Читать книгу Time Out Of Mind - Rachel Field - Страница 8

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How shall I write of those early fall mornings? How shall I tell of the peculiar glaze that came upon every berry and leaf and grass-blade, or how the sea was bright beyond all believing, and crickets beating out their shrill pulses in the burnt brown grass? It was as if some inner hint of frost quickened every living thing to put forth its best of color and fruit and song. We three children felt it stirring in our veins, though we had no means to show it except our overflowing high spirits. That was my first sight of September by this northern coast, and though I have seen so many autumns flare since then, never yet have I been able to believe in the glory my eyes were beholding. Day after day we watched the dark wedges of wild geese fly south and marveled at their sure winging. We heard their honking cry, deep with frosty warning.

"How do they know?" I asked Rissa and Nat, the first time I saw the dark wings and long, shifting triangles pass overhead. "How do they know when it's time and where to go?"

"They must have little compasses inside them." Nat told me. "That's where they have it easier than people."

"Yes," Rissa said, "but they aren't smart enough to tell the decoy ducks from real ones. George has got his out already and he's going to put them down by the creek soon."

"Does he shoot them?" I was horrified, as I had been before about the seals.

"Oh, yes," she nodded, "Father says there's nothing he likes so much as a roast wild duck, but Nat and I won't ever touch a mouthful."

"We couldn't," Nat said making a face.

"Well, I won't either." I agreed. "I think it's dreadful, setting out wooden ones that look like their mates to trap them and shoot them down. I hope they fool George and get away."

But for all our wishes George shot plenty that fall. I can remember the sight of the first one he brought in as it lay on the kitchen table. I did not want to look at it, but horror and curiosity drew me there in spite of myself. It was so different from the taut, living birds I had seen taking the blue only a little while before. This one lay heavy and limp, a heap of feathers that showed shifting colors as I blew on the soft breast and head. The wings were lax and long, and the feet strong and webbed, yet delicate in all their creasings. Blood had dripped and dried on the proud beak, and the open eyes, though they were glazed in death, still kept a kind of wild surprise. I couldn't help thinking of the little compass that Nat had said it carried to steer by, and as I did so I turned and ran crying from the kitchen. Mother was put-out later when I wouldn't help her pluck it.

"Now don't you go and get notions," she scolded. "It's all very well for Nat and Rissa to get finicky, but you can't. Where would I be if I took on so over every dead bird I had to cook?"

But she couldn't make me touch a feather.

I think she was glad that the fall term of school would begin for me in a couple of weeks. She liked me to pick up nice ways of talking and such from Nat and Rissa, but she didn't want me to catch other tricks from those two.

It was over a month since the Major had discovered our secret, and we were only just beginning to breathe easily again after that encounter in the east parlor. The piano had been locked ever since and Major Fortune had often looked long and disapprovingly at Nat. Still, there had been no further words about it, and we began to think we had come off easily once his temper had passed. He was away from the house much of those early fall days for he was busy with plans for the launching. Sometimes he did not come home at all but stayed the night with Henry Willis to be near the ship-yard. His mind and heart were bent upon his new vessel and indeed the whole countryside thought and talked of little else. It was several years since there had been an important launching thereabouts, and all Little Prospect was agog. The Fortune saw mill was humming, and nearly all the able men not already employed there or in the ship-yard were busy with extra work on the "Rainbow." Even the minister had made mention of the great event from his pulpit the Sunday before, as if God Himself must hold it in special regard.

