Painting the Light

by Sally Cabot Gunning

  The temperature dropped. The wind kicked up. It began to snow. Ida took another trip outside to collect the shovel from the barn and prop it next to the back door just inside the kitchen; good thing too—by the time the grandfather clock chimed eleven the world outside was white and howling. She collected her lamp, climbed the stairs to her bed, undressed down to her skin and then added things back in layers: flannel nightgown, shawl, wool stockings, a pair of Ezra’s wool socks. She would have to say of Ezra he did keep her warm nights. She would also have to say he kept her sleepless. He slept as if he’d died, without worry, but that trait never comforted Ida; instead it left her to take on the worry herself. Like now. Too late, she thought of Ezra’s salvage company down on Main Street and wondered if the old roof would hold. She got out of bed and looked out the window at nothing but white swirling by like smoke in hunt of a chimney. She returned to bed and listened to the wind shriek and moan and roar till morning.

  It snowed and blew all the next day, easing just enough before dark so Ida could get out to scatter corn for the chickens, lug water, muck out the livestock, and spread fresh hay. She stamped off the snow on the porch but might have saved herself that bit of trouble—a pane on the east front window had blown out and snow covered the floor as far as the hearth. She snatched the quilt off the downstairs bed and stuffed it into the window, swept the snow onto the hearth to melt it, repeated the previous night’s routine down to the roasted cheese, and went to her bed.

  By morning the snow had stopped. Ida looked out her bedroom window and saw drifts piled four feet high, almost burying the chicken house. She crossed the hall to look out the front window and saw her favorite old beech measuring its length on the ground alongside random other tree limbs and pieces of fence. Beyond the road she saw the soupy, heaving Sound. But what of Ezra’s salvage vessel, the Cormorant? And what of the office and warehouse on Main Street?

  Ida pulled on her heaviest skirt and accessorized it with Ezra’s rubber boots, wool sweater, and oiled jacket. She went downstairs, picked up the phone, and was unsurprised to get nothing but silence. Ezra had been proud of that phone line, one of the first to branch off the main trunk in town, no matter it went dead in every blow. Ida tended the animals, collected the office keys from the desk, and started down the hill, picking her way around the drifts. She was sweating and breathing in rough gasps by the time she reached the town center, the lower foot of her skirt weighted with clumps of half-frozen snow. A dozen men and boys were just starting to work on the road, but past experience told her it would take a day to clear a mile and she was glad she hadn’t waited.

  Ida looked toward the water. At first she couldn’t take in what she was seeing along the shore: boats piled up like children’s abandoned toys; a schooner impaled in the middle of the Union Wharf, rendering both boat and dock useless; another dozen two- and three-masted schooners run aground or sunk with nothing but their masts showing; one large coastal trader sitting like a hen on a nest high and dry on the beach; on another a cargo of lime smoldered. Farther out, a group of men had managed to reach one of the schooners and was attempting to extricate something in the rigging. Ida was about to turn away when she saw that the thing was a body, so stiff the men were forced to handle it like a severed dock piling. Beyond that boat another was engulfed in flames, but no one was troubling to put out the fire.

  Ida spied Lem standing among the rowboats talking to Chester Luce, the owner of the grocery and operator of the telephone and telegraph, the place where all news either began or ended. As Ida approached Lem, his eyes traveled to the burning vessel at sea. He pointed. “The gasoline for the compressor must have exploded.”

  Ida whirled around and took a closer look at the burning vessel: Ezra’s Cormorant. She started to walk in its direction but stopped; even in those few short minutes it had listed farther, and no matter how angry she was at Ezra, she could take no pleasure in seeing the Cormorant go down.

