A Star for Mrs. Blake (7 page)

Once she was in, Linwood closed the door and tapped her window two times for no good reason. He got around to his side and slid into the seat that welcomed his six-foot frame and lanky legs, molded from driving hundreds of county roads, recording in a notebook the locations of houses, streams, and boundaries in miles, tenths, and hundredths of a mile. Measuring things brought him peace of mind; and he knew he was about to plunge into uncharted territory.

They drove in silence. The woods were at the peak of growth, treetops meeting in a green canopy over the sunlit road. They passed through pine forests and crossed a placid river. Summer had brought out roadside attractions like gnats. The hand-lettered signs advertised
“Crafters,” “Pies,” “Collectibles and Unusuals,” “Cold Ice Cream,” “Used
Books,” “Country Cookin’,” “Mulch and Hay for Sale,”
and there was the Half Moon Inn with red awnings, famous for its cold potato soup.

“I know I shouldn’t be nervous,” Cora said finally.

If everything went smoothly and she met Katie McConnell at the station, the rest of Party A should take care of itself. Minnie Seibert, heeding Cora’s advice, had gotten her two grown daughters to gang up on their father and convince him to let their mother go. Mrs. Olsen was coming down from Cambridge by limousine. She had business in New York City, and would meet them on the boat. The only one Cora hadn’t heard from at all was Mrs. Russell, and Mrs. Olsen had just the Prouts Neck address for her. In any case, there was nothing Cora could do about Mrs. Russell now.

“They’ll show up one way or another,” she said out loud.

“Well then,” Linwood replied. “You’ll be swell.”

Still, she fretted. “It’s not like I’ve never traveled before.”

“It’s not like a picnic at Orchard Beach,” he said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

“No, it’s not like anywhere you’ve ever been,” she agreed.

They took a curve. The hog slid heavily across the truck bed.

“… I guess that’s why they say it’s a pilgrimage,” Cora said.

She worked the word in her mouth like a cherry pit, seeking the essence. The more everyone made a fuss, the more she wondered. They said the pilgrimages were “good for the morale of the country,” but how would Mrs. Cora Blake’s going to France make anyone forget about bread lines and folks who’d lost their jobs living in tents? For herself, she didn’t need a row of crosses to know that Sammy was gone. She knew it every time she passed the girls’ room and instead of her boy there was little Kathleen fast asleep, with the covers thrown off and the cat perched on her rump. Sometimes Cora had to sternly remind herself that she loved her nieces.

“How’s the time?” she asked.

The only way to get off the island was to cross the bar and then take the car ferry. The causeway was banked with stones, but high tide could leave you stranded.

Linwood glanced at his watch. “Tide’s out. We’ll be fine,” he said and took a sudden left off the main road.

“Where are you going? You missed the turn!”

“Don’t you worry,” Linwood said with a tight grin. “I’ve got a little something up my sleeve.”

Cora hoped it wasn’t whoopee. Then they’d truly miss the train.

“Lin—”

“Just be patient … give it a minute …”

They cruised through a village and crossed the bay and soon they were on the shore road.

“What are you doing?” she asked, not a little annoyed. “Can we please go back?”

And then she saw where he was taking her.

“Linwood! Don’t go down that road!”

But he pulled into the driveway of Tide’s End, her family’s old farm, now deserted. They drove past the familiar quartet of maple trees until he finally brought the car to a stop between the house and barn. At one time they were painted bright white with black gambrel roofs and red doors, but both were showing age and disrepair, most dramatically in the disintegrated front porch and missing shingles from the west-facing side of the barn. It was distressing to see the broken pump, the lonely birdbath, the rusted pulleys where clotheslines once told the story of the family in long johns and pillowcases, and the flagpole, empty.

“Thought you’d like a look,” Linwood said.

“For God’s sake, why now?”

Her voice sounded so strangled that he had to get out of the car. The fields were mostly fallow except for the one Big Ole Uncle Percy kept up in order to sell off hay. When Cora was a child they’d had five milking cows, chickens, sheep, vegetable gardens, and oxen to plow the fields. There were seven small upstairs bedrooms and during the summers her mother would take in boarders, providing three full meals a day. The girls had to clean rooms, wait on tables, pick corn, and forage for berries. Cora learned early about hard work and endurance; she hated the hens but collected the eggs. That was her job, so she did it.

