BOOK FOUR 
SMALL ENDS UNDONE BOOK FOUR SMALL ENDS UNDONE(June 14–15, 1897)
J ust north of Jackman Station, about twenty or thirty miles from the Canadian border, on a rainy afternoon following a rainy morning, Clarence Nesbit was sorting accounts in the parlor and wondering when the pigs would litter when he looked out the window and saw, coming through the weather atop Heald Hill, the figure of a man with a sack under one arm and a great length of something slung over his shoulder. The solitary walker was on a footpath, well away from the main road, and Clarence thought he must be a little damp around the edges, traipsing the rain and the June grass.
“Evie,” he called to his wife. Evie had come up from the cellar just before lunch with two quarts of peach preserves and announced that she was going to bake some pies. Clarence loved peach pie about as much as anything you could carry with a table fork, and he deplored to interrupt her good work, but he called again. “Evie, come look at this.”
Evie came into the parlor, wiping flour from her arms with a grain sack towel. It was not usual for Clarence to call to her like that, and she approached the desk where he sat with curiosity and a little dread that he had bad news about what they owed.
“Who is that?” asked Clarence. The figure descending Heald Hill was almost to the point where he would disappear behind the near rise.
Evie squinted through her glasses, then squinted over them. “What’s that he’s carrying?” she asked in reply.
Then the figure did disappear, though the upper length of whatever the man was carrying continued to bob in sight above him.
“It’s not Charlie Pintner?” Clarence wondered aloud.
“Charlie never walked that pace,” said Evie.
“It is raining.”
“He never walked in the rain, either,” she said. “Nor walked when he could ride, and he’d wait a week to get one.”
“John Beamus?”
“Out here?”
“Grant Goodey?”
“Too broad.”
They could see the fellow’s head, and then his shoulders. He was a good deal closer now, and they thought they could make out what he was carrying. By the time he reached the front of the Nesbits’ farmhouse, where the footpath crossed the track to the main road, Clarence was on the front stoop watching him.
“Kind of pondy out there, isn’t it?” called Clarence. “You’ll need that oar, and a boat and a bale besides, if you follow that path much farther. Goes right down to Coburn Pond and the old landing there.” The fellow looked over his shoulder, and Clarence invited him in. “Come out of the rain, and put on a pair of dry socks, if you got them.”
The man thought about this, then walked up to the house and laid the oar beside the front steps. The fellow’s boots squelched on the hall carpet when he entered, and Evie stood at the pantry door, watching him as he pried them off.
“No, no,” said Clarence when the man looked about for a place to hang his coat. “By the parlor fire.”
“Much obliged,” said the man; those were his first words since entering the farmhouse.
“Come in, come in,” said Clarence. He led the way to the parlor and swung a chair around for the man to settle his large frame. The fellow politely hesitated, considering his damp backside, but Evie came in with an old flour sack to put beneath him.
“I put the kettle on,” she said. “You’re too early for peach pie; but I baked bread this morning, and it’s still warm.”
The man blinked and nodded. Evie frowned at her husband, but more from curiosity than outright disapproval.
“Clarence Nesbit,” said the husband. “This is my wife, Evie.”
The stranger shook Clarence’s hand and said, “Robin Oig.”
“You look like you’re going somewhere with that oar,” said Clarence.
“Fiddler’s Green,” said Robin.
Clarence straightened in his seat and did his best not to look astonished.
“Is that up by Moose River?” wondered Evie.
“No,” said Clarence with a short laugh. “I don’t think it’s up Moose River.”
“Fiddler’s Green,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the sailor, for it was plain to them he represented that breed.
“Is that where you hail from then?”
