’m getting awful tired of it,” Idella said, looking up from her plate. “I don’t think you know how to cook anything else.”

 

The girls soon learned there were things Maddie would not talk about, would not even finish listening to the question about—mostly about where she came from, what her folks were like, who her people were. It was as if she came out of nowhere.

“How come you never wear them boots you brought?” Avis asked her one morning. “You walked in here carrying ’em and hardly nothing else. Whose are they? They’re awful big.”

“They’re mine.”

Even Avis knew not to keep asking after that.

As she got more comfortable in the house, Maddie loved to question the girls—about growing things, about how things were done in the house with their mother. How was a table set properly? How was a hem sewn on a skirt? These were things that Idella, at ten, knew way too much about and that Maddie, at fifteen, should have known a lot more about than she did.

Hardly any sounds at all came out of her when she was around Bill. She would answer a question when asked—never more than a word or two—or just nod. She looked down at her feet when she finished her answer.

So far Avis had learned the most. Maddie had no brothers or sisters that she knew of. French was what she spoke when she was young, but she’d had to learn the English more when her mother left her. She once had a cat named Nuage, which meant cloud, but he got lost in the woods and probably eaten by something.

She had no middle name.

“Didn’t your mother give you one?”

“She never told me.”

Avis liked being called “Petite Avie” and started asking for words in French. This amused Maddie, and she would point to things and tell Avis the word:
la fourchette
,
le cheval, la tasse, il pleut
.

Avis made Maddie laugh out loud at breakfast one morning when she asked if she could pass her “an oaf.”
“Oeuf !”
Maddie laughed. “Not ‘oaf.’”

“What is an oaf anyway?” Avis asked.

“Well, that’d be someone like me,” Dad said, laughing, too. “Right, Maddie?”

“Non.”
Her laughter stopped.
“Mon père,”
Maddie replied.
“Mon père est un
‘oaf.’
”

 

Maddie wore the one dress over and over. It was gray wool, more like a blanket than a dress, tight over her breasts and under her arms. She’d worn it so much that it was soft and thin in places, like at the elbows. One day the girls noticed that she’d done something to the dress to make it fit across her front better. She’d taken strips of fabric from her brown blanket and sewn them into the side seams under the arms like panels. It looked funny, but the dress didn’t pull on her so. Her breasts were looser, not so bound. Idella and Avis chose to not say anything out loud about the changes, though they both noticed and discussed it between themselves.

There was a lot of brown to Maddie. Idella thought her hair and her eyes were the light color of leaves that’ve been on the ground the whole winter and crumble when you pick them up. An earthy brown.

But all of her color came out when she sang. The whole first week she was there, she didn’t sing a note. She was serious all the time. Then one day she started in singing while washing the windows. It was a clear, bright, windy day, and suddenly Maddie started singing a French song. It started soft and sort of hummy, then got louder as each window got cleaner, as if the more light she let in, the more sound she let out. It was like a bird singing in the house, Idella thought, listening from the bedroom.

One day Dalton came into the house unexpectedly for some lunch. He was quiet, as he heard Maddie singing upstairs. He stood in the kitchen and listened until she tumbled down the stairs, quilts to be aired in her arms. She stopped still upon seeing him.

“Go on, Maddie.”

“Oh, I thought no one was here.”

“No one was. Now I am.” He smiled. “I’d be glad for you to sing. Mother sang in the house, too.”

Maddie blushed and smiled. But she did not sing anymore. She went out to hang the quilts from the line. She shook them busily, snapping them from the corners, until she saw Dalton come off the porch. Sandwich in hand, he waved and walked on into the barn.

 

“She wears things,” Avis said one morning as they watched Maddie standing at the cliff edge.

“What are you talking about?” Idella turned away and slipped out of her cotton nightie.

“She wears things in her clothes. There’s a lump that moves around.” Avis stood on the bed to get a better look at Maddie. “Sometimes I think it’s stuck down her boobies.” Avis demonstrated, her hand under her nightdress across her flat little chest. “Sometimes I think it’s under her skirt.” Avis waggled her fanny.

“You’re crazy.”

“You ever seen her undress?”

“No. But I’d like to see
you
get dressed.” Idella tossed Avis her clothes.

“She waits till we’re sleeping before she gets into bed.” Avis wrenched her nightie over her head carelessly. “And she’s up before us.”

“Why would anyone hide things in their clothes?” Idella carefully pulled on her stockings and stuck her feet into her shoes.

“Nowhere else to, I guess.” Avis pulled her dress on.

