Tree by Leaf

by Cynthia Voigt

  Life went easily for Father. Even when he made it hard, it was easy for him, because everyone liked him. He was big and handsome and happy, he had a ready laugh and a strong arm, he was always talking, telling stories on himself. When Father, who had only been there for a day and a night, left the farmhouse to ride off to war, he left the rooms cold and empty behind him, as if the house had already gotten used to him being there and wanted him to stay. But Father had gone.

  But sometimes, as if time cracked and let a glimmer of light through from the past, Clothilde could look quickly at the driveway and quickly away, and see Father riding off—and her heart would lift. Recently, she could always see that picture, although the figure on the big horse became less distinct every time. Setting down the heavy basket, holding herself still to catch that glimpse, Clothilde almost really saw it.

  Chapter 2

  Nobody but Lou was in the kitchen. And Lou had the windows wide open to cool down the room. She was heating flatirons on the stove and she had set the ironing board beside the open door. She didn’t look up when Clothilde came in.

  Clothilde emptied the clams into the sink. She might as well go ahead and give the clams their final cleaning. She guessed she would steam them, too, if Mother didn’t show up. She turned on the tap water and scrubbed the pale gray clams, one at a time, one after the other, using a vegetable brush. The brush made a small sweeping sound on the clam’s shell, water trickled into the sink, the iron swooshed back and forth on the damp clothes, and the trees rustled outside.

  Dierdre would still be napping, and Nate had sailed over to have lunch and play tennis at the club in town with one of his friends from Phillips Academy. She hadn’t seen Mother in the garden, she was pretty sure Mother wasn’t upstairs, and she guessed she knew where Mother had gone. Mother wouldn’t stay long there, and when she got back she wouldn’t have anything to say. Clothilde washed the clams, then scrubbed at her hands to get the gray mud out from under fingernails. That done, she ran a little water into the big steamer and set it on the stove. Lou had the stove stoked up high for the irons, so Clothilde didn’t need to feed in any more wood. While she waited for the water to come up to a boil, she sat at the kitchen table.

  Lou paid no attention to her. Lou ironed. Her thin, pale hair was pulled back into a knot at the back of her head. Her thin arms moved the heavy iron along the skirt of Mother’s blue church dress. The skirt hung down onto the floor, but that did no harm because Lou scrubbed the painted floorboards every evening. Lou wasn’t much taller than Clothilde and she wasn’t that much older, just fifteen, but she looked and worked like a woman grown. When Lou returned the flatiron to the stove and had tested one of the others with a dampened fingertip, she told Clothilde, “Pot’s steaming,” in her flat voice.

  Clothilde carried the clams over by handfuls, dumping them into the pot. She put the lid back on top and sat down again. It took fifteen minutes to steam clams. She looked at the clock on the wall.

  Lou finished Mother’s dress and held it out to see that there were no wrinkles she’d left. She put the dress on a hanger and hung it up on the nail by the door. Then she turned around to look straight at Clothilde. She looked and looked before she asked her question. “Who is that man in the boathouse?”

  Clothilde looked at the clock. Lou was a servant. Clothilde didn’t have to answer. She didn’t want to answer, didn’t want to say, didn’t want to think about it. Lou stood waiting, her jaw out, her pale face without expression, lips, eyes, and eyelashes pale, and she didn’t have any right to ask. In Grandfather’s house, a servant would never have asked a question like that, and in that way.

  “What man?” Clothilde asked.

  “Yuh,” Lou said. “He’s been seen, daytime, and Tom Hatch was late coming in the other night and he said there was a light in the boathouse. He was worried about your ma, so he ast me. It’s that man I’m asking you about.”

  Clothilke didn’t want to say it. Even having Lou mention him made the day dark, as if a cold gray fog had seeped up into the kitchen from the cellar below. Because she didn’t want to say it, the words hurting in her mouth, Clothilde made herself speak. “He’s my father.”

  It was true. There was no use denying that. It frightened her, but there was no use denying it.

  Lou thought for a while about what Clothilde had said. Clothilde looked at the clock. She looked at the freshly ironed dress. She looked at her fingers resting on the wood of the table.

