Читать книгу Time Out Of Mind - Rachel Field - Страница 6

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On the shelf beside my bed are some half dozen books that I have kept close to my hand for many years, and one of them is the green and gold book of fairy tales Henry Willis brought to Rissa from that trip to Boston. I have only to open it again to summon up the delight of those long, still afternoons when we read it from cover to cover in the dimness of the old boathouse by the salt inlet. "And it was summer, warm, delightful summer"—so ends the story of Kay and Gerda and the Snow Queen, and so it must always be for me as I turn the pages.

We each had our favorites, but Rissa loved best "The Wild Swans". She always chose to read that one aloud, and her face would grow flushed under her falling hair as she read of that young Princess whose love for her brothers was so great that she suffered muteness and sentence of death to weave the nettle coats to free them of the spell that had turned them into wild swans. But for Nat it was always "The Nightingale" that he must hear over and over again. I can see his eyes now, dark and enormous, as Rissa read about the poor Emperor dying in his palace of a strange malady, and his courtiers jabbering about his bed.

"'Music! Music! the great Chinese drum!' he cried, 'so that I may not hear all they say!'

"'And they continued speaking, and Death nodded like a Chinaman to all they said.'

"'Music! Music!' cried the Emperor. 'You little precious golden bird, sing, sing!'"

But it was not the golden bird who had compassion on him. It was the little, live nightingale on a spray outside the window come back to save the Emperor.

Once long after we were grown, Nat and I had reason to remember that tale and take it to our hearts again.

But we did not sit cooped up in the boathouse always. We saved that for sultry afternoons or days of rain and fog. Late June was wild strawberry time and mother saw to it that I picked plenty for preserving. There were fine large strawberries in the garden, but the wild ones were held a special delicacy and I was good at finding and picking. Sometimes we persuaded mother to put us up a lunch and Rissa and Nat spent the day with me roaming the half cleared pastures and the fields on either side of Fortune's Creek. A twelve foot tide filled and emptied itself there twice a day, and at the highest flood-tides when the moon was at its full in June and September, the water almost came over the wooden bridge that crossed it just below The Folly. It was a proper place for digging clams when the tide was out and the water shrunk to a narrow channel between brown mud flats. Some of the Major's cattle grazed thereabouts, but for the most part it was deserted, being too far for village boys to venture except by dory. Such wild strawberries grew in those tidewater meadows as I have never seen the like of before or since. Till well into July my fingers were stained rosy and smelled delicious.

Rissa and Nat liked to go with me on these long expeditions, though they were more fitful berry pickers than I. Rissa was always upsetting her basket and losing the best she had gathered, and Nat often forgot and put them into his mouth instead of into my pail. I had learned to strip the hulls as I picked and I tried to show them how, but somehow they would leave them on and I would have theirs to hull all over again. Still, I did not mind that, being glad of their company. It was seldom that we met anyone on these jaunts, and Nat could sing and hum to his heart's content. Jake Bullard had made me a willow whistle that spring, one he had cut himself from the old tree in the schoolhouse yard. I had given it to Nat and he always carried it in his pocket when we went off berrying. As soon as we were out of ear shot of the house he would have it to his lips, trying to imitate the birds and making queer little tunes that sounded like brook water going over pebbles and rushy places. He could take even that home made thing and make it give out sweet, queer snatches of music. But it drove him wild sometimes because he couldn't get all the notes he wanted out of it, no matter how he fluttered those thin fingers of his over the little holes.

One day towards the end of June we decided to take the dory and go higher up the inlet than we had been before. We had picked the best of the strawberries in the nearby fields and the tide was right for just such an expedition. It was half-way to flood and running strong from the sea, so we would have it with us going up, and by mid-afternoon it would carry us back without much rowing. Rissa and Nat were better at handling oars than I, but I made up for lack of skill by having more strength and endurance. We said nothing of our plan at the house, for though we were allowed to paddle near shore in the dory, the two young Fortunes were not supposed to go far by themselves. Their father was busy in his study, going over a lot of papers and letters that Bo had brought up from the village the night before, and mother luckily made no objections to putting up our lunch. She did, though, notice Nat's high spirits, for he would burst out singing and skipped about like something possessed. I thought surely she'd suspect us of mischief, but she only shook her head and told him not to wear himself out before the dew was off the grass.

