Before We Sleep Read online

  She flashed back a grin. “I’ll do it.”

  She drove out to the road and slipped the gearshift into neutral and pulled up the handbrake. Then reached inside her shirt and freed the bird bone. Dull-white and smoothed by water and light as the air it once rode. She set it up on the dash, where it would ride safe. Then let off the brake and dropped into gear.

  In New Harbor she circled about the village twice, enough that she passed the same older woman twice and so slowed and asked for the restaurant and was sent down to the docks. Tommy’s was a long narrow place of weathered wood at the end of one of the docks with a painted signboard and a window to order and pick up food. She parked in the crushed shell lot and walked up onto the dock and stood back, studying the board. Mostly it was food she’d never eaten before. But the smells flooded out and smothered the brackish water and her stomach rumbled.

  Except for a couple with a baby at one of the tables she was the only one there. She stepped up to the window and after a moment a boy her age leaned forward toward her, looking down. He wore a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and had a white paper hat tilted on his head, his hair long enough to cover his ears in the ragged way of a boy trying to look cool but not quite sure how.

  “Help you?” He smiled as his eyes cut down to her chest and slowly dragged back up. She thought Thinks he’s the big deal in New Harbor, even as she noted the roll of muscle where his forearms led to his elbows and the pale hairs along those arms, the cords in his neck and a single dimple more like a crease one side of his mouth. His smile faded under this scrutiny and she knew he was less sure of himself than he wanted her to think.

  “I’ll have the lobster roll, the medium bucket of clams, fries and slaw. And a chocolate shake.”

  He whistled and said, “Hungry girl.”

  She said, “I am.”

  “You want that regular or malted?”

  “Malted. Thank you.”

  He jotted it up on a green pad and gave her the total and she paid and then turned away, looking out at the long dock, the other docks or wharves, the boats tied up, the stacks of domed slatted lobster traps, the oily slow water pushing back and forth. Gulls on most every upright surface, post or pillar, the sky with high wedges of streaming sunlight with fleet clouds casting shadows passing over the land where she stood, the water about her. As she waited the couple with the baby finished and left and she gained a small pool of dread that once her food was ready the boy would want to talk more with her. And did not know, could not make up her mind if that dread was if he would or wouldn’t. But had an answer ready if he tried to.

  He called, “Miss? Your food’s ready.”

  She turned from the water and a cloud passed over the sun and she felt the press of a fresh breeze.

  He had everything lined up on a dented, wash-polished aluminum tray and was back from the window at a small sink scrubbing something she couldn’t see. Under his apron he wore shorts that came to above his knees and the backs of his legs were golden and finely haired. Somewhere between her chest and belly was a hum, a faint and far distant relation of what she’d felt looking down over the rock an hour before.

  She pulled napkins from the dispenser and rattled the tray as she pressed them in a wad against her fork and knife and he glanced back from his work and flashed her his ready smile and said, “You all set, now?”

  “I believe I am.” Her mouth felt as if it twisted around as she spoke.

  He nodded and said, “Let me know if there’s anything you need.” And went back to work.

  The tray was heavy as she lifted it and she slid her hands to get balance and said, “Thanks. I will.”

  She walked the dozen feet to the table farthest away, stepping gingerly, her legs uncertain with her as if the fright she’d felt an hour ago was only now released fully within her, her steps over the wooden planks as cautious as her making way back along the rocks. She had to stand a moment before the table before she dared lean to set the tray down, the world heaving, the water just dockside lifting and falling. She stood looking down at the food and felt a sweat break upon her face, under her arms. She reached down and lifted the tall metal shaker of chocolate malt and drank down a couple of long swallows and felt her throat burn with the pleasure of it, almost a choke of freeze that brought a smart of tears to her eyes. She set the drink down and then eased into the chair as the cold-burn subsided and she studied the food before her.

  There were little cups of melted butter and a clear gray broth and she didn’t know what to do with them and so she ate the lobster roll first. The lobster meat was delicious, slick and salty with the taste of butter. When that was done she pulled a clam free from its shell and it was good but with a trace of grit and sweet but dry. The next one she dipped in the butter and it was much better but still the grit cracked against her teeth and she paused and thought about it, eating fries and slaw. Then she pulled free another clam and swabbed it in the broth and then the butter and the world was right. Under the table she knocked her knees together, something she’d done since earliest memory when delighted with food. As simple as ice cream could bring this on; also rare times; Thanksgiving, Easter dinner, hot dogs on a summer night cooked on sticks over a wood fire outside. Meals up on West Hill when her grandmother was still alive.

  But never anything like this. A couple of times trout fried with bacon, food she understood that had been given to her father and her mother prepared and often as not the two of them ate alone. There was a fish truck came Thursday afternoons late spring throughout the summer to Royalton she’d heard about, knew it came from Maine but the one time she’d asked her mother about it was told it wasn’t for the likes of them, that it was for the Catholics mostly, the summer people also, the handful that had bought used-up farms in the hills above the village.