  Lem and Chester Luce resumed their conversation, Lem angling his body to include Ida too, Luce making no note whatsoever of her presence. The local news was grim but should have been grimmer; eight men had been lost off ships taking refuge in the harbor, but some local men had made a series of runs in the height of the storm and saved dozens more. Fifty schooners had either washed aground or sunk at anchor; the man they pulled out of the rigging was the captain of the Thurlow out of New Jersey, his crew and many others now packed into the Seamen’s Bethel at Union Wharf, where they would be given food and clothes in addition to shelter. Phones and telegraph were down but news was going out from the Cape on the undersea cable to France, back to New York, and from there by land to Boston. The latest news—the biggest news—had just come in from Boston off the steamer, and Luce’s voice took on a minister’s pall as he rolled out the words: the steamship Portland had sunk off the back side of Cape Cod, the beaches there littered with its wreckage.

  Others lifted their heads, moved close. “The Portland?” asked John Cottle. “Boston to Maine?”

  “The same. Bodies are washing up from Wellfleet to Chatham. The funeral homes are full.”

  The words rippled down the beach. Steamship. Portland. Bodies. The crowd grew. “Anyone come in alive?” Bert Robinson asked.

  “None’s I’ve heard of,” Luce answered.

  “Alive? In this sea?” Cottle laughed, saw the looks, cut off.

  “Anyone know anyone on her?” Most heads were shaken, but some others offered up distant connections as if they were badges of honor: Ira Briggs’s cousin lived in Maine and always came up to Boston and back for Thanksgiving; Chester Luce recalled the Chilmark Hardings saying the Edgartown Hardings were going to Portland to stay with their family for the holiday season; Bert Robinson said his nephew often traveled from Boston to Maine . . .

  Ida drifted away, the old, familiar horror rising in her. Her father and brothers had gone down in a coaster off the Carolinas, the news sending Ida’s mother into such a state of melancholia that a month later she’d walked off an old dilapidated wharf with her pockets full of stones. But as horrific as her mother’s death was, the two of them waiting for news of her father and brothers had been as bad—the weeks stretching to months with no word, no certainty. As Ida trudged the beach she could think only of the Chilmark Hardings and Ira Briggs and Bert Robinson’s niece, of their faces growing tighter and tighter just as her mother’s had grown tighter with each long, news-less day, until the day the news did come that melted her face into an endless pool of weeping.

  Ida pushed on, giving a nod to the rare islander who lifted a hand, most of them too busy giving and receiving their own news to take any notice of someone who was still considered “off-island.” When she reached Main Street, she dropped into one of the slushy wheel tracks that ran down the middle, the snow piled two feet high on either side of it. She slogged ahead in Ezra’s boots, heel to toe, until she reached Ezra’s building. The sign pease & barstow marine salvage was gone; the window on the right-hand side had been pierced by somebody’s dislocated awning; the roof was missing a whole swath of shingles.

  Ida kicked down a drift, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The office held the usual books and papers and safe and telephone along with the unusual: a heap of rusted chain, a bracket for a ship’s lantern, a dented spittoon. Most of the junk sat in front of the broken window, but Ida decided none of it could be harmed by a little more weather. She examined the ceiling and saw no stains; books, papers, desk, cabinets, all seemed free of wet.

  Lem stepped into the office behind her, tracking snow and sand and the smell of wet wool, carrying Ezra’s sign. “Found it in the snow in front of the cobbler’s. When’s Ezra due back?”

  Ida’s cheeks burned, remembering their parting words. Go. Stay there forever if you like . . . “I don’t know.”

  “Come along,” Lem said. “I have the wagon.”

  “I need to check the warehouse.”

  Lem went with her. The warehouse roof and walls were intact, the
contents—more salvage—dirty and rusty but dry. She followed Lem and climbed into the wagon. “I should check on Ruth.”

  “Already did. Nothing but a fence amiss. And I’ll fix that window of yours. I’ve got the glass in the back.”

  So he’d checked on her too. A wave of affection flooded Ida, which she quickly checked. Lem Daggett did not need her—either figuratively or literally—wrapping her arms around his neck.

  As they drove past the beach Ida looked for the Cormorant, but it had already dived below the surface.

