I stopped, miserable. Not only had I as good as accused him of stealing lilacs, I had intimated that I thought the natives had no need of gratuitous loveliness.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
He did not smile again, but his face unfroze a bit.
“Caleb and I always take an armful to the cemetery when we trim Mrs. Chambliss’s lilacs,” he said. “All our people are there from the year one. Caleb knows almost every one of his ancestors by now.”
“How lovely,” I said. “How nice to be where all your people have always been. I think it’s a wonderful idea. Thank you again, and please go on with your trimming.”
I turned and went back into the house. Presently I heard the metallic snipping start again. Still hotfaced, I went back to Mother Hannah’s Blueberry Bombe.
An hour must have passed before I heard the scream. It was the child; I knew that instantly, but the terror and anguish in it was electrifying, and I was on my feet and out the front door before it fairly ended. Micah Willis knelt on the grass beside his son, who was stretched out on his back, writhing and shrieking, while a fountain of bright blood arced through the air and spattered on the snowfall of lilacs around them. I saw that Micah had his pocket handkerchief pressed hard around the child’s instep, but it had bloodied to slick limpness, and the fountain pumped on. I turned and flew to the linen closet and grabbed an armful of clean towels and ran back. Micah was just gathering the little boy into his arms, and the blood was still pumping.
“Here, hold it hard over the cut and don’t let up on the pressure,” I gasped, falling on my knees beside him. He grabbed the towels and wrapped the little foot in them, his face white under the tan. The boy screamed on.
“Who can I call?” I cried. “Is there a doctor in the village? I’ll run down to the Thorne girls’ and telephone—”
“It needs sewing,” he said. “He needs the doctor over in Brooksville. It’ll be faster to take him. Tell his mother where we’ve gone when she comes back.”
He scooped the child up and ran for the truck, and when he did the awful bleeding started again.
“Wait!” I ran after him. “Somebody’s got to hold that towel firm. Give him to me and you drive. I know first aid; we had to, in the woods back home.”
He put the child into my arms in the truck and slammed it into gear. The old car coughed and wallowed up the lane and swayed out onto the dirt road toward the mainland. I held Caleb hard against me on my lap, a wad of towels wrapped tight around his little foot and held there with one hand. With the other I smoothed his hair and cheeks.
“Now,” I whispered. “Now, then. It’s stopping already, and we’ll get you all fixed up, and maybe, if you’re really, really lucky, you’ll have a scar.”
The child stopped some of his writhing and all of the sobbing and looked up at me. His face and blue denim clothing were spattered dark with his blood, and his eyes were huge in his bone-white face.
“A scar? You reckon, really?”
“Shoot, yes,” I said, kissing the top of his head. “I can almost promise you a scar. Probably the best scar on Cape Rosier. You can charge people a penny to look at it.”
“Aw, g’wan,” he said, but he did not begin crying again. He slumped against me and closed his eyes. His father looked worriedly at him and then at me, but I could feel the strong beat of the little heart and the steady breaths on my arm.
“It’s hard work making a scar,” I said, more to the boy than his father. Both smiled, small smiles.
“Is it stopping?” Micah Willis said, and I nodded yes. Blood still seeped through the top towel, but it did not pump.
“What happened?”
“He stepped on the shears. I put ’em down to pull some witch grass and the next thing I knew he was screaming and bleeding like a stuck pig. I was some scared; I never saw him hurt like that before. His mother will kill me.”
“It’s not going to be so bad,” I said. “There’s an artery there, is all. That’s why it bled so. It’s close to the top; I’m almost sure it didn’t go deep enough to cut a tendon. He couldn’t move his foot like that if it had.”
“Were you a nurse?” he said. He was still driving fast, the truck bouncing over the dusty corrugated ruts, but he was not literally flying now.
“No, but we lived in the middle of a river swamp miles from town, and my father made sure I knew what to do about cuts and snakes and things. I stayed out by myself a lot. And then I’ve read a lot of biology too. At least enough to know Caleb’s going to be fine.”
