The Hearth and Eagle (31 page)

Hesper slipped back quietly into her normal role of helping her mother at the Inn.

The Marblehead matrons said that she had settled down and become an excellent daughter. Usually this remark was directed in reproach at one of their Annies or Bessies who were sulking under parental discipline. Most of Hesper’s own contemporaries had married long ago, except, of course, Charity.

Sometimes Hesper, urged by her mother, went to take a cup of tea with one of her married friends—Nellie Higgins who had married Willy Bowen, or Agatha Bray, now Mrs. Woodfin. From these expeditions she usually returned with a dull headache and a feeling of constriction around her heart. Marblehead had always been known for its fecundity, and the new young matrons rapidly contributed to the tradition. Hesper had to endure a good-natured patronage, and she was always called upon to admire a clutch of round-cheeked infants, trotted out in pinafores or swaddling clothes for the admiration of Miss Hesper. Now be good, dear, Miss Hessie won’t eat you, she just loves babies.

Hesper increasingly avoided these visits. She helped her mother at the Inn, she did a little church work, she still occasionally wrote little verses in her Pansy Album, and once unsuccessfully submitted one of her poems to the
Atlantic,
then
Leslie's,
then
Godey’s.
She did not try again.

She knew that nobody had the slightest expectation that she would ever marry. There weren’t enough men to go around in Marblehead. Hesper had had a chance and been unlucky. Well, there were plenty of useful spinsters, and always room for more. Hesper consciously shared this view, but she suffered from strange unhappy dreams full of yearnings and unknown faces, from which she sometimes woke up crying.

The fifteenth of June was a beautiful day and a quiet one at the Inn. The fishing fleet lay off the Georges Banks for the summer fare, because now only a couple of the sturdiest old jiggers ventured as far as the Grand Banks. For the first time since before the war the town had tried to give its fleet the traditional sendoff. On the Monday morning of their departure each freshly painted schooner had sailed up and down the harbor, and the drone of chanteys from their decks competed with the spasmodic ringing of church bells and the honk of fish horns blown by excited small boys. Hesper and Susan had stolen time from the taproom to climb Fort Sewall and watch. But the celebration had rung hollow. Susan had shaken her head, sighing. “It isn’t like before the war is it—Hes—and you should’ve seen it in my young days. The harbor so thick you could’ve walked across on the decks, an’ the whole town dressed to kill and singing too. Those days there wasn’t one of us but had a man on board, and we sent ’em off to man’s work. It’s a niminy-piminy business now with the dory fishing and the trawling and the seines.”

Still, there were over a hundred men gone with the fleet, and the Inn was nearly empty. On this June day Hesper served fishballs and ale to two old sail-makers who had come over on business from Salem by dory, and to a seedy youngish drummer from Boston who was trying with little hope to interest the new Emporium in a line of ladies’ cloth gaiters. He had wandered in to the Hearth and Eagle because someone had told him it was a cheap place to board. Seeing that Hesper was young he volunteered a few listless sallies. These small-town girls always expected to be sparked a bit by the traveling men. But as Hesper returned no answer at all, and served him in chill silence, he pushed back his pie plate, pulled out his gold-plated toothpick, and relapsed into nervous gloom.

Hesper stacked the dinner dishes and carried them into the kitchen where they clattered into the old stone sink.

“Have a care—” said Susan automatically. She was kneading bread in an enormous wooden bowl, and her stout freckled arms and one cheek were dabbed with flour. A gauze of flour dust swirled in the ray of June sunlight that fell across the sink, the scarred oak table, and the glossy wide-planked floor. A soft breeze fluttered through the open door and stirred a tiny cobweb high against the smoke-blackened summer beam. The kitchen sharpened to the scent of Atlantic salt and wild roses.

“It’s a fine day,” said Susan, plunging her fingers again into the viscous gray dough.

Hesper nodded. She pulled the wooden stopper from under the cleansed dishes. The dirty water gurgled through the pipe in the wall and dispersed itself on the grass beside the back step.

“Did you get ’em real clean?” asked Susan sharply. “I was mortified at that egg spot yesterday on Judge Salter’s plate.”

Hesper nodded again, not answering. She stacked the dried plates on a lower shelf of the oak dresser.

One of her black spells, thought Susan with annoyance and pity. “Go out an’ help your pa in the garden, child, breath of air’ll do you good.”

