Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
accident or arson. (There was no doubt that the burn was a great con-
venience to the blueberry growers who were harvesting out there those
summers.)
By the time the wills were settled, it seemed awkward to Mr. Da-
vidson to mention that he had the Bible. He had learned by then how
much it was worth on the rare book market, and it was too much for
him to either keep or sell without explanation. He did some research on
the early Haskells whose births, marriages, and deaths were listed in the
front, and found that an Efraim Haskell had gone to Harvard in 1688.
He wrapped the Bible in brown paper and mailed it off to the university,
with a note declaring an anonymous donation from an old Harvard family.
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WhenIwaswellenoughtomakethetrip,Edithdroveme
and Stephen home. Boston was hot and loud and felt as if it had a
disease that brought fever. Our apartment had been shut up since my
father left, with dust sheets over the furniture. Something had rotted
in the icebox, and the smell soaked into the corners of the house and
could not seem to be aired out. Edith had tense conversations on the
telephone with Father, but he did not come back. I was still Edith’s
prisoner. Or her charge. I needed help dressing and bathing and going
to the bathroom, and she gave it as kindly as she could. Stephen was
my comfort. He sat in my room by the hour, and we listened to the
radio or played Parcheesi. One weekend Father came home to be with
me, and Edith went to her mother’s. When she came back she was in
tears over Grandma Adele and a silver pitcher that was given to Aunt
Hester, when everyone knew it was Edith who had always wanted it.
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My injuries healed, but my sickness at heart was no better. I
couldn’t eat properly and stopped having my monthly. At first I be-
lieved I was pregnant, and it gave me the most unholy glow of hope,
but the doctor told Edith I was in danger of beriberi, and after that
she made me eat three meals a day and cooked everything in lard.
Once I wrote to Conary’s father. It took me a week, writing and
rewriting. I wanted to tell him I would love Conary all my life and
was sorry for his loss. It didn’t matter how hard I worked on it, it
came back marked REFUSED. Much later we used to run into each other
in Abbott’s now and again. Toward the end of his life when he
couldn’t fish anymore he worked for a time at the Esso, pumping gas.
He even filled my tank once when he couldn’t avoid it, but he never
spoke a civil word to me. He believed that if I had kept to myself,
with my big city ways, and obeyed my elders, his son would be alive.
That was hard. It was hard when we met, and it’s hard now.
At Christmas my father came home and Edith packed her bags
and Stephen’s and left for good. Father kept saying everything would
be all right again, the bad time was over. I couldn’t figure out what
on earth he meant; I didn’t think the bad time would ever be over,
and I missed my brother. It turned out he meant that he and Edith
were getting a divorce. He thought all my wildness that summer, my
“summer fling with the town rebel,” was all about him and Edith.
Stephen was having nightmares too and a rash, but now all that would
stop, according to Father. He had a new “friend,” a widow who worked
in his office. He’d known her quite a while, and he was sure I would
like her.
I thought Stephen had plenty of real things to be having night-
mares about, but I didn’t say so. I made sure I wrote to him, and most
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weekends he was allowed to come spend a night with us, though it
seemed strange, him arriving with his little suitcase. Edith lived with
her mother briefly, then got a job as a hostess at the Chilton Club,
where they also gave her a room, so for a while Stephen moved back
with us. Then Father married his “friend,” a fattish woman with no
children of her own and no interest in them. Edith, who was furious,
lost her job, so off Stephen went again to live at Grandma Adele’s
with her.
It’s all pretty much a daze to me. In fact, the bad time did end,
as most things do. I never did go back to school, but it didn’t matter.
I didn’t want to anymore. It was looking more and more as if a war
was coming, and everyone was worried about whether we’d be drawn
into it. I took a course in typing and got a job in an office which I
liked quite well. I gained some weight back and began to care about
things I hadn’t for a long while.
My grandmother died in the spring of 1940, in mud season. I
went up to Dundee with my father for the funeral. Mr. Davidson did
the eulogy, and I thought it was fine, though my grandfather com-
plained that the landscape had done something to Mr. Davidson, that
he wasn’t a Christian anymore. “Listen to him preach; he never men-
tions our Lord or the Trinity. We pray about rocks and trees and the
eternal sea.” Grandfather called him the Druid.
I’d seen Ralph Ober at my grandmother’s funeral, and when he
came through Boston on his way to the war, he looked me up; a lot
of the boys from the county had enlisted. Soldiering was a paying job.
Ralph and I wrote to each other while he was in the service, and when
he got out we got married, and in the summer started coming back to
Dundee.
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*
*
*
The Schoolhouse is gone. One of the volunteers in the fire bri-
gade told me that the night it burned he saw a figure in the window
upstairs just before the roof fell in. Scared him so much he quit fire-
fighting. They never found anything human in the ashes though.
Conary’s sister, Mary, is still alive. I used to see her sometimes.
She’s gotten immensely fat and is thought never to leave her house. I
know she does, probably at night, because when I go to visit Conary’s
grave, there are often flowers there. She plants primroses on it in the
spring, and when they need it, I water and weed them. It’s like a secret
message going back and forth between us, like the notes she used to
leave in the book for me.