The man took a deep breath and weighed his answer before issuing the following statement. “Fiddler’s Green, ma’am, is a form of paradise, that is, heaven, that is, anyplace that won’t starve you, burn your hide, or freeze parts that you might be needing in port. Fiddler’s Green, they say, takes some wandering to find, and there’s only one way of knowing it. Throw an oar over your shoulder, take that oar with you wherever you go, and wherever you go, you go as far from the sea as the sea will allow (when you leave the sea, you’ll find the sea if you go far enough, if you take my meaning), and you roam with that oar till you come to a place where they ask to look at it, and they peer at it, and they consider it, and they ask you what it is. And then you’ve found it.”
“Goodness’ sakes!” she said. “What could that be?”
“Fiddler’s Green,” he said with conviction. He looked to Clarence.
Evie was a little wide-eyed.
Clarence nodded and waved a hand. He had heard of Fiddler’s Green—there had been a song that someone sang, years before—but he had never met anyone who believed such a place existed, and certainly not anyone who was looking for it with an oar over his shoulder. “You’re heading north then,” said Clarence.
Robin Oig nodded. The guest had come from farm stock himself, they soon discovered, and he could talk great sense on the subject, so that they began to wonder, before he thanked them for tea and a sandwich and said he must be moving on, if they had heard him right after all.
But in the hall, once he’d got his boots on again (wincing a little as his dry socks squelched against the wet leather) and shouldered into his coat and lifted his sack, Mr. Oig looked out into the rain and looked relieved to see the oar leaning against the house. “I hope it was all right to leave it out there,” he said.
“An oar means to get wet,” said Clarence.
“It’ll get wet today,” said Evie. “I wish we could save it all up for August when it gets droughty.”
“Don’t you have a well?” asked Robin Oig.
“Well,” said Clarence, “we do. But it doesn’t last the summer.” He pointed down past the eastern corner of the house.
“You want to dig over that way,” said the sailor. He pointed in the other direction. “About six or eight yards this side of that oak tree.”
“How do you know that?” asked Clarence.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “It just sort of came to me. My oar has been leaning toward water these days.”
Clarence and Evie exchanged glances.
The sailor thanked the Nesbits again, took up his haversack and his great long oar, and went out into the rain. He seemed to study the weather for a moment, squinting at the dark sky and the wet. He waved when he was up the track some yards, heading for the main road.
“Goodness’ sakes!” said Evie.
“You never know, do you?” said Clarence.
“I certainly didn’t when I got up this morning. This side of the oak tree!”
“What do you think?” said Clarence. He leaned out into the rain and looked west. “Should I try it?”
“What, dig a hole over by the oak tree?”
“He seemed pretty sure.”
“Yes, his oar leans toward water.”
“I never did hear of a sailor who could dowse,” said Clarence.
“I never did hear such nonsense, but I suppose you won’t sleep soundly till you’ve dug up those oak roots and made an ugly hole in the yard.”
Clarence laughed. She knew him too well. “I don’t suppose I will,” he admitted. “It was you who brought it up.”
Evie shook her head, made a noise, and went into the parlor to clean up after their unexpected guest. Clarence looked after the man, but he was gone; then he leaned out into the rain again and looked over at the oak tree.
“Clarence?”
“Yes.”
“Clarence?”
“What is it?”
“Since when have you a gold watch?”
“Since when have you lost your mind?” he replied with a laugh.
“I mean it!”
“A gold watch.” Clarence shut the front door and wandered into the parlor. His wife held something golden in the palm of her hand.
“It has your initials,” she said.
“What?”
“C. N. Look!”
Clarence peered over her outstretched hand, then gingerly lifted the gold watch from her palm.
“It sure does appear, doesn’t it,” he said.
“Wasn’t his name Robin?”
“Where did you find it?”
“On the mantel, big as life.”
Clarence held it to his ear. “It ticks nicely.”
“Do you suppose he left it?”
“Who else?”
“But did he mean to? Why would he leave a gold watch?”
Clarence held the timepiece to his ear again and shook his head. “I couldn’t say. I’d better harness up the rig and go after him.”
“In this weather?”
“What else?”
“I’ll get your slicks. Your boots are in the pantry closet.”
