Of course, Aunt Martha had worked on that soil. She’d tended it and nurtured it. Dad was more lopsided in his tending. He didn’t have much patience for a good system. He’d throw fish all over, which smelled to high heaven, and leave them be, to work their way into the soil or get carted off by birds and animals. Idella’d seen enough of those herring to last her a lifetime—but she knew she’d not seen or eaten or cleaned her last one.
When Mrs. Elmhurst, the teacher in the one-room school at Scarborough, had learned that Idella had to go back up, she’d called her aside after school. “Idella, I heard about your having to go back to Canada, and I’m sorry.” Idella had started to cry, right in front of her. She’d kept quiet about it ever since Aunt Martha had read Dad’s letter aloud and shown them the money he’d sent for their train tickets.
Mrs. Elmhurst had sat her down at a desk and handed her the cotton handkerchief that was always peeking out of her dress pocket. Idella had been too ashamed to use it. She couldn’t blow her nose on that beautiful handkerchief. There was embroidery on it. She’d sat there like a fool, clutching at it, her eyes and nose a shameful mess. Mrs. Elmhurst had been so kind. She had taken the handkerchief from Idella and wiped her eyes and then put it right up under her nose and said, “Blow.” They had both smiled at that.
“Idella,” Mrs. Elmhurst had said, “if you’d like, you may take the eighth-grade test, and if you pass it, then why don’t you come and graduate with all the others?” Idella had nodded yes, too shy to say anything, and the teacher had taken the handkerchief and put it into Idella’s hand. Now Idella reached into her skirt pocket till she felt the soft folds of the handkerchief. She’d keep it forever.
She had passed the test with no trouble. She’d been paying attention to whatever got put on the board all along. Nothing slipped past her.
Mrs. Elmhurst gave her a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to recite in the graduation ceremony. Idella worked on the poem nonstop. She kept going over it, moving her lips, after she’d blown out the light and gone to bed.
She closed her eyes, and the words of the poem rolled around in her head, taking on the rhythm of the train wheels.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
“A Psalm of Life,” Longfellow called it.
When the time had come for graduation—lining everyone up just right and getting them all to sing, then getting them all seated again—it had gone a little slowly. Meanwhile the sky had started to threaten. The ceremony was out on the lawn behind the school, so all the relatives could come. Avis had scooched herself down in the front row where she could make faces.
By the time they got to Idella’s turn, there were little spits coming down and things were turning restless. Mrs. Elmhurst had played the musical chord of introduction on the piano—that was her sign to begin. Idella had stood up, trembling. She had looked directly at Mrs. Elmhurst and shaken her head no, ever so slightly. Mrs. Elmhurst had smiled and nodded that she understood. Idella sat down, with great relief, and Raymond Tripp stood up and began his poem from Shakespeare. He’d barely gotten anything out when it started to pour. Everyone scattered like chickens. The men rushed at the piano, practically knocking Mrs. Elmhurst over, to get it inside quick. Poor Raymond kept stopping and starting the first line over again. He never got to finish. Idella was more glad than ever that she’d passed herself by.
She sighed and looked over at Avis slumped in her seat, knees under her chin, staring out at the fields. Her eyes were red and her cheeks salty and sore. She’d been biting on her lower lip till it looked ragged. It’d bleed if she kept at it. But Idella didn’t say anything. She let her be.
“Della,” Avis asked, tentatively, her voice a thin thread, “Della, do you think we’ll ever come back? Will we ever see Aunt Martha and Uncle John and everybody again?”
“Oh, sure,” Idella soothed her. But she had been wondering the same thing as she felt the miles slip behind them, the train pushing them farther and farther toward what sure seemed like nowhere, back to Dad and the farm.
Bay Chaleur, New Brunswick
April 1921
“Go on! Go on in after ’im! Chase ’im out!” Bill Hillock called across the field to Dick Pettigrew. He was waving him around into the woods from the far side.
