The Eyes of the Amaryllis

by Natalie Babbitt

  While the cake was baking, she found herself wandering again and again to the dining room to look at the drawing of the Amaryllis, with its wind-belled sails and thrusting prow, the figurehead tilting unafraid over a frill of splitting waves, chin lifted to the wide and blank horizon. She tried to picture the ship sailing like this on the sea bottom, and found that she could picture it—could easily imagine the heavy silence of the deep, deep water, the schools of little fish flitting soundlessly before the prow, the dim green wavering light surrounding it. And she could see, too, rotting chests and boxes, lids askew, the rocks and sandy bottom glinting here and there with scattered treasures. She could picture all this, and more: the shadowy figures on the deck, one of them surely the grandfather she had never seen, striding effortlessly up and down. Phantoms. But real. And wonderful. Why not?

  Why not. There was no answer for “why not,” except to say “why not, indeed.” And so, at last, accepting everything, she said to Gran at lunch, “Will Seward want you to give back the head?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gran. “I’ve been asking myself that very question. But if he doesn’t know I have it…Geneva, perhaps I should put it away somewhere for a while. Just in case.” And the deed was done at once, the head nested deep in a drawer of the lowboy in the dining room, the drawer locked, the key dropped into the china teapot on the parlor mantelpiece. “Now,” said Gran, “if he should come here—which is very unlikely—he won’t discover it. I think we shall be safe. Have another piece of cake. Why, bless my soul, look there! The sun’s come out!”

  It was true. The house brimmed suddenly with light—hard, yellow light—as if a curtain had been swept aside. From the parlor window after lunch, Jenny saw a sky wiped clean, and polished to a glittering blue. The tide was in, but the sea still seemed sullen, thumping fretfully no more than halfway up the sand as the breeze puffed, dropped, puffed again. She craned her neck to look both ways along the beach, and that was when she saw him—Seward, plodding along, still some distance away, headed in their direction.

  Her first thought was: He walks here even when the sun shines! And then: “Gran!” she called. “Come look. He’s on the beach again.”

  Gran came in from the kitchen, where she’d been setting a pot of beans to soak, and stumped up to the window. By this time, Seward had made his way a great deal closer and his face was lifted. He was looking toward the house.

  “Speak of the Devil, and he’ll appear,” said Gran.

  Jenny understood for the first time what this expression really meant, and she shivered a little. “Do you think he’s coming to the house?” she whispered, as if she feared he’d hear her through the glass.

  “He never has before,” said Gran. “He’ll pass on by, no doubt.”

  But he did not pass on by. When he arrived at the bluff, he turned and, coming up the sand beside it, paused, pulling at his beard.

  “Stand back,” Gran murmured. “He’ll see us. He’s coming in.” She moved away from the window, and Jenny, turning too, saw that she stood very straight beside her chair, her chin up. “We’ll tell him nothing, Geneva,” she said. “Whatever he asks, we’ll tell him nothing. There. There’s his knock. Let him in, child.”

  If Seward was a ghost, he was a very solid one, a rather short man, only a few inches taller than Jenny, but stocky, wearing the same coat she had seen him in before. His tousled hair and beard were damp and beaded with sea spray, and the rough-skinned folds and pouches of his face made him look as if he’d spent a dozen lifetimes on the beach. He wiped his sandy boots carefully before he came in, and he stood in the parlor a little awkwardly, keeping his hands in his pockets. He looked about the room, and when his quiet eyes found the plaster sea gull, they flickered briefly and then were quiet once more. “I’m sorry to intrude on you this way, Mrs. Reade,” he said, and Jenny thought again how much his low voice sounded like the breeze.

  “You’re welcome here,” said Gran stiffly.

  “Something has come,” he said.

  Gran’s fingers tightened on her crutch. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “It’s valued,” he said, ignoring her words. He spoke without severity, without any emotion at all. “You must give it back at once.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Gran repeated. “Nothing has come.”

  There was a pause, and then his gaze moved to Jenny. “She must give it back, miss,” he said.

