Lightkeeper's Wife

by Sarah Anne Johnson

  She couldn’t speak.

  “I got plenty of bullets. I can put one in you right now. I saw you kill perfectly good men, and now you will replace them. First you’ll have to prove you’re up to the task,” he said, grabbing her by the elbow and shoving her aft toward the captain’s quarters, his pistol pressed hard into her ribs, while her own gun dangled from her hand. There was something utterly masculine about his odor and his gait and his brutality that intrigued her as much as it repulsed her. He stood atop the companionway and pulled her closer. “Go down there and finish the job.”

  He searched her eyes for signs of fear, but she wouldn’t reveal herself. She shook her elbow loose and climbed down the steps into the cabin. Daniel sat on the edge of his bunk worrying the button of his waistcoat, twirling it around as if it would deliver answers from its shining brass surface. When he saw her, he turned to slap her, but he couldn’t reach.

  “You’ve ruined us,” he said. “If we’d let them take what they wanted, they would have left us alone. How many of my men are dead? What in God’s name are you doing? Have you gone completely mad?”

  “Shut up.” She stood back, held the gun with both hands, and tried to level it at his head. She wanted to remember why she hated him or if she ever loved him, but rage shook her—she would not die for Daniel. Her certainty coalesced in a cold and thoughtless will to carry this out.

  “Think for a minute, Annie. What are you doing?” When she didn’t release her focus, he said, “You are utterly lost. You are not my wife.”

  The gun shook violently in her hands. She pushed the muzzle into his chest to steady it.

  “That’s my gun,” he said.

  “Finish it, or I’ll kill the both of you myself,” Jack said, leaning down the hatch, his voice a serrated edge.

  “You’ll not be the end of me,” Annie said.

  Daniel shoved her back against the wall. He lunged at her and struggled to reach the gun, but she moved her arm back and forth, dodging his reach. She had to get him off her, but he was taller, stronger. She drove her knee into his groin, and when he doubled over, she swung the gun at his head. Then he was on top of her, trying to pin her right arm to the deck. His breath on her face infuriated her, and she shook herself loose. The strength she’d gained over the last months of working on the ship drove her into a frenzy of activity, and she swung the gun at his head again. The crew’s attention on the fight only heightened Annie’s focus. She wasn’t going to die, but she started losing track of herself. She was tired. They struggled back and forth amid the hollering crowd of sailors. When the gun went off, the sound ricocheted in the cabin, loud enough to burst the wooden boards.

  Jack climbed down the stairs, his buttons rattling like coins in a pocket. He stood over the pair and watched as blood ran across the floor. Daniel lay on top of Annie, and Jack kicked him off with the heel of his boot, so that he fell onto his back, blood pooling from the hole in his stomach.

  “You did good,” Jack said. “Now get up and make yourself useful. Get me a sack or a sea bag.”

  Annie stared at the blood, the gun hanging from her hand as thoughtlessly as a child might hold a rag doll.

  “Move it!”

  Once she handed over Daniel’s sea bag, Jack went to work ransacking the drawers. He took a watch engraved from her father as a gift, Daniel’s gold cuff links, and a pair of sailing pants, whatever he could find of any value.

  Annie headed for the ladder to get out of the stuffy room where it reeked of blood and gunpowder. Her legs swayed beneath her.

  “You’re not going anywhere. Where’s he keep the money?”

  “Under there.” She swung the gun toward the drawer beneath the mattress. “That should be enough to buy my freedom,” Annie said.

  “Your freedom’s not for sale. You’ll fight with us to replace the men you killed, and we’ll need some of the ship’s crew to replace the others. Which are worthy?”

  Annie let her face reveal nothing while a typhoon of emotions swept through. Sheer terror at the prospect of the pirates, rage at Daniel for not fighting. “They’re all useless. Not a fighter in the lot of them. You’ve seen for yourself.” She grabbed the trousers back from him, and a red jacket. “I’m keeping these. I’m going to need them,” she said.

