by Van Reid
“There!” announced Dee. She raised her chin and smiled, her eyes sparkling with her own brand of dissident amusement. She took the man’s arm. “I’ve given Mr. Porch very strict orders to behave himself,” she called back to her mother and Uncle Fale.
“Mr. Porch?” they heard Olin say as he and Dee went out the door.
Dee pulled the door to behind them, saying, “My cat.”
Mother Pilican and Fale did their best not to be too obvious as they watched Olin help Dee onto the wagon’s bench, then climb up on the other side and shake the reins. Hank, Olin’s tall, gray horse, looked grand enough to pull royalty.
“Olin Bell,” said Mother Pilican.
“Pretty smart, aren’t I,” said Fale, peering after the wagon.
“Oh?” said his sister.
“I already have three tins of Tecumseh in the kitchen cupboard.”
“You had better hide them.”
“He’s younger than Dee, isn’t he?” wondered the old man.
“It doesn’t make a skiff of difference,” she replied. Judd Pilican had been seven years older than Deborah Field, and had died too young.
Her brother chuckled.
“Fale!” said Deborah Pilican. “What on earth are you doing with that bucket?”
The old man considered the object in his hand, looked up at his sister, then back at the bucket again. Finally he looked back at the pantry door, as if some answer might be evident there. “Well,” he said, “I can’t remember.”
“Pretty smart,” said the old woman with a small laugh.
37. Fern and Moss
The Ferns and their guests had whiled away a further hour with peach pie, pound cake, and small talk when Madeline declared the need to walk off a drowse and Sundry offered to accompany her almost before she had finished the thought. He was wise enough, after this readiness, to inquire if anyone else would like to join them; the parents’ doubts concerning his intentions were thereby allayed, and the children rose up as one with renewed excitement.
Madeline might have been disappointed to have a crowd escort them, and Sundry sorry that his invitation was so happily accepted, but they bore circumstance bravely and off they went across the field. Sundry was of farm stock himself and used to children and family at his elbows, so that the laughter and commotion was hardly more distracting than the call of birds or the breeze in the stand of birch they passed along the bank of the river; little could dissuade his pleasure in the company of such a pretty woman.
Before they made the top of the nearest hill, he guessed that the oaks and maples upon it, the crowns of which he’d seen from the picnic sight, cast their shadows past rows of gravestones. It was not strange to come here; cemeteries along these riverside towns often occupied the finest views, and a sentiment among Yankee folk holds the graveyard as part of the community’s conscious life. Lovers might tryst demurely in its quiet and children play hide-and-seek among the stones. If those departed souls were close enough to hear, how much better might they like the sound of children’s laughter than silence.
Madeline picked some wildflowers at the edge of the cemetery and brought them to a pair of graves some rows away. “My mom’s people” she told Sundry. “I never knew my grandmother, but Grandfather I remember from when I was small.” There was something sweet in the way she divided the flowers between the two memories and considered the pair of names and dates. “He was a very short man,” she said. “My mom grew up on the farm, though it was smaller then, and Granddad had a little shop, that burned years ago, where he made fences and hurdles.”
“Did your father come from Bowdoinham?” asked Sundry.
“He’s from Chelsea. He schooled at Bowdoin, but his father lost all the family’s money, and Daddy was left without room or tuition, or even the fare to get back home. I don’t know how he lived—sweeping storefronts for a penny, I imagine. If he’d found the job here a few months earlier, he would have been teaching Mom. They both say it’s a good thing he didn’t. They met at church.”
“Your father never went home?”
“His father drank, which was the beginning of my father’s hate for the stuff, and, I dare say, he was never too fond of his father to begin with. There was a terrific sum of drinking at Bowdoin in those days, and he doubly despised the practice by the time he had to leave.”
“Your Aunt Beatrice doesn’t despise it quite so much.”
“I don’t know what to think. Until a few months ago, she echoed every curse Daddy laid upon drink, and more. Mom says that old folk sometimes grow tired of strict rules and perhaps we could learn something from that.”
The little boys played tag along the further slope, and some rows away the two middle sisters earnestly read the stones as they walked arm in arm. Madeline and Sundry had reached the less tended border of the graveyard, where their boots kicked up last year’s leaves. One low piece of granite caught Sundry’s eye, and he scooched down to brush away the grass and scratch at the lichen that covered the single word—Unknown.
“It puts me in mind of your father’s story,” he said.
“I had heard it before,” said Madeline. “Two or three times, though Daddy doesn’t remember telling it.”
Sundry hardly heard her. His mind had left the hilltop, and the beautiful young woman and the laughter of children from over the further slope, to delve beneath the loam and soil at his feet and consider, not the remains of some forgotten member of the species, but the person himself (he imagined a man), and to know a brief wonder and concern that was not unlike a generative act. His mind did not construct a particular face, or a specific heart, but something of his own perceived self, akin to that which was, here, Unknown. He did not forge particular deeds, or thoughts, but had a crisp realization of all the moments and every breath that amounted to a lifetime, whether well used or wasted.
