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

Come summer, if the wind was in the right direction, May could catch the joyous shrieks and whoops of children swimming off the town wharf. But she was forbidden from entering the water. When she went to town with her father on a hot day it was almost painful for her to watch the swimmers. Their hair plastered to their heads made them seem sleek as seals and more beautiful than they actually were. It was mostly boys who swam, not girls. Perhaps the wet clothing revealed too much of what was beneath the light cottons and muslins that clung to the girls’ bodies. May’s own figure had begun to change in the last year. She was particularly conscious of Zeeba’s furtive glances and odd comments referring to her
robust health while staring at her waist or the bodice of her dress, which might be a bit tight. But still, it was all she could do not to jump in when she heard those children squealing with delight as they ran off the wharf into the water.

And when they reemerged she gaped at them in wonder, for their skin glistened with saltwater. She craved the feeling of those rivulets of seawater that coursed down their arms. She saw the sparkling little liquid spheres caught in their eyelashes and wondered what it felt like to look through a scrim of water drops. Like glistening travelers from far away, the children climbed from the harbor onto the wharf, carrying their souvenirs from another world. The streamlets of water that traced patterns on their shoulders, the twinkling drops in their eyelashes, the rime of salt that formed on their skin as the children baked themselves dry in the sun—these were their keepsakes, their mementos, their artifacts from that lovely and mysterious underwater world.

But could May join them? Never. Swimming was the one subject on which her father and mother
agreed. Zeeba objected because “normal” girls didn’t swim. But a few did. May had seen them jumping off the dock in their petticoats. There was no use arguing with her parents, however.

Her father seemed genuinely fearful of her swimming. “Your mother’s right, de-ah. Swimming never brought anybody any good. Bad for your lungs. My uncle, he went overboard. Was only in the water for a minute, no more, and was never the same again.” Gar would not permit her to even wade on the beach of the calm inlet on the back side of Egg Rock Island where the sea furrowed in.

May stole a glance up from her mending and regarded her parents. They both sat in thick shadows. Until they could get to the mainland for oil, the Plums could only use one lamp in the kitchen. It was against the regulations of the lighthouse service board to use its high-quality kerosene for domestic purposes. They were running low on ordinary lamp oil, and since May was doing the darning she got the light. But she did have school-books she wanted to read. Those had to be read in
daylight only. “Can’t waste light on books!” That was Zeeba’s constant refrain. The only book that light was wasted on was the Bible. That was the single exception.

School had been May’s only escape from the lighthouse and the unceasing narrative of Zeeba’s illnesses. But before the storm set in her mother had had a bad spell with her stomach and insisted that May stay home from school in Bar Harbor, on the big island of Mount Desert, for most of the past month. Then just when her mother was feeling better the storm hit so it was impossible for her father to take her in the skiff, even though it was a short sail. She would be behind in everything! And whenever she did open her books, Zeeba seemed to resent it. It wasn’t simply what she said that suggested her irritation with “book learning,” as Zeeba called it, but her dark glances, the little snorts that issued forth every time May sat down to read or try to do arithmetic problems in the math book. She had a peculiar way of staring at her, staring at May so hard it felt as if Zeeba’s eyes were drilling through her. And they
did. They wrecked her concentration. She couldn’t believe how many mistakes she had made in a simple set of fractions. It was useless to be in the same room with her mother when she was trying to do homework.

But May couldn’t wait to get back to school even if she was behind in every subject. If only Zeeba wouldn’t get sick again! She glanced at her mother and then at the lamp.

Meanwhile, the storm continued to rage outside, sealing them off more completely than ever from the big island of Mount Desert. The mail boat had not come out for days now. Too rough. Not that May ever received a letter. Still, it was nice to go down to the pier when Captain Weed delivered her parents’ mail.

The stifling predictability of her life in this house, on this drear and forlorn rockbound tiny island in a boiling sea, was almost too much. Why had it begun to grate on her so intensely these last few months? She had lived with it all her life, but right now she felt as if she could not stand another minute. The
space was too tight. There was really only room for Zeeba and her sicknesses.

