More Than You Know (2 page)

from Dundee, I was able to stop thinking about it. When you’re young,

you can leave a memory in your mind, like walking out of a room

and closing a door behind you. Or like dropping a rock in a pond.

When the surface clears, you look at the clouds and the treetops mir-

rored in it as if you didn’t know what was on the bottom. I picture

the pond, still and deep, in the old granite quarry up Dundee stream

where we used to swim, though it was terribly cold. On summer morn-

ings that pond catches the light so the surface turns a color we used

to call skyblue pink.

I’d better bring in more wood. I can’t start this story and then have

to go out into the snow in my nightgown, on a night with no moon.

*

*

*

8

M O R E

T H A N

Y O U

K N O W

I’m reminded of how, one winter when my brother and I were

little, we all came up here for Christmas. On Christmas Eve, right

beside this fireplace, we read our letters to Santa Claus. Grandpa had

a big fire going, very hot. He crumpled the letters and stuck them on

the end of his pitchfork and held them in the fire. They blazed up, and

were carried up the chimney with a whoosh. Then we ran outside to

watch the sparks flying out from the chimney and off on the night

wind to the North Pole, flickering orange against the cold white stars.

It made you feel you could write a letter to anyone like that, living or

dead, and mail it in the fire. Perhaps I believe it still.

You’ve seen how sometimes a young man falls in love not so

much with a girl as with a whole family? I think that’s the way it was

when my father married my mother, Sara Grindle from Dundee,

Maine. They met at college in Boston. He was alone in the world at

the time, and my grandparents made him feel like a son. They never

changed to him, even after their own daughter died and he remarried.

They welcomed all of us, Edith and Stephen too. My grandparents had

their faults, but as examples of how to live you could do a lot worse.

Edith hated that Christmas in Dundee. Stephen and I sat in the

backseat and listened to her fight with our father the whole way home.

“I have family too, you know,” she kept saying. That was true.

She had a mother and two sisters, and they all seemed to hate each

other. My father kept his mouth shut on the car ride, and after that we

had Christmas at home in our apartment in Boston with Grandma

Adele and Aunt Lou and Aunt Hester. Every year as she made her

Christmas preparations Edith worked herself into a swivet over how

her mother played favorites among her children, and every Christmas

Day someone was in tears by lunchtime. Grown women slamming

doors and weeping came to be part of the holiday tradition. You’d

have thought that after a while they’d all give up trying to be together

since it just made them miserable, but it didn’t seem to occur to them.

9

B E T H

G U T C H E O N

The Christmas we spent at Dundee, Stephen and I bunked in

together in that room behind the kitchen that had been my mother’s

when she was little. It’s the warmest bedroom, when the stove’s going.

My children think I should sleep there now myself instead of going

up and down stairs, but if I start making concessions like that, where

will it end?

My neighbor, Phil, keeps a pretty good eye on me. When a house

like this has been closed up for any length of time, the first thing you

do when you come in is open all the windows. Even in midwinter.

It’s impossible to heat stale air, I don’t know why. Air dies, I guess.

Phil came in two days ago and aired it out, and then lit the woodstoves.

When the house was warmed through, he turned the water back on

and brought ice and food. In the fall, before the first snow, he banks

the spruce all up around the outside too. It gives a nice feeling to have

a blanket of evergreen tucked up around you.

You feel so close to the sky here. I think you feel everything

more cleanly here, more keenly. There
are
times and places that alter

your senses. I certainly saw things that summer I was seventeen that

others couldn’t see. And I was so raw, all that year, so exposed, like

a peeled egg. A smile or a slight could pierce right through me and

come out the other side, and the damage inside was enormous. I

wouldn’t be that age again for anything, but then, when you are so at

risk, when you feel everything so intensely that the world seems al-

most to shimmer, you may be closer to God. Or for that matter to evil,

especially the kind that looks for a heart to use. Everyone knows

stories of people suddenly killed just at a moment of great fulfillment,

great joy. Irony doesn’t explain it. I’m not sure I believe in irony, I

think it’s just a conceit of ours to explain the way our notion of God’s

plan differs from the evidence.

1 0

M O R E

T H A N

Y O U

K N O W

I had a favorite rock on Jellison’s Point, and on summer nights

I used to sit for hours and watch the water go from silver blue to

mauve to black, and listen to the loons. In the stillness of sunset, when

the wind drops, a boat leaves a path like a scar across the water that

remains long after its wake has flattened and the boat is out of sight.

I always remembered that, in landlocked years, that scar across the

water, a mere disarrangement of molecules, lovely and purposeless,

but an illustration that everything matters, everything that happens

changes something else.

I know what it is, that scar on the water: it’s proof that inanimate

things have memory. Dogs have memory, machines have memory,

why not rocks and trees and water? What they don’t have is judgment.

It’s late. There will be fresh snow tonight, you can smell it in

the wind. They say up here that if the bubbles on your coffee float

together it will stay fair, but if they scatter it will storm. Grandfather

could always tell when snow was coming. I couldn’t as a child, but I

can now. One of the things he left me.

One of the things I’ll leave behind is that jar on the mantel of

periwinkle shells I gathered with Conary. When you see periwinkles

on the beach, wet and alive, they’re blue-black like mussel shells,

but dry they turn pale sandy colors from buff to gray. When you

peel one from a tide rock, he pulls his foot into his shell as far as

he can go. You can see it in there, like gleaming black rubber. Con-

ary said they’d come out if you whistled, but that was one thing I

couldn’t do, though I tried and tried. I was so proud to be able at

last to make a wispy little note with my lips that I scarcely minded

when I came to find out the snails wouldn’t have budged if I’d

whistled “Celeste Aida.”

