“Hush.”
The woman dropped her face into the blanket, as if sniffing. Bea thought she was trying to decide, but the woman was already decided. She knew the story of Ruth, even if Bea didn’t. A second later, she and the boy and the child and the baby were gone, following the others through the gap and disappearing into the woods. Soon Bea heard the sound of boats being dragged off the rocks. The high, whining creak of oars in their locks, moving offshore. Another whine, coming from Bea herself, a piercing, involuntary sound running from her stomach to her throat: all she could do not to wail. She clamped a hand to her mouth, then vomited into her cupped palm as quietly as she could.
One
1927
The Stanton Quarry was 230 feet deep and half a mile long, the largest granite operation on Cape Ann, and since the woods around it had been cleared to make room for derricks and cutting sheds and garymanders and the locomotive that hauled the rock down to the piers, a man could now stand in the corner office of the Stanton Granite Company headquarters and see the wide, whitecapped sweep of the Ipswich Bay. On the clearest days, he could see all the way to New Hampshire or, if he squeezed himself against the office’s western wall and looked due north, as Josiah Story did now—his cheek taking on the shape of the wood paneling—the whaleish hump of Mount Agamenticus in Maine. Josiah waited for revelation. On his desk sat an optimistically thick stack of paper, all blank except for one sentence: I did not come to Gloucester, I was born here, just like my dear wife Susannah was born here, and just how our children and grandchildren will be.
Maybe it wasn’t a very good sentence, as far as sentences went. Josiah didn’t worry about that. Susannah would fix his grammar, smooth any awkwardness, tweeze out just enough but not too much of his townie roots, clean him up, as she always did. And he liked the idea behind the sentence. He thought it established not only his nativity but his inescapable devotion to the place, and he guessed that was important when a person was running for mayor. The trouble came when he tried to speak the sentence aloud and his tongue went limp on the word “children,” which he and Susannah had been trying and failing to produce for the entire seven years and three months they had been married. He knew the numbers because Susannah kept track in a small leather journal and updated him on their progress, or rather lack thereof, each month. She might have kept track of the days and hours, too, though if so, she spared him that. Josiah did want children. The thought of their smooth heads running around provoked a drumming in his chest—he liked the idea of two, one boy, one girl, disturbing the order of his and Susannah’s house. But he also liked order. He liked quiet, it turned out, a discovery since leaving his clamorous childhood home. He didn’t mourn, as Susannah did, on a daily basis, the dreamed children’s absence. But then he tried that first sentence and his mouth wouldn’t do it—his tongue simply stopped, a flaccid rebellion. The children flung themselves at him with their sweet-smelling hair and noisemaking and he felt at once a crush of grief and the cold humiliation of having told a lie.