It was about as forlorn a thing as he ever wanted to see. The house perched on its raft as though it were trying not to be sick. Its roof beams sagged in the middle, its shingles clung loosely, and the chimney pipe swayed with each wave, trying to be jaunty but not very good at it. Lashed to its sides were two barrels, a few lobster pots, and an old, battered trunk complaining at being dragged out onto the water.
Faces looked out the windows. Abbie's face. Perlie's face. Tripps' faces.
On the shore stood what looked to be just about everybody who lived on Malaga Island, Lizzie and her granddaddy hand in hand. No one was saying much, just watching as Mr. Tripp circled the raft, tightening a rope, checking the barrel tops, and trying to make it about as shipshape as Aeneas would have made a warship. Then he went back onshore, and there were handshakes and nods, all quiet, until he went back aboard and cast off. A wave kicked up, but he hung on, and soon the house was drifting down the New Meadows, heading out to the coast. Mr. Tripp held on to the door frame with one hand, and the other he held high, his fingers spread out as if he were blessing them all.
In that moment, Lizzie's granddaddy lifted up his voice, quavery but loud, and soon every soul on the shore was singing.
Yes, we'll gather at the river,
The beautiful, the beautiful river,
Gather with the saints at the river
That flows by the throne of God.
And the raft floated away, the sounds of the singing faded, and the gulls swooped and screeched as if they were announcing a death in the town.
One by one, those on the shore headed back up into the island. By the time Turner had climbed down the ledges and stood just across the New Meadows, only Lizzie and her granddaddy were standing there, still looking at the raft before it crossed behind the island and so out of sight. "Lizzie," Turner called. "Lizzie Bright."
But she did not answer. Instead, she put her hands to her face and ran up the beach. And her grandfather, after peering at Turner for a moment, followed her.
Turner didn't feel like Aeneas anymore. Suddenly, he felt a whole lot like Mrs. Hurd, alone, with her friends before her gone.
CHAPTER 8
IN late September, the sea breeze stole the gold from the maples, the silver from the aspens. The oaks browned; the beeches paled. And in a general disheartening, the leaves let go, twirled and somersaulted, and finally settled down to sleep.
The sea breeze cooled the sun, too, which shone whiter and feebler against aging clouds. Some mornings, it seemed to want to sleep with the leaves.
On such a morning, not long after the day had finished rubbing its eyes and yawning, Turner rubbed his eyes and yawned to a pounding on the parsonage door. He heard his father's slippered feet hurrying down the stairs. Figuring that only a calamity would fetch the minister out this early in the morning and that a minister's son should stand by his father at such a moment, he jumped out of bed, gathered his robe around him, and went downstairs, too. But he could have stayed in bed and still have heard the news Mr. Stonecrop brought, since he was hollering it loudly enough to let folks on the other side of the New Meadows hear it.
"Have you read the Portland newspaper, Buckminster? Have you read it?" He waved it in front of Reverend Buckminsters face.
The reverend admitted that he hadn't read a single word yet today.
"Then let me read this for you!" Mr. Stonecrop held the paper out with both hands, mumbled a moment until he found the right place, and then began to sputter as though great Lucifer himself had provoked him. "Here, the wretch says that he's been forced off the island that has been his home—as though he had any right to call it his home. Forced to put his house on a raft. And here, that Phippsburg has never given a fig about him, never even tried to help him or his family—as though we'd never built a school or hired a teacher. And here, he claims that now that he's floated all the way down to Portland, he has nowhere left to go. And that's not all, Buckminster. The moving saga of the Tripp family continues: how they had to tie up at Bush Island after being prevented from coming into Phippsburg, how he had to row back and forth three miles to find a doctor to tend his wife, and how all of this is the fault of the good people of Phippsburg." He stopped and took a breath.
"The fault of the people of Phippsburg!" declared Reverend Buckminster.
"The insolence of it all!" declared Mr. Stonecrop.
