“Someone has made a mistake if you’re the third in line,” my mother said.
She was twenty-nine and still beautiful. I never noticed that about her, but other people did. Men certainly noticed. She had long dark hair; like mine, I suppose, although hers was thicker and wavy and mine was straight as sticks. Her complexion was rosy and she had pale-blue eyes, so pale you could fall into them. The lighthouse keeper stared at her when she made that remark. He narrowed his eyes, as if he wasn’t sure what she meant, and she made a face at him. “I’m never wrong, you know,” she told him. “I see big things for you.”
“Do you now?” Rowan said.
I saw how interested he was. I could tell about such things. When men were interested, they had a faraway look, as if they were trying to figure out their attraction. Was it a dream, or was it real? Did they want a woman, body and soul, or was it only the body that appealed to them? Sometimes it took them a while to figure it out, sometimes only minutes.
The third lighthouse keeper’s son, the other Rowan, who I came to call Billy Goat when I knew him better since he was always chasing after the goats on the island, was a few years younger than I. He was shy with most people but not with me. The fact that I didn’t talk brought out his chatty side. “I’m not sure your mother will like it here,” he told me. He said the conditions were so rough in the sea around us that Charlotte Fuller, the wife of Travis, the number two keeper, had her baby in a rowboat on the way to the doctor in town. The waves were so high and the current so daunting, they’d been forced to turn the boat around and come back. When they arrived, Charlotte had her baby in her arms. They named him Thacher Warren. Thacher after the island, Warren for a great-grandfather who himself had been taken by the sea.
“You think your ma could have a baby in a rowboat?” young Rowan asked me.
I shrugged and said nothing. A woman like my mother shouldn’t have children.
“My ma hates it here,” he went on. “The day she’s free of Thacher Island is the day of her redemption. She begs my father to go back to Boston.”
That made sense to me. Mrs. Ballard sounded very wise, although how a wise woman could end up here was anyone’s guess. All the same, I suspected that this woman and I would be great friends, and so it turned out to be, which rescued both of us from this rock in the sea that I soon enough learned was known as Thacher’s Woe. Some of the lost from the shipwreck were buried here, beneath the pear trees. One of the nieces must have been especially loved, and someone had built a cairn of stones over her grave, not just any stones, only the polished white ones that were not easy to find. Once I was settled in, Billy Goat and I brought flowers to her grave and stood there with our heads bowed. The sea was a dangerous enemy, and we were surrounded by it. But I remembered what my father had told me. You could grow to love something so strong and elemental, but you’d have to value the beauty of it more than you did your own life. Whenever I found a white stone, I thought of my father, and sometimes I imagined him sitting beside me, watching the glory of the sea.
The lighthouse keepers and their families shared one house. There was the man in charge, Mr. Jonas Ford, his wife, Elizabeth, their two boys and two daughters, and of course the Fullers, famous for their rowboat baby. Then there was the Ballard family. The children went to school by rowboat in the fall, and the older ones boarded with families in town, coming back to the island on Friday afternoons. My mother and I were to have a one-room cottage near the cow barn. It was a low blow to her, for the cottage was filthy and airless, but the view was remarkable. The last housekeeper to live here had lasted six months. Though the island was made of rocks, there were meadows and woods, as well as a garden planted in 1836 by a former lighthouse keeper who’d had a way with such things. Every time he’d gone to town, he’d brought back another specimen until he had created a kind of Eden. It was quite miraculous to be in the middle of the sea and yet still have pear and quince and apple trees, wild currants and gooseberries and blackberries, along with grapevines. Lupines grew wild, and there were sweet peas everywhere, pink and fragrant all summer long. The milk from the seven cows he kept were said to have saved the crews of the Ann Maria and the Royal Tarr, ships stranded on the rocky reef people called the Londoner, which had caused hundreds of shipwrecks. There were still cows, out in the pasture, and a few wild goats, impossible to catch, though Billy Goat and I tried often enough. There were seven children, and I was the oldest. It was my job to watch over the others, save for the baby, who was rarely out of his mother’s arms. My mother’s job was to help with the cooking and the heavy cleaning and laundry, which she minded a great deal. She cursed when she made their meals up in the big house. In truth, she had no talent for cookery; all the same the third lighthouse keeper, Rowan, always said it was the best food he’d ever eaten.
His wife didn’t seem to agree. Her name was Julia, and all that summer, she wrote out proper recipes for my mother. She gave my mother a black book in which to record her menus. Julia also kept an eye on me. She had seen my mother slap me when I refused to kill a chicken for supper, for it was not in my nature to do such a thing. Frankly, I’d rather starve than murder the patient hen that followed me through the grass. Julia found me crying out by the coop, holding the poor startled hen in my lap. The waves were high and a rainstorm was moving in and I wished myself to be somewhere else. I wished it so much I thought about jumping into the water. Perhaps my blood wouldn’t freeze and I would peacefully drown. My father had said he’d seen men drown and when they were recovered each seemed to have found peace. My despair was likely written all over my face, even though I tried to reveal nothing. Julia knelt beside me.
“I’ll take care of it,” she told me. She brought the hen into the barn, then brought its lifeless body to my mother so that she could pluck its feathers. “You’re the housekeeper,” I heard her say. “This is your duty to perform. If we’re to have a chicken dinner, you wring its neck.”
I quickly came to prefer Julia to my mother. I think she knew this, because whenever I came to her kitchen door to bring Billy Goat back from a day at the shore, she would give me a slice of pie.
“If you have any difficulties,” she advised, “just come to me.”
From then on, I was her accomplice.
The two lighthouses on the island had been built to distinguish their beacons from the single Boston Light, down the coast, and Plymouth Light, which was to the north, and save ships from the Londoner. The current brought ships toward the reef, and in the dark, at high tide, it was the perfect trap. The lighthouses were the warning signs in the inky night, and even in the fog sailors knew to stay away. As the summer passed, I began to feel free. I had time to myself, and I enjoyed watching over the children. I felt a sort of joy I’d never felt before. I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy. The sea was ever changing, ever interesting, and I felt closer to my father. I now loved the ocean, as he had. The island was a sort of paradise for children in fine weather. I watched over the young boys and girls by the shore as they jumped in the pools left by the high tide and dug for mussels and hermit crabs. We collected seashells and bags of white stones to bring to Thacher’s niece’s grave. It was a spectacular and lonely landscape that I wished my father could see. I wished he could take off his shoes and climb over the rocks and wave to me and that he would be here in this world once again, if only for a few hours.