Lightkeeper's Wife (9 page)

“It was over near here.” Her father pointed. “The horse was just wandering, like it was waiting for him to come back.”

Hannah stared at the ground where he pointed. Nothing but dirt and dried pine needles. If the horse had been waiting for him to come back, John must have stood right there, but the ground showed nothing. She followed a trail into the woods, casting her eyes into the bushes, looking for…
what?

When Hannah had exhausted herself searching through the woods for any sign at all of her husband, when her eyes grew tired and common sense told her to stop, she stood by her father and looked across the pond. What had she expected? This place meant nothing. It was a spot in the woods, unchanged by whatever had happened here.

“There were marks from different hooves, marks from wagon wheels going in both directions up the road. One line of thinking says he was ransacked and carried off around the back of the pond along that skimpy bit of road. Another theory is they sunk him out in the pond, but you know how far you have to go out there to hit any deep water. We went out in rowboats with tall branches, poking them all around down there. We did that for six days. Men traveled along the main road with a sketch of John and talked to anyone who would listen. We tore this place up, Hannah. There was nothing. It's like he was standing right there.” He tapped his foot on the ground in front of him where two stones rested side by side. This was his offering, his uncertain knowledge. “Right there,” he said, “and then he just disappeared.”

Grief was like a wave cresting, gathering size and velocity. Hannah braced herself against it. Isn't this what she'd wanted—to know?

On the ride back to the house, her father didn't know what to say or how to console her, and she couldn't find the words to express her distress. A woman standing on her porch watched them pass. Hannah felt the woman's eyes on her, thanking fate for sparing her own husband and sending a prayer out for Hannah, as if this act of goodwill would spare her. Hannah didn't want her prayers. It was too late for that. The sun became a sliver on the sky, the cold a slap on her face that said,
Wake
up! Wake up! Don't you see what's going on? Your life is not here. It is gone, like your husband is gone, and you are left, Hannah, left.

***

Back at the house, Hannah went to her room and lay across the bed until her tears became sobs she couldn't control. John was torn from her, one rip at a time. She was relieved to let go, and then stricken once again by the thought of a life without him. The sound of his voice, the weight of him in the bed beside her, or waiting for him to return from the beach during a storm. For over six years, she'd feared it would be the sea that would take him, never the road. Not once had she imagined danger on the road, and for this she blamed herself. If only she'd thought to worry about the road, this never would've happened. If only she'd held him back from leaving with one more thing.
John, you forgot your
… Was it the weight of the wagon that had slowed him down enough to run into whatever had killed him? Or had he left her parents' house too early, or too late?
Why? Why?
At the window she watched the road. The evil, darkening road. Never again would she trust it. She'd ride home alone in spite of it.

Her father's shadow by the woodpile. How much time did he spend out there? The sound of her mother downstairs, a storm of domestic activity that started in the front parlor and worked its way down the hall toward the kitchen. She saw how they rattled around in their own pain. No one was exempt.

Hannah wiped her face, swollen from crying. She pulled back her hair and went downstairs.

Her mother placed an apple tart on the cooling rack by the window. “Did you get any rest?” she asked. She ran a cloth under cold water and folded it neatly, then held it out to Hannah to place over her swollen eyes.

“Not really,” Hannah said.

“It's going to take time.”

“I don't think we're going to find him,” Hannah said.

“I know, I mean to grieve. For all of us, but for you, dear—”

Hannah removed the cloth from her eyes. “When did his drinking get this bad?”

“Oh, Hannah, stop it. You need to think about what you're going to do.”

“I'm serious—when?”

Her mother went to the window for the tart. “You've got to try this. I rolled the dough out thinner, which makes the crust a bit crispy.”

Hannah watched her wipe down the counter and put the dishes away. She bent to pick up crumbs that had strayed from their proper place atop the pie and brushed them into the sink. Nora worked hard to keep back her waves of anger, all the things she did not want to say. The disappointments and devastations that coursed through her over the years took shape in her stooped shoulder, the rolls of fat around her waist and gathered at her ankles, the squint of her right eye that held some essential part of herself back, as if she'd given everything she had to her husband and her child and her store, and this one thing, hidden, she would keep for herself. Hannah saw it glittering beyond the dark reaches of her mother's pupils.

“It's only because of his back,” she said finally, then took out the trash herself. “You're grieving your husband, Hannah. You don't need to worry about me.”

***

That night was her last night in Barnstable, and her mother roasted a chicken. The three of them gathered around the table staring into the candles, grief palpable like ocean waves they had to walk through. Her mother carved the bird, her face bowed and in shadow. She looked beautiful right then, the strong lines of her cheekbones, her eyes focused on her work, but her mind was somewhere else as she lifted generous portions onto each plate.

“I wish you'd stay,” her father said. “I don't know how you're going to get along out there by yourself.”

“A young grieving widow should be with her family,” Nora said. “We can take care of you and help you get the rest you need. You're going to kill yourself up at that lighthouse. And for what?”

