Light Over Water Read online

  “There’s a nice flock of birds come to meet us,” Aubrey murmured to Sam, with his eyebrows raised and a confident smile settled on his generous mouth.

  Sam looked from Aubrey back to the wharf. His mother looked pale and anxious, the boys were wriggling with excitement and Sam saw Alison gripping Esther’s arm tightly. When Darren cupped his mouth and yelled, “We’re at war!” Willie punched him in the arm so hard that a small tussle ensued and Olivia Eliot spoke an uncharacteristic sharp word to William.

  “Hush up now and hold still before someone falls in!” The anxiety in her voice sounded across the water.

  Aubrey picked up the pace and they were carried forward until they nudged the edge of the dock lightly. Anxious faces peered down at them as they lifted their gear and climbed out of the dory.

  Across the small inlet at the public wharf there was a bustle of activity. Sam felt a frisson of alarm mixed with anticipation at the heightened air of excitement affecting everyone in the village.

  Reg ascended quickly and took the baby from his wife as he encircled her shoulder with his arm. “It’s true, Reg,” Sam heard her say at the same time Willie thrust a paper in his hands.

  “The president declared war, Sam. We’re in the war now.”

  Sam grasped the paper, taking in its terse headline and scanning the front page. His gaze traveled from Aubrey, who was scowling as he secured the dory, to Willie who was grinning impishly. His mother looked white, her mouth trembling and her arms supporting her belly, stroking it absently. She looked at Sam as if her heart was broken and he was already gone.

  “You boys stop your racket!” Reg barked, his lips compressed and the lines around it like two parentheses. “Come on, love,” he said as he drew his wife up the hill toward their house. The young boys ran off, racing toward the public wharf, where they would, no doubt, soak up more enthusiasm. Sam noticed that Cleo stayed with them, her eyes rarely leaving Aubrey Newell’s face.

  Sam sank to a sitting position, his back against one of the pilings that supported the dock. He smiled to himself before meeting the eyes of his sisters, and Alison. They settled themselves on the dock, but no one spoke. The girls all watched him expectantly. He wondered what they were waiting for. He shook his head and laughed. “Finally! It’s really happening, Aubrey!” He thought of his father’s words on this very day and knew that now there’d be no question about whose war it was. Aubrey smiled half-heartedly, standing uncomfortably as if an outsider. Sam gestured to him, “Come on, sit down. Let’s see what it says.” Aubrey awkwardly sat near him but didn’t look at the paper.

  “Does it say there’ll be a draft, Sam?” Esther questioned.

  Sam shrugged as he scanned the newspaper, not really reading but trying to absorb the news. His smile dissipated like the watery afternoon sunlight. His dark sympathetic eyes lifted to his mother’s form as she slowly climbed the slope to their house. He had watched her grow thinner, older and more depleted with each successive child. She never complained. She loved her family wholeheartedly and just seemed to take the changes as part of life. But today she looked so frail and terribly vulnerable.

  Sam sighed deeply then and closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the piling. When they were younger, the six of them; Sam, Esther and Cleo, along with Alison and her brothers Remick and Owen, would sit along this wharf, foot to foot along the rows of pilings. They worked it, if possible, so that two could sit exactly between the logs, arranging and rearranging as they grew. For a long time Sam and Alison fit best. Then Sam shot ahead, his legs wedged tighter and tighter, while Alison stopped growing at just over five feet. They had to switch so Alison sat with Esther and eventually none of the boys fit together with anyone. Alison sat against the piling across from him; both her long braids draped over one shoulder, playing with the ends as she glanced at him. Sam could tell that she was near tears, but had no idea why she would be so upset at this exciting news nor yet how to calm her. But then he himself felt both elation and concern for his mother.

  The Eliot’s dog, Brute, a brindled old mutt who belied his name, came and eased himself down beside Sam, who began to stroke his head and smooth his fur.

  “Are you going to enlist?” Cleo asked him. Her eyes flickered over his way as he nodded, then back to Aubrey. “What about you, Aubrey?” she continued.