“We’re beholden to you,” he said formally. “I don’t know that I could have managed without somebody to hold him. You’re all over blood. Going to scare the bejesus out of your mum-in-law.”
“Well, it may scare her, but it sure won’t surprise her,” I said. “After what I’ve put her through the last week, a little blood of somebody else’s isn’t going to bother her a bit. She’ll probably wish it was mine, at that.”
I looked at him sheepishly. This man was, after all, a virtual stranger, and the employee of my mother-in-law to boot.
“That was an ungrateful and ungracious thing to say, and I apologize,” I muttered.
“Never mind,” he said, and grinned outright. It softened the sharp, dark face extraordinarily. “I heard about your outing with Parker Potter. Surprised you didn’t knock him overboard. Good thing if you had.”
I smiled too, suddenly shy, and said, “How much farther?”
“Through South Brooksville and on to Brooksville, about five miles,” he said. “There’s a full-time doctor with a surgery there.”
“Oh—I plain forgot,” I cried. “Dr. Lincoln was right there in the colony; he wouldn’t be out sailing, and I don’t think they leave the cottage until after lunch. We could have saved all this time—”
“This is better,” he said. He did not look around at me. Something in his tone told me not to ask why. I was silent, holding the nodding child against my breast, until we pulled up at the doctor’s gleaming white miniature Greek Revival, some twenty minutes later, and he did not speak either.
When he came out of the surgery carrying Caleb, washed and bandaged and drowsy with relief and anodyne, the little boy held his arms out to me as automatically as he might have to his mother, and I took him and held him against my shoulder and carried him back out to the truck. In the back, the mound of white lilacs looked incongruous, exotic, like a cargo of snow. They had scarcely wilted. We were halfway back to Retreat, Caleb sleeping limply, when I said, “It’s a shame to let the lilacs die. Is there somewhere you can put them until you can get them to the cemetery?”
“Well,” he said, “the cemetery’s right on the way, just before we get to the general store. If you’ve got a little more time, I might drop them off there. Caleb’s going to be disappointed if we don’t. There’s a spring and well there, too; might not be a bad idea if you cleaned up a tad.”
I looked down at my hands and arms and the hem of my dress. They looked as if I had been assisting in an abbatoir.
“I’d like to see the cemetery,” I said.
We turned into the little Cove Harbor cemetery through two leaning rusty-white marble pillars, long since naked of whatever arch they had supported. There was a dark screen of spruce and fir between the area of the graves and the road, but once past it you could see the tumbled old monuments, most blackened with age and weather and covered with moss, marching in irregular rows down to the saltwater meadow that fringed the bay. Wild grasses and flowers waved in the little wind off the sea, and the smell of salt hay drying down at the water’s edge, and kelp, and lilacs, and the clean spruce smell of Cape Rosier itself was wonderful after the choking dust of the road. Butterflies danced above the grasses, and birds sang, and gulls mewled and wheeled overhead, and the dark fingers of the pointed firs scratched against the ringing blue of the midday sky. Without the racketing motor it was very quiet. The salt wind was damp on my hot face and neck.
“What a beautif
ul place,” I said. “And what a lot of people are here. Is it very old?”
He paused from unloading armfuls of lilacs. We had laid the sleeping boy down on the front seat and covered him with the last of the clean towels.
“Goes back to about 1680. These up here are the newest,” he said, indicating the nearest row of stones. “These are Allens; they got here in the late 1800s and had to take the slots nearest the road. The oldest are back down there, closest to the sea. My folks are back there. Christina’s too. And the Murrays and the Bartletts and the Goodens. Got here first, got the best pews, so to speak.”
“Your people have been here since sixteen something?” I said. “I didn’t think anybody was here then but Indians. That’s forever.”
