May

by Kathryn Lasky

  Hugh not only knew about the science of the stars but he knew poetry. And that first night he recited a verse from memory by a poet she had never heard of named William Blake. The poem was about a “fair-hair’d angel of the evening.” Hugh promised to bring her a book of Blake’s poetry the next time they met, “since you are my ‘fair-hair’d angel.'”

  “But I’m not fair-haired,” she said, taking a long, thick strand that had fallen from the scallop comb. “I’m not sure if red counts.”

  “Of course it does,” he replied, and picked up the strand and pressed it to his lips. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’re not an angel, either.”

  A shiver passed up her spine, and she gave a small shake. She wrapped her arms around her shoulders.

  “Cold?”

  “No, no,” she said in barely a whisper. Not cold, but not quite an angel, she thought.

  When Hugh returned to the small dinghy dock in the village and neatened up the boat, he sat for several minutes, thinking. There was something so extraordinary about May. She had a quick mind, one of the quickest he had ever encountered. She was every bit as smart as any of the Radcliffe College girls he had met, and yet she’d received much less formal education. By her own admission there were long periods of time when she missed school because it was impossible to get to Bar Harbor from the lighthouse. And yet she had read the entire volume of Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea. And she mentioned that she had been trying to teach herself trigonometry. When she’d given him the book, she’d apologized if there were any scraps of paper still stuck between the pages.

  But it was not simply her intellect that impressed him. There was something essentially mysterious about her. She was like the stars—alluring and yet ultimately unknowable. Even her hair was unique, a shade he had never seen. It was the color of cooling embers, full of subtle flickers, soft radiances. However it was her eyes, with their green intensity, that held the secret of her being, the mystery that was at her center. He had kissed her. He hadn’t meant to. But he did and it was … His thoughts drifted off. She was beyond words. He sighed and looked down. Something glittered on the floorboards of the boat. He reached down and picked it up. Was it a fish scale? How would a fish scale have gotten into the boat? He was the first person to sail it, the only so far. Well, he knew they scaled fish on the next pier over. So perhaps the wind just blew the scales around a bit. He was just about to flick it overboard, but something stopped him and instead he tucked it into his pocket.

  21

  SHADES OF GRAY

  “YOU SEEM MIGHTY PERKY,” Zeeba said when May walked into the kitchen the morning following the dance.

  “Oh, I guess it’s just summer coming on. Makes me feel good.”

  Zeeba made one of her half sigh, half groan noises. It was a sound May often thought must be difficult to make for it seemed to come simultaneously from both Hepzibah’s chest and her nose. May made a habit of never responding to this odd noise. “I think I’ll go out and check the new chicks.”

  They had ordered chicken eggs, which had been delivered four weeks before, and they had only just hatched. “They don’t need your tending them yet. They’re just a day old. Don’t need to feed a chick ‘til it’s three days old.” Zeeba was right. May knew this. Just before a chicken hatches it draws into its stomach all the yolk of the egg from which it hatched. They arrive well fed. But May wanted to get out of the house. She wanted to relive those kisses of the night before.

  Here it was summer—clear blue sky—and yet inside the lighthouse it seemed like the dead of winter. Zeeba had closed most of the curtains, for she said that the light hurt her failing eyes. Murky shadows crowded every corner of the house. Dimness lurked in every nook and cranny.

  There were so many shades of gray. There was the bleak, leaden grayness of the lighthouse—repressive, gloomy, deadening. Then there was the clear gray of Hugh Fitzsimmons’s eyes. Lively, full of light, like a breaking dawn.

  May went out to the chicken yard. The chicks seemed fine—twenty little hatchlings all softly bobbing about. She sat down and picked up one. Holding it in her hands, she could feel its rapidly beating heart. It seemed to soothe her jumbled emotions about Hugh. She had never felt this way about any boy … well, he’s not really a boy, she thought. He’s a young man and so is Rudd. She might have liked Rudd well enough once. But now she could hardly believe she ever had. Why hadn’t she seen through Rudd’s confidence to realize it was really cockiness? Hugh was confident, too, sure of himself but never cocky. He could laugh at himself. She bet that Rudd could never do that. The question came back to haunt her once again — What if Hugh knew that I am not quite human? Would he be sickened? Suddenly it was as if the light drained out of the day. She could never tell Hugh Fitzsimmons who she really was. Never, ever.

