Anxious Hearts

by Tucker Shaw

  Two pairs of lovers.

  Two hundred years apart.

  One eternal story.

  EVA AND GABE EXPLORE THE golden forest of their seaside town in Maine, tracing the footsteps of two teens, Evangeline and Gabriel, who lived in the same idyllic woods more than two hundred years ago. On the day that Evangeline and Gabriel were to be wed, their village was besieged and the two were separated. And now, in the present, Gabe too has mysteriously disappeared from Eva.

  A dreamlike tale of romance and undeterred faith inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic love poem “Evangeline,” Anxious Hearts tells the story of a love so strong it sometimes causes one to lose oneself. Yet it also avows that even when lost somewhere on life’s journey, true love can be found and there is a way home again.

  Anxious Hearts

  ALSO BY

  TUCKER SHAW

  The Girls

  Anxious Hearts

  a novel by

  TUCKER SHAW

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

  and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events,

  or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shaw, Tucker.

  Anxious hearts / by Tucker Shaw.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In alternate chapters, retells events of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem

  “Evangeline,” and relates a modern-day tale of Maine teens who were childhood friends and

  later grew to love each other, and who, when pulled apart, are determined to reunite.

  ISBN 978-0-8109-8718-0

  [1. Love—Fiction. 2. Acadians—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.

  5. Nova Scotia—History—1713–1763—Fiction. 6. Maine—Fiction.] I. Longfellow,

  Henry Wadsworth, 1807–1882. Evangeline. II. Title.

  PZ7.S53445Anx 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009039754

  Text copyright © 2010 Tucker Shaw

  Book design by Maria T. Middleton

  Published in 2010 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No

  portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in

  any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

  without written permission from the publisher. Amulet Books and Amulet Paperbacks are

  registered trademarks of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  Printed and bound in the U.S.A.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  www.abramsbooks.com

  This book is for my grandmother, Barbara Shaw,

  who sees a story everywhere she looks

  Prologue

  LOOK AROUND.

  Behind you the forest is thick, gray-green and silent and dark. Craggy pine trees stand in crowded clusters, shading the mossy ground with pointed shadows. Shafts of fizzy daylight dribble through the canopy onto the cushion of leafy undergrowth, dispersing into a pulsing green glow.

  You stand at the edge of the wood, on a path that cuts faintly through the bearberry bushes and the ivory grove of birch trees. A deliberate path, but obscured, half hidden by undergrowth and fallen hemlocks. Where does it lead?

  You follow this path, this stony stream, through a carpet of scarlet and yellow wood lilies as it curls out of the woods and into a billowy meadow of golden-green beach grass. The air, now a salty mist, carries a quiet, far-off rumble, the groan of the distant ocean tides.

  This path, like all paths and all stories, leads forward, through the calico grasses and thorny rose brambles, toward the horizon, toward the sky. But after a mile, or many, this path ends abruptly, where the ground falls away at what feels like the edge of the world. Only air, white and blue and yellow, and sea, white and blue and black, lie in front of you.

  You step back from the unexpected precipice at your feet before peering warily over its edge. The cliff is vast, red-black and craggy, its narrow ledges populated by lean clusters of daredevil pine trees rooted precariously in the rock, far above the muffled waves and frothy whirlpools that snake and swirl through the rugged outcroppings a thousand feet below.

  This bluff is a wild place, endless and open. You are alone here.

  And yet, the air here is alive.

  You trace back toward the woods, away from the cliff and into the taller grasses. There, you come upon the weathered remnants of a low wall of mossy granite, crumbling in places but solid. Beyond the wall, huddled against two hulking, primeval boulders, are the hollow remains of an ancient, neglected stone building. The structure, just big enough for a small dwelling, sits alone on this bluff, roofless and exposed, its forgotten threshold facing the open sky. Still farther on, a low rock, flat-topped and smooth, an altar, rises from the grassy ground.

  In the distance, a wood bird argues with a seabird, shrill voices trilling across the meadow. The breeze strengthens and swirls, weaving through the grasses, and gathering clouds twist lazily in the sky. You lie down atop the flat rock and listen. The wind whispers, hums, groans. You stare at the every-colored sky above and listen.

  Whose path was this? Whose altar? Whose story lived here?

  PART ONE

  eva

  I hate reading.

  All those words. It’s painful. Give me biology. Gym. A frog to dissect. Some laps to run. Anything but English. All those words.

  What have words ever done for anyone anyway? Can you catch fish with words? Can you pick berries with words? Fix a car? Heal the sick? No. Waste of time.

  Especially poetry. Words that don’t even make sense. And you’re supposed to read them out loud. Please, tie me to a tractor. I can’t wait for next year, when all I have to do is coast. Then real life takes over and, if I don’t get out of Franktown, Maine, beats me senseless.

  I think even Mr. Denis hates all the read-aloud stuff, even though he’s a big believer in words. Or maybe he hates it because he’s a big believer in words. He can’t stand to listen to us shred them in his class.

  But he pronounces things wrong, too. Like the town up the road, Calais? Mr. Denis thinks it rhymes with ballet. If you’re from here you know that Calais rhymes with Alice. Palace. Callous. Malice.

