Only in New England : the story of a gaslight crime (5 page)

"I told him my name, and he laughed and patted me on the shoulder. What do you know! Well, a lot of water has sure run under the bridge.' I said it sure had. Must have been in grammar school, or maybe high school, since last I'd seen him. He nodded, and expelled a deep breath. 'Funny, ain't it,' he said. 'But the Point seems the same. The people ain't changed either.'

"He sort of grunted after he said that, and looked hard at me without seeing me. He looked sort of angry. Then his eyes came back into focus, and he fixed a look at the bottle I had balanced between my knees.

" 'Oh, excuse me,'I said. 'Have a drink, if you want one, Wallace.' He had one. A good long one. When he hands the bottle back, he's coughing. Then he burst out laughing. He threw his head back and laughed so hard, it made me laugh, too. He had to pull out a handkerchief and wipe his eyes. Then he sobered up, sudden, and reached for the bottle again. He took another long pull. This time, handing it back, he didn't cough and he

didn't laugh. He looked mad. 'Dear old Quahog Point,' he said.

"Me, I didn't get it. I'm wondering if the guy is a little nuts. I'm wondering a lot of things. His wife lives there at the Point, see. Cornelia Ord. I'd guess at the time she was close to sixty. She lived at this farm way out along the shore.

"The thing was, she'd been living alone there for years and years. Raised a few chickens and what not. But all by herself, with a bunch of cats. The town kind of looked after her, and folks would drop in to see how she was. But I'd always thought —assumed, you know—she was a widow. Never stopped to wonder whether it was grass or sod. Just a widow.

"Then here was Wallace Ord—her husband—all the sudden sitting by me in my coupe there at Gillion's Wharf. What with the two of us alone there in the cold rain, it was kind of creepy. I didn't even know he'd come back to the Point. I began to wonder where in hell he'd come from, and how he got here.

"I expect you're wondering what I'm doing here,' he says, like he'd been reading my mind. 1 expect you didn't hear I came in on the morning boat.'

" 'No I didn't,' I told him. 'But I didn't get down to the Center this morning. Anyway, Wallace, that's your own business.'

"He agreed it was his business, and he appreciated other folks not minding it. 'There were only a couple of other passengers on the boat this morning, and I didn't speak to them,' he tells me. 'Didn't know any of the crew, and this skipper is new to me. Last time I saw this Newport steamer was seventeen years ago. I expect you're wondering why I came back to see Cornelia.'

"I said, 'Tell you the truth, Wallace, I always thought you'd died. I mean, you'd gone away to sea and had died somewhere. It's been a long time.'

"He reached for the bottle and took a short one and handed it back. 'Look,' he said, Tiow well do you know Cornelia?'

"I said I saw her around from time to time, but never had much occasion to go out to the Ord farm. 'She seems to get along all right by herself out there, Wallace.'

" 'She does,' he agreed. 'By herself. That's why I left the first

time. Part of the reason, anyway. She's got the farm and some chickens and a herd of cats, and that's enough. Shell never be in want. Now I'll tell you the real reason why I left her back in Nineteen Hundred and Nine. You got a minute?'

"I said I wasn't going anywhere, I was just there waiting. So he told me. He said that him and Cornelia were married just after the Spanish War when he got out of the Coast Guard. He lived at home back then, out at the farm, and he lived there with Cornelia for the next eleven years. They got along all right, except his wife was kind of bossy. It was this way. Wallace would come back from work at night—he had this job at Grim-ese's Boatyard—and he'd settle in his chair with the newspaper to wait for supper. Or he'd get on his slippers and light his pipe. Or he'd go lie down on the lounge. Well!

"The minute he'd settle, or get on his slippers, or lie down, Cornelia she'd start giving him orders. Wallace, you got to fix the kitchen pump. Wallace, go back down to the Center Store, we're out of tapioca. Wallace, get out there this minute; you got just time before supper to shovel a path to the outhouse.

"As Wallace told it, he didn't mind the chores. Everybody has to do chores, and he didn't object to his share. What bothered him was Cornelia always give him an order of some kind just as soon as he got his shoes off or got himself relaxed in the Morris chair.

"He didn't say nothing about it, though. He just went on, day in, day out, bearing it. He never tried to add up the number of times, or anything like that. He just took it, the way Job or whoever it was in the Bible took a lot of things. But there's a limit, as Wallace says. He wasn't sore, exactly. It just got to be too much. A camel can carry so many straws, was how Wallace explained it. Then one too many breaks its back. It just takes that final one.

