The Sea Keeper's Daughters

by Lisa Wingate

  She reminded herself that she and Thomas were colleagues, hired to perform an important job. That they must set a good example for the children. That nothing could happen between them. But, reading her letters, it was clear enough that something was happening… .

  The card table creaked as Clyde leaned my way. “Keep tryin’, you’ll make it out. You got younger eyes than mine. You could borrow my lookin’ glass.” He held up the large, square magnifier that my mother had used with her fine needlework. While I’d been down in the park with Ruby and Mark, Clyde had gathered up a few new tools.

  “I’ve got it. Thanks, though.”

  “Be stubborn, then. Sometimes, you could just take somebody’s help.”

  “Look who’s talking.” A laugh pushed out, and Clyde snorted in response.

  “Just like your mama.”

  I glanced up, and he shook his head, then went back to work, his lips moving like he was chewing gristle … or trying not to smile.

  Just like your mama. Was I anything like her? My mother was the best person I’d ever known. She had a nose for potential. She found it in pieces of sea glass and driftwood, and in people. She always wanted those around her to see the greatest possible versions of themselves. That passion made her a fantastic teacher.

  I wasn’t anything like her. But I wanted to be.

  “Thanks, Clyde.”

  Shrugging away my gratitude, he put the magnifier back in its stand, peering through it as he tweezed tiny scraps of paper onto a piece of double-sided tape. Some of the letters, corroded by liquids or food acids, had disintegrated to the point that nothing else could be done with them.

  I returned to the one Alice had written after the visit to the theater. That evening, storms, more flooding, and a flat tire had trapped them at the farm of a friendly old couple. Alice took advantage of the opportunity to collect the family’s stories of life in the mountains before the turn of the century. Thomas spent time in the barn working on the car, which had been pulled from the ditch by the farmer’s mule team. The girls enjoyed brushing and riding a Shetland pony, kept for the entertainment of twenty-four grandchildren.

  I read the letter in bits and pieces, making out what I could between stains and ink runs.

  Mr. Higgs knows of the Melungeons and says that we have made out the map given us by the cave dwellers quite correctly, despite our enormous detour caused by the flooded water crossing. Even though we’d had slow going, with two flat tires the day we stopped to see the picture show, it is good to know that we are still on roughly the right track. I have explained to Mr. Higgs that it is our intention to find the mission school that was Merry Walker’s hope for Able. Poor child, she is round as an apple in the middle, though the baby isn’t due for two months yet.

  Mr. Higgs was reluctant to talk of the Melungeon school in the beginning, but has since admitted that, though he has never seen it, he has heard of the place. He has directed us to go from here to the home of Mrs. Ida Mullins, a Melungeon woman living an hour’s drive around the mountain, though less than a mile across the hollow, as the crow flies. The location is quite remote, the last part of the trail traversable only by mule or on foot. He is confident that she can direct us to the orphan school. He has warned us, though, that it is unlikely the place will be equipped or willing to take in Able’s baby. Not many schools are prepared for orphans so young. We’ve told him we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

  On our route to the home of Ida Mullins and then hopefully to the school, we will cover some of our requisite tour territory, albeit not by the prescribed path. The national headquarters has decreed that all tour descriptions for the guidebooks must run from south to north. Thomas says that the bureaucrats in Washington do not understand the nature of mountain roads and flooded bridges. With Thomas’s skills and mine, we will piece together the information needed to keep up my quota and ensure that field reports go in more or less on time. As we’ve been able between the storms, Thomas has worked at his mapping and photography, and I have collected narratives and have written descriptions of several nearby rock bluffs and waterfall sites that will be included in the North Carolina State Guidebook.

  I have begun to worry, if only slightly, what the headquarters’ reaction may be when I submit the Melungeons’ narratives, assuming I am so fortunate as to gather them. Indeed, I have been shocked at times by how venomously the residents here speak of the Melungeons. There are those who find their inclusion in the project to be a threat to the reputation of the mountains.