There was something more compelling about that single inexplicit word—Unknown—than all the names and dates and accolades that might cover the tallest stone. A soul like Sundry’s could breath something like life into ancient clay.
While he considered the nameless stone, Madeline said, “Mom can tell you about this.”
Sundry looked up and around them, at the fields and the rock-strewn hills, like ripples in a vast counterpane. Great tracts of Maine had long ago been cleared of those ancient forests that greeted the European. Now where farms were given up for other ways of life, or abandoned for less rocky soil out West, the groves were beginning to return to the glaciated hills and river valleys. Below this small, well-tended graveyard some seventy years of straight pine rose up like guardians to watch the approach by river.
Sundry and Madeline went down a short, steep slope to sit beside one of these lofty trees. He held her hand as they went and reluctantly let it go when they found a spot with a clear view of the river. A chipmunk scolded in the branches above them and a blue jay flitted among the trunks, cocking his crested head at the pinecones as he turned them over.
“This is my favorite place,” said Madeline.
Sundry could believe it; there were three worlds within a stone’s throw—the fields and meadows behind, the river before, the shadowed grove between. Sitting there, he had the first intimation of weather on the way—a subtle shift in the density of the air, a doubling back of the wind; the scent of a darker front brought his head up and sent his gaze among the breaks in the trees, where a patch of blue, or a tatter of cloud, could be seen.
There was something enlivening about those places in between—the pines, the turning point of weather they occupied, that brief experience of thought and apprehension at the Unknown grave as contrasted with the presence of Madeline Fern. Sometimes, thought Sundry, a person is gifted with a moment of absolute clarity; Madeline was speaking, and he was thinking less about her words than about the song he had heard her sing, as it was now and continually evident in her voice.
Their hands were propped beside them, his right hand within a finger’s width of her left. Her k
nees were up, and he could see a hint of stocking between her short boots and the hem of her blue dress. Her head was rested against the bark of a pine; there was a single brown needle in her hair above her ear. She was laughing about something, and Sundry grinned (stupidly, he was sure) as she spoke.
“And I would have rolled all the way to the river if that tree hadn’t stopped me,” she finished, pointing down the slope and laughing.
Sundry laughed with her as the import of her story came to him from behind, as it were. He thought, however, what it might be like to sit with another young woman (Priscilla Morningside, to be exact), and though there would be those who thought Madeline the more beautiful, she was transcended somewhat—not dimmed but transcended—in his mind.
Something else occluded the tension of the moment, the sense that a love was as sacrosanct as a mate, and that, by being there first, even an unspoken love had certain rights and expectations. Most important, Sundry was not staying in Bowdoinham, and though Priscilla Morningside lived in Ellsworth (and Sundry wasn’t staying there, either) he felt something very different about the two equations.
“You have a great admirer,” he said to Madeline, without even a warning to himself.
She lifted her hand from the floor of the grove and pulled it away from Sundry, almost as if he had said something insulting (which he hadn’t) or intrusive to the moment (which he certainly had).
The awkwardness Sundry had experienced beside this pretty woman left him, and he was his old, engaging self. “Well,” he added to his previous statement, “aside from all the other admiring fellows you meet.” Madeline smiled, but tempered this bit of light with a wryly cocked eyebrow, which—and he had to be completely honest with himself—made him a little sorry he’d spoken. “I guess you know,” he said.
“I guess I don’t,” she replied. She might have said that she hoped—or, rather, imagined but didn’t hope. “Say something!” she demanded when he did not.
“There’s only the one fellow I’ve met around here,” he answered.
Madeline looked a little cross. Her jaw set determinedly. “You can’t mean Johnny,” she pronounced carefully.
“Why can’t I?”
“Because he hardly talks to me.”
“He’s hardly able.”
“All he does is play with the children.”
“All he talks about is you—when you’re out of earshot.”
Sundry didn’t know if she was embarrassed or angry or simply confused. Madeline pulled her knees closer to her and folded her arms on them. Sundry was startled to see something glistening in her eye. “What am I supposed to do if he won’t so much as speak to me?” she asked. “Last Sunday I went right up to him and said good morning and he hardly knew I was there.”
“I’m pretty sure he knew you were there,” said Sundry. “I guess he thinks the same about you.”
“How could he?”
Sundry laughed. He scratched his head. “It is something, isn’t it?” He laughed again, but regretfully. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I put my oar in where it wasn’t wanted.”
Madeline put her hand on his—something she might never have dared to do a moment before. “What can I say to him? It’s not proper for a woman to speak up to a man!”
“Oh, I don’t know—” He thought of Miss McCannon and Mister Walton.
“Some beautiful girl in town is just going to take a look at him one day and decide she’s got to have him, and I’ll just be ruined the rest of my life!” Madeline was in absolute tears now.
“No, no,” he was saying. “No, no. Don’t think it. He just has to know how you feel about him, and ... well, I’ll tell him first thing!”
“Oh, no, you daren’t!”
“I daren’t?”
“My parents would be beside themselves. If he thought I sent you to tell him, that would be as bad as if I spoke up first.”