  “Keep your pistol, too. Johnson, take her aboard while I collect what’s mine.”

  Johnson walked her to the break in the rail that opened onto the pirate ship. Her stomach lurched and she leaned over the side to puke into the sea, and then wiped her mouth on her shirtsleeve. Johnson laughed.

  The two ships bobbed together in the swells amid wafting clouds of gun smoke. When her boot struck the unfamiliar deck and she caught her balance, she saw two cabins with round portholes and the helm and binnacle positioned at the stern and the same rigging, masts, and sails that she’d learned aboard Intrepid. The only difference in this ship was the guns loaded into holes cut in the bulwarks. She stood clear of the gate and watched the men loading crates down into the hold. When Jack crossed onto the ship, the sailors cast off the lines, and Annie watched as they drifted clear of Intrepid. Daniel lay dead in the captain’s quarters. She wanted to feel regret or remorse, but she didn’t feel anything at all.

  The wind had come up now and the captain spoke loud enough to sound like he was dressing the men down, but he was only talking, his stentorian voice a roar in the sea air.

  “I’m the captain of this crew in battle and you’ll follow my orders when that time comes. In all else we’re a democracy. You’ll get equal shares of any booty, and food and drink and a say in what happens on this ship. You being a woman makes no difference. You could be a goddamned duck for all we care, as long as you fight like a man. You hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” Jack said.

  She hesitated. “Blue,” she said. It was what her father had called her as a child, Blue for the color of her eyes. Blue for the sullen disposition he could not cheer. And wasn’t that appropriate since her father was a kind of pirate himself?

  “Go down the fo’c’sle and find an empty bunk, get the lay of the ship. You know how to fight, but can you sail?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I can navigate to true course.”

  “So you’re good for more than murdering my men. I’ll make use of you then,” Jack said.

  Blue stood at the rail holding on to the clothing she’d taken from Daniel. She stared blankly into the heaving ocean, letting the spray wet her face and hair. This was as close to tears as she could come. When the ship’s rocking motion broke her gaze, she headed to the hatch that led down to the crew’s quarters. Each step into the bowels of the ship carried her into an underworld that bristled the fine hairs along the back of her neck and made her muscles twitch. The fo’c’sle smelled of stagnant bilge water, sweaty men, unwashed clothes, and rum. It was the odor of oblivion. Under the low ceiling, Blue inhabited a limbo between the woman she had been and the woman she would become. She dropped the armful of clothing onto the aft-most bunk on the starboard side. She quickly undressed. Daniel’s cotton trousers hung loose from her hips. She rolled the waist down and cuffed the hems. She felt safer in men’s attire. The bunks were built two high into the hull on either side of the ship. Blue, satisfied that her bunk on the end offered easy escape and sufficient space from the other sailors, stuffed her clothes in the wooden chest beneath and lay back, her pistol in her right hand, her arm crossed over her chest so that the pistol rested on her heart.

  6

  By the time Hannah came down from the lighthouse, Billy had stoked the fire and boiled water for coffee. He’d filled the lanterns and lit the candles and brought in extra firewood. Hannah slid a pile of root vegetables from beneath the sink into a scooped-out wooden bowl and placed it alongside a cutting board and a knife on the dining table.

  “Peel and chop these,” she
said.

  Billy shook his head. “I can’t cook.”

  “I’ve yet to meet a sailor didn’t know his way around a knife. All you have to do is peel and chop.”

  Billy scooted his chair up to the table and peered into the bowl. He was handsome, blond hair and gray-blue eyes startling in the way they looked right at you, then looked away as if that moment of seeing was too much to bear. Fearful as a kicked dog, she thought, and smelled nearly as bad.

  “How big do you want them?” He sat at the table with his head resting on one hand, exhausted, as he would be for a while. How long was she going to be stuck with him?

  “However you like,” she said curtly. “I’m making a soup that has to last us through the storm. We’ll have no time to cook once it hits.”

