Leaving Lucy Pear(25)

So. Albert hadn’t bathed. He’d barely eaten. The whiskey was long gone. And now he’d been sitting at Bea’s awful writing desk for hours without managing to finish a single sentence because Teddy was right, Albert was despicable, and stupid, too, not only in the sense that he’d never learned Latin but in the sense that he couldn’t sustain a thought long enough to figure out what it was that he wanted to say to Bea. The city was coming to life outside, Saturday picnics and paddleboats, children’s balls pounding the paving bricks. People had to know about Albert, of course, but they wouldn’t know unless he did something. What would he do, stick his head out the window, holler? Telling Bea about the court would accomplish nothing, he admitted. She, too, was very good at keeping secrets—she would allow it to slide in between them, another piece of furniture in the sham house of their marriage. And even if people knew, say the boys at the bank, what good would it do now? Teddy was gone and the Green Lamp, too, buried along with Cyril and Cummings beneath the paving bricks and the cobblestone walks and the granite curbs of the city, the fusty air and old trees, all of it pressing down on Albert, all of it propping him up.

His stomach whimpered. He was aware of it as an organ, gaunt walled and angry, requiring his attention. He wondered if this was what drew Bea to eat so little, if she stayed hungry because hunger helped one stop thinking of other things, its hard lump like a ballast, steadying you. He thought he could almost cry from hunger. He thought, I don’t want Bea to stay in Gloucester forever. I would like her to come back. “What are you waiting for?!” shouted one of the boys down in the street. “Throw the f*cking ball!” Hunger, thought Albert. My stomach is crying. On Monday he would go into work, say he had recovered from his illness, make it so. He fisted the sheets of paper into a ball, retrieved himself from the table, dressed, and walked toward Charles Street, to find something to eat.





Nine




I’ll tell Mum,” Liam threatened for the twentieth time that week.

“You won’t,” Lucy said.

“Give me a penny.”

“Oh, fine.” She gave one to Liam and one to Jeffrey, too.

They were on their way home from the quarry, cutting through the beech and pine woods above Washington Street. The shade cooled them and they quickly fell into not talking, their feet navigating the rocks and roots on the forest floor. There was a path somewhere near here, but they never took the path.

Lucy Pear was nine and wished she could stay nine forever. She easily hid, beneath a pair of suspenders and one of her brothers’ vests, her newly, barely swollen breasts, which she hoped against all likelihood were done growing. Her hair she would gladly have cut, except that their mother would ask questions. The rest of it wasn’t so difficult, to walk like a boy, and work like a boy, and keep her mouth shut. She was Johnny Murphy. She counted her first week’s pay by touch, in the pocket of her brother’s trousers: five dollars and twenty-five cents. An astounding sum, given that they worked only in the afternoons. A ticket to Canada was twenty-eight dollars and thirty-one cents, Lucy had learned from her sister Juliet, who lived in Rockport now, with three children of her own. Juliet was the oldest of the children, and very resourceful, and because she would never have thought to leave Cape Ann herself, she was the perfect target for Lucy’s questions.

How much is a ticket to Canada?

That depends. Handing Lucy a cookie. Chuckling. Where are you pretending to go? Will you need a berth?

Where did Peter go?

Their brother Peter had gone to Canada the year before. He was ten years Lucy’s senior, an outwardly tough boy, almost a man now. Lucy trusted him. She imagined living with him, in Canada, imagined that he would be like a brother-father to her. In Canada, apparently, they had turned the schools into breweries, the grass into moonshine; they had laid tracks straight from the distilleries to the border. Everyone was getting rich.

Quebec. Juliet said it Kebeck, as if she were French.

To make the trip, Lucy calculated that she needed thirty for the ticket, ten for food, and ten extra to get by until she found Peter. The perry, their mother had explained matter-of-factly and too late, oblivious to the panic rising in Lucy’s throat, wouldn’t be ready until next year. So when the quarry jobs came along, Lucy thought, Why not? If she kept up the work at the quarry, she might be gone before the pears even hit the press. Maybe, if a storm came up or the fish were scarce, before Roland even returned from his trip.

? ? ?

In the yard, their three sisters—with help from the youngest boy, Joshua—were working on the shack that would hold the press. Three walls were up, the fourth in progress, a pine door resting on its side against the cedar tree. Beneath where the floor would be, she and Liam and Jeffrey had been digging a secret cellar. The way down to the cellar would be through a “turnip bin,” which would be just like the potato bin beside it except that its bottom would drop out. Voilà! Lucy’s latest idea was to put the scratcher in the shack above and the press in the cellar below and devise a detachable chute that would carry the pulp straight down into the press. They would press the juice, let it ferment into perry in wooden barrels, then funnel off the perry into jugs. The jugs and barrels had already been ordered—like everything else—with funds from Josiah Story.

“Hello, boys!” Janie sang in greeting, and Lucy was seized by an urge to jump into her sister’s arms. Instead she took off her cap, let her hair swing down, and said, “Hulloh,” in a deep voice, which made them laugh, Janie and Anne and Maggie and Joshua, too, though he didn’t understand what was funny. She missed them all already. Her continued devotion to the perry—despite her understanding that she wouldn’t profit from it—was her way of apologizing to them, in advance. She hoped that next year, when the jugs were ready to sell, they would see that all her bossing—the lists she made for them each morning, her inspections at the end of the day—had been for them.