When Daniel told her that he was going to leave her in Jamaica in the care of the local midwife, she thought he was joking, until his silence confirmed that he meant these cruel words.
“How can you even consider leaving me alone to have your child? They don’t have real medicine or—” She hadn’t been able to think of what to say or how to describe her utter sense of abandonment. “They’re strangers.”
“It’s perfectly safe,” he consoled her. “The midwives are very good.”
“I’m not going,” she said.
“You can’t stay on the ship, Annie. None of the men are prepared to deliver a baby. It’s just not possible. And this is done all the time, believe me. It’s for the best.”
“Please, Daniel, don’t make me go. I can’t bear it.”
“I have no choice.”
“You’re the captain. Of course you have a choice.”
“You need a midwife.”
“Then stay with me. Don’t make me have this child alone. Can’t you see how frightened I am? Can’t you imagine the things that can go wrong on that island?”
The Intrepid sailed into Negril, and one of the crew rowed Annie into the docks. Daniel said good-bye, but she couldn’t look at him. She watched neither the ship disappearing behind her, nor the shore as it approached, only her bare feet in the bilge water stretched before the sphere of her belly.
The midwife who met her at the dock carried her by horse and wagon to a small hut near the beach. It was a rickety structure with one solid wooden wall that seemed to hold the whole thing up, and the other walls built from bamboo and palm fronds. Annie stood in the doorway but didn’t step inside. A small bed with a night table, a basket for her clothing, and a single chair were all the comfort she could expect. “I can’t stay here.”
“I will take good care of you. You will be okay here, better than on that ship.” Ishema fluffed the pillow on the bed and folded the blanket back. “Come, lie down now, rest.” Five feet tall, a perfectly round head, and hair shorn close to her scalp, she was a sturdy woman with wide shoulders, no waistline, and flat feet that rooted her firmly to the ground.
“I’m not tired. I don’t even know where I am.”
Ishema looked Annie over, assessing her strength. “We’ll take a walk; you’ll see where you are.” She left Annie’s bags outside the cottage and led her along the beach, a scooped-out section of the island about two hundred yards wide with tall cliffs on the eastern edge. “This is the southern shore. We get the warm breezes. And these cliffs.” She waved her hand to indicate the rock walls that protected the area. “They protect us from the weather, so you are safe here.”
Daniel had told Annie that Ishema was well respected on the island and that she had delivered many sea captains’ children. Once Annie settled into her temporary home, her fear began to subside. Local children ran by and stuck their heads in the window to see the white woman. Ishema’s friend Therese came every day with a basket of mangoes, papayas, bananas, coconut, lime, roast chicken, or grilled fish. She wore her hair braided with multicolored shells and ceramic beads that rattled when she walked.
“Who is she?” Annie asked one evening. She and Ishema sat on woven mats outside the hut and watched the sun go down while they picked at chicken bones.
“She is my friend,” Ishema said.
The birth had been difficult, the baby girl born two months early. Seeing her daughter was like seeing God. It filled her with hope. But in the first two days, the baby developed an infection in her lungs. Ishema nursed her with island herbs, and Therese brought medicinal remedies from the village, but the little girl stopped breathing in the middle of the night.
They buried Annie’s daughter in a tiny grave beneath a wooden cross that existed as a blur across her mind. Did she throw herself on the grave, or had she dreamed that? Did the baby cry during the funeral? Did Daniel know?
When Annie refused to get out of bed after five days, Ishema threatened to pour the chamber pot on her. “You’re not the only one to lose your baby. There’s many ladies lose their baby.”
She peeled a pineapple while she spoke. Her hands were always in motion. When Annie got up, Ishema brought in a basin and bathed her, lifted Annie’s arms to scrub her armpits like she would a child’s. “You stink,” she said.
Annie pulled on the light cotton shift Ishema gave her and drank the glass of water forced upon her.
“Come now, outside.”
Therese leaned against the curved trunk of a palm tree, her head tilted back in the shade of the fronds that sheltered her like an umbrella. A frayed end of rope held her braids back off her face so that they poured down her back like a dark waterfall. She followed them through the beach grass toward the village road. “You need to move your body to get your mind back,” Ishema said, tossing the words over her shoulder.
Annie felt as if she was trying to walk underwater with the tide pushing against her. When was Daniel going to get her off this godforsaken island?
In the village, small huts constructed from palm fronds and vines served as storefronts for locals who sold fruit, soup, and brooms. The huts lined the road down to the harbor, where small skiffs splayed out from the long dock like fins. Several schooners and a brig swung on their moorings. Of course none of them was Intrepid. It wasn’t her husband she longed for but escape from this place where her baby had been buried in the ground, escape from the strange sound of these women’s voices telling her the names bougainvillea, jacaranda, pimento.
“The women in Jamaica don’t have husbands to do all the work for them. Sometimes the husband is useless, and these women here”—Ishema waved her stout hand along the row of huts—“they provide for their families. No husband like yours to take care of them.”
“But he left me here,” Annie said.
“He’ll be back, and we’ll still be here working for ourselves. You count your blessings while you have them.”
Therese stood to one side during this conversation. Somewhere along the road she’d picked up a cedar branch to use as a walking stick. Now it was propped at her left side, her long fingers wrapped intricately around the bark as if staking her claim to the soil she stood upon and to the league of women left to fend for themselves. Her lithe, strong body, upright and relaxed, seemed to embody the power of these women.
“Come now, let’s go,” Ishema said, and she pushed Annie along the road. They walked past the harbor into thick woods until the path ended.
“Now what?” Annie asked.
Therese climbed, catlike, the tendons in her calves taut like an animal’s as she followed the trunk of a fallen palm tree. She walked along the trunk to another tree, where she climbed down the branches to a wooden plank that led deeper into the woods.
“You go,” Ishema said, her finger poking Annie in the back. Annie stepped onto the tree trunk. As her legs found their strength, her balance came and she stepped easily onto the wooden plank. She lost herself to the rhythm of her huffing breath and the work of keeping up with Therese.
They followed a dirt path through boulders until they reached a lagoon, where light turquoise water reflected harsh light and burned the eyes. Cliffs rose a hundred feet on the western side of the lagoon. Behind a grove of coconut palms, away from the water, was a cluster of huts where women sat outside and wove blankets, mats, and baskets. Beyond the huts, closer to the water, four women were arranging and counting crates like the ones Daniel transported on his ship. As Therese led her toward a hut with a veranda and a room on each side of the front door, Annie began to sense in her reserve a leadership that came not from speaking but from knowing.
Annie sat across from her on a rattan mat backed with bright pillows while Ishema went inside to get them something to drink. She had questions but was afraid to speak.
Therese leaned back against the pillows. “So, you see. This is how our women work.”
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“You give them work,” Annie said.
“We have sailors who come ashore often. They need to unload their goods, and visit with the women, and eat good food before they go back to sea.”
“You help them sell their cargo?”
Therese nodded. “These men,” she said. “They can’t go to a buyer in the harbor. They need to sell through another means. Do you understand?”
“No.”
“They are robbers.”
“Pirates?”
“We break up the cargo and sell it off in pieces where it can’t be traced. Coffee, spices, lumber, hemp—for everything there is a buyer.”
“And these women, they…work with the men?”
Therese lit a hand-carved pipe and puffed it out the side of her mouth. “You can’t judge us. We have to survive, like you. We all make arrangements to survive.”
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.
4
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 con
cerned, 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.”
Lightkeeper's Wife Page 4
