Tree by Leaf

by Cynthia Voigt

  It would be several minutes before the oatmeal had cooked, and Dierdre got cranky when she was kept waiting for her food, so Clothilde went back down to the cellar for an apple. She cut it into quarters and removed the core from each quarter before peeling off the skin. She set the four pieces in a bowl. She was wiping her hands on her apron as she went into the parlor. “I’ve got an apple for you, Dierdre,” she said. “To keep the wolf away.”

  Dierdre jumped up, giggling at the wolf. Mother didn’t even look up. One thing about Dierdre—if you gave her what she wanted she cheered up right away.

  Clothilde kept an eye on her sister, to see that she didn’t cram too much apple into her mouth at once, while she kept an eye on the oatmeal, where it bubbled away on the stove. When Dierdre climbed down from the table, Clothilde brushed her tangled hair, and braided it the way Mother liked. French braids had two small braids beginning at the top of your head; each smaller braid was then braided into the bigger pigtails. Clothilde couldn’t do French braids for herself, but she could do it for Dierdre. “Pretty,” she said, giving the little girl a hug.

  “I’m pretty,” Dierdre answered satisfied.

  “Pretty enough to go tell Mother that breakfast is ready?”

  Dierdre considered this. “Yes,” she decided.

  Clothilde spooned oatmeal into bowls and sat down with Dierdre to wait for Mother. “Clothilde, dear, you musn’t sit down to table with your apron still on,” Mother said. Clothilde obeyed without asking any questions, even though she would just have to put the apron back on again for the washing up. It was the fog that made Lou late, she thought.

  Mother said the grace: “Bless this food to our use, and us to Thy service.” They ate without talking. When Dierdre spilled cereal over the edge of her bowl, Mother ignored it, so it was left to Clothilde to warn her sister to eat more carefully, and to mop up the spill. Clothilde finally asked her mother, “When did Nate leave?”

  Mother looked at the clock. Clothilde also looked at the clock. It was well after eight. Lou was usually back by half-past seven. She wondered how thick the fog was, in the village.

  “I think it was just after six,” Mother said. “He wanted an early start, and with the fog … it’s only a short sail across the bay to town, so he’ll have arrived in good time. They wanted to catch the midday tide.”

  But the tide wasn’t high at midday, and Nate knew that as well as Clothilde. By midday, the tide would be well out. Maybe Mother had misunderstood. She was paying so little attention to things that she might well have mistaken what Nate told her.

  “Young men are so eager for things to happen,” Mother said. She had only eaten half of her oatmeal, but she put her spoon down to show she was finished. “Always set out plates under bowls, dear,” she reminded Clothilde, and then went back to the subject. “Nate was so excited. Young men like going off together, to have adventures.” That made Clothilde think of all the young men going off to war. She thought Mother must be thinking the same thing, but her mother just looked gently amused, the way she did when Dierdre played house with Dolly Molly.

  “Lou is really late,” Clothilde said.

  “You said you’d teach me to stitch,” Dierdre told Mother.

  “Servants are always as late as they can be. They’re not reliable,” Mother answered Clothilde. Then she turned to Dierdre. “Not this morning, dear. Mother’s busy.”

  “But you said,” Dierdre insisted.

  “Don’t talk back.” Mother rose from the table. Dierdre tagged along behind her into the parlor.

  Clothilde had finished washing their dishes and was drying out the saucepan when Lou came in. “I didn’t hear you,” Clothilde said. “You’re late.”

  “Yuh, that fog muffles sound fine,” Lou told her. “It’ll burn off, mebbe.” She sounded cheerful, as if she liked the fog.

  Lou’s good humor made Clothilde cross. “Did you get lost coming out? Is that why you’re more than an hour late?”

  “Oh no, I wouldn’t get lost. Not on the road out here. I could walk that road blindfolded. No, we stayed up late, my ma and me, after we got back from services. We were jes’ talking. So we slept in this morning, because my brother Jack kept the little ones fed and quiet. It was gone seven when I woke up.”

  “Talking about what?”

  “Just—talk. He was out on one of his runs, see, so we had the big room to ourselves since the little children went asleep. With two to work, it doesn’t take long at all to do, so we had time to sit together. And once we get started talking, we go on.”