"The Tripps!" declared Turner.
Silence in the parsonage as Reverend Buckminster and Mr. Stonecrop looked at Turner for a long moment.
"You know these people?" asked Mr. Stonecrop.
"You know these people?" asked Reverend Buckminster.
Turner suddenly wished he hadn't come downstairs. He thought of the house floating down the New Meadows with all the Tripps inside, and Mr. Tripp holding the house together and steady against the waves. Did he know these people? Hadn't he flown with them around the island? Hadn't he made Perlie laugh?
But he said, "Not much."
"Well," said Mr. Stonecrop, "had he set out to deliberately humiliate the town, he could hardly have done much worse. Good Lord, Reverend, if this town is going to survive, we need not only hotels to house tourists, we need goodwill to bring them in. And this kind of thing does not bring goodwill."
"Perhaps, Mr. Stonecrop, you are depending too much on—
"Perhaps, Reverend, if you want a town to preach to, you should begin to use some of that influence we understood you had. We need to be done with this business, and done quickly. Write to Governor Plaistead. This very day. Tell him the situation. I know things move slowly up to Augusta, but good Lord, the state declared six years ago that it would adjudicate Malaga Island. Six years! It's time to get things moving. Tell him that."
"I could write to him."
"Today, Reverend."
"Mr. Stonecrop, tourism is at best a chancy business."
"It is the only business left to us. The only business once the shipyards fail—as they will within a year. Write the letter."
Mr. Stonecrop blustered out of the house, and Turner and his father watched him take the street by right of possession. There wasn't a sea breeze anywhere near him, and if there had been one, it would have been trampled into the dust of Parker Head until it wasn't anything but a puff or two.
Reverend Buckminster stood still, watching the striding Mr. Stonecrop, who had paused by Mrs. Hurd's house and was gazing up at it as if to appreciate its value. A long sigh. "Go get your breakfast," he said finally. "I've a letter to write this morning, and you've got a hundred lines of Virgil to translate."
The lines turned out to be a hundred dull ones, as Aeneas—Turner thought he finally had the spelling down—moped about and looked for a place to live. With Robert Barclay in front of him, it promised to be an even duller afternoon. Turner figured he had had enough of Robert Barclay's tormenting propositions, more than enough to satisfy any human being, and he said so.
And as if to prove that miracles can still happen on a dull day, Reverend Buckminster agreed. When they came back to the study after dinner, his father closed the door—something he hardly ever did—and reached for a volume in the glassed case behind his desk. He weighed it in his hand. He looked at his son, as if trying to make up his mind.
Finally he did.
"Turner," he said, "books can be fire, you know."
"Fire?"
"Fire. Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches." He handed the book to Turner.
"The Origin of Species," he read aloud. "Is this fire?"
His father laughed, and Turner suddenly realized that this was the first time he had heard him laugh since they had come to Maine. The very first time. "It is a conflagration," he said.
Turner looked steadily at him. "Should a minister's son be reading this?"
"Who better?" said his father."Besides, your mother says that maybe First Congregational doesn't need to know everything we're thinking." He laughed again. "Whatever would Deacon Hurd say if h
e knew you were reading Charles Darwin?"
Turner felt as if the world was suddenly a more mysterious place. He had never before thought that there were things he ought to be doing that might cause, well, fire. When he opened the book and began to read, he was Jim Hawkins at the captain's chest, Sinbad opening his eyes in the Valley of Rubies, Huck himself waking up to a brand-new bend in the Mississippi.
And it wasn't long before he knew that what he was reading was fire, all right.
It was almost like lighting out for the Territories.
He read with fire in his brain through the afternoon; the next day, he rushed through Virgil so that he could read again. Day after day through the week he read, the fire heating him, while outside the sea breeze grew colder and colder, and soon there wasn't a single maple it hadn't nipped or a single oak whose leaves it hadn't curled to a crispness. When Saturday came around, Turner spent the morning with Darwin. He finished in a breathless run just before the three ringing bells and ran down Parker Head carrying the fire in his hands.
