The Promise Keeper: Sea Heroes of Duxbury

by Lisa Norato

  With the cock of a brow, Johnny eyed her pointedly.

  She pulled him a long face. “You think to frighten me with your talk of prison, your riddles and your dark, silent stares so I’ll not return. But I know there is more to your story. I know it. You do not seem a criminal, and I believe you when you say you were never a pirate. The rumors are false, but what is the truth, I wonder.”

  Johnny held his tongue. They were nearing the rocky bluffs of Nook shores, and presently her gaze drifted past him towards the mainland. Johnny glanced curiously over his shoulder to see what had captured her attention. A couple of men were scanning the beach. Though they called out, their words were lost to him. “Do you recognize those fellows?” he asked, returning to the oars.

  As the Moonbeam sallied closer, Iris strained to see. “I … why, I believe it is my father and cousin Lud.”

  The white dog stood in the stern, her large paws braced for balance. Head high, nose pointed toward shore, she harkened to the voices. Her tail wagged.

  “They’re calling for Snow,” Iris said. “Oh, and now Father has seen us. He’s waving.”

  She waved back.

  “Does Captain Moon know you rowed out to Clark’s Island to see me?”

  “No.”

  She would not meet his gaze. Johnny had half suspected as much. He rowed them into the shallows, bringing the skiff to dock alongside the wharf. Snow leapt out, followed by Iris, while Johnny secured the lines.

  Captain Moon trudged down the weathered planks with a heaviness in his stride one might attribute to either arthritic pain or intense anger. Since Johnny had never known the hearty captain to suffer a physical ailment, he assumed the sea urchin was headed for a disciplining.

  He intended to be gone and rowing for home before that happened.

  Captain Moon stopped to greet his dog then straightened as his daughter approached. He stood rigid and tall, waiting. Johnny climbed from the skiff to follow in Iris’s wake.

  “Were you worried, Father? Forgive me, I should have alerted you. I knew everyone was busy, so I took the Moonbeam to Clark’s Island to deliver the gift basket to Keeper Mayne. I wanted him to have it before Christmas day.”

  “Daughter,” said Captain Moon in the strong, authoritative voice Johnny remembered like it was yesterday, “we came looking for Snow after she failed to join us in the shipbuilding shed. I had no idea you were gone until the moment I spied you and Keeper Mayne in your skiff. Be truthful, Iris. You never did intend to tell me where you were going. You knew I’d forbid it.”

  Standing behind her, Johnny couldn’t see Iris’s remorse, though he sensed it in the silence that followed.

  Captain Moon’s gaze swept past her hood to lock with Johnny’s. His eyes narrowed as if he were nursing a headache, causing the creases at their corners to grow pronounced.

  Johnny stepped forward, feeling fully the awe and respect he held for the man.

  “Captain Moon, I deliver your daughter to you from the deep, yet again. I’ll return her skiff when I’m able, but if you agree, sir, for now it is perhaps best kept with me, where she won’t be able to use it.”

  The white-haired and bearded captain gave a nod of gratitude.

  Johnny made Iris a swift bow. “I bid you good tidings, Iris Moon.” Then he strode off, back down the wharf to the Moonbeam, where he heard her enquire, “Father, what did he mean, ‘yet again’?”

  Chapter 4

  The following day, Johnny was awakened at mid-afternoon by the shriek of a strong northeasterly wind as it whipped about the lighthouse tower. He kicked off his bed linens and bolted upright, swinging his feet to the cold floorboards. The circular walls of his sleeping quarters trembled and shook, as though the wind sought to penetrate every crack in the wooden planks.

  Less than forty-eight hours ago, the weather had been cold but fair, with a favorable wind blowing in from Massachusetts Bay. Last evening that breeze had freshened then began to blow violently. By midnight tonight, Johnny predicted a gale would sweep in from the sea. He was a native New Englander, born of a hearty stock that thought nothing of swift changes in weather, but the danger he feared this wind carried rattled him to the bones.

  His thoughts flew to Iris. This morning he’d spied her again on the roof of Nook House, the Georgian mansion of her father, Captain Ezra Moon.