"The little bird that sings in the morning the old cat will eat before night," was all she said as she spread our bread and butter and gave us a pail of milk and three tin cups.

That was a morning to remember. It was one of those days they call a dry-easter, when the sun is stronger than the wind that brings fog, and all the islands and far headlands stand out clear enough to touch with your forefinger. Clumps of delphinium were blue as driftwood blaze round the heathen Buddha in the garden and cinnamon roses were pink and lilies golden all round the house. The hum of bees in them sounded like the sea in the mantelpiece shells, and a hummingbird was there, too, its wings spinning a tremulous rainbow wheel. Everything shone with summer and sun. The sea was polished like a wide blue dancing floor, and the resin on the spruce cones high overhead glittered like Christmas tinsel. Pure joy ran through me, swifter than the tide under the wooden bridge. We caught each other by the hand and ran together down the long driveway to the water's edge.

We got ourselves and the lunch and baskets into the old pumpkin colored dory and pushed off. Nat was in the bow, hie face pointing upstream like a small, eager figurehead. That was the way I knew he looked though I could not see him, my back being bent over the oars in the middle seat. Rissa sat astern, holding the ropes of a sort of rudder that Annie's husband, George Button, had rigged there. She looked like a picture, I thought, in a lilac chambray dress and white sunbonnet. Under its frilled edge I could see soft rings of pale brown hair that was golden where the sun struck across it. She did not grow tan as Nat did after long days in the sun and wind, and though I had as many freckles as there are stars on the milky way, try as I would I couldn't find even one on the bridge of her straight nose. The girls from Little Prospect made remarks about her at school. They said she was proud and stuck up; but I would never listen to them. Proud she was, and set in her ways, yet I couldn't call her vain. It was the way she was fashioned, like a fine piece of china or some ship that wears the look of proud hands that have made it. If she had gone barefoot in my old checked gingham made over from mother's, she would have contrived to give herself an air. It was her right to be lovely and to move with grace. It came as naturally to her as breathing.

"Put up the oars and let the tide serve us, Kate," Nat begged me. "We've gone miles already."

That was hardly true, but having the tide with us was a help and before long we were in country altogether new to me. Sometimes the woods grew close to the water on either side and then there would be more marshes and open fields. Nat played on his whistle and presently we were all startled by a tremendous splashing from some low, weedy ledges.

"Seals!" Rissa cried and motioned me to pull in the oars.

Several sleek brown heads were bobbing in the water only a few yards from the dory, and at least half a dozen other wet shapes were moving on the ledge. I could scarcely tell wet fur and smooth flippers from low-tide kelp, but I held my breath to see them go plopping and splashing into the water so near us. Now that the oars no longer dipped they seemed untroubled by our presence. We even talked together in whispers without disturbing them at their wallowings.

"They're not really seals?" I asked.

Rissa nodded.

"Not like the kind Miss Ada Joy has for her Sunday jacket?"

"Yes," Rissa was sure. "They come here in summer. There used to be lots round Fiddler's Reach, and Seal Rocks, too, before they killed them off there."

A round shining head with two startled eyes rose beside us only to go under again. I felt suddenly frightened and turned to Nat.

"They'll never find them here," he whispered back to me, "if we don't tell George and Bo, and we won't."

Presently he put the whistle to his lips and blew ever so softly into it. Hardly a thread of sound came out at first and the seals went on swimming and sunning themselves. Rissa and I leaned over the boat side straining our eyes while Nat blew one of his tunes. As he made it come louder, I saw one wet head lift from its place on the ledge. Another followed, and then the first that had given sign, rose a little out of the kelp. A flipper waved, something brown and shining moved softly, wetly, as sea weed sways in a current. My heart seemed to stop beating as the truth came over me. The seal was keeping time to Nat's music.

But the tide was taking us up-stream as tides will. Kelp and brown heads and wet flippers all grew together as we watched.

"Did you see?" Nat could hardly contain himself. "It kept time with me. I made it."

