“In your village in Sweden?”
He nods. “Gällinge.”
“Gällinge,” I repeat. The word is strange. Yah-lee-nyeh. “So you kept it to remind you of home?”
He blows out a noisy breath. “Perhaps.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Not really. I miss some things, I suppose.”
“Like . . .”
“Oh, I don’t know. A bread called svartbröd. With salmon and soured cream. And a fried potato cake called raggmunk my sister used to make. Maybe the lingonberries.”
“But what about . . . your sister? And your mother?”
And that’s when he tells me about the squalid, low-ceilinged two-room hut in the village of Gällinge that his family of ten shared with a cow, their surest hedge against starvation. His father, a drunkard with two moods, brooding and raging, who terrorized him and his seven younger siblings and worked occasionally at a peat farm as a day laborer when he was desperate enough. Papa’s own constant stomach-churning hunger. More than once, he says, he avoided jail by eluding police on a long chase through cobbled streets after stealing a rasher of pork, a jug of maple syrup.
From an early age he knew there wasn’t much of a future for him in Gällinge; no jobs, none he was qualified for even in the big city of Gothenburg, sixty miles away. Though a quick study, he paid little attention in school, knew how to read only the simplest stories. Never learned a trade. He taught himself to knit so he could help his ma, who earned a few coins making scarves and mittens and hats, but that was no job for a man, he says.
So when he heard about a trading ship bound for New York, he rose in the dark to be the first at the dock at Gothenburg Harbor.
The captain scoffed. Fifteen years old? Too young to leave your mama.
But Papa was determined. She won’t miss me, he told him. One less mouth to feed, a few more coins for the rest. Sick babies. The youngest, his brother Sven, not even a year old, had starved to death a month before.
And so he set sail with the captain and his small crew, across and back and around the world. As months turned into years, his past began to recede. He sent money to his mother, and talked, as all the sailors did, about going home, but the more time he spent away from Gällinge, the less he missed it. He didn’t miss tripping over his brothers and sisters, not to mention the cow. He didn’t miss that dingy hovel with its slop pail in the corner and the rank smell of unwashed bodies. The dank confines of a ship’s belly might not have been much of an improvement, but at least you could rise from its depths onto a wide deck and gaze up at a vast sky sprinkled with stars and the yolk of a moon.
IT’S SURPRISING THAT Papa knows as much as he does about farming, given that he grew up in a hovel and spent his twenties at sea. Mother says he’s just a quick study at whatever he puts his mind to. He restored the inn to a family home, raises cows and sheep and chickens for milk and meat and wool and eggs. He plants corn and peas and potatoes in the rocky soil, rotating them yearly, and he set up a farm store on the property to sell them. His customers come by boat from Port Clyde and St. George and Pleasant Point, loading their dories with produce and rowing back to where they’re from.
Having discovered that seaweed in the fields keeps the ground moist and the weeds down in the summer, Papa corrals Al and Sam and me to collect and distribute it. It takes two of us, our hands encased in thick cotton gloves, to steer a heavy wheelbarrow down to the water’s edge at low tide. We rip the kelp from the rocks, pulling up barnacles and crabs and snails, and load the barrow with spongy green strands bubbled at the ends and flat, wide strips fluted like piecrust. The gloves are stiff and unwieldy; it’s easier to grab it without them, so we take them off, rinsing our hands in ocean water to wash off the slime. Then we push the wheelbarrow up the hill to the newly furrowed field, where we grab big handfuls of cold kelp, squishing it between our fingers and scattering it down the rows. “Push it back,” Papa calls from where he’s hoeing. “Don’t smother the plants.”
Papa is always dreaming up projects to make money. His flock of sheep is growing, and though he sells wool to local people, one season he decides to box up the bulk of it and send it away to be carded and spun and dyed and sold out of state for a higher price. The following summer he constructs a fishing weir with a neighbor in the cove between Bird Point and Hathorn Point. Now that it’s winter, he’s decided that he will harvest freshwater ice, which can be loaded onto ships and transported easily and cheaply by steamer ship on the nearby sea-lanes to Boston and beyond. He’ll store it in an icehouse Captain Sam built that has been standing empty for decades.
