May: Daughters of the Sea #2 (4 page)

“I manage,” she replied mechanically.

“Expect you do, but it’s not going to be pretty or easy if you find that body all bloated up.”

May looked down. Less than an hour ago, that “body” had been alive and could have been saved. “Let me get some more chowder for all of you.” She walked back to the stove. She could feel his eyes following her.

She ladled out chowder, fetched some cheese from the cold larder, and was about to slice some bread, when he was by her side. “Here, I’ll help you do that, May.”

“I said I could manage,” she said a bit too sharply. She was not used to people paying much attention to her, especially an attractive young man older than the boys she knew in school.

“I don’t doubt it,” he said with an undisguised twinkle in his eye.

Was this fellow actually flirting with her? There was a dead man on the cot, three others half drowned, and a body swirling out in the eddies off the island. Yet this Rudd Sawyer put his hand on top of hers, took the knife, and started cutting the loaf of bread. The touch of his hand sent a surprising thrill through her. She caught her breath, feeling a twinge of guilt, and pulled away.

“May!” It was her mother’s voice from the back bedroom. “May, what’s going on?”

“I told you, Ma,” May called back. “Ship went up on The Bones. We got Captain Haskell here with his crew from the
Alba Jean”

“Well, I need my stomach powders now! My digestion’s in a frightful way and —”

“Yes, Ma!” May felt the color rise in her cheeks. She was mortified. How her mother could be talking about her stomach, her digestion, at a time like this defied all reason.

May looked over at Rudd. “She’s—she’s —”

“Poorly,” Rudd said with a sympathetic half smile.

May was too embarrassed to say anything. She turned and went to fetch the powders her mother demanded.

When she had tended to her mother, she took chowder and bread up to her father and assured him that the broken chimney had not caused the catastrophe. Although in truth she could not be certain. Then she returned to the kitchen. Rudd had gone out to bring wood in from the shed to build up the fire in the stove and the hearth. “Wind seems to be dying down,” he said when he came in with several logs.

“Hope so,” Captain Haskell replied. “Question is if it dies down enough should we try and haul these fellows out of here?” He nodded at the rescued men, who were lying on the piles of bedding that May had fixed up for them. “Or bring the doctor here? That one in the corner looks like he might be working up to pneumonia. Lungs sound wheezier than a pecked set of bellows.”

There indeed was an ominous rattle coming from the man’s chest. Captain Haskell turned to May. “You should get on to sleep, May. You’ve done enough for the night. We can’t thank you for all your kindnesses.”

May glanced toward the cot, where the figure of the dead man peaked and dipped beneath the sheet like a forsaken landscape. “Don’t worry none about him. We’ll get him out of here first thing,” the captain said.

She shook her head softly and began to say something, but words failed her. How could she explain that it was not just the drowned man who she was worried about but the lost sailor as well? The other she had seen so clearly when they had not, the other, whom she thought she could have saved. She felt Rudd Sawyer’s eyes again resting on her. She touched her hair nervously. She was not accustomed to anyone looking at her—at least not in this way—and not a very handsome man.

“Well, good night,” she said. And not even daring to look at him she went to her bedroom. She knew his eyes were following her.

But sleep seemed impossible. Her mind kept turning to her father and his completely irrational fear of her
going into the water. Yes, she understood that he did not want her to jump into a stormy sea. That made sense. But that look of terror on his face had revealed more than just a momentary fear. Until she had turned fourteen she had never thought about it much before, but now that she was almost sixteen her urge to swim sometimes seemed overwhelming but never as intense as on this night. She had a mind to dash up those stairs and ask him. Demand that he give her an explanation. But how could she? Every time she thought of the terror she had seen in his eyes she knew she could not ask him. She couldn’t bear to cause him any more pain.

She was haunted by the notion that one of the sailors had died tonight. And then there was the other man whose body was yet to be recovered. Where was he now? But more insistently another question haunted her: Why did she have this certainty that she could have saved both of them?

