Lightkeeper's Wife (5 page)

Ishema brought three glasses on a tray and sat beside Annie, her heft and her sweat overbearing at that moment.

“Drink,” Therese said.

The liquor burned at first, then warmed her throat.

“Why don't they have husbands?” Annie asked.

“They don't want them or lost them or left one that was good for nothing. What does it matter? They are here now. We get paid to please these men. Nothing for free.”

Annie leaned back into the pillows and finished her drink. The hot coil of her pain cooled in the relief of the liquor. “Do you never rest, Ishema?”

“Rest will come later.”

“Do you miss your husband?” Therese asked.

“Not yet,” Annie said.

Daniel didn't come back for another month, and after weeks spent with Therese and Ishema, Annie had no patience for his grief. She flailed between bouts of drinking and sleeping; she cried in her bed and cursed her husband. He should've been here. He'd arrived too late to console her, and she blamed him for leaving in the first place, for leaving her on this island where her baby had died.

“This is your fault, this infection. Some island disease! It could've been avoided!” She fought with him and accused him even when she didn't believe her own words. Annie's rage was forged in grief and only deepened as they sailed away from the island, away from her baby interred in dark soil.

Tom rapped hard on the door and called Hannah's name, scraped the mud from his boots on the edge of the porch before he stepped inside. No sign of her, only the sailor wrapped tight and dozing by the fire.

Tom ventured down the passageway and yelled up the lighthouse steps, “Hannah, you there?” But the echoes of his own voice were the only call back to him. He felt a terrible emptiness standing there.

When he ducked back through the passage into the house, the man by the fire looked over with startled eyes. “She went down to the beach,” his voice rasped.

“You any better, friend?”

“I'm awake, aren't I?”

Tom pulled the door shut behind him and made his way to the stairs. Halfway down he spotted Hannah dragging a man out of the surf. She held him under his arms and carried him backward so his head bobbed side to side. When Tom's feet hit the sand, he hollered for her and waved until she looked up.

The body she dragged hung loose as a bag of rocks. Her wet hair whipped in the wind as she leaned forward and pulled harder on the man to get him up the beach.

“He's dead, Tom. Can you grab his feet? He washed up into the shallows with the tide. Should've been carried out with the rest of them.”

Tom took the man by his boots and watched Hannah's frenzied eyes dash back and forth from the dead man to the steps.

“Let's get him in the cart,” she said.

They carried the waterlogged body across the beach and lifted the man into the life cart. “I was dousing the lights when I saw him,” Hannah said. “At first I thought it was a seal, or a black fish, then I saw his legs knocked about in the waves and I knew.”

“Maybe that other one up at the house knows something about him.”

Hannah looked into the bloated face of the drowned man. A thin lace of light green seaweed stuck to his right cheek, and his fingernails had wood splinters under them, as if he'd clawed his way out of some airless place. His pants were shredded, one boot missing, and his foot was tangled in rope.

She and Tom strapped the dead sailor into the life cart and coiled the ropes and tucked the blankets in around him. Hannah fingered something along his chest that looked like a locket. She folded the blanket back and opened the man's shirt. Small black hairs curled delicately against his skin. No locket. Only a broken oyster shell pressed into his flesh. She left it there, a vestigial relic to mark these last hours.

“What are you going to do with him?” Tom asked. “If he's got no wallet or papers, you'll never find his people. I can send Billings over.”

“He would've been better off swept away with his shipmates.”

“Yep,” Tom said.

They maneuvered the life cart with the dead man to the side of the stairs and out of the wind to wait until Billings the undertaker could come for him. “He'll be okay here,” Hannah said, disturbed by the unmoving weight beneath the blankets.

“Crows,” Tom said, and they took the canvas tarp from the skiff and draped it over the man, pulled it tight, and weighed it down with rocks.

Tom followed her up to the house, where Hannah went to the stove to heat a pot of water. She opened the cast-iron door and poked at the fire. She added one of the logs from the bin until the fire caught and she closed the door. Still in her jacket and boots, she asked, “You see John up Cape?”

“That's the thing,” Tom said, looking tentatively into her face. “I didn't see him. Come sit down.”

Hannah shook her head. She leaned over the sailor's disheveled sheets. “Looks like he was up earlier.”

“I didn't think he could move,” Tom said.

His rank, snorting breath disgusted Hannah as she tucked the blankets in around him. Finally she sat in the chair Tom held out for her. “Just tell me, Tom.”

