Read A Piece of the World Page 3


  Her children were buried here too. All the Hathorns after her are buried here.

  We continue to the shore on the southern side of Hathorn Point, above Kissing Cove and Maple Juice Cove, where the estuary of the St. George River flows into Muscongus Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. There’s an ancient heap of shells here that Mother says was left by Abenaki Indians who spent long-ago summers on the point. I try to envision what it would’ve been like here before this house was built, before the three log cabins, before any settlers discovered it. I imagine an Abenaki girl, like me, scouring the rocky shore for shells. From the point you can see way out to sea. Did she keep one eye on the horizon, scanning it for intruders? Did she have any idea how much her life would change when they arrived?

  The tide is low. I stumble on the rocks, but Mother doesn’t say anything, just stops and waits. Across the muddy flats is Little Island, an acre-wide wilderness of birches and dry grass. She points to it. “We’re going there. But we can’t stay long, or the tide will strand us.” Our path is an obstacle course of seaweed-slick stones. I pick my way along slowly, and even so I trip and fall, scraping my hand on a cluster of barnacles. My feet are damp inside my shoes. Mother glances back at me. “Get up. We’re nearly there.” When we reach the island, she spreads a wool blanket on the beach where it’s dry. Out of her rucksack she takes an egg sandwich on thick-sliced bread, a cucumber, two pieces of fried apple cake. She hands me half the sandwich. “Close your eyes and feel the sun,” she says, and I do, leaning back on my elbows, chin toward sky. Eyelids warm and yellow. Trees rustling behind us like starch-stiff skirts. Briny air. “Why would you want to be anywhere else?”

  After we eat, we collect shells—pale green anemone puffs and iridescent purple mussels. “Look,” Mother says, pointing at a crab emerging from a tide pool, picking its way across the rocks. “All of life is here, in this place.” In her own way, she is always trying to teach me something.

  TO LIVE ON a farm is to wage an ongoing war with the elements, Mother says. We have to push back against the unruly outdoors to keep chaos at bay. Farmers work in the soil with mules and cows and pigs, and the house must be a sanctuary. If it isn’t, we are no better than the animals.

  Mother is in constant motion—sweeping, mopping, scouring, baking, wiping, washing, hanging out sheets. She makes bread in the morning using yeast from the hop vine behind the shed. There’s always a pot of porridge on the back of the range by the time I come downstairs, with a filmy skin on top that I poke through and feed to the cat when she isn’t looking. Sometimes dry oatcakes and boiled eggs. Baby Sam sleeps in a cradle in the corner. When the breakfast dishes are cleared, she starts on the large midday meal: chicken pie or pot roast or fish stew; mashed or boiled potatoes; peas or carrots, fresh or canned, depending on the season. What’s left over reappears at supper, transformed into a casserole or a stew.

  Mother sings while she works. Her favorite song, “Red Wing,” is about an Indian maiden pining for a brave who’s gone to battle, growing more despondent as time passes. Tragically, her true love is killed:

  Now, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing

  The breeze is sighing, the night bird’s crying,

  For afar ’neath his star her brave is sleeping,

  While Red Wing’s weeping her heart away.

  It’s hard for me to understand why Mother likes such a sad song. Mrs. Crowley, my teacher at the Wing School Number 4 in Cushing, says that the Greeks believed witnessing pain in art makes you feel better about your own life. But when I mention this to Mother, she shrugs. “I just like the melody. It makes the housework go faster.”

  As soon as I’m tall enough to reach the dining room table, my job is to set it. Mother teaches me how with the heavy silver-plate cutlery:

  “Fork on the left. L-E-F-T. Four letters, same as ‘fork.’ F-O-R-K,” she says as she shows me, setting the fork beside the plate in its proper place. “Knife and spoon on the right. Five letters. R-I-G-H-T, same as ‘knife’ and ‘spoon.’ K-N-I-F-E.”

  “S-P-O-O-N,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “And glass. G-L-A-S-S. Right?”

  “What a clever one!” Mamey calls from the kitchen.