  “Why’s she hiding him away over there?’ Lou asked.

  “She’s not,” Clothilde said. Which was true and not true. “She doesn’t say.”

  “Yuh.” Lou moved slowly back to the ironing board. Clothilde got up from the table, to set the metal colander over the soup pot, to line the colander with clean muslin. She knew Lou didn’t carry tales. The servants in Grandfather’s house gossiped, but when Lou went home Sundays to her family, she didn’t talk about the people out on the Point. They’d learned that, because whatever trouble they had on them, Mr. Grindle at the store never knew of it. Mr. Grindle didn’t know, not until Mother told him, that Nate was going to attend Phillips Academy, where the summer boys from town went to school; and he never suspected that it was Grandfather who sent Nate there, with mother asking Nate to accept the gift. What Mr. Grindle knew, his eyes showed, if he was sorry for your trouble and glad for your good news, or if there was something he knew you wanted kept secret. Those bulging eyes didn’t know anything, nothing they hadn’t told him themselves, because Lou wasn’t the kind to carry tales from the Point into the village.

  Clothilde took a holder to lift the top off the steaming pot. The clams had opened. The steamy air that rose into her face smelled sweet and fishy. She picked up another holder to lift the pot in both hands, carried it over to the sink, and carefully poured its contents out into the colander. Then she sat down again at the table. The broth needed time to drain through the muslin. She watched Lou’s thin shoulders move as her arms moved the heavy iron up and down over one of Nate’s shirts.

  “What did you say to Tom Hatch?” Clothilde asked.

  “I told him to mind his own business, yuh,” Lou answered, without turning around.

  Clothilde could just hear Lou saying that. Poor Tom Hatch would have thought he was just giving them a warning, if a tramp had moved out onto the property and Mrs. Speer there with only her boy for protection, and him just fourteen. Tom Hatch would have meant well. But Lou must have given him one of her pale-eyed glances all the same, and she’d told him to keep his nose stuck in his own business.

  When the clams had stopped steaming up into the air, Clothilde shook the colander a couple of times, in case any broth was trapped in any shells, then lifted it over onto the metal draining rack. She moved the soup pot with its watery broth back to the stove, setting it up high on the warming shelf. She turned around and watched Lou.

  Lou held the iron awkwardly, and her hands moving the shirt around on the ironing board looked clumsy, because of her fingers. Lou’s fingers had been caught in the looms, more than once, when she worked in the mill in Fall River, and they’d healed up crooked. Lou had clever hands, for sewing and cooking, strong hands for cleaning, even though they looked like she shouldn’t be able to do anything. Lou was full of contradictions like that. She was a girl but she seemed a woman grown. She looked pale and weak, but she was strong. She couldn’t read or write, but whatever she said made sense, and she was quick to learn. She had a meek and quiet way of behaving, standing as if she hoped nobody would notice she was in a room, as if she’d never dare speak out, but she asked stubborn questions or stubbornly refused to answer. She never complained, even though Clothilde guessed she had plenty to complain about.

  Never having had what she’d call a friend, Clothilde wasn’t sure of it, but she suspected that Lou would make a good friend, if she hadn’t been a servant. As far as Clothilde had observed, you made friends from among the girls you went to school with, because of things that were the same
for all of you. Clothilde had always been different from the girls in her school in Manfield, and here too. If those girls in Manfield with their starched pinafores could see her now, she thought, getting up to shuck the clams, she could imagine what they’d say She didn’t care anyway. They didn’t know anything, anything, they never did and they always acted like they were so perfect. If Lou had ever been in a school, she wouldn’t have acted like that. Those girls wouldn’t even know how to shuck clams.

  Clothilde pulled at the shell of the first clam until it broke apart. She removed the honey-colored body and peeled off the thin black skin that lay along its side and fitted over its long dark neck. She put the clam into a bowl; the skin she dropped onto the counter. Without having to think about it, she picked up the next. And the girls here, she thought, her fingers working, they wouldn’t believe she knew all about how to shuck clams, and dig potatoes, and scrape a mussel clean with a knife, and—a whole lot of things. If she were God, she’d make people differently, she’d make them all plan to like each other, she’d make them all the same.