  They worked with their backs to each other, silent but for the wind shaking the chimney and the strike of the knife on the cutting board. Hannah wouldn’t tolerate disobedience, Billy realized. There was no room for stepping out of line. He needed to get a hold of himself, but he’d learned from Annie that recklessness was not a thing you could overcome.

  After supper, Billy finished with the dishes and wiped his hands on the seat of his pants. “Galley duty’s over.” He leaned back against the counter, one foot crossed over the other. The hollows of his hips showed through his low-slung pants. She needed to fatten him up so he could leave.

  He pulled a rigging knife from his pocket and began to run it along the underside of his fingernails.

  “That’s a disgusting habit. I’ll thank you not to do it in my kitchen.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, holding his hands up. He sheathed the knife, lifted his pant leg, and slid it into his sock so that it rested along his calf. “So where’s this husband of yours?” he asked.

  “You should be in bed,” Hannah said, annoyed. “You’ve still got a fever.”

  Billy swaggered to the bedroll where he lay back against the pillows and stared into the fire. “Not many people come out here.” He leaned on his side now and looked up at her.

  She didn’t want to answer him. Still, there he was, waiting for her to respond. What was his point? Was he trying to frighten her? Because she wasn’t afraid. He was too weak to do anything foolish.

  “Tom comes regularly, as you know. You’ll meet others.” The truth was that other than John, she had the company of Tom and shipwrecked sailors and travelers passing through who saw the light and sought refuge—mostly men.

  “I never heard of a lady lightkeeper.”

  “My husband’s the lightkeeper, I told you that.”

  “Still, it’s strange, and you wear pants.” He laughed.

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “I’m glad it was you here when our boat when down. I bet he doesn’t go out there like you do. I never heard of a lightkeeper doing that,” Billy said.

  Hannah went to bed early to get away from him and his questions. She dreamed of water running so heavily that it filled the ocean and ponds and lakes in Barnstable to overflowing; it ran down the roads and turned them into rivers, it lifted John from his horse and carried him downstream, shattering his wooden wagon to bits. Torrents of water carried him off, and he couldn’t rescue himself because he was too far from home and the lighthouse and his rescue boat and his tools were off in the distance. He needed a rope thrown to him, or a tree branch stretched low over the road, but there was nothing. If only she could reach into her dream and pluck him free, pull him under the covers where she could feel his heat, but he drifted farther and farther out of sight.

  She woke crying, reaching for him on the other side of the bed. The empty space where John slept was cold. She stretched herself across it, hoping that he would climb in next to her, and say, “I’ll explain in the morning.”

  ***

  A loud knock on the front door drove Hannah up from the bed. She looked around her room, disoriented. She’d been up and down all night, climbing the lighthouse stairs to check the flames, and then back to bed, up the stairs, then back to bed. The instinct that drove her up to check the lights was heightened in John’s absence—there was no one to rely on but herself. At four in the morning, she’d stood with her back to the flames, her eyes toward Barnstable where John had spent the night with her parents, spent the night in her childhood bed, but all she saw was her own reflection staring back at her, and a look in her eyes that said, You are alone.

  Now it was dawn, and she was exhausted.

  The knocking was louder now. Hannah pulled a wool sweater on over her nightdress. “I’m coming,” she said, and she splashed cold water on her face, glimpsed her startled expression in the glass. She looked tired, her eyes red and irritated from not sleeping well. When she rounded the corner into the kitchen, Tom stood holding his hat against his chest. Billy had opened the door and stood by the fire to see what was going to happen, but when Hannah appeared, he ducked out the passageway to the barn.

  “I got news, Hannah. You better sit down.”

  “I can hear it standing.”

  “I just rode back from Yarmouth. They found John’s horse, wandering loose down by Dennis Pond. There was no sign of John.”

  “What happened? Where is he?” She held her stomach, as if she’d been kicked.

  “They don’t know. Search parties have gone out but they found nothing so far. They’re still looking.”

