The summer he was eleven a new minister had arrived on the Islands. A man from Halifax, a big-city Baptist with modern ideas and sermons more pointed to the everyday than the great wheel of angst and sulfur of the previous reverend. It had been the summer Henry joined the Bible Study Group and took the Temperance Pledge. For a time he thought he had heard the Call and walked about his work with the stories and his own quaking homilies and sermons ringing his head. There were times, delivering coal, that he was silent but there was a siren of voice in his head—a stream of words racing faster than he could keep up with and he was suffused with the Word of the Lord. Then came the Sunday in late September when he along with the rest of the swollen congregation filed into the church and took their seats. The stoves were not yet lit and the room was cold and Henry thought that right; comfort caused one to drift from the Word. But the ten o’clock hour came and passed and there was a quiet undertone drifting as neighbor leaned to speak with neighbor. Then the door of the church opened and all eyes turned to the vestibule but it was Henry’s Uncle Fred Dorn who strode up the aisle and stood upon the platform before the lectern and waited for the organist behind him to notice his presence and allow a final chord to die away. Then Fred leaned forward and with both hands lifted spoke.
He said, “Last night the Reverend Lewes took passage on the packet boat to Yarmouth. A little after midnight with his single trunk. I asked if it was an emergency of some kind and he answered No, that he was leaving. Stealing away in the middle of the night, I asked? What crime have you committed we should know of? He asserted there was none. But he could not face you all to explain. Explain what, I inquired. It was the strangest thing. That man stood looking down at his shoes for the longest time and then said I have to go, the air is too heavy for me to breathe here. I said The air? He was quiet again, still not looking up. Aye, was what he told his shoes. The air.”
Laura Crocker was a brash-mouthed twelve year old who caught Henry off guard and thrashed him in the school yard, not a difficult thing to do as he was not only unprepared but wouldn’t fight back and so lay with the breath blown out of him as she sat astride his chest, her knees pinning his upper arms to the ground, her high buckled boots digging into his sides, the frenzy of attack having stirred her long skirts sufficiently so her petticoats and bloomers were a frothy mass inches from his face. She smelled of rosewater and the thick ropes of flaxen curls had escaped their band and cascaded down over her heaving chest and framed her bright serious eyes and the full red bow of her mouth. She rocked against his chest, studying him.
“What’d you do that for?”
“Because I wanted to. Because I could.” She pushed a final time against him, then stood and stepped away. “Smarty-pants.”
He scrambled up, smacking the dirt and shell bits from his long pants. A group of younger boys had lingered but left when Henry turned toward them with his fists up—he might be a scholar but he was quick and hard-muscled from his years of delivering coal. Laura and her three girlfriends were already partway down the road passing the Community Hall, heading on their afternoon loop around the forks of the bay. He stood watching them go, that mass of hair down her back, a smudge on the lower back of her skirts. Then he ran his hand through his short-cut brush of hair and picked up his book-satchel and headed home to change to workclothes.
He’d seen her knees, white-shining, cupped, round. Whiter than her bleached and starched underclothes.
The only thing to do was ignore her. Which over the next months he tried mightily to do. At first it seemed she’d dismissed the episode as well as any further notice of him also but then, time to time when he felt most secure within the business of school or the more difficult thus less likely to be witnessed glimpses at church, he caught her looking back at him. Or waiting for his eye. At Christmastime he returned late one dark evening after work to find a small box of fudge had been delivered for the family. He endured the sly comments from his sisters but nevertheless later was able to retrieve from the trash her holiday tag, wanting it for the gorgeous flowing rendering of her name. He hid this in his secondhand copy of Robinson Crusoe which only prompted fantasies of being stranded by shipwreck with Laura rescued by him, the two of them under palm trees, on white sand eating coconuts and swimming in clear blue warm waters. Naked, he thought although the few actual dreams this produced were maddening as she always seemed sheathed in some version of white underclothing. Her hair underwater like sun-made kelp.
The next summer everything changed. School was out a week when Uncle George met him at the coal shed, the little ox and summer cart already gone along with the day’s sheaf of delivery notices and bills. Henry was out of a job. The work had gone to a Titus from Brier Island, a man Henry knew only by story—the winter past the man had lost a hand caught in the mighty blocks lifting the thousand foot, four hundred hook longline with its full catch of cod and haddock. No longer any good for the boats. George told him to go up to the office to see Fred.
