Otherworldly Maine (35 page)

Touches of autumn color stood out against dark spruce along the shore, and hazy mountains swelled in the distance. The young Hayfords were now more than halfway between Little Sorrow and the cove from which they'd launched. Samuel sat with his back to the prow, working the oars, while Prudence had a clear view of their progress. The water close to shore had lightened to a soft drowned green; its little waves stroked the breaching boulders like one soothing the head of a pet.

Prudence tucked her own head into her shoulders and gazed absently at the baskets of red fruit. Once again her mind was busy with imaginary recipes. Peripheral motion drew her eye back to the cove. She noticed the silvery agitation of displacement and a smallish pale figure lifting from under the surf. It rose up slowly, hunched, and only fully standing after a moment, as if adjusting to the pull of gravity. At first she thought it was some kind of animal, but it had long light hair pouring across its back, and limbs like a person, and once it had its footing it scurried up onto the jagged granite outcrops.

“Samuel, Samuel! Quick—see there—something from the water rises!”

The boy turned. He saw the naked back of a young blond girl as she reached the cliff above the stone embankment and plunged into gloomy forest.

“By God!” Samuel exclaimed.

Prudence stood up to try to get a better look and the boat rocked in protest. She felt something thump against the boards beneath her and glanced into the water, thinking they had struck a rock. Samuel felt it, too, and was distracted from looking for the child. An ashen blur passed alongside them, too low in the water to discern clearly, but whatever it was, it trailed long dark hair sinuous as seaweed.

“Samuel!” Prudence grabbed her brother by the arm.

The boy's eyes were wide and he craned his neck this way and that to try and see the thing in the water, but it had slipped out of sight. He shook free of his sister and slapped his oars in the surf to frighten off whatever might be below. When nothing unusual happened, he started rowing again, suddenly eager to be on dry land.

Prudence's gaze darted from side to side, behind the boat and in front, but the glare of sunlight on the surface of the waves made it difficult to distinguish anything. She looked back toward the mainland as they moved nearer to it. Some distance down the shore from where she had seen the child, a spindly naked figure walked out of the ocean onto an inadvertent staircase of stones. It was a stern-faced old man with long white hair plastered to his bony shoulders. Beyond him, a nude young woman pulled herself from the tide, grabbing onto rockweed and ledge, her skin glistening as she emerged.

Prudence cried out and her brother spun to look. More of them appeared at unequal intervals along the coastline. An infant wiggled out like a seal, then scrabbled up the gravely slope of the quiet cove. Here two young boys, there a lumbering unclothed man. They came up dripping, silent, strangely determined.

“How is it they are not drowned?” Prudence asked, incredulous.

Samuel was too distracted to respond. “See there,” he said, “is it not Abner Tilden?”

The bulky, bearded man, like the rest, was oblivious of his observers and moved steadily up toward the wooded expanse.

Prudence replied, “Abner Tilden died Sunday last.”

“And there!” Samuel pointed. “Polly Fisher! And old Mrs. Pratt . . . Look—Jedediah, the minister's son! It cannot be so, for they all are dead.”

More children, a corpulent limping woman, and figures too far down the coast to distinguish, rose from the Atlantic and made their way up with the rest. They were all without clothes and all pale as chalk, and not a word came from any of them. They were like migrating birds returning to a place they knew, instinctively, single-mindedly. Off they went, into the swallowing green of the dark spruce forest.

Every one of them was gone before the Hayfords' skiff reached the gentle waters of the cove, but rather than go ashore, Samuel chose to float there. He and his sister looked at each other, then up into the trees, then at each other again. Knowing that those people, or ghosts, or whatever they were, might be in there, made them wonder if it would prove safer to stay in the boat.

“We must tell Mother,”
Prudence said after a long moment.

Samuel nodded and began to row. He felt the stone heart in his coat pocket pressing against his thigh. It suddenly felt very cold to him, as if it were a chunk of ice rather than granite.

