More Than You Know (3 page)

Osgood brothers, John and Asa, having married sisters.) The two families

had once celebrated birthdays and holidays with family dinner together,

but there were now so many of them they couldn’t all sit down indoors

at one time, even if some sat in the parlor. In summer they often ate

together outdoors, but in colder weather they ate separately and gathered

after the meal. They usually gathered in Mrs. John Osgood’s house, since

it was she who had the parlor organ.

The third thing was the rabbits. Claris’s oldest brother, Simon, had

caught a huge jackrabbit in a snare last fall; he had brought it home alive

and left it in a sack in the barn, where Claris had found it. He had gone

in to tell Mother that he’d caught dinner, and come out again to find

dinner being rocked in his little sister’s arms. He stood over her, arms

akimbo, and watched as the big wild terrified animal gradually stopped

trembling, and Claris stared at Simon with her small blue eyes.

“I suppose you give him a name already,” he said.

“Esau,” said Claris. Simon started to laugh.

“For my brother Esau is a hairy man?”

Claris nodded gravely.

“You beat all,” Simon said. He went back into the house to explain

to his mother there would be no meat for supper.

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“Biscuits and grease again, Mother,” said John Osgood. His daugh-

ters seemed always to amuse him. His wife looked sadly at the onions

and apples she’d started cutting to cook with the rabbit.

“Get the molasses, Mother,” said John, and his wife set about put-

ting away the onions and getting out the flour and shortening with a

resignation that also made her husband laugh. The set of her back and

the way she plopped the onions back into their barrel was a wordless

code old lovers understand. Mrs. Osgood was saying she’d rather eat

biscuits in bacon fat six nights a week than have a set-to with her second

daughter, even though Claris was only nine.

After supper, Simon went out to the barn and knocked together a

cage for Esau, and that night after Claris went upstairs to bed, she could

hear roars of laughter at Simon’s expense from her father and brothers as

Simon told again and once again of walking into the barn, the taste of

stewed rabbit already on his tongue, to find Claris’s blue eyes staring out

at him and, right beneath her chin, the large terrified eyes of his former

dinner.

Later that winter Simon caught a second rabbit. This one he never

even tried to take to the kitchen; he just dumped it into the cage with

Esau and went to tell Claris he’d brought her a Jacob. However, Jacob

should more properly have been called Martha, for by the end of March,

Claris knew for a certainty that Jacob was expecting bunnies. Simon dis-

covered it too and thought it a huge joke, though he didn’t tease Claris

about it. Alone of his brothers and sisters, Claris did not take to that

sort of thing.

He said, “I’ll build you a separate cage for her.”

“Why?” Claris resented his assuming he knew more about her rab-

bits than she did.

“Because it’s what you do. Separate the mothers—you’ve been to

Mrs. Leaf’s.” Mrs. Leaf was a widow in the village who raised rabbits for

meat.

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“No,” said Claris, “they want to be together.” Her rabbits were not

like Mrs. Leaf’s in any way. She took to slipping out to the barn every

night after supper to sit in the steamy warm dark, listening to the oxen

snort and chew, with Jacob in her lap, whispering into the warm fur.

Claris had developed a growing conviction that the rabbit babies would

be born on her birthday. She and Esau shared a running joke about how

she was known in the woods, a heroine among rabbits, for having saved

him from the stewpot. It was certain that this litter would be in her

special care.

On the silver dim morning of her birthday, Claris dressed silently

and slipped down the stairs. She knew exactly where to step so as not to

make a creak or sound; it was hard, in that house, to be alone with your

thoughts, or your God, or your rabbits. One creaking board, and she

knew Mabel would be after her like a hungry shadow wanting hugs or

stories or just to be allowed to follow her. (“Can I come with you, Claris-

Claris? Claris-Claris-Went-to-Paris?” And, “How could he have babies,

Claris? Is it a miracle? A boy having babies?”) Jacob’s belly had been so

great with children last night that Claris didn’t see how the moment could

hold off much longer. Besides, Jacob had made her nest in the straw

Claris brought her.

k

Claris paused inside the barn door to breathe the animal smells and

let her eyes adjust to the dim light. The rafters were lined with barn

swallows; they stirred and fluttered as a crack of morning light followed

her in and then vanished as the door shut behind her. Tense with delight,

Claris went to the rabbit cage and knelt beside it. Esau greeted her

brightly. He pressed his nose against the wire, and she held her flat palm

against it for him to nuzzle.

Jacob lay on her side. She looked sick. Her belly was stretched and

deflated; it seemed somehow draped across the straw. Jacob’s eye was

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glazed, and she made no notice of Claris. At first, Claris could see no

sign of the babies. No tiny blind bunnies burrowed against Jacob’s belly.

Then as Esau stirred around, having lost her attention, Claris noticed the

debris in the corner of the cage where he made his droppings. Tiny bits

of fur were stuck to the straw with bright patches of blood. She saw a

minuscule paw clinging there, and here and there a pink translucent needle

of bone. The bunnies had been born, and Esau had eaten them.

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I’llhavetodescribethehousetoyou,becauseitwasunusual.

That’s what Edith liked about it; she liked to have things different.

When my father said he wanted us to go to Dundee for the summer,

she couldn’t think on what grounds to refuse, but she said she’d have

to have a place of her own, two women can’t share a kitchen. I don’t

know about that myself; I’ve seen women seemed to be having the

time of their lives, chopping and stirring and laughing together, but

I’ll grant you two women couldn’t share a kitchen if one of them was

Edith. As it happened, my grandmother broke her hip that spring and

had to be living downstairs all summer. It wasn’t the year for her to

have grandchildren underfoot, plus Edith, so that settled that.