  Aubrey Newell shrugged uncomfortably. “I dunno,” was his terse reply. “I want to,” he added, looking at Esther and Alison when he noted their reaction. “I’ll have to lie about my age. Lots do. I can’t wait to see some action, can you, Sam?” His words were wary, with an obviously pretended confidence and Sam realized suddenly how little Aubrey had ever said about the war.

  “You seem a lot older than seventeen,” Cleo told Aubrey, her heart-shaped face as readable as the sky.

  Esther said, “Surely with our involvement in the war it can’t last much longer. Don’t you think it will be over quickly now?” Sam and Aubrey both nodded, with Aubrey adding, “I hope not before we get there.”

  Alison bit her lip, a habit she’d had for years when she was actually trying to keep herself from blurting out something.

  Sam saw this and said,” What?”

  Alison shook her head, unwilling to say anything. Her eyes narrowed and she seemed to study Sam for a moment. She nudged Esther and said, “Let’s go back to my house.” They got up to leave and Cleo rose to join them. Esther turned to her and said, “Where do you think you’re going?” Her words sounded as strangely sharp as her mother’s had.

  “I want to come with you,” Cleo answered. Her little pointed chin jutted out and her cheeks flushed suddenly. But she controlled her usual whiny manner in front of Aubrey, causing Sam to chuckle. Cleo heard and whipped around, demanding, “What are you laughing at?”

  Sam just looked away as Esther answered her sister. “Mum needs help with supper and it’s your turn.”

  “I’ll walk you up to the house,” Aubrey offered Cleo, who turned, as the tide turns, docile and agreeable.

  The girls moved off the wharf to the road that led through the village, around the harbor and out to the Granger homestead. Aubrey and Cleo headed up the high hill to the Eliot’s home. Sam stayed, running his hand over Brute’s bony head and watched them until they passed into the trees, which shaded the road. Aubrey seemed to be listening and nodded at Cleo’s chatter, but he kept turning his head back to catch a glimpse of Alison and Esther. “Which one, Brute?” Sam wondered aloud, a sudden concern erupting that Aubrey’s interest might be in Alison. In such a small village, one’s friends became as familiar as family. Alison, with her eyes the color of blueberries in August, her freckled nose and wide smile, was like a sister to him. But there was more that he felt for her; a sensation undefined but certain and proprietary. As he watched her and Esther walk away, he realized how slowly they moved and how little they spoke. And he wondered why exactly Alison had been so close to tears.

  Only at night did Mary Reid allow herself to visit her husband. Ian kept trying to edge into her thoughts, as stubborn as always, making it hard for her to get any work done. Sometimes, like today, it would be in broad daylight; she’d be lecturing her students on the importance of proper grammar and Ian would be there saying, “There’s naught else for me but you, me darlin.” Or she’d see the blue of the sea under a certain sky and be staring into his eyes. The caress of a warm breeze across her shoulders was his touch, or the ripple of men’s laughter from the shore was his laughter. She held him at bay, never allowing herself to linger over any of these unexpected glimpses, never crossing the line to embrace these snatches. Except at night.

  After a long day at school filled with children, she would step across the road to her small cottage and continue working, correcting papers and planning lessons. Work in her garden was followed by supper, and then she read the newspaper and her books until bedtime. Then she would wait. Ian came to her when she closed her eyes. She never beckoned him, but he was there with his grin, his sun brown
ed hands, his infectious laugh. At times he was young, his blond hair untouched by gray and his skin smooth and unlined. She’d see him before the accident that left him with a limp, flying across the fields of their farm after a stray heifer. Sometimes it was as if they’d never parted. He’d be there in his brown wool suit and button down collar; his traveling clothes, his face seamed with sorrow, yet calm, going to bury his mother. On their first trip back to Ireland in ten years they had been grieving for her, yet thrilled to see their homeland. The worst nights were those in which she felt Ian’s hands firmly moving her to the lifeboat, heard his insistent directive, “Don’t move from there, Mary me love,” and turning, she lost him. She screamed his name over and over and often woke herself up with that name on her lips.