  And what if he doesn’t really like me at all? What if I am just a passing fancy, something to entertain him while he does his research in Maine? Then what matter would it make what I am? There must be so many beautiful, fashionable girls in Boston, smarter than she was, more elegant.

  That night, as she slipped into the water, she felt guilty. Was she swimming to her life or away from it? The sea was so still that the reflections of the stars barely shivered. But for the first time since her transformation, she felt a kind of loss. She was leaving behind the world that Hugh Fitzsimmons knew and entering one that he could never, despite all his learning, even imagine. She swam on slowly.

  The two dolphins that now often swam with her were not swimming as close as usual. They seemed to sense that she was in no mood for play tonight. She needed to be alone, so they soon grew bored and swam off.

  When she was well past The Bones, May rolled over on her back. She lifted her tail and studied it in a shaft of moonlight. Was it freakish? The scales climbed up over her hips and finished in a curve just beneath her navel. Would a human find her revolting? Would her shape, her form, disgust Hugh? She had never felt lonelier.

  Yet she was not entirely alone. Once again she felt the two empty spaces on each side of her pressing in. She looked up at the stars and searched for the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades. The moon was still young, so the darkness made the star cluster more visible. She found two of the sisters just rising on the purple line of the horizon.

  “Have you ever loved?” She spoke out loud to them as if she expected the stars to whisper back to her. “Loved a human?” She swam through the night and into the clear gray light of the dawn.

  22

  A STRANGE ENCOUNTER

  A WEEK LATER, May was walking down the street in the village when she spied Rudd ahead. Abruptly she turned into a small lane to avoid him. She couldn’t forget his face from the night of the dance. The vacant space behind the eyes that made him—the words popped into her head—less than human. But was that not exactly what she was? A chill ran through her.

  “Hannah!” She felt a tap on her shoulder. Surely it couldn’t be him. He had been at least a hundred yards away. She wheeled around, a seething fury rising in her. It was not Rudd but a tall, dark-haired man with luminous green eyes. But those eyes soon clouded in confusion. “P-pardon me,” he stammered. “I mistook you for someone else.” The color drained from his face. He seemed suddenly fearful and wavered slightly on his feet. He was holding a small jug of something that he had apparently just bought at the chandlery.

  “Are you all right?” May said. The man looked as if he were suffering some sort of attack.

  “No! No! I’m fine. Really.” The color crept back into his face and he laughed, although it seemed rather forced. “It’s just that you do resemble another young lady—and—and I’m slightly embarrassed.”

  “Oh” was all May could think to say. She was uncomfortable with the way he was regarding her. It was not offensive by any means, and yet it seemed slightly intrusive, as if he saw something in her? Once again, she was aware of a cool radiance that seemed to define those spaces at her sides. She looked at the man again. He did
n’t seem like a shipyard worker; perhaps he was a yacht captain and that was why he had been in the chandlery shop. She looked at the jug.

  “Turpentine,” he said. “Painter, you know.” His eyes were clamped on her face as if he were searching for something, or perhaps attempting to convince himself that she was not the other girl. She suddenly realized that there was an odd familiarity about him. She had never seen him before, of this she was certain, but there was something about this man that resonated within her.

  “Painter? Yacht painter?”

  “Oh, no, portrait painter. I am doing a portrait of the Hawleys’ daughters.”

  “Oh, summer folk,” she said, thinking of all the beautifully dressed girls who would soon be fawning over Hugh.

  “Yes.”

  There was nothing left to say. There never was much to say between island people and the summer folk, except if they served in their “cottages.” And a portrait painter did not qualify as a servant. May realized this. She knew of the Hawleys. They had a vast, rambling estate that was called Gladrock. She said good-bye and walked quickly down the lane. But she felt the painter’s eyes on her back the entire time.

