“Where does he get it?” I asked. “I know there’s always been a little liquor at Braebonnie, but no more than any of us have, and that’s surely not enough to get drunk every day on.”
Peter looked at me quizzically. “Do you really not know?”
he said. “He gets it the same place we all do. We buy it up here. There’s more whiskey smuggled into these coves and inlets on dark nights than the rest of the Atlantic coast put together. Best stuff, too. Up here, if a guy has a lobster boat, you can be fairly sure he’s smuggling. Retreat has three or four ‘official’ sources. I’m not going to tell you who they are, but Micah Willis didn’t get that Ford truck hauling, you can bet on that.”
“Micah…oh, I can’t believe that,” I said. “He has a family, a business—are you sure? I thought the liquor in the cottages was just sort of…what everybody had left when Prohibition started. Peter, you know as well as I do that Micah Willis is one of the most
moral
men we’ve ever known.”
“I agree,” Peter said, grinning. “And if he thought he was doing anything immoral, he’d stop and turn himself over to the sheriff. He thinks, like most of the natives, that it’s the law that’s immoral. That the government’s got no business telling a man what he can drink and what he can’t. I’m not so sure he isn’t right, either.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“You bet your bottom dollar it is,” he said. “And that’s all I’m going to tell you about smuggling or Micah or anybody else. And you’d do well not to mention it to him or Christina or my mother. She still thinks our stock is Dad’s leftovers.”
“I’m not a fool,” I said crisply. And of course I did not mention it to Micah Willis or to anyone else. But forever after that, when I caught a glimpse of Micah’s solid shape pruning shrubbery or carrying the ladder around the house or swinging easily into the kitchen with a load of wood, I saw behind him, as if in a kind
of pentimento, the dark shapes of silent skiffs on moonless water, and cloth-muffled oars resting in oarlocks, and the still forms of waiting men peering through the black for a single flash of light far out in the bay and straining for the low throb of idling engines. And something old and dark in my own blood leaped to meet those images.
“Maybe it would be better if nobody would sell Parker liquor,” I said to Peter, but he shook his head.
“Micah and some of the others won’t now, but there’s always somebody down bay who will. If Parker wants booze he can get it easily enough. I really thought when his dad died he’d shape up, but it’s gotten a lot worse.”
“Of course it is,” I said. “He can never win, now. He can never on this earth show his father how tough he is, or how grown up. He’ll drink more and more and act worse and worse, and he still won’t be able to get his father’s attention.”
Peter skinned out of his salt-damp sweater and came and put his arms around me. I buried my face in his smooth, cool, damp chest. I licked his skin lightly; it tasted of salt and the sweetness of his flesh. He kissed the top of my head.
“How come you’re so smart?” he said.
“I’m not,” I said. “I just know how it feels to go around having an eternal one-sided conversation with a dead parent.
I railed at my mother for years, for going off and leaving me to grow up without her. And…I think that’s sort of what you were doing when you went off in the boat last summer, after your father died. You were furious at him, and so you ran away from home.”
“Don’t make excuses for me,” he said into my hair. “I was a jerk. A louse. It still makes me cringe to think about it.
Leaving you alone to cope with all that shit after he died, and then to have to go to hospital to have our baby with only my mother and the hired man.
Christ! I wonder you even let me back in the house.”
“Well, I knew how upset you were,” I said, nuzzling him.
“And after all, the baby wasn’t supposed to come for almost two months. And I could do worse than have your mother and Micah around when I had a baby. And after all, you’re back, aren’t you? You haven’t run away to sea once since then.”
He pulled me with him down onto the bed. It was tumbled and warm, and outside the clouds that the east wind presaged were streaming in, sucking the heat from the last of the sun.
I was still a bit sleepy from the nap his homecoming had interrupted. Downstairs, Petie slept in the old wicker crib that had been his grandfather’s, watched over by pretty twelve-year-old Polly Willis, Micah’s brother’s child. Mother Hannah had hired her expressly to mind Petie this summer, and she was good at it. She minded several small siblings and cousins at home. I knew that if Petie woke in one of his small red rages, Polly could soothe him back to sleep. I burrowed into the warm bed and curled up into Peter’s side.
