A Piece of the World(26)
“I hope you won’t think this impertinent, but did you know that the blue flowers in your dress match your eyes exactly?” he murmurs.
“I did not,” I manage to answer.
The Carles’ boat is a single-mast sloop, with a jib in the front and a large white mainsail attached to the back of the wooden mast. They keep a wooden dinghy on the shore near Kissing Cove, paddles tucked inside, to row out to the sailboat. When we get to the beach, Alvah is waving from the deck of the sloop, about a hundred yards out in the bay. We drag the dinghy to the water. Walton insists on taking the oars and we meander toward the sailboat, this way and that. I have to bite my lips to keep from laughing: his strokes are choppy and inexpert, nothing like Al’s rhythmic motion. When we arrive at the boat, Ramona ties the small craft to the buoy, and Walton, taking Alvah’s proffered hand, jumps up first so the two of them can assist us.
“Gallant of you, I suppose, but unnecessary,” Ramona says, batting away Walton’s hand. I don’t protest. I need all the help I can get.
Once aboard, I’m more at ease. It is a mild, warm morning, with a gentle wind, and I know how to sail, having learned with Alvaro on his small skiff. Alvah hoists the mainsail, which flaps dramatically in the wind like a sheet on a clothesline, and I pull down firmly on the halyard until it stops. He turns the boat to starboard, weaving away from the wind, lessening the tilt to bring us to a more comfortable sailing angle as we approach open water. I have to warn Walton to duck so he won’t get hit in the head by the boom.
He seems surprised and a little impressed that I seem to know what I’m doing. “So many hidden talents!”
It’s a miracle I’m any help to Alvah given how distracted I am by the skin on Walton’s neck, slightly sunburned just above his collar. The small flaps of his ears turning pink in the sun. The quick flash of his gray-blue eyes.
Alvah, passionate for sailing in the way that boys who grew up on boats with their fathers and grandfathers can be, is happy to do the brunt of the work, and once we’re out on the ocean we fall into an easy rhythm. Ramona opens a basket and cuts chunks of bread, slices of cheese, passes around hard-boiled eggs and salt and a tin canteen of water.
In the course of conversation, I learn bits and pieces about Walton’s upbringing. His mother is obsessed with social decorum, his father a banker who stays in Boston in a small apartment several nights a week—“when he has to work late. Or at least that’s what he tells us,” Walton says. I’m not sure what he’s implying and fear it’s rude to ask; I don’t want to look ignorant but also don’t want to pry. It’s as hard to picture where Walton grew up as it is to imagine life on the moon. I conjure parlor rooms out of Jane Austen, a redbrick mansion, the walls of the dining room adorned with gilt-framed paintings of Harvard-educated ancestors.
He tells me that he had a curved spine, scoliosis, as a child, and had to wear a plaster body cast for a long, hot summer after an operation when he was twelve. While other boys were climbing trees and kicking balls around, he lay in bed reading adventure stories like Swiss Family Robinson and Captains Courageous. He doesn’t say so, but I know he’s trying to explain that he understands what it’s like to be me.
As the hours pass, the sky drains of warmth. It’s not until I notice goose bumps on my arms that I realize I’ve forgotten a sweater. Without a word, Walton peels off his jacket and drapes it around my shoulders. “Oh,” I say with surprise.
“I hope that wasn’t too forward of me. You seemed chilly.”
“Yes. Thank you. I just—I didn’t expect it.” In truth, I can’t remember the last time anyone noticed my physical discomfort and did something about it. When you live on a farm, everyone is uncomfortable much of the time. Too cold, too warm, dirty, bone tired, banged up, injured by a tool or hot grate—too preoccupied to worry much about each other.
“You’re quite an independent girl, aren’t you?”
“I suppose I am.”
“You’ve never met anyone like Christina, Walton,” Ramona says. “She’s not like those silly girls in Malden who don’t know how to light a fire or clean a fish.”
“Is she a suffragette, like Miss Pankhurst?” he asks in a teasing voice.
I feel woefully ignorant; I don’t know what a suffragette is and I’ve never heard of Miss Pankhurst. I think of all the years Walton spent in school while I was washing and cooking and cleaning. “A suffragette?”
“You know, those ladies starving themselves for the vote,” Ramona says. “The ones who think, God forbid, they can do anything a man can do.”
“Is that what you think?” Walton asks me.
“Well, I don’t know,” I say. “Shall we have a competition and find out? We could split logs for firewood, or fix a drainpipe. Or maybe slaughter a chicken?”
“Careful,” he says, laughing. “Miss Pankhurst was just sentenced to three years in jail for her treasonous words.”
There is, I am almost certain, a spark between us. A flickering. I glance at Ramona. She raises her eyebrows at me and smiles, and I know she senses it too.
ONE DAY WALTON shows up alone on a bicycle. He’s wearing a pin-striped sack coat and a straw boater, not the kind of hat any man around here would wear. (For that matter, they don’t wear pin-striped sack coats either.) Around my brothers he looks slightly preposterous, like a peacock in a cluster of turkeys.