Cordelia Underwood, or the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League

by Van Reid

  48 Walton from Walnut

  MISTER WALTON STEPPED ONTO THE PORCH OF THE WEYMOUTH HOUSE and filled his senses with a host of satisfying adjectives. A dry breeze pinked the surface of the harbor, dispelling the haze that often settles upon the summer coast. The sun shone with a perfect intensity, inhabiting a sky so blue it might have been imagined by a child, sharing that azure field with great cumulus clouds set at full sail like fleecy airships.

  What more can be said about a perfect summer day on the coast of Maine? This day fairly beamed with goodwill, and Mister Walton stood speechless with gratitude before it. Others joined him on the porch and there was a great deal of deep breathing and gusty “ahs” as they leaned against the porch railing.

  A person of disagreeable nature is not often made less so by such conditions, whereas an amiable soul will find an extra measure of grace to celebrate the day. Sundry was so impressed by Mister Walton’s joyous aspect upon the porch that he nearly laughed aloud with gladness, just to know that such a happy man existed.

  “So,” said Sundry, “we are off to Damariscotta this morning.”

  “Yes,” replied Mister Walton. “And if the town is as picturesque to the eye as its name is to the tongue, it will be a fine outing.”

  “It is a pretty town,” said Sundry offhandedly; he was from Edgecomb, after all, and not expected to praise other places too highly. “I like Miss McCannon very much,” said Sundry.

  “Do you?” asked Mister Walton. He had come to value Sundry’s opinion.

  “My mother would say, she is handsome in her ways.”

  “That is very nice,” said Mister Walton, as if he were thanking Sundry. “Yes . . . handsome . . . very nice.”

  Phileda McCannon joined them shortly thereafter, and though she greeted the sunshine with great pleasure, she did not indulge in the sensual flavor of the day; she was quite happy with the sun and the warm breeze, but it was no more than she had expected.

  An hour after breakfast, they were seated upon the upper deck of the Islesford. Captain Leeman chatted with them as they waited for the final passengers to be boarded, and he helped Phileda list the sights they would be passing on the excursion.

  “The fort at Pemaquid is gone, then?” asked Mister Walton.

  “Oh, yes,” said the captain.

  “The Pemaquid settlement prefigures Plymouth by nearly fifteen years,” said Phileda.

  “Really,” said Mister Walton.

  “The famous Samoset first met English settlers here, and the colony at Plymouth was rescued in its first winter by supplies from Pemaquid.”

  “Then why the preeminence of the Pilgrims in our history books?” wondered Mister Walton.

  “There was more hazard here,” explained the captain. “Pemaquid was burned out several times. Fortunes were harder to carve this far north and this close to the French colonies. Certain Pilgrim descendants were powerful enough to convince that the nation began at Plymouth Rock.”

  Phileda looked conspiratorial. “Why, the first Thanksgiving feast wasn’t even held at Plymouth.”

  “No!”

  “Allen Island, in Georges Harbor, 1607,” she said flatly.

  “Then Plymouth is the younger brother!” declared Mister Walton.

  “Rather than our Pilgrim Fathers,” added Sundry, “those who stepped on Plymouth Rock are more rightly our Pilgrim Uncles.”

  “I will speak of them just that way,” said Captain Leeman, “to a woman I know whose family stems from the Mayflower.”

  “Someone who wears her pedigree upon her sleeve?” asked Phileda.

  “Yes. My sister.”

  “I am not sure why anyone wants respectable ancestors,” said Phileda, when the captain had returned to his duties. “I myself rather enjoy a little associative disreputability. I really do.”

  “There must be a rascal in every family tree, I suppose,” said Mister Walton with some humor.

  “You spoke of someone,” said Sundry to Mister Walton, “the first time we met—a grandfather, I believe—who was rescued from a profligate life by a hole in his boot.”

  “Well,” said Mister Walton, with an air of disappointment. “He was a reformed rascal in the end.”

  Phileda shaded her eyes, squinting as the Islesford came about and swung with the channel current. “I would like to hear how a man was rescued by such a humble bother,” she said. “Was he a Walton?”

