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Best-in-Booh hy RUTH MOORE • Complete Novel 3 by MANNING COLES • Complete Novel 295 by KATHARINE SCHERMAN • Excerpt 443 by MARSHALL PUGH • Excerpt 483 by IRVING STONE • Excerpt 513

NELSON DOUBLEDAY, INC.

Garden City New York

PART ONE MacKechnie's Kingdom 1855-1910

THE ISLAND WAS off the beaten track as islands go; it was four miles from the mainland, across a stretch of dangerous water. Other islands lay around it to the north and west, but to the south and east it had nothing but open ocean, the North Atlantic stretching to the sky. The islands were of all kinds, some rocky, some low-lying and green, with harbors for boats and beaches where children could play. Wherever there was a harbor not too much of a tide hole, people lived. This one. Chin Island, as it was called, had no harbor, so that for years it went uninhabited, a jutting chin of granite thrust out into the ocean, a wild three miles of rock, spruce forest and alders laced v^th blackberry vines.

In the very old time, an ancient race of Indians, the Paint People, went there for red ocher, which they mined on the west end of the island; at least, the ocher was there in a series of scratched, shallow pits; who made them, or when, was anybody's guess. Later, the Passamaquoddy hunters must have stopped long enough to lose an occasional arrowhead near the only place where it was possible to pull up a canoe— a small, exposed beach on the western shore, which had a fine spring of clear water running out of a split rock. They might have stayed as long as the migrating flocks of sea birds did, but no longer, for the place was unsheltered, unfriendly to humans.

Its shores came down in blocks and tiers of tumbled granite, shelving off gradually underwater, so that around three sides of the island thrust out wicked snouts of rock, on which the sea loitered with intent, even in calm weather. From tidemark, ten acres of black ledges made off to the east and south, some underwater, some just awash, at different times of tide. Over them, the sea was always in motion. No matter how quiet the day, or how still the spruces baked in the summer sun, a slow, cool, sleepy sound hung over the island everywhere, a sound, it seemed, not so much of water as of air.

Perhaps on some such summer day, an early visitor to the coast, seeing the swirl of lazy green about the ledges, the rockweed lifting and falling like a field of grass, named the place The Pasture, though no one could say what pastured there, outside of crabs and cunners and south-flying sea birds. In winter. The Pasture was white water for weeks at a time. Big rollers lifted up green from across the gulf and smashed in on the headland, shattering the granite sometimes, shifting great boulders and changing the face of the shore. Sheets of spray roared up, twenty, forty, fifty feet high, drove in to freeze in white rime on the spruces, which on the eastern shore were stunted like trees at timber line.

The island was all granite, its peak a round hill a hundred feet high and naked as a cup. What grew there, grew where the land leveled out at the base of the hill, a wild tangle of northern coastal forest, on roots driven into the crevices of rock. Through centuries, it had made topsoil, deep enough on the island's western end to grow a little grass, and on that side, too, a half-mile back from the shore, just before the hill started to climb, was a small, deep pond in an alder swamp of almost tropical lushness.

This pond was always full; it caught the wash of rain from the hill behind it, and, besides, it was spring-fed. From the high, dry, lichened ledges, no one would suspect that the island was a watery place, but deep within it flowed never-failing streams, surfacing here at the pond and trickling down, through crevices into the sea— in summer, a slow, steady drip dampening the rocks above tide line, in winter, great waterfalls of yellow ice.

The swamp flowered all summer, no matter how dry the season. Above it, the granite crisped its lichens in the sun, baked as fiercely dry as if the heat struck outward from furnace fires within. But the growth around the pond stayed brilliant, electric green. Alders grew thick as a man's thigh, and some of the old swamp birches were three feet through at the base. Tall trees and the hill kept away the wind, so that air hung hot and still, full of jungle-rich smells of mud and moss and lush, sunny leaves. Squirrels lived in the swamp, and deer, and mink and beaver and muskrat. Hermit thrushes sang there all spring long. The trees were full of wingflash and flutter and the four or five clear notes, repeated a thousand times, of white-throated sparrows. Ducks gathered in the pond; at fall dusk, it might be brimful of them, floating side by side. To these inhabitants, at any time of year, the swamp offered shelter, either of shade or snow.

The Indians made a few scratches on the land and went; early white settlers sailing along the coast eyed the rugged island warily. "No harbor," they said, and passed on to other islands.

