Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (25 page)

Her mother fell silent with her arms at her sides. Her toes and fingers twitched after a few minutes as her breath settled into the rhythm of sleep. Rebecca listened for her father's footsteps, but she could tell from the distant flutter of a turning page that he was still down in the living room reading the paper.

Rebecca stared at the bedroom ceiling and imagined standing with her mother as her father swam back to the boat and climbed up the ladder. Her father dressed, hopping on one leg, and whispered something in her mother's ear as she bent over, laughing. Rebecca had never seen her mother laugh this way before. Her parents put their arms around each other and walked toward the stern as if Rebecca wasn't there because, of course, she wasn't. Then her father ran back toward Rebecca, but only for his jacket, which lay at her feet, and when he glanced up, there was no look of recognition on his face. Rebecca knew this feeling, had known it all along, of not being seen, but she would also remember the look on her father's face that told of how even this brief moment away from his new wife was too much to bear.

Rebecca went to bed, falling immediately asleep without undressing, and didn't know what time it was when she sat straight up and looked out the dark window. Her clock radio was unplugged, probably from when her mother vacuumed, and her limbs felt heavy as she padded down into the kitchen. The moon hung low in
the sky, everything silent except the dormant sounds of the house, the refrigerator, and the furnace in the basement.

“Rebecca, is that you?” Grandmame called from her room. Even though Grandmame rose before dawn, she kept the blinds tightly drawn at night and the room pitch black, so that Rebecca had trouble finding her way to the ratty green chair.

“Is that you?” Grandmame said again. She was only a foot away in her narrow bed, but Rebecca couldn't see her face.

“It's me,” she said.

“There was something I wanted to tell you after dinner, but I didn't get the chance.”

Instead of going on, though, Grandmame's breathing calmed, and the airless room filled with the musk of her skin and clothes. Rebecca leaned her head back and pictured herself on the train headed north toward Jeremy. She tried to remember his face in that house but could only see the strain of his neck and the cleft where there had not been one before. The harder she tried to remember his face, the more he looked like someone she didn't know. She thought of what her mother had said about winter coming. In one afternoon of snow, everything she had seen up there—the pines, the field, and the low house—would be sheeted white against a white sky. He wouldn't stay in Dennis for long, she guessed, and he wouldn't come back to Vaughn. He would continue north on the train, hundreds
of miles through the thick forest until there was nothing but rock covered with ice. She pictured him there, as far up as anyone could go, walking across a blank white plain extending out to the horizon. Her brother, she realized, had gone north not to run away from life, as her father had said, but to know everything. Because he had wanted her to follow, she would have to keep looking for him, even if she would never find him, and even if he was no longer there but somehow everywhere, all around them.

Grandmame shook Rebecca's leg, and Rebecca opened her eyes to the morning light framing the shade.

“An awful, awful thing has happened,” Grandmame said in such an urgent voice that Rebecca leaned forward to hear. But then Rebecca realized her Grandmame was about to tell the tale, once again, that she had read in the newspaper of the girl who had been buried in a backyard. There was nothing Rebecca could say to stop her, so she just listened and waited for the story to end.

“I was only six years old when they buried me,” Grandmame said as tears soaked the moth wings of her cheeks. “My father wanted to put me next to his mother, but the people who bought the farm from us wouldn't let him, so he dug my grave in their vegetable garden while they were sleeping, and no one knows. No one knows where I am.”

The train whistle blew in the distance, the first warning of its approach from the north. Rebecca felt the air shiver from the force of the locomotive against the tracks as the second whistle blew and echoed down the valley, carried on its way south by the tide. The third whistle blew the final warning, though to Rebecca it was less a warning than a cry.

“I don't want to be buried in this place,” Grandmame said and squeezed hard on Rebecca's arm. “Promise me you won't let them.”

A promise was easy to give, and as Rebecca whispered it, Grandmame sighed as if she had finally been relieved of an unbearable secret.

Jacob's father had business in town that afternoon and the next morning. “Go with him,” Jacob's mother said. “You two can spend the night and sign up for your preseason soccer in the morning before coming back. It will save me having to give you a ride down.”

Jacob agreed to go, even though it took him away from the island and involved a trip with his father across to the mainland in the skiff and a seemingly endless hour's drive. Not bothering to bring a change of clothes, Jacob jumped off the back porch and followed his father down to the island's dock.

The fetch between Heron Island and the mainland darkened as Jacob's father, in the stern, thumbed tobacco into his pipe. After a few attempts he gave up trying to light the pipe in the wind, and as if this failure tumbled him toward another, he pushed away from the dock and started to row from the wrong direction, pushing the handles away from his chest. Jacob was in the oarsman's seat, and it was harder for
his father, rowing this way, to keep the leathers from popping out of the locks. The bags under his father's eyes looked even heavier than usual, and a thin line of blood traced across his freshly shaved neck. His shoulders bunched as he reached forward, his already round face growing red and puffy after only a few strokes.

“You take it.” His father pushed the oar handles toward Jacob. Even though it was not far to the dock on the mainland, they would blow downwind, toward Robinhood Cove, unless Jacob pulled as hard as he could. As a way of not looking at his father's face, he gazed through the Townsend Gut, the narrowest point between the island and the main, where the water funneled in and the wind whipped between the columns of tall pines, kicking up rows of chop.

“It's the best day for sailing we've had yet,” his father said. Jacob shot a glance at the
Sassanoa
riding high on her white hull above the water, her nose pointing into the wind and jumping up like a thoroughbred against her mooring tether.

“Let's go for a short sail, just once across the bay, and then I'll still have time to get to town.”

“I thought you had to be there by four. We might not even make it if we start now.”

