Prologue #2
Jamie’s father owned three lobster-fishing boats but was still entirely dependent on the profits from the catch to support his family.
Their home was far more modest than ours, with barely any yard.
Jamie was still sharing a bedroom with his older sister, Edna, even though she was practically engaged to Philip Booth, who commanded one of his father’s three boats.
They, and practically everyone I knew, had grown up and gone to school on Birdlane Island.
People who had done so or had lived here most of their lives were affectionately called “Birdies.”
Daddy didn’t like to be called that even though he had grown up here.
He was proud of our family business, despite his complaining that his father didn’t give him the authority he deserved.
He often complained about not getting enough recognition from Baxter employees.
Maybe he really did think we should be treated like royalty.
I know he wanted to look very wealthy and tried to have only very wealthy friends.
“We should be sendin’ Lisa to the Montessori School in Bar Harbor,” I had just heard him say yesterday. “We have more in common with those parents, and she will certainly have more in common with those children than the children of people on the fringes of poverty.”
“You were once one of those children,” Mommy reminded him. “The son of a lobster fisherman.”
“But I’m not now.”
“Thanks to your father,” Mommy muttered loud enough to be heard.
“Even so, nothin’ wrong with bein’ proud and livin’ like it.”
“We’re not sending her to the mainland school,” Mommy had insisted. We often called Bar Harbor “the mainland” because you had to cross Frenchman Bay to get there. After a moment, she had firmly added, “You know why we can’t do that.”
They were both silent, so I imagined Daddy had walked away; however, Mommy had realized that I had overheard them arguing about my being sent to a “proper” school. She saw me outside the living room door, practically crouching in a corner.
“Don’t pay any attention to your father’s bluster,” she had told me. She hugged me without saying another word. Later that day, when I told Jamie what Daddy had wanted, he looked upset.
“You’re no mainland kid,” he had said. He said that from time to time as if he was afraid I would want to be.
As the years went by, Jamie spent more time with me than he did with other kids in his class, especially the boys.
I knew that they often mocked him about it.
Rarely did he react. He would simply shrug and walk off, come over to join me, just as he did that day I had decided to go to the high cliff to watch for the geese like some barrelman in a crow’s nest.
Our parents wouldn’t be happy we had climbed our way up there.
There was practically a natural stairway of grooves that had formed since the Ice Age.
That was what Jamie said. He knew lots more about Birdlane than I did.
He told me that archaeologists had found the remains of stone and bone tools in Frenchman Bay, some of which went back thousands of years and lots of which were exhibited in the Abbe Museum in downtown Bar Harbor.
Most of it was from the Native people in Maine, the Wabanaki.
I hadn’t been there yet, but Jamie had. Even though it took only ten minutes to cross the bay, Mommy had always wanted me close to home when I was very young.
If Daddy tried to take me along on one of his business trips, she would say no. “You won’t keep your eyes on her, Melville Howard Baxter.” His close friends, most of them business associates, called him Mel, but Mommy never did.
Of course, now I knew what she meant and why she was so firm about her decisions concerning me, as firm as the legs of an old pier planted hundreds of years ago in the bay. But back then I thought she was being a little unfair to Daddy. And to me!
Jamie periodically looked back as we walked toward the cliff.
I was sure he was worried that we’d be seen and maybe he would be blamed.
His parents would be just as mad about it as mine would be.
I felt a little guilty about having him go with me.
I wouldn’t want to hurt Jamie even accidentally.
We walked on, him checking every once in a while to see if I really wanted to do it.
But I didn’t hesitate, not even for a moment.
The grooved steps were narrow, and there was nothing to hold on to if you got dizzy or stumbled.
Even older boys had fallen, the most famous one being Gibson Carper, who fell halfway down and broke his neck.
He was nearly fifteen. But that was nearly twenty years ago and more like an old wives’ tale to me.
Once we reached the top of the cliff, Jamie and I sat on a small flat area not far from the edge and waited.
All those high bluffs we saw would lovingly shield the house on the island that was, curiously enough, shaped like a bird in flight.
Winter’s breath was already in the air. The surf roared more loudly with the waves splashing higher on the rocks, some of them so washed they glistened like jewels.
Many were jagged and looked dangerous. Sometimes the sea looked angry, but most of the time it looked inviting, beckoning.
Walking on the beach and being dazzled by the leaping spray was always exciting.
Jamie and I sat closer, enjoying the aura of warmth around our young bodies.
My hair danced around my head, and as he gazed at the sky spotted with long, thin clouds that looked like they had been spread over the darkening azure with a butter knife, he squinted; his eyes were an amber color with a copper tint to them.
Of course I didn’t know everyone’s eye color, but Mommy once said that Jamie’s eyes were the only eyes that shade on the island.
Maybe there were only a few more like his in the whole state of Maine.
I didn’t pay as much attention to other boys’ faces as I did to Jamie’s. His smile always began in his eyes and rippled down to his lips the way the seawater at high tide ventured over the rocks at the shore and, like tiny fingers, tried to touch shiny stones farther and farther inland.
Sure enough, this morning, as my dream had told me, the geese appeared.
At first they were nothing more than a smudge against the sky, a shifting shape that looked like a fast-moving cloud approaching; they were that close together.
At this height we could see their eyes, steadily focused on where they were going.
With the distinct black markings on their necks giving them an air of quiet authority, they flew in a sharp V, each bird following the last without hesitation.
Their feathers gleamed, and their pale underbellies caught the light as they passed overhead.
They were Canada geese, travelers of great distances.
As they soared, I watched their wings, broad and sturdy, lift them higher, and their eyes seemed to hold quiet determination.
Mommy had told me that they could sleep with one eye open and one eye shut, watching for predators.
Their eyelids shut from bottom to top, so it was easy to think they didn’t have eyelids at all.
I used to try to sleep with one eye open but couldn’t do it for more than a minute, if that.
“How do they know winter’s coming?” I asked Jamie, who wore a small smile of wonder at how accurately I had predicted their coming, his lips just barely softening.
He brushed his hair back and turned a little to get a better view.
He was already fighting with his father, who thought his dark brown hair was too long.
There were only a handful of boys in our school who defied their Birdlane parents to wear their hair anywhere near as long as he did, even seniors.
They wanted to be more like boys on the mainland who modeled themselves after rock stars.
Jamie said his father had told him the geese had a built-in thermometer. Of course I knew that wasn’t exactly true.
What really interested me was wondering what would happen if any one goose didn’t go with the flock.
“He’d hafta go,” Jamie said as they disappeared off to our right.
“Why? ’Cause he’d freeze?”
“No,” he said, “because he’d be lonely.”
“Lonely,” I repeated, and looked at them all disappearing, fixed on the horizon toward the south.
Their flight was accompanied by a melodic chorus of honks among them.
How sad that made me feel. I knew there were tears in my eyes from the imagined vision of one goose losing the flock and drifting in the wind.
Loneliness.
In the end, that made the most sense. It was really why you did most things: to avoid being alone and having your own echoing voice be the only voice you heard.
After which there would be the silence or the emptiness of your own thoughts searching fruitlessly for someone to hear them.
And that was when you were most afraid.
So I knew that I always would smile at the geese honking together, refusing to remain in the wrong season at the wrong time.
Eventually, I would refuse, too.