Read More Than You Know Online
Authors: Beth Gutcheon
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary
serious face, the deep eyes, as he had before.
“I didn’t know you were an orchardist,” she said for want of any-
thing better.
“I keep apples and pears at home,” said Danial. “I noticed last time
I was onto the main that Miss Clossy’s trees were about worn out, and
I thought a little pruning might encourage them.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
He shrugged.
“Is she kin to you?”
“No. But she’s got no one to do for her, and I like apple trees.
You don’t remember me, do you?”
They were standing in the sunshine, he with his saw in his hand,
and she with the apronful of apples he had thrown to her. Now she was
taken aback.
“Certainly I remember you. You brought me ice cream at the town
picnic.”
“I mean from when we were small.”
She was greatly surprised. He was right; she did not remember him,
at least not yet.
“I came into the village one winter when my mother was doctoring.
We stayed with the minister, and I went to the village school.”
She still didn’t remember.
“You were just a little thing. You sat up close to Miss Clossy’s
desk, in front of your sister Mary.”
Something was coming back to her. A boy the age of her brother
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Simon, but not nearly as far along in school. A boy who loved poetry . . .
who stood up in front of the class, so nervous he was shaking and her
heart had gone out to him. It was a lovely poem that she had remembered
and learned herself when she got bigger.
“You said the snow poem,” she said to him. It was like trying to
describe a dream that changes and disappears the moment you touch
words to it. But she could see that she was right . . . he was the boy who
had said the snow poem.
“The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway . . .”
She said with him: “With a silence deep and white.” There had
been a boy, as old as her brother Simon, who sat in back with the big
boys, but who kept to himself and seemed shy, and had long dark eye-
lashes and such dark eyes. He didn’t go to their church, and she hadn’t
known what his name was, but one day . . . this was so odd, it was like
the moment in Scripture when Mary Magdalene is looking into the empty
tomb, and yet when Jesus walks right up and speaks to her, she doesn’t
recognize him. How could that be, that she could look right at him and
not recognize him? That story had never made real sense to her before.
“You gave me a marble,” she said, and a slow smile came to his
face.
“I did. I won it from your brother Leander.”
“And then you were gone, you didn’t come to school anymore.”
“My mother was better, and my father came in over the ice and
took us back home.”
“I still have the marble,” Claris said, trying to shake off a feeling
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of unreality. She did, she kept it in a tiny Indian sweet-grass box along
with her locket and her collection of buttons. This was the boy, the
mystery boy, the quiet one, who had only one set of clothes, and didn’t
know the games the others did, who noticed her alone at the edge of the
circle of bigger children, and gave her his marble. All these years, when
her family was roaring away with their songs and their games and their
mock battles, and she didn’t want to belong to a herd, she wanted one
person who felt the same as she did, who would watch her with his dark
eyes, as this boy had done, she had thought of him and kept the marble.
Suddenly shy of him, she said, “We better go in to Miss Clossy.”
Danial put his saw in the crook of a branch and picked up the bag of
eggs and doughnuts she had left on the ground. She went ahead, holding
up her apronful of apples, into the low dark house.
Miss Clossy had never been a beauty, and age was not improving
her. She was big and bony, and her hair had gone very thin, but she didn’t
wear a cap as other women did, so you could see her scalp. In fact you
couldn’t avoid it. Her face was deeply pitted, and the scars were on her
scalp too; maybe that was why so much hair had fallen out. Her cottage
was very old-fashioned, without even a stove. Miss Clossy still cooked in
the open hearth, as people had in the old days. She had only two windows,
both small and high in the walls, so only a little light got in, and there
was no view out. It had the feeling of a fortified place, a tiny cave, well
defended. Miss Clossy herself, their old teacher, sat at a table. She seemed
to be doing nothing, though a large spinning wheel, the kind you stand
to use, stepping forward onto the treadle and back in a rhythm, stood by
the fire beside a large basket of carded wool, which filled the little house
with a lanolin smell. Claris guessed that the farmwives on the road gave
her some of their work so she could exchange finished yarn for cheese
and milk, or even a few pennies.
“Good day, Miss Clossy, it’s Claris Osgood, come with some eggs
from my mother, and doughnuts.”
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“We’ve brought in some of your apples for you too,” said Danial.
He walked over to the window and stood where the light would fall on
his face, so Miss Clossy could see who he was. She peered at him, then
ducked her head, as if to say, Good, it’s you, I know you.
Claris sat down at the table in Miss Clossy’s second chair (she had
only two). She began to talk of the neighborhood news, a little loudly,
as you talk to a deaf person, though as far as she knew there was nothing
wrong with Miss Clossy’s hearing. After a while she sputtered into silence,
frustrated by the lack of response, though Miss Clossy listened with ap-
parent interest, clucking a little, or ducking her head to indicate that she
was following. Her responses came as from a distance, as if an invisible
layer of some impenetrable stuff muffled her like quilt batting.
Danial leaned against the door, quiet and apparently content. Once
he said into the silence, “I’ve cut some deadwood out of them apple trees,
Miss Clossy. Ought to make pretty good kindling.”
Miss Clossy ducked her head.
“Want us to stack it there beside your door where you can get at
it?” Miss Clossy bobbed again. She kept her head to one side, as if she
could see better out of one eye than the other. Claris was growing more
and more uncomfortable.