I’m not sure how it was worked, whether Edith traveled up to

Dundee to find a place to rent, or whether she did it through the mail.

One evening, though, she announced she’d taken a place: an old

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schoolhouse, made into a cottage by two maiden ladies. Nice high

ceilings, big windows, with big open rooms, “not all little and cut up

and dark,” Edith said, “like so many old houses.” (Gracious of her,

since she meant like this house, my grandparents’ house.)

If you’re heating with wood and lighting with kerosene, as this

house was built for, you do want to keep your rooms cozy. And you

do keep them stacked one on top of the other so the heat from the

stove downstairs carries up and warms the bedrooms. Well, it wasn’t

what Edith wanted. And she was right about the schoolhouse; it was

lovely. It was a white square thing, pretty good size, perched like a

torso on a broad skirt of rock above the water. If it had had a school-

house belfry for a head, it would have looked just like a person. Its

face, door for mouth and bedroom windows for eyes, was on the north

side, facing the road.

It was out past the post office, past the town park where the

swings are. The downstairs was mostly one big room except for a

kitchen in the back, with a nice back porch right over the water. There

were three bedrooms upstairs, a little one in the front looking out

toward the road to town that was mine, and a big square one at the

top of the stairs for Stephen, and then one at the back overlooking the

bay for Edith. And, of course, for my father, not that he managed to

be there that summer more than a day.

I liked it better than this house, my grandparents’ house, in one

way; this house is too far from town to walk. When we were little and

could play all day in the cove here, it didn’t matter, but that summer

alone with Edith it would have mattered a lot. This house, and those

couple or three down closer to the shore, was built for the quarry

workers in the 1880s. My grandfather came from Vermont to manage

the quarry. He married Frances Friend, from one of the old Dundee

families, and stayed. His stoneworks cut granite for the Brooklyn

Bridge and the post office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Local people

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were proud of that, and often they’d travel to visit the buildings and

monuments their stone made.

The one thing I thought when I first saw that house Edith had

rented, it was an odd place for a schoolhouse. Down on that point,

instead of right up in the village—I thought maybe they called it the

Schoolhouse because one of the ladies who fixed it up had been a

schoolteacher. Mrs. Pease at the library told me that.

The Ladies Social Library is that small brick building on the

corner of Main Street and the Eastward road. In those days it was set

about with huge elm trees. Gone now—Dutch elm disease took them

all. The library has a big fireplace at the end, where you could curl

up and read on a rainy day, and even when it was fine, it was a lovely

place, with its welcoming musty leather smell, to get away from your

stepmother.

“Don’t tell me who you are, you’re as pretty as your mother,”

said Esther Pease, when I came in that first afternoon. ‘‘Are you pay-

ing a visit to your grandmother?”

“We’re here for the summer. We’re in the white house down on

the point.”

“Oh, did you take Miss Hamor’s house? I always thought that

was a lovely house.” Esther Pease was a talker, as I was to find out.

Her table behind the reference desk was stacked with hurt books, and

spools of red binding tape, and bottles of glue, but I never saw her

mending. She was always out in front helping some child understand

the card catalog, or discussing the rental books with the women from

the summer colony. The new best-sellers were for rent for two cents

a day, which was a lot of money. Mrs. Pease liked to hear how each

reader enjoyed her book; she’d tuck report cards in the front. “Mrs.

Cluett says it’s not his best, but she liked it quite well. B minus.”

Many days that summer I helped with shelving returned books,

or sat in back and mended with Mrs. Allen. Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Pease

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seemed glad of the help and content to have me around. They were

cheerful and easy to be with because they so enjoyed each other’s

company. That first day I asked Mrs. Pease what she knew about the

house.

“It’s been empty a little time now,” Mrs. Pease said. “Miss Fan-

nie Hamor owned it. I took Latin from her; so did your mother.”

I asked what Miss Hamor was like. “Tough as a pitch knot,”

said Mrs. Pease. “She lived there with Miss Kennedy, who drove the

town taxi and sold jellies. She died, Miss Kennedy. And Miss Hamor,

people were surprised at how undone she was. No one thought she’d

been all that kind to Miss Kennedy in life. She stayed on in the house,

but she wasn’t herself. Nella B. Foss at the post office, she keeps track

of those that live alone. If Miss Hamor didn’t come for her mail two-

three days in a row, she’d send someone over with a plate of berries

or some pickles to call her to the door and make sure she hadn’t died.

That’s how they came to find her after her fall. She fell right down

her own stairs, and lay there all night. She’d had a shock. They took

her to a nursing home, but she never came back to herself. She died

soon after. Her nephew owns it now; he thought he had the house

rented out last summer, but the people didn’t stay. I don’t know why.

Have you seen our armor, over there? They say it belonged to Ma-

gellan.”

The reading room was filled with scrimshaw and kimonos, ships’

models and various oddments brought back by local sailors from their

voyages around the world. It was surprising to think of the ships that

were built right here at Dundee, brigs and barks and ships of a thou-

sand tons and more. Right down there at the boatyard, where they

build little peapods now and store a few yachts in the winter. There

was a brickyard here too. The old brick houses you see anywhere from

Dundee down the Neck and beyond, those bricks were fired right here

in the village out of local clay.

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