More Than You Know (10 page)

as he could ever be, but Danial understood her well enough by now not

to have to be told that.

In the spring of 1867, little Amos had outgrown all the clothes

Claris could make him by cutting down outworn clothes of her own and

Danial’s, and she and Danial were threadbare themselves. Furthermore

Amos was barefoot, and the rocks and sharp clamshells on the shore hurt

his feet.

Claris took Amos down to the dock to meet Danial one blue and

gold April evening soon after her birthday. The snow was gone from the

meadows, and the air was warm and full of the fir-scented smell of spring.

She stood watching Danial maneuver his little gaff-rigged sloop in against

the falling tide.

“Fresh fish for supper, Mother,” Danial said, when his boat was

safely on the outhaul. He sat down on the dock beside a bucket of fish

and began to clean them, throwing the guts into the water.

“Keep the heads; I’ll make chowder,” said Claris. Danial grunted.

“I’d like to go into town to the store tomorrow,” she said, after

watching him for a bit.

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Danial didn’t react; he just kept cleaning the fish.

“I need some buttonhole silk, and I want to order shoes for

Amos.”

“You want to sit and gossip with your sisters, you mean.”

“Well, I haven’t been to town in months, Danial.”

“Mother didn’t used to go to town from one year to the next.”

“I’m not your mother,” said Claris.

Danial raised an eyebrow and looked at her, as if to say, I’m well

aware of that.

Amos was off on the beach, studiously gathering shells, selecting

and rejecting rapidly according to some system of his own. She watched

him, and then said to Danial, “The baby’s helping you.”

“Good. I can use it.”

“My brother should be home from Bermuda,” Claris said. Both her

brothers had come home from the war, though seven boys from the village

had died. So many boys had been lost from Deer Isle, to the south, that

for thirty years it would be known as the Island of Widows. “I’d like to

see him. And I have eggs to trade, and buttons.” Claris had been carving

buttons out of sheep bones all winter, to earn some cash money.

“Thought you traded them up at Duffys’.”

“Not the buttons. There are things the island store doesn’t have.”

“Make me a list and I’ll get them for you.”

Claris went silently to Amos and let him fill her pocket with his

shells and pebbles. She didn’t want to speak, she was so angry and dis-

appointed. She didn’t want to give Danial the pleasure of seeing how

much it mattered to her.

k

The next morning she watched from the shore as Danial sailed

away up the bay with her bucket of eggs and the buttons she’d made

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sewn up in a bag. If he couldn’t match the buttonhole silk exactly, she

knew he’d get the wrong thing. And she wanted to weep, thinking of

how Leander would have smiled at catching sight of her and Amos

coming up the walk, and of Amos on Otis’s shoulders, and of dinner

at home. She wanted to know what her mother was reading, what new

music her cousins had for the parlor organ, what games the children

were playing in the town. She wanted to know if Cousin Mark’s bro-

ken arm had mended and whether Alice was as sick with this baby

coming as she’d been with the last. She wanted her brothers and cous-

ins to have a blanket toss, to hear Amos’s shrieks of joy as he flew into

the air and fell back to the safety they stretched underneath him.

She doubted if Danial would even call at home, let alone ask any

of the questions she herself wanted to ask. He seemed to think people

thought ill of him for not going to the war, though he’d had an ancient

mother and young wife to support, and babies coming. He’d march up

to Abbott’s and do his business as if the ground were burning his feet,

then quick-march back to his boat. She knew how much he resented

dawdling around town waiting for her to finish her visit when he brought

her along. For her part, she resented his letting his temper show, for she

fancied her father and mother, and aunts and uncles too, taking note of

it. She pictured them talking her over after she left with her husband,

saying, “We told her. We told her how it would be, but . . . you know

Claris.”

k

Claris saw Danial’s sail coming down the bay at midafternoon and

went down to the dock to meet him. She could see by the way he handled

the lines of the outhaul that he was furious. He marched up the path

toward her and went past into the house with her hurrying after him. His

limp was worse when he was mad.

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As she came into the kitchen, he threw a small pair of worn leather

boots onto the table.

“Your sister Mary sends these to Amos,” he said, the words ex-

ploding out of his mouth as if he were spitting bullets. The atmosphere

was as charged as the minutes before a lightning storm, and Claris was

both puzzled and annoyed.

“What’s the matter now, Danial?”

“Your brother paid my bill at Abbott’s.”

“What bill?”

“My bill! I’ve been paying it off in my own time, and Abbott knew

I was good for it, but your brother got wind that I owed money and he

went in and paid it off.”

“Simon?”

“Of course, Simon! What other high muck-a-muck would do such

a thing?”

“Oh, Danial—that’s just what a brother does!” She was exasperated.

“Not mine.”

“Maybe it would be a better world if he did!”

“A better world if we were all Osgoods? I can pay my debts!”

“I didn’t know we had one!”

“Why should you have? So you could tell your brothers?”

“Was Abbott charging you interest?”

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“Is Simon?”

“I don’t know what Simon is doing—trying to shame me!”

“I don’t see that you need much help doing that!”

Amos looked from his father’s face to his mother’s and started

to cry.

Claris was relentless when she was angry, and she was looking at

Danial with fury, as if she couldn’t remember ever having loved him in

her life.

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His face congested and red, Danial half-raised his arms, as if he

were a bird about to take flight, then dropped them. He reached into his

pocket and pulled out a reel of scarlet buttonhole twist. He threw it at

her, and wheeled out the door, slamming it behind him. The spool hit

her hard on the breast, but she never moved.

