Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

“That is quite a tale, Mr. Tolly,” said James pleasantly.

  “It all happened sixty years ago. I am nearly eighty-six now, and it’s the best this old head of mine could remember.”

  “You remember it vividly, it seems,” said Mercia.

  “The experiences of youth,” said the man wistfully.

  “One thing, though, Mr. Tolly,” said Cordelia. “I understand polar bears are ferocious beasts, and hardly tameable. However did the man subdue such an animal?”

  “In a fair fight, miss,” said the elderly fellow with gentle gravity. “Two falls out of three.”

  “I wonder how Maude is doing,” said James.

  27 Chorus for Duck and Bear

  DUCKY PLANKE HAD LIVED IN THE WOODS AND THE FIELDS OF DAVIS Island, on the eastern shore of the Sheepscott River, for years. The Davis family, who had owned and would own the island for generations, tolerated his presence by ignoring him. Several members of the Davis clan, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, had seen Ducky’s ambling, ragged figure traversing the meadow below the barn, and even crossed paths with the odd fellow in the two-acre wood once or twice. They seldom mentioned these sightings to anyone, and perhaps thought of Ducky as just another wild creature roaming on Davis land.

  No one knew where Ducky slept, or what he ate, or how he survived winters, barely shod and dressed in ancient clothes. There was a list of things that people didn’t know about Ducky; no one knew where he had come from, no one knew what his true Christian name was, and no one knew how his surname had been discovered—no one knew and no one remembered.

  But people up and down the river, people from the surrounding towns, saw him occasionally from their boats and their dories and their canoes as he sat beside the water, clucking softly and meekly to himself.

  “Hey, Ducky!” they would call to him, and he would toss a hand in the air for greeting. Several Samaritans, including certain members of the Davis family, had tried leaving food for the man by one or another of his favorite haunts, but as often as not they would return to find, from the tell-tale scat, that a raccoon or a fox had enjoyed it instead.

  Ducky Planke was the Green Man, a spirit upon the island, and a bogeyman by which to threaten uncooperative children.

  He was indeed like a natural creature of the wild, and stood for long hours when the sun had set, watching one house or another and the shadows of people passing the windows of lighted rooms. Other times he shuffled in the dark—pitch dark on moonless nights—through the woods to the river and admired the lights of Wiscasset across the water, where ships hulked against the wharves. Once he had watched the highest flames of a fire several streets up from the waterfront.

  The river was a fair highway for smugglers, and occasionally small boats passed him quietly in the night, signaling the transportation of goods not bearing the Custom House stamp. He listened to the scull of oars from the banks below Fort Edgecomb.

  By day he went to the other side of the island and watched the traffic of the boats and the people on foot and on horseback and in rigs crossing the bridge to and from Wiscasset. Just past midday on Tuesday the 7th of July, 1896, he sat happily among the rocks by the waterline, not far from the bridge, filling his pockets with periwinkles and snapping seaweed pods between his fingers.

  He clucked and quacked to himself in the bright sun and watched as a cormorant disappeared beneath the surface of the river, only to appear half a minute later and several yards away with a fish in its bill. The black bird brought to mind a bit of verse that someone had recited for him in his youth.

  Ducky repeated this silently to himself several times over, then cawed like a crow, and the cormorant took wing and disappeared upriver on the other side of Goose Island.

  Looking in that direction, Ducky saw several figures, tiny with distance, on the Wiscasset shore, forming a line in a field. He watched them as they bunched up beside a stand of trees, and saw another figure scrambling down the riverbank just below them. Ducky’s eyesight was sharp, but he could only guess that this lone figure was a large dog. He lost sight of the creature for several minutes, and he had to climb to a higher venue before catching sight of a black head bobbing in the current of the river.

  Fascinated, Ducky hurried to the northernmost point of the island, where a glacial boulder afforded him a place to stand. Here he watched with increasing excitement as the swimmer neared the Edgecomb shore. The bobbing head disappeared briefly behind Goose Island as the outgoing tide drew it downriver.

