Speak to the Winds

Ruth Moore

Chapters (1)

Speak to the Winds Interior

Speak to the Winds Interior

Speak to the

Winds

A Novel

Novels by Ruth Moore

The Weir (1943)

Spoonhandle (1946)

The Fire Balloon (1948)

Candlemas Bay (1950)

A Fair Wind Home (1953)

Speak to the Winds (1956)

The Walk Down Main Street (1960)

Second Growth (1962)

The Sea Flower (1965)

The Gold and Silver Hooks (1969)

“Lizzie” and Caroline (1972)

The Dinosaur Bite (1976)

Sarah Walked Over the Mountain (1979)

Collections of Poetry

Cold as a Dog and the Wind Northeast (1958)

Time’s Web (1972)

The Tired Apple Tree (1990)

Jim Nichols

Speak to the

Winds

Ruth moore

A Novel

Islandport Press

P.O. Box 10

Yarmouth, Maine 04096

[email protected]

Originally Published in 1956 by William Morrow & Co.

First Islandport Edition, June 2022

Print ISBN: 978-1-952143-37-3

ebook ISBN: 978-1-952143-43-4

LCCN: 2021946859

The background of this novel is authentic, but I have not described in it any living person, nor would I wish to do so. It would be difficult to write a story about a place so well-known and beloved as the Maine coast without apparent character resemblances; but if anyone feels he recognizes himself or his neighbor in this book, he is mistaken, and such description is only a coincidence.

Dean L. Lunt, Editor-in-Chief | Publisher

Piper Wilber, Assistant Editor

Trevor Roberson, Graphic Designer

Table of Contents

Part One: MacKechnie’s Kingdom 1

Part Two: Christmas 25

Part Three: Easter 169

Part Four: Spring 227

Part Five: Summer 257

Part Six: Autumn 276

Part Seven: Winter 292

About the Author 307

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 with 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.