My mother presses her lips together. “What’s the alternative?”
Dr. Heald winces in an exaggerated way, as if this is as hard for him to say as it is for us to hear. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t think there is one.”
The braces Dr. Heald puts me in clamp my legs like a medieval torture device, tearing my skin into bloody strips and making me howl in pain. After a week of this, Mother takes me back to Dr. Heald and he removes them. She gasps when she sees my legs, covered with red festering wounds. To this day I bear the scars.
For the rest of my life, I will be wary of doctors. When Dr. Heald comes to the house to check on Mamey or Mother’s pregnancy or Papa’s cough, I make myself scarce, hiding in the attic, the barn, the four-hole privy in the shed.
ON THE PINE boards of the kitchen floor I practice walking in a straight line.
“One foot in front of the next, like a tightrope walker,” my mother instructs, “along the seam.”
It’s hard to keep my balance; I can only walk on the outsides of my feet. If this really were a tightrope in the circus, Al points out, I would have fallen to my death a dozen times already.
“Steady, now,” Mother says. “It’s not a race.”
“It is a race,” Al says. On a parallel seam he steps lightly in a precise choreography of small stockinged feet, and within moments is at the end. He throws up his arms. “I win!”
I pretend to stumble, and as I fall I kick his legs out from under him and he lands hard on his tailbone. “Get out of her way, Alvaro,” Mother scolds. Sprawling on the floor, he glowers at me. I glower back. Al is thin and strong, like a strip of steel or the trunk of a sapling. He is naughtier than I am, stealing eggs from the hens and attempting to ride the cows. I feel a pit of something hard and spiky in my stomach. Jealousy. Resentment. And something else: the unexpected pleasure of revenge.
I fall so often that Mother sews cotton pads for my elbows and knees. No matter how much I practice, I can’t get my legs to move the way they should. But eventually they’re strong enough that I can play hide-and-seek in the barn and chase chickens in the yard. Al doesn’t care about my limp. He tugs at me to come with him, climb trees, ride Dandy the old brown mule, scrounge for firewood for a clambake. Mother’s always scolding and shushing him to go away, give me peace, but Mamey is silent. She thinks it’s good for me, I can tell.
I WAKE IN the dark to the sound of rain drumming the roof and a commotion in my parents’ bedroom. Mother groaning, Mamey murmuring. My father’s voice and two others I don’t recognize in the foyer downstairs. I slip out of bed and into my woolen skirt and thick socks and cling to the rail as I half fall, half slide down the stairs. At the bottom my father is standing with a stout red-faced woman wearing a kerchief over her frizzy hair.
“Go back to bed, Christina,” Papa says. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Babies pay no attention to the clock,” the woman sing-songs. She shrugs off her coat and hands it to my father. I cling to the banister while she lumbers like a badger up the narrow stairs.
I creep up after her and push open the door to Mother’s bedroom. Mamey is there, leaning over the bed. I can’t see much on the high mahogany four-poster, but I hear Mother moaning.
Mamey turns. “Oh, child,” she says with dismay. “This is no place for you.”
“It’s all right. A girl needs to learn the ways of the world sooner or later,” the badger says. She jerks her head at me. “Why don’t you make yourself useful? Tell your father to heat water on the stove.”
I look at Mother, thrashing and writhing. “Is she going to be all right?”
The badger scowls. “Your mother is fine and dandy. Did you hear what I said? Boiling water. Baby is on the way.”
I make my way down to the kitchen and tell Papa, who puts a pot of water on the black iron Glenwood range. As we wait in the kitchen he teaches me card games, Blackjack and Crazy Eights, to pass the time. The sound of the wind driving rain against the house is like dry beans in a hollow stick. Before morning is over, we hear the high-pitched cry of a healthy baby.
“His name is Samuel,” Mother says when I climb onto the bed beside her. “Isn’t he perfect?”
“Um-hmm,” I say, though I think the baby looks as crab apple–faced as the badger.
“Maybe he’ll be an explorer like his grandfather Samuel,” Mamey says. “Like all of the seafaring Samuels.”
“God forbid,” Mother says.
“WHO ARE THE seafaring Samuels?” I ask Mamey later, when Mother and the baby are napping and we’re alone in the Shell Room.
“They’re your ancestors. The reason you’re here,” she says.
She tells me the story of how, in 1743, three men from Massachusetts—two brothers, Samuel and William Hathorn, and William’s son Alexander—packed their belongings into three carriages for the long journey to the province of Maine in the middle of winter. They arrived at a remote peninsula that for two thousand years had been a meeting ground for Indian tribes and built a tent made of animal skins, sturdy enough to withstand the coming months of snow and ice and muddy thaw. Within a year they felled a swath of forest and built three log cabins. And they gave this spit of land in Cushing, Maine, a name: Hathorn Point.
Fifty years later, Alexander’s son Samuel, a sea captain, built a two-story wood-frame house on the foundation of the family’s cabin. Samuel married twice, raised six children in the house, and died in his seventies. His son Aaron, also a sea captain, married twice and raised eight children here. When Aaron died and his widow decided to sell the house (opting for a simpler life in town, closer to the bakery and the dry goods store), the seafaring Hathorns were dismayed. Five years later Aaron’s son Samuel IV bought the house back, reestablishing the family’s hold on the land.
Samuel IV was my grandfather.
All of those sea captains, coming and going for months at a time. Their many wives and children, up and down the narrow stairs. To this day, Mamey says, this old house on Hathorn Point is filled with their ghosts.
WHEN YOUR WORLD is small, you learn every inch of it. You can trace it in the dark; you navigate it in your sleep. Fields of rough grass sloping toward the rocky shore and the sea beyond, nooks and crannies to hide and play in. The soot-black range, always warm, in the kitchen. Geraniums on the windowsill, splayed red like a magician’s handkerchief. Feral cats in the barn. Air that smells of pine and seaweed, of chicken roasting in the oven and freshly plowed soil.
One summer afternoon Mother looks at the tide chart in the kitchen and says, “Put on your shoes, Christina, I’ve got something to show you.”
I lace up my brown brogues and follow her down through the field, past the humming cicadas and the swooping crows, and into the family cemetery, my legs steady enough that I can almost keep up. I trail my fingers across the moss-mottled, half-crumbled headstones, their etchings hard to read. The oldest one belongs to Joanne Smalley Hathorn. She died in 1834, when she was thirty-three, the mother of seven young children. When she was dying, Mother tells me, she begged her husband to bury her on the property instead of in the town cemetery several miles away so their children could visit her grave.
Her children were buried here too. All the Hathorns after her are buried here.
We continue to the shore on the southern side of Hathorn Point, above Kissing Cove and Maple Juice Cove, where the estuary of the St. George River flows into Muscongus Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. There’s an ancient heap of shells here that Mother says was left by Abenaki Indians who spent