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After Conary left me at the post office, I went up to the

blacksmith shop. I’d never seen a blacksmith work before I came to

Dundee. Horses were not used at all in Boston anymore, but they were

still quite common here in the farming communities. Not so much for

riding but for hauling heavy loads out of the backcountry and for

pulling farm machines and bringing goods to town. The first day I

discovered Bowdoin Leach, he was shoeing a team of Belgians while

he and the farmer told stories. I could have sat there all day watching

him heat the black metal until it passed orange and turned an angry

white, and then he began to shape it with tongs and hammer as if he

were bending an icicle. Best was the tremendous sizzle and hiss of

steam when he plunged the hot iron into water to set and temper it.

This day, he was making a sign to mark the driveway of a house

in the summer colony. The Elms, it was going to say. I wonder if that

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sign is still there in front of the house; I’m sure the elms are not.

Anyway, I said, “Hello, Mr. Leach,” and he said, “Afternoon, Miss

Gray.” He called me Miss Gray all that summer until somebody told

me to call him Bowdoin. You pronounce it
Boe-din,
like the college,

which someone in his family founded. Edith would have given birth

to goldfish if she knew I was being familiar with my elders, even a

blacksmith, but by then I had stopped listening to her just about al-

together.

I settled myself on one of the big sawed-off stumps that stood

around his shop. You could use them for chairs, or Bowdoin might

use any one of them to hammer on. They were all covered with burnt-

in scars. “You used to live out on the island, didn’t you? Mrs. Allen

said you did.”

“She’s right. I did.”

“Did you know the Haskells?”

He stopped and looked at me. “You haven’t been listening to

that crate of flapdoodle of Abby Gordon’s, have you?”

I hadn’t, but immediately I wanted to know what crate of flap-

doodle that might be. I knew Miss Gordon ran the little notions store

on Union Street, but I hadn’t known up to then she knew anything

about Beal Island.

“No, I haven’t.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” He held up the curlicue of iron he’d been

heating and moved very carefully to his anvil. You could see in his

movements how painful must be whatever force of nature held his

back hunched over as relentlessly as he bent the iron.

“Abby Gordon never knew the Haskells. I knew them, and my

father knew them well. He sometimes fished with Danial, and he often

did odd jobs for Mrs. Haskell when Danial wasn’t by. I took music

from Mrs. Haskell up at the schoolhouse.”

I was surprised. To look at him, you wouldn’t have thought of

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Bowdoin Leach “taking” music, any more than you’d picture him cro-

cheting doilies. (Which he could also do, I later learned.)

“What instrument do you play?”

“Mouth harp, anymore. Back then Mrs. Haskell wanted to teach

me the parlor organ, which she had one, down at her house. But she

could only do that when old Danial was off-island. He wouldn’t have

music in the house. She taught me fiddle, instead.”

“She played both?”

“She played anything. She was an Osgood.”

“Why didn’t Danial like music?”

“I don’t know that he didn’t. He just wouldn’t have it in the

house. Pure meanness, like as not. I don’t know anyone who knew

him who didn’t think he needed killing.”

You can tell when someone has said more than he meant to.

Bowdoin turned abruptly and carried his ironwork back to the fire hole.

When it was glowing, he flopped it onto a stump far from me and

began to hammer. I waited to see if he would come back to me, but

he seemed wholly absorbed in shaping his iron elm, so I went on

home.

There was rain for the next three or four days that kept us

trapped indoors. I stayed out of Edith’s way as much as I could, which

was hard enough in a small house. I played Chinese checkers with

Stephen, and Edith showed us how to make pull taffy. I put on my

slicker and took Whitey up to the village to get the mail, and there

was quite a crowd in the post office, killing time and gassing. Kermit

Horton said the mackerel were running; the day before Buster Gordon

went out trolling in the rain and he got so many he was giving them

away. There was a bucket of them on the back porch, iridescent and

slick. I wondered aloud if Edith would like some.

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“They’re wicked good, fried in cornmeal,” Mrs. Foss said to me.

She winked as she said it.

Kermit said, “Wicked good fertilizer.”

I decided not to take any. What I really wanted to do was go

out fishing in the rain myself, but I didn’t know anyone with a boat.

That night, Stephen went to sleep with forbidden bubble gum in

his mouth, and the next morning it was all in his hair. Edith was sure

I had given him the gum, though I hadn’t. She announced I was on

bounds for a week, and then she said there was no way to get gum

out of hair but to cut it out, and that’s what she did. She took a pair

of kitchen scissors and cut off a handful of Stephen’s beautiful black

hair. Maybe she had to—I’ve never tried to get gum out of hair—but

the way she did it made me mad. Edith said it would teach him a

lesson. Later I tried to fix it by cutting the rest of his hair shorter, but

he didn’t look much better and it was going to take months to grow

out. He looked just tragic sitting there on my bed with his Roosevelt

Bear under his arm and his mouth all turned down. He said he was

going to wear a paper bag on his head.

I asked him if he would feel better if I had short hair too. At

first he just looked gloomy, but then I said maybe we could get the

whole town to cut their hair, even Mrs. Foss, and even Mr. Horton,

and even the coon cat that slept on the windowsill at Abbott’s. The

town would be famous; we’d all be in the newsreels. He finally started

to laugh. Well, then I had to make good on it. We went into the hall

bathroom between his bedroom and mine. He stood on a stool beside

me so I could look at his shorn forelock while I cut my own, so we

would match. There was a moth in the room, and it kept bumping

against the lightbulb over the mirror.