Henry’s sister’s fiancé, Nelson Thurber, was behind the counter in the mercantile as he had been now for over a year. He nodded as if Henry was expected and indicated with his head the rear office, where Henry was headed anyway. Nelson and Lucy were to marry shortly and life at home had been wretched by Henry’s reckoning for several months.
Fred pushed up his visor and sucked the pencil tip a moment and then told the silent waiting boy, “Part of the time you’ll help Nelson. Most of the time you’ll be working with me. Not so much sitting in here although there’ll be enough of that. Mostly though you’ll be my legs, ears and mouth when and where I tell you to.”
“But I enjoy the coal route,” he said. “I know all those people. What they need and when. And I like going back and forth between the houses and the boats.”
“Are you arguing with me?”
“No sir.”
“Look at it this way. What you know of the families and the boats, that’s key to everything else they need and use. Almost all of which, one way or t’other, flows through Dorn Brothers. Need I clarify?”
“No sir.”
“Tomorrow morning. Seven sharp. You’ve saved money?”
Silence was answer enough.
Fred said, “You’ll be wanting more long pants and white shirts. You’re too young for a vest or suit coat—the men would think you’ve airs. Have your mother measure the trousers long so they can be let out as needs.”
A month later Lucy married Nelson Thurber. After some argument Gil prevailed and walked his sister to the alter. It was a grand affair. Someone—not Euphemia and certainly not Nelson’s family— had rented the Community Hall for the feasting and merriment after the ceremony. Henry suspected his Uncle George. There was no dancing but two fiddle players, a man playing a snare drum strapped to his waist and the Hall’s regular pianist provided a flow of reels, jigs, laments, ballads and airs even as the guests, the whole village and many from up-Island and crossed over from Brier Island, sat to the heavy laden tables spread with the best borrowed from everyone possible linens and lace. Although festive, most of the music one way or another was born of the sea and the toll it exacted. Weddings, Henry decided, were strange affairs, as likely to produce tears as laughter and no telling one moment to the next who would erupt with any possible combination. The food was grand—chowders thick with lobster or clams or fish, cod tongues baked in cream, platters of cod, haddock and pollock cooked every conceivable way, bowls of fresh summer vegetables and, most delicious of all, an entire pig roasted two days and nights in a pit attended by a select group of men who wouldn’t let Henry or any other of the curious youngsters come close.
Outside the hall there was a furtive but distinct path that led behind the building, in fact to the grove where the now cooling hog pit was. Henry, coming and going, didn’t venture there but kept a careful eye and more than once saw his new brother-in-law slip around the green clapboard corner into the clump of forlorn crabapples. Once, Uncle George as well. It was a simple route to escape to as the Hall had the necessaries set off to the other side, some distance apart and so it was no great feat to leave and enter the Hall as needed. A hedge of battered salt-bitten roses separated the men’s from the ladies’. And so, just before the great three-tiered cake was to be cut, the ranks of pies and puddings and other, lesser cakes, the tubs of hand-cranked ice cream thick with strawberries or handfuls of black walnuts, the crocks of lemonade and birch and root beers waiting on side tables, Henry excused himself for the third or fourth time and stood a moment in the dazzling heat and light, his body and mind already offkilter from the combination of ceremony and rich food, then coming from the dank spidery outhouse into the spangling day once again, his fingers working to align stubborn buttons to his flies, peering down to try to determine where he’d gone wrong when she spoke.
“Have you lost something there?”
In a brand new yellow frock with lace at the shoulders and long tight white sleeves, heavy braids wrapped crownlike about her head as a sun-bedecked halo, her pink cheeks, eyes glistening as if merriment held there, one hand raised, extended slightly toward him. He hastened the button.
“Hullo Laura. You hadn’t ought to be over to this side. You’ll catch the devil, your mother hears of it.”
“My stars and garters! You haven’t been back there after that rum with the others, have you? Mother’s inside not missing a bit of it all, weeping away as if twas me instead of your sister. Besides, Nelson’s little brother Raymond just come round that corner and tried to give me a squeeze and steal a kiss.”
“He better not try.”
She brought her face closer to his, the floral scent stronger than he recalled. She said, “I kicked him in the shin.”
He nodded.
She said, “You’re not a rough fella, are you Henry?”
“I can blow the flukes right off Ray Thurber’s anchor, I took the mind to.”
She shook her head. Then said, “Do you think I’m pretty, Henry?”
“Fishheads,” he said. “Plenty girls are pretty, Laura. You, you’re beautiful.”