  “What do you mean they don’t know? Someone had to see him.”

  “Your mother said good-bye to him near daybreak the day of the storm. Wilbur Dickinson saw him pass by the post office soon after that, and his trail stops there. Next sign of him is his horse found down by the pond. We didn’t find any of his cargo or any indication of where he could be.”

  “I don’t understand. What could’ve happened?” Her voice rose in pitch, her words came out in a stream of grief. “If it wasn’t the storm, what was it?”

  Tom hesitated. “Well, there’s been speculation, of course. He could’ve been robbed or thrown from his wagon. There’s no way of knowing until we find him.”

  “You think he’s dead?” Hannah held her fists clenched at her sides, her body rigid. All color had drained from her face, as if she was the corpse they’d been looking for.

  Tom looked down. “There was a lot of blood, Hannah. I didn’t want to say, but you might as well know.”

  Hannah fell into the nearest chair, her legs weak. Her head swam with possibilities, all of them accompanied by an overwhelming grief that set her adrift in the soft cushioned chair. “You’ve been searching for his body,” she said, the fact like a rock dropped into the room.

  Tom fell into a chair and landed, elbows on the table, the weight of his head in his hands.

  “He could’ve been taken off, you know, kidnapped or something,” Billy said. Hannah turned to see him standing in the doorway.

  “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Not long,” Billy said.

  Tom interrupted him. “Are you in the habit of listening to people’s conversations?”

  Tom tried to reassure Hannah, but he couldn’t overcome the despair in his voice. “Your father went out on the search team. Half the mid-Cape men are searching day and night, but so far they’ve come up with nothing. Your parents want you to come home. They don’t want you here alone.”

  “I’m not alone, Tom. I’m keeping the lights while John is gone, just like I always do.”

  Tom looked at Billy. No one spoke.

  ***

  That night, Hannah slid the fireplace grate into place and doused the candles one at a time. Her body felt as if it were filled with sand that shifted and dragged with each step across floor. If only the floor tilted toward the bedroom, she’d have an easier time getting there. It was easy to let herself drop into the chair by the fire. She wanted to feel something, to cry or scream or wail, but her mind worked har
d to leave no room for grief. She searched for explanations that would mean John was alive. He could’ve been robbed, beaten, and left in the woods while the criminals got away. Maybe he fell from the wagon and wandered off, disoriented. Any number of things could happen to a man traveling alone, even in a small place like this, she told herself.

  She had to see for herself the place where he’d gone missing. If anyone could find him, it would be her. She’d know where he was by instinct. Tom would watch the lighthouse. At the front window, she looked toward the road, but it promised nothing.

  7

  The musty air hit her all at once with a memory that was not a picture in her mind but an ocean swell of feeling. It was a lifetime of days spent stepping over this threshold through the smells of tobacco, human dirt, and earth brought in on the bottoms of boots, mildew, damp wool, whale oil, and spilled beer, all the meals they’d ever eaten, every fish cooked, every pine wreath hung, every bayberry candle burned. All of these odors seeped and layered into the shifting floors and in between walls, smells that could not be kept back with daily cleaning.

  “Hannah, is that you? Come here, come in. I’m so sorry, dear.” Her mother pulled her by the elbow into the front hall. There was her father’s pipe spattered with paint, propped on a sack of tobacco, his boots kicked off by the door.

  Hannah let her hat drop to the floor and stepped into her mother’s fleshy arms, into the scent of rose water and fresh linen and cooking smells from the kitchen. That’s when her tears came heavy and hard.

  “Oh, dear, dear. We’ll do our best to find him. You’re home now. I’ll take care of you.” Her mother helped Hannah out of her coat and hung it on a peg by the door. She faced Hannah and looked at her squarely from the top of her hair to her bootlaces and nodded. Nora had gained weight, but she carried herself with dignity and purpose.

  “You can go on upstairs, freshen up. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. We’ll fatten you up while you’re here.”