  Jenny found herself unable to speak. She could only stand there clutching the skirt of her pinafore, staring at him.

  At last he said, “I’ll come again.” He turned and stood at the door, waiting. Jenny went and opened it, and he stepped over the sill into the wind, his hair lifting and fluttering. Jenny noticed, then, that much of it was white. “Goodbye, Mrs. Reade,” he said without looking back.

  “Goodbye, Seward,” said Gran with the same stiffness in her voice.

  Jenny shut the door behind him and went to the window to watch him move away. Gran said, “He shan’t have it.” And all the easy calm of the last few days was gone. “I’ve waited too long. I’ll never give it up.”

  “How did he know?” asked Jenny, feeling again a trembling in her stomach. “What will he do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gran, “but he shan’t have it. If he comes back, Geneva, you’re not to let him in.”

  Early in the evening, after supper, Gran said, “I want to go out and have a look around. Let’s go sit on the bench for a while.”

  “But what if Seward comes back?” Jenny asked her nervously. “What if he’s out there now?”

  “If he is, he is,” said Gran defiantly. “I’m not going to shut myself up in this house because of him. I haven’t been out for a week, and I need a breath of air. Get the oilskin, Geneva. The bench will still be damp and we’ll need something to sit on.”

  Outside, settled on the bench, the two sat for a long time without speaking. Gran kept her back straight, standing the crutch upright against her knees, gazing up and down the beach, but there was no one to be seen walking there. Waves came rolling in smoothly, in even rows that smacked the whole length of the beach at once till the sand seemed to ring with them. There was no wind at all.

  “Gran,” Jenny said at last, “doesn’t the sky look funny!” She had been studying it, and had thought at first that it was promising another sunny day tomorrow, but now she was not so sure. From far to the south, high feathers of cloud were fanning up and out from what appeared to be a single point on the horizon, and behind the house they were stained to brilliant orange and scarlet as the sun dropped. “Gran,” said Jenny, “look! The clouds are coming in a great big V.”

  Gran looked up, and her eyes narrowed. After a pause, she said, “Yes. I’ve seen it like that before. There’s a storm somewhere out to sea. Maybe even a hurricane. It’s the time of year for it.”

  “A hurricane!” Jenny exclaimed, and all at once she was dismayed. They heard of such things in Springfield from time to time, and had even felt the fringes of the worst ones in the form of lashing rains and wind. Her father—how pale and quiet he would be until the storm was over! She remembered standing beside him at a window when she was much smaller, watching the raindrops drive against the pane, and he had said, not really to her, “It’s a terrible way to go, out at sea in such a storm.” And she had thought at the time that by “go” he had meant, simply, “travel,” and could not understand the dread she sensed in him. Now she understood it very well, and felt the dread herself. The Amaryllis had been lost in a hurricane, and he had stood here, right here where she was sitting now, and watched it all happen. And couldn’t do a thing to stop it. “A hurricane!” she repeated. “Will it come here?”

  “Perhaps,” said Gran, “but I don’t think so. They very rarely do. We might get the edges, if there is one, but that’s all.” Her manner was casual, but there was something behind it that Jenny couldn’t read—something hard.

  “The air is so quiet,” said Jenny uneas
ily. “There isn’t any wind at all.”

  “Not now,” said Gran, “but it may pick up. You mustn’t let it frighten you, Geneva. Weather is only weather. It comes and goes.”

  Jenny was amazed by this response. She stared at Gran, and then she said, “But, Gran, how can you say that when you know what the sea can do?”

  “What can it do, Geneva?” Gran asked, and her voice was harsh. “Rise up? Swallow ships? Wash away a town? Yes, it can do all that. It can take your life, your love, everything you have that you care for. So. What should you do? Run away from it, as your father did? Run to Springfield and hide in a closet so you don’t have to hear it or see it, or even think of it? That doesn’t make it go away. It’s still here, doing what it pleases. So you stay and try to keep what’s left to you. You wait it out. You fight it and survive it. Lots of storms have blown across this bay, blown and gone, and I’m still here. Strong as ever. I’m not afraid of it, and never was.” She sat breathing hard for a moment and then she said, in a cooler voice, “You mustn’t be afraid of it, either.”

