eva
I hate reading.
All those words. It's painful. Give me biology. Gym. A frog to dissect. Some laps to run. Anything but English. All those words.
What have words ever done for anyone anyway? Can you catch fish with words? Can you pick berries with words? Fix a car? Heal the sick? No. Waste of time.
Especially poetry. Words that don't even make sense. And you're supposed to read them out loud. Please, tie me to a tractor. I can't wait for next year, when all I have to do is coast. Then real life takes over and, if I don't get out of Franktown, Maine, beats me senseless.
I think even Mr. Denis hates all the read-aloud stuff, even though he's a big believer in words. Or maybe he hates it because he's a big believer in words. He can't stand to listen to us shred them in his class.
But he pronounces things wrong, too. Like the town up the road, Calais? Mr. Denis thinks it rhymes with ballet. If you're from here you know that Calais rhymes with Alice. Palace. Callous. Malice.
The other thing about Mr. Denis is he doesn't like to be corrected. Mostly he just paces back and forth while we go around the room reading aloud. Today the lucky poem is "The Courtship of Miles Standish," which he thought we'd be "wicked excited about" (his words) because the guy who wrote it was from Maine, but what Mr. Denis doesn't know is that this part of Maine has nothing to do with that part of Maine. Another thing he doesn't know is that when people like him say things like "wicked excited" it sounds stupid. Wicked stupid, as a matter of fact. He also doesn't know that no high school junior is going to get excited about a two-hundred-year-old poem anyway.
Back and forth in front of the windows, Mr. Denis just paces, looking out into the fog, which hasn't lifted all day. Behind him, Louise catches my eye and makes a face. I roll my eyes, catching John Baptiste in my peripheral vision, pointing at me like he's pointing a gun, and winking. No joke. Winking. What a tool. I look back at my textbook.
Back and forth paces Mr. Denis, licking his finger and smoothing the last few hairs left on his head, back and forth past the rows of desks, pretending not to look at us, almost closing his eyes, then without warning spinning around with a snap! to try and catch someone in the act of, I don't know, passing a note I guess. Or falling asleep.
Or not paying attention, like Gabe Lejeune, who as usual is hunched over that mysterious notebook he carries around everywhere, running his left hand through his floppy chestnut hair and scribbling away with his other hand, writing whatever it is he writes in there.
I wonder what he writes about.
"Mr. Lejeune!" says Mr. Denis. "You are next."
Gabe doesn't even look up. He has no idea it's his turn to read.
Gabriel
EVANGELINE SET DOWN HER RAKE AND UNTIED her felt cloak of cornflower blue, draping it over the fence that enclosed the small garden in front of the small, square stone-and-log house. She pushed her linen sleeves up over her forearms, swiped her hair away from her face, and looked up at the low, wispy clouds above. Gabriel seized on the gesture, sweeping his charcoal across the sheet of birchbark.
No good, he thought. He tossed the birchbark sheet aside and began to sweat with frustration. He glared at his inept hand, his sloppy sketch, and fretted. What if he was never able to accomplish this task? What if he never captured Evangeline's beauty? He pulled another piece of birchbark from his foresleeve and smoothed it over his thigh.
Gabriel's failure as an artist wasn't for lack of trying. Gabriel had spent hours, days, years watching Evangeline, his bewitcher, and equal hours, days, years trying to draw her. Another eye might call his drawings fair, even beautiful, but not Gabriel. He knew they were poor. Empty. Anemic representations of the exquisite Evangeline.
Gabriel took a deep, silent breath. Perhaps he just didn't have enough skill yet. After all, no one ever showed him how to use charcoal from a dead fire to draw on sheets of birchbark. He'd discovered that himself. No one showed him the tricks of light and shape and how to convey them. But he knew. Still, he could not capture Evangeline. Nothing he created could approach her beauty.
Practice, he said to himself. This is your life's work. There is nothing else. There is no one else.
Gabriel and Evangeline were betrothed sixteen months now, just long enough for him to follow the custom of the Cadians and build her a home, a strong house of stone and wood aside an orchard of twelve saplings, eight apple and four pear, and a small outbuilding for goats and chickens and cider making.
