by Bill Bowers
“The widow Perot is dead at last,” was his first greeting.
“What time did she die?” asked C——.
“Last night at half-past ten o’clock.” C—— rose, and going out beckoned the old man to follow her. “These are graves,” she said, pointing to the heap of bricks. “Who were buried here?”
“I didn’t keer to tell thee: I was afraid it might make thee oncomfortable. But—as thee knows so much the crew of the Petrel was buried onder them. That one which is part oncovered by the wind is whar Captain John Salterre is laid.”
The old man never knew our reason for asking. There is my ghost-story, the only one for which I have never heard a rational explanation.
11
The Woman at Seven Brothers
By Wilbur Daniel Steele
A famous author of short stories, plays, and novels, Wilbur Daniel Steele (1886–1970) was raised mainly in Denver, Colorado, where his father was a university professor. Steele was well known for his mastery at creating a dark, foreboding atmosphere in his many ghost stories. “The Woman at Seven Brothers” was published in 1908.
I tell you sir, I was innocent. I didn’t know any more about the world at twenty-two than some do at twelve. My uncle and aunt in Duxbury brought me up strict; I studied hard in high school, I worked hard after hours, and I went to church twice on Sundays, and I can’t see it’s right to put me in a place like this, with crazy people. Oh yes, I know they’re crazy—you can’t tell me. As for what they said in court about finding her with her husband, that’s the Inspector’s lie, sir, because he’s down on me, and wants to make it look like my fault.
No, sir, I can’t say as I thought she was handsome—not at first. For one thing, her lips were too thin and white, and her color was bad. I’ll tell you a fact, sir; that first day I came off to the Light I was sitting on my cot in the store-room (that’s where the assistant keeper sleeps at the Seven Brothers), as lonesome as I could be, away from home for the first time, and the water all around me, and, even though it was a calm day, pounding enough on the ledge to send a kind of a woom-woom-woom whining up through all that solid rock of the tower. And when old Fedderson poked his head down from the living-room with the sunshine above making a kind of bright frame around his hair and whiskers, to give me a cheery, “Make yourself to home, son!” I remember I said to myself: “He’s all right. I’ll get along with him. But his wife’s enough to sour milk.” That was queer, because she was so much under him in age—’long about twenty-eight or so, and him nearer fifty. But that’s what I said, sir.
Of course that feeling wore off, same as any feeling will wear off sooner or later in a place like the Seven Brothers. Cooped up in a place like that you come to know folks so well that you forget what they do look like. There was a long time I never noticed her, any more than you’d notice the cat. We used to sit of an evening around the table, as if you were Fedderson there, and me here, and her somewhere back there, in the rocker, knitting. Fedderson would be working on his Jacob’s-ladder, and I’d be reading. He’d been working on that Jacob’s-ladder a year, I guess, and every time the Inspector came off with the tender he was so astonished to see how good that ladder was that the old man would go to work and make it better. That’s all he lived for.
If I was reading, as I say, I daren’t take my eyes off the book, or Fedderson had me. And then he’d begin—what the Inspector said about him. How surprised the member of the board had been, that time, to see everything so clean about the light. What the Inspector had said about Fedderson’s being stuck here in a second-class light—best keeper on the coast. And so on and so on, till either he or I had to go aloft and have a look at the wicks.
He’d been there twenty-three years, all told, and he’d got used to the feeling that he was kept down unfair—so used to it, I guess, that he fed on it, and told himself how folks ashore would talk when he was dead and gone—best keeper on the coast—kept down unfair. Not that he said that to me. No, he was far too loyal and humble and respectful, doing his duty without complaint, as anybody could see.
And all that time, night after night, hardly ever a word out of the woman. As I remember it, she seemed more like a piece of furniture than anything else—not even a very good cook, nor over and above tidy. One day, when he and I were trimming the lamp, he passed the remark that his first wife used to dust the lens and take a pride in it. Not that he said a word against Anna, though. He never said a word against any living mortal; he was too upright.
