May: Daughters of the Sea #2 (16 page)

“Either she did or she didn’t, mister. It ain’t such a hard question.”

Stannish Wheeler was indeed a knower of faces. His eyes scrutinized the one before him. There was something about the man that was disturbing.
Predatory. “No,” he said quickly. “I was talking to a woman, not a young girl, just a minute ago, but she had jet-black hair. Not red. About thirty, thirty-five years old, I would say.”

“Not the one I’m hunting,” Rudd said quickly, and went off.

Hunting!
Stannish Wheeler thought. And although the man went in the opposite direction, the painter felt only small relief.

M
AY’S FATHER HAD BEGUN TO ALLOW HER
to take the skiff to and from Egg Rock on her own when the weather was good. She was not sure why he had come to this decision. It might have been for the same reasons that he was so agreeable to her meeting Hugh at the cove beach. After a few of these evening meetings she decided to tell her father about their star sails, as she called them. Gar seemed genuinely happy for her. But they both agreed that it was perhaps not a good idea to tell Zeeba.

Her sense was that Gar had agreed partly in defiance of Zeeba. For ever since that day when Hepzibah had said so quietly and yet with such deadly earnestness, “You’re not mine,” a new power was unleashed
in May. As horrible as those words might have seemed, they gave her the power to call her life her own.

May would never openly defy Gar, but it was as if her father almost envied her for claiming ownership of her life in a way he never had. He was both amazed and inspired by her boldness, and he wanted to honor it. There came to be a tacit understanding between May and Gar that Hepzibah’s position in the household had changed. Her complications, her elaborately contrived physical failures, were failures of not eyes, heart, or lungs but failures of the soul.

Hepzibah Plum sensed this change in her position as much as anyone. Although May and Gar still brought her hot-water bottles, fetched all the potions, powders, and tonics, spared her any of the normal household chores that a woman might be expected to perform, Hepzibah felt that her complications were no longer respected. May and Gar indulged her as one might indulge a very young child who claimed to have an imaginary friend. They played along, and it enraged Hepzibah.

Hepzibah was home alone at the moment. Gar had gone out with Doug Hardy to help him haul traps, and the girl had gone off in the skiff. Hepzibah was deeply suspicious of May whenever she left and was sure she was sneaking off to see a boy. Well, if she got herself in the family way they’d have to hire someone to help out. The idea of May going off and marrying used to upset Hepzibah. But ever since the change in the household, this lack of respect for her complications, she had begun to think perhaps it would be better to get a hired girl in. Her cousin Suzanne, out in western Massachusetts, had a daughter, a docile dough-faced girl, Iris, who might fit the bill fine. They wouldn’t have to pay her much, not if they provided room and board.

Hepzibah got up from her rocker to shut the screen door, which was flapping about in the breeze. Gar should have fixed the durn thing weeks ago. She didn’t like drafts slipping in uninvited. And those chicks were peeping out there. She bet the girl had forgotten to feed them. Well, Hepzibah would do it. Serve the girl right if one of those pullet chicks died. Then where would they be next winter for eggs?

After tending to the pullets, Hepzibah walked around to the other side of the house to see if she could spot either Gar or May coming back. It was long past dinnertime.

She raised her hand to her forehead to shade her eyes and scanned the cut between the island and Bar Harbor. She spotted the gaff-rigged sail of the skiff and pressed her lips together. “Hmmph.” It would take May another forty-five minutes to get back on this wind. She would have to tack against it. So much for dinner!

Hepzibah plopped down on the round top of a large spool that had been used for cable and decided to watch her. “Girl’s got a way with the wind,” she muttered as she saw May neatly come into the wind and head off on a new tack. As the skiff drew closer she could make out May’s figure at the tiller.
What is that fool thing she wears in her hair all the time?

There were other boats out there that were wrestling with the shifting and capricious breezes, but May seemed to be slipping right through them. It was as if she were playing cat’s cradle with the wind. She avoided becoming tangled while the others were
floundering about, luffing to a near halt as their sails were pressed into irons and not pulling worth a tinker’s damn. “Way with the wind,” Hepzibah murmured again, and then began to wonder some more.

Hepzibah tipped her head toward the sunshine and closed her eyes. Did she think of Polly Bunker first or Noggy Brynn? Or did they both come to her at the same time? But Polly was real, very real. Didn’t matter that she had been dead all these years. She’d been Gar’s true love, his fiancée, and she’d clung to him from the grave, she had! Sometimes Hepzibah swore she could smell Polly—a sick, rotting-flesh stench. She knew Gar visited her grave up at the Meeting House cemetery, where all the Bunkers done been planted. Not her family, thank God. She didn’t want to be neighborly with Polly in death. It was bad enough now with Polly dead and her alive!

And Noggy? Well, that was just an old tale about a sea witch who lived in a cave off Grand Manan. But they were both beautiful. Noggy, the stories went, had strange powers over the tide, the moon, and yes, the wind — a way with the wind. She had a magic
rope tied with three knots — witches’ knots they called them—the first could summon a gentle breeze, the second a southeasterly, and the third a strong nor’easter full of ice and fury even in the summer. Polly Bunker had her ways, too, not perhaps with the wind but with men. Was it possible for Polly to have birthed the girl? She died in the winter. She could have hidden her pregnancy, but no. Not possible, for it was ten years later that Gar had brought the baby back, and it was a baby — not a ten-year-old child. She laughed.

“Whatcha laughing about out here in the sun, Zeeba?” May had been astonished to come across Zeeba sitting on the spool, looking perhaps more relaxed, almost content, than she had ever seen her. Hepzibah leaped up. Her energy and quickness stunned May. “What’s come over you, Zeeba?”

