by Ann Swinfen
During the time they stayed on the coast, they camped in their wagons, rolling themselves up in their blankets and sleeping cheerfully on the hard boards. They cooked over open fires and sat down sedately to eat on the grass with the same solemn prayers as they spoke in their bare scrubbed refectories. Tobias Libby always gave them permission to park their vehicles and graze their horses on a small meadow at the far end of the Libby land, nearest to Todd’s Neck. It was separated from the main farm by the marshy ground and pine woods which lay behind the beach; farm machinery could only reach it by driving along the county road to the Todd’s Neck turn. The meadow was the only piece of open ground on either side of this by-road until you reached the narrow isthmus of the Neck itself.
Harriet always said the Shakers were good folks, for all their queer ways, and she would send them round milk and eggs every day, and sometimes some fresh baked loaves or a joint of bacon. Ever since Tirza could remember, they had been coming. This summer she wondered briefly whether the war would stop them, but no, Tobias had received the usual formal letter requesting permission to use his field again. It meant moving the bull, but that was the only inconvenience. Sam walked up one morning along the ledges to fetch old Duncan back to the farm, leading him by a rope through his nose-ring. In the midsummer heat the bull was placid and followed Sam at an easy amble along the coastal path until he saw the first of the foxholes. Then he dug in his feet, lowered his head and snorted.
‘Come on, you silly critter,’ said Sam. ‘‘Tain’t nothin’ but a few holes in the ground.’
But Duncan, who had known this path all his life, was not to be persuaded so easily. He balked and side-stepped, waltzing around the edges of the foxholes all the way back to the farm track, till Sam was red-faced and worn out. His flushed colour was not due just to the struggle. There were soldiers on the beach, enjoying time off sunbathing and paddling about in the edge of the heavy surf. Afraid at first of the great Holstein, they had started up a volley of jeers and catcalls when they saw the hard time Sam was having. During the trudge up the farm track from the sea Sam rehearsed in his mind all the sarcastic things he would have said if he had thought of them in time. Behind the barn there was a small area of grass where the bull was sometimes kept, enclosed by an electric fence. Sam shut Duncan in with relief, checked that he had salt in the lick and water in the trough, and put his head round the kitchen door.
‘That’s the bull back, Mrs Libby.’
‘You’ve been a time, Sam.’
‘Ayuh. Fool beast was scared of them foxholes. Sooner these soldiers clear outta here the better, I say.’
‘Well,’ said Harriet, who agreed with him for reasons of her own, ‘I guess we’ll just have to endure it until the war is over.’
The next day the Shakers arrived and, as in every previous year since they had been old enough to walk that far on their own, Tirza and Simon carried a couple of large chip baskets of food along to the field where the wagons and buggies were now parked in a wide circle.
It was the first time they had done anything together for weeks, and Tirza felt unexpectedly shy of him. Simon, however, swung along quite cheerfully. The visit of the Shakers, though repeated every year, was enough out of the ordinary to bring a little liveliness into life. They did not talk much. Out at sea the naval patrol boats were doing a depth charge run, and they could sense the explosions through the soles of their bare feet on the sandy soil as much as from the sound, which hit the eardrums like a wave of heavy pressure. On the horizon they could count the dim outlines of six naval vessels. Further out part of the superstructure of another just showed above the curve of the ocean as it disappeared over the horizon. Slightly nearer than the naval ships a cluster of inshore fishing boats out of Flamboro was trawling dispiritedly.
‘Dad’s mostly given up trawling,’ said Tirza, watching the boats as she walked.
‘Why’s that?’
‘It’s these depth charges. Ruins the fishing. Kills some fish. Scares the rest away. The catch is down to about one-third of what it ought to be.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘Ayuh. At least Dad has a lobster licence. I don’t know what the others will do, who don’t have one.’
They walked on and a patrol plane droned overhead, flying along the line of the path they were following. It passed them and faded into the distance. They both thought, but did not speak, the same thing.
The Shakers were glad to see them. They shook them both formally by the hand and invited them to sit down while the baskets were unpacked.