Rissa and Nat and I had exchanged discreet nudges in the Fortune front pew when the Reverend Chase had fervently petitioned Heaven for a northwest wind, and later when he chose for his sermon text:—"She sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the river," we had smiled with stealthy satisfaction. We could not help knowing that this concerned us more intimately than the rest of the congregation. Rissa was to christen the "Rainbow" with the cob-webby bottle her father had fetched from the highest shelf in the wine cellar, and Nat and she were going to be at Major Fortune's side along with their cousins from Philadelphia. I would be going, too, and we would all have new outfits. For a week past Miss Addie Jenkins had been up at The Folly every day cutting and fitting yards of India muslin and pale blue taffeta to Rissa, who vowed she lay awake nights thinking of the care she must take wearing it. Her Aunt in Philadelphia had been commissioned to send a new hat and it was a wonderful affair with ostrich feathers and intricately knotted blue ribbons. Ever since its arrival she and I had gone to gaze upon it in its bandbox at least three times a day. Mother had entered into the spirit of the occasion so far as to let Miss Addie make over a cherished plaid mohair for me. She worked on it at odd moments under the dressmaker's directions, and there were a good many head shakings over the size of the waist band and the difficulty of giving it proper style once my sturdy body was inside.

"I'm like to die fitting you, Kate," Miss Addie would sigh through her bristling mouthful of pins. "You put me in mind of that old dory my brother Dan rigged up once in a made-over sail. Well, it's lucky you won't be in Rissa's shoes at the launching."

With the Major so much away and everyone so busy we three had more freedom than ever, and we made the most of it, though Nat would sometimes go and stand sadly in front of the locked piano. But for the most part we entered into the bustle of preparations. The house had to be thoroughly overhauled against the arrival of the Philadelphia cousins, whose coming Nat and Rissa dreaded as much as I. Their Aunt Esther was Major Fortune's only sister and her two daughters were several years older and far more stylish and grown up according to their memories of the last visit. It was a relief when we heard they would drive directly to the ship-yard from the train and not go with us in the carriage.

Even the tide seemed to have entered into the spirit of the affair, for it would be nine o'clock in the evening before the water would be high enough to float the "Rainbow." A night launching was considered an even greater event than one taking place in broad daylight.

"Not much chance of a fog with the September moon coming on to the full," we heard George Button tell mother. "Yes, sir, everything looks prosperous."

We pestered him with questions and he explained how you couldn't be too careful where moon and tides were concerned. He gave long, rambling accounts of other launchings where owners had taken foolish chances and let their vessels leave the ways with a moon on the wane. That was flying in the face of Providence, according to George, for anyone who knew anything at all knew hard luck and dwindling profits were certain to follow. "No," he told us, "'tisn't safe to trifle with the elements. Sooner or later they pay you back for it."

George had been to sea in his young days and the talk of the launching set him singing sea songs in such lusty tones that his wife scolded and she and mother and Rose complained they were nearly distracted hearing him. But we could never get enough of them, and often joined him in our favorite—"Root, Hog, or Die."

Once, I remember, we were singing it full blast, all four of us, as George weeded the driveway, when the Major and Henry Willis drove in. We had got as far as the verse:—

"Now we've got her fore and aft, and we'll go below, The wind is to the eastward and like the devil it does blow, We beat about and banged about and never saw the sky, At last we shot in Port Latoun—Root, Hog, or die!"

But instead of scolding us for singing a verse with "devil" in it, the Major and Henry Willis smiled broadly. They got out of the carriage and walked up the drive together and we followed, near enough to hear what they were saying about us.

"Sounds as if Nat was getting the salt water spirit," Henry Willis chuckled.

"He's going to know more'n to sing about taking reef and getting her fore and aft before I'm through with him!" was the Major's only comment. Then he squinted at the red ball of sun, slipping behind the islands and gave a satisfied smile. "Well, Henry," he added, "looks as if we could count on favoring weather."

It turned suddenly cold the evening before the great day, and so I had my first glimpse of northern lights on the eve of the launching. It may be partly because of this that they must always seem the strangest and most stirring of all natural wonders to me. We should have missed them but for George who called us out of the parlor to behold the spectacle. Nat and Rissa and I pressed close together at the window in the upper hall, awed into silence by the northern sky. Over the far crest of Jubilee Mountain the heavens were bristling with long fingers of ghostly white. They dimmed and brightened and swept down almost to the edge of the shore and the Narrows. Sometimes ice-green wheels moved through them and flashes of red appeared and disappeared eerily. And there was not a sound. They flared in a stillness that brought queer chills to my ten year old bones.