  “What if he was arrested?” Clothilde asked. She didn’t know why she did that, because it was almost as if she was trying to make Lou unhappy.

  “Who’s to catch him?”

  “The revenue men.”

  “They don’t know the water like our men do, they don’t know the coast. The fog he’ps, too, yuh. That’s not to say I’d be sorry if they did—except for the shame to my ma.”

  “But then how would you live?” Clothilde asked.

  “My ma could work out some, if she didn’t have him.” Lou’s mouth closed on the words and her face closed off. “If I’m working over away at one of the cottages, with higher wages. We could manage.” Lou’s good cheer had vanished.

  Clothilde didn’t want Lou to go someplace else to work. She could imagine, too, how Lou would be treated in a house like her grandfather’s. “You ought to just stay here,” she muttered.

  “If it was my choosing, I would. If it was your choosing, too, yuh. But it’s never ours to choose, is it? Enough woolgathering—it’s washday. It’ll be bad enough, the drying, with this fog, without putting off the washing. Will you help me with the water?”

  Clothilde would. Lou’s hands were clumsy with the heavy pots of steaming water, heated on the stove. This was the only chore that gave Lou any trouble, handling the big pots of water, filling them and setting them on the stove, then carrying them over to the washtub. As she ran water into the two big pots, Clothilde looked at her own hands. She could almost feel how Lou’s hand must feel, her twisted fingers; for a minute she could—lifting up a full pot to carry it to the stove—see her own hand being caught into the machinery of the mill, being pulled in—she turned around to look at Lou, whose fingers were tying the apron around her waist. Lou’s fingers were nimble enough. Clothilde guessed Lou was used to her hands.

  While the water heated, Clothilde and Lou went upstairs and stripped the beds. While the linens soaked in soap and bluing, they remade the beds with fresh sheets, plumping up the pillows and pulling the bedcovers up straight and neat. Nate’s bed didn’t need fresh sheets.

  Clothilde helped Lou scrub the linens against the corrugated washboard. It was a job she particularly hated, but the fog outside seemed to have seeped inside, and swirled with clammy confusion around her spirit, so that she took a bitter pleasure in the discomforts of hot water and heavy sheets, of the hard steel bruising her knuckles as she scrubbed. The weight of the sheets pulled at her shoulders. Her arms grew tired, achingly tired. The stove heated up the whole kitchen with the doors and windows closed against the fog; the whole room was steamy. Mother and Dierdre stayed in the parlor, playing with threads. The bitterness rolled around Clothilde like a fog, and she fed her own angers, like feeding logs into a fire to keep off the chill.

  When she went outside to hang out the first of the sheets, Clothilde saw that Lou was right: the fog was lifting. Her circle of visibility extended about forty or fifty feet. Beyond that circle, the shadowy woods were blurred. After hanging out the sheets—and why even bother to do that Clothilde didn’t know, on a day when they would become more damp every hour they hung there—Clothilde wandered over to look at the garden before going back inside. Laundry was Lou’s chore, after all, not hers. She needn’t feel guilty about taking a couple of minutes off. Her arms and shoulders were tired, her back was tired, and her fingers were cold and stiff—her heart was tired. Weeds had sprung up in the neglected garden, crowding th
e plants, so it was hard to see the neatly planted rows of vegetables. Mother should be out here weeding, Clothilde thought. Or Nate. Somebody should be taking care of the garden or they wouldn’t have the vegetables to put up for winter. Even the Swiss chard was beginning to look choked off, and chard could grow through almost anything.

  She dragged the laundry basket back inside.

  Lou had wrung the towels damp, feeding them between the two wooden rollers and cranking at the handle. She piled them now into the basket.

  Mother came to the door before Clothilde could get out of the room. Mother, in her green flowered dress, looked cool and fresh. “It’s time for a cup of tea and Dierdre would like warmed milk,” Mother said.

  Lou’s pale face looked up from the tub where she was scrubbing at the white blouses. She straightened up, nodding, drying her hands on her apron.

  “And I need my hair done properly, Lou,” Mother said.

  Lou looked quickly at Clothilde, and then away.

  “Clothilde, I need Lou here, so I’m going to ask you to go to the store and see if Mrs. Grindle has a nice fowl.”