Evangeline's beauty and intelligence were known throughout the Cadian lands. Her hand was coveted by every bachelor on the shores of Glosekap Bay. But Gabriel, with persistence and hopefulness and true love, had won her over all the others.
She had chosen him.
She does not yet belong to me, Gabriel reminded himself. Not yet. That will come tomorrow, when she becomes my wife.
Gabriel and Evangeline had played together as children, archery and footraces and blindman's bluff, as had all the children in the harborside village of Pré-du-sel. But the fastest and strongest among them were Gabriel and Evangeline. And their fathers, both widowers, were old friends.
In the years when she grew taller and he broader, their paths diverged. He took to the arts of tanning and carpentry and blacksmithing, she to the arts of spinning and farming and cider pressing. Her life was on the farm, where she cared for her aging father. His life was in the village, where he fanned the fire in his father's blacksmith shop. The games and races were left to the younger ones. Seasons went by, one following the last, the next ever approaching, and the space between the two motherless children expanded.
But in his fifteenth year, three summers ago, Gabriel saw that Evangeline, once just a playmate and companion, had transformed into a vibrant beauty.
One of those love-struck mornings, in the misty darkness of the pre-dawn hours, Gabriel hiked to the top of Evangeline's bec. At sunrise, the mist became a drizzle and forced him to find shelter under the hang of a boulder at the edge of her apple orchard, where he curled up and, weary from the walk and the early hour, promptly fell asleep.
At midmorning, he was jostled awake with a violent prod.
"Attend!" he gasped, opening his eyes and tensing his muscles.
A blurry figure was standing over him, wrapped in a cloud of golden pink mist and pressing the blade of a garden hoe to his throat.
"What is your purpose here?" the figure demanded.
Gabriel blinked through the haze to see that his attacker was his Evangeline, his desired, illuminated with an angel's glow. "My beloved," he said, squinting up at the vision of her, straining to bring her into focus.
"What?" she said.
"Evangeline Bellefontaine," he said, surprised that the words rose so easily from his lips, even in this awkward pose. His eyes traveled across her freckled cheek to rest on the tensed ridge of her lovely jaw.
Evangeline pressed the blade of her hoe more forcefully against his neck, and her tone dropped lower. "What are you doing here, Gabriel Lajeunesse?" Evangeline said, her untamed hair dropping in heavy black waves from her perfect head. "Why are you in my father's orchard?" She tightened her grip on the hoe's handle.
"I fell asleep," Gabriel said without breathing, because he had seen the dog, the snarling, angry dog with curly black fur, at Evangeline's feet.
"Easy, Poc," she said to the dog. "Don't bite him. Not yet."
Gabriel exhaled. "I'm sorry," he said, or at least meant to say.
"You were stealing apples."
"I was stealing nothing," Gabriel said. He paused, then continued. "I am here only to breathe the ocean air that feeds your lungs while you sleep, only to receive the sounds of this windy bec that fill your ears by day." He pointed toward the stone and log home beyond the orchard, Evangeline's home, and the ocean beyond. "That I might know this place. That I might know you." He slowly rose to his elbows. "Forgive me," he said.
"Your words are foolish," she said, "but they are more considered than some." For a desperately short moment, hope washed through Gabriel. "But if you were not stealing, then you were spying," Evangeline said. She studied his face for a moment. "Your eyes tell me you are not a danger, only a nuisance." She stepped back and tucked the hoe under her arm. "A poetic nuisance, perhaps. But you must leave at once." Gabriel scrambled to his feet.
"I was not spying, Mademoiselle Bellefontaine," Gabriel said boldly. He smoothed his felt jacket and tried in vain to slick down a curled cowlick. He turned toward the path he'd hiked up.
"You'll never get home that way," she said. "The path you followed here will be impassable after this morning's rain. But if you do a task for me, I'll show you a better way."
"Anything," Gabriel answered.
And she asked him to stack firewood, and he did, great piles of it. And she fed him porridge and honey and cider. "You must never spy again," she said.
"I will prove my sincerity to you," he answered. "I will dedicate my life, long or short, pleasant or tragic, to this task alone."
Gabriel knew his words were grandiose, and he honored them.
