A Piece of the World

  An ironic look flits across his face. “How’s that?”

  “He could’ve worked on any ship. Traveled all over the world. But he settled here, with her.”

  “Mother had a big house and hundreds of acres.” He flings his hand toward the window. “You know what this house, the Olson House, used to be called.”

  I splash the cutlery in the dishwater impatiently. “Did you ever consider that maybe Papa fell in love?”

  “Sure. Maybe. Just remember—you have three brothers. This house isn’t yours to inherit.”

  “Walton isn’t after this house.”

  “Okay.” He dries his hands on a dish towel and hangs it on a hook. “I’m just saying you should be careful. It’s not right for him to keep you on a tether.”

  “I’m not on a tether,” I tell him sharply. “Anyway, I’d rather be with Walton for three months in the summer than any of these local boys all year-round.”

  One morning after gathering eggs, a few weeks later, I step across the threshold into the house and hear my parents’ voices in the Shell Room, a place they rarely enter. I stand very still in the foyer, cupping the eggs, still warm from the hens, in my hands.

  “She’s no beauty, but she works hard. I think she’d make a fine companion,” Papa is saying.

  “She would,” Mother says. “But I’m beginning to wonder if he’s toying with her.”

  My face tingles as I realize they’re talking about me. I lean against the wall, straining to hear.

  “Who knows? Perhaps he wants to run a farm.”

  Mother laughs, a dry bark. “That one? No.”

  “What does he want with her, then?”

  “Who knows? To fill his idle time, I suspect.”

  “Maybe he really does love her, Katie.”

  “I fear . . .” Mother’s voice trails off. “That he will not marry her.”

  Papa says, “I fear it too.”

  My cheeks are aflame, my heart beating in my ears. In my trembling hands, the eggs jostle and shift, and though I try to contain them they slip between my fingers and drop to the floor, one after the other, splattering smears of yellow and viscous white across the entryway.

  Mother appears in the doorway, looking stricken. “I’ll get a rag.” She ducks away and comes back; crouching, she mops the floor around my feet. Both of us are silent. I’m aware of nothing but my own humiliation, the shock of hearing my silent fears put into words. The screen door slams and I watch Papa go past the window, ducking his head on his way to the barn.

  IN SEPTEMBER, WHEN Walton is back at school, he writes, “I think that night we made the trip to Thomaston was the happiest I ever spent. How could you steer, under the circumstances? I believe I was to blame.” He is homesick for Cushing. Homesick for me. “This was the best summer of my life. A large part of that I owe to you,” he writes, signing his letter, “With love, Walton.”

  I feel as if a wall of the house has detached from the rest and fallen gently to the ground. I can see a way out, a clear path to the open sea.

  WITH WALTON AND the Carles around all summer I don’t need anyone else; my brothers and I buzz around them, moths to their vivid flame. But after they leave, I am lonely. When Gertrude Gibbons, a girl I never particularly liked at school who has grown into a mildly tolerable adult, invites me to a Wednesday night sewing circle run by a professional seamstress, Catherine Bailey, I reluctantly agree. Gertrude, too, makes her own dresses, and between sessions of the group we start sewing together in the evenings sometimes, when the chores are done. It’s a way to pass the time.

  On a cool November evening, I take my sewing to Gertrude’s house in a sack slung over my shoulder, a two-mile walk. All day it’s been raining; the road is damp, and I have to walk slowly and carefully to avoid muddy puddles.

  “Finally!” Gertrude exclaims when she answers my knock. Round faced and ruddy, with an ample bosom that strains the buttons on her dress, she’s chewing a molasses cookie. Her large black dog barks and leaps. “Down, Oscar, down!” she scolds. “Come in, for mercy’s sake.”

  A cat is curled on an upholstered chair. “Shoo, Tom,” Gertrude says, flapping her hands, and the cat reluctantly obliges. “Sit here,” she tells me. “Cookie? Fresh baked.”

  “I’m fine for now, thanks.”

  “That’s how you stay so thin!” she says. “You’re abstemious like my sister. I try, honestly I do, but I don’t know how anyone can resist a warm molasses cookie.”