I don’t know how it came about; or, rather, I do know, but it was so sudden, and so far away from my thoughts, that it shocked me, like the world turned over. It was at prayers. That night I remember Fedderson was uncommon long-winded. We’d had a batch of newspapers out by the tender, and at such times the old man always made a long watch of it, getting the world straightened out. For one thing, the United States minister to Turkey was dead. Well, from him and his soul, Fedderson got on to Turkey and the Presbyterian college there, and from that to heathen in general. He rambled on and on, like the surf on the ledge, woom-woom-woom, never coming to an end.
You know how you’ll be at prayers sometimes. My mind strayed. I counted the canes in the chair-seat where I was kneeling; I plaited a corner of the table-cloth between my fingers for a spell, and by and by my eyes went wandering up the back of the chair.
The woman, sir, was looking at me. Her chair was back to mine, close, and both our heads were down in the shadow under the edge of the table, with Fedderson clear over on the other side by the stove. And there were her two eyes hunting mine between the spindles in the shadow. You won’t believe me, sir, but I tell you I felt like jumping to my feet and running out of the room—it was so queer.
I don’t know what her husband was praying about after that. His voice didn’t mean anything, no more than the seas on the ledge away down there. I went to work to count the canes in the seat again, but all my eyes were in the top of my head. It got so I couldn’t stand it. We were at the Lord’s prayer, saying it singsong together, when I had to look up again. And there her two eyes were, between the spindles, hunting mine. Just then all of us were saying, “Forgive us our trespasses—” I thought of it afterward.
When we got up she was turned the other way, but I couldn’t help seeing her cheeks were red. It was terrible. I wondered if Fedderson would notice, though I might have known he wouldn’t—not him. He was in too much of a hurry to get at his Jacob’s-ladder, and then he had to tell me for the tenth time what the Inspector’d said that day about getting him another light—Kingdom Come, maybe, he said.
I made some excuse or other and got away. Once in the store-room, I sat down on my cot and stayed there a long time, feeling queerer than anything. I read a chapter in the Bible, I don’t know why. After I’d got my boots off I sat with them in my hands for as much as an hour, I guess, staring at the oil-tank and its lopsided shadow on the wall. I tell you, sir, I was shocked. I was only twenty-two remember, and I was shocked and horrified.
And when I did turn in, finally, I didn’t sleep at all well. Two or three times I came to, sitting straight up in bed. Once I got up and opened the outer door to have a look. The water was like glass, dim, without a breath of wind, and the moon just going down. Over on the black shore I made out two lights in a village, like a pair of eyes watching. Lonely? My, yes! Lonely and nervous. I had a horror of her, sir. The dinghy-boat hung on its davits just there in front of the door, and for a minute I had an awful hankering to climb into it, lower away, and row off, no matter where. It sounds foolish.
Well, it seemed foolish next morning, with the sun shining and everything as usual—Fedderson sucking his pen and wagging his head over his eternal “log,” and his wife down in the rocker with her head in the newspaper, and her breakfast work still waiting. I guess that jarred it out of me more than anything else—sight of her slouched down there, with her stringy, yellow hair and her dusty apron
and the pale back of her neck, reading the Society Notes. Society Notes! Think of it! For the first time since I came to Seven Brothers I wanted to laugh.
I guess I did laugh when I went aloft to clean the lamp and found everything so free and breezy, gulls flying high and little whitecaps making under a westerly. It was like feeling a big load dropped off your shoulders. Fedderson came up with his dust-rag and cocked his head at me,
“What’s the matter, Ray?” said he.
“Nothing,” said I. And then I couldn’t help it. “Seems kind of out of place for Society Notes,” said I, “out here at Seven Brothers.”
He was the other side of the lens, and when he looked at me he had a thousand eyes, all sober. For a minute I thought he was going on dusting, but then he came out and sat down on a sill.
“Sometimes,” said he, “I get to thinking it may be a mite dull for her out here. She’s pretty young, Ray. Not much more’n a girl, hardly.”
“Not much more’n a girl!” It gave me a turn, sir, as though I’d seen my aunt in short dresses.
