Lightkeeper's Wife (8 page)

The wind had come up now and the captain spoke loud enough to sound like he was dressing the men down, but he was only talking, his stentorian voice a roar in the sea air.

“I'm the captain of this crew in battle and you'll follow my orders when that time comes. In all else we're a democracy. You'll get equal shares of any booty, and food and drink and a say in what happens on this ship. You being a woman makes no difference. You could be a goddamned duck for all we care, as long as you fight like a man. You hear?”

“I hear.”

“You didn't tell me your name,” Jack said.

She hesitated. “Blue,” she said. It was what her father had called her as a child, Blue for the color of her eyes. Blue for the sullen disposition he could not cheer. And wasn't that appropriate since her father was a kind of pirate himself?

“Go down the fo'c'sle and find an empty bunk, get the lay of the ship. You know how to fight, but can you sail?”

“Yes,” she said. “And I can navigate to true course.”

“So you're good for more than murdering my men. I'll make use of you then,” Jack said.

Blue stood at the rail holding on to the clothing she'd taken from Daniel. She stared blankly into the heaving ocean, letting the spray wet her face and hair. This was as close to tears as she could come. When the ship's rocking motion broke her gaze, she headed to the hatch that led down to the crew's quarters. Each step into the bowels of the ship carried her into an underworld that bristled the fine hairs along the back of her neck and made her muscles twitch. The fo'c'sle smelled of stagnant bilge water, sweaty men, unwashed clothes, and rum. It was the odor of oblivion. Under the low ceiling, Blue inhabited a limbo between the woman she had been and the woman she would become. She dropped the armful of clothing onto the aft-most bunk on the starboard side. She quickly undressed. Daniel's cotton trousers hung loose from her hips. She rolled the waist down and cuffed the hems. She felt safer in men's attire. The bunks were built two high into the hull on either side of the ship. Blue, satisfied that her bunk on the end offered easy escape and sufficient space from the other sailors, stuffed her clothes in the wooden chest beneath and lay back, her pistol in her right hand, her arm crossed over her chest so that the pistol rested on her heart.

By the time Hannah came down from the lighthouse, Billy had stoked the fire and boiled water for coffee. He'd filled the lanterns and lit the candles and brought in extra firewood. Hannah slid a pile of root vegetables from beneath the sink into a scooped-out wooden bowl and placed it alongside a cutting board and a knife on the dining table.

“Peel and chop these,” she said.

Billy shook his head. “I can't cook.”

“I've yet to meet a sailor didn't know his way around a knife. All you have to do is peel and chop.”

Billy scooted his chair up to the table and peered into the bowl. He was handsome, blond hair and gray-blue eyes startling in the way they looked right at you, then looked away as if that moment of seeing was too much to bear. Fearful as a kicked dog, she thought, and smelled nearly as bad.

“How big do you want them?” He sat at the table with his head resting on one hand, exhausted, as he would be for a while. How long was she going to be stuck with him?

“However you like,” she said curtly. “I'm making a soup that has to last us through the storm. We'll have no time to cook once it hits.”

They worked with their backs to each other, silent but for the wind shaking the chimney and the strike of the knife on the cutting board. Hannah wouldn't tolerate disobedience, Billy realized. There was no room for stepping out of line. He needed to get a hold of himself, but he'd learned from Annie that recklessness was not a thing you could overcome.

After supper, Billy finished with the dishes and wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. “Galley duty's over.” He leaned back against the counter, one foot crossed over the other. The hollows of his hips showed through his low-slung pants. She needed to fatten him up so he could leave.

He pulled a rigging knife from his pocket and began to run it along the underside of his fingernails.

“That's a disgusting habit. I'll thank you not to do it in my kitchen.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, holding his hands up. He sheathed the knife, lifted his pant leg, and slid it into his sock so that it rested along his calf. “So where's this husband of yours?” he asked.

“You should be in bed,” Hannah said, annoyed. “You've still got a fever.”

Billy swaggered to the bedroll where he lay back against the pillows and stared into the fire. “Not many people come out here.” He leaned on his side now and looked up at her.

She didn't want to answer him. Still, there he was, waiting for her to respond. What was his point? Was he trying to frighten her? Because she wasn't afraid. He was too weak to do anything foolish.

