More Than You Know (11 page)

I combed a hank of my hair forward over my face. My hair

wasn’t like Stephen’s; his was silky fine, but mine was dense and

straight, then as now. I felt for my eyebrows with my finger and made

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a cut with the scissors flat across my forehead, and then I could see

from one eye. I met Stephen’s eyes in the mirror; he was aghast with

delight that I had really done it. I positioned the scissors carefully,

taking care not to poke myself in the eye. I felt Stephen was holding

his breath watching what I was doing. Slice—the blade cut through

my hair, and suddenly there I was, transformed. Stephen was looking

with amazement at my new face in the mirror and seeing nothing else.

But my heart nearly stopped. Now in the mirror I could see a tall

black-shrouded figure just outside the door, in the hall, silently watch-

ing us. It had arrived soundlessly and was hovering, intent, as if it

didn’t know it could be seen, its face shaded except for terrible pierc-

ing eyes, a gaze like ice picks. I screamed and dropped the scissors

into the sink, and all the electric lights in the house went out.

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1868

The
RandallD
wasaschooner,fifteenhundredtons,oneofthe

biggest ships ever built in Dundee. The builder was John Osgood; the

captain was his brother Asa; and she sailed in 1867 with Otis Osgood

as second mate. Otis was nineteen. It was March of the following year

when word came that the
Randall D
had been lost with all hands in the

Bay of Biscay. She’d not been seen since she left Ca´diz, making for Cardiff,

and it was presumed she had broken up in a winter storm.

Beal Island heard the news before Dundee, from a coastal steamer.

Percy Grindle came out to the Haskell house himself to tell Claris, and

she wept as she got the children ready for the trip onto the main. Amos

was six; the new baby Sallie was almost two. Danial moved around Claris

silently as he made their preparations; he held a grudge against Claris’s

older brothers for being so different from himself and for having the

knack of making Claris happy, but no one could have held a grudge

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against young Otis. Danial understood Claris’s tears. Although by the

time they were halfway up the bay he’d had enough of them.

The whole village had gone into mourning. There had been a dozen

men from the village and the Neck on the
Randall D,
and scores who had

worked on her or sailed with those who had sailed on her. There were

services held for all hands at both the Congregational church and the

Baptist. The whole town attended both.

The youngest Osgood cousins were inconsolable, feeling the loss of

Otis, their playmate and champion, as terribly as the loss of their father.

Claris’s mother and her newly widowed sister stayed very close together.

The neighbors brought in vast arrays of food, and visitors came and went

throughout the days and into the evenings.

Claris and Danial slept in the bed Claris had once shared with her

sister Mary. Their new baby Sallie slept between them, and Amos was

on a trundle on the floor. It was the first time since her marriage Claris

had spent a night under that roof. As always when they were among her

family, Danial grew more and more silent. On the evening of the second

day, Claris’s mother asked Mary to play the parlor organ for hymns.

Afterward, Leander got out his fiddle and started to play, mournful songs

and chanteys. When he played “Black-Eyed Susan,” their mother broke

down and wept without reserve, as she had not done even at the church

service.

Amos had moved to sit beside his uncle, watching Leander’s hands

as he played.

“That was Otis’s favorite song,” Leander said to him. “He started

playing it when he was about your age.” He began to play it again. Claris’s

father left the room. Claris watched him go, knowing John Osgood was

suffering terribly, not only from the loss of his brother and his son and

so many young friends and the sons of friends but also from the terrible

fear that it was somehow his fault, that there was something in the way

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the boat was built, something different he could have done to it to bring

them all home safe.

All in the Downs the fleet was moor’d

The streamers waving in the wind,

When Black-Eyed Susan came onboard,

“O where shall I my true love find?

Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true,

If my sweet William, if my sweet William

Sails among your crew?”

Their mother had learned it in England on her honeymoon and

taught it to each of the girls in turn. It was always sung after supper, a

duet or ensemble, the night before any man of the family left on a sea

voyage.

Change as ye list, ye winds, my heart shall be

The faithful compass, the faithful compass

That still points to thee.

Leander looked down at Amos. “Do you want to try?” he asked,

and he held out the fiddle to him. Amos nodded solemnly. He arranged

the fiddle under his chin and placed his left hand just so; he had been

watching very carefully. Leander put his arms around Amos and placed

his big hands over the little ones, one on the neck of the fiddle and one

on the bow. Very slowly, moving Amos’s fingers with his, he played the

first note of “Black-Eyed Susan,” then the next, then the next. Claris

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observed from across the room with a terrible ache in her heart. Little

Otis. She saw a hundred pictures of him in her mind. She wrapped her

arms around the sleeping baby Sallie on her lap, and watched Amos

hungrily.

Meanwhile, Danial was also watching his son, whose face was a

mask of concentration, following his uncle Leander’s fingers with his,

passionately studying how to squeeze music out of the box of wood and

gut, as one wrings juice from an orange.

