Tree By Leaf (17 page)

At that thought, Clothilde shriveled up inside herself at the ugliness in her own heart. She couldn’t even learn her lesson, she thought, shriveled up like a worm inside herself. If she really were God, the world would be in a horrible mess. Because now she only wanted to have this third thing over with, however bad it was going to be, so it would be all over and done with. There didn’t even have to be a third thing, even if she did have to lose her peninsula. And now she thought of it, she’d be willing to do that—to trade off the Point so the Voice would stop its joke on her. She would, she really would be willing to give it up; that would be fair, she thought desperately.

She sent her thoughts upward.
I will,
she thought.
I promise, I will.

Even under the fall of warm sunlight, the boathouse crouched on its rocky bed, the door closed. Clothilde knocked and was answered by the same waiting, empty silence. She didn’t let herself scare herself with her imagination. She didn’t give herself time. She pushed at the door, scraping it across the floor, and marched right in. She would put the box on the table and take the dish and get out, fast.

She didn’t even look around. She fixed her eyes on the table and took three steps to it, where it sat in the middle of the dim room, with the covered dish on it. She dropped the box on the tabletop and picked up the bowl.

But the bowl was heavy. She lifted the cloth and could see that nothing had been eaten. The creamed chicken had turned rancid. He hadn’t even eaten the food Mother made for him, she thought, angry, and he hadn’t even bothered to throw it out. Then what was he eating? She didn’t care.

She dropped the cloth back over the bowl—it was stained now, but he didn’t care because he didn’t do laundry—and turned to leave.

The dark shape on the bedroll didn’t move. It didn’t have to move. She recognized it. He was there, his back against the wall, staring at her. A face like that couldn’t have any expression, she thought, turning her eyes away; but she couldn’t see it anyway, she thought, because of all the shadows. Sunlight couldn’t get into the room much, with the high dirty windows to keep it out.

For a second, Clothilde stood there with her head bent down so she didn’t have to look at him. The man didn’t move either; he just hunched there against the wall.

Clothilde felt like walking out, away. But she couldn’t. “That package came for you,” she said. “Mother says she hopes you have already paid for it.” That was an ugly thing to say, and she didn’t know why she had to say such an ugly thing.

He didn’t answer, but he got up. She saw him, out of the corner of her vision. She was looking at the floor, and at the covered bowl in her hands, the food he hadn’t even touched. They would have liked creamed chicken, over rice, for a supper, and now nobody would be able to eat it.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him standing by the window, where, if she looked, she’d have to see him. He was trying to make her look at him. He was trying to drive her away, to make her go away. He was trying to scare her.

Clothilde refused to budge. Her shoes were planted on the wooden floor, and the boathouse was planted on the rocks.

“Nate has run away to live with Grandfather,” she said. That was his fault too, this man’s fault, so he should know about it.

“Then Nate’s a fool,” the man said. “You can tell your mother, my father will have to give up my money. I went to a lawyer. The lawyer will get it for her.”

“But Mother said—” That was why they were going to have to let Lou go.

“I thought I could surprise her. It was a foolish idea, trying to make her happy.”

In her anger at him, Clothilde automatically looked at him. Before she could remember and look away, she saw his face. His face was like the cove at low tide, with the water gone entirely out. Usually, water lay over the cove and hid the floor of it, the rough mud-colored floor, scarred with gulleys, pitted with clam breathing holes, and the dark splotches where colonies of mussels spread out. When the water lay over the cove, it could be smooth and serene, or moving under wind the way expressions moved over a face. This face had no expression, and never would be able to, as if the tide had gone out and never would come back. His eyes looked back, dark blue in the shadows. She wanted to look away. She wished she’d never looked. But she couldn’t look away and he was looking right back at her.

It was horrible, as if she could see right through his eyes across his brain and down into his heart—and it was all like that drawing on the wall, cold and bare, and the black shadows falling.

“Tell her that,” he said. “Tell her she doesn’t have
to worry. I’ve set the lawyers on him, like a pack of dogs.”

Clothilde just nodded her head. The bowl in her hands was heavy, the dinner Mother had prepared so carefully for him. The dinner he hadn’t even touched. And he could have told Mother, too, and then Mother wouldn’t have told them false news. She turned to leave. Because if Mother hadn’t told them that false news, things never would have happened that had happened. Things she had made happen.