“Not really,” he said, amused. “There’ve been people here since about three thousand B.C. Came from Spain and France. From what’s been found of their artifacts, they were the same folks as the ones who did the paintings in the caves in Lascaux. Pretty stuff, very modern-looking. Then there were several ages of Indians, mainly the Abenakis, the Dawn People. Then old Leif Erickson brought his Vikings here and looked around; there are carvings on the rocks over on Monhegan and a couple of other places that they’re pretty sure are Viking, and a paved highway buried deep at Pemaquid they’re sure is. Then after that we had the English, and the Spanish, and the French, and the Italians—though they were mostly hired hands—and the English again, under Sir Walter Raleigh and his brother, and so forth and so on. The first permanent settlement was at Kittery, in 1616. My folks came over from Massachussets as soon as anybody knew about Maine. Never could stand not having our own piece of dirt, could the Willises. Christina’s folks were Duschesnes, descendants of the French, the coureurs de bois, wild young rapscallions sent over here to live with the Indians and learn their ways. Wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some Jesuit blood in the Duschesne family, either. Those old guys really got around in the name of God.”
I looked at him, humbled. “I don’t think many people know as much about their state or their family as you do,” I said. “We do in Charleston, but only about our families. The rest of South Carolina might as well not be there. Do they teach you much history in the schools here?”
“Not too many of us go to school,” he said matter-of-factly. “Most of us go to haul, or to apprentice with sails, or to the lumber camps or the land when we’re old enough to wear long pants. There are precious few schools this far Down East. But we manage to learn. My family, now, is a great one for reading, so we learn that when we’re tykes. That’s what we do in the long dark winters, when it’s too bad to get out. Others make music, or weave, or paint, or carve. Not many of us just sit there. And all of us tell stories to the rest of us. But there are formal educated people among us. Christina’s brother is a biologist over in Bar Harbor, and her uncle plays a concert violin in Portsmouth. My own grandfather was a sea captain and my other one a teacher in Nova Scotia. I was set to go on to school and study, but Daddy lost the fingers of his right hand to frostbite and couldn’t haul anymore, and he started a little old boatyard, and I’ve helped him, and now it’s a right good little country boatyard, all told. Make nice wooden boats, if I do say so myself.”
We reached the area where the Willises lay in their weathered ranks, and laid our armfuls of blossoms on their graves. We had enough left over for the Duschesnes too, and one or two more bunches for some of the neighboring graves. By the time he had shown me the little stone cistern over the spring, at the edge of the meadow under a great twisted spruce, and I had dabbed most of the blood off my face and my clothes, the sun was high overhead. We started back to the truck.
“Do you ever regret not going to school?” I said.
“Sometimes, I guess,” he said, looking off to the water, a white glitter now in the noonday. “But usually not. Willises have always had some land and a house, whatever else they didn’t have. We’ve always owned our own doorsteps. I don’t think we could have kept what we had here if I’d left, and it wouldn’t have been worth it to me in the long run. We’re not too smart; we’ve always been willing to sacrifice anything we had, to keep our land and our homes. There’ll be none of us rich. Maybe that boy up there will be the one to cut and run. But somehow I don’t think so.”
“You’re just like my family,” I said. “Or rather, mine is just like yours. My family has hung on to its big old place in the swamp since the 1700s too; you’d think land was the holy grail to us. Isn’t that funny? I’m even French like your wife. My family’s name is Gascoigne. I didn’t think I’d ever find a soul up here I had anything in common with.”
“You still haven’t,” he said crisply. “A French last name isn’t enough, by a long stretch.”
I was silent for a space, my face smarting with the sting of his rebuff. For a time I had forgotten we were employer and employee; we had been, in my eyes, only two people with a commonality, if a slender one. The ease had been palpable.
“You all don’t like us much, do you?” I said. “Us summer people, I mean?”
“Well, it’s mainly that you don’t work, you see,” he said seriously, and I thought he was sorry he had spoken sharply but would never tell me so. “We see you up here in your big houses and your automobiles and sailboats, but we never see you lift a finger. Mainiacs are keen on working.”