He would not warm anyone at First Congregational with it. He had promised his father.
But he could warm Lizzie.
He was at Mrs. Cobb's by the last toll of the Congregational bells, but Lizzie was not there. Still, the fire burned red in him, and when Turner played for Mrs. Cobb, he marched briskly through the "Battle Hymn," then drove through "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" until it was swinging mighty low and mighty fast. He kept listening for the knock on the back door. It did not come, and after playing long enough for even Mrs. Cobb to shush him out, he waited on the back porch.
But Lizzie never came.
When she did not come on Sunday afternoon, either, the fire in him weakened to a smolder. He played the organ slowly, so that Mrs. Cobb said she had never heard "Shall We Gather at the River" played so mournfully. "I'm not about to say my last words this afternoon, Turner Buckminster."
"No, ma'am."
"So play something a little cheerier."
He played a blood-and-thunder hymn, and Mrs. Cobb clapped to it. "Yes," she said, "those hymns about eternal lakes of fire are always so jaunty, aren't they? Play another." And he tried to find one equally hearty in its pleasures of damnation, but he was smoldering so low that he could not keep the tempo up.
Turner felt about as low as a raft set loose on the New Meadows River.
"Where's that Negro girl been?" asked Mrs. Cobb suddenly.
"I don't know," said Turner."I don't know where she's been and I'm not allowed to go down to find out and I don't even know if she's there anymore or if she's gone with everyone else on the island and Lord knows they haven't done a single thing that calls for people being so awful to them and taking away their home and I haven't even said goodbye, if she's gone, that is."
He stopped to breathe. Mrs. Cobb looked at him, startled, with eyes as wide as daybreak.
"You said all that in one breath."
"I suppose.
She nodded and looked down at her hands gripping her knees. "I've gotten to like her, too. Awfully much."
"I didn't say I liked her."
"Turner Buckminster, you don't have to be a minister's son all the time."
You don't have to be a minister's son all the time. You don't have to he a minister's son all the time. Turner had never thought he could ever, at any time, be anything else. The thought shivered him—as if he had almost touched a whale.
"I do like her," he said.
"Of course you do. And it doesn't matter a damn—yes, even old ladies cuss—it doesn't matter a damn what anyone else in the town of Phippsburg has to say about it. It doesn't matter what anyone else in the whole state of Maine has to say about it."
Turner nodded.
"And if anyone has anything to say about it, it should be me!"
"You, Mrs. Cobb?"
"Yes, me, Turner Buckminster. You don't think people haven't been talking about me letting this colored girl into my house to hear you play? Next thing they'll be taking me down to Pownal. Yes, I know all about Mrs. Hurd. That son of hers, sending her to Pownal so he can sell her house and invest the money. You think there's any other reason?" She shook her head solemnly.
Turner stood up from the organ.
"That's right. Go find out about her as fast as you please, and faster."
And Turner—Turner ran out of Mrs. Cobb's house and down Parker Head. He did not see the lace curtains parting, or Mrs. Cobb watching him sprinting, or hear her humming "I Have Some Friends Before Me Gone." But he felt the sea breeze rolling beside him, and he heard the rising of the gulls, and he felt the fire in his hands again. He felt as if he were standing on the edge of the sea cliff with the green waves roaring in and their yellow froth churning at the tops—and he was ready to leap.
He half ran, half tumbled down past the scrub trees and over the ledges, almost expecting that Lizzie would be waiting for him—and so he was hardly surprised when he reached the shore and she was there, her arms muddied up to her elbows, a bucket of spitting clams beside her, and her dory pulled up against the shore.
"Hey," he called.
She looked up, then back down.
"Hey," he called again as he came up.
"Hey."
"I haven't seen you for days."
"Nine days," she said. "You haven't seen me for nine days."
"Nine days, then."
She went back to her clamming.
