by Ann Swinfen
Pam O’Rourke has been really kind. Her husband took the children back to Boston in time for school, but we stayed on a few days here, just lazing around and gossiping. I feel thoroughly rested. She’s a live wire when she’s occupied with gallery business, but when she switches off she has a wonderful capacity for relaxing. She puts it all down to having studied meditation and using aromatherapy! I don’t know about that, but this visit to Vermont with her has done me a lot of good.
When are you going off to Tuscany?
Love,
Tirza
16
Maine: Fall 1942
The summer weather never truly returned after the hurricane. There were hot days again, but these spells did not last for long. The wind would get up, or the banks of fog come rolling down from the Bay of Fundy, bringing an underlying chill to the air. Tobias was working every hour of clear weather to bring in the harvest. Tirza’s days were full, between the fishing and the harvest, and two weeks or more went by desolately without her meeting Sandy. Harriet and Abigail spent long hours in their kitchens, crimson-faced over their stoves, canning and making jams and pickles. Even Simon was working hard at the harvest, cutting and boxing cabbages and driving the reaping machine.
During the harvest, Tirza saw more of Simon than she had since spring had brought the soldiers to Flamboro. One day they were working side by side in the cabbage field, crumpling sheets of newspaper to make individual nests for the best ones and packing them into heavy cardboard cartons for shipment to a wholesaler in New Jersey. Simon was whistling ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ softly as he worked. He looked cheerful, and not as though he was counting the minutes until he could escape from the farm, the way he had earlier in the year.
‘Have you changed your mind?’ Tirza said, not sure how much he would confide in her any more. ‘About taking over the farm after your dad retires?’
Simon sat back on his heels and looked at her with narrowed eyes. He was passing a big cabbage from one hand to the other, as if he was hefting a basketball.
‘You haven’t been blabbing to anyone, have you?’
‘Of course not.’ She was offended. ‘I only wondered.’
Simon looked over his shoulder. Sam and Tobias were working along parallel rows, but they were some yards ahead of Tirza and Simon.
‘I’ve been talking to some of the guys.’ He had lowered his voice. ‘The enlisted men, like Captain Tucker, are some different from the men just drafted into the army because of the war. If you enlist in the regular army, they teach you a specialised skill. Like gunnery, see, or signals. And you can get promotion to officer. If you graduate from high school first, you’ve got a chance to enlist straight away as an officer, if you pass the exams and all. And there’s other possibilities...’
A few days ago, Simon had met the British airman in Flamboro, getting out of the hotel car.
‘Good morning,’ said Sandy, stopping at the foot of the steps up to Flett’s Stores.
‘Morning,’ said Simon, side-stepping on his way up to the headland to see the gun crew.
‘Like a Coke?’
Simon stopped. He was hot from the walk, and Mary Flett always kept a few bottles of Coke in the ice-box.
‘Great!’
They sat side by side on the edge of the porch with their legs dangling, all the rocking chairs already being occupied by the porch regulars. Simon gulped thankfully from the thick glass bottle, then pressed it against his hot temples. Sandy was talking about Martha, but Simon let it wash over him; he’d heard it all before.
‘So I suppose you’ll be taking over the farm eventually,’ said Sandy. ‘Do you plan to go to college first? Like Hector Swanson?’
Simon looked at him in surprise. He had never given a thought to college. Suddenly he was blurting out his longing to be free of the drudgery and emotional blackmail of the farm, his plans to join the army, the idea of enlisting after high school.
‘Have you thought about West Point?’
‘West Point?’
‘That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? Like our Sandhurst? Sort of university for army officers. If you’re serious about joining the army, better go about the thing properly.’
‘But... I don’t know... Wouldn’t it cost a lot of money?’ Simon was momentarily dazzled, then downcast.
‘I’ve no idea. I expect there are scholarships. Why don’t you ask Captain Tucker? If he doesn’t know himself, he’ll know where you can find out.’
