Читать книгу After You've Gone - Jeffrey Lent - Страница 10

His uncles George and Fred, known collectively as the Dorn Brothers owned the best wharf, a store for marine supplies and other sundries, a shipbuilding yard, an ice house, coal supply and salt yard, three coastal schooners and interests in half-a-dozen fishing boats, as well as a red Highland ox and cart. The summer Henry was ten he was hired to deliver coal to the homes in Freeport and galleys of the fishing boats. Despite lye soap and the hard hot water his fingernails always held black half moons—a brand of his work. When fall came it was dark by the time school was out but he worked an hour and a half, sometimes two but the deliveries were staggered at his mother’s demand so he was not out too late. And by November of that year he had earned fifteen dollars, enough for his mother Euphemia to take his measurements and send off mail order for his first suit with long pants. To this time he had only worn rough trousers to work in but short pants for school and church and the rare dress-up events. His excitement was tremendous, as the work had proclaimed him a man and now he would have the clothes to announce it. Light mail—letters—came down the Neck from Digby by stage which was ferried across Petite Passage onto Long Island but heavier objects—household furnishings, boat fittings, store goods, parcels—came up the coast from Yarmouth twice weekly and arrived between four and six o’clock in the evening depending on the weather. He met that boat seven times before a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with rough twine was handed down to him. The postmark was a Boston mail-order firm and this seemed doubly propitious since that city held a great mystery for him and he ran home and tried the suit on and it fit, he thought, most handsomely. He barely slept that night and next morning dressed again in the suit to wear to school, only to be sent back upstairs to change into his old school clothes. The suit would have to wait for Sunday service. His mother was firm as ever and while he changed he already saw the advantage— his step into manhood would be witnessed not simply by his classmates and teacher but by all the adults in the community in a solemn quiet way—the way it should be. He was a boy who long since had learned to read well past his mother’s terse commands and simple tales of example. So he hung the suit carefully to wait the four days.

Two nights later the stovepipe of contention between his mother and stepfather began to burn off an accumulation of creosote while all were sleeping, the thin tin soon a ragged lace of black stitching failing before the orange fire raging inside and so collapsed, leaving four feet of open space between the parlor stove and the chimney which had already also caught fire and the tatters of pipe brought the fire down onto the carpet and against the wall and the flames shot high from the stove and by the time the smoke had filled the downstairs and was seeping up and the chimney was roaring it was all that could be done to get everyone out, the children and their mother and stepfather. The big pump was hauled around the bay but the water was a gesture and nothing more. By dawn the house was smoking rubble, except for the chimney, which stood blackened and mighty.

And Henry stood with the rest in his nightclothes with a wild wailing crying and when his mother finally came and knelt and drew him close, her youngest son, and held him as he racked against her and held him until he was only snuffling and choking, stroking his hair until he blurted, “My suit. My beautiful suit.”

Euphemia, still kneeling, slapped his face. The only time he could remember her doing so, ever. Then she said, and this he would always remember, “We’ve lost two homes in six years. And you snuffle over nonsense. If I should ever see you in long pants it will be when you are out of my house and none of my doing.” Then she stood and left him. His sisters watched this but said nothing. He stood alone. After a time his stepfather, Charles Morrell, whom Henry and the rest of his siblings all called Mr. Morrell, came and stood by the boy, setting a hand on his shoulder but was wordless. Even at that age Henry knew this gesture was not simply about him—early that fall his stepfather had wanted to replace the pipe and Euphemia had thumped it twice and declared it sound enough for one more year. Even then when a new fire was laid you could see fire through the joints of the pipe. Until they sealed over with the creosote that would destroy it all. It was an argument badly won.

After a moment his Uncle George appeared from behind and wrapped his own wool coat around the boy and said, “Your feet are blue. Come. There’s nothing to be done here.”

They walked silently for a bit, Henry thinking. He needed clothes for school. Denim serge pants, canvas fishing pants—it did not matter to him. His Uncle George would want to outfit him without cost— kicking his feet against the lumped frozen sand of the road he knew this already, guessed that all the family would be offered such. But the humiliation of his mother’s blunt words and slap had been seen by far more than his sisters and Mr. Morrell. There would be no handouts taken, not by him. And much coal to deliver that winter and spring just to pay for those clothes. But he would be in school that day.

George gently said, “Gil’s a fishing?”

“With Captain Titus.”

“Simon Titus is a good man, a good captain.”

“Gilbert’s a good hand.”

Beside him George nodded. “He is.”

Henry said, “Gil’s the lucky one tonight.”

They went on silent.