One of them must have gone ashore there for a while, and built himself some kind of house on the western side by the Passamaquoddy spring, for he left a stone foundation over a shallow cellar hole, and his initial, "A," chiseled in a ledge by the shore. But no one knew what his name was, nor how long he might have stayed. When Robert MacKechnie and Ansel Gilman, early settlers, went to the island in 1855, they found the marked boulder; but "A's" cellar stones were fallen in and green with moss, his initial almost obliterated by the gray rosettes of the lichen that grows on granite.

Robert MacKechnie and Ansel Gilman were quarrymen— stonecutters by trade, looking for stone. In the cities, public edifices were buildingchurches and courthouses, post offices, tombs. Already in the coast country, south and west, quarries were coining money, the two and three masted schooners sailing to New York and Boston and Philadelphia loaded deck-deep with the pink-gray granite that split so straight along the grain of the stone. MacKechnie was newly over from Scotland, where his people had owned and operated quarries for generations. Ansel Gilman, a Connecticut man, knew a good deal about stone, too, though perhaps not by instinct and by heritage, as MacKechnie did.

From the deck of a small sloop hired for the day, they saw the granite hill on Chin Island heaved up against the bay's blue water, and Mac- Kechnie looked and whistled. Ansel shook his head.

"I said to him," Ansel wrote in his diary, "that's the worst rock pile I ever saw and there's no landing place within forty rows of apple trees. By landing place I meant a harbor where we could load stone aboard of a vessel. But Robert kept on looking at it. I will say it was a sightly island, but I did not like the look of it from the beginning."

He also wrote, "It is a waste of time to argue with Robert, I have found out that. Because when you have got done, you find you have not changed his mind, so your time is wasted anyway."

This was the journal which did not come to light until years after Ansel's death, and then was rummaged out of a trunk in the attic of his empty house by his young grandson, Elbridge Gilman. There was little enough in it about the actual happenings of that day. Most of what took place, Elbridge got from his other grandfather, who was MacKechnie.

"Nevertheless I said to him," MacKechnie said, "that I would like to land and look it over."

They landed on Chin Island, on the beach by the stone marked "A," and hauled up their punt; and MacKechnie went as straight as a hunting dog through the tangled thickets and the swamp to what he was looking for— the high-nosed hill, rounded, polished by weather— clean outcrop, straight-grained red granite.

"He kept up with me until we came to the swamp," MacKechnie said, "and then he fell behind and didna catch up until I had been for some time on top of the hill. I thought it was the swamp that was bothering him— a stone man hates a swamp like a cup of cold poison, you have to have hard ground to move granite over; but it seems it was not that, or not that entirely."

Before they left the island that day, Ansel and Robert had a fight. They stood toe to toe on the level bank near the stone marked "A" and decided whether or not to put their money into a granite quarry on the island. Robert wanted to; Ansel didn't; and Robert won.

It was a long time afterwards and Ansel had been dead for years, before MacKechnie told his grandson, Elbridge Gilman, the grandson of them both, how the settlement on the island had begun v^th a fight.

"And a bloody one," MacKechnie said. "My nose bled for a week. We told the girls we'd fallen down yon mountain."

Elbridge grinned, remembering his grandmother, "Big" Sarah Mac- Kechnie, long dead, but a power in her time. 'The girls," Sarah Mac- Kechnie and Jennie Gilman, doubtless guessed what had taken place. In a country where the custom was to tell women only what was supposed to be good for them to know, most women learned early to put two and two together. He recalled hearing Big Sarah say, once, with a snort, "The lies, for heb'm sakes, that men tell women! If 'twas only about each other, I could put up with it, makes things more fun not to have the like of that nailed down, cut and dry. But he wants to bum coal in the stove, too lazy to cut wood— so he tells me now, after fifty years, that wood will ruin the chimney!"

And indeed, it did seem to Elbridge, thinking over the lore of the country, that some of it might be based on, not lies exactly, but on men's convenience. Weeds are good for the garden, they shade the plants. Potatoes grow better on new ground if you don't shake out the turf. Cistern water is better to drink than well water; such things. Oh, yes, the girls would have guessed about the fight. Anse and Robert would not have wanted them to know that a decision which meant so much hardship and change in their Hves had depended on whose husband had the toughest fists. And Anse would not have wanted anyone to know that he had been thrashed by a man half his size.

Elbridge hid his grin. No sense to stir the old man up— he looked pretty frail today; and MacKechnie went on.

"Anse hated the place from the beginning," MacKechnie said. "I never could see or find out why. He said, that day, it was Old Ellick, whatever that was. It sounded foolish to me and, at first, it was what made me mad, he a grown man letting himself be shaken in such an enterprise by the bogieman, if that was what it was; I never knew. But later on that day, I was mad because I wanted the place, and to talk to him was like talking to last year's deer hide nailed on the barn. I wanted it for the stone, though not entirely for the stone. Though it was lovely stone.