Like any crop, ice is delicate and mercurial; bright sun or a sudden storm can ruin it. There’s no guarantee, until the ice is received in Boston, that Papa will get paid. He waits until February, when the ice on Vinal’s Pond is fourteen to sixteen inches thick, and offers money to other farmers to help him clear the snow with horses and plows. Up before dawn on frigid mornings, they use a workhorse to pull the clearing scraper, a series of boards attached together to create a flat bottom that angles back about eight feet wide, and a three-foot-wide snow scraper to remove heavier, wetter ice. Several men saw through the ice with handsaws fused to long iron T-bar handles, shedding coats and scarves and hats as they warm up. It is hard work, but these men and horses are accustomed to hard work.
When a slab of ice is cut and floating, twelve inches above the syrupy water, the men hold float hooks, long poles with spiky ends, to keep the ice where they want it. After this comes the tedious work of cutting and loading these floats onto flatbed trailers behind horses that will transport them to the icehouse behind the barn. There the blocks will be stacked and stored in sawdust, some set aside to sell to locals and the rest to wait until a carrier bound for Massachusetts is ready in the cove.
The morning of the harvest, after Papa has left the house, I dress in the dark, layering sweaters and trousers over my long underwear and pulling on two pairs of socks. I meet Al in the downstairs hall and we head out into the mist, blowing our breath at each other, and make our way toward Vinal’s Pond to watch the horses harnessed to plows trek back and forth on the thick ice, deepening the grooves. Snow falls softly, like flour through a sifter, accumulating in drifts.
We spot Papa in the distance, leading Blackie and the plow. He sees us too. “Stay off the ice!” he shouts. When Al and I reach the edge, we stand silently watching the men do their work. Blackie prances skittishly, tossing his head. He’s a nervous horse; I’ve spent hours in the paddock devising routines to calm him. He’s wearing the choke rope I fashioned around his neck several days ago to control him when he gets spooked.
One of the men has broken his float hook in a block of ice, and everyone is distracted, offering suggestions, when I notice that Blackie is sliding in slow motion toward the lip of the ice. All at once there’s a high-pitched whinny. His eyes roll in terror as he plunges into the breath-stopping cold, flailing and churning in the water. The plow teeters on the edge. Without thinking, I run toward Papa across the ice.
“Damn it, get back!” Papa yells.
“Grab the choke rope,” I call, motioning to my own neck. “Cut off his breath!”
Papa gestures to some of the men, and they join arms, elbow to elbow, Papa in the middle and several holding his belt. He leans far out over the horse’s head and grasps the rope, pulling it tight. After a moment, Blackie quiets. Papa manages to pull him up onto the slab by his harness, forelegs first, then belly, and finally his powerful thick haunches. For a moment the horse stands as if frozen, front and back legs apart like a statue. Then he dips his head and shakes his mane, spraying water.
At the supper table that night Papa tells Mamey and Mother that I am the orneriest and most stubborn child he has, and the only reason he didn’t wring my neck for running onto the ice is that my quick thinking probably saved Blackie’s life. A drowned horse, we all know, would’ve been a big loss.
“I wonder where she gets that from,” Mot
her says.
IN THE EVENINGS, once or twice a month, local farmers come by the house to drink whiskey and play cards around the dining table. Papa is different from the others, with his quiet ways and his Swedish accent, but the fact that they’re all farmers and fishermen is enough of a bond. After Mother and Mamey have gone to bed, Al and I sit on the stairs, just out of sight, and listen to their stories.
The more Richard Wooten drinks, the more he rambles. “There’s treasure in that Mystery Tunnel, by God, there is. One of these days, I swear, I’ll get my hands on it.”
Al and I are fascinated by the legend of Mystery Tunnel. According to local lore a two-hundred-foot tunnel was carved out of rock near Bird Point by early settlers as a place to hide from passing pirates and Abenaki Indians.
“I came this close. This close,” Richard says. His voice softens, and I have to lean close to the banister to hear. “Pitch black. Not a star in the sky. I sneak down there with a lantern. I’m digging for who knows how long, hours, it’s gotta be.”
