More Than You Know (22 page)

I took my hand and wove my fingers between his. Shyly he

turned and kissed my shorn forehead. We sat like that in silence for I

don’t know how long. Connie stroked my hair now and then. I was

tired. And sad. And hungry. And falling in love.

Conary said, “Look at the water.” I did. It had a silver texture,

no longer as glassy still as it had been at sunset. “Breeze is coming.

By the time the moon is up we’ll be able to sail.”

We waited, and slowly the waning moon slipped out of the trees

on the far shore and filled the bay with shimmering light. We were so

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hungry for it after all that blackness that it seemed to us the difference

of night to day. For the first time since sunset we could see the shapes

of rocks and trees beyond the circle of firelight. We both stood up,

and Conary started piling sand onto the fire.

“Is there enough breeze to sail?”

“Yes. Not very fast, though.” Quickly we loaded our gear onto

the little sailboat. In the moments it took Conary to return the blanket

to the fishing hulk, I was terrified something would happen before we

could leave. But then he was back, beside me. We climbed into the

sailboat and with the paddle poled ourselves out into the cove. Conary

pulled up the anchor; the wet line spattered freezing water as he reeled

it in and coiled it. The anchor had to be dipped and dipped to rinse

off the black sandy muck before he would bring it aboard. There was

no way to recover the clam hod. It was many feet down in water as

black as ink.

I let down the centerboard and unstopped the main. We hoisted

sails. What breeze there was seemed barely to be whispering across

the water, but the sails softly filled to the north, and as soon as we

had way on to come about, we turned and started up the reach for

home.

We were well out onto the bay, gliding directly before the

breeze. Our sails were all the way out like motionless wings, and we

moved softly and silently in the silver moonlight. You could barely

even hear the licking of water against the hull. Conary leaned against

the coaming, holding the tiller. His hair fell across his forehead, and

there were dark shadows around his eyes. He was worn out. I sat down

hugging my knees for warmth, but Conary held out his arm to me,

and I went to him and settled in, leaning back against his chest in the

warm circle of his arm. We watched the stars.

Somewhere down the bay we heard an engine cough to life. It

could have been miles away. Gradually the sound grew stronger. It

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was coming toward us, indeed at that hour could only have been com-

ing
for
us. Thoughts of what was now ahead of us began to crowd

into my head. It occurred to me that Conary and I would be separated.

I reached up and took his hand, and he squeezed it hard. We ghosted

along, waiting.

I don’t know exactly when I understood that the boatman was

Conary’s father. The boat was an old lobsterman, white with scarred

pink paint on the cockpit housing, and
Ruth E
written in script on the

transom. It roared up the bay and made a circle around us. The driver

stared without expression at Conary, who met his gaze, and the fact

that he circled at undiminished speed, throwing a huge wake, was the

only sign that he was furious. Neither he nor Conary said a word.

When we stopped rocking wildly in the wake, the
Ruth E
pulled up

beside us and slipped into neutral.

Mr. Crocker stared at me awhile and then at Conary. He said,

“Are you Hannah Gray?” I admitted to it. He said to Conary, “Her

mother’s looking for her.” Conary nodded. Well, he’d said they’d be

looking for me. What he hadn’t said, but of course knew, was that he

would be blamed.

Conary got up and made to drop the mainsail. I went forward

to take down the jib. Mr. Crocker tossed me a towline, which I cleated

to our bow. Then he pulled
Frolic
in to him and reached a hand to

me. . . . I understood. I was to ride with him. I looked at Connie, and

caught a flash of something dreaded, unhappy, in his eyes, but then it

was gone. He said nothing and gave me no sign. So I left him.

Mr. Crocker took off the lumber shirt he was wearing and made

me put it on. It didn’t make me any warmer; there was no sense that

it was given out of warmth. Mr. Crocker was a big man with a deeply

weathered face and the same weirdly light eyes as Conary’s. This I

noticed during the brief moment he stood looking at me as if to say,

So you’re what a smart girl from Boston looks like? I wondered all

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the way home how cold he was, and how much he resented me. I tried

to imagine by what transaction he had learned that I was missing, and

that Conary and I were together.

He pushed his engine back into gear. He watched carefully,

expressionless, for the moment when the towrope grew taut before

he accelerated. He was too good a boatman to snap the line by start-

ing up too fast, though I felt fairly sure that his care was out of

pride in himself, not concern for Connie’s comfort or safety. We

picked up speed and I watched from the stern as Conary, ten feet

behind us, set about furling and stopping his mainsail. Then he

flaked and bagged the jib and coiled all his lines. When all was se-

cure, he stood holding the boom to steady himself and the tiller to

hold
Frolic
in line, and looked at me. I watched the air stir his dark

hair. I reached a hand to my own hair, abruptly remembering what

it looked like; my reaction must have showed on my face because

Conary smiled. His smile seemed to say, Courage, buddy, this is

only the beginning. So I smiled too, as well as I could, to say,

Courage to you too.

As we pulled into the town anchorage, there was not a word, or

even a look, between father and son. Mr. Crocker slowed down and

made for a mooring with a little rowboat on it. Conary tied his tiller

long enough to go forward and, at just the right moment, to cast off

the towline. From the stern of the
Ruth E
I reeled it in and coiled it,

watching as he glided on to his own mooring. We circled around to

ours. I wanted to pick up the buoy for Mr. Crocker, but he never even

acknowledged the offer; he just went about doing what he did every

day in exactly the way he liked to do it. He picked up the buoy from

the cockpit, stopped the boat by throwing the engine into reverse, cut

the motor, and then walked himself forward to secure the mooring line

on the bow cleat. Then he brought the rowboat around and held it for

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me to get in. I could feel him waiting for me to do something stupid

like sit in the bow.

