The Body in the Sleigh (6 page)

“Where's my chutney, Ma?” Willie asked.

Nan jumped up. “I didn't forget. Just didn't bring it in.” She turned to the Fairchilds in explanation. “Willie has to have my rhubarb chutney with his turkey or it isn't Christmas.”

Many of the faces around the table were ones Faith had never met, but knew from the Sears portraits crowded on the Marshalls' mantelpiece. Only Willie, his sister Debbie, and their families lived on the island. The others were scattered from New Hampshire to North Carolina. But everyone came home for Christmas.

It could have been a
Saturday Evening Post
Norman Rockwell cover. Work clothes had been exchanged for Sunday best and many of the men had indulged in
both
aftershave and hair gel. Several of the women had recent perms. Nan and Freeman beamed at their progeny. It was all very idyllic. Except it hadn't been achieved without struggle, and the idyllic part was in the moment. Willie, the oldest, was open about his drinking problem—a problem that had started when he had worked on the fishing boats that traveled out to Georges Bank for weeks at a time in search of large catches. Days of mind-numbing boredom were punctuated by short intervals of frantic, extremely dangerous activity, and the combination created an addictive thirst. Faced with the prospect of divorce and losing contact with his two children, he entered a rehab program in Ellsworth and joined AA on the island. He'd been sober for twelve years. Two more kids were born. There was nothing alcoholic being served today, not even in the hard sauce for the plum puddings.

And Faith knew that one daughter had had a messy divorce and another was on the brink of one. Her husband, a bear of a man from away—Vermont—kept leaving the table for a smoke outside.

In short, the Marshalls were just like millions of other American families sitting down to eat today—problems solved and unsolved, connections occasionally stretched thin, but a palpable sense of family. Their roots extended deep into the island's granite bedrock; their forebears lay beneath headstones from that same granite in the island's cemeteries.

Idyllic moments were all well and good, but it was the working out of life's curveballs that mattered. The “never stop talking to one another even if you are right and the rest of the family is wrong.” The “dropping everything and coming home in good times and bad.” Faith felt her spirits rise. The Marshalls were a powerful tonic.

Conversation was swirling around her, and those who lived away had reverted to their Sanpere cadences. This, combined with the laughter, made it hard to figure out what was being discussed, but deciphering it all was making Faith feel as happy as a clam at high tide.

On her right side, Willie was complaining about the law requiring fishermen to buy sinking instead of floating line for their traps—a major expense, even though there was a buy-back program for the old line, because the sinking line deteriorated faster. When he'd left the deep-sea boats, he'd fished with Freeman for a time, but had been on his own for years. Now that the kids were in school, his wife was his sternman. “Better than sitting home worrying and I get a workout for nothing that women pay good money for up to Ellsworth at Curves,” she said.

“As I was saying before I got interrupted…” His sibs weren't going to let him get away with anything and there was a chorus of “Keep talking like that and you're going to catch it when you get home! Forget about any canoodlin' tonight.”

He tried again. “I've been fishing in the Gulf of Maine since I was a kid and Dad since Hector was a pup. Neither of us and no one I ever heard tell of has caught a single whale in our lines. Not a tail, not a fin. So for Washington to paint us all with the same brush is not just as stupid as the bastards are usually, but a disaster. Fine. Whales get caught in line. That's not good. But, Jeez-zuz! We don't even get many whales here—and any that have been injured are because those cruise ships smack into them! They've got plenty of Mobys down on Cape Cod and Cape Ann. I can see the point there, but to apply it irregardless is number than a pounded thumb!”

“We got to do something, Willie,” his father called from the head of the table, reaching for the sweet potatoes that Nan had made with plenty of butter and brown sugar—just the way he liked them. “Added to the cost of fuel and the price for lobster going straight down to hell in a handcart—well, I don't see how anybody's going to make it this year.”

On Faith's other side, talk was about the economy as well.

“I'd counted on getting housecleaning jobs next summer, but folks aren't going to be renting what with this economy. They'll stay home if they've been able to hold on to them, instead of driving all the way up here.”

