“But they started in death and they ended in death,” my mother declared, referring now to the meeting in the cemetery I’d described in the courtroom only hours before. I could hear again the things I’d said, the answers I’d given, always careful to tell nothing but the truth, yet all the while listening as one truth followed another, the body of evidence accumulating one answer at a time, until, truth by truth, it assumed the shape of a monstrous lie.
My mother lifted her head proudly. “I’m proud of you, Henry,” she said. “For remembering the ones they murdered.”
I heard my father gasp. “Mildred, you know perfectly well that—”
She raised her hand and silenced him. Her eyes fell upon me with a lethal force. “Don’t ever forget the ones that died, Henry.”
I never did. But in remembering them, I also remembered Miss Channing and Mr. Reed in a way my mother would have abhorred. For despite everything, and for a long, long time, I persisted in thinking of them as romantic figures, modern-day versions of Catherine and Heathcliff, standing together on a snowy hilltop or strolling beside a wintry sea rather than rushing toward each other across a windswept moor.
And yet, for all that, there were other times when I’d glimpse a row of marble headstones in the same cemetery where they’d gone to be alone that long-ago afternoon, and see Mr. Reed and Miss Channing as they’d appeared that final spring, Mr. Reed staring toward the courtyard, his eyes trained on Miss Channing as she worked on her column of faces.
But that had been toward the end of it, the curtain poised to close, all the characters already beginning to assume their positions for the final scene: Abigail Reed, scratching at her hands as she peered out across Black Pond; little Mary at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes trained on the distant, darkened shed; I trudging grimly down Plymouth Road through the sweltering summer woods, a single phrase circling in my mind, taken from William Blake and quoted by Mr. Reed, facing the courtyard when he said it, Miss Channing at work on her column only a few short yards away.
PART 4
CHAPTER 16
Mr. Reed and his family returned to Chatham from Maine on the third of January in the new year of 1927. I’d just come out of Warren’s Sundries, a cup of hot apple cider steaming in my hand, when his car swept past me. Mrs. Reed was seated in the front seat, Mary in the back, an old trunk lashed to the top of the car, olive green, and with one of its corners slightly battered in.
Mr. Reed didn’t see me as he drove by, nor did Mrs. Reed, for both were staring straight ahead, Mr. Reed’s face cast in shadow beneath the brim of a floppy gray hat, Mrs. Reed’s locked in stony silence, Mary’s eyes drifting toward me as the car went by, a frail smile on her lips, her small hand lifted in a faint gesture of recognition.
It had been nearly two weeks since Mr. Reed’s departure, and the sight of him returning to Chatham filled me with anticipation, as if, after a long intermission, the curtain had risen again on the adventure in which I’d joined him.
When I rushed home and told Sarah that I’d just seen Mr. Reed drive past Warren’s Sundries, she’d seemed to share my excitement about his return. “You can get on with the boat now,” she said, smiling. “Maybe finish it by summer.”
During the Christmas break Sarah and I had often found ourselves alone in the house, my mother working at the church, helping other local women prepare for the Nativity play, my father busy in his office at Chatham School. The school vacation had given us a chance to talk more intimately and for longer periods than we ever had before. Sarah spoke eagerly of one day going to college, her glowing ambition no longer satisfied with attaining the most basic skills, but now set resolutely upon mastering the highest ones. In later years I sometimes thought that it was she who should have been my father’s child, a proud and grateful graduate of Chatham School, I an illiterate boy shipped in from far away, the future author of its ruin.
For by then my own character and ambitions had moved very far from my father’s teaching. It was Mr. Reed to whom I was drawn, particularly to the passionate discontent I could sense in him, his need to do more, be more, break free of Chatham, discover some new world, as if life were a horn of plenty, vast and infinite, rather than a small basket, inadequately stocked, and from which, in choosing one fruit, we must forever lose another.
I found him in the boathouse the day after his return to Chatham. Coming through the door, the Christmas gift I’d brought for him held firmly beneath my arm, I’d expected to find him as I usually aid, planing spruce for the rigging, caulking seams, or simply at work with sandpaper, paint, varnish.
But instead, he was sitting idly at the stern of the boat, his hands in his lap, the cane propped up against the bare, unpainted rail to his left.
He looked up sharply at my entrance, like someone pulled abruptly from a long period of deep concentration, his face still cast in that mood of troubled thoughtfulness I’d seen in it the day before.
“I thought you might be here,” I said. “I saw you drive through town yesterday.”
He smiled faintly. “Go warm yourself,” he said, pointing to the stove. “Then we can start to work.”
I walked over to the stove, then stood with my back to it, watching silently as Mr. Reed began to apply a coat of sealant to the inner frame of the boat. He seemed preoccupied, very nearly distracted, his eyes narrowing from time to time, his lower hp moving very slightly, as if he were reciting lines beneath his breath.
“Did you enjoy your trip to Maine?” I asked, though I could tell he hadn’t.
He shook his head, his eyes following the brush. “Not much.”
I offered a possible reason, though one I doubted. “It’s probably even colder there than it is here in Chatham.”
Mr. Reed didn’t look up from his work to answer me. “I don’t care for Maine. I’d rather have stayed here.” He added nothing else for a while. Then he said, “Did you go over to Milford Cottage during the break?”
“Once,” I told him. “With Sarah.”
The brush stopped. “And Miss Channing … how is she?”
“Fine, I guess.”
And yet, even as I answered him, I recalled that there’d been something in Miss Channing’s manner that had seemed somewhat different from the other times I’d accompanied Sarah to Milford Cottage, more subdued than