  Arriving at the mouth of a little salt marsh that divided the Walker and the Smith farms, the black bear waddled up onto the flats and shook herself vigorously. There she played in the mud, clawing up mussels to break open with her jaws and eat, rolling on her back and groaning with pleasure.

  Ducky was beside himself with happiness, and he jumped up and down on the huge boulder, clucking and quacking and flapping his arms. Maude sat up on her haunches and mooed at him. For a moment the riverfront sounded like a barnyard, till the bear tired of the conversation and waddled shoreward, disappearing in the marsh. For several minutes, Ducky could discern her movements from the shaking reeds and cattails. Then she was gone.

  Ducky couldn’t remember when he’d had such a good time.

  For her part, Maude slept the rest of the day away in the Smiths’ rubbish pit, where she also managed to find a bite to eat. When night had fallen, she crossed through several backyards and frightened half a dozen dogs on her way to the Marsh River, where she found the fishing tolerable the following morning.

  28 Colonel Taverner Proposes

  KNOWING MISTER WALTON’S JOVIAL CHARACTER, THE READER WILL NOT BE surprised to learn that he dined that evening with the sheriff and his family. His extraordinary account of the upside-down bear would have, of its own, recommended him as a dinner guest, but upon learning of the portly fellow’s acquaintance with Mary Moriarty—to whom the sheriff was distantly related (and for whom, if the truth be known, he had harbored a boyhood affection)—Sheriff Charles Piper insisted on playing the host.

  The tale of the bear was wagged again for the sheriff ’s appreciative family, and no one enjoyed the telling of it more than Mister Walton. He outdid himself in expressing the confusion he felt when he discovered an inverted bruin before him, and was positively hilarious in his attempts to reproduce Maude’s cow-like groans.

  There were three children still living with the sheriff and his wife, Fawn. Jimmy, who was seven, was keen to know if a bear could indeed sound so bovine; Henry, who was ten, wanted to know if Mr. Lofton might offer to fight Mister Walton again; and Anne, who was seventeen, was interested in hearing more about Sundry Moss.

  “Sundry was rather brave, I think,” said Anne.

  “He is a noble fellow,” agreed Mister Walton, “though I wish he had not felt it necessary to put himself between Mr. Lofton and myself. I am sure that Mr. Lofton would have cooled off, given time.”

  “Cooling off is not something for which Mr. Lofton is known,” said Mrs. Piper. “Sundry was quite right in taking your part.”

  “You know Mr. Lofton, then.”

  “He and his wife, and several other families from parts south, rusticate at the Wiscasset House every summer,” said the sheriff. He pushed himself away from the table so that he could lean back and stretch his legs before him. “Lofton’s the type, you know, that gives folk from away a bad name. He thinks culture arrived in these parts with him.”

  “Social aristocracy is often confused with culture,” said Mister Walton sagely. “And aristocratic breeding with good manners.”

  “That is very well put, Mister Walton,” said Mrs. Piper.

  “That is what my father told me. It was in the context of an admonishment, I fear, during my large-headed youth.”

  “Well, Sundry was rather brave, I think,” said Anne again, who seemed to think that the conversation had wandered.

  “He was indeed.” Mister Walton waved away a third helping of roast beef. “He is a very likabl
e fellow, though I do find his name a curiosity.”

  “Sundry is a curiosity,” said the sheriff, with a quick smile in the direction of his disapproving daughter. “You have yet to meet his brother, Varius, I take it.”

  “Good heavens!” said Mister Walton.

  Sheriff Piper chuckled; his wife smiled.

  “He has a brother named Various?”

  “Varius—without an 0,” said the sheriff.

  “A twin brother,” said Henry.

  “Sundry and Varius?”

  “Their father is an eccentric,” said Mrs. Piper, who began to clear the table.

  “Not to mention that Dr. Cushman, who delivered Sundry and his brother, had a rare sense of humor,” added the sheriff. “Wyman—that is Sundry’s father—was arguing with his wife what the baby’s name should be and each of them had thought of half a dozen possibilities by the time the doctor was called for. It was a surprise, of course, when two boys arrived. When Mrs. Moss and her sons were sleeping, and the doctor was in the kitchen washing up, he told Sundry’s sister—who couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time—to go in and ask her father if they had come up with any names, so that he could write out the certificate of birth.

