He chews his lip and goes back out to the barn.
LATE ONE EVENING, I’m lying on my pallet in the dark in the dining room when I hear a commotion upstairs, directly above me. Mother’s bedroom. I sit up quickly, fumble for a candle and match, and make my way to the foyer. “Mother?” I call. “Are you all right?”
No answer.
Al is out with Sam, playing cards. Papa is sound asleep in his room. (There’s not much point in waking him; he’s frailer than I am.) I haven’t been upstairs in months, but I know I have to get there now. I haul myself up the stairs as quickly as I can on my elbows, sweat dampening my neck from the effort. When I reach the top, I pull myself to my feet and grope my way down the hall to Mother’s door, push it open. In the moonlight I see that she is on the floor on her knees, fumbling at the quilt in a kind of panic, trying to claw her way up back onto the bed, her nightgown bunched around her thighs.
She turns and gives me a bewildered look.
“I’m here, Mother.” Stumbling forward in the dark, I collapse on the floor beside her. I try to help her up with my hands, my elbows, even my shoulder, but her weight is like a sack of flour, and I can’t get any traction.
She begins sobbing. “I just want to go to bed.”
“I know,” I say miserably. I feel helpless and angry: at myself for being so feeble, at Al for going out. After a few minutes, her sobbing turns to whimpering, and she rests her head on my lap. I pull her nightgown down over her legs and stroke her hair.
Some time later—fifteen minutes? Half an hour?—the front door opens downstairs. “Al!” I shout.
“Christie? Where are you?”
“Up here.”
Footsteps pound up the stairs, the door slams open. I see the confusion in Al’s eyes as he takes in the sight of Mother collapsed on the floor, me cradling her head in my lap. “What is going on?”
“She fell off the bed, and I couldn’t lift her.”
“Lord a mercy.” Al comes over and gently hoists Mother up onto the mattress, then pulls the quilt over her and kisses her on the forehead.
After he’s helped me down the stairs and onto my pallet in the dining room, I say, “That was terrible. You can’t leave me alone with her like that.”
“Papa’s here.”
“You know he’s no help.”
Al is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I need a life of my own, Christie. It’s not too much to ask.”
“She could’ve died.”
“Well, she didn’t.”
“It was hard for me.”
“I know.” He sighs. “I know.”
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, about a week after Thanksgiving, I wake early, as usual, to stoke the fire in the kitchen and begin the process of making bread. The floorboards above my head creak with the ordinary sounds of Al getting up and dressed and going to Papa’s room to check on him, the muffled sounds of Papa’s deep bass and Al’s higher tenor. I scoop flour into the earthenware bowl and add a sprinkle of salt, my hands going through the motions while my head is free to plan the day: pickled beets and sliced ham, warmed in the oven, for the noontime meal; gingerbread cookies if I have time, a pile of mending . . . I add a scoop of yeasty starter, a dollop of molasses, warm water from the saucepan on the range, and start kneading, folding in the flour.
Upstairs, Al knocks on Mother’s door—or perhaps I only think I hear it, so accustomed am I to his routine. And then I hear, sharply, “Mother.” Furniture scrapes along the floor.
I feel it before I know it. I look up at the ceiling with my hands in the dough.
Al clatters down the stairs. Materializes, panting, in the kitchen.
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” I whisper.
He nods.
I sink to my knees.
The next day Lora brings a mourning bouquet to hang on the front door. It’s round and black, with long streamers and artificial flowers pasted in the middle. Mother would’ve hated it. She didn’t like fake flowers, and neither do I.
“It’s to show the community that this is a house of mourning,” Lora says when she sees me scowling.
“I suspect they know that,” I say.
The wind blew so hard all night it swept most of the snow into the sea. Neighbors swoop toward the house like crows, in groups of two and three, black scarves and coats flapping. They rap on the front door, hang their coats on hooks in the foyer, file past Mother’s body in the Shell Room. The women bustle into the kitchen. They know what to do in a situation like this: exactly what they’ve always done. Here is Lisa Dubnoff, unwrapping a loaf of spice cake. Mary-Violet Verzaleno, slicing turkey. Annabelle Weinstein, washing dishes. The men jam their hands in their pockets, talk about the price of lobster, squint out at the horizon. I watch some of them out the kitchen window smoking cigarettes and pipes in the yard, stamping their feet and hunching their shoulders as they pass around a flask.
