Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  The Hayford children had dressed for a frosty morning, Samuel in a dead uncle’s oversized coat and Prudence in her dull blue cloak and riding hood. They walked from the house and made their way along the cow path, cutting between cultivated fields and stony pasture. They passed leafy expanses that denoted sleeping turnips, and ripening pumpkins hunched amidst browning foliage. A dark wood waited at the end of the trail, its tall pines and solemn spruce crowded together, all but obscuring the oaks and reddened maples. The children looked small as they approached this wall of trees.

  Once in the woods, Samuel led the way on a line of worn earth that was narrower and more crooked than the cow path. The air was moist, heavy with the scents of vegetation and dark soil, and it added to the sense of being enclosed. There was moss and shadow, and birds that were heard but not seen, and small red squirrels that chattered their agitation.

  Prudence was prattling on about what she wanted to do with the cranberries once procured, inventing recipes as she maneuvered the ruts and roots and half-hidden stones that would have proved treacherous for the unfamiliar. She swung her empty basket like a pendulum. Samuel tired of her voice and began to whistle to himself.

  “You would be well to save your vigor for the picking and less so for blathering,” the boy cautioned over his shoulder.

  This stirred the girl to defense. “I would blather and pick all at once, should it suit my fancy,” she said, swatting away a little yellow leaf that had snared in the lacey trim of her day cap. “I would blather in my sleep as well, if it please me.”

  Samuel chuckled.

  There were few indications that the young Hayfords were approaching the Atlantic, only quick glimpses of water through dense boughs.

  “You sound a squirrel with that tireless tongue of yours,” Samuel prodded.

  “Were I a squirrel, I should bite you,” Prudence returned.

  The shaded spruce forest came to a sudden end, and there, startlingly expansive, was a glittering blue ocean. The border between water and trees was a steep jumble of overlapping pinkish boulders. They were smooth and jagged, broken and whole, randomly studded with periwinkles, and here and there cupping tidal pools lined with drowned green hair.

  This rough crescent of granite shaped a small cove where the water, calmer than the open sea beyond, was an inscrutable gray. It was an inlet where ducks were known to bob and dive, and loons were apt to winter, away from their summer lakes. Betsy made her way down toward the waterline, beyond the hem of grass and scrub-plants, across a slanted swath of pebbles and shells, past the bleached remains of fallen pines like great broken antlers, over a crunching layer of dried brown seaweed. There was a gap in the natural stone rampart, allowing for a small area of gravely beach where a boat could gain access to the water.

  Samuel’s father’s skiff was upside down, with oars beneath it, placed safely above the reach of high tide. Despite its worn appearance, the vessel was capable of floating, and so the boy flipped it onto its keel and pushed it down toward the surf, grunting the whole way.

  “In with you,” Samuel panted to his sister.

  The girl climbed into the boat—so as not to soak her feet and skirts—and the boy gave it a shove. The skiff sloshed into the water with Samuel pushing behind it, until he himself scrambled in. The boat rocked as he took up position, setting his oars in their rowlocks and leaning back, dunking the blades, taking control. The tide was on its way out, which was to Samuel’s favor, and just lightly caressed the stones along the shore.

  A small island stood between the rowboat and the infinite Atlantic. Little Sorrow, they called it. The covering of trees gave it the look of a furred animal floating off the coast. It was the color of spruce, but for a rough line that dared above the blue water, a granite ridge the color of salmon. There were no homes or human residents on Little Sorrow.

  It took only a short while to row across, and soon Samuel was dragging the skiff up a pebbled slope, slick with rockweed. Gulls had left pieces of ruined crabs about—a pale orange leg like a crooked skeleton finger, a hollow carapace, upside down and holding water; teacup for a mermaid.

  The young Hayfords left the boat and marched up into the woods with their baskets, away from the cool air sighing in over the water. Autumn had preceded them, bringing its colors, and these showed brighter for the contrasting shadows under the spruce. Many of the small birches and maples appeared to be dead or dying, perhaps starved for light, their roots no rival for towering evergreens. Their branches were emaciated, and bore scratchy clots of ghostly-green moss instead of leaves.