“It’s a good home for her, though,” he went on slow. “I’ve seen a lot worse ashore, Ray. Of course if I could get a shore light—”
“Kingdom Come’s a shore light.”
He looked at me out of his deep-set eyes, and then he turned them around the light-room, where he’d been so long.
“No,” said he, wagging his head. “It ain’t for such as me.”
I never saw so humble a man.
“But look here,” he went on, more cheerful. “As I was telling her just now, a month from yesterday’s our fourth anniversary, and I’m going to take her ashore for the day and give her a holiday—new hat and everything. A girl wants a mite of excitement now and then, Ray.”
There it was again, that “girl.” It gave me the fidgets, sir. I had to do something about it. It’s close quarters for last names in a light, and I’d taken to calling him Uncle Matt soon after I came. Now, when I was at table that noon I spoke over to where she was standing by the stove, getting him another help of chowder.
“I guess I’ll have some, too, Aunt Anna,” said I, matter of fact.
She never said a word nor gave a sign—just stood there kind of round-shouldered, dipping the chowder. And that night at prayers I hitched my chair around the table, with its back the other way.
You get awful lazy in a lighthouse, some ways. No matter how much tinkering you’ve got, there’s still a lot of time and there’s such a thing as too much reading. The changes in weather get monotonous, too, by and by; the light burns the same on a thick night as it does on a fair one. Of course there’s the ships, north-bound, south-bound—wind-jammers, freighters, passenger-boats full of people. In the watches at night you can see their lights go by, and wonder what they are, how they’re laden, where they’ll fetch up, and all. I used to do that almost every evening when it was my first watch, sitting out on the walk-around up there with my legs hanging over the edge and my chin propped on the railing—lazy. The Boston boat was the prettiest to see, with her three tiers of port-holes lit, like a string of pearls wrapped round and round a woman’s neck—well away, too, for the ledge must have made a couple of hundred fathoms off the Light, like a white dog-tooth of a breaker, even on the darkest night.
Well, I was lolling there one night, as I say, watching the Boston boat go by, not thinking of anything special, when I heard the door on the other side of the tower open and footsteps coming around to me.
By and by I nodded toward the boat and passed the remark that she was fetching in uncommon close to-night. No answer. I made nothing of that, for oftentimes Fedderson wouldn’t answer, and after I’d watched the lights crawling on through the dark a spell, just to make conversation I said I guessed there’d be a bit of weather before long.
“I’ve noticed,” said I, “when there’s weather coming on, and the wind in the northeast, you can hear the orchestra playing aboard of her just over there. I make it out now. Do you?”
“Yes. Oh—yes—! I hear it all right!”
You can imagine I started. It wasn’t him, but her. And there was something in the way she said that speech, sir—something—well—unnatural. Like a hungry animal snapping at a person’s hand.
I turned and looked at her sidewise. She was standing by the railing, leaning a little outward, the top of her from the waist picked out bright by the lens behind her. I didn’t know what in the world to say, and yet I had a feeling I ought not to sit there mum.
“I wonder,” said I, “what that captain’s thinking of, fetching in so handy to-night. It’s no way. I tell you, if ’twasn’t for this light, she’d go to work and pile up on the ledge some thick night—” She turned at that and stared straight into the lens. I didn’t like the look of her face. Somehow, with its edges cut hard all around and its two eyes closed down to slits, like a cat’s, it made a kind of mask.
“And then,” I went on, uneasy enough—“and then where’d all their music be of a sudden, and their goings-on and their singing—”
“And dancing!” She clipped me off so quick it took my breath.
“D-d-dancing?” said I.
“That’s dance-music,” said she. She was looking at the boat again.
“How do you know?” I felt I had to keep on talking.
Well, sir—she laughed. I looked at her. She had on a shawl of some stuff or other that shined in the light; she had it pulled tight around her with her two hands in front at her breast, and I saw her shoulders swaying in tune.
“How do I know?” she cried. Then she laughed again, the same kind of a laugh. It was queer, sir, to see her, and to hear her. She turned, as quick as that, and leaned toward me. “Don’t you know how to dance, Ray?” said she.
