Black Cat Weekly #8

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 4Jude Farr’s Grandson

THE Purchas kitchen was fragrant with the buttery smell of lobster stew when the rescue crew came through the doorway, bringing Dr. Sutton with them. Mrs. Purchas, busy sliding pans of rolls into, the oven, stopped to greet their guests warmly.

“I’ve nearly worn the binoculars out watching for the Abenaki,” she said, smiling. “It’s good to know you’re safe. Supper will be ready by the time you’ve had a chance to catch your breath, and Wait Webber will be hobbling in to join us any minute. He’s been down at the boatshop a couple of hours.”

“With that foot!” Steve exclaimed disgustedly. “Is he crazy?”

His mother’s eyes twinkled. “He sounded pretty normal to me,” she admitted. “He spent fifteen minutes here in the kitchen sampling stew and taking doctors apart for the way they cramp your style with adhesive. He’s all right, Steve. There weren’t any bones broken. Dr. Littlefield dropped him off himself.”

She turned pleasantly back to their guest. “You and the Delight took care of today, Doctor,” she explained, “but Waity provided yesterday’s excitement. When the Cobbs saw him, he was half-drowned.”

“A mite of water in my scuppers,” Waity agreed, limping into the room, “but I don’t know if it wasn’t a sight better’n being checkreined and harnessed so tight the beach fleas play tag all over me.”

Mrs. Purchas presented him to Dr. Sutton and the Cobbs, and he stared down in obvious surprise at Linda’s head, a good four inches below his shoulder. “I’ve been wanting to say ‘much obliged’ for pulling me out,” he assured her. “Only thing now, I’m kind of sorry I missed that performance.” Waity shook his head regretfully. “Must have been considerable like watching a herring try to tow a shark.”

They were a contented group when they gathered around the supper table, and Dr. Sutton, of course, was the center of everyone’s attention. Long before they had reached doughnuts and coffee, he had had to tell the story of the failing engines and the heavy seas that had nearly ended in disaster for the Delight. It made thrilling listening.

“I’d have been petrified,” Linda confessed at the end. “I can’t even decide which part was worst.”

“I can manage quite nicely without a repeat performance of any of it,” Dr. Sutton told her, “but that last hour off Haddock Rock when our anchors parted, first one and then the other, finished eight of my nine lives.”

“Enough to take your mind off blueberry picking,” Waity agreed, and Dr. Sutton laughed.

“It certainly was,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I never expect to see a prettier sight than the Abenaki nosing around the end of Haskell Island!”

“The Bay doesn’t always treat strangers that way,” Mrs. Purchas said apologetically, “so we hope you’ll stay long enough to fall under her spell in spite of a bad beginning.”

“Actually, I’m planning to stay the rest of the summer,” Dr. Sutton said, “I hadn’t got around to telling you, but I own an old house somewhere here in Harpswell. It belonged to a family named Farr.”

Captain Pel snapped his fingers with satisfaction. “That’s the answer, of course,” he exclaimed. “Your name has been teasing at my mind all afternoon, Doctor. So you’re one of the Sutton family those Boston lawyers have been handling taxes for all these years!” He looked across at the doctor with fresh interest. “If I recollect rightly, my father used to say Jude Farr had a distant cousin surviving somewhere out West. You’re kin to him, I take it.”

Dr. Sutton shook his head. “Not kin to him,” he explained, “kin to Jude Farr and his wife Patience. My mother was their daughter.”

The Purchases and Wait Webber looked at him in blank bewilderment. “You’re claiming to be Jude Farr’s grandson?” Captain Pel put down his coffee cup as if it were suddenly too heavy to hold. “Why, Jude and Patience never had but the one child, and she was lost, along with them, when their ship went down in a gale off the coast of Florida.”

He pushed back his chair and reached for a big scrap-book on the shelves behind him. “I forget the date—it was before my time, but the newspaper story’s pasted in here. My father kept everything he found in print about Harpswell ships and Harpswell seamen.”

The others crowded around to look over Captain Pel’s shoulder as he laid the book down and turned the pages.

“There,” he said, pointing to a yellowed clipping, “the ship that foundered was Jude’s own Sturdy Beggar, and the date was 1902.”

Nodding, Dr. Sutton brought his wallet out of his pocket and extracted another yellowed clipping to lay beside the first.