"Wallace knew it was coming sooner or later. Sooner or later, he wouldn't be able to take it like he'd been. Time was coming when he'd have to put his foot down. Have to teach Cornelia a lesson.

"Well, here's what happened. It was late in the November of

Nineteen Nine, and he was working hard at the shop. On this particular Friday he comes home dog tired. It's a cold, rainy night, with a norther making up, same as there at the pier, and he's almost frozen to the bone when he reaches home that Friday evening.

"Into the house by the back door—the kitchen cozy and warm. 'Evening, Cornelia.' 'Evening, Wallace.' She's at the stove with her back to him, busy. He waits. She doesn't turn. He takes off his things and hangs them up. Gets into his slippers. Picks up the paper. Drops into a chair at the kitchen table. A pot on the stove smells good. 'I sure got an appetite, Cornelia. What's for supper?'

" 'Fricasse,' she says, turning around with a bowl in her hand. 'I'm makin' biscuits. But you won't get no supper, Wallace, till you go out to the woodshed and fetch in an armload of wood.'

"'What's that?' he says.

' 'You heard me,' she says. 'Go out to the woodshed and fetch in an armload of wood.'

"As Wallace explained it, it was an order. Not please fetch some wood, or do you mind bringin' in some wood. Just plain, flat go get some wood. Like a Coast Guard petty officer might speak to a seaman third. She always spoke to him like that, and if he delayed a little, she might say hurry up. That night she said it. 'And hurry up.'

' 'I got up out of my chair,' says Wallace. 'I went to the door where I'd left my boots. I put on my boots. I put on my overcoat. I put on my sou'wester. I reached down the lantern, and I lit it, and I went out the door, closing it behind me. I went down the path to the woodshed in the ice cold dark and rain. I went into the shed.

"It was cold as Greenland in there,' says Wallace. 1 had to blow on my hands so's I could pick up the axe. I put down the lantern and I blowed on my hands, and I went to the chopping block and picked up the axe. I looked at the axe, and I looked at that there pile of wood, and all the sudden I made up my mind. By Godfrey, I just couldn't take it from Cornelia no more.'

"What did Wallace Ord do? Why, he just wheeled around,

and he drove that axe into a corner post of the shed, just as hard as he could drive it. Wham! Like that. Deep into the corner post so the blade was almost buried up to the head.

"He left the axe driven into the post like that, and he turned and walked out of the woodshed. He walked up the path to the house, but he didn't go in. He'd picked up the lantern, and he kept on going down to the front gate. Reach the gate, he turned right in the road, and he headed for town. He walked straight into town and down through the Center—wasn't a soul abroad in the freezing night and rain—and he kept on going right through town.

"He walked out to the moor, and he kept on going across the moor. He followed the road on across the dunes, and he kept on going across the dunes. He didn't stop when he reached the inlet. He'd kept a rowboat down there, in a duck blind, and he rowed his boat across the inlet and left it on the other side. Over there he hit the peninsula road, and he just kept on walking.

"He kept on walking, and he didn't look back once. He walked all night, with a nor'easter blowing and the scud like to sweep him off his feet. Just before morning, the lantern give out, and he tossed it into the bayberry. He didn't care. He knew every foot of that peninsula road like he knew the back of his hand.

"Funny. Wallace says he wasn't tuckered. Come daylight, he felt fresh as a daisy. An all-night hike like that would have fagged him ordinarily. But he felt great. When he reached the main highway—the country turnpike that cuts inland—he was going strong. A van came along and picked him up. Took him all the way to Newport.

"He had a couple of bucks in his pocket, and he ate a breakfast that tasted like a Thanksgiving dinner. Two servings of everything, and three cups of boiling coffee. He hadn't even caught a cold. He went down to the waterfront to a place he knew, and asked about a ship. They didn't have anything special, but there was a coal collier lying in—an old barkentine that had been dismasted, with bunkers built in her, and an auxiliary engine. She was to go on a tow line down to Norfolk, Virginia, to pick

up a cargo of anthracite. If he could run an auxiliary engine, they needed a hand.

"Wallace told them he could run any kind of marine engine. They signed him on. The coal barge wasn't much, but he felt as though he'd stepped aboard the Mauretania. Outward bound, the empty barkentine rolled her beam ends under if a launch went by. Wallace Ord went down the Narragansett like Thomas Lipton on a yacht.

