All Chapters of THE WEIGHT OF GOLD : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The sea off Oakhaven did not roar; it sighed, a long, dragging breath against the shingle that rose and fell with the regularity of an ancient engine. In the summer of 1961, the town lived under a canopy of light that seemed filtered through amber, heavy with the salt of the Atlantic and the sharp, piney scent of the interior woods. It was a place where the roads ended at the granite bluffs, where the telephone wires hummed softly in the salt fog every morning, and where nothing of consequence was thought to have happened since the great schooner fleet grounded itself on the shoals during the storm of ’98.June Calder was twenty-two years old, and her fingers were almost constantly stained with the pale, dry dust of rag paper and foxed ink.Calder Books occupied the lower floor of a three-story clapboard building on Water Street, three doors down from the fishmonger and directly across from the granite steps of the town hall. The building had been built by her grandfather, a retired s

The rain returned before dawn on Sunday, falling not as a mist, but in hard, slanting sheets that rattled against the northern panes of the Calder house like thrown gravel. By seven o'clock, the wind had veered to the northeast, driving the tide high into the lower reaches of Water Street until the dark, salt-stained pilings of the fish houses were entirely submerged in churning white foam.June stood at her bedroom window, her dark hair pinned up with a haste that left soft, stray wisps hanging about her throat. She wore her practical grey wool walking skirt and a heavy cardigan of unbleached grease-wool that smelled faintly of the sheep farms on the upper ridge. Her carpetbag lay open on her bed, half-filled with her small linen undergarments, two spare dresses, her journal, and a leather-bound copy of Keats she had bought from her father’s stock three years ago.She was leaving.The decision had not come as a sudden flare of emotion in the dark, but as a cold, quiet certainty that

November brought a quiet, silver hush to the high coast of Maine. The autumn foliage, which had burned like scattered hearth-fires across the ridges throughout October, had surrendered its gold to the autumn gales. Now, the gray limbs of birch and oak stood bare against the pale sky, framed by the permanent, stubborn green of spruce and white pine.In the valley, Oakhaven was settling into the rhythmic preparation for a long, hard winter. Smoke curled lazy and blue from every brick chimney down Water Street. At the docks, the fishermen were hauling their boats onto wooden skids above the high-water line, coating the hulls with thick green pine-tar to guard against the coming ice. But two miles south, on the desolate granite tooth of Blackwood Point, the air rang not with the sleepiness of winter, but with the sharp, vital music of creation.Clang of iron cold against stone. The rhythmic thump-thump of oak mallets against cedar pegs. The rasp of long crosscut saws biting through season