"What do they mean?" I asked, shaken by the sight.

"Cold weather coming," said Rissa, "and a bad winter. At least that's what they said the other time we saw them."

"But not a bad sign for the launching?" I pressed her.

"I don't think so, and you mustn't say things like that, Kate—come on, let's all go right to bed now, and make it tomorrow sooner."

By morning we had forgotten them in the bustle of preparations. Hours slipped by in a frenzy of helping pack baskets of food; of running errands to garden and orchard and barn; of scrubbing and brushing and combing, and the last putting on of finery. Nat had a velvet jacket the color of russet leaves, and his eyes were all dark pupil under his hair that would never stay slicked and smooth. My round head was painfully neat and moist to keep down my cowlicks and my cheeks were scarlet from soap and water. I hardly recognized myself in the made-over plaid, and I had brand new button boots with tassels and a squeak that Nat insisted sounded louder than old Deacon Black passing the plate in church. But when Rissa appeared she drove all other thoughts from my mind.

"She's a picture and no mistake," I heard mother and Rose whisper as she came down the stairs to join us.

"The Major'll be prouder'n Lucifer when he claps eyes on her." Rose agreed. "I hope to goodness she don't spill anything down her front."

"Trust her not to," mother sighed as she smoothed her own best black dress. "Young's she is she always looks as if she'd come out of the bureau drawer. I wish Kate had the knack of it, she's commenced to lose her starch already."

"Rissa," Nat told her as we waited for George to bring the horses round, "there won't be anyone at the launching can hold a candle to you, will there, Kate?"

"No," I said loyally, my eyes glued to her trim grace under the draped blue and white, "she'd ought to be on the cover of a soap box."

It was no small compliment that I gave her, for then we children had few colored pictures save those. I could tell she was pleased by the faint deepening of pink in her cheeks, but she kept her lips pressed tight in a way she had when she felt a lot depended upon her.

"You'd throw the bottle lots better, Kate," she said generously, "I'm so scared I won't break it. Father'd never get over it if I didn't."

Just then Bo and George drove up. We three children were swung into the front seat, while mother and the rest sat in the back with all the baskets.

"Well," George Button called out in his best sea-voice, "all aboard there, and all sail set!"

Roadsides were bright with asters and goldenrod all the way, and mountain ash trees loaded with fiery fruit. Bo picked a branch as we passed and Nat had a bunch for his button-hole and I one to wear in my brown straw hat. Once we got on the turnpike all sorts of rigs were headed in the same direction—old buggies and farm-wagons and prosperous carriages from Little Prospect and neighboring harbors. It might have been election or County Fair day from the cluttered roads and deserted houses, and from the white triangles of sail all headed for Fortune's Ship Yard.

It seemed as if everyone would be there before us and we three worked ourselves into a fever of impatience before the five mile ride was ended. But at last we were there and the place as gay with bunting as the fall trees had been along our way. I had thought to keep with Nat and Rissa but once we were set down from the carriage Henry Willis bore the two away to join their Philadelphia cousins and I was left with mother and the Jordan family. Jake Bullard was there in his best Sunday suit and though he had scowled at sight of my two companions, he joined me after awhile and we prowled about together. He and some of his cronies had been there for hours and it pleased him to show off the sights and answer my foolish questions.

"I'll show you the best place to see from," he volunteered, "We got plenty of time before we eat supper."

I followed him up a ladder into an old sail loft where the view was uninterrupted by tall bodies, or hurrying workmen. I had only been in the brick office once, so I had had no notion what a bustling ship-yard could be on the eve of a launching. No vessel in harbor had ever looked so vast as this one—set high and dry, with stern to sea and great wooden timbers holding it like giants' arms.

