Together
Together
1877
I t took four years for Willis’s sons to return home from their whaling work off the Pacific coast. When they did, the older one, Edward Moses, brought a wife with him. The other son, Basil, never married, though he became a favorite of his brother’s children. He was always surrounded by the kids and their friends. Uncle B, as they called him, was generous with his time, engaging in such essential tasks as building and fixing tree houses, playing his violin, and telling stories that made the children squeal with laughter. Every family needed someone like Uncle B.
Willis’s boys preferred not to speak of their time at sea, the whaling having been such a drawn-out and bloody affair. Still, there was one occasion, when the three generations of Freemans were gathered for a meal, that Uncle B described the first time he’d ever seen a whale. The beast had risen straight out of the water and flipped itself back down into the depths, he told them. It had frightened and thrilled him to see the size of that thing.
“That whale,” Uncle B said, “was the most magnificent creature in the world. It was larger than the longboats that chased it.” At this description, the children said, “Ohhh!” in unison. Uncle B’s eyes took on a gleam as he continued, waving his arms dramatically.
“The creature had a waterfall coming out of the top of its head!”
“Ahhh!” the kids yelled.
“Well, that whale,” Uncle B said, picking up his spoon, “was living proof of the greatness of God, I tell you.” Uncle B took in a mouthful of soup. “It was not an easy task, ours, to have to hunt those creatures. It was a nasty job, to have to process them later for their oil.” He made cutting gestures and grimaced, and the children made the same face back at him. “But we needed the work, and it was a privilege to ride the seas. To see the Lord’s wonders. That whale was only one of them.”
Grandpa Willis listened to his son, nodding, a big grin on his face. What a fortunate man he had turned out to be, he thought. To be here, alive still, and free. To witness this gathering in his kitchen. To hear his own youthful impressions echoed by one of his sons. There had been bleak days without his boys, though the occasional letter had arrived from San Francisco. But here they were, now, all together. And they were doing well.
Willis’s family was growing. He had enough land to feed them all. His wagon wheels and sleigh runners and decorative painting were back in demand. There was less need for sailmaking, though Aquinnah still had plenty to do. But all the talk about being at sea made Willis think of his very first days in Massachusetts. He looked over at Moses’s stoneware jar, which was sitting by the kitchen door, as it had for years. On that evening, he decided that if he was still around when his grandchildren established households of their own, he would pass the jar down to a new generation.
It would be nearly twenty more years before the stoneware jar changed hands. Willis’s youngest grandson had just married a minister’s daughter from Springfield, and Willis decided they should move the jar into their home.
“No sense waiting until I’m gone,” Willis said. “It won’t be going far anyhow.”
In five decades, the jar had rarely been used for its intended purpose, namely food storage, but Old Willis and Aquinnah directed their children to stock the jar symbolically with food to provide for the young couple as they began their union. Amid much noise and laughter, they loaded the ceramic container with a series of smaller glass jars that had been filled with fruits, dried beans, and pickled meats and sealed shut with glass lids and metal clamps.
The jar was then hoisted into a wheelbarrow and pushed from the kitchen of the house where Willis and Aquinnah had raised their boys to a much larger home down the road, but on the same property. Once the original store of canned foods had been removed from the jar, it became an occasional receptacle for whatever suited the family. The post, newspapers, parasols, jackets, and, at one point, a hunting rifle.
The jar would remain in the big house through childbirths, wars, the Spanish flu, stock market crashes, and house renovations, until 1984, when Edward Freeman III moved into the first home he would share with Soh. By then, the Freemans had become a family prosperous beyond the wildest hopes of Willis and Aquinnah. Still, they understood that the old jar was the most valuable thing they had, apart from their freedom.
Ed, like his father, left the jar mostly empty, with the exception of one item, which had always remained in the bottom of the vessel, no matter what else was placed in there. Every once in a while, someone in the family would reach their hand all the way down to the bottom of the jar and twirl their fingers around until they found the old piece of wood with the X burned onto its surface. Invariably, they would pull it out to look at it, smile, then let it fall back in. That piece of wood was still helping the Freemans to find their way through the world, along with the hidden message carved into the bottom of the jar.