More Than You Know (7 page)

got him, and was very skittish.

“Mail’s taking extra time,” Mrs. Foss said cheerfully. “We got

the Sears catalogs in it this morning. Good for a half hour right there.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. I sat down beside Hoover, who shrank

behind Kermit’s leg. I had learned from Bowdoin Leach that Mrs.

Foss and Mr. Horton kept company in some way that was left inten-

tionally vague. Mrs. Foss called herself a widow, although it was well

known that someone who looked exactly like the late Mr. Foss was

living down in Portland with a young wife. Mrs. Foss was serene; she

seemed to relish life greatly.

“How are you enjoying things down on the point?” she asked

me. I said things were all right.

Mrs. Foss leisurely stuck envelopes here and there into people’s

mail slots. “You know of Miss Kennedy? She used to live in that

house. She had a terrible time there.” She said this mildly, and Kermit

smiled and nodded.

“She did?”

“Yes, she used to come in all draggle-tailed some mornings, but

Miss Hamor wouldn’t let her talk about it.”

I began to think that Mrs. Foss might be some kind of mind

reader. “Why wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know, dear. But Miss Hamor ruled the roost.” Kermit

agreed with that, evidently.

I said, “Miss Hamor taught at the Academy, I gather.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Is that why they call the house a schoolhouse?”

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“Oh, no, dear,” Mrs. Foss said. She seemed surprised that I had

to ask. “That
was
a schoolhouse—it was the old schoolhouse out to

the island. After it was closed, Miss Hamor had it brought across on

the ice one winter.”

“Really!”

“That’s quite common around here. That schoolhouse was

brought across, and some people in the summer colony, they brought

over a barn and made it into their living room. I’m told that; I’ve

never been in it.”

This was news to me, and I was suddenly full of questions. Of

course later I came to know a great deal about the island. Once the

gasoline engine was invented, there wasn’t the advantage there had

been in living out at the edge of things, close to the fishing grounds

and handy for the coasting trade. With an engine you could get out

there almost as quick if there was wind or not; you just had to get up

earlier in the morning. And the days of the great sailing vessels that

called on the islands as they traveled from the Maritimes up to Boston,

well, those days were mostly over anyway by the turn of the century.

“Course, there are islands where people stayed, gas engines or

no,” said Kermit. Mrs. Foss had paused in her dealing envelopes into

slots to read some postcards. Everyone expected this, and, along with

many others, in later life I’d often send a greeting to her on the edge

of a postcard I was mailing to someone else in the village. “The truth

is people started to remove from Beal back in the nineties, after the

murder.”

“The murder,” I said. My skin pricked, and I stopped trying to

get through to Hoover.

“Yes, there was a murder out on Beal in . . .’eighty-six, was it,

Nella B.?”

“Eighteen eighty-six. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. A

girl called Sallie Haskell killed her father with an ax. There was a trial

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up in Unionville. . . . It was a terrible thing to happen in a little island

village.”

Killed her father! Was that what I had seen crawling across the

bedroom floor? An old woman who had killed someone once? Was I

so sure it was a woman? Was it a murdered man? The more I thought

of it, the more I thought that I had heard something about it; it was

the kind of tale that gets whispered among the sleeping bags at camp-

outs. A girl murderer, a lonely island. But I certainly didn’t know it

was this bay, or that island.

“What happened to her? Sallie Haskell?”

“Why, they couldn’t convict her. They tried her twice. The first

time the jury was hung, and the second time they acquitted.”

“Yes, reporters come up from all over New England for the

trial,” said Kermit. “My father went to the first one, every day. Course,

the state was dry at the time, so reporters didn’t have much to do with

themselves except make things up. Not many wanted to come back

up here for the second one.”

“What happened to Sallie afterwards?”

“She came back here,” they both said, as if this made perfect

sense.

“But she didn’t go back to the island,” said Nella B. “She stayed

in Dundee, where she had family, and lived in a little house by herself.

She tried to teach school, but the children were so interested about

who she was, she couldn’t get much else through their heads. And

every little while the press would dredge everything up. Anniversaries

of the murder, that sort of thing. In her later years, she hardly went

out.”

“Wore nothing but black, and only went out after dark,” said

Kermit. “The children tended to follow her about, otherwise.”

I was growing afraid to ask more about her. But I couldn’t help

wanting to know what she was like, had they known her?

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“Yes, I knew her quite well,” said Mrs. Foss. “She was quiet.

She was always grateful for what you did for her. I’d take her her

mail, when she got any, and visit a little. Max Abbott always sent a

boy down with her groceries. She knitted a great deal. And she was

wonderful during the influenza epidemic.”

“Oh, I remember that,” Kermit said. “Godfrey, wasn’t that a

time—half the town down with it; they turned the school here into an

infirmary, and all that were able helped with those that weren’t. No

sooner one would get better than three more would go down with it,

and we buried quite a few. When was that, Nella B.? Nineteen nine-

teen?”

“Nineteen nineteen. My daughter got it. She came through,

though. Sallie Haskell was just as patient and kind, though she was

awful frail herself by then. She was the only one nursing who didn’t

get it, and folks said she was the only one who really wanted to.”

“She wanted to,” I said.

“I think so, yes. Her life pretty much ended the day her father

died.”

“Though she went on breathing,” said Kermit.

Nella B. began filing bills and catalogs into the mailboxes again.

I sensed that I’d gotten to the limit of what she thought seemly to say

on the subject.