  “He was not born a Walton,” said Mister Walton, eager to oblige. “His name was Walnut, you see—Elisha Walnut, the fifth child of a well-to-do family, though not in the habit of doing anything very well himself. It was in 1798, according to family legend . . .”

  It was a story that Mister Walton would tell more than once (since there is a written record of it amongst the archives of the Moosepath League). The hand that wrote this document has yet to be positively identified, and some debate among archivists and historians has taken place regarding it; but it is clear—as much from the tone of the piece as from the style of handwriting—that it was not written by Eagleton, the club’s first historian.

  The chronicle does not vary greatly from known fact, however, nor from Mister Walton’s story as he told it to his companions. It is presented, therefore, for the delectation and enlightenment of the reader:

  Elisha Walnut, fifth scion of a prosperous Cambridge family, found himself—in the spring of 1798—in extreme financial embarrassment, which was in consequence of such a dissipated style of life that he could expect neither monetary support nor familial sympathy from his long-suffering relatives. First and foremost among his creditors was the infamous Henry Steeple—a gambler, whose means of winning at cards was questionable, and whose manner of settling unpaid debts could be painful, if not fatal. Several people, suggested one of Elisha’s waggish friends, had been buried on Henry Steeple’s account. In answer to his peril, Elisha described the better part of valor and left Cambridge by the first coach, which was heading north.

  Elisha knew of a distant cousin in Maine—which was then still a part of the Commonwealth—who resided in the vicinity of Bangor, and he hoped, with his reputation left behind, that their kinship might bear upon this relative for a bit of hospitality.

  But he was destined never to meet his cousin, nor ever to set foot within a hundred miles of Bangor. It is one thing to leave behind a reputation, and quite another to outrun one’s personal disposition. So, when a certain female (whom some would disdain to call a lady) boarded the coach in Portsmouth and, from her seat, proceeded to smile upon Elisha in a suggestive manner, old and unadmirable instincts rose within him. After an evening stop at an inn, these two found themselves alone in the coach, and a good deal more than smiling found itself on their proposed itinerary.

  Fate would have it otherwise, however—fate and Maine’s spring (of which there is little) and mud (of which, that time of year, there is quite enough). Just as Elisha was shifting himself to the opposite seat, the coach wheels on one side plunged into a morass of soft clay, the result of which was that the door to the carriage flung open and he was pitched from the vehicle into the night. The woman, now alone with the better part of his belongings, thought herself well ahead of the game and neglected to voice the alarm of man overboard. She shut the door, we are told, without a single backward glance. However many her faults, curiosity was not to be counted among them.

  If the spring mud had compounded Elisha’s woes, it also provided him with a soft landing. The breath was knocked out of him, and he was momentarily stunned, but beyond the soreness and aches expected from such an ordeal, he experienced no major injury. From his back he heard the clop and trundle of the coach as it disappeared into the darkness. He sat up with a groan, pushed himself to his feet, and shook the mud off himself as best he could.

  The night was slightly overcast, and a middle-aged moon was well above the western horizon. Elisha looked south along the road, but did not take to the idea of retracing his path. He looked north, knowing that the relatively large tow
n of Portland lay in that direction. A harbor town, he hoped, might be more amenable to his immediate needs—and so, shivering, he went north, dictating, however unintentionally, the fate of successive generations.

  Trudging through the night—wet, cold, and eventually footsore—Elisha thought upon his misfortune, and came to the conclusion, as he reached the outskirts of Portland in the growing light of a false dawn, that he had only himself to blame. A small voice of self-recrimination, hitherto unheard from, spoke up within him, and with the expression of a beautiful dawn (the sunrise of which he viewed from a hill overlooking the sea) came a determination to apply himself to honest labor—the first honest labor, he decided, that would offer itself.