  Captain Moon had christened his manse after the small, southern Duxbury community in which he resided. With its pale yellow clapboards, a prominently centered doorway and shutters of fashionable Paris green, the retired sea captain’s home stood high and dry on a knoll above the meadows that overlooked Duxbury Bay.

  He had expanded the rooms of his old family home, added chimneys, a third floor and enclosed its hipped roof with waist-high balustrades. Such a structure was commonly known as a captain’s walk, where wives had been known to await the return of their mariner husbands.

  Almost to the day of his arrival, Johnny began to espy what resembled the spirit of a woman visiting the walk each morning. A wisp of illumination. Like a lantern’s light swinging from a rooftop.

  No matter how bitter the cold or stark the day, it did not deter her.

  Johnny couldn’t shake the feeling that, although he was the watchman, it was him who was being watched.

  He couldn’t shake the sense that, although it was his duty to ensure the safety of passing ships, his greatest responsibility was to protect her.

  Iris was a beautiful, grown woman, no longer the child he’d once known, and yet those old, protective feelings toward her remained. At least he’d gotten a chance to warn her. Hopefully, the sea urchin had sense to heed his words and keep indoors until the oncoming storm passed.

  Johnny hustled into his warm woolens. He pulled the green Monmouth cap over his ears and wound an old, silk neckerchief around his neck and over his upturned shirt collar before tying a bow. Putting the remaining daylight hours to good use, he gathered a store of firewood. He lashed down the Moonbeam and his rescue boat and every other unsecured object about the lighthouse.

  A few hours later it began to rain. A half hour before sunset Johnny donned his apron and climbed the circular, iron staircase to light the lamps in order that they might be burning at full brilliance by twilight.

  The gale kept him confined to the tower, working through the night to keep the flames blazing as brightly as possible. Time dragged, endless hours filled with the roar of heavy downpours and the pungent, smoky odor of whale oil. The rain fell in slanting torrents, sluicing against the thick glass as strong gusts slammed it against the windows. The effect was that of peering through a waterfall.

  Gale winds shook the tower. Johnny worried the lights might not sufficiently penetrate the stream. The flames quivered and shuddered in their chimneys. He kept vigilant watch, lest they blew out. He trimmed the wicks, refilled the oil reservoirs and polished the concave disks of the reflectors, keeping them free of soot. Throughout the night, he watched, and into the following day, sustaining himself on small, fitful doses as the storm persisted. He ventured below only to feed the fire in his living quarters and warm himself on a quick meal of fish and potatoes.

  The incessant wind and rain continued into yet a third day.

  The fourth day dawned with some sunshine, and Johnny was glad to see it, grateful to be freed of his confinement, despite the increased cold. After extinguishing the lamps, he eased open the door to the lantern room and stepped on deck into a brisk sea wind. A noisy flock of seagulls wheeled and dove over the bay in search of breakfast. As he watched, one white and bluish gray gull separated himself from his hungry cousins and soared directly toward him. Wings spread, Salty alighted on top of the fog bell, balancing on his one leg. He shook off a glistening coating of salt spray and cocked his head.

  “Good morning, Salty. How I’ve missed your company these past few days.” Johnny greeted the gull with a broad grin and a strip of raw bacon from his pea coat pocket. Salty spread his wings for balance and stretched forth with opene
d beak. Johnny watched the fatty strip disappear then bob and slither on its way down the gull’s long, white throat.

  “I’m relieved to see you’re no worse for the weather. You are an old salt, aren’t you? The stories you could tell, eh?”

  With a squawk, Salty snapped up more bacon from Johnny’s fingers.

  He’d met the gull over the summer while clamming on the Gurnet beaches of Plymouth. Head cocked, the one-legged seabird had stood in the ebb tide watching him. Johnny tossed it a clam shell. Salty took to flight, soaring high, only to drop the clam on the rocks below so he could pick the meat out from its cracked shell. The bird had kept Johnny entertained throughout the day, smashing shells and even helping Johnny pull the smaller clams out from the flats.

  They had remained good friends ever since.

  Even if the gull did cost him his ration of bacon.

