I have to remind myself that once I saw this man as kind and just and strong.
When my brothers and their wives arrive at the house, we go through the familiar motions of mourning, serving cake and tea and slicing ham, accepting condolences, singing hymns. The body in the Shell Room, the burial in the family plot. As I stand at Papa’s grave I think of how he was at the end, miserable in his wheelchair in the front parlor, clutching a chunk of anthracite in his fist and gazing out through the window toward the sea. I don’t know what he was longing for, but I can guess. His robust youth. His ability to stand and walk. His family of origin in the land of his birth, to which he never returned. A clear sense of where he belonged, and to whom, and why. Did he regret the calculations and miscalculations he made that opened up the world to him and eventually narrowed it to this point of land?
Though I lived with this man for my entire life, I never really knew him. He was like a frozen bay himself, I think—an icy crust, layers deep, above roiling water.
AFTER ALL THE mourners leave, I am struck by the vast emptiness of this house, stretching up three floors to the dormers. All these unused rooms. Sam and Fred have started their own family farms and gone into business together, manufacturing lumber and hay. Now it’s just Al and me—and the wheelchair, taking up space in the middle of the Shell Room.
“It’s yours if you want it,” Al says. “Still in pretty good shape.”
I look at the nasty contraption, with its sagging stained seat and rusted wheels. “I hate that chair. I never want to see it again.”
His eyes widen. I guess it’s the first time I’ve said that aloud. He stands there for a moment, sucking on his pipe. Then he goes over to the woodstove, knocks the ashes out of his pipe, and says, “All right. Let’s get rid of it, then.”
I watch as Al drags the wheelchair out the front door and down the steps, where it teeters to its side and crashes over. He disappears into the barn and comes back a few minutes later with Tessie hitched to the small wagon. Pulling on her harness, he leads her close to the wheelchair and heaves it into the wagon, then doffs his hat to me with a smile and leads the horse and wagon down to the cove.
About half an hour later I see Al through the window, trudging back up the field with Tessie. The wagon is empty.
“What’d you do with it?” I ask when he comes through the kitchen door.
He sits in his chair, takes off his cap, sets it on the bench in front of him. Fiddles inside his jacket, pulls out his old brown pipe and a pouch of tobacco. Finds a matchbook in his trouser pocket. Takes a pinch of tobacco, packs it into the pipe, tamps it down with his finger. Adds more tobacco, tamps it down again. Sticks it in his mouth and lights it, cupping a hand around it to protect the flame. Shakes out the match. Sits there inhaling the smoke and blowing it out.
I know better than to rush him. Anyway, we have all the time in the world.
“You know the boulder by the Mystery Tunnel? That drop-off below?” he says after a while.
I nod.
He sucks on the pipe. Takes it out of his mouth and blows a stream of smoke. “I rolled that wheelchair up to the top of the rock and dumped it over.”
“Gone,” I say. “Good riddance.”
“Good riddance,” he says.
For the rest of my life I will think of that wheelchair lying smashed and rusting in the salty water near Mystery Tunnel, a place that once opened me to a world of magic, of possibility, but that over the years has come to mean something else. A place where Walton spun his false promises. A path strewn with anticipation that ends at a pile of rocks. A repository for my broken dreams, the treasure vanishing as soon as I reach for it.
The wheelchair, fool’s gold, in the depths below.
SADIE IS STANDING in my kitchen, dropping off a chicken dish, when she says, “Are the rumors true? I hear Al’s got his eye on that new teacher at the Wing School.”
My skin prickles. “What are you talking about?”
“Angie Treworgy, I think her name is. She’s boarding with Gertrude Gibbons.”
Boarding with . . . Gertrude Gibbons? “I haven’t heard a thing about it.”
“He would make some lucky girl a wonderful husband, don’t you think?”
“No, I do not think,” I say stiffly.
Al has started going out three or four nights a week, usually to join the card game at Fales. He knows I don’t like being left alone at night, but still he goes. On Saturdays he often drives to Thomaston, where the stores and bars stay open until nine. Or at least that’s what he tells me. Now I wonder if he’s going instead to Gertrude Gibbons’s.
I don’t mention what I’ve heard about the teacher, but for several days I give Al the silent treatment. He doesn’t ask why.
I hear no further news of any woman until a few weeks later, when Al mentions casually that he’s going to help out a man who lives with his daughter down near Hathorn Point. “They could use some firewood,” he says. “I told him I’d cut some logs for them later in the week.”
“How old’s the daughter?” I ask.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I just wonder.”
He gives me a look and scratches his head. “Old enough that it’s rude to ask her age.”
“As old as you are?”
He shifts his feet. “Well, no.”
“Is she even in her forties?”
“I’d say not.”
“Married?”
Sighing heavily, he says, “Divorced, I believe.”
“I see.” A few days later, I ask Sadie, “So who’s that divorcée down on Hathorn Point?”
“You mean Estelle Bartlett?”
I shrug.
“Lives with her father?”
“That’s the one.”
Sadie leans close. “Word is she’s been married three times, each time to someone older and wealthier. Who knows, it could be idle gossip. But she does appear to be well-off. Bought her father a brand-new Pontiac. Why do you ask?”
“Al’s doing some odd jobs for her father.”
Sadie’s eyes shine. “She’s a pretty lady. Wavy brown hair. That devil, your brother! Good for him.”
Al keeps to his routine. He does his chores in the house, in the barn. But more and more these days he comes and goes as he pleases.
It’s a sunny Fourth of July, the day of the annual clambake down at the shore near Little Island. My sister-in-law Mary’s in charge—she pickled carrots and made wild rhubarb pies; Lora fried chicken and made yeast rolls. They’ve gathered blankets and bonnets and cutlery and dishes and piled them into baskets to be transported to the beach. My only task this year is drop biscuits, which I could make in my sleep. I start on them early in the morning. By the time people start showing up, just before noon, five dozen biscuits are cooling on racks in the pantry. I’ve had time to change my apron, which I can never help soiling (a dousing of flour, a smear of lard), and I’m sitting in the kitchen when they arrive.
“You look well, my dear!” Lora says.