It was this fresh, unexpected sorrow that made me stay my steps when it came time to leave Papa behind. Mama, too, could not leave the spot, and I stood beside her and looked across the rooftops of Middle Haven and out to sea. In all the land was a heavenly clarity, the long arms of the shore stretching forward with the running tide, the sharp pine forest pointing up from the white rocks to the sky.

“I detest the state of Maine,” Mama remarked into the silence the clergyman had left behind. Startled, I slipped my hand beneath her arm and watched as he descended, nodding to the diggers, who waited farther on down the hill at a respectful remove, their brown-clad backs to us, passing a little pouch between them. Mama’s veil lifted slowly in the light breeze. I could not look down into the neatly filled hole before us.

“But Papa loved it here, Mama,” I tried to comfort.

“I never understood that love of his,” she answered tiredly, and without another word to me, she put off my hand from where it rested in the crook of her arm, as carefully—as distantly—as if she removed a restraining vine that caught at her clothing. Then she leaned forward and whispered tenderly to the new-made grave, “Good-bye, my darling.”

And she proceeded down the hill between the stone markers, a slowly diminishing black form, stepping resolutely farther and farther from this spot I could not leave.

“Mama?” I called after her, but she did not turn, and the sound of my voice hung round me in that perfect sunshine, my only companion save the dead. As I watched my mother’s departing back, my heart stuck. The harbor waters below glanced back the air in little dizzying specks of brightness upon the waves. A fishing boat sailed slowly past the breakwater. My heart tocked once. Who was there now to call me child? I looked down, here lay Papa. I looked up, there was Mama—and I the sad pivot between. I stood still, watching as she grew smaller and smaller, until, just as she reached the gate of the churchyard, I picked up my skirts and ran down.

All through the mournful long train journey down from Boston, Papa’s mahogany cigar box upon her lap, Mama uttered not a word. Farther and farther through the green countryside we traveled, the outdoors flashing by as the maples of Massachussetts waved into the blue air. In Providence, we changed locomotives, and Jessie came up into our compartment with the basket Mrs. French had thoughtfully prepared, handing boiled eggs and salt chicken round while the men shouted one to the other above the train’s silence.