Among the family, it had never needed to be spoken. The older ones must have known the story, and the younger ones must have wondered, once they were old enough to notice what other people noticed. Lucy had allowed herself to wonder only in the briefest, most hidden of ways—her eyes flashing open in the dark, a line between lines in her primer, a particular tree branching into two in a particular way. Then it was gone—the beginning, the question of the beginning, the beginning of the question. She stuffed it away like her brothers would a dirty photograph.
It seemed unnecessary. It seemed a betrayal. Then she turned nine and Roland bumped into her one night, in passing. The force knocked her to the opposite wall. He walked on. She thought it was a mistake; Roland touched none of his children, not even on the head or hands, as if to preclude some idea—his own? the neighbors’?—that he must beat them. But the next evening, passing her in the same doorway, he touched her arm, the upper part where she was soft: with one finger he drew a straight line down, quick but hard enough to leave a mark. Since then, every so often, he poked or pushed her in this way: without warning, and on an almost-but-not-quite-private part of her, and so silently and inscrutably, Lucy wondered if she had dreamed it. She felt pain, but only briefly. The next day, Roland would smile at her. He had a sudden, toothy smile not a single one of them could resist, the kind of smile that if seen only once a month made amends for the other twenty-nine days, his eyes shining as impishly as a child’s. Maybe she had it wrong. She said nothing. Complaints were not tolerated, and besides, who would believe that Roland had behaved so strangely? He was tempestuous and prone to shouting, but this was not like that. This was like another man, like Roland’s dark, quiet cousin emerging, but only for Lucy. This was, undoubtedly, Roland’s punishment for her having wondered. Worse, each time he did it, she wondered more. Which would only lead, she feared, to more punishment. And so, it seemed, she was trapped. Which was why she planned to go to Canada, to Peter.
Lucy let Anne and Maggie comb her hair. The yard smelled of pinesap, and more faintly of fish—down at the cove, a field of cod had been laid out on racks to dry. If Quebec was inland, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t stink of fish. From the top of the hill, the crazy old widow Mrs. Greely called for her crazy cats. Beast! Lover! Old man! Lucy counted the money again, gave one penny to each of her siblings, for their labors on the shack, which she was supposedly in charge of. Then she went inside to wash her face and change into her dress before their mother came home.
Ten
After the fire of 1873, the Bent heirs had been heartbroken and brash and, in the rebuilding, had overlooked or dismissed a number of elements, some trivial, like a weather vane that would have been stolen anyway when young men from neighboring towns started stealing such things decades later, and some more important, like gutters. The original house wore 240 feet of copper gutter, a glorious, greening skirt you could see from across the harbor. But now there were none at all, and when it rained hard, as it did today, the whole house appeared to be crying.