Summer nights the neighbor kids came over and they cranked ice cream and played Red Light, Green Light between the buildings.
They’d get lost in the dark and scare each other with flashlights. And although they weren’t allowed, they’d sneak into the barn and climb the perilous spiral staircase to the top of the cupola, which Grandpa Harding had built between travels, with a sailing ship for a weather vane. The vista up there was unobstructed from the bay to the mountains, and he’d installed a compass to instruct the children how to find the most important landmarks. But now the cupola meant the opposite for Cora—the place where she’d escape when Sammy was an infant, to be alone with her shame, until her mother called that it was time to nurse. The place she’d hidden the trunk of memories, and their secrets.

Cora swung out of the car. The harbor breeze had been fresh; just eleven miles away the country air was pollen-filled and mild. Linwood stood in the overgrown grass, fiddling with a daisy.

“Do you think about coming back here?” he asked.

“The soil’s not good. Mainly clay, isn’t that what you said?”

He nodded. “You’d need help to get it running.”

“And where would that help come from?”

“I could do a soil analysis at the university. See what else it’s good for. You could hire out the work and keep on librarying.” He twirled the stem in his hand. “It’s no secret that we get along,” he said out of nowhere.

“What do you mean?” she asked, alarmed. “Who else knows about us? Not Big Ole Uncle Percy—oh my Lord—”

“Nobody, Cora, nobody. I’m talking just between you and me—you know it and I know it.”

“Yes. Okay. We get along,” she said, not seeing the point. “Unless you make me miss that train.”

“A shame to leave the place idle.”

“I think my farming days are past.”

“It could be our future.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Why don’t we get married?”

For a long moment Cora lost her words. “What about Grace?” she managed.

“I could ask you the same. Would you hold back because of Curtis?”

“I might.”

“I don’t believe it. I’ve never heard you say one good thing about that fellow. Grace would tell me to go ahead and live another life. I firmly believe that. Curtis would, too, if he cared about you at all.”

Cora took a few confused steps in the direction of the barn. Linwood’s romantic idea to bring her here had boomeranged in ways she didn’t have the means to say, but it was there before them in the rust and weeds. Much had been lost over the last decade, leaving her hollowed out, almost seeking isolation so as not to stir the eddy of desire with its lacerating bits and pieces of the past. She didn’t have it in her. The parts that had capacity for hope had all scarred over and shut down. When two people cherished each other, deeply and steadfastly, it also meant that they were prepared to carry on. Not for one’s own sake, but because of an unspoken promise to the other:
We are joined in life as well as death
. She didn’t have the strength of character to love Linwood Moody the way he deserved to be loved. He was too much of a trusting soul to grasp the truth: she wasn’t good enough for him; her heart was not that big.

“You’re a wonderful man—”

“Just say yes.”

Linwood gave her the daisy. He’d tied the stem in a loop like a ring, like they did when they were kids.

“Look!” he said with a hopeful smile. “We even have a witness!” Meaning the dead pig.

Cora didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead, she touched his cheek.

“You’ve been giving this some thought.”

“Little bit.”

They looked into each other’s eyes and saw the questions there.

“Can we just go?” she asked quietly.

“Sure. Sure we can,” Linwood said, and they went back to the car and down the short gravel driveway to the main road. He drove through the quiet village, shoulders tense and staring straight ahead,
until the blue truck broke from the archway of trees and hit the causeway, Eggemoggin Reach fanning out in all directions.