“Well, most of us work the rest of the year,” I said, wondering why I was defending these people who were, to me, such alien corn. “Some of us work up here. My father-in-law is working on a book on birds and flowers. My husband works on his lesson plans. Lots of the women work like demons in their flower beds.”
“Flower beds. What kind of work is that? That’s fussing around to make themselves think they’re working. How do you suppose our women feel, seeing the way you live up here? Working for you in your houses? Saying yes, ma’am; no, ma’am? How do you think our men feel, seeing their women doing it? Or our children?”
“You don’t have to do it, do you?” I said, annoyed.
“No,” he said. “We don’t. It’s just that most of us are fond of eating in the winters. You cannot imagine what a winter here is like if you’ve never seen one. Or seen one in one of our houses, I mean. Big difference from staying over a few days in one of those big winterized jobs your folks have.”
“They’re not my folks,” I said. “Not really. My folks are just as poor, and probably just as stubborn as yours are, if you want to play ‘my poverty is nobler than your poverty.’ I’m more like you than them. I don’t think I ever really saw that until today. I don’t know if I would have, if we hadn’t come out here and talked to each other.”
“Well, you’d do well not to make a habit of that, either,” he said, looking straight ahead.
“You mean I can’t talk to you any more? Or to Christina or Caleb?”
“It wouldn’t go well for you if you did,” he said. “Your mother-in-law wouldn’t like it. None of those old ladies would. Probably not your husband, either.”
“Don’t you dump Peter in with those…women,” I said hotly. “If you knew anything at all, you’d know he isn’t like them, not at all. And I’ll darned well speak to who I want to. That’s one thing all the old ladies in the entire state of Maine can’t stop me from doing.”
He turned and looked at me. It was a long look, level and assessing. His eyes were very dark, and his mouth a straight line. He looked carved from dark marble. I remembered how warm his body had felt against mine when he had pulled me out of the water. I went suddenly scarlet and hot and turned away.
“You’re not going to do well up here, Maude Chambliss,” he said. “You see too clearly. You have a foolhardy heart.”
“What do you mean?”
“That sail in the fog. The fawn. My boy.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“That’s true,” he said. “You don’t.”
We got back into the truck and I gathered the sleeping child against me and we swayed on back down
the road toward Retreat to deliver me to Liberty. Neither of us said much until we turned off at the place where the old oar beckoned beside the road.
He cleared his throat.
“We are mightily in your debt,” he said. “It’s for your own good that I ask you not to mention today to your family or any of your neighbors. I understand that you acted from a kind heart, and I thank you for it. But others here would not understand that.”
“You mean just not say anything about the accident or any of it?” I said.
“That’s what I mean. Your mother-in-law and Christina aren’t usually back by now, and if you go and change your clothes there’ll be no reason for them to know. Everybody else will be gone to lunch or out on the water. I’ll let you off and go get this sprat to bed. That was good, that about the scar.”
I nodded dumbly, and when he pulled into the driveway of Liberty I saw he was right; none of my family was about. The entire colony seemed deserted. But when I got out, rumpled and mussed and damp with spring water and still splattered with blood, Miss Isabelle and Miss Charlotte Valentine were just coming out of the cottage, their card cases in their gloved hands. I had a great desire to laugh, to shout, howl, double up with laughter, laugh until I rolled in the lane and choked on my glee. First coral satin and hickies, now rumpled, bloody, grass-stained clothes and Micah Willis’s truck.
“Good morning,” I said to them, as I had said on that other day that seemed a lifetime ago. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”
Chapter
Five
In early January of the next year I got pregnant, and so once again the summer world of Retreat narrowed, for me, to the slice of it I could see and smell and hear and taste from the sun porch in Liberty. That second summer we went there, Mother Hannah had me off my feet and under layers of wool almost before I had taken my hat off.
“I really think it most unwise of Peter even to bring you here this summer, but of course he never listens to his mother, and so here you are,” she said, bringing me warm milk and Saltines on the sun porch. I have always loathed both.
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