More Than You Know (14 page)

I threaded the needle. We made three quick tacks, close-hauled,

to leave the nun to port, the middle-grounds spar to starboard, and the

double black cans off the eastern shore to starboard as well. Then we

headed across the wind for an easy reach out to Beal Island. I felt like

a million bucks as I let the mainsail out, and Connie was smiling to

himself.

I think it was right about then I began to feel like singing or

laughing out loud. It was euphoric. A perfect, joyous, gleaming mo-

ment. We couldn’t be stopped. I couldn’t run into Edith. No one could

expect me to do anything except exactly what I was doing. The sky

was wide and blue and bright, the sun was warm, and the colors . . .

the gray water, violet-blue sky, and black-green shore lined with gran-

ite gray . . . I can see them still, more intense than any landscape I’ve

seen since. I felt that if only I could take that vision in with open eyes

and open heart, I would be able to carry it with me into the world,

glowing inside me like a talisman.

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Conary reached into the cuddy and produced a bottle of beer

and a church key. He opened the bottle and handed it to me. “First

blood.”

“Thanks.”

He touched my hand as I handed the bottle back. We didn’t have

to talk. From the beginning we could talk, and we did when we wanted

to, but we never had to.

There was a thud and a hard blow to the hull. Conary sat up.

“What was that? A lobster pot?”

I hadn’t seen a thing. We looked at our wake; twenty feet back

there was a dark shape floating.

“Come about,” said Conary. We tacked and sailed back, but long

before we reached it I knew what it was. A body. A baby seal. Its

head lolled back and forth on the waves as if its neck were broken,

and its flippers waved like kelp. I wanted to weep. Conary put a hand

on my arm. I brought
Frolic
into the wind so that the sails flapped,

and we wallowed in the water beside it, like a noisy wraith.

“Hannah, you didn’t kill it.”

“Of course I killed it. I was sailing.”

“You didn’t kill it. You can’t hit a live seal. They dive.”

“It’s a baby.”

“It still knew how to dive. They’re born knowing.”

“What’s it doing way out here? It was lost.”

“It was dead.” He took the tiller and sculled for a minute until

the boat turned and the sails filled. I felt sick. I couldn’t tell if he was

telling me the truth or trying to protect me, and I didn’t want to ask.

So in a different quality of silence we made our approach to the green-

black hulk of Beal Island.

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ThisistheotherdayfromearlychildhoodSallieremembered.

She was seven. It started with an argument, as did many days.

Her father was getting ready to sail to town on the main. Her

mother said she wanted to go too. Her father said he wouldn’t take her.

“I’m marooned here!” Claris cried.

“Get your own boat, then. I don’t like to spend all afternoon staring

into space while you gaggle with your kinfolk.”

“You’re a cold man, Danial!”

Danial looked at her, unmoved. “That may be, but you knew what

I was when you married me.”

“I did not!”

Danial laughed. “Then you should have. I haven’t changed.”

“You have!”

“That’s one of your stories. I am who I’ve always been.”

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So far, this was all familiar. Claris hurled grievances, Danial let them

land and fall, as if the very thought of being hurt by them amused him.

But on this day he turned on her and added, “Meanwhile, you made some

promises on our wedding day yourself.”

“Promises! You promised to cherish me! You said it in church!”

Danial stared at her, then smiled. (This was particularly frightening,

a man who smiled when he was angry, as if pleased at having his bitter

worldview confirmed.) “So I did.” (Smiling.) “And I’m not the one who

changed.”

“You won’t even take me to town!”

“Not my fault if you fooled yourself,” said Danial, and he went

off down to his boat landing.

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Even Sallie knew that the joke was, her mother really didn’t care if

she went to town or not. If she didn’t go, then the minute they saw

Danial away past the headland, Amos went to the schoolhouse for his

fiddle. They could play music all day. Amos played the fiddle tunes Uncle

Leander taught him, and Claris played the organ. They tried to teach

Sallie to sing along, but she was hopeless. (A Haskell, her mother said,

with a downward pull of one corner of her mouth.) But Sallie loved to

listen, and she danced with her dolls. Sometimes, if he had the time, old

Virgil Leach came down with his washtub bass, and young Bowdoin

brought his fiddle or an empty molasses jug, which he played by blowing

across the neck of it, making a sound like a tuba. Mrs. Leach would come

in too, and she and Claris sang. Sallie was happy on those music days

because her mother smiled and laughed. Then, when someone caught sight

of the gaff-rigged sail coming up the bay, the Leaches would tip their

hats and skedaddle and Amos would run his fiddle back up to the school-

house.

On this morning, after Danial’s little boat was out of sight, Amos

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came in on the run with his fiddle. It was a weirdly hot and still day

in September, the kind of day when Captain Osgood would tap the

glass in his barometer and watch the needle fall. Hurricane weather, he

called it, or earthquake weather. But the morning was cloudless as yet,

and Mrs. Leach had left her book
Songs That Never Die
with Claris so

she could play through them. Mrs. Leach had an idea that if Claris ac-

companied her, she could offer lessons in voice to the ladies of the is-

land.

Claris could read music and had tried to teach Amos, but Amos’s

ear was so quick that he could play any song through if he’d heard it

once, so it was hard to get him to see the value of reading. “You’re just

like Otis,” Claris would say, shaking her head, her eyes glowing. When

they had new sheet music, as now, Claris would play through the melody,

and then they’d go to town, with Amos stomping his foot and adding

embellishments around his mother’s steady song line.

