Читать книгу A Piece of the World - Christina Kline Baker - Страница 11

My mother drapes a wrung-out cloth across my forehead. Cold water trickles down my temple onto the pillow, and I turn my head to smear it off. I gaze up into her gray eyes, narrowed in concern, a vertical line between them. Small lines around her puckered lips. I look over at my brother Alvaro standing beside her, two years old, eyes wide and solemn.

She pours water from a white teapot into a glass. “Drink, Christina.”

“Smile at her, Katie,” my grandmother Tryphena tells her. “Fear is a contagion.” She leads Alvaro out of the room, and my mother reaches for my hand, smiling with only her mouth.

I am three years old.

My bones ache. When I close my eyes, I feel like I’m falling. It’s not an altogether unpleasant sensation, like sinking into water. Colors behind my eyelids, purple and rust. My face so hot that my mother’s hand on my cheek feels icy. I take a deep breath, inhaling the smells of wood smoke and baking bread, and I drift. The house creaks and shifts. Snoring in another room. The ache in my bones drives me back to the surface. When I open my eyes, I can’t see anything, but I can tell my mother is gone. I’m so cold it feels like I’ve never been warm, my teeth chattering loudly in the quiet. I hear myself whimpering, and it’s as if the sound is coming from someone else. I don’t know how long I’ve been making this noise, but it soothes me, a distraction from the pain.

The covers lift. My grandmother says, “There, Christina, hush. I’m here.” She slides into bed beside me in her thick flannel nightgown and pulls me toward her. I settle into the curve of her legs, her bosom pillowy behind my head, her soft fleshy arm under my neck. She rubs my cold arms, and I fall asleep in a warm cocoon smelling of talcum powder and linseed oil and baking soda.

SINCE I CAN remember I’ve called my grandmother Mamey. It’s the name of a tree that grows in the West Indies, where she went with my grandfather, Captain Sam Hathorn, on one of their many excursions. The mamey tree has a short, thick trunk and only a few large limbs and pointy green leaves, with white flowers at the ends of the branches, like hands. It blooms all year long, and its fruit ripens at different times. When my grandparents spent several months on the island of St. Lucia, my grandmother made jam out of the fruit, which tastes like an overripe raspberry. “The riper it gets, the sweeter it gets. Like me,” she said. “Don’t call me Granny. Mamey suits me just fine.”

Sometimes I find her sitting alone, gazing out the window in the Shell Room, our front parlor, where we display the treasures that six generations of sailors brought home in sea chests from their voyages around the world. I know she’s pining for my grandfather, who died in this house a year before I was born. “It is a terrible thing to find the love of your life, Christina,” she says. “You know too well what you’re missing when it’s gone.”

“You have us,” I say.

“I loved your grandfather more than all the shells in the Shell Room,” she says. “More than all the blades of grass in the field.”

MY GRANDFATHER, LIKE his father and grandfather before him, began his life on the sea as a cabin boy and became a ship captain. After marrying my grandmother, he took her with him on his travels, transporting ice from Maine to the Philippines, Australia, Panama, the Virgin Islands, and filling the ship for the return trip with brandy, sugar, spices, and rum. Her stories of their exotic travels have become family legend. She traveled with him for decades, even bringing along their children, three boys and a girl, until, at the height of the Civil War, he insisted they stay home. Confederate privateers were prowling up and down the East Coast like marauding pirates, and no ship was immune.

But my grandfather’s caution could not keep his family safe: all three of his boys died young. One succumbed to scarlet fever; his four-year-old namesake, Sammy, drowned one October when Captain Sam was at sea. My grandmother could not bring herself to break the news until March. “Our beloved little boy is no more on earth,” she wrote. “While I write, I’m almost blind with tears. No one saw him fall but the little boy who ran to tell his mother. The vital spark has fled. Dear husband, you can better imagine my grief than I can describe to you.” Fourteen years later, their teenaged son, Alvaro, working as a seaman on a schooner off the coast of Cape Cod, was swept overboard in a storm. News of his death came by telegram, blunt and impersonal. His body was never found. Alvaro’s sea chest arrived on Hathorn Point weeks later, its top intricately carved by his hand. My grandmother, disconsolate, spent hours tracing the outlines with her fingertips, damsels in hoopskirts with revealing décolletage.