“I seen ’im go into them trees by the pasture, Bill.” Fred Doncaster was trotting across the field, his rifle in hand. “If we get him turned in to the swamp, he won’t know which way to go and we’ll bag ’im for sure.” He stopped and snapped the gun open. “Don’t know when I’ve seen a buck that big.”
Bill dropped a bullet into his own rifle. “Here come the rest of them. Smelling it still on the hoof.”
Across the pasture loped the two Doncaster boys, Will and Donnelly. They were followed by Sam Hillock—Bill’s brother—and Stu Wharton, who’d come by hoping to sell lobster traps to the Hillock brothers.
“He’s got ten points on ’im.” Stu was out of breath, straggling in back of the younger men. “Must weigh three hundred pounds.”
“He’s in that stand of trees,” Bill said. “Let’s fan out around the edge of them. I’ll go on around to the far side.”
The men scattered across the muddy fields, toting their rifles. Each took up a position at the edge of the woods. They waited and watched, staring into the spaces between the bare, gray tree trunks, among the almost-barren branches just beginning to sprout tight little buds. They waited for what seemed a long time—lifting their rifles up to their faces and slowly resting them against their shoulders, silently flexing, looking for movement in the woods.
“I’m goin’ in to flush him!” Bill called. “That bastard’s in there, and I’m getting him out. Get ready.” Each man listened for the crack of a branch and watched for the sudden rush of antlers through the brush.
The explosions and the shout were simultaneous. “Jesus Christ, I’m shot!” Bill cried. “Mother of God, they shot me.”
No one knew whose bullet it was. No one wanted to know. They all felt part of it. The stag, too, was wounded, but they paid no heed as it charged off out of the woods, trailing blood.
“Bill! Bill!” Sam dropped his gun at his feet and ran to his brother. “Get the women! Run like hell!” he shouted to the men who surfaced from all directions. Bill lay writhing on his back among the trees. “Where you hit, Bill?”
“The goddamned fools shot me! Right through the leg,” Bill shouted from the ground. “Jesus Christ, the blood.”
“Don’t move him till we get him onto something.” Stu Wharton was summoning all his strength to run and shout. “I seen McPhee’s mail car a ways back. Get a horse!” The Doncaster boys were tearing for the barn.
Elsie Doncaster was flying into and across the field as fast as her two boys were leaving it. She’d heard the shots and yells and had run to pull her sheets off the line. She ran with no heed to her bulk, charging down a plowed furrow like a train. Her skirts were pulled above her knees, her arms clasped round the bundled sheets. A bottle of whiskey was in one fist and a wooden spoon in the other.
She reached the edge of the woods and stopped. “Lead me to him straight through. Get me to him.” Her husband pulled her through the trees. “Get the door, Fred,” she said when she saw Bill’s long body lying like a pinioned snake and blood pouring onto last year’s leaves. “Get the door down!” Without a word she handed Sam the whiskey bottle.
“We need the front door!” Fred Doncaster took off running, calling out to Stu Wharton.
“And rope to strap him!” Elsie shouted after him. “Blankets off the beds!” She bit into the edge of a sheet and tore down a strip with a great wrench of her arms. “You damned fools,” she said, bending down next to Bill. “You goddamned foolish men!” She started wrapping the strip around Bill’s thigh. “Keep tearing, Sam.”
Bill cried out, “Jesus Christ, El
sie, I’m bleeding!”
“Hold still so’s I can wrap it.” Elsie wound the strips as quick as Sam handed them to her.
From the other direction came Cora Pettigrew. She, too, had heard the yells. She’d pulled the curtains from her windows and grabbed her good scissors. Guided by Bill’s shouts, she’d headed straight into the woods.
“Lord help us, Bill, what have we done to you?” Cora knelt down in the mud and immediately started slicing through her curtains.
“Those goddamned sons of bitches shot the hell out of me! My whole backside’s on fire!”
Both women started wrapping Bill’s leg and thigh. The pooled blood blackened whatever it touched, smearing the hands and arms of the women.
“Sam, give me the whiskey. Ah, goddamn it, Elsie! Don’t finish me off!”
“Lie still. Stop bawling.” Elsie bore down with a single-minded intensity, wrapping layer upon layer of torn fabric around his leg and groin.