In general Hepzibah Plum preferred the word
fail
to
sick.
Her eyes were failing, her lungs were failing, her arthritic joints were failing, and, of course, her heart, with its strange syncopated rhythms, was failing. But even preferable to the word
fail
was
complications. Complications
suggested the awesome mystery of her illnesses. She was extremely proud of her heart, with its peculiar beat. It had defied diagnosis by all the best doctors from Bar Harbor to Eastport and right on down south and west to Cape Rosier. It was Hepzibah’s dream to go to Boston and be examined by the finest doctors in America at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She lived to be diagnosed with something horrific, and then presumably die very happily.
Happily ever after
had a meaning for Hepzibah that had nothing to do with storybooks or fairy tales. It meant a death dignified and certified by Boston doctors.

May looked again at Zeeba. How could she be so different from her own mother? Her mother’s hair, thin and dark with iron-gray streaks, was skinned straight up into a knob that perched on top of her head. It was pulled so tight that it seemed to May to have permanently dragged the top of Hepzibah’s ears into two sharp points, as if they were trying to leap up there and keep company with that nodule of hair. Her face appeared waxen and was grooved rather than wrinkled. Two deep trenches ran from either side of her nose to the corners of her thin, colorless lips. There were liver spots on her cheekbones, and beneath her eyes there were small gray pouches with a tinge of yellow that reminded May of raw clams.

It was not simply that May and Hepzibah were as unlike in appearance as any mother and daughter could be, but they were just as different on the inside as well. None of May’s organs were failing. She had hardly been sick a day in her life. She was robust and brimming with health, a health that her mother seemed to almost resent. The closest she ever came
to voicing any bitterness was when she would regard May while she was hoeing in the garden or lugging an immense basket of wet laundry to hang out to dry. On those occasions Zeeba would sigh deeply, shake her head, and say wearily, “I do envy that girl’s strength.” Then in a slightly lower voice she might whisper, “Almost unnatural, though,” and look at May as if she were a complete stranger.

And although May did not envy her mother’s ill health she sometimes wondered if her mother would like her more if she were weaker, more fragile. Would it please her mother to see her very, very sick? Would it bring out a tenderness in her? May thought about the mothers and daughters in Bar Harbor walking arm in arm down the street, window-shopping or maybe even in summer buying an ice cream to share. Those mothers and daughters seemed as if they belonged together whether they looked alike or not. They were coupled through deep feelings. Did those girls ever catch their mothers looking at them as if they were complete strangers? Did they feel out of place in their own families, as if they didn’t quite belong?

“Belong.” She whispered the word to herself and felt a deep and terrible overwhelming sadness flood through her. The wind temporarily eased and then a few seconds later began again with a thin wail that built to a mournful lament as it scoured around the corners of the house and pried shingles from the roof.

May turned her gaze to look out the window at the two five-second flashes as they swept across the snow. These two flashes were followed by a ten-second gap. This was the “signature” of the Egg Rock Light, or its characteristic sequence. Each lighthouse along the coast of the country had its own sequence designed to aid mariners in distinguishing one light from another. The flashes were like parentheses in the darkness of the long winter nights whose shadows clung like lint through the short day when hours of light were whittled away minute by minute.

May and her father maintained their light. It was a great deal of work. In all there were over one hundred and fifty instructions for proper lighthouse
keeping. The first was that the lamps must be lit at sunset and kept continually burning “bright and clear” until sunrise. It was the extraordinary lens that multiplied the light of the kerosene lamp through its array of prisms, bending it into horizontal sprays. It was a beacon for ships at sea, warning them of The Bones, rock ledges that lurked just beneath the surface and earned their name from the lives they had claimed from innumerable shipwrecks before Egg Rock Light had been built. Edgar Plum’s father had been the first lighthouse keeper of the rock. And now Edgar had tended it for thirty years. When the weather was foggy or stormy, the light was kept burning both day and night.