  The tree cover thinned and the children came to a marshy tract of land, thick with cranberry bushes. The plants were shrubby and low, with small green leaves and stark red fruit. Even from a distance the children could see that it was a good year for the berries.

  Samuel and Prudence looked to one another, smiled, and went to their task. There was salt in the air and September in the air and the earthy scent of the shrubs as the children knelt in damp vines, eagerly plucking. Some of the elliptical fruits were still white, while others were blushing softly, but a good many had ripened to a deep red. Prudence sampled one of the tart berries, biting it in half to reveal its four hollow chambers.

  When their baskets were full and bulging, the children started back for the skiff. They passed through the wooded expanse they had crossed to access the berries, but found a less steep route down toward where the boat awaited. Had they come this way initially, they would have seen what Prudence now spotted.

  “Samuel, look there!”

  The boy stopped and stared. “Do you suppose wasps fashioned it?”

  It was gray and long and loosely shaped like a man, or more a shroud containing a man.

  Samuel put his basket down on the grass above the rocks and, forsaking the path of smooth descent he had been on, made his way across undulating ledges to where the strange object lay wedged against an outcrop. He knelt by the gray object, which in size and shape was indeed suggestive of a man, all the more so for the rough shoulders and head. He reached down with his hand.

  “Samuel!” Prudence called, “You mustn’t touch it!”

  Samuel touched it. He pressed his palm against the coarse slate-colored skin, which, though it looked as if it could have been some kind of stone, was not. It felt dry and somewhat yielding, like parchment hardened in layers, the outermost of which was flaking and frayed. He rapped his knuckles against the chest, then looked over at his sister.

  “It seems hollow,” he said.

  “Leave it be, Samuel,” Prudence pleaded.

  The boy took the shape by the shoulders and gave it a shake. Whatever it was, it was relatively light, for it rocked with his effort, and he thought that he heard rattling.

  “There is something within,” Samuel reported.

  He picked up a length of driftwood, which lay nearby, and stood above the form. The first blow crunched through the chest, making a hole as big as a fist, and dust puffed out. The encasing crust was hardly an inch thick. The second blow widened the opening, revealing some of what was inside. Birch branches, he thought at first.

  “Have a look, Prudence,” Samuel called, “there are bones!”

  “I shouldn’t like to look, Samuel. I am cold and I wish home.” The girl had her hood pulled tight against her day cap, and held her cloak closed at the throat.

  Samuel’s fascination possessed him. He tore at the sides of the broken chest with his hands, and higher up to the featureless face of the cocoon, removing chunks, so as to get a better look at the dingy disheveled skeleton lying there in its womb of dust and shadow. The skull, the size of a man’s, was tipped to one side, all teeth and pitted stare.

  A flurry of thoughts went through the boy’s mind. Whose bones were these? How did they get there? Had waves flung their container up onto the boulders? How old were the bones? Why were they sealed in that strange gray encasement? He wondered if maybe Indians were responsible, but then he had never heard of Indians te
nding to their dead in such a manner.

  “There is something more,” Samuel called.

  A lumpy black cloth sack was tucked into the ribcage of the skeleton. The boy had to reposition himself, pressing his chest against the broken chest of the coffin, in order to angle his arm in to reach the bundle. Stale odors drifted up into his face and he snared a button on the sleeve of his coat while pulling the sack out through its tunnel of ribs. His prize secured, Samuel sat back on his heels and opened the cloth.

  “I’m for home!” Prudence snapped, turning and walking off with her basket.

  Samuel only half-noticed his sister’s departure.

  “A heart. . .” he said to himself.

  It was a petrified heart, or a faithful carving of one, fashioned from pink granite and veined with cracks.

  Samuel put the heart in the pocket of his coat and made a daring dash over the treacherous ledges, grabbing his basket of cranberries before rejoining his sister down below the tree line, where the boat awaited. Prudence was standing there shivering, her knees imprinted on the skirt of her frock like damp shadows.

