A Piece of the World(29)
We are close to the lip of the tunnel. His hands on my waist, Walton turns me around, his forehead against mine.
“I’ve already discovered the treasure,” he says. “All this time you were here, waiting to be found.”
WALTON’S ATTENTION IS like a sun high in the sky, so bright, so blinding, that everything else fades in contrast. The voices of my parents, my brothers, the clucking chickens and barking dog, rain on the roof like rice in a can—these noises simmer like a stew in the back of my brain. I am barely aware of them until my mother or a brother shakes my arm and says sharply, “Did you hear what I said?”
Do other people walk around in this state? Did my parents? What a strange idea—that perfectly ordinary people with mundane lives might have once experienced this quickening, this vertiginous unfolding. Their eyes betray no evidence of it.
Mamey used to tell stories about natives on the islands she visited who’d never seen snow and had no language for it. That’s how I feel. I have no language, no context, for this.
My friend Sadie says, “You’re a goner. You’ll move to Boston and we’ll never see you again.”
“Maybe I’ll convince him to live here.”
“And do what? He doesn’t seem like the farming type.”
“He wants to be a journalist, he says. He can write anywhere.”
“What’s he going to write about? The price of milk?”
But what does Sadie know? Walton seems smitten with our way of life. “This is so different from how I grew up,” he says. “Your knowledge is real. It’s practical. Mine is all in my head. I don’t know how to foal a calf or skim cream from milk. I’m hopeless at sailing or harnessing a horse to a buggy. Is there nothing you can’t do?”
“You’re the one who can do, and be, anything you choose,” I remind him.
“What I choose,” he says, “is to be with you.”
It feels as if my life is moving forward at two separate speeds, one at the usual pace, with its predictable rhythms and familiar inhabitants, and the other rushing ahead, a blur of color and sound and sensation. It’s clear to me now that for twenty years I have gone through the motions of each day like a dumb animal, neither daring to hope for a different kind of life nor even knowing enough to desire one.
I am determined to keep up with Walton. I ask my brothers to bring the newspapers from town when they go for supplies. I want to learn enough to discuss politics and current events—the flood in Dayton, Ohio, and Irish Home Rule; the federal income tax and the suffragettes demonstrating in Washington; Woodrow Wilson’s views on segregation and the assassination of King George of Greece. At the library in Cushing I check out novels by authors Walton has mentioned, Willa Cather and D. H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton, all of which I read through a filter, thinking of him: “She was afraid lest this boy, who, nevertheless, looked something like a Walter Scott hero,” Lawrence writes in Sons and Lovers, “who could paint and speak French, and knew what algebra meant, and who went by train to Nottingham every day, might consider her simply as the swine-girl, unable to perceive the princess beneath.”
I’m afraid that I am the swine girl. But he treats me like a princess. Papa agrees to let me take Blackie and the buggy one afternoon, and I take Walton on a long tour from Broad Cove, with its views of the outer islands, to the quaint shops in East Friendship, to the pristine Ulmer Church in downtown Rockland. We end up in the grass on the hill overlooking Kissing Cove, eating egg salad sandwiches and home-canned pickles, drinking lemonade from a mason jar. As afternoon fades to evening we watch the sun melt into the liquid horizon, a thin disc of moon emerging faintly above. “The stars are so close,” he says, pointing up to the black expanse. “Like you could reach up and take one. Hold it in your hand.” He pretends to grab one and hand it to me. “When I am in Cambridge and you’re here in Cushing, I’ll look up at the stars and think of you. Then you won’t seem so far away.”
THE FINAL WEEK of August is sodden, cloud heavy, with an unwelcome chill that announces the end of summer as abruptly as a dinner host standing at the table to signal the end of the party.
When Walton comes to say good-bye, I am so choked up I can barely speak. I had not realized how dependent I’ve become on seeing him. “I promise to write,” he says, and I promise, too, but he doesn’t yet have an address at Harvard, so I will have to wait for him to write first.
Waiting to hear from him is agony. I plod to the post office once a day at noon.
“I’m taking the buggy into town at three o’clock, as always,” Al says. “I can pick up the mail.”
“I like the fresh air,” I tell him.
The postmistress, thin, fussy, meticulous Bertha Dorset, eyes me with curiosity. I soon learn her routines: she keeps stamps in rolls in a tidy drawer and dusts the coin wrappers with a goose feather. Twice a day, according to a checklist on the wall behind her head, she sweeps the floor. At sunset every evening she lowers the flag outside the post office, takes it off the pole, and folds it neatly into a box.
When I arrive, she hands over the mail in our box, bills and circulars, mostly. “That’s it for today,” she always says.
I nod and try my best to smile.
I feel like I’m living in a jail cell, waiting for release, the strain of listening for the man with the keys making me tense and jittery. After supper one night, as I’m clearing the dishes, my brothers are debating whether to take up the fish weir; it will be destroyed by ice storms if they wait too long, but on the other hand the sardine catch is good so it would be a shame to dismantle it too soon, and I think I might jump out of my skin. I snap at the boys, surprising myself at my own meanness: “For crying out loud, you clodhoppers, pick up your plates! Were you born in a barn?”