“How many times have you told this story, a hundred?” someone scoffs.
Richard ignores him. “And then I see it: the glint of treasure.”
“You do not.”
“I do, with my own eyes! And then . . .”
The men grumble and laugh. “Aw, c’mon!” “Now he’s just makin’ it up.”
“Spit it out, Richard,” Papa says.
“It disappears. Like—that.” I hear the snap of his fingers. “Just as I was reaching for it. It was there and then it was gone.”
“Rough luck,” one of them shouts. “To treasure!”
“To treasure!”
The next evening Al and I slip out of the house with a candle nub and make our way down to Bird Point. The lip of the tunnel is dark and mysterious; our flickering candle keeps sputtering out. It’s eerily silent as we creep along. About fifty feet in, fallen rocks block the path. I feel a strange relief—we probably would’ve dared ourselves to continue. Would we have found the buried treasure? Or would we have disappeared in the depths of the tunnel, never to be found?
Al and I take our adventures where we can find them. Several weeks later he wakes me up in the middle of the night, a finger to his lips, and whispers, “Follow me.” I pull on a housedress over my nightgown and my old leather shoes over my socks and leave the snug cocoon of my bed. As soon as we’re outside I see a glowing orange ball several hundred yards out in the harbor, its reflection splashed across the water. Then I realize what it is: a ship on fire.
“Been burning for hours,” Al says. “A lime coaster. Headed to Thomaston, no doubt.”
“Should we wake Papa?”
“Nah.”
“Maybe he could help.”
“A dory came ashore with a group of men a while ago. Nothing anybody can do now.”
For more than an hour we sit in the grass. The freighter blazes in the dark, its destruction a thing of beauty. I gaze at Al, his face illuminated in the glow. I think about his favorite book, Treasure Island, about a boy who runs away to sea in search of buried treasure. Mrs. Crowley, seeing how often Al thumbed through the pages of the copy on her shelf, gave it to him when school let out for the summer. “For our seafaring Alvaro,” she wrote on the inside cover in her neat handwriting. “May you embark on many adventures.”
Months later, the ribs of that lime coaster are visible when the tide is low. Papa and Al row out to the wreck and strip the hull of its oak planking, and after stacking and weighting them to make them straight, they use them to rebuild the icehouse floor.
EVERY WEEKDAY AL and I walk together to the Wing School Number 4 in Cushing, a mile and a half away. With my unsteady gait it takes a long time to get there. I try to focus on my steps, but I tumble so often that my knees and elbows are constantly bruised and scraped, despite the cotton padding. The sides of my feet are tough and callused.
Al complains the whole way. “Jeez, the cows are faster than you. I could’ve been there and back by now.”
“Go ahead, then,” I tell him, but he never does.
It helps if I swing my body forward, using my arms for balance, though even that doesn’t always work. When I fall, Al sighs and says, “Come on, now we’re really going to be late.” But when he pulls me up, he puts all his weight into it.
Sometimes we walk with two neighbor girls, Anne and Mary Connors, but only when their mother insists on it. They cluck their tongues and kick at sticks when I trip and fall behind. “Oh Lord, again?” Mary mutters, and the two of them whisper together so Al and I can’t hear.
At school I wait until the cloakroom is empty before taking off my knee pads and armbands and stashing them in my lunch pail. The other kids can be mean. Leslie Brown trips me as I walk up the aisle to get a book, and I crash into Gertrude Gibbons’s desk. “Watch it, clumsy,” Gertrude says under her breath.
There are things I could say. Few of us at the Wing School Number 4 have picture-perfect lives. Gertrude Gibbons’s mother ran off to Portland with a man who worked at the paper mill in Augusta, and never looked back. Leslie’s stepfather beats him with a belt. The Connors girls have no father; he didn’t go away, he was never here. It’s a small town, and we know more about one another than any of us might wish.
One afternoon Al and I are sitting outdoors with our lunch pails under the shade of an elm in the schoolyard when Leslie and another boy begin to circle and taunt. “What’s wrong with you? You’re not normal, you know that?”
