More Than You Know (24 page)

hard to eat it slowly, swallowing one bite before ripping off another.

“Hannah?” Edith barked.

I swallowed. “We went for a walk.”

“For how many hours?”

“We went to look for the lost town.”

“What lost town?”

I told them. I was hoping one of them would ask if we found

it, but they weren’t thinking along those lines. Grandma Adele was

thinking, though. She said to Edith, “I really think she ought to have

a good wash right away. Those woods could be full of poison ivy.

Yellow laundry soap.”

Poison ivy. There isn’t any poison ivy on Beal Island. The poi-

son ivy was in some other woods, in someone else’s childhood, but

that didn’t stop either of them.

There wasn’t a laundry in the schoolhouse, and no yellow laun-

dry soap. Our wash was taken to Mrs. Seavey, who had a machine

with a mangle and a jungle of clothesline strung in her yard. Edith

and Adele made me take off all my clothes right there in the kitchen,

where the light was brightest, and watched as I washed all over with

a sponge and a cake of Ivory soap. I could have gone upstairs and

soaked in a hot tub in private, but that way I might have felt warm

again, or been comforted. When they let me dry myself, with a dish

towel, Edith carried my clothes away to the laundry hamper, and Adele

brought me a wrapper. It was her own, a baby blue wool old lady

wrapper with lace on the collar. It was much too short and smelled of

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bath powder. I felt repossessed by these two, completely. Edith asked

if I wanted anything more to eat, but I was too exhausted and demor-

alized by then to feel hungry. Edith turned out the lights, and we all

three trooped upstairs.

Outside the door to Stephen’s bedroom, Edith stopped and gave

me this dry little kiss on the cheek, as if to say I shouldn’t forgive

you but I’m so tenderhearted I can’t help myself.

Her mother watched. Then Edith said, “Well. We’re just glad

you’re safe. Of course you can’t see any more of the Crocker boy. If

it will make it easier for you, I’ll call and explain it to his father.”

I just stared. I was choked with aching in my throat, tears and

anger, so I turned and went into the bedroom and shut the door. I

couldn’t think what she would do to me for not saying good night or

thank you to Grandma Adele.

I sat in the dark wishing Stephen was awake; I thought of Con-

ary, and wondered what was happening to him at that moment. I

wanted to be near him. I wanted just to see him, so badly it was

sickening. I sat in that lacy wrapper and listened as Adele came out

of her bedroom again and down the hall to the bathroom; then Edith.

When the house was completely quiet I went back out and down

the stairs in the pitch dark. I couldn’t risk turning a light on, and I

was too exhausted and angry even to care what might be waiting,

anywhere, in that inky blackness. I felt my way into the kitchen and

found the laundry hamper. I dug Conary’s shirt out and crept back,

desperate not to bump anything or make a noise that would bring the

two of them down on me. Back in Stephen’s room, wearing the shirt,

I could finally go to bed, and to sleep.

I don’t know how to explain what happened next. It was as if a

high wall I’d been constructing for years had collapsed and buried me

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under a ton of rubble. What had happened the day before, and in the

weeks since we’d come to the Schoolhouse, seemed like a phantasm.

What was real was that Edith hated me. Edith stripping me naked in

the kitchen. Edith, who was solid flesh and right outside my door, and

was such a poor excuse for a mother to me that I hated her. I really

hated her. I was so angry that I couldn’t wake up, and I certainly

couldn’t get out of bed. I think I was afraid that if I did I would roar

out black flames and say unforgivable things, even hit her. I pictured

myself bringing something sharp and heavy right down on her head,

and the surprised stupid look on her face. I felt motherless, homeless,

and possessed.

I slept and slept and my head was filled with lurid dreams, of

sex and murder, red-tinged black visions. I must have been radiating

something fearsome, because Edith stayed away from me. I heard

voices outside the bedroom door, often, and then I’d sleep and then

there would be knocks, but I never answered. Sometimes Stephen

would creep in and sit on the side of the bed and look at me, to make

sure I was alive. I felt as if I’d been drugged, and all I wanted was to

stay under the covers with Conary’s shirt wrapped around me and stay

asleep forever. Finally Edith started banging on the door to say I had

to get up because my father was there. I was such a problem that with

all his worries he had had to leave his job and take the train all the

way up here to deal with me.

I finally managed to haul myself out of bed, but I felt as if my

body was made of anchors. I thought of wearing Connie’s shirt down-

stairs, but I was afraid they’d take it away from me, so I hid it under

the covers at the bottom of the bed. Without it, I felt so vulnerable

that I didn’t think I could make myself leave the room.

The jury was waiting for me in the kitchen. Edith, Father, and

Adele. If I had had any hope that now, finally, my father would stand

up for me, that he would remind Edith that he and I at least were the

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same flesh and bone, it didn’t survive my arrival in that room. My

father didn’t get mad often, but when he did, it was not pleasant. He

was mad to be there, and he might have been mad at Edith for calling

him there, but she was a dangerous adversary and I wasn’t. I was

about to become the object of all the things he had to be mad about

in that long hot Depression summer.

Of course first we had to deal, again, with my hair. I’m sure

he’d been told what to expect, but he seemed shocked anyway. He

said I looked as if I’d escaped from Dixmont. (That was the local

lunatic asylum where he grew up. Idiotic and feeble-minded persons,

the inmates were called in the county records.) Father did not think I

looked like Saint Joan.

He asked me what I had to say for myself. I didn’t say anything.