  The house is snug; embers glow in the fireplace. Gertrude tosses on another log while I get settled. Her parents are away, visiting relatives in Thomaston, she says; her brother is out with friends. Oscar sprawls in front of the hearth, his eggplant stomach soon rising up and down in contented sleep.

  We chat about the large yield this season of potatoes and turnips; I tell her about the fox that stole three hens out of our coop, and how Al trapped and killed it. She wants to know my famous fried apple cake recipe and I explain it step-by-step: how you peel and thinly slice the apples, fry the slices over a low flame in a heavy black skillet, adding a stream of molasses until the apples are soft in the middle and crispy on the edges, then turn the skillet over onto a platter. (I don’t tell her that I can no longer turn the skillet on my own and have to ask one of my brothers to do it.)

  The skirt I’m working on is beige cotton, with pleats and pockets. Before I came to Gertrude’s I pressed the fabric with a hot iron, one inch all the way around, and now I’m using a slip stitch to hem it. My stitches are small and neat, partly because I have to concentrate so hard to get them right. Gertrude’s are sloppy. She is easily distracted, full of gossip she’s been waiting to share. Emily Jones had a stillborn baby early in the summer and she still hasn’t left the house, poor girl. Earl Standin has a drinking problem. His pregnant wife showed up at Fales with a shiner last week, claiming she walked into a pole. Sarah Stewart married a blacksmith from Rockland she met at a social, but rumor has it she’s in love with his brother.

  “So what do you hear?” she asks.

  I hold up the fabric and frown, pretending to be vexed by a missed stitch. The more she natters on, the less I want to say. I know she is eager for details about Walton, but I hold them close, not trusting that she won’t chew them into cud. She waits patiently, her sewing in her lap.

  “You are a sphinx, Christina Olson,” she says finally.

  “I’m just a bore,” I say. “Nobody tells me anything.”

  “What about that Ramona Carle and that Harland Woodbury? I hear he’s sweet on her.”

  A man named Harland Woodbury did, in fact, travel up from Boston to visit Ramona this summer in Cushing. But after he left, Ramona made fun of his chubby cheeks and porkpie hat. “Don’t know a thing about it,” I tell Gertrude.

  She gives me a sly look. “Well, I heard something you might be able to shed light on.” She licks her index finger and rubs the frayed edge of her thread into a point. “I heard,” she says, threading her needle, “that a certain young man from Harvard can’t make up his mind.”

  A flush moves through me, starting at the top of my head, like heatstroke. My fingers tremble. I put down the cloth so Gertrude won’t see.

  “Surely you’re aware that a man like that . . .” she says gently, as if to a child. She sighs.

  “Like what?” I ask sharply, and immediately regret engaging her at all.

  “You know. Educated, from away.” She reaches over and pats my leg. “So just—what’s the saying—don’t put all your goods on one ship.”

  “Okay, Gertrude.”

  “I know you’re private, Christina. And you don’t want to talk about this. But I could not, in good conscience, let the moment pass without telling you what I think.”

  I nod and keep my mouth shut. If I don’t speak, she can’t answer.

  MAKING MY WAY home from Gertrude’s house I am distracted, lost in thought, when my foot sinks into a rut in the road and I tumble forward. As I fall I try to pivot sideways to prot
ect the parcel I’m carrying containing my half-finished dress, landing with a thud on my right side. I feel a searing jolt of pain in my right leg. Both of my forearms are skinned. As soon as I brush the gravelly dirt off, blood springs to the surface. My leg is twisted under me, my foot splayed in an unnatural direction. The parcel is torn and muddied.

  It’s no use calling for help; no one will hear. If my leg is broken, if I can’t get up, it will probably be morning before anyone finds me. How stupid was I to venture out like this on a cold night by myself—and for what?

  I moan, feeling sorry for myself. People make dumb mistakes all the time, and that’s the end of them. A man in Thomaston was found frozen to death last winter in the woods, either because he was disoriented or had a heart attack. People go out in skiffs in cloudy weather, swim in the ocean when there’s an undertow, fall asleep with candles burning. Go out alone and break a leg in the middle of nowhere on a frigid November night.