  By the time I’m seven I can strip thin ribbons of skin from potatoes with a knife, scrub the pine floors with bleach on my hands and knees, tend the hop vine behind the shed, culling yeast to make bread. Mother shows me how to sew and mend, and though my unruly fingers make it hard to thread a needle, I’m determined. I try again and again, pricking my forefinger, fraying the tip of the thread. “I’ve never seen such determination,” Mamey exclaims, but Mother doesn’t say a word until I’ve succeeded in threading it. Then she says, “Christina, you are nothing if not tenacious.”

  MAMEY DOESN’T SHARE Mother’s fear of dirt. What’s the worst that can happen if dust collects in the corners or we leave dishes in the sink? Her favorite things are timeworn: the old Glenwood range, the rocking chair by the window with the fraying cane seat, the handsaw with a broken handle in a corner of the kitchen. Each one of them, she says, with its own story to tell.

  Mamey runs her fingers along the shells on the mantelpiece in the Shell Room like an archaeologist uncovering a ruin that springs to life with all the knowledge she holds about it. The shells she discovered in her son Alvaro’s sea chest have pride of place here, alongside her black travel-battered bible. Pastel-colored shells of all shapes and sizes line the edges of the floor and the window ledges. Shell-encrusted vases, statues, tintypes, valentines, book covers; miniature views of the family homestead on scallop shells, painted by a long-ago relative; even a shell-framed engraving of President Lincoln.

  She hands me her prized shell, the one she found near a coral reef on a beach in Madagascar. It’s surprisingly heavy, about eight inches long, silky smooth, with a rust-and-white zebra stripe on top that melts into a creamy white bottom. “It’s called a chambered nautilus,” she says. “‘Nautilus’ is Greek for ‘sailor.’” She tells me about a poem in which a man finds a broken shell like this one on the shore. Noticing the spiral chambers enlarging in size, he imagines the mollusk inside getting larger and larger, outgrowing one space and moving on to the next.

  “‘Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul / As the swift seasons roll!’” Mamey recites, spreading her hands in the air. “’Till thou at length art free, / Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.’ It’s about human nature, you see. You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it’ll become too small.”

  “Then what?” I ask.

  “Well, then you’ll have to find a larger shell to live in.”

  I consider this for a moment. “What if it’s too small but you still want to live there?”

  She sighs. “Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you’ll either have to be brave and find a new home or you’ll have to live inside a broken shell.”

  Mamey shows me how to decorate book covers and vases with tiny shells, overlapping them so they cascade down in a precise flat line. As we glue the shells she reminisces about my grandfather’s bravery and adventurousness, how he outsmarted pirates and survived tidal waves and shipwrecks. She tells me again about the flag she made out of strips of cloth when all hope was lost, and the miraculous sight of that faraway freighter that came to their rescue.

  “Don’t fill the girl’s head with those tall tales,” Mother scolds, overhearing us from the pantry.

  “They’re not tall tales, they’re real life. You know, you were there.”

  Mother comes to the door. “You make it all sound grand, when you know it was miserable most of the time.”

  “It was grand,” Mamey says. “This girl may never go anywhere. She should at least know that adventure is in her bones.”

  When Mother leaves the room, shutting the door behind her, Mamey sighs. She says she can’t believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let th
e world come to her. She says Mother would’ve been a spinster if Papa hadn’t walked up the hill and given her an alternative.

  I know some of the story. That my mother was the only surviving child and that she clung close to home. After my grandfather retired from the sea, he and Mamey decided to turn their house into a summertime inn for the income, the distraction from grief. They added a third floor with dormers, creating four more bedrooms in the now sixteen-room house, and placed ads in newspapers all along the eastern seaboard. Drawn by word of mouth about the charming inn and its postcard view, visitors streamed north. In the 1880s a whole family could lodge at Hathorn House for $12 a week, including meals.

  The inn was a lot of work, more than any of them anticipated, and my mother was needed to help run it. As the years passed, the few eligible bachelors in Cushing married or moved away. By the time she was in her mid-thirties she was well past the point, she thought—everyone thought—of meeting a man and falling in love. She would live in this house and take care of her parents until they were buried in the family plot between the house and the sea.

