Chapter 10 - The Salt Gate
We did not wait for the four o'clock train.
There was a freight-run leaving the south yard at noon—eight empty coal-hoppers and a caboose that had a pot-bellied stove in the corner, where the brakeman let us sit on two three-legged stools if Dunstan gave him two plugs of black naval tobacco from his bag.
My father did not come to the station.
He had stood in the marble corridor while Arthur Henderson’s associates packed their leather cases, his back against the wall, his velvet collar turned up against a draft that only he could feel.
When I passed him, he had reached out his hand—his dry, white clerk’s hand that had never held anything heavier than a passbook—and touched the rough wool of Maeve’s blanket.
“Bridget,” he had said. His eyes were wet, but they were the tears of a man who knows that the door he shut from the inside cannot be opened by leaning against the outside of the casing. “What will I tell your mother?”
I looked at him for the last time.
“Tell her,” I said, “that the baby is eight pounds, four ounces. And tell her she has my grandmother’s mouth.”
Then I walked down the marble steps, through the tall iron doors of the Old Exchange, and into the wind that was blowing up from the salt flats.
***
By nine o'clock that night, we were back in Port Claire.
The fog had cleared. A north-west wind had come up off the mountains, scouring the bay until the stars looked like chips of white flint set into an iron plate. The tide was at the full, slapping against the pilings of the Gable dock with a clean, rhythmic hollow boom that shook the floorboards of the third-floor room.
Maeve was asleep on the iron bedstead, wrapped in a dry flannel diaper that Mrs. Gable had warmed over the hall stove before we came up the stairs.
The kerosene heater was burning blue and steady, its yellow smell gone, replaced by the sharp, clean reek of pine-pitch from the box Donald had left beside the coal-scuttle.
On the table lay *The Ledger*.
Beside it lay forty-two dollars—the balance of the fifteen dollars Dunstan had forced Arthur Henderson’s clerk to pay as "statutory witness costs" before we left Room 302, and the twenty-seven dollars I had left from the cannery voucher.
It was not a fortune. It was not even enough to pay the rent until midsummer.
Tomorrow, at six in the morning, the cannery whistle would blow—two long, iron shrieks that called the cutters to the salt-benches for the spring herring run. I would carry Maeve down to Mrs. Gable’s kitchen, put her basket beside the range where the old woman was baking the pilot-bread, and walk down the slipway with my gutting knife wrapped in an oiled rag in my pocket.
My hands would be red by noon. The salt would find every cut around my knuckles, and my back would ache until I couldn't stand straight without holding onto the edge of the trough.
Marcus Henderson would be in Boston. He would be sitting in a lecture hall with tall windows that looked out over the Charles River, his notebook open to an analysis of commercial paper, his clean fingers holding a fountain pen that didn't leak.
In June, he would marry the girl whose father owned the three paper mills on the Kennebec. He would stand beneath four thousand white roses in a stone chapel, and his mother would weep into a handkerchief made of Brussels lace, and people would say that Arthur Henderson’s son had a very solid future in the corporate line.
He would have the future he had chosen on the Tuesday afternoon when he unplugged his telephone charger.
And I would have this.
I walked to the window.
The glass was cold against my forehead. Down in the harbor, the lights of the night-trawlers were moving out toward the channel, green and red lanterns swinging against the black water like low stars.
Behind me, Maeve let out a long, shuddering sigh in her sleep—that deep, luxurious exhalation an infant makes when the milk has settled, the room is warm, and the blanket is tucked firmly beneath the chin.
I didn't need the house on Maple Street. I didn't need my father’s green armchair or my mother’s gold-damask sofa, where people sat with their feet together and waited for other people to tell them what they were permitted to think.
This room was mine. The five dollars a week was mine. The bread on the shelf was mine, paid for in coins that had been counted three times on a clean board.
I reached out and touched the window sash, ready to pull it down against the rising draft, when I saw the light.
It was not a lantern on a trawler. It was down at the foot of the Gable lane, where the narrow dirt track met the harbor road.
A car had stopped.
Its headlamps were long, yellow cones that cut through the salt-haze, illuminating the dry weeds along the ditch and the white-painted palings of the widow’s garden. It was not a local truck; it sat low and long against the gravel, the engine idling with a rhythmic, eight-cylinder purr that Port Claire had never heard except when the summer people took the wrong turn off the turnpike.
A door opened. The interior light came on—soft, yellow, and warm against leather seats.
A man stepped out into the mud.
He was not wearing Arthur Henderson’s charcoal overcoat, nor did he have the leather soles of the process server. He wore a dark, heavy pea-jacket, but as he stepped through the beam of the headlamps toward the bottom of the Gable stairs, the light caught his face.
It was Marcus.
He stood in the road, his duffel bag in his left hand, his face white beneath the glare of the headlamps, looking up at the third-floor window where the kerosene light was burning through the salt-filmed glass.
May you like
He didn't move. He stood there with his collar turned up against the Atlantic wind, his hand clenched around the canvas strap of his bag, looking at the only window in the house that had a light behind it.
Behind me, the brass knocker on the front door down on the porch gave a single, hesitant, shivering tap.