Susanna Hayford worried. Winter was on the way and there was so much to do. So much preparation and relatively little time. So little money, and so few hands. The frost may have delighted her children, but to her it meant the cold season was upon them. Would there be food enough and wood to last? Was there a sufficient quantity of salt to preserve the meat that November's slaughter would provide? Would sickness come sneaking with fevers and coughs? Would she and her children survive to see the spring? While the sky boasted cloudless blue and the sun made the autumn colors pretty, there was indeed plenty to be concerned about.

It was hard enough carrying on after Abel's death, but the loss of her young Betsy had proved overwhelming. While once she had risen in the dark of day and whirled through the house, efficient and hardy, she now slept too long, and found the slightest task exhausting. It was as if the black of her mourning clothes had soaked deeply into her limbs and organs, a painful, unyielding weight. How, she wondered, could a creature in such a state provide for her children through a hard New England winter?

Following a quick breakfast of milk and bread, Susanna forced herself to get busy. Samuel and Prudence had already milked the cows, gathered eggs, fed the hens, and carried water into the kitchen, so she emptied her chamber pot, then went to the garden to see what the frost had done to the herbs that had yet to be harvested for drying. The situation did not seem so bad, the herbs being such sturdy plants, but time would tell. The frost was already melting off—she would wait for the sun to dry them and then gather the rest.

Next she worked in the formal parlor with its wainscot and paneled fireplace wall painted a warm mustard yellow. She took down the light curtains and put up the heavier winter ones in their place. She then did her sweeping and built up the kitchen fire to boil water for tea, having earned a few minutes rest.

If only her body had the vitality of her mind, she thought, for her head was a whirl of thoughts. She considered the possibility of selling off two of the cows, seeing as there probably would not be enough feed to last the lot of them all winter. That would give her some extra money, enough to hire a neighbor's girl to help with the fall whitewashing, and a man to repair the outbuildings and sow the winter hemp. Yes, Susanna thought, she might just be able to afford Bathsheba Hibbard's daughter for a few months, which would be a great help when it came time to cut up and salt meat, and make applesauce and cider to store.

After her tea, Susanna pushed herself to do more. She laundered the summer curtains and hung them to dry, thinking all the while about selling the long-handled bed warming pan, and—as much as she hated entertaining the idea—the tall clock in the parlor that had belonged to her father. That would give her money to stock up on molasses and nutmegs and cinnamon, and perhaps leave some to put by in case stores ran out and she needed to buy sugar and meat toward winter's end.

Susanna killed a chicken to prepare for the final meal of the day, and sat out in the dooryard on the milking stool, plucking it. She glanced over at the barn and thought that if she
did
sell the clock, the proceeds might better be spent fixing the building's leaky roof. The parson's son John would be agreeable for a reasonable sum, she imagined, and while slow-witted, he was known to put his back into whatever task came his way.

With the naked chicken sitting on the table, Susanna went back to the garden and quickly collected the rest of the herbs. She brought them into the kitchen and began stringing them up where there were already festoons of drying apples and red peppers and aromatic plumes of mint and savory. She was reaching above her head with a bundle of sage when she heard soft knocking at the front door. Only a stranger would use the front door, she thought, wiping her hands on her apron and adjusting her white day cap as she walked through the house. The rapping came again, more insistently. Susanna opened the door and looked down.

There stood her dead daughter Betsy, her soggy blond hair dripping down her small naked body.

*      *      *

Samuel and Prudence moved as quickly as they could without spilling their baskets of cranberries. By the time they came out of the woods it was afternoon, and the shortening September light was casting severe shadows. The Hayford house awaited, shingled and unadorned, surrounded on all sides by a horizon of jagged spruce trees. Wood smoke streamed from the big center chimney and pleasantly scented the air. The children panted up to the rear door and rushed in, calling to their mother, even before they saw her.

When they did see her, they were breathless and words of the strange and frightful emergence they had witnessed began to fly from their mouths. But then they fell silent. The pretty woman in her dark mourning clothes looked up and smiled, though her cheeks were wet with tears. She was sitting by the fire in the cozy family parlor with a child on her lap. It was a small pale girl with sodden blond hair, wrapped like a baby in Susanna's red riding cloak.