“What would I do without you?” he said, sleepy himself, into the curve of my neck. “What if you were somebody else and not you, somebody I couldn’t talk to? What if you didn’t understand me like you do? What if you were stuck up or mean-spirited or stupid?”
“Then I’d know you married me for my looks,” I said, eyes closed. After the distance and trouble of the past summer, Peter’s body against mine felt doubly precious, doubly comforting. I’d told Amy the truth that morning; I did indeed have Peter back and could not imagine ever feeling estranged from him, shut away. But I had.
“What if I couldn’t…do this?” he said, turning me to face him and wrapping his long legs around me. “Or maybe this….”
I let myself go limp against him but said into his ear, “You may want to reconsider. It’s not the best time for this unless you want another baby—”
“Christ, no,” he said, propping himself up on one elbow and running his hand over his face. “Not until this one shapes up.”
I was silent against him. Yes, I had told Amy the truth about Peter that morning, but not the whole truth. The other part of that truth was, this summer, the first great wedge between us.
For Peter could not seem to make contact with his son, not on the terrible subterranean level where I felt my kin with him; indeed, not in any essential way. It was not that he ignored Petie. He played with him in the mornings and held him when he was awake, and fresh from his bath, and fed; he carried him about the colony when we first brought him there and showed him to all the friends of his youth and seemed, at those times, to be every inch and every fiber the proud young father. And I think he was, at those sweet times.
It was just that he could not sustain the bond through the bad times, and there were plenty of those with Petie. Then he gave him back to me or to Polly and, if the crying did not stop, went into his study or back into the big bedroom to talk with his mother or, less frequently, down to the water, to the boat. At home in Northpoint, he seemed more patient with the baby, and more sympathetic with my struggles to calm and quiet him. There, he seemed, if not smitten with Petie, at least moved by his tiny son’s war with the universe and sometimes softly amused by it.
“That’s right, little guy,” he would say. “Go after that windmill and give it hell.”
But in Retreat, he seemed to distance himself from the baby and to slide over into his mother’s stern and implacable camp.
“That child needs to shape up. Let
him cry, Maude. He’ll never hush if you run in there and pick him up every time he opens his mouth.”
“You sound exactly, precisely, like your mother,” I said early on that summer. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Children should be seen and not heard. What happens to you up here? You don’t sound like that at home. Shape up, indeed. He’s a ten-month-old
baby,
Peter! You sound like you want to put him in military school.”
“It might not be a bad idea,” Peter said grimly above the baby’s outraged howls, and I picked Petie up, love and pain at his pain twisting me inside from my throat to the pit of my stomach. Peter Williams Chambliss IV had been born furious, as if racked with helpless rage at being tumbled early from his secret sea, and was, these ten months later, still an angry and inconsolable baby. He fought, he cried, he raged, he hungered, he thirsted, for something we simply could not give him. At times he frightened me badly; at others he angered me in my turn. He seemed insatiable, a ravenous little organism, a living, breathing need. He was dark and simian and red and flailing; I knew that in his grandmother’s eyes, and to a lesser extent in his father’s, he was the very graven image of the dark, low-to-the-earth aliens of the swamp South who were my people. There was nothing in little Petie, in those early days, of his father’s long-boned, flaxen, northern tribe. I think Peter only saw that clearly when we were in Retreat, among those people; saw what Mother Hannah saw and pursed her mouth at. At home, Petie was more his son and less exclusively mine.
Mine, mine…yes, he was mine. Every ounce and bone and eyelash and fingernail and tooth and shriek, he was mine. I shook all over with love for him; I wept, often, at his intract-able, furious pain. I felt every tremor in my own flesh. I know they thought I
spoiled him badly, my husband and my mother-in-law.
