Blackbird House (7 page)

It was a pink morning, misty, and the tide was especially low. Beaching of whales often happened in the place where the dike road had been built, a marshy acre which in older times the days before men and roads and even cranberries had led directly from the bay to the ocean. This particular migration had begun sometime in the night.
 
Perhaps the whales were misled by a full moon, a false beacon shining off the dark water beside the dike road.
 
Perhaps some of the blackfish were diseased, or one ill-fated turn was followed by scores of confused creatures searching for some ancient route their ancestors had once taken from the confines of the bay to the open sea.
 
Whatever had gone wrong, the blackfish had accepted their fate with a low, keening song.
 
It was a sound much like water, elusive, drifting in and out of people’s dreams, frightening cattle, calling the gulls and hawks to circle over a landscape of death and misery.

Lucinda Parker had heard the whales’ song best of all.
 
She worked for the Reedy family, whose farm backed up against the marsh, and she’d never been an easy sleeper.
 
As of late, she barely slept at all.
 
She was housed in a room above the barn, and from her one window she could see flickers of water when the tide was high.
 
Lucinda was long past thirty and too plain for anyone to bother with, except for William Reedy, who left his wife and family sleeping in the house and came to her room on nights when she least expected him.
 
It was always a surprise to her, the way he thought he had a right to her, and she could never choke out any words in his presence, for fear she’d lose her home and what little of her reputation she could lay claim to.
 
She could never say, Stay away.

Lucinda heard the whales’ cries as she was sleeping.
 
She woke in the dark and threw off her quilt and went to the window, and immediately she knew what she must do.
 
She made her way to the bay the way dreamers navigate their way to morning, without thinking, unable to stop what was about to happen.
 
The whole world seemed topsy-turvy.
 
It was nearly dawn, but there was a moon in the sky, so big and bright it might have been a lantern.
 
Water was sand, sand was water, and the beach was littered with over seven hundred blackfish; those pilot whales, which were so sleek and so quick in the water, were motionless now.
 
The shoreline was thick with the dying and the already dead, with pools of moonlight and eelgrass and the sorrowful sound of the thrush, waking in their nests.
 
And there it was, that watery song that had awakened Lucinda
 
The marsh seemed to reach on forever, with the tide so low none of the blackfish could possibly survive.

Lucinda Parker, who was wearing nothing but her nightdress and a pair of old leather boots, cut across the marsh despite the chill in the air.
 
She sank to her knees in the face of what was so mighty, so inevitable, so filled with sorrow.
 
She wore her long, dark hair braided in a single plait down her back.
 
Already, there were strands of gray Perhaps people in town thought she was too old and too ugly to really be a woman, to have a man use her for his own pleasure, to create life.
 
No one had noticed when her waist grew larger; sometimes she wept when she came into town to buy groceries for the Reedys, but no one bothered to ask about her troubles.
 
She was ugly; what was a pinch more of ugliness?
 
She was plain and fat; what was a little more added to her girth?
 
She’d gone out to the cow shed three nights earlier, when she felt she was ready, so no one would hear her if she screamed.
 
But she hadn’t screamed, hadn’t even called out, except to wish that the world would end, that the man who had done this to her would keel over and die, that daylight would never appear again.

Lucinda had the baby with her now.
 
He was perfect in every way, hidden in a shawl so that he might have been anything, seashells found on the shoreline, asparagus picked from the garden, a dove fallen down from the sky.
 
She unwrapped him and kissed him, though she’d been afraid to do so before, lest she feel anything.
 
Now all she felt was emptiness, vast as the open sea.
 
She carried him on a path in between the dying whales until she reached the low-water mark, where the reeds were as tall as bulrushes.
 
The salt was so thick it looked like a crust of ice.
 
She stood there in the moonlight, under the pink clouds, watching as the sun began to rise, breaking open the world into bands of yellow and blue, of daylight once more, inevitable daylight in a world in which there didn’t seem to be any choices.
 
Only instinct, the sort of action a desperate woman might take on a morning such as this.

Larkin was alone on the road at this early hour.
 
He had his wooden cranberry scoop over his shoulder, where it rested easily; the scoop was a part of him, another arm, another hand, dyed the same red as his flesh.
 
He smelled the blackfish before he saw them, and then the vision rose before him as he took the turn onto the dike road.
 
The whales had already begun to rot, and the air was thick with mayflies and salt and a bad egg smell.
 
Larkin thought he was imagining this odd vision, for it seemed that mountains had grown up along the shore.
 
He wondered if perhaps he had gone mad somehow, though he was known to be one of the most reasonable and calm men for miles around.

He took the first path that would lead him down to the bay With every step, he saw more clearly that what was before him was real.
 
Hundreds of corpses, a fisherman’s dream, acres of flesh and oil, free for the taking.
 
Already, the dogs in town had begun to bark.
 
Those few fishermen who were left, old Captain Aaron and even Henry Hardy, would soon awake with tears in their eyes.
 
Could a gift really come to them when it was least expected, a windfall, a promise, a reason to get out of bed?
 
It was a lean time, and more than three hundred local men had gone off to fight for the Union.
 
Those left behind were old men, like Henry Hardy and the captain, or boys like the Bern brothers, too foolish to find their way home let alone reach some far-off battlefield.
 
There were only a few family men left, like William Reedy, who had to care for his flock of seven children eight, actually, at the present time.

The men in town were the ill, the wounded, the lame, the overburdened; those who clearly could not be asked to fight.
 
Larkin Howard had something wrong with him as well, though he looked well built and healthy He was blind in one eye and deaf on that side as well.
 