“Hold on, Bill,” Sam said. He raised up Bill’s head to let him drink. “Easy, now. Easy.”
McPhee’s mail car, horn blasting, came heading across the field. Sam ran to the edge of the woods, shouting, “Get the door! Where’s the damned door?” The car bounced across the furrows.
“We’ve got it!” The three Doncaster men were lunging across the furrows with the door. “We’re coming!” When they reached the woods, Sam led them to Bill, clearing away brush and snapping off branches with his bare hands. He helped Cora prepare a clearing for the men to lay down the door and put Bill onto it. McPhee was turning the car around, backing it into position, opening the doors, the motor running.
“Get me the hell out of here!” Bill’s bluster was losing its edge. He tossed his head restlessly from side to side, as though trying to block out a blazing ball of sun that only he could see and feel. “It’s burning. It’s burning a hole right through me down there.”
Sam took hold of one end of the door, ripped from its hinges, and helped to lay it down as flat as possible next to Bill. The men stood ready holding the ropes.
“We’re gonna move you now, Bill,” Sam cautioned. “Get ready for a ride.”
Elsie placed her wooden spoon between Bill’s teeth. “Bite this.” But he’d already grabbed onto it, snarling through his clenched teeth. She took hold of Bill’s hand and squeezed it while the men lifted him carefully onto the door.
Then four men knelt at the corners and hoisted the door above the ground. Bill’s yells of pain were muted by the clenched spoon. Two other men and Cora Pettigrew started tying his arms and legs down with the rope, winding it over and around the whole frame, securing the loops around the doorknobs that still remained on top and bottom. Bill’s feet jerked in anguish. Elsie kept squeezing his hand, and he kept biting down on the spoon. Her voice was low, deliberate, steady. “Hold on, now, Bill. We’ll get you there.”
Sam looked down at his writhing brother. “You’re gonna get that fast ride in McPhee’s mail car you been wantin’ for years, Bill. But you ain’t gonna enjoy it.”
Bill heard his brother’s voice through the white heat. He spoke through gritted teeth. “I sure as hell won’t be drivin’.”
Idella leaned back in the seat of the train and closed her eyes. While she was so happy to be in school, those men, the men she’d known all her life, were flushing out a deer off season. Now she was having to pay for it. Her life was getting changed. Going back to the same damn thing, only worse.
She’d heard how they’d put Dad on a door and carried him out of the woods and onto Mr. McPhee’s back seat. Neighbors and Uncle Sam had been writing Uncle John and Aunt Martha letters. They got a new one nearly every day from someone who’d been there or seen part of it or heard all about it. Dad had nearly choked on a wooden spoon that he bit clear through on the way. It was a full fifteen miles down to Salmon Beach, where Dr. Putnam lived. A good thing they caught the doctor at home. He’d just come back from waiting on an old woman way down country and was about to have his “breakfast lunch and dinner,” as he’d told it, when he heard that horn blasting nonstop, it must have been three miles away. He’d got right up from the table and gone over to his office and started getting things ready for whatever might be coming through the door. He didn’t know it’d be coming on a door.
Before he’d even gotten sight of the car—he was standing in his office doorway, waiting, and people were coming out of their houses—before he even saw the car, he heard Dad, screaming from the back seat.
Dad was hurt bad, but he made it. He could hardly walk yet. And he wanted them home, Avis and Idella.
She knew what that meant—his girls, to take care of him. Emma, living over with Aunt Beth and Uncle Paul, was too small. Idella sighed and turned to the window. Clouds were moving in. The whole sky seemed lower. There wasn’t much to see now anyway, just trees. She’d seen enough of them. God help us, Idella thought. Soon enough they’d be home.
It was getting toward twilight when the train finally pulled in to the stop near their farm—not even a station, just a place to take on water. Dalton was there, tall and lean as a post, propped up against the wagon, somberly waiting. He was squinting down at the tracks, his hands in his pockets. Even in a busy place, Dalton seemed alone.