Evie was a little worried when Clarence didn’t show before evening. She had liked their unexpected guest, though she thought him odd, but as the hours passed she began to wonder if odd wasn’t somehow sinister. Several times she thought she heard something and went to the door, and finally she tried to keep her mind occupied and her hands busy by baking that peach pie.
Clarence came in when she wasn’t looking or listening for him, and her heart jumped.
“Goodness’ sakes, Clarence!” she shouted from the kitchen. “Where have you been?”
“Everywhere and all about,” he called from the hall.
She met him in the pantry and didn’t know whether to “get after him” or give him a kiss. “Did you find him?”
Clarence looked the smallest bit distressed. He shook his head and produced the gold watch from his pocket. She could hear it tick against the small noises of their house and the sound of rain upon the windows. “He wasn’t so long ahead of me, I didn’t think, but he wasn’t on the road to Dennistown. I went back the other way and talked to some of the fellows down the mill. They got up a little search party and went out in all directions, but not a bit of him.”
“Where did he get to?” she wondered.
“I couldn’t say. It’s troublesome to lose a fellow that size. Earl Capp and Beanie McKeevy even went to the swamp over to Moose River.”
“And nothing.”
“Nothing.” Clarence shook his head. He held the watch to his ear.
“What’ll you do with that?”
“Put it back on the mantel, I guess, and keep it wound against the day he comes back for it.”
“Odd, it having your initials.”
“It is odd. It gives me a queer feeling carrying it.” She nodded, but he didn’t think she understood. “It is odd,” he said again. He shook his head and went into the parlor, dripping. He gave a couple of turns to the stem of the watch and set it back on the mantel. He checked his back end, and when he decided that he wasn’t too wet, he settled himself onto the settee. “Fiddler’s Green,” said Clarence to himself. “I hope he finds it.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll have some pie when it comes out of the oven.”
Mr. Christopher Eagleton had not intended to walk Spruce Street on his way to the residences of his two long-standing friends Mr. Matthew Ephram and Mr. Joseph Thump, but his feet had (seemingly of their own will) veered in the direction of Mister Walton’s home and the scene of that recent event so famous in the annals of the Grand Society. Eagleton was in fact thinking about the day of the wedding and the ceremony itself, the letter that he had received that morning like a dowsing rod pulling him toward the habitation of its writer.
Eagleton was tall, and his legs were long; he walked at an admirable pace, his hands clasped behind him, his elbows out, his head erect. He walked with such a brisk step that whenever something warranted more leisurely attention, he usually found that he had walked past the object of his interest and must back up, as it were, to look at it more closely, and so it was that morning when he passed a thoughtful-looking, darkly mustached fellow in an elegant gray suit. The man stood with his back to the street, perusing a letter, which he held out nearly at arm’s length.
It was the distance between the paper and the man’s nose that first struck Eagleton as familiar; countless times he had seen Ephram reading the Eastern Argus at that exact remove. The gray suit and the handsome gray hat, worn at the most proper angle, also put Eagleton in mind of his friend, and the dark mustaches finished the resemblance so uncannily that Eagleton turned his head, keeping to his excellent velocity, as he passed this fellow and forthwith ran into something broad and solid.
“Good heavens!”
“I do beg your pardon!”
“Hmmm?”
“Gentlemen!”
“How careless of me!”
“Are you injured?”
“Hmmm?”
“Let me help you up!”
“Eagleton!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Thump!”
“Hmmm?”
“Ephram! Thump!”
“How extraordinary!”
“Once again our paths coincide with uncommon exactness!”
“My word! I couldn’t have said it better!”
“Oh, I’m sure you could!”
“Not at all!”
“Good heavens, Thump! Let me help you up!”
“Oh, yes! My letter. No. This is addressed to you, Eagleton.”
“Thank you, Thump. I must have dropped it.”
“I couldn’t help but see that it was from our chairman himself.”
