Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.
1896–1900
My mother drapes a wrung-out cloth across my forehead. Cold water trickles down my temple onto the pillow, and I turn my head to smear it off. I gaze up into her gray eyes, narrowed in concern, a vertical line between them. Small lines around her puckered lips. I look over at my brother Alvaro standing beside her, two years old, eyes wide and solemn.
She pours water from a white teapot into a glass. “Drink, Christina.”
“Smile at her, Katie,” my grandmother Tryphena tells her. “Fear is a contagion.” She leads Alvaro out of the room, and my mother reaches for my hand, smiling with only her mouth.
I am three years old.
My bones ache. When I close my eyes, I feel like I’m falling. It’s not an altogether unpleasant sensation, like sinking into water. Colors behind my eyelids, purple and rust. My face so hot that my mother’s hand on my cheek feels icy. I take a deep breath, inhaling the smells of wood smoke and baking bread, and I drift. The house creaks and shifts. Snoring in another room. The ache in my bones drives me back to the surface. When I open my eyes, I can’t see anything, but I can tell my mother is gone. I’m so cold it feels like I’ve never been warm, my teeth chattering loudly in the quiet. I hear myself whimpering, and it’s as if the sound is coming from someone else. I don’t know how long I’ve been making this noise, but it soothes me, a distraction from the pain.
The covers lift. My grandmother says, “There, Christina, hush. I’m here.” She slides into bed beside me in her thick flannel nightgown and pulls me toward her. I settle into the curve of her legs, her bosom pillowy behind my head, her soft fleshy arm under my neck. She rubs my cold arms, and I fall asleep in a warm cocoon smelling of talcum powder and linseed oil and baking soda.
SINCE I CAN remember I’ve called my grandmother Mamey. It’s the name of a tree that grows in the West Indies, where she went with my grandfather, Captain Sam Hathorn, on one of their many excursions. The mamey tree has a short, thick trunk and only a few large limbs and pointy green leaves, with white flowers at the ends of the branches, like hands. It blooms all year long, and its fruit ripens at different times. When my grandparents spent several months on the island of St. Lucia, my grandmother made jam out of the fruit, which tastes like an overripe raspberry. “The riper it gets, the sweeter it gets. Like me,” she said. “Don’t call me Granny. Mamey suits me just fine.”
Sometimes I find her sitting alone, gazing out the window in the Shell Room, our front parlor, where we display the treasures that six generations of sailors brought home in sea chests from their voyages around the world. I know she’s pining for my grandfather, who died in this house a year before I was born. “It is a terrible thing to find the love of your life, Christina,” she says. “You know too well what you’re missing when it’s gone.”
“You have us,” I say.
“I loved your grandfather more than all the shells in the Shell Room,” she says. “More than all the blades of grass in the field.”
MY GRANDFATHER, LIKE his father and grandfather before him, began his life on the sea as a cabin boy and became a ship captain. After marrying my grandmother, he took her with him on his travels, transporting ice from Maine to the Philippines, Australia, Panama, the Virgin Islands, and filling the ship for the return trip with brandy, sugar, spices, and rum. Her stories of their exotic travels have become family legend. She traveled with him for decades, even bringing along their children, three boys and a girl, until, at the height of the Civil War, he insisted they stay home. Confederate privateers were prowling up and down the East Coast like marauding pirates, and no ship was immune.
But my grandfather’s caution could not keep his family safe: all three of his boys died young. One succumbed to scarlet fever; his four-year-old namesake, Sammy, drowned one October when Captain Sam was at sea. My grandmother could not bring herself to break the news until March. “Our beloved little boy is no more on earth,” she wrote. “While I write, I’m almost blind with tears. No one saw him fall but the little boy who ran to tell his mother. The vital spark has fled. Dear husband, you can better imagine my grief than I can describe to you.” Fourteen years later, their teenaged son, Alvaro, working as a seaman on a schooner off the coast of Cape Cod, was swept overboard in a storm. News of his death came by telegram, blunt and impersonal. His body was never found. Alvaro’s sea chest arrived on Hathorn Point weeks later, its top intricately carved by his hand. My grandmother, disconsolate, spent hours tracing the outlines with her fingertips, damsels in hoopskirts with revealing décolletage.