“N-no,” I managed, and I was going to say “Aunt Anna,” but the thing choked in my throat.
I tell you she was looking square at me all the time with her two eyes and moving with the music as if she didn’t know it. By heavens, sir, it came over me of a sudden that she wasn’t so bad-looking, after all. I guess I must have sounded like a fool.
“You—you see,” said I, “she’s cleared the rip there now, and the music’s gone. You—you hear?”
“Yes,” said she, turning back slow. “That’s where it stops every night—night after night—it stops just there—at the rip.”
When she spoke again her voice was different. I never heard the like of it, thin and taut as a thread. It made me shiver, sir.
“I hate ’em!” That’s what she said. “I hate ’em all. I’d like to see ’em dead. I’d love to see ’em torn apart on the rocks, night after night. I could bathe my hands in their blood, night after night.”
And do you know, sir, I saw it with my own eyes, her hands moving in each other above the rail. But it was her voice, though. I didn’t know what to do, or what to say, so I poked my head through the railing and looked down at the water. I don’t think I’m a coward, sir, but it was like a cold—ice-cold—hand, taking hold of my beating heart.
When I looked up finally, she was gone. By and by I went in and had a look at the lamp, hardly knowing what I was about. Then, seeing by my watch it was time for the old man to come on duty, I started to go below. In the Seven Brothers, you understand, the stair goes down in a spiral through a well against the south wall and first there’s the door to the keeper’s room and then you come to another, and that’s the living-room, and then down to the store-room. And at night, if you don’t carry a lantern, it’s as black as the pit.
Well, down I went, sliding my hand along the rail, and as usual I stopped to give a rap on the keeper’s door, in case he was taking a nap after supper. Sometimes he did.
I stood there, blind as a bat, with my mind still up on the walk-around. There was no answer to my knock. I hadn’t expected any. Just from habit, and with my right foot already hanging down for the next s
tep, I reached out to give the door one more tap for luck.
Do you know, sir, my hand didn’t fetch up on anything. The door had been there a second before, and now the door wasn’t there. My hand just went on going through the dark, on and on, and I didn’t seem to have sense or power enough to stop it. There didn’t seem any air in the well to breathe, and my ears were drumming to the surf—that’s how scared I was. And then my hand touched the flesh of a face, and something in the dark said, “Oh!” no louder than a sigh.
Next thing I knew, sir, I was down in the living-room, warm and yellow-lit, with Fedderson cocking his head at me across the table, where he was at that eternal Jacob’s-ladder of his.
“What’s the matter, Ray?” said he. “Lord’s sake, Ray!”
“Nothing,” said I. Then I think I told him I was sick. That night I wrote a letter to A.L. Peters, the grain-dealer in Duxbury, asking for a job—even though it wouldn’t go ashore for a couple of weeks, just the writing of it made me feel better.
It’s hard to tell you how those two weeks went by. I don’t know why, but I felt like hiding in a corner all the time. I had to come to meals, but I didn’t look at her, though, not once, unless it was by accident. Fedderson thought I was still ailing and nagged me to death with advice and so on. One thing I took care not to do, I can tell you, and that was to knock on his door till I’d made certain he wasn’t below in the living-room—though I was tempted to.
Yes, sir; that’s a queer thing, and I wouldn’t tell you if I hadn’t set out to give you the truth. Night after night, stopping there on the landing in that black pit, the air gone out of my lungs and the surf drumming in my ears and sweat standing cold on my neck—and one hand lifting up in the air—God forgive me, sir! Maybe I did wrong not to look at her more, drooping about her work in her gingham apron, with her hair stringing.
When the Inspector came off with the tender, that time, I told him I was through. That’s when he took the dislike to me, I guess, for he looked at me kind of sneering and said, soft as I was, I’d have to put up with it till next relief. And then, said he, there’d be a whole house-cleaning at Seven Brothers, because he’d gotten Fedderson the berth at Kingdom Come. And with that he slapped the old man on the back.