It took months, years. It took bushels of pears and cords of wood and gifts of tobacco and brandy for her father, the farmer Monsieur Bellefontaine. It required assisting with the goats and gardens, and it took scaring off a pair of lynxes who cornered Poc behind Evangeline's compost pile. It took love poems whispered in the garden. But Gabriel's persistence, fueled by his soul-filling desire, won Evangeline's heart and her father's favor, above all other suitors in Pré-du-sel, including Jean-Baptiste Leblanc, the notary's son.
Gabriel turned his attention back to Evangeline, now scattering seed for the hens. He pulled another sheet of birchbark from the pocket of his felt jacket, spun his charcoal stick in his fingers, and started again. His hand re-created her wavy, obsidian hair, curls straining against the confines of her braid, sometimes escaping across her upper back. Dark eyebrows, animated islands in the liquid light that cascaded over her pale, freckled skin. Blue-black eyes set wide across her visage, framed by smudges of cedar ash as was the fashion. Her lips, her lips, red and curved, the way Evangeline chewed on them whenever she concentrated, as she did now, tending her fowl. Gabriel bit his own lip to share the sensation. He studied her breasts, the smooth rounds of them, carefully concealed under her ocean-blue kirtle of felt, which was laced over a roughly woven linen-cloth shirt and extended into dual panels-tails, she called them-that billowed around her hips and over her lean, muscular legs, clad in deerskin to her ankles. Gabriel imagined the feel of her ankles, powerful and delicate at once, of her calves, her thighs. His breath caught as her kirtle-tails rolled and waved in the breeze, swaying like the ocean a thousand feet below the crest of this bec, the restless ocean that jovially tossed frothy waves skyward to catch the white-gold light of the afternoon sun as the unyielding and rambunctious tide turned back toward Glosekap Bay. The tide kept time in Cadia, and even so far above the water, Gabriel could hear the tide changing.
Gabriel knew he should go. He wasn't supposed to be here in the first place. He would see Evangeline later tonight for the signing of the contract, and then, after tomorrow, they would be together, always, forever, and his ever-tossed heart would be peaceful at last. But Gabriel had meager faith in tomorrow. Life had taught him well: Tomorrow doesn't exist until it arrives.
Evangeline turned toward Gabriel, looking down, not seeing him, eyes fixed on her task. At her heels scuttled Poc, the mutt, scattering dust and leaves, and growling to keep the lordly turkey away from the hen seed. She smiled at Poc and took his jaw in her hands. A wave of envy passed through Gabriel's stomach and wedged itself in his throat, and he forced his feet still to keep from rushing to her.
Gabriel lost his balance and, stepping back, snapped a twig under his moccasin. Evangeline spun around, squinting into the wood beyond the mossy stone walls surrounding her father's small farmyard and into the murmuring pines beyond. Gabriel froze, his ruddy green hunting tunic and brown skin fading into his sylvan hiding place, the living woods where the tips of the leaves were just starting to assume their rich autumn hues of scarlet and amber. The shadows were long now, orange and pink and gold as sunset approached, and though Gabriel was certain she'd seen him, Evangeline turned back to her charges, unalarmed.
"Eat, my girls," she said in a musical whisper. "Eat and lay. We'll need eggs for strength tomorrow. For strength and feasting." The chickens clucked in eloquent recognition of Evangeline's gentle command. Even they were devoted to her.
Just then, a voice called out, "Sunshine!" Gabriel recognized Benedict Bellefontaine's voice, coming from inside the house.
Gabriel studied the house and its hulking chimney. Except for the short summer season, life around Glosekap Bay was a constant struggle against cold, different kinds of cold, sometimes an ocean-wet whisper of coolness, sometimes a delicate sting of frost, sometimes a crackling seizure of ice. The fireplace was the largest and most important feature in every dwelling. Now in Second Summer, the days were warm again, but the nights grew ever longer. Gabriel smelled the afternoon and knew, or feared, that this winter would be as long and inclement as last year's. In generations past, the Ab'naki elders had taught the Cadians to read the fur of the foxes, and this season the fur was thick. Gabriel hoped the fireplace in the home he'd built for Evangeline would suffice in the cold, hungry winter ahead.
But today was not cold, it was warm, and the bec was bathed in golden vapors, the magical light of deep afternoon, and winter seemed distant. Gabriel's thoughts converged on tonight. Monsieur Bellefontaine had invited Basil and Gabriel to sign the documents of betrothal. It would be the first time he stepped into her home.