  “There’s an old expression,” Mamey tells me. “‘Daughtering out.’ Do you know what it means?”

  I shake my head.

  “It means no male heirs survived to carry on the family name. Your mother is the last of the Cushing Hathorns. When she dies, the Hathorn name will die with her.”

  “There’s still Hathorn Point.”

  “Yes, that’s true. But this is no longer Hathorn House, is it? Now it’s the Olson House. Named for a Swedish sailor six years younger than your mother.”

  My mind is reeling. “Wait—Papa is younger than Mother?”

  “You didn’t know that?” When I shake my head again, Mamey laughs. “There’s a lot you don’t know, child. Johan Olauson was his name then.” I mouth the strange words: Yo-han Oh-laow-sun. “Barely spoke a word of English. He was a deckhand on a schooner captained by John Maloney, who lives in that little house down yonder with his wife,” she says, gesturing toward the window. “You know who I’m talking about?”

  I nod. The captain is a friendly man with a bushy gray mustache and yellow-corn teeth and his wife is a ruddy, broad-faced woman with a bosom that seems of a piece with her middle. I’ve seen his boat in the cove: The Silver Spray.

  “Well, it was February. Eighteen ninety—a bad winter. Endless. They were on their way to Thomaston from New York, delivering fuel wood and coal to lime kilns up there. But when they reached Muscongus Bay and dropped anchor, a storm swept in. It was so cold that ice grew around the ship in the night. There was nothing they could do; they were stranded. After a few days, when the ice was thick enough, they got out and walked across it to shore. This shore. Your father had nowhere to go, so he stayed with Maloney and his wife until the thaw.”

  “How long was that?”

  “Oh, months.”

  “And the boat was just out there in the ice the whole time?”

  “All winter long,” she says. “You could see it from this window.” She lifts her chin toward the pantry. I can faintly hear the clatter of dishes on the other side of the door. “Well, there he was, in that little cottage all winter, down near the cove, with a clear view of this house up the hill. He must’ve been bored to death. But he’d learned how to knit in Sweden. He made that blue wool blanket in the parlor while he was staying with them, did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “He did, sitting around the hearth with the Maloneys every night. Anyway, you know how people are: they talk, they tell stories—and oh, those Maloneys like to gossip. They would’ve told him, no doubt, about how this house was on the verge of daughtering out, and that if Katie married, her husband would inherit the whole thing. I don’t know for sure, of course; I can only guess what was said. But he’d been here just a week when he decided he was going to learn English. He walked into town and asked Mrs. Crowley at the Wing School to teach him.”

  “My teacher, Mrs. Crowley?”

  “Yes, she was the teacher even then. He went to the schoolhouse every day for lessons. And before the ice thawed, he’d changed his name to John Olson. Then, one day, he made his way up through the field to this house and knocked on the front door, and your mother answered. And that was it. Within a year Captain Sam died and your parents were married. Hathorn House became the Olson House. All of this”—she raises her arms in the air like a music conductor—“was his.”

  I picture my father sitting with the Maloneys in their cozy cottage, knitting that blanket while they regale him with stories about the white house in the distance: how three Hathorns bestowed their new name on this spit of land, and one built this very house . . . the spinster daughter who lives there now with her parents, their three sons dead, no heir to carry on the family name . . .

  “Do you think Papa was . . . in love with Mother?” I ask.

  Mamey pats my hand. “I don’t know. I really don’t. But here’s the truth, Christina. There are many ways to love and be loved. Whatever led your father here, this is his life now.”

  I WANT MORE than anything for Papa to be proud of me, but he has little reason. For one thing, I am a girl. Even worse—I know this already, though no one’s ever actually said it to me—I am not beautiful. When no one is around, I sometimes inspect my features in a small cloudy fragment of mirror that’s propped against the windowsill in the pantry. Small gray eyes, one bigger than the other; a long pointy nose; thin lips. “It was your mother’s beauty that drew me,” Papa always says, and though I know now that’s only part of the story, there’s no question that she is beautiful. High cheekbones, elegant neck, narrow hands and fingers. In her presence I feel ungainly, a waddling duck to her swan.