"If you could have seen yon hill that morning the way I saw it— the clean granite, none finer in Scotland or in any place in the world I ever saw, the hill itself, and the island lying there as if untouched since the start of time— I remember there away east and south was a mess of rocks and timber— plenty of poles stout enough for derricks, I noticed at once —then a black headland and a wrack of ledges breaking white, and all the sea and sky in the world. And I said, 'What a place, Ansel! Look at yon stone!' And he said, 'Considerable surf, ain't there?' and went stomping back down the hill.

"I did not go back to the boat for three hours, but spent time going over the island to see what might be done. I found it would be a tairrific job of work but could be done," said MacKechnie.

His Scottish burr was a memory, overlaid now with a Yankee twang through years of association, and his voice had always been curiously gentle for so tempestuous, though so small sized, a man.

"So I went back to the shore and there was Ansel with a face like a meat ax, because he guessed when I didna come that I was up on the hill, looking, with serious purpose in my mind. Besides, I looked as if I had swum the frog pond. My clothes were ripped from the blackberry bushes, and I had a great splat of mud across my face.

" If a hundred-and-thirty pound man has that much trouble clawing himself dovm from that hill,' he says to me, 'what about loads of granite blocks weighing upwards of five tons?'

"If I hadna been already put out with him, I would have been then, as he well knew. I have never wished to be twitted about my size. So I went to the spring and washed my face without making him an answer.

" 'Do you expect to drop and bounce them, maybe?' he says. *0r dig a canal in across that swamp and sail your vessels up to the foot of the hill?'

"I said, 'We can throw a causeway across the swamp, there's a place where 'tis no a hundred feet wide, and then all downhill and hard ground to the shore,' and he snorted like a bull.

"'And what do you plan to build a causeway out of?' he said, and that was unreasonable, because he knew as well as I did, having seen it, that there was a part of the hill which could be blasted away, an overhang which would fall. I didna trouble to explain it to him, a child could have seen it. So I said in short words, as though to a child, 'Yon hill is not so steep but you could ease loaded flatcars down with winches and cables. They would roll of their own weight to the shore. You'd not need any power, even, only iron rails for the cars to roll on, and cables to ease them down.'

" 'Why bother to ease them down,' Anse says. 'Take out the chocks and let them roll. They might travel fast enough to jump the gap between the shore and a vessel's hold out in the bay. Because that's the only living God's way you'd ever get a vessel loaded here. Or set your granite afloat and a man with a crowbar on each block to paddle it down to Boston. There's no harbor here. How would you load a vessel? Or have you got that figured out, too?'

" 'I have,' I said. 'In Scotland, on a difficult shore, we build a breakwater.'

'"Build a causeway, build a breakwater!' he says. 'There are dozens of places on the mainland where we wouldn't need to do either. Are you crazy, man?'

"So then I tried to tell him a little of what I had in mind. I did not come from Scotland, I said, to work for other men, in places they have already interfered with and chumbled over. I could have done that at home. But nobody had touched this island, and I had it in mind that we could build something lasting here on good foundations.

"He said, 'To hell with it, Robert! I have it in mind to start a stone quarry, not a kingdom. You've got bees in your bonnet. Go ahead, if you want to, but count me out,' and he started down the shore for the punt.

"It was then that I began taking off my jacket.

"I said, 'I won't quit the partnership, Anse, over this bee I've got in my bonnet, but I'll fight you for it, win, we stay, lose, we go elsewhere,' and I let him have a backhander, and we went to it, there on the shore.

"I didna know what possessed me to think I could lick him. He was a bookish man, not a fighter, perhaps that made the difference. Though do not get it into your head," MacKechnie said, peering at his grandson from under his shaggy eyebrows, "that the two cannot go together. We fought for upwards of half an hour, until he hit me on the nose and the pain was tainific, and I butted him in the belly and knocked him head over giblets into *A's' old cellar hole, where he stayed for some time."

"That was dirty fighting, Gramp," Elbridge said. "To butt a man in the belly."

