Anxious Hearts (13 page)

I walk through the grassy meadow, wind tossing my hair first into my face, then off to one side, then the other. It takes much longer to reach the edge of the bluff than I thought it would, thanks to rocks and pine logs hidden in the grass. When I reach the edge of the bluff, a monumental cliff falls abruptly below me; it is so high that I’m afraid to look over the edge.

When I do, gingerly, my stomach sinks to my feet and I feel woozy.

I lie down on my stomach and hang my head over the edge, safer that way. There are ledges on the cliff, and a few renegade pairs and trios of pine trees cling to its face. I toss a rock over the edge and listen, but its landing is drowned out by wind and distance and waves. I imagine daredevil kids climbing the face of this cliff, and dying for their foolishness in the frothy water hundreds of feet below, the salty waves slapping their bodies against the rocky outcroppings.

But I don’t recognize this seascape, or any of the islands in this bay. I can’t be that far away from home, can I?

I turn over and look at the sky. It is split in two—blue and clear and endless over the ocean, but dark to the west. Thunderclouds are gathering.

The wind picks up and I turn back toward the woods. I stumble on a rock. Only, it’s not a rock. It’s a stone wall. Crumbled, but still a wall of flat granite stones carefully stacked. I trace it around a large rectangle of land, a small plot. I walk its perimeter in just a few minutes.

At one end of the plot, surrounded by blueberry bushes and sea grass, I find a rock. A big rock, a boulder, with a level top so smooth it seems unnatural. Almost more
like a bench, or an altar, something made by someone for something.

I sit on the edge of the stone and, feeling the warmth it’s been absorbing from the sun, crawl onto it and lie down. A moment ago it felt like I was at the edge of the earth. Now I feel like I’ve been here before.

I don’t even realize that I’ve fallen asleep until I wake up and see that the sun is low now, grazing the tops of the pine trees I emerged from this morning. I sit up quickly. Have I slept all day?

I stand up on the rock-platform to scope out the meadow for a place to set up a small camp. At the other end of the stone wall, I see two more large boulders. I could use those for shelter, I think. I gather my pack and walk over.

As I approach the boulders I see a small, crumbled building that reminds me of the old mill up near the lakes where Da’ used to take me canoeing. He said the old mill was the oldest building in Washington County, which was saying a lot since Washington County had a lot of old buildings.

I walk over to the structure and run my hands along its stones and wonder what this building used to be. I wonder how old it is. I am amazed at the way the stones fit together,
all irregular shapes but all perfectly fitted, like a jigsaw puzzle with moss growing from the seams.

I search in the wall for a place to wedge a stick to hang my poncho from and my fingers catch on something, something that doesn’t feel as old as these walls, stuffed between the rocks. It is a notebook.

Gabriel’s notebook.

Gabriel

A
FTER FOUR DAYS OF HUNGER AND SLEEPLESSNESS
and despair, the doors of the Great House burst open, and the once able Cadian men poured out onto the frosty meadow, tripping and stumbling and falling to the ground in the blinding sunlight. The days without sun had dilated their eyes, and Gabriel, with the others, squinted and covered his face to shield them.

Gasping not so much for oxygen as for this fleeting moment of freedom, false freedom, the men, weakened by darkness and hunger and captivity and fear, sprawled around the entrance of the Great House like seals tossed onto the rocks after a violent ocean storm.

Gabriel, lying beside a blueberry bush, looked through
his fingers, letting the light in slowly. The Great House, rising from the banks of the Manan River, stood beside him, looking over the harbor. Gabriel turned his head to see that the dock was surrounded by New Colony skiffs, sent from the ships anchored deeper out in the harbor.

They’d learned to navigate the tide.

“To your feet, Cadians,” said a soldier. “You will now be escorted to your transports.”

“Where is my wife?” Gabriel said to no one in particular. “Evangeline. My wife.” He mumbled more than spoke, and struggled to stand.

“This way, please,” said the soldier, prodding Gabriel to his feet with the butt of his musket. “This way.” He pushed Gabriel toward a shuffling crowd of men.

Gabriel hobbled forward on weak, uncertain legs. “Father?” he said. “Where is my father?”

“My son,” said a voice to his left. Basil.

“Father,” Gabriel said. “You are here.”

“Let me take your arm, my son,” Basil said. “Let me follow you.”

Gabriel mustered his last reserves of clarity and led his weakened father to the dock, following the others around him, eyes cast downward, spirits shamed and hopeless. It had taken only four days to break every able Cadian
man, and here they were, broken, imprisoned, enslaved. Even Basil.

Gabriel carried his slumping father, struggling under Basil’s weight but moving forward steadily with the crowd. So intent was he on not falling underfoot, on not dropping his father, that he barely noticed the women, children, and old men gathered silently at the dock. His eyes, reddened by darkness and desperation, nearly missed his beloved, disheveled and dirty but eternally lovely, bent under the weight of her own father, who leaned heavily on her sloping shoulders.

“Gabriel,” she said boldly as he walked past.

Gabriel, ripped from his misery by her voice, spun to see the cornflower cloak of Evangeline. He reached out to her, almost unbelievingly. “My beloved!” he cried, breaking stride with the shuffling men and falling out of the line toward her. “My wife!”

“This way,” insisted a soldier as he prodded Gabriel in the leg with the butt of his gun. “Return here, if you please.” He took Basil from Gabriel’s arm and pushed him roughly onto the dock.

Gabriel jumped over the soldier’s gun and hissed. “She is my wife,” he said gravely and determinedly. His eyes burned. “I will go to my wife.”