The coat for a man fell around Henry like a dense robe and he wrapped himself tight against the wind coming up the bay from the wild hungry water of the Bay of Fundy. The meager winter sun was not up yet but it was mere light anyway, there was no warmth to it as if it had died or flared out to an ember, a shadow of a sun. They passed the field of salting racks and were out along the other arm of St. Mary’s Bay, away from the town. Here was the wharf with the schooners, and the boatyards and the store, the piers of fishing boats, the shacks built on stilts for lobster traps and sail-lofts and netting-works—the world of men. The store windows were lit. It opened at three in the morning for the fishermen and Henry, walking toward it, knew his Uncle had seen the house burning from there and helped haul the pump. And so the boy walked toward the dawn-quiet store and resolved to ask the question that his mother had refused the once he’d asked her. The question Gil had beaten him with a strange vigor in his only other attempt. But he would ask Uncle George. And George would tell him. Something at least. Not because of the fire. But because the boy knew it was time.

The interior was a sensory assault after the brittle salt air—the new rubber smell of fishing boots and vulcanized overalls and coats and gloves, the faint-straw odor of the great spools of hempen rope, the stringent ribbons of kerosene, raw plug tobacco and old cigar smoke and like everywhere else along this side of the bay the constant under-belly of fish. Rows of lanterns hung overhead alongside gaffs, long fish knives, scaling pliers, and high along one rafter an old whaling harpoon—not for sale. There were shelves of rough clothes and racks of wool coats, blankets, mittens. A crate of flares. A stack of new varnished oars for the dories. One small shelf of food—canned peaches and pears, sacks of onions and potatoes. On the counter glass crocks half the size of him filled with pickled eggs. A smaller jar of hard licorice drops.

Uncle George took his place up behind the counter in his plain suit with vest and his heavy white mustache and thick hair that rolled back from his high forehead as if his earlier days had blown it there forever. The man watched the boy and the boy watched the man.

Uncle George said, “Your mother—” and stopped.

Henry said, “Just because she argued the pipe was sound doesn’t mean Mr. Morrell had to leave it like that.”

His uncle studied him. He said, “Well. Charlie Morrell is a good man. And it was far more than Euphemia Moore he took on when she brought the lot of you back.”

Henry said, “She was a Dorn then.”

George Dorn nodded. “In a sense. A manner of speaking. But she was born a Moore and will remain one. It’s the stubbornness of a woman raised below what she regards as her rightful place. But you’re here for clothes. Pick out what you need.”

“I’m not after glad-rags. But I can’t go to school in my nightshirt.” And opened the loaned coat and worked his way out of it and folded it and set it aside. His uncle came around the counter and looked him up and down.

He said, “You’ll look more like you’re ready for the boats. But you’ll be warm enough. We’ll start with socks for them blue feet and long underwear and work up from there. How does that sound?”

Henry said, “I’ll work it off.”

His uncle reached and rubbed the boy’s head. “I’d not charge for a tragedy such as this. You’ll need to be earning money anyway, not working off debt.”

“No.”

“Suppose I was to refuse you, then?”

The boy stood silent.

George did not wait. But went about gathering the odd assortment of clothing he had in the smallest of men’s sizes. As he did he talked, almost as if to himself.

“The difference between a gift and a debt can be large or small and it’s not always easy to see the difference twixt the two so what we’ll do is simple and that’s I’ll charge you cost for the clothes, which is a gift but allows you the debt. I lose nothing that way but my profit and you gain something which is pride so we both come out ahead and that is the end of that argument. And you’ll need not one but two sets of everything or else you’ll be in school each day layered in coal dust and your mother would be up the Neck buying you what you don’t want her to buy. As it is she’ll have to keep ahead of the wash but that’s not my worry. She might not admit or remember but it won’t be the first time a Moore has reddened their hands with hard soap. At the moment her mind’s upon where the lot of you’ll be living.”

Henry was dressing. He was very cold. He said, “I guess there’s Mr. Morrell’s old house.”

“The Morrell house is rough. Men are funny. They can do most anything they set their minds to but I’ve seen it before—they just let a place run down. Still, I’d imagine you’re right and that’s where you’ll end up. At least for the winter. But I’ll bet you a dime come spring Euphemia rebuilds right there on that burned-out lot.”

Henry was nearly dressed. The denim pants were long and he rolled them up and the shirt was short at the wrists but he was used to that. The coat was heavy red and black checked wool and came far down the backs of his hands. He said, “Uncle George?”

“What is it?”

Henry heard the caution as if his uncle knew there was a shift in their particular wind. But he forged forward. “What happened to my father?”