  Even Mrs. Higgs, who is part Cherokee herself, does not speak well of these people. She has not refused shelter and food to Able, but she will not allow her to sleep inside either. We’ve been forced to put Able on the porch. When Mrs. Higgs sat us to dinner, she sent the girls to the kitchen, claiming the space at the main table for her grandchildren, who had walked over from the nearby farm in the rain. Though they were big boys, they were quite afraid of Able, and I gathered that, like many children, they had often been threatened that the Melungeons would spirit them off to some devilish fate, were they to misbehave.

  What a sad and strange thing that, having herself suffered some amount of injustice over the years for her Cherokee blood, Mrs. Higgs would not find the stench of it unpleasant. Indeed, her husband is loosely aligned with local Klansmen, having friends among them and occasionally attending their rallies and parades, in his words, “for the good o’ my bid’ness.”

  It does cause me to wonder if we have not been quite the same over the years ourselves, Ziltha, but I did not speak up about this to Mrs. Higgs. As we were staying beneath her roof and dependent on her husband’s kindness to repair the car, I thought it polite not to press the issue. If I am completely honest, perhaps I was merely lacking courage. I did allow her to put Able on the back porch on a sleeping pallet, pregnant as the child is, rather than insisting Able be given the bed with Emmaline.

  Upon our preparing to leave when the car was ready for travel, Mr. Higgs delivered a stern warning to me that, if we valued both our health and our souls, we would deposit Able as quickly as possible, either with Ida Mullins if the woman consented or at the orphan school. Mrs. Higgs admonished me not to inquire about the eventual fate of Able’s baby, should the school be willing to take her in.

  “Goodness,” I said. “I couldn’t leave her without knowing that the baby will be cared for. Able is hardly prepared to raise a child. I do not think she has fully grasped what will soon happen to her.”

  “Ain’t yer worry what’ll come of it,” said Mrs. Higgs. “No tellin’ what man that gal’s been with. Could be her babe might pop out blacker’n coal dust. Be better if’n it died birthin’, then. The gal’s just honey brown. She could be took for Injun if’n you bind up that nappy hair, but saddle her with a colored whelp and ain’t no man gonna want her, never. Best hope she’s ever got is if’n some fool feller might take a fancy to her.”

  “Able is just a child, and the baby only an innocent,” I protested, at once horrified and terribly aware that Mrs. Higgs was only acquainting me with the reality to which I had conveniently turned a blind eye thus far. Whatever future we may find for Able, there was scant chance of a future here for her child. In this hard place, in these lean times, little ones die every day. The rough mountain graveyards are filled with tiny bones.

  I thought of Emmaline when she was born … so small, so helpless, so dependent upon me to protect her and care for her. My heart ached for the babe nestled within Able’s body. What might happen to that fragile little life?

  Mrs. Higgs took me by the arms then. She held on hard. “And don’t dally there among them people, neither. Any sorry man ’r woman what goes to Melungeon country is liable to come home carryin’ some ailment what can’t be cured in the old ways ner the new… .”

  Alice’s story vanished into a water wash of ink, the bottom of the page, both front and back, completely unreadable.

  I turned over the plastic sleeve, read the top part of the back.<
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  … fear that, for all my worrying about the Ku Klux Klan, and how the state FWP office may receive my narratives, in the end, this may be my undoing instead. I have spoken to Tom of it several times, but he is young and carefree, and he considers these matters with his heart and not his mind. He does not yet know the weariness of the world, Ziltha. He practically still believes in fairy stories!

  I told him last night it was only a youthful crush he had for me, and that one day when he sat happily at his kitchen table, settled into a fine home with a family of his own, I would be but a distant memory. I would be only a woman he knew in another time and another place, merely a friend with whom he had shared an adventure in the early part of his life. No longer someone who mattered a bit.

  He insisted quite firmly, his blue eyes clear and earnest … painfully so, “There won’t be a life for me without you in it, Alice. I’ll marry you one of these days. You just wait and see.”