In the days that followed, Simon had thought of little else. He hadn’t managed to speak to Captain Tucker yet, but he kept whispering to himself, West Point. That would show Dad. And Martha. And Flamboro. He’d prove he could really amount to something, not stay a dirt farmer all his life.
‘Maybe I might even get to West Point.’ It burst out of him now half defiantly.
Simon looked more animated than Tirza had seen him for a long time. One thing stood out clearly. He planned to finish high school first. She let out a sigh of relief.
Simon misunderstood.
‘You don’t need to started sighing, Tirza,’ he said irritably. ‘I’ll join the army if I want, and I’ll go all round the world. Get to be a general, maybe!’ He laughed.
‘No, no, I wasn’t complaining or anything,’ she protested. ‘Only I’m glad you’re coming to high school in the fall.’
‘Oh, sure,’ he said airily. ‘Sergeant Klinsky says only a fool would try to work his way up in the army, like him. He’s still only a sergeant and maybe won’t get any higher. He says, graduate from high school, with some math and physics and stuff, and you’re halfway to being an officer.’
He packed the cabbage into the box, and picked up his knife to cut another.
‘Anyway, if I eventually decide to retire from the army when I’m forty or something, I could still take over the farm. Dad could run it with hired help till then.’
They continued to work their way along the rows of cabbages, crawling forward on their knees. Tobias wanted a third of the field cut and packed by the time the buyer’s truck came at five thirty. Just now they were kneeling near one of the stone piles. Every year men, women and children of the Libby family had picked the stones from the fields and laid them in long piles by the field edges like ancient burial mounds. When a family picked stones, the size each child could lift was decided at the start by the father, who handed out a measuring stick cut to length. That way every member of the family contributed, each according to physical capacity. The largest stones had gone to the building of the stone walls, many of them almost as old as the family’s tenure of this land. But even so the stone piles were fifteen or eighteen feet long, eight feet wide, and almost as tall as a man.
You would think all the loose stones in the soil would have been picked up by now, but every winter’s frost threw up more to be gathered each spring, and at harvest time, if there had been a long dry spell, the dusty earth crumbled away from the insidious stones, which always moved upwards as if they were living creatures. So when you were on your knees in the dry earth the hard edges of granite pieces pressed into your flesh. You could always stand, of course, and bend double, but that was certain sure to give you a crick back. Tirza often thought there should be some easier way to harvest the vegetable crops, but she had never been able to figure out how.
The weather was a good deal cooler now, with a high white veil drawn over the sky, but down here pressed against the sun-warmed earth and labouring hard she had to keep wiping the sweat out of her eyes. Her hands grew slippery on the handle of the sharp knife she was using to cut the cabbage stalks, and she wiped her palms on the seat of her shorts every few minutes. She would have preferred to be out with Nathan in the lobsterboat, but he had said he could manage the hauling fine on his own, when Tobias came yesterday asking for her help.
‘Want to pick crab apples this evening?’ Simon asked suddenly. He had lifted the full carton to carry to the edge of the field.
‘OK.’
Tirza
was pleased. She had been wondering whether he would want to go picking with her this year. The crab apple trees grew on the Tremayne estate. The first time she and Simon – daring each other on – had climbed into the orchard they could not have been more than five and six. They ate the apples that year, despite their sour flavour – that was all part of the adventure. The severe stomach aches they suffered as a result did not put them off going back the following year. By then they knew that crab apples had to be cooked and made into jellies and preserves, so they filled a bucket and brought them home to Harriet with pride.
‘Sakes!’ she said. ‘Where did you find these?’
When they told her, she shook her head.
‘Seems to me that’s stealing.’
Sam, surprisingly, had come to their defence.
‘Them apples just go to waste every year,’ he said. ‘Fall to the ground and rot away. Feed nothin’ but the yellow jackets and such. Tremaynes ain’t gonna use them. Don’t seem like stealin’ to me.’