After another silence Danial said, “We better get to it then, Miss
Clossy. I have to catch the tide, but I’ll see you the next time I’m in.”
Miss Clossy, smiling now, bobbed her head at them. They saw
themselves out, leaving her at her table. Danial went into the orchard and
began collecting apple boughs, and Claris went with him, grateful to him
for knowing just how to manage the visit.
Danial took a large heavy bough from Claris and sawed it into
smaller lengths. Claris gathered them and followed him, taking up the cut
pieces as he reduced the limbs to firewood.
“Do you see her often?”
“I try to whenever I come in. She was very good to me when I
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went to school. She made a shirt for me, seeing I had only one and the
boys were teasing me.”
Claris felt ashamed. She was sure the teasing boys had included her
brothers and cousins. She looked at his calm, sober expression, which
seemed to hold no rancor or self-pity. This was the boy who was teased,
but stood up and recited that snow poem. Who was he? What was he?
He worked in silence for a bit and then said, “I don’t think it
matters if folks are odd. What matters is what makes them that way.”
“There are so many tales told of Miss Clossy. But no one really
knows, do they?”
“I do,” said Danial.
“Can you tell me?”
“When she was a girl in Tomhegan, her mother took in a woods-
man who asked for a bed for the night. The next morning the woodsman
was dead of smallpox. One by one her whole family went down with it.
When Miss Clossy came to herself again, the rest were all dead. She
dragged the bodies into the woods one by one, then she walked away and
walked till she came to rest here.”
They worked in silence for a time. Finally Claris asked, “How do
you know that?”
“She told me.”
“Why?”
After a moment, he said, “I think she wanted to tell me people had
teased her too. She wanted me to see that they wouldn’t have, if they’d
known what they were doing.”
What a strange boy, Claris thought. She stood looking at him, and
he returned her gaze, open and frank, and hopeful.
“Claris, Claris, Went to Paris . . .” he said softly.
“My jump rope rhyme,” said Claris, and he nodded.
“Why did you give me the marble?” She surprised herself. She had
not known she would ask that.
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“Don’t you know?” he said softly.
She shook her head, her eyes locked on his. But she did know.
When she could take her eyes from his face, she said, “You’re a
strange boy,” and thought, not for the first time this afternoon, that he
kept making things come out of her mouth that she hadn’t meant to say.
“There’s a streak of it in my family. As far back as can be remem-
bered.”
She nodded. She didn’t doubt it.
“I had a great-great-uncle,” he said, “he went completely strange,
back at the time of statehood. In fact, when they drew the Maine border
and he found out his farm wasn’t in New Hampshire, he went right
downhill and nobody could snap him out of it.”
“Why?”
“He wouldn’t say. They asked him was he afraid of more taxes,
but he said no. They asked him if he didn’t care for the new state
government, but he said that wasn’t it.”
“What could it be?”
“They finally got it out of him. He said he dreaded them cold
Maine winters.”
She looked at his sober face for a moment, before she burst into
laughter.
k
The hook was now set in each mouth, and each would become a
barb through which the other would learn what life had to teach.
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The morning after I saw the old woman in my room, I told
Edith I wouldn’t spend another night there.
“I’m moving in with Stephen.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re too old for that.”
“That may be, but I’m moving. Either that or I’ll go back to
Boston.”
This threw her for a loop, briefly. “You can’t go back to Boston.”
“Why not?”
“Your father’s working very hard. There’s no one to look after
you.”
“I’m too old to need looking after.”
She waited a moment too long to retort, so I went into my room
and started cleaning out the dresser. She followed me to the door.
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“This is just nonsense, Hannah. Stephen needs more sleep than
you do, you’ll keep him up—”
“No, she won’t,” said Stephen. That was brave of him. The last
thing on earth Edith wanted was to find we’d formed a team, and she
wasn’t on it.
“Honey . . .” Her tone always softened when she spoke to him.
“You don’t know how late she stays up reading . . . the light will
bother you, sweetie.”
“I’ll use a flashlight,” I said, and went on to Stephen’s room
with my clothes in my arms.
When I was done, I went out and walked to the village, to the
post office. I knew the mail wouldn’t be ready, but I wanted to be
outside, in the bright light of the summer morning. The air had a sweet
crispness of balsam that seemed to wash me clean.
“Why, good morning, young lady,” said Mrs. Foss when I came
in. She had the most beautiful smile. She wore cotton dresses with
mother-of-pearl buttons, and she sat on a stool behind the counter,
holding court. It wasn’t in that new building we have now, with the
big parking lot in front so the summer people don’t bash into each
other on Main Street, backing into August traffic. The old post office
was in that little building by the millstream where the man sells picture
frames and fudge. When I was young it looked like the store it had
always been (and is now again). It had a counter and shelves and a
little woodstove in the middle of the room. Mrs. Foss had the mail
contract in those days because she owned the building; her husband’s
people used to sell dry goods and notions there as well as run the P.O.
Instead of fabric and buttons on the shelves, Mrs. Foss kept dime
novels that summer people left with her to give away, and when the
gardens started coming in, baskets of squash and beans and tomatoes
that everyone had too much of.
“Good morning, Mrs. Foss,” I said.
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“How are you this morning, Hannah Gray? You know Mr. Hor-
ton?”
Kermit Horton was sitting by the window with his feet up on
the cold stove. He had his dog Hoover with him. Hoover was a large
yellow mutt, with tragic eyes. He had been mistreated before Kermit