More Than You Know (20 page)

“Just ring Dot and ask her. I’m going to try to reach Ed and

Frances. One of us will call you back.” He hung up.

Edith hated it when anyone hung up on her. She behaved as if

someone had yanked a plate away from her before she’d begun to eat.

Only of course she couldn’t show that because, in front of Grandma

Adele, she had to be Lady Bountiful with the perfect life.

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Dot, being the saint she was, called Edith the minute she saw

the connection go dead.

“Mrs. Gray, it’s Dot Sylvester. How are you, dear?”

“Well, I’m—”

“I’ll tell you why I’m calling. I just checked on the line to be

sure your long-distance call went through, and I couldn’t help hearing

that you’re worried about Hannah. I saw her this morning, right after

she had her haircut. She was going through the village with Conary

Crocker. I saw them turn down the road toward the town dock. You

want me to go down to the corner and look, see if his truck is still

down there?”

“I don’t want you to go to any trouble,” said Edith stiffly.

“I don’t mind, I’ve had children of my own. I’ll come right on

back and let you know,” Dot said. She closed down the switchboard

and went out and trotted down to the town wharf and back. She rang

Edith and told her, “Conary Crocker’s truck is down by the dock, and

his boat’s off her mooring. I believe they must have gone out fishing

and run out of air. There’s not a breath of wind out there right now;

they could be anywhere. I’ll tell you what I’d do, I’d call Mrs. Tapley,

who lives down across from Tom Crocker, have her go and knock

him up and find out if Conary’s still out somewhere. If he is, Tom

Crocker can go looking for them.”

Mrs. Sylvester talked in a rapid-fire manner as if every speech

was timed and charged by the minute. She was busy and cheerful and

had a heart as big as a house. I doubt if she gave Edith a chance to

answer.

“I’ll just go ahead and call Mrs. Tapley, dear. She won’t mind,

it’s good for her to worry about something besides herself. Tom

Crocker won’t bite
her
head off anyway. If I find out anything more,

I’ll let you know.” The switchboard was lighting up now, and it was

all Dot could do to keep track of it all.

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My grandfather called Edith, wanting to know if she had heard

anything. Edith told him about Dot Sylvester and Mrs. Tapley, but he

already knew all of that. He told her: “Jewel Eaton says Tom Crocker’s

clamming gear is missing and Webby Allen saw Conary going down

the bay late in the morning. Webby said he had another boy with him,

so there are probably three of them. Tom doesn’t have any running

lights on that boat of his, so he’s waiting for moonrise, then he’ll get

out and go looking. Now try not to worry.”

“But where can they have been all this time?”

“Out on one of the islands,” my grandfather said to her. “Either

that or they’re out of wind ashore someplace, and they’ll start walking

and someone will pick them up. If they’re on the bay, Tom will find

them. It’s a fine night, don’t worry. Everyone in the village has pulled

a stunt like this one time or another.”

Edith called Dot back, sounding really scared. “Dot, I think I’d

better call the police.”

“Nearest police are over in Unionville. Would you like me to

put you through?”

“Yes, please.”

“I’ll call Ham Fitch, he lives closest, and he’s probably to home.

Hang up, dear, I’ll ring you back.”

Dot told me she was worried herself, that she didn’t try to talk

Edith out of this. What if we were out of wind down the shore some-

place and trying to walk home and fell afoul of vagrants? The woods

were full of desperate characters, Hoover’s Army. The Depression had

taken a turn for the worse that summer, and the mood abroad was just

miserable.

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1885

MercyChattowashalfamazedwhenMrs.Haskellsuggested

she board with them for the winter, since they didn’t seem like the kind

of family that would welcome company. Everyone on the island agreed

that Claris Haskell was a woman not easy with strangers or those she

thought not her class. Some wondered if she had the melancholia. Also,

everyone knew there was a state of open warfare between Sallie Haskell

and her father; even over on the Neck people had heard about it. Sallie

was going about with Paul LeBlond. It was said that her father tried to

lock her in at night but she climbed out the window. They had exchanged

angry words in public.

Mercy had graduated from the Academy the previous spring and

come to take over the Beal Island School from Miss Pease, who’d gone

gouty. Mercy hadn’t really wanted to leave home, but things were changing

in Dundee. A man from Philadelphia had paid an enormous price for

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Homer Carleton’s farm, the prettiest farm on the shore between the village

and the Neck. The Philadelphia man wasn’t going to farm it either: he’d

built a great boardinghouse on it, a barn of a place with no stoves in the

rooms, for he intended to open it only in the summer. Mercy’s father

and her uncle Paul had laughed themselves silly over that, but the second

summer the place was full, and the third year a woman from Cleveland

came for the whole summer, bringing her own carriage and horses with

her and a driver from Hampshire, England.

There were all kinds of accents to be heard when you went up to

Abbott’s to market, or even to the Grange store. Not only were the

rusticators and their servants everywhere but there was a mining boom

on. Three copper mines had opened within fifteen miles, and Simon

Osgood built a great square brick hotel for the miners to live in. James

Chatto thought his daughter Mercy would be better off out of harm’s

way, and the island was quieter, and less infected with change.

Mercy had started out boarding with her Aunt Gott, who was

actually her cousin a few times removed, around on the southern tip of

the island right next to the granite wharf. But there was sickness in the

house, and Aunt Gott had to ask her to find another place. Mercy con-

fided this to Mrs. Haskell, a tall reserved woman who was often at the

schoolhouse. Claris Haskell led the children in singing in the afternoons

in the schoolroom, and she gave violin lessons in the rooms above, or

sometimes sat up there alone, playing for her own solace.