I keep that book up here in the shelf to the right of the fire-
place. It’s one of the reasons I like to be in this house, even in win-
ter. I can see it from my desk here by the window. I can watch it,
as if someday I was going to find it pushed back an inch or two on
the shelf.
It’s been a strange experience, rereading that diary after all these
years. It’s as if the girl I was is still inside me, and the broken-down
old body she carries around belongs to somebody else. Maybe to one
of those old women I knew in my youth who seemed to have been
old always.
Not that I haven’t changed. I have; I’ve had a quiet life, with
much of the kindness and patience I wanted as a child finally coming
to me from my husband. So many things have come to me that never
came to Conary, both good and bad. It’s my hope that Ralph never
knew how much that ache of missing Conary remained with me. I
know it would have made him unhappy, and he was a good man and
never deserved that.
Ralph and I went through a lot with our middle daughter, who
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seemed possessed by some banshee about the time she turned four-
teen. She’s turned out pretty well, but the bad times are not com-
pletely forgotten on either side. There were times I wished I could
have talked to Edith about it, but she never allowed it, and now it’s
too late.
I find myself thinking about Bowdoin Leach, saying his life had
been a circle. I think of mine that way, as if being old and alone has
brought me around again to that moment in my life when feelings
were shimmering and huge, and you felt you were the first person on
earth ever to really be in love. It hasn’t been easy to visit again the
girl I was. Yet it seemed important, not to pretend that the present
changes the past. I believe the past changes the present much more
than we know, but we don’t like to think about what we can’t ever
understand.
I suppose in going back to that time in my life I hoped I might
come to understand where that evil came from. And where did it go?
There’s a sage plant in my herb bed now that winters over. It isn’t an
evergreen, but it doesn’t lose its leaves. They go limp and silver gray
and then freeze and hang there, looking like dead bats hanging upside
down from the rafters. Then spring comes, and the green comes back
into the same leaves and the thing is alive again. I suppose a really
bitter winter would kill it, but nothing has yet.
How does harm pass in patterns the way it does from one gen-
eration to the next? Is there any more sense to it than to that sage
plant? I hoped to find out, but I can’t say that I have. Now that I’ve
done the last thing I could, by telling this story, I suppose I should
study on the most mysterious thing we have to do, that each of us
does alone, and for the first time, and hope that it’s not the end of
understanding.
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I know things about true love and ghosts, but I don’t know the
thing I’ve wanted to know most. I know there are feelings that survive
death, but can they all? What if only the bitterest and most selfish are
strong enough? That would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?
I expect I’ll know sometime. I don’t think it will be long now.
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Coda
Dundee, Maine, 1939
TheHamornephewwhoownedtheSchoolhousetriedtorent
it one more summer. The tenants left after a week and made him refund
their money. They complained of bats, but that didn’t make any sense.
No one else had seen the bats, and besides, everyone wanted bats; they
ate the mosquitoes. After that the house stood empty, but for some reason
the field in front of it became the best place in the village for fireflies,
and the children used to go there on summer evenings to catch them in
mason jars.
Then there was the day late in summer when some hikers from
Mt. Desert got turned around and fetched up at Dundee when they’d
been aiming for Hancock Point. They finally staggered into the post
office saying they’d been told that someone there could arrange a ride
for them back to Northeast Harbor. Kermit said he probably could,
but who had they been talking to? There was no one living up the road
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they came in by. The hikers said they’d had a nice chat with a lady in
a flowered dress in the house out on the point, the one that looked like
a schoolhouse.
k
The Hamor nephew grew tired of paying upkeep on a place that
wasn’t earning him any money. He put it on the market, but it never
sold, though the real estate agent said she was sure it would go if he’d
rewire it and put in two more bathrooms. He said he was damned if he
was going to throw good money after bad. He offered it to the volunteer
fire department, and they accepted it gratefully. They always needed
houses they could burn down to practice on.
The night before the Schoolhouse was to burn, Bowdoin Leach
walked down the road to have a last look at it. He had known it on the
island and he had known it on the main. There were not many things
left he could say that about, and he thought he’d just go down there by
himself to say good-bye.
Bowdoin had always said that Sallie hadn’t done the murder, she
just knew who did. But saying it hadn’t made it true, and it bothered
him not to know. The one thing he knew was the person who could
do that murder was a person who would take something of value from
someone else, even though it was useless to her. Killing Danial Haskell
hadn’t given a new life to anybody else. Not a new life anyone could
have wished for. The person who could refuse to see that coming could
refuse anything. It was a thought more frightening than the blade of an
ax, a soul like that, but Bowdoin was too old to be more frightened
than curious.
He stood in the road a good while, looking at the old place. Its
face was dark, as if its eyes were closed and it was ready to go. But after
a while he walked around to the back, and there he could see the light
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in the window. It was very faint, but what was clear and growing clearer
as the sun set was the sound of fiddle music. He listened a long time. It
was an old-fashioned tune he hadn’t heard since his youth, but he knew
it well. It was the sailor’s song Mrs. Haskell used to play with her son,
called “Black-Eyed Susan.”
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I am deeply grateful to friends who have read and responded to
various versions of this story and offered invaluable reactions
that helped it toward its final shape. Tina Nides and Ben Cheever