Blackbird House (11 page)

I kept the scales in storage, but I didn’t look at them again.
 
I could smell them, though, the salt and the sulfur, tinged with the scent of apples from the cake on my bureau.
 
In the night I dreamed about bluefish.
 
I dreamed that I was far out in the bay, in a world of water, at the very edge of the map.
 
I dreamed someone I didn’t recognize was drowning and there wasn’t a thing I could do.

The next afternoon Ewan Perkins talked my sister into going out to the pond.
 
He must have been desperate for proof of something, and she must have been desperate as well.
 
She was afraid of snapping turtles and bullfrogs and hornets, whose sting could bring down a horse.
 
When I followed them to the pond, I realized my sister looked like a splash of milk, a pool of sunlight.
 
What a relief that must be to a man used to monsters.
 
She was laughing, but I could tell she was scared that the serpent might be lurking somewhere close by.
 
Among the many things Huley was frightened of was the water; she’d never learned to swim. Now I remembered that after our mother died I used to sleep in bed with my sister.
 
I would promise her that her nightmares weren’t real things.
 
It was only her imagination, and she seemed to accept that as something less important, less powerful.
 
Ewan was reaching for a water lily, the Egyptian sort, something yellow and glorious to present to my sister.
 
He probably had no idea they were as common as weeds in our pond.
 
Surely, he had no idea of how easy it was to trick a man, even one who was so devoted to zoology and nature.

My hands smelled like fish scales and sulfur and apples.
 
I hadn’t

bothered to braid my hair, and it fell down my back, heavy and hot.
 
I

heard something in the sky, and I looked up, thinking it was some of

the coots, traveling south, but it was that white blackbird, the one I

saw now and then.
 
I had never really found any of its feathers; I’d

only said that I had.
 
I kept walking toward the pond-pulled there, it

seemed.
 
I went up to my sister, and I

pushed her, hard.
 
She tipped over, in a single plash.
 
The water was deep right away; she’d been standing on a bluff, the place where the milkweed grew.
 
For an instant there was nothing.
 
Not a sound.
 
Ewan was standing there, looking into the water.
 
His skin was so thin I could see his veins.

I jumped into the water after her, and the cold was a relief.
 
My dress billowed out like a cloud, like a lily.
 
I put my arms around my sister’s waist.
 
She smelled sweet.
 
I remembered that about her.
 
I wondered what it would be like to go where she was going, to walk through the streets of Cambridge and London, to be waiting while he traveled, searching for things he’d probably never find.
 
I saw an insect walking across the water, a small miracle, perhaps, but a miracle all the same.
 
I thought I’d just keep the fact of its existence to myself, or maybe I’d ask George West if he’d ever heard of such a thing, if he might happen to know its name, if by any chance he’d ever seen one himself.

LION HEART

IN 1908 THE FIRST AUTOMOBILE ARRIVED

in town, driven along the sandy King’s Highway, with the horn honking so loudly that sea fowl and hunting dogs alike took up the racket until the whole town was vibrating.
 
Things shook and rattled and fell apart in a matter of minutes.
 
Early McIntosh apples tumbled from the trees.
 
Milkweed was blown off its stalks.
 
Girls who had sat down to do their mending pricked themselves with needles and drew blood.

It was Jack Crosby who was driving the automobile, the Crosby son who

made his fortune in oysters and lived on Beacon Hill,

not the other one, Edward, who drank himself to death on his boat docked in Provincetown.
 
Jack Crosby had initiated the Crosby Fellowship, which would send one local boy to Harvard each year, and the first recipient was Lion West, the smartest boy in town.
 
The best-looking one with the nicest temperament, too, if his mother, Violet, had anything to say about it, and she was a woman of good judgment who had raised seven children in all, three other sons who were perfectly fine boys, and three wonderful daughters.

The children who followed Violet’s firstborn, those wonderful daughters and fine sons, were Gemma, Susanna, Huley (after Violet’s sister, who had died of fever while traveling in Egypt), George Jr.”
 
Seth, and John.
 
Anyone would expect even the most loving mother to get the names of her children wrong every now and then, especially when there were so very many of them, to call for red-haired Gemma when it was dark, moody Susanna who was needed to stir the split-pea soup on the stove, to scold Seth for the window John had in fact broken.
 
But Violet never forgot who Lion was.
 
When the other babies were born they had squeaked like mice, but this was a child who had roared, and so she’d decided upon his name.
 
He was not like anyone else, that much was evident, and he never would be.

“Are you sure?”
 
Violet’s husband, George, had asked when she told him what the child’s name would be.
 
“It’s a big name to live up to.”

“That’s all right,” Violet had assured George.
 
“He will.”

The other children arrived over the next ten years, one after another.

Dark or light, son or daughter, they were all embraced and loved.
 
Still, no one took anything away from Lion.
 
The other children had to share rooms, the girls in one, the boys in another, with bunk beds built into the wall.
 
But Lion had a room all to himself in the attic, to make certain that when he entered school he could study in peace and quiet.

Not that Lion West was a stuffy scholar.
 
Nothing of the kind.
 
He was an outdoorsman from the start, and preferred skating on the pond or fishing with his father, George, whom he idolized, to classrooms and books.
 
Being smart had just come to him naturally He didn’t have to work at it in the least.
 
For penny candy or chores exchanged, Lion would gladly write up experiments for science class or solve mathematics problems for his younger brothers and sisters.
 