MY BEDROOM IS still and bright. Light filters through the lace curtains Mamey crocheted, making intricate shapes on the floor. Dust motes float in slow motion. Stretching out in the bed, I lift my arms from under the sheet. No pain. I’m afraid to move my legs. Afraid to hope that I’m better.

My brother Alvaro swings into the room, hanging on to the doorknob. He stares at me blankly, then shouts, to no one in particular, “Christie’s awake!” He gives me a long steady look as he closes the door. I hear him clomping deliberately down the stairs, and then my mother’s voice and my grandmother’s, the clash of pots far away in the kitchen, and I drift back to sleep. Next thing I know, Al is shaking my shoulder with his spider-monkey hand, saying, “Wake up, lazy,” and Mother, trundling through the door with her big pregnant belly, is setting a tray on the round oak table beside the bed. Oatmeal mush and toast and milk. My father a shadow behind her. For the first time in I don’t know how long, I feel a pang that must be hunger.

Mother smiles a real smile as she props two pillows behind my head and helps me sit up. Spoons oatmeal into my mouth, waits for me to swallow between slurps. Al says, “Why’re you feeding her, she’s not a baby,” and Mother tells him to hush, but she is laughing and crying at the same time, tears rolling down her cheeks, and has to stop for a moment to wipe her face with her apron.

“Why you crying, Mama?” Al asks.

“Because your sister is going to get well.”

I remember her saying this, but it will be years before I understand what it means. It means my mother was afraid I might not get well. They were all afraid—all except Alvaro and me and the unborn baby, each of us busy growing, unaware of how bad things could get. But they knew. My grandmother, with her three dead children. My mother, the only one who survived, her childhood threaded with melancholy, who named her firstborn son after her brother who drowned in the sea.

A DAY PASSES, another, a week. I am going to live, but something isn’t right. Lying in the bed, I feel like a rag wrung out and draped to dry. I can’t sit up, can barely turn my head. I can’t move my legs. My grandmother settles into a chair beside me with her crocheting, looking at me now and then over the top of her rimless spectacles. “There, child. Rest is good. Baby steps.”

“Christie’s not a baby,” Al says. He’s lying on the floor pushing his green train engine. “She’s bigger than me.”

“Yes, she’s a big girl. But she needs rest so she can get better.”

“Rest is stupid,” Al says. He wants me back to normal so we can run to the barn, play hide-and-seek among the hay bales, poke at the gopher holes with a long stick.

I agree. Rest is stupid. I am tired of this narrow bed, the slice of window above it. I want to be outside, running through the grass, climbing up and down the stairs. When I fall asleep, I am careering down the hill, my arms outstretched and my strong legs pumping, grasses whipping against my calves, steady on toward the sea, closing my eyes and tilting my chin toward the sun, moving with ease, without pain, without falling. I wake in my bed to find the sheet damp with sweat.

“What’s wrong with me?” I ask my mother as she tucks a fresh sheet around me.

“You are as God made you.”

“Why would he make me like this?”

Her eyelids flicker—not quite a flutter, but a startled blink and long shut eye that I’ve come to recognize: It’s the expression she makes when she doesn’t know what to say. “We have to trust in his plan.”

My grandmother, crocheting in her chair, doesn’t say anything. But when Mother goes downstairs with the dirty sheets, she says, “Life is one trial after another. You’re just learning that earlier than most.”

“But why am I the only one?”