  Empty shells clattered into the sink. Clothilde’s hands smelled like cooked clams, a warm, nutty smell.

  “Is she afraid of him, then?” Lou’s voice asked behind her.

  “What?” Clothilde asked. “Who?”

  “Him. That man. Your father.”

  “Afraid?” Clothilde couldn’t understand what Lou was thinking of.

  “I shouldn’t be asting, I shouldn’t be thinking about it,” Lou’s voice said. They were talking with their backs to each other, both of them working at their tasks. “And I wouldn’t, except I’m worried about her.”

  “You mean Mother?”

  “It’s like she’s sickly. You must’ve noticed it. Maybe I should put my nose right back on my face, but if I found out I could’ve he’ped her, and I hadn’t ast—because she’s been so good to me.”

  Clothilde turned around, confused. The kitchen was a big room, taking up half of the downstairs. The other half was partly the front parlor, and partly the hall where the stairs came down. The kitchen was their main room, with the heat from the range to warm it and the broad table—big enough for a dozen people at one sitting. When the farm had been worked, in Great-Aunt Clothilde’s day, there might be a dozen men sitting down for a meal, when the harvest hay was being gathered, or the blueberries were ripe. Her family used the table for study, for extra counter space when they were putting up beans and peas and tomatoes, for laying out patterns to cut fabric—they used it for everything, and eating too. The parlor they only used in the evenings, when Mother read the Gospels to them. If they’d had callers, the parlor would have been used to receive them in. But the kitchen was where they lived.

  Finally, Clothilde thought of something she could say. “She didn’t help you so much.” She didn’t think Lou ought to be talking like this and she knew she oughtn’t to be listening. But why not? she asked herself, angry,Who says?

  “My ma needs my wages, so she’s he’ped,” Lou told her, which was surely true. Clothilde had been to where Lou’s family lived, and she had seen the need for even the small wage Mother could pay Lou. “And your mother kep’ me on, yuh, even after she told Pa he couldn’t work for her no longer. He’d been thinking, he’d got a fine place where he’d go Fridays with his hand out and never do nothing because it was only a woman to run it. She sure ripped his ears off, and now—she lets things slip.”

  Clothilde put the clam she was holding into the bowl, and gave Lou her full attention. Lou was just waiting, holding the iron. “Mother’s an orphan,” she explained. “She always acted like one until my father went away.”

  “To the war,” Lou said.

  Clothilde didn’t need any reminding of where Father went. She tried to explain how things were, in Grandfather’s house, in Massachusetts. “Before, at my grandfather’s house, we lived there but nobody wanted us, except we were Father’s.” Lou didn’t understand. “It was because Mother was a nobody. And a Catholic too. And because they eloped to get married. It was—she was—a shame on the family—we are. She isn’t sickly.”

  “Then why keep him over to the boathouse?” Lou demanded, unsatisfied. Lou couldn’t have understood, Clothilde realized. She couldn’t know how it had been at Grandfather’s house. Lou couldn’t know how people could act when they were angry at you, and how they could stay angry for years and years, even when they had money to buy everything they could want and always went to church.

  “It’s whathe wants,” she said. “He said.”

  Clothilde thought Lou would go back to her ironing then, but she didn’t. There was something more on her mind, something she wanted to ask, or say. Clothilde was afraid of what Lou would ask, but she made herself stand waiting for the question. She knew how to make herself stand quiet, to see what people were going to do, and stay quiet, whatever happened.

  “Is he in a bad way, then?” Lou asked. Lou meant, in a bad way like Jeb Twohey, who’d come back home after only three months in France, not wounded but crazy as a bedbug—he’d talk crazy, to people who weren’t even there about things that weren’t happening, until his family kept him to the house. Jeb’s in a bad way, people said, feeling sorry for his family. Whenever he came out they’d act like he wasn’t there, because if you said anything to him, Jeb’s mouth would wrinkle up and he’d burst into tears, or start yelling, or do something crazy like crawl under a table with his hands over his ears and nobody could get him to come out.