George glanced toward the window. To see if anyone else was approaching. To gather his thoughts. Then turned back to the boy and said, “Why you already know. Certainly you remember. He took the whole lot of you down to the Boston States when you were just a little boy and wasn’t there but close to two years when he took sick and died and your mother buried him and brought all of you back up here. Where you belonged.”

Henry said, “No. What really happened?”

His uncle studied him a long moment. And part of that moment was the first time Henry could pinpoint for sure that the world of adults was less certain, more tenuous, strained, and daily in struggle toward events unknown—the future.

George said, “Even dressed warm as anyone out on the Banks you’re still shivering. Do you drink coffee?”

“No sir.”

“Well, it’s a good morning to start. Come back and sit. You might be late for school.”

“I guess,” Henry said. “I’ve got as good an excuse this morning as I’ll ever have.”

George poured coffee into two white and black speckled enameled cups and lightened both with condensed milk from a tin and went around behind the counter, Henry following. There was an angled clerk’s desk with a wall rack of numbered and lettered cubicles against the wall behind the desk. The desktop was a fury of paper, from long legal forms to slips of paper torn from brown bags, stacks of letters rubber-banded together and a pad of paper with the Dorn Brothers letterhead, a can of pencils and a set of pens and inkpots and George sat there, swiveled around and indicated the other chair, which once had a woven rush seat but the rush was gone so a piece of plank was nailed over the seat. Henry sat and his uncle handed him the coffee. The boy sipped and was transported—the sublime flavor and warmth running down into him and so one of life’s long loves began for him.

“It’s good,” he said.

His uncle did not respond. He chewed one corner of his mustache, small persistent nippings of thought. Then ran his tongue around his lips, drank from his cup and said, “Your father was the youngest of us boys. He was different, some would say strange.” He paused then and scowled at his nephew. “You asked me and I’m going to tell you. What you make of it’s your business. But it stays between the two of us, do you understand that?”

Braver then he felt, Henry said, “Yes sir.”

George thought a bit and then went on. “They say he never belonged in this place but then I don’t know the place he would have belonged. There are men, and he was one of them, who aren’t of their time. Or perhaps any time, as any place. He dwelt inside himself. He couldn’t absorb the everyday, it bored him, and frustrated him I think as well. Yet when left to himself he became nervous, unsettled, almost flopping. When he was like that there was a look in his eye like a skinned fish. I couldn’t tell you more than that what it was like to be Samuel Dorn but I wouldn’t want to know either. Whatever, it wasn’t comfortable, nor easy to be around. I think perhaps where he failed was his mind could not invest in what was before him but he lacked the resources to do with it what he might have. You must recall, all he had was six grades and that spotty. He weren’t much older than you when he went to work on the boats but that didn’t last the year. It wasn’t that he was slight, like you; he was but there are plenty men lean and tough. It was that he would stand in the midst of hauling nets or be gazing off toward the black clouds working up upon the crew frantic to get the work done and in ahead of the squall or storm or gale—some days you never know what it’ll be until it’s upon you. But he would watch it as if studying how it unfolded. Which is a unusual mind and some rare intelligence I dare say myself but not the sort of hand you want working alongside you. Like I said, it wasn’t even that first season and there were no captains who would have him.

“So Fred and I put him to clerk in the store and he was a fair hand at that. Still a daydreamer but there’s time enough for that and he was sharp with figures and Fred and I were still younger fellows, at least than we are now and so I went back to running one of the packet schooners, which as a young man I loved nothing better. Then he met your mother and we thought There, Euphemia Moore is just the one to buckle him down. And for a time it worked well. Fred and I came near making him a partner after Gil and Lucy had come along. He seemed well settled. Then, I swear it wasn’t maybe a week before we were going to sit down with him but he came and asked for a six month leave from the store. Six months off! And the season just starting. We tried to talk him out of it but he was determined. He’d saved enough to live on. And they had the house—it had been our grand-parents’s and was conferred as a wedding gift. I guess maybe then we all knew he would need at least that much help.

“Now, I make him sound something like an idiot or a ne’er do well but he weren’t either one. He had a gift and it was considerable. He could draw. And he made paintings too, landscapes, the sea, scenes from fishing, all of what he knew. He had no training at all but I saw a many of them and he had a gift there. But, even more so than that was his drawings in pencil or pen. He’d go down along the Bay at low tide and find some thing or another. A piece of driftwood. Even just a scrap of kelp. Scallop shells for the love of God! But he’d take it home and sketch that thing out in the finest lines you ever saw and right there on that piece of paper was the most everyday thing we’d all stepped on a thousand times and it was not just beautiful. I mean the drawing was not just beautiful in being accurate. But he had a way of bringing it onto the page where you recognized it immediately, the detail incredible to see but it was more than that. It was as if he discerned the perfection in those things and rendered them for us to understand as well. It’s hard to explain. You could set a scallop shell next to his drawing of one and it was the drawing that made you suck your wind in. As if he saw the design of the Lord in these simple things. Or the Lord allowed him so the rest of us might pause over them as well.”

