The more Richard Wooten drinks, the more he rambles. “There’s treasure in that Mystery Tunnel, by God, there is. One of these days, I swear, I’ll get my hands on it.”
Al and I are fascinated by the legend of Mystery Tunnel. According to local lore a two-hundred-foot tunnel was carved out of rock near Bird Point by early settlers as a place to hide from passing pirates and Abenaki Indians.
“I came this close. This close,” Richard says. His voice softens, and I have to lean close to the banister to hear. “Pitch black. Not a star in the sky. I sneak down there with a lantern. I’m digging for who knows how long, hours, it’s gotta be.”
“How many times have you told this story, a hundred?” someone scoffs.
Richard ignores him. “And then I see it: the glint of treasure.”
“You do not.”
“I do, with my own eyes! And then . . .”
The men grumble and laugh. “Aw, c’mon!” “Now he’s just makin’ it up.”
“Spit it out, Richard,” Papa says.
“It disappears. Like—that.” I hear the snap of his fingers. “Just as I was reaching for it. It was there and then it was gone.”
“Rough luck,” one of them shouts. “To treasure!”
“To treasure!”
The next evening Al and I slip out of the house with a candle nub and make our way down to Bird Point. The lip of the tunnel is dark and mysterious; our flickering candle keeps sputtering out. It’s eerily silent as we creep along. About fifty feet in, fallen rocks block the path. I feel a strange relief—we probably would’ve dared ourselves to continue. Would we have found the buried treasure? Or would we have disappeared in the depths of the tunnel, never to be found?
Al and I take our adventures where we can find them. Several weeks later he wakes me up in the middle of the night, a finger to his lips, and whispers, “Follow me.” I pull on a housedress over my nightgown and my old leather shoes over my socks and leave the snug cocoon of my bed. As soon as we’re outside I see a glowing orange ball several hundred yards out in the harbor, its reflection splashed across the water. Then I realize what it is: a ship on fire.
“Been burning for hours,” Al says. “A lime coaster. Headed to Thomaston, no doubt.”
“Should we wake Papa?”
“Nah.”
“Maybe he could help.”
“A dory came ashore with a group of men a while ago. Nothing anybody can do now.”
For more than an hour we sit in the grass. The freighter blazes in the dark, its destruction a thing of beauty. I gaze at Al, his face illuminated in the glow. I think about his favorite book, Treasure Island, about a boy who runs away to sea in search of buried treasure. Mrs. Crowley, seeing how often Al thumbed through the pages of the copy on her shelf, gave it to him when school let out for the summer. “For our seafaring Alvaro,” she wrote on the inside cover in her neat handwriting. “May you embark on many adventures.”
Months later, the ribs of that lime coaster are visible when the tide is low. Papa and Al row out to the wreck and strip the hull of its oak planking, and after stacking and weighting them to make them straight, they use them to rebuild the icehouse floor.
EVERY WEEKDAY AL and I walk together to the Wing School Number 4 in Cushing, a mile and a half away. With my unsteady gait it takes a long time to get there. I try to focus on my steps, but I tumble so often that my knees and elbows are constantly bruised and scraped, despite the cotton padding. The sides of my feet are tough and callused.
Al complains the whole way. “Jeez, the cows are faster than you. I could’ve been there and back by now.”
“Go ahead, then,” I tell him, but he never does.
It helps if I swing my body forward, using my arms for balance, though even that doesn’t always work. When I fall, Al sighs and says, “Come on, now we’re really going to be late.” But when he pulls me up, he puts all his weight into it.
Sometimes we walk with two neighbor girls, Anne and Mary Connors, but only when their mother insists on it. They cluck their tongues and kick at sticks when I trip and fall behind. “Oh Lord, again?” Mary mutters, and the two of them whisper together so Al and I can’t hear.
At school I wait until the cloakroom is empty before taking off my knee pads and armbands and stashing them in my lunch pail. The other kids can be mean. Leslie Brown trips me as I walk up the aisle to get a book, and I crash into Gertrude Gibbons’s desk. “Watch it, clumsy,” Gertrude says under her breath.
There are things I could say. Few of us at the Wing School Number 4 have picture-perfect lives. Gertrude Gibbons’s mother ran off to Portland with a man who worked at the paper mill in Augusta, and never looked back. Leslie’s stepfather beats him with a belt. The Connors girls have no father; he didn’t go away, he was never here. It’s a small town, and we know more about one another than any of us might wish.
One afternoon Al and I are sitting outdoors with our lunch pails under the shade of an elm in the schoolyard when Leslie and another boy begin to circle and taunt. “What’s wrong with you? You’re not normal, you know that?”
The tips of Al’s ears redden, but he stays quiet. He’s small and slight, no match for these rough boys with chaw in their cheeks. I don’t want him to defend me anyway. I’m more than a year older than he is.
A girl in my grade, Sadie Hamm, strolls over. She’s a thin, tough girl, as solid as a sunflower stalk, brown eyed, round faced, with a nimbus of curly sunflower petal hair. Putting her hands on her hips, she juts her chin out at the boys. “That’s enough.”
“Sadie Bacon,” Leslie says with a sneer. “That’s your name, right?”
“I don’t think you want to play the name game with me, Leslie Brown.” Turning to Al and me, Sadie says, “Okay if I join you?”
Al doesn’t look too happy about it, but I pat the grass.
Sadie shares her sandwich with me, meatloaf sliced thin on bread with butter. She tells us that she lives with her two older sisters in an apartment above the drugstore, where one sister works behind the counter. She doesn’t mention her parents, and I don’t ask.
“Mind if I sit with you tomorrow?” she asks.
Al cuts his eyes at me. I ignore him. “Sure you can,” I say.
For so long Al has been my only companion. He is as familiar to me as the walls of the kitchen or the path to the barn. It would be nice, I think, to have a friend.