Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
thought of roads different from the few she walked so often. The chance
to get out South Street on her own would be a great adventure, to see
what new houses there were and what folks she would see.
She was a strong girl and a fast walker. It was still mud season, but
the roads were drying fast in the days of sun they had had this week, and
there was plenty of traffic. She walked all the way from the village to the
neighborhood on the Neck, where she met Ellen Cole, an old friend from
the island school whose family had removed to the main. They were
excited to see each other and had a thorough visit.
Ellen insisted Sallie stop up to the house to say hello to her mother
and see the new hats the milliner had just finished for them. The milliner
came up from Portland spring and fall and spent a week or more living
with one family or another, making hats for the ladies of the area for the
season. When she had finished at the Neck she would move up to Dun-
dee, and from there on over to Franklin. This never happened on the
island, and Sallie was thrilled to see the new styles. She tried on both
Ellen’s hat and her mother’s, memorizing details of both to tell Claris
when she got home.
It was much later than she’d meant to stay when she came to start
for the village. The sun was high, and she knew the tide would be turning.
If it set them getting out of the mouth of the harbor, her father would
be angry and the return trip would be long. She walked faster, but she
was getting tired and thirsty.
As soon as mud season was over, there began to be peddlers on the
road, and they were very welcome, except for the Gypsies. There was
always a tinker and tinsmith or two who could mend your old cook pots
or sell you new ones. There were Micmac Indians selling grass baskets,
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often very beautiful, and there were the dry-goods men, with wagonloads
of cloth and ribbons and fancy glass buttons from Boston. Sometimes
these peddlers would even hire a boat to sail out to the island, but not
very often, and to Sallie the sight of a peddler’s wagon held the promise
of high excitement. Almost everything they used every day was homemade;
for store-bought there were the tools and household goods that Abbott’s
carried, the same year in and year out, but the peddlers brought the latest
things from the big cities. At least they claimed they did, and Sallie
believed them.
She was beginning to be apprehensive about how late she was when
she heard a wagon coming along behind her. She didn’t relish her father’s
black mood and sarcasm if she made him miss the ebbing tide. She turned,
hoping she might see a relative or acquaintance, but it was a wagon drawn
by a small sorrel horse with a paper flower pinned to its bridle. The
wagon had staves arching above the flat bed so it could be tented over
with canvas in bad weather, but today the tenting was rolled up, and Sallie
could see as it pulled up beside her that the wagon was full of row upon
row of shiny new shoes.
She was staring at the shoes long before she looked at the driver.
There were ladies’ button shoes and men’s work boots and shoes and
boots for children, and house slippers in all sizes and even shoes in colored
leather. When she got around to looking at the man, she saw a pleasant
face, neither Gypsy nor Indian, with a large mustache. He was offering
her a ride.
“It’s a hot day for April,” he was saying. She could tell that he was
noticing her shoes, her only good ones, which were not made for hiking.
“Climb up, old Bob won’t mind. I’ll be glad of the company.”
She was tired, and the sun was indeed hot. And she’d never in
her life been in the vicinity of so many new and stylish shoes. She
climbed up.
The peddler clucked the horse into a trot and turned to look at
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Sallie. “Saw you looking at my shoes,” he said. “You were looking at
’em, weren’t you? Saw you looking.”
She agreed that she was, hoping it hadn’t been rude to do so. They
jogged on for several minutes.
“Fine looking girl, looking at my shoes, and I could show you
shoes,” he said in a burst. He seemed excited. “Fine bosom too.” He
turned to look at her square in the face. Sallie was bewildered. The horse
was going along at a good clip, and the countryside seemed to be whizzing
by. She didn’t much like the way the peddler smelled.
“Fine bosom, fine looking girl, want to see my shoes? Want to
show me your bosom, I’ll show you my shoes?”
“Put me down,” said Sallie. “Stop right now, I’m getting down.”
“I’ll stop when we get where we’re going,” he said and slapped the
reins hard on the horse’s back, making it go even faster.
Sallie moved as far from the man as she could go without falling
off the seat and said once more, very loudly, “Stop! I want to get down!”
“Wants to get down, I’ll put you down. I’ll stop when we get where
we’re going,” he said. This man is crazy, Sallie said to herself. I’ve never
seen a crazy person, but this is one. Her heart was pounding so that the
blood hammered in her ears. This man could kill me, she thought. There
are people who do such things. He could carry me off and kill me and
no one would ever know. With her right hand, she reached behind her
until she grasped a shoe, and she threw it out of the wagon. She reached
and threw another. She threw another and another until she couldn’t reach
any more with her right hand. The wagon was slapping along the road,
and the shoes were in the dust behind. Watching the man from the very
corner of her eye, she reached with her left hand, found a shoe, and threw
it. She reached for another, and this time he saw her.
His hand whipped around and caught hers with the shoe still in it.
As he did this, his eye moved to the road behind, and he saw the shoes
lying along it. He yelled a word at her she had never heard before, and
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so didn’t understand, and hauled on the reins, sawing at the horse’s mouth.
The minute she dared, Sallie threw herself out of the moving wagon.