He didn’t like that. He looked worn out and rumpled, as if he’d

slept in his clothes on the train, which I’m sure he had. “Do you want

a good whack, young lady?” he asked me.

I said, “Oh sure, why not?” I saw his hands twitch. He really

wanted to hit me. He had never hit me in his life, but this day, he

wanted to.

“Keep it up, Hannah,” he said. His voice was cold. Then he

asked me what I thought I was doing, disappearing for something like

twelve hours with some hoodlum and worrying my mother half to

death. I said I thought I was going clamming. It failed to amuse him.

Edith gave him a look that meant, See? See what I mean?

“I don’t understand why ‘clamming’ takes twelve hours, Han-

nah.”

I thought about it awhile. What did it matter what I said? Prob-

ably not at all, so why not just tell him the truth? I tried to, but no

matter what I said, with them all staring at me, it sounded like lies.

A silence followed my recitation. I gathered that by now Adele

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had been brought up to date on my summer vacation, because she

didn’t say anything. Daddy’s voice changed then. He began using a

very mild tone, the sort of tone you’d use on a mental defective who

had taken a few hostages and was threatening to shoot them all in the

head. Talk sweet, boys, and she’ll never figure out that as soon as she

gives up her guns we’re going to mow her down.

“Tell me, Hannah. Is this ghost you saw the same one that’s

supposed to be in this house?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Well, can you tell me, how does it manage to be here

and out there at the same time?”

“I don’t know that it is. Was it in this house on Tuesday at four

thirty in the afternoon?”

Nobody answered.

“I guess it wasn’t, then. So it wasn’t here at the same time. It

was there.” Surprise, I thought. Even a mental defective can be a

smarty-pants. I wanted so badly for him to understand me, defend me,

but we were going from bad to worse.

He said, “Hannah. Why would a ghost from Beal Island come

all the way into Dundee to make trouble?”

He in no way wanted an answer, so I didn’t bother to give him

the obvious one: Because the town on Beal Island is gone. There’s

nobody there to haunt. Out loud, I said, “This house used to be the

schoolhouse on the island. I don’t think the ghost cares that it’s been

moved.” That stopped them for a minute.

My father was surprised and asked Edith if it was true about the

house. She didn’t know. He asked me how it got here, and I told him.

He was pretty interested. He seemed to remember, briefly, where he

and I had met before.

He said, “So. You think there’s some connection between this

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house and whoever this ghost is supposed to be?” He made it sound

as if it were a cartoon ghost, something cuddly and white with pop

eyes.

“We think so, yes. Ghosts have their places. Maybe we found

the house where it lived, maybe we found the old schoolhouse foun-

dation; we don’t know.”

“We?” Oh, what a patient smile he gave me. I almost fell for it.

“Me and Conary.”

That was all they needed to hear. They were all over me like

wet blankets trying to smother a fire. What was the matter with me.

What would happen to me if I so much as spoke to young Mr. Cracker

again. (My father deliberately and repeatedly called him Young Mr.

Cracker.) I was rude. I had bad morals. The whole list of my crimes,

plus the kitchen sink.

I stopped listening.

When my father was gone, back to Boston, Adele gave me a

bowl of graham crackers in milk for supper. I ate it, and was suddenly

so hungry I could have eaten the box, but she put it away. I tried to

read a story to Stephen while we waited for his mother to come back

from taking Father to the train, but I kept crying. Stephen leaned

against me and looked frightened, so I told him I was sorry and went

back upstairs to bed.

Edith, or someone, had searched the bed and taken Connie’s

shirt. I never saw it again. She must have burned it.

*

*

*

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Late that night, or in the early morning, I had finally cried so

much and slept so much that I couldn’t do either one anymore. Lying

awake in the dark room listening to my brother breathe, I was visited,

most unwillingly, by thoughts of the Haskells. They began playing on

the screen behind my eyelids, like a movie I didn’t want to see but

couldn’t turn off. On a Sunday morning, when the meeting house bell

was tolling for worship, something unthinkable happened. Someone

walked into the parlor with an ax. I saw that much—I saw the ax

raised, then I saw it fall, then I saw it again, a figure walking sound-

lessly into the parlor with an ax.

According to Phin Jellison, it had been going on noon when

Virgil Leach called in to borrow something and found that someone

had lost a battle against anger and split Danial Haskell’s head open

like an acorn squash, wrecking at least five lives with one stroke.

Six, if you count Sallie’s lost brother, and you might as well since

he was certainly part of the toll. They all would have been dead by

now in any case, but one of them refuses to have it. One of them

walks and grieves for its life so relentlessly that it wouldn’t mind

sucking the life out of you or me, as if that would give it another

chance.

I thought about them all—Danial, Claris, Sallie, Mercy, Amos—

and I began to be angry at
them
as well as at Edith for blaming me

for her own unhappiness, at my father for not protecting me from her,

at Grandma Adele for that sugarcoated malice that made Edith the

way she was. People made their own choices and mistakes and then

shoved the consequences onto other people, and I was mad at all of

them. I was furious at the ghost. I thought about what little I’d learned

about the Haskells from this one and that one, from Bowdoin and

Nella and Phin Jellison’s gory pamphlet. I thought people were fools

to make such a mystery of it. Sallie was young and passionately in

love and she wanted a chance to live her own life. Her father said no

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to her once too often for no good reason and she bashed his head in.

Why would they have tried her twice if it wasn’t that? But Paul

LeBlond had left her anyway, and she was weeping weeping weeping,

the tragic heroine, except when she ran across living people, who

didn’t think that life itself should stop because of what she was feel-