Gabriel closed his eyes and imagined what he'd see. He'd painted the picture in his mind innumerable times: a single room, protected from the offshore gales by boulders on the windward side, with two pine-shuttered windows facing away from the ocean, away from the northeasterly storms that blew across the bec in the coldest months, sparely furnished with a deep, comfortable ladder-back chair for Monsieur Bellefontaine and a bench and long table for Evangeline and their guests. A dirt floor, packed solidly, swept and decorated each morning with a new border pattern traced with a swirl of Evangeline's pointed broomstick.
Benedict Bellefontaine had lived seventy winters, which made Evangeline's father older than nearly all the men in the Cadian settlements around Glosekap Bay, and certainly older than Gabriel's father. Monsieur Bellefontaine's voice was indeed that of an old man, labored and graveled, and his brittle body bent heavily whenever he walked, which was less and less frequently as the seasons passed. He enjoyed the kindness of fellow Cadians from the village, Gabriel first among them, to help him with the planting and harvest, but he relied on Evangeline, his only family, to care for him and his home. And Evangeline loved her father fiercely. She kept the house, and him, as a mother keeps a cub. Gabriel knew she was torn at the thought of leaving her father alone. But Monsieur Bellefontaine had insisted that it was time.
He called out again. "Sunshine!"
"Coming, Father," Evangeline said softly. She gathered a basket of apples she'd picked up from the ground in the orchard that stretched from the back of the house into the meadow beyond. She draped her cornflower cloak over her arm. "Poc," she said. "Come. Let's press these apples into cider. Tomorrow we will marry our beloved Gabriel."
Evangeline stepped into the small log house, glancing back into the woods to where Gabriel stood unseen. "Tomorrow, everything becomes new," she said.
And-could it be? She smiled before pulling the Dutch door closed. Gabriel listened for the latch.
Tomorrow! Gabriel looked at the sky. The clouds over Glosekap Bay blushed golden pink, signifying imminent sunset. It was late. Soon twilight would descend. And there was much to do.
"I love you, my angel Evangeline," Gabriel whispered, but only the moss between the stones heard him. "I love you. No matter what happens."
He tucked his sketchbook into his foresleeve, securing it with a length of fabric, and turned into the woods.
eva
Mr. Lejeune? Mr. Lejeune!" Mr. Denis doesn't yell, exactly, but his voice gets stern as he walks toward Gabe, who is still slouched over his notebook, still writing. "May we be so bold as to request your participation in today's recitation?" Mr. Denis always uses as many words as possible because he likes to remind anyone who's listening that he knows more words than they do. He obviously doesn't care that it's torture for everyone else.
It's not my fault I'm in a bad mood today. My father called me by my full name this morning. Evangeline. Da' is the only person in the world except Gabe who even knows my full name. Everyone else in Franktown calls me Eva. Everyone. Ada. Louise. Mr. Denis. Even Da', most of the time. Eva. That's it. Eva Bell. Done. Da' only calls me Evangeline one day a year, on my dead mother's birthday.
It's a whole routine. He wakes up early, puts a framed photograph of my mother on the kitchen table, and sits there and stares at it until I wake up and come downstairs. When I sit down at the table across from him, he says, still looking at the picture, "You are so beautiful, Evangeline." I don't know if he's talking to me or to my mother, because her name was Evangeline, too. Then he cries for the rest of the day. It happens every year.
Ada, who lives across the street, says that once men lose their wives, they add twenty years to their ages. Which I guess would put Da' north of seventy, in widower years. And Da's not just old in his mind, either, or in the way he behaves. It's his body, too. Da's got arthritis way worse even than Ada, who's over ninety and should have it. Some days he can barely make it out to his fields, or even just to the barn. "But we'll manage, Eva," he says. "We always do." I guess you have to be optimistic to be a farmer.
No one's ever really told me why my mother died the same day she gave birth to me. They just say vague things like "there were complications." They don't want me to think it was my fault that she died, that the complication was me. That my birth caused so much bleeding that she never regained consciousness. That Da' and my mother were definitely planning to name me Evangeline long before I was born, so that I don't get the idea that he named me Evangeline after she died because he really wanted his wife back, not a new daughter. This is why I never bring up my dead mother in conversation, because that kind of conversation always ends in a lie.