  Her mother had been wrong about so much and she’d known that for a long time. She ate the last fry and the rest of the slaw before eating the last clam. By then the broth and butter both were cool but the clam was sweet as the first, sweeter even, for being the last. The past few years Katey felt as if she’d been watching her mother from a tilted distance, as if unsure of what she was a witness to. Only knowing it was a woman living a way she never intended to allow for herself.

  She rose filled again with purpose and carried the tray to the counter and the pretty boy was waiting for her.

  “Was it good?”

  “Of course it was.”

  “So …” he said.

  “So?”

  She watched him swallow, his Adam’s apple bob up and out and down again.

  He said, “If you’re up for the summer I’d be happy to show you around. And there’s movies in Damariscotta. Or we could go out after lobsters, my uncle’s got a boat. Or anything. If you’d like.”

  She nodded. Then said, “Sounds nice. What’s your name?”

  He grinned again. She knew it was nerves. “I’m Mark,” he said. “Mark Crowell.” And he stuck a hand through the window.

  She reached and slid her fingers along the back of his hand and took them away and said, “Sorry, Mark. I’m only passing through. I was you I’d watch for some other girl to come along.”

  She turned before he could speak and walked down off the dock toward the truck, playing it cool, almost jittery, a sense of playacting; also the overall drama of the day behind and what lay ahead. She got in the truck and cranked it up. She drove on out of the lot and up through the village.

  Going over a height of land, still on the narrow point, in the rearview mirror she saw a dark roll of storm clouds far behind her. She guessed that was about right.

  Once again she was on her way. Now headed north. When she could, she’d turn east again.

  Two

  Ruth

  He was the towhead boy with a gap between his front teeth, skinny limbed but wiry-strong and she’d known him all her life in the way of knowing everyone in a small town but he first impressed her the year they both were seven at the outer edg
es of the Fourth of July picnic that followed the church service. Each year one or another of the town fathers, including her own twice, read aloud the Declaration of Independence, with the minister leading prayer and the choir singing patriotic songs. The town soprano, an aging widow who favored elaborate hats to counter her rusty black skirts and ancient green sweater even on the hottest days, a homely woman who with age gained a reserved and sublime beauty, stood alone and without accompaniment—a frustration the organist, a woman of her own generation, suffered by folding her hands over her lap and watching the performance with cool and precise admiration that fooled no one in attendance—sang the national anthem with delicate vibrato and hidden but real pride in sustaining easily those difficult high notes, the song ending as a silence fell upon those gathered with no few moist eyes, a silence held long enough so the pigeons in the steeple could be heard by those below before the appointed boy tolled the bell fourteen times, one each for the original colonies to become states in the new union and the final time for the little republic that became the fourteenth state. In which they all resided.

  The bell also the signal for the picnic and other festivities to begin.

  She was in the shade of the elms along the North Common, away from the hubbub to cool off from the heat within the church as well as the swelling emotion she’d felt this year, a turmoil she didn’t fully comprehend but resided within her as a timorous bird’s-nest gathered in her breast, wanting only to step away, to take a moment, when a firecracker went off right behind her. She jumped and gasped, then turned, furious at the intrusion and saw Oliver Snow dashing away off among the trunks of the other elms. Glancing back once to witness the aftermath of his effort, grinning at her scowl.

  After that, best she could, she paid him no mind. After that she saw him everywhere she turned. He was the boy who would not be ignored.

  In the fifth grade he bested her in a spelling bee after she stumbled over “incongruous” and he prevailed with “prognosticator.” He was an unlikely victor, a casual scholar although even then he was known to be a reader. As was she. They’d run into each other at the town library. In his glory he was oddly adult, stepping across to where she stood holding back tears and gravely shook her hand and congratulated her, as if she and not he, had been the winner. The prize a certificate for a banana split. At his own father’s mercantile, which housed a soda fountain as well as the town’s telephone service switchboard. He offered to share the reward with her and she demurred; it would be two years before she realized he was offering her an early attempt at a date. He only tossed up his head and grinned, his hair flipping away from his forehead, hair now the pale yellow of fall birch leaves. In the summer before seventh grade he walked up to her in the library one warm afternoon, flies droning against the windows, the place empty but for the two of them and the librarian who was shelving books, and asked her if she’d care to go to the picture show that Saturday night, when the stage and the painted mural backdrop at the town hall was replaced with a hand-stretched canvas screen to hold the movies stitched through the projector by Doc Durgan who had a feel for such devices, was in fact responsible for bringing this possibility about to save the residents the drive over the three long ridges and valleys to the Playhouse in Randolph. Again she’d said No. She went anyway with a pair of girlfriends as she most always did. And saw him at intermission as she bought a paper sack of popcorn, the brown paper translucent with loops and whorls of butter. He grinned and lifted a finger to his dipped brow. A salute, a greeting, but the smile also asking the question of why not with him, after all. She’d clutched tight her bag of popcorn and turned to speak to her friend Gladys. She didn’t have an answer for Oliver Snow.

