After You've Gone. Jeffrey Lent
But I can’t go to school in my nightshirt.” And opened the loaned coat and worked his way out of it and folded it and set it aside. His uncle came around the counter and looked him up and down.
He said, “You’ll look more like you’re ready for the boats. But you’ll be warm enough. We’ll start with socks for them blue feet and long underwear and work up from there. How does that sound?”
Henry said, “I’ll work it off.”
His uncle reached and rubbed the boy’s head. “I’d not charge for a tragedy such as this. You’ll need to be earning money anyway, not working off debt.”
“No.”
“Suppose I was to refuse you, then?”
The boy stood silent.
George did not wait. But went about gathering the odd assortment of clothing he had in the smallest of men’s sizes. As he did he talked, almost as if to himself.
“The difference between a gift and a debt can be large or small and it’s not always easy to see the difference twixt the two so what we’ll do is simple and that’s I’ll charge you cost for the clothes, which is a gift but allows you the debt. I lose nothing that way but my profit and you gain something which is pride so we both come out ahead and that is the end of that argument. And you’ll need not one but two sets of everything or else you’ll be in school each day layered in coal dust and your mother would be up the Neck buying you what you don’t want her to buy. As it is she’ll have to keep ahead of the wash but that’s not my worry. She might not admit or remember but it won’t be the first time a Moore has reddened their hands with hard soap. At the moment her mind’s upon where the lot of you’ll be living.”
Henry was dressing. He was very cold. He said, “I guess there’s Mr. Morrell’s old house.”
“The Morrell house is rough. Men are funny. They can do most anything they set their minds to but I’ve seen it before—they just let a place run down. Still, I’d imagine you’re right and that’s where you’ll end up. At least for the winter. But I’ll bet you a dime come spring Euphemia rebuilds right there on that burned-out lot.”
Henry was nearly dressed. The denim pants were long and he rolled them up and the shirt was short at the wrists but he was used to that. The coat was heavy red and black checked wool and came far down the backs of his hands. He said, “Uncle George?”
“What is it?”
Henry heard the caution as if his uncle knew there was a shift in their particular wind. But he forged forward. “What happened to my father?”
George glanced toward the window. To see if anyone else was approaching. To gather his thoughts. Then turned back to the boy and said, “Why you already know. Certainly you remember. He took the whole lot of you down to the Boston States when you were just a little boy and wasn’t there but close to two years when he took sick and died and your mother buried him and brought all of you back up here. Where you belonged.”
Henry said, “No. What really happened?”
His uncle studied him a long moment. And part of that moment was the first time Henry could pinpoint for sure that the world of adults was less certain, more tenuous, strained, and daily in struggle toward events unknown—the future.
George said, “Even dressed warm as anyone out on the Banks you’re still shivering. Do you drink coffee?”
“No sir.”
“Well, it’s a good morning to start. Come back and sit. You might be late for school.”
“I guess,” Henry said. “I’ve got as good an excuse this morning as I’ll ever have.”
George poured coffee into two white and black speckled enameled cups and lightened both with condensed milk from a tin and went around behind the counter, Henry following. There was an angled clerk’s desk with a wall rack of numbered and lettered cubicles against the wall behind the desk. The desktop was a fury of paper, from long legal forms to slips of paper torn from brown bags, stacks of letters rubber-banded together and a pad of paper with the Dorn Brothers letterhead, a can of pencils and a set of pens and inkpots and George sat there, swiveled around and indicated the other chair, which once had a woven rush seat but the rush was gone so a piece of plank was nailed over the seat. Henry sat and his uncle handed him the coffee. The boy sipped and was transported—the sublime flavor and warmth running down into him and so one of life’s long loves began for him.
“It’s good,” he said.
His uncle did not respond. He chewed one corner of his mustache, small persistent nippings of thought. Then ran his tongue around his lips, drank from his cup and said, “Your father was the youngest of us boys. He was different, some would say strange.” He paused then and scowled at his nephew. “You asked me and I’m going to tell you. What you make of it’s your business. But it stays between the two of us, do you understand that?”
Braver then he felt, Henry said, “Yes sir.”
George thought a bit and then went on. “They say he never belonged in this place but then I don’t know the place he would have belonged. There are men, and he was one of them, who aren’t of their time. Or perhaps any time, as any place. He dwelt inside himself. He couldn’t absorb the everyday, it bored him, and frustrated him I think as well. Yet when left to himself he became nervous, unsettled, almost flopping. When he was like that there was a look in his eye like a skinned fish. I couldn’t tell you more than that what it was like to be Samuel Dorn but I wouldn’t want to know either. Whatever, it wasn’t comfortable, nor easy to be around. I think perhaps where he failed was his mind could not invest in what was before him but he lacked the resources to do with it what he might have. You must recall, all he had was six grades and that spotty. He weren’t much older than you when he went to work on the boats but that didn’t last the year. It wasn’t that he was slight, like you; he was but there are plenty men lean and tough. It was that he would stand in the midst of hauling nets or be gazing off toward the black clouds working up upon the crew frantic to get the work done and in ahead of the squall or storm or gale—some days you never know what it’ll be until it’s upon you. But he would watch it as if studying how it unfolded. Which is a unusual mind and some rare intelligence I dare say myself but not the sort of hand you want working alongside you. Like I said, it wasn’t even that first season and there were no captains who would have him.
“So Fred and I put him to clerk in the store and he was a fair hand at that. Still a daydreamer but there’s time enough for that and he was sharp with figures and Fred and I were still younger fellows, at least than we are now and so I went back to running one of the packet schooners, which as a young man I loved nothing better. Then he met your mother and we thought There, Euphemia Moore is just the one to buckle him down. And for a time it worked well. Fred and I came near making him a partner after Gil and Lucy had come along. He seemed well settled. Then, I swear it wasn’t maybe a week before we were going to sit down with him but he came and asked for a six month leave from the store. Six months off! And the season just starting. We tried to talk him out of it but he was determined. He’d saved enough to live on. And they had the house—it had been our grand-parents’s and was conferred as a wedding gift. I guess maybe then we all knew he would need at least that much help.
“Now, I make him sound something like an idiot or a ne’er do well but he weren’t either one. He had a gift and it was considerable. He could draw. And he made paintings too, landscapes, the sea, scenes from fishing, all of what he knew. He had no training at all but I saw a many of them and he had a gift there. But, even more so than that was his drawings in pencil or pen. He’d go down along the Bay at low tide and find some thing or another. A piece of driftwood. Even just a scrap of kelp. Scallop shells for the love of God! But he’d take it home and sketch that thing out in the finest lines you ever saw and right there on that piece of paper was the most everyday thing we’d all stepped on a thousand times and it was not just beautiful. I mean the drawing was not just beautiful in being accurate. But he had a way of bringing it onto the page where you recognized it immediately, the