  2

  When Ida finally saw her husband’s dark shape coming up the track from town, she wasn’t ready to face him. She dove into the pantry and began hauling jugs and boxes and bags from the shelves as if she’d been midway into a good clear-out. She’d just set his whiskey bottle on the floor when she heard the knocking and straightened up. Ezra wouldn’t knock. She went to the door and flung it open on Chester Luce.

  “Letter for you,” he said. “Just off the boat. From your husband. Thought I’d run it up in case you were waiting on news.”

  Ida looked at Ezra’s sloppy writing on the envelope and wondered that Luce had recognized it. How many letters did Ezra ever write? She opened the envelope. The letter was dated Saturday, the day of the storm.

  Ida—I’m writing you in a hurry Mose and I are about to board the Portland for that Maine job I’ll be back by weeks end Call Lem if you need help with the sheep—E—PS Sorry

  The word that struck Ida first was the word sorry. He’d used it twice in a week now and it wasn’t as a rule a common presence in his vocabulary. And why the mention of Lem and the sheep? Didn’t Ida always turn to Lem when she needed help with the sheep? She read the letter again, and this time she stopped at the word Portland. That word was as strange as the word sorry. Ezra couldn’t have boarded the Portland. The Portland went down.

  Ida looked at the date on the letter again, read it again, sure she’d taken some particular word wrong, but none of the words had changed into other words or clarified their meaning. She dropped the letter on the table and raced out the door down the track; no matter how old she might feel, Ida was still young enough to run, a skill she’d picked up since she’d moved to the island and begun to chase sheep. She caught Luce just as he was about to take the turn onto Main Street. He heard her and swung around, cautious on the ice, as slow as if she were dreaming him.

  “What news of the Portland?”

  “She went down.”

  “I know she went down. Still no word on survivors? Ezra was on her. And Mose Barstow.”

  Luce blinked, looked up, spoke to the clouds. “None’s I’ve got wind of. They’ve piled the unidentified at the Lifesaving Station at Cahoon Hollow, over in Wellfleet.”

  “I’m talking of the passengers. The passengers on the Portland.”

  Luce gave Ida an odd look. “Like I told you. Piled up in Wellfleet.”

  “I don’t mean the bodies, Mr. Luce. I mean the passengers.”

  Luce took his eyes from the sky and brought them down to Ida’s level. “One and the same, Mrs. Pease. All one and the same. I’m sorry as can be, but that’s the thrust of it. Terrible thing, I know. Whatever Mrs. Luce and I can do . . . You’ll be wanting to get to Wellfleet, I imagine. If we can help with any of the procedures—”

  Ida fought down a wave of hysterical laughter. “I’m familiar with the procedures,” she said. She turned and started back up the hill. She made it as far as the kitchen stoop when her knees began to tremble. She sat down hard on the cold and the ice and this new truth that she couldn’t seem to wrestle to earth. Ezra. Drowned. On the Portland.

  Ida sat on the stoop until the rest of her began to tremble from the cold.

  Later, crouched before the fire, Ida still felt frozen—her body and her mind. What to do? Ezra would have told her, and she’d have ignored him more like, but even so, right now she’d have welcomed the telling. She sat some more, wishing something would thaw out so she could at least think if not feel, and when her brain did thaw the first thing she thought of was Chester Luce. You’ll be wanting to get to Wellfleet. Ida straightened. Yes, that was first. Or rather, second.

  First was Ruth.

  Ida climbed the uphill track to Ruth’s with greater ease than she’d managed the downhill slide after Chester Luce. As she reached the house she stopped to gather herself, to bundle up her own inner turmoil and pack it away someplace out of reach until a later time when she could pull it out and sort through it in privacy. Now was Ruth’s time. Hattie’s time. But still, Ida hovered on the step, turning to look out over the farm. Ezra’s farm.