“Fishheads, yourself,” she said. “Then why don’t you ask me to walk out with you some Saturday afternoon?”
He kicked one shined leather toe against the white of the crushed shell road. “My mother’d say I was too young for that.”
Laura Crocker leaned in quick and kissed him, her lips soft warm surprise that ran through him. She pulled away before he understood what she was doing and said, “I couldn’t care less what your mother thinks. We’re plenty old enough.”
He met her eyes, his face fired. “I’d be happy if I could buy you a root beer next Saturday evening.”
She studied him a bit and said, “I’d like that. I like root beer. But say, Henry? Have you been up above the Pas of an evening to look out for the whales this summer?”
At the moment, other than working for his uncles, no one had any other plans for him. Except clearly Laura Crocker and while not sure exactly what her ideas might be, he expected he’d enjoy learning them as they were disclosed.
Until the winter weeknight two years later after he closed the mercantile himself and walked home through a dense freezing fog and steady drizzle to find his mother, uncles George and Fred, the Reverend Critten, and head of the Freeport School, Master Haines, balancing tea and waiting for him in the moist warm parlor. Where he sat in silence and gathering excitement as they laid out his future already discussed and long-agreed upon. But it was still a full two and a half years distant and his immediate focus was upon his slightly lessened duties within the family enterprise, duties he now knew so well he could discharge them within the reduced time, and the additional studies were nothing more than what he desired.
Uncle Fred finished. “If it was all my doing, I’d say it will be fine and well and then you’d be able to return and put all that to even better use, right here. And you keep that in mind.”
The Reverend attempted the last word of the night. “Your mind is quick for business, you’ve already demonstrated that. But it’s for other things it’s meant. Which does not preclude you from considering seminary following a university education. The Word remains the most exalted purpose we can set ourselves to. But only you, Henry, perhaps with the Lord’s intervention, will be able to determine that.” He rose and the other men with him. “There are multitudes of righteous paths, gentlemen. Let us go forth into the night bearing that in mind.”
“And a righteous rough night it is,” said George. Who had been the man with the least to say that evening. Although whenever Henry turned toward him George’s eyes were full, hard and quizzed upon him.
Alone in the kitchen with his mother as she washed, dried and put away in the high cupboard the good china, he’d felt tall, rough and clumsy, too large for the room. Then she turned, dish towel in hand and her hidden eyes revealed red, she stepped and gathered him tight and said, “The world calls you, does it? The world called your father but he alone heard it.” She stepped back and held him by his upper arms and shook him and suddenly louder, angry it seemed, “You must eat it, Henry. As good breakfast oats. Make it nourish you. It shan’t eat you. Remember that.”
That evening no mention was made of Laura Crocker. And Henry, with that great gulf of time before him, also did not think of her.
For many reasons all practical these new plans were held close and yet in any small place even small changes are noted and considered. Fewer hours around the docks and processing plant and cannery, among the drying and salting racks, additional texts at school and quiet but observable solitary meetings with Master Haines and the other teachers, the inevitable if subdued shift in Henry’s carriage of himself, the long hours given over to more reading than usual.
Next summer a high mid-June evening he was seated with Laura in their usual place, high up in the bracken and blueberries and stunted cedars overlooking Petite Pas toward Brier Island, below the lighthouse the dark spruce on the sheer side of that island dark and oily appearing in the long lengthening sun—a huge lemon-drop far out in the Gulf of Maine. Side by side, her legs folded under her, their upper arms touching as they leaned against each other. Some puffins worked along the steep shoreline rocks.
She dug into a pocket and brought out a small cork-stoppered clear bottle. “My brother brought this back from Saint John. It’s mild, a sort of mint tonic.” She pulled the cork with her teeth and sipped and passed it to him. He held it and looked at it and back to her. The red tip of her tongue ran over her lips. She said, “Go ahead. It’s nothing, you’ll see. I’ve had it before.” Her eyes snapping and laughing at him, taking him right back to when she first sat on his chest, pinning him to the ground. A different ground this, but she had him pinned. He lifted it and sipped. It was thicker than he’d expected and far smoother. Easy, really.
Quickly he kissed her and said, “Oh, that’s sweet.”
They passed it back and forth and kissed between sips, their mouths growing moister, sticky, a wet wild peppermint shade of evening over them. And then she said, “It’s been months since you were like this. Truly.”
“Laura—”
“Hush now.” This time when their mouths met she slowly gathered him to her and settled back against the sweet spinning earth.
