More Than You Know (13 page)

particularly aware of the sun and breeze on my shorn head. I was also

absolutely aware of what Conary had said about our house; I’d been

wanting to ask him why he said it ever since. I was trying to think

how to introduce the subject when he saved me the trouble, as if he’d

been reading my mind.

“I spent the night in that house of yours, one time. Or part of

one.”

I turned to him. “How did you . . .”

“After Miss Hamor died, the house stood empty. People began

to say they saw lights moving inside at night. Some little boys said

they’d heard someone walking around and talking inside. I thought it

was funny.”

He drove on a bit, knowing I was waiting. Waiting . . . I was

barely breathing. He seemed to decide that if he was going to tell it

right, he didn’t want to be doing two things at once. He pulled off the

road near the top of Tenney Hill and stopped the engine. The day was

suddenly very bright and quiet. We looked down the meadow to

the bay.

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He sat for a minute remembering. Or deciding whether to trust

me, although I think he had already decided to do that. Finally he said,

“It was in the spring, two years ago. May, but still plenty cold at night,

and this girl and I were looking for someplace we could . . .” He

paused, looking for the right word.

I said, “Yes.”

“We weren’t planning to hurt anything, we just wanted to be

inside somewhere, and I thought, Well, there aren’t a lot of places

people hide keys. I figured that even if the real estate agent took

one away, Miss Hamor probably left another one somewhere

around. An old lady living alone doesn’t want to go out for wood

late at night and find herself locked out. So, we got in. We found

a room up on the second floor at the front of the house that had a

stove. We figured that if people out on the road saw a light or smoke

from the chimney, it would just add to the rumors. It was a dark

night.”

“That’s my room,” I said, not adding that I was afraid to sleep

there anymore. What an odd feeling, to think of him there. I guess he

thought the same thing. I had to prompt him to go on.

“We got a fire going, and the place started to warm up, and one

thing was leading to another, when I heard this noise.”

I was afraid I knew what noise.

“I thought we were caught. I heard this sound like somebody

thumping on the floor with a stick or cane. At first I thought it must be in

the hall, and yet it sounded closer. As if it was in the room. Then it

stopped. This girl was saying, ‘What’s the matter?’ I thought she must

be deaf. Then there was silence. Then—I swear—I heard the stove door

open and slam closed again. It must have been something metal banging

in the hall, or on the roof, but the sound was weird. You couldn’t tell

where it came from. Well, by this time the girl is just staring at me, like

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she thinks I’ve gone mental, and I’m wondering why the hell she doesn’t

get her shirt on. No matter who’s there, if it’s some caretaker or what,

you don’t want your personal parts hanging out. . . . It seemed like an

hour I sat there waiting.”

It was so real to me, I could barely stand to listen to him.

“Then I realized someone was in the room with us.” His voice

dropped to a whisper as the memory came back to him.

He knew. Finally, someone to believe me.

“Could you see it?”

He shook his head. “I felt it. And then I heard it. It began to

make this noise, like someone crying. Horrible sobbing. The worst

thing was . . . the worst thing was that it wanted something. It was

crying in that angry way a person does when they expect you to drop

everything and make it right . . . But make
what
right? What could

make any difference? It’s
dead.
”

I had felt that exactly. It came around weeping, but then it didn’t

get what it wanted, and found out that you were going to go on liv-

ing . . .

“What happened?”

Long pause. “The door slammed.”

“By itself?”

He shrugged. “And I nearly jumped out of my skin, and the girl

started to yell.”

“Had she seen it?”

He shook his head. “Never saw it, never felt it, never heard a

thing, except the door, and she thought I’d done that somehow, to

scare her.”

I might have laughed at this, except I knew that the only thing

worse than what he’d gone through was discovering you were alone,

even when someone else was beside you.

“Did you ever tell anyone what happened?” I asked him.

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“Are you kidding?”

“Did she?”

He smiled. “I wouldn’t know. We didn’t have a whole lot to say

to each other after that night. She still gives me a pretty wide berth

when we meet.”

9 7

When Sallie Haskell was old, with plenty of time to sort

through the pictures of her life glinting like pieces of beach glass in a jar

of stones, she found she had only two vivid memories from the time

before her brother died.

The first was her mother’s birthday in perhaps ’71 or ’72. It was a

very mild April that year, and Sallie had discovered a meadow full of

snowdrops in drifts across the new grass in a glen beyond the cow pasture.

She was still a very little girl but free to wander where she wanted, and

this was an immense discovery; she had never before been the first in the

family to find these proofs of spring. She knew how her mother longed

and waited for them, impatient at the end of drawn-out winter. She knew

too that everything that happened on her mother’s birthday was important

in some secret way. Claris examined and interpreted the events of her

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birthday like a priestess reading secret runes of a religion with only one

member.

Sallie did not exactly know that her mother didn’t see her, any more

than a fish knows that water is what it swims in. That was simply there.

She was aware, though, of a sense of waiting for the moment she believed

up to then was inevitable, when her mother would turn from Amos to

her, and her face would fill with delight and she would see that she had

a daughter as well as a son. This would take nothing away from Amos.

It would simply be Sallie’s turn; she had reasoned that this must be the

way the world worked.

She began to pick the snowdrops, laying them on the grass in the

shade, and then she found that there were also violets. Her plan grew

more grand, and she left the flowers where they were and ran back to the

house. Her mother was in the parlor at her new loom, making a rag rug

out of scraps of cloth left over from Amos’s and Danial’s winter shirts.

