A Piece of the World(16)

“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 teaches 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.