A Piece of the World(57)

I feel a little twinge. I’d forgotten about the gift. But I’m in no mood to apologize. “Let’s be honest, Gertrude. You didn’t want me at your wedding.”

“Do not presume to know what I want or don’t want!” she says, her voice rising in a hiss. Then she pokes at the ceiling and puts a finger to her lips. “Shh!”

“You’re the one raising your voice,” I say evenly.

“Christina, this is foolishness,” she says, suddenly imperious. “No doubt it was devastating for you, what happened with that man. Walton Hall.” Hearing his name on her lips makes me shudder. “But it’s time to move on. You have to stop stewing in your misfortune. Don’t you wish the best for your brother and Mary? Now let’s forget this ever happened and go make some food for those hungry people.”

Bringing up Walton is the final straw. “Get out of my room.”

She gives a little disbelieving laugh. “Why, I—”

“If you don’t leave my room this minute, I swear I will never speak to you again.”

“Now, Christina—”

“I mean it, Gertrude.”

“This is outrageous. In all my days . . .” She looks around as if some unseen presence in the room might come to her aid.

I shift on the bed, turning my body away from her.

She stands in the middle of the floor for a moment, breathing heavily. “You have a very cold heart, Christina Olson,” she says. Then she wrenches open the door and walks out into the hall, slamming it behind her. I hear her hesitate on the landing. Then heavy footsteps down the stairs.

Muffled voices. She is speaking to Papa in the dining room. The screen door opens with a creak and swings shut.

WHAT PROMISES I make, I keep, Walton once said. His words were empty, but mine are not. Despite the fact that we live in a small place and are bound to run into each other, I keep my promise to Gertrude Gibbons. I will never speak to her again.

By the time my nephew—John William, given his grandfather’s American name—is born on the third floor a few hours later, I’ve made my way downstairs to the pantry, where I wash my face with a cool cloth and tame my hair with a horsehair brush. I coax the fire back to life and lay a table with sliced turkey and pickled beans and fried apple cake. When my brother Sam places the small bundle in my arms, as warm and dense as a loaf of bread fresh from the oven, I look down into the face of this child. John William. He stares up at me intently with dark eyes, his brow furrowed, as if he’s trying to figure out who I am, and my melancholy lifts, lightens, evaporates into the air. It’s impossible to feel anything for this baby but love.





THORNBACK





1946–1947


Only traces of white remain on the sun-bleached, snow-battered clapboards and shingles of this old house. Inside, wood smoke, fuel oil, and tobacco have darkened the wallpaper. Sometimes it feels as if Al and I are living in a haunted house with the ghosts of our parents, our grandparents, all those sea captains and their wives and children. I still keep the door between the kitchen and the shed open for the witches.

Ghosts and witches, all around. The thought is oddly comforting.

Much of the time, these days, the house is quiet. I’ve come to think of silence as another kind of sound. After all, the world is never totally silent, even in the middle of the night. Beds creak, a wolf howls, wind stirs the trees, the sea roars and shushes. And of course there’s plenty to see. In springtime I watch the deer, noses to the wind, trailed by speckled fawns; in summer rabbits and raccoons; in autumn a bull moose loping across the field; a red fox vivid against December snow.

Hours accumulate like snow, recede like the tide. Al and I drift through our routines. Get up when we want to, go to bed when light drains from the sky. Nobody’s schedules to attend to other than our own. We hunker down in the fall and winter, slow our heartbeats to a hibernating rhythm, struggle to rouse ourselves in March. People from away arrive in cars laden with bags and boxes in June and July and head out in the opposite direction in August and September. One year melts into the next. Each season is like it was the year before, with minor variations. Our conversations often revolve around the weather: Will this summer be hotter than last; can we expect an early frost, how many inches of snow by December?

This life of ours can feel an awful lot like waiting.

In the summer I’m usually up before sunrise, lighting the Glenwood range and making porridge. (I rarely sleep through the night on my pallet; my legs throb, even in my dreams.) I’ll scoop a cup for myself and eat it in the dark, listening to the sounds of the house, the gulls cawing outside. When Al comes into the kitchen, I’ll hand him a cup of porridge and he’ll take it to the counter and sprinkle sugar on it from Mother’s cut-glass bowl.

“Well, I suppose it’s milking time,” he says when he’s finished. He carries the cup to the sink in the pantry and dredges water from the pump.

“I can wash that,” I sometimes protest. “You’ve got chores.”

But he always rinses his cup, and my cup too. “It’s no trouble.”

When Al heads out to the barn, I sit in my old chair looking out the window toward the road to town in one direction and the St. George River, and beyond it the sea, in the other. The sun shimmers on the water and the wind carves patterns in the high grass. Around mid-morning Andy usually shows up, disappears upstairs, emerges for lunch, leaves in the late afternoon. With the door propped open, Topsy and the cats come and go as they please. Sometimes a friendly porcupine climbs up the steps, waddles across the kitchen, and disappears into the pantry. I might drift to sleep and wake to purring, which sounds to my sleep-clotted brain like a faraway motor. Lolly, seeing my eyes flicker, stretches toward my face, her paws digging into my shoulder. I reach under her rib cage, feeling through her warm skin the quick thrumming of her heart.