When Tobias came in, he agreed.
‘I hate to see good food thrown away. Tell you what, Harriet. Make them into jelly, and if the Tremaynes turn up, you can hand it over to them, and they’ll be grateful.’
Since that time, six years ago now, Tirza and Simon had gathered crab apples every year for Harriet’s jelly. They sometimes helped with the chopping too, because at this time of year Harriet could barely keep pace with all her work. And Tirza never quite lost her sense of wonder at the glow of the finished jelly.
After a quick supper in the farm kitchen, they set off. As well as the root cellar under the house, over the horse barn next to Sam’s bedroom there was a loft where apples and pumpkins and onions and other keeping fruits and vegetables were stored for the winter. They climbed the ladder to collect four bushel baskets for the crab apples.
This evening the loft was full of a hazy light like dark honey. Motes of dust from the hay stored below swam in the beams which fell slantwise through the window and the cracks where the old boards of the walls had shrunk away from each other over the years. A shaft glittered on Simon’s fair hair. The scent of harvest never left this place. Mostly compounded of apples and onions, it carried harmonies of pumpkins, turnips and rutabagas. Potatoes, too, Tirza had noticed, had their own woody, earthy smell. This year’s harvest was beginning to fill the slatted shelves, but it would be some weeks yet till the apples from the orchard and the main-crop potatoes would be gathered, and the pumpkins were still fattening. Sam had already braided together a dozen ropes of onions and hung them from old, squared-off, handmade nails that were hammered into the roof beams. More would follow when he had time in the evenings to make them, sitting in the rocker on the porch which he always occupied. Tirza loved to watch the way his bony fingers worked the leaves of the onions together. Although she was able enough when it came to mending nets, she had never managed to plait onions successfully. They always fell apart as soon as she held up the rope to show it off.
Simon ducked underneath the onions and unhooked two bushel baskets from the wall and passed them over to her. Then he lifted down two more for himself and they climbed back down the ladder to the barn. The farm track was already partly in shadow from the pine woods as they headed down to the shore, and mingies were dancing maddeningly around their faces. They slapped and swatted at them, and Tirza kept huffing air out through her mouth in the hope that they would stay away from her face. She led the way into the Tremayne estate by crossing the cabbage field and climbing over the stone wall. It was fairly high here, but she didn’t want to go right round by the coast path. Simon might spot the foxes’ den. Anyway, the orchards were opposite here, some way in from the shore.
‘We never remember the plums,’ said Simon, as he said every year. ‘The wasps and the birds will have eaten them all by now.’
‘Ayuh. Last year we said we’d remind each other.’
‘There’s been too much going on this year. Maybe next year.’
Although the evening shadows were long, there was plenty of light to see what they were doing, and they moved apart, each selecting a promising looking tree. Tirza managed to fill one of her baskets with the apples she could reach from the ground, but to fill the second one, she climbed up into the lower branches and balanced the basket in a convenient crook where she could pick into it. The half-filled basket was not too heavy to lift down from the first tree, but by the time it was full she knew she would need help.
‘Simon!’ she called. She could not see him in the dim light. He was probably up in the branches of another tree. She shinnied down and looked around. He had put his two full baskets next to her first one, but wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
‘Simon?’
‘I’m here.’
He came sauntering over from the direction of the house and helped her lift the basket down from above their heads.
‘Where did you go?’
‘Thought I saw a light in the house. But it was probably just a reflection of the setting sun.’
Tirza remembered broken wine bottles and the half-naked soldier with the girl from the village, and shivered. Suddenly she wanted to be away from here. She didn’t want Simon to know that the lovely old house had been so defiled. Between them they carried a basket to the stone wall and passed it over, then went back for the others. After they had climbed over into the cabbage field, Simon peered out towards the darkening sea.
‘You’d better get home. Looks like a fog getting up. Don’t want Grandma starting a ruckus. I can carry one basket up to the house and get Dad and Sam to help me bring back the other three.’
