10

Elizabeth’s grandmother died at the end of the third week in September.

On a Thursday afternoon, after dropping her schoolbag on the kitchen floor, Elizabeth lifted Stephen Lindsay from her mother’s arms, sat down on a rocking chair, and held him upright on her lap. He regarded her seriously. She made a loud popping noise with her mouth. His lips trembled, widened into a smile. Then his voice rose in a cry of hilarity.

“I love to break him up,” Elizabeth said to her mother, who was looking through a heap of catalogs that had arrived in the morning mail.

“I have no character,” Mom said. “I hate these things, but I always look at them.”

The wall telephone rang. Her mother went to answer it. “Charlie,” she said. She listened. Elizabeth saw tears start from her eyes. Elizabeth clutched her brother to her, his breath on her neck.

After a while, her mother hung up the phone. She turned her wet face to Elizabeth.

“Gran is dead,” Elizabeth said.

Stephen Lindsay let out a wail, and her mother took him. They stayed in the kitchen. Weeping, Mom poured a glass of milk for Elizabeth, put some cookies on a plate, warmed a bottle for the baby. There didn’t seem to be anything to do but sit there thinking about Gran. Elizabeth wiped her eyes on a kitchen towel. She ate a cookie but tasted nothing.

After a while, Mom whispered, “I’ll put Stephen in his crib now. I think he’ll sleep.”

On Sunday, the three of them flew to Bangor for Gran’s funeral.

The service was held in a Congregational church that had been built in 1853. The squeaking, high-backed pews that smelled of old varnish were nearly filled with people who had known Mrs. Benedict. On his father’s lap, Stephen Lindsay fought sleep. The young minister who led the service tended to smile at odd moments, as though his thoughts and his mouth weren’t quite in agreement. Perhaps, reflected Elizabeth, he was unsettled by her brother’s occasionally loud chirps, which echoed high above the congregation like the sound of a trapped bird.

Yet, though he hadn’t known Gran, the minister spoke of her in a tender way, the little smile coming and going, as though the simple fact that she had been born and had lived was reason enough for reverence.

Only a few people drove north to the Blue Hill peninsula for the burial where Gran had arranged, some years earlier, for a plot in a small, old cemetery on a hill.

The Benedicts made the trip in a rented car. Keeping steady speed in front of them was the hearse.

It was the first time they had all been together except for their hushed ride from Bangor, where Mr. Benedict had met Elizabeth, her mother, and the baby. He had spent most of the month in Ellsworth, with side trips to Camden and Pring Island when he could get away from the hospital. There had been many things to take care of, he told them, the accumulation of a lifetime, papers, paintings, other artwork of hers, furniture, and clothes, to be given away or stored. The cottage had been much easier than the Camden apartment.

“Did Gran talk a lot to you?” Elizabeth asked, feeling a certain shyness. Her voice sounded unnatural to her own ears. Was it because she was speaking of one so recently gone from life? Gran was now a word for a mysterious space. Yet in the part of her mind that flashed with ever-changing images, Gran moved among them, animated or at rest, sharp or kindly, as the mood took her. Elizabeth was, she realized, memorizing her.

“She hardly spoke,” her father was saying. “She asked one time to see a picture of your brother. By the time I got it out of my wallet, she was drowsing.”

Elizabeth glanced at Stephen Lindsay, asleep at last in his car seat beside her.

“That’s all?” she asked.

He was silent for a few miles, his hands gripping the steering wheel.

“She worried so about a couple of envelopes she’d left in the cottage,” he said at last. “One is for someone named Jake Holborn. The other is for you. They’re back in that canvas bag on the floor. Even when I brought them to the hospital and showed them to her, she was so confused … didn’t recognize them. It was terrible. She cried.”

“Jake Holborn was the old man who brought supplies to us in his boat,” Elizabeth said.

“Was he at the church?” Daddy asked.

“No,” she replied. She drew two envelopes from the canvas bag, one printed in large letters with her name, the other with Jake’s. She kept them on her lap.

After a time, her father said, “So many people came.” Her mother drew closer to him.

They reached the narrow roads of the peninsula. A wind had risen. Dead leaves blew through the streets of the villages through which they drove. The houses were mostly shabby. Small grocery and hardware stores were closed and dark for Sunday, but everywhere, in yards, on front lawns, alongside cracked patches of sidewalk, old trees glowed, flaming with autumn color like festal torches, undimmed in the bright day.

Soon, a hill rose steeply in front of them. At the top, the hearse passed through the open gates of a white picket fence. Mr. Benedict parked behind several other cars on the grassy verge of the road.

“I hope Stephen won’t wake when I pick him up,” Elizabeth’s mother said. “The wind’s blowing so hard. Put that wool hat on him, will you, Charlie?”

Elizabeth, wanting to get away from her family, got out of the car, still holding the envelopes, and entered the gates.

The back doors of the hearse were open, and two men in dark suits stood beside them. Several yards away, an old man leaned on a shovel. Elizabeth saw a rectangular hole with clods of earth along its edges. She went quickly past it.

The cemetery must have covered four or five acres of the slope of the hill. Most of the gravestones looked older than the three on Pring Island.

There were people standing about, but Elizabeth kept her head down. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed goldenrod and black-eyed Susans swaying wildly in the wind amid the tall grass that grew behind the fence stakes. When, past the last graves, the slope grew so steep she could go no farther, she looked up.