“Wreath sales were way down too,” a woman across the table said. It was Debbie, the daughter who lived on the island with her husband, an electrician, and their three kids. One of them was Jake. “At least people always need wiring installed or replaced. Maybe I should learn plumbing and we'd be sitting pretty. Cover all the bases.”

“More like a throne—the porcelain kind,” her brother said, and laughter broke out again.

Faith looked down to check on her kids at the far end of the table. Amy had cleaned her plate and her blond head was bent toward the brown one next to her. It belonged to the granddaugh
ter from North Carolina, Faith thought. It looked like the two little girls were sharing secrets or more likely plotting a getaway from all the boring adult talk.

Ben was listening in rapt adoration as Jake talked about his car and how he'd tricked it out with all sorts of stuff from NAPA Auto Parts, including a gearshift that lighted up at night. “Got a vanity plate that says ‘Way too cool'—I used a numeral for the ‘too' and left the
y
off ‘way,'” Faith heard him say proudly. “All cost me a pretty penny.”

She helped herself to another serving of the stuffing and wondered for a moment where Jake's pretty pennies for a car were coming from. Maybe he was working with his father, learning the trade. The island could certainly use another electrician. She reminded herself to compliment the family on their holiday window. Most likely Jake rigged a dinghy with an outboard and had his own traps during the summer. He was very involved with sports during the school year, she knew from his proud grandparents, which wouldn't leave time for much more than homework after practice.

Tom's plate was empty. It had borne little resemblance to the plates of Christmas Dinners Past—mounds of comestibles that immediately were consumed by his enviably active metabolism. At this one he'd eaten lightly—the doctor had cautioned him on heavy meals, advising smaller ones spread out over the day—and Tom had avoided fats, although since the whole table was swimming in them that had been almost impossible. The turkey provided plenty of the protein he needed and, without gravy, met the low-fat requirement. Nan's biscuits and dinner rolls didn't need butter. They melted in your mouth as they were. So, he certainly hadn't starved after proclaiming on the way over that he was hungry enough to eat a boiled owl—a Maine phrase he'd picked up from their host. Now he was having an animated discussion with Freeman about a McMansion going up on the other side of the
island that had “raised a ruction.” It wasn't because the house was an obscene contrast to the way the majority of people on Sanpere lived—as the Fairchilds thought when they'd heard about it—but because, Freeman informed them, the owner was using an off-island crew to build it and buying all his materials off-island too. “Heard the stone for round the fireplaces is coming from Africa. Now I ask you, Tom, what is wrong with our granite? I'm sure whatever they're quarrying in Africa is finest kind, but he's setting on the stuff. Why wouldn't he use it? There's still a couple of small operations here.”

“Got to have something exotic to put in the caption when the house is featured in
Architectural Digest,”
Debbie said.

Faith was no longer surprised at the things people on the island knew, or underestimated their sophistication. When their Aleford neighbors the Millers had convinced them to rent a place on their beloved Sanpere Island when Ben was a toddler, she had resisted with every bone in her body. An island off the coast of Maine? Vacation had meant the Hamptons to Faith as a young twenty-something before her marriage. And afterward, as a newlywed, it had meant Provence or Portofino. The craggy, rockbound coast where dressing up meant exchanging one kind of L.L.Bean shoe for another and L.L.Bean jeans for an L.L.Bean skirt was not her idea of a getaway.

It was partly the food that hooked her that first summer—peekytoe crab, fresh halibut, all the lobster you could possibly want, mussels and clams gathered just before they went into the pot. The growing season was short, but each fruit or vegetable became that much more special. Strawberries in late June. New peas to go with salmon for the Fourth of July. Then salad greens, broccoli, blueberries, squash, and cukes until tomatoes flooded the farmer's market in August. There was a rhythm to what she put on the table over the summer months and a rhythm to their lives that she had come to treasure, watching the June lupine in the small
meadow in front of the house give way to daisies, Indian paintbrush, Queen Anne's lace, black-eyed Susans, and finally goldenrod and tiny purple asters in late August. A rhythm that matched the tides she never tired of—the emptying out of the water that left a shiny mudflat interrupted by granite ledges, and the water's return that hid what was below, its surface ever changing, its color reflecting the sky.