These neighbors leach pity the way a canteen of cold water sweats in the heat. The slightest inquiry is freighted with words unsaid. Worried about you . . . feel sorry for you . . . so glad I’m not you. . . . The women in the kitchen stop talking as soon as I come in, but I hear their whispers: Lord help her, what will Christina do without her mother? I want to tell them, My mother hasn’t actually been present for a long time; I’ll get along fine. But there’s no way to say this without sounding harsh, so I stay quiet.
In the late afternoon of the third day, we huddle around Mother’s burial plot in the family graveyard, strafed by the wind, the sky as yellow gray as a caul. Reverend Carter from Cushing Baptist Church opens his bible, clears his throat. When you live on a farm, he says, you are particularly aware that God’s creatures are born naked and alone. Given only a short time on this earth. Hungry, cold, persecuted, afflicted, released. Each one of us experiences moments of doubt, of despair, of feeling unduly burdened. But there is solace to be found in giving yourself to the Lord and accepting his blessings. The best we can do is appreciate the wonders of God’s green earth, try to avoid calamity, and put our faith in him.
This sermon sums up Mother’s life perhaps all too well, though it does little to improve the general mood.
Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother’s favorite gospel hymn:
Oh, what joy it will be when His face I behold,
Living gems at His feet to lay down;
It would sweeten my bliss in the city of gold,
Should there be any stars in my crown.
Mary’s lovely voice rises and lingers in the air, and by the end of the song most of us are crying. I am too, though I still don’t know what those stars are meant to represent. My mistake, I suppose, is in thinking they should mean something.
ONE MORNING IN July I’m sitting in my chair in the kitchen, as usual, when there’s a rap on the window. A slip of a girl with straight brown hair and large brown eyes is staring at me. The side door is open, as it always is in the summer. I nod at the doorway and she comes to the threshold and steps cautiously inside.
“Yes?”
“I’m hoping I might impose on you for a glass of water.” The girl is wearing a white shift dress, and her feet are bare. She is watchful but clearly unafraid, as if accustomed to walking into the homes of strangers.
“Help yourself,” I tell her, motioning toward the hand pump in the pantry. She sidles across the room and disappears around the corner. From my chair I hear the screech of the heavy iron arm moving up and down, the chortle of water.
“Can I use this cup here?” she calls.
“Sure.”
She comes back around the corner, drinking noisily from a chipped white mug. “That’s better,” she says, setting the cup on the counter. “I’m Betsy. Staying up the road with my cousins for the summer. And you must be Christina.”
I can’t help smiling at her forthrightness. “How did you know that?”
“They told me there’s only one woman living in this house, and she’s named Christina, so I figured.”
&n
bsp; Lolly, who’s been winding around my feet, leaps into my lap. The girl strokes her under the chin until she purrs, then glances at the other cats milling around the kitchen. It’s time for their breakfast. “You sure have a lot of cats.”
“I do.”
“Cats only like you because you feed them.”
“That’s not true.” Lolly sinks down, exposing her belly to be rubbed. “I’m guessing you don’t have a cat.”
“No.”
“A dog?”
She nods. “His name is Freckles.”
“Mine is Topsy.”
“Where is he?”
“Probably out in the field with my brother Al. He doesn’t like cats much.”
“The dog, or your brother?”
I laugh. “Both, I guess.”
“Well, that’s no surprise. Boys don’t like cats.”
“Some do.”
“Not many.”
“You seem awfully sure of your opinions,” I tell her.
“Well, I think about things a lot,” she says. “I hope you won’t mind my asking: What’s wrong with you?”
I have spent my life bristling at this question. But the girl seems so frankly curious that I feel compelled to answer. “The doctors don’t know.”
