The next morning, Miss Carstairs entered the conservatory to see the merman sitting on his rock, his face turned sternly from the ocean and toward the door. Clearly, he was waiting for her, and when she took her seat and lifted her eyes to his, she felt absurdly like a girl caught out in some childish peccadillo and called into her mother’s sitting room to be chastised.
Without preamble, the merman sent a series of images breaking over her. Two mer—one male, one female—swam together, hunted, coupled. Soon they parted, one to the warm coral reefs, the other to arctic seas. The merwoman swam, hunted, explored. A time passed: not long, although Miss Carstairs could not have told how she knew. The merwoman met a merwoman, drove her away, met a merman, flung herself upon him amorously. This exchange was more complex than the earlier couplings; the merman resisted and fled when it was accomplished.
The merman began to eat prodigiously. He sought a companion and came upon a merman, with whom he mated, and who hunted for him when he could no longer easily hunt for himself. As the merman became heavier, he seemed to become greedier, stuffing his pouch with slivers of fish as if to hoard them. How ridiculous, thought Miss Carstairs. Then, all at once, the scales covering the pouch gave a writhing heave and a tiny crested head popped out. Tiny gills fluttered; tiny arms worked their way out of their confinement. Claiming its wandering gaze with iridescent eyes, the merman’s companion coaxed the infant from its living cradle and took it tenderly into his arms.
Three days later, Miss Carstairs sent John to the village to mail the completed manuscript of her article, and then she put it out of her mind as firmly as she could. Brooding, she told herself, would not speed it any faster to the editor’s desk or influence him to look more kindly upon it once it got there. In the meanwhile, she must not waste time. There was much more the merman could tell her, much more for her to learn. Her stacks of notes and manuscript pages grew higher.
In late January, “Preliminary Study of the Species Homo Oceanus Telepathicans” was returned with a polite letter of thanks. As always, the editor of The American Naturalist admired Mr. Carstairs’s graceful prose style and clear exposition, but feared that this particular essay was more a work of imagination than of scientific observation. Perhaps it could find a more appropriate place in a literary journal.
Miss Carstairs tore the note into small pieces. Then she went down to the conservatory. The merman met her eyes when she entered, recoiled, and grinned angrily at her; Miss Carstairs grinned angrily back. She felt that her humiliation was his fault, that he had misled or lied to her. She wanted to dissect his brain and send it pickled to the editor of The American Naturalist; she wanted him to know exactly what had happened and how he had been the cause of it all. But since she had no way to tell him this, Miss Carstairs fled the house for the windy marshes, where she squelched through the matted beach grass until she was exhausted. Humanity had always bored her and now scholarship had betrayed her. She had nothing else.
Standing ankle-deep in a brackish pool, Miss Carstairs looked back across the marshes to her house. The sun rode low in a mackerel sky; its light danced on the calm water around her and glanced off the conservatory glazing. The merman would be sitting on his rock like the Little Mermaid in the tale her father had read her, gazing out over the ocean he could not reach. She had a sudden vision of a group of learned men standing around him, shaking their heads, stroking their whiskers, and debating whether or not this so-called merman had an immortal soul. Perhaps it was just as well the editor of The American Naturalist had rejected the article. Miss Carstairs could imagine sharing her knowledge of the merman with the world, but she could not share the merman himself. He had become necessary to her, her one comfort and her sole companion.
Next morning she was back in the conservatory, and on each morning succeeding. Day after day she gazed through the merman’s eyes as if he were a living bathysphere, watching damselfish and barracuda stitch silver through the greenish antlers of elkhorn coral, observing the languorous unfurling of the manta ray’s wings and the pale groping fingers of hungry anemones. As she opened herself to the merman’s visions, Miss Carstairs began not only to see and hear, but also to feel, to smell, even to taste, the merman’s homesick memories. She became familiar with the complex symphony of the ocean, the screeching scrape of parrotfish beaks over coral, the tiny, amatory grunts of frillfins. In the shape of palpable odors present everywhere in the water, she learned the distinct tastes of fear, of love, of blood, of anger. Sometimes, after a day of vicarious exploration, she would lie in her bed at night and weep for the thinness of the air around her, the silent flatness of terrestrial night.
