Peter Loon

by Van Reid

  Peter did not know how to answer any of this, except to say, “Thank you.”

  “The man has not seen fit to discover what he’s brought for me,” said the Captain, who was on to other things. He lifted the volume in his hand to indicate what were his real concerns. “But I will corner him tonight, with luck, and add something to my shelves. You are welcome, by the way, to avail yourself of anything here.” Captain Clayden led Peter into the den and swept the book-lined room with a single gesture.

  Peter did not have a large command of the printed word and the idea of abiding within a book for a pastime was strange to him, though curiously appealing. He considered the leathery backs of Captain Clayden’s books and thought that no other subject of conversation could have so demanded the parson’s presence. “What are they about?” he asked.

  The Captain looked sharply at Peter, but only for the briefest moment; his expression softened as he studied the boy. “All creation,” he said, with a fondness in his tone that Peter could not completely understand. “Here is a geography of the known continent,” he told the young man, pointing to one tall binding, “and here are the creatures that inhabit it depicted in engravings from life,” he continued, pointing to the next volume. “There is an astronomy, and here is ‘Roderick Random’ and ‘Joseph Andrews.’” The elderly man walked the perimeter of his den, pointing out favored books as he would friends standing by to be introduced. “Mr. Johnson’s Dictionary, Mr. Boswell’s life of Mr. Johnson, Tristram Shandy, Thomas Paine, Izaak Walton–”

  “The fisherman!” said Peter, pleased to recognize a single name, if only a name he had learned the day before yesterday.

  “Do you know Izaak then, my lad?” said Captain Clayden with surprise and sudden interest.

  “Parson Leach does,” said Peter. This seemed meek enough reason to invoke Izaak Walton’s name, but Captain Clayden only nodded, as if he approved of Peter knowing someone who knew the famous angler’s writing. “Yes,” said the elderly gendeman, “Zach-ariah supplied me with this edition.”

  They could hear a dog barking, and Peter hoped it meant that the parson had come back early, but instead young James Clayden bounded into the den with the hound happily in tow. “You’re awake!” he declared as if this were news and also long in coming.

  “You’ll be wanting breakfast,” said the Captain to Peter. “Mrs. Magnamous will have saved something out for you.”

  “We’re going to pique-nique” said James, as if he had had to tell his grandfather this more times than was necessary. “He can eat with us!”

  There were more footsteps in the hall and while the Captain and James escorted Peter toward the kitchen, they met Sussanah and Martha. The young women were, if anything, prettier than the night before; they had been out in the day, and the wind and the sun had put apples in their cheeks and brightened their eyes. They were nearly more vision than Peter could graciously receive and he feared, afterwards, that he had disobeyed Parson Leach’s instructions to keep his mouth shut when he wasn’t speaking.

  “We are going for an outing, Mr. Loon,” said Sussanah, a little breathlessly. “Mrs. Magnamous is packing things for us.”

  “Nora has agreed to go,” said Martha, with a kindness implied in the statement, she was that quick to let Peter know he would be with someone she believed he knew well.

  Peter was amazed by their enthusiasm, it seemed so childlike to him, who had known the sober pursuits of subsistence farming his entire life, and the duties of an older brother and a laborer for the most of that. He understood the nature of an outing, he thought, though he hadn’t the slightest notion what to expect from a pique-nique. He hardly knew how to answer their question, but said “Certainly,” and as this seemed to please these lovely young women–which, just then, was his soul’s entire purpose–he added nothing to it.

  James let out a shout of joy and charged toward the kitchen.

  “Emily and Nora are getting ready,” said Sussanah. She watched Peter carefully whenever Nora’s name arose, as if to see what affect it had upon him.

  He looked very braw in their father’s clothes, with an old pair of riding boots serving for lack of anything else appropriate, and a brown waistcoat and jacket over a white shirt, and dark wool trousers. He had pulled his hair back, and in the kitchen found the nerve to ask Mrs. Magnamous for a bit of twine with which to tie it back. She did him better by producing a dark bit of ribbon from an apron pocket, and the effect of this behind his head along with his rugged outfit was the appearance of true gallantry, though he hardly suspected it.