‘We are most grateful to your mother, young man,’ said Brother Ethro, who appeared to be some kind of leader, though it wasn’t clear whether the Shakers believed in such a thing. ‘Won’t you join us? We are just going to have a little of Sister Dorcas and Sister Hannah’s cakes after our long journey. We’d surely be glad to have you share with us.’
They accepted, feeling it would be discourteous to refuse, but Simon fidgeted through the preliminary prayers and Tirza’s mind wandered. The cakes, though, were delicious. Afterwards, they helped erect the stalls in the hotel ballroom. These consisted of no more than boards laid on trestles, but over each was spread a blue-and-white checked blanket, topped with a fine starched embroidered cloth. The Shakers believed in a stark simplicity of life, but that did not seem to blunt their skill in producing beautiful things.
On these stalls, arranged around the edges of the room, they laid out the crafts they had brought to sell, to help support the community. There was the elegant Shaker furniture: candle tables and rocking chairs, a baby’s cradle, stools and small chests. There were woven goods, worked over the winter, both thick woollen blankets and fine table-linens. There were all kinds of practical items: sturdy Shaker brooms and brushes, garden and farming tools, and pieces of harness. Simon picked among these, looking for unusual items but failing to find any. Most of the Shaker tools were old stalwarts that had proved their worth over generations, but sometimes they came up with a new invention, for they were practical people and believed that the invention and design of a useful new tool was as good a way of worshipping God and giving thanks for His created Earth as spending the same number of hours in prayer. ‘Hands to work and hearts to God’ – that was their motto.
Tirza liked the small fancy items best, especially the boxes which were made by wrapping thin wood round an oval form and pinning the overlapping tongues of wood in place with slim brass rivets. The wood was beech, hand cut as fine as cardboard, so the boxes were light to hold, but springy and resilient. Mostly they were left the natural colour of the wood, but some were painted in clear strong colours: oxblood red, the green of spruce trees in midsummer, or a rich deep blue the colour of Gooseneck Lake on a fine day. One set of five, piled one on top of the other in diminishing sizes, had been painted with scenes of houses and barns and orchard trees.
‘Them’s where we live,’ said a girl about Tirza’s age, who had been setting up the stock on this stall with her, but had not yet spoken.
‘In your community?’
The girl nodded.
‘I haven’t seen you here before,’ said Tirza, ‘though I’ve seen the Shakers every year.’
‘My daddy just brung us to the Shakers last fall. That’s Ma over there.’ The girl nodded towards a thin, tired-looking woman spreading a cloth on the next stall. As she nodded, her over-large poke bonnet slipped off, exposing wispy brown hair. She pulled it back on again.
‘He said as how it was gettin’ beyond him to feed the twelve of us any more, with Ma expectin’ again. So we druv up in our buggy all the way from West Virginny. My daddy said as how the Shakers would give us a home and feed us an’ all. Then two days after we was there, he took off again. We ain’t seed him since.’
‘That’s too bad,’ said Tirza sympathetically. ‘What did your mother do?’
‘Oh, I reckin she didn’t take it too bad. She was purdy thankful. I guess she finds it kind of peaceful with the Shakers. When he was in l
icker, my daddy sure did beat up on us. Ma says as how she’s had enough of men to last a lifetime.’
Tirza was puzzled. ‘But there are men Shakers too.’
‘We live separate an’ sleep separate, an’ Ma reckins that fine by her.’
‘Will you stay a Shaker always, then?’
‘Oh, yezum. I don’t want no eleven babies!’ The girl laughed merrily. ‘Here, I got to go help Ma. Be seeing y’all.’
The next day when Tirza delivered the crabs, she found the man called Sandy waiting by Stormy Petrel when she returned to the pier, the long way round this time, avoiding the formal garden.
‘Good morning,’ he said.
‘Morning.’
She climbed down into the boat and began to cast off. He put out one crutch and held the gunwale against the fenders.
‘I don’t suppose you’d consider taking a passenger?’