  “But it’s Monday,” Clothilde protested. Chicken on Monday? On Monday, they finished the chowder, if there was any left, along with Saturdays roast, if any remained.

  “Your father always enjoyed creamed chicken over rice. Don’t be slow with tea, Lou,” Mother said, turning to leave the room.

  Clothilde wanted to run after her mother, before she had a chance to sit down again and pick up her fine needlework. She wanted to look right into Mother’s face and sayStop it, say Why aren’t you working? But you couldn’t talk to your mother that way, that angry way You couldn’t quarrel with your mother. She was your mother.

  Besides, Clothilde thought, she could leave right away for the village and not have to do any more laundry. She put down the basket and took off her apron. She rolled her sleeves down. She wasn’t exactly pleased to be going to the village to pick out delicacies for the man in the boathouse, and she knew there was something wrong with Mother, but a walk sounded good to her. Even with the fog, a walk sounded good.

  “Should I wrap up some bread and jam for you?” Lou asked.

  “I’m not hungry, thanks,” Clothilde answered. “And the garden needs weeding.”

  “She’s been talking about flowers,” Lou said. “She’s been talking about rosebushes and dahlias, chrysanthemums and spring bulbs. I don’t know where she’ll get the money for flowers. I don’t know what she’ll do without me, yuh.”

  Clothilde took Nate’s car jacket down from its hook by the door and went out, without even moving the laundry basket out of the way, without even bothering to answer Lou. Lou was right, so there wasn’t anything to answer.

  She walked along without thinking, just walking, following the driveway through fog-shrouded woods, up and down hills, until the land rose upward to form the narrow causeway that joined the peninsula to the mainland. There, no trees grew. There, the road was just wide enough for a single carriage, and the rocks fell away at either side of it. Mussels clung to the rocks down by the water, all sizes of mussels, from tiny half-inch babies up to big three-inch grandfathers. The mussel colonies made black stains on the sides of the rocks.

  On the mainland, the fog lay much lighter. Hawkweed flowers shone yellow among the grass that sloped down to the water’s edge. Hawkweed liked open expanses, Clothilde thought, watching the slow way the sun was burning away patches of fog. In the shady woods, it was white plumes of foamflower you saw, spreading along the floor of the woods as summer began. The foamflowers, which appeared and then disappeared as if summer were a tall lady walking through the woods with a lacy train to her dress, could only grow in the cool shadowy woods, where trees and broad-leafed ground cover gave them a sense of protection. The wood lily, however, liked only those in-between places, where woods turned into meadows; there and nowhere else they bloomed out, reaching up to the sky with their bright orangy-red hands cupped to catch the sunlight. Every flower had its season and its own particular place, Clothilde thought. She walked along at an easy pace. She was in no hurry to reach her destination, no hurry to return once her errand was done. If she could have spent the whole day on the quiet road, she’d not have minded.

  Her eyes lingered over the golden hawkweed, and suddenly her mouth gasped for air.

  How could she have forgotten? How could something like the Voice have happened—or even just maybe happened, maybe not been a dream—and she forgot it for a single minute? If it was true—

  She peered at the field that she was slowly walking past, grasses and flowers. It remained a field of grass and flowers, nothing like the overwhelming vision of each shape and hue that she had seen—or thought she had seen, maybe she had dreamed it—yesterday afternoon. She wished she could still see things that way, but she was already forgetting what that way was, she could see that. Like a dream fading from memory.

  Clothilde jammed her hands into the pockets of Nate’s jacket, and stepped out briskly. There were only two possibilities. Either it was real and true, or she was losing her mind. She had asked for three—no, four—things. If those things were to come to pass, then she would know. And if they didn’t come to pass?

  It made her sad, knowing how much she could not see, looking around her. She was like a blind person who’d been given sight for about two minutes, then had to go back to blindness.

  If these things never came to pass, if Nate went ahead on his cruise, and Lou’s father kept on in his bad ways, if the man in the boathouse weren’t made better, healed, and—

  She remembered then that when she had asked that Speer Point be hers, the answer had been No. So if it stayed hers, that would be a backward answer.

