More Than You Know (17 page)

as good as you remembered.

We walked from one end of the meadow to the other. We found

some ripe blueberries and picked them and ate them. They were warm

from the sun. I found a little hard dry animal spoor that looked almost

like a pinecone.

“Porcupine,” said Conary.

“Are there all kinds of animals out here?”

“Not all kinds. No moose. No bears, anymore. There are a lot

of deer. At one point there was a good deal of hunting out here in the

fall, but it’s dropped off lately.”

“Why?”

“Well . . . people started coming back to the main with weird

stories. One fella claimed he’d seen someone dressed in black floating

around in a field. Another claimed he saw a light in a window where

there isn’t a house anymore. Then someone told a hell of a yarn about

seeing a man with a rope around his neck, and how he shot at him

but the bullets went right through him.”

“Was anyone ever hanged out here?”

“Not that I ever heard. Besides, someone heard this sport laugh-

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ing in a bar down in Belfast about the bill of goods he sold the locals

when he was up here.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what he was telling me. If he meant it was

all just stories, or if he thought there was something out here.

We walked in silence for a while. I was very aware right then

that I was very far from home, alone with a boy—a man—I didn’t

know very well. After such sweetness, was he trying to frighten me?

We were walking among tall pine trees; the ground was soft

with rust-colored pine needles. We moved almost silently, and it struck

me that there should have been birds singing, but there weren’t. For

the first time, Connie took my hand.

“Should we be dropping bread crumbs?” I asked him. Whistle

in the dark.

Conary smiled. “Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

He squeezed my hand.

“Are you?”

“Yes,” he said. “But less, with you.”

We went on. After a time Conary said, “When I’m out here, it

feels like the world on the main is gone. Maybe we’ll come around a

corner and find a mansion, and it will be ours. We just forgot about

it, that we had a mansion with mahogany furniture and linen sheets.

Or maybe we’ll meet a wild red Indian, and we’ll speak his language

and he’ll take us to his village. Maybe we were kidnapped as babies

and given to those people to raise. It would explain a lot.”

“Maybe we were given away as some kind of test, and if we

can find our way back, we passed it.” I was happy again. With him,

it didn’t take much.

We came to a fern grove hemmed around by trees, where tall

grass grew the fantastic bright green color of the first buds in spring.

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Sunlight shafted down into the middle of it so that it felt like a chapel.

We soon understood the luxuriant growth; the grove was a bog. We

could see that the path resumed on the other side, but the only way

to get to it was through muck that sometimes only seeped up around

our soles but sometimes rose to our ankles. We were halfway across

before we discovered this.

“Here’s a log,” Conary said, after feeling in the muck with his

feet. He stepped, and it was solid. It carried us about ten feet and then

ended. Connie stepped off into whatever it turned out to be, and I

followed, thinking of the deadly cottonmouth water snakes I had read

about and reminding myself there are no poisonous snakes in Maine.

Muck began to suck at my feet with each step.

“Is there quicksand in Maine?”

“Yuh,” said Connie.

“Is this it?”

“Don’t know. But we’re still moving.” He added, “Don’t be

scared.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t help.”

“Oh.”

Step by step, we crossed. Nothing bit us; we didn’t sink in and

disappear. Where the bright grass ended there was a mass of scrub

birches and alders, taller than we were but no bigger around than my

arm. There, the ground became firm again. Connie bent a birch out of

our way to clear the path and held it till I had passed, so as not to let

it swing back and whip me. I did the same for him with the next one,

and in that fashion, passing each other, we made our way through to

pinewoods again. Here we regained an open path, perhaps the same

one we’d been on, perhaps not. The woods were crisscrossed by trails

of different creatures looking for different things.

I asked, “What direction are we going?”

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Connie looked at the sun. “South.” Toward the outer tip of the

island. Seaward.

“Have you been here before?”

“I have no idea.”

“You don’t?”

“I might have been. Woods change. It’s been a long time.”

“How long?”

“I used to come out here all the time with my sister when we

were kids. We used to prowl around looking for the lost town.”

“Did you ever find it?”

“I didn’t.”

“Aren’t there maps?”

“Yes. But they’re just sketches, made by the Baptist minister

seventy years ago. You can’t really follow them. None of the land-

marks are the same as when they were drawn, and the distances are

all wrong. We didn’t mind, really. It was just an adventure.”

“Have other people found it?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes not. At first after the island was aban-

doned people came out a lot. The houses were broken into. Some

burned. One or two were moved. Then somebody burned off a good

bit of land for blueberrying, and most of the houses that were left

burned too. Woods take over fast.”

A cloud passed across the sun. It got suddenly cool; it would be

cold when night came. We had reached another meadow. Once again

we were drenched in sunlight.

The cloud moved on. We walked in silence.

“So,” I said. “There ought to be blueberry barrens here some-

where.”

Connie smiled. “Ought to be.”

“Look.” There was a shade tree, a huge oak, in the middle of

the meadow. Part of my brain registered something the minute I saw

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it, and then I knew what it was. We hadn’t seen any hardwood like

that since we started walking. Someone had planted it. Someone had

cleared the land around it so it had all the root room and sunlight it

needed, and it was bigger by far than any tree we’d seen since we left

the beach. People plant trees like that in their dooryards. And now I

could see that there was something nailed to the trunk; that was what

I was pointing out to Connie.