She stared up at him in astonishment.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Give me a lift round to Flamboro? I’m bored out of my mind toddling around the garden here with all the aged pensioners. I can’t climb on the rocks and my crutches sink into the beach. I thought if you would give me a lift to the village it would be a change of scene.’
‘How would you get back?’
‘Taxi?’
‘There’s no taxis in Flamboro!’ She laughed at the absurdity of the idea.
‘Well, the hotel would probably send a car for me.’
She looked doubtful.
‘There’s gas rationing now, you know.’
His shoulders drooped.
‘Yes, you’re right. Stupid idea. Forget it.’
Suddenly Tirza felt sorry for him. She thought how bored she would be, stuck here on crutches, with nothing to do and the fine summer going on all around.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you for a sail and then I’ll bring you back.’
‘Really? But aren’t you very busy with your crabs and everything?’
‘Doesn’t take every minute of my day.’
She threw a hitch round the post again and climbed on to the pier. It required some manoeuvring to lower Sandy into the boat, but with Tirza putting her shoulder under his armpit and half lifting him, they managed it at last. She stowed his crutches forrard, partly under the deck, and told him to sit amidships.
‘Have you ever sailed before?’
‘A little, in a friend’s boat, but only on a loch, not on the open ocean.’
‘On a what?’ Tirza was busy hoisting the sail and easing Stormy Petrel away from the pier.
‘Loch. A kind of lake.’
‘Well, this is no lake. Keep your head down below the boom.’
Once they were fully under way, Tirza sat on the windward side deck, with her toes curled round the gunwale on the lee side for support and with the tiller under her arm.
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘That English airman Pierre told me about. They picked you out of the sea after your plane went down.’
‘That’s it. But...’ he pulled a comic face. ‘A British airman, if you don’t mind.’
‘Why, what’s the difference?’
‘I’m Scottish. Which means I’m British, but not English.’
‘Oh.’ Tirza wasn’t interested. ‘Head down.’
She brought the boat about and began to head out to sea.
‘I tell you what. There’s an island about a couple of miles offshore. Mustinegus Island. Would you like me to take you out there? It’s uninhabited now, though there used to be two or three farms there.’
‘Sounds fine to me.’
He felt in the pockets of his loose cotton jacket.
‘It’s a good thing I was hopeful about you agreeing to take me aboard. I persuaded the chef to make up a packet of sandwiches and some fruit.’ He took them out and laid them on the bottom boards of the boat. ‘And I got a couple of bottles of beer from the bar. Or maybe you aren’t old enough to drink beer yet.’
Tirza looked at him, startled.
‘No.’ She shook her head at him. ‘I don’t drink beer.’
‘Oh, well. Sorry. I suppose I should have brought a Coke.’
As she headed on a long tack which would take them almost to the island, Tirza pondered this briefly. What kind of girl did he think she was, to be offering her beer? She was glad none of her family had heard him or they might not be too pleased that she was taking him out to Mustinegus Island all by herself. But she soon dismissed it from her mind, concentrating on her sailing.
The boat was awkward to handle with a man’s weight fixed amidships. Tirza was anxious that Stormy Petrel shouldn’t seem sluggish but would show off what a fine boat she was to this slightly odd but attractive stranger. Luckily the breeze was brisk enough that the boat soon picked up speed, but not so strong that she would have to ask Sandy to shift about as they sailed. It occurred to her a little late that a partially crippled passenger might be dangerous in the wrong weather conditions. The direction of the wind, though, favoured them, and the heat of the sun, blazing down from a cloudless sky and dancing off the waves, was modified by its cool breath coming from further out at sea.
After ten minutes Sandy took off his jacket and folded it up.
‘It’s good to get away from the hotel for a bit. They’re very kind to me, but it’s dull there on my own, and immobile. One minute I’m sitting around an airfield in the south of England waiting to be scrambled to fight the Jerries. The next I’m doing an impersonation of Long John Silver three thousand miles away in a stately New England hotel amongst the geriatrics.’
Tirza thought he exaggerated a lot, and didn’t understand everything he said, but she only commented, ‘Treasure Island. That’s a great book.’