At the door she turned around. She couldn’t have said why, except Mother had said he would know about voices and she needed to know.

When she turned, he already had his back to her, and was looking out the window. He was tall enough to look out of it. All she could see was the back of him, his tall broad shape in a soldier’s shirt and trousers, the back of his head with his hair grown shaggy. “People heard voices,” she said. “They used to. Was there anyone who ever heard just one voice?”

He turned around again, but the light behind him kept his face in shadows. “Why do you want to know?”

Clothilde didn’t have to answer that.

“Are you going crazy, stuck here in this
Godforsaken place.” He didn’t say it like a question, so she didn’t have to answer it like a question.

“It’s not Godforsaken,” Clothilde said. She saw in her imagination the mittened hand, with its clawed fingers digging into the ocean—her peninsula. “It’s beautiful,” she said, thinking of the water crashing up against the fallen rocks, the tall swaying birch trees and their high waving leaves.

“Is it,” he said, another nonquestion. Then—as if he was giving up some battle he was too tired to fight anymore—he said, his whole voice tired, “Maybe it is. Maybe. Socrates did, he’s the only one I know, outside of the Bible.”

“Who’s Socrates?”

“In ancient Greece. He heard a voice he called his daimon. He said it only told him No. When not to do things and when things weren’t true. He said it never told him Yes, so he learned to just listen for the negatives, and I guess he hoped, when he didn’t hear them, that he was acting and speaking rightly.”

“What happened to him?”

“They put him to death.”

“Because he was crazy?”

“No. Because he wanted to speak and act rightly,” the man said. “Go away,” he added.

But Clothilde had more questions.

“Go away,” he said again, dangerous now, even though he stayed still as a shadow.

She left, but she didn’t close the door behind her. Let him close the door himself. She ran clumsily up the hill from the boathouse, never minding the way the rancid creamed chicken slopped and slipped, spilling over onto her apron and falling to the ground. She’d be laundering it herself. At least, she did her own laundry.

Clothilde didn’t want to wake up. The wind, blowing into her room—the wind and the bright sunlight forced her eyes open. She tried to close them. She tried to fall back into forgetting sleep. The wind blew, mixing leaf sounds and water sounds. She sat up in bed.

It was Friday. In town—early, so as to be in time for the morning train from Ellsworth—Tom Hatch would have loaded Lou’s family trunk into the wagon and they would have driven away, inland. Friday was the day they were leaving, returning to Fall River. Clothilde didn’t know what Lou might be feeling, traveling back to the mills. She couldn’t imagine, except that she knew how she would be feeling herself, if she were leaving the peninsula forever behind her. Imagining that, Clothilde got out of bed.

She didn’t look at herself in the bathroom mirror. They had buried Mr. Small and Mr. Twohey yesterday. Nobody from the Point had gone to the service,
or to the little graveyard, it wouldn’t have been proper. But even if it had been proper, Clothilde couldn’t have gone, knowing what she knew. She braided her hair tight, so tight it hurt her scalp. It should never have come asking her, that Voice. And the man in the boathouse, she didn’t know what was due to happen to him.

She pulled on a sweater over her blouse and laced her shoes up impatiently. She wanted to get out of her room and out of the house, to get away. She wasn’t hungry. Her stomach was a flat board of nonhunger; she couldn’t even remember what hunger felt like. If Mother tried to make her eat something—and she would—Clothilde might just be sick. There wasn’t any way Mother could force her to open her mouth, put a spoon into it, and swallow. She better not try, Clothilde thought, clattering down the steep stairs.

She had slept late. It was after nine o’clock. Mother was at the kitchen sink, washing her hands. Dierdre sat unhappily at the table, her face newly scrubbed, her hair in French braids, tears hanging from her eyelashes. Clothilde didn’t sit down.

“You’re too late. I was going to make a chowder, but there won’t be another low tide until late evening,” Mother said, her voice muffled by running
water, and because she was speaking with her back to Clothilde.

All Clothilde could have said about that was I’m sorry, so she didn’t say anything. “What’s wrong?” she asked Dierdre.

