More Than You Know (12 page)

Amos nodded, all fifty pounds of him full of manly gravity.

“All right then,” said Leander. “Get your things.”

The rest of the leave-taking went as expected. Sallie finally wore

herself out and fell asleep. Mary and Claris hugged each other good-bye,

if stiffly, then Alice and Mabel hugged Claris in turn. Claris turned to

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her mother, who was weeping. She led the children next door to say

good-bye to Aunt, and to the cousins, then came back to hug her mother

once more. And there, standing at the foot of the stairs, was Leander,

waiting to say good-bye, holding Otis’s fiddle.

“Next time I see you, boy, I want you to play ‘Black-Eyed Susan’

with me. I’ll be practicing.”

Amos couldn’t speak. He only held out his arms for the violin case.

k

When they landed at the Haskell dock, Danial was there to meet

them. Claris was much calmer, soothed by the quiet sail and the presence

of her beautiful boy.

“You took your time,” was Danial’s greeting. Bowdoin Leach

started handing bags up onto the dock.

“Father—William can come out to visit me!”

“That’s fine. He’s a nice boy.”

“I can play Authors!”

“Can you?” Danial was waiting for Amos to say he was glad to be

home. He was waiting for Claris to start in about how he had gone off

and left them. He’d been thinking about this as he lived there alone for

three weeks, picturing the scene in the Osgood house. From time to time

he had wondered what he would do if they never came back.

“Father, look! Leander gave me Otis’s fiddle!” Bowdoin Leach was

handing the last of the gear up out of the boat to Claris.

Danial stopped what he was doing and looked at his son. “Why,

you’re turning into a regular little Osgood, aren’t you?” he said.

Claris’s face burned. She heard the nastiness in his voice. “Thank

you, Bowdoin, for all your help,” she said, and took the bow line off the

cleat, wanting no witness to the rest of the scene. At a nod from Bowdoin

she cast him off and turned to Danial, but he was looking at Amos.

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“You will not play that thing in our house, or I’ll throw it in the

bay.”

Amos was shocked. He drew closer to his mother and stared at

Danial.

“We are Haskells out here,” he said. “Let’s not forget it.” He picked

up Claris’s carpetbag and started for the house.

“He won’t throw it in the bay, it belongs to you,” said Claris to

Amos. “Come on, bring your things.” She gathered the baby’s gear and

started up the wooden walk to the house.

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Edith was in a fine mood the morning after the lights went

out. I don’t know why; it had been utterly terrifying stumbling around

in the cellar, dank as a grave and darker, trying to find the fuse box.

(Dot Sylvester had confirmed on the telephone that the blackout was

only at our house; the lights were on in the village.) I imagined that

horrible figure in every corner; I could see its sallow eyes, and if

anything had reached out and touched me in the dark, my heart would

have blown out like an overfilled tire.

I held the oil lamp high, casting long stretched-out shadows of

Edith and me onto the walls, while Edith marched fearlessly into the

darkness like Stanley searching for Livingstone, full of confidence and

purpose. She found the fuse box under the stairs, and I held the lamp

for her as she unscrewed one fuse, then another, finding every single

one of them blackened and dead.

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“What on earth could have made them all go at once?” she kept

saying. “It must have been lightning.”

“There wasn’t any.”

“There must have been. We just didn’t see it.”

Fortunately she had found two entire boxes of fresh fuses in a

kitchen drawer, as if sudden blackout was a contingency Miss Hamor

had had to contend with often.

But when I came downstairs the next morning, the sun was out,

finally. The kitchen door was standing open to let the light in. Edith

had made oatmeal for our breakfast and put out a pitcher of maple

syrup. Stephen was already eating. I said, “Good morning, Mother.”

She said “Good morning, Hannah,” quite civil, but when she took a

good look at me she added, “My, don’t you look awful in bangs.” She

appeared to get a real kick out of that.

When she finished her gruel she said, “Well, I’m sure you re-

member that Grandma Adele arrives today. Will you change the sheets

in the front room, Hannah, and clean the bathroom before we go to

meet the train?” I said I would just nip up to the village and get the

mail first. I had no intention of spending the day with Edith. I was

awfully on edge from the night before, and the crack about my bangs

had made me want to smack her.

As soon as I’d washed up the breakfast things, I went into

town and made the barber cut off the rest of my hair. The barber

was upset; he kept saying he didn’t know how to cut girls’ hair and

I said, Good.

The barbershop was in that tiny white cottage with the flower

box in the window down past the old post office. There’s someone

sells gewgaws from it in the summer now. Then it had a striped pole

out front. As I was going out from my haircut, Conary Crocker was

coming up the street. He was going to go right past me.

When I said hello to him, Conary stopped and looked, and then

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he stared. You’ve got to remember that in those days girls didn’t do

things like that to their hair. I was standing there in the street looking

like a convict or a mental patient.

I could see pretty quickly that he liked what I’d done, a lot. In

fact, he looked at me an awfully long time. I think seeing me with

my hair cut off made Conary suddenly feel that I wasn’t an alien,

some party girl from the big city. That I felt like him, whatever that

meant.

That was the beginning of a day I will never forget, a day that

seemed to last about forty hours. It was turning into a beautiful blue

one, with high streaks of cirrus clouds. Conary said, “What are you

up to?”

I shrugged. All I knew was, I didn’t want to go home.

“We could go on over to the hospital and have something else

cut off,” he suggested. I said I thought I’d done enough for the time

being. Then he said, “I was thinking I’d go clamming. Want to

come?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s get us a bucket.”