“When I was born, my bones were kind of deformed,” she says. “I had to do all kinds of exercises to get better. I’m still a little crooked, see? Kids made fun of me.” She shrugs. “You know.”
I shrug back. I know.
The girl raises her chin at the pile on the sideboard. “Look at that pile of dirty dishes. You could use some help.” She goes over to the sideboard, makes a pile of dishes, and carries them over to the long cast-iron sink in the pantry.
And then, to my surprise, she washes them.
WHEN PAPA DIES at the age of seventy-two in 1935, he has been so unwell and so unhappy for so long that his death comes as a relief. For decades I did my best to care for this man who ended my schooling at twelve, who squandered the family fortune, such that it was, on a crackpot scheme, who expected his only daughter—possessed of an infirmity as debilitating as his own—to manage the household, and never once said thank you. I fed him, cleaned up after him, washed his soiled clothes, inhaled his sour breath; and his own discomfort was all he could see.
I have to remind myself that once I saw this man as kind and just and strong.
When my brothers and their wives arrive at the house, we go through the familiar motions of mourning, serving cake and tea and slicing ham, accepting condolences, singing hymns. The body in the Shell Room, the burial in the family plot. As I stand at Papa’s grave I think of how he was at the end, miserable in his wheelchair in the front parlor, clutching a chunk of anthracite in his fist and gazing out through the window toward the sea. I don’t know what he was longing for, but I can guess. His robust youth. His ability to stand and walk. His family of origin in the land of his birth, to which he never returned. A clear sense of where he belonged, and to whom, and why. Did he regret the calculations and miscalculations he made that opened up the world to him and eventually narrowed it to this point of land?
Though I lived with this man for my entire life, I never really knew him. He was like a frozen bay himself, I think—an icy crust, layers deep, above roiling water.
AFTER ALL THE mourners leave, I am struck by the vast emptiness of this house, stretching up three floors to the dormers. All these unused rooms. Sam and Fred have started their own family farms and gone into business together, manufacturing lumber and hay. Now it’s just Al and me—and the wheelchair, taking up space in the middle of the Shell Room.
“It’s yours if you want it,” Al says. “Still in pretty good shape.”
I look at the nasty contraption, with its sagging stained seat and rusted wheels. “I hate that chair. I never want to see it again.”
His eyes widen. I guess it’s the first time I’ve said that aloud. He stands there for a moment, sucking on his pipe. Then he goes over to the woodstove, knocks the ashes out of his pipe, and says, “All right. Let’s get rid of it, then.”
I watch as Al drags the wheelchair out the front door and down the steps, where it teeters to its side and crashes over. He disappears into the barn and comes back a few minutes later with Tessie hitched to the small wagon. Pulling on her harness, he leads her close to the wheelchair and heaves it into the wagon, then doffs his hat to me with a smile and leads the horse and wagon down to the cove.
About half an hour later I see Al through the window, trudging back up the field with Tessie. The wagon is empty.
“What’d you do with it?” I ask when he comes through the kitchen door.
He sits in his chair, takes off his cap, sets it on the bench in front of him. Fiddles inside his jacket, pulls out his old brown pipe and a pouch of tobacco. Finds a matchbook in his trouser pocket. Takes a pinch of tobacco, packs it into the pipe, tamps it down with his finger. Adds more tobacco, tamps it down again. Sticks it in his mouth and lights it, cupping a hand around it to protect the flame. Shakes out the match. Sits there inhaling the smoke and blowing it out.
I know better than to rush him. Anyway, we have all the time in the world.
“You know the boulder by the Mystery Tunnel? That drop-off below?” he says after a while.
I nod.
He sucks on the pipe. Takes it out of his mouth and blows a stream of smoke. “I rolled that wheelchair up to the top of the rock and dumped it over.”
“Gone,” I say. “Good riddance.”
“Good riddance,” he says.