"He'd only signed for the Norfolk passage, so at Norfolk he left the collier and got a deckhand job on a freighter bound for Paramaribo. And that was how it went. From South America he shipped to New York on the Munson Line. He sailed on Lucken-bach freighters for a year or two out of New York. Then went to the West Coast, Panama Pacific, and after that got an Orient run on one of the Dollar liners.

"Cornelia? He never wrote to her. Five years. Ten years. Fifteen. Never wrote her a single line. He sailed to India. Japan. Australia. Back to 'Frisco. Out again. Not one letter to Cornelia, although he thought of her occasionally. Then, unexpected, he heard of her. Honolulu, of all places. It was during the World War. In a bar there he ran into one of the Purdy kids—just a youngster when Wallace had left the Point—but the kid recognized him there in Hawaii. This John Purdy was an Army sergeant out there at Schofield Barracks. He was sure surprised to see Wallace Ord in Hawaii, and vice versa.

"They talked about the Point, and Wallace asked about his wife, Cornelia. The Purdy boy said last time he'd seen her she was running a bean dinner at the Shoreside Methodist, same as always. He told Wallace the farm was about as usual; Cornelia did all right renting rooms to summer people. So she was okay. Wallace was glad to hear it.

"Wallace didn't bear any ill will. He'd been gone close to seventeen years. He figured that was about long enough, and Cornelia had learned a lesson. So he started home. He came back by way of Singapore, Bombay, Suez. Gibraltar, Liverpool, Halifax— that run. As he put it there on Gillion's Wharf, he got in just that morning.

"Wallace says it as if he's only been around the corner instead of a few times around the world. But seventeen years is a long time away. 'And you went out to see Cornelia?' I asked him.

"He gave me a straight look. 1 did,'he says. 'There wasn't no taxi at the pier this morning—the other passengers had their own car waiting—so I walked. It wasn't raining, then. Just cold mist, the fog comin' in. I lugged this here bag into town. Didn't go through the Center, but took the side road the short way—the drift road across the bayberry past Hatfield's Pond. Then it was solid fog along the shore road and I didn't pass a soul. I got out to the farm about noon.'

"Wallace gazed off in that direction. 'Fog was so thick I could hardly see the house from the gate. But when I went up the path everything looked about the same. I see smoke climbin' out of the chimney, so I figure Cornelia is fixing dinner.

"I went around by the kitchen door,' Wallace says. 'Sure enough, through the window I see Cornelia at the kitchen stove. She's got the lamps lit, it's such a dark day, and it's almost like that Friday evening seventeen years ago. Looks to me like she's almost wearing the same apron.'

"Wallace shakes his head, kind of doleful. It sort of touched me,' he says. 'Well, I done something almost like I'd planned it. I hadn't planned it, but it just seemed like the thing to do. I put down my suitcase at the doorstep, and I walked down the path to the woodshed. Same old woodshed, except a littie more in need of repair, maybe. Same old door standing a little open. I go in. I look around. What do you know? There's this hatchet—one I didn't remember—stickin' up in the chopping block. And there's my axe driven into the corner post, all covered with dust and cobwebs, right where I'd left it.'

"Wallace stopped to take a drink. He coughed and cleared his throat. 'The thing touched me,' he says again. 'The axe, I mean. It comes to me that she's left it there all these years, sentimental like. Cornelia. Well, I got the axe out of the post, and I blew off the dust. I went over to the woodpile, and I chopped an armload of kindling. I carried the wood up to the house. I walked straight in the kitchen door.

'Hello, Cornelia,' I says. 'Hello, Wallace,' she says from the

stove without turning around. I go to the corner and put the wood in the woodbox. I hang up my hat. I take off my coat. I take off my boots. I go to my chair at the table, and stretch out, and light my pipe. 'All right, Cornelia,' I say, 'there's your gosh dang armload of stove wood.'

"For the first time Cornelia turns around and looks at him. She gives him a smile. Then, as Wallace tells it, she goes to the cupboard by the stove. She takes down a plate of something that looks like little black walnuts. She carries it to the table and sets it down in front of him. He touches one of the hard little nuts with a finger, and looks up at her, inquiring.

"Cornelia gives him a cold nod. 'And there,' she says, 'are your gosh dang biscuits.'