"Same as if it was dancing—almost."

"Bo told me he'd heard they liked fiddling, but I didn't think they'd notice a whistle. Oh, Nat!" Rissa hugged her knees rapturously, "you did it!"

Once, years afterward in a book I was dusting in the Major's library, I came upon the picture of a man named Orpheus in Greek robes. Underneath was a line of poetry about how he could make the birds and beasts and all creation listen when he played on his lute. It always put me in mind of Nat and the seals that day of our expedition in the old dory. I knew then, that he had power above the rest of us. Even the great night when he stood up before that packed houseful and held the musicians bending to his will, and all those people in the hollow of his outstretched hand, I was never more aware of it.

We ate our lunch in a shady place under old trees for the sun stood high and hot in the noon sky. Then I went afield picking strawberries for I knew I must have something to show for the day and neither of those two were of a mind to help me. They went off together to see if they could find a cave they had heard was somewhere about, and we agreed to meet where the dory was tied fast to an old spruce that was half tumbled into the water. The grass in the field sloping down to the inlet was long and daisies and devils-paint-brush and single summer dandelions broke in a sea of white and gold and copper against my bare feet, I had to push aside the burnt grass to find my strawberries, but they were larger and more scarlet than any I had found before. Berry after berry beckoned me till I lost all count of time. My basket was almost filled when I heard faint cries and started back to the water.

"Kate! Kate!" The long drawn wail of their voices told me something must be wrong, and I hurried on breathless and stumbling.

I came upon the other two by the fallen tree, their eyes large and scared.

"It's gone, Kate," Nat cried out to me, "it's got away."

We stood and stared at the empty water.

"You didn't tie it fast enough," Rissa turned on me with flushed cheeks and tears on her long lashes. "You're from back country and don't know how to make a proper half hitch."

For a moment I was too spent and stunned to speak. I knew I had not been the one to tie the rope. I had seen Nat's quick brown fingers throw it over the tree roots.

"That's not so, Clarissa Fortune," I burst out with the first breath I could summon. "You've no call to blame me."

"Well, I didn't touch it and Nat would know better. I suppose you think it untied itself?" She looked suddenly grim like her father.

Nat gave me a long, anxious look and I hadn't the heart to betray him.

"We'll never get home now," Rissa fumed. "It's miles by the shore and we'd get lost trying to find the back road. Besides there's a swamp between. George lost one of our calves there last summer. The bog just sucked it right under."

All the brightness drained out of the June afternoon though the sun still came warm through the branches overhead.

"We'll have to find some way back." I said at last. They both looked so forlorn I couldn't go on being angry, though I still felt sore at Rissa's words. "Doesn't anybody live round here?"

"Crazy Tim and his mother do," Nat broke in. "Father lets them have what's left of the old mill that burned."

"But, Nat," I saw Rissa give a little shiver, "they're as queer as queer. Bo says she's kind of a witch and anyway it's miles farther on."

"He's got a boat, though," Nat reminded her. "I've seen him fishing in it sometimes. I don't believe she's as queer as all that. Bo just believes in spooks and things because he's black."

"We couldn't walk all the way we came," I put in. "It would take us till after dark. What time do you suppose it is now?"

We squinted up at the sun and decided it was past mid afternoon. No more minutes to waste in wondering what to do next, so off we set with our faces turned up river. We had to pick our way along the edge and sometimes the going was rough and difficult. With the river brimful now it was necessary sometimes to crash through underbrush and criss-cross roots in the wooded parts. And then we would come to mud and marshy bits that were even harder to skirt. I had the best of it in these spots with my bare feet, for Nat and Rissa's shoes were soon mud caked and oozing. An overhanging branch flew back and gave Nat a long scratch across his face. He bit his lips to keep from crying at the pain and when Rissa and I tried to wash it with her handkerchief wet in the water he winced at the sting of salt on the open place. Then Rissa stumbled on a snarl of roots and twisted her ankle. She struggled on as best she could, but I could see the flesh swelling above her shoe top. She grew whiter round the mouth as we pressed on.

"It must be round the next bend," Nat kept saying in a kind of monotonous chant. "It's bound to be."