“That’s a little refined,” said Sundry.
“Do you think so?” She looked at Sundry for the first time since she began to weep, and he couldn’t understand how her eyes had gotten so red so quickly. “Good heavens!” he said, sounding a bit like Mister Walton. “How did our parents ever marry? Do you suppose they just tripped over each other one day?”
“I don’t know! It’s all seems very simple once it’s done with, I suppose.”
This made him chuckle, but he realized that he had been lacking in basic chivalry and produced a handkerchief for Madeline’s tears.
Sniffing, she thanked him, took the handkerchief, and began to dab at her eyes. “It’s even worse if you say he likes me, too.”
“Of course he likes you,” said Sundry—the implication being that any fellow would, himself included.
She looked down at her boots and the needles and roots of the grove and Sundry was struck by the sudden change that she had undergone within him. Only moments before, he had experienced that potent swirl of emotion spoken of in Mister Walton’s remembered verses about irises and doves; his senses were filled with Madeline’s beauty: his eyes with her features—her auburn hair and the freckles across her nose; his ears with her voice; and his nose with a kind of perfume that naturally followed her. His hand had reveled at the touch of hers as he helped her down the slope. Now that reel of sensation was focused and still, though just as bright, as he thought it might be, were she simply a friend.
It was a very nice thought, in all the primary and overused worth of that simple adjective. Madeline perhaps experienced something like it, for she said to him, “You are a very nice man, Mr. Moss.”
“Sundry, please,” he said, and he laughed, which was a means to fend off embarrassment. “There’s something to be said for a man being bashful,” he said. “Speaking ofJohnny,” he added hastily.
“Is bashful something you know about?” she asked with a portion of her previous wryness.
He laughed again.
“Well,” she said. “I will simply have to wait.” Emotions were flying through her like clouds over the sun, and now she felt sad again.
“I don’t think it has to be a problem,” he said easily
“But you mustn’t say anything to him!”
Sundry promised nothing. “If some girl in town decides she has to have him,” he cautioned, “don’t say you didn’t say so.”
Madeline’s sad expression broke as she laughed softly. “You do have a funny way of putting things,” she said. She smiled again, though her eyes were still red. She glanced back at her sisters, but they were concentrating on the ground as they helped each other down the steep slope of the grove. Madeline then leaned forward and kissed Sundry on the cheek.
The wind had risen another degree by the time they returned to the picnic; those dusky clouds, having hung in the east all morning, now advanced against the pale blue half of the sky. When the young folk returned, the older members of the party had packed most everything away, and Hercules, of his own volition, was ensconced in the back of the wagon once again.
“It seems that we are expected to spend another night with the Ferns,” said Mister Walton quietly without seeming secretive.
“I think we must,” said Sundry.
Mister Walton adjusted his spectacles. “I don’t want to keep you from visiting your uncle.”
“Once we start a job, we should be sure to finish it.”
Mister Walton chuckled.
“Or be sure that it is finished,” amended Sundry.
The children were already running ahead and shouting something about a shortcut. Madeline lingered beside the wagon, trying to look nonchalant, but was obviously waiting for Sundry.
“You and Miss Fern are getting along well,” said Mister Walton in that same quiet tone, but there was a touch of pleasure, and even mischief, in his voice. He had watched with great pleasure as the younger children came charging across the meadow to the picnic spread. The middle sisters twirled and skipped, laughing, and Sundry and Madeline came behind, walking and talking, he had noticed,
with the ease of seasoned friends. “She is a very lovely woman,” said Mister Walton. The playfulness had left his demeanor.
Sundry, by his expression, agreed. “I think I’ll go to that ball after all,” he said before joining Madeline on her way back to the farm.
Mister Walton was both mystified and relieved to hear it. “Phileda will be very pleased,” he said, more or less to himself.
BOOK FIVE May 29, 1897
(Afternoon and Evening)
38. How to Be Two Places at Once
The weary sailor had been cobbled back together, more or less, since the “Danforth Street Pianoforte Demolition.” It had taken several men to drag the bar back to its previous station, and a ship’s carpenter was hired to reaffix it to the floor, though it was unfortunate he took his pay in ale and in advance as when he was finished the bar was out of level and patrons discovered new sport in laying their glasses on one end of the counter and rolling them down to the bartender. Much broken glassware was the immediate result, and the proprietor of the Weary Sailor had more reason still to curse Gillie Hicks.
The famous piano (or what was left of it) was piled on the tavern porch for the inspection of the curious, and a sign was hung from one comer of the inharmonious heap that said flatly, if not with literal accuracy: This is the instrument of Gillie Hicks’s destruction.
It was just past noon on Saturday when Fuzz Hadley straggled down the sidewalk of Portland’s Danforth Street with Tony Sutter and Jimmy Fain. Fuzz was not his swaggering self, which meant that he was a little meaner than usual. He glowered at people, as if waiting for someone to smile or laugh at him. He did not know what Thaddeus Spark’s look-alike relative and his gang were up to the night before, and he feared that what he didn’t know made him look like a fool.