Amos, her adored brother, was down in the yard working on an elver

net. It was warm in the sun. Sallie slipped in the door of the ell and into the

pantry, where she stood on a chair to get a willow basket down from the peg

on which it had hung all winter. Then she hurried out again and ran back to

her flower glen with the basket bumping against her knee.

She picked as fast as she could. The stems of the snowdrops were

tiny, like green threads, and even though it felt as if she’d picked hundreds,

there were still as many as stars sparkling in the new grass, and only a limp-

looking handful in her basket. She pictured herself presenting an armload of

spring to her mother, and the moment Claris would turn to her, and the

light would fill her smiling eyes, and she would say, “Sallie! How beautiful!”

and then it would be Sallie’s turn to matter. She worked and worked.

When she had picked all that she could, and waited as long as she

could wait, she started back to the house with her basket.

As she came into the dooryard, Amos came whistling around the

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corner. “What have you got there, Little Bit?” he asked her. She looked

to him hardly bigger than the basket she was carrying.

She showed him her cargo.

“Little Bit! Look at that! Where did you find them?”

She pointed.

“Look how many you’ve got!”

“They’re for Mother.”

“Of course they are! Come on, come up to the larder. Let’s put

them in water.”

Water. She hadn’t thought of that. Maybe that was why the green

threads were going all rubbery. She went up the stairs behind Amos and

her basket and stood on a chair by the sink while he pumped water into

a pretty goblet with a fragile stem. Then he held the glass for her as she

carefully lifted her limp treasures into it, stem by stem.

She was almost finished when the door to the larder swung open

and there stood their mother. A shaft of afternoon sun fell across the

room from the open door.

Sallie turned to her joyfully. This was the moment.

“Look!” Sallie cried.

“Look what Sallie brought you, Mother!”

“Happy birthday!” Sallie waited for the eyes, aglow with pleasure,

to turn to her.

“Oh, how beautiful!” said Claris, crossing the dark little room to

take the glass full of snowdrops. “Where did you find them?”

Amos was smiling broadly at his sister, happy for her triumph.

Claris had carried the flowers to the window to examine them.

“There are violets too! Snowdrops and violets! What a wonderful

birthday present!”

Just then Danial came in, and Claris turned to him, holding the

glass out. “Look—look what Amos brought me for my birthday!”

1 0 0

Bythetimewegotdowntothewharf,thewindwasfilling

from the south. Conary’s boat was a beautiful little sailing dinghy that

had been so lovingly sanded and varnished for so many springs that

the deck and gunwales felt like velvet and glowed as if the wood were

still alive.

“My dad bought her for me from some fool who’d let her swamp

and spend a couple of weeks underwater,” said Conary. “She was quite

a mess, but I’ve done some work on her since. He bought her the year

my mother died.”

“When was that?”

“When I was seven.”

The boat’s name was
Frolic.
He kept it in town because there

wasn’t any deep anchorage at Sand Point, where they lived. The shore

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turned into mudflats for half of every tide. We rowed out and loaded

the gear we’d brought onto her and got ourselves aboard.

“All we got to do is hoist sail and cast off,” he said. “You want

to hoist, or steer?”

I took the tiller and he raised the jib; it flapped like a frustrated

gull as I held us into the wind while Connie hoisted the mainsail. He

moved smoothly and swiftly, winching up the sail, cleating the hal-

yard, and then, with one long-armed motion, he unhitched us and

threw the buoy overboard.

“We’re a sailboat,” he said, as I pulled the tiller over to get some

way on.

“Oh gawd no, fill the sails to northward first . . .”

“Why?”

“For good luck. Jeez, you straphangers.”

“If I come about now, I’ll ram the
Molly II.
”

“That’d be all right. George Black puts her on the rocks so often

she’s practically amphibian.”

“I’d rather not. Ready about.” I brought the boat around just

under the fishing boat’s bow, and Conary trimmed the jib. He watched

me and smiled. He didn’t say anything, and that felt good. I liked it

that he assumed I could do what I said I could.

Frolic
’s mainsail was gaff-rigged, so she looked like a tiny pirate

sloop scudding out to sea. A lobster boat we passed gave us a toot

and a wave. As we approached the mouth of the harbor, I expected

Conary to take the tiller, but instead, he handed me a chart. The mouth

was narrow and had a spit of rocks jutting into it from each shore like

pincers waiting to crush a little wooden hull (or a big one). There was

a safe channel, but sailing it was like threading a needle. A drop in

wind or a fighting tide could put you right up on Captain Herrick’s

lawn, and it had happened to plenty. (Before this coast was charted

and marked, so many ships had come to grief trying to enter the elu-

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sive safety of the cove, lying in beyond those jaws, that early maps

left the bay a blank. Just sail past Beal Island and give the whole place

a miss, was the common wisdom. It was a bad-luck stretch of coast;

leave it to the demons.)

“What’s our tide?” I asked. I was looking at the depths noted

on the chart for the channel at lowest tide.

“Middle, ebbing.”

“Good.” That meant the flow would carry me, not fight me.

“How much do we draw?”

“Three and a half.” Feet.

“Could I cut this nun?” There was a red channel marker showing

the outer tip of the rock ledge.

“Could. Won’t need to.”

He lay back against the bulwark, apparently unconcerned that I

might in the next five minutes reduce his boat to splinters.