Lucy freed her hair from Emma’s hand and stood. “What about Da? He’ll be back before we get it in the barrels.”
“I’ll handle that,” Emma said, though she had no way of predicting when Roland might return. The boat he had left on was heading for the Grand Banks, but only after it dropped Roland and a couple others in Eastport, Maine. There, they planned to night fish for sardines and herring. More lucratively, they would provide shore watch for the speedboats running whiskey in from the mother ships anchored at the twelve-mile line, just beyond the Coast Guard’s jurisdiction. Roland might be gone as many as ten weeks, or as few as six. He would come back on a different boat—they wouldn’t know he was coming until he walked in the door. “We’ll take the long view,” Emma said. She pulled Lucy into an awkward hug, the girl’s hip against her ear. “It’ll be okay.”
“Maybe,” Lucy said, standing stiffly in Emma’s embrace. Her hip had grown a little curve, which Emma felt against her ear. How, Emma thought, had she not noticed this? “If Josiah Story ever comes.”
“He’ll come,” Emma said again, though she wasn’t sure at all.
But he did come, the next day, in a butter yellow car half the length of the Murphy house, with a wad of cash he slipped into Emma’s hand. He talked business: Where would Emma buy the press and how many barrels were needed, and didn’t the boys want the jobs he’d offered? But when it was time to go he reached into his pocket again and, taking Emma’s hand as if to shake it, slipped into her palm a silver chain, one of a dozen or more—they all looked the same to him—that Susannah Story kept in a little box she almost never bothered to open. Emma didn’t know where the necklace came from. She felt it shiver coolly against her palm, felt her palm break instantaneously into sweat. She was too surprised to refuse. Even if she hadn’t been, the children were watching. All she could think to do as he drove off was wave, and call, “Thank you!” and wave some more, a stilted wave, her hand fisted around the necklace as it wiggled. But the other one was full of money, so she didn’t have a choice.
Three
In 1915, tired of buying and selling railroads in the Middle West and West, Caleb Stanton stood upon a parcel of land overlooking the Essex River and told the brokers and lawyers and architects gathered around, “To live here would be to live in a painting.” He smiled. His throat ached. He was dismayed not by the land—the land was perfect—but by himself. He still had ideas about hunting lions in Africa, or sailing to the Galapagos. He could do those things now—he hadn’t remarried, his younger son was at Harvard, his older one quietly taking over his own railroad company, Susannah sixteen and willing to travel with him anywhere—yet here he was, looking at the painting that was to become his life. He understood then that he was like his father: his hands were small, he couldn’t grow a full beard, he was too practical to be truly reckless, and he preferred staying over going. His father had stayed in Maine, and now Caleb would stay in Gloucester. His adventure would be to purchase a rock ledge—a most immovable thing—and blow it to pieces.
The place, for the most part, had brought him pleasure. The view was a gentle one: the far dunes rising to form the mouth of the Essex River, the double hump of Hog Island’s furry ridge, the beached dories of the clam diggers out at the flats, the salt marsh unfurling like a rust-colored carpet. The estate itself was laid out in the English style, with a slight, but only slight, asymmetry. There was a rose garden, a carriage house, a gardener’s shack, a crescent-shaped swimming pool, and a bathhouse. There was Caleb’s house, and the house he built for Susannah. There were a dozen old pine trees he had not cut down, and lawns running down to the rocks. It was easy to look out at his gracious bay and manicured land and see the logic of it all. It was easy to feel at peace.
And at night, when the logic was swallowed, when the gravel paths grew spectral and the pines rose up like a mountain range, a different pleasure worked at him. The barks of harbor seals sounded like feral dogs roaming the plain. A cat in heat became a moaning puma. Coyotes howled themselves into wolves, raccoons clawed themselves into boars as they ransacked the gardener’s compost heap. The noises sent delicious tremors into Caleb’s limbs—the wildness he’d longed for was here! Over time, he started taking long naps during the day so that at night he could be transported.
This was how, one night in the spring of 1927, he came to hear the loping of large bodies and think: LIONS!!!