by Abi Maxwell
When she lit the fire, it was after she had worn herself out with tears and cold and with the work of gathering sticks and carrying them back up the hill. In that terrible night the moon had spread a light upon the hill that looked beautiful—there was that, Rose had the sense to recognize it. As she walked back and forth up the hill and down she imagined herself as a girl sitting upon the moon and watching this Rose toil. She would remember that—that image of herself as a small being working dutifully upon the land.
It had only been to warm herself, but then she had opened her backpack and thrown those letters in and watched them burn one by one. Ain’t no love exists in the world, she had said to herself. When she threw the last letter in Rose lay back and looked up at the moon. The grass was high, there had been no rain for weeks, and she understood this. She had made a fire ring of rocks. And she had the milk jug of water there, which she intended, once she sat up, to pour over the flames.
“Go out there,” Gerald’s grandmother told him. “Just go up and down the street and call her name.” When he’d begun to put on his boots she’d said, “That Tasha. Go down the street and see if Rose isn’t with her.”
Gerald began to call her name before he was even outside. He wasn’t worried, Rose often disappeared, but it felt good to yell anyway. He picked up a stick and a rock and as he yelled her name he nailed the rock with the stick and looked up in the moonlight to see where the rock flew and when he did he saw that hillside lit up like a forest of sunflowers in full bloom.
By the time Gerald and his family got to the edge of the fire, no one had yet found the little girl. The fire department was already there, along with nearly the whole of Kettleborough. Kenneth was there, and Simon, too. In silence the two watched the flames, and something about the hillside burning gave Kenneth the sense that it was time, that this little life would not last forever and that he ought to confess his sin of being a criminal of a postman by stealing all of those letters. The heat from the flames made him sweat and he unzipped his jacket and looked around. Across the way he saw his Tash, standing in close to Sophie Wickholm.
“Well,” Kenneth said to Simon. He meant to go on, to say that he himself had broken the law, that Alice had loved Simon and that he had the proof, he’d hidden it right there not twenty yards away, just there in the northwest corner of the factory where he and Tash used to go with blankets and candles when they were teenagers and in love. He cleared his throat and looked once more at Tasha, lit up by the light of the flames, and she looked at him, too, and he knew then that she was remembering the very same thing. “Simon,” Kenneth said, but just then the firemen pushed through, splitting Simon and Kenneth apart from each other, carrying that little girl.
Up on the hill, with Kettleborough residents together in the glow of the fire, Simon scanned the crowd for the woman he imagined to be Alice. Patty Jean out on the island had told him she had moved to town. “Love letters?” Patty Jean had said. “You never once met the girl?” She had laughed and Simon had smiled as though he, too, was entertained by the notion, but in truth the fact of it kept him up through the night with no one but his own dog to talk to. A hundred times he could have met her but instead he had chosen to be a coward. Now he believed that by love he would know her when he saw her. Everybody was here—why wouldn’t she be? He would be brave. Like a crazed man he pushed through that crowd, searching.
Sophie could have told him that the girl whose face shone so clearly of her own dead Karl’s was not up there on the hill. Malcolm, too, for though he was drunk and though he was silent he certainly had the clarity to know his own brother’s daughter when he saw her. And in fact he had seen her—tonight when Malcolm left his shop downtown and headed up the hill he’d seen that girl whom in those weeks after his brother had died he had held and rocked and loved so dearly. Grown now, she had been standing on the pier, watching the lake so intently that she had not even noticed the fire, lit by her own love letters, that raged on the hill behind her, or the sirens that passed by, rushing that burned little girl to the doctor.
But Rose would heal. In the hospital she would learn that Justin Green had required stitches but had lived, and that she herself had been cursed with a scar that ran from the tip of her toe up the entire surface of her leg and then stretched like the branch of a maple across her midsection, with one limb extending up her neck and brushing against her ear. That seemed all right to her. With her scar as remembrance of the pain she had caused, it seemed to Rose that the world and all that was in it might perhaps contain a trace—and only a trace—of order.
Return
1982
WHEN I CAME off the island, I was lucky to find this small house to rent, and luckier still to find that the store needed a baker. Now, while the rest of Kettleborough sleeps, I plunge my hands into living, breathing yeast. The solitude of it suits me; my days on the island prepared me for such a quiet life. I enter the store around midnight, and it doesn’t open until six a.m. By seven I am on my way home to sleep. When I wake, in the afternoon, I walk through town and the woods, and often I find myself in the old cemetery at the end of Main Street. The stones there are the oldest I have ever seen. Many are small and thin, some have crumbled right apart under the weight of the years, and others have long ago lost their names and dates. The ones that lie flat in the ground are the ones I like the best. Moss and grass push up around their edges, reminding me that the earth is slowly taking them in.
