During this time I had only Sarah to remind me of everything that had once seemed so exciting, the piercing intensity I’d felt the day we’d all stood on the snowy hilltop together and gazed down at Black Pond, how open life had seemed at that moment, how thrillingly romantic. All of that now appeared smothered and inert. So much so that I even began to avoid Sarah, closing my bedroom door at the sound of her approach, as it she were nothing more than a bitter reminder of some lost ideal, a charred locket that had once hung from a lover’s neck.
Sarah no doubt sensed the way I felt, but she refused to withdraw from me despite it. Instead, she often came to where I lay in my room, knocked at the door, and demanded that I join her for a walk along the beach or accompany her on a shopping trip to the village.
On the final Thursday of that school year, she found me sitting at the edge of the playing field. It was late in the afternoon. The teachers had already gone home to prepare the final examinations of the coming week, and some of the boys had decided to play a game of touch football before going to their rooms for a night of study.
“What are you doing here, Henry?” she asked as she strode up and lowered herself onto the ground beside me.
I shrugged silently, pretending that my attention was on the boys as they continued at the game, their movements dictated by its unbending rides, no hitting, scratching, kicking, rules that must have, in the end, given them comfort, the limits laid out so clearly, but which I saw as yet another example of their strapped and adventureless lives.
“You hate it, don’t you, Henry?” Sarah demanded. “You hate Chatham School.”
The game dissolved. I looked at her evenly, the truth bursting from me. “Yes, I do.”
Sarah nodded, and to my surprise read my thoughts with perfect accuracy. “Don’t run away, Henry. You’ll be leaving for college soon. After that, you won’t have to …”
I turned away from her and nodded toward the boys. “What if I end up like them?”
She settled her gaze on the playing field, watching and listening as the boys darted about and called to one another. From the look in her eyes I could tell that she did not think them so bad, the boys of Chatham School, nor even the lives they would later make. For she was already mature enough to sense that the wilder life I so yearned for might finally come to little, the road less traveled end in nothing more than the dull familiarity of having traveled it.
But I lacked that same maturity, and so Sarah’s rebel spirit now seemed as dead as Mr. Reed’s and Miss Channing’s, the whole world mired in a vile dispiritedness and cowardice. “When you get right down to it, you’re just like them, Sarah,” I told her sneeringly, nodding toward the boys, my words meant to strike deep, leave her soul bleeding on the ground. “You’re a girl. That’s the only difference.”
I might have said more, struck at her with an even greater arrogance and cruelty, but a loud crash suddenly stopped me. It was hard and metallic, and it had come from the lighthouse. Glancing toward it, I saw Miss Channing rush out its open door, a red scarf whipping behind her as she made her way across the lawn.
Sarah’s eyes widened. “Miss Channing,” she whispered.
Miss Channing reached the street, wheeled to the right, and headed down it, her stride long and rapid until she came to the coastal road. For a moment she stopped, briefly dropped her head into her hands, then lifted it again and whirled around, glaring toward the lighthouse for an instant before she turned away and rushed down the road toward town.
It was then that we looked back toward the lighthouse. Mr. Reed stood in its still-open door, his head drooping forward as he leaned, exhausted, upon his cane.
“Why don’t they just run away together?” I blurted out with a vehemence so deep the words seemed directed less to them than to me. “Why are people such cowards?”
Sarah watched me softly, gently, the harsh words I’d just said to her already put aside. “They’re not cowards, Henry,” she told me firmly.
“Then why don’t they just go ahead and do what they want to do and forget everything else?”
She did not answer me. And when I recall that moment now, I realize that she could not possibly have answered. For we have never discovered why, given the brevity of life and the depth of our need and the force of our passions, we do not pursue our own individual happiness with an annihilating zeal, throwing all else to the wind. We know only that we don’t, and that all our goodness, our only claim to glory, resides in this inexplicable devotion to things other than ourselves.
I turned back toward the lighthouse. Its open door was now empty, for Mr. Reed had mounted the stairs to its top by then. I could see him standing there, staring out over the village, his hands gripped to the iron rail, posed exactly as I would no doubt have painted him, a crippled silhouette against a bloodred sky.
“She’s killing him,” I said, my mina now so fierce and darkly raging that I all but trembled as I said it. “They’re killing each other. Why don’t they just get in his boat and sail away from all this?”
Sarah looked at me intently. I could tell that she hardly had the courage for her next question, but felt that she had to ask it anyway. “Is that what you were doing, Henry?” she asked. “Building a boat for them to run away in?”
I thought of all I’d seen and heard over the last few weeks, the hours of labor I’d devoted to helping Mr. Reed build his boat, the unspoken purpose I’d come to feel in the building of it. I looked at her boldly, proud of what I’d done, regretful only that so much work had come to nothing. “Yes,” I told her. “That’s what I was building it for. So that they could run away.”
Sarah’s eyes widened in dismay. “But, Henry, what about—” She stopped, and for a moment we faced each other silently. Then, with no further word, she rose and walked away, taking her place, as it seemed to me, among that numb and passionless legion forever commanded by my father.
For the next few hours, lying sullenly in my bed upstairs, I felt nothing but my own inner seething. The most ordinary sounds came to me as an unbearable clamor, the heaviness of my mother’s footsteps like the thud of horses’ hooves, my father’s voice a mindless croaking. The house itself seemed arrayed against me, my own room closing in upon me like a vise, the air inside it so thick and acrid that I felt myself locked in a furiously smoldering chamber.
It was nearly nine when I finally rushed down the stairs and out into the night. My mother had gone to a neighbor’s house, so she didn’t see me leave. As for my father, I could see the lights of his office at Chatham School as I slunk down Myrtle Street, and knew that he was at work there, curled like a huge black bear over the large desk beside the window, his quill pen jerking left and right as he signed “important documents.”
I didn’t know where I was going as I continued toward the bluff, only that it vaguely felt like I was running away, doing exactly what Sarah had warned me not to do, fleeing Chatham School on a wave of impulse, casting everything aside, throwing my future to the wind.
I knew that I was not really doing that, of course, but I kept moving anyway, down through the streets of the village I so despised, past its darkened shops, and further still, out along the road that ran between the marshes and the sea, to where Plymouth Road suddenly appeared, a powdery lane of oyster shells, eerily pale as a bank of clouds parted and a shaft of moonlight fell upon it, abruptly rendering it as gothic and overwrought as I would no doubt have drawn it, its route stretching toward me like a ghostly hand.