  “ ‘Have you come up with any names, Papa?’ asks the little girl.

  “ ‘Various and sundry,’ says Wyman. So, thinking these are her brothers’ names, she goes out and announces the fact to the doctor.

  “Very carefully,” said the sheriff, ghost-writing on the table, “the doctor entered the names, though by his own account he spelt Varius without the O because he thought it looked Latin. He had every intention of making out a real certificate once everyone had appreciated the joke, but Wyman decided he liked the names, and they stuck.”

  “That’s wonderful!” exclaimed Mister Walton. “All the more so since Sundry’s name does him justice somehow.”

  “I’m not sure that I could explain it to anyone, Mister Walton,” said Mrs. Piper, “but I think I know what you mean.”

  “What does the boy do, there at the hotel?” asked the guest.

  “A little of everything,” said the sheriff, with a wry expression. He pulled his watch from his pocket and consulted it. “I’m afraid I have to go up to the jail for my nightly inspection, Mister Walton, but if you’d like to take a walk, I’ll give you a tour.”

  The day had not yet turned to gloaming, and a small breeze had caressed its way up Federal Street, skimming away the heat of the afternoon. Mister Walton and Sheriff Piper were greeted by several people who were also taking the air, and hailed from the porches of houses they passed.

  The building that constituted both the jail and the jail-keeper’s house was of two personalities. The keeper’s house, on the left, was a handsome brick domicile with granite lintels and sills; the front door was painted a formal black, which varied nicely to the eye against beds of bright flowers ranked at either side of the front steps. Curtains hung in the windows, and trimmed shrubs stood at its corners.

  The jail end of the building, however, gave every evidence of its use. There was little in its stark granite walls to interest the eye, except for stains of rust below the iron bars of its narrow windows. A fence separated the jail grounds from the keeper’s lawn, and a general air of solitude and frost hung over that barren yard and the gray walls it surrounded.

  A knock at the front door brought a young girl, who ushered the sheriff and his guest to the kitchen, where the jailer, Seth Patterson, and his wife, Laura, sat with a mutton-chopped fellow at the table.

  “Ah, shehriff,” said this third person with a distinct burr in his voice, “I’ve been waiting fohr you,” and he rose with his hand extended. He was a handsome fellow, perhaps fifty years old; not tall, but of such a hard and energetic build that he gave the appearance of a large man compacted into a small carriage. His hair had receded only slightly, but it was without the slightest hint of gray and allowed to grow full enough as to take years off his appearance. His clothes were sharply cut and dapper, and it was clear that he took pride in his aspect.

  “Roddy,” said the sheriff, shaking the man’s hand. Mister Walton was introduced to the room, and while he exchanged greetings, Sheriff Piper said with only a dash of irony in his voice: “This is Colonel Roderick Taverner, Mister Walton, late of Her Majesty’s army, who has kindly come to the colonies to assist our Customs Service in the apprehension of smugglers.”

  Mister Walton received this information with a bit of a jolt, as if the Scotsman might suspect that he had assisted in smuggling rum (however unwittingly) as recently as the week before. Taverner smiled, however, and shook Mister Walton’s hand with feeling. “Pleased to meet you, sihr,” said the colonel, his burr from this point to be left to the imagination of the reader.

  “Well, Roddy,” said the sheriff. “I suppose you weren’t waiting for me on social grounds.”

  “That would be pleasant, Charles,” said the man as he reoccupied his seat at the table. “But you suppose correctly.”

  Room was made at the table for Mister Walton and the sheriff, and Mrs. Patterson put a kettle on the stove.

  “What’s smuggling tonight, then?” said Piper.

  Taverner glanced briefly at Mister Walton, decided that the sheriff trusted the bespectacled gentleman, and said: “Of that I’m not sure. But there’s been nocturnal activity observed on Davis Island, across the river, and I have reason to suspect certain sightseers to drop by for a visit near the fort this very night.”