They were miles past the farm by then, with no further conversation on the subject of marriage. The windows were all the way down and Cora had been engrossed by the marshy breeze blowing straight through. As Linwood said, the tide was out, unrolling before them unexpected distances of sea and sky. The busy shipyards on the far shore of Sedgwick looked like a blurry brown pencil sketch. Closer, almost under their wheels, wide mudflats were steadily exposed by the receding water. The image had come to Cora of Sammy and his friends, maybe six years old, playing in Blue Hill Harbor with the tide way out like this, poking around with driftwood in mud up to their hips. The gulls went insane for mussels, fighting on all sides of them in a mad barrage of wings and snapping beaks, while the mothers watched from a grassy rise, gossiping and knitting, never thinking that the mud of faraway France might someday swallow their sturdy bare-chested little boys. At that point the memory vanished and Cora was left with terrifying fear—had she left the special international Gold Star Mothers passport in a dresser drawer?

At the same moment, Linwood was seeing underwater volcanoes and gray-white granite plutons going all the way down to the center of the earth, a scientific reality that might have been reassuring if it hadn’t brought to mind the chilling fact he faced every day in his work with rocks and minerals, that the origins of the universe were unintelligible. He appeared to be the man in charge of things, wearing a man’s hat, skimming a truck along a body of water with both hands on the big leather wheel, but he was hamstrung by an awareness that he believed few outside the field of geology could grasp, of five hundred million years of time, and the pointlessness of any destination; even the convergence of the road ahead, allegedly leading to the ferry ramp, was an optical illusion. In an accidental universe that had been in flux for millennia, what was the point of holding back? Why not make a stand?

“I have some news,” he finally said. “They offered me a new job.”

Cora had been frantically rummaging in the tartan tweed travel bag on her lap, tomato-red and brown with leather handles that Grandpa
Harding had brought back from Australia. The size was more suited to a man, but it was practically unworn except for the smell of cologne and clove cigarettes that lingered in the silk lining, and that’s what she loved; it was like taking her father along on another globe-trotting journey. She prayed to him to please let the passport be inside.

She dug past wallet, comb, hairpins, itinerary, the bundle of letters from Party A, travel diary, and the new Willa Cather novel,
Shadows on the Rock
, which had just come into the library.

“Who offered you a job?” she asked distractedly.

“The fellow I’m working with on the Penobscot County survey. He asked if I’d like to move over to the Soil Conservation Service and I told him I would consider it.”

“But you never said anything.”

“It’s civil service, you have to apply. I just got the letter that I made it.”

“That’s wonderful,” Cora said with relief. She’d found the passport underneath the snack she’d brought for the train—homemade bread and butter and an apple, wrapped in a handkerchief.
Thank you, Papa
.

She closed the bag. “When do you start?”

“We’re supposed to report the end of July. The in-service training starts in August.”

“That’ll work out fine. Just when I get back! We’ll go out to Great Spruce Island and celebrate,” she said, thinking that would please him.

“I was kind of hoping it would be an engagement celebration.”

“Lin—”

“Hear me out. I don’t want to put any pressure on, but I have to tell them yes or no.”

“Tell them yes. It’s an opportunity.”

He couldn’t seem to look at her. “The job’s in Massachusetts.”

“Massachusetts?”

“Pittsfield, Mass. Western side of the state. It would mean a big jump in salary,” he went on, almost apologetically. “Forty-two hundred a year. That’s a thirty-three-percent increase over what the University of Maine is offering.”

“Do you want this job?”

“I’m happy where I am. The thing is, I’d be a lot happier with you.”

She folded her arms. “I’m not moving to Massachusetts, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Listen, I don’t want to leave the island, either.”

His profile was steady and he drove with great concentration, as if they were navigating a wind-whipped lightning storm instead rolling along on a mild day.

“We could make the farm work, Cora. If you wanted to. That’s what I’ve been trying to get across.” He threw her a sideways look. “I thought you had affection for that place.”

“Of course I do. Tide’s End will never leave this family. I just can’t manage it right now.”

“Great!” He bounced one hand off the wheel with mocking cheeriness. “I’m glad you feel that way! Now I have an excuse to turn down the Conservation Service!”

“I didn’t say yes,” Cora put in quickly.

They passed the gatehouse and rolled down the ramp, where the ferryman was impatiently waving them forward. There was a passenger car behind them and one already on the scow, which could only carry two vehicles. They were lucky to make it and not have to wait.

“Linwood?” she said anxiously. “Did you hear?”