Lightkeeper's Wife (3 page)

***

The first time John had come into her mother's store, nearly seven years ago, she hadn't looked up from where she stood at the cash register, running her finger through dust between the register keys.

“I need supplies for the light up at Dangerfield,” he said. “Silas Gibbons finally retired. I've only been up there a couple of months, and the store down at the harbor doesn't have a lot to offer. I mean, it has enough for the day-to-day, but not much more.” He wore a dark blue seaman's jacket, unbuttoned. A red handkerchief held his hair back under his black cap, tilted to shield his eyes from the weather, and dark curls sprang out in all directions. Baggy trousers and a loose linen shirt could not contain the energy of his limbs, as if all that fabric was there to make room for motion. “I need whitewash and staples for the kitchen.”

“Hannah, give the man a hand,” her mother said, waving her toward him.

Hannah led him across the floor to the whitewash. “You need any brushes?” she asked.

“No, just the whitewash, a hundred fifty feet of one-inch hemp rope, some potatoes, and smoked meat, whatever else you have. I'll trust your opinion on that.”

“You have a stove up there?”

“Wood stove and a fire.”

“Good,” Hannah said, filling the wicker basket he'd brought with potatoes, carrots, green beans, a jar of blackberry preserves, a smoked ham.

“You ever seen the lighthouse?” he asked. “It's a beautiful spot out there, right on the edge of the dunes.”

“Lots of wrecks, I hear. Ocean's Graveyard they call it.” As she added up his order, she took in his long, lean body and hands thick with work, like her father's.

“You make it sound bad. That's not the only thing about it.”

She looked up at him then.

“My name's John Snow,” he said. “I'll be down here pretty regular now. I was out on a whaler for a few years before I took this post. I'm not used to land living yet. I appreciate your help with the groceries.”

Hannah nodded and placed the change in his open palm. He didn't bother to count it before folding it into his pocket. After loading boxes of groceries and supplies onto his wagon, he retrieved his last crate, and on his way out he stopped. “See you again,” he said, smiling. His attention made her flush, but she refused to show it, and so bent down to reorganize a shelf.

Every few weeks John Snow came in for supplies, and their visits became friendlier. Hannah's mother began to notice her daughter's interest in the lightkeeper, and while she wasn't convinced that he was an appropriate suitor, he was the only man Hannah had ever paid any attention to. For this reason alone, she decided one morning to give him a good look. Under the guise of giving him two loaves of cranberry bread, she invited him to sit at the counter and drink a hot cup of coffee. John hung his jacket and hat on the rack. He wore a black wool sweater that exaggerated his dark features. “Those berries are harvested here in Barnstable,” her mother said, pushing the cream and sugar in front of him.

“Thank you, ma'am. I don't get a lot of baked items up at the lights. I've no talent for it myself.”

“Hannah can bake when she sets her mind to it,” her mother said, wiping a clean rag over the varnished counter. Hannah ignored her and walked to the front window where she glanced up and down the road. She spotted Evan Pierce strolling by as if he didn't have a care in the world. Evan worked on his father's boat fishing for cod off George's Bank, and she'd come to know him on the docks working with her father. His eyes flitted just like a fish until he spotted her and stopped in front of the window. His brownish-red hair reflected the sun like fish scales, tiny rainbows of shimmering light. They spoke through the window.

“What're you doing in town?” she asked.

“Had to borrow some caulking for repairs.”

Hannah gazed into her clasped hands and then back up through the streaked glass. Now that she was stuck in the store, there wasn't a lot for them to talk about. Evan looked up the street. He shrugged, then tossed a quick wave on his way toward the harbor.

Hannah sighed in as frustrated a tone as she could muster, picked up the duster from its hook, and began lifting items from the shelf and dusting, then slamming each item back down again.

“She doesn't like working indoors,” Nora said. John smiled, his eyes on Hannah.

When Hannah invited him to go clamming out on the flats at the end of Wharf Road, her mother took her into the stockroom. “Couldn't you wait for him to ask you on a proper outing?”