  “The fort,” said Piper, pulling a frown. “It’s not a very hidden place, even at night. There must be half a hundred coves and inlets between Westport and Sheepscott Bridge that are better suited for sneaking goods.”

  Taverner smiled, like a fox contemplating a hen. “That is precisely why it interests me so, Charles!”

  “When are you setting up watch?”

  “An hour or so after dark, I think. Mrs. Patterson is a brave hand at keeping jail, I’m told, so Seth is willing to join us. Perhaps Mister Walton would like to come along.”

  “I think Mister Walton may have had enough adventuring today,” said the sheriff, but something in the portly fellow’s expression must have told otherwise. “Would you care to join us? Strictly as an observer, mind.”

  “I’d be fascinated.”

  “Are we keeping watch from the blockhouse?” asked Piper.

  Taverner lifted a large ring, from which depended three great iron keys. He shook them meaningfully.

  “Well, Mister Walton,” said the sheriff. “You said you wanted to see Fort Edgecomb. You didn’t, perhaps, consider touring it by starlight.”

  “I am quite excited.”

  “Do you play cribbage, sir?” asked the colonel.

  “Oh, most certainly,” said Mister Walton.

  “Ach! That’s fine. If there’s moon enough, we can have a pleasant game or two.”

  29 Captain Coyle’s Riddle

  THE STEAMSHIP THAT WAS THE UNDERWOODS’ CONNECTION FROM THE rail end at Rockland pulled up to the docks at Ellsworth when the last inkling of sunset had long since faded. Cordelia stifled a yawn as she stepped down the platform to the wharf, and since stretching in public was unheard of, she discreetly flexed her limbs as she waited for her parents to follow.

  “It feels a bit like rain,” said Mercia as she joined her daughter.

  James had their baggage tickets in hand when he came down the ramp. The crew of the ship and the dockmen were working the loading platform, and already trunks and bags were being passed down to the wharf. A great gout of steam billowed from the stack with a loud hiss, and a tremor ran through the boat as if it were some unruly beast, vexed to be held still for even a moment.

  “Ethan should be round about somewhere with the carriage,” said James. “I’ll see to our bags.”

  “It’s such a nice night,” said Mercia. “We’ll wait up by the street.” James strode down the wharf, weaving through the small groups of arrivals and greeters, tipping hi
s hat at the occasional bit of eye contact. Then a young face emerged from the darkness and the crowd.

  “Uncle James!” shouted Ethan Morningside, who was twelve, towheaded, and short for his age.

  “Ethan, how are you?” said James, and he shook the boy’s hand warmly. “Your aunt and cousin are waiting up above.”

  “The carriage is just across the street, but I thought you might like a hand with the baggage.”

  “You’re a good fellow, Ethan.” James flagged a porter with a handcart and the three of them were able to locate and load the Underwoods’ bags.

  They found the women where the wharf met Water Street. Cordelia hugged her young cousin happily and embarrassed him by declaring him handsome as she inspected him at arm’s length. His Aunt Mercia added to his troubles by saying how tall he had grown (an obvious bit of flattery) and ruffling her hand through his hair as she remarked how pretty it was.

  “The carriage is over there,” said Ethan, hoping to avoid any further admiration. He led the way and helped the porter secure the Underwoods’ baggage on the Morningsides’ rig. James brought up the rear, slowing his walk at the sight of a familiar figure.

  “Captain Coyle,” said James, approaching an older man who stood to one side of a carriage as a trunk was being loaded by two porters. The man raised his eyes at the sound of his name, and recognized James with the slightest change of expression.

  “Ah!” said the captain. “Young Underwood.”

  “Not so young anymore, sir,” said James as they shook hands.

  “It’s all relative,” said Captain Coyle. He had never been a tall man, but age had stooped him further. His face had filled out since James had see him last, but his hawk-like nose was the same, and he still sported mutton chops that did nothing to disguise his lack of chin. The old captain’s manner had not changed, either—impatient at the best of times, he spoke even now with a hint of irritability. “You’re not sailing these days, are you.”