  Once he reached the waking town of Portland, a hole in the sole of one of his boots sent him to the door of a shoemaker, Jacob Arbuthnot, who—it so happened—had recently lost his only apprentice to the adventurous life of a sailor. Intending to pay for the repair of his boot with some of the few coins left to him, Elisha listened to the troubles of the busy tradesman, and watched with interest as the fellow worked. It seemed a quiet, safe trade, this shoemaking; and Elisha breathed deeply the smell of leather in the shop. It looked pleasant, working with one’s hands; people appreciated a good shoe—heaven knows Elisha did at this moment.

  Elisha Walnut then became Elisha Walton. His family never again heard from him, and he never again heard from his past, his reputation, or his previous tendency toward dissolution. He was not young to be beginning an apprenticeship—but he showed a talent for the work. Indeed, he had such a mind for business and such an eye for style, that trade grew and prospered. In eight years, the master retired, and Elisha purchased the business. Two years later he married Fanny Woolrich, the daughter of a local blacksmith.

  In 1810 they had a son, christened Jacob Walton, who saw the family business grow, and move, and grow again—into a factory with workers and salesmen and the latest in shoemaking machinery—till they had a business that helped define the harbor town, while the Waltons became respected citizens whose favor was sought, and whose opinions were counted.

  In the intervening years, father and son barely set foot from the city precincts, and the Waltons were famous homebodies until a third generation came into their own—Jacob the second, who was reportedly lost at sea off Cape Hatteras; Elizabeth, who married a missionary and sailed to Africa; and Tobias—born in 1849—who joined the Federal Army in 1865 and became the drummer-boy for a regiment that never heard a shot fired in anger.

  Tobias had a great love of travel that his father dismayed of and his grandfather mistrusted. He was a jolly fellow and took after Josephine, his mother, who laughed easily and projected innocence upon everything she saw. Fascinated with the world outside of their native city, she encouraged his explorations. When the business was incorporated, and forty-nine percent of the shares were sold, a comfortable fortune was assured to as many generations as were willing to spend wisely. They invested in shipping, and did well; and Tobias became the family representative—traveling among the great cities of the eastern seaboard.

  As his family passed on, Tobias had less and less reason to return to Portland, and when his mother’s sister—the last of her generation—died, he came home to close the house in which he had spent an idyllic childhood.

  Or so legend has it.

  “ . . . and so,” concluded Mister Walton, “when my Aunt August died, I came home to close up the family estate—a duty which I have dealt with by the utmost procrastination.”

  “Perhaps,” suggested Miss McCannon, “the house does not want closing.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Mister Walton quietly.

  During the course of his tale they had steamed upriver, past islands and coves. A great marsh fell past them on the port as the pilot prepared to take them through the river’s next meander.

  On either hand, well-demarcated fields swept down to the banks, which as often as not fell into blunt ledge and precipitate cliffs. High above them, orderly farmhouses and the homes of mariners, marked by widow’s walks and lookouts, dotted the landscape.

  A breeze chased them, or passed them, or accompanied them, according to its gusts. Swirls of swallows flitted after bugs that hovered upon or above the water.

  The noise of the Islesford’s engines, and its passage, was at once agitating and hypnotic; the wind in the trees and upon the fields could not be heard from her decks, though the breeze’s course was clear to see, like the wake of unseen runners through the grass, and the weight of invisible birds upon the leaves.

  A happy and unspoken quiet fell upon the passengers as they rounded an island and the twin villages of Newcastle and Damariscotta could be described between the next two points of land. There was an obliging symmetry between the two towns, with a bridge connecting them like the balance bar of a scale. The elevated sun shone upon the roofs of houses, and glowed upon steeples on either side of the river, and the haze of summer rose like a sleepy man’s vision above one of the loveliest and most pleasingly assembled settlements that Mister Walton had ever seen.

  “Yes, Sundry,” he said. “It is a pretty town.”

  49 Alces Alces with Undergarment

  THEN CAME THE MOOSE.

  Eagleton would refer to him as “that fateful moose!” and it was thought until recently that all reference to this cumbersome (if serendipitous) quadruped went no further than the immediate vicinity of Newcastle, so it was gratifying that a letter was recently found, the contents of which corroborates the written testimony of Eagleton and Mrs. Maloney.