She laughs. “Oh, child, you’re not the only one.” She tells me about a sailor in their crew with one leg who thumped around deck on a wooden dowel, another with a hunchback that made him scuttle like a crab, one born with six fingers on each hand. (How quickly that boy could tie knots!) One with a foot like a cabbage, one with scaly skin like a reptile, conjoined twins she once saw on the street … People have maladies of all kinds, she says, and if they have any sense, they don’t waste time whining about them. “We all have our burdens to bear,” she says. “You know what yours is, now. That’s good. You’ll never be surprised by it.”

Mamey tells me a story about when she and Captain Sam were shipwrecked in a storm, cast adrift on a precarious raft in the middle of the ocean, shivering and alone, with scant provisions. The sun set and rose, set and rose; their food and water dwindled. They despaired that they would never be rescued. She tore strips of clothing, tied them to an oar, and managed to prop this wretched flag upright. For weeks, they saw no one. They licked their salt-cracked lips and closed their sunburned lids, resigning themselves to their all-but-certain fates, blessed unconsciousness and death. And then, one evening near sundown, a speck on the horizon materialized into a ship heading directly toward them, drawn by the fluttering rags.

“The most important qualities a human can possess are an iron will and a persevering spirit,” Mamey says. She says I inherited those qualities from her, and that in the same way she survived the shipwreck, when all hope was lost, and the deaths of her three boys, when she thought her heart might pulverize like a shell into sand, I will find a way to keep going, no matter what happens. Most people aren’t as lucky as I am, she says, to come from such hardy stock.

“SHE WAS FINE until the fever,” Mother tells Dr. Heald as I sit on the examining table in his Cushing office. “Now she can barely walk.”

He pokes and prods, draws blood, takes my temperature. “Let’s see here,” he says, grasping my legs. He probes my skin with his fingers, feeling his way down my legs to the bones in my feet. “Yes,” he murmurs, “irregularities. Interesting.” Grasping my ankles, he tells my mother, “It’s hard to say. The feet are deformed. I suspect it’s viral. I recommend braces. No guarantee they’ll work, but probably worth a try.”

My mother presses her lips together. “What’s the alternative?”

Dr. Heald winces in an exaggerated way, as if this is as hard for him to say as it is for us to hear. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think there is one.”

The braces Dr. Heald puts me in clamp my legs like a medieval torture device, tearing my skin into bloody strips and making me howl in pain. After a week of this, Mother takes me back to Dr. Heald and he removes them. She gasps when she sees my legs, covered with red festering wounds. To this day I bear the scars.

For the rest of my life, I will be wary of doctors. When Dr. Heald comes to the house to check on Mamey or Mother’s pregnancy or Papa’s cough, I make myself scarce, hiding in the attic, the barn, the four-hole privy in the shed.

ON THE PINE boards of the kitchen floor I practice walking in a straight line.

“One foot in front of the next, like a tightrope walker,” my mother instructs, “along the seam.”

It’s hard to keep my balance; I can only walk on the outsides of my feet. If this really were a tightrope in the circus, Al points out, I would have fallen to my death a dozen times already.

“Steady, now,” Mother says. “It’s not a race.”

“It is a race,” Al says. On a parallel seam he steps lightly in a precise choreography of small stockinged feet, and within moments is at the end. He throws up his arms. “I win!”

I pretend to stumble, and as I fall I kick his legs out from under him and he lands hard on his tailbone. “Get out of her way, Alvaro,” Mother scolds. Sprawling on the floor, he glowers at me. I glower back. Al is thin and strong, like a strip of steel or the trunk of a sapling. He is naughtier than I am, stealing eggs from the hens and attempting to ride the cows. I feel a pit of something hard and spiky in my stomach. Jealousy. Resentment. And something else: the unexpected pleasure of revenge.

I fall so often that Mother sews cotton pads for my elbows and knees. No matter how much I practice, I can’t get my legs to move the way they should. But eventually they’re strong enough that I can play hide-and-seek in the barn and chase chickens in the yard. Al doesn’t care about my limp. He tugs at me to come with him, climb trees, ride Dandy the old brown mule, scrounge for firewood for a clambake. Mother’s always scolding and shushing him to go away, give me peace, but Mamey is silent. She thinks it’s good for me, I can tell.