A line of old maple trees forms a perfect square around the cemetery, and when the trees are heavy with leaves it makes that small place seem like a room cut off from the rest of the world. When the leaves drop, the stone wall that runs just in front of the trees becomes more visible, so even without the leaves the cemetery remains set off from the land around it, and to stand outside the wall is quite a different experience than to stand within it. This year, as the leaves dropped, I took care to keep them off the graves. Once, after I discovered his name, I read all the stones, looking for it, Karl Wickholm, but it’s not there.
On one of these evenings in the cemetery, when the leaves had just fallen and the bare maple arms cast shadows that made it seem that I was in the palm of a great and glowing hand, a skinny little girl came in repeating a name.
“Eliza Plimpton, Eliza Plimpton!” she said breathlessly.
“Here,” I told her, for though that name meant nothing to me, I had seen the grave, and I led her to it.
That girl was astonished; she put her hand to her head and let her jaw drop and after a moment she looked slowly around the cemetery and then she held out her hand and asked me to pinch her, which I did, gently, and she said, “So it’s true, this is real life?”
I assured her it was. She told me that some weeks ago the name had come to her, dropped down into her mind like a ray of light, and since that time she had been certain—though her brother mocked her—that this woman surely had existed. She ran her hands over the gravestone. I told her about tracing graves with a sheet of paper and a pencil, which she said she would certainly do. I went right along with her; I acted as though I, too, was astonished that the name had come to her and had turned out to be a real name of a real Kettleborough woman. In truth I suspected that she had heard this name before, in school or in the walls of her own house, where it could be that this very woman had lived, or on a field trip to one of the old mills around, or maybe even in the cemetery itself. But like I said, I went along with the girl, amazed at the sheer magic of it.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after the fire on the hillside that I saw that little girl again. I entered the cemetery and there she lay, so still, her head resting upon Eliza Plimpton’s grave. Because of the dried leaves my entrance made noise, but the girl did not even look up. I went to her and said something, I don’t remember what—“Excuse me?” or “Are you all right?”—and she didn’t respond. Finally I reached out and touched her upon the head. At this point she let out the sigh of an adult upon whose shoulders an incomprehensible weight has
been placed.
“All the world,” she said heavily. She was utterly worn out.
By this time I had kneeled down beside her. When I asked her what the trouble was she finally looked up, surprised, I think, that anyone should bother to ask. And there was her face; I knew it right away. She had been in the papers—the little girl who had started the fire. Rose Hughes, and now with those wide and glistening eyes I saw that my old friend Gerald Hughes was indeed her father, and I was astonished that I had not realized that the first time I met her. Still, I pretended I had heard nothing of the fire, and instead asked her once more what the trouble was.
She moved from the grave and lay down in the leaves, her arms spread out wide. Here she breathed loudly for a few minutes, and then she lifted her shirt and showed me her scar—I had heard she had scarred severely—and she said, “I have my mark. The world is a fair place.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
Rose lifted her legs straight up and then let them drop to the ground.
“I have ruined the only true love I ever knew,” she told me.
“You were in love?” I asked her.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, to be in love.”
“I know,” I told her.
Just then the church bell rang; it was five o’clock. Rose jumped up and ran out of the cemetery.
In the afternoons I also spend hours at the library. There’s a wonderful old woman there who worked for years as the head librarian but retired at least two decades ago. She’s ninety-seven now. “All my friends are dead,” she says frequently. Her husband, too, and though she has children, “good ones,” they have gone off to live their own lives. Now she spends her days as I imagine she did when she worked, and by now she must have read every book in that library. She’s still sharp, too—in fact, I took her mind for granted when I first met her. For she says things—on that first day I met her she said, “I should think you would come around,” and then on another day, “Don’t you look like your grandmother.” Shamefully, I took these things for the remarks of an old woman who had gotten confused.
On that first visit to the library, I told the old librarian that I wanted to find out about the history of the lake. She gave me a pile of ancient, fragile books. Their covers were cloth or leather, black or green or dark blue, and their pages had yellowed to the color of firewood. There were books about the boats of the lake; books about the islands and the Indians who first settled them; books that describe the geology in a grand, celebratory way; and there was one book that documented the legends people have told of the lake. Typically, these books were not allowed to be taken out of the library, but the old librarian slipped each one into a plastic cover and sent me home with them, saying I had two weeks. In just three days I had already been through all of them, but I kept them for the allotted time. They revealed nothing for me, but with them in my hands I had the strange feeling that some part of myself had been described.
When, after two weeks, I replaced the books in their plastic covers and walked them back to the library, the old librarian put her hand on mine and said, “You just take them out any old time.” After that she led me to the microfiche, where she taught me how to flip through old editions of the Kettleborough News. “When were you born?” she asked me, and suggested I start looking there, and in the days and weeks that surrounded that day.
At that point, I had not yet told her that I was truly on a search for my own history. Yet as I looked through the papers that she had led me to, almost immediately I came upon a name I had wanted to find: Wickholm. This was Karl Wickholm. His crashed Ford was pictured right there on the front page of the evening paper. I can only hope their family was spared that evening’s edition. It wasn’t too many issues later until I discovered myself, announced as the new child of Clara and Paul Thorton.