She listened to the storm, which had lessened somewhat. Having lived so close to the sea all her life, she knew intimately the sounds of wind and water in all of its moods. She could hear tiny noises
that other people never heard. It was as if she could tease them out from the fabric of churning water. If she listened carefully she could hear beyond the roar of the storm and identify the rustlings of water as it swirled deeper beneath the crashing waves, the fizzing sound of the long curling combers that ran in over Tuckmanet Shoals a half mile to the east, and offshore in the deepest parts of the ocean the crushing undulations building into watery mountain ranges. She fell asleep with this music like a symphony eddying through her head. She felt her body break loose as she crossed the border into sleep and began to dream—surging, wonderful dreams of swimming deep beneath the surface. She felt the magnificence of her own body, its power as she melted into the water, becoming one with the sea and flowing through a dazzling underwater tapestry illuminated by the refractions of moonlight. At other times, the water was dark and yet occasionally shot through with odd, unexpected colors—a banner of seaweed glinting with a burnished luster.

Thick in the folds of sleep, she felt someone shaking her shoulder, bringing her up from the wonderful
depths of her dreams and into her small square bedroom with its pale gray clapboard walls.

“May! May!” a voice said. She could feel the breath near her ear. She gasped and awakened suddenly. Rudd’s face was close to hers. May pulled the bedclothes up to her chin.

“Sorry to come right into your room, but I knocked pretty hard. You didn’t wake up. Anyhow, we done found him. He washed up a half hour ago.”

She blinked again. It took her several seconds to comprehend what he was saying. May looked straight into his dark eyes. He had a scar above one eyebrow, and even now in winter his skin was a deep reddish bronze as if he never spent a day indoors. She had thought he was older. Apart from the crinkled lines that radiated out from the corners of his eyes, he looked perhaps twenty, but she knew he’d been fishing most likely all his life. This thought made her feel as if a chill wind brushed just beneath her skin.

She had grown up among fishermen. Eight out of every ten men in Bar Harbor were fishermen, so why should this one disturb her? He was certainly very attractive in his weathered way. She looked away
from him quickly and got up from her bed. She had slept in her clothes.

“I have to go up to the lantern room to trim the wicks and wind the clockworks and bring my father something to eat,” she said as she rushed toward the door.

“You’re a busy lady.” She felt a tiny pulse throb in her temple and averted her gaze. She was not sure she liked the term
lady.
It seemed constricting.
Like a girdle!
she suddenly thought, and almost laughed out loud. But she was well past her fifteenth birthday and it was not rare for girls in the fishing towns along the coast to marry at her age. She went to the stove and saw that it had a good fire going in it, and a kettle was about to boil.

Rudd was at her side. “I freshened it up.”

“That was very kind of you,” she said softly. “Thank you.”

“Would you look at me when you thank me?” he asked.

She felt the blood rush to her face. She marveled that he was doing this—this courting, was it?—in
front of Captain Haskell and a dead man. She turned her head slightly and suddenly realized that Captain Haskell was not there. Nor was the dead man on the cot. “Where are the others?” she asked.

“Well, the three half-drowned ones are still here. But Captain Haskell and Alfred, the first mate, done took the dead man into Bar Harbor and plan to sail back with a doctor for these three. He felt they were too sick to move right now. It’s still cold out there, and sleeting.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” May had busied herself reheating a pot of leftover oatmeal.

“May!” a voice cawed.

May flinched. “It’s my mother. I have to fetch her medicines.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Rudd asked.

Somehow these four words struck May as terribly funny. She almost began to laugh but turned to him with an odd smile that broadened until it seemed to illuminate her entire face. “She’s sick,” and then barely concealing a chuckle she added, “rather
she
would say so.”

Rudd nodded and smiled, right into her smile. “Oh, I know the kind. I got an aunt like that and an older sister.” For the first time May felt relaxed with him.

“You understand? You know what I am talking about?” He nodded. He did not smile. His face was serious. “Does it run in your family?” she asked. But to herself she was thinking,
I am not the only one.
It seemed almost miraculous to her that another person, this weathered sailor, had been bullied by another’s illness.