I WAKE IN the dark to the sound of rain drumming the roof and a commotion in my parents’ bedroom. Mother groaning, Mamey murmuring. My father’s voice and two others I don’t recognize in the foyer downstairs. I slip out of bed and into my woolen skirt and thick socks and cling to the rail as I half fall, half slide down the stairs. At the bottom my father is standing with a stout red-faced woman wearing a kerchief over her frizzy hair.

“Go back to bed, Christina,” Papa says. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Babies pay no attention to the clock,” the woman sing-songs. She shrugs off her coat and hands it to my father. I cling to the banister while she lumbers like a badger up the narrow stairs.

I creep up after her and push open the door to Mother’s bedroom. Mamey is there, leaning over the bed. I can’t see much on the high mahogany four-poster, but I hear Mother moaning.

Mamey turns. “Oh, child,” she says with dismay. “This is no place for you.”

“It’s all right. A girl needs to learn the ways of the world sooner or later,” the badger says. She jerks her head at me. “Why don’t you make yourself useful? Tell your father to heat water on the stove.”

I look at Mother, thrashing and writhing. “Is she going to be all right?”

The badger scowls. “Your mother is fine and dandy. Did you hear what I said? Boiling water. Baby is on the way.”

I make my way down to the kitchen and tell Papa, who puts a pot of water on the black iron Glenwood range. As we wait in the kitchen he teaches me card games, Blackjack and Crazy Eights, to pass the time. The sound of the wind driving rain against the house is like dry beans in a hollow stick. Before morning is over, we hear the high-pitched cry of a healthy baby.

“His name is Samuel,” Mother says when I climb onto the bed beside her. “Isn’t he perfect?”

“Um-hmm,” I say, though I think the baby looks as crab apple–faced as the badger.

“Maybe he’ll be an explorer like his grandfather Samuel,” Mamey says. “Like all of the seafaring Samuels.”

“God forbid,” Mother says.

“WHO ARE THE seafaring Samuels?” I ask Mamey later, when Mother and the baby are napping and we’re alone in the Shell Room.

“They’re your ancestors. The reason you’re here,” she says.

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.

Mother sings while she works. Her favorite song, “Red Wing,” is about an Indian maiden pining for a brave who’s gone to battle, growing more despondent as time passes. Tragically, her true love is killed:

Now, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing

The breeze is sighing, the night bird’s crying,

For afar ’neath his star her brave is sleeping,

While Red Wing’s weeping her heart away.

It’s hard for me to understand why Mother likes such a sad song. Mrs. Crowley, my teacher at the Wing School Number 4 in Cushing, says that the Greeks believed witnessing pain in art makes you feel better about your own life. But when I mention this to Mother, she shrugs. “I just like the melody. It makes the housework go faster.”

As soon as I’m tall enough to reach the dining room table, my job is to set it. Mother teaches me how with the heavy silverplate cutlery:

“Fork on the left. L-E-F-T. Four letters, same as ‘fork.’ F-O-R-K,” she says as she shows me, setting the fork beside the plate in its proper place. “Knife and spoon on the right. Five letters. R-I-G-H-T, same as ‘knife’ and ‘spoon.’ K-N-I-F-E.”

“S-P-O-O-N,” I say.

“Yes.”

“And glass. G-L-A-S-S. Right?”

“What a clever one!” Mamey calls from the kitchen.

By the time I’m seven I can strip thin ribbons of skin from potatoes with a knife, scrub the pine floors with bleach on my hands and knees, tend the hop vine behind the shed, culling yeast to make bread. Mother shows me how to sew and mend, and though my unruly fingers make it hard to thread a needle, I’m determined. I try again and again, pricking my forefinger, fraying the tip of the thread. “I’ve never seen such determination,” Mamey exclaims, but Mother doesn’t say a word until I’ve succeeded in threading it. Then she says, “Christina, you are nothing if not tenacious.”