MY BEDROOM IS still and bright. Light filters through the lace curtains Mamey crocheted, making intricate shapes on the floor. Dust mites float in slow motion. Stretching out in the bed, I lift my arms from under the sheet. No pain. I’m afraid to move my legs. Afraid to hope that I’m better.
My brother Alvaro swings into the room, hanging on to the doorknob. He stares at me blankly, then shouts, to no one in particular, “Christie’s awake!” He gives me a long steady look as he closes the door. I hear him clomping deliberately down the stairs, and then my mother’s voice and my grandmother’s, the clash of pots far away in the kitchen, and I drift back to sleep. Next thing I know, Al is shaking my shoulder with his spider-monkey hand, saying, “Wake up, lazy,” and Mother, trundling through the door with her big pregnant belly, is setting a tray on the round oak table beside the bed. Oatmeal mush and toast and milk. My father a shadow behind her. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I feel a pang that must be hunger.
Mother smiles a real smile as she props two pillows behind my head and helps me sit up. Spoons oatmeal into my mouth, waits for me to swallow between slurps. Al says, “Why’re you feeding her, she’s not a baby,” and Mother tells him to hush, but she is laughing and crying at the same time, tears rolling down her cheeks, and has to stop for a moment to wipe her face with her apron.
“Why you crying, Mama?” Al asks.
“Because your sister is going to get well.”
I remember her saying this, but it will be years before I understand what it means. It means my mother was afraid I might not get well. They were all afraid—all except Alvaro and me and the unborn baby, each of us busy growing, unaware of how bad things could get. But they knew. My grandmother, with her three dead children. My mother, the only one who survived, her childhood threaded with melancholy, who named her firstborn son after her brother who drowned in the sea.
A DAY PASSES, another, a week. I am going to live, but something isn’t right. Lying in the bed, I feel like a rag wrung out and draped to dry. I can’t sit up, can barely turn my head. I can’t move my legs. My grandmother settles into a chair beside me with her crocheting, looking at me now and then over the top of her rimless spectacles. “There, child. Rest is good. Baby steps.”
“Christie’s not a baby,” Al says. He’s lying on the floor pushing his green train engine. “She’s bigger than me.”
“Yes, she’s a big girl. But she needs rest so she can get better.”
“Rest is stupid,” Al says. He wants me back to normal so we can run to the barn, play hide-and-seek among the hay bales, poke at the gopher holes with a long stick.
I agree. Rest is stupid. I am tired of this narrow bed, the slice of window above it. I want to be outside, running through the grass, climbing up and down the stairs. When I fall asleep, I am careering down the hill, my arms outstretched and my strong legs pumping, grasses whipping against my calves, steady on toward the sea, closing my eyes and tilting my chin toward the sun, moving with ease, without pain, without falling. I wake in my bed to find the sheet damp with sweat.
“What’s wrong with me?” I ask my mother as she tucks a fresh sheet around me.
“You are as God made you.”
“Why would he make me like this?”
Her eyelids flicker—not quite a flutter, but a startled blink and long shut eye that I’ve com
e to recognize: It’s the expression she makes when she doesn’t know what to say. “We have to trust in his plan.”
My grandmother, crocheting in her chair, doesn’t say anything. But when Mother goes downstairs with the dirty sheets, she says, “Life is one trial after another. You’re just learning that earlier than most.”
“But why am I the only one?”
She laughs. “Oh, child, you’re not the only one.” She tells me about a sailor in their crew with one leg who thumped around deck on a wooden dowel, another with a hunchback that made him scuttle like a crab, one born with six fingers on each hand. (How quickly that boy could tie knots!) One with a foot like a cabbage, one with scaly skin like a reptile, conjoined twins she once saw on the street . . . People have maladies of all kinds, she says, and if they have any sense, they don’t waste time whining about them. “We all have our burdens to bear,” she says. “You know what yours is, now. That’s good. You’ll never be surprised by it.”