He hesitated before speaking. “I think it runs up and down the coast of Maine and maybe all across New England for all I know. Women are fragile. They have complaints, weak constitutions, maybe.”

“I’m not fragile,” May replied, dumping a ladleful of oatmeal into a bowl.

“No. I can see that.” His voice was taut. There was a sudden flickering in his eyes, not the flirtatious twinkle she had seen the previous night but a bright glitter that May found slightly unnerving.

H
ER MOTHER WAS PROPPED UP IN BED
when May came with a tray covered with tablet boxes and tall glasses of water. On the small table beside the bed was another glass of water in which Hepzibah’s false teeth floated eerily. For May they had a kind of animate life of their own, independent of her mother, as if on sudden provocation they could actually begin scolding May for some minor infraction.

“Good. You brought the smaller spoon.” Hepzibah nodded at her daughter. “You can’t really get these powders to properly mix with a big spoon. Hand me my specs, will you?”

“Yes, Ma.” May set down the tray and walked to the dresser to fetch her mother’s spectacles. Zeeba
then set about mixing up the powders. Her face was suffused with an almost beatific look.

“I remember doing this so well for my mother and my grandmother. Powders were much coarser back then. Took longer to dissolve. But I learned, and oh, in that final illness of my mother’s … oh, how she suffered! I never left her side.”

May had heard the final illness stories of both women many times. Finally, when the powders had dissolved sufficiently, her mother looked up. “Have they left yet?” May bristled at the callousness of Zeeba’s question.

“Three of the men, the ones that didn’t die, are too sick to move right now.”

Her mother’s lips twitched and a grimace scored her face. “What are we running, then, a hospital instead of a lighthouse?”

“But, Ma. They’re too sick. So the doctor’s coming here.”

The dark hole through which Hepzibah normally poked her words opened as her lips pulled back to reveal purple gums. She was smiling. A toothless
smile. “The new doctor! Now, isn’t that a bit of luck. The storm’s done brought him to us!” She looked down and pressed her lips together.

Luck! Two men dead, another three nearly drowned! A tiny needle of malice pricked any patience May had left. “I hope the new doctor will be able to help Pa.”

A darkness like storm clouds gathered in Hepzibah’s face. “All he has to do is not touch that bottle,” she snapped.

“He cut his hand and he did something to his hip. He can’t walk.”

Hepzibah made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort. “Pass me my specs again, will you?” They were two inches away. She could have easily reached them herself, but May dutifully walked over to the side table. The teeth in the glass glared at her as she brought her mother her spectacles. “And my gargling cup.” May sighed, handed her mother these articles, and left. She had to get out of this room.

It wasn’t the solitude of their lives that bothered May, nor was it simply the stifling atmosphere of the
lighthouse, but rather the silence that had grown up over the years. There was an insidious quality to it. Ironically, this silence spoke loudly and clearly to the bitterness, the resentment that had ripened and then rotted, eating away at both her parents.

The three of them lived on this windy rockbound island, and yet it was as if they needed to open every window and let scouring gusts blow through. But May knew that it wasn’t wind that would vanquish the quiet but words. She was tired of the tyranny of this silence. In the past year she had sensed something changing in her. She felt a deepening intolerance for the way things had always been. May was known as an even-tempered girl. But she had been feeling slightly uneven recently, and the mysterious surge of the sea rising within her seemed to drive her more toward an edge she wanted to cross. This lighthouse was secure, safe, and boring. But May knew that she was on the brink of something rich, exciting, and yes, perhaps dangerous.

She went up the stairs with a bowl of oatmeal for her father. She had promised herself last night before finally falling asleep that she would ask him why he
would never let her even go wading. She wasn’t going to demand an explanation as she had burned to do the previous evening, and she certainly was not going to tell him that she thought she might have saved at least one of those men. But a quiet determination had rooted in her.

“Pa,” she said as she entered the room. “How are you doing?”

“Quite a bit of pain in my hip. But I don’t think anything is broken. Just stiffened up on me. How are the men downstairs that Captain Haskell picked up?”