Lightkeeper's Wife Read online

  “Thank you, ma’am. I don’t get a lot of baked items up at the lights. I’ve no talent for it myself.”

  “Hannah can bake when she sets her mind to it,” her mother said, wiping a clean rag over the varnished counter. Hannah ignored her and walked to the front window where she glanced up and down the road. She spotted Evan Pierce strolling by as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Evan worked on his father’s boat fishing for cod off George’s Bank, and she’d come to know him on the docks working with her father. His eyes flitted just like a fish until he spotted her and stopped in front of the window. His brownish-red hair reflected the sun like fish scales, tiny rainbows of shimmering light. They spoke through the window.

  “What’re you doing in town?” she asked.

  “Had to borrow some caulking for repairs.”

  Hannah gazed into her clasped hands and then back up through the streaked glass. Now that she was stuck in the store, there wasn’t a lot for them to talk about. Evan looked up the street. He shrugged, then tossed a quick wave on his way toward the harbor.

  Hannah sighed in as frustrated a tone as she could muster, picked up the duster from its hook, and began lifting items from the shelf and dusting, then slamming each item back down again.

  “She doesn’t like working indoors,” Nora said. John smiled, his eyes on Hannah.

  When Hannah invited him to go clamming out on the flats at the end of Wharf Road, her mother took her into the stockroom. “Couldn’t you wait for him to ask you on a proper outing?”

  “What difference does it make, Mother?”

  “It’s no way to win a man over.”

  “I don’t want to win him over. I want to take him clamming.”

  ***

  She watched John work the clamming rake in the mud, scooping until he heard a solid clank against the metal, then he dunked the rake underwater to reveal the clams and drop them in the wire basket. Hannah carried the basket across the flats and instructed him on the finer points of using the rake. She refused to play coy with him, as her mother would have her do. “You look for the blowholes in the mud, then rake slowly, deeper and deeper, until you hit something. Hold the handle lower, so you get a better angle, right, that’s it.” The marsh grass, verdant and shimmering in the summer light, swayed in unpredictable patterns, and across the bay the sun flashed off the dunes of Sandy Neck. They walked along the flats barefoot, John shirtless and tanned, following the rippled edge of water, Hannah with her skirt rolled and tucked up into her waistband so that her ankles showed white as the underbelly of a fish. When the tide started back in, the clams spouted jets of water from under the wet sand, and John gathered as many clams as he could, until the basket was too heavy for Hannah, and he had to carry it while she raked. With the basket full, they worked their way back along the flats to the beach where they sat together on the edge of the water.

  Hannah told him about her friends, the Coopers, whose father was on a whaler. They only saw him every three or four years. He sent money and paid for their house, and the kids grew up hardly knowing him. One winter he tried to stay on shore, and he spent all his time drinking and starting fights, until his wife begged him to go off to sea again.

  John knew the type, the ones who had it in their blood. He was not that sort. He was not cut out for such a bloody business. Even stripping the whale was an ordeal for him. They pulled the whale alongside the ship and sawed off the strips of blubber, and the water filled with blood, and the sharks lurked all around, and the decks ran with blood. The blood and the smell and sight of the fish ripped up and desecrated drove him ashore.

  While John talked, she became aware of his solid arms, his hands mapped with dried salt, gesticulating as he told his story. His feet dug into the sand, the tiny curls of dark hair on each toe pressed flat, and his sweaty smell mixed with the salty bay water.

  “You’ve let me go on now. What about you, Hannah? It’s clear to me that you don’t like working in the store.”

  “I used to work with my father on his fishing boat, pulling in lobster traps, dragging for scallops. Sometimes we fished for cod or bass or whatever was running. I loved being on the boat with him and working outside, just the two of us. But my mother put me to work in the store like a prize heifer on display.” Hannah scraped a stone into the boulder they sat on, then tossed the stone into shallow water. “If I could get away with it, I’d go out on a whaler, blood, guts, and all.”

  John laughed. “It can’t be that bad.”