Mamey tells me a story about when she and Captain Sam were shipwrecked in a storm, cast adrift on a precarious raft in the middle of the ocean, shivering and alone, with scant provisions. The sun set and rose, set and rose; their food and water dwindled. They despaired that they would never be rescued. She tore strips of clothing, tied them to an oar, and managed to prop this wretched flag upright. For weeks, they saw no one. They licked their salt-cracked lips and closed their sunburned lids, resigning themselves to their all-but-certain fates, blessed unconsciousness and death. And then, one evening near sundown, a speck on the horizon materialized into a ship heading directly toward them, drawn by the fluttering rags.
“The most important qualities a human can possess are an iron will and a persevering spirit,” Mamey says. She says I inherited those qualities from her, and that in the same way she survived the shipwreck, when all hope was lost, and the deaths of her three boys, when she thought her heart might pulverize like a shell into sand, I will find a way to keep going, no matter what happens. Most people aren’t as lucky as I am, she says, to come from such hardy stock.
“SHE WAS FINE until the fever,” Mother tells Dr. Heald as I sit on the examining table in his Cushing office. “Now she can barely walk.”
He pokes and prods, draws blood, takes my temperature. “Let’s see here,” he says, grasping my legs. He probes my skin with his fingers, feeling his way down my legs to the bones in my feet. “Yes,” he murmurs, “irregularities. Interesting.” Grasping my ankles, he tells my mother, “It’s hard to say. The feet are deformed. I suspect it’s viral. I recommend braces. No guarantee they’ll work, but probably worth a try.”
My mother presses her lips together. “What’s the alternative?”
Dr. Heald winces in an exaggerated way, as if this is as hard for him to say as it is for us to hear. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think there is one.”
The braces Dr. Heald puts me in clamp my legs like a medieval torture device, tearing my skin into bloody strips and making me howl in pain. After a week of this, Mother takes me back to Dr. Heald and he removes them. She gasps when she sees my legs, covered with red festering wounds. To this day I bear the scars.
For the rest of my life, I will be wary of doctors. When Dr. Heald comes to the house to check on Mamey or Mother’s pregnancy or Papa’s cough, I make myself scarce, hiding in the attic, the barn, the four-hole privy in the shed.
ON THE PINE boards of the kitchen floor I practice walking in a straight line.
“One foot in front of the next, like a tightrope walker,” my mother instructs, “along the seam.”
It’s hard to keep my balance; I can only walk on the outsides of my feet. If this really were a tightrope in the circus, Al points out, I would have fallen to my death a dozen times already.
“Steady, now,” Mother says. “It’s not a race.”
“It is a race,” Al says. On a parallel seam he steps lightly in a precise choreography of small stockinged feet, and within moments is at the end. He throws up his arms. “I win!”
I pretend to stumble, and as I fall I kick his legs out from under him and he lands hard on his tailbone. “Get out of her way, Alvaro,” Mother scolds. Sprawling on the floor, he glowers at me. I glower back. Al is thin and strong, like a strip of steel or the trunk of a sapling. He is naughtier than I am, stealing eggs from the hens and attempting to ride the cows. I feel a pit of something hard and spiky in my stomach. Jealousy. Resentment. And something else: the unexpected pleasure of revenge.
I fall so often that Mother sews cotton pads for my elbows and knees. No matter how much I practice, I can’t get my legs to move the way they should. But eventually they’re strong enough that I can play hide-and-seek in the barn and chase chickens in the yard. Al doesn’t care about my limp. He tugs at me to come with him, climb trees, ride Dandy the old brown mule, scrounge for firewood for a clambake. Mother’s always scolding and shushing him to go away, give me peace, but Mamey is silent. She thinks it’s good for me, I can tell.
I WAKE IN the dark to the sound of rain drumming the roof and a commotion in my parents’ bedroom. Mother groaning, Mamey murmuring. My father’s voice and two others I don’t recognize in the foyer downstairs. I slip out of bed and into my woolen skirt and thick socks and cling to the rail as I half fall, half slide down the stairs. At the bottom my father is standing with a stout red-faced woman wearing a kerchief over her frizzy hair.