“She's right, you know. Now that John's gone—”

“Just stop, both of you. I'm not helpless, and I need to work if I'm going to get through this.”

“The man you rescued. What's his name?” Nora asked.

“Billy,” Hannah said.

“It's not right, him still there with you,” her mother said. “I know you're alone, but—”

“You might want to chastise her about the thing that could actually kill her, Nora.”

“Yes, of course. I just…I don't know what to say about that. I can't believe it, and yet I do. Then I ask myself why? But I know why. We raised you, didn't we?”

Hannah saw then that her mother knew better than her father that Hannah couldn't stay ashore in a storm. If she'd been able to stop herself, she never would've gone out in the boat alone. Whatever pulled her was a thing beyond reason, and it would keep her going back. Her mother's efforts to guide Hannah into moving home were like trying to steer her to safe harbor.

“I could ask you to stop, I suppose,” her mother said. Her father watched, dumbfounded. “But you wouldn't listen.”

“By God, she will listen.” He slammed his fist on the table, by now an impotent gesture.

“Oh, just eat your dinner, Ed,” her mother said.

Upon her return to Dangerfield, and in the days that followed, what had started with a storm of activity and talk from Dangerfield to Barnstable had become a quiet resignation that settled like fog. She'd decided against a funeral. Without John's body, she couldn't bear it. She'd mourn her husband in private, the same way they'd lived their life together. Still, she wanted to shake herself loose from grief the same way she shook herself from sleep in the morning, but all she could do was brace herself for another day and try not to think about the morning John left, the way he'd looked back as if to secure the place in memory, where he could not lose it.
Just
go, John.

She stared blankly out the kitchen window toward the water, clouds like steam drifting then gone, the sky a darkness like foreboding. Billy came in from the barn covered with chicken seed. Two days ago, she'd ridden John's horse straight through Orleans to Dangerfield, until the lighthouse flashed from the road, and there was Billy standing on the porch, as if he knew Hannah would appear at that moment and had stepped outside to watch her ride into the yard. His cough had lessened now, and he was able to stay awake most of the day. “Mr. Billings still hasn't come. I can see the body down there in the life cart and there's crows swooping over it.”

“Billings hasn't come? Aren't you angry? That man was your shipmate.”

Billy walked to the table as if he was crossing a ship's deck, his swagger accounting for any fluctuations in the ground beneath his feet. He rubbed his hands across the tops of his pants and stared at his place setting as if a plate of eggs would appear any minute.

“You look like a dog waiting to be fed. Put the water on for coffee, and get the stove fire going.”

He did what he was told. Since she'd been gone, he'd taken to cleaning the chicken coop and feeding the chickens, cleaning the stalls and feeding the horses. He repaired the broken catch on the front door and nailed down the loose barn boards. Tom must've gotten him started on one task after another until he could move through the work on his own.

When the kettle poured steam into the room, Hannah poured water over the coffee grounds, but she was distracted. The coffeepot spilled across the counter and boiling water dripped down the front of her clothes. She slammed the kettle down and lifted her shirt to keep the boiling water from her skin. Her eyes roved feverishly across the mess. She swept her hand across the counter and in one swift motion sent everything flying onto the floor. Broken bits of glass and shards of clay cracked beneath her boots. Coffee seeped into the floorboards, and the kettle rolled across the floor and settled under the stove.

“I'll get the broom,” Billy said quietly.

***

The women of Dangerfield knew about loss as surely as they knew how to fillet and fry a strip of cod. Women gathered around the bereaved like a covey of quail and suffered as if their own loved one had passed into the next life or into no life at all. They offered consolation, knowing that their presence was the only consolation they had to offer. Mourners came by in twos, as if grief were a storm that required reinforcements. They carried baskets of pies, preserves, cooked chicken, bowls of potatoes, all in an attempt to stem the loss.

“Eat. It will help you sleep,” Ruth Miller said, sliding a hot plate of chicken and potatoes in front of Hannah.

Hannah wasn't friendly with these women on a regular basis, but they shared camaraderie as they shared the risks of living in Dangerfield. The women discussed which men had been lost that year and how the widows were faring, which whalers had been heard from after rounding Cape Horn, and who they expected to come in off the banks with the most cod. In their small town with its small economy, the news affected everyone, and the women talked and talked as if talking could save them.

When Billy stuck his head into the room from the barn passageway and saw the women, he retreated like a scared rabbit.

“Will they look for a new lighthouse keeper?” Mary Hopkins asked. She was the wife of Everett Hopkins, a sturdy and well-liked man, known for his inventive ship designs. Mary was Everett's opposite, nervous, slight, and predictable down to the dish she brought a grieving widow: chicken potpie, which could be heated up and eaten without a lot of fuss. “I'm sure you will want to leave before winter.”