MAMEY DOESN’T SHARE Mother’s fear of dirt. What’s the worst that can happen if dust collects in the corners or we leave dishes in the sink? Her favorite things are timeworn: the old Glenwood range, the rocking chair by the window with the fraying cane seat, the handsaw with a broken handle in a corner of the kitchen. Each one of them, she says, with its own story to tell.

Mamey runs her fingers along the shells on the mantelpiece in the Shell Room like an archaeologist uncovering a ruin that springs to life with all the knowledge she holds about it. The shells she discovered in her son Alvaro’s sea chest have pride of place here, alongside her black travel-battered bible. Pastel-colored shells of all shapes and sizes line the edges of the floor and the window ledges. Shell-encrusted vases, statues, tintypes, valentines, book covers; miniature views of the family homestead on scallop shells, painted by a long-ago relative; even a shell-framed engraving of President Lincoln.

She hands me her prized shell, the one she found near a coral reef on a beach in Madagascar. It’s surprisingly heavy, about eight inches long, silky smooth, with a rust-and-white zebra stripe on top that melts into a creamy white bottom. “It’s called a chambered nautilus,” she says. “‘Nautilus’ is Greek for ‘sailor.’” She tells me about a poem in which a man finds a broken shell like this one on the shore. Noticing the spiral chambers enlarging in size, he imagines the mollusk inside getting larger and larger, outgrowing one space and moving on to the next.

“‘Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul / As the swift seasons roll!’” Mamey recites, spreading her hands in the air. “’Till thou at length art free, / Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.’ It’s about human nature, you see. You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it’ll become too small.”

“Then what?” I ask.

“Well, then you’ll have to find a larger shell to live in.”

I consider this for a moment. “What if it’s too small but you still want to live there?”

She sighs. “Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you’ll either have to be brave and find a new home or you’ll have to live inside a broken shell.”

Mamey shows me how to decorate book covers and vases with tiny shells, overlapping them so they cascade down in a precise flat line. As we glue the shells she reminisces about my grandfather’s bravery and adventurousness, how he outsmarted pirates and survived tidal waves and shipwrecks. She tells me again about the flag she made out of strips of cloth when all hope was lost, and the miraculous sight of that faraway freighter that came to their rescue.

“Don’t fill the girl’s head with those tall tales,” Mother scolds, overhearing us from the pantry.

“They’re not tall tales, they’re real life. You know, you were there.”

Mother comes to the door. “You make it all sound grand, when you know it was miserable most of the time.”

“It was grand,” Mamey says. “This girl may never go anywhere. She should at least know that adventure is in her bones.”

When Mother leaves the room, shutting the door behind her, Mamey sighs. She says she can’t believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her. She says Mother would’ve been a spinster if Papa hadn’t walked up the hill and given her an alternative.

I know some of the story. That my mother was the only surviving child and that she clung close to home. After my grandfather retired from the sea, he and Mamey decided to turn their house into a summertime inn for the income, the distraction from grief. They added a third floor with dormers, creating four more bedrooms in the now sixteen-room house, and placed ads in newspapers all along the eastern seaboard. Drawn by word of mouth about the charming inn and its postcard view, visitors streamed north. In the 1880s a whole family could lodge at Hathorn House for $12 a week, including meals.

The inn was a lot of work, more than any of them anticipated, and my mother was needed to help run it. As the years passed, the few eligible bachelors in Cushing married or moved away. By the time she was in her mid-thirties she was well past the point, she thought—everyone thought—of meeting a man and falling in love. She would live in this house and take care of her parents until they were buried in the family plot between the house and the sea.

“There’s an old expression,” Mamey tells me. “‘Daughtering out.’ Do you know what it means?”

I shake my head.

