The Last Sailor Read online

  Also by Sarah Anne Johnson

  The Lightkeeper’s Wife

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Anne Johnson

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Olga Grlic

  Cover images © Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel Images, EastVillage Images/Shutterstock, LightFieldStudios/Getty Images, tomograf/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Johnson, Sarah Anne, author.

  Title: Last sailor / Sarah Johnson.

  Description: Naperville, IL : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019052856 | (trade paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3610.O3765 L37 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052856

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part III

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part IV

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Epilogue

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Lightkeeper’s Wife

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Gregg

  I

  1

  Sunlight penetrated the flat expanse of Cape Cod Bay, exposing glittering schools of minnows and tentacles of green seaweed drifting in the current. The windless August air was an oppression that drove Nathaniel’s hand into the cool seawater. Linen knickers stuck to his legs with sweat and salt as he lay across the wooden seat, flicking the fishing line with his finger to see if he’d gotten a bite. No fish since this morning. No fish until the tide turned to run along the shore. Then he’d take the trouble to rebait his hook and fish in earnest.

  He liked being out on the boat. He wanted to be left alone. For ten years, he’d achieved a comfortable solitude on the salt marsh, over two miles from the harbor, until events conspired to bring him back into the orbit of people he’d once held dear.

  He eyed the ragged shore, where seagrass held the shape of weeks and months and years of wind and the rocks of the jetty stuck out like two dark thumbs to mark the harbor. He could see the mackerel boats unloading at the pier, their sails listless in the still air.

  When the fishing line grew taut, he raised himself slowly so as not to shift the boat and disturb the water beneath. He began to reel the fish in, feeling him fighting on the other end. The trick was to just let him swim it out. Nathaniel squinted down into the murky depths, inching the line a little at a time until he saw the shadow moving in desperate circles, and only then did he jerk the line up. The hook set firm, and he pulled the fish alongside the boat. A good one, thick around the gills with a fine rainbow sheen. Once in the boat, the fish flailed miserably. Nathaniel whacked him with the sawed-off end of an oar, and then the fish lay limp in the bilge where the seawater would keep him fresh.

  Nathaniel rowed toward the jetty, working with a slow motion, letting the boat find its own momentum. The masts of a schooner came into view, then the jetty rocks, slabs of granite stacked like rubble. He rowed alongside them, the slap of the water ringing in his ears, the smell of brine and dried seaweed and broken clamshells with the meat picked clean overwhelming his nostrils. The tide shifted beneath him and swept his boat into the harbor. Familiar sounds struck him, the business of the docks: the creak and strain of a yardarm lifting crates, the clomp of horses pulling wagon carts, and seagulls squawking their comments on the entire scene as if they were the last and final word, angels speaking divinity.

  He didn’t look toward his father’s house on the hill, but he knew his father was there, same as the schooners with their multiple masts and sails like wings and the fishermen scuffing along the gravel in their boots, the horses eating from feed sacks, and men loading crates of cod onto wagons. His father would be at the window, gazing over the fish-drying racks, eyeing the ice shack and the salt barrels, counting the number of fishing vessels, and tallying up the money pouring into the harbor on a Wednesday afternoon.

  In 1898, the village of Yarmouth Port was growing, the harbor traffic increasing along with that growth. There were five or six schooners at a time, some from as far away as Gloucester, nearly seventy miles north. The boats moored in the harbor or tied up to the dock and handed crates of fish to a line of men who passed them down until they reached the ice wagon that transported the fish to the railway, where they were shipped to Boston and sold on the state market by Butler Fishing Company. Nathaniel tried not to think about Meredith Butler, but she was always there, like a breeze in the back of his mind. Since she’d married Theo Butler and become part of a wealthy family, he’d tried to let his thoughts of her drift out on
the running tide.

  All this harbor business went on with such rote familiarity that nobody thought about the boats and wagons and trains that took one fish from the sea and got it into the hands of the person who would eat it. Industry was booming, and Nathaniel’s father was profiting by buying and selling land or renting to sailors and tenant farmers. Still, Yarmouth Port was one small cog in the larger wheel, and most of the inhabitants remained happily unaware of their role in the nation’s growth. Local folks were consumed with building houses and ships, setting up law firms, dry-goods stores, blacksmith shops, haberdasheries—all the makings of a proper town.

  Nathaniel wanted none of it. He’d moved to the marsh ten years ago, at nineteen, after losing his youngest brother, Jacob. The boy had been twelve years old, and he’d believed in Nathaniel the way only a younger brother can believe.