“It is indeed,” said Eagleton. Truthfully, he felt the smallest bit guilty in having received a letter from Mister Walton, as if that honor might have been better bestowed upon one of the other charter members. “I believe it was intended for all of us, certainly,” he added.
“I was going to say the same about the letter he sent to me,” admitted Ephram, who had been feeling a mix of emotions quite similar to those of Eagleton.
They engaged in this dialogue, all the while helping Thump to his feet and dusting him off, and did not observe the man who walked toward them on Spruce Street with two horses in tow.
“I have had similar communication from Mister Walton,” Thump was saying, “similarly communicating to us all.”
“How very communicative of him!” declared Eagleton.
“A more thoughtful and gracious chairman could not be had!” intoned Ephram.
“That’s very good, Ephram.”
“Thank you, Eagleton.”
“They had extraordinary weather on their voyage.”
“Did they?”
“Not unlike what we were experiencing, in fact.”
“Extraordinary!”
Eagleton nodded. “Three very sunny days in a row.”
“Mister Walton was quite precise as to the moment of their arrival,” said Ephram. He referred to his letter, once he had separated it from Eagleton’s. “And also the times of several salient events as they sailed.”
“It will not surprise you to hear me say that it doesn’t surprise me.”
“It won’t surprise you, then, that it doesn’t.”
“Not at all.”
Thump made a sound that seemed to indicate some penetrating thought. It was a slight variation from his typical “hmmm,” and Ephram and Eagleton were interested in its motive. Thump appeared to be considering his beard, and his fellow Moosepathians also peered into that remarkable brush, thinking that he had perhaps discovered something unusual there, when he looked up and said in his deep tones, “I, too, am not surprised. But I think I speak for us all when I say that a lack of astonishment in no way indicates that his perpetually gracious behavior is in any way or manner taken for granted.”
“Bravo, Thump!”
“Ever in the fore!”
“It doesn’t surprise me!”
“Not at all!”
By this critical juncture in their colloquy they had continued not to observe the man with the two horses, though he stood on the street but a few paces away from their earnest and enthusiastic group.
“The tides in Halifax are quite extreme,” said Thump. “According to our chairman.”
As one, and without any apparent destination in mind, the gentlemen of the club advanced west on Spruce Street, and the man with the two horses fell in just behind them. To the people they met, this fourth man appeared a member of their little group, as much for the pleasure he manifestly took in their company as for his physical proximity. When the party slowed before the Walton home on Spruce Street, the larger horse in the fourth man’s keeping nudged Thump’s shoulder with her muzzle.
“I beg your pardon,” said Thump.
“I’m sure it was nothing,” said Eagleton.
The fishmonger came down the street, his own lazy mare plodding the hard-packed way in half a doze. The horses greeted one another with small, friendly sounds and the monger touched his hat to the man holding the reins of the dark mare and the gelding. The three well-dressed gentlemen in top hats were very taken with the Federal style brick house behind the wrought-iron gate and up the walk. The fishmonger knew that no one had been at home there the last few days, and he rattled his little dray past and continued down the street.
He was a little way down a knoll in the street when he heard a voice come up from behind him.
“Mr. Moss!”
And another: “Good heavens!”
And a third: “Hmmm?”
Dear Sundry,
The Manitoba made Halifax this morning, and Phileda and I wasted no time in reporting to the government offices for news of recent English steamers in hopes of locating Victor. No word of him has reached this city, however, though the Gawain is expected from Portsmouth (England) in the next day or so, and Phileda says with great confidence that “this is the boat.” I think I will be more surprised than she if it isn’t.
Halifax is a wonderful place filled with a gracious and warmhearted people. It has, perhaps, a touch more of the Old World about it than our own Portland and so evokes a little mystery for an American. Phileda and I walk the wharves, waiting for Victor’s ship or word of him, listening to the jumble of languages and watching the variation of country and continent represented in the faces of sailors and merchants, and think ourselves in a good book. You will excuse my blush if I admit that it is a pretty good chapter while Phileda is on my arm.