  “What do you know? You’re up there at the end of the earth watching for ships from the lighthouse.”

  “True,” he said. John stood up and extended a hand for Hannah. As they walked back to her house, he told her stories of shipwrecks and the men who’d washed ashore, men who’d sailed all over the world, men with stories of their own told around the fire over hot cups of coffee, and with the urgency and disbelief of eyes that had seen death up close. Hannah longed for contact with the world beyond her mother’s store, for a life on the water like she’d known with her father. She resented her mother for bringing her ashore, and resented her father for not sticking up for her.

  At the house, she lit a lantern in the barn and set to work shucking clams. She brought a bucket of clean water from the well, a wooden bowl from the house, and sat next to John on a narrow bench. The lantern cast their faces aglow and illuminated only a small circle around them, so that they appeared to be working in an orb of light.

  “Watch now,” Hannah said, holding a wood-handled, six-inch, flat blade in her right hand and the clam in her left, snout pointing right and the hinge away from her. “You slide the knife in here, aft of the siphon, then through the muscle like this.” She pushed the steel blade into the crease between the shells and pulled back through the tight muscle. Then she ran the knife around the rim of the shell toward her body until the clam was open. With one quick motion she scooped the fleshy meat, making clean cuts across the last bits of muscle that clung to the shell. With the clam on the end of her knife, she pinched the stomach to release the guts. “Then you just peel this skin off the siphon,” she said, and peeled back the black membrane. Hannah dunked the clam into the clean water to rinse the sand, then picked up the clam in her fingers and dropped it into John’s waiting mouth. Her fingers brushed across his chapped lips, and he smiled and chewed the clam until she could smell the sea on his breath.

  “Damn, that’s good,” he said. “But I know how to shuck a clam.”

  He grabbed a clam from the basket, positioned it in his large hand, and made fast work of shucking it.

  “Not bad,” she said, laughing. He delicately slid the clam onto the ends of his two fingers and lifted it toward Hannah’s mouth. She waited, perched like a bird, her lips slightly parted, then she opened her mouth as his fingers swept nearer. He dropped the clam onto her tongue and slowly removed his fingers, letting them graze her open lips, then sweep across her suntanned cheek. When she swallowed the clam, she leaned in close, face upturned, and John kissed her, the taste of seawater in their mouths. When he stopped, she felt dizzy.

  All that summer John’s trips up to the store became more frequent, and Hannah took him to all her favorite places, rowing through the salt marsh near the bay, fishing off the Mill Bridge, clamming on the flats. They went out cod fishing with her father and came across a humpback whale sunning itself, its massive, sleek black body and ridged fins floating quietly. “I’m not a man who wants to harpoon that whale, Hannah. I’ll never be rich.”

  Hannah ran her fingers along his neck, and she kissed his Adam’s apple when her father wasn’t looking. They stood together at the stern of the boat to watch the whale turn itself over in the sun, water running off its body, and the splash when the tail slapped the water and soaked the boat.

  ***

  Oct 12: Winds > 30 NE, rain, 0 visibility

  Oct 13: Ship aground, total wreck, one su
rvivor, NE < 20

  Over the logbook were pinned the torn pages from the almanac with the tide charts for each month. She checked the tide and filled in the events that she’d been too busy to record, right after John’s notes from his last scan of the horizon that day he’d left for Barnstable. With the house restored to order, she sat by the shipwrecked sailor and watched him sleep. Then she was on her feet again and casting about for something to do. She ate a piece of toast standing at the kitchen counter. The humming through her body drove her outside to gather wood from the pile on the front porch. In between trips to the lights, heating the room became her focus, warming the sailor back to health, waiting for him to wake up and for John to come home.

  She and John had been married for over six years now. The second summer of their marriage, when Hannah was twenty years old, they had their first real fight. John hadn’t allowed her to row to a wreck, even though the storm had passed and there was no real hazard. Hannah couldn’t accept his judgment that no wife of his would endanger herself on his behalf. “You want me to participate in your life here, to take on your responsibilities, but only those that you see fit.”

