Lightkeeper's Wife (2 page)

If the shape of the Cape was a bent arm, Barnstable was the biceps, a long day's ride by horse and wagon, Orleans the elbow, and halfway home. Dangerfield was the wrist, exposed to the worst of the northeast storms that pounded its narrow shore.

The man in front of the fire hadn't opened his eyes. His chest rose and fell with his wheezing breath, so loud you could hear the rattle of it through his mouth. His lips were blue, the rims of his eyes swollen red. He mumbled blurred syllables, his head jerking from one side to another, and then resting as if defeated.

Tom watched him, then looked at Hannah, who was twirling her napkin into a tight rope. “I was planning on riding down to Orleans later if the wind lets up. You need anything?”

Hannah looked closely at Tom, reminded now of the world beyond Dangerfield. “No, I'm set,” she said. He was handsome, with red hair that hung over his forehead and high cheekbones, a strong jaw, and soft chin. He didn't know his good looks and this made him more attractive.

“If I pass John on the road, I'll give him a shout.” Tom took his coat from the hook by the door. “You okay with this stranger?” he asked, pointing to the sailor. “I can stay if you think—”

“No. I'll get him up before too long and send him on his way.”

“Alrighty, then.” Tom hesitated by the door.

“It's okay,” Hannah said.

As much as she didn't want to explain the sailor on the hearth, Hannah comforted herself with the thought that John would be home soon, and the responsibility that sat on her shoulders would lift. Whenever he came home from his monthly trips, he rode his wagon straight into its stall, unloaded the supplies, and took Hannah's hand in his own. “Let's go up to the lighthouse,” he'd say.

This time, before John left for Barnstable, he'd made her promise to record the passing ships she spotted each day. After his final scan of the horizon and careful notations in the logbook, he'd slung his carpetbag over his shoulder and gone to the barn to hitch up the wagon. But every few minutes, as Hannah stood in the kitchen washing vegetables or putting away the breakfast dishes, John hurried back inside to retrieve some forgotten item—his straight razor and strop, clean socks, his timepiece, which he finally found in his pocket.

“Just go, John. Whatever you don't have you can borrow.”

“Right,” he said, making an effort to laugh at himself as he swept the black curls back from his forehead and pulled his cap into place.

“I'll see you in a few days,” she said, playfully pushing him through the door. She'd watched him steer the wagon, checking his pockets and looking back at the house as if willing it to remain attached to the lighthouse, so he could find it upon his return.

Hannah and John had ample room in the lightkeeper's cottage, an open space except for their bedroom in the far right corner. A small kitchen to the right of the front door had three windows over the sink facing east, so that the lighthouse keeper had a clear view of the ocean. To the left sat a dining table, and in the farther left quadrant of the house, a sitting room with a large fireplace where the sailor now slept. A loft over the dining area offered a place for shipwrecked sailors who needed time to recover. What had once been a borning room, they'd opened to create more space in the living area. Tom's two-story farmhouse down the road with its eight rooms was much more typical, but this layout made the house easier to heat by the single fireplace. South-facing front windows drew what heat and light could be gathered from the sun. The structure was built from rough-hewn boards, the beams beneath the house still covered with bark. The white plaster walls at night shined bright in the light of whale oil lanterns and the wood fire, another small mark upon the shore.

At the kitchen sink, Hannah stared out the window where the ship had gone down. She'd saved a man. She was thrilled and terrified and she wanted to do it again. Hadn't she been training for this since she was a young girl? Before she could walk, her father took her out on his boat, and he taught her to row as soon as she could hold an oar. She'd worked with him on his boat since she was seven years old, pulling lobsters from the traps and pegging the claws while her father did the heavier work of hauling the traps from the water. She didn't wear pants then, but a skirt that was the only one her mother would let her wear on the boat. Her father let her tuck the bottom into her waistband so that she could move around easier.

His sleeves rolled to the elbows had revealed his forearms, blue veins running through hard muscle that swelled with work. She loved how his hair curled at the ends in the salt air. He steered the boat up to a buoy, headed the boat into the wind and let the sails flap, fastened the buoy onto a hook and hauled away on the trap line until he got the trap alongside the hull. The sun glared across the water and his eyes reflected with light, his hair blown back in the wind, sideburns thick and long. He held the trap open for her small hand and taught her how to grab the lobster between the claws so it couldn't snap at her. Then she pegged it and dumped it in the bucket. “Thatta girl, Hannah,” he said, and pulled out the flask he carried in his jacket to take a swig. He let her take celebratory sips and gave her a penny for every lobster she pegged.

Once Hannah turned fourteen, her mother forbade her to go out on the boat anymore. She was made to work in the store and wear a proper dress with a corset and baleen like a young lady. The dress nagged at her; it followed her around like a pesky dog. The corset pinched the skin on her ribs and she was always pulling at it.