  The other thing about Mr. Denis is he doesn’t like to be corrected. Mostly he just paces back and forth while we go around the room reading aloud. Today the lucky poem is “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” which he thought we’d be “wicked excited about” (his words) because the guy who wrote it was from Maine, but what Mr. Denis doesn’t know is that this part of Maine has nothing to do with that part of Maine. Another thing he doesn’t know is that when people like him say things like “wicked excited” it sounds stupid. Wicked stupid, as a matter of fact. He also doesn’t know that no high school junior is going to get excited about a two-hundred-year-old poem anyway.

  Back and forth in front of the windows, Mr. Denis just paces, looking out into the fog, which hasn’t lifted all day. Behind him, Louise catches my eye and makes a face. I roll my eyes, catching John Baptiste in my peripheral vision, pointing at me like he’s pointing a gun, and winking. No joke. Winking. What a tool. I look back at my textbook.
<
br />   Back and forth paces Mr. Denis, licking his finger and smoothing the last few hairs left on his head, back and forth past the rows of desks, pretending not to look at us, almost closing his eyes, then without warning spinning around with a snap! to try and catch someone in the act of, I don’t know, passing a note I guess. Or falling asleep.

  Or not paying attention, like Gabe Lejeune, who as usual is hunched over that mysterious notebook he carries around everywhere, running his left hand through his floppy chestnut hair and scribbling away with his other hand, writing whatever it is he writes in there.

  I wonder what he writes about.

  “Mr. Lejeune!” says Mr. Denis. “You are next.”

  Gabe doesn’t even look up. He has no idea it’s his turn to read.

  Gabriel

  EVANGELINE SET DOWN HER RAKE AND UNTIED her felt cloak of cornflower blue, draping it over the fence that enclosed the small garden in front of the small, square stone-and-log house. She pushed her linen sleeves up over her forearms, swiped her hair away from her face, and looked up at the low, wispy clouds above. Gabriel seized on the gesture, sweeping his charcoal across the sheet of birchbark.

  No good, he thought. He tossed the birchbark sheet aside and began to sweat with frustration. He glared at his inept hand, his sloppy sketch, and fretted. What if he was never able to accomplish this task? What if he never captured Evangeline’s beauty? He pulled another piece of birchbark from his foresleeve and smoothed it over his thigh.

  Gabriel’s failure as an artist wasn’t for lack of trying. Gabriel had spent hours, days, years watching Evangeline, his bewitcher, and equal hours, days, years trying to draw her. Another eye might call his drawings fair, even beautiful, but not Gabriel. He knew they were poor. Empty. Anemic representations of the exquisite Evangeline.

  Gabriel took a deep, silent breath. Perhaps he just didn’t have enough skill yet. After all, no one ever showed him how to use charcoal from a dead fire to draw on sheets of birchbark. He’d discovered that himself. No one showed him the tricks of light and shape and how to convey them. But he knew. Still, he could not capture Evangeline. Nothing he created could approach her beauty.

  Practice, he said to himself. This is your life’s work. There is nothing else. There is no one else.

  Gabriel and Evangeline were betrothed sixteen months now, just long enough for him to follow the custom of the Cadians and build her a home, a strong house of stone and wood aside an orchard of twelve saplings, eight apple and four pear, and a small outbuilding for goats and chickens and cider making.

  Evangeline’s beauty and intelligence were known throughout the Cadian lands. Her hand was coveted by every bachelor on the shores of Glosekap Bay. But Gabriel, with persistence and hopefulness and true love, had won her over all the others.

  She had chosen him.

  She does not yet belong to me, Gabriel reminded himself. Not yet. That will come tomorrow, when she becomes my wife.

  Gabriel and Evangeline had played together as children, archery and footraces and blindman’s bluff, as had all the children in the harborside village of Pré-du-sel. But the fastest and strongest among them were Gabriel and Evangeline. And their fathers, both widowers, were old friends.

  In the years when she grew taller and he broader, their paths diverged. He took to the arts of tanning and carpentry and blacksmithing, she to the arts of spinning and farming and cider pressing. Her life was on the farm, where she cared for her aging father. His life was in the village, where he fanned the fire in his father’s blacksmith shop. The games and races were left to the younger ones. Seasons went by, one following the last, the next ever approaching, and the space between the two motherless children expanded.

  But in his fifteenth year, three summers ago, Gabriel saw that Evangeline, once just a playmate and companion, had transformed into a vibrant beauty.

  One of those love-struck mornings, in the misty darkness of the pre-dawn hours, Gabriel hiked to the top of Evangeline’s bec. At sunrise, the mist became a drizzle and forced him to find shelter under the hang of a boulder at the edge of her apple orchard, where he curled up and, weary from the walk and the early hour, promptly fell asleep.

  At midmorning, he was jostled awake with a violent prod.

  “Attend!” he gasped, opening his eyes and tensing his muscles.

  A blurry figure was standing over him, wrapped in a cloud of golden pink mist and pressing the blade of a garden hoe to his throat.

  “What is your purpose here?” the figure demanded.