  On top of that, there’s my infirmity. When we’re around other people, Papa is tense and irritable, afraid that I’ll stumble, knock into someone, embarrass him. My lack of grace annoys him. He is always muttering about a cure. He thinks I should’ve kept the leg braces on; the pain, he says, would’ve been worth it. But he has no idea what it was like. I would rather suffer for the rest of my life with twisted legs than endure such agony again.

  His shame makes me defiant. I don’t care that I make him uncomfortable. Mother says it would be better if I weren’t so willful and proud. But my pride is all I have.

  One afternoon when I am in the kitchen, shelling peas, I hear my parents talking in the foyer. “Will she have to stay there alone?” Mother asks, her voice threaded with worry. “She’s only seven years old, John.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will they do to her?”

  “We won’t know until she’s looked at,” Papa says.

  A finger of fear runs down my back.

  “How will we afford it?”

  “I’ll sell a cow, if I must.”

  I hobble toward them from the pantry. “I don’t want to go.”

  “You don’t even know what—” Papa starts.

  “Dr. Heald already tried. There’s nothing they can do.”

  He sighs. “I know you’re afraid, Christina, but you have to be brave.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “That’s enough. It’s not up to you,” Mother snaps. “You’ll do as you’re told.”

  The next morning, as dawn is beginning to seep through the windows, I feel a rough push on my shoulder, a shake. It takes a moment to focus, and then I am staring into my father’s eyes.

  “Get dressed,” he says. “It’s time.”

  I feel the soft shifting weight and dull warmth of the hot water bottle against my feet, like the belly of a puppy. “I don’t want to, Papa.”

  “It’s arranged. You know that. You’re coming with me,” he says in a firm quiet voice.

  It’s cold and still mostly dark when Papa lifts me into the buggy. He wraps the blue wool blanket he knitted around me and then two more, adjusts a cushion behind my head. The buggy smells of old leather and damp horse. Papa’s favorite stallion, Blackie, stamps and whinnies, tos
sing his long mane, as Papa adjusts his harness.

  Papa climbs into the driver’s seat, lights his pipe and flicks the reins, and we set off down the hard-packed dirt road, the buggy squeaking as we go. The jostling hurts my joints, but soon enough I adjust to the rhythm, drifting to sleep to the lulling sound, clomp clomp clomp, opening my eyes some time later to the cold yellow light of a spring morning. The road is muddy; melting snow has created streams and tributaries. Hardy clusters of crocuses, purple and pink and white, sprout here and there in slush-stained fields. In three hours on the road, we pass only a few people. A stray dog emerges from the woods to trot alongside us for a while, then falls back. Now and then Papa turns around to check on me. I glare at him from my nest of blankets.

  Eventually he says, over his shoulder, “This doctor is an expert. I got his name from Dr. Heald. He says he will do only a few tests.”

  “How long will we be there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “More than one day?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will he cut me open?”

  He glances back at me. “I don’t know. No point worrying about that.”

  The blankets are scratchy against my skin. My stomach feels hollow. “Will you stay with me?”

  Papa takes the pipe out of his mouth, tamps it with a finger. Puts it back in and takes a puff. Blackie clip-clops through the mud and we lurch forward.

  “Will you?” I insist.

  He doesn’t answer and doesn’t look back again.

  It takes six hours to reach Rockland. We eat hard-boiled eggs and currant bread and stop once to rest the horse and relieve ourselves in the woods. The closer we get, the more panicked I become. By the time we arrive, Blackie’s back is foamy with sweat. Though it’s cold, I’m sweating too. Papa lifts me out of the buggy and sets me down, ties up the horse and attaches its feed bag. He leads me down the street by one hand, holding the address of the doctor in the other.

  I am woozy, trembling with fear. “Please don’t make me, Papa.”