“Tom comes regularly, as you know. You'll meet others.” The truth was that other than John, she had the company of Tom and shipwrecked sailors and travelers passing through who saw the light and sought refuge—mostly men.

“I never heard of a lady lightkeeper.”

“My husband's the lightkeeper, I told you that.”

“Still, it's strange, and you wear pants.” He laughed.

“Aren't you tired?”

“I'm glad it was you here when our boat when down. I bet he doesn't go out there like you do. I never heard of a lightkeeper doing that,” Billy said.

Hannah went to bed early to get away from him and his questions. She dreamed of water running so heavily that it filled the ocean and ponds and lakes in Barnstable to overflowing; it ran down the roads and turned them into rivers, it lifted John from his horse and carried him downstream, shattering his wooden wagon to bits. Torrents of water carried him off, and he couldn't rescue himself because he was too far from home and the lighthouse and his rescue boat and his tools were off in the distance. He needed a rope thrown to him, or a tree branch stretched low over the road, but there was nothing. If only she could reach into her dream and pluck him free, pull him under the covers where she could feel his heat, but he drifted farther and farther out of sight.

She woke crying, reaching for him on the other side of the bed. The empty space where John slept was cold. She stretched herself across it, hoping that he would climb in next to her, and say, “I'll explain in the morning.”

***

A loud knock on the front door drove Hannah up from the bed. She looked around her room, disoriented. She'd been up and down all night, climbing the lighthouse stairs to check the flames, and then back to bed, up the stairs, then back to bed. The instinct that drove her up to check the lights was heightened in John's absence—there was no one to rely on but herself. At four in the morning, she'd stood with her back to the flames, her eyes toward Barnstable where John had spent the night with her parents, spent the night in her childhood bed, but all she saw was her own reflection staring back at her, and a look in her eyes that said,
You
are
alone
.

Now it was dawn, and she was exhausted.

The knocking was louder now. Hannah pulled a wool sweater on over her nightdress. “I'm coming,” she said, and she splashed cold water on her face, glimpsed her startled expression in the glass. She looked tired, her eyes red and irritated from not sleeping well. When she rounded the corner into the kitchen, Tom stood holding his hat against his chest. Billy had opened the door and stood by the fire to see what was going to happen, but when Hannah appeared, he ducked out the passageway to the barn.

“I got news, Hannah. You better sit down.”

“I can hear it standing.”

“I just rode back from Yarmouth. They found John's horse, wandering loose down by Dennis Pond. There was no sign of John.”

“What happened? Where is he?” She held her stomach, as if she'd been kicked.

“They don't know. Search parties have gone out but they found nothing so far. They're still looking.”

“What do you mean they don't know? Someone had to see him.”

“Your mother said good-bye to him near daybreak the day of the storm. Wilbur Dickinson saw him pass by the post office soon after that, and his trail stops there. Next sign of him is his horse found down by the pond. We didn't find any of his cargo or any indication of where he could be.”

“I don't understand. What could've happened?” Her voice rose in pitch, her words came out in a stream of grief. “If it wasn't the storm, what was it?”

Tom hesitated. “Well, there's been speculation, of course. He could've been robbed or thrown from his wagon. There's no way of knowing until we find him.”

“You think he's dead?” Hannah held her fists clenched at her sides, her body rigid. All color had drained from her face, as if she was the corpse they'd been looking for.

Tom looked down. “There was a lot of blood, Hannah. I didn't want to say, but you might as well know.”

Hannah fell into the nearest chair, her legs weak. Her head swam with possibilities, all of them accompanied by an overwhelming grief that set her adrift in the soft cushioned chair. “You've been searching for his body,” she said, the fact like a rock dropped into the room.

Tom fell into a chair and landed, elbows on the table, the weight of his head in his hands.

“He could've been taken off, you know, kidnapped or something,” Billy said. Hannah turned to see him standing in the doorway.

“How long have you been standing there?”

“Not long,” Billy said.

Tom interrupted him. “Are you in the habit of listening to people's conversations?”

