“I thought I was coming to meet somebody who knew her,” he said.
“I didn’t,” Caleb answered.
“I only know what the people around her hid.”
Jonah looked at the garden.
“That seems to be what my family left behind.”
“Not all of them.”
“Clara wanted you named.”
Jonah nodded.
“And the Dunns did name me.”
“I’m trying to hold both things without letting one take the other away.”
Caleb understood more than he expected.
He too had spent months trying to hold contradictory truths without allowing someone powerful to choose the easier one for him.
“You don’t owe Hawthorne anything,” Caleb said.
“Neither do you,” Jonah replied.
They walked toward the cooperage, where Amos was teaching Daniel Fitch’s nephew to fit a barrel hoop.
Jonah watched the work with interest and soon asked whether the apprentice could show him a better joint for a wagon box.
Within minutes they were talking about wood grain and weather damage rather than inheritance.
Caleb found the change comforting.
Not every meeting had to become an accusation or a trial.
When Jonah prepared to leave, he took a small velvet case from his pocket.
Inside lay Clara’s silver locket, repaired at the hinge but still bearing the dent Caleb remembered.
“I wanted you to see that it finally reached me,” Jonah said.
Caleb touched the edge of the case but not the locket.
“Your mother wanted that,” he answered.
“And somebody finally listened.”
Jonah closed the case.
He promised to write about his work, not only about family secrets.
Caleb said he would welcome that.
The two young men parted without pretending the past had been made right.
They had met because of cruelty, but their conversation did not have to remain its property.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Apprentice’s Wages
The first argument Caleb faced as a paid carpenter did not concern Hawthorne or an infant whose birth had unsettled an entire household.
It concerned a missing week’s wages and a young apprentice who could not bring himself to ask for them.
The apprentice was named Peter Ellis, a boy of seventeen who had arrived at the cooperage looking for work after his father’s death.
Peter had learned to sand barrel staves and repair basic joints, and Daniel Fitch had agreed to pay him a modest weekly sum while he learned.
He worked diligently, though his hands often shook when someone raised a voice.
Caleb noticed him counting coins near the stove one evening, then hiding them when he realized he was being watched.