"It was. But he was a head and a half taller and outweighed me by forty pounds. And a fight, then, was a fight, not a punching match. I would have done worse, just so I beat him that day, or any other man who came between me and what I had made up my mind to do. Bees in my bonnet, he told me, when his own was buzzing, and did so, all his life, with notions such as he could mine profit out of a trace of gold vein in the quartz, when a child would have known that the money was in cut stone. He might have buzzed his way through the earth to China or come back with the wealth of the Indies, pairhaps, but with no more gold from that vein than he found, which was enough, precisely, to make a wedding ring—"

"Now, hold on, Gramp, you're mixed up," Elbridge said. "It was Father had the gold mine. Malcolm. Remember?" and the old man stared at him testily, shifting his weight a little in the bed where he now spent his days.

"—for my daughter," he went on stubbornly, aware that he had made a mistake, not willing to admit it, passing it over quickly, as trivia from the packed trunk of his memory.

"That day, for once, I knocked the stubbornness out of him, the foolishness, the Old Ellick, whatever that was. At least, I thought I had."

Elbridge knew what "Old Ellick" was.

"It is lonesome, yes," read Anse's journal. "But so is any wild place and I have seen plenty of those. I cannot help but see how foolish I am to feel that this lonesome has anything behind it. A place is a place, no more than that. A man can do his work anywhere. But remembered when small, a time I was stealing apples and looked up to see a hairy head poked out of the bushes, old black hat, shag eyebrows and whiskers, little eyes, looking, not winking. It was only Old Ellick, he owned the orchard, a neighbor who never hurt anyone, nobody to be scared of. Yet, all of a sudden, what there was in the world to be afraid of, hidden but not seen in any dark woods or secret place, now was here. The old wild, the come-to-get-you. It is all damn foolishness to feel that a place can be your enemy. I made a bargain and I will keep it. But I do not believe that we will ever make a scratch on that island, and I told Robert so/'

"I thought I had," MacKechnie went on saying. "But on that day as we were sailing home in the sloop, he looked back at the island, and said, *It's a hell of a place, Robert, and we'll never make a scratch on it/"

MacKechnie, in the eighty-fifth year of his life, in the year 1908, from his bed pointed out how he had been right, Anse Gilman wrong.

"As for scratches," said MacKechnie, "we made them "

THE enterprise, as MacKechnie said, in the beginning was "tairrific." On his good days, when he felt like talking and could remember, he never tired of telling how they did, back there, when they built the quarry. If the place were an enemy, and there were times when it seemed to be, they fought it tooth and nail. Heavy equipment of all kinds, tools, wagons, forges, anvils, chains, had to be loaded aboard a vessel at a mainland wharf, sailed across, and somehow landed on the shore, from the anchorage out in the bay. The light stuff they handled in dories, and other small boats; for the heavy, they built timber rafts, loaded them deep and hauled them ashore with cables.

It took a long time; they could work only on days when the wind did not blow, and those days were few.

"It was a devilish landing place," MacKechnie said. "Boulders everywhere, even at high tide, to trip up a raft, and we waded to our shoulders in the cold water every time we brought one in."

And Anse had written in his journal, "The damn southwest vdnd still blows. Today we drove the horses overboard from the deck of the vessel and made them swim ashore. Robert thinking that horses might go when boats could not. We lost three."

"We lost a good deal," MacKechnie said. "Had you been able to walk on the sea bottom, you could have followed our track from the vessel to the shore, what with the bolts, tools, iron stuff, we lost overboard; even a donkey engine. But I will say of Anse, he did not rub it in, even when we lost the donkey."

Elbridge had seen the donkey. At low tide, on a calm day, you could look down through the water, a hundred yards off the beach, and see it lying there on bottom, not even rust color any more, only a vague outline crusted with barnacles, wavering with the motion of the water.

MacKechnie never mentioned the loss of horses, nor did he at any time mention the loss of men. He had always been a man to cut losses, and now his memory, searching back, cut them for him. But Anse had been living in a present that was, more than anything, real to him. He wrote it all down.

"Today we lost Joe Packard. Taking out the big birches on the causeway road through the swamp. One of them fell on him, drove him facedown into mud. We got him out quick as we could, but too late he was gone. He was a good man and will be missed."

And later, "Teddy Winter took sick in the camp and had to be sent home when the vessel left. I hope he is not going to have a bout of it. We all have this cold and coughing, but his is bad."

And three days later, "Manson brought back news of Teddy Winter's death, said pneumonia. I took Robert one side and tried to talk him into quitting until spring. It is not right to keep the men here, living the way we have to in these lean-to shacks, sleeping on the ground and no way to dry wet clothes and boots except an outdoors fire. But he is bound to drive through. He says I am crazy to think of turning a gang of men loose, coming into winter, with no work, and he is right, though he would do it, and be damned to them, if it suited his turn. It does not suit his turn; so I have taken part of the men off the causeway and we are building tight houses. Robert has raved at me some, but he knows as well as I do that we will need houses sometime if we are to bring the women over, so why not now?"