  “Mrs. Lorring,” I corrected again. “Thomas, please. I have been married. I have lived a life. I’ve a daughter to raise and guide. You are a very sweet boy, but I do not intend to marry again. Not ever. Not to anyone.” And though I knew it to be unwise, I bridged the space between us, touched his face as he turned away from me, hurt. “Thomas, you are so young… .”

  “I’m old enough to know my own heart, Alice.” He was as firm as can be, and just then, it was as if I could see into him, as if I could feel what a fine, good man he was, and how rich will be the woman who one day becomes his wife. I imagined seasons and years, mornings and nights, and babes with his soft blue eyes, his blond curls, his dimple embedded in their tiny chins.

  I know I could never commit such a wrong upon him. I could never deny him all that he truly deserves, all that his mother back home undoubtedly has dreamed for him. “I’m broken, Thomas. I am.”

  I told him of Emmaline’s father then, of the choice he had made to hurl himself from the ferry’s bow, his death by all accounts no accident. Not a tear came from me with the story. None ever have. There was only the hollowness again. “He never even knew his daughter. Three months after he passed, Emmaline came. Perhaps it was my grief, or the nerve tonics the doctors prescribed to me, but there were problems with Emmaline’s birth. I can never have another… .”

  Her confession disappeared into an ink run at the bottom of the page. I held it to the light, trying to make out anything more. How had Thomas answered her? Where had the conversation gone from there?

  “Won’t find it.” Clyde eyeballed a vacant spot in his current project, tried one tiny shred of paper, then another. “No way to tell what his answer was. She’s a stubborn woman, that Alice. Silly, bein’ so worried about … whatever it is … ten, twelve years’ difference. That was part of the trouble with your mama and me. She ever tell you that? She was just barely seventeen when I went to Michigan to visit my aunt and uncle. I was twenty-seven. I had some leave time before headin’ overseas, and my cousins ask’ me up there ice fishin’. I met your mama one night at a dance hall—not the sort of place they have nowadays. This was a respectable deal. We two danced all night long, and that poor fella she come there with, he finally just give up.”

  Clyde took off his glasses, sat back and rubbed his eyes, then gazed into the darkness beyond the room. “Next day, I ask your mama out to go snowshoein’ in the north woods, and she said sure, she’d like that. Hoo-eee! That was some day! Just quiet, the spruce trees all aglitter and the ground lookin’ like somebody’d sprinkled sugar over it. It shined ever’where. Your mama had on a red coat and a hat to match, and curls tumblin’ over her shoulders. I can still see her, clear as yesterday. She told me she knew how to snowshoe, but truth was, she had never been, not even once. I spent the whole day catchin’ her, and the two of us laughin’. She had the sweetest laugh, your mama. Just like harness bells, jinglin’ soft over the snow the way they do on a winter morn.”

  I sat perfectly still, lost in Clyde’s story now, imagining the scene. Imagining my mother: young, vibrant, seventeen, her auburn hair long and thick. No bald head, no tired eyes, no heavy disappointments in life yet.

  If only I could talk to her—that girl in the woods. The one I’d never known. If only I could understand who she was …

  Now I saw a truth I hadn’t before. Clyde was the only way I could. He held a piece of my mother I’d never experienced. That piece would be gone when Clyde was gone, unless I asked him to share it with me.

  “What happened?”

  “After eight days, it was time for me to ship out.” Clyde told the story matter-of-factly as he worked, as if he’d already made peace with it. “I was headed to ’Nam for a yearlong tour of duty. But your mama and I knew it was love. We walked down the lakeshore that day and promised we’d wait on each other, however long it took. What I didn’t know was that she hadn’t told her folks what was goin’ on, at all. They thought them dates was with a boy from school, not some soldier. When they found out the truth, and that I was ten years older and headed off to Vietnam, they said no—we had to end things.”

  “Your mama and I wrote letters while I was in ’Nam, and we traded ’em through my cousins, but her parents got wind of that and made it clear I’d better stop. So I did. I couldn’t blame ’em, much. If I had a daughter, sixteen, seventeen, I wouldn’t want some grown man chasin’ after her neither. Once I come home on leave, I wrote her a letter and told her I was gettin’ married. Not too long after that, I did.”