May put down her darning and went to the window to watch the sweep of the light more closely.

“You see it, don’t you, de-ah?” her father said.

“Yes, Pa, I think that wick is smoking again.”

“Well, time to wind anyhow. I’ll tend to it.” From the watch room they could service the light, wind the clockworks, oil its gears, and then climb up a short ladder to get inside the lens itself, which rose like an
immense glass beehive. Once inside they could stand on the slowly rotating platform and trim the wick of the lamp.

May looked at the bottle on the table. It was almost empty. But she would not say anything. She never did. No matter how much her father drank he was never too unsteady to climb the winding stairs of the sixty-four-foot tower to the watch room, just below the lantern room. But he seemed tired tonight. “I’ll go up, Pa. I need to stretch my legs.”

“So do I,” he laughed, and rose to start the climb.

“You know, I swear I can smell those fumes down here,” Zeeba moaned. “The durned thing ain’t vented properly. I think that’s what’s been giving me a headache. And of course that’s no help for my eyes. Or maybe that’s what gets to my eyes first and why they be failing and then that gives me the headache. Vicious circle, it is.”

“Oh, Mother, I don’t think the fumes could come down here,” May said. “You know they rise with the heat up in the lantern room.”

“It’s back-drafting. Don’t contradict me, child. You think you know so much. Well, you don’t.”

May listened. She had a keen ear for all noises. The cries of the cormorants when they spotted a school of mackerel; the flap of a schooner’s sails buried in the howling wind as it tacked across the bay. And she knew the sound when the lantern was not vented properly, and this lantern was not back-drafting.

Since as long as she could remember, May had helped her father with the light, simple tasks at first like hanging the brushes up neatly after he had dusted off the prisms. She liked these lighthouse-tending chores. They were so different from the odious tasks involved in tending her mother—emptying her bedpan when she was too tired to do her business in the privy, mixing up the endless potions, preparing hot or sometimes cold compresses depending on which body part was “failing.”

It was not very long until May was able to help her father trim the wick, wind up the clockworks, and
her favorite—polish the lens with the brushes and the special solutions. She loved climbing into the glass beehive and slowly turning around, caught in the glittering reflections of the prisms. The prisms intrigued her. It seemed magical to her how they multiplied and focused light.

So she asked Miss Lowe, who was the librarian in Bar Harbor. Miss Lowe was eager to answer her questions and very excited. She took out what looked like a triangular piece of glass from her drawer. “Come over to the window,” she said. She held it up to the light, and suddenly what had been a simple beam of sunlight on one side of the prism became bent bands of colored light.

“It’s like a rainbow!” May exclaimed.

Miss Lowe found as many books as she could with information about prisms. Rainbows, May learned, were nothing more than millions upon millions of water droplets through which the sun’s rays passed and bent and split into bows of color. She thought of those droplets she had seen ensnared in the eyes of the children who dove off the wharf.

For her birthday that year Miss Lowe had given
May a small prism of her own, which she hung up in her room and watched as the light passed through on sunny days, casting shimmering spots of color onto her bare walls.

May now heard her father’s footsteps receding as he climbed higher in the tower. She was about to pick up another sock and begin darning when there was a horrendous crash, then a stuttering of light across the snowfields.

“The lantern!” May screeched, jumping out of her chair. She raced up the winding stairs. There were always buckets of water up there in case of fire, but she did not smell kerosene or smoke. However, she did hear a ragged groan and then a gasp.

“Pa! Pa! Oh my God!” she yelped. Her father was on the rotating platform of the lens. There was blood on his hand, but no fire, and the lens was still rotating in its housing. But something had shattered. Then she saw the shards of the lantern’s chimney. As if to confirm this the light was stammering into the night! The signature of the flash would be broken, the characteristic sequence of the Egg Rock Light
garbled, and sailors would become confused and their vessels fetch up on the deadly rocks and ledges.

May was stunned. She felt herself at the vortex of a frightening collision of events. Her father was bleeding, the chimney was broken, and the night was growing wilder.