I went out into the sunshine. Lovely as the day was, the shock

and fear from the night before stayed with me like some foul-smelling

vapor. I felt jumpy and anxious and wanted to go home to Boston. I

missed my friends; I badly wanted to talk to someone who liked me.

I guess it’s in moments like that when you see if there’s a meaning

to things, because that was right when along into my life came Conary

Crocker.

5 0

1858

Itwastwoyearsaftertheappleafternoon,anddeepwinter,when

Danial asked Claris to marry him. The courtship had been sporadic be-

cause he lived on the island fishing and farming with his mother and

brother and could not often come into town. Claris was twenty, and not

only did her sister Mary have two children but her younger sister Alice

had been married in the spring to one of the Crocker boys.

Danial had come to the main to take Claris to church at Christ-

mastime, and she thought he might speak then, but he hadn’t. He was

often tongue-tied, but she believed she could read his silences better than

a babble of talk from most people. She thought next that he would

probably come across the ice for the horse races.

As soon as the bay was frozen solid, the village boys swept a course

clean of snow and built great bonfires on the ice to mark the starting and

finish lines. Men of the town and the farms gave their horses the day off,

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carriage and work horses both, and brought the likeliest of them down

to try their speed. The whole town turned out to bet and cheer as the

horses raced from one line on the ice to the other. Their hooves made a

terrific booming sound, and they breathed steam like dragons as they

galloped. This year Otis was wild with excitement; Leander had brought

his mare, and Otis was going to ride with him in the pung. Their father

and uncle Asa stood with the men at the fire, smoking and joking. Claris’s

mother and aunt kept track of the little ones who were shouting and

falling down, holding skidding matches on the ice. The half-grown cousins

were building snow forts. Meanwhile, far across the ice, Claris could see

a sleigh coming down the bay toward the bonfires from the southern end

of Beal.

When Danial drew his sleigh in among the watchers, Claris saw

that he had his mother with him. Old Mrs. Haskell was bundled up

under bearskin robes and wearing a man’s fur hat. She peered out from

beneath the brim with bright black eyes but did not attempt to leave the

sleigh. Claris had met Mrs. Haskell only once and hoped this was a good

sign, that she’d come into town, perhaps to be made acquainted with

Claris’s family. She waited for Danial to come find her and fetch her

near. She began to feel almost impatient, as the Haskells, mother and son,

hung back, apart from the gathering. Danial stood by the horse’s head,

and Mrs. Haskell stared before her in the direction of the races until the

Baptist minister’s wife, Mrs. Tull, climbed into the sleigh with her and

asked her how she did. Danial called a small boy to come hold the horse

and finally made his way to Claris.

“Miss Osgood,” he said.

“Mr. Haskell.” Claris bowed. It amused her when he got all formal.

They looked at each other and became tongue-tied, two small figures on

the edge of a gathering, in a vast white landscape of ice. They were both

very conscious that half the town might be looking at them, since there

is nowhere on a frozen bay to hide. Certainly the whole town knew they’d

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been courting quite long enough to be calling it on at last, or calling it

off. Danial hoped they were not watching and Claris rather hoped they

were. Finally Danial reached into a pocket and drew out a small wooden

box with tiny handmade hinges. She looked it over thoroughly, guessing,

correctly, that he had made it himself. She glanced up at him. The gray

winter sun made a bright disk behind a screen of haze, and all the coves

inshore were full of sea smoke. This was it. This was the moment, she

was sure.

“Open it,” he said.

After one more glance at him, both shy and excited, she opened

the box. Inside, on a bed of soft silk, was a cat’s-eye marble.

Claris was suddenly uncertain that this
was
the moment. Even poor

gormless Byron Crocker had announced his intentions to Alice with a

garbled speech, delivered on one knee, and an offered ring. She looked

up at Danial, questioning.

“We got but one diamond in the family, and it’s Mother’s,” he

said. “But it will be yours in due time if you’ll consent to become Mrs.

Haskell.” He said it stiffly, as if he were about to perish from embar-

rassment.

It
was
the moment. Well, thank heaven. Suddenly Claris would

rather have had a marble in a handmade box than a ruby ring from the

fanciest jeweler in Boston.

“Danial,” she said, turning her face up to his. “My dear.” Smiling,

she closed the box and kissed it, then slipped it into the pocket of her

coat. Then she gave him her hands and he took them, and they looked

at each other, both grinning as if they would burst.

k

There were tears and anger at the Osgood house in the night and

day that followed. Claris had known her family didn’t like Danial as

much as they had Jonathan Friend, or even cross-eyed Byron Crocker.

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Danial was quiet. Her family liked people lively in company who told

stories and sang. But through the courtship she had said she could read

Danial’s silences as she could the animals’. He was strong and a hard

worker; Simon and Leander said so. He was fiercely protective of his aged

mother. Danial understood Claris; she knew he felt the same way she did

about things.

Claris had asked Danial to come to the house with her after the

races, to ask her father for her hand, but he said he believed he ought to

take his mother back home before it got dark. She said she understood.

She spoke to her mother and father by herself after dinner, telling them

Danial had asked her to marry him and she had accepted him. She ex-

pected kisses and congratulations as there had been for Mary and for

Alice; she expected her father would send word out to the Haskells, asking

Danial and his mother and brother to come to Sunday dinner so they

could make wedding plans. Instead, there was a silence. A glance passed

between husband and wife. Then her mother came and hugged her and