  The seams of the story came together like one of Alice’s letters, ragged edges slowly fitting in, changing what I’d always believed. I’d never asked my mother about Clyde after they’d reunited. I didn’t want to know. She probably wouldn’t have told me anyway. She’d done everything she could to protect and repair the damaged memory of my father, believing that by doing so, she was protecting and repairing me.

  “So … you broke my mom’s heart?” Seventeen. That would’ve been around the time she’d been awarded a scholarship by her dad’s employer and gone to college—the first one in our blue-collar family to do so. She’d finished her music education degree in less than four years and taken an inner-city teaching job because it came with a grant that would pay off the rest of her education and allow her to start graduate work. She was almost through her master’s degree when she’d met my father at his concert. She always said she’d fallen in love with him over Lord Byron’s poem and Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major, a piece once deemed unplayable.

  Ironically, Tchaikovsky wrote the concerto after a disastrous three-month marriage and a suicide attempt. Perhaps that had been a harbinger of things to come. My mother had no idea that the euphoria of new love was only one of my father’s many long-lasting moods.

  “… did what I thought was best.” Clyde was still telling the story—his and my mother’s. “I thought your mama’d get over me, and I thought I’d get over her, too. In some ways we did and in some ways we didn’t. That’s how life goes. Nothin’s all true and nothin’s all wrong. You make choices, and you guess at how they’ll turn out. Little bit like these letters. It don’t come with a map, and only some of the print is on the pages. The rest, you gotta figure out yerself.”

  The doorbell sounded. Ruby stood up and barked, and Clyde and I looked at each other. I had the odd sense that my mother was out there in the quiet darkness, finally home and waiting for us to let her in so we could clear the air between the three of us, once and for all.

  You see, she’d say in the patient, managerial teacher voice that tamed classrooms full of rowdy music students, beating on instruments. There’s no sense in getting upset. When you’re upset, you don’t think clearly. Just take a deep breath and try again… . Years of working with kids had taught her not to be too reactive about anything.

  “Who d’ya reckon is downstairs at this hour?” Clyde checked his watch. “It’s after nine thirty in the evenin’.”

  “No idea.” After last night’s incident in the stairwell, I’d made sure to doub
le-check the lock when Ruby and I had come home with supper. Softshell crab was on special, and I’d splurged. Following the conversation in the park with Mark, I’d felt giddy and impractical … and relieved. A good lawyer could make all the difference in our situation with Bella Tazza, and I didn’t doubt that Mark was a good lawyer.

  Rising from my chair, I had the silly notion that Mark was downstairs—that he’d come by to … I couldn’t really conjure a reason he’d stop over at nine thirty at night, but the thought was appealing. I paused at the long, gold-framed mirror in the hallway, wiped away the mascara stains under my eyes, whipped the ponytail holder from my hair and let it fall in loose, dark waves around my shoulders.

  Not good … but not horrible, either.

  I’d done all that before I even realized how dorky it was. Of course it wasn’t Mark down there. He wouldn’t just show up at my door without calling. And he had my cell phone number. He’d put it in his phone right after he’d opened a whole new—and confusing—door during our conversation in the park. I was afraid to step through that door. I think we both were. But I couldn’t resist taking a peek, thinking, Maybe I’m after something more… .

  What did he mean by that, exactly?

  A message on his cell phone had reminded him that he was late leaving for a dinner meeting, so we’d parted ways hurriedly, and with the question unexplored. Mark had hustled off while I’d stood in the park with Ruby, inconveniently theorizing as to what sort of dinner meetings happen on Saturday nights. Maybe he had a date.

  Curiosity still niggled, even hours later, as the doorbell rang again.

  “You gonna get that, or do I gotta?” Clyde prodded.

  “I’m headed down.” Come on, Whitney, get a grip. It isn’t Mark.

  But I did a last once-over, just in case.