For a few seconds Hepzibah appeared slightly disoriented. Then her eyes hardened and she glared at May. “Whatcha got there in your hand?”

“Well, in this hand I got your new stomach powders from Doctor Holmes.”

“I mean the other hand!” Hepzibah spoke sharply. “And no lying.”

“No lying? What are you talking about? It’s a halyard from the skiff. It’s starting to shred. I took it down so Pa can splice it.”

“It’s got three knots in it,” Hepzibah said in an accusatory voice.

“Yes, so what? I tried to fix it just temporary.”

“Just temporary?” She made the low growlish sound she so often summoned to express disapproval mixed with disbelief. “You want to know what I got?” Hepzibah plunged her hand into a deep pocket in the folds of her skirt. “Now, lookee here!” She opened her hand to reveal a dead chick. “You done starved it, girl. You ain’t been doing your chores.”

May felt a nausea seize hold of her. Her legs turned weak. Something was very wrong with Hepzibah.

Somewhere above them a seagull screeched and wheeled through the sky.

May had done her chores. That chick had not starved to death. Its neck was broken.

Ever since the seal and her pup had come to Avalonia’s cave and told her the garbled story about the mer creature who had saved the seal pup’s life, Avalonia had been tormented. Although she had tried to understand it as best she could, the story came out in such a disjointed, confused muddle there was no way she could unscramble any of the details. She could not figure out where they had come from. Was it from the north, the Shetlands, through the Caledonia passage to the North Sea, or the south or the west? But surely a mother and pup would not have come all that way from the west, across the Atlantic. Unless, of course, they had caught the current that mer folk knew about that was embedded deep in the Gulf Stream. But that was only for mer folk. No other creatures traveled it. Would the mer creature who helped them have told them about the Avalaur current? It was the current for which she and her sister had been named, and it began in and looped back to the gyre of Corry.

The story the seal told her became splinters of glass digging at the old fears and memories she had so neatly tucked away. For days on end Avalonia could not sleep. Her dreams were fractured with shards of old nightmares. It had been so long since Laurentia had died — died in her own arms on that deserted beach. But Avalonia had promised to search for the babes. And she had for days until it became too dangerous. First she had been sighted by a boat from the Marine Revenue Service and then been chased by a trawler. The trawl nets hung from the booms, ready to drop and sweep her up. She had only the fog to thank for her escape. She had quickly turned her tail on the continent and raced back to Barra Head.

But now, after sleep-torn nights, Ava was so distraught that she decided she must swim to the gyre of Corry. She rarely went at this time of year. Late autumn was the time of her usual visit. It was an old mer ritual to take the white plaid to the sea cauldron and wash it, then spread it on the rocks of Hag’s Head to dry on All Hallows’ Eve. But a visit to the
boiling, swirling waters of the gyre often soothed her mind. Had not her own mother sent her and Laurentia there when they were young stubborn girls —
“Go to Corry and give yourself to the gyre, then set yourself on the Hag’s Head for a good think. That’ll put some sense in you!”

Well, it was time to go to Corry, set herself on the head of the Hag, and come back with some sense.

At the precise moment that Avalonia decided to swim to Corry, on the other side of the ocean Hepzibah Plum walked down to the beach for the first time in perhaps five years and flung the dead chick into the surf. Two women separated by three thousand miles of water on opposite shores, one human, one not quite.

T
HE NIGHTS HAD BEEN CLEAR,
so May and Hugh had seen each other almost every evening for the better part of a week. On this particular night May leaned back and watched Hugh as he adjusted the scope. There was nothing she didn’t love about him, from his eyes, to the way he twisted the telescope rings, to that soft exhalation of breath, the sigh that always accompanied the discovery of a new gift of the night in the changing heavens. “Say that poem by that fellow—not Shakespeare,” May asked on this windless night as they drifted idly about the cove.

“What other fellow? There are several poets, you know.”

“Yes, you know—the one about the fair-haired angel.”

“Oh, William Blake’s ‘To the Evening Star.'”

“Yes, that one.”

When Hugh recited poetry there was something in his voice, in the rhythm, that evoked within her
feelings similar to the ones she experienced when she swam. She could never tell him this, and it made her sad. For May, swimming was a kind of poetry. Within the currents, within the depths of the sea, the water had its rhythms and cadences that, once found, suffused her being with a quiet glory.

May picked up a piece of her hair and held it out. “I’m still not sure if red is considered fair hair.”

“You’re being awfully literal, May! A little poetic license can be used here.” He paused. “And of course you fit the angel part, no quibbles there.”

She smiled into the darkness. She liked being compared to an angel. An angel had wings, not a tail! An angel, in May’s mind, was more than human. An angel was a spirit of the invisible world.

Since the dance, Hugh and May met not only for star watching but spent long hours together in the library, where May continued her study of trigonometry and together they pondered the Maury book. Their conversations about the influence of the stars on the currents transported May to another world. She forgot about Zeeba. Even her worries about finding her sisters faded away. But sometimes they veered too
close to forbidden subjects. Just the previous afternoon she was suddenly struck by the oddity of Maury’s phrase “the visible and the invisible ocean.” She blurted out, “Don’t you think it’s odd, Hugh, that Maury calls the ocean, the real ocean, the visible one when there is so much we never see?”

“Like that lovely scallop comb you sometimes wear in your hair.” He touched it. “Never seen a scallop like that…. What’s wrong, May?”

Her face had turned pale, and her lower lip began to tremble. “Nothing! Nothing at all!”

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“No! No. I’m fine. Really.” She changed the subject. “Why don’t you take me sometime to the top of Abenaki so I can see the stars from there—the highest point.” She wanted to distance herself as far as possible from the ocean.