  Jenny was silent, her grandmother’s scorn for her father burning deep inside her. Gran seemed like a rock there next to her. Invincible. And unforgiving. There was something fine in her defiance, but something heartless, too. Jenny wondered if she herself could be a rock, but looking out at the water, she doubted it. The sea was full of transformations. It was very wide, and very deep. And she was very small.

  “Come,” said Gran at last, pulling herself up. “We’ll go inside now.”

  In the time that remained till bedtime, as they sat in the parlor, each with her own book open in her lap, the breeze came back gradually, first in little puffs and gusts, and then in longer sweeps that whined at the corners of the house. Gran looked up, listened, and laid her book aside. “Geneva,” she said, “we’ve left the oilskin out on the bench. I can hear it flapping. Go out and get it, child, before it blows away.”

  “Yes, Gran,” said Jenny. She went outside and stood in front of the house for a moment. It was growing dark very rapidly, and the sea, though it had been lying far out before, was rising, in those long, smooth swells, at a pace that seemed unusual even to Jenny’s inexperienced eye. She hurried to the bench and took up the oilskin, and then, turning, she stopped short and gasped. Seward was standing on the grass between her and the house.

  “Good evening, miss,” he said.

  “G-good evening,” Jenny stammered.

  “I said I’d come again,” he reminded her. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Jenny stared at him, not knowing what to say. Gran had told her she mustn’t let him into the house, but what if he insisted?

  “Tell her for me,” he said, as if he could read her thought, “that she must give it back at once.”

  “She won’t, though,” Jenny blurted, forgetting that she was to tell him nothing. “She said so.”

  “She must,” said Seward. “It’s valued. The ship can’t find its way along the bottom without its eyes. Explain to her. She must give it back now, before it’s too late.”

  Jenny’s breath caught. “Oh, please,” she begged, “what do you mean? What will happen?”

  “If she doesn’t give it back,” said Seward in that voice without emotion, “the sea will come and take it.” He turned away. “Tell her,” he said over his shoulder, and then he disappeared into the dark.

  But, inside, Gran set her jaw and said, “Never. No matter what. Does he think I waited half a lifetime just to give up now? Don’t be afraid, Geneva. Go to bed.” She sat up straight in her chair, her eyes bright and hard, gripping the crutch across her knees like a weapon. “I shall stay down here tonight,” she said, “and wait.”

  All night the hurricane—for there was a hurricane—wheeled slowly north. Its eye rode far offshore, but its sweeping arms of wind and rain clawed at the nearest beaches, and the sea rose up before it in great, spreading welts that raced for miles ahead, rolling in to land in the measured waves Jenny had seen at evening.

  It had begun a week before, this hurricane, on the very day of the arrival of the sign, begun as a petulance deep in the Caribbean. But as it swung in an upward arc to the west and north, its indignation grew, the speed of its winds increased, until at last, arriving in mid-coastal waters, it had spun itself into a rage. It was small, no more than forty miles across, but deadly: round its eye the winds were whirling ninety miles an hour. It paused at dawn and hung for an hour, and then, as if its orders had been heard, its target sighted, it veered abruptly westward toward the coast, and the sea ran on ahead in a frenzy of excitement.

  All night Jenny had slept in fits and starts, aware of the booming rhythm of the waves. Then, after hours of tossing, she was brought bolt upright by a sudden Niagara of rain. At the same moment a blast of wind slammed at the house, a wind that did not pass off but kept on coming, its voice rising steadily. The light was so dim that she could barely see, and could not guess what time it was. Alarmed, she slipped out of bed, pulled on her clothes, and crept downstairs, holding tight to the banister. The clock in the lower hall said eight o’clock. Morning! But it seemed more like the onset of the night.