“Hannah, stop it,” was her mother's constant refrain.

She missed being on the boat. The sun taunted her through the front windows of the store while she counted money from the cash drawer and refused to smile at the customers. She yearned for one day on the water with her father, for the smell of fish and lobster, for her father's appreciation of her skills on the boat and his brief words of approval. “That's it, Hannah, good.”

Her mother was nothing like him. Unlike any other woman in town, Nora Paine thrived on business. She rose at dawn to make breakfast, dressed in one of many fine skirts, with shirtwaists to match, corsets cinched tight, and then went straight to the shop to take a quick inventory. At the harbor she pushed her hat back to reveal eyes the color of the sky, whatever it was that particular day. Soft feathers of gray in her dark hair, long eyelashes, small pretty hands—these were the things the merchants noticed when she negotiated prices on corn meal, flour, coffee, bolts of fabric, and rope. Nora found a thrill when she talked the man down a penny on a pound of flour. The merchants knew she was shrewd and wanted to avoid her, but not only was she pretty, she ran the busiest store in town. They had to do business with her if they were going to move their goods, and conducting business with a woman was not a usual thing in 1843.

Nora feared poverty more than she feared anyone's opinion. A lobsterman's income was seasonal at best, and the sea had claimed many a husband. Without money a woman faced an awful fate. So Nora bought buckets made by a deaf man in town and sold them at a profit. She rented out a room over the barn to travelers, even baked pies over the holidays and took orders from the local men who had no one to cook for them. If she worked hard and lived honestly, she believed God would protect her and her family from ruin.

The women in Dangerfield worried over every detail of a daily life centered around fishing—how many nets to mend, who was the best man to ask for help with the firewood. At least those worries they could do something about, unlike the larger worry of losing a loved one to the sea. No matter how much fish or money, journeys or adventure the ocean brought, she was a capricious friend. She could not to be trusted from one year to the next, and the women believed that to trust the sea, to believe that you would be spared, that your men would be spared, was to ensure disaster. If you remained frightened and humble, then God would watch over your family and protect their flimsy ships and precious lives, and if you lived in the midst of a volatile being such as the sea, God was your only hope. Hannah's mother believed that self-sufficiency was her only hope. Hannah didn't agree with any of them.

What
difference
does
it
make
if
I'm self-sufficient?
With the sea as her only god, Hannah had no reason to be afraid. Whatever the tide carried in, it would eventually take out. Any bad weather would change to good weather, just as the good weather would turn bad. It was the nature of things. This was Hannah's faith.

And it had gotten this shipwrecked sailor ashore. There he slept, unmoving. As she looked at the frayed socks in the basket by her chair, she absently rolled a piece of thread between her fingers, sore from rowing. Is that faith, she wondered, to not be afraid? A shutter snapped in the wind; the storm door slammed hard in its frame, and she was up like a spark from the fire. She rushed to the window and pulled the curtain back.

She wanted to tell John about the wreck and how she'd managed to get the sailor onto the boat. Her eyes scanned the dark toward the barn. She waited several long seconds for the flash from the lighthouse to see what was out there, but there was nothing, only the barn door rocking in the wind.

***

Another two hours gone and it was time to trim the wicks and check the oil. Hannah followed the off-kilter passageway to the bottom of the lighthouse where she reached for the kerosene lantern. The light threw shadows against the brick walls that surrounded the spiral staircase. Huge casks of whale oil were stacked high against the walls. The metal grate of each step clanked beneath her boots, her hand sliding along the cool rail. Out the tiny window halfway up the stairs, the Atlantic sprawled. Hannah noted the position of two schooners and a brig. She would record her findings in the lighthouse logbook when she got downstairs, marking in pencil for each ship the direction in which it sailed, the approximate distance from the shore, and the type: brig, schooner, bark, or sloop. When John returned, he would review her findings, nodding his head at her meticulous entries.

Hannah continued up the stairs, her tired legs accustomed to the work. The wind had died off, but the upper windows still whistled with every blast of air that gusted up the dunes. She climbed into the thick scent of burning oil and lamp smoke. The top of the stairs spilled onto a round landing, and she stood in the tall windows and looked down the full forty-seven feet of the tower. Her eyes followed the path of crushed shells to the house, then eastward where Dangerfield rambled in narrow roads, occasional houses situated amid sweeping properties.

Dangerfield was a town of nearly eighteen hundred wind-blown residents. The Pilgrims had settled the town in the 1600s. John told her stories about how the Pilgrims took advantage of the native Payomet Indians, stealing the corn they'd stored in the dunes, bartering their land out from under them for nothing of value, and introducing them to alcohol, until all that remained of the tribe was their name, Anglicized to Pamet, given to the land they no longer owned.