‘OK.’ She hesitated. ‘It was great to pick the apples with you again,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Aw, sure.’ He looked embarrassed and heaved up one of the baskets. ‘Be seeing you.’
Without a backward glance he set off up the farm track. Tirza watched him go. Against the setting sun he looked as insubstantial as if he had been cut out of cardboard. The edges of him were blurred as she squinted into the red-orange light. She wondered whether you could take a photograph of that. Sandy had said you shouldn’t point the camera into the sun because it would spoil the photograph, but it seemed to her that you might want to do just that. It was peculiar the way Simon, whose hand, bumping against hers as they manoeuvred the basket out of the tree, had felt so solid and muscular, could be turned by a trick of the light into something as wispy as a shadow. Probably you could paint that, but she wanted to photograph it.
The evening fog seemed to have been just a trick of the weather, because the next few days were hot and bright, almost like July again, although it was nearly Labour Day. Nathan told Tirza to spend her time helping up at the farm. She wasn’t catching many crabs now, and the guests at the Mansion House were drifting away. Privately, Nathan thought it would be a good idea for her to be kept busy with Tobias and Harriet, and to see something of Simon. She shouldn’t spend so much time fishing with him on the Louisa Mary. She was growing up and needed to mix more with other people.
Anyway, when she started at high school in Portland she wouldn’t be able to come out hauling with him. She would have to leave on the early bus in the morning and wouldn’t return to Flamboro until after he was back in harbour, so he’d better get used to doing without her help right now. He’d managed well enough on his own when she was a baby. It saved him time and physical effort when she helped, of course, but he had to admit that what he liked best about having her on board was the companionship.
If you had told him when he was a young man that he would ever relish the presence of a daughter on his lobsterboat, he’d have laughed aloud. But she was good company. Talking enough for good conversation’s sake, but never too much. Oh, she had never been a chatterer. But since the loss of Reliant, he had been worrying about taking her out with him at all. It wasn’t right to take youngsters to sea and risk their lives. Though folk had been doing it since Flamboro was founded. Boys, at least. Mind, according to Christina the origi
nal inhabitants, the Abenaki, had thought nothing of women fishing. They went out on equal terms with the men. Perhaps that was what made Tirza so good in a boat. Perhaps she had inherited her sea craft from her Indian ancestors.
He grinned to himself. That was some crazy notion!
The day before Labour Day Nathan went out as usual to haul his gang of traps. It was hot and sultry, with a dense breathless feel in the air as if the whole world was suffocating – interrupted by sudden gusts of cold air. They had all been discussing it on the wharf side as they collected their bait and readied their boats.
Ben was of the opinion that a thunderstorm was brewing.
‘My missus woke with one of her almighty headaches this morning, and that’s a sure sign of thunder. Swears by it, she does.’
Arthur shook his head.
‘Don’t feel like thunder to me. More like one of them settled calms that used to maroon the old windjammers out at sea. I don’t see no problem.’ He took off his shirt and wiped his forehead with it. After his grandfather Eli had been lost with Reliant, he had stopped lazing around so much. He was saving his money for a boat of his own, to help out his whole family. Meantime, he was still crewing for Ben. Since the naval patrols had disturbed the fish, they had to work longer hours for poor catches, but there didn’t seem much else any of them could do.
Nathan suspected that it might be a heavy sea fog building up way offshore. Summer was ending, and the season was upon them when areas of hot air and cold air collided, stirring up fog. As he motored out of the harbour, he spotted wisps of steam rising from the surface of the waves. He nodded in confirmation of his own thoughts. That meant the sea, still holding the heat of the last few days, was warmer than the air seeping in from Canada, even though there was barely wind to stir the listless leaves on the trees in Flamboro. Fog was more than likely, he reckoned, before the day was much older. He opened the throttle a little wider, heading for twenty or so pots he had laid out over towards Mustinegus Island.