"That's the cradle she sets in," Jake told me. "It has to cant just that much and no more. If 'twas half an inch out there'd be trouble when they started the blocking."

I didn't understand till after it was over what he had been talking about, but I listened as if I did. All the time he pointed this or that out to me I was thinking how the figures of the men working on the hull below us looked no bigger than dark bees clustering on an enormous hive. The hammers and men's voices mingled into a sort of gigantic buzzing.

Even without her masts, which Jake explained would not be set up till she lay at the wharf, the "Rainbow" loomed like a monster. High and dry she rose above the water that was steadily rising to receive her. A rich smell I had never known before hung low over the whole yard. There has been none like it since, for it was made up of lesser smells—the steam of hot iron from the blacksmith's forge; boiling tar; hemp rope; freshly sawed lumber, and the tallow greasing the ways under that untried keel. My nose quivers yet at remembrance of it.

"There's Cousin Sam," I pointed out. "I didn't know he'd be working on it."

"Why, he's a master hand at the blocking," Jake told me scornfully. "I guess there couldn't be a launching without him. He'll knock the last block out, most likely."

"Is that hard to do?" I ventured, there being no one else about to hear my ignorance.

"Holy Moses, yes! You just wait and see. He'll have to be quick as lightning. Sometimes there ain't even time for him to get out 'fore she starts. He'll deal that last block a regular knock and then maybe he'll have to throw himself down quick and let it go right over him down the ways."

"Oh, my, Jake, won't he be all squashed?"

"No, Sir, he won't. He says there's plenty of room if he lays flat. It's loose timbers and blocks flying round he has to watch out for. I wish they'd let me do it."

I couldn't help staring at Jake with new admiration, for he looked as if he really could do it with those big-knuckled fists of his. My expression must have pleased him for when we went down the ladder again he did not leave me to join the Little Prospect boys. We found mother and the Jordan tribe and though I missed Nat and Rissa, still I was glad of Jake and his wide grin and pushing elbows in all the crowd.

We ate our supper, picnic fashion on a point not far from the yards. Besides Jake there were other schoolmates about me—Abbie Stanley and her brother Joe; Dan Gilley and Mollie and his older sister Sadie, as well as Cousin Martha Jordan's Ruth and Hilda. I felt shy at first after being with Nat and Rissa all summer long. But little by little it got to seem like recess in the school yard again, and we ate apples and crullers, and eggs and pie as lively as could be. Only I couldn't forget those other two, not even when we skipped stones and played tag on the strip of shingle, getting as near the tide line as we dared without wetting our best shoes. I was careful not to talk with them the way I did with Nat and Rissa, for I knew they wouldn't like it, and would say I was getting stuck up and full of corn-starch airs. I'd heard them talk among themselves about the Fortune pair before now. As it was, Abbie and Ruth and even tall Sadie got discussing Rissa's clothes till I was ready to fly out at them.

"Did you see her?" Sadie laughed to the others. "Why she looks all rigged up like a Maypole. Mother says it's a shame and she's only going on thirteen!"

"And him in a jacket like the one the monkey wore in the circus!" Jake jeered.

"A regular Miss Nancy that's what he is!" Joe Stanley was scornful.

It would have ended in a squabble most likely and I wouldn't have been able to hold my own against so many dissenting voices, only just then the others called us to help carry the baskets back to the wagons. Already the sun had set and the red afterglow was dwindling behind the spruces on the western point. A fall chill was in the September air and I felt glad of mother's old paisley shawl though it was so long I had to hold up its fringes with both my hands. We found good places near enough to see the busy men on the dark hull. The noise of hammering and shouting had grown louder. The very air was charged with a kind of current from all the human beings gathered together in that place. But at the time I could not guess that. I only knew that under my layers of shawl and dress my heart began to beat in time to the hammers. Flaring torches had been lit and in the yellow flickering light the ship-yard looked vast and strange. All the familiar faces about me wore an unnaturally sharp, bright look. The tide was well up now and still rising. I could not see how far the timbers Jake had called the cradle stretched into the dimness, but I know that nothing again will ever seem so tremendous to me as the "Rainbow" before she took to water. There still lacked some minutes before the September moon would be up.