"We cleared for the houses first," MacKechnie said. "Dug cellars, laid foundations. In December, at the end of the first year's time, we brought the women and the young ones over, and had Christmas in warm houses, with fires going. Most went on the vessel, with all our stuff and things, but Anse had a dory he wanted to sail across, so he and Jennie went in that."

"December 18, 1856," wrote Anse. "Sailed Jennie over to the island for the first time today. It was a cold day, and ice made on the dory and stiffened up the sail, so I had to knock some off. I was afraid she would be cold and take harm in the state she is in, three months along, so I bundled her up in everything we had and put in so many hot bricks that we both laughed when I had to take some out, it ballasted the dory's bow too low in the water. We had a good time going over. She tickled to death to be with me for good now, and I to have her. We have been apart the biggest part of a year now. And when we hove up under the lee of the island, she saw the big yellow icicles the springs make down over the ledges, and said it was pretty. I don't call it pretty, I call it dam cold. I hope I have not done wrong to bring her here. If anything happens to her I don't know what I would do."

And in May, 1857: "J^i^i^ie has had our baby, a fine boy. Called him Malcolm, after her father. She did not have a hard time. Was a good girl from the beginning and had it in the DAYTIME, in good weather, so it was not hard to sail over to town and fetch the doctor. I thank God.**

THAT winter and spring, MacKechnie's gang swamped and cleared roads. They built a breakwater with a loading wharf at the end of it, on the northern side of the island, where the next island to the north somewhat sheltered a landing place. They built MacKechnie's causeway across the swamp, his railway running from the hill to the shore, where the loaded flatcars were to be let downhill by an ingenious system of cables and winches.

For over half a century MacKechnie and Oilman's quarry operated on the island and shipped cut stone half a world away. Five hundred people lived there in its heyday, a cross-section of nationalities, for MacKechnie imported his stonecutters, the best in the world, he said, from Italy and Scotland; and as soon as the breakwater thrust out its curve far enough to make a safe harbor for boats, the Yankee farmer-fishermen came. Schooners hauling granite down the coast had crews who might be Yankee, or Greek or Negro or Portuguese. Some stayed, brought families, or married on the island. The children had strange combinations of names: Eliseo MacGimsey, Nikolaides Pumlow— not strange at all when it was shortened, as it soon was, to Nick.

In time, the island was no longer cut off from the world. The vessels, hauling granite, sailed back and forth from the cities; twice a week a little coastwise steamer called at the wharf, bringing passengers and freight. A minister and a priest came over from the mainland periodically to hold services for those of their faiths. Summer visitors came, a few at first; or temperance speakers and debaters to talk to the Iron Clads, which was a forum; once or twice a year a stock company stopped over from the mainland and offered plays in the new town hall.

"We put up our ovm town buildings and took pride in them," said MacKechnie.

In spare time, the island men laid stone foundations, hewed timbers and drove nails; they built a church, a schoolhouse and a town hall, in the order of importance. Their stone foundations were a wonder to see, the big, bland, pink-gray granite blocks tailored to fit, morticed and overlapped as if they had been no more trouble to cut than so many pieces of soap.

"The men who worked for me did not need to look twice at a piece of stone to see how the grain would run. And then, too, there was considerable competition. A public building is something for a man to be remembered by. In time to come, a grandson might lay his hand on the stone and say, 'From here to here, my grandfather, Sherebiah MacGimsey, laid this stone; from there to the corner, Joseph Lessaro. You see there is a difference."

Yes, his grandson thought, that's true; and MacKechnie went on. "There was a difference in the work, but not in quality, only in style. It was all built to last."

The church was a bleak, rectangular box with a squat gable and a low belfry, in which hung a singularly clear-toned bell. MacKechnie had sent to Scotland for the bell, having in his youth known the bellmakers. In his letter to them, he wrote that he wanted a bell which would say, "Come."

"It was only what church bells have always been supposed to say, but some do not. When it was rung for the first time, I did not have to tell anyone what to listen for. They heard the bell say, 'Come.' "

It was rung a good deal, not only for services— for gatherings of all kinds, for emergencies, at five-thirty in the morning and at six at night to mark the beginning and the end of a work day. On a still, sunny morning, or above the hoarse growl of the sea and the battering wind of a black winter's evening, the bell sounded sweet and penetrating, "Come . . . come . . . come."