She loved working with Agnes, who actually worked, whose formality was deeply relaxing. Why did she have to be eighty-two years old? Maud wished she could collaborate with her forever.
Maud piled two plates with cucumber sandwiches and hummus and peppers and quiche and cookies. Robert was still walking around with Clemmie, otherwise she’d have asked him for help. She managed—story of her life. As she approached the table, she saw a strange man sit down next to Polly. Her heart sank. Even if this was a party, she’d rather have had her people to herself. Agnes was rubbing off on her.
Agnes slipped between the trees, reaching hand over hand from trunk to trunk, absorbing their strength. A branch snapped loudly beneath her foot. Some Indian girl she was. She came to the spot where she and Elspeth had often returned during their childhood sojourns. They loved it because it felt timeless, untouched by any destructive force. They imagined what it was like to live here before, when the earlier residents paddled around the bend into the cove and pulled their canoes onto the rocky beach below, climbed up the bank and were glad to be back here for another summer, just as Agnes and Elspeth always felt.
So many beaver to harvest, and sardines to pull from the sea. So much open land. The Native Americans were long gone before William Lee arrived, and he didn’t even find evidence of their habitation for several summers after being on the Point. Then he tugged at something sticking up from the ground and found a carving. He dug more, found more. He kept a notebook where he catalogued everything, drawing illustrations and noting when and where he found the items. He collected monographs about the local peoples and talked to those who knew much more. He never claimed to have a Native American friend—he was fastidious—but he met men who lived on the reservation land on the Penobscot River near Bangor and asked them about items from his collection. It brought him up short, he’d written, when he conceived of other people living in a different relation to time than he did, something both eternal and more finite.
His words seemed ridiculous now, but that was how it was. Even good, charitable William Lee was a pillager, a colonialist in his own pacificist, Quaker way. The pathos of conquest. Again, the tricks played by imagining. You could only get so far. You could get far enough, though. She’d had to believe that to be a writer, and Agnes did believe it, but she did not believe she could really know what it was like to live inside the body of an Indian girl waking up on an August morning at this summer camp. She could only pay attention to this same vista and beauty, these scents and smells, and think of that girl hearing and seeing the same things. She could ask and she could listen. That was the best she could do.
When she’d made arrangements to pay for Mary Mitchell’s defense, the girl had asked what she’d have to do in return. Agnes came up with a price. She wanted to know what it was like to be Mary Mitchell, to know the secret places of the Cape, what Mary dreamed about for her future, but most of all she wanted to know if Mary Mitchell had ever hunted on Fellowship Point. Mary Mitchell said no. She came to the Point by boat to put up the rope swing, and she climbed up the bank to the site of the old summer camp. Stories of those days had been passed down, and a great-aunt had told her about it.
“We were told we weren’t making use of it, so we had no right to it.”
“I was taught that, too, except it had the opposite consequence.” Agnes said. “We believed we knew better what to do with the land, so we deserved to own it.”
The Looses and Archie and James thought the same thing—Agnes and Polly weren’t making use of the Point.
“I don’t believe in killing or eating animals,” Agnes told Mary Mitchell. “I have protected the eagles all my life.”
Mary Mitchell nodded. “The eagle is sacred. I don’t kill it either.”
“But you do.”
“No. That is not what happens. The sacred cannot be killed.”
Agnes was predisposed to dismiss this statement based on her allergies to religiosity, but she found herself returning to it now, alone in the Sank. She thought, now, she understood what Mary meant. She wasn’t killing the eagles. She was asking them for their help.
She lowered herself down to the ground, careful careful, and pulled herself in different directions until she lay on her back. A stick poked her between the shoulders, exactly where Grace’s nails often prodded all those years ago. Why wouldn’t Grace leave her alone? Agnes had pretended not to notice, refused to give her the satisfaction. Those thin, pressed lips, that crumpled, wounded face. Her nemesis. Pushing for recognition now. Agnes couldn’t remember Grace ever walking out here to this place, not even once. She’d never liked being on Fellowship Point and only perked up in the middle of August when she started packing to go back to Walnut Street. It was a relief to bury her in Philadelphia and not have to see her name every day in the graveyard. Agnes would be under the ground herself soon enough; she’d had Robert only lightly cover the hole where they’d dug out Nan’s stone. It was possible that eventually all the bones might be dislodged in the process of digging the foundation for a resort hotel. So be it. She’d tried. “Why don’t you try a little?” Grace said when Agnes would appear at parties in pants and no lipstick. “Why don’t you?” Agnes would retort childishly. What had she even been referring to?
Agnes rolled onto her side. From that vantage point she could see down to the beach. Look at that! There was the rope swing, refastened to the sketchy branch. Friends of Mary Mitchell’s perhaps had put it up. She’d have to bring Polly to see it.
Agnes tried to get up but tipped over halfway and banged to the ground.
* * *
Polly wanted to scream. How had she gotten stuck with Hamm Loose?
“This is Heidi Silver,” she said.
Hamm stuck out his paw. “Are you visiting?”
Heidi shook her head but didn’t explain. Hamm wasn’t all that interested anyway. “It’s God’s country up here,” he said. “I’d never live anywhere else.”
Heidi looked at him. It was difficult to characterize how Heidi looked at things. She said very little; they didn’t know how much she understood. People tended to raise their voices to her, which Agnes swiftly punished. “She can hear you, but maybe she doesn’t want to speak with you, ever think of that?” Polly would love to say that to Hamm Loose, but it wasn’t her way.
“Have you traveled?” she asked Hamm, all manners.
“Yes. I liked Rome.”
Polly laughed. This pleased him. He looked at her bashfully. “I guess that’s not saying much.”
“No, no, everyone has his own Rome.”
“I’d still choose this.” He looked into her eyes, seeking—what? Agreement? Approval? She smiled again. “I haven’t been here in a long time. Never felt welcome!” He belly-laughed at this.
“Why do you think that was?” Polly asked, both on guard and goading.
Hamm’s brow tightened. His sons had skulked away to more private reaches of the party, and Hamm seemed a bit tetherless because of it, though Polly was sure only she was noticing that. He was a big man, not fat like his son Teeter, who must weigh three hundred pounds, but heavy boned and broad and boxy, with meaty legs. Yet his eyes, nose, and lips were all close together in a small circle on the front of his large head, like someone had drawn them onto a ballon before inflating it. His hair was wavy and dark, his fingernails buffed—a point of grooming Agnes saw as a bad sign in a man. Vanity was bad enough in a woman, but in men it cloyed. What did they have to be vain about? Why bother with it if you don’t need to? Polly’s granddaughter Maeve once told Agnes she was sexist for having such opinions. “Thank you!” Agnes said.