Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (13 page)

"Well, it might not be exactly like that."

"Lord, I guess it wouldn't."

"Come anyway."

Lizzie looked at him for a long time, tilting her head to one side as if trying to figure him out—which was what she was doing. "You're a strange person, you know that, Turner Buckminster? I wonder if you can see anything straight. What do you think your daddy would say if he saw us two standing out here right now? Or knew that I would be coming up to Mrs. Cobb's house just to hear you play?"

"He'd say hell and damnation. So you going to come?"

"I'll come. At high tide, when I can't be clamming anyway."

"Then I'll see you tomorrow at high tide, Lizzie Bright."

"Yes, you will," she said, and whistling softly, she turned toward the back of the yard. The sea breeze came down from the leaves and followed at her heels, jumping up now and again and frisking all around.

Turner snuck back inside, as quiet as could be, thinking of high tide.

***

By the next morning, gray clouds scuttled over the sea, muffling the sound of the waves and throttling hope of a sea breeze. But they were only the beginning. Around noon, all the clouds that had been gathering back of the White Mountains let loose and skittered across the lowlands with a slanting rain until they hit the sea, where they stopped to enjoy the view. The rain came down steadily, cold from the mountaintops, and had no intention of moving on. Turner watched the town soak.

Turner's mother suggested that he might not want to go down to Mrs. Cobb's that afternoon. She made the suggestion over a quiet and still noon dinner. Reverend Buckminster suggested that Mrs. Cobb might be expecting Turner, and it would be appropriate for a minister's son to keep his commitments, no matter what the weather. Turner said he would go later, maybe at high tide, when the weather might be clearing. Turner's mother raised an eyebrow and remarked that he had started to become a real Maine boy, thinking of the tide and the weather. Turner supposed that was so.

And that was about it for the rest of dinner.

High tide was indeed late in the afternoon, but it did not bring any clearing. Mrs. Cobb was waiting for him just inside her door, scowling and sour and wondering why he hadn't come yet.

"I thought I'd wait for the weather to clear."

"You may as well wait for Armageddon as that."

And then Turner heard a knock at the back door. A tiny, halting knock.

Mrs. Cobb did not hear it. "This is just the kind of day when my last words might come in handy. There's that damp chill in the air that gets down into your lungs."

Another knock. Louder.

"You may as well start on something happy to get the chill out. Just in case I survive the afternoon."

Knocking. Downright rude.

"What is that?"

"Someone at the back door."

"Go and see who it is, then."

And so he did, and there stood Lizzie, her hands on her hips again, about as soaked as if she had been thrown into the ocean, wrung out, and thrown in once more. Water dripped down her face.

Turner held the door open.

"You getting hard of hearing?"

"What was that you said?"

"You must think I like standing in the wet, and stop answering a question with another question."

Turner looked around and found a dish towel. It was the best he could do. She took it, still glaring, wiped her face and arms, dried off her legs as best she could, then folded it and handed it back. "Thank you," she said.

She followed Turner into the main house, her feet squeaking on the dark, polished wood of the floor. She held her arms around herself, and when Turner looked back at her, her eyes were large as she looked into the rooms off the hallway.

"Just one person lives here," she said, and shook her head at the thought. "Golly Moses, wouldn't Granddaddy think this was fine?"

"Who is that?" called out Mrs. Cobb, turning in her chair as they came into the room.

"Mrs. Cobb, this is—"

"Oh my sweet Jesus," said Mrs. Cobb. "A Negro girl standing in my house."

T
HE
rain came on gray and cold, pattering with hard, metallic fingers at the panes of Mrs. Cobb's parlor. Drips spilled from Lizzie to the floor—the only other sound in the room.

Turner looked back and forth between Mrs. Cobb and Lizzie, both of whom seemed about as surprised at each other as a new hope drying a last tear. Mrs. Cobb breathed heavily, and her hands throttled the chair arms. Turner wondered if this would be the moment he would hear Mrs. Cobb's last words.

"This is Lizzie Griffin, Mrs. Cobb."

"I know who she is. I know who her daddy was. And his daddy before him."