  She peered into the parlor and saw that Gran was sitting rigid in her chair, wide awake, still gripping the crutch across her knees. “Gran,” Jenny quavered, “is this it? Has the hurricane come?”

  “Yes,” said Gran. “It’s here. It’s just beginning.”

  “Oh, Gran, what shall we do?” wailed Jenny.

  “We shall wait!” Gran rapped out. “It’s only a storm. Only a storm, Geneva! We shall sit here and wait it out.”

  Jenny was drawn almost against her will to the window, and what she saw there dizzied her. Under the darkened sky, the sea was white, running sidewise, exploding in sheets of spray against the long arm of land that formed their end of the little bay. Clots of foam fled by through the air like rushing phantoms, and the water was so high that the beach had vanished. Rain was flung past the window horizontally, so that it was hard to tell the place where it ended and the sea began. Everything was water. And noise. For the voice of the wind kept rising steadily. Jenny shrank back from the window. “Oh, Gran!” she whispered.

  “It’s only a storm, I tell you,” Gran insisted. Her face was stony. “Go put the kettle on for tea.”

  Jenny went to the kitchen and took up the kettle. She was trembling so much that it rattled in her hand, and she could not get the pump to work. She leaned against the metal sink and worked the handle up and down, up and down, but nothing came. Helplessly, she went back to the parlor. “There’s no water!” she exclaimed.

  Gran laughed at this, a harsh, unnatural laugh. “No water!” she echoed. “Milk, then. And bread. We must keep up our strength.”

  They sat in the parlor with their bread and milk, but Jenny could scarcely swallow. She wanted to cover her ears, to run away, but there was nowhere to run. That other world she had accepted, that world that lay beyond the edges of the sea, had loomed up now and was blotting out, shouldering out, drowning out the real world altogether. The parlor, the house, and everything in it seemed altered—thin and unfamiliar—as if the order she depended on had warped and might collapse at any moment. She wanted to cry, but Gran’s fierce expression kept her from it. Her grandmother sat with narrowed eyes and ate slowly, refusing to acknowledge the rising bellow of the wind, ignoring the spray dashed in around the windows, down the complaining chimney, under the bolted door. The house trembled, Jenny trembled, the whole world trembled. Gran alone was firm.

  Outside, the wind increased. Impossible, and yet its voice grew stronger, till the roaring was almost intolerable. Jenny doubled over on the sofa, her arms around her head, but still she dared not cry. And then, after a time, Gran seemed to notice her and said, “Geneva. Sit up.” Her voice was steely. “Take away the plates and glasses. Now.”

  Jenny got to her feet somehow, and did as she was told. “I won’t cry,” she told herself over and over. “I won’t let her see
me cry.”

  When she came back to the parlor, Gran said to her, “Bring me the head.” Without a word, Jenny took the key from the china teapot, opened the drawer in the dining room, lifted out the wooden head, brought it to Gran. Gran took it and settled it in her lap, pushing the crutch off onto the floor. “Now,” she said, “go and sit down. And wait.”

  Perched again on the sofa, Jenny wrung her hands and fought back tears. There was nothing else to do but sit and wait, while the storm shrieked on, all around the house. Outside, the sea rose higher and came searching almost to the top of the little bluff. Sit and wait—it can’t go on forever—there isn’t that much wind and water in the world. Jenny’s thoughts presented these alternatives to nightmare, but other thoughts rejected them: sit and wait for the sea to come and take us—take the wooden head and me and Gran and everything.

  And then, after a screaming eternity, the clock in the hall began to strike, a faint, feeble sound against the wind—bong, bong, bong, all the way up to ten. And as if the tenth stroke were a signal, the storm stopped. Suddenly. The rain stopped, the wind stopped, the room was full of dazzling sunlight. Jenny thought, “We’re dead. We’ve gone to heaven.” Her ears rang with the silence. She looked at Gran, but her grandmother sat as stiffly upright as before. “Gran!” she cried. “Is it over? How can it be over all at once like that?”