Tom tried to reassure Hannah, but he couldn't overcome the despair in his voice. “Your father went out on the search team. Half the mid-Cape men are searching day and night, but so far they've come up with nothing. Your parents want you to come home. They don't want you here alone.”

“I'm not alone, Tom. I'm keeping the lights while John is gone, just like I always do.”

Tom looked at Billy. No one spoke.

***

That night, Hannah slid the fireplace grate into place and doused the candles one at a time. Her body felt as if it were filled with sand that shifted and dragged with each step across floor. If only the floor tilted toward the bedroom, she'd have an easier time getting there. It was easy to let herself drop into the chair by the fire. She wanted to feel something, to cry or scream or wail, but her mind worked hard to leave no room for grief. She searched for explanations that would mean John was alive. He could've been robbed, beaten, and left in the woods while the criminals got away. Maybe he fell from the wagon and wandered off, disoriented. Any number of things could happen to a man traveling alone, even in a small place like this, she told herself.

She had to see for herself the place where he'd gone missing. If anyone could find him, it would be her. She'd know where he was by instinct. Tom would watch the lighthouse. At the front window, she looked toward the road, but it promised nothing.

The musty air hit her all at once with a memory that was not a picture in her mind but an ocean swell of feeling. It was a lifetime of days spent stepping over this threshold through the smells of tobacco, human dirt, and earth brought in on the bottoms of boots, mildew, damp wool, whale oil, and spilled beer, all the meals they'd ever eaten, every fish cooked, every pine wreath hung, every bayberry candle burned. All of these odors seeped and layered into the shifting floors and in between walls, smells that could not be kept back with daily cleaning.

“Hannah, is that you? Come here, come in. I'm so sorry, dear.” Her mother pulled her by the elbow into the front hall. There was her father's pipe spattered with paint, propped on a sack of tobacco, his boots kicked off by the door.

Hannah let her hat drop to the floor and stepped into her mother's fleshy arms, into the scent of rose water and fresh linen and cooking smells from the kitchen. That's when her tears came heavy and hard.

“Oh, dear, dear. We'll do our best to find him. You're home now. I'll take care of you.” Her mother helped Hannah out of her coat and hung it on a peg by the door. She faced Hannah and looked at her squarely from the top of her hair to her bootlaces and nodded. Nora had gained weight, but she carried herself with dignity and purpose.

“You can go on upstairs, freshen up. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. We'll fatten you up while you're here.”

Hannah glanced up the darkened stairway toward her old bedroom, the last place where John had slept, the last place she wanted to go. Her father nudged her mother aside and kissed Hannah on the cheek, took her by the shoulders as if to feel her strength, and then, satisfied, stepped back and let her mother take the lead.

Hannah stood in the hallway, not wanting to step in any direction. As she looked toward the kitchen, she saw John frying a fresh fillet of sole as he'd done the night he'd spent here. Or when she looked toward the living room, there he was with his boots kicked off by the fire, talking with her father about his catch.

“Why don't you relax with your father while I finish getting dinner ready?” Nora said.

Her father led her into the parlor at the front of the house where he'd set a fire going. The room was warm, and Hannah fell into a chair and stared into the flames, suddenly tired. Her father sighed over his newspaper and she turned to him, but he did not look up. She had never considered the fact that he would age, but there he was, stooped a bit at the shoulders, a soft belly pressing out against his sweater. Still, he was a handsome man with a swath of dark hair and brown eyes, a heavy jaw that strengthened his round, poutish face.

They sat for some time in silence. Theirs was normally a conversation of dropping a trap off the side of the boat and a wave signaling the buoy's rise to the surface. It was watching a squall blow in from the horizon, battening down the boat, and racing for the harbor with hardly a word spoken. But this silence was something else.

He sat with the newspaper across his lap, his spectacles balanced near the end of his nose. “When did you get those?” Hannah asked.

He looked up, pulled from thoughts deeper than the news. “They're just for reading.” He folded the paper and slapped it against his knee. “You must have questions, Hannah.”

“I want to see the place tomorrow.”

“We'll go, then.”

Hannah stood and gazed out the front windows, imagining herself into the distances beyond the dark. The men John had rescued walked through their lives with a scant memory of him or no thought at all. He'd ridden away from here and into his absence, which only seemed broader and deeper now.