“It’s rusted something,” he said. We hurried toward it. It proved

to be several ancient gearwheels of different sizes composed in a pat-

tern. They were oddly beautiful.

“What is it?”

“Art,” said Conary.

“I guess.” Whatever we had felt during our journey here, we felt

delight now. We’d found it! Or we’d found something. We went on

a few paces, and just the distance from the tree where you’d expect

the house to be, concealed by waving grasses, was a cellar hole. It

was lined with cut granite blocks, mostly tumbled into the hole itself.

Young birches grew in a cluster in the center of it. We learned to

recognize these clumps of young hardwoods as markers of a former

foundation.

Lives had been lived here. Babies had played in this yard, and

women in long cotton dresses had done the wash and hung the clothes

on a line from this tree, and then walked back inside, just there. (We

had found the doorstep.) A man with a beard and suspenders had

chopped and split wood with an ax somewhere just here. Perhaps there

were chickens, and the children fed them and gathered eggs in the

mornings.

“Did they have glass?” I called to Conary. He seemed excited;

he was pacing something off. I was excited too, imagining being a

farmwife out here. She’d have loved that tree out her window!

“Did they have what?”

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“Glass. For windows.”

“Depends on how old the house is. But sure. You know the

Jellisons’ house?” I did. “Well, that one’s probably older than this one

here. They could order whatever they wanted from Boston, and the

packet captain would bring it the next time up the coast.”

That made it even more real. Not a cabin. A house. White frame,

with curtains and windows and braided rugs, and iron stoves.

“Here’s the barn!” Conary called. I hurried over. There was a

rim of stones roughly forming a rectangle about thirty feet from the

first foundation. This one had no cellar. We stood in the middle of it

and tried to imagine the animals we would have if we lived here.

“Cows, do you think?”

“At least one. A horse, for riding and plowing. Or maybe oxen,”

said Conary.

I hoped so. I love oxen. I wished I was a barefoot farmgirl of a

hundred years ago riding the horse bareback over the meadow at sun-

set to drink at the pond.

“Where did they get water?”

“There’d be a cistern for rainwater in the cellar. That’s what we

have at home. There’s a hand pump in the kitchen sink brings it up

into the house. But there must be a spring or dug well too.”

“Where?”

“I’d guess in the back. Someplace handy for watering the ani-

mals.” We went looking in the direction away from the tree. I noticed

as we went that my shadow was beginning to lengthen. It must have

been getting on toward midafternoon, and we’d have to go soon if we

didn’t want to have to dive for the clams Conary left beside
Frolic.
I

didn’t want to go, at all. I loved it there. I could picture Conary in

suspenders, chopping wood.

We didn’t find a well. We did find two small headstones. The

first said, LORENZO 1872–1874. The second said, ROSELBA 1873–1874.

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We didn’t speak for a time. I kept looking back at where the

house would have been. What was it like to grow old there, looking

out at these graves every day? What could it have been like to leave

them?

“Little babies.” Conary sounded sad. I moved closer to him.

“They must have gotten sick. Smallpox or something.”

The breeze riffled the grass around the graves, and it blew Con-

ary’s dark hair on his forehead. I didn’t have enough left to blow.

“Why such strange names?” I wondered aloud.

“Maybe the father was a sailor. Maybe he’d been to Portugal,

or Spain.” Conary took my hand. By unspoken mutual consent we

moved on toward a break in the trees ahead of us, leaving this house

behind. We could see another clearing beyond; perhaps two or more

families had settled near each other. Or perhaps this was actually what

was left of the village.

“Were there roads?”

“Not paved ones. The Duffy family ran a store near the southern

tip, and there was a school, and a tavern before the temperance law.

There must have been horse paths and some wagon roads there. It may

have been that the families living up island just came around to the

south end on foot or by boat.”

“And the graveyard?”

“It’s a small one. I’ve seen pictures of it. Some buried their

people at home, and some sailed the dead over to the main to be buried

with relatives in town.”

“If you’d once buried a child on your own land, you couldn’t

ever leave it, could you?”

“You wouldn’t do it expecting to. No.”

Through the trees we could see a sweep of blue water.

“There’s Closson Point out beyond there,” said Conary. “We’ve

come almost to the southern end.”

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“Then we must be near the village.”

“We must. What fuddles me is, I
have
been here before. I came

out here by boat once, and climbed up the ridge from the beach to

about this view, and tramped around all afternoon. I never saw this

before, though.”

He gestured to the second meadow, which we had just entered.

There were some little apple trees not far from us, and we could see

from where we were that they were still bearing fruit. A little gnarled

and green, and probably sour, but bearing. Beyond that was a clump

of alders, like the young birches in the first foundation.

“They had a beautiful view of the water.”

Conary nodded. We walked down to the apple trees and stood

looking south.

“If you were up as high as a second story here, you could see

all the way out to Jericho Bay.”

“You could see a ship come up the bay before anyone else did.

Maybe a sailor lived here. Maybe his wife had a widow’s walk and

spent her days scanning the horizon.”

“The house would have faced the sea, with the apple trees in the

backyard. And the barn was probably back there, and out at that

end . . .”

“The garden . . .”

“Yes.”

We walked to the foundation to pace the size, to get a feel for

the house. We surprised a squirrel or something that had been sunning