Blackbird House (9 page)

Before he left for home, Larkin wrapped the braid carefully in a piece of muslin.
 
A keepsake for the baby.
 
Having had nothing himself, he had a pure sense of what a child needed, including that which someone else might find foolish, the braid of his mother’s hair, for instance.
 
Walking along the dock, Larkin saw dozens of soldiers, some boys so young it seemed they should be playing war in their own yards.
 
He was ready to go home and buy the house down the lane where he so liked to walk; now that he really considered it, he realized the boggy land around the pond at the back of the house was perfect for cranberries.
 
He’d set to work as soon as he got home.
 
Every day when he stepped out his front door, he’d think about the black-fish that had risen up like mountains.
 
He’d think about salt and sorrow and the way he had walked along the road that day with no idea of what the tide might bring in.
 
When people asked where the child living with him had come from, he’d simply say he’d found it on a battlefield.
 
He’d express what he had come to believe, that some plans were made not by men, or fate, or even heaven, but by circumstance, and by the song of whales.

BLACK IS THE

COLOR OF MY TRUE

LOVE’S HAIR

IN EVERY STORY IN WHICH THERE ARE

two sisters, one is always prettier.
 
One wants the world served up on

a platter while the other longs for nothing more than a rose.
 
My

sister, Huley, was the pretty one; you’d think she would have been

selfish as well, but I was the one who was greedy.
 
I wanted things I

never should have begun to imagine I deserved.
 
I was an ugly girl who

lived in an old white house with my father and my sister, but in my

mind I was something more.
 
I read books as though I were eating

apples, core and all, starved for those pages, hungry for every word

that told me about things I

didn’t yet have, but still wanted terribly, wanted until it hurt.

My mother had named me Violet, most likely because of the blotchy thing on my face, a birthmark in the shape of a flower, blue in cold weather, hideous and purple in full sun; when the heat made me sweat, the mark stood out more than ever, bumpy and blistering, filling me with shame.
 
My mother was kindhearted, but she died of a fever when I was seven and my sister was only five.
 
I liked to think she was leaving me a blessing when she gave me such a beautiful name; I believe she assumed my pretty sister had no need for anything more than a name that would have suited a mule.

I did most of my reading in the barn, where our horses were kept.
 
I

thought of books and hay together, a single sweet parcel.
 
There was no

line drawn between the soft snuffling of horses breathing and the

glorious worlds I most likely would never see.
 
I read Greek myths.
 
I

read about far-off places, Venice and Paris.
 
I read about men who

searched for things they could not find at home, and women who fell in

love with the wrong person and waited for the arrival of their beloved

for so long that a year was no different from a single day.
 
The same

thing was happening to me.
 
Years were passing.
 
I was already a woman,

and I still wasn’t done reading.
 
When my father and my sister went to

sleep, I would sneak away from the house, taking a lantern.
 
The horses

didn’t startle when they heard

me.
 
They were used to me.
 
Maybe they enjoyed the sound of turning pages; maybe it made the taste of hay rise in their mouths.
 
When I stretched out with my book in the pool of yellow light, I could hear the hum of the bees in the hive perched on the crossbeam above me a thousand wings flapping in unison and I’d think, I’m alive.
 
I’m alive.

Our father was a fisherman, Arthur Cross, a good man, worn down by the sea and by the loss of our mother.
 
He was often gone for weeks at a time, off to the Middle Bank, between Cape Cod and Cape Anne, along with his helper, a boy named George West.
 
This year, when they came back from fishing at the end of August, George West had grown nearly a foot.
 
He was rangy and silent and had blisters all over his hands.
 
George was nineteen, a year younger than me, but he towered over our father.
 
Although George barely spoke, and couldn’t seem to meet my eyes perhaps because he was afraid of the mark on my face my sister and I were relieved that there was someone to help draw in the nets, someone our father could rely upon.
 
When there was fishing nearby, runs of herring and bluefish, my father and George worked in our bay.
 
Huley and I shucked razor fish and clams for bait.
 
We harvested salt-meadow grass to feed our horses and the three dairy cows that were kept in the field.
 
Books weren’t the only things I knew: I could imitate the song of the red-winged blackbird that always announced the alewife’s run.
 
I could place a single blade of eelgrass between my fingers and whistle so loudly the oysters buried in the mud would spit at us.
 
Still, all the while I was out there laughing with my sister, a straw hat on my head to protect my blotchy face, I was thinking about the barn, about books, about the yellow lantern light.

Before long, I had read everything in the schoolhouse, including The Practical Navigator, and had borrowed whatever I could from the lighthouse keeper’s wife, Hannah Wynn, who had inherited a small library of books from her father in England.
 
It was Hannah Wynn’s husband, Harry, who first saw the serpent and filed the official report.
 
Harry Wynn had been a surveyor for the county and a trusted observer of the coast for many years.
 
Sea serpents of our local tales usually turned out to be whales, or large seals, or banks of curly seaweed, tangled and thick.
 
Surely, there were strange things in the water; our own father had told us of a night when the ocean around his boat had turned green, as alight as the stars in the sky.
 
George West had been a witness to this as well, if anybody dared to doubt our father’s word.
 
As for Harry Wynn, although he wasn’t as honorable a man as our father, he wasn’t a liar or a madman.
 
Not in the least.
 