For the rest of my life I will think of that wheelchair lying smashed and rusting in the salty water near Mystery Tunnel, a place that once opened me to a world of magic, of possibility, but that over the years has come to mean something else. A place where Walton spun his false promises. A path strewn with anticipation that ends at a pile of rocks. A repository for my broken dreams, the treasure vanishing as soon as I reach for it.
The wheelchair, fool’s gold, in the depths below.
SADIE IS STANDING in my kitchen, dropping off a chicken dish, when she says, “Are the rumors true? I hear Al’s got his eye on that new teacher at the Wing School.”
My skin prickles. “What are you talking about?”
“Angie Treworgy, I think her name is. She’s boarding with Gertrude Gibbons.”
Boarding with . . . Gertrude Gibbons? “I haven’t heard a thing about it.”
“He would make some lucky girl a wonderful husband, don’t you think?”
“No, I do not think,” I say stiffly.
Al has started going out three or four nights a week, usually to join the card game at Fales. He knows I don’t like being left alone at night, but still he goes. On Saturdays he often drives to Thomaston, where the stores and bars stay open until nine. Or at least that’s what he tells me. Now I wonder if he’s going instead to Gertrude Gibbons’s.
I don’t mention what I’ve heard about the teacher, but for several days I give Al the silent treatment. He doesn’t ask why.
I hear no further news of any woman until a few weeks later, when Al mentions casually that he’s going to help out a man who lives with his daughter down near Hathorn Point. “They could use some firewood,” he says. “I told him I’d cut some logs for them later in the week.”
“How old’s the daughter?” I ask.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I just wonder.”
He gives me a look and scratches his head. “Old enough that it’s rude to ask her age.”
“As old as you are?”
He shifts his feet. “Well, no.”
“Is she even in her forties?”
“I’d say not.”
“Married?”
Sighing heavily, he says, “Divorced, I believe.”
“I see.” A few days later, I ask Sadie, “So who’s that divorcée down on Hathorn Point?”
“You
mean Estelle Bartlett?”
I shrug.
“Lives with her father?”
“That’s the one.”
Sadie leans close. “Word is she’s been married three times, each time to someone older and wealthier. Who knows, it could be idle gossip. But she does appear to be well-off. Bought her father a brand-new Pontiac. Why do you ask?”
“Al’s doing some odd jobs for her father.”
Sadie’s eyes shine. “She’s a pretty lady. Wavy brown hair. That devil, your brother! Good for him.”
Al keeps to his routine. He does his chores in the house, in the barn. But more and more these days he comes and goes as he pleases.
It’s a sunny Fourth of July, the day of the annual clambake down at the shore near Little Island. My sister-in-law Mary’s in charge—she pickled carrots and made wild rhubarb pies; Lora fried chicken and made yeast rolls. They’ve gathered blankets and bonnets and cutlery and dishes and piled them into baskets to be transported to the beach. My only task this year is drop biscuits, which I could make in my sleep. I start on them early in the morning. By the time people start showing up, just before noon, five dozen biscuits are cooling on racks in the pantry. I’ve had time to change my apron, which I can never help soiling (a dousing of flour, a smear of lard), and I’m sitting in the kitchen when they arrive.
“You look well, my dear!” Lora says.
“Doesn’t she?” Mary says.
I know they mean to be kind, but their chipper tone makes me feel like I’m a hundred years old.
While Lora packs up the biscuits, Mary helps me into the car. She drives to the grassy area above the water, where they set up a chair for me away from the treacherous rocks. A gaggle of children, my nieces and nephews and some of their friends, are already on the beach, skipping rocks far out into the sound, competing to see whose goes the farthest, whose skips the most, their voices rising and mingling with the cawing of gulls.
My fourteen-year-old nephew, John, the oldest of the bunch, climbs up from the beach to sit with me for a while. We watch the others play games in the grass: Red Rover and Red Light/Green Light and Giant Steps and hide-and-seek. They climb pine trees and gaze out at the small islands like Al and I used to do, sailors on the mast of a ship, the fields below a yellow ocean. The adults lounge on wool blankets, poke at the fire, pour fruit punch, squint up at us with a wave and a smile. Only Al is absent.