“What difference does it make, Mother?”

“It's no way to win a man over.”

“I don't want to win him over. I want to take him clamming.”

***

She watched John work the clamming rake in the mud, scooping until he heard a solid clank against the metal, then he dunked the rake underwater to reveal the clams and drop them in the wire basket. Hannah carried the basket across the flats and instructed him on the finer points of using the rake. She refused to play coy with him, as her mother would have her do. “You look for the blowholes in the mud, then rake slowly, deeper and deeper, until you hit something. Hold the handle lower, so you get a better angle, right, that's it.” The marsh grass, verdant and shimmering in the summer light, swayed in unpredictable patterns, and across the bay the sun flashed off the dunes of Sandy Neck. They walked along the flats barefoot, John shirtless and tanned, following the rippled edge of water, Hannah with her skirt rolled and tucked up into her waistband so that her ankles showed white as the underbelly of a fish. When the tide started back in, the clams spouted jets of water from under the wet sand, and John gathered as many clams as he could, until the basket was too heavy for Hannah, and he had to carry it while she raked. With the basket full, they worked their way back along the flats to the beach where they sat together on the edge of the water.

Hannah told him about her friends, the Coopers, whose father was on a whaler. They only saw him every three or four years. He sent money and paid for their house, and the kids grew up hardly knowing him. One winter he tried to stay on shore, and he spent all his time drinking and starting fights, until his wife begged him to go off to sea again.

John knew the type, the ones who had it in their blood. He was not that sort. He was not cut out for such a bloody business. Even stripping the whale was an ordeal for him. They pulled the whale alongside the ship and sawed off the strips of blubber, and the water filled with blood, and the sharks lurked all around, and the decks ran with blood. The blood and the smell and sight of the fish ripped up and desecrated drove him ashore.

While John talked, she became aware of his solid arms, his hands mapped with dried salt, gesticulating as he told his story. His feet dug into the sand, the tiny curls of dark hair on each toe pressed flat, and his sweaty smell mixed with the salty bay water.

“You've let me go on now. What about you, Hannah? It's clear to me that you don't like working in the store.”

“I used to work with my father on his fishing boat, pulling in lobster traps, dragging for scallops. Sometimes we fished for cod or bass or whatever was running. I loved being on the boat with him and working outside, just the two of us. But my mother put me to work in the store like a prize heifer on display.” Hannah scraped a stone into the boulder they sat on, then tossed the stone into shallow water. “If I could get away with it, I'd go out on a whaler, blood, guts, and all.”

John laughed. “It can't be that bad.”

“What do you know? You're up there at the end of the earth watching for ships from the lighthouse.”

“True,” he said. John stood up and extended a hand for Hannah. As they walked back to her house, he told her stories of shipwrecks and the men who'd washed ashore, men who'd sailed all over the world, men with stories of their own told around the fire over hot cups of coffee, and with the urgency and disbelief of eyes that had seen death up close. Hannah longed for contact with the world beyond her mother's store, for a life on the water like she'd known with her father. She resented her mother for bringing her ashore, and resented her father for not sticking up for her.

At the house, she lit a lantern in the barn and set to work shucking clams. She brought a bucket of clean water from the well, a wooden bowl from the house, and sat next to John on a narrow bench. The lantern cast their faces aglow and illuminated only a small circle around them, so that they appeared to be working in an orb of light.

“Watch now,” Hannah said, holding a wood-handled, six-inch, flat blade in her right hand and the clam in her left, snout pointing right and the hinge away from her. “You slide the knife in here, aft of the siphon, then through the muscle like this.” She pushed the steel blade into the crease between the shells and pulled back through the tight muscle. Then she ran the knife around the rim of the shell toward her body until the clam was open. With one quick motion she scooped the fleshy meat, making clean cuts across the last bits of muscle that clung to the shell. With the clam on the end of her knife, she pinched the stomach to release the guts. “Then you just peel this skin off the siphon,” she said, and peeled back the black membrane. Hannah dunked the clam into the clean water to rinse the sand, then picked up the clam in her fingers and dropped it into John's waiting mouth. Her fingers brushed across his chapped lips, and he smiled and chewed the clam until she could smell the sea on his breath.