  “May we now go?” The girl whined.

  Samuel pulled out the heart and showed her. “See what I have found, Prudence . . . is it not a wonder?”

  The girl frowned. “You mustn’t take it, Samuel. To thieve from one’s grave is improper.”

  “Mustn’t take it? Silly! Those old bones have not a need for it.”

  With that Samuel stuffed his treasure back in his coat and loaded the baskets of berries into the skiff. Prudence was cold and in no mood to argue, knowing how stubborn her brother could be. She sat quietly in the back of the boat, hugging herself as Samuel rowed for the mainland.

  Touches of autumn color stood out against dark spruce along the shore, and hazy mountains swelled in the distance. The young Hayfords were now more than halfway between Little Sorrow and the cove from which they’d launched. Samuel sat with his back to the prow, working the oars, while Prudence had a clear view of their progress. The water close to shore had lightened to a soft drowned green; its little waves stroked the breaching boulders like one soothing the head of a pet.

  Prudence tucked her own head into her shoulders and gazed absently at the baskets of red fruit. Once again her mind was busy with imaginary recipes. Peripheral motion drew her eye back to the cove. She noticed the silvery agitation of displacement and a smallish pale figure lifting from under the surf. It rose up slowly, hunched, and only fully standing after a moment, as if adjusting to the pull of gravity. At first she thought it was some kind of animal, but it had long light hair pouring across its back, and limbs like a person, and once it had its footing it scurried up onto the jagged granite outcrops.

  “Samuel, Samuel! Quick—see there—something from the water rises!”

  The boy turned. He saw the naked back of a young blond girl as she reached the cliff above the stone embankment and plunged into gloomy forest.

  “By God!” Samuel exclaimed.

  Prudence stood up to try to get a better look and the boat rocked in protest. She felt something thump against the boards beneath her and glanced into the water, thinking they had struck a rock. Samuel felt it, too, and was distracted from looking for the child. An ashen blur passed alongside them, too low in the water to discern clearly, but whatever it was, it trailed long dark hair sinuous as seaweed.

  “Samuel!” Prudence grabbed her brother by the arm.

  The boy’s eyes were wide and he craned his neck this way and that to try and see the thing in the water, but it had slipped out of sight. He shook free of his sister and slapped his oars in the surf to frighten off whatever might be below. When nothing unusual happened, he started rowing again, suddenly eager to be on dry land.

  Prudence’s gaze darted from side to side, behind the boat and in front, but the glare of sunlight on the surface of the waves made it difficult to distinguish anything. She looked back toward the mainland as they moved nearer to it. Some distance down the shore from where she had seen the child, a spindly naked figure walked out of the ocean onto an inadvertent staircase of stones. It was a stern-faced old man with long white hair plastered to his bony shoulders. Beyond him, a nude young woman pulled herself from the tide, grabbing onto rockweed and ledge, her skin glistening as she emerged.

  Prudence cried out and her brother spun to look. More of them appeared at unequal intervals along the coastline. An infant wiggled out like a seal, then scrabbled up the gravely slope of the quiet cove. Here two young boys, there a lumbering unclothed man. They came up dripping, silent, strangely determined.

  “How is it they are not drowned?” Prudence asked, incredulous.

  Samuel was too distracted to respond. “See there,” he said, “is it not Abner Tilden?”

  The bulky, bearded man, like the rest, was oblivious of his observers and moved steadily up toward the wooded expanse.

  Prudence replied, “Abner Tilden died Sunday last.”

  “And there!” Samuel pointed. “Polly Fisher! And old Mrs. Pratt . . . Look—Jedediah, the minister’s son! It cannot be so, for they all are dead.”

  More children, a corpulent limping woman, and figures too far down the coast to distinguish, rose from the Atlantic and made their way up with the rest. They were all without clothes and all pale as chalk, and not a word came from any of them. They were like migrating birds returning to a place they knew, instinctively, single-mindedly. Off they went, into the swallowing green of the dark spruce forest.

