Blackbird House (2 page)

Coral was a good woman, and John was a handsome man, tall, with dark hair and darker eyes, a Cornishman, as tough as men from Cornwall always were.
 
All the same, he didn’t have too much pride to herd sheep, or clean out a stable, or plant corn and turnips, though it meant a long-term battle with brambles and nettle.
 
Still, his was a town of fishermen; much as soldiers who can never leave their country once they’ve buried their own in the earth, so here it was the North Atlantic that called to them, a graveyard for sure, but home just as certainly.
 
And John was still one of them, at least for the present time.
 
If a man in these parts needed to earn enough to buy fences and cows and turnips, he knew where he had to go.
 
It would only be from May to July, John figured, and that would be the end of it, especially if he was helped by his two strong sons.

They moved into the house in April, a pale calm day when the buds on the lilacs their neighbors had planted as a welcome were just about to unfold.
 
The house was finished enough to sleep in; there was a fireplace where Coral could cook, and the rest would come eventually.
 
Quite suddenly, John and Coral felt as though time was unlimited, that it was among the things that would never be in short supply.

“That’s where the horses will be,” John Hadley told Coral.
 
They were looking out over the field that belonged to them, thanks to those years John had spent at sea and the emerald they’d sold.
 
“I’ll name one Charger.
 
I had a horse called that when I was young.”

Coral laughed to think of him young.
 
She saw her boys headed for the pond.
 
The blackbird chick rode on Isaac’s shoulder and flapped his wings.
 
It was their first day, the beginning of everything.
 
Their belongings were still in crates.

“I’ll just take him with me and Vincent this one time,” John said.
 
“I promise.
 
Then we’ll concentrate on turnips.”

“No,” Coral said.
 
She wanted three milk cows and four sheep and her children safe in their own beds.
 
She thought about her youngest, mashing worms into paste for his fledgling.
 
“Isaac can’t go.”

By then the brothers had reached the shores of the little pond.
 
The frogs jumped away as they approached.
 
The blackbird, frightened by the splashing, hopped into the safety of Isaac’s shirt, and sent out a small muffled cry.

“He’s like a hen,” the older brother jeered.
 
At fifteen, Vincent had grown to his full height, six foot, taller than his father; he was full of himself and how much he knew.
 
He’d been to sea twice, after all, and he figured he was as good as any man; he already had calluses on his hands.
 
He didn’t need to go to school anymore, which was just as well, since he’d never been fond of his lessons.
 
“He doesn’t even know he can fly” he said of his brother’s foundling.

“I’ll teach him.”
 
Isaac felt in his shirt for the blackbird.

The feathers reminded him of water, soft and cool.
 
Sometimes Isaac let the chick sleep right beside him, on the quilt his mother had sewn out of indigo homespun.

“Nah, you won’t.
 
He’s a big baby.
 
Just like you are.
 
He’ll be walking around on your shoulder for the rest of his life.”

After that, Isaac brought the blackbird into the woods every day, just to prove Vincent wrong.
 
He climbed into one of the tall oaks and let his legs dangle over a high limb.
 
He urged the blackbird to fly away, but the bird was now his pet, too attached to ever leave; the poor thing merely paced on his shoulder and squawked.
 
Isaac decided to name his pet Ink.
 
Ink was an indoor bird, afraid of the wind, and of others of his own kind.
 
He hopped around the parlor, and nested beneath the woodstove, where it was so hot he singed his feathers.
 
He sat on the table and sipped water from a saucer while Isaac did his studies.
 
It was a navigation book Isaac was studying.
 
The Practical Navigator.
 
If he was not as strong as Vincent, or as experienced, then at least he could memorize the chart of the stars; he could know the latitude of where they were going and where they’d been.

“Do you think I could teach him to talk?”
 
Isaac said dreamily to his mother one day.
 
Ink was perched on the tabletop, making a nuisance of himself.

“What would a blackbird have to say?”
 
Coral laughed.

“He’d say: I’ll never leave you.
 
I’ll be with you for all time”

Hearing those words, Coral felt faint; she said she needed some air.
 
She went into the yard and faced the meadow and gazed at the way the tall grass moved in the wind.
 
That night she said to her husband again, “Don’t take him with you, John.”

April was ending, with sheets of rain and the sound of the peepers calling from the shore of the pond.
 
Classes would end in a few days, too they called it a fisherman’s school, so that boys were free to be sent out to work with their fathers or uncles or neighbors from May till October.
 
The Hadleys left in the first week of that mild month, a night when there was no moon.
 
The fog had come in; so much the better when it came to sneaking away.
 
The British had lookouts to the east and the west, and it was best to take a northerly route.
 
They brought along molasses, the fishing nets, johnnycake, and salted pork, and, unknown to John and Vincent, Isaac took along his blackbird as well, tucked into his jacket.
 
As they rounded the turn out of their own harbor, Isaac took his pet from his hiding place.

“You could do it now if you wanted to,” he said to the bird.
 
“You could fly away.”

But the blackbird shivered in the wind, startled, it seemed, by the sound of water.
 
He scrambled back to the safety of Isaac’s jacket, feathers puffed up, the way they always were when he was frightened.

“I told you he’d never fly.”
 
Vincent had spied the blackbird.
 
He nudged his brother so that Isaac would help check the nets.
 
“He’s pathetic, really.”

“No, he’s not!”

By now they were past the fog that always clung to shore at this time of year, and the night was clear.
 
There were so many stars in the sky, and the vast expanse of dark and light was frightening.
 