Mercy had been glad at first to move to the Haskells’. She thought

it would be merry to have another girl in the house for a companion,

and Mrs. Haskell was a lady; you could see that. But she soon found that

you didn’t have to know much to know that something had gone gravely

wrong in these people’s lives.

The house was spotless. Mrs. Haskell was a careful, even zealous

housekeeper. But she hardly cooked. No one cooked. Mercy had never

seen a household in which there were no regular meals, no table spread

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with hot and cold dishes and a time set aside for the family to gather

for food and fellowship. Mr. Haskell was a dark inward man whose first

thought seemed always to fancy a slight or to find himself hard done by.

He got up in the mornings and fed the fire in the kitchen stove, then

went out to tend the large animals. He had something wrong with one

foot, and on cold days it pained him worse than common and he used a

cane. She grew to dread the sound of the cane thumping on the stairs,

or moving around in the kitchen below. Mrs. Haskell had given her the

cozy back room above the kitchen; it kept the warmest on winter nights.

It had once belonged to a son of the house, who’d been lost at sea.

Mercy’s grandfather Kane was a sea captain, and two of her young cousins

had been drowned, one on the China Sea and one at the Straits of Ma-

gellan, so she knew the sorrow that could bring to a family.

In the mornings, once Mercy could hear that the fire had been

renewed and the pump in the kitchen sink started, she would dress herself

and hurry down and out to the backhouse carrying her chamber pot. Back

in the warm kitchen, she heated water for washing face and hands and a

kettle for tea, and cooked a pan of oatmeal. If Sallie came down in time

to gather eggs before Mercy left for school, they would boil half a dozen

and share them for breakfast. Sallie cooked lunch and dinner up at the

boardinghouse, and took her own dinner and supper there. She was saving

up to escape, Mercy thought, and Mr. Haskell may have thought so too,

for she sometimes heard him rummaging about in Sallie’s room trying to

find out where she hid her money. One time he must have found it, for

one Saturday morning Mercy was awakened by a blazing great argument

between them downstairs. After that, Sallie took to paying a visit to Mercy

at the schoolhouse every week, and she always found an excuse to spend

a few moments upstairs by herself. Mercy assumed she had a hiding place

up there. She hoped it was a good one. She didn’t know but what Danial

searched the schoolhouse too.

Sometimes Mercy would come home to find that Mrs. Haskell had

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cooked a pot of beans, or Boston brown bread, or made a pie. Sometimes

Claris would have a fancy to reproduce some meal from her childhood,

and Mercy would find an embarrassment of riches at the table, perhaps

boiled meat and vegetables, with biscuits and butter and raisin pie.

One time she made a pitcher of switchell, a summer drink of water

and ginger and molasses that farmwives used to carry to the fields for

thirsty men in haying time. Mrs. Haskell set the pitcher on the table,

saying, “This is Sallie’s favorite.”

Sallie, passing the table, simply gave her a look.

“Come sit, Sallie,” said Mrs. Haskell. “I made switchell for you.”

“I hate switchell, Mother. It’s Amos who liked it.”

Mrs. Haskell paused for a moment, and then said dismissively, “
Hate

is too strong a word for food. Say, ‘I don’t favor it.’ ”

But Sallie said nothing and went upstairs, while Mrs. Haskell poured

two glasses and began to talk to Mercy about summer afternoons of her

girlhood.

On such evenings Danial sat silent, fuming. After a while he’d cook

a pan of whatever he found around, cabbage fried with salt pork, or some

salt cod, and plop a plate of it down for Mercy and one for himself. If

Mrs. Haskell wanted some, she served herself; otherwise what was left

was pushed to the back of the stove and Mercy took it to school in her

lard pail the next day for dinner.

Sallie brought home leftovers from the boardinghouse at night, and

that often made up dinner for the next day, and even supper. But there

were several nights when Mercy was so hungry she went out to the hen

yard, where sometimes Danial had thrown crushed pieces of the lobster

he picked up along the beach and boiled for the chickens to save corn.

She discovered that he often failed to crush the claws, and she could wash

those off at the well and break them open with a stone at the door rock

and get enough to eat to keep her stomach from grumbling all evening.

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Danial called lobsters “bugs,” but Mercy’s family ate them, and she liked

them well enough.

Another oddity of the family was that the only one who ever went to

worship service was Mr. Haskell. The services on the island were intermit-

tent and Baptist, conducted by a lay leader except for the rare occasions

when a minister came from the main. Mrs. Haskell claimed to have reverted

to the Congregational faith of her childhood, while Sallie made no excuse.

She simply didn’t do anything her father wanted her to do. Mercy herself

didn’t go because she was a Roman Catholic, the family having originally

been Chatteau, from Montreal.

On Sundays, either the three women were alone or all four of them

were cooped up together, bored and silent. Mr. Haskell was some kind

of very strict Baptist, and when someone took to a frivolous pastime on

Sunday, he would stare and say that his mother was turning in her grave.

Mrs. Haskell replied once that his mother wasn’t in a grave, she had

probably long since been dinner for the lobsters, and Mr. Haskell whipped

his head around to stare at her and moved in his chair as if he might get

up and hit her. He didn’t, but Mercy noticed that, still, Mrs. Haskell

didn’t go to her loom on Sundays, which Mercy knew she was aching to

do the way a drunkard aches for rum. All the other days of the week,

except when she was at the schoolhouse playing music, Mrs. Haskell sat

at her loom in the parlor with a basket of rags torn into strips at her

side, weaving rugs. There were rugs of her making in every room of the

homeplace and of the schoolhouse, and now they were piling up in the