The snow fell without Miss Carstairs’s noticing, melted and turned to rain, which froze again, then warmed and gentled toward spring. In her abandoned study, the ink dried in the well and the books and papers lay strewn around the desk like old wrecks. Swimming with the merman in the open sea, Miss Carstairs despised the land. When she walked abroad, she avoided the marshes and clambered over the weed-slick rocks to the end of the spit, where she would stand shivering in the wind and spray, staring into the waves breaking at her feet. Most days, however, she spent in the conservatory, gazing hungrily into the merman’s pearly eyes.
The merman’s visions were becoming delirious with the need for freedom as, in his own way, he pleaded with Miss Carstairs to release him. He showed her mermen caught in fishermen’s nets, torn beyond recognition by their struggles to escape the ropes. He showed her companions turning on each other, mate devouring mate when the social cycle of one had outlasted the patience of the other. Blinded by her own hunger, Miss Carstairs viewed these horrific images simply as dramatic incidents in his submarine narrative, like sharks feeding or grouper nibbling at the eyes of drowned sailors.
When at last the merman took to sulking under the rock, Miss Carstairs sat in her wicker chair like a squid lurking among the coral, waiting patiently for him to emerge. She knew the pond was small; she sensed that the ocean’s limitless freedom was more real to him when he shared his memories of it. She reasoned that no matter how distasteful the process had become, he must eventually rise and feed her the visions she craved. If, from time to time, she imagined that he might end her tyranny by tearing out her throat, she dismissed the fear. Was he not wholly in her power? When she knew the ocean as well as he, when she could name each fish with its own song, then she would let him swim free.
One spring morning, Miss Carstairs came down to the conservatory to find the rock empty. At first she thought the merman was hiding; only when she moved toward the pool did she notice that the floor of the conservatory was awash with water and the door was ajar. Against all odds, her merman had found a way to escape her.
Miss Carstairs groped for her wicker chair and sat, bereaved and betrayed as she had not been since her father’s death. Her eye fell on the open door; she saw blood and water smeared over the steps. Rising hurriedly, she followed the trail through the garden to where the merman lay unconscious at the head of the beach stairs. With anxious, delicate fingers, she caressed his mouth and chest to feel the thin breath coming from his lips and the faint rhythmic beat under his ribs. His tail was scored and tattered where the gravel garden path had torn away the scales.
Somewhere in her soul, Miss Carstairs felt dismay and tenderness and horror. But in the forefront of her brain, she was conscious only of anger. She had fed him, she thought; she had befriended him; she had opened her mind to his visions. How dare he abandon her? Grasping him by the shoulders, she shook him violently. “Wake up and look at me!” she shouted.
Obediently, the merman opened his opalescent eyes and conjured a vision: the face of a middle-aged human woman. It was a simian face, slope-jawed and snub-nosed, wrinkled and brown.
The ape-woman opened her mouth, showing large, flat teeth. Grimacing fearfully, she stooped toward Miss Carstairs and seized her shoulders with stubby fingers that stung and burned her like anemones. Harsh noises scraped over Miss Carstairs’s
ears, bearing with them the taint of hunger and need and envy as sweat bears the taint of fear. Miss Carstairs tore herself from the ape-woman’s poisonous grasp and covered her face with her hands.
A claw gripped her wrist, shook it to get her attention. Reluctantly, Miss Carstairs removed her hands and saw the merman, immovably melancholy, peering up at her. How could he bear to look at her? she wondered miserably. He shook his head, a gesture he had learned from her, and answered her with a kind of child’s sketch: an angular impression of a woman’s face, inhumanly beautiful in its severity. Expressions of curiosity, wonder, joy, discovery darted across the woman’s features like a swarm of minnows, and she tasted as strongly of solitude as a free-swimming mer.