  Johnny withdrew his spyglass from his waistcoat pocket and trained it across the deep waters of Duxbury Bay at Captain Moon’s rooftop. As expected, the visage of a young woman took focus in the lens. Pale ash blond hair, the color of moonlight, swirled around her, obscuring her face. It spilled to her waist, straight and unbound, then blew and danced around her head on a fresh breeze. Ethereal as an angel, a finely-made dressing gown billowed over her tall figure. Surely that garment was not warm enough to ward off the chill of this late December air.

  A moment passed, one quick glimpse, and then she disappeared. Johnny lowered the glass in disappointment.

  “Two things keep me sane on this island, Salty. Your faithful companionship and the Bible that was once my mother’s.” He tossed the rapt and eager gull another meat strip.

  It was a welcomed relief to exercise his voice, to hear the sound of it aloud and watch his breath steam in the frosty air. “Sometimes I find this tower lonelier than prison.”

  Pilgrim Light was an isolated place. There were no roads on the eighty-acre Clark’s Island. No homes, except for the Watson farm on the southernmost tip. The family raised hay and turnips and were in the process of replacing their farmhouse with a twelve-room Dutch Colonial.

  A two-day liberty was granted him every three weeks. More frequently Johnny found himself rowing to Duxbury to spend his earnings on grog in the old ordinary. He liked to sit quietly by the fire and listen to tongues wag. It mattered little what they said. It was the hearty rumble of other men’s voices that soothed him after weeks of nothing but silence.

  “What do you make of her, Salty? Iris has grown into an extremely beautiful woman, yet she remains the wide-eyed sea urchin I remember. Imagine her rowing out here alone to have a look at me and assuage her curiosity. How would she have reacted, do you think, had I told her we were once warm friends?”

  The seabird cocked his downy head sharply to the left as though trying to make sense of Johnny’s words.

  “Well, none of that is your concern, my friend,” he told Salty, feeding the gull the last strip of bacon from his pocket. “But if you can understand me at all, fly off now. This morn. Somewhere warm, somewhere safe. I detect the smell of snow in the air.”

  At dusk, Johnny noticed the sky clouding over. Soon the air was soaked with a light mist. Raindrops clung to the windows, reflecting the glowing flames. Eventually, they changed to gentle snowflakes that blew past, soft and pure and beautiful.

  An hour passed and then another before Johnny thought to pull out his log book. Being the first keeper of a new lighthouse, there were no other entries in the log, no thoughts and writings of previous keepers he could read to help ease the loneliness. He felt it keenly now that he was bound indoors with the snow blanketing out all signs of life, and he was burdened with the full responsibility of keeping the lights burning, so that any vessel out there might have visibility, some ray of hope.

  He believed Pilgrim Light would be his answer, a safe place to work and dwell. He thought he’d escaped prison. He thought he could hide his shame, and confinement lay behind him. But this was imprisonment of a different sort. A jail of his own making. Isolation.

  Johnny was beginning to rethink his choice of cutting himself off. Privacy had brought upon himself an even greater torment — the fear that no one would ever truly know the man inside.

  Captain Moon had taught him that self-worth was achieved through doing a work one was skilled at, and now Johnny was beginning to doubt whether he was any good at living alone.

  Johnny blamed Iris Moon for this melancholy. Before her visit, she had existed only as a young child from his past. Little Iris, who had adored him for no other reason than his being her playmate and friend. She was a child no longer. Age had erased her memory of him, and yet she bedeviled his thoughts when duty required he focus his attention on observations of the weather.

  It was with great effort that he forced himself to return to the log.

  At three a.m. the following morning, he ventured out upon the galley deck to brush a thick coating of accumulated snow off the glass panes. In the thick, drifting snow, clear sight of the mainland was closed off from him, but suddenly, despite the reduced visibility, the masts of a vessel took shape in the blur below.

  Pulse racing, Johnny returned to the warmth and shelter of the lantern room. He quickly shrugged the snow off his cap and shoulders and reached for his spyglass, training the telescope on the vessel, where he was able to make out the thrust of her three masts — square rigged sail on the two forward and fore-and-aft on the mizzen. A barque.