  Of the two farmhouses Ruth’s was the newer, built when Ezra took over the farm, perched on the top of the rise so that Ruth would remain part of the place where she’d been born and raised but at enough of a distance to keep her nose out of the actual workings. Of course it was never possible to keep Ruth’s nose out of anything, but Ruth’s house held the best view: the scope of pasture and hill demarcated by the serpentine stone walls, a wide swath of sea beyond, an even wider patch of sky. From that vantage point nothing appeared changed, as if Luce had never climbed the hill and handed Ida the letter, as if Ezra had never written the letter, as if he and Mose had never sailed off for Boston. She peered down the hill at the pastured sheep, the old house, the barn. Any minute Ezra could walk out of that barn door knocking manure off his boot and cursing, most likely at Ida, but still . . .

  Still. There should have been something more after that still. Ida waited, but nothing came. She knocked, opened Ruth’s door, and stepped inside.

  Of the two women, Ruth seemed to adjust to the news more quickly; Hattie looked blankly at Ida, but in due time the tears came. Ruth’s face looked as if it were meant to cry, the tracks already worn, but Hattie’s wasn’t yet laid out for it; Ida watched the tears flow willy-nilly over Hattie’s smoother cheeks for a time, but after a while she stood up.

  “I need to go to Wellfleet and look for Ezra’s body.”

  Hattie’s tears stopped. She stood also. “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, you need to look after Ruth.”

  Ruth snorted. “Who looks after who around here, I’d like to know?”

  But Hattie dropped into her chair without argument.

  Lem was waiting at the fence when Ida returned. He was about to speak but Ida cut in first.

  “I’m off to Wellfleet to look for his body. Will you mind the farm? I should only be a night.”

  “I’ll go to Wellfleet.”

  “No, I need you to mind the farm.”

  “Ida—”

  “I guess I know what you want to say but I think I’d do better just now if you didn’t say it. Is that all right?”

  Lem peered hard at her. “I’m taking you to the boat.”

  “All right.”

  Ida went inside, climbed the stairs to her room—Ezra’s room—and fumbled in the closet for her travel suit and travel boots, feeling under water. She looked down at the scuffs on the boots in disgust. Ida had been raised with pretty things; she liked pretty things; she painted—back when she’d painted—graceful still lifes and elegant portraits of men and ladies clad in their finery. But after her first soggy winter on the farm she’d returned her own silk dresses and satin shoes to the trunk where they still sat at the back of the closet, and—somehow—stopped even polishing her boots. But polish them for whom? Ruth would have missed the opportunity to cast a disapproving eye, and Ezra wouldn’t have noticed.

  Lem helped Ida into the wagon and threw her bag in the back. They stayed silent the length of the ride until the wharf came into view, the schooner Newburgh still embedded in the middle of it; a crew worked nearby, taking the easiest route of rebuilding the wharf around the vessel. In the meantime rowboats still set off from shore to ferry the passengers to the steamer, and when Ida’s turn came she was glad enough of Lem’s hand, but not just because of the restriction of her corset. Oh, the dread she felt, sitting in that rock
ing boat, feeling every ounce of her own weight! Even without her mother’s stones, it would be a fast trip to the bottom.

  “You call when you get back!” Lem hollered.

  Ida nodded and could only hope he saw it because she couldn’t wave; she gripped the dory’s gunwale with both hands and stared at the crewman’s back as it strained, the past flying in and out of the waves around her.

  For the better part of a year after Ida lost her family, she’d sat in her parents’ town house on Beacon Hill, pinned down under the sheer weight of her grief. It was too much; too many; how to pry apart one face or voice or heart from the solid mass of dead to register its loss? How to separate a single memory? She was unable to think or form a plan. Whenever she saw water it had seemed to press on her, suffocate her, much as it had suffocated her mother. The house, frayed and fading around encased treasures her shipmaster grandfather had brought back from China likewise oppressed her. She couldn’t seem to break out of the track she walked from room to room, dusting and re-dusting lifeless objects that had lost all meaning for her. When she finally attempted to paint even a simple floral it came out too dreary, too full of umbers and ochres; when she tried a portrait of a neighbor’s child, the poor boy came out looking like he’d drowned, so pale had she made him. Such was Ida’s state at the end of that first year that she might have taken up with any man who chose to notice her, even one far less charming than Ezra.