A Star for Mrs. Blake (6 page)

She even got a send-off by the Martha Washington Benevolent Society at the Odd Fellows Hall. They gave her a bouquet of pink car-nations
and multicolored gladioluses from Mrs. Healy’s garden, plus a travel bag filled with toilet articles and accessories, handkerchiefs, and a sewing kit—presented by Essie Jordan herself. Punch and angel cake were served.

She had already said goodbye to Big Ole Uncle Percy the day before. He’d been going over to Sunset to put in windows for some summer people. Yes, they were both glad of the cash. When he raised a hand in farewell and started down the road for the twelve-mile hike to the job, Cora realized that despite his bulk and outlaw reputation, Big Ole Uncle Percy was shy. It made her smile. He hadn’t come back that night, which she half expected.

The morning of her departure she cooked rolled oats for breakfast with the last of the sugar—her going-away treat for the girls. School would soon be out for the summer—that was a load off her mind. All they had to do was not drown in the Lily Pond or fall out of a tree. Once again she’d gone over her list of warnings and instructions.

“Now, your dad will be working over in Sunset, which means sometimes he might not get back in time for supper—”

“Sometimes?”
Sarah said, with an emphatic eye roll.

“But he still has to be fed, so remember to leave a covered dish. And if he doesn’t come back for a couple of days, it’s because he’s up north fishing,” she’d said, hoping they hadn’t heard otherwise. “Even if your dad’s not around, a dozen people know to look out for you, but if you’re
really
worried about him, go down to the shop and ask Lester King his whereabouts—”

Laura patted her wrist. “It’s okay, Aunt Cora.”

Kathleen, the little one, nodded solemnly. “We can handle our dad.”

Cora held back a smile. “Good.”

There was no help for it. They’d have to fend for themselves. As she stood on the porch watching them scramble down the rocks clutching their books, she knew—in that place in her gut where she knew what she knew—that her girls would be all right.

“Aunt Cora! Come down, you got to see!”
they were calling, but suddenly she felt weepy and strangely paralyzed. A moment ago she’d
been elated. Now her feet would not move toward the steps. Linwood and his truck all gleaming down on Main Street meant that she was really leaving home.

“You come up here, Lin!” she called instead.

The stonecutter’s cottages were built up high, with no access from the street, but Linwood strode easily over the granite outcrops and patches of chickweed, surefooted despite his size, from climbing over stone walls and across fields. He’d recently been promoted to the head of a survey crew assigned to map the soils in Penobscot County, which entitled him to transportation. The blue truck belonged to the government, but government workers had to go by a strict gas allowance, which would not have covered the trip to Bangor. A collection was begun to get Cora Blake to the train station, but it had come up short—and Linwood Moody had to make some inventive arrangements in order to make up the difference.

“You look smart,” he said when he’d reached the porch.

“Liar,” she mocked gently. “Haven’t gotten any sleep in a week.”

She was wearing the dress she’d sewn for the trip. It was soft and feminine, made of light heather-gray wool that fell to the ankle, with a natural waist and a scalloped collar of white eyelet. Cora was afraid it was too fancy, but everybody said that’s what they’re wearing in Paris—certainly not a housedress! She’d also been given a burgundy silk chemise on loan from a neighbor, and a navy suit Doc Newcomb’s wife had worn to their daughter’s high school graduation six or seven years ago.

That morning she’d put on the entire traveling ensemble for the first time—including the new black pumps and claret-red beret. The rising sun on its way to summer solstice struck a new angle, saturating the bedroom in light. She saw every cobweb and stain in the old paint (money for spring wallpaper had gone for the pumps)—but in the mirror there was a surprisingly young and eager face with inquisitive blue eyes. Her figure was nowhere near the slim silhouettes they were showing in the magazines, but she looked well proportioned in the dress. The beret was … questionable, but what the heck. If she was trying too hard, it was for Sammy. She wanted to look good for Sammy. She wanted him to be proud of his mother.

Cora was not the only member of Party A concerned with what to wear. The letter she had finally received from Mrs. Katie McConnell, the maid from Dorchester, Massachusetts, made her sure of that:
“I changed places and I guess you maybe couldn’t find me here, but I am glad to have your lovely letter. I work for a lady who is a good lady but I got plenty to do I cannot be Idle. I want to know if France is cold as Ireland and how we are to wash clothes. I am sorry that I do not have my mother’s pearls for the occasion as I had to sell them for passage.”