  I was repairing a fence at the northern border of my property the other day, [wrote Captain John Taylor of Newcastle to his brother in Londonderry, New Hampshire], when a large animal on the slope below the Academy caught my eye. It looked to me like a horse, and I watched it for a good quarter of an hour before I realized my mistake. In another season I would have roused Benjamin and gotten my gun. It was a moose, brother! an unusual enough sight to halt my progress on the fence for another half an hour while it made its way toward the river and eventually strolled from sight behind the next hill. He was quite racked out, but appeared to be minding his own business, so I minded mine.

  Now let me tell you what happened that very evening at the Lincoln Hall, and you will think that things have grown rather wild hereabouts . . .

  (It will be noted that Captain Taylor makes no mention of red flannel underwear.)

  It was oysters for lunch at the Maine Hotel that momentous day, and oysters that led to a conversation concerning the famous shell heaps on the shores of the Damariscotta River. All further events, you will see, stemmed from this fact; and so, without oysters, you would be reading a very different sort of account from this point on, or (most likely) no account at all. The Moosepath League has, ever since, celebrated July the 10th with toasts to (and dishes made up of) this marvelous bivalve.

  It is difficult to eat an oyster from the half-shell with any degree of delicacy; one must approach the task with a rough-and-ready attitude, something that Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump had in good supply. Thump, in particular, covered himself with honor in this pursuit, and his friends were quick to praise his appetite.

  “Ah, the oyster!” said a gentleman from the next table. “It fulfills one appetite and whets another!”

  “Hear, hear!” declared Ephram, without the slightest notion of what the man was saying.

  “We understand,” said Eagleton, “that the Indians ate a great deal of oysters in their time.”

  “Oh, yes!” affirmed the man. “And possibly another race, that lived here before the Indians, feasted on them as well.”

  This interested the trio, and they said as much.

  “Haven’t you seen the shell heaps, then?” asked the man.

  “We did hear about them,” said Ephram. “Tell us, what are they?”

  “See them for yourselves, gentleman. You will not be disappointed. It will make you a proper walk this afternoon, something for which you h
ave sturdied yourselves with this potent meal. If you’re not sturdy for something else, if you take my meaning.”

  They didn’t, but laughed with him as he winked knowingly. “Go and see these shell heaps,” said the fellow. “It’s an inspiration how the Red Man put them away. I am part Indian myself, don’t you know?”

  An anecdote followed this declaration, the gist of which has been lost over time; but the three friends were duly motivated to view the fabled site, and the next half-hour found them walking jauntily down Damariscotta’s Main Street to the bridge. They were innocent, of course, without any notion of nearing an historic junction that would henceforth be celebrated by Moosepathians through the years.

  At the bridge they saw the Islesford docking against the wharf just below them. Several people on the steamer’s upper deck waved and, filled with a sort of esprit de corps with the rest of the world, Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump waved in return.

  “It is a shame,” said Ephram as they crossed over to Newcastle, “that we weren’t able to locate our chairman.”

  “Who knows what adventure he has experienced since we saw him last,” said Eagleton. “Eh, Thump?”

  Thump stood some yards behind them, gazing at a maple tree as if he had never seen one before—head tilted back, hands behind him. Ephram and Eagleton joined him, looking as if they had lost a kite in the upper branches.

  They were travelers and everything, common or rare, was a curiosity to them. They had seen many a noble tree, maple and otherwise, in their native Portland; but this was Newcastle, and who was to say that they would ever again have the opportunity to view a Newcastle maple?

  Their progress was not rapid, therefore; countless sights demanded their attention—trees and shrubs, houses and outbuildings, front yards and granite stoops. It was all extremely informative and uplifting. They greeted passersby and raised their hats to the ladies; they patted a friendly dog and observed two innings of a baseball match with four boys on one team and three on the other. The way was punctuated by a short hill, from the top of which they could see an array of beautiful homes on either side of the river. The day had reached an almost mythical sort of perfection for them, and they were nearly mesmerized by it, when they first heard a woman’s voice calling: “You get back here, you miserable creature!”