They had both seen the ruins of the old mill from the water, and they were sure it hadn't been so far. I think all three of us prayed secretly under our breath. I know I did, at the head of our forlorn little mud-streaked troop. One wooded point after another kept appearing as we toiled on, too tired and dogged now for more than an occasional brief word.

"It must be soon," Nat insisted as we struck into another sunny field of burnt coarse grass. I opened my mouth to answer him when a stab of pain shot through the calf of my leg.

"Hornets! Look out!" I had just presence of mind enough to scream before a black cloud rose up out of nowhere all round me.

I fled screaming, beating them off with both hands and fierce red hot stings tapping at my face and arms and legs. Instinct led me to the water and I plunged in up to my knees in a blind panic of pain and terror. Of course I lost my footing and went down with a wild splash. I thought my end had come, but I had struggled out before they could reach me. I had screamed in time for them to escape the hornets, but already my face and neck and arms were swelling and my bare legs showed great red humps in spite of the mud already plastered there. Tears of pain began to squeeze out of my fast closing eyes as I stood before them. I don't know what we should have done if at that moment we had not heard the sound of distant chopping and a voice raised in song.

"Listen," Nat and Rissa cried out together in shrill relief, "we're there. That's old lady Phibben."

Through a blur of pain I could hear that high old voice lifted to the thud of an axe on a chopping block in a familiar hymn:

"In vain with lavish kindness—clop! clop! The gifts of God are strown; The heathen in his blindness—clop! clop! Bows down to wood and stone"

Nat dropped my hand and went ahead as more wood splintered to the words.

"Shall we whose souls are lighted With wisdom from on high—clop! clop! clop! Shall we to men benighted—clop! clop! The lamp of light deny?"

I could hear Nat's voice breaking in, polite and eager.

"I'm Nat Fortune, please, and this is Clarissa, and that's Kate, and we're in great trouble."

We couldn't have come to a better person for help as it turned out later. Old Lady Phibben left off her chopping and hymn singing and led us indoors then and there. At the time I wasn't able to see much out of my eyes, but they told me afterwards that she had the part of the mill that hadn't burned fixed as nice as could be, with braided rugs on the floor and a stove and tables and chairs. I knew there was a bed, with pillows and cool sheets for she had me on it, and my clothes off in no time.

"Dear, dear," I could hear her commiserating above me, "You must have stirred 'em up considerable from the looks. Berrying, I expect you were, and walked right into a nest."

At that I began to cry afresh, her words putting me in mind of my basket of strawberries that I knew was gone for good. I could hear Nat and Rissa explaining our plight to her as she rattled tins and crockery in another part of the room, but I felt too despairing to join in.

"Why to be sure," I heard her answer them, "My son'll fetch you home in his boat soon as he's back. He's gone up river with a load of clams. Why, yes, Tim ought to be here by sundown."

Presently she brought over cloths and water and began to wipe away the mud from my face and neck and arms and legs. Her hands were quick and gentle, though they hurt me I was so sore and throbbing.

"Yes," she said as she worked over me, "you're the kind they hitch their stings right into. The mud helped some, and this salve's the best thing to draw the poison out."

To this day I have no idea what remedy she rubbed into my smarting flesh, but help it did. After she was through I lay back among the covers, less frantic with pain. She gave some to Rissa, too, to rub on her ankle, and after awhile we all quieted down to wait for her son Tim.

"She's nice," Nat whispered in my ear. "It's her nose and no teeth make her look queer. And we'll get home tonight even if he is kind of crazy."

We had a long wait, and I couldn't eat any of the ginger cookies and root beer old lady Phibben brought out for us. Nat got out his whistle and played for her and he and Rissa chatted as they never did up at The Folly. I felt too miserable to put in more than a word or two, though I listened as I lay all sticky and swollen. Just how they got talking of fortune telling I cannot remember, but it surprised me to know that Old Lady Phibben could tell them with cards. It seemed queer to me that she could do that and still sing hymns with such fervor. Nat and Rissa sat very close to her while she dealt a pack on the old table. I only caught snatches of what she said, but when she told them that there were other ways of telling the future I grew more interested.

