“Still, I regret that—”
In an act whose unexpected courage has never left my mind, my father suddenly stepped forward and gathered her gently into his arms. “My dear, dear child,” he said.
Standing beside them, I saw Miss Channing draw him closer and closer, holding him very tightly, and for what seemed a long time, until, at last, she let him go.
“Thank you, Mr. Griswald,” she said as she released him and stepped away.
“We will come again,” my father told her. “I promise you that.”
“Thank you,” Miss Channing said.
We stepped out of her cell, my father quickly moving away from it and back down the corridor, while I remained, my eyes fixed upon her as she retreated to the rear of her cell, to the place where we had found her. For a time she stared at her hands, then her eyes lifted and she saw me lingering in the corridor. “Go, Henry,” she said. “Please.”
I wanted to do exactly that, even felt the impulse to rush down the corridor as my father had, unable to bear a moment longer the tragedy before me. But I found that for the briefest instant I couldn’t draw my eyes away from her, and as she turned away, I saw her once again as she’d first appeared, so beautiful as she’d stared out at the landscape of Cape Cod, pronounced it a world of stricken martyrs. It was then I felt something break in me, a little wall that had held through all my nightmarish dreams of Sarah and Mrs. Reed, of women floating in dark water. I thought of the rash and terrible thing I’d done and knew that I would never be able to trust myself again. And so the only answer seemed never to get close to anyone, to hold books as my sole companions, accept a bloodless, unimpassioned life, revere the law’s steadfast clarity against the lethal chaos of the heart.
I was silent for a long time after that, silent as I turned from her cell, silent as I walked down the corridor to where my father waited, hollow-eyed, before the iron door, silent as we drove back to Chatham, a clear night sky above us.
“What is it, Henry?” my father asked finally as we crossed the bridge from the mainland, the old car rumbling over the wooden trellis.
I shook my head. “You can never take anything back,” I said, feeling for the first time the full call of confession, wanting to let it go, to tell him what had really happened on Black Pond.
He looked at me worriedly, his eyes filled with a father’s care. “What do you mean, Henry?”
I shrugged, closing myself off again, retreating, as Miss Channing had, into the shadowy darkness of my own cell.
“Nothing,” I told him.
And I never told him more.
I’m sure that my father fully intended to visit Miss Channing again, despite the objections my mother had already voiced. But he still had the remainder of the school year to contend with, and so it was not until summer that he began to mention making such a visit.
I had returned home from college by then, taken a summer job as a clerk in a law office in Chatham, its cordial atmosphere a pleasant respite from the mood at home, the way my mother and father forever bickered over small matters, while leaving the great one that had long ago divided them buried deep inside.
And so I was once again in Chatham when another letter arrived suddenly from Hardwick Prison, addressed to my father, just as the first one had been, but this time bearing graver news.
My father read it in the small room he’d turned into a cluttered study, sitting in one of the great chairs that had once been in the parlor of our house on Myrtle Street and which seemed to fill up the entire room.
“Here, Henry,” he said, lifting it toward me after he’d read it.
I took the letter from him and read it while standing beside his chair. It had been written by Warden Bly, and it informed us in language that was decidedly matter-of-fact that following a short recovery, Miss Channing had fallen ill again, that she had finally been transferred to the prison clinic, then to a local hospital, where, two days after her admittance, she had died. Her body was currently being housed in the local morgue, Warden Bly said, and he wished instructions as to what should be done with it.
I will always remember how curiously exhausted my father looked after reading this letter, how his hands sank down into his lap, his shoulders slumped. “Poor child,” he murmured, then rose and went to his room, where he remained alone throughout that long afternoon.
The next day he telegraphed Miss Channing’s uncle, informing him of his niece’s death and requesting instructions as to the disposition of her body. Two days later, Edward Channing replied with a telegram requesting my father to make whatever arrangements he deemed necessary, and to forward him “a bill for all expenses incurred in the burial of my unfortunate niece.”
Miss Channing was buried in the little cemetery on Brewster Road four days later. Her plain wooden coffin was drawn by four uniformed guards from a prison hearse and carried on their shoulders to her grave.
“Would you be wanting us to hang about?” one asked my father, no doubt noticing that no one else had come to, as he put it, “see her off.”
“No,” my father answered. “You didn’t know her. But thank you for asking.”
With that, the guards left, the prison wagon sputtering along the far edge of the cemetery, past the grove with its cement pond, then disappearing down Brewster Road.
My father opened the old black Bible he’d brought with him, and while I stood silently at his side, read a few verses from the Song of Songs,
“We’ll need to send her things back to her uncle,” he said when he’d finished and we’d begun to make our way out of the cemetery.
My father had gotten permission to store Miss Channing’s things at Milford Cottage, fully expecting that she would one day return to Chatham to reclaim them. When we walked into its front room, we found most everything still in place, the table by the window, the red cushions on the chairs.
Everything else had been packed away. We found three boxes stacked neatly in Miss Channing’s bedroom, along with the two leather valises she’d brought with her from Africa. Only the black dress she’d worn on the day