Though the short voyage from home to here was necessarily dotted with thoughts of my nephew and who he must be and how he might fit into our lives, the trip was not without moments when all matters except those between Phileda and myself were forgotten. We have discovered how we can soak up one another’s worries without really suffering ourselves from what we have taken on. Thus we shoulder one another’s infirmities and troubles without half knowing it. An arch is stronger by far than a free-standing column. (And an old romantic who has spent several days with his romance waxes more poetic by far than he ought to.)
I hope you are not enjoying your independence from my company too much. Phileda and I are both convinced that your part in Victor’s adaptation to our home and ways will be invaluable, as is your continued friendship.
Toby Walton
P.S. Please stay well and away from that “keg” business, whatever it was about. I have had a troubled mind about it.
Toby
“Well, God rest the man,” said Mabel. “He did ask to be remembered to you.”
Sundry had yet to take a seat at the kitchen table of the Faithful Mermaid. Standing at the counter with his arms folded before him, he had said very little since hearing that Burne Ring had died in the night. Sundry had ridden into Portland that morning, paid a visit (quite by chance) with the members of the club, and attended to several duties at the Walton home before walking to the Faithful Mermaid, his riding side being a little sore after some days of unaccustomed miles in the saddle. He hadn’t really known the man and hadn’t really liked him for some of the time that he had known him, but he was sad to hear that Burne Ring had passed away.
Melanie sat at the table with Tim, contemplating lunch. She had hardly left her father’s side since they returned to Portland five days ago. Burne had taken sick again as they trained into Portland, and Mr. Flyce had carried the man to a carriage and paid the driver with the money Mr. Moss had given them. Mrs. Spark had hugged Melanie and cried when the little girl appeared at the back door with her dress on backward and Tim’s old brogues on her feet. Thaddeus himself had looked uncertain about his emotions, blinking and nodding and saying, “Well, now, it’s best you’re back, isn’t it. No doubt about it. You can’t make room for someone without feeling something’s missing when they’re gone. No, it’s best you’re back, and no doubt.”
When Burne Ring was upstairs again, looking frail and deathlike, Thaddeus stood by the bed for some time with Melanie, one large hand over her shoulders. When Mabel came in with a cloth and a bowl of cool water and a bottle of small beer, saying she would stay with the little girl, the burly taverner leaned down and kissed Melanie on the top of the head before he left the room.
“You’re awfully good to us, Mrs. Spark,” said Melanie.
“Hush, now,” said the woman, who was still at the high end of her feelings. “It’s what family does,” she had said with her chin up.
For the first time in her short life Melanie Ring had a home and a family and people who would take care of her, yet, as she sat there in the kitchen of the Faithful Mermaid on the morning of Mr. Moss’s return, the only family she had ever known was gone. She had never been left alone in the sickroom; Mr. and Mrs. Spark and Davey and the girls all had taken their turns sitting with her. Bobby was too young for such a duty, and Tim—younger still—stood at the periphery of Melanie’s consciousness during those days, looking strange and confused.
Mr. and Mrs. Spark both had been there when Burne Ring’s too-short candle had blown out. Melanie rose from her chair and leaned over her father, listening, and when Thaddeus suspected and then knew that Burne had died, he took the little girl’s hand. Mrs. Spark breathed as if something heavy were on her chest, but no one cried, just then. There was something that Melanie almost said to them, but she held it back.
Standing in the kitchen that morning, Sundry Moss knew none of these details, but he could imagine most of them. “Horace and Maven aren’t in the tavern, are they?” he asked Davey Spark when the taverner’s son came into the kitchen with some empty mugs.
“Haven’t seen them,” said Davey.
“When you do,” said Sundry, “would you tell Maven that his horse is over on Spruce Street?”