But the chatty tone of their exchange had ended when Katie later wrote that the pilgrimage would be doubly hard for her because she’d lost two sons in the war.
“Tim and Dolan. Fifteen months apart, but so different. One was Night and one was Day, but they were bound to be together. Killed a week apart. My heart was broken twice.”

When they received their official pilgrimage badges, Cora had written first to Mrs. McConnell. From a bronze bar engraved
CORA BLAKE, MAINE
hung a red, white, and blue ribbon, at the end of which was a heavy bronze medallion with a gold star and the words
Pilgrimage of Mothers and Widows
. The medallion was elaborately decorated with crossed American flags and an eagle surrounded by oak and laurel leaves.
“Isn’t it wonderful?”
Cora wrote, hoping to cheer her up.
“Never mind pearls, we have the most beautiful jewel in the world! The War Department says we must wear this badge in a conspicuous place at all times while on the pilgrimage, so that everybody knows who we are and why we’re over there, and we should be treated special.”

Mrs. McConnell replied,
“I cried when I saw it. I Promise I will never take it off. I am sure now that our Darling sons are in heaven.”

Earlier that morning Cora had reverently taken the badge from its velvet box. Considering what was meant by “a conspicuous place,” she smiled to herself and jauntily pinned the badge over her left breast.

Linwood’s reaction was somber. “That’s very handsome. I’m proud of you, Cora.”

She blushed. “We’ll see.”

He stood beside her as they lingered on the porch. It was always hard to give up the view of the harbor, especially on such a rare day of warm sun and high, carefree clouds. The lobster boats were coming
in; farther out a double-masted schooner passed under full sail. Cora squeezed his hand.

“What’s the matter?”

“Butterflies,” she said.

“It’s the excitement. When you get back it’ll be high season. I’ll take you out to Great Spruce Island and we’ll have some fun.”

The suggestion meant more than a pleasant half day’s sail, a picnic of macaroni salad and ham sandwiches. Great Spruce Island was where they’d secretly first made love—away from the eyes of scandalmongers who would disapprove of a widow lady shacking up with a man who had just lost his wife. Free at last, Cora had peeled off her clothes and run shrieking through the icy wavelets, plunging into the tide. When she surfaced, a dozen yards from shore, a dark head had poked out of the water just an arm stroke away.

“There’s a sea lion!” she called.

He went in wearing his undershorts. The frigid water nearly stopped his heart, and his privates withdrew like a stunned quahog, but sixty seconds later their bodies were straining together on the heat of a smooth boulder, like the first humans after the tectonic plates crashed, and land rose out of the sea, and the ice retreated a couple of millennia ago. They would live forever on wild blueberries. Nothing else existed in the world but the tide grating over pebbles and her fingertips grazing his thighs. They rested naked on worn towels, a warm breeze crisscrossing their skins, small green crabs bright as silver dollars, living and dying in a hollow of basalt.

“Yes,” said Cora as they stood on the porch. “We’ll go back to Great Spruce Island.”

In her pocket was a velvet pouch containing a handful of tiny shells she intended to bring to France. She’d collected some from the island and others at Kydd Cove, where she and Sammy used to go clamming. All you needed was a clam hoe and a strong back, and you could make twelve dollars in a day. How old was he when they stopped going to the cove together? When he’d go instead with his friends and she would be at home, slicing potatoes and stewing onions in pork fat for the chowder, and the door would slam open and Sammy would dash inside—dump the heavy burlap bags because the guys were waiting—
Here’s your clams
,
Ma
—and was gone. At what age did he start skipping school and hanging out at the wharf, picking up information for the life he could already see for himself, becoming a sea captain like his grandfather?

When Sammy was twelve, Grandpa Harding had come home from the sea. Those were the good years, when Cora was relieved of the guilt she felt for bringing up her son without male influence. If there was mischief in town, he was the one who caused it. His best trick was the time he and his friends stole a toilet house and put it on the principal’s porch. The thing he loved best, besides being a nuisance, was to go fast. Once, sliding down the steepest hill in Hancock County, he had crashed his cape racer and was knocked out cold. Sammy and his grandfather became inseparable, and he calmed down from being a kid who seemed born to make trouble.