  “You do plenty, Hannah, more than your share. This is for your own safety.” The calm in his voice was a counterpoint to her anger.

  “I think I can judge what’s safe for me and what’s not. I’ve been in boats my whole life. It’s torture for me to know there are men drowning with the lighthouse in view, and I’m stuck on shore. It makes no sense.” Hannah paced behind him where he sat at the table, until he stood up and crossed the room to put his plate in the sink. She followed at his heel.

  “You’re in no position to judge what’s safe, Hannah. You’d row to Nantucket in a snow squall if it suited you.”

  “That’s ridiculous and you know it. I just want to help. Yet you want to keep me cooped up in the house like all the other wives.”

  John turned from the sink, face flushed, his voice angry but even. “I can’t believe that you think I’m concerned with myself when it’s you I’m concerned for.”

  “You’re not concerned for me at all. You’re concerned for your own pride. You don’t want any wife of yours risking her life alongside you. What kind of a man would allow that? Not John Snow. What would people think?”

  “Hannah, stop it.” He stepped toward her. “You’re being unreasonable.”

  “I am not unreasonable,” she spat. “You’re a coward.”

  He held her wrists down by her sides and wrapped his arms around her to calm her, but she fought him, flailing with her torso and legs. She struggled to free her wrists and writhed against him. “Let me go, John. Let go.” But he didn’t let go until she’d worn herself out and collapsed against him, then he carried her to the bed and lay with her until she fell asleep.

  ***

  Dusk settled over the house like a trance. Dusk fell across the fields and emptied the air of any promise save the light flashing every eight seconds, a steady pulse, as familiar to Hannah as her own breath. She kneeled down for a closer look at the sailor, then she nudged his shoulder until he opened his eyes for a moment and squinted at her.

  “You’re okay,” she told him. “You’re at Dangerfield Light.”

  He looked down the mummified length of his body, the layers of blankets and quilts.

  “Your ship went aground,” she told him. “You’re injured, but you’re safe now.”

  “You should’ve let me drown,” he said, his voice scraping his throat, his eyes fierce now and fixed on her.

  She sat upright in her chair. “You should’ve let yourself drown,” she told him, startled. “When I found you, you were clinging to a spar. What’s your name?”

  “William Pike.” He remembered clinging to the spar, his elbows hooked over on each side, his head resting like a child’s while his legs drifted. Frigid with cold, he’d stopped caring whether he lived or died. Still, he didn’t let go of the spar. It was the weakness in him, clinging to life.

  “You cut your head. I’ve been changing the bandages so you don’t get infected. It’ll scar though. You’ll be quite distinctive.”

  “I’ve got enough scars.”

  “And the name of your ship?”

  “It wasn’t my ship.” He held his arm over his eyes. “Cynthia Rose. We went aground in the storm. The light was so close. I don’t know how it happened.”

  He struggled to free himself from the blankets, took a quick look around the room, and then dropped his head back onto the bedroll.

  “Where are the others?” he asked.

  Hannah looked into the pattern of wear on the blanket, pilled and frayed on the edges. She picked at the torn edge and thought she should mend it, but the blanket was too old for mending.

  He clamped his teeth down and turned his face away from her. “They’re all drowned, aren’t they?”

  Hannah was silent, and he turned his face toward the fire. “You’re the only one I found,” she said.

  He placed his hand to his forehead, as if remembering the pain. He let her hold a cup of broth to his mouth and drank a little before he slept again.

  Hannah added wood to the fire, his rasping breath a lonely kind of solace as she waited for John.

  3

  William Pike pretended to sleep, but instead watched the woman mend a shirt, then get up and pace by the front window before she sat down and took up her mending again. She jabbed at the fabric, then pulled the thread taut with three sharp tugs. He kept his eyes partway open for minutes at a time. When she stood to press a damp cloth to his forehead, the gentle sound of her voice eased him as she said fever, delirium. The smell of chicken cooking in a pot that hung over the fire and the warmth of the room made him drowsy. When the woman found out who he was, she’d make him leave.