"Kate," I suddenly heard Nat's voice at my side and felt his hand. "I thought I'd never find you in all these people. Come on with me."

"But, Nat," I began, "there isn't room, is there?"

"Hurry," he urged me, "Father won't notice, and he won't care anyhow, he's too busy. You can squeeze in by me on the platform."

Mother nodded and we began picking our way back between all the close pressed legs and skirts. It wasn't till we were safely up on the rough piece of scaffolding above all the heads and almost overhanging the great bows, that I knew how disappointed I had been not to see it all with those two. I could not get close to Rissa, but we smiled at each other, and I knew they were both glad I was there. She wore a long red cloth cape over her finery. It made her look taller and more grown up than she had in the afternoon. She stood beside her father and her Aunt and the two Philadelphia cousins, the bottle with all its ribbons pressed close to her chest and her lovely face a little pale and anxious.

"Rissa's a whole lot prettier'n your cousins," I whispered to Nat.

"Yes," he nodded, "and I think her clothes are nicer too, but she doesn't now she's seen theirs have got fur trimming."

"Moon's up—over there!" Someone cried above the poundings as an orange rim began to show above the wooded ridge of Ragged Island.

"There's a sight for you, Esther," I heard Major Fortune say to his sister with a wave of his arm, as if he had somehow contrived to make it rise.

Up and up it crept till the shining ball had cleared the black trees. The red drained out as it climbed, and at last it hung, round and golden, above its own broad silver track. The farther islands swam in that brightness like bristling-backed monsters, and though I was already used to moonlight over sea and islands, yet somehow this was different from all other moons. I turned to Nat who stood quiet beside me.

"Nat," I said because I felt somehow frightened by it. But before I could speak or he could answer me, the hammer blows were beginning to fall with curious heavy thuds on the wooden blocks. "It's begun," I cried to him above the sudden commotion. He nodded and from that moment his eyes got big and dark and far removed from me.

There will never be any sound like that for me till the day I die. The air was alive with a great throbbing pulse of hammer beats, hundreds of them all going it together. At last those quickening blows and my own heart beats became one in some strange and indescribable way. I lost all count of time and nothing was real to me but that sound and the dark shapes of men's bodies and arms rising and falling in the smoky glare below me. They made me think of the little men going through their motions on the clock in the east parlor. I tried to tell Nat, but he hardly seemed to hear me. His cheeks had grown red, the way they never were except when he played the piano and he kept time to the hammers, beating with his clenched fist on the wooden railing as if he were part of it all.

The blocks of wood were falling away under the blows so fast it made me giddy to watch. And then there was a pause, and a whisper went round that it was time for the christening.

"Friends," Major Fortune's voice went out to the farthest corners as he stepped to the edge of the make-shift platform and leaned out over the "Rainbow's" forepart, "there's no call for me to make a speech. I'm not much given to words as most of you know. Timber and canvas and cargoes are my line and I'll back my last dollar on them every time. I don't need to tell you that my father and my father's father sent Fortune ships round the globe and that the best went into their making then and now." Someone broke in there with a cheer and other voices took it up in a mighty cheer that silenced the Major for more than a minute. I could see his eyes were pleased under their beetling brows, though there was a sort of heaviness in his voice as he went on. "Times may not be what they were and shipping may not be so prosperous as it once was, but I'm not one to break with the past for any new notion afloat. Fortunes have always built the finest wooden ships that sailed, and this vessel here on the ways is sound in every beam, that's all I've got to say."