“Thing is, no one saw him coming back. Could be the last person to see him was your mother when he left the store two days ago.”

“Well, where did he go?”

“I don't know, no one knows.”

“A man doesn't disappear into thin air.”

They both watched the sailor as he muttered and groaned in his fevered dreams.

“We could ride down there.”

“Someone's got to watch the lights. I can't just up and leave,” she said, pouring hot water into two cups. She knew from Tom's look that he thought she should leave the lighthouse to someone else to watch, one of the many able men from town. It wasn't any place for a woman, especially a woman as headstrong as she. But they'd never left anyone to tend the lights, and he knew better than to suggest it. As she swung the kettle toward the stove, she knocked one of the cups to the floor. Tom's eyes flashed and she saw then how absolutely green they were, and bright, like the fresh seaweed on the dead man's face. “Where on earth is he, Tom?”

“I'll go up Cape, see what's what,” Tom said. “You write a note for your folks, see if we can figure how far he got on his way back.”

Hannah sat at John's desk and found a piece of notepaper in the top drawer. She penned the following letter:

October 14, 1843

Dearest Mother & Father,

I'm writing to you in an urgent request to determine the whereabouts of my John. He did not return from Barnstable as scheduled three days ago. I thought at first it was the storm that kept him overnight in Orleans, but he was not spotted in Orleans at all. I am wondering when he left you, and if he mentioned any plans or stops along the way. Such unpredictable behavior is unlike him, as you know, and so I find myself concerned, unduly, I hope, but nonetheless. Perhaps you can alert Sheriff Eldridge.

Please let me know anything you can as my ability to wait patiently without word is eroding with each hour.

Your loving daughter,

Hannah

The next day was a series of minutes that passed into hours, each ticking one into the next until Hannah begged them to stop. If time stopped there would be no bad news. She tried to find something to do that wasn't waiting. Even the steady tasks of keeping the lights did not release her from worry. Why had John resisted going to Barnstable, all that foolishness about a forgotten razor? She stood over the desk and opened the logbook to that day, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. His notations looked like all of the other notes made in his careful square script, counts of passing ships, wind direction and speed, visibility.

In the kitchen, she nudged the stove fire to life and heated the fish stew. She carried a steaming cup on a saucer and waved it in front of William's face until he rustled beneath the blankets and opened his eyes. “You're awake,” she said.

“I wasn't sleeping,” he told her. He tried to lift his head but couldn't, and so Hannah lifted him by the shoulders and slid another pillow beneath him. He pulled his arms loose from the blankets and turned them this way and that before stretching them out.

“This isn't my shirt,” he said, and patted his hands down the front of the fabric.

“We had to change your clothes. You were soaking wet.”

“Who changed me?”

“We didn't disturb your bandages, William. Were you injured before the wreck?”

“I have an old injury, ma'am. Billy's what I'm called.” His words were cautious.

“How did you come to be sailing past Dangerfield, if you don't mind my asking?”

“That's a long story.”

“I've nowhere else to be. My husband is the keeper here and he'll want to know where your ship was heading, and where from.”

He sipped from the cup and licked the broth from his upper lip. Hannah kept her eyes on him in the most intimate way.

“You said earlier you were going to Portland.”

“Yes, ma'am, from Jamaica. We stopped in Virginia to pick up cargo, but I don't know what it was. I didn't go ashore.” He didn't look at her but stared straight ahead, his head resting on the pillow.

“Do you know who owned the ship?”

“It was owned by a company in New York. The captain was a Theodore Walker of New Bedford, been in the merchant marine for years but never owned his own ship. Guess he never will now, eh?”

“And how about you, where were you headed?”

He turned his cloudy eyes on her. “Anywhere north. I swore if I made it, I'd never get on another boat again. Now here I am, and all I can think about is signing myself aboard the first ship that crosses my path.”

Hannah watched Billy poke at the logs with a broken twig. She'd never met a man who could be still in front of a fire. They had to adjust the lay of the logs with their boot, or add more wood, or bring out the bellows, or wonder about the draft of the flue and whether the wood had dried enough and if locust or oak was better for burning. “What is this place anyways?”

“Dangerfield Light, at the outermost edge of Cape Cod. Nor'easters drive more ships onto the shoals here than anywhere else on the eastern seaboard. You're not alone in finding yourself stranded.”