This intelligence merited an explanation, which explanation merited the whole tale of Dutten Pond as Sundry had lived it. The Sparks came in and out (mostly in) and caught what they could of the narrative in the course of their duties, and Mrs. Spark let a pie burn. They might have been an entire clan of Flyces for their honest amazement. Tim let out several exclamations, one or two of which his mother would have objected to under the spell of less intense curiosity.
“I could hardly credit it when Melanie told us,” said Mabel.
“Maven didn’t say a word,” said Thaddeus.
“I’m not sure as he quite took it in,” said Sundry.
“Ben Gun should hear it!” said Thaddeus.
Sundry almost laughed. He had yet to feel wary about the old penny dreadful writer. Mabel laid an overflowing plate on the table and ordered him to sit and eat. Thaddeus heard a call from the tavern, and he and Davey went out to tend the custom. The Spark girls were herded back to their chores, and Mabel turned her back on the table to see to tomorrow’s stew.
Timothy had fallen to, but Melanie had yet to address her lunch. She was in one of Annabelle’s old dresses, her lengthening hair in a blue bow. Sundry tried to see Mailon in the little girl’s face and realized that she was returning his gaze.
“I don’t think he had a very happy life,” she said quietly. The thought was meant for his ears only, and if anyone else did hear, he or she did not respond.
Sundry held his gaze, a fork poised above his plate for some moments before he thought to set it down. “I think,” he said, and he thought a little more before saying, “I think that everything he was ever happy about was rolled up and folded away in you.” He picked up his fork again and considered his plate. He was still thinking.
Tim glanced from Sundry to Melanie and back again before his mother gave him a look signifying that he should tend to his own business. Her own ears were probably not shut, however.
“Some people do have trouble being happy, it seems,” said Sundry, almost as if he were thinking out loud. “The rest of us had better be thankful. And it seems to me that you owe it to your father to be just as happy as you can.” He punctuated this opinion with a squinted eye and a shake of his fork.
Sitting in the kitchen of the Faithful Mermaid with the Spark family about her and with the sturdy presence of Mr. Moss before her, Melanie Ring was not unhappy and perhaps had felt guilty for it. Something in Mr. Moss’s injunction lifted the burden of self-censure from her small shoulders, and the lightening of that weight prompted a lightening in her expression. She would say to someone else, years later and in troubled circumstance, “We owe it to one another to be happy when we can.”
Or, as Mister Walton would once append to a similar thought, “Why else face trouble?”
Sundry himself felt a little lighter, and for some reason (and for the first time) he was able to recall dancing with Priscilla Morningside without also knowing a pang of overriding sadness.
“Your friends from the Moosepath League were by the other day,” said Mabel, and she began to tell of Messrs. Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump’s latest visit.
Sundry listened happily as he turned his attention to his meal.
“Do you want to go over to the Oaks?” asked Timothy. He and Melanie were out in front of the Faithful Mermaid, kicking a can back and forth on the sidewalk and stepping aside when anyone came walking by.
Melanie looked interested but uncertain. She squinted up at the third floor of the old tavern and located the window of the room where her father had died. He wasn’t there anymore—or his body wasn’t; someone had come and taken it away. There was to be a funeral on Wednesday, and several people, including Mr. Moss and the Sparks, had pitched in for the expenses. Before the arrangements were finalized, the Moosepath League would help defray costs, and even Burne Ring’s old employer and master mason would show up with flowers for the hearse and a ten-dollar bill for the deceased man’s only surviving child.
Melanie didn’t know if she should be out in the street playing with Timothy. Perhaps she should be in her own room, alone and contemplating what it all meant. Then again, she recalled what Mr. Moss had said.
Timothy’s mom came out, and it was strange to see the woman at the front of the tavern, standing on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips. “Melanie Ring!” she said. “You remember how you’re dressed and how you’re expected to act.” She shook a finger, but there was nothing angry or even stern about her manner. Mabel Spark was simply adamant in her sense of propriety. “You can’t climb trees in a dress. And no clambering around on wharves and roofs.”
“Mom!” said Tim.