He stepped back to more cheers as the Reverend Chase took his place to pronounce a blessing. Peering under my hat brim as he prayed I stole a look at Rissa. She had slipped out of the red cape and I could see her hands shaking about the bottle.

"Oh, Lord," I prayed in a more personal petition than the Reverend Chase, "please let it break good and hard when she throws it—"

Only those of us who stood close could hear Rissa say:—"I christen thee 'Rainbow'", but a rewarding splinter of glass followed, and a sharp fragrance rose from the bows. A moment later the poundings began with renewed vigor. Now they were coming faster and faster, with a kind of ringing wildness that was like a storm of sound. Then the last blows fell. Braces cracked and solid blocks spurted as if they were no more than chips flying before an axe. Suddenly there was a rending and splintering the like I have never heard before or since, and the whole great mass began to move, as if it were breaking up there in front of my eyes. Those sweat-glazed men leaped aside as the great hull settled down into her cradle. It slid with her while she moved steadily on and out over the greased ways. Above the noise of ripping wood and rushing water, a cry went up:—

"She's floated! Hip-hip-hooray, Rainbow!"

Nat's cold fingers were gripping mine. My heart seemed to swell inside me, and my whole body to be swallowed up in its beating. I knew that I was shouting along with the rest, and the usually demure Rissa was hopping up and down and waving her handkerchief. Only the Major stood quiet, with head craned forward, to watch the welcoming surge of water.

"Took it neat as a dolphin," he cried out to Henry Willis, relieved and jubilant.

In the confusion that followed I have no very clear notion of what happened next. But I began to know that something was the matter. I heard cousin Sam Jordan's name on people's lips.

"He's hurt—bad," someone was saying.

"Block must have caught him."

And from far off the call.

"Anybody seen Doc Robinson?"

I tried to beat my way through all the crowd to find mother, for I had already lost Nat and Rissa. Instead I kept being pushed down nearer to the mass of timber and wrecked wooden supports. Odd shaped wedges tripped me up and I would have fallen save for the close pressed bodies of men and women. A jumble of talk was going on above me, and I made out a little of what they were saying.

"No, he ain't stirred yet."

"Must have hurt him inside."

"Anybody fetching the brandy?"

"Here's Doc now—let him through."

A woman was crying beside me, an old woman I had seen in the village. Tears were running down her wrinkles, and she kept saying over and over how it was a bad sign. There hadn't been an accident at a launching in twenty years, not since the "Eliza Jane" left the ways and everyone knew what had happened to her off the coast of Guinea.

It was Bo who found me at last and I was glad to cling to his black hand and let him take me to the carriage. Rissa and the Cousins from Philadelphia had already started back, but Nat and I were hoisted beside Bo on the front seat. All the way home in the bright moonlight they talked of the accident. Cousin Sam Jordan was badly hurt, crushed by falling timbers as he he knocked away the last blocks. No one knew whether he would come to or not. His mishap had somehow made the glory of the launching fade to second place. Mother and Annie and Rose could talk of nothing else the whole way. Even black Bo joined in as he slapped the reins on the horses' backs.

"There was blood on that moon. Yes sir, I knows the sign."

"Oh, Bo, there wasn't, was there?" Nat and I shivered to hear him.

"Now don't you go and get the children all on edge, Bo," Mother told him. "I expect signs ain't all they used to be along with other things. You two stop bothering your heads about it and watch out you don't fall over the dashboard."

"Well, it was a nice launching anyhow," I whispered to Nat as we lolled against one another, "and we saw every bit of it."

But he was beating time on my knee. I could feel his cold fingers through my skirt.

"They went like that," I heard him saying softly to himself.

"First sort of slow and then faster and faster—"

His voice trailed off but his hands kept on thumping for a long time as the carriage swayed and jolted on its way with the moon high in mid-heaven, laying strange brightness on the Narrows and outer islands and on the broad backs of Fancy and Fanny as they took us home.