“It means no male heirs survived to carry on the family name. Your mother is the last of the Cushing Hathorns. When she dies, the Hathorn name will die with her.”

“There’s still Hathorn Point.”

“Yes, that’s true. But this is no longer Hathorn House, is it? Now it’s the Olson House. Named for a Swedish sailor six years younger than your mother.”

My mind is reeling. “Wait—Papa is younger than Mother?”

“You didn’t know that?” When I shake my head again, Mamey laughs. “There’s a lot you don’t know, child. Johan Olauson was his name then.” I mouth the strange words: Yo-han Oh-laow-sun. “Barely spoke a word of English. He was a deckhand on a schooner captained by John Maloney, who lives in that little house down yonder with his wife,” she says, gesturing toward the window. “You know who I’m talking about?”

I nod. The captain is a friendly man with a bushy gray mustache and yellow-corn teeth and his wife is a ruddy, broad-faced woman with a bosom that seems of a piece with her middle. I’ve seen his boat in the cove: The Silver Spray.

“Well, it was February. Eighteen ninety—a bad winter. Endless. They were on their way to Thomaston from New York, delivering fuel wood and coal to lime kilns up there. But when they reached Muscongus Bay and dropped anchor, a storm swept in. It was so cold that ice grew around the ship in the night. There was nothing they could do; they were stranded. After a few days, when the ice was thick enough, they got out and walked across it to shore. This shore. Your father had nowhere to go, so he stayed with Maloney and his wife until the thaw.”

“How long was that?”

“Oh, months.”

“And the boat was just out there in the ice the whole time?”

“All winter long,” she says. “You could see it from this window.” She lifts her chin toward the pantry. I can faintly hear the clatter of dishes on the other side of the door. “Well, there he was, in that little cottage all winter, down near the cove, with a clear view of this house up the hill. He must’ve been bored to death. But he’d learned how to knit in Sweden. He made that blue wool blanket in the parlor while he was staying with them, did you know that?”

“No.”

“He did, sitting around the hearth with the Maloneys every night. Anyway, you know how people are: they talk, they tell stories—and oh, those Maloneys like to gossip. They would’ve told him, no doubt, about how this house was on the verge of daughtering out, and that if Katie married, her husband would inherit the whole thing. I don’t know for sure, of course; I can only guess what was said. But he’d been here just a week when he decided he was going to learn English. He walked into town and asked Mrs. Crowley at the Wing School to teach him.”

“My teacher, Mrs. Crowley?”

“Yes, she was the teacher even then. He went to the schoolhouse every day for lessons. And before the ice thawed, he’d changed his name to John Olson. Then, one day, he made his way up through the field to this house and knocked on the front door, and your mother answered. And that was it. Within a year Captain Sam died and your parents were married. Hathorn House became the Olson House. All of this”—she raises her arms in the air like a music conductor—“was his.”

I picture my father sitting with the Maloneys in their cozy cottage, knitting that blanket while they regale him with stories about the white house in the distance: how three Hathorns bestowed their new name on this spit of land, and one built this very house … the spinster daughter who lives there now with her parents, their three sons dead, no heir to carry on the family name …

“Do you think Papa was … in love with Mother?” I ask.

Mamey pats my hand. “I don’t know. I really don’t. But here’s the truth, Christina. There are many ways to love and be loved. Whatever led your father here, this is his life now.”

I WANT MORE than anything for Papa to be proud of me, but he has little reason. For one thing, I am a girl. Even worse—I know this already, though no one’s ever actually said it to me—I am not beautiful. When no one is around, I sometimes inspect my features in a small cloudy fragment of mirror that’s propped against the windowsill in the pantry. Small gray eyes, one bigger than the other; a long pointy nose; thin lips. “It was your mother’s beauty that drew me,” Papa always says, and though I know now that’s only part of the story, there’s no question that she is beautiful. High cheekbones, elegant neck, narrow hands and fingers. In her presence I feel ungainly, a waddling duck to her swan.