  What if these things never happened? Then she could keep on waiting, or she could admit that there was something wrong with her. But no matter what was true, there was nothing she could do right then except wait and see.

  Chapter 7

  Clothilde followed the road on into the village, going through the woods first, and then past the outlying farms. The Henderson farm was farthest out from town. It was their many children that enabled Mr. Henderson to also work the fields on Speer Point. He grew feed crops out there, because they needed less care and that left his own acres for market crops and grazing pastures. A foggy haze hung over the surrounding fields. A couple of the Hendersons’ sons were walking from the barn to the house; a few cows grazed on a hillside, four-legged shapes in the fog.

  Clothilde walked steadily along the hilly road, not hurrying, not dawdling. The smell of the ocean was in the air, although woods and slopes hid the water from view. The last farm outside of the village belonged to the Twoheys. Their house was at the crossroads where the rough farm tracks joined the more traveled road where you turned left into the village, or right, off to the northwest and the larger towns. At the Twoheys’ the curtains were drawn and the three cows that the farm’s few acres could support stood in the mud of the fenced barnyard. The house gave a blank silent face to the road.

  Clothilde followed the flat dirt road to the left, passing the one-room, one-story schoolhouse. Over the summer weeks, grass grew up wild around the little shingled building. Queen Anne’s lace had rushed into the schoolyard during June and now looked like a veil the fog had spread out to dry over the top of the long grasses. Butter-and-eggs, like drops of sunlight that had been left behind, crowded up beside the shingled walls.

  When they had first come to Maine, Mother had planned to plant flowers, planned to surround their house with beds of tulips and daffodils, dahlias and chrysanthemums, planned a rose garden. But there was no time for flowers, as it turned out, and Clothilde was just as glad. The stiff formal gardens at Grandfather’s house gave her no pleasure. Neither did the neatly planted beds in the yards of the houses near her school in Manfield, with their bright-faced flowers looking as if they wanted to escape from behind the white picket fences. Clothilde didn’t like planted gardens; she liked the acciden
tal flowers of woods and fields, and the way they came unexpectedly into bloom, into sight.

  She descended into the village, two stores and a dozen houses spread irregularly out over hillsides that dropped down to the harbor. That foggy day, the water lay still and the square shapes of the boats hung motionless on it, like half-formed ideas. Sturdy masts rose up into the misty air. Fog was more dangerous than winds or waves, so nobody went out on a foggy day if he could help it. A man who knew the coastal waters could bring his boat safely to harbor during a storm, or could keep it out in deep water, away from the dangers of the shore. But in fog, a man could get confused and lose his bearings entirely, and be on the rocks before he knew he was anywhere near them; or he might sail out into the thick air and never be seen again.

  Even over the harbor the fog was already half mist, with just the occasional thick cloud blown down it from open water. It probably wasn’t a fog that would lie over the land for days. It wasn’t even that thick: a thick fog devoured color, turning everything gray or black. Clothilde could see the yellow light inside Grindle’s general store, and the dark red of the black-smith’s barn. She could see, now that the dock was visible, the greens and browns and blacks of the same direction, as if they were answering the slow summoning call of the foghorn. As she looked down on it, the group broke apart and came up the hill, singly or in pairs. Mrs. Grindle was among the women, as was Polly Dethier. Mrs. Grindle wore the white jacket that she put on when she worked behind the counter. Polly wore a bright white pinafore over her yellow dress. Clothilde didn’t stay to watch them come up the steep roadway from the dock, she didn’t stay to talk. She went into Grindle’s store.

  Mr. Grindle was behind the counter. When he saw who she was, he leaned toward her, his round eyes bulging with curiosity. He asked how the family was, out on the Point, and Clothilde said they were all well. He asked if they didn’t mind the isolation, and she said No, they didn’t. He asked if they weren’t bothered by strangers out there, and Clothilde, knowing now what the secrets were his eyes were wondering about, said No, they weren’t bothered by strangers. That was true, too. Mr. Grindle gave up, then, and asked her what he could do for her. She asked him for a fowl, ready for the pot. He fetched one out from the back room where an icebox kept meat and poultry fresh. He held the pale plucked chicken by its limp neck, waiting for her approval. Clothilde nodded, so he went to the marble counter and cut off the head and feet with a cleaver.