  Not only was Peter in strange waters, but he had lost his mooring in the absence of Parson Leach; he was a little perturbed with the clergyman for leaving him in a situation for which he was not equipped.

  “You’ll have some breakfast,” said the cook, and “Of course he will,” declared the Captain, but James insisted that Peter would eat soon enough outside. “Nonsense!” said Mrs. Magnamous and she shooed the boy away while Captain Clayden chuckled; nothing would do but Peter had at least a bit of sausage on a piece of toast, a hard-boiled egg, and a bowl of milk, and she managed this in between loading a basket with victuals for the youngsters’ outing.

  Emily appeared in the kitchen with an air of authority and briskness about her; Nora came behind with a good deal less energy, and she graced Peter with an expression that was a little more than relieved and not quite as much as a smile. “Parson Leach left this morning,” she said, as if he might not have known or, if he did, did not realize the gravity of this circumstance.

  Peter was perplexed how Nora’s anxious presence could make him feel more comfortable in such strange surroundings, but intuition told him straightaway that, if he were without a mooring–in the form of Parson Leach, Nora had her own in the form of himself, and a mooring must be a steady thing. “He’ll be back this evening,” he said, with a certainty he had not felt when he first heard the news.

  Nora had benefited from the Claydens already; there was a sense of security among them, they were so secure themselves and in themselves; and little can be said against a bold dinner and breakfast and a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed. Peter, when he thought about it, felt revived, but thought his state was nothing compared to Nora’s, whose color was higher and whose eyes shone with more curiosity and less fear. She might have put on a pound of flesh over night, she looked that much prettier.

  Peter was not the only one to notice this, for Captain Clayden complemented her on her bright appearance, and Mrs. Magnamous was very pleased to have helped the cause by feeding the young woman what was good for her. Emily seemed to think she had manifested this transformation, and promised that Nora would do better still, given time.

  Peter was famished, but he put the minimum amount into him that Mrs. Magnamous demanded, as the Clayden brother and sisters and Martha were chafing to go and since they promised him food at the end of their exertions.

  The sun was out, but it was an October day after all, and coats were found for everyone, and bonnets and hats. Nora and Peter, all the while, watched the goings on with interest and concern. Sussanah and Martha and James talked incessantly, and Emily went about frowning at all the preparations till Mrs. Magnamous handed her a quilt and James the basket and drove them out. Captain Clayden laughed as they tumbled through the kitchen door and Mrs. Magnamous gave out orders to be cautious that were scarcely heard.

  One of the dogs set up a bark and the chickens scattered in the yard as they stepped into the day. James was having difficulty with the basket and Peter offered to take one handle. Sussanah came forward hurriedly, then, and explained, in a whirl of words, that James was too small for such a chore and she was his big sister, and how it was proper that she help him, which meant of course that she was helping Peter to carry the basket before anyone else knew what was about. Peter caught an anxious look from Nora and Emily shot Sussanah a look of disapproval that was not easy to mistake.

  They were quickly past the yard and walki
ng in a cluster toward the river and the extremity of the point about a quarter of a mile away. They walked in rolling fields and there was a grove of hardwood alongside the beaten track, and the river pulling itself in and out. The shore was a series of irregular features, waning and waxing into the water with rooty mounds of soil, granitic out-croppings, and long mounds of white debris, which the sisters insisted were crushed oyster shells, left by ancient Indians who feasted at these river shores.

  Peter didn’t know an oyster from an octopus and wondered if he were being told a tale, or if Sussanah and Emily had been told one before him. Who was being led astray? Courtesy dictated that he accept the idea with a straight face, but wariness lit his eye with something that must have looked to the young women like wise humor.