  Impossible! Stannish Whitman Wheeler thought as he watched May turn the corner at the end of the lane. How on earth could there be two of them? As soon as she turned around, he knew it was not Hannah, although the resemblance was extraordinary. But he was a portrait painter. He knew faces. In the manner that cartographers could map an unknown continent and transpose a landscape, a topography, from the mysterious into the knowable, he could interpret the geography of a face and map it with his paints and brushes. The girl’s chin was a tad less sharp, but had the same slight dimple in the middle. Her cheekbones a degree or two higher. Her eyebrows did not sweep in with quite the same curvature. And the mouth? Perhaps a bit less generous. Yet she moved with the same fluid grace as Hannah.

  And there was one thing he knew for certain. This girl, unlike Hannah, had already crossed over. She knew what she was. As if to confirm this she wore a scallop shell—the scallop of the Cailleach, found in the deep open waters of the Atlantic, which rarely washed up on any beach. The word Cailleach meant blue hag or veiled one in Scottish folklore. And the pleated shell, which was almost pure white with reddish or blue tints at its edges, did resemble a veil or mantle like a nun’s wimple or a priestly stole.

  God forbid, he thought, that a man falls in love with her as I have with Hannah. “God forbid!” And this time he whispered it aloud.

  He felt someone touch his shoulder and wheeled around. He was embarrassed to be caught talking to himself. He hoped this rugged fellow hadn’t heard him.

  “Pardon me, mister, but did you see a gal with red hair pass this way?”

  “Girl with red hair?” he repeated. Something about the man’s face unnerved him. “I’m not sure.”

  “Either she did or she didn’t, mister. It ain’t such a hard question.”

  Stannish Wheeler was indeed a knower of faces. His eyes scrutinized the one before him. There was something about the man that was disturbing. Predatory. “No,” he said quickly. “I was talking to a woman, not a young girl, just a minute ago, but she had jet-black hair. Not red. About thirty, thirty-five years old, I would say.”

  “Not the one I’m hunting,” Rudd said quickly, and went off.

  Hunting! Stannish Wheeler thought. And although the man went in the opposite direction, the painter felt only small relief.

  23

  OPPOSITE SHORES

  MAY’S FATHER HAD BEGUN TO ALLOW HER to take the skiff to and from Egg Rock on her own when the weather was good. She was not sure why he had come to this decision. It might have been for the same reasons that he was so agreeable to her meeting Hugh at the cove beach. After a few of these evening meetings she decided to tell her father about their star sails, as she called them. Gar seemed genuinely happy for her. But they both agreed that it was perhaps not a good idea to tell Zeeba.

  Her sense was that Gar had agreed partly in defiance of Zeeba. For ever since that day when Hepzibah had said so quietly and yet with such deadly earnestness, “You’re not mine,” a new power was unleashed in May. As horrible as those words might have seemed, they gave her the power to call her life her own.

  May would never openly defy Gar, but it was as if her father almost envied her for claiming ownership of her life in a way he never had. He was both amazed and inspired by her boldness, and he wanted to honor it. There came to be a tacit understanding between May and Gar that Hepzibah’s position in the household had changed. Her complications, her elaborately contrived physical failures, were failures of not eyes, heart, or lungs but failures of the soul.

  Hepzibah Plum sensed this change in her position as much as anyone. Although May and Gar still brought her hot-water bottles, fetched all the potions, powders, and tonics, spared her any of the normal household chores that a woman might be expected to perform, Hepzibah felt that her complications were no longer respected. May and Gar indulged her as one might indulge a very young child who claimed to have an imaginary friend. They played along, and it enraged Hepzibah.

  Hepzibah was home alone at the moment. Gar had gone out with Doug Hardy to help him haul traps, and the girl had gone off in the skiff. Hepzibah was deeply suspicious of May whenever she left and was sure she was sneaking off to see a boy. Well, if she got herself in the family way they’d have to hire someone to help out. The idea of May going off and marrying used to upset Hepzibah. But ever since the change in the household, this lack of respect for her complications, she had begun to think perhaps it would be better to get a hired girl in. Her cousin Suzanne, out in western Massachusetts, had a daughter, a docile dough-faced girl, Iris, who might fit the bill fine. They wouldn’t have to pay her much, not if they provided room and board.