“Been awhile since you stood right there,” he said. He took his glasses off and dropped them onto the side table. He asked Hannah to help him get some firewood and groaned as he stood up and stretched his back. “I'm no good at getting old. No good at all.”

He led her out the side door into the yard where moonlight lit the side of the house. Alongside the barn, the cords of wood he'd stacked rose near as tall as him. He reached behind the woodpile, wiggled his arm back there, and came up with a bottle. He drank and dabbed his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “You want some?”

“No thanks.”

“I hurt my back pulling traps. This relaxes the muscles or makes me too drunk to care. I don't know which.” He drank, leaning back against the woodpile, his head tilted to look into the sky. The moon cast the woods into an otherworldly glow and they could see the yard, the broken traps and boat parts and mangled nets.

“If there's anything you can't do—”

“Forget it,” he said.

“Why hide the bottle?”

“Your mother doesn't want to know about it, but if I need it for the pain, she'll ignore it. It's just her way.” He sat on the chopping block, and with his hands on his knees, he leaned forward and spoke as if he meant to be heard.

“I heard about that rescue of yours.”

“You know better than to listen. People like to hear themselves talk.”

“Sure, but I know you, so when I hear something like that and weigh it against what I know about you, there's not a lot left to question. I'm no fool. I know what you're capable of doing in a boat.”

“There's nothing wrong with what I did.”

“You think you're so goddamned invincible,” he said. “You always have.” He spat at the ground. “I taught you good but everyone is susceptible. I'm not saying this because I doubt you. You know I don't, but you can't control everything that happens out there, no matter how strong or good you are. You can't control an ocean.”

He sloshed the liquor around in the bottle and took another sip. “I wish you'd just
think
, Hannah. Stop and
think
. That's what scares me. You're so full of passion you don't stop to consider the consequences.”

“You believe some thirdhand story, but you've never once come up to Dangerfield to see what I do.”

“I guess we've both been remiss.”

They sat for a while watching the dark. From this part of the yard Hannah could see the bedroom window she'd stared out of for years as a younger girl. The bedroom where she'd spent her first night with John. The bedroom where he may have spent his last night.

“Mother's heard about the rescue too?” Hannah asked.

“Not from me.” He rocked himself forward and stood from the chopping block, slid the bottle back behind the woodpile. He loaded Hannah's arms with wood, then his own, steady as if he hadn't taken a drink. They stacked a couple loads of maple by the fire and went outside again to brush wood shavings from their clothes.

In the dining room, the table was set with everyday dishes, scratched and worn with years of use, while the good china remained in the cabinet on display. Hannah's mother swept from the kitchen to the dining room and back again, placing serving dishes around the table.

“Christ, Nora, would you come in and sit down? We're half starved.”

“You've never been starved in your life,” she said, untying her apron and hanging it on a peg behind the door.

Her father didn't look up from his meal. The food seized his attention, and he worked his way around the plate as if finishing was another task in life.

Now Hannah's grief took a turn, and she found herself chattering as if the silence would destroy them. She spoke frantically, afraid that if she stopped, the heavy oak table would crack down the middle in the face of John's absence and her father's drinking and the years not spent sitting together around a good meal. “I haven't had a roast like this since the last time I sat right here. I just can't seem to get it to cook for the right amount of time. Father, pass the salt, would you? I love how the potatoes are crunchy on the bottom. Did you roast them in the same pan with the meat?”

“There's plenty more,” her mother said, nudging the potatoes toward Hannah.

“Father, what do you think? Is this the best dinner you've ever had?”

He looked up from his plate as if caught in the act. “What? Yes, yes, it's good, real good.”

When her mother finished eating, she folded her napkin and placed it beside her plate. She leaned back and considered her husband before speaking. “Edward, those traps have been piled out back for months. I'm not saying you should move them on your own, but now that Hannah's here—”

“I told you I'd take care of that,” he said.

“He won't admit he needs help, Hannah. Maybe you can talk some sense into him. We can afford to get someone to help him out, but he won't allow it. He's too stubborn.” Her mother leaned forward in her chair. “It wouldn't kill you to get a little help, Ed.”

“I'm fine,” he said. He pushed himself up from the table.