  I reach down to touch my right thigh. The kneecap. I bend my leg and feel a sharp jab. Ah, there. The ankle.

  Papa urged me to take his walking stick when I left the house, but I refused.

  I’m so tired of this mutinous body that doesn’t move the way it should. Or the low thrumming ache that’s never entirely absent. Of having to concentrate on my steps so I don’t fall, of my ever-present scabs and bruises. I’m tired of pretending that I’m the same as everyone else. But to admit what it’s really like to live in this skin would mean giving up, and I’m not ready to do that.

  “Your pride will be the end of you,” Mother often says. Perhaps she’s right.

  I tuck the parcel into my waistband and struggle to my knees. Bunching my skirt beneath me to buffer my skin from the ground, I drag myself toward the side of the road, moving gingerly to avoid putting pressure on my ankle. I squint toward a clump of birches about a dozen feet away, looking for a stick to use as a cane. After pulling myself to my feet, I stagger to the cluster of trees, picking my way over rocks and ruts, and feel around with my hands. Here. Too short, but it’ll do. Limping back to the road, I lean heavily on the stick, grimacing through the pain.

  An hour ago I couldn’t wait to leave Gertrude’s house, but now going back there is my only option. I hobble slowly down the road. When I see her front porch, I breathe a sigh of relief. I pull myself up the three front steps, leaving a sludgy trail, and pause in front of the door. The lights are off. I pound on the door with the side of my closed fist. No answer. I rap hard on the window beside the door with my knuckles.

  From deep inside the house I hear footsteps. Through the window I see the glow of a lamp. Then Gertrude’s frightened voice on the other side of the door: “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Christina.”

  The door opens and I lurch inside.

  “Mercy!” Gertrude flaps her arms like a bird trying to land on a rock. “What happened?”

  “I fell on the road. I think my ankle may be broken.”

  “Oh dear. You are covered in mud,” she says with dismay.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to bother you.” Hot tears spring to my eyes, tears of relief and exhaustion and bitterness—that I can’t walk right, that I am back at this house, that, damn her, Gertrude may be right: Walton will never marry me, I will be stuck in this place for the rest of my life, sewing with this wretched woman. I turn my face so she doesn’t see the tears streaking through the grime.

  Gertrude sighs and shakes her head. “Stay right there. Let me find a cloth so you don’t ruin the rug.”

  “I BROKE MY ankle coming back from Gertrude Gibbons’s house,” I write to Walton. “It was foolish. I never should have been alone on that road in the dark.”

  “I am glad to hear you’re on the mend, and dearly hope you’ll be more prudent in the future,” he writes back. “Yours faithfully—.”

  I scan the letter several times, trying to hear his voice between the lines. But the words are stiff and formal. No matter how often I read them, they sound like an admonition.

  I’M APPREHENSIVE ABOUT seeing Walton for the first time after the long winter apart, but he gives me a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. “I have a present for you,” he says, drawing a large shell from the inside pocket of his seersucker jacket and placing it on the table in front of us. “I thought you might add it to your collection.”

  The shell is shiny and garishly colored—orange red, with bulky knobs on top that get smaller toward the edges.

  I pick it up. It’s as smooth and heavy as a glass paperweight. “Oh. Where did you find this?”

  “I bought it. In a specialty shop in Cambridge.” He smiles. “From Hawaii, I believe. It’s called a cameo shell. At least that’s what the card on the shelf said. It’ll look nice in the Shell Room, don’t you think?”

  I nod. “Sure.”

  He touches my arm. “You don’t like it.”

  “No, it’s—interesting.” But I’m disappointed that he doesn’t know me well enough to understand that this gaudy bauble from a specialty shop doesn’t belong in the Shell Room, filled with discoveries from expeditions. I wish he’d lied and told me he found it on a beach.

  I set the cameo shell on the mantelpiece in the Shell Room, but it looks out of place, like an artificial flower in a garden. After a few weeks, I put it in a drawer.

  AS THE SUMMER of 1916 progresses, Walton acts exactly as he always has: solicitous, courtly, quick with a smile and an ironic aside. But I am acutely aware that like a slip of paper in the wind, something in his nature eludes my grasp. Even when I ask direct questions, he is evasive, offering only vague generalities about his life in Boston, his family, his plans for the future.