Before her lay a vast landscape. Over a long reach of water, a spidery green bridge arched to an island that appeared to be traveling into the eastern sky. Its shores were ringed with rocks and, here and there, a stone-strewn beach. A thin church steeple rose high above the roofs of a village. Everywhere, clusters of trees rippled and swayed in the wind, their red and orange and yellow leaves recalling to her the shimmer of a rug from North Africa, at home in the farmhouse, when sunlight touched it.

“Elizabeth!” a familiar voice called. Turning almost reluctantly, she saw Aaron. Behind him stood his parents, and Deirdre, astonishing to see dressed in a neat plaid skirt and blue blazer, her hair short and brushed. A few feet away, Jake Holborn lounged against the fence, his cap jammed down on his head, a wrinkled brown corduroy jacket hanging from his bony shoulders.

Aaron was staring at her uncertainly.

“It’s me, Elizabeth,” he said in a timid voice.

She had to speak to them. The older Herkimers murmured the words of consolation she had heard many times today. They were sorry, they said, that they had missed the service, but they’d had to pick up Jake in Molytown. Aaron touched her wrist briefly. “I wish she wasn’t dead,” he said.

Then Deirdre came close to her and pulled her away from the others.

“You were really lucky,” she said in a low voice. “I told you that before. This time, I mean to have had someone like your gran who wasn’t in the stew.”

“Stew?” asked Elizabeth.

“The family stew,” Deirdre said with her usual impatience, and left her side without another word.

Elizabeth took a few steps toward the Herkimers. “How is Grace?” she asked.

“Just fine,” Mrs. Herkimer said. “We’re extremely competent with animals.”

“Naturally,” muttered Deirdre.

“She’s getting used to us, I think,” said Mr. Herkimer.

“We must join the others,” Mrs. Herkimer commanded as she took Aaron by the hand.

They moved away and Elizabeth went to Jake. “I have something for you, Mr. Holborn,” she said. Jake nodded and straightened up. In one hand, he held an unlit, very stale-looking cigarette.

“I saw you just now looking down on Eggemoggin Reach,” he said. “That’s Deer Island across the bridge, where I used to live years ago before I went to Molytown. I’m really sorry about Cora Ruth. The Herks came all the way from Orono to pick me up. That was nice of them, but she did go on about her being so charitable all the way to here. I expect you know the way she is. Nobody ever needs to give her a compliment. Cora and I used to laugh about that. I see my name on that envelope so I guess it’s for me.”

Elizabeth handed it to him. He opened it, drew out a pasteboard with a drawing taped to it, and whistled softly. “I may just get this framed,” he said.

The drawing of El Sueño with Jake standing in the bow rustled where the tape had come loose. He licked one finger and pressed down on it. “I’ll fix it,” he said. “That’s a strong west wind. There’ll be good weather for a time.”

Elizabeth’s father was motioning to her. As she climbed the slope toward the grave site, the gallery owner, the minister, the Herkimers, her parents, and a few elderly women began to form a circle. The coffin was suspended by ropes over the hole. She saw the minister’s lips move, but his words were snatched away by the wind. The coffin was slowly lowered by the two men who had come with the hearse. Her father looked up at the sky, then let fall upon the coffin a handful of earth.

The grave digger continued to lean on his shovel, motionless as a statue. People stood around now, speaking in low voices. The gallery owner was making comic faces at Stephen Lindsay, who was fully awake and apparently trying to turn his head in a complete circle so he could see everything. One of the elderly women who was talking to Elizabeth’s father, an earnest look on her face, suddenly burst into laughter. “So like Cora …” Elizabeth heard her say.

Aaron came up to her.

They stared at each other, then, as though they’d silently agreed on a plan, went a short way down the slope and sat on the ground near a small gravestone with an angel poised on top of it. One of its wings had crumbled away.

“That’s your little brother?”

“Yes.”

“Do you tell him what to do?”

“I can’t tell him much of anything yet,” Elizabeth said. She wasn’t really paying attention to him.

Despite the wind, there was some warmth in the air, that late autumn warmth that makes you think of the hard, cold months to come. She stretched her legs out in front of her. The mystery of the land and sea spread out beyond the hill—it seemed like the whole earth—filled her with wordless anticipation.

Gran had said you can’t pursue happiness. It can strike in the middle of trouble, and it can disappear for no apparent reason, even when you think you ought to be happy.

“What’s in that envelope?” Aaron’s question interrupted her thoughts.

She opened it and drew out a sheaf of drawings. Every one of them was of her.

“Look!” Aaron said excitedly. “That’s you washing dishes. Here you’re reading with your hair falling all over your face! Your shoe’s off and it’s under the table. Here’s one of just your back. There’s Grace on your lap. I love Grace. She doesn’t say anything. Look at this one! You’re asleep in the chair. What were you stirring in the bowl?”

No one would ever see her exactly as Gran had seen her. A great shaft of loss went through her.

“Maybe you were making cookies for me,” Aaron said with a touch of slyness.

Elizabeth turned to look at him. She examined his face closely, his straight black eyebrows, his dark eyes, his large ears, the spiky hair. He began to smile.

“You remembered me!” he said.