  Violent wind gusts blew snow through her rigging with gale force upwards of a hundred miles per hour, and he realized she’d not long be able to withstand the frothy swells gradually forcing her closer to shore.

  He yanked on his gloves and returned to the gallery to ring the fog bell, but the sound carried off in the wind, muffled by the dense hush of the thickly, driving snow. The barque would be hard pressed to hear its mournful toll. With a dread-filled heart, Johnny feared for those lives aboard. He worked through exhaustion, keeping the lamps burning at full strength and the windows outside free of ice, but no sooner had he brushed off a fresh coating of snow when they became blanketed once more.

  The air was charged with frost and cold, a bitter cold that stole his breath and reddened his cheeks. Benumbed and his strength waning, Johnny returned to the warm lantern room and once more took up his telescope. Melting snow dripped from his jacket to puddle on the floor. The barque was lying to, about a quarter mile from shore and just outside the breakers. Her main boom had been wrenched from the mast, and the halyards, frozen with ice, broke loose, bringing the mainsail crashing down.

  Johnny imaged the terror only too well. He heard the crackling of ice and screams of the men as though he were standing on the barque’s deck alongside them. He saw thirty foot waves crash over the rails and heard the rent of canvas, as the wind shred the foresail until it was torn away.

  The crew had lost control over their vessel. With certain finality, she drove onto the beach and lay there helplessly.

  The foreboding that had visited him days ago had become reality.

  Chapter 5

  Incessant pounding at the back door roused Iris from a deep slumber. The sound echoed up the grand staircase and through the hall to her second floor bedroom. Boom! … boom! … boom! The entire mansion seemed to quake with the urgency of it.

  She forced open her drowsy eyelids with her heart beating as though it were lodged in her throat. Not even the dullest light shone behind the draperies. Who would demand entrance in the dead of night if it weren’t an emergency? What frightening occurrence had the snowstorm brought to their door?

  On the other side of the wall in her father’s room, his white Labrador, Snow, began to bark and scratch at his bedroom door.

  Iris pushed herself off her pillows, and within moments, the entire household began to stir. She heard her father’s indiscernible mumblings, as though he were fumbling in the dark. A door creaked opened in the hallway. The sound of Snow thumping down the carpet followed, barking more ferociousl
y. Father’s heavy footsteps trailed after her.

  She lit a candle then tossed her dressing gown over her arm on her way out the door.

  Outside her room, she ran into Hetty. Eyes drugged with sleep, dark silver night braid tumbling down her back, the elderly Cornish woman held a crocheted shawl over her ample bosom and reached out a hand. “Pass me that candle, my Iris, and get on with your wrapper. ’Tis chilly in these halls, and I will not have you answering the door in naught but a thin nightgown,” she said in her West Country accent.

  Henrietta Hastings was well schooled in propriety, having lived in service in England the majority of her life — her most significant post being that of Iris’s mother’s nursemaid, where she was nicknamed Hetty by a very young Eleanor Sutherland, who found it difficult to pronounce Henrietta. Hetty remained with Eleanor into maturity and her eventual marriage to Captain Ezra Moon, a marriage which brought them both to America.

  Servant no longer, Hetty’s role in the new world had been as Eleanor’s devoted companion and a cherished Moon family member, though she had helped care for an infant Iris and had nursed her mama until the very end.

  She held the candleholder aloft, while Iris slipped her arms into the sleeves of her white dressing gown then quickly tied the pink silk ribbon at her throat. Reclaiming her candle, she took Hetty’s arm and strode with her to the top of the grand staircase. The flame wavered as they descended, casting eerie shadows over the papered walls and dark wood of the railings and carved balustrades.

  As they reached the main hallway, the banging ceased and soon so did Snow’s protective barking. The dog’s tone mellowed to quiet whimpers of greeting. The callers were known to Father, then. Their deep male voices carried from the back of the house, rising and falling in excited tones. Over them, Iris heard her Uncle Alden’s most clearly. He was shouting something about a vessel in distress.

  Iris glanced at the Boston-made, tall case clock as she passed. With each second that ticked by, a small ship rocked across the top of its dial, which at present read 4:17 a.m.