The water was rougher than Isaac had ever seen it in their bay, and they were still not even halfway to the Middle Banks.
 
The sloop seemed small out here, far too breakable.

“Is this the way it always is?”
 
Isaac asked his brother.
 
He felt sick to his stomach; there was a lurching in his bones and blood.
 
He thought about the oak tree and the meadow and the frogs and the way his mother looked at him when he came in through the door.

“It’s the way it is tonight,” Vincent said.

Used to the sea, Vincent fell asleep easily, but Isaac couldn’t close his eyes.
 
John Hadley understood; he came to sit beside the boy.
 
It was so dark that every star in the sky hung suspended above the mast, as though only inches above them.
 
Isaac recognized the big
square
of
Pegasus
that he’d seen in his book.
 
The night looked like spilled milk, and John Hadley pointed out Leo, the harbinger of spring, then the North Star, constant as always.
 
John could hear the chattering of the blackbird in his son’s waistcoat.
 
He could taste his wife’s farewell kiss.

“What happens if a storm comes up?”
 
Isaac said, free to be frightened now that his brother was asleep, free to be the boy he still was. “What happens if I’m thrown overboard?
 
Or if a whale comes along? What happens then?”

“Then I’ll save you.”
 
When the wind changed John Hadley smelled turnips, he really did, and he laughed at the scent of it, how it had followed him all this way to the Middle Banks, to remind him of everything he had to lose.

II.

SO MANY MEN WERE TAKEN IN THE MAY GALE THAT

the Methodist church on

Main Street

could not hold the relatives of the lost all on one day.
 
There was a full week of services, and not a single one had a body to behold.
 
The law suggested three months pass by before any action was taken; time after time, it was true, sailors who had been thrown off course by the cruel circumstances of the seas, then assumed drowned, had appeared at their own funerals.
 
Once a drowned man arrived on the steps of the church, those who mourned him demanded to know where on earth he’d been all this time.
 
Was there another woman in the West Indies or up in
Nova Scotia
?
 
Had every cent he’d earned at sea been spent on rum?
 
The truth was usually far simpler: it took a long time to get back home, out here to the edge of the world.

After the May gale the town waited an unheard-of six months before the services commenced, and even then Coral Hadley refused to have her husband and sons counted among those who were mourned.
 
She didn’t answer the door when the parson came to call; she didn’t attend a single one of the services, though they were held for the husbands and sons of her friends, Harris Maguire and Otis West among them.
 
Coral had known something would happen the morning they’d left.
 
That was the worst part of it: she kept going back to that day, wondering what might have been if only she’d insisted on having her way.
 
She’d found four blue eggs out on the hillock by the pond, and every egg had a hole in it.
 
Coral had rattled each one.
 
Nothing inside.
 
A bad sign to find such things, a terrible sign, an omen of misfortune and of lives unfinished; futures cracked open into a powdery dust.
 
Later that night, when the wind came up, she heard her name called aloud.
 
When she told people about this, no one believed her, but Coral didn’t care.
 
She had gone to stand outside on the night they disappeared; though it was foggy, she went into the field where they would keep their cows, where the horse they planned to name Charger would graze, and she heard someone say, I’ll never leave you.

As soon as news of the gale came in, she refused to mourn with the other women.
 
Right away, she said there’d be no service, no matter what the parson advised, and all these months later she could not be moved.
 
The tragedy of her lost family was still unproven; there were no bodies found, not even a single splinter of wood from their sloop.
 
The women in town tried to convince Coral to let the dead be put to rest; they’d seen women in a mourning delirium before, unable to tell what was real and what was not.
 
Even old Hannah Crosby came down the lane and told Coral she had to face up to the terrible thing that had happened.
 
If the British had caught her men, they surely would have heard by now; John would have been taken to trial in Boston, just like the Henry brothers and so many others.
 
There would have been some news of the boys.

“I can wait,” Coral said.
 
That and nothing more.

She had planted the field, the way she thought John would want her to.
 
Though the ground was cold, she dug in row after row of turnips, then she planted corn; at last she sprinkled the seedpods of pink sweet peas, feed for the cows they would someday have, and for remembrance as well.
 
John had favored sweet peas, and had brought her armfuls of the flowers when he was courting her.
 
Her mother had said they were weeds, but, as was often the case, her mother was wrong.

Coral worked with a pick in the hot sun all summer long and into autumn, unafraid of dirt or hard work, dressed in black, refusing to eat anything her neighbors might bring.
 
In honor of her family, and what they must be suffering, she ate only Johnny cakes and catfish caught from the pond, simmering in an old pan over the woodstove.
 
She kept in mind those men who had reappeared at their own funerals: Robert Servich and Nathaniel Hawkes, for instance, both of them lost for months in the Indies, and now living right down the lane.
 
She thought about turnip stew and turnip cakes and how pleased John would be when he tasted the fruit of her labors.
 
How he’d be surprised to hear there were green onions growing wild in the far field, that there was a grapevine so huge it would keep them in jellies and jams and pies all year long.

And then, the next spring, when May arrived and the leaves were budding in shades of yellow and green, Coral realized that the blackbird had returned.
 
It was some time before she recognized it, because the bird had turned entirely white.
 
It sat in a branch of the big oak, where it could have easily been mistaken for a wisp of a cloud.
 
It looked like something Coral could blink away, but it wouldn’t disappear.
 
First the bird was on her roof, then it was at her window, and then, one morning, the white blackbird tapped at the door, and that was how she knew they were gone.