  Clothilde shook her head, No.

  “Yes,” Clothilde said.

  Then she nodded her head, Yes, and said, “I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and said, “No.” She didn’t want to have to think about it.

  “Will she be wanting me to move out?” Lou asked. She had her own room in the ell, with a cot and a bureau in it. She’d asked Mother, soon after she’d come to work for them, if she couldn’t please sleep in; she’d said she was clean and quiet and would keep out of the way. Mother had given her permission.

  “No, of course not.” Clothilde had never thought of that possibility. Mother wouldn’t do that, would she? Besides, now that Father was back, only he could ask Lou to leave, so Mother couldn’t. “Why should she?”

  “Because I wouldn’t like to leave her, not like this, and I don’t want to go back to home, besides. Yuh, that’s a sure thing.” Lou turned back to her ironing.

  Clothilde went back to shucking the clams, her fingers working, her mind working. She wouldn’t want to go back to Grandfather’s house, never mind how big and fancy it was. If she thought she might have to … she’d run away, and hide, and live in the woods. She couldn’t have stood to go back there. She didn’t want to go back to the school there, where the girls ignored her, or said things in corners for her to hear but never the teacher. What did it mean, anyway, what people said about Catholics? She wasn’t one anyway—Mother never went to a Catholic church; she went to the Presbyterian Church with Grandfather and Father and the aunts. On the other hand, Clothilde had to admit the school here wasn’t any better, so it wasn’t just those girls. School here had never been any better and it was worse, since Nate had left. They’d minded his going off to Phillips Academy last fall, although nobody said so to him. Nobody would say so to him, and if they did he’d turn it into a joke. They just said so to her, and the boys who used to be his friends would troop along after her, like a pack of yapping dogs, when she started along home. She hadn’t known how it would be, at school, with Nate gone. They said teasing things to her, waiting for her to start to run away. She’d pretend that she couldn’t hear a word, pretend she was alone, while they said things about kissing a girl whose brother was going to inherit a factory and be a rich man. They’d come up closer and closer around her. Once, one of them had stopped her and pushed his face into hers—she’d slammed her books into his face, and he was surprised, andshe’d just laughed. Since then, they’d kept their distance, but they’d gotten meaner. The girls weren’t any bett
er. They thought she was stuck up, and teacher’s pet, and they moved away if she came to sit near them, which she didn’t, any more than she could help. Nate had it easier, because he could fight, he was a boy. Then, when he’d fought out whatever it was, he’d laugh and say let’s go do something, let’s get some frogs, or race to the church and back. They didn’t think Nate was stuck up, and they didn’t mind that he was a teacher’s pet.

  Clothilde didn’t think she was stuck up, anyway. She didn’t mind how small the village school was, just fourteen boys and girls in all the grades together. If there had been more of them there would just have been more people not to like what she wore and said, how she talked and the way her school papers looked. If she had a round face and blue eyes, and bright fluffy dresses, like Polly Dethier, Clothilde thought they’d act differently. When boys came up to ask Polly Dethier if they could carry her books, it wasn’t so they could drop them into any mud puddle, or run away and hide them in the woods. Clothilde had light brown hair her mother braided every morning into French braids, and a square face; her dresses were made-over skirts worn with white blouses; and whenever she saw Polly, envy ate at her heart. She despised Polly Dethier, who did nothing but act happy and smile, to show off her dimple. She wished she looked like Polly so she could like herself better. You could bet your buttons, things would go easy for Polly Dethier.

  Clothilde finished the clams. She covered the bowl with a plate, to keep flies out, and scooped the shells and skins into a bucket, to take them down to the beach. Looking out the window, she saw Mother, just standing beside the garden. Mother wore a big hat and white gloves, and she was holding an empty basket. She stood still, studying the garden, with the slim skirt of her white dress moving in the breeze. Where had she gotten those gloves from, where had she had them packed away? And why was she just standing there, when the garden needed weeding? Clothilde watched her mother, the straight back and small waist, the gloved hand resting on top of her hat as if the breeze wanted to take it away when barely any breeze blew.