On top of that, there’s my infirmity. When we’re around other people, Papa is tense and irritable, afraid that I’ll stumble, knock into someone, embarrass him. My lack of grace annoys him. He is always muttering about a cure. He thinks I should’ve kept the leg braces on; the pain, he says, would’ve been worth it. But he has no idea what it was like. I would rather suffer for the rest of my life with twisted legs than endure such agony again.

His shame makes me defiant. I don’t care that I make him uncomfortable. Mother says it would be better if I weren’t so willful and proud. But my pride is all I have.

One afternoon when I am in the kitchen, shelling peas, I hear my parents talking in the foyer. “Will she have to stay there alone?” Mother asks, her voice threaded with worry. “She’s only seven years old, John.”

“I don’t know.”

“What will they do to her?”

“We won’t know until she’s looked at,” Papa says.

A finger of fear runs down my back.

“How will we afford it?”

“I’ll sell a cow, if I must.”

I hobble toward them from the pantry. “I don’t want to go.”

“You don’t even know what—” Papa starts.

“Dr. Heald already tried. There’s nothing they can do.”

He sighs. “I know you’re afraid, Christina, but you have to be brave.”

“I’m not going.”

“That’s enough. It’s not up to you,” Mother snaps. “You’ll do as you’re told.”

The next morning, as dawn is beginning to seep through the windows, I feel a rough push on my shoulder, a shake. It takes a moment to focus, and then I am staring into my father’s eyes.

“Get dressed,” he says. “It’s time.”

I feel the soft shifting weight and dull warmth of the hot water bottle against my feet, like the belly of a puppy. “I don’t want to, Papa.”

“It’s arranged. You know that. You’re coming with me,” he says in a firm quiet voice.

It’s cold and still mostly dark when Papa lifts me into the buggy. He wraps the blue wool blanket he knitted around me and then two more, adjusts a cushion behind my head. The buggy smells of old leather and damp horse. Papa’s favorite stallion, Blackie, stamps and whinnies, tossing his long mane, as Papa adjusts his harness.

Papa climbs into the driver’s seat, lights his pipe and flicks the reins, and we set off down the hard-packed dirt road, the buggy squeaking as we go. The jostling hurts my joints, but soon enough I adjust to the rhythm, drifting to sleep to the lulling sound, clomp clomp clomp, opening my eyes some time later to the cold yellow light of a spring morning. The road is muddy; melting snow has created streams and tributaries. Hardy clusters of crocuses, purple and pink and white, sprout here and there in slush-stained fields. In three hours on the road, we pass only a few people. A stray dog emerges from the woods to trot alongside us for a while, then falls back. Now and then Papa turns around to check on me. I glare at him from my nest of blankets.

Eventually he says, over his shoulder, “This doctor is an expert. I got his name from Dr. Heald. He says he will do only a few tests.”

“How long will we be there?”

“I don’t know.”

“More than one day?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will he cut me open?”

He glances back at me. “I don’t know. No point worrying about that.”

The blankets are scratchy against my skin. My stomach feels hollow. “Will you stay with me?”

Papa takes the pipe out of his mouth, tamps it with a finger. Puts it back in and takes a puff. Blackie clip-clops through the mud and we lurch forward.

“Will you?” I insist.

He doesn’t answer and doesn’t look back again.

It takes six hours to reach Rockland. We eat hard-boiled eggs and currant bread and stop once to rest the horse and relieve ourselves in the woods. The closer we get, the more panicked I become. By the time we arrive, Blackie’s back is foamy with sweat. Though it’s cold, I’m sweating too. Papa lifts me out of the buggy and sets me down, ties up the horse and attaches its feed bag. He leads me down the street by one hand, holding the address of the doctor in the other.

I am woozy, trembling with fear. “Please don’t make me, Papa.”

“This doctor could make you well.”

“I’m all right the way I am. I don’t mind it.”