The soldier whistled sharply, and suddenly four soldiers tackled Gabriel, pinning him to the ground. They flipped him onto his face and bound his hands behind his back with a spiky length of rope. “It is the troublemaker’s son,” one said. “Move him. We must hurry, or we will lose this infernal tide.”

Two soldiers took Gabriel by the arms, lifted him roughly, pulled him across the dock, his unshod feet dragging behind him, and shoved him onto a skiff. The boat was flush with the dock, easing Gabriel’s landing onto its floor, but not by much. An oarsman grabbed Gabriel and jerked him to his feet. Gabriel growled.

The oarsman quickly pushed off and began rowing for the ships.

“My son!” Basil shouted from the dock.

“Father,” whispered Gabriel. “Evangeline.”

The skiff rowed away slowly, carrying Gabriel, stroke by unhurried stroke, away from the dock, his father, his wife, his life.

A great cry came up from the collected Cadians still on shore, just as a fast fog licked across the land and drew an opaque curtain over the dock, the Manan River, and Gabriel’s beloved Pré-du-sel.

This is the last I shall ever see of this place, he thought
as the cloud closed around him, and the sadness was so powerful and final that his knees buckled. As he fell, he saw flames striking through the fog, and realized that the fog was not fog, but smoke from a fire. They are burning the village, thought Gabriel in his delirium. It is over.

“Evangeline.”

Gabriel slumped to one side, and toppled over the edge of the skiff and into the crystal-black ocean, as cold as an icy heart.

“Overboard!” yelled the oarsman. “Man over!”

“Worry not,” answered the commander. “He is bound. He will not surface again. Row on. And proceed with the destruction of the dikes.”

eva

I don’t have time to decide whether to read Gabe’s notebook. It just happens before I can think about it. I am transfixed by the first words in the notebook, sloppily lettered in Gabe’s handwriting.

Evangeline set down her rake and untied her felt cloak of cornflower blue, draping it over the fence that enclosed the small garden in front of the small, square stone-and-log house. She pushed her linen sleeves up over her forearms, swiped her hair away from her face, and looked up at the low, wispy clouds above. Gabriel seized on the gesture, sweeping his charcoal across the sheet of birchbark.

I ignore the slowly building ocean breeze, the descending clouds, the fading afternoon light. I read intently, not caring
about the time or the temperature, at turns enchanted and alarmed by the words in the notebook. I am swept away in the story, because it is Gabe’s story.

I sit on the stone platform and read, straight through sunset and into the dense blue-dark of the Maine twilight. I read about Evangeline in her leggings of deerskin and kirtle of blue, and Gabriel clutching his sketch in pursuit of her beauty, and the rolling, golden land of Pré-du-sel, and of hotheaded Basil and fatherly Benedict and the threatening ships. I read about the wedding and the violence and the imprisonment and the separation at the docks. I read about Gabriel, who fell overboard but will not surface, because he is bound.

After the words
“Row on. And proceed with the destruction of the dikes,”
there are only blank pages. The rest of the notebook is empty.

Except for, tucked in the back, up against the spiral, a slip of paper that has been crumpled, then carefully folded, like a piece of rubbish retrieved from the trash can and reclaimed.

I unfold it. It is typed and ruled, like a third copy of a triplicate form, stamped: “Bangor Regional Hospital, Oncology.”

Then it says: “Northern Maine’s Best Cancer Care Facility.”

Then it says: “Patient Name: Paul Lejeune, Franktown, Maine.”

Then it says: “Indication: Lymphocytic leukemia.”

Then it says: “Procedure: Bone marrow.”

Then it says: “Donor: Gabriel Lejeune, brother.”

I blink and read it again. Gabriel Lejeune, brother.

I stare at the paper for a long time, hypnotized, before a cold raindrop on my forearm startles me. I look up at the sky. I knew the clouds were getting thicker, but I am surprised at how gusty and dark it’s gotten since I’ve been here. More raindrops. Are these really the first? My shirt is already soaked through. I’m still staring at the piece of paper, but I can’t see it. I’m not sure how long I’ve been here.

So Gabriel knows about Paul. He was the donor. Was that why he limped? Was he recovering from the surgery? My heart hardens to think of the pain Gabriel must be carrying this day.

And then there is a voice behind me. “What are you doing here?” it says. The voice is deep, powerful, insistent. But not unfamiliar. I have never heard this tone before, but I know this voice.

I look up, but all I see is sudden darkness and flashes of light, distant lightning snaking through the thunderclouds, unrelenting flashes, one atop the other like a strobe light. Am I hearing things?

A massive crash of thunder overhead makes me jump. I turn, and suddenly the fuming sky above me roars, the storm now directly overhead, lightning illuminating the bluff, the sea, and the wild face in the wind staring at me.

“Gabe!”

Another strike of lightning, even closer now, illuminates the face again. It is him, only his face is different. Mangled, tight, angry like the sky, with streams of rainwater flowing from its planes.

“What are you doing?” he yells, and grabs the notebook out of my hands. “Did you read this?”

A gust of wind whips up behind him, catching his hair and blowing it into his face. Water swirls around him like an airborne whirlpool. I can’t see his eyes, only his mouth, screaming, his neck red and bulging with tendons. “How did you find this place? Why are you here?” He seems so much bigger than I know him to be.

“Gabe! I—”

“How did you get here?” he wails, yelping, then begins mumbling, pacing. “No, no,” he says. “No!” He looks back and forth, panicked. “No, no one is supposed to be here!”