"You do?"

"Of course I do, and don't be rude, you with all your questions."

Lizzie smirked at Turner. "This is Mrs. Cobb," he said.

Lizzie said nothing at all as the metallic fingers of the rain pattered about as hard as they could without breaking the glass.

Turner figured that if there ever was a time for a hymn, this was it. So he sat down at the organ and wheezed the air into it. He thought for a moment of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" but decided it wasn't a good idea to invoke the military. And so he set into "Shall We Gather at the River?" as the most peaceful hymn he knew, even if it was about the afterlife. But Mrs. Cobb seemed not to be interested in the river that flows by the throne of God. "A Negro girl in my very house," she said again after the first refrain.

Turner played through all four verses, with the refrain every time, and when he came to the last verse, he sang the words out loud—"Soon our happy hearts will quiver with the melody of peace"—and finished with a harmonized "Amen."

He lifted his fingers and let the last wafting air carry the notes out into the room. When he turned around, Lizzie was sitting on the floor, her legs tucked up beneath her. Mrs. Cobb was still throttling the arms of her chair, but she was leaning back now and not breathing so heavily.

"Turner," Mrs. Cobb said, "don't ruin the music by singing."

Lizzie's eyes fairly danced. Turner figured she would have said the same thing had she thought of it first.

"I thought you might not know all the words, it being the fourth verse."

"Since I was singing that hymn before your father was born, it's likely I would. Try something snappier."

So Turner pumped again and set into the "Battle Hymn," and then into a couple of missionary hymns written to hold the attention of lost drunkards—they were pretty catchy—and a temperance hymn with a kind of rollick to it. Then he settled down into hymns that liked a trembling vibrato. All the while he did not look behind him but felt Mrs. Cobb and Lizzie holding their breath.

When he finished with "I Have Some Friends Before Me Gone," he turned around and saw that Mrs. Cobb's hands had finally relaxed. She had folded them together and settled them high up on her lap. Her head was tilted back on the chair, and though her eyes were not closed, she certainly wasn't looking at anything in the room. And Lizzie—Lizzie Bright was smiling the kind of smile that showed that happiness had settled in somewhere deep and was glad to be there.

"You always play that last hymn so loud," said Mrs. Cobb.

Turner shrugged. He figured maybe this was just the kind of moment when God wouldn't mind his stretching. "It sounds like a hymn that needs to be played loud."

"It's a morbid hymn, for funerals. No one plays a funeral hymn loud unless they want to wake the dead."

"I suppose I wouldn't want to do that."

"No, I suppose you wouldn't." She looked at Lizzie. "It never does, to wake the dead." She leaned forward. "Come tomorrow at high tide again."

"Yes, ma'am. How did you know it was high tide?"

"You think an old lady doesn't know anything? I've followed the tide since before your father was just a glint in God's eye. Today it came in at two-forty. Tomorrow it will be half past the hour. Come then, and tell your friend here that she can come, too, if she wants. And that I never did think to ... Well, tell her she can come. Now, the both of you scat and leave an old lady some peace."

So they scatted out the back, Lizzie still dripping now and again. And when they came out from the kitchen and stood for a moment in the first sunlight of the day, Lizzie looked at Turner while he smiled back and waited for her to tell him how wonderful he had been, how fine his music was.

And God's truth, that's what she almost told him.

But she caught herself just in time.

"It got a whole lot better once you stopped singing," she said, and skipped out the yard and was gone.

And Turner, Turner skipped across the front yard and through the picket gate. He waved to Mrs. Hurd, who grinned and waved back from her window, and then skipped down Parker Head as thunder came from far, far away. His feet threw up mud with each step, and he hardly cared that by the time he was back at the parsonage, he would be wetter and muddier than the parishioners of First Congregational felt their minister's son should be.

That's how it was for the rest of the week. Day after day the skies quilted over and the houses of Phippsburg shivered and croodled together and the rain spilled down onto leaves that hung brown and heavy with the wet. High tide came too late now, so each afternoon, Turner waited for the bells of First Congregational to ring three times. Then he left the parsonage and sprinted to Mrs. Cobb's house, where Lizzie would be waiting and dripping inside the kitchen—Mrs. Cobb had started to leave the back door open for her. They would take their spots in the parlor, Turner at the organ and Lizzie sitting with her legs bent beneath her on the floor and Mrs. Cobb in her armchair, and Turner would wheeze the organ into life.

