Of that first sojourn to the Boston States, to Massachusetts, Henry had almost no memory. There was, he thought, a wooden yellow duck with red wings on wheels so when he pulled it about by a string the wings went round and round. Black shutters against gray clapboards. Sheep in a field past an apple tree in bloom—this was vivid, the sound of the sheep, the bright spring grass, the white and red blossoms and a drift of sweet scent. Of his father there was only a recalled presence; a looming figure, huge hands and a gentle voice but no images to fit this—only the sense of those things having existed. Of the death and burial, even the return to Nova Scotia he remembered nothing. His mother had two photographs of his father but he’d seen them only a couple of times as a boy and they could have been anyone. Years later, when he and Olivia brought Alice and Polly to visit, Olivia pregnant with Robert and sick for the voyage and much of the time they were there, and Charles Morrell dead a year, Henry prevailed on his mother and Euphemia sat for a time in the soft chair with knitted throws over the arms and back and he waited with his request out in the air between them and finally she rose up groaning to ascend the stairs and some good while later— he’d almost decided she’d refused him and was napping—she returned and handed them to him. Both clearly taken at the same studio on the same day. A front view and a profile both from the waist up. His father’s dark hair long and swept back behind his ears, his face sporting a trimmed beard and a mustache, both fashionable at the time, but it was the features, the eyes and nose and chin and mouth that Henry wanted to study. And the hands, which were a disappointment because in the front view they were folded in his lap and the side view out of sight altogether. The man in the photographs was at least ten, perhaps twelve years younger than the son now studying them. There was a likeness, he supposed. Although his father more clearly resembled his firstborn, Gilbert who had been lost in a storm off Grand Manan when the boat struck a shoal and foundered and sank with all hands six years ago. Henry was alone with his mother. The girls were out playing with Island cousins and Olivia was napping.
“Mother,” he said, holding the photographs. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?” Her voice charged already. She put him in mind of a solitary lightbulb that would not burn out but was the only source of light it knew.
Gently he said, “Of Father. Of Father and you.”
She worried a yarn unraveling from her sweater, studying it. He half expected her to rise and seek a darning needle. But she said, “There is little to tell. I was just a girl, sixteen years old when I met him. Pregnant with Gil before the year was out and married. He was charming and as you can see a devil of a handsome man but he didn’t know a dime from a dollar. I learned that too late. He was a dreamer, Henry. His head in the clouds as they used to say. We managed just barely and with more help from your uncle George than I expect I’ll ever know. Then he died and left me in a strange land with young children and a newborn. It was not an easy time for me.”
Henry waited but it seemed she was done. After a bit he said, “But he had a talent. Isn’t that right? Weren’t things, before he got sick, starting to work out for him? Down there to Boston?”
She was quiet a while. Then said, “Henry. You’re an educated man. Something I once hoped for myself, if you didn’t know.”
Now he was the one quiet.
She went on, “But you’ve done well. Better than I expected when you slipped out of here if you must know the truth. Take that as you will—I’m proud enough of you. But you must have learned this, all those years at University, all those degrees, all the people you’ve met and worked with. In a place like Freeport your father stood out. But talent, in any way but I’m talking here of the talent of the artist is not an uncommon thing. At least the number of people who think they have it. Henry, listen to me: He was good at what he did, Sam was. But he was not brilliant with it. He saw the layers of things and rendered them beautifully. And that work suited his temperament. But it was not enough—do you understand what I’m saying? Now, if he’d lived he might well have made a sufficient living at it—he was well started. But he never would have achieved the greatness he felt was in him. Because it was not. And I could not tell him so. It was one of the hardest times in my life, standing so firm behind him when I recognized that ultimately he would fail, that at some point he would realize and accept that. Until he died I always thought when that time came we’d come home and he’d be able to clerk for Fred and George and make a living for us and still paint and draw—that work was something he would never have abandoned, never set aside as the folly of youth. I knew him well enough to know that. In truth, part of me was waiting him to realize it himself so we could get on with things. But then he died—” She stopped.
“Mother, what?”
She rubbed her hands across her eyes. “I’m a stupid old woman sometimes. I know Fred never forgave me for not bringing him home, for burying him there. But when he died. Oh Henry. When he died I was just plain angry at him. I see now, looking back, it was the only way I could get through it all. Good God, Eva was at my breast and we were two months behind not just on the house payments but everything else—bills piling up at the butchers and mercantiles for God’s sake. There was nothing in this world that would let me contact George for help. I settled with the bank and paid off the bills and buried him right there and came home. Actually he was buried first and that was one more debt to take care of— I was terrified to try to keep him and bring him home, terrified that one or more of us had the tubercular already. I was a young woman still.” She looked up at him and then away again. “I did what had to be done.”
“I know you did, Mother.”
From outside came the cries of little girls playing. Henry distinctly heard one say “I will never play with you again.” Moments later the screams of the game resumed. He studied his mother who had her hands in her lap and was gazing somewhere off into the floral wallpaper.
Softly he said, “May I keep these?”
Her eyes bolted to him. “Why?”
“Well. I’d like them for the girls someday.”
Euphemia stood. “No,” she said, crossing and taking them from him. “He was my husband.” She went into the hall and he heard her trying to tread quiet up the stairs to not disturb Olivia. He never saw the photographs again.
Later that evening, after Olivia and the girls were asleep he slipped out of the house and wandered down round the cove to the store where as if both were expecting each other, George sat on the store-front bench, the dark building backlit by the night sky. Henry sat beside him and for a time they were both quiet, content to simply be in each other’s company.
George said, “Those are fine little girls you have. That Polly, she’s a pistol. I offered em both sour balls out of the jar and she looked at the red one I gave her and asked could she have lime. Reminds me a bit of your mother. I told her lime was my favorite too. She said Does that mean you get em all to yourself? I said Nope and gave her two.” He grinned at Henry. “Reminds me a bit of you, too.”
Not needing to ask how so, Henry said, “Tell me something.”
“If I can.”
“Talking to Mother today, about my father. When he took all of us down to Boston. Something in how she phrased things made me think maybe you supported that idea a good bit more than Uncle Fred.”
“Oh I’d say twas about even,” George said. He stood and looked off at the dimly ringed lights around the cove. “You recall how when you came back that first summer of your university? How miserable you were? You recall what I told you?”
Henry stood beside him. “How some people left a place because they never were meant to be anything but born there, so they’d know enough to leave.”
George nodded. “Samuel Dorn was the same way. Despite what your mother might’ve thought. Or Fred, for that matter. Well, now, it’s late, isn’t it?”
“And I haven’t been back since.”
“That’s not a bad thing. The way I see it.”
“Not others, though.”
“There’s always them love to second guess another man.” George stepped down off the porch. Henry followed and together in silence they walked up the cove. At Euphemia’s house they paused, the shell road crackly white in the starlight. Henry put out his hand and George took it, a tight stout shake.
“It’s been good to see you.”
“You best get inside. You know your mother’s waiting up for you. As Fred waits up for me. He’s odd that way. But some of us need someone to worry over.”
“He worries over you?”
George paused and said, “He’s my brother.” Then went on, his broad back crossed by suspenders, black against the pale of his denim shirt. Henry watched him until he passed around the head of the cove and out of sight behind the Temperance Hall toward the house on the hillside with its single windowlight.
It was the next to last time Henry went back to Nova Scotia.