People listened when he reported that the sea serpent was nearly fifty feet long, brown in color, snakelike in form, stinking of sulfur. Harry had watched the creature crawl out of the ocean, and, sure enough, when the men in town went to inspect the beach the next day, there was a trail in the sand, nearly four feet across.
 
The smell of sulfur was palpable.
 
Several men dropped to their knees, then and there, to pray for forgiveness for deeds they did not care to announce or explain.

One day everything was the same, the same sky and sea and beach, and the next day it was another world entirely.
 
People saw shadows where none had been before.
 
The women in town panicked.
 
Most would not let their children wander freely; cows were brought in from the field, in case the creature had a taste for meat or milk; windows and doors were secured.
 
An article appeared in the Boston Post, with quotes from Harry Wynn describing in great detail the size of the sea serpent’s teeth, nearly four inches long, and the way it had looked back at him, before darting into the woods.
 
By then, my sister refused to go to the shore with me, though it was only a mile from our door, so I went to dig up bait by myself.
 
I wasn’t afraid.
 
I had read the Odyssey and I knew there was no way to escape your own fate.
 
I knew that every monster had a beating heart, even those with scales, even those with flame-hot breath that could light the eelgrass on fire, even those whose faces were too terrible to see.

On the day the Professor arrived, we had what was called a spring tide, a tide lower than usual, so that the bay seemed devoid of water.
 
I could walk miles out into the sea and find nothing but mud.
 
There were enough littlenecks and quahogs to fill two wicker baskets.
 
Before me appeared a world without water, and it buzzed with mosquitoes and gnats.
 
It was September, that golden month.
 
My straw hat made everything seem yellow: the mud, the sky, the sulfury shoreline.
 
I saw the Professor from a distance, and, yes, my heart stopped.
 
No one believes it when people say that, but in my case, it was true.
 
It was just for an instant, but it was an instant I understood.
 
Thank goodness I was wearing my hat.
 
Perhaps he saw me as beautiful as he waved from the shoreline, my body young and strong, my hair in one long braid, nearly to my waist, my ugliness hidden by straw and sunlight.

His name was Ewan Perkins and he was one of the curators of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, a naturalist, originally from London, who had written for such esteemed journals as Zoologist and Scientific America.
 
He was an expert in unusual creatures: giant snakes in Bolivia, a small breed of crocodile discovered in Oxfordshire, Mexican frogs that could not only climb but fly.
 
These things I learned later, just as I learned he preferred toast with jam for breakfast, and hot, thick coffee when out in the field, but when I first saw him I only knew he was perfect.
 
He was waving to me from the shoreline, accompanied by two men from the town council, Frederick Dill and our mayor, John Morse.
 
I blinked, but if I wasn’t mistaken the stranger held a book in his hand, a natural history of Massachusetts, at least three hundred pages thick.

“Well, that’s a foolish thing to do,” John Morse told me

J ll as I approached with my baskets of clams.
 
“You’ll likely be eaten up in one snap if you’re not careful.”

“Unlikely” the Professor said.
 
His voice went through me, as a hook might have done.
 
No one in our world spoke the way he did, with such certainty and such clarity that a single word rang like a bell.
 
“If the creature left the salt water, it’s most probably looking for fresh water instead.
 
Are there ponds in this area?”

I kept my head down so he wouldn’t see my face.
 
So I’d have a few more minutes of him thinking I was beautiful.
 
Through the straw of my hat brim I could see that his eyes were some strange pale blue.
 
I was done for, I knew that.
 
I was trapped then and there.

We had half a dozen kettle ponds in our town, bottomless, with cool water, and probably another score of small ponds, like the one at the rear of our property, where the cows grazed on water weeds that made their milk turn faintly green in the bucket.

“I know where you can find every one of the ponds, even the hidden ones,” I said in a thin voice.
 
“I could show you.”
 
I was acting as though I had very little patience and even less time and would perhaps do him a favor if it suited me.

“She’s a smart girl,” John Morse said.
 
“You could do worse.”

I owed John Morse my allegiance forevermore after that, and would go door to door when his term as mayor came due, asking my neighbors to reinstate him.
 
The Professor said he would meet me in the morning in front of the schoolhouse; the mayor would lend him a horse, and Frederick Dill would take him in as a boarder to his fine house, which had a grand view of the bay.
 
I looked up then, and if Professor Perkins was shocked by my face, he didn’t show it.
 
He was used to monstrosities, after all, curious as a matter of fact.
 
He gazed right at me with those blue, blue eyes, and for an instant I felt unusual rather than deformed.
 
Something to be studied, understood, learned.

I didn’t care what my father said when he told me not to trust strangers; I went to meet Ewan Perkins so early in the day that there was still a sprinkling of stars in the sky.
 
I took the horse I liked best, the one I called Swan.
 
Swan was ugly and old, but steady.
 
I was so dizzy with what I was doing, I needed something dependable beneath me.

Ewan Perkins was waiting when I got there he had one of the Dills’ horses and a jug of black coffee, along with a satchel of charts and equipment and glass specimen jars.
 
We started out down by the lighthouse, where the creature had first been seen.
 
I was wearing my straw hat bent low over my face.
 
I could hardly breathe when we stood close together and walked along the sand.
 
The marks of the sea monster had been washed away with the tides, but every once in a while Perkins would bend down and extract something from the sand, using tweezers.
 
After an hour, he had found several scales, rather large and brown as the mud.
 
I was fairly certain they were the scales of a good-sized bluefish, turned color in the sun, but I said nothing.