I’ll tell Mum,” Liam threatened for the twentieth time that week.
“You won’t,” Lucy said.
“Give me a penny.”
“Oh, fine.” She gave one to Liam and one to Jeffrey, too.
They were on their way home from the quarry, cutting through the beech and pine woods above Washington Street. The shade cooled them and they quickly fell into not talking, their feet navigating the rocks and roots on the forest floor. There was a path somewhere near here, but they never took the path.
Lucy Pear was nine and wished she could stay nine forever. She easily hid, beneath a pair of suspenders and one of her brothers’ vests, her newly, barely swollen breasts, which she hoped against all likelihood were done growing. Her hair she would gladly have cut, except that their mother would ask questions. The rest of it wasn’t so difficult, to walk like a boy, and work like a boy, and keep her mouth shut. She was Johnny Murphy. She counted her first week’s pay by touch, in the pocket of her brother’s trousers: five dollars and twenty-five cents. An astounding sum, given that they worked only in the afternoons. A ticket to Canada was twenty-eight dollars and thirty-one cents, Lucy had learned from her sister Juliet, who lived in Rockport now, with three children of her own. Juliet was the oldest of the children, and very resourceful, and because she would never have thought to leave Cape Ann herself, she was the perfect target for Lucy’s questions.
How much is a ticket to Canada?
That depends. Handing Lucy a cookie. Chuckling. Where are you pretending to go? Will you need a berth?
Where did Peter go?
Their brother Peter had gone to Canada the year before. He was ten years Lucy’s senior, an outwardly tough boy, almost a man now. Lucy trusted him. She imagined living with him, in Canada, imagined that he would be like a brother-father to her. In Canada, apparently, they had turned the schools into breweries, the grass into moonshine; they had laid tracks straight from the distilleries to the border. Everyone was getting rich.
Quebec. Juliet said it Kebeck, as if she were French.
To make the trip, Lucy calculated that she needed thirty for the ticket, ten for food, and ten extra to get by until she found Peter. The perry, their mother had explained matter-of-factly and too late, oblivious to the panic rising in Lucy’s throat, wouldn’t be ready until next year. So when the quarry jobs came along, Lucy thought, Why not? If she kept up the work at the quarry, she might be gone before the pears even hit the press. Maybe, if a storm came up or the fish were scarce, before Roland even returned from his trip.
• • •
In the yard, their three sisters—with help from the youngest boy, Joshua—were working on the shack that would hold the press. Three walls were up, the fourth in progress, a pine door resting on its side against the cedar tree. Beneath where the floor would be, she and Liam and Jeffrey had been digging a secret cellar. The way down to the cellar would be through a “turnip bin,” which would be just like the potato bin beside it except that its bottom would drop out. Voilà! Lucy’s latest idea was to put the scratcher in the shack above and the press in the cellar below and devise a detachable chute that would carry the pulp straight down into the press. They would press the juice, let it ferment into perry in wooden barrels, then funnel off the perry into jugs. The jugs and barrels had already been ordered—like everything else—with funds from Josiah Story.
“Hello, boys!” Janie sang in greeting, and Lucy was seized by an urge to jump into her sister’s arms. Instead she took off her cap, let her hair swing down, and said, “Hulloh,” in a deep voice, which made them laugh, Janie and Anne and Maggie and Joshua, too, though he didn’t understand what was funny. She missed them all already. Her continued devotion to the perry—despite her understanding that she wouldn’t profit from it—was her way of apologizing to them, in advance. She hoped that next year, when the jugs were ready to sell, they would see that all her bossing—the lists she made for them each morning, her inspections at the end of the day—had been for them.
Lucy knew—Lucy was not blind—that she was not a Murphy by blood. There was the fact that she was barely older than Janie. (She’d been told that her middle name came from her having been born right around that year’s pears, but Janie’s birthday was barely nine months after that.) There was Lucy Pear herself. She was dark where they were light, round where they were straight. At her nape there was a fur, very soft but very dark, which spread out on either side of her spine like the wings of a skate. In school, children used to taunt her, ask where her parents had bought her, or what monkey her mother had fucked. Fucking Catholics, they would say, even some of the ones who were Catholic. Fucking Catholic rabbits. Then Peter had come to school one day. He was seventeen, already working the Jones Creek clam flats, but he walked into the school yard, grabbed the worst of the bullies by the collar, knocked his nose to the right, and blew his wind out in one punch. What’s it to you? he said tenderly, showing that he had the stamina to inflict far worse. And no one had bothered Lucy since.
Among the family, it had never needed to be spoken. The older ones must have known the story, and the younger ones must have wondered, once they were old enough to notice what other people noticed. Lucy had allowed herself to wonder only in the briefest, most hidden of ways—her eyes flashing open in the dark, a line between lines in her primer, a particular tree branching into two in a particular way. Then it was gone—the beginning, the question of the beginning, the beginning of the question. She stuffed it away like her brothers would a dirty photograph.
It seemed unnecessary. It seemed a betrayal. Then she turned nine and Roland bumped into her one night, in passing. The force knocked her to the opposite wall. He walked on. She thought it was a mistake; Roland touched none of his children, not even on the head or hands, as if to preclude some idea—his own? the neighbors’?—that he must beat them. But the next evening, passing her in the same doorway, he touched her arm, the upper part where she was soft: with one finger he drew a straight line down, quick but hard enough to leave a mark. Since then, every so often, he poked or pushed her in this way: without warning, and on an almost-but-not-quite-private part of her, and so silently and inscrutably, Lucy wondered if she had dreamed it. She felt pain, but only briefly. The next day, Roland would smile at her. He had a sudden, toothy smile not a single one of them could resist, the kind of smile that if seen only once a month made amends for the other twenty-nine days, his eyes shining as impishly as a child’s. Maybe she had it wrong. She said nothing. Complaints were not tolerated, and besides, who would believe that Roland had behaved so strangely? He was tempestuous and prone to shouting, but this was not like that. This was like another man, like Roland’s dark, quiet cousin emerging, but only for Lucy. This was, undoubtedly, Roland’s punishment for her having wondered. Worse, each time he did it, she wondered more. Which would only lead, she feared, to more punishment. And so, it seemed, she was trapped. Which was why she planned to go to Canada, to Peter.
Lucy let Anne and Maggie comb her hair. The yard smelled of pinesap, and more faintly of fish—down at the cove, a field of cod had been laid out on racks to dry. If Quebec was inland, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t stink of fish. From the top of the hill, the crazy old widow Mrs. Greely called for her crazy cats. Beast! Lover! Old man! Lucy counted the money again, gave one penny to each of her siblings, for their labors on the shack, which she was supposedly in charge of. Then she went inside to wash her face and change into her dress before their mother came home.