  The mowed fields had grown little since late summer, and there was a wistful aspect to the waving calf-high grasses as they passed. The young women’s dresses shushed as they walked, and the breeze tugged at the locks of hair outside their bonnets. Peter was conscious of the necessity of keeping his stride moderate–that he didn’t hurry Sussanah–and also that Sussanah, herself, was not walking as fast as he imagined she could. The result was that they fell behind several times, and Sussanah seemed to slow the more when everyone else noticed and came back for them. It happened only once, however, before Nora placed herself a step or so behind Peter, if some paces to one side, and stayed there. Emily made noises at her sister to hurry along.

  Peter understood that they were taking a basket of food to some remoter portion of the Claydens’ property to spread it out and eat it there, and this seemed a curious business to him; he was not used to making extra work out of such a fundamental matter as eating. The out-of-doors, the trees and grass, the wind and water were elements of his daily life, his work life, and often the agents against which his small increase, and that of his family, must struggle. The young Claydens hurried into the open-air as to a “town day.”

  He had known gatherings of people, of course–days in which people of Sheepscott Great Pond and, on occasion, one or another of the nearby hamlets, came together; but they were always times of renewed labor, when a neighboring farm was raising a building or a nearby settler had grown sick or had died and his family needed help plowing their rock-strewn fields or bringing in the plain harvest at the last of the season. The numbers of people would divide the labor, and bring about a sense of respite toward the end of the day; rum and beer were in large supply at such gatherings from the start, and though the work would get done, there were also carousings and brawls and sometimes something like leisure as folks sat about a stump-riddled yard and told stories or shared complaints. Evening might bring song. Peter had known such gatherings, but they had been few and far between, and always born of necessity.

  He felt a little mortified by the enthusiasm of the Claydens and their cousin, it was so unhidden. He looked at the Clayden women and thought of his sister Sally Ann. She would shine in dresses such as these, he thought, but she could not have looked so careless and happy. Nora, who must have seen many a spontaneous celebration at her father’s tavern, looked surprised, as if she had not seen such glad behavior from anyone but the smallest child. But James and Emily, Sussanah and Martha were unaware of the curiosity they aroused, or unheedful of it.

  They came, finally, to a place where birches stood in tall white ranks, their yellow foliage like bright hills glowing in the sun. The trees stood on a brief knoll, where the sun and wind had dried the grass and below which boulders and courses of stone riled the river narrows. On the opposite shore, a cow grazed placidly.

  Peter was struck by something he had not known before, and that was the smell of salt water, which intoxicated him as had the wine at supper. The day itself was beyond anything he had experienced when he saw it over the river, and he looked with fascination toward the town where the masts of several vessels swung gently against the sky.

  The quilt was spread over the grass before the birches, and the basket laid beside it. Peter stood awkwardly at the edge of the quilt, while the women sat and kneeled and James clambered down the bank. Nora had followed her guests’ lead, but could not recline so carelessly, nor look so natural, nor drape her limbs so gracefully. Emily actually reached out and, with a quick motion, tugged the hem of Nora’s skirts over her ankles.

  “Oh!” cried Martha. “Everything is so sweet after it rains!” and she took such a breath that her whole form seemed filled with it. Peter watched, fascinated, as she drew this luxurious breath, and every line and curve of her seemed to pulse with a feminine energy that made his ears turn red; and yet it was wholly innocent and without motive. Sussanah was less unfettered in her joy of the day, but Emily sprawled like a cat on the quilt so that even Nora smiled softly.

  Peter went to the edge of the knoll to look out over the river and James’s activity among the rocks of the shore, and all the feminine eyes were upon him. He was a tall, straight young man, made lean and muscular by the life in which he was raised, and the uncultivated figure in the refined attire made a contrast that pleased his observers.

  The chatter died some, while the wind moved in the trees and the sound of the water reached them on the knoll. James shouted something they couldn’t understand; exclaiming over some discovery. Peter was conscious of the sudden quiet and began to feel more unwieldy, standing there with his back to the others. When Sussanah spoke, the anxiousness in her voice made her sound almost like Nora.