“Go back to bed, Christina,” Papa says. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Babies pay no attention to the clock,” the woman sing-songs. She shrugs off her coat and hands it to my father. I cling to the banister while she lumbers like a badger up the narrow stairs.
I creep up after her and push open the door to Mother’s bedroom. Mamey is there, leaning over the bed. I can’t see much on the high mahogany four-poster, but I hear Mother moaning.
Mamey turns. “Oh, child,” she says with dismay. “This is no place for you.”
“It’s all right. A girl needs to learn the ways of the world sooner or later,” the badger says. She jerks her head at me. “Why don’t you make yourself useful? Tell your father to heat water on the stove.”
I look at Mother, thrashing and writhing. “Is she going to be all right?”
The badger scowls. “Your mother is fine and dandy. Did you hear what I said? Boiling water. Baby is on the way.”
I make my way down to the kitchen and tell Papa, who puts a pot of water on the black iron Glenwood range. As we wait in the kitchen he teaches me card games, Blackjack and Crazy Eights, to pass the time. The sound of the wind driving rain against the house is like dry beans in a hollow stick. Before morning is over, we hear the high-pitched cry of a healthy baby.
“His name is Samuel,” Mother says when I climb onto the bed beside her. “Isn’t he perfect?”
“Um-hmm,” I say, though I think the baby looks as crab apple–faced as the badger.
“Maybe he’ll be an explorer like his grandfather Samuel,” Mamey says. “Like all of the seafaring Samuels.”
“God forbid,” Mother says.
“WHO ARE THE seafaring Samuels?” I ask Mamey later, when Mother and the baby are napping and we’re alone in the Shell Room.
“They’re your ancestors. The reason you’re here,” she says.
She tells me the story of how, in 1743, three men from Massachusetts—two brothers, Samuel and William Hathorn, and William’s son Alexander—packed their belongings into three carriages for the long journey to the province of Maine in the middle of winter. They arrived at a remote peninsula that for two thousand years had been a meeting ground for Indian tribes and built a tent made of animal skins, sturdy enough to withstand the coming months of snow and ice and muddy thaw. Within a year they felled a swath of forest and built three log cabins. And they gave this spit of land in Cushing, Maine, a name: Hathorn Point.
Fifty years later, Alexander’s son Samuel, a sea captain, built a two-story wood-frame house on the foundation of the f
amily’s cabin. Samuel married twice, raised six children in the house, and died in his seventies. His son Aaron, also a sea captain, married twice and raised eight children here. When Aaron died and his widow decided to sell the house (opting for a simpler life in town, closer to the bakery and the dry goods store), the seafaring Hathorns were dismayed. Five years later Aaron’s son Samuel IV bought the house back, reestablishing the family’s hold on the land.
Samuel IV was my grandfather.
All of those sea captains, coming and going for months at a time. Their many wives and children, up and down the narrow stairs. To this day, Mamey says, this old house on Hathorn Point is filled with their ghosts.
WHEN YOUR WORLD is small, you learn every inch of it. You can trace it in the dark; you navigate it in your sleep. Fields of rough grass sloping toward the rocky shore and the sea beyond, nooks and crannies to hide and play in. The soot-black range, always warm, in the kitchen. Geraniums on the windowsill, splayed red like a magician’s handkerchief. Feral cats in the barn. Air that smells of pine and seaweed, of chicken roasting in the oven and freshly plowed soil.
One summer afternoon Mother looks at the tide chart in the kitchen and says, “Put on your shoes, Christina, I’ve got something to show you.”
I lace up my brown brogues and follow her down through the field, past the humming cicadas and the swooping crows, and into the family cemetery, my legs steady enough that I can almost keep up. I trail my fingers across the moss-mottled, half-crumbled headstones, their etchings hard to read. The oldest one belongs to Joanne Smalley Hathorn. She died in 1834, when she was thirty-three, the mother of seven young children. When she was dying, Mother tells me, she begged her husband to bury her on the property instead of in the town cemetery several miles away so their children could visit her grave.
A Piece of the World Page 2