“Timothy Spark!” she returned, but only followed this declaration of her youngest child’s name with a silent expression of precise warning. “Melanie?”
“Yes, Mrs. Spark,” said the little girl.
Mabel heaved a large sigh. Before she went back inside, she took the little girl’s face in her round, warm hands and kissed her on the forehead. Timothy looked more upset than Melanie did. He kicked the can against the wall of the tavern with a resounding clatter.
“You can go if you want,” said Melanie. She looked resigned and shrugged philosophically.
“You want to see a secret?” he asked, looking around, as if desperate and nearby enemies might be keening their ears.
She nodded, and he made a gesture to indicate that she should follow him. She really did try to be a little more ladylike and not run so fast, but it was hard to fight the old habit of dodging pedestrians and skipping through the traffic on the streets. When she leaped over a sleeping dog, she glanced back to be sure that she wasn’t being watched, then slowed her pace and made Timothy slow down so that she could keep up with him.
When they came to the shack behind the old molding mill at the end of Pleasant Street, she stared up after her friend as he scrambled onto the roof. “I’m not supposed to go up there,” she said when he looked back at her.
Timothy signaled that she should wait for him, and she backed away from the building so that she could see him skittering the rooftops and leaping the tiny places between the tightly packed buildings of the working district. She lost sight of him after a moment and waited, feeling conspicuous by herself and in her girl’s clothes.
She heard him before she saw him. She had taken to watching a crew that was building a brick wall across the way and was turned in the other direction when his unmistakable hop and jump came down the slope of the molding mill roof and banged on the tar paper shed. Melanie was astonished when she saw what he was carrying. Timothy held the boys’ shirt and trousers, the socks and beaten brogues out to her, smiling as if he had counted coup against their bravest foe. He was out of breath.
She did not take them at first. She only stared at them and held her hands behind her back as if they might sting her. It was only when the happiness began to fade from Tim’s face that she reached out and took the clothes.
“You can change into them in that old cellar hole beneath the soda factory,” he said, but not quite as triumphantly as he might have suggested it a moment before.
She nodded. Perhaps the only thing more fun than running the roofs and wharves as a boy was running the roof and wharves as a girl in boys’ clothes. Her face lit as doubt left her.
“I’ll stand guard for you,” he said, and he blushed a little.
Half an hour later they were racing above Danforth Street, climbing one of the taller roofs for one of their favorite views of the harbor, when she heard it again, though the name spoken by that voice was not entirely clear. Melanie stopped, and Tim’s pace was arrested by the sound of her faltering steps. He turned around just above her on the roof and said, “What is it?”
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“The whistle?” he said. There had been a toot from the harbor, but that had been some time and a roof or two ago.
She shook her head.
“What was it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, though in fact, at that very moment, she did. She knew that he couldn’t have heard it and that it would have been wrong side to if he had. She shook her head again and laughed.
“We’ll have to get you a hat,” he said. “When your hair gets longer.”
“Race you!” she shouted, and she laughed and she sped ahead of him up the roof as if there were clouds on her feet, and for the first time ever, she beat him to the top.
She didn’t know where the voice had come from, but she did know to whom it belonged. It might have come from the air above or the street below. It might have come from inside her. All this would have seemed contradictory, or even paradoxical, if a six-year-old street waif, an orphan, and an only child with a brother and a family and a home could have understood such a thing.
It wasn’t her poor dead mother, and it wasn’t her father calling from his deathbed. It wasn’t anyone else. Someday it might call out her real name, but whatever it said and however often it spoke, she would never have to look over her shoulder again.
It was a beautiful June day. The sadness caught up with her a little when she and Tim sat at the top of the roof and they began to count sails in the harbor. He seemed to know it and did most of the counting, and when he was done, he suggested nothing else but sat with her in the sun and the breeze. He said nothing and did not look at her when tears came down her cheeks.
Mr. Spark had always said that Tim was born with philosophy.