  Gabriel blinked through the haze to see that his attacker was his Evangeline, his desired, illuminated with an angel’s glow. “My beloved,” he said, squinting up at the vision of her, straining to bring her into focus.

  “What?” she said.

  “Evangeline Bellefontaine,” he said, surprised that the words rose so easily from his lips, even in this awkward pose. His eyes traveled across her freckled cheek to rest on the tensed ridge of her lovely jaw.

  Evangeline pressed the blade of her hoe more forcefully against his neck, and her tone dropped lower. “What are you doing here, Gabriel Lajeunesse?” Evangeline said, her untamed hair dropping in heavy black waves from her perfect head. “Why are you in my father’s orchard?” She tightened her grip on the hoe’s handle.

  “I fell asleep,” Gabriel said without breathing, because he had seen the dog, the snarling, angry dog with curly black fur, at Evangeline’s feet.

  “Easy, Poc,” she said to the dog. “Don’t bite him. Not yet.”

  Gabriel exhaled. “I’m sorry,” he said, or at least meant to say.

  “You were stealing apples.”

  “I was stealing nothing,” Gabriel said. He paused, then continued. “I am here only to breathe the ocean air that feeds your lungs while you sleep, only to receive the sounds of this windy bec that fill your ears by day.” He pointed toward the stone and log home beyond the orchard, Evangeline’s home, and the ocean beyond. “That I might know this place. That I might know you.” He slowly rose to his elbows. “Forgive me,” he said.

  “Your words are foolish,” she said, “but they are more considered than some.” For a desperately short moment, hope washed through Gabriel. “But if you were not stealing, then you were spying,” Evangeline said. She studied his face for a moment. “Your eyes tell me you are not a danger, only a nuisance.” She stepped back and tucked the hoe under her arm. “A poetic nuisance, perhaps. But you must leave at once.” Gabriel scrambled to his feet.

  “I was not spying, Mademoiselle Bellefontaine,” Gabriel said boldly. He smoothed his felt jacket and tried in vain to slick down a curled cowlick. He turned toward the path he’d hiked up.

  “You’ll never get home that way,” she said. “The path you followed here will be impassable after this morning’s rain. But if you do a task for me, I’ll show you a better way.”

  “Anything,” Gabriel answered.

  And she asked him to stack firewood, and he did, great piles of it. And she fed him porridge and honey and cider. “You must never spy again,” she said.

  “I will prove my sincerity to you,” he answered. “I will dedicate my life, long or short, pleasant or tragic, to this task alone.”

  Gabriel knew his words were grandiose, and he honored them.

  It took months, years. It took bushels of pears and cords of wood and gifts of tobacco and brandy for her father, the farmer Monsieur Bellefontaine. It required assisting with the goats and gardens, and it took scaring off a pair of lynxes who cornered Poc behind Evangeline’s compost pile. It took love poems whispered in the garden. But Gabriel’s persistence, fueled by his soul-filling desire, won Evangeline’s heart and her father’s favor, above all other suitors in Pré-du-sel, including Jean-Baptiste Leblanc, the notary’s son.

  Gabriel turned his attention back to Evangeline, now scattering seed for the hens. He pulled another sheet of birchbark from the pocket of his felt jacket, spun his charcoal stick in his fingers, and started again. His h
and re-created her wavy, obsidian hair, curls straining against the confines of her braid, sometimes escaping across her upper back. Dark eyebrows, animated islands in the liquid light that cascaded over her pale, freckled skin. Blue-black eyes set wide across her visage, framed by smudges of cedar ash as was the fashion. Her lips, her lips, red and curved, the way Evangeline chewed on them whenever she concentrated, as she did now, tending her fowl. Gabriel bit his own lip to share the sensation. He studied her breasts, the smooth rounds of them, carefully concealed under her ocean-blue kirtle of felt, which was laced over a roughly woven linen-cloth shirt and extended into dual panels—tails, she called them—that billowed around her hips and over her lean, muscular legs, clad in deerskin to her ankles. Gabriel imagined the feel of her ankles, powerful and delicate at once, of her calves, her thighs. His breath caught as her kirtle-tails rolled and waved in the breeze, swaying like the ocean a thousand feet below the crest of this bec, the restless ocean that jovially tossed frothy waves skyward to catch the white-gold light of the afternoon sun as the unyielding and rambunctious tide turned back toward Glosekap Bay. The tide kept time in Cadia, and even so far above the water, Gabriel could hear the tide changing.

  Gabriel knew he should go. He wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place. He would see Evangeline later tonight for the signing of the contract, and then, after tomorrow, they would be together, always, forever, and his ever-tossed heart would be peaceful at last. But Gabriel had meager faith in tomorrow. Life had taught him well: Tomorrow doesn’t exist until it arrives.

  Evangeline turned toward Gabriel, looking down, not seeing him, eyes fixed on her task. At her heels scuttled Poc, the mutt, scattering dust and leaves, and growling to keep the lordly turkey away from the hen seed. She smiled at Poc and took his jaw in her hands. A wave of envy passed through Gabriel’s stomach and wedged itself in his throat, and he forced his feet still to keep from rushing to her.