  “Have you been to Newcastle before, Mr. Loon?” she asked.

  Peter was not used to being addressed so formally and he had to wade through this before he could consider his answer. “No, I haven’t,” he said, after some toil.

  “Oh.”

  In all his life, he had never been so far from his birthplace, and he was attempting to conjure a way of saying this without sounding exceedingly cloddish, when he said instead, “Have you been very far from here yourself?”

  “Father took us to Boston, when we were young,” said Sussanah.

  “I don’t remember,” said Emily, as if that were more to the point of his question.

  This small exchange served as an excuse to look at the young women, but this in turn made further conversation more necessary still. He’d heard of Boston from the old sailor who lived, now, in Sheepscott Great Pond, but nothing the man had told him seemed proper to convey to such refined people.

  “Is it very different where you live?” asked Martha. She watched him with such a soft expression, and her features were so mild, that his heart went out to her in an entirely unexpected manner. He thought again of his sisters, and in such a tender light that he wished he’d been alone for a time to ponder this sudden emotion. He had the vision of his sisters toiling in a manner these young women would probably never know or understand, and he was touched by an unaccustomed sadness. It seemed strange that he must come to this place, so foreign to the circumstances of his own life, before some verity regarding his own people came home to him. “Yes,” he said, in the midst of this confusion.

  The young Clayden women were beginning to think their conversational efforts were unsuccessful when Emily said, “How did you meet Mr. Leach?”

  “I was looking for my uncle,” he said, and began to tell them of his father’s death and his mother’s peculiarities and how he had been sent to find a man whose existence he had never suspected, and whose present circumstances were unknown to him. He told of his walk through the forests at night and his experience in the midst of the deer herd; then he explained how he had made a bed of leaves at the foot of an oak and how the woodsmen Manasseh Cutts and Crispin Moss had mistaken him for some singular manifestation of a felled deer.

  The tale sounded poor and hardscrabble to Peter as he told it, and he considered his own roughened hands, as if they were emblems to prove it; but the story was myth and legend to the young women, Nora included, and when James clambered back up the bank with an eagle feather in hand and news of his venture along the shore, he was shus
hed to silence, and soon he too was enthralled by Peter’s account.

  By the time he was done, and they had extracted (by question and comment) all they could from the tale, they had all but forgotten the purpose of their outing and gazed down at the quilt with dreamlike gazes. Emily was the first to rouse herself and consider practical matters; with sudden resolve, she delved into the basket that Mrs. Magnamous had packed for them, laying plates and jars out on the quilt. Martha and Sussanah asked Peter who his uncle was and they speculated, with James’s assistance, about the man–somewhat fancifully, as can be supposed. Peter was amazed at their notions, at the wealth and attainments they conjured for the unknown uncle; Nora did not appear to be as charmed by the story, or by its implications, as if she were uncertain what it meant that Peter had such a task to accomplish. She had said almost nothing since speaking to Peter in the Claydens’ kitchen.

  “You won’t be sick after a while,” stated James categorically, when it was decided that Peter would need to sail somewhere foreign and strange to find his uncle. “Momma said she hardly feels ill at all, anymore, when she sails with Poppa.”

  Peter was amazed again by the abundance laid out before them, and also by the affable manner in which it was shared. The Claydens laughed and referenced private jests among themselves and praised the day and asked him more questions. Emily thought to draw Nora into the eddy of conversation, but this proved a difficult undertaking, for Nora grew quieter still when she was questioned or spoken to.

  The day was rare, as only the fall can offer, and Peter began to understand the young Claydens’ responses to it, though it continued to open a melancholy sort of hole within him. The Claydens prompted a game they called “I Spy” while they ate, and Sussanah at one point, fell to tickling her brother as a forfeit for his having failed an impossible challenge–“I spy the corner of my eye.”