The tips of Al’s ears redden, but he stays quiet. He’s small and slight, no match for these rough boys with chaw in their cheeks. I don’t want him to defend me anyway. I’m more than a year older than he is.
A girl in my grade, Sadie Hamm, strolls over. She’s a thin, tough girl, as solid as a sunflower stalk, brown eyed, round faced, with a nimbus of curly sunflower petal hair. Putting her hands on her hips, she juts her chin out at the boys. “That’s enough.”
“Sadie Bacon,” Leslie says with a sneer. “That’s your name, right?”
“I don’t think you want to play the name game with me, Leslie Brown.” Turning to Al and me, Sadie says, “Okay if I join you?”
Al doesn’t look too happy about it, but I pat the grass.
Sadie shares her sandwich with me, meatloaf sliced thin on bread with butter. She tells us that she lives with her two older sisters in an apartment above the drugstore, where one sister works behind the counter. She doesn’t mention her parents, and I don’t ask.
“Mind if I sit with you tomorrow?” she asks.
Al cuts his eyes at me. I ignore him. “Sure you can,” I say.
For so long Al has been my only companion. He is as familiar to me as the walls of the kitchen or the path to the barn. It would be nice, I think, to have a friend.
ON LAND AL is shy and awkward. He doesn’t talk much. In a crowd of people he acts like he wants to be somewhere, anywhere, else. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, which hang like oversized gloves from his wrists. But out on the ocean, when we pull up to one of Papa’s blue-and-white buoys bobbing in the water, he is purposeful and self-assured. With a quick yank on the rope he can tell how many lobsters are in the trap far below.
Al has always wanted to be a lobsterman. The summer he turns eight, Papa decides he’s old enough to learn. He takes Al out in an old skiff a few afternoons a week, and sometimes I go along for the ride. We row out so far that our white house looks like a speck on the hill. It makes me nervous to be on the open ocean in the small boat—my balance is precarious enough on land. The water is deep and dark around us; the planks are rough, and saltwater pools between the ribs of the boat, pickling my bare feet and dampening the hem of my dress. I fidget and sigh, impatient to get back. But Al is in his element.
Papa hands each of us a handline. It’s a simple rig, cotton line coated with linseed oil and wrapped around a piece of wood he whittled on each end to better hold the line. There’s a big hook at the end and a lead weight to make it sink. He te
aches us to bait the hook with chum he keeps in an old bucket covered by a board. We let our lines down slowly, and then we wait. I don’t catch anything, but Al’s line is magic. Is it the way he fastens his bait? The way he jigs his line, making the fish believe it’s alive? Or is it something else, a serene confidence that fish will come? Half a dozen times there’s an almost imperceptible tug on the line between Al’s forefinger and thumb, and he in response pulls hard on the line to set his hook and then, hand over hand, hauls in a flapping haddock or cod from the depths of the sea, over the gunwales into our boat.
With the skill of a surgeon, he removes the hook from the fish and detangles the line. He insists on rowing all the way back by himself. When we land at the dock, he holds up his palms, red and raw, and grins. He’s proud of his blisters.
Within a few years Al has restored Papa’s old skiff and learned how to build and rig his own traps, fashioning the bows and sills from scraps of lumber, knitting twine for the heads and using rocks as weights to sink them. The traps he builds are better than Papa’s, he boasts, and he’s right: they brim with lobster. He constructs a fish house behind the barn to store the lobster traps and bait barrels, boat caulking and buoys, fishing nets and nails. Before long, he has taken over the blue-and-white buoys and is selling lobster to customers in Cushing and as far away as Port Clyde.
Al can’t wait to be done with book learning. He’s just biding his time, he says, counting the days until he can spend every waking moment in his precious boat.
MRS. CROWLEY TOLD me once—the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me—that I’m one of the brightest students she’s ever taught. Long before the others, I have finished my reading and arithmetic. She’s always giving me extra work to do and books to read. I appreciate the compliment, but maybe if I could run and play like the other kids, I would be as impatient and distracted as they are. The truth is, when I’m immersed in a book I’m less aware of the pain in my unpredictable arms and legs.
A Piece of the World Page 5