“By five, five thirty. I just have to meet the guy to have him sign some papers and have someone take them over to the courthouse in Augusta before it closes.”

Jacob didn't say anything. He had already said enough to his mother about not wanting to go to town. He wanted to sign up for soccer, but he hated anything that took him away from the island. Also, he and his father would be alone for the night, and then Jacob would have to hang around the house all day, waiting for his father to finish work so they could make the trip back to the island.

He wondered if it was a good idea for his father not to leave enough time to get his client to sign the papers, and he knew when his father rushed he always drove too fast, and sometimes got a ticket. That would put him in a foul mood for the whole week. Jacob didn't want to say anything about not sailing, didn't want to screw up his chances of taking the boat out alone the next year, while his father was at work, when he could sail by himself down the coast to Five Islands. The tourists there, eating lobsters and clams, would look at him as though he had stepped into their lives from a past century. The year before, his father had said he could take the boat out when he was twelve, the same age at which Jacob's grandfather had let his father go out alone, but this year his father changed his mind to thirteen. Jacob wasn't sure he would ever be old enough at this rate.

“We'll just go across the bay and back,” his father said and nodded in the direction of the
Sassanoa
. Jacob pushed harder on the port oar and swung them around.
The day was good for sailing. The pines swayed; the breeze was southerly but cool. Jacob started to row for the island dock. His father's hand shot forward and wrapped around the starboard oar, shoving it into Jacob's chest so hard that it knocked the wind out of him.

“What about the life jackets in the boat bag?” Jacob asked.

“We're just going across the bay once.”

His father looked away, apparently realizing he had accidentally been too rough. Jacob wasn't going to argue about the boat bag. Even his grandfather had gone without it on short sails—just to spite the yacht-club guys and their overprecautions, he would say. Jacob's father opened his briefcase for the mobile phone (as large, with the battery, as a cracker box) and pushed POWER, bringing the clear buttons to life with yellow light. He dialed and held the phone to his head while reaching out with the other hand to grab the
Sassanoa
. Frustrated, he handed the phone to Jacob.

“When your mother picks up tell her we're just going across the bay and back before we head to Vaughn.”

Jacob took the phone. His father rested his briefcase on the deck of the
Sassanoa
, balanced himself precariously on the seat of the skiff, and pulled himself up. Both Jacob and his mother hated having a phone on the island, where they came to escape these things, and his mother was already upset about his father rushing
to Vaughn three days into his late August vacation, for an emergency meeting.

“You don't have your windbreaker,” his mother said, after Jacob told her what they were doing.

“It's warm out.”

“Tell her we're not going to be out long.”

Jacob's mother heard her husband. “So call me from town tonight,” she said. Jacob didn't know what to say. He said goodbye, his mother said goodbye, and he replaced the receiver in the battery case.

Jacob couldn't remember a time when they had not come to the island in the summer. Jacob often helped his mother scrub the clothes against the washboard in the back of the cottage, using water they caught from the sky and stored in a large tank. Jacob's grandfather had been the pilot of Portland Harbor and both his grandparents had lived on the island year-round without insulation or anything else the cabin still didn't have—things that Jacob wished their house in Vaughn didn't have either. Sometimes in the fall, after returning to Vaughn, Jacob refused to use the phone, lights, or running water, as a way of pretending he was still on the island.

As if they were trying to escape, or as if the rush that Jacob expected on the road had already begun, his father tugged frantically at the sail ties, pulling out the boom crutch and tossing it carelessly under the
foredeck, whereas Jacob had been taught to lash it forward to keep it from banging around while under way.

Things were done in a certain manner on the island, not only because they had been done that way for sixty years but because it was the right way. Jacob had learned everything about the island from his grandfather. Now that his grandfather was gone, Jacob sometimes wondered if his father was forgetting things. The previous fall Jacob had had to remind him to spread wood chips beneath the
Sassanoa
in the boathouse, to absorb moisture through the winter. The old oak planks, cut from trees on the island, would get dry rot in one season without the wood chips, and he worried that his father did not think of it.

“Just tie the skiff up now,” his father yelled. They had always tied the skiff to the stern until the
Sassanoa
was ready to sail. Otherwise the two boats would rub. Jacob moored the skiff to the buoy, as he had been told, and of course his father had not raised the main by then, so he had to sit on the deck and separate the two boats with his legs. His father tugged on the halyard, but it was stuck.

“Damn,” his father grumbled. “Jacob, help me for a second.” Jacob was reluctant to let the two boats rub, but his father was frustrated, so Jacob pushed the skiff off as far from the sailboat's hull as he could and rushed back to hold the halyard while his father jiggled the runner free. The sail rose easily then, snapping at the air, and Jacob rushed back to the bow to find the rail of
the skiff already rubbing against the
Sassanoa
's white hull. He swore to himself, pushed the dory away, and leaned over the bow to see what damage had been done. He saw a scratch three inches long. It hadn't penetrated to the wood, but the skiff had gouged out several layers of paint and left a green smudge. It would allow moisture closer to the wood. He should fix the scratch right away, as his grandfather had taught him to do, though the only way to really take a scratch out was to haul the
Sassanoa
and repaint the entire hull. Jacob was trying not to think about it, but he knew they shouldn't sail now. Not with a scratch in the hull.

“Cast off,” his father yelled. The sail was up, but the tiller was still lashed. Jacob untied the bowline but did not let go of the mooring buoy until his father freed the tiller. Then they drifted back with the wind until the sail scooped the air and leaned them to port. It was a perfect breeze. With the jib up they would move along nicely. The
Sassanoa
never moved very fast. She was nineteen feet on the waterline and modeled after a Friendship Sloop, with full keel and wide beam; Jacob's great grandfather had designed her to transport his family and their supplies to and from shore.