Hannah hadn't thought beyond the simple structure of her tasks, the steady reliance of the light. It was the physical work of getting up and down the lighthouse stairs, firing up the lamps, checking the whale oil, noting passing ships in the log, that anchored her to each day. She was not going to leave the lighthouse. She would not go back to her family in Barnstable and work with her mother in the store. She hadn't married John and moved to the lighthouse and established her life here only to go back.

“I'll remain here to take care of the light,” she said.

“But—”

“I'm not leaving,” Hannah said, slamming her words like a fist on the table. Without a body, no one could prove that John was dead.

Ruth and Mary looked at each other and gave Hannah a sympathetic stare.

“You don't have to decide right now, dear,” Mary said. “But you'll want to send that sailor on his way.”

“He's a ruffian,” one of the women said. “I don't understand why he's still here.”

Hannah didn't answer, and they covered the bowl of potatoes and combined the chicken dishes in an impressive display of domestic efficiency. “Just make sure you eat something,” Ruth said, pulling on her gloves and buttoning her coat against the wind.

Hannah felt them wanting to offer a comfort more than food, and since they couldn't, Hannah felt obliged to receive the food more wholeheartedly. “I'm going to eat the entire chicken when you're gone,” she told them, holding the door while they stepped into the cold.

***

On the beach, the breakers rolled low and wide. Billy helped Hannah get the corpse onto a board and fasten it with canvas straps. On the count of three they lifted the board into the back of the skiff so that it tilted from beneath the middle seat up over the transom. All Hannah had to do was tip him into the sea and it would be over.

“It's what should've happened in the first place,” Hannah said, setting the oars, while Billy walked the skiff into the surf. “No man should have to rot on the beach. It's a disgrace.”

“He was the ship's cook, Brennan Jones. Knew his way around the galley, but could barely bring himself to look at the ocean. He paid the first mate McNealy to write letters to his sister. We all used to listen because he had a nice way of talking and describing things.”

Hannah nodded.

“Okay, you're off, ma'am,” Billy said, giving the skiff a good shove.

Hannah dug in with the oars, working against the extra weight in the boat. She wanted to get out far enough into the tide where he would be carried off to sea with his shipmates. With the board wedged beneath her seat, she had to straddle the corpse to row. Even though the man's face was covered, the smell of his decay and his inert form beneath the blankets filled the skiff with death. She rowed harder, until she felt the tide's northbound pull. Here she drew the oars in and made them fast. She loosened the board from beneath her seat and maneuvered the weight of the corpse. A couple of flicks of the clasps and the canvas straps fell loose. The body jostled as the boat rocked in the swells. She wanted to say something. She folded the blanket back from the man's face and touched his forehead. Then she tilted the board to let him slide into the water. The body bobbed for a moment before thrusting up once then dropping below the surface. Hannah whispered, “Good-bye.”

She thought of John and the troubled look on his face when he'd left that day, the worry she didn't want to see as she'd rushed him out the door. “John,” she said, watching the shadowed form disappear below the surface. He'd been at her mother's. Then Wilbur Dickinson saw him heading for home with the wagon loaded down. Then gone.

“John! John!” She screamed until her throat couldn't make sound, then sat down hard and sobbed, the boat drifting. If she'd known she wouldn't see him again, would she have done things differently? If she hadn't gone out in the boat alone, would he have come home? Could she go back and do it again, stay ashore and wait for him? Then would he walk through the door, soaking wet from the storm, and shake himself dry?

Light drained from the sky, and she couldn't bring herself to set the oars. What had she said to him?
Just
go, John
.

***

The next morning a cold wind crept in around the door frame. When Hannah saw that she'd run out of split wood for the fire, she almost called for John. How many times a day did she nearly speak to him? How many times a day did his absence confront her anew? With months of winter ahead, she was afraid of the storms that would heave ships onto the shoals. She imagined countless trips up and down the lighthouse stairs, endless barn chores, and the small garden needing to be turned and planted in the spring. With her boots in the wood chips and her nightgown billowing around her in the morning air, she knew that she must face her fear before it took hold.

Hannah reached for the ax, right where John had left it leaning against a log. The handle, worn smooth, had taken on a patina from the oil in John's hands. She felt the ax's weight and heft, then lifted it over her head and let it fall forward in a practice stroke. It couldn't be that hard. She'd seen John do it a hundred times. She tipped a log on end and stood with her legs hips' width apart. Then she swung the ax forward into the wood. The log didn't split. It only gave the ax a place to lodge itself. After wriggling the ax loose, she tried again, aiming for the outer edge of the log. This time, the log split. Encouraged, she swung the ax one more time, and the log fell into pieces. Sweat dripped from Hannah's brow and collected under her arms, but she couldn't stop. It was hit-and-miss at first, but after a while she split the log more often than she missed.

“What do you think of that, Johnny? I'll bet you never thought I could do it, did you?” she yelled into the wind, tears filling the creases by her eyes. Exhausted and spent, she turned toward the house. Billy was there in the window, watching.