More Than You Know (33 page)

“Sylvanus McGraw,” he would say, and Flossie would answer,

“Scratch him off. He went over to the Baptists after his wife died.”

“Catherine Bowey.”

“Yes, she’d like a visit. She can talk the handle off the pump,

though.”

“I don’t mind. Sallie Haskell.”

Flossie paused. What to say about Sallie?

“She’s given a little every year. Yes, she does that in memory of

her uncle Leander. He stood right by her always.”

“Perhaps she could do more,” suggested Gilbert.

Flossie looked at him, thoughtful. “She doesn’t come to service at

all,” she offered.

“Why not? Isn’t she well?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in a good while.”

“It can’t hurt to try,” said Gilbert, completely missing the signals

Flossie was sending. He asked directions to Sallie’s house and made notes

on his list.

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The afternoon he arrived on her porch was a lovely one, with light

golden over the bay, which was dotted with sailboats. The front curtains

in Miss Haskell’s house were all drawn, but there were many of her

generation who kept the sun out of the house to save the furniture. Behind

him on the sidewalk a group of girls wearing straw hats and carrying a

picnic basket stopped to stare at the man up on Sallie Haskell’s porch.

He nodded, stiff in his clerical collar, and they nodded back and walked

on, whispering to each other. He supposed that they were pleased to see

an attractive young man arrived in the village.

He knocked. He listened for footsteps within and heard nothing.

He knocked again. (He would learn, later, that these days the people who

brought Sallie her groceries and mail walked around to the back porch

and left them without knocking.)

The third time he knocked, he heard something inside, and finally

the curtain in what he guessed to be the parlor moved slightly. He smiled

and waved at the unseen person, then waited some more.

The front door opened a crack.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Gilbert Davidson. Is Miss Haskell

at home?”

The door opened very slightly more. He could see now that he was

talking to a woman dressed in an old-fashioned style, as if she had put

on a full black Victorian mourning costume for some pageant or play.

She was a tall woman with a strong jaw and large hands and feet. Nev-

ertheless, she gave the impression of grave frailty. Her yellow-white bun

was partly tumbled down in the back, as if she had lacked the energy to

contain it. He began to be a little unsure of the wisdom of this visit; not

everyone liked company.

“I am Miss Haskell,” said the woman, speaking so softly he could

hardly hear.

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“I believe you are a member of my flock,” said Gilbert, trying to

be light. “I’ve come to take over from Reverend Beech.”

“A member of your flock,” she said, as if this were a novel thought.

“Well. I suppose I am. In some sense.” She spoke carefully, as if the

atmosphere inside the house was thick with something other than oxygen

and she had to conserve her breath for words that mattered.

“Could I come in?”

Sallie Haskell appeared to be thinking this over carefully. At last

she opened the door wide enough for him to enter, and he popped in,

now as much curious as anything else.

The house was furnished very simply and was painfully tidy, as if long

ago someone had picked it up by the neck and squeezed the life out of it,

and then put it down again, arranged in a natural-looking pose. He stood

inside the front door with his hat in his hands, waiting. Miss Haskell

seemed to have completely forgotten the conventions of a social call.

“Perhaps we could go somewhere to sit down,” he said after a bit.

“Oh,” she said. She examined him again, but just as her eyes were

beginning to make him uncomfortable, she turned and led the way slowly

through the dark dining room and into the sunny kitchen at the back of

the house. She moved painfully. “This is where I sit,” she said, when she

had achieved the kitchen. There was a rocking chair facing the window

and beside it a basket piled high with needles and wool.

She sat down facing the window, and he drew a chair from the

kitchen table and sat beside her. Seated, he could see that her view led

down to the shore and out across the bay.

“Lovely view,” he said.

“Yes.”

Then, “I see you’re a knitter,” though he knew it was a pathetic

conversational gambit.

“Yes,” she said again. He looked down rather desperately at the

pile of woolen work in her basket. He couldn’t imagine what it was.

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“What are you making?”

“Bandages.”

Now he was feeling like a fool. He wondered what ailed her, and

how soon he could excuse himself. Suddenly, though, she made an effort.

“You remember, we were all asked to knit bandages during the war.

I know the war is over; and yet I keep knitting them. Habits are hard to

break. I tell myself that sooner or later there will be another one.”

Was she making fun of him? Of herself?

“Another war?”

“Yes. What was it you came for?”

“I hoped to get to know you,” he said lamely.

“Why?”

If all his parish calls were going to be like this one, Gilbert David-

son decided he would hang himself.

“Miss Haskell. I’m new in town, and one must start somewhere. I

understood you had lived here all your life.”

After a pause, she assented to this.

“I hope to make it my home too,” he said. She looked at him, as

if wondering what that could possibly have to do with her.

“Miss Haskell, are you in health?”

This was a question nearly as stupid as the remark about the knit-

ting, and he braced himself for a recitation of symptoms. Instead, she

said, wheezing, “I was not brought up to discuss such things with strang-

ers.”

An old lady who didn’t want to talk about her health? What sort

of place had he come to?

He couldn’t simply grab his hat and flee. For one thing, she was

certainly not in health. She seemed to be slowly drowning, or strangling.

Was she getting proper medical attention? “Have you family in the area,

Miss Haskell?”