  Nathaniel rowed the boat hard onto the beach where Elliot Kelly kept his traps and sat working his fingers in the netting that flowed over his thighs.

  “Catch anything?” Eli said, his voice syrupy and languorous.

  Nathaniel bent and slid two fingers into the bass’s gills to lift it.

  “Oughta keep you out of the poorhouse for now.”

  “Yep.”

  Nathaniel slid the oars beneath the seats and climbed from the boat. At five feet eleven inches tall, he was a man of sinewy strength, his features sculpted from physical work. Thick waves of sun-streaked brown hair hung loose about his shoulders and hid his gray eyes, ringed red and heavy at times. The hollow look of them spoke to something deeper than physical need, but he admitted no want, no desire. Angular cheeks and thick red lips and the prominent forehead and the firm line of his jaw made for a face that people looked at twice.

  Nobody noticed the tiny scar on the edge of his upper lip where he’d caught a fish hook as a boy. His younger brother Phinneas, or Finn, had been the brave one who cut the hook with wire cutters that they kept in the fishing box. It was Finn who pulled the metal through Nathaniel’s lip and used his own hands to stop the bleeding. The scar wasn’t bad. It reminded Nathaniel of a good time between him and Finn, and that was worth something.

  Nathaniel spotted a thick piece of twine on the ground. He ran it through the bass’s gills, then carried the fish with the twine like the handle on a lady’s bag. He walked the flat dirt road, past O’Shea’s Restaurant and the sailmaker, keeping his head down, his eyes to himself. He turned away from a woman with a basket of flowers walking toward the harbor as if he hadn’t seen her. He didn’t want to say hello or be acknowledged in return. He wanted to blend into the landscape like a fish or a flower or a cloud.

  In the back of Finn’s fish shop, Davey Sampson stood at the wooden cutting block, running a knife along the underside of a flounder. He worked with the precision of a man, though he couldn’t have been fifteen years old. He didn’t look up, as if making eye contact would demonstrate a weakness he didn’t want to reveal; he fought the stigma of his age with a bravado that belied his skinny arms.

  Nathaniel went to the front of the shop and watched Finn pass a package across the counter to a local woman. The slope of his shoulders were like two mounds of worry gathered up around his neck.

  When the woman was gone, Finn said, “I told you not to come in here when I have customers. Next time, I won’t pay you.”

  Nathaniel nodded and handed the fish over to Finn.

  “I mean it,” Finn said. He turned and cast his eyes down. They were brown, like their father’s eyes, always disgusted with everything they found disappointing in this world. He went to the cashbox and ran his fingers through some coins and over a single dollar bill until he decided the amount he wanted to pay and handed it over.

  Nathaniel stuffed the money in his pants pocket. No sense counting it. The price was not negotiable.

  “Father wants to see you,” Finn said.

  “I’ll see him when we get back from Boston.”

  “He insists. Just go see him.”

  Nathaniel stood in the doorway, watching his brother rearrange a row of fluke on the ice tray. Finn worked as if work could save him. Their father had instilled in his boys the notion that a man’s value in the world was directly linked to the value of his bank account, and satisfaction was found by taking in the sweep of one’s land. While Nathaniel had rejected their father’s way of life, Finn wanted to be just like him. Their father knew how to talk to other men about business so that people buying property from him couldn’t help feeling they were getting a deal.

  His confidence, his forthright approach, had influenced Finn, but he couldn’t manage to emulate his father’s integrity in his dealings with customers and the fishing captains. When he purchased fish, he tried to bring the asking price down. He made it sound like he needed to get a pound of fish for a nickel less if he was to sell it for any profit at all, as if he could negotiate the price based on some aspect of the local economy that the fishermen didn’t understand. But they understood, and they knew to avoid him. Only Nathaniel and the Garrison brothers sold fish to him because they would not be bullied. Since they provided a wide range of fish—everything from flounder and mackerel to cod and swordfish—Finn was able to stock his shop.

  Nathaniel hadn’t seen his father in over six months, not since the man had come down to the harbor himself to visit his sons. “When are we leaving for Boston?”

  “I told you already,” Finn said. “Two days. Just meet me at the train, and try to wear something suitable for meeting my client, would you?” Finn shook his head as if his brother was something he could shake off. “Now, take the fish to Davey,” Finn said, his voice curt, abrupt.