What they didn’t know, this still, hot morning, was that Danial’s

main halyard had parted before he was halfway down the bay. With the

sail dumped in the cockpit like a heap of laundry, he’d had to turn around

and beat home on his jib, feeling put out and foolish.

It was far too early for anyone to be watching for his sails. He had

plenty of time to hear the music floating out over his cove as he sailed

into his landing and moored his boat. He had plenty of time to listen to

his wife’s laughter and his son’s stomping foot as he came up the path

to the porch. Plenty of time to hear the sudden panicked silence as his

step was heard at the door, turned into an ogre to his children in his

own house, by his own wife.

The fight was terrible. Amos tried to defend his mother, which

made Danial roar and turn on Amos. Sallie sat in the corner with her

doll, watching in horror as the three cloud giants who filled her sky

clashed together in thunder and lightning. She and the doll followed the

battles with matching wide-open black marble eyes.

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In the end, and it came quickly, Amos said he was leaving. “There

will be no peace in this house until I’m out of it,” he said. Though Sallie

wondered much later what sort of peace he had thought there would be

even then. “I’ll go to sea, like my uncles.”

“No,” cried Claris, in a wail of terror.

“Good,” roared Danial. “That’s a perfect Osgood thing to do.”

After a minute to pack a kit bag, Amos was out the door on the

run to the landing.

“He’s going to start by stealing my boat,” said Danial to Claris.

Claris had begun to weep as if her heart were a piece of cloth and

she could feel it ripping. She wasn’t ready to have Amos leave. It was too

soon. She’d never been able to picture him leaving, even when he would

be grown. Danial looked at her with her eyes swimming, so undone by

grief (and of course not for him or their marriage, never for that) that

he didn’t know whether to comfort her or slap her.

Finally he said roughly, “He won’t get far. Shackle’s broke, main

halyard’s parted. The worst that will happen is he’ll spend the night in

the woods and be back at breakfast time.”

Danial went out to the backyard and spent several hours with his

ax, splitting out kindling. Claris packed up Amos’s fiddle (Otis’s fiddle)

and took it to her room upstairs. (Amos and Sallie slept upstairs also:

Danial slept in a room off the kitchen that had once been a buttery.)

Claris came down and put her music away and went to her rug loom,

where she rocked in and back, in and back, moving the shuttle along the

cotton warp threads. All the while only Sallie, watching speechless at

the window, knew that the little gaff-rigged sailboat had hoisted sail, the

halyard jury-rigged somehow, and had scudded out past the headland and

out of sight. As the hour passed, and her father in the backyard raised

his ax and whacked it down, and her mother rocked into her loom and

then back, waiting for morning, when their son would drag in ready to

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apologize, the boat was limping far down the middle of the bay with a

line squall filling in behind it.

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It was Bowdoin Leach who found the hull, demasted and floating

upside down, and towed her home next morning. As far, at least, as Danial

knew, his son was never seen again.

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Conarysailedforapatchoflimegreenmeadowontheridge

of the island. I looked at the evergreens and scrub hardwood that

crowded the shore. It was amazing how dense it had grown in the

short time since the farms there were abandoned. The island people

must have felt the trees and undergrowth trying to edge them off the

land every day. It must have been like living in a house where every

morning you find that all the rooms are smaller, and all the walls have

drawn in toward you and have to be forced back.

We put into March Cove, a small horseshoe of beach surrounded

by rock. Above the rock the land slopes steeply to the ridge of the

island. The hull of an ancient fishing boat had been pulled up onto

the land, and it lay there among wild raspberry bushes, weathering

and looking oddly at home. Just above the dark line of dried seaweed

that marks the high waterline, there was a circle of beach rocks for a

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picnic fire, and a fat barkless log, silver with age, had been pulled into

place as a bench or backrest for those around the fire. It’s a true sand

beach too, not pebbles. Because the tide was nearing low, the beach

stretched for thirty feet or so down to the water, and the sand glistened

like warm gray glass in the sun. It was utterly silent. The colors were

so vivid that the cove seemed to me enchanted. It made me feel the

way some illustrations did in books I loved as a child.
The Mysterious

Island,
N. C. Wyeth, with the blues bluer than blue, and the woods

full of apes and pirates.

As we skimmed into the cove, Conary pulled up
Frolic
’s cen-

terboard. I could see gray boulders covered with rust-colored lichens

inches below us in the clear water, but we glided over them and

nudged up onto the sand with a gritty crunching sound. I dropped over

the side of the boat and held the painter while Conary furled the sails.

We were silent. Sand crabs played around my toes in the sun-warmed

water.

When he had finished furling the sails, he cleated and coiled

all his lines. I liked that. There was no one here to see us and it

seemed a calm day. It would do no harm, one would think, to leave

the boat in a more slapdash way, but it never occurred to Conary.

When he had finished, he pulled a little anchor from the cuddy and

tossed it up onto the beach. He reeled it back toward him until it bit

into the sand and held; then he cleated the anchor line on
Frolic
’s

bow. He’d calculated the length of rope so she wouldn’t end up

with her nose underwater if the tide came up under her before we

were ready to go. Last, he tied a light line to the bow cleat over the

anchor line and carried it up the shore, where he settled a large rock

on top of it. That was the painter, for pulling the boat to us once

she was floating.

*

*

*

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We set about our clamming and must have dug for two hours.

The sun was high, and the tide was all the way out.
Frolic
lay beached

on drying sand. All over the tide flat there were holes with piles of