Grandpa Harding had skills a boy could respect. Sammy, the guy who hated to memorize spelling words, became a meticulous knots man. He seemed to crave the discipline of sterning for his grandfather on their lobster boat. The captain could talk sense to anyone—child or man—and he could build anything. Touch any part of his body and it was like iron. His thumbnails were at least an inch across. He could speak Spanish. He’d escaped pirates off Africa and transported English royalty. He knew how to roast a pig. He liked whiskey as well as his wife’s fudge. It was unthinkable that this conqueror would lie down one night on their marriage bed when he was fifty-seven and wake up unable to speak or move his right side. Sammy quit hanging around and smoking in the bait shops to come home and read to his grandpa, and feed him and help him to the bathroom, trying his best to keep him here for one more day. Six months after he was dead, Sammy enlisted in the army.

“… I’ll have the boat ready when you get back …” Linwood was saying, halfway down with the suitcases. The granite quarry on Crotch Island had started up, the piercing shrieks of the jaw crushers reverberating across the harbor. A white sheaf of seagulls shot up in protest. Cora patted the shells in her pocket and then picked her way after Linwood. The new black pumps were a catastrophe on the rocks.

The nieces had gathered around, ogling the open bed of the truck.
It was a short bed, maybe four feet deep—which was taken up with the carcass of a slaughtered animal. A porcine leg poked through the neck of a burlap sack, stained with brown blood and leaking fresh. The nieces were making faces and pretending to gag.

“What on earth is that?” Cora asked.

Linwood said, “Eli Grimble’s hog.”

“Why?”

Cora’s eyes grew wary as she stared at Linwood. Her eyes were usually the radiant sky-blue of turquoise—and he deeply regretted the way they were darkening.

“To be honest,” he said, “it’s half of Eli’s hog. He’s keeping the other half.”

“What’s it doing in your truck?”

“He wants to get it to the market in Bangor.”

“We’re taking a hog to Bangor?”

“I said I would drive it for three dollars.”

Laura giggled and danced. “Aunt Cora’s going to France with a pig!”

Cora couldn’t take the nervous tension one more minute.

“Stop fooling around!” she snapped.

“Say goodbye to your aunt. Quickly,” Linwood advised.

They dutifully clung to Cora’s arms and tried to climb up her body, moaning with sorrow.

“For heaven’s sake!” she said. “Get off my dress. I’ll be back in three weeks. Longer, if you don’t behave. Go to school. And don’t forget to soak those beans before you cook them!”

When the girls had finally gone off—running backward and blowing kisses—Linwood drew closer and lowered his voice.

“Don’t be sore, sweetheart. A lot of folks pitched in … Everybody did their best … But … this’ll make the gas money to get you to the train,” he finished lamely.

“I shouldn’t have let you talk me out of taking the steamboat.”

“I wanted you to go in style.”

“Well, you sure managed that,” Cora said, eyeing a hairy hoof.

Linwood shook hands with it and said, “Shall we dance?”

Cora laughed in spite of herself. “Stop it.”

Then he did a little jig with the pig and sang,

Cora shoved him. “Will you
stop
? Where am I supposed to put my suitcases? They’re not even mine, they’re borrowed.”

“I’ll put them inside.”

“They’ll never fit!”

“Watch.”

Cora held on to her red tartan travel bag while Linwood gallantly grabbed the handles of the suitcases and swept them off the ground, despite a queasy sense that his cheapness had spoiled it. Why hadn’t he sprung for the three bucks and left the damn hog at home? Only one of the cases fit up front; the other had to be tied to the roof. By then it was as hot as noon and Cora was moaning that they might miss the train, and that would ruin everything! She’d made a firm arrangement with Mrs. Katie McConnell, who lived on the outskirts of Boston, to meet in the women’s waiting room in South Station when Cora’s train got in. They were to catch (
“Catch!”
It made them sound so stylish!) the 7:45 p.m. express to New York City. If they missed each other in Boston it would be a calamity and start the whole thing off on the wrong foot.