  When he was awake, the overwhelming knowledge that he’d washed ashore with no place to go, no people, drove him to sleep again. Dreams swept through him, vivid as life. He tried to remember a time before he’d gone to sea, before the Alice K and the Intrepid, when he’d lived in Worcester and known his family. The last William heard about his own mother was that she worked as a laundress. His father had died in prison, where he was incarcerated for embezzling funds from his biggest client, a textile manufacturer who found him out when they hired another firm to audit the accounts. The lightkeeper’s wife tugged the blankets tight around his neck, and as she leaned over him, he felt her breath on his face. Her careful attention frightened him in its intimacy. He couldn’t move. She sat again in her chair and sighed, leaned back as if waiting for a cup of tea, but there was no one here to bring her one. He didn’t deserve her kindness, born as he was from criminal blood and grown into the same stuff or worse. His father had always been setting up investment schemes that never paid out, or finding himself with another windfall that he couldn’t explain. The man was a thief and a liar, and he died in jail. And now look at me. No different. I turned out just like him. But it wasn’t until he’d gone to sea that he discovered his ruinous potential.

  In his fevered state, he tried not to think about Annie, but she taunted him back to the ship Intrepid, where his misadventure had begun. He remembered the first signs of her pregnancy, her heightened sense of smell, or rather, her limited tolerance for foul odors, such as the fish guts flung into a bucket when one of the sailors caught and filleted dinner, or the stench of the men, or the putrid stink that rose from the livestock pen. He wanted to forget how the smell of Annie’s own husband, who’d taken care to bathe in lavender and oil his skin, turned her stomach so that she heaved over the rail.

  The lightkeeper’s wife pressed her palm to his forehead, and for a moment she pulled him from the events that had led him to her house. Why she took him in he didn’t understand, but she wasn’t the only woman who’d shown him kindness on his way north. There had been women in Jamaica, women he’d never speak of, but Annie was the beginning, and
when the lighthouse keeper left him alone, his mind drifted back to that ship.

  ***

  It had only taken a few days for Annie to realize that her belly’s bloating was not due to illness. She was with child, and when the blood didn’t come, she told Daniel.

  “A son,” he said. “Wonderful.”

  “Or a little girl,” Annie corrected.

  “Ten fingers and ten toes, that’s all I care about,” Daniel assured her, patting her tenderly on the back. “You stay down here and rest. Are you warm enough?”

  “It’s stifling in here,” she said.

  “Would you like a cool cloth?”

  “Oh, Daniel. You have better things to do. Send your cabin boy.”

  “I’ll find you a nurse in the next port.”

  “The cabin boy will do for now.”

  Annie rolled to face the beadboard wall, counting the lines of white slats with her finger. Boy. Girl. Boy. Girl. Let’s try it again. Boy. Girl. Boy. There was no telling the sex of the baby, and her mind filled with images of cherubic faces and big ears, or wide black eyes like her father. Would her child have Daniel’s sparrow-hawk nose? Annie’s blue-gray eyes? The possibilities ranged from the beautiful to the terrible, but the question that persisted was who are you? She dreamed of names—Adam, Jacob, or Elliot if it was a boy; Katy, Margaret, or Abigail if it was a girl—as if assigning this unformed creature a name would help her know him or her any better.

  She hadn’t wanted to get pregnant. Every time Daniel climbed on top of her, she resisted, physically willing her body not to conceive. She had no sexual desire for her husband and no longing for a child. When the baby started growing, her body grew strange and round, swelling into a monstrous shape that she did not recognize as her own. She felt overtaken by this thing growing inside her. Her muscles grew soft, her thighs softer. Then the baby kicked and the promise of a child surprised her. Someone to care for and fill the hours with this unexpected love. She would guard her baby against loneliness. No matter what happened, she would never leave the child. No matter what, she repeated like a mantra.