A Piece of the World(7)
She tells me the story of how, in 1743, three men from Massachusetts—two brothers, Samuel and William Hathorn, and William’s son Alexander—packed their belongings into three carriages for the long journey to the province of Maine in the middle of winter. They arrived at a remote peninsula that for two thousand years had been a meeting ground for Indian tribes and built a tent made of animal skins, sturdy enough to withstand the coming months of snow and ice and muddy thaw. Within a year they felled a swath of forest and built three log cabins. And they gave this spit of land in Cushing, Maine, a name: Hathorn Point.
Fifty years later, Alexander’s son Samuel, a sea captain, built a two-story wood-frame house on the foundation of the family’s cabin. Samuel married twice, raised six children in the house, and died in his seventies. His son Aaron, also a sea captain, married twice and raised eight children here. When Aaron died and his widow decided to sell the house (opting for a simpler life in town, closer to the bakery and the dry goods store), the seafaring Hathorns were dismayed. Five years later Aaron’s son Samuel IV bought the house back, reestablishing the family’s hold on the land.
Samuel IV was my grandfather.
All of those sea captains, coming and going for months at a time. Their many wives and children, up and down the narrow stairs. To this day, Mamey says, this old house on Hathorn Point is filled with their ghosts.
WHEN YOUR WORLD is small, you learn every inch of it. You can trace it in the dark; you navigate it in your sleep. Fields of rough grass sloping toward the rocky shore and the sea beyond, nooks and crannies to hide and play in. The soot-black range, always warm, in the kitchen. Geraniums on the windowsill, splayed red like a magician’s handkerchief. Feral cats in the barn. Air that smells of pine and seaweed, of chicken roasting in the oven and freshly plowed soil.
One summer afternoon Mother looks at the tide chart in the kitchen and says, “Put on your shoes, Christina, I’ve got something to show you.”
I lace up my brown brogues and follow her down through the field, past the humming cicadas and the swooping crows, and into the family cemetery, my legs steady enough that I can almost keep up. I trail my fingers across the moss-mottled, half-crumbled headstones, their etchings hard to read. The oldest one belongs to Joanne Smalley Hathorn. She died in 1834, when she was thirty-three, the mother of seven young children. When she was dying, Mother tells me, she begged her husband to bury her on the property instead of in the town cemetery several miles away so their children could visit her grave.
Her children were buried here too. All the Hathorns after her are buried here.
We continue to the shore on the southern side of Hathorn Point, above Kissing Cove and Maple Juice Cove, where the estuary of the St. George River flows into Muscongus Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. There’s an ancient heap of shells here that Mother says was left by Abenaki Indians who spent long-ago summers on the point. I try to envision what it would’ve been like here before this house was built, before the three log cabins, before any settlers discovered it. I imagine an Abenaki girl, like me, scouring the rocky shore for shells. From the point you can see way out to sea. Did she keep one eye on the horizon, scanning it for intruders? Did she have any idea how much her life would change when they arrived?
The tide is low. I stumble on the rocks, but Mother doesn’t say anything, just stops and waits. Across the muddy flats is Little Island, an acre-wide wilderness of birches and dry grass. She points to it. “We’re going there. But we can’t stay long, or the tide will strand us.” Our path is an obstacle course of seaweed-slick stones. I pick my way along slowly, and even so I trip and fall, scraping my hand on a cluster of barnacles. My feet are damp inside my shoes. Mother glances back at me. “Get up. We’re nearly there.” When we reach the island, she spreads a wool blanket on the beach where it’s dry. Out of her rucksack she takes an egg sandwich on thick-sliced bread, a cucumber, two pieces of fried apple cake. She hands me half the sandwich. “Close your eyes and feel the sun,” she says, and I do, leaning back on my elbows, chin toward sky. Eyelids warm and yellow. Trees rustling behind us like starch-stiff skirts. Briny air. “Why would you want to be anywhere else?”
After we eat, we collect shells—pale green anemone puffs and iridescent purple mussels. “Look,” Mother says, pointing at a crab emerging from a tide pool, picking its way across the rocks. “All of life is here, in this place.” In her own way, she is always trying to teach me something.
TO LIVE ON a farm is to wage an ongoing war with the elements, Mother says. We have to push back against the unruly outdoors to keep chaos at bay. Farmers work in the soil with mules and cows and pigs, and the house must be a sanctuary. If it isn’t, we are no better than the animals.
Mother is in constant motion—sweeping, mopping, scouring, baking, wiping, washing, hanging out sheets. She makes bread in the morning using yeast from the hop vine behind the shed. There’s always a pot of porridge on the back of the range by the time I come downstairs, with a filmy skin on top that I poke through and feed to the cat when she isn’t looking. Sometimes dry oatcakes and boiled eggs. Baby Sam sleeps in a cradle in the corner. When the breakfast dishes are cleared, she starts on the large midday meal: chicken pie or pot roast or fish stew; mashed or boiled potatoes; peas or carrots, fresh or canned, depending on the season. What’s left over reappears at supper, transformed into a casserole or a stew.