‘You’ve read it?’ He looked pleased and rather surprised.
‘Sure. Robert Louis Stevenson. I’ve read his Kidnapped too. And Travels with a Donkey. But not Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.’
‘Well, now.’ He looked at her appraisingly, as if he had noticed her for the first time. ‘And what books do you like best?’
She regarded him a little scornfully. ‘Depends on how I’m feeling. I like different things for different moods. Or different weathers. Or different seasons. Miss Bennett – she’s our class teacher – she had us write a theme this year on “My Favourite Book”. Plain silly I thought. So I wrote about why I feel like certain things at certain times.’
‘Sounds very interesting.’
‘Oh, it was interesting, all right! She gave me a D grade. Said I hadn’t answered the question.’ She grinned at him suddenly. ‘I didn’t care. I liked writing it.’
‘I’d enjoy reading it.’
‘Well.’ She was suddenly shy and became busy coiling away loose ends of rope.
‘So tell me some of the things you enjoy reading,’ he said. ‘Never mind about ranking them in order.’
‘Sometimes I just want to read poetry. It’s so spare and clean. Like a boat with good lines, you know? I’ve been reading a lot of Robert Frost lately – he’s a New England poet. But I like the old poets too. Chaucer is great. I like getting my tongue round the old words, and he tells good stories. And I like Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. It makes you think. All these kings and presidents and such, with their puffed-up words, conceited as a turkey-cock. What do they amount to in the end? In the end, nature will take over everything. Only here in Maine it will be the forest, not the desert.’
‘What about Shakespeare? Don’t you like him?’
‘Oh, I don’t count him just in with the others. He’s some different. I’ve read all his plays now. Maybe one day I’ll get to see one.’
‘You’ve never been to one?’
‘In Flamboro?’ She laughed.
‘Portland, then.’
‘Maybe I’ll go some day, I don’t know. My dad and my grandmother wouldn’t be interested. My other grandmother might be, I suppose, but she’s never suggested it.’
Sandy opened his mouth to as
k about these relatives, but just then she had to bring the boat about on to a new tack which would fetch them in to a small cove on the island. By the time the boat was quiet again, heeling over as the wind grew fresher, he had moved to something else.
‘Do you read any other novelists, apart from Stevenson?’
‘Of course. I like those nineteenth-century English ones.’
‘British.’
‘Oh, shucks!’ She laughed. ‘You know, Dickens and the Brontës. I didn’t like Jane Austen at first, but I read Northanger Abbey this spring, and it was really funny.’
‘What about the Americans?’
‘Mark Twain is great, but I thought Moby Dick was awful slow. I never finished it. And there’s that novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, have you read him? Tender Is the Night?’
Sandy, his eyes dancing, agreed that he had.
‘I just read it, though I didn’t understand everything,’ she confessed. ‘I’m used to people thinking I’m crazy because I read so much,’ she continued, misunderstanding his expression, ‘but I read fast. I don’t spend so much time on it, except in bed at night. And, besides...’
‘What?’
She was embarrassed. ‘Well, when you’re reading, you can go anywhere, can’t you, away inside your head? You can be anyone.’
She looked at him, suddenly making some kind of mute appeal for recognition, for kinship. He smiled back fondly.
‘That’s exactly right. That’s just how I feel myself. But what an unusual fellow you are, for a crab-fisher laddie.’
Tirza half rose, staring at him.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said...’ He saw the blood rising from her neck and flooding her face, and the curve of her cheek as she turned away from him. ‘My God, you’re a girl!’
Tirza ran the boat ashore on the beach and jumped into water up to her thighs. In silence she hauled Stormy Petrel further up and tied the painter around a tree. Sandy, stranded in the bottom of the boat with the sail flapping above him and the boom jerking back and forth, could do nothing but wait. Tirza waded out to the boat again and lowered the sail. As she reached out her arm to gather in the folds of cloth he could see, which he should have noticed before, that her shirt clung to the small curves of budding breasts. He felt foolish and humiliated, sitting there, and did not know how to make it up to her.