  Even though she lived two miles up West Hill and he lived less than a quarter-mile down Creamery Road they were village children. They attended the two-story academy that schooled the village elementary students on half of the first floor and the high school students from the entire town in the rest of the building; those students who attended neighborhood schools from first to eighth grade up at the crossroads of West Hill, Taplin Brook, Brocklebank, King’s Valley, Kipplin Hill; those children of farmers and loggers and trappers and those make-as-best-they-could, which was most of them—those children who came down to attend high school which were not so many after all, making graduating classes of sixteen or nine or twenty-one. Year to year would rise or fall. Girls in flour- or feed-sack dresses bleached or worn so the imprints were faded next to girls in their dresses made from bought bolts of cloth, some few mail-ordered from Montgomery Ward, boys likewise in trousers and shirts and vests as their fathers wore, hard shoes from September to May next to boys in one-strap overhauls with the same boiled collarless shirt day after day, barefoot until the ground froze, then wearing home-cobbled boots worn thin and resoled many times or needing it, some even in grease-softened and waterproofed handsewn deerhide moccasins some great-great-grandmother had learned to make and no reason seen yet to quit, together they all came. To learn and advance. As if pulled by something beyond their own ken or reckoning but there. As her father explained to her.

  So she and Oliver were village children and seen so in the eyes of those high-hill hamlet children but both also knew they were different. And she did not care and he did. How blood flows down.

  Her father, Nathaniel Hale, was the superintendent of the county schools, including of course those of the town. This bought her no favor—in fact her teachers if anything were more firm and exacting with her as if recognizing her intelligence and demanding she do the same, that she rise to their expectations. He rarely appeared at the village academy, preferring to meet with the school board in the town offices. Otherwise his county office was in the village of Orange and he held his handful of weekly hours there. Mostly he could be found in Montpelier striding the halls of the capitol building, cornering politicians to discuss legislation one hour and the next sitting with them over a meal or cigars or late afternoons a glass of whiskey in one or another locked office. He was a man of large girth, precision-blue eyes, an oiled thatch of squirrel-colored hair. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles that he’d lower with one finger down his nose to meet eye to eye if the occasion called for it—equally for firmness or mirth. He was well-liked and well-feared and knew the strength of a quiet voice from his own father. Ruth was the youngest of his three daughters, younger by fourteen and sixteen years, a source of embarrassment to her mother who became pregnant after she’d believed herself to have gone through the change. Ruth thus grew up as an only child and also the baby of the family. Her mother understood this quickly enough as the older girls left home and so became even more firm with her than she’d been with her sisters. Ruth having no way to know this except as a natural state of affairs. The gaiety that occurred when Margaret or Betty were home for holidays with their own growing families she attributed to adulthood, a notion enforced by the affection and special attention those women paid their much younger sister.

  The family was unique in other ways and she knew this quietly also. The quietness was part of being a Hale. Her grandfather had been a state legislator until he was felled at the early age of forty-six by a bad oyster or a bad heart, depending upon who was telling the tale. He’d read law with Ephraim Allan himself, against the wishes of his father who wanted one son not headed out to the western prairies for the deep loam and easy riches promised there but Aldridge Hale was determined and so made hay in the summer for his father and boiled sap in the spring to make sugar but otherwise spent his time in Allan’s office or in court and quickly proved adept at writing opinions for his mentor and passed the bar at the age of seventeen. He opened a law office in the village and so made his own hay with his townspeople and also aligned himself with a larger firm in the capital and made his mark as a defense attorney, the man to hire if you were in dire trouble and could provide a glimmer of escape. When Aldridge ran for the legislature it took many of his neighbors by surprise; most all thought he’d become a judge or simpl
y continue making good money. His landslide victory over the five-term incumbent was understood as a mandate, not least by himself. He kept the farmhouse on West Hill and the orchard his own grand-father had started but had the house rebuilt in the 1890s on a slightly grander, more genteel scale, sold off the rest of the land to neighboring farmers who were happy to acquire these fine upland fields and pastures. The orchard he studied much as he had the law all those years ago. He hired the best man in the area to prune and tend and oversee harvests but studied his own trees and the other varieties in the area before corresponding with distant university and state nurseries over the years and so to the Baldwins and Seek-No-Furthers and Yellow Transparents added Gravensteins, Wageners and Pippins and took particular delight in corresponding with the breeders at the agricultural experiment station in western New York over trials and errors, much of which they all suffered. Or enjoyed. Both.

  Ruth’s father kept the orchard up, like his father employing the best man he could find to run the operation in all aspects; depending on that man to replace old trees with the best new stock, to do the work his father had otherwise done. He enjoyed the idea that he was keeping his hand in, that each fall apples went down the hill to the village in slatted crates stamped in block print, Hale Orchards. On then by rail to the Boston markets. He kept to his roots.

  So Ruth grew up among the orchards. In spring the trees heavy with white blossoms studded with faint pink hearts. Blown off the trees like a late magic snow. The busy low song of bees at work. Wandering, head down, searching for and finding four-leaf clovers. The heavy red-and-green-speckled fruits in fall and coming home after school to the songs of the apple pickers, the lovely skeletal lace of dark branches against winter twilight.

  The ice storm in the late winter of her thirteenth year would take the orchard away except for a single tree that bore Macouns. Her father surveyed the damage and declared he was too old to start again. The tree would serve to provide the household with applesauce, with dried apples for pies through the winter. He could buy cider. In truth he was glad to be done with the larger burden.