“Our Betsy has come back,” Susanna said softly. “God has returned her to us.”

The youngest of the Hayford children turned her head and gazed impassively at her siblings. She was healthy looking, but for her pallor. There was nothing to suggest that her breathing, blinking body had ever been decaying under earth, let alone for half a year. While the girl's hair was light like her father's had been, she had her mother's dark eyes, though there was something curious about them now. In each pupil there was a thread of moonlight loosely wound in a spiral. They glistened like periwinkles kissed by a sea.

There was little to distinguish the village of Newcomb from the expansive wilderness around it. No central cluster of shops and offices, no streets crowded with homes. The buildings were scattered, set apart from one another, divided by farmland and the undulating, heavily forested terrain that appeared as if it could swallow this humble attempt at civilization with a modicum of effort. The meetinghouse stood alone, as did the blacksmith's shop and the mills and the tavern. Some of the farms, which comprised the bulk of the buildings, were not even within view of neighbors.

One such farm belonged to Abner Tilden's widow, Mary. She didn't have the strength to finish sweeping her kitchen, so she sat down in the bow-back Windsor chair her spouse had been fond of and started to weep. Not a week had passed since she'd put Abner in the ground, and she still found herself expecting him to walk in at any time. When something tapped on the window, she turned to see her husband's pale, puffy face, with its beard like a clump of dark foam, gawking in at her through one of the small panes.

Another farm, belonging to Tolford Bird, dominated a rise that offered expansive views of bleeding maples and mountains. The property was encroached on its western side by wild-armed pines and an army of somber spruce trees. The farmer's orchard took up a good deal of the area at the bottom of the incline, close to a stream where he kept moose snares. This is where he and his five surviving children had spent the last hour, picking apples. Two sons, Henry and Owen, had died of “lung fever” the previous winter.

The youngest boy, Seth, who was seven, picked his way up and over a rise and now worked apart from the others. His small size allowed him to reach areas under gnarly branches where his father and older brothers would not have been able to fit. He was about to sample an apple when he lost his grip and it dropped at his feet. There was enough of a slant to allow the fruit to roll and Seth bent, grabbing as he chased after it, but the wayward fruit eluded him until it came to rest between two bony un-shod feet. Seth lifted his head, his eyes passing over bare legs and an un-clothed torso, on up to the gaunt, staring face of his dead brother Owen.

A group of men were bunching Indian-corn stalks into raggedy shocks when they noticed a nude old fellow with long white hair emerging from shady woods at the edge of the field. One of the men recognized the figure as his grandfather, Braddock Gliven.

Benjamin Fisher and his hired man Jeremiah were unloading a cart-load of pumpkins and squash to put up for winter when they saw the landowner's young daughter Polly, her body uncovered and damp, walking slowly toward them through a yellow rain of twirling birch leaves. Polly, who died two years before, four days after falling off a ledge onto the rocks of Dunning's Point, moved numbly through complaining chickens in the dooryard, passing her stunned father and his worker as if they weren't there. She stopped at the entry of the simple one-story house and rapped with her small, faded fist.

By the time the sun lowered behind dark spruce hills, there was hardly a house in the village of Newcomb that went unvisited by the naked, sea-dripping dead.

Dusk fell and the low-ceilinged family parlor of the Hayford house was as homey as it could be, with a vigorous hardwood fire burning, and candle glow, and the woodwork of the mantel and doors and wainscoting a rich blue-gray that seemed to soak in the shadows. Susanna would not be torn away from her Betsy, and so Prudence prepared a meal using the chicken that the woman had plucked earlier.

The youngest child had been dressed in one of her own frocks, with which Susanna had not been able to part. The family, reunited, ate in that same room, safe from the September chill that floated an icy freckling of stars. Outside the innumerable trees had merged into a single darkness, a wall around the farm, the tops of evergreens like flaked-stone arrowheads against the indigo sky.