Blackbird House (10 page)

“Do you think monsters are a figment of man’s imagination?”
 
Ewan asked me.
 
The sun was coming up, and he had offered me some of the coffee, still warm.
 
I drank it and felt I was floating.
 
I watched the stars evaporate into the lightening sky.
 
Who was I to say what men might imagine?

“There are always authentic abnormalities,” I offered.
 
“And if it’s part of the natural world, it is, by definition, natural.”
 
It was brave of me to say, even braver for me to look at him straight on, not hiding what was wrong with me.

We went to the larger ponds, one after another, five in all, and as we went along I told him the names of the species of trees he had not seen before, common things, like pitch pines and locusts.
 
The mulberry trees brought from China he recognized, for he had been to China once.

There he had seen a flying squid, which arose from the waves like a

raven, as well as a two-headed fish that could keep one set of eyes

closed while the other blinked open and shut.
 
He might have been to

China, but he hadn’t been to the Cape before.
 
Things here were new to

him, and therefore interesting.
 
I told him about the white blackbird

that nested in our woods, a ghost bird people called it, but

I’d collected four feathers and they had proved to be entirely corporeal.
 
I pointed out the tracks of a red fox, the thickets of winterberry, green as we passed them, but scarlet in the dead of winter; I told him about dragon’s blood, the crystallized tree sap we used as a dye for quilts and dresses.
 
He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

We met each morning for three days in a row.
 
I learned to be quiet while he looked for samples.
 
He was looking for tracks, scales, half-eaten gulls or terns, any bit of evidence.
 
I drank hot coffee.
 
I didn’t bother with my hat and let my braid of dark hair shine in the sunlight.
 
I walked through the mud and pointed out bullfrogs.
 
I drifted salt out on logs, hoping to entice the sea monster into coming forth for what it must naturally need, the essence of what it itself was, the dregs of the salty sea.

My father had every reason to be angry.
 
I didn’t care for the cows, and they cried pitifully in the evenings, so that my sister, Huley, had to go out in the field to do the milking, even though she was afraid of the monster.
 
I forgot my errands, my chores, my life; the horses waited in their stalls for me to come and read by lamplight, but I didn’t appear.
 
In time, Ewan put his hand on my arm, then my shoulder, then my leg.
 
He kissed me when I wasn’t expecting it, and then when I was.
 
I thought about water.
 
I thought about salt.
 
I thought that every monster who looks at his reflection in pond water sees only the black movement of the water and the pinpricks of starlight from up above.

What happened was my fault, of course.
 
I should have let him go at the end of the week, when he said there was no proof that the sea monster, if it had ever existed, was anywhere to be found.
 
I thought of all the places Ewan had been, and all the places he’d yet to travel to, and the way he had held me close and lifted up my skirt.
 
When he was with me, he always put his face against mine, not afraid to touch me the way others were, as though I were poisonous.
 
That morning, I went to the harbor, where George West was already at work on the nets.
 
I knew there was a huge run of bluefish.
 
By noon of that day, the bay would be swarming as the bluefish chased schools of mackerel inland to their death.

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me,” I said.

George nodded, and as soon as he turned away from me, I collected the bluefish scales that had washed up on shore.
 
I held a match beneath them, singeing