"If I do you're not to say a word about it at home," she cautioned when they begged her to tell theirs. "Not to your father or anybody in the village for I can't afford to get a bad name."

"We won't say a word. We promise not to." Nat and Rissa agreed, their voices sunk to excited whispers.

"Well, mind you don't forget." She warned them. "It's bad luck to pass a fortune on, unless you want to lose the best and have dust and ashes to show for it."

Neither of them spoke she sounded so solemn, but I heard them draw their chairs closer to hers. I lay still and listened with all my might. I could not see well enough out of my smarting eyes to make out what she did, though they told me afterwards that she made them spread out their hands on the table, first palms out and then closed over a round pebble that was smooth and clear as glass.

"That's my lucky stone," she explained, "I've had it since I was knee-high to nothing. Now then, ladies first."

It was so still in the room as Rissa spread out her hands that we could hear the soft slap-slap of the tidewater against the stonework of the mill and a great droning of bees about a syringa bush, heavy with bloom just outside. I can smell that thick, sweet fragrance now and hear again her old voice speaking to Rissa.

"Soft, pretty hands you've got, child," she said, "and they'll touch precious things, silver and gold someday. You'll go a long way off from here, but you'll come back. Now, close your fingers over the lucky stone. Lord, what a grip you've got. You'll never let go of what's your own. Take care you don't hold too fast."

"But I want to know who I'm going to marry," Rissa broke in with something of annoyance in her voice. "And where I'll go, and how many children I'll have?"

Old Lady Phibben told her a long rigmarole that I have long since forgotten. But when Nat put out his hands I pricked up my ears to hear what she would tell him.

"Well, well," she exclaimed, "that's a pair of bird claws and no mistake, but they'll hold winds and waters and beating hearts in them before you're done. Yes," her voice grew so low I could hardly make out the words, "you'll be spreading them out in glory someday in a high place. Put your trust in the thin black stick and it will carry you through. But first there'll be the white horses and you watch out for them. They'll lay you low and try to break you if they can. Hold the lucky stone now."

It clattered in the stillness, and I heard Rissa cry out sharply. "Oh, Nat, you dropped it!"

"Tutch! Tutch!" Old Lady Phibben ducked under her breath. "That's no way to treat luck when you've got your hands on it. Now then, let me see what I see."

But before she was well launched we heard the sound of oars and someone whistling from the water.

"That'll be Tim," she told us, and she went to the door and hailed him.

"But Kate needs hers told, don't you, Kate?" Nat came over to me in a burst of remorse. "I guess maybe it was my fault about the boat. If I'd tied it tighter then you wouldn't have got all stung up, so you ought to have the best fortune of us all."

"We haven't got time," Rissa was already gathering up her shoes and basket. "We'll be ever so late anyway, and look at her hands."

She was right about that. They were so swollen I could not have bent a finger, not even for all the luck in the world. But Old Lady Phibben promised that if we would come back someday I should have mine too. So we were put into her son's old dory, our feet among wet clam shells and I wrapped in a red tablecloth because my clothes were still too damp to pull over all my hornet stings.

"Good-bye," we called to Old Lady Phibben as we swung out into the mid-stream.

"Good-bye," she answered from the door, "Don't forget what I told you. Tim, you watch out for them now and come straight back."

She spoke to him like a child, which was indeed all he ever was, poor fellow. I think he tried to talk to us on the way home, but he had a queer, thick speech that was hard to follow. Rissa and Nat tried to make polite answers, but now that we were headed for home, with all the confessions and explanations just around the next bend of the river as you might say, we all grew low-spirited and quiet. Crazy Tim's boat was slimy with fish scales and clams and water that slopped about our feet. Rissa couldn't keep her skirts clear of the mess and Nat wrinkled his nose against the stench that was as strong as the familiar one we knew from the old fish houses by the Little Prospect wharf. Hungry gulls, scenting it as well as we, swooped low over us, on the trail of fish cleanings. Even I, in a miserable heap on the stern seat, caught the strange brightness of their breasts and wings in the long, slanting light of late afternoon, and those watching eyes that were never still. So we came home in the first flush of sunset, a bedraggled and anxious group.