But soon enough they stopped asking for his help.
 
And that made sense.
 
The West children knew what their teachers expected of them, and, even more important, what they were capable of.
 
Oh, you’re Lion’s brother, the teachers would say.
 
You’re Lion’s sister.
 
Well, you have a lot to live up to.

By the time Lion was in high school, the mathematics instructor, Mr.
 
Grant, asked the boy to teach the more difficult lessons, so as not to embarrass himself in light of Lion’s greater grasp of the material and his almost unearthly knowledge.
 
After a while, Lion seemed to be speaking a different language.
 
He didn’t mean to.
 
Surely, he had no desire to elevate himself above anyone else.
 
He played ice hockey with his brothers and let his sisters tie ribbons onto him on May Day, even though he knew the girls aimed to dance around him chanting solstice rhymes.
 
He cut blocks of ice from the pond with his father till his fingers turned blue; he took care of the horses and the chickens, he danced with local girls, he sneaked up to the deserted cottage on the bayside and shared drafts of ale and off-color jokes with his schoolmates.

But his involvement in such day-to-day activities could not change who Lion was.
 
No one understood him.
 
Not really.
 
No one even came close.

“It’s like this, Dad,” Lion would say as he tried to explain mathematical problems to his father, the books splayed open in front of them on the kitchen table, columns of figures that were indecipherable to anyone in the household, save Lion.

George would laugh, impressed not only by the boy’s intellectual abilities, but by his kind nature.

“I could describe a halibut to you scale by scale, but don’t show me figures,” George said.

Violet West was not surprised by any of it.
 
Not how tall Lion was, or how handsome, or how singularly talented.
 
She had watched him as a baby in his cradle and had known then and there.
 
She had held his hand when he was a toddler and been certain of it.
 
Lion was meant for great things.
 
This certainty of who he was, the clarity of who he could be, made Violet love her eldest son all the more.
 
When George got up from the table, confused by advanced mathematics, calling himself an old dog who was long past the age of learning any new tricks, no matter how good a teacher Lion was, Violet waited for her husband to leave the room.
 
Then she sat down with Lion.
 
She let him teach her the solutions to some of the easier problems, and if mathematics didn’t come naturally to her, at least she understood bits of his language.
 
What he loved, she loved, whether it be numbers scrawled on a page, or hot apple pie; whether it be biology, astronomy, or green-pepper soup.
 
Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow.
 
When this happened, other people in the family couldn’t bring themselves to disturb them.
 
All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.

The other children noticed the special connection between mother and son, but they didn’t resent Lion.
 
They felt sorry for him, as a matter of fact.
 
They might not have been as smart, but they weren’t fools. To be loved so intensely tied Lion up and freed them.
 
All the brothers and sisters understood this, and they acted accordingly.
 
Susanna, for instance, had no fear that she would break her mother’s heart when she married at seventeen.
 
George Jr.”
 
never much for books, knew no one would try to stop him when he left high school to work alongside his father as a fisherman.
 
There was a camaraderie among the children, a ring of good fellowship.
 
They liked games and challenges, ice hockey and relay races.
 
One June evening they had all decided to play tag in the woods after supper.
 
It was a warm summer night, and the fireflies were drifting through the woods.
 
The children, save for John, who was only eleven, were all too old for such games, which made them all the more enjoyable.

Lion had come up the drive at this hour, thinking about his future.
 
He had graduated from high school, and had spent nearly two years working with his father on his boat, joined now by George Jr.
 
But then the idea of college had come up; perhaps Violet West had gone to the town council or perhaps the town council had come to her, the sequence of events wasn’t really clear.

All the same, Lion seemed to be on the path to college.
 
He had just been to Town Hall, directed there by his teachers, especially Mr.
 
Grant, and by the mayor himself.
 
Lion was twenty, a bit old to start college; still, he had applied for the fellowship to Harvard.
 
He knew that Jack Crosby was shifty, that he’d taken over some of the older fishermen’s oyster beds at a fraction of their worth.
 
Crosby was said to disdain shellfish as disgusting and unnatural, choosing to serve only beef for dinner at his house on Beacon Hill.
 
Whatever he was, Lion considered himself to be a fisherman’s son first and foremost, and he carried a fisherman’s resentment of the bosses who seemed to be taking over the industry.
 
At the very last minute, as Lion stood there in Town Hall, told he’d be a shoo-in for the fellowship, he’d taken his application and folded it into his pocket.
 
He’d have to think about it some more, he told the town officials.
 
He’d need a little more time.

Lion was considering his future as he walked toward the house on the June night when his brothers and sisters were playing tag.
 
Could he really leave home?
 
Could he be elsewhere when the red pears ripened, when his father chopped ice in the winter, when they took their boat out on the bay in the early mornings as the fog was closing in to make the whole world seem made of clouds?

Lion could hear laughter weaving around trees as he neared the house, and several shouts of surprise from deep in the woods.
 
Though the dark had fallen in sooty waves, he could narrow his eyes and make out several familiar figures.
 
There was his sister Huley, in her favorite gray dress, running to hide in the barn, and Gemma, easy enough to spy with her red hair.
 
There was poor John, tapped to be It, traipsing through the woods after his older brothers and sisters, doing his best, but never quite catching up.
 
Hundreds of fireflies were rising from their resting places in the tall grass, the males burning yellow with desire.
 
The summer constellations were appearing in the dome above them: Libra in the west; Ursa Major, the she-bear, in the northern sky;