Conary’s truck was parked across the street at the Esso station.

The guy in the office seemed to leer at us as we walked across the

street together, but Conary ignored him. He came around to open my

door for me. I thought for a minute this was a show of conspicuous

gallantry, but it wasn’t; it was that the door handle was off and you

had to work the latch by reaching inside and doing something with a

screwdriver. In all the times I rode in that truck, I never did figure out

how to do it.

“Careful,” he said. “You don’t want to put your foot through

that floorboard.” That was true. I didn’t. I was used to boys driving

as if they thought everyone might mistake them for daredevil race car

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drivers and fall in love. But Conary drove gingerly, as if the truck

were an ailing animal, and if it faltered he would have to carry it. I

found I liked that better than taking curves at high rates of speed on

the wrong side of the road, a pastime that had previously struck me

as mature and romantic. There was something protective about every-

thing Conary did, even teasing. He did a lot of teasing, but it never

hurt.

As we crept onto the Westward road, the bay spread out below

us to the left, a silver gray color in the morning light. It was miles

from here to open sea. I could see the greenish black hump of Beal

Island.

“You ever been out there?” Conary asked, seeing where I was

looking.

“Beal? No.”

“Want to go?”

“With you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes. I do.”

“All right. They got clams out there as well as here.”

I hadn’t realized he meant right that day, but it was fine with

me. I wasn’t in any hurry to hear what Edith thought of my new

haircut.

We had come to Tenney Hill, and this was where I first expe-

rienced the truck’s peculiar style of coping with a grade. Connie pulled

into a cow path, turned the truck around, and proceeded smoothly up

the hill in reverse. When he got to the top, he pulled around again and

off we went forward.

Seeing my expression, Connie said, “Would you believe,

Hale Bogg was going to sell this truck to Carleton Haskell for

scrap?”

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I laughed.

“I told him, ‘Don’t do that. I can make her run. Besides, you

don’t want to do Carl Haskell no favors, he’s so mean he charges his

mother to take a bath.’ ”

I laughed again.

“He does,” Conary said. “He figures up how much the oil costs

him to heat the water and makes her pay him.”

I asked, “Is Carleton related to Danial Haskell?”

“The whole town’s related, one way or another. Carleton would

be a great-nephew or some such, I guess.”

“You aren’t related to them.”

“Oh, yes. My great-grandmother was Elzina Haskell. Maybe

great-great.”

“Do you know all about the murder?”

“I know what they say about it.”

“What do they say?”

“Well, Bowdoin Leach says Sallie Haskell didn’t kill anybody,

but she knew who did. Some thought it was Mercy Chatto, the school-

teacher. She boarded with the Haskells, and it came out she was preg-

nant. She wouldn’t say who got her that way, but most thought it was

Sallie’s father. Then there’s those think Sallie’s boyfriend murdered

Danial because he wouldn’t let them marry. He disappeared the night

of the murder; folks say he was spirited off the island disguised in

women’s clothing.”

“And never came back?”

“Never came back.”

“Think . . . if Sallie Haskell took the blame for him, and he let

her.”

“There’s people say it broke Sallie’s heart, that he never came

back and never sent for her, and that’s why she kept to herself in that

queer way. Then there’s Abby Gordon. At the trial they said that if

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Sallie Haskell did the murder she would have had blood on her clothes,

but no bloody clothes were ever found.”

“She would have burned them or buried them.” I was picturing

myself taking a hatchet to Edith and planning how to get away

with it.

“Burned them where? Her mother or Mercy would have seen

her do it if she’d burned them in the house. The ground was frozen,

so it would have been hard to bury them. Abby Gordon said she had

it figured out, though; she said the reason there weren’t any bloody

clothes was, Sallie took them off first and did it in the nude.”

There went my career as a murderess. I tried to imagine taking

off your dress and your corset and your stockings and whatever else

Sallie wore . . . I tried to picture walking naked into a room where

Edith was napping, with a hatchet in my hand. I couldn’t.

We rode the last half mile in silence. Then Conary pulled his

truck into the yard of a house I’d passed a few times before and

thought looked haunted. I was shocked when he said, “Stay here, I

won’t be a minute,” and I realized he lived there. He climbed out over

his door, and now that I knew what it took to move the latches, I

appreciated why. He disappeared inside.

The house looked a hundred years old and as if it had not been

painted in fifty. The front porch sagged. There was a bedspring leaning

against the side of the house, and wheels and pieces of farm gear stood

rusting in the side yard. Chickens wandered around looking discour-

aged. There was a well a few yards from the kitchen porch with a

bucket hanging from the crank. There were cords of wood in a chaotic

mound on the far side of the yard partly covered with a rotten canvas

tarp, as if no one in the household had the spirit to bother to stack it

neatly.

Then I noticed that the power lines that ran beside the road from

the village to the Neck did not throw a spur down to the Crocker

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house. No electricity meant no pump, so no running water. I began to

understand that Conary’s no-fuss grooming might be something other

than a fashion statement.

Conary came out carrying a pail, a long-handled tin spoon, and

a large pot with scars where the enamel was worn off. He stopped at

the woodpile to load some dry kindling into the pail. When he climbed

into the truck, I saw that he also had a hatchet, a box of matches, and

a gob of butter wrapped in wax paper in the cook pot.

“We’re off,” he said.

We drove in silence back toward town, enjoying the day. I was