He’d had a fever as a child, not long after his parents died, and when it was done and he’d risen from his sickbed, unattended to in his lodging rooms, one eye was fine and the other was cloudy.
 
Someone spoke to him, the lady of the house, Mrs.
 
Dill, who expected him to work for his keep.
 
Larkin had seen her mouth move, but he couldn’t hear a word, not until he swiveled round to his left side.

Because of his failings, Larkin had never learned to shoot a rifle.
 
He had never left town; never been to sea.
 
He still had a ringing in his one bad ear.
 
On this odd morning, he shut his cloudy eye and looked out at the bay.
 
The pink light was striking the pools of water, turning them red.
 
The tide still had a bit to go till it reached its lowest point, and more blackfish were being stranded as he watched. The smell was unbelievable.
 
Larkin pulled his neck kerchief over his mouth in order to breathe.
 
He saw the woman in her nightdress then, her braid down her back, crouched down in the mud.
 
His first thought was an odd one: She’s been trapped.
 
It seemed to Larkin she’d been beached along with the whales, one of more than seven hundred, dying in the warming air.

Larkin felt the echo and the ringing in his bad ear as he ran down the grassy path, anxious to see what was wrong.
 
The ringing was in his head as well.
 
The smell was hellish, and the sound of the blackfish, moaning or singing, it was impossible to tell which, was like thunder, shaking the sand under his feet.

“Let me help you,” Larkin said, or he thought that’s what he said.
 
But the woman must have heard differently, be cause, when he leaned down to pull her out of the mud, she turned and hit him as though he were about to attack her.
 
She hit him a second time, and then a third, her arms flying.
 
Larkin had to drop his cranberry scoop in order to protect himself He pushed her off, trying not to hurt her.
 
“Are you mad?”

When she fell away from him, he thought indeed she was.
 
He recognized her as the hired woman from the Reedys’ farm.
 
Perhaps she’d been driven insane by this god-awful smell, by the pointless death of so many creatures.
 
There was mud all over her nightdress, and her face was drawn.

“I just wanted to see if you need anything.”
 
Larkin bent to retrieve his wooden scoop, and that was when he saw the child.
 
There in the mud, between two blackfish, it was crying, its little mouth puckered, fists in the air.

Larkin looked over at the woman, and Lucinda stared back at him.
 
She didn’t say a word.

“Can I do something?”
 
There was that ringing, now in both Larkin’s

ears, the good and the deaf

“You want to do something for me?”
 
Lucinda stood up.
 
She was black with mud, and she had the stink of the whales all over her.
 
She had no idea that she was crying.
 
“Change the world.”

There were so many seagulls overhead, ready to feast on the dead, that before long everyone in town would know something momentous had happened.
 
And it had.
 
The baby looked up at a pink cloud; at last, he stopped crying.
 
There was salt all over his skin.

“All right.
 
Fine,” Larkin said.
 
“I will.”

Lucinda Parker laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound.

Larkin pointed across the bay, to the farm he liked to look at and pretend was his on his way to work.

“Is that enough of a change for you?”

Lucinda closed her eyes.
 
She could see the moon inside her eyelids.

She could see all of the life that she’d led.

“I’ll give it to you,” Larkin said.

All he wanted was for the baby not to start crying again.

“Just take care of him until I can manage it.”

Lucinda opened her eyes.
 
She was still in the same world, and the baby was beginning to fuss.

“When is that exactly?”
 
she asked of Larkin.
 
“Never?
 
Or the day after never?”

Poor Larkin Howard was a fool who was trying to stop the inevitable.
 
How could he change anything?
 
This was the bay of inevitability and of sorrow, of mistakes made and mistakes that were about to unfold, of all that had been lost in a minute or a lifetime.
 
This boy, Larkin, couldn’t possibly understand anything.
 
Lucinda felt old enough to be his mother.
 
She might have been if she’d had this baby long ago, when William Reedy first came to her, when she was only fifteen.

The baby in the mud was whimpering.
 
He looked shiny, with the same slick, wet skin as the blackfish.
 
If she’d ever had a child, one of her own, one she could keep, Lucinda would have liked for him to have blue eyes, like this one.
 
Seawater, tear water sky water blue as the heaven she’d imagined as a child, although truly that seemed another person entirely, that hopeful little girl who made wishes.

“Give me two weeks,” Larkin said, “and I’ll do it.”

He was sweating.
 
The day would be hot, and by now the fishermen in town were certain to be on their way.
 
And yet, all of a sudden, it seemed as though nothing had ever existed but this moment.
 
This one chance to do something right.

“Why should I give you anything?”
 
Lucinda certainly wasn’t making her salvation easy.
 
“What’s anyone ever given to me?”

“Two weeks.”
 
He was even more sure of himself now.
 
“That’s all the time I’ll need.”

It was a foolish promise, but one Lucinda Parker agreed to.
 
Larkin stood there watching as she picked up the baby and cleaned the mud off, ignoring his cries.
 
Larkin had to go on to the bog, but he felt paralyzed.

“I told you I wouldn’t do anything,” Lucinda said when she saw the way he was looking at her, as though he didn’t trust her with a bale of hay, let alone a child.

She wrapped the baby back in its shawl.
 
She could hide him in her room for a little while longer.
 
She could hold her hand over his mouth if he hollered at night.
 
She walked quickly, so she could get back before any of the family woke, and as she climbed the grassy hill that led away from the marsh, hurrying, out of breath, the oddest thing happened.
 
She felt the baby’s heart beating against her chest.
 
Two weeks, she thought, and not a minute more.
 
All the same, she remembered the girl she’d been so long ago, the one who’d been hopeful, the one who had expected something from this world.