  One early July morning Walton and I are making our way through the high grass to Hathorn Point to harvest mussels for dinner when I notice that he’s not saying much. He seems uncomfortable, fiddling with his sleeve as he walks.

  “What is it? Walton, tell me.”

  “It’s just . . .” He shakes his head as if dislodging a thought. “My parents. Thinking they know what’s best for me.”

  I know his parents live in Malden, near the Carles. As far as I’m aware they’ve never come up for a visit. “Did you get a letter?”

  He bends down, swipes an errant stick from the grass, and snaps it in half with a small, sharp movement. “Yes. A long, tedious letter. Saying it’s time for me to grow up, to take a job in Boston in the summers and stop frittering away my time up here with the Carles.” He snaps the stick halves in half again before flinging all the tiny pieces onto the ground.

  “Is this about . . . me?”

  He shoves his hands in his pockets. His grievance has taken on a theatrical air, as if exaggerated for my benefit. “It’s not personal,” he says brusquely. “They claim to be concerned about my future. They don’t want me to limit myself.”

  My heart skitters ahead of my words. “What—what do they mean by that?”

  “It’s absurd,” he says. “Keeping up appearances. Harvard, all that. The right job. The right wife.”

  “Meaning . . .” I ask in as neutral a tone as I can muster.

  He shrugs. “Oh, who knows. They want me to marry someone”—he lifts forked fingers to convey that he’s quoting—“‘educated’ and ‘from a good family.’ Which means, naturally, a family they’ve heard of. A Boston family, preferably. A family that will bolster their social standing. Because that’s the important thing.”

  I find myself shrinking into silence. Of course Walton’s parents don’t want their Harvard-educated son marrying a girl who didn’t even go to secondary school.

  “You’re upset,” Walton says, patting my arm. “But you shouldn’t be. This isn’t about you. They don’t really know about you.”

  This shocks me into words. “You’ve never mentioned me?”

  “Of course I’ve mentioned you,” he says quickly. “I just don’t think they realize quite what . . . quite how much you mean to me.”

  “Do they know that we are .
. .” The word sweethearts springs to mind, but I’m afraid it will sound cloying, presumptuous.

  He shrugs. “I try not to talk to my parents about much of anything.”

  “So they don’t know that we’ve been . . . seeing each other for four years?”

  “I’m not sure what they know, and I don’t care,” he says dismissively. “Let’s put this aside and enjoy the morning, shall we? I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  I nod, but the conversation has dampened my mood. It’s only later, going over it in my head, that I realize he didn’t answer my question.

  THE DAY BEFORE Walton and the Carles are to return to Massachusetts, we make a plan to go to the Acorn Grange Hall in Cushing for a dance. Walton shows up earlier than expected with Eloise and Ramona and finds me in the yard behind the house, struggling with a load of laundry. It’s wash day, and I can’t leave until all the clothes are on the line.

  “Go ahead, I’ll be along soon,” I tell them. I’m hot and perspiring, still wearing my old frock and apron.

  “I’ll help her finish,” he says to the others. “We’ll catch up with you.”

  Eloise and Ramona leave the house with Al and Sam in a clamorous gaggle. I watch them as they make their way down the road—Al and Sam tall and awkward, bending like reeds toward the pretty sisters.

  Walton helps me wring the damp pieces, his strong hands far more efficient than mine. He hoists the straw basket to his hip and we make our way to the clothesline; then, crouching, he takes each piece of damp clothing from the basket, shakes it, and hands it to me, and I pin it to the rope. The intimacy of this ordinary task feels bittersweet.

  Walton waits on the back stoop while I go inside to change into a clean white blouse and navy skirt. “You look nice,” he says when I appear. As we stroll toward the Grange Hall, he rummages in his pocket. I hear the familiar crinkle of wax paper. He pops a butterscotch candy into his mouth.

  “Do you have one for me?” I ask.

  “Of course.” He stops and takes out another, unwraps it, and puts it on my tongue. He rubs my arms. “Autumn in the air already,” he muses. “Are you cold? Do you need my jacket?”