Gabe, who still hasn't looked up from his notebook, is the only other person I know whose mother is dead. I remember the first time he told me. I think we were seven, or maybe eight, and he was high up in a tree in the woods behind Ada's house. I yelled at him to come down, and he shushed me. "You're not my mother," he said, then pointed to a gnarled branch far out beyond the limb he was on. "Beehive."
"Be careful!" I yelled. "Come down!"
"Shh!" Gabe crawled across the branch like a panther, crouching low and moving slowly. A few bees buzzed around the branch, which was about as big around as Gabe was, which is to say not very big. Gabe kept moving, reaching out to grasp the branch with his hands, then pulling his body forward, each inch deliberate and intense. When he reached the hollowed-out knot that opened into the hive, he stopped. He flexed his fingers and took a deep breath. "Here goes." Slowly, deliberately, he maneuvered his hand down around the branch and reached into the hole. A few more bees buzzed around him, but Gabe's hand moved steadily, disappearing deeper into the opening. "Got it," he said.
Gabe pulled the honeycomb free from the hole and tossed it down to the mossy ground. He scooted back to the trunk of the tree and lowered himself down. "You're crazy," I said.
"It wouldn't hurt anyway, even if I got stung," he said, picking up the honeycomb and scooping honey onto his finger. "My mother is dead. Nothing hurts me anymore." He licked his finger and held out the honeycomb to me. "Have some."
Almost every day after that we went to the harbor at low tide. We left our shoes in the muck and climbed up under the dock. One day, Gabe found a quarter balanced on two of the beams, twenty feet above the seabed. He picked it up, breathed on it, shined it on his T-shirt, and handed it to me. "My life's savings," he said.
"Wow, a whole pack of gum," I said, but when I put it in my pocket I knew I wouldn't spend it.
We stayed there under the dock that day picking periwinkles off the posts and shivering in the midsummer chill and wondering if anyone noticed we were gone.
Gabe told me that he was probably going to run away one day. To disappear. I asked him why, but he just stared back at me with clear, child eyes, blue and determined. I wanted to tell him that no matter where he wanted to run, ever, I would go with him, if he wanted me to. But I said nothing.
We stayed under the docks until the freezing tide licked at our backs and forced us out and up, choking water and gasping for air. Our shoes were gone. After I got home, and told Da' what happened to my shoes, he yelled at me. Didn't I know how dangerous the docks were? Didn't I remember how the Felician girl was washed away last year and turned up down in Nova Scotia? He told me that Gabe's father called to say he didn't want me hanging around with Gabe anymore. I said that was stupid, but Da' said it didn't matter. He said that when a rich man like Mr. Lejeune says he doesn't want his son hanging around with the daughter of a poor farmer like Da', he means it. And the sooner I got used to it, the sooner I would get over it. He said it all really matter-of-fact, like I wouldn't care, like Gabe wasn't my best and only friend.
That's pretty much the last time I talked to Gabe. He never really had any friends after that, just his notebook. He was always around, because everyone in Franktown goes to the same school, and I saw him every day, and I thought about him every night, but it was like part of him had disappeared and I didn't know how to find him.
Sometimes, I still pretend to talk to him. I pretend to reach out and take his troubled head in my hands.
"Mr. Lejeune!" Gabe doesn't look up from his writing. His pen speeds across the pages. "It is your turn to read, but it appears that you are otherwise occupied." Mr. Denis raps his hand on Gabe's desk. "Mr. Lejeune. May I inquire what it is that you are so feverishly documenting?" Mr. Denis daintily pulls Gabe's pen from his hand.
Gabe doesn't look up. He just puts his hand over his notebook, pressing it into the desk.
"Let us have a look!" In a tiny instant, Mr. Denis grabs the notebook from under Gabe's hand and whisks it violently upward, pages flying like a flapping chicken. Gabe grabs at it, clawing at the spiral binding, sending torn paper floating into the air like feathers, but Mr. Denis holds the notebook up out of his reach and quickly steps away. "Please, share this masterpiece. Surely your words have more literary merit than this laborious Longfellow we are wasting our time on."