Through her grief and remorse, Miss Carstairs recognized the justice of each of these portraits. “Beast and angel,” she murmured, remembering old lessons, and again the merman nodded. “No, I’m not a mer, am I, however much I have longed for the sea. And it isn’t you I want, but what you know, what you have seen.”
The merman showed her a coral reef, bright and various, which seemed to grow as she watched, becoming more complex, more brilliant with each addition; then an image of herself standing knee-deep in the sea, watching the merman swim away from her. She smelled of acceptance, resignation, inwardness—the taste of a mer parting from a loved companion.
Wearily, Miss Carstairs rubbed her forehead, which throbbed with multiplying thoughts. Her notebooks, her scholarship, her long-neglected study, all called to her through the merman’s vision. At the same time, she noted that he was responding directly to her. Had she suddenly learned to speak visions? Had he learned to see words? Beyond these thoughts, Miss Carstairs was conscious of the fierce warmth of the spring sun, the rich smell of the damp soil, and the faint green rustle of growing leaves. She didn’t know if they were the merman’s perceptions or her own.
Miss Carstairs pulled herself heavily to her feet and brushed down her skirts with a shaking hand. “It’s high time for you to be off,” she said. “I’ll just ring for Stephen and John to fetch the sling.” Unconsciously, she sought the savor of disapproval and rum that was John’s signal odor; it lingered near the kitchen door. At the same time, she had a clear vision of Stephen, wrapped in a disreputable jacket, plodding with bucket and fishing pole across the garden to the seawall. She saw him from above, as she had seen him from her bedroom window early that morning. So it was her vision, not the merman’s. The scientist in her noted the fact, and also that the throbbing in her head had settled down to a gentle pulse, discernible, like the beating of her heart, only if she concentrated on it.
A laughing school of fish flashed through the ordered currents of her thoughts, and Miss Carstairs understood that the merman found her new consciousness amusing. Then a searing sense of heat and a tight, itching pain under her skin sent her running into the house shouting for John. When he appeared—from the kitchen, she noted—she said, “Get a bucket and a blanket and wet down the merman. You’ll find him in the garden, near the sundial. Then bring the stretcher.” He gaped at her uncomprehendingly. “Hurry!” she snapped, and strode off toward the seawall in search of Stephen.
Following his scent, she found him hunched over his fishing pole and his pipe. He tasted of wet wool, tobacco, and solitude. “Stephen, I have learned everything from the merman that he is able to tell me. I have decided to release him.”
Stephen began to pull in his line. “Yes, miss,” he said. “About time.”
The tide was going out, and the men had to carry their burden far past the tidal pool where the merman had first washed ashore. It was heavy going, for the wet sand was soft and the merman was heavy. When they came to water at last, Miss Carstairs stood by as they released the merman into the shallows, then waded out up to her knees to stand beside him. The sun splintered the water into blinding prisms; she turned her eyes inshore, away from the glare. Behind her, Stephen and John were trudging back toward the beach, the conservatory glittering above them like a crystal jewel box. Sharp tastes of old seaweed and salt-crusted rocks stung her nose. Squinting down, Miss Carstairs saw the merman floating quietly against the pull of the sea, one webbed hand grasping the sodden fabric of her skirt. His crest was erect, his mouth a little open. Miss Carstairs read joy in his pearly eyes, and something like regret.
“I shall not forget what you have shown me,” she said, although she knew the words to be superfluous. Mentally, she called up the ape-woman and the scientist and fused them into a composite portrait of a human woman, beast and angel, heart and mind, need and reason; and she offered that portrait to the merman as a gift, an explanation, a farewell. Then he was gone, and Miss Carstairs began to wade back to shore.
The Maid on the Shore
I live on a rocky coast at the easternmost tip of Newfoundland, in a cottage huddled under a cliff at the beach’s edge. Its tumbled stones suggested poverty, a reeking seaweed fire, and a dirt floor, but that was just my father’s caution. We did burn seaweed, but cleanly, in a well-vented hearth, and our floors were laid with polished stone flags softened with wool rugs of my mother’s weaving. The two bedrooms behind the kitchen were furnished with finely carved beds and chairs of walrus bone. The windowless walls of the inmost room were lined with rows of books.