Side by side in silence the two men secured their oars and at-

tached their skiffs to their outhaul. They used the same moves. Mr.

Crocker, pulling hand over hand, sent the two little boats bobbing out

to where they would float even at lowest tide. Then in silence we

walked up the hill together. Connie and I moved toward his truck, but

Mr. Crocker marched toward a decrepit sedan patched with spots of

rust.

“I’ll drive her,” Conary said.

“
That’s
a fine idea,” said his father. He opened the door of his

car for me, and stood waiting for me to get in. So, I did. Conary and

I didn’t say good-bye. We didn’t say anything. I sat in the car smelling

the ancient upholstery and looked at my hands. Mr. Crocker backed

carefully up to Main Street and turned his car toward Edith’s house.

He drove twenty-five miles an hour the whole way. He was

pretty polite to me, once Conary wasn’t there anymore. I said we got

stranded when the wind dropped. He said it was true, there hadn’t

been a breath of it. He asked if we’d had anything to eat, and I said

clams for lunch. He said, “Where’d you go, March Cove?” and I said

yes. There was a little edge in that last question, as there is when you

know the answer and mean to be insulting.

I wondered what it was going to be like for Conary when he got

home. His father said to me, “Your mother must be pretty worried.”

I wondered what it was going to be like for
me
when I got home. I

said I was sure she was. We drove the rest of the way in silence.

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Spring 1886

By April the air in the Haskell house had become thickand

charged, like the atmosphere that produces heat lightning. Mercy Chatto

hid in the schoolhouse as much as she could. She didn’t want to be alone

with Danial anymore, and neither did anyone else. When he lumbered in

from the cove, it was like hearing a wounded bear up on the porch,

furious and lonely and unnatural. He could locate his injury but not

reason past it or help himself. In fact his efforts to do so had long since

broken the shaft of the weapon off in the wound, where no one could

get at it.

Venom, which sometimes coursed quietly for months like an un-

derground stream, other times erupted in unexpected places in the house-

hold. Danial roared at Sallie. Mrs. Haskell lashed out at Mercy for boiling

a pan dry when it was she herself who had done it. Sallie and Mrs. Haskell

fought with each other. This shocked Mercy almost more than the con-

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temptible pokings she infrequently suffered from Danial. She’d been

around farm animals far too long for virgin primness, though not for

disgust, since it seemed to her that at the moment Danial wielded his

swollen manhood where it wasn’t wanted, he was most unmanned. She

disliked pitying him but put up with him as you would a badly trained

dog. Mercy was young, but she was not a delicate flower. If she had a

resentment, it was less of Danial than of Claris, for not seeing what turn

things had taken and putting a stop to it.

She couldn’t tell her parents what they had done when they sent

her out to the island to preserve her from the wicked ways of town. She

didn’t want to shame them. This was only what came of wanting your

children to make the same choices you had. Mercy was beginning to think

she would not go back to the Neck when this school year was over. She

was beginning to think she would like to travel to Florence, Italy, the

most beautiful city in the world according to Signor Floro, the island’s

master stonecutter, who came from Carrara, and whose dark-eyed twins

with their long black lashes and shy foreign manners made up Mercy’s

entire second-grade class. These twins had brought her a stereopticon

picture of the Florence Duomo as a present their first day of school, and

she kept it on her desk in the schoolhouse. Out here on the edge of the

island, in sight of open sea, it seemed like the easiest thing in the world

to hop overboard onto a ship and be off to the wide world. It was a

better thing to think about than growing up to a life like Claris and

Danial Haskell’s.

Spring was late in coming that year; the winter seemed to wind on

and on, and the joke going around the village was that when the trees

finally did leaf out it would be in yellow and orange and they’d fall right

off the same day. The hackmatacks were covered in yellow fuzz, but

nothing turned green. What they were having instead of spring was an

endless mud season. Even in April the ground was frozen hard except for

a few inches at the surface. When snow or rain fell, it had nowhere to

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go. The surface mud became saturated with water, and all the roads and

footpaths were the consistency of chocolate pudding. Everyone’s boots

and hems and trouser cuffs were caked with it.

Sallie Haskell’s beau, Paul LeBlond, was talking about Colorado.

Sallie came into the schoolhouse one afternoon when Mercy was there

alone grading a Latin essay.
Pater bonus agricola est,
it began. Sallie had been crying, hard, and her eyes and nose were red and ran with anger. She

couldn’t go home like that. She sat beside Mercy, weeping.

“What happened? Can you tell me?” Mercy asked.

Sallie took deep breaths and shook her head violently, less to answer

no than to shake off some intolerable emotion. “Paul,” Sallie said.

Mercy said, Oh. She had already heard that Paul was leaving the

island. She didn’t know if Sallie would go with him, and Sallie seemed

incapable of saying more about it than his name. That was the way of

the family. There were so many things they had secretly decided must

never be put into words that living with them was like living in a glass

maze. Mercy kept bumping into barriers she didn’t know were there,

although Claris and Sallie navigated them expertly. Mercy had thought at

first that Danial was the jailer, but when she began to see more of how

it worked, she wondered if it was designed by the women, a prison in