Then there had been the people. People like Nan and Freeman, and so many others. This wasn't simply a place where people left their cars unlocked when they went to pick up their mail at the post office or dashed into the market for milk, but the keys in the ignition, often with the motor running.

As the summers had passed, the depth of her feeling for the island increased—although she still made time for several visits to her sister, who moved from her Manhattan town house to East Hampton in the summer. Hope was a year younger than Faith. Her determined—and always well-shod—little feet had taken her from college to B school to Wall Street in one straight, successful line. She'd met and married Quentin, her soul-and workmate. They'd synchronized their BlackBerries and found time to produce Quentin III, now four years old. Nannies and advanced technology enabled Hope to shift households seasonally, for which her sister was profoundly grateful. Faith's life had taken more zigs and zags, none more marked than her departure from the Big Apple for the mackintoshes of New England when she'd married Tom. Her sojourns with Hope put her in touch with her roots—the three
B
s: Bloomies, Barneys, and Balducci's—and their Hamptons equivalents.

She'd be calling Hope later and missed her now. When they were little, they'd interpreted the “We like sheep” passage in Handel's
Messiah
literally and created their own version, adding “and goats and chickens and cats and dogs too.” Each year they sang a few bars together over the phone or in person. Yes, it was corny—
like saying “Be an angel” when they hung up after talking for a long time. It was their mother's phrase and they'd gone from regarding it as an admonition to realizing it was an endearment.

Nan was standing up and putting on the apron she'd taken off earlier and hung on the arm of her chair. A signal understood immediately by all the women present, and they jumped to their feet like marionettes on strings.

“Time to take a breather before dessert,” Nan said.

Most of the men were rising now too.

“Now, mother, we'll all pitch in and help. Once again, you've given us a dinner to remember,” Freeman said.

“Freeman Marshall, you know very well that you're dying to show off that iceboat you've been working on out in the barn and all you men would just get in the way. Get your jackets and go on out. Cold will give you an appetite for the pies and the rest of the desserts.”

In the kitchen as they were putting away the remarkably few leftovers, Nan told Faith, “Freeman's been iceboating with some of his friends for years now. These are the same crazy boys that used to go down to the shore, take a pole, and push themselves around on ice cakes in grade school, then take their motorcycles out on the ponds when they were in their teens. I'll never forget hearing about one time when Freeman was crossing Georges Pond and it was late in the season. The ice was okay in the middle, but as he went in close to shore, it cracked. He managed to jump off and get to dry land, but his friend Forrest on the other side didn't know that. Just saw a headlight pointed at the sky and then nothing. He thought he'd lost him and yelled several times before Freeman answered—steamed, because he thought his bike was gone for good. Next day a bunch of them managed to find it with a grappling hook and they got it to shore, except there was a lot of do-si-doing with first all of them finding the thing, then lightening the load in the rowboat to bring it in, still with one person
rowing. They thought it was some funny, but Freeman's father heard about it and gave him major hell. I'm sure my boys—and girls”—her eyes swept the room and three grown women loading a dishwasher froze in their tracks—“did a lot of things I didn't know about and I'm glad I didn't.”

Faith joined in the laughter, which ended abruptly when Debbie said sadly, “I wish we had known what Norah was up to. Jake has been so upset. He won't even talk about it. I was surprised he asked Dad to say a blessing for her. I haven't even heard her name cross his lips since we got the news. I'm worried about him—and all the other kids in her class.” She turned to Faith. “Our grades are so small that the kids are tight. They knew Norah from summers and better once she and Darlene came back.”

“Tight enough, so they cover for each other. Yes, I know I'm way far away in New Hampshire, but it's the same all over,” her sister said. “I'm not saying Jake knew exactly what she was into, but some of her friends had to have. Knew where she was getting the drugs, even if it was off-island.”