I cannot remember a time when I did not read. Sheltered by my family’s isolation, I learned of mankind and magic from the volumes on my father’s shelves. On winter nights, we would sit by the salt-smelling fire—Mother, Father, me—each absorbed in worlds that touched but did not disturb each other. Mother would card the wool from her sheep and spin the fluffy rolags into yarn that she would thread upon her handloom and weave into fine cloth. She sang as she worked, the cloth inspiring the song and the song the cloth, for her magic was wordless and deep and strange: the inhuman, sifting magic of the sea.
Father sat at the other side of the hearth, a lap-desk of fine teak upon his knee, scratching-scratching with a gray goose quill on the thin pages of his notebook. His magic was all words. Spells, formulas, observations of the stars and moon, charms, cantrips, and incantations—he played with them through the winter evenings, muttering constantly under his breath.
Sometimes I could coax Father out of his wizardly fog by begging him for a tale of his life upon the Continent and in the fabled East, where magicians were still held in honor. His favorite story, and mine, was of the one time when he had found himself without words: the soft May night when he had seen my mother dancing naked on the shore.
Under the moon she had danced and sung with her sisters, her body white and fluid as sea-foam, her hair black as a starless night. Knowing that she was a seal-maiden, knowing that he must hide her sealskin if he wished to possess her, knowing she would not return until next May Eve, my father cast aside his knowledge and his clothing together and walked naked down to the strand to meet her and the seal-maidens took him into their dance as the sea takes a swimmer.
When the dawn-star rose and her sisters drew on their pelts to slide into the ocean, my mother held my father’s hand and watched them go. Next morning she was with him still. Of her own will, she lived with him and loved him; of her own will, she bore him a maid-child: me.
Like my parentage, my person and magic were strange, mixed things. My human and selkie blood mingled to give me a subtle, elusive magic that would seep away if I were to lose my virginity—a fate that seemed more distant than the ever-receding horizon. On the winter evenings of my childhood, I would sit between Mother and Father on a sealskin rug, reading to myself and humming in counterpoint to Father’s mutterings and Mother’s singing. I understood and loved both their magics: Mother’s songs and patterns spoke to me as though tongued; Father’s words seeped into my bones like music. I was, I know now, content.
Although I had heard tales of mortal men, I never saw one until the autumn of my eighteenth year, when an unlucky fisherman ran aground in a sudden squall on the rocks at the mouth of our bay and my mother swam out and hauled him to sh
ore, bruised, half frozen, terrified. Father insisting that she bring him into the cottage, she dragged him through the door and dropped him beside the kitchen fire, where he lay panting and staring about him.
In that fisherman’s wondering eyes, I saw my family anew. My father—small and spindle-shanked; a reader by the squint of his ice-blue eyes; a thinker by the animation of his dark, thin face. My mother—plump and white-skinned; strong, smooth muscles mounding her arms; hair and whiteless eyes black-brown and glowing like a healthy animal’s. Me—plump and white-skinned like my mother, small like my father; black-haired, blue-eyed, seal-toothed. The fisherman drank our broth and reluctantly accepted Father’s offer of a pallet beside our hearth. When dawn came, he was gone, and one of Father’s books, left carelessly on a side table, went with him, and the finely woven cloth under it as well.
Mother roared her rage at the theft and Father talked of moving. But as the days and weeks went by, our fear ebbed. The fisherman might have died making his way overland, or lost the book or the weaving; perhaps no one believed his story of a wizard and a selkie and their witch-daughter living alone in a distant bay. We did not move.
Winter came. We folded our sheep, stored the potatoes and dried the beans from Mother’s garden, salted the last of the fish she had caught for us with her sharp seal’s teeth, and settled in gratefully to our usual winter pursuits.
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