  Every one of them was gone before the Hayfords’ skiff reached the gentle waters of the cove, but rather than go ashore, Samuel chose to float there. He and his sister looked at each other, then up into the trees, then at each other again. Knowing that those people, or ghosts, or whatever they were, might be in there, made them wonder if it would prove safer to stay in the boat.

  “We must tell Mother,” Prudence said after a long moment.

  Samuel nodded and began to row. He felt the stone heart in his coat pocket pressing against his thigh. It suddenly felt very cold to him, as if it were a chunk of ice rather than granite.

  Susanna Hayford worried. Winter was on the way and there was so much to do. So much preparation and relatively little time. So little money, and so few hands. The frost may have delighted her children, but to her it meant the cold season was upon them. Would there be food enough and wood to last? Was there a sufficient quantity of salt to preserve the meat that November’s slaughter would provide? Would sickness come sneaking with fevers and coughs? Would she and her children survive to see the spring? While the sky boasted cloudless blue and the sun made the autumn colors pretty, there was indeed plenty to be concerned about.

  It was hard enough carrying on after Abel’s death, but the loss of her young Betsy had proved overwhelming. While once she had risen in the dark of day and whirled through the house, efficient and hardy, she now slept too long, and found the slightest task exhausting. It was as if the black of her mourning clothes had soaked deeply into her limbs and organs, a painful, unyielding weight. How, she wondered, could a creature in such a state provide for her children through a hard New England winter?

  Following a quick breakfast of milk and bread, Susanna forced herself to get busy. Samuel and Prudence had already milked the cows, gathered eggs, fed the hens, and carried water into the kitchen, so she emptied her chamber pot, then went to the garden to see what the frost had done to the herbs that had yet to be harvested for drying. The situation did not seem so bad, the herbs being such sturdy plants, but time would tell. The frost was already melting off—she would wait for the sun to dry them and then gather the rest.

  Next she worked in the formal parlor with its wainscot and paneled fireplace wall painted a warm mustard yellow. She took down the light curtains and put up the heavier winter ones in their place. She then did her sweeping and built up the kitchen fire to boil water for tea, having earned a few minutes rest.

  If only her body had the vitality of her mind, s
he thought, for her head was a whirl of thoughts. She considered the possibility of selling off two of the cows, seeing as there probably would not be enough feed to last the lot of them all winter. That would give her some extra money, enough to hire a neighbor’s girl to help with the fall whitewashing, and a man to repair the outbuildings and sow the winter hemp. Yes, Susanna thought, she might just be able to afford Bathsheba Hibbard’s daughter for a few months, which would be a great help when it came time to cut up and salt meat, and make applesauce and cider to store.

  After her tea, Susanna pushed herself to do more. She laundered the summer curtains and hung them to dry, thinking all the while about selling the long-handled bed warming pan, and—as much as she hated entertaining the idea—the tall clock in the parlor that had belonged to her father. That would give her money to stock up on molasses and nutmegs and cinnamon, and perhaps leave some to put by in case stores ran out and she needed to buy sugar and meat toward winter’s end.

  Susanna killed a chicken to prepare for the final meal of the day, and sat out in the dooryard on the milking stool, plucking it. She glanced over at the barn and thought that if she did sell the clock, the proceeds might better be spent fixing the building’s leaky roof. The parson’s son John would be agreeable for a reasonable sum, she imagined, and while slow-witted, he was known to put his back into whatever task came his way.

  With the naked chicken sitting on the table, Susanna went back to the garden and quickly collected the rest of the herbs. She brought them into the kitchen and began stringing them up where there were already festoons of drying apples and red peppers and aromatic plumes of mint and savory. She was reaching above her head with a bundle of sage when she heard soft knocking at the front door. Only a stranger would use the front door, she thought, wiping her hands on her apron and adjusting her white day cap as she walked through the house. The rapping came again, more insistently. Susanna opened the door and looked down.

  There stood her dead daughter Betsy, her soggy blond hair dripping down her small naked body.