“I don’t know what we’ll eat for supper,” Dierdre said. At the thought, her eyes filled with tears again, and the tears spilled over. “Mother won’t tell me.”

Why wouldn’t Mother tell her? And why did Dierdre have to cry about something that hadn’t even happened yet? “We’ve got bacon, there’s fried bread and bacon. You like that,” she reminded her little sister.

Dierdre’s fresh dress and little white pinafore, and hair subdued into stiff braids, and her scrubbed face—all looked as if she were going to go to a tea party. But Dierdre wasn’t going to a tea party. What was she supposed to do with her day, dressed like that? Her eyes looked big and sad, “I wanted chowder,” she said. “Mother said. With crispy things.”

Dierdre’s got down from her chair and stood beside Clothilde, glaring at Mother. Her little head came no further than Clothilde’s hip. Clothilde didn’t know what Dierdre expected her to be able to do—you couldn’t dig clams except at low tide. It just wasn’t possible. But she did know what Dierdre wanted,
what Dierdre always wanted. When Dierdre turned around and buried her face in Clothilde’s skirt, reaching her arms around Clothilde’s legs, Clothilde let her two hands stroke Dierdre’s back. Mother stayed at the sink, washing away.

When Mother turned around it was only to hold her hands out to Clothilde. The skin was red with scrubbing, the nails were broken short with garden work. “Just look at them,” Mother said, as if she was asking Clothilde to look at a crooked seam or some other bad piece of work.

Clothilde looked at the hands. They looked strong, capable, clever.

“And look at me,” Mother said.

Clothilde did. Mother’s cheeks were pink from being outside in the wind, and her face was getting brown. Her blue eyes with their dark lashes—Mother looked lost, lost and afraid.

Behind her eyes, Mother looked as if she was lost in some strange country, where nobody could understand what she was saying, and she couldn’t understand where she was supposed to try to go. She looked as if she were a little child who didn’t know what to do and was holding her hand out—but there was nobody there to take her hand.

“I look like some working woman,” Mother said.

What did Mother expect to look like? After all, she did work. Clothilde felt as if everything was her fault, but it wasn’t.

“He didn’t marry you because you were a lady,” she said to her mother. “He married you because you weren’t. If he’d wanted to marry someone—like the aunts—there were plenty of them in Manfield.”

Mother put her hands down and gathered herself up straight. She was going to reprimand Clothilde, the way a lady should. Dierdre went to take Mother’s hand, and stand glaring at Clothilde.

Clothilde didn’t let her mother speak. “There’s going to be money, he told me yesterday. He hired lawyers, because Grandfather has to pay the trust money. He didn’t want to do that, but he did it for you. You don’t know what he wants,” Clothilde told her mother, right to her face.

She didn’t wait to hear anything Mother had to say. She ran out of the kitchen and across the long grass down to the beach. She didn’t know why she’d talked that way to her mother, and she didn’t want to think about it. And she meant what she said, she meant every word.

The tide was up. Waves blew sideways across the
cove. The water was dark blue, and the grainy sand sparkled. The rocks she approached, running along the curve of the beach, running into the wind, shone gray and brown. Clouds—great masses of high clouds—blew across the deep blue sky. Clothilde slowed to a walk, looking around her. The bright wind blew over everything. It was a wind from the east, where the war had been. When one of the clouds covered the sun, the wind blew its shadow across the beach and out over the water.

Anger blew through her like a shadow. Mother could have told them, but she never had. Mother must have known for months what had happened to the man’s face, but she hadn’t told Clothilde. She’d never said, either, that Grandfather didn’t want them at his house, or that the aunts didn’t like them. Clothilde had had to learn that for herself. Clothilde remembered how she had gradually figured it out, not wanting to be hearing and seeing all the little clues, about the money troubles. It was as if Mother put things off until the last minute, hoping something would happen. Mother just didn’t
do
anything.

Clothilde stopped dead in her tracks beside the rocks. Her thoughts rose like rocks before her.
She
did things—and now look at the mess she had made.
Besides, if you thought about it, all the things she’d done were selfish, all the things she asked for. No wonder she had caused so much trouble. She knew she had caused it, even if nobody else did. She had no business being angry at Mother when her own heart was so bad.