Idella and Avis dropped their bags off the train and dragged them away from the tracks. Avis stared up at him, her arms pulled down from the weight of her suitcase. “Aren’t you even going to say hello?”
Dalton looked down and smiled as much as he ever did, that queer little half smile of his. Idella always felt that he was holding back a secret, as if there were something more he wanted to say, but she never dared ask what. Her brother never talked much with anyone, and when he did, it wasn’t to say much of anything.
“Well, if it ain’t Avis-Mavis.” He reached over, tousled her hair, and nodded at Idella. “Better give me those bags.” He hoisted them up into the wagon. “I hope you got your learnin’ good. ’Cause you’re ’bout done with it now, I’d say.”
Idella clamped her mouth tight and stared ahead at the nodding neck of Blackie pulling them home. They rode along in silence. Dalton had not been allowed to go to school in Maine. Dad needed him on the farm to help with the fish and the lobsters. He’d been to the local one-room school some off and on, and he could read well enough and do figures. Idella didn’t know how Dalton felt about his sisters getting to go, because he never expressed an opinion. She clutched at the book she still carried in her hands.
“He’s fiery. Get ready.” Dalton didn’t turn to look at them. “He can’t get up yet for more’n a few minutes. Hates lying there.” He pulled the reins to slow the horse over a muddy patch of road. “Been home four days. Seems longer.”
Idella noted the houses of the few neighbors as they rolled past—Uncle Sam’s, the Doncasters’, the Pettigrews’ in the distance. All the houses were slanted and gray and sparse-looking, sticking up out of the flat land like rotten teeth.
When they turned off the road toward the house, Idella smelled the sea. A deep breath filled her up. She didn’t know she’d missed it. Tippie, the Doncaster dog, came up barking at the back wheels.
The farmhouse was like all the other houses along the road, with two bedrooms upstairs and a spring kitchen attached to the main house. Most had been built by the same men. Dad had built theirs himself, with Uncle Sam’s help, just before Dalton was born. He had put it on the high cliff overlooking the bay that pounded and raged beneath them. Mother had wanted it there.
Idella could hear the restless water while she lay in bed or while she was cooking suppers. The house was exposed and unsheltered, perched so near the cliff. In winter the press of the winds wrapped around its corners and pushed on the walls. Steady streams of cold air whistled under the windowsills, prodding the loose shingles that Dad never got to fixing.
Mother had loved to hear the sound of the water far below, crashing over the rocks. One of the strongest memories Idella had was of standing in the middle of the kitchen
during a fierce storm, with her mother crouched at her side. Idella had been afraid. “Listen, Idella, listen. Isn’t that a wonderful thing—to hear the ocean? Can you hear it crashing? And the wind howling and howling. And here we are safe in our own home. Aren’t we lucky!” Idella had not been so sure, even then, but she had tried to smile like her mother. She’d trailed after her the whole afternoon, one fist clutched in the folds of her skirts. Her mother didn’t seem to mind. She’d sigh sometimes and pat Idella’s head, but she never told her to let go.
Dad hated the wind and loved it both. He’d shake his fist and rail against it, and then he’d start talking about his dead wife, saying it was her damn fault for perching them all on the goddamned brink like that and then dying. When he was drunk one time, late on a cold winter night, Idella heard Dad talking as the wind beat mercilessly at the windows. He spoke as if her mother had come back to haunt them. It had scared her. He’d started out loud, raving. Idella had snuck to the top of the stairs to listen, thinking at first that someone else was really down there talking to him. But Dad had ended up quiet, standing in front of a window, his head pressed against the glass. She had gone back to her own bed and cried. She missed her mother, too. Everything had changed when she died, everything.
“You’d best go on in. He’ll be waitin’. He raves, then he rests. You’ll see.” Dalton rode the wagon up close to the door, and his two sisters jumped down and got their bags. Then he clucked to Blackie and headed him over to the barn. “I’ll be in for supper.”
“Come on,” Idella said to Avis, who was looking longingly at the open fields, still visible in the soft late light of June. “We better go in.”
The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay Page 11