All the Osgoods remembered the night Otis had first taken up

Leander’s violin. Claris turned to Danial, wanting to describe that moment

to him, as they looked together at their son. But as she turned and leaned

toward him to speak, Danial got out of his chair and left the room swiftly,

without looking at her.

k

Danial left the house the next morning as soon as it was light. He

left no word for Claris as to how she should get home, and she decided

to take that to mean she should pay as long a visit as she wanted. She

stayed three weeks. As the days passed, the family returned to their usual

pursuits. One of Mary’s children had a birthday, and they had the familiar

form of celebration, although the feeling was terribly muted. Life was for

the living. There was a coconut cake, and there were presents; Claris’s

mother gave the little girl a doll that had been Mabel’s; she had sewn it

a new dress and a tiny muff made of rabbit fur. Mary and Claris made

small patchwork quilts for the doll’s carriage. Amos had the completely

new experience of attending a party, and baby Sallie was given her first

taste of ice cream, which Alice and Cousin Sarah had made using crushed

peppermint candy canes saved from Christmas for the flavoring.

The cousins next door treated Sallie as if she were their own brand-

new doll, singing to her and pushing her around in a doll’s carriage. Amos

made a special friend of Mary’s third child, William. William introduced

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him to the pleasures of the pony cart, the same one Otis used to drive

behind Elmer the burro. Together Alice and Mary had shared the expense

of a Shetland pony, the first ever seen in the state, and Amos learned to

drive it as well as to sit astride it while the cousins led him around the

backyard.

Every night there was music. Sometimes Mary or Cousin Deborah

played the organ while those who liked to sang, sometimes Leander or

Thomas played the fiddle, and one night Neighbor Treworgy carried his

bass violin up the hill to join them. Simon coached Amos so that he won

the first game of Up Jenkins he ever played. Claris saw even Sallie forget

her lifelong habit of clinging to her mother’s skirt and begin to venture

forth, toddling after the older children.

k

After the first week of mourning, the older cousins returned to

school, and Amos went with them. The school had three times the number

of children as the island school, and that meant many more games could

be played. After school Amos usually went home with William and some-

times stayed the night. One afternoon he came home alone in a funk; he

and William had had a fight over possession of some marbles, but Mary

and Claris left them to sort it out themselves, and by the next afternoon

they were friends again. Amos learned to play Authors, a game unknown

in Solace Haskell’s house, since it was played with cards. On Sundays

they played a spelling game but used only words from Bible stories.

Jonathan Friend conducted these. And almost every night after dinner,

Leander went on with Amos’s fiddle lessons.

It should not have come as a surprise to Claris when it was time

to leave that Amos didn’t want to go. But it did; it shocked her. Amos,

her beloved son, sent to her to make her life worth living. With his face

set in misery, he said, “I could stay with William.”

“But your home is with us!”

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“Why?”

She didn’t know what to say. She looked over his head at her sister

Mary; she knew that if she could part with him, Mary would willingly

take him in. There were several families on the island and more on the

main that had done this, kept a son or daughter when a family removed

for one reason or another. She pictured Amos happily folded in with

Mary’s brood and was flooded with terrible feeling. Baby Sallie in her

arms seemed to sense it; she began to wail.

“Hush!” Claris jiggled the baby and felt her own heart pound as

the crying grew worse. Young Bowdoin Leach would be waiting for them

at the landing, ready to sail them out home. She had packed the few

things they’d brought and the many things they’d been given, hand-me-

downs and keepsakes and new things for the baby.

“I have to go back, and you have to go with me. You’d miss us

terribly if I left you behind. You’re my son.” She could see that this

utterly rational statement of fact meant nothing to him beside the huge

emotion he was feeling; he’d found the place that felt like home to him,

and it wasn’t with her.

Mary reached out and took the howling baby from Claris and began

to croon to her. Almost at once Sallie grew calmer; then something worse

happened. Claris turned on her sister and grabbed the baby back, setting

off a fresh shrieking.

“Claris—I was trying to help,” Mary said.

“I don’t need help, I can comfort my own child!” said Claris, though

she manifestly could not. Sallie was arching her back now and screaming,

hysterical. Amos watched with horror the explosion of emotion he had

set off. More than anything he wanted the conflict to stop, but almost

as much he wanted to choose for himself. He wanted to stay.

Mary had turned to her sister Alice, who put an arm around her

and whispered to her. William slipped closer to Amos and stood with

him, shoulder to shoulder. Mrs. Osgood watched her daughters quietly,

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deeply upset. Claris tried angrily to calm Sallie. So fierce were her com-

mands and ministrations that more than one person in the room worried

that she might accidentally hurt the baby.

Oddly, it was Leander, the bachelor uncle, who solved the impasse.

He came and knelt beside Amos so they were eye to eye.

“So, nephew,” he said. “I have a going-away present for you.”

“What is it?”

“Watch out—it doesn’t work that way. If you go with your mother

and take care of her, the way we count on you to do, then you can take

it with you. Otherwise I have to keep it.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way the world works. Uncles make the rules.”

There was a pause.

“What is it?” Amos had a glimmer of an idea, but it was so huge

he didn’t want to let it grow. It would be like a genie out of a bottle.

Leander made a show of thinking this question over. “I don’t think

I can tell you. There’s a rule about that. I’ll give you a hint. Then you

have to decide, fish or cut bait. Bargain?”

Amos thought hard and then nodded.

Leander nodded. “All right then. It’s something Otis would want

you to have. You, out of all his nieces and nephews.”

Amos seemed frozen, considering Leander. He hardly dared to

breathe.

“That’s it then. Now it’s your turn. Are you going to look after

your mother for us, and baby Sallie, so they won’t get lost on the way

home and sail off to China and never come back and visit us again?”