"I could clam with you some."
"There's another rake in the dory, if you want to so badly." Turner went to fetch the rake. "What have you been doing?"
"Same thing I'm always doing."
They raked together and dug, silently.
They raked together and dug a long time, silently.
"Lizzie, you mad about something?"
"Well now, Mister Turner Ernest Buckminster, why should I be mad about anything?"
"I guess if there were people in a town trying to take away my home, I'd be mad."
"I guess you would, but it's not hardly likely"
"And I guess if they were taking it away just for money, I'd be madder still."
"I guess you would. And you'd be even madder if you had a granddaddy so sick he couldn't move, and a deacon from the town come down to tell him he had to move anyway."
Turner stood over the clam hole he had raked."How sick?"
And Lizzie Bright threw her rake across the flats, sat down in the mud, and began to cry. Turner set down his rake, sat beside her in the mud, and took her hand.
Muddy palm in muddy palm they sat, and the sea breeze was quiet. Not even the gulls called out. And Turner did not care if Willis Hurd called down the whole town of Phippsburg upon them.
"You done holding my hand yet?" asked Lizzie after a season or two.
"Not yet."
"You going to tell me when you're done?"
"I suppose."
She nodded. "After a while, this mud will dry so hard we won't be able to get apart."
"It'd be all right by me."
Lizzie looked at him, and it seemed as if she might start crying again, but this time, she'd be crying and laughing at the same time. "I guess it'd be all right by me, too, Turner Buckminster. But what'll we do when the tide comes back in?"
"Go see your granddaddy."
And that's what they did. When the tide came back in, they rinsed their hands together in the seawater, and together they climbed into the dory and rowed to Malaga, and together they hefted the bucket of clams around the point and up to the house.
Lizzie's granddaddy was not sitting on the doorstep smoking his pipe, and Turner felt the loneliness of the place. For a moment he imagined the Tripps wheeling out of the woods and flying around them. But there were no Tripps anywhere on the island anymore. He stretched the fingers of his hand and was surprised that he could no longer feel Lizzie's hand in his own. Is it possible to forget the feeling so quickly? he wondered.
Inside the house it was darker than he remembered, darker than it sho
uld have been. Lizzie's granddaddy was propped up in a bed, perched on his angled elbows so that he could see out the window. "Lizzie Bright." He smiled when they came in, and he spoke her name as if he were reciting a blessing. "And Turner Buckminster. Boy, we've missed you here. No, no, don't go explaining. You don't need to go explaining. We're just glad you're here today."
Lizzie handed Turner a knife. "You know how to open clams?"
"I will in a minute or two."
"You think you'll just figure it all out on your own?"
"No, I think you'll just tell me."
"You think so?"
"Of course I think so. You never can keep from telling me something you know that I don't."
"Then I must be telling you a whole lot all the time, because there's a whole lot I know that you don't know."
Lizzie told him a whole lot, even after Turner got the knack of it and could open the shell with the point of the knife, slit the muscle before the clam objected too much, and drop it into the pot along with its juice. It was enough, Lizzie's granddaddy said, to make even a man sick in bed look up and take notice, seeing those clams slip out of their shells. But Turner saw that Reverend Griffin couldn't do much more than look up and take notice, and that once the chowder was set to cooking, he lay back down on the bed, exhausted from having propped himself up. He coughed once or twice, weakly, as if he didn't have the heart for it, and then lay too still.
Lizzie and Turner sat by the shore while the chowder hottened up. They didn't talk much—didn't have to. The New Meadows was quiet, with the tide slow and careful not to scrape itself against the shore rocks. The gulls rode its back as if for a joke, calling now and again to each other, but mostly just riding the waves up and down, then up and down again. They must have been doing this for more years than anyone could count, thought Turner, and for a moment he saw Darwin standing on the bridge of the Beagle and watching the seabirds of the Galápagos, and maybe thinking the same thing.
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (Newbery Honor Book) Page 12