She landed in soft mud. A rock caught her in the ribs, and her
wrist hit hard and bent backward, making her cry out once. Then she
was up and running as fast as she could, waiting to hear hoofbeats gal-
loping after her, but she heard nothing but the blood in her head. Finally,
when her lungs were burning, she looked back and saw the peddler driving
his horse the way they had come, going back to pick up his shoes. She
kept running, fearful at every point that he would overtake her and kill
her, but he must have finally retraced his way and taken another road,
perhaps fearing she would reach Dundee first and tell what had happened.
She did reach the village at last, and she was so exhausted and
frightened that she hadn’t even noticed yet the throbbing pain in her wrist
and side. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, her skirt was covered
in mud, and her shoes were broken. She stood by the town pump and
breathed in great gasping gulps, then bent to wash her face with one hand,
and to drink the pure cold water.
William saw her coming up Union Street and cried, “Sallie! Mother,
she’s here! Sallie—what happened?” He ran down to meet her, asking
again what had happened to her, but all she could do was put her arms
around him and cry.
Later, when she was properly washed and comforted, and her aunt
Mary had made her drink a cup of hot sweet coffee, she told the story.
Uncle Jonathan wanted to go out looking for the man and beat him up,
but Sallie said she couldn’t bear to see him again. Mary and Alice could
hardly breathe for fear and relief at what had almost happened to her, at
what might at any moment happen to any of them. All the while the
Osgoods were listening to her and petting her and telling her what a
strong brave girl she had been, her father sat outside on the porch step,
looking at the sky and saying nothing. Once in a while Sallie saw a look
pass from aunt to aunt, a glance toward the porch and then a shake of
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the head and a glance toward heaven. Danial had been waiting there for
an hour before Sallie came, but he wouldn’t come into the house.
When finally the aunts were convinced that she was calm again, and
safe and had broken no bones, they packed up the things they wanted to
send to her mother and let her go. Sallie and Danial walked away from
the house, Sallie with her egg pail full of presents and Danial empty-
handed; the boat would be loaded and ready to sail when they got to the
dock, so she would know she had kept him waiting.
He had still not said to her that he was frightened by what had
happened to her or glad to have her back. When they got to the town
wharf, he stopped to look at her before they stepped down into the sloop.
“Weather coming,” he said.
Oh, thought Sallie, briefly angry. Weather. The sky was the Bible
of the island sailor. Children come and go, but the Scripture is forever.
She looked down the bay and saw that indeed a threatening green-black
passage from Jeremiah was coming from the east, and she got down
quickly into the boat and stowed her things.
They sailed toward home in a freshening breeze. They were taking
green water over the bow by the time they passed the north point of the
island. Sallie’s muslin dress and light wool shawl were waterlogged before
the rain began to fall, which it did as Danial made his first pass at the
home dock. Sallie had seen her mother on the rocks in the wind watching
for them, but by the time they had made the boat fast and climbed to
the pathway, she had gone inside.
Claris stood by the window with her back to them as they came
in. Her posture was as eloquent as any words. I must stand here alone,
far from the fire, watching this terrible sky, while you, you who drove
the person I loved most on this earth to his death in just such a squall,
you have my one living child on the bay somewhere, in peril, you unfor-
given and unworthy of forgiveness.
As the door closed behind Danial and Sallie, Claris turned to face
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them. They stood drenched, held by her gaze, which was almost yellow
in anger. Sallie wanted to take off her sopping shawl and lay the wet
letters and presents on the bench for Claris before they were ruined, but
she didn’t move.
“She had a run-in with a peddler,” said Danial. “Took her up on
the road from the Neck and then wouldn’t let her down. She had to
jump off and run away from him. She’s some torn up, but your sister
says nothing is broken.”
Claris looked from Danial to Sallie. Her weight shifted. Finally she
moved to Sallie, took her wet shawl, and looked at the swollen wrist and
painful abrasions on her palms and her torn dress.
She looked back at Danial. She looked like a dog in a fight who
is quivering to close his jaws on the opponent’s throat but is prevented
by some inner primordial prohibition that governs the conflict.
Finally she turned back to Sallie. “I thought you had more sense
than to take a ride from strangers,” she said, and that was all she ever
said to her about it.
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Finally the tide made us move up the beach. It had turned,
and the clam hod was up to its handle in water. Conary fetched it and
brought it up the beach to
Frolic
and left it in the shade beside her,
then covered it with seaweed. I doused the fire and collected the things
we had brought, all the signs of human activity, and put them back in
the boat. Then we put on our shoes and Conary led the way to a path
that went up the bank into the woods.
It was steep at first; we had to scramble up rocks barely covered
by earth and moss, and sometimes we had to pull ourselves on sur-
rounding bushes to keep from sliding back. Sometimes long thin
branches would whip across our faces and sometimes we had to go
almost on hands and knees to get through the bracken. I remembered
what Conary said about the island having been cleared at the turn of
the century. It didn’t seem possible.
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“What made this path?”
“Don’t know. Deer, probably.”
The undergrowth thinned some and gave way to bigger trees.
This path had a clearer floor, and walking was easier. We were still
climbing. Then with an abruptness that seemed almost magical, we
stepped out onto a meadow, open and shimmering. There were out-
croppings of rock here and there, and low ground cover, some I knew
to be blueberry bushes and something silvery that looked like heather.
This was the meadow we had seen from the water, and I knew Conary
had been here before. He was smiling the way you do when you’ve
arrived at something you looked forward to but feared it wouldn’t be