Lightkeeper's Wife

by Sarah Anne Johnson

  “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.

  8

  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. “N
o 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.

  9

  The shabby, mismatched crew taught Blue how to fling a buck knife at a target nailed to the mast, how to shoot at rotten pineapples, shells, and pieces of wood from the rail, and later, the finer points of punching, choking, tripping, and slitting an enemy’s throat. Daniel and the death of her baby became distant memories that she folded into drawers in the back of her memory. Every loss fueled her rage, until Annie was replaced with blind fury. She fought the men until she beat them as much as she lost to them. She fought as if she was fighting for her life.

  One afternoon, as she dumped the slosh bucket over the transom, she looked up and spotted a three-masted schooner, a merchant runner. Blue stared until she was sure, until she saw the bowsprit bob on a wave and the steady progress to windward, then called, “There’s a ship out there!”

  The call echoed among the pirates as she ran belowdecks and rushed to the fo’c’sle for her gun and her knife, fumbling among the others. Johnson slung one cutlass across either side of his belt, loaded his musket with one round, and filled his pockets with lead. Jack stood amidship to eye their prey. Spyglass to one eye, he gestured Donovan to hold his course.

  “Looks like we got work to do. Get some loot and head to shore for a fuck.” The sailor called Rusty spat the words at Blue. He was a short, broad man with a wide, concave face like a shovel, his square nose flat as his chin, his green eyes tarnished. His vein-splattered skin was bloated with liquor.

  “Leave her alone,” the one called Donegan said, a pistol tucked under the belt that he wore high on his waist. He held his right hand on the pistol butt and shoved past Rusty with one shoulder.

  “You can fuck all you want,” Blue said, her hand on her knife. “But you’re going to need a pile of gold to convince any woman to take that shriveled little prick into her twat.”

  Rusty lunged toward her, and she unsheathed her knife and held it pointed outward so that if he advanced his stomach would puncture on the fine tip she’d sharpened every day since her arrival on the Alice K. She couldn’t give in or show weakness; it would be the end of her.

  Rusty saw the knife and stepped aside. “Fucking whore, you’ll be the one to die in this. You!”

  Blue grabbed him by the shoulder and, catching him off his guard, swung his great weight around, slammed him into the wall, and knocked the wind out of him. She stepped forward and grabbed his windpipe with a thumb and forefinger on either side. Her heart knocked loud in her chest. “I’m nobody’s whore,” she said, tightening her grasp. “You understand? I’m here to fight and get my money just like you. You hear me?”

  Rusty spat at her, and when she loosened her hold on his throat, he jerked himself free and shoved her back, adjusting the weapons hanging in disarray from his holsters. He pulled his shirt down over his waist and spat again into the bilge.

  On deck, blood still throbbed in her head. Jack stood at the helm and barked orders to the crew to hold the ship on course toward the merchant runner. They would pretend to be convening for a gam, as ships often met at sea to trade mail and news of other boats. “Take ’em off guard. Don’t even give ’em time to think anything’s wrong or pick up their arms.”

  Blue walked back to the quarterdeck so that she could be closer to Jack. His tactics appeared simple enough, sailing up to windward of the merchant ship and calling out for a meeting. When the Alice K sailed alongside the schooner, the crew threw ropes across to the merchant runner and the ships were tied together. The captain of each vessel stood amidships, and a plank was run from one ship to the other.

  That was when Jack leaned in toward Blue and said, “You’ll follow the men and try not to get yourself killed.”

  Jack stepped across to the other ship and spoke for a moment with the captain. He seemed to vibrate with authority, the fiend in him conveying orders by the sheer force of his energy as he handed the captain over to Rusty, who led him to the mast and held him there with the point of his musket. With Jack’s signal, the men rushed across the plank. One of the pirates carried an iron spear; others carried hatchets and wooden clubs with
nails protruding from the ends, pistols slung around their shoulders, and a variety of swords and knives swinging from belts. The men crossed the plank in a clatter of brass and boots, some of them barefoot and hollering obscenities. As the pirates boarded, the schooner’s crew scattered and the captain’s eyes darted about the decks. In a desperate attempt to escape, he kneed Rusty in the groin. Rusty bent over and the captain delivered an uppercut to his chin that Rusty seemed to barely notice. He grabbed the captain by the throat and pinned him to the mast. “You’ll stay right here. You’ll not move a muscle!”

  The merchant ship’s crew reached for any makeshift weapons: belaying pins, buckets, ropes. They fought for any hope of survival. Blue followed Jack toward the hold to take stock. When a young sailor swung a knife at Jack, Jack caught him by the wrist and bent his arm back to shake the knife loose.

  “That’s your one chance.” Jack spat in the sailor’s face. “Get moving.”

  The hold was full of coffee, salt beef, jute, sugar, rum, and other goods they couldn’t identify without unpacking. “We’ll take what we can use,” Jack said. “And those extra sails, and any ammunition or weapons onboard. You got it?”

  “Okay, okay,” Blue said, counting the sail bags. She followed Jack to the captain’s quarters, where Rusty held the captain on the floor with his boot pressed into the man’s neck. Jack tilted his head in the direction of the open trunk, which held gold coins and bills, and then nodded and swept his hands around the room in a gesture that said, Take all of it. Blue filled the captain’s own rucksack with the gold and cash and emptied the captain’s jewelry box—a gold pocket watch, cuff links, buttons—and took socks and trousers as well as a sextant, a brass telescope, and a small box compass.

  When the room was cleared of all valuables, Blue went into the passageway and heard a single shot that rang from the captain’s quarters. He’s killed the captain, she thought. The captain’s murder unleashed whatever fight the crew had left in them—part fear of the same thing happening to them, and part rage at the unfairness of the attack, the sheer bad luck of crossing paths with the pirates.