  In the village of Little Cove, she was still an outsider. She knew this, and sure she was that she would remain so. Growing up in a small fishing village in Ireland gave her insight into the mindset of village folk. They were insular, suspicious of the differences, no matter how they coated their suspicions in good manners. Mary knew if you weren’t actually born here you were from away, however long you lived here. The one exception she knew of was her friend, Olivia Eliot. Olivia loved her way into any community. Mary had seen it when they were at Bowdoin College together, in her involvement in church groups there, and then most extraordinarily, in Little Cove. Surely these people were unaware of their inconsistency, but they embraced Reg Eliot’s wife as a native, while looking on Mary as a stranger.

  It was because of Olivia that she was here. Olivia never finished college; having fallen in love with Reg she defied her family and married him when she was twenty years old. But she had been studying to be a teacher and was in many of the same classes with Mary. They remained close through years of correspondence, so Olivia wrote Mary when she heard of Ian’s accident, begging her to come and teach at Little Cove. For eight years she’d been among them, teaching their children, going to church with them, buying their goods and joining their groups. However, she remained an outsider.

  The village took good care of her, especially now. The school board paid her salary in a timely fashion; her housing was provided also. Her teaching was above reproach and in spite of the shrinking attendance at school she was enthusiastically retained every year. But except for the school children and her friends the Eliot’s, she was held at arms’ length.

  Olivia told her clearly, not many months ago, that it was her politics. They’d been sitting at Mary’s tiny kitchen table. She was unwinding with a cup of steaming tea at the end of a long day and Olivia was stopping for a brief interlude after supper. She knew now that Olivia had stopped to tell her she was expecting again; her tenth child. Mary remained stoic about her own lack of children, but was not surprised at the number Olivia had. When she was in college, she spoke often of her longing for a large family, being an only child. But that night she was oblivious to Olivia’s wan appearance and exhausted sighs. Mary had been poring over the newspaper, muttering about the repeated losses and descrying the continued stubborn neutrality on the part of the United States. She was surprised to see Olivia flushed with emotions. “It’s a decision that’s not in our hands, Mary,” she protested. “You must stop blaming our village for not ending the country’s neutral stance.”

  Mary remembered blinking, coughing and sputtering as she inhaled a swallow of tea.

  “I’m horrified by all that is occurring over there, but at the same time I know if we join this war it will be…” Olivia stopped here to draw back a sob, “it will be my boy, and his friends, who go.” Her eyes held Mary’s a moment, then a film of tears slid down and spilled onto her cheeks. She withdrew a handkerchief and fumbled away her tears. “I’m not forgetting Ian either, and your loss. I’m such a horrid friend.” Olivia rose, shrugged on her overcoat, and grasped her basket tight against her waist. “I’m sorry, Mary,” she said, going out the door and letting in a slap of cold air.

  Mary found her voice then and hurried across to catch the door. “Olivia, dearest, wait! Don’t go!” But her friend had dissolved into the enveloping darkness.

  Mary realized the truth in Olivia’s statement. But on this evening in April she also knew a delicious sense of elation. She read again the day’s newspaper and sensed only victory in this war, now that the United States was involved. She’d been in an agony of impatience for this to occur for years, especially the last two. She made ready for bed, relishing her sleep this night.

  It was the first night that Ian failed to come to her.

  Chapter Two

  A Moderation of Counsel

  Tom Hudson slowed his pace as he approached the steps to the orphanage that was his home. Usually when he returned from a trip to town, a gang of boys rushed out to meet him and to help carry the supplies up the porch stairs, through the kitchen to the pantry. He would parcel out the items so that even the youngest child had something to carry. He taught them to be responsible, helpful and to carry what burdens they could so that others had the strength for their own burdens. He taught them that a household runs best with the cheerful assumption of one’s chores and duties. When you don’t do your part, he would remind them, then someone else has to do it, and they often feel bitter about the extra work.

  It was late now and all the boys would be either in bed or preparing for bed. He was late going to town and slow in returning. He’d let the oxen, Stone and Patience, take their time while he came to a careful decision on the way home. So preoccupied was he that he didn’t realize they had stopped and the oxen were burrowing their noses into the tender growth of some newly planted oats. He’d pulled them back and chuckled mildly at himself and them.