He did not try to sing again.

But Lizzie did.

When Turner slipped into "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel," Lizzie began to tap her knee. By the end of the first verse she was nodding, by the end of the second she was humming, and by the end of the third she was singing along. "I set my foot on the Gospel ship, and the ship it began to sail. It landed me over on Canaan's shore, and I'll never come back anymore." Turner—who hadn't known the words to the last verse—fretted that Mrs. Cobb might want to grab ahold of Canaan's shore, but when he looked at her, she wasn't holding a hand to her heart or even clenching the arms of her chair. Her head was laid back and her eyes turned to Lizzie, and she was listening to her sweet high voice as if it were the first spring day.

After that, Lizzie always sang the hymns she knew, and Turner cut down on the high churchy tunes to accommodate her. She never spoke to Mrs. Cobb, though, and Mrs. Cobb never spoke to her. But Turner figured Mrs. Cobb's leaving the back door open was enough.

So the two weeks of Turner's sentence ended and he was free—or at least as free as any minister's boy could be. Malaga Island was still
forbidden,
but he began to explore the paths into the woods above Phippsburg and to hike along the peninsula's Kennebec shore and climb down to its barnacled rocks. Sometimes he found himself at Thayer's haymeadow, and he would stand at home plate and see the ball coming in hard and fast the way it was meant to, see it so clearly that he could make out the spinning of its seams and know which way it was about to curve.

He never saw Willis Hurd except at church, and then only because he had to. But there were times, especially down at the haymeadow, when he was so lonely he figured he might as well climb on the Gospel ship and head to Canaan's shore—if he couldn't reach the Territories—because he sure didn't want to come back anymore.

***

Phippsburg cooled into autumn, and Turner spent an hour or so every morning moving wood into the shed closer to the house and splitting kindling—until he figured he had enough kindling to start a conflagration across the whole state of Maine. The maples shivered into their new finery. The oak leaves wrinkled at the edges, though they had no notion of going anywhere for quite a long while.

Turner felt a kind of unhappy kinship with them.

Still, every day at the ringing of the three Congregational bells, Turner left his kindling and set off to Mrs. Cobb's house, and every afternoon Lizzie would be there. Mrs. Cobb never asked for Mr. Milton and Mr. Addison anymore. Instead, Turner would play and Lizzie would sing, and then she would disappear out the backyard and Turner would wave to Mrs. Hurd, and he'd settle himself for the silent supper—and the still more silent evening. School would begin soon in Phippsburg, and although he would not be attending—Reverend Buckminster believing that a minister's son should learn at home under the tutelage of his ministerial father—he was already beginning to read the theology that would soon be a part of his curriculum: Nathaniel Emmons,
On Some of the First Principles and Doctrines of True Religion.

Lord, save us all, thought Turner when he hefted the volume.

One day, after the frost had hinted that it might be on its way soon, Turner came out of the woods above Phippsburg where aspens had bleached to a dull yellow-beige and the pines were starting to look haughty in their greenery, and he figured he had better be at Mrs. Cobb's. He sprinted on down, and he might have been there on time if he hadn't been struck by something about as expected as a megalosaurus lumbering up Parker Head.

The door and shutters of Mrs. Hurd's house had been painted green.

He walked across the street and onto her porch. The paint was still glistening. He opened the screen door and rapped with the knocker, but he could tell right away that Mrs. Hurd would not be answering. The house was holding itself tight and lonely, even its curtains pulled together and tied against the day. Turner walked around to the side porch—the shutters had all been painted there, too—and he found a single window whose curtains had not been pulled. When he looked in, he saw sheets laid eerily over all the furniture and even on the carpet, as if an arctic landscape had lifted itself and dropped into a parlor in Phippsburg. Even the wind seemed to be blowing colder, and Turner shivered.