“What happened to them? The drawings? The paintings too?”

“Wait. You did the asking. I do the telling. So he took the six months and then six more and then six more. During that time you were born. Euphemia never complained, at least to any of us and never ran a charge account neither, but she bought precious little. They had a garden like everyone of course and she and Gilbert would scallop in the bay and dig clams too. They had a cow. Nobody was starving but it wasn’t a flourishing neither.

“Then Sam came to me and wanted a mortgage on the house. To buy passage for the whole family to Boston. He had these two huge folders he’d made of box-cardboard himself and he showed me some of the work he’d done and said he’d been in contact with a man in the States who thought the pictures was good enough to earn a living with. Now, your father was not the type that some stroke of luck like that he’d be worked up about. No. He was quiet and serious and, God’s Truth, I thought Maybe this is what he needs. Maybe this is where he’s truly to fit in this life. So I refused the mortgage but gave him passage and told him there was always return available and if he should end up back here we’d work out repayment at that time. It was the closest I could come to telling him I thought it was the right thing. But I think he knew.

“Now this part is thin. Your mother could tell you more but she won’t. All I really know is things went well enough, maybe not setting the woods on fire like he’d hoped but they were doing well enough so after the first year they were able to buy a little house somewhere outside of Boston. Newton, I think the town’s called. So yes, you all went down there. And Eva was born there. What none of us knew was your father had the tuberculosis. I guess he hid it well enough, although your mother must have known. That secret I don’t hold against her, it was between the two of them. And some people, most in fact, live years with it. But your father died of it on a single afternoon and evening. A great hemorrhage of blood that would not stop, that could not be stopped. What I do not, can not and never will, forgive your mother for was the first I heard was a telegram saying he was dead and buried and she and you children were returning. Why she waited so long I’ll never know. Why she buried him there when it would have been simple to put him on ice and bring him home I’ll never know. I try and give the benefit of doubt—she likely was not thinking straight at such a time.

“But there’s a little more you need to know. A pair of stories your father heard from your grandfather who had heard them from his great-grandfather who lived to the wondrous and likely horrible old age of one hundred six. The first is the family came up from the States after the American Rebellion, good solid loyalists. But they had been there, down in New York before it was New York, when it was New Amsterdam for nigh two hundred years before they came up here. That fascinated him. When he was a lad he would go round pestering all the old people for stories back to those days. Which never went far enough back to suit him. Because, you see, along with that first Dorn to come first to Yarmouth then Digby then down the Neck to Freeport there also came another story. Or the legend of a story. The ghost of one. But that same old great-grandfather, Abraham Dorn, or rather van Doorn as the family was known then, had this old glimmer of a tale that the first one of the family to leave Holland and settle in New Amsterdam did so because of some trouble behind him. Something he wanted hidden. Time’s done its work there. But your father, those two stories, they were a haunt to him. I think because a part of him thought that if he could only somehow follow it all back he would know something, comprehend something missing from him. Now, I can’t explain just why I think this, but it seems to me there was a connection between that urge and his striving to make those beautiful pictures.”

“So what did happen to the pictures?”

George was quiet a moment and when he spoke his voice was quieter also. “I guess there’s a plenty somewhere down in the States. If he was making a living at it.”

“All of them?”

“I believe,” George said. “I believe before she returned with you children, your mother destroyed what was left of them.”

“Why would she do that?”

George looked at his nephew. Locked in a drawer under the desk he sat at were half a dozen of the early drawings. But he would not mention this. It was not the right time, certainly not the right day. He spoke slowly. “I imagine, they were too painful for her to keep. Please, do not mention them to her. Certainly not today. And if you get it into your head to talk to her about all this do me one favor.”

“Yes sir?”

“Come talk to me first.”

Henry studied his Uncle. Then he stood from the hard seat. “I’m late for school. I’ll be by after to deliver coal.”

“Perhaps tonight you should help your family in their new dwelling, be it Morrell’s or somewhere else.”

“They’ve enough hands. And people count on me. Thank you, Uncle George.”

“You were ready to know. Now, pay attention in school.”

A smile flashed, a bit of joke between them—Henry was ahead a grade for his age. “I’ll try.”

“Did you like the coffee?”

“I did. Afternoons, it would warm me before I set out with the coal.”

George nodded. “Just don’t tell your mother. She’ll think it’ll stunt your growth. But no fear of that, eh boy?”

“No sir.”