Gabe's lanky body freezes, stiff in his chair, eyes fixed on the floor, hair flopping back over his face. He is awkwardly good-looking, olive-skinned with clear, green-blue eyes, but you have to look pretty hard to see it. His clothes are always rumpled, his sneakers worn, and he never has a coat warm enough for the weather.
John Baptiste, all blond and square-jawed and varsity-jacketed, snickers and winds his finger around his ear, making the crazy symbol, but I pretend not to see. Gabe is not crazy. He is strange, but he is not crazy. I know that much.
"Would you like to read aloud?" Mr. Denis says. "No? Then allow me to give voice to your words." Mr. Denis walks to the front of the room and clears his throat. "Ladies and gentlemen, an original work by Gabe Lejeune, Esquire."
I watch Gabe. He is staring at me. It's the first time I've seen his eyes straight on since that day under the docks, and even though they seem darker now, they are still full of determination, and they pierce into mine and I know he remembers, too. I stare back.
I know him.
He knows me.
"Evangeline," says Mr. Denis, reading from the notebook.
My stomach drops suddenly. What did he just say?
"Evangeline," he repeats.
No. I bow my head. I get that strange kind of nausea that comes in a wave over your body and brain right after you cut yourself, that kind of sinking sickness that tells you the worst is yet to come. I pull the hood of my sweatshirt around and across my mouth. My heartbeat gets deeper, stronger, and thumps in my ear.
"Evangeline," says Mr. Denis again, his eyes scanning the page. "Evangeline, Evangeline, Evangeline, Evangeline." Mr. Denis turns the page. "Evangeline. Evangeline."
He flips a few more pages. "Evangeline." He stops. "Well, Mr. Lejeune, it seems as if you are not as far off-topic as I feared. You've got the right poet, just the wrong poem. We are not reading 'Evangeline,' also by Longfellow, in this class. Instead, we are muddling through 'The Courtship of Miles Standish,' and it is your turn to contribute to the recitation. Please take it from 'Over his countenance flitted a shadow…'" He drops the notebook back on Gabe's desk. Gabe slams his hand over it.
I am frozen.
"Freak," Louise whispers. John Baptiste snickers and shakes his head. I hide behind my hair, thanking God I have hair to hide behind. I peek out into the classroom and realize that not everyone is looking at me. Of course. No one knows that Evangeline is my full name. No one knows that Gabe is sitting over there writing my name over and over.
"'The Courtship of Miles Standish,' Mr. Lejeune," Mr. Denis says. "Please begin."
But Gabe does not begin. He slowly stands up, then stuffs his notebook into his backpack, bunches his windbreaker in his fist, walks straight over to my desk, and says, "I'm sorry."
Then Gabe turns toward the door and pushes his way into the hall and leaves.
"Good-bye, Mr. Lejeune," Mr. Denis says.
I slip my hand into my jacket pocket and take Gabe's quarter in my fingers.
Gabriel
GABRIEL STRUCK HIS HEELS AGAINST HIS MARE, Eulalie, who responded with a brusque trot across the rippled, mucky flats of the darse. She moved with staccato steps between the groves of Irish moss and clusters of moules, between the tiny pools of abandoned seawater glistening golden with the reflected light of the falling sun. At high tide, this stretch would lie beneath thirty feet of water, but at low tide the exposed seabed stretched far out into Glosekap Bay, linking the mainland becs and marshes to the islands. Dories and whaleboats, temporarily landed until the water's return, sat like stranded toys in the muck.
The Glosekap tides were ferocious, fast, more like an insistent, unstoppable wave than a slow rise, plunging some thirty feet of water from Glosekap Bay into the darse, the narrow harbor where the Manan River emptied into the sea. Twice a day the wave rolled into the darse, sometimes angrily, sometimes merely resolute, speedily transforming the landscape into a seascape, before retreating with equal haste. Only the secrets passed through generations allowed the Cadian fishermen to navigate it, so complex were its currents. Many of the oldest stories told around Cadian fireplaces were of those unlucky enough to be carried off into the desolate heart of the ocean. Bodies were rarely found.
Twice in their history had an angry, storm-fed tide washed through their village, destroying it.