  For ten years Reverend Tom Hudson and his wife Ruth had cared for orphaned boys at Valley of Hope Home for Boys, along with Ruth’s sister Naomi. When they were younger Tom and Ruth had worked with the church in the town of Vay in the northern part of New York State. This church helped support the small orphanage outside of town, operated then by a pair of widows, Mrs. Bowden and Mrs. Camp. When Mrs. Camp died from pneumonia one winter, Mrs. Bowden spent a month fasting and praying for someone to come help her. And Tom Hudson, unaware of her prayers, spent a month with a burden on his heart that he was unable to lay to rest until he spoke to the directors about working out at Valley of Hope. Tom often sensed the hand of God in his life in this way. He hadn’t wanted to marry; yet after meeting Ruth one winter night, he knew that God had different plans for him. He had been an apprentice to a local carpenter for three years when he sensed God calling him to go to seminary. This night that same sense was undeniable; that he was needed elsewhere for a while. As soon as he had said yes to God, he felt that sense of peace that always accompanied his surrender. But he had yet to tell Ruth.

  Ruth was a strong woman with a deep faith and a quick mind. She had physical strength and stamina that enabled her to care for a household that sometimes swelled to twenty people. She was firm but kind to the orphans. She protected them and her sister with the fierceness of a mother bird, yet she was unusually vulnerable where he was concerned. Tom feared that she loved him more than anyone else, even God, and he knew that made an imbalance in her life. He pictured her standing at the chopping block; sturdy and poised, and knew the look of calm satisfaction she got in her sea green eyes when she brought the axe down and split the wood in one sure stroke. She’d had that same look the previous week when she had informed him that he was eligible to be exempt from a draft because he was director at the orphanage. She carried on as if she had solved a problem and it was time to go on to the next thing. He dreaded what he was about to do.

  Naomi was at the sink, humming while she finished drying the supper dishes. Her pale blonde hair was scraped back in a meager bun, emphasizing the thinness of her face, and her lips were pressed into a straight line, but she gave Tom a tired smile as he passed through the kitchen. Ruth was just coming down the stairs and hadn’t seen him. He watched her slow descent; her steady hand as she held the rail
; her light brown hair with its gentle curls escaping the combs in back; her slight smile - recalling some sweet saying one of the boys had just said, no doubt. She moved as if she were weary. Her day began before the sun rose without much chance for a rest until they lay down at night. He wondered how well she’d sleep tonight.

  She turned at the bottom of the stairs, trailing her hand over the carved banister that he himself had made. She saw him then, standing in the hall and flew into his arms.

  “Tommy! I was starting to get worried. What took you so long?”

  He laughed and held her and kissed the top of her head. “What’s to worry about? That I got lost? That I went too fast around the Kissing Corner and was thrown from the wagon?”

  She squeezed his ribs at his teasing. “I don’t know.” She kissed him and put her head against his chest. “I missed you.”

  Tom looked up at the ceiling as if he could see God and asked a silent question, “Are you sure, Lord?” He grimaced but said lightly, “Stone and Patience were unusually true to their name. They found the oats in Saunders’ field especially delectable on the way back.”

  Ruth pulled away and said cheerfully, “Let’s get the wagon unloaded. Were you able to get everything?”

  “Everything and more.”

  She stiffened as her smile faded. “Tom! You know we can’t afford treats every time you get supplies.”

  “Don’t worry, Ruthie! Just some fudge for you girls and a newspaper. It came out of the chair money anyway.”

  “Which you know has got to be saved!” she declared over her shoulder as she led him back through the kitchen. “We can’t keep doing this forever!”

  He mouthed the words to Naomi at the same time as Ruth said them and Naomi smirked. Both in their late thirties, Ruth expected their health to break down at any moment while Tom said they’d die at one hundred with a baby on each shoulder. He made furniture and sold it – using part of the money to support the orphanage and saving most of it. He called it their chair money. Really he knew it was God’s money because they were called upon from time to time to give some away to someone in need.