Free More Than You Know by Beth Gutcheon

Allen were crazy about
    him.
    Conary, driving with his left hand, gave me his right to shake.
    He seemed pleased to think he had a reputation, and not surprised.
    “I’m Hannah,” I said.
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    He said, “Yeah, I worked that out. How you liking that house?”
    I don’t know why, but I felt there was something behind the
    question. I said, “It’s a beautiful spot . . .”
    The way he said, “Well . . . yeah,” as if that was hardly the issue,
    I knew there had been something behind the question, so I asked him,
    “Did you know Miss Hamor?”
    He said, “To speak to. Everybody did. She was pretty ancient.
    She taught my father Latin at the Academy.”
    “Really?”
    “I don’t believe he shone, at Latin.” Something about this
    thought made Conary smile to himself.
    I asked him why the house was empty for so long, just to see
    what he would say. We were drawing into town.
    He said, “ I heard it was haunted. Now . . . where can I set you
    down?” As he asked, he pulled in at the post office. I thanked him for
    the ride and got out, wishing the way had been twice as long.
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    The Civil War
    TheHaskellplacewasonthesoutheasternshoreofBealIsland,
    with a wide view of the outer passage to Frenchman’s Bay. Claris knew
    this when Danial brought her home on their wedding day; what she hadn’t
    exactly understood was that Danial’s mother and brother, Leonard, were
    to go on living in the house with them. Danial had merely said that his
    mother would welcome her and all necessary things had been arranged,
    and Claris had assumed that things would now be for her as they had
    for her sisters. When Mary had married, Jonathan Friend’s family built
    a house for them. When her sister Alice married, Byron Crocker took her
    all the way to Boston on a honeymoon.
    Claris’s honeymoon consisted of having an ancient coverlet quilted
    in a wedding knot pattern produced from a chest in Mrs. Haskell’s bed-
    room and spread on the bed where Danial had slept since boyhood.
    Additional arrangements were that Leonard moved downstairs to sleep in
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    the buttery, and that for her night soil Claris was given a rather grand
    china commode with a lid, from England.
    In her first island winter Claris lost a child, a stillborn daughter.
    This was a terrible blow; her mother and sisters all gave birth to healthy
    babies at the drop of a hat; why should she alone suffer such loss, such
    failure? The brief dark days of that winter for Claris were endless. Ten
    months later she lost a second baby, also a girl. Her mother-in-law said
    very little about this (or about anything) but peered at Claris with ap-
    parent dislike from under her bonnet.
    It was during this lonely passage in her life that Claris first began
    to doubt that behind Danial’s silence lay a mind that divined her thoughts
    and a heart that beat in sympathy with hers. She was living in a thick
    atmosphere of paralyzing bleakness, waiting for Danial to show that he
    knew how it was with her, how it felt to have longed to be a mother but
    instead produced only death. When he merely came and went as usual
    and expected her to do the same, it finally began to occur to her that
    behind Danial’s stolid silence might be . . . nothing she understood.
    When her mother-in-law died the third winter, Danial brought the
    Baptist minister out from the main, along with the few old friends who
    remained, to pray for the soul of the inaccurately named Solace Haskell.
    While Reverend Tull was with them, he said prayers for the dead at the
    tiny graves of Claris’s daughters, both named Sallie. The ground was
    frozen too hard to dig a hole for Solace, so Claris sewed her into a
    sailcloth shroud weighted with rocks, and Danial and his brother took
    her far out onto the ice, cut a hole, and buried her at sea.
    Solace had been almost completely silent during her last year, and
    nearly bald, and so nearly dead it was hard to tell she