The girl shook her head. “I’ve got to shred the cod and the potatoes aren’t peeled yet. Besides I don’t fancy fussing in the garden.”

Susan’s irritation flared. “Rather go back to stitching uppers at Porterman’s I guess—” and she would have said more, but something in the dulled look of Hesper’s face stopped her. “Never mind the garden,” she said more gently. “It’ll wait. And the fishcakes too. Get your shawl and go out for a walk. Over to the Neck, mebbe. You used to like that.”

Hesper glanced toward the south window, toward the bare slopes and green tufted outline of the Neck. “I don’t feel like it, Ma.”

Susan looked again at her daughter, then she rolled pellets of dough from her fingers, wiped her hands on her apron. “Domnation—Hes! I’m not asking you how you feel, I’m telling you to go. Here’s your shawl. Now scat. And don’t come back ’till suppertime.”

Hesper gave her mother a dreary little smile. I wish I never had to come back, she thought, but there was no actual urge or conviction. She took the shawl and went out the back door.

She wandered along Front Street glancing without interest into the open windows which ran along beside her at shoulder level. Blinds were never drawn in Marblehead, even at night. Old Gee Haw and Mrs. Bessom were sitting in their parlor entertaining the stylish young niece from Beverley. They nodded at Hesper, who nodded back, seeing in that one quick glance that the niece was very pretty and smartly dressed and her saucer-blue eyes held a coquettish assurance.

Hesper quickened her step and her gaze after that remained on the waterfront side with its string of docks, sail lofts, ship’s chandleries, and boat yards. The smell of tar and oakum and paint mingled with the smell of roses across the way. Beside each house a meager plot sprawled over the cliff and flamed with lusty pink cabbage roses.

At the town dock, Hesper paused. The ferry was about to cross over to the Neck. Well, why not? It had been two years since she had gone there. “Budgeo” Watson the ferryman was a frequent customer at the Inn, and greeted her amiably. “Ye goin’ over to Ham’s far-rm fur yore ma?—Business is been mighty brisk terday. Took three furriners over this mar-rnin’. Young couple from Par-rtsmouth was goin’ to board a week with Mor-rtin Ham. They was screechin’ about how ro-mantic the Neck was. I liked to ’ve bust a gut laughin’.” He chuckled and rested on his oars. “But they warn’t the queerest. Was a paintin’ feller went over too. Leastways said he was, when the young folk axed him. Had a tin box with him an’ a package an’ his vittles in a red kerchief. They axed him what he was goin’ to paint, an he said, ‘Anything worth the paintin’—’ Just like that. Gruff an’ grouty. An’ then they kep’ at him and axed where did he come from and he give ’em a smile sharp as a splittin’ knife, an’ said ‘From here an’ there along the coast.’ That shet ’em up.”

Budgeo chuckled again. “He warn’t as gabby as most furriners,” he said, approvingly. Hesper smiled, warmed by the sun. Budgeo pulled hard against the incoming tide. The wherry rocked gently. Except for a few dories the great harbor was empty. Far ahead of them in the South Channel, an East Indiaman sailed past, bound for Salem.

Budgeo tied up at the rickety Neck dock. Hesper jumped out.

“You goin’ to walk back by the Beach or cornin’ home with me in about two hour?” asked Budgeo.

“I don’t know,” said Hesper, and with the voicing of it she was engulfed by the futility of this expedition. What use was it coming over to the Neck? What use to go to Castle Rock, or to look at the sea? She trudged up the path that led toward Martin Ham’s farm, but before she reached it she branched off through scrub pine and sand, heading for the ocean on the other side. Her steps dragged. It was hot here in the middle of the Neck. Might go and look at the Churn, she thought listlessly, but even that mild excitement would be unavailable today. The wind and the tide were wrong. I might wade, she thought.

Behind Castle Rock there was a cove and a strip of shingle called Ballast Beach, because the ballast lighters often put in here to gather the heavy round stones. She scrambled down the bank and stood at the line of foam breathing deeply. It was just about here Johnnie and I landed that day war was declared, she thought, but it was only a faint, bitter memory. It was good to be alone with the ocean and the sun, and no living thing in sight except a square-rigger out beyond Halfway Rock.