Many of the town's men had drowned while fishing on George's Bank two years earlier during the October Gale of 1841, leaving behind scores of widows and fatherless children. The men who remained continued their lives on the sea—fishing, whaling, cargo hauling, and running passengers by sloop up Cape or to Boston. These men couldn't imagine their lives any other way, regardless of the pleading cries of mothers, wives, and sisters. Seamen came home and then went to sea for days or months or years at a time, their lives spent whaling or transporting cargo to foreign ports, while women waited at home for news, praying over every lost ship off their coast as if it held their own loved ones.

With only a thin sliver of light left in the sky, Hannah could see the sand dunes of Provincetown to the northwest. She turned to her work, holding her hair back with one hand as she checked the oil in each lamp. She trimmed the ends of wick by snipping off the charred bits with her fingernails, and pulled the wicks up to align the center of the flame with the center of the reflector. Then she struck a match and worked her way around to light each lantern, twenty-four in all. People didn't know that it wasn't one giant light, so powerful a glow did the separate flames create. When she'd first come to the lighthouse six years ago, John had taught her the everyday routine of checking the lamps for oil and trimming the wicks. He'd held her hand as she lit one of the lanterns for the first time, not because she needed him too, but for her initiation into his life, which became their life. She'd started on the opposite side of the light, trimming the wicks and filling the oil before lighting the lantern as he'd shown her, until they met in the middle and he grabbed her around the waist. She dropped the scissors on the floor and kissed him hard on the mouth until he let her gently onto the floor and they made love in the glare of the lanterns.

Every four hours during the night, one of them got up and filled the lanterns with oil. For months, when it was her turn, she felt the thrill of their lovemaking each time the light flashed in her face. When the sun rose each day, they doused the lights and readied them for the evening ritual to begin again.

The first night she'd arrived at the lighthouse, they had stood side by side atop the light. They watched the beam flash a path across the ocean and illuminate the waves and the narrow beach and the impossibly long set of stairs leading up to their yard. She knew then that she would love John forever no matter what came to pass. He had delivered her home. The sky was clear and black. She believed that together they would live this life, and if their love faltered or they encountered some failure between them, they would have their shared love of this place to hold them together.

She turned her gaze southwest where John should be traveling toward Dangerfield. There was no sign of him, but she could see Sam Potts the peddler camped beneath a tarp near the end of the lighthouse road. John always let him rest there if the weather turned bad or his trip was too long. He always made a point to buy something from Sam: an ounce of sage, a money tin, a small cutting board.

She rubbed her char-stained fingertips together. The heat of the lanterns penetrated her back, and exhaustion settled into her like sand at the bottom of a barrel. Maybe she'd spend a couple of pennies on that licorice John liked.

***

Early afternoon and the sailor still hadn't budged. At least he was breathing, she told herself, and she left a hot cup of coffee beside him before changing into her skirt to leave the house. She wanted to think that she had good reason to go back down to the beach, to take notes about the wreck, or to check for more sailors, but neither was true. She wanted to see for herself what had washed ashore since this morning, as if the flotsam could contain some clue as to how many lives had been lost and why. On her way around the lighthouse, she looked up the road, but there was nothing to see. John should be home by now, regardless of where he'd stayed the night. But she tried to push the thought from her mind.

Now that the weather had cleared, onlookers from town came to stand along the shore and set fires with driftwood to stay warm and keep vigil where the ship had gone down. They watched the ship tilt farther into the ocean and listened to the crack and yaw as the hull ruptured and seawater filled the last empty spaces to sink her. No matter how many ships went aground, there were always people fascinated and terrified and reverent of the sinking ship, and they watched with an attitude akin to prayer. Hannah walked the beach among them as they ventured guesses as to why the captain ran aground with the lighthouse so near. They speculated on the money lost and imagined the valuable cargo that could have been sold in town but now lay on the ocean floor.

“John find anyone after the storm, Hannah?”

“Damn near tore the shutters off my house.”

“What'd he think of the wreck?”

“Hannah, where's John?”

“He's up Cape for supplies. He'll be back soon,” she said, and she wanted to believe it.

“He'll be sorry he missed this one.” They respected her distance, walking the beach, not talking much, as part of her job as the keeper's wife, figuring out how the wreck happened and how the next one might be prevented.

Hannah understood that they considered themselves lucky to be standing on the beach, but more than luck, they believed it was fate that drove a ship aground, it was fate that took a man's life. Fate created the storms and tides and determined where ships would be and who would be upon them when they drove themselves aground. Destiny was not something any human being could control. Humility and gratitude were their only hope, and once they'd spoken enough about the wreck to remember this simple truth, their talk faded into random remarks. Hannah tilted her head into the wind and let it blow her hair back from her face. The salty air filled her nostrils and lungs as she started up the stairs to the lighthouse. The town's voices hung about her ears.
Where's John?