“Do you not want to run and play, like other children?”

“I do run and play.”

“It’s getting worse.”

“I don’t care.”

“Stop it, Christina. Your mother and I know what’s best for you.”

“No, you don’t!”

“How dare you speak to me with this disrespect?” he hisses, then quickly glances around to see if anyone noticed. I know how much he dreads making a scene.

But I can’t help it; I’m crying now. “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m sorry. Don’t make me go. Please.”

“We are trying to make you better!” he says in a violent whisper. “What are you so afraid of?”

Like a slight tidal pull that presages the onset of a huge wave, my childish protests and rebellions have been only a hint of the feelings that well inside me now. What am I so afraid of? That I’ll be treated like a specimen, poked and prodded again, to no end. That the doctor will torture me with racks and braces and splints. That his medical experiments will leave me worse, not better. That Papa will leave and the doctor will keep me here forever, and I’ll never be allowed to go home.

That if it doesn’t work, Papa will be even more disappointed in me.

“I won’t go! You can’t make me!” I wail, wrenching away from him and running down the street.

“You are a mulish, pigheaded girl!” he yells bitterly after me.

I hide in an alley behind a barrel that smells of fish, crouching in the dirty slush. Before long my hands are red and numb, and my cheeks are stinging. Every now and then I see Papa stride by, looking for me. One time he stops on the sidewalk and cranes his neck, peering into the dimness, but then he grunts and moves on. After an hour or so, I can’t take the bitter cold any longer. Dragging my feet, I make my way back to the buggy. Papa is sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking his pipe, the blue wool blanket around his shoulders.

He looks down at me, a grim expression on his face. “Are you ready to go to the doctor?”

I stare back at him. “No.”

My father is stern, but he has little tolerance for public displays. I know this about him, in the way you learn to identify the weak parts of the people you live with. He shakes his head, sucking on his pipe. After a few minutes, he turns abruptly, without a word, and jumps down from the buggy. He lifts me into the back, tightens Blackie’s harness, and climbs back into the driver’s seat. For the entire six-hour ride home he is silent. I gaze at the stark line of the horizon, as severe as a charcoal slash on white paper, the steely sky, a dark spray of crows rising into the air. Bare blue trees just beginning to bud. Everything is ghostly, scrubbed of color, even my hands, marbled like a statue.

When we arrive home, after dark, Mother meets us in the foyer, baby Sam on her hip. “What did they say?” she asks eagerly. “Can they help?”

Papa removes his hat and unwraps his scarf. Mother looks from him to me. I stare at the floor.

“The girl refused.”

“What?”

“She refused. There was nothing I could do.”

Mother’s back stiffens. “I don’t understand. You didn’t take her to the doctor?”

“She wouldn’t go.”

“She wouldn’t go?” Her voice rises. “She wouldn’t go? She is a child.”

Papa pushes past her, removing his coat as he walks. Sam starts to whimper. “It’s her life, Katie.”

“Her life,” my mother spits. “You are her parent!”

“She threw a terrible scene. I could not make her.”

Suddenly she turns to me. “You foolish girl. You have wasted your father’s day and risked your entire future. You are going to be a cripple for the rest of your life. Are you happy about that?”

Sam is starting to cry. Miserably I shake my head.

Mother hands the squalling baby to Papa, who bounces him awkwardly in his arms. Crouching down in front of me, she shakes her finger. “You are your own worst enemy, young lady. And you are a coward. It is senseless to mistake fear for bravery.” Her warm breath is yeasty on my face. “I feel sorry for you. But that’s it. We are done trying to help you. It’s your life, as your poor father said.”

AFTER THIS, WHEN I wake in the morning, I spread my fingers, working out the stiffness that creeps in overnight. I point my toes, feeling the crimp in my ankles, my calves, the dull sore ache behind my knees. The pain in my joints is like a needy pet that won’t leave me alone. But I can’t complain. I’ve forfeited that right.