Later with the first of summer stars over them, his fingers idly twining the reaches of her hair, she said, “So you’re going then?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking off.
“What in the world,” she said. “Are you scared all the sudden?” She was quiet a moment and then said, “It was me, I wouldn’t think twice.”
Now he looked at her. “I really don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Laura.” Letting it trail off. She heard his plaint clearly and stood quickly in the deep dusk.
“You’d better pray, Henry Dorn. Because I won’t wait for you. Not even so long as tomorrow.”
Dazed all ways and bolt upright he walked her home where she refused his mouth and he stood wavering a bit in the dark watching as she let herself in. Then he walked the long road back around the Cove, passing his house, his mother’s house, he told himself and kept going, all the way down past the drying racks, the cod turned skin-side up for the night and morning fog, on past the store where he was not sure but thought there might be a light burning in the back office and on from there past the canning shed and the docks with the hoists and gutting sheds, along the string of docks with the tied-up boats all the way to the end to the deep-water wharf where a single fishing schooner and one of the coastal freight boats tucked and rocked against their bumpers and he stood out at the end of that wide wharf, feeling the gentle motion of the boats as the relentless tide moved them, here where the broad sweep of Brier Light swept the passage and fled then into the fog-shroud of Fundy, stood there with the flood of brine and salt and fish strong up into his nose as he tried to make sense of where he was and what all of this life around and upon and before him could possibly mean.
Walking finally back up the wharves and past the dark buildings he saw the figure of a man deep in the porch of the mercantile. Fred Dorn. Henry paused ever so slightly to be hailed and when he was not he walked on.
Laura Crocker ignored him for the remainder of the summer, although he felt her eyes, and her eyes through other girls upon him also. It was a silent, fraught time. But when school resumed that fall it was clear to him that she carried no baby. As the autumn went on he attempted to regain at least a bit of their old familiarity. Henry thinking it was too small a place for her to react so. Laura saw it differently.
In late summer 1882 at the age of seventeen he went south to Boston on one of the Dorn’s coastal schooners where he took the train to Rhode Island and began his undergraduate education at Brown University, paid for by his uncles and a modest academic stipend with severe standards. In one of his two trunks, protected with a rough folio of box board was the drawing of the cod basket his father had made and Uncle George had given him days before departure. It would be several years before he could afford to have it even modestly framed, but from that time on was never out of his hands or sight.
So off he went. Equally split with terror and excitement. He recognized the vastness of the opportunity and mostly had little doubt of his abilities. He also had his own secret plan. To spend his weekends and holidays tracking down what he could of what remained of his father. If it was nothing more than finding that grave in Newton, perhaps recognizing the house. But he was confident also he could find some of the drawings, the paintings he’d only heard of. Things like that, beautiful things, did not disappear from the face of the earth but lasted. It was only a question of being dogged, not giving up, asking the right questions enough times to enough people and he would find them. Only to see them. It was all he wanted or expected. After all, someone would own them. And he now had his own.
As with most such ventures this scheme proved not only daunting but impossible. The single name of a dealer his mother had been willing or able to recall had turned out to be an emporium of home furnishings in Boston, the owner from his father’s days long since dead and the walls dotted with undistinguished land and seascapes and scenes of homely comfort, most in great heavy gilt frames worth more, he reckoned, than the daubings they held, interspersed with free-standing ionic columns meant to support potted plants, elephant-foot umbrella stands, coatracks of unlikely and hideous construction. Adding to, or perhaps crushing upon this disappointment was the realization he had neither the time nor funds to travel from Providence to Boston as his brain was strangled by the magnificent critical expectations of his masters.
But still, in early October when this apparently temperate climate seemed bathed in a glow of light and snapping colors, one Sunday he bought a round-trip ticket to Newton. Departing at dawn, the ride, even with stops, took less than three hours. At the station he received directions to the town cemetery and not only found his father’s grave but had ample time to sit before it in a curious state of emotion that was grim and overwhelming at once. When the bells in the church summoned morning service he had seen enough of the plain white stone so he rose and went inside and sat through the service. The homily was on The Manna and the Grain, which inspired him and he left the church feeling a sense of accomplishment as well as meditation— that old plan was not his and now was the time to make his own. He had wanted to talk with the minister about the grave of his father but felt unrooted and without manly explanation for his appearance there. He thought At least I’ve seen it. I can always come back once things get sorted out.