Hannah's wavy brown hair fell over her shoulders as she leaned down to loosen the laces on her boots. A single strand of gray hair. Her hazel eyes reflected the gray afternoon. She had a strong jaw and sultry lips, skin lightly freckled by the sun. She watched Billy notice her. She let him look.

“What drove you north?” Hannah asked.

“Many things,” he said. “Lost my family, lost everything. Thought if I got back north, I could start over.”

The wind shuddered against the house as if to remind them that it was there. She offered him another cup of broth, and when he refused, she left him to rest.

***

Billy's cough was the first thing she heard in the morning now. Not John's boots scuffing the passageway from the lights. Not his distracted whistle as he fried some eggs. Not his voice whispering in her ear to wake her for breakfast, even though he knew she was already awake and enjoying the remnants of his heat in the bed. The lights kept flashing and she wanted to get up and douse them to save oil, but she couldn't rouse herself. She wanted to stay in bed, but she couldn't give in.

She pulled herself from the sheets and made her way to her feet. The kitchen held no promise. Eggs, she needed eggs, and so filled the pail with chicken seed. The sound of bickering and feathers beating back reached her before she saw the chickens in the coop. The egg hens perched in the cubbies John had built. Others clustered near the wire gate as she approached and fought over the arcs of seed she cast. A hole in the wall let them go outside to a larger pen. John kept a pig and cow before they married, but with his pay from the lighthouse, and the expense and work of keeping the animals, it was better to barter for their provisions or buy them outright.

Outside, Hannah walked along the edge of the vegetable garden, covered in sea hay. She grew turnips, sweet potatoes, onions, and squash in the sandy soil. The best soil blew away in the stormy winds. Root vegetables kept all winter in the dirt cellar. They still ate salt pork and salt beef that Hannah had brined six months ago. Hannah's mother had taught her well how to survive the winter months.

If
the
vegetables
are
sprouting
or
decaying, spread them to a drier place.

Keep
the
beef
and
pork
under
brine
that
is
sweet
and
clean.

Lamps
will
have
a
less
disagreeable
smell
if
you
dip
your
wick yarn in strong, hot vinegar and dry it.

Then it occurred to her. Her mother's remedy, equal parts camphor and hartshorn spread along the throat, could cure a hard cough. “So simple,” she muttered on her way back to the house.

***

Four days since the wreck and Hannah cursed another day of not knowing where her husband was. With John's trousers drawn up around her, she knotted the waist with a piece of rope and left her upper body bare. The cold water in the basin was clean. She thought of heating it but didn't want to go into the front room where Billy slept. As she opened one of the curtains, her bedroom took on an amber hue. She touched a water-soaked cloth to her skin, scrubbed under her arms and all over her torso and the parts of her back that she could reach, working as fast as she could. When John was home and he came upon her washing, he stepped up behind her and wrapped his arms around to cup her breasts. She would lean back against him and feel the length of him along her body. He'd be home soon, she told herself.

She dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and a sweater from John's closet. Wearing his clothes was the closest she'd been to him in six days. What had started as a practicality had become her only intimacy with her husband. She favored clothes that he'd already worn, clothes that still carried his distinct smell of sweat, salt, and sex. Without him here, she didn't care how she looked. She tried to push her fear away, but he was due four days ago, and it was only a day's ride from Barnstable to the lighthouse. There was no reason he wouldn't be home by now. She brushed out her hair and tied it back, pulling all the loose strands off her face. Anyone who saw her would think she'd lost her mind. Never mind that she wasn't properly corseted, but wearing men's clothes!

On her way into the kitchen, she turned to the hearth to make sure the fire hadn't gone out. Billy was gone, the blankets heaped like discarded clothing. “Billy!” she called. She fumbled through his blankets as if they contained some clue. There was nothing but the odor of his sweat, fever, and camphor. The cure must've worked. She followed the passageway to the bottom of the lighthouse and called his name, but only the cold sound of her voice called back to her. “Where on earth are you, you stupid fool,” she muttered. He was too weak to go anywhere, and why would he bother? She was insulted one minute that he had the nerve to leave, and relieved the next that she wouldn't have to explain him to John or deal with him anymore. But he didn't have the money or means to go anywhere. She grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair and pulled the front door shut behind her. The brown fields roved toward a line of beech trees sketched against a metal gray sky, white fog drifted over the fields and showed the speed of the wind, faster than a man could walk.