When I left the library that day, the librarian didn’t say a word. She just put her hand on my shoulder and walked me to the door, and even opened the door for me. The sun was bright, blinding, and it was clear to me that though I was still unsure about just where I had come from, she certainly knew. Now, as I walk through this town, I wonder just how many people know my story, and how it is possible that in all these years, no one has ever thought to tell it to me.
It was around this time that a woman appeared at the back counter of the store and rang that bell one solid time. I had never heard anyone ring it before, for usually I am gone before the first customer arrives. I was startled when I heard it ring, and jumped. I came out to the counter in my white coat and hat and immediately I recognized her. I had not seen her in years, but I would have known her anywhere—the woman who would stand outside the school fence while we children played hopscotch or four-square at recess. Then, as now, she wore a fitted skirt and suit jacket, held her hands clasped neatly at her waist, and did not let one piece of her tightly permed hair ever fall out of place. Of course I always assumed that she was someone else’s grandmother.
Over the years, I saw her on the pier, too, looking toward Bear Island with that same urgency that I have learned to look toward that place with. Once, when I was a child, I saw her at a ski race of mine. And what about the day when I was fourteen years old, running home from the Hughes’s railcar after I had been scolded and mocked? I was so depleted on that day, and when I tripped on the sidewalk and landed on my hands and knees, her small feet were there in front of me. I remember noticing that her laces were tied so neatly, each loop the same size as the other, and all of it centered perfectly on her stiff shoes. She kneeled down and helped me up, and took my hands into her soft ones. The time she dared, I can now say. She looked into my eyes and said without doubt, “You are accepted.”
These days, I find myself wondering if she could have known, back then, that those words would mean something to me. Her gentle blue eyes, her soft hands—I believed that she held some grace far beyond this world that allowed her to see right into me. How very different those words would have been had I known they came from a grandmother who had failed to take me in.
“Alice,” she said as she stood at the counter.
“Yes?”
“Sophie Wickholm,” she said, and held out her hand.
I have Hill hands. When I was young and paired with Martha Hill for a school project, I noticed, all those years before she became my dear friend, that she and I had the same awkwardly angled pointer fingers that push inward, toward the next finger in line. The same long, straight thumbs, too, and the same blunt nails that will never be shaped into something delicate and beautiful, as Sophie’s are.
I took her hand, shook, and returned to my work.
On the night that the hillside burned, I heard the call of a loon. The water was so cold, and that poor creature should have long since fled for the south. When the call would not quit I ducked beneath the pier’s railing and there I found an old canoe tied to a solitary pine tree at shore. I untied the boat and climbed in and paddled until I was an equal distance from mainland and Bear Island. It was not something I had ever done before, and it was not my boat, but the night was so lovely, and I wanted to be nearer to that loon. When I looked back toward home, I saw its hill flicker and shine. It took me a moment to realize it was burning. Go to sleep, I bade the loon, who called so urgently, as though she believed it was her job to save Kettleborough. Yet she would not quit; her call rang out until the fire calmed, so together for hours we floated as the ash of our town drifted down upon us like snow.
I told the old librarian about that. She wears bright, colorful clothes such as I have never seen in Kettleborough, and she speaks so unabashedly about my life. “You’re a strange one,” she likes to say to me, and “Get married and have your babies fast.” I’m not sure if she was always this way, or if her boldness has come with age, but either way it is an inspiration for me. “Why are you shy?” she demands. When I told her about the loon she took my hands in her soft, trembling ones. “You be careful with that call,” she said.
Her
warning was so serious, so firm, but this only made me curious, so as the weather grew colder I listened more intently. Twice I believed I heard it. I was at work each time, and immediately I lifted my hands from the dough and ran to the front of the store and pushed the door open with my hip, my hands dripping with water and flour, and crossed the street to the pier. By then the call was gone, and I doubted that I had ever heard it.
And then one time, in the cemetery, I was sure I heard it, but I did not chase it. That was when Rose reappeared.
“I’m Alice,” I told her, and she swooned, she actually did; she put her arm to her forehead and she tipped back and exhaled, and then the little girl tipped right over.
“Rose!” I called, and kneeled down at her side. I tapped her cheeks and said her name again.
“Pinch me,” she said, so I did, gently, for the second time. Again she asked me whether or not this was real, true life, and again I told her it was.
“So you’re psychic?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Are you?”
With the palm of her hand she hit herself in the head; she was demonstrating her stupidity, trying to say that of course she held no such power. I reached out for her and helped her up, and she stood for just one moment and then sat back down, her legs crossed, and she asked me to sit with her. She wanted to know if she could trust me, and I assured her she could, and then she spit into the palm of her hand and held it out. I shrugged and did the same; already I loved this wild girl. We shook.