Conary also taught me to dig for clams. We have huge tides

here; we’re so near the Bay of Fundy. The water depth changes by

ten or twelve feet every six hours, and as much as sixteen in moon

1 1

B E T H

G U T C H E O N

tides. Of course the distance between the low and high waterlines on

a long flat beach is much greater than that. He showed me how to

walk barefoot across the middle of the tide flat, carefully looking for

squirt holes. When you find a cluster, you step gently near to see if

your weight shifting onto their blind gritty world makes them spit.

Where they spit, you dig. Conary’s nails were always ragged from

sifting through deep sand holes, telling live fat clams from stones or

empty shells with his fingertips, like reading braille. I remember being

up to my elbows in salty muck, my hands in darkness while all around

us was tawny bleached sand and a high white sky, and the bay stretch-

ing toward the sea.

Once in a while in the sand you’d feel something long and

muscular and think you had a giant clam neck, but it would be a sea

worm. That’s a long broad white disgusting thing which you would

rather not have touched. I asked after my first if I could use a clam

rake, or even a spoon, but Conary said if you dig with something

you can’t feel with, you always crush some shells and kill the

clams, and he hated the thought of destroying the very thing he was

looking for.

Well. I don’t suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that

we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess

at, and many more things that we can’t.

I remember that afternoon as if it happened last week. I remem-

ber the light. I remember being side by side on our knees on the sand,

up to our elbows in muck, with the sun on our backs.

I love this room late at night. I love the firelight reflected in

black windows. Grandma used to sit in this window seat looking down

1 2

M O R E

T H A N

Y O U

K N O W

the meadow to the bay. Especially on rainy afternoons, we’d sit to-

gether to do jigsaw puzzles or play hearts.

What I don’t love is going up those stairs alone at night.

Well. There’s nothing for it. God hates a coward.

1 3

1848

ClarisOsgood’stenthbirthdayfellonaSunday.Shewokeup

with the light. Her sister Mary was sound asleep beside her in the big

sleigh bed their uncle Asa had built them, with a mound of quilts pulled

tight around her. In the early gray light, Claris could see the window

crazed with hoarfrost; although the sun would warm the air by midday,

early April in Dundee was still winter. Claris looked at the candle by

Mary’s side of the bed to see how long Mary had stayed awake last night;

hours, it must have been. Mary was in love with Jonathan Friend, who

was down at Harvard. She wrote to him every night, and they would be

married in the spring. Mary and Claris looked very alike; “cut from the

same cloth,” their father said. (The boys were quite different in looks, all

of them big and blond and heavy-boned.) Cuddled under a coverlet of

cutting table scraps from the making of their aprons and dresses and the

boys’ shirts, Mary looked all arms and legs and long slender neck; she

1 4

M O R E

T H A N

Y O U

K N O W

looked like a deer asleep under a pile of leaves. Claris knew that however

alike they seemed, with the same fine brown hair and blue eyes, Mary

had some happy, cheerful light in her that made everybody love her, and

Claris . . . didn’t. She knew it was true, but she didn’t know why. It was

the puzzle of her girlhood.

Claris got out of bed. The house was still silent; the little girls,

Alice and Mabel, slept on trundle beds in her parents’ room with baby

Otis in the cradle, and the two big brothers plus middle Thomas were

in the room next door. There would be two hours of church this morning.

Good. Claris could sit for hours with her backbone straight as a ramrod;

Reverend Friend often spoke about her remarkable composure. In a big

noisy family people tended to label the children as if otherwise they would

blend together into one burbling shouting mass; Claris was known as the

serious one, determined, the one who would rather talk to animals. She

was also known among her aunts as the one who had always had a pebble

in her shoe, always the one who wasn’t quite pleased by what was pleasing

the others. No one wondered why children, even those cut from the same

cloth, were so different from each other, or why they changed, or what

things changed them. They were born with different wills and different

ways, and all you could do was pray that the choices they made and the

lives they met with brought out the best that was in them, and not the

worst.

That tenth birthday was one Claris never forgot, and there wasn’t

another living person who ever knew that, or knew why. When she got

out of bed that morning, she thought of three things. One was, it was

the day that marked her first decade, and it was Sunday. The boys tended

to fidget through church. Her parents, she suspected, relished it as the

only two hours of the week when their children were silent, so they could

think of things like how much butter to put down cellar and how much

the yearlings would fetch. Mary of course thought only of Jonathan. But

Claris actually thought of God. She believed that she and God understood

1 5

B E T H

G U T C H E O N

each other. She prayed with real passion, and she waited for signs that

she was marked for some special destiny.

The second thing on her mind was that there would be chickens

for dinner instead of the boiled salt cod they had on normal Sundays.

Her mother and Mary would catch two hens and kill and dress them

before church, and when they came home the house would be filled with

the fragrance of the roasting fowl, and of rolls and potatoes and lima

beans. After grace, when the hens were carried to the table, brown and

glistening on a white china platter, everyone would be glad about Claris’s

birthday. After dinner, the cousins would come in from next door and

there would be music. (The cousins were actually double cousins, the two