“Maude, I worry so that he’ll be spoiled beyond reclaiming, and nobody will want to be around him, and then what sort of life will he have?” Peter said once, as I rocked the baby in the middle of yet another sleepless night. After that, I tried not to go so often to my crying child. I would do anything to spare him the loneliness of alienation.
But in the end I could not let him cry alone. I knew about outcasts and pariahs. I had cried in the night at Retreat, too.
My child would be loved here in this place, if only by me.
A week or so after Amy and I had our talk on the beach of the Little House, Peter took me over to Castine for an outing. We went alone, for once, Mother Hannah having an afternoon bridge game at the club with Erica’s visiting friends.
Petie was asleep in his crib when we left, and Polly Willis sat beside him reading
Anne of Green Gables.
I had found her, when she first came to us that summer, a proficient reader and starved for books, so I had dug out the best of the cottage’s library for her and borrowed others I thought she would like from the little village library. I had even taken her there one afternoon and helped her get her own junior library card. Miss Prudence Comfort, the librarian, told us she was the youngest person in the library’s history to have one, and Polly was as proud as if she were writing books instead of merely reading them.
“She’s ruined for sure,” Micah said when he brought her to us that morning. “Not a jot of work can anyone get from her now, nose always in a book.”
But his face as he looked at his niece, reading beside the sleeping baby, was gentle.
“You don’t fool me, Micah Willis,” I said. “I know you sit up nights and read Greek by lantern light, or something impossibly esoteric. Runs in the family, I’ll bet.”
“That’s all you know, Maude Chambliss,” he said, going out the kitchen door. “It’s Latin, not Greek. I’ll pick you up at four, Pol,” he called back to his niece. “Your Aunt Christina won’t be here today; gone to old Mrs. Waldo’s funeral. But if you need me, call the store and send down to the boathouse.”
“I’ll be fine, Uncle Micah,” she called back, not lifting her taffy head. Micah and Peter and I all smiled at her. Polly had that effect on people. She had a child’s generous, trusting heart in the ripening body of a young woman. It made an appealing combination.
“We’ll be home by four too,” I said, and she smiled again, and Peter and I got into the Marmon and left. As we drove out of the driveway I noticed again how tall the lilacs had grown, once again shutting the windows away behind a wall of green and white. It seemed only days since the day Micah had cut them, not years. The smell of them was almost dizzying.
It was a near-perfect day. The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change, but not for another day or two. Along the meadows’
edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves.
Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets
and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay. I took a deep breath and put my head back on the seat.
“This is what Maine is,” I said. “The sky, the ocean. Wildflowers and black fir and spruce, and rocks and gulls and always the smell of pine and salt in your nose. Nothing else really matters; everything else is just…tacked on. Just noise.”
“Me too?” Peter said. “You too? Are we just noise?” But he covered my hand with his and squeezed it, and I knew he knew what I meant.
We had lunch on the porch of the ornate wooden Pento-goet Hotel, surrounded by flower boxes full of begonias and geraniums with butterflies dancing above them, overlooking the sail-speckled harbor at the foot of the steep street. The great three-masted schooner that was the official training vessel of the Maine Maritime Academy atop the hill lay at anchor, her sails furled, small blue-clad figures moving about her decks. The packet for Islesboro wallowed at the dock, and a small crowd of soberly dressed people waited for the arrival of the great steamer, the E.S.S.
Belfast,
that had plied the bay from Boston to Bangor since near the turn of the century. The street and harbor had the air of a resort village or a European working port; it seemed exotic, far removed from the stark gray, green, and cobalt terrain around Retreat.
From where we sat, we could not hear the noise of the harbor, but there was still a tingling feel of holiday in the air. A fat yellow cat came out of the hotel and settled down to doze in the sun, and a perfect blanc mange with a daisy on it arrived for dessert. Old ladies and crying babies and frightened young wives seemed light-years away. I stretched in the afternoon balm and smiled at Peter and felt very young again, and as free as a leaf in a lazy river.