  Nathaniel did as he was told. He laid the fish across the table and patted the full body. Then he left Davey to his work.

  Outside the shop, the sun cast an eerie light across the docks. Dusk always caught in Nathaniel’s throat. He remembered his mother, Helen, striking the ship’s bell attached by the back door before she called for her sons. Nathaniel! Finn! Dinner! It was memory that persisted, right in the heart of him.

  Nathaniel was tired from rowing now. He wanted to get away from the world of the harbor, his brother, and his father’s request, but the trip to Boston weighed on his mind. He and Finn would travel by train to the city, where they would meet Edwin George from the boatyard. Edwin had a schooner he needed delivered back to Yarmouth Port, and he’d asked Finn to skipper the boat. While Finn had jumped at the chance to make money and have a good sail, Nathaniel hesitated. He hadn’t been on a boat with Finn in ten years, not since the accident that took their younger brother, Jacob. It would be an easy sail, but nonetheless, he felt a combination of anticipation and grief that he could only quell by retreating into his world on the marsh.

  He walked the wharf road, past sickly sweet smelling rows of grapevines, willow trees that bent over the road, and a few houses perched across the street from the marsh. When a familiar stray dog climbed out from behind a stone wall to greet him, Nathaniel stopped and scratched him under the chin. “Rascal, where you been?” Sometimes the dog followed him home for dinner and maybe a night beneath a roof, but he was as wild as a deer and just as independent.

  Near the end of the road, Nathaniel took a left and found the path that led through briars and brush into the marsh. Rascal followed him through seagrasses washed flat by the tides and dried in the wind and the sun so they were soft beneath his feet. The smells of clay and salt and the fetid odor of rotting brush, the swish of grasses in the breeze that came in off the bay, and the gray evening light were his home.

  They hurried along the path toward the island. Feeling the miles in his legs, Nathaniel moved through the fecund odors of wild grapes. A fox dashed into the woods. Nathaniel made out the copper-red body with black around the head, furtive in the light of late afternoon. Rascal ran after him, and Nathaniel knew that was the last he’d see of the dog today. Nathaniel imagined the f
ox’s sense of smell leading it along the trail of a smaller animal that was itself instinctively chasing another odor that had to do with nuts or noncarnivorous sustenance. A flock of geese swooped low to the ground as if to claim it. Nathaniel looked up when he heard their loud, nasal complaints on their way to the fields where they pecked at the earth.

  A world of instinct driven by unknowable forces confronted him every day, and he found reassurance in the fact that the fox knew to stay hidden in the daylight, and the geese knew where to find sustenance. Nathaniel wanted to survive on instinct alone. That was why he’d moved out to the marsh—to live outdoors and on his own, without the distraction of working for his father or fishing on a schooner with a bunch of other men. He was his own man, and that was something his father couldn’t understand.

  As he neared the island, nothing more than an outcrop of beech trees and scrub pine, bayberry bushes and briars, he stepped beneath a canopy of branches. He’d built the shack at the center of the island where even the highest tides couldn’t reach. Only twelve feet by twelve feet, the shack held enough room to live in and had for a long time. Grass poked through the floorboards in spring and rotted beneath in fall, then the clean smell of frozen ground surrounded him all winter.

  The structure had a strong foundation of stones he’d carried from the woods on the other side of Wharf Road. He’d survived many storms on this island, snow and gales and one hurricane. He knew how to barricade himself in. The shack was braced with logs. He’d placed the gray, weatherworn boards with precision and double-filled the walls with sea hay for insulation.

  Nathaniel couldn’t remember when he first thought of living outdoors. He supposed the idea had been with him since he was a boy, making fires from flint rock, sleeping with his brothers in a fort they’d built with a lean-to woven from branches and covered with a canvas tarp. Only fishing for what he needed to eat, growing turnips, building his own shelter—these things pulled at a primitive longing.

  But moving to the marsh as an adult had been more than a response to that longing. It had been a desire for comfort and the kind of ease he could only find living outside. There was a purity in the marsh, a simple rhythm to each day that soothed Nathaniel, and he clung to that rhythm as a wall against loss. On the marsh, he didn’t recall Jacob’s footsteps on the stairs or expect him at the breakfast table. He didn’t hear his father crying in the night. Nathaniel could live with the loss because he wasn’t constantly confronted with his brother’s absence, but still there were days when he didn’t leave the shack, when he curled around a blanket and held his pillow to his stomach. At those times, no amount of sun on his body or wind or fish in his boat could soothe him.