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“I have my mother,” she said simply. Mr. Davidson was rocked by

this. It had not occurred to him that Miss Haskell could have a parent

living. He had been thinking of a niece or nephew. He tried not to show

his surprise.

“Here in the village?”

“Out there.” She motioned with her head. She seemed to indicate

that her mother lived in the bay.

Seeing that he did not understand, she said, “On the island.”

He was startled. “I thought no one lived there anymore.”

“She does,” said Miss Haskell. “I would know if she was dead.”

By the time he left the house, which was very soon after that, Gilbert

Davidson felt in need of spiritual counsel himself. He could not have said

exactly what had disturbed him so profoundly about this visit; it was

something far deeper than social awkwardness. He thought of going, hat

in hand, to his brother in the cloth, the Baptist pastor, although there

had been a certain competition, if not enmity, between the two denom-

inations in the town for many decades, but the Reverend Mr. Stover had

gone to rusticate at Lake Moosemeguntic. Gilbert wrote a letter describing

the visit to his mentor at divinity school in Lincoln, and by the time he

received his reply, Sallie Haskell was dead.

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It was Bowdoin Leach who ferried Mr. Davidson out to the island.

Only he was quite sure where the landing was for the Haskell house. The

dock had long ago blown off in a hurricane, and the birch and alder had

grown up blocking the view of the house from the water. There was a

path, barely visible, remaining. If the old lady needed supplies, she wrote

a note on a piece of cloth and tied it to a tree branch on the shore. Some

fisherman passing on his way to or from the main would stop for it and

leave what she needed on the beach the next time he passed. Every few

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months Mr. Abbott would take her bill over to the bank, and the banker

would pay it. It had been years since Claris had come down to the beach

to chat, or say please or thank you. Nobody knew how it was with her,

but all respected her privacy and her right to live as she chose.

Gilbert Davidson sat amidships in the little sailing dory with the

warm wind in his hair, thinking it was ironic that instead of bearing the

news of the old lady’s death to the daughter, he was carrying sorrow

the other way. But when he got to the house, he found he was not doing that

either. It was impossible to say which had died first, the mother or the

daughter, or who had died more alone.

Claris Haskell was lying awkwardly on the floor in her nightdress.

It looked as if she had fallen and been unable to rise, and was trying to

drag herself or crawl somewhere. She was shockingly thin, thin enough

to have starved to death, although there were beans and molasses and

flour in the house, and vegetables in the overgrown garden. He went down

to the beach to tell Bowdoin what he had found.

“What should we do?” the young minister asked the older man.

“Should we . . . wrap her in something, take her with us?”

Bowdoin paused, looking at the sky. “I guess I’d rather not,” he

said finally. Mr. Davidson was relieved, as he would also rather not. He

asked Mr. Leach if he would come up to the house while he covered the

body and said a prayer, but Mr. Leach said he would rather not do that

either. The new minister went back and prayed for the safe repose of the

soul of Claris Osgood Haskell by himself.

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Claris had left a will, including orders that she be buried alongside

the graves of her stillborn daughters, with no minister and no mourners.

“In my experience,” said Mr. Davidson to the lawyer, “when the elderly

say they want no service it’s a vanity; it’s not the service they object to,

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but the fear that a service would not be well attended.” He was picturing

something rather stark and lovely, with himself in black and a small

contingent from his choir to sing “Now the Day Is Over.”

“You didn’t know Claris Haskell,” said the lawyer, who had. She

was buried as instructed, with only the undertaker and his man there to

dig the hole and lower the coffin, and the grave was left unmarked.

“There’s nobody left alive who’d have any business looking for it,”

she had written. By the time he heard that, Mr. Davidson knew more of

the history of this unhappy family, and thought he understood.

Because there was no way to tell who had died first, it could not

be determined whether the house and belongings should be donated to

the village poor farm, as in Claris’s will if her daughter predeceased her,

or parceled out among village charities and various far-flung Osgood,

Friend, and Crocker cousins, as in Sallie’s. It was more curiosity than self-

interest that caused Gilbert Davidson to visit the island once more that

fall, though the reason he gave to the boatman he hired was that if Sallie’s

will should be honored, the house she had grown up in would belong to

his church.

He found the house much changed from his earlier visit. It had

been thoroughly picked over by curiosity seekers and vandals. People had

tried on the clothes in the closets, and taken many of them away. More

were left scattered about where they fell. They had taken books from the

shelves and rummaged through letters in a desk upstairs. In an upstairs

bedroom he found a very old doll with a china head and brown hair that

seemed almost human; it was wearing an old-fashioned lawn dress, made

with tiny hand stitches and a double row of pearl buttons down the back.

The dress was so fragile it looked as if it would crumble if you touched

it. Someone had turned down the bed and put the doll into it, leaning

up against the pillow like a tiny girl. He reached out a hand to touch

the doll’s hair, and the head slid sideways. The doll had been decapitated.

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At the moment he made this discovery, he heard a door slam somewhere

downstairs, and the sound of laughing. Since he was utterly alone in the

house, it sent through him a shock of terror that he could later describe

to himself only as unholy.

He left the house so precipitously that he was halfway to the safety

of the beach and his boatman when he realized he was still holding the

Haskell family Bible, printed in England in 1610, which he had found

in a downstairs bedroom. Unwilling to return to the house, Gilbert

wrapped it in his coat and took it back to the main with him. Not long

afterward the island house and outbuildings burned to the ground by