“Where are you going now?”

“I'll be outside.”

“Getting some more wood from the pile?” Nora asked, her voice a sarcastic snap.

The sound of the kitchen door slamming shut was answer enough.

***

In the morning, when Hannah was making coffee, she watched the fog drift past the kitchen window. An off-kilter formation of geese flew over the trees, their call growing distant and marking the immensity of the world beyond their yard. She'd woken several times during the night to check the lights, but the lighthouse beam didn't interrupt the dark and she felt her childhood bed beneath her. There in the shadows her dresser settled into the floor, the washbasin right where it had always been, and the night table by the bed. She'd thought of lighting the candle, but the darkness softened. What a blank and sprawling enormity—nighttime without the regularity of the light flashing, the four-hour check for oil, the threat of bad weather that would call her out onto the beach.

She drifted back to sleep and found herself alone in her dreams wandering the woods behind the barn, running along the trail toward Dennis Pond, through the thick patch of spruce that thinned to pine, an occasional birch tree and then a green field and brambles and there was the pond. Still and flat as the beginning of time.
Did
you
take
him?
The place where they'd found his horse wandering was less than a mile east of where she stood. In her dream the water smelled like rain and mildew, and when she turned toward where his horse would've been, her feet froze and she couldn't move. She tried to speak, to scream.
Where
is
John?
But her throat didn't work and she had to pantomime the words, holding her hands out and stabbing the pond with her questioning glare, as if to say,
Where, where, where?

***

The next morning, she stared into the fog from the kitchen window and tried not to think about John, but his absence took up space and had weight. If he'd been here to spend the night with her, they would have fallen asleep wrapped around each other and would have woke to make love. He'd cover her mouth to keep her from making noise, and when they fell away from each other, they'd lie back in bed and talk about the lighthouse like it was a child they'd left behind.

When she heard her mother's firm foot on the back stairs, she poured a cup of coffee for her and cut thick slices of bread for toast, relieved by the simple act of placing her hand on a loaf of bread.

“You're up early,” Nora said. “Aren't you tired from your trip?”

“Habit. The lights,” Hannah said.

Nora arranged the butter dish and the jam pot on the table and set two places. “This is strawberry, but there's beach plum, too, if you'd rather.”

Hannah felt her mother holding back the one thing she wanted to talk about. “Strawberry's fine.”

Nora carried her coffee to the small table by the window. Hannah took the toast from the stove, tossed it on a plate, and brought it to the table.

“Did you sleep well?” Nora eyed her cautiously, stirring her coffee, the spoon against the cup an annoying tinkle in the air.

“He didn't want to leave that last day. He kept forgetting things and coming back to the house. I just wanted him to leave so I could get on with my day. I thought he'd be back in a couple of days. He always came right back.”

“I know.”

“And then there was the storm. I thought for a while he stayed in Orleans to get out of the rain, or was injured.” Hannah scraped her knife around the rim of the jam jar, over and over, and then dropped the knife.

Nora opened the window a crack and let the cold air into the room. “You'll have to get on with things at some point,” Nora said. “Do you think it's practical to stay in Dangerfield? You could have a good life here, find a husband when you're ready.”

“I have to stay. It's my home now, Mother.”

***

That afternoon, Hannah rode alongside her father, who was in a bad humor but determined to take her to the place where John had gone missing.

“It's hard on your mother,” he said, rocking with the stride of his horse. He could've been talking about his drinking or losing John or just about anything. He spat into the bushes and scratched his whiskers. “There's things you lose that don't come back.”

She felt him trying to right himself like a man holding on for his life to a capsized dinghy. Only he couldn't get hold. His thoughts ran scattershot, careening in one direction, distracted by the sound of a dog barking—“Don't know whose dog that is, but if it was mine, I'd whack it good and hard”—then taking off in another direction that led to a place of dumb silence. He shook his head, repentant about things that were not his fault—John gone missing, Hannah's refusal to stay ashore, his disabled back—when so many things were his fault.

On Summer Street, loose rocks and tree roots upended the road. They passed the old graveyard in silence and then onward through the pines. The smell of pond scum reached them first, a smell that Hannah remembered from childhood.