“The story has a sequel,” he told them, “a happy ending. Delight Farr did survive. A life preserver and some drifting wreckage kept her afloat, but she was ill for a long time after a fishing smack picked her up and brought her into Palm Beach. She had been pretty badly battered about the head, Dad said. It was months before she remembered who she was or what ship she had sailed in.”

He put a snapshot of a handsome man and woman on top of the clippings. “Joel Haine Sutton and Delight Farr Sutton.” He showed them the names on the back. “Delight married the young doctor who took care of her during her illness. I was their only child.”

The group around Captain Pel still looked at Dr. Sutton in amazement. “It’s like something out of a book,” Linda said wonderingly. “It’s not what happens to people you actually know.”

Then Captain Pel and Wait were shaking hands again with Dr. Sutton, and Mrs. Purchas was beaming.

“So you’re really going to open the old Farr house,” she exclaimed with satisfaction. “I’ve never seen it alive—just dead and dreary looking. Houses aren’t meant to be like that.”

Dr. Sutton smiled as though he understood what had troubled her. “Mother felt the same way,” he said. “That’s one reason I’ve come. My father had a Boston law firm take charge of everything. They shipped family papers down to Mother and had the house boarded up. She hated thinking of it like that. When I was small, she was always planning to spend summers here as soon as my father could take real vacations. She never had the opportunity; she died before I finished grade school.” The doctor shook his head ruefully. “I meant to get here myself years ago, but it was hard for a young surgeon to steal a lengthy holiday. Fifty years, though, is a long time for a house to be deserted. I’ll be lucky now, I suppose, if the timbers aren’t rotten.”

“Timbers are sound enough,” Captain Pel told him. “I was over that way duck hunting in the fall and prowled around some. Your mother probably told you that the Farr place was a garrison house originally; the old walls are eighteen inches thick. Shingles and porches, the barn ell, too—those are what will need attention.”

“Maybe a few spring cleanings wouldn’t have hurt much either,” Mrs. Purchas suggested mildly.

Dr. Sutton whistled. “Great Scott, I never thought of dirt,” he admitted. “It must be a foot deep!”

Grinning wickedly, Steve glanced out of the corner of his eye at Waity. “You get Abby Beamish after it, Dr. Sutton,” he advised. “Abby says there’s no percentage in everyday cleaning; she likes dirt enough to begin on to know she’s done something when she’s through.”

Waity snorted, and Steve smiled. “Just don’t go buying her a lot of newfangled cleaning apparatus though,” he warned the doctor. “Waity bought a broom down at Randall’s last week, and I heard Abby telling him a new broom might sweep clean but the old one knew where the dirt hid.”

Dr. Sutton laughed outright. “The redoubtable Miss Beamish it is then,” he announced. “How do I go about luring the lady into my cobwebs?”

“Mrs., not Miss.” Waity was still snorting when he corrected him. “Dirt’ll do the luring, Dr. Sutton; don’t you trouble your head about that. You’ve got self-preservation to fret over. Dirt lured her into Lem Beamish’s place eight years ago, and before Lem knew what was happening, Abby’d married him.” Waity looked owlish. “Come spring, she’d cleaned Lem Beamish straight into the graveyard. If you’ve a mite of sense, you’ll take out over the clam flats and let Abby Beamish lie.”

But the doctor refused to be daunted. “You’ve got to admit I’m prepared,” he told him. “That’s more than Lern was.”

Mrs. Purchas’s eyes danced. “Prepared?” she repeated. “My stars, you’re practically barricaded in the cruiser’s cabin with your diving suit at hand! If Abby Beamish needs a cake of soap, she’ll have to rout out the Coast Guard to find you.”

Still laughing, she stacked the dishes on a tray to start for the kitchen, but Dr. Sutton reached persuasively for the sweater hanging on the back of her chair.

“Those dishes have the patience of Job,” he insisted. “Daylight hasn’t, and I’ve come a thousand miles to see a house. There must be a car around here somewhere.”

“A new station wagon in our barn,” Dr. Cobb offered promptly, and Mrs. Purchas untied her apron.

“I’m already on my way,” she said. But she paused a second as she started for the door. “Pel, please go find a hammer and a crowbar. Dr. Sutton’s going to have a chance to see the boards off the door over on Graveyard Head if I never wash those dishes.”