  Hepzibah got up from her rocker to shut the screen door, which was flapping about in the breeze. Gar should have fixed the durn thing weeks ago. She didn’t like drafts slipping in uninvited. And those chicks were peeping out there. She bet the girl had forgotten to feed them. Well, Hepzibah would do it. Serve the girl right if one of those pullet chicks died. Then where would they be next winter for eggs?

  After tending to the pullets, Hepzibah walked around to the other side of the house to see if she could spot either Gar or May coming back. It was long past dinnertime.

  She raised her hand to her forehead to shade her eyes and scanned the cut between the island and Bar Harbor. She spotted the gaff-rigged sail of the skiff and pressed her lips together. “Hmmph.” It would take May another forty-five minutes to get back on this wind. She would have to tack against it. So much for dinner!

  Hepzibah plopped down on the round top of a large spool that had been used for cable and decided to watch her. “Girl’s got a way with the wind,” she muttered as she saw May neatly come into the wind and head off on a new tack. As the skiff drew closer she could make out May’s figure at the tiller. What is that fool thing she wears in her hair all the time?

  There were other boats out there that were wrestling with the shifting and capricious breezes, but May seemed to be slipping right through them. It was as if she were playing cat’s cradle with the wind. She avoided becoming tangled while the others were floundering about, luffing to a near halt as their sails were pressed into irons and not pulling worth a tinker’s damn. “Way with the wind,” Hepzibah murmured again, and then began to wonder some more.

  Hepzibah tipped her head toward the sunshine and closed her eyes. Did she think of Polly Bunker first or Noggy Brynn? Or did they both come to her at the same time? But Polly was real, very real. Didn’t matter that she had been dead all these years. She’d been Gar’s true love, his fiancée, and she’d clung to him from the grave, she had! Sometimes Hepzibah swore she could smell Polly—a sick, rotting-flesh stench. She knew Gar visited her grave up at the Meeting House cemetery, where all the Bunkers done been planted. Not her family, thank God. She didn’t want to be neighborly with Polly in de
ath. It was bad enough now with Polly dead and her alive!

  And Noggy? Well, that was just an old tale about a sea witch who lived in a cave off Grand Manan. But they were both beautiful. Noggy, the stories went, had strange powers over the tide, the moon, and yes, the wind — a way with the wind. She had a magic rope tied with three knots — witches’ knots they called them—the first could summon a gentle breeze, the second a southeasterly, and the third a strong nor’easter full of ice and fury even in the summer. Polly Bunker had her ways, too, not perhaps with the wind but with men. Was it possible for Polly to have birthed the girl? She died in the winter. She could have hidden her pregnancy, but no. Not possible, for it was ten years later that Gar had brought the baby back, and it was a baby — not a ten-year-old child. She laughed.

  “Whatcha laughing about out here in the sun, Zeeba?” May had been astonished to come across Zeeba sitting on the spool, looking perhaps more relaxed, almost content, than she had ever seen her. Hepzibah leaped up. Her energy and quickness stunned May. “What’s come over you, Zeeba?”

  For a few seconds Hepzibah appeared slightly disoriented. Then her eyes hardened and she glared at May. “Whatcha got there in your hand?”

  “Well, in this hand I got your new stomach powders from Doctor Holmes.”

  “I mean the other hand!” Hepzibah spoke sharply. “And no lying.”

  “No lying? What are you talking about? It’s a halyard from the skiff. It’s starting to shred. I took it down so Pa can splice it.”

  “It’s got three knots in it,” Hepzibah said in an accusatory voice.

  “Yes, so what? I tried to fix it just temporary.”

  “Just temporary?” She made the low growlish sound she so often summoned to express disapproval mixed with disbelief. “You want to know what I got?” Hepzibah plunged her hand into a deep pocket in the folds of her skirt. “Now, lookee here!” She opened her hand to reveal a dead chick. “You done starved it, girl. You ain’t been doing your chores.”