“Damn, that's good,” he said. “But I know how to shuck a clam.”

He grabbed a clam from the basket, positioned it in his large hand, and made fast work of shucking it.

“Not bad,” she said, laughing. He delicately slid the clam onto the ends of his two fingers and lifted it toward Hannah's mouth. She waited, perched like a bird, her lips slightly parted, then she opened her mouth as his fingers swept nearer. He dropped the clam onto her tongue and slowly removed his fingers, letting them graze her open lips, then sweep across her suntanned cheek. When she swallowed the clam, she leaned in close, face upturned, and John kissed her, the taste of seawater in their mouths. When he stopped, she felt dizzy.

All that summer John's trips up to the store became more frequent, and Hannah took him to all her favorite places, rowing through the salt marsh near the bay, fishing off the Mill Bridge, clamming on the flats. They went out cod fishing with her father and came across a humpback whale sunning itself, its massive, sleek black body and ridged fins floating quietly. “I'm not a man who wants to harpoon that whale, Hannah. I'll never be rich.”

Hannah ran her fingers along his neck, and she kissed his Adam's apple when her father wasn't looking. They stood together at the stern of the boat to watch the whale turn itself over in the sun, water running off its body, and the splash when the tail slapped the water and soaked the boat.

***

Oct 12: Winds > 30 NE, rain, 0 visibility

Oct 13: Ship aground, total wreck, one survivor, NE < 20

Over the logbook were pinned the torn pages from the almanac with the tide charts for each month. She checked the tide and filled in the events that she'd been too busy to record, right after John's notes from his last scan of the horizon that day he'd left for Barnstable. With the house restored to order, she sat by the shipwrecked sailor and watched him sleep. Then she was on her feet again and casting about for something to do. She ate a piece of toast standing at the kitchen counter. The humming through her body drove her outside to gather wood from the pile on the front porch. In between trips to the lights, heating the room became her focus, warming the sailor back to health, waiting for him to wake up and for John to come home.

She and John had been married for over six years now. The second summer of their marriage, when Hannah was twenty years old, they had their first real fight. John hadn't allowed her to row to a wreck, even though the storm had passed and there was no real hazard. Hannah couldn't accept his judgment that no wife of his would endanger herself on his behalf. “You want me to participate in your life here, to take on your responsibilities, but only those that you see fit.”

“You do plenty, Hannah, more than your share. This is for your own safety.” The calm in his voice was a counterpoint to her anger.

“I think I can judge what's safe for me and what's not. I've been in boats my whole life. It's torture for me to know there are men drowning with the lighthouse in view, and I'm stuck on shore. It makes no sense.” Hannah paced behind him where he sat at the table, until he stood up and crossed the room to put his plate in the sink. She followed at his heel.

“You're in no position to judge what's safe, Hannah. You'd row to Nantucket in a snow squall if it suited you.”

“That's ridiculous and you know it. I just want to help. Yet you want to keep me cooped up in the house like all the other wives.”

John turned from the sink, face flushed, his voice angry but even. “I can't believe that you think I'm concerned with myself when it's
you
I'm concerned for.”

“You're not concerned for me at all. You're concerned for your own pride. You don't want any wife of yours risking her life alongside you. What kind of a man would allow that? Not John Snow. What would people think?”

“Hannah, stop it.” He stepped toward her. “You're being unreasonable.”

“I am not unreasonable,” she spat. “You're a coward.”

He held her wrists down by her sides and wrapped his arms around her to calm her, but she fought him, flailing with her torso and legs. She struggled to free her wrists and writhed against him. “Let me go, John. Let go.” But he didn't let go until she'd worn herself out and collapsed against him, then he carried her to the bed and lay with her until she fell asleep.