Hesper stared through the dazzling blue at the Halfway Rock. The outgoing fishing fleet always tossed pennies at it with prayers for a full fare and a safe return. Fathoms deep in the blackness the ocean bed must be spangled with pennies, she thought. That might make a poem; indestructible pennies, indestructible wishes glinting through the darkness of time.

She sat down on a chunk of driftwood, wadding her brown merino skirt up under her, and thought about it. But there was no rhyme for wishes except fishes, which might be appropriate but not elegant, and none at all for pennies.

She sighed and gave it up. There was a small breeze but it was still hot. She took off her heavy shoes and darned cotton stockings, laying them carefully above high-water mark. She kilted her skirt up around her thighs, showing the hemstitching on her cambric drawers, and pulled the coarse net off her hair. Her loosened hair fell across her shoulders and down her back like a rippling red-gold shawl. It made her hotter than ever, but she had loosened it because of an earlier and happier memory of Johnnie. Twelve years ago when they were children they had sailed to the Neck one summer afternoon and gone wading like this. Now, when she felt the cold water on her feet and the salt breeze in her hair, it brought back a little of the magic of that earlier afternoon.

She waded deeper into the water, waiting for the slow waves to break around her ankles, running out as far as she dared, following the suck-back to sea, counting for the seventh or the eighth big one.

I should be ashamed at my age, she thought, playing silly games like this. Thank heaven there’s nobody to know. She gave a quick guilty look around her and was transfixed by the sight of a man leaning against an abutment of Castle Rock staring in her direction and apparently sketching.

She clutched at her sodden skirts trying frantically to loosen them from under the belt where she had tucked the bunched hems.

She had forgotten the ocean behind her; the great wave swept up in its own rhythm and swirling at her knees knocked her down.

Her mouth and nose filled with choking green water, her fingers clawed at the shifting pebbles, and for a moment of gasping fear she felt the bottom drop away beneath her and the backwash suck her outward. Then her neck snapped back; even through her terror she felt sharp pain in her head, and then under her hands again the tumbling gritty shingle. Another yank at her head, reinforced by one at her waist, and she lay panting on the beach.

She lay raised on one elbow coughing and spitting out the sea water, while a hand thumped her forcefully between the shoulder blades.

In a moment she sat up and looked at her rescuer. Wet to the waist, his blue trousers plastered to his legs, he seemed very tall and thin. His dark, narrow face was tanned as any fisherman’s. And he was looking down at her with an expression so new to her experience—a blend of speculative interest and amusement—that the shock of it counterbalanced the physical shock of her escape.

“Thank you—” she panted, still coughing. “I don’t know how I could’ve been so stupid, I’m bred to the water, but I didn’t expect to see anyone—”

She pulled her wet skirts closer about her bare legs and blushed.

He nodded. “Lucky you’ve got so much hair. Handy to grab on to. It streamed through the water in back of you.” He looked down at his hands. Several of her long bright hairs still clung to his wrists. He plucked them off, twisting them together, and frowning down at them. “Strange color. Hard to get,” he said thoughtfully...”

Hesper scrambled to her feet, hurt to encounter here again a taunt about her hair, and hurt too, by a sensation of anticlimax. He was young, and in an odd way attractive, he had just fished her out of the sea and probable drowning, now surely there should be drama of some sort. Or at least, gratitude and chivalrous declaimer.

She made another attempt. “You saved my life, sir. I don’t know how to thank you. I’m Hesper Honeywood, I live in the town. If there’s anything—”

“Yes, there is.” He spoke decisively. “Stand right there as you are now, and let me sketch you. I’d started while you were paddling around in the water, but this is better. Now your clothes are wet I can see your body structure.”

Again the color flamed to her face and anger with it, when suddenly he smiled and added, “You’ve a fine body. Good bones. You’re really a beautiful woman.”

Hesper felt her mouth fall open. She stared at him suspiciously. He was smiling but there was, surely, no mockery in the smile. Instead there was warmth and friendliness. He had short teeth, white as corn milk, dazzling against his dark skin. The smile vanished; he turned to the rock where he had laid his sketching things. The pad, the pencils, the square box. She noted with surprise, that though he must have run to rescue her, yet he must also have taken time to lay all these down first.

“Just look out to sea, toward that rock out there, turn towards me just a trifle,” he called, assuming her consent. “Oh, and tuck your skirt up again, the way it was. I want your legs and feet.”