“We give her a drawer.”

“That’s not much.”

“You ever been into it?” Idella looked over at the closed bottom drawer.

“Yeah. Nothing in there but a few old clothes.”

 

“Goddamn if these boots are going to walk me through another goddamned day.” Bill was bent over in a kitchen chair examining his booted feet. His suspenders strained at the sharp curves of his shoulders, and his long woolen underwear rose up out of his trousers. He tugged off a boot and sat up with it in his hand. “Cracked like a broken chimney all along one side here. Salt water does it. Eats at it.” He held it up and looked into the worn old boot. “Surprised I can’t see light coming in.”

“Church don’t smell like them boots.” Avis laughed.

“Well,” Bill said, “that might depend on what you think of church.”

“I think church smells like pine boughs,” Idella said, watching Maddie milling about the stove. She was making griddle cakes of various shapes and sizes. Some were coming along a lot better than others, it looked like, by the agitated way she was turning and scraping them around in the pan. When all the batter had been poured and fried, she put the biggest and best of them on Dad’s plate. Then she chose the best ones she could for Avis and Idella. Dalton had taken bread and dried fish and was already out checking his lobster pots.

“Well, I wondered what you were cooking up over there, Maddie.” Bill looked down at the large, misshapen griddle cakes. “Better hand me the syrup and a new cup of coffee.”

Avis held hers up. “I’m still wondering what she was cooking. This one looks like the map of Canada at school.”

“Well, now, maybe I can use any extras to put in the bottom of my boots. If I can cut that one down to size, it might do the trick.” Idella watched Maddie walk quietly from the kitchen while Avis and Bill were laughing. He poured syrup all over his plate.

“Avis, put your food down.” Idella looked over at her. “You’ve hurt Maddie’s feelings. She’s gone upstairs. What’s the matter with you?”

Everyone got quiet and set about to eat what was in front of them. “These are damn tasty!” Bill called out loudly. “I hope you can whip me up a few more, Maddie, before I set out.”

“I love ’em!” Avis called up the stairs. “I want more!”

Idella attempted to eat the one she’d been given. It was awfully burned on one side and still gooey on the other. There was no in-between to it. “Pass me the syrup, Avis.”

Maddie returned to the kitchen from upstairs. She stood in front of Bill for a moment—and then took from behind her back the new pair of men’s boots she’d come in the door holding when she’d first arrived. She placed the boots at his feet, without looking up, and said, so softly they could barely hear it, “
Pour vous.
These boots. They are yours if they fit you.”

Everyone stopped their chewing and looked at Maddie.

“Where in hell did these come from?” He picked up the boots and examined them. “These are a fine pair of boots. They’re special made. Look at that double stitching they got around the edges there. And this heel could flatten a mule if you stepped on it. Where’d you get them, Maddie?”

Maddie shook her head. “They belong to me. I don’t want them.”

Bill looked at Maddie hard. Idella knew that look, so intense it felt like your bones might get holes in ’em. Finally he pursed his lips and squinted up his eyes. The girls knew this to be a signal that he’d made a decision of some sort. “All right, then. They don’t do any good sitting upstairs. They’re a fine pair of work boots, and I’ve got work that needs doing.” He removed his old boots and slowly slid his feet, one and then the other, down into the new boots. “They went in, by God.” He stood up. “With room to spare. I can manage spare room. It’s the too-tight I can’t handle.” He walked around the kitchen, up to the door and back. All eyes were on his new boots.

“Well, thank you, Maddie. You bring unexpected gifts.” He smiled at her.

Maddie’s face took on a light they hadn’t seen before. “It is good, then? You don’t need pancakes at the bottom?”

Bill laughed full out. “No pancakes.”

“You will wear them?” She smiled.

“I’ll wear them and I’ll dance in them, Maddie.” He lifted his feet high, one and then the other in a prancing step. Grabbing her hands, he pulled her about the room in small circles, laughing. Avis and Idella laughed, too.

Avis got up and grabbed their hands and got herself in on the circle. “Round and round the mulberry bush!” she started singing, and they all joined in, laughing and spinning. “The monkey chased the weasel.” When it got to the “pop,” Bill lifted by the waist—not Avis, who was expecting it—but Maddie, who was startled and shy. It was a small lift, for Maddie was not a small girl, but it was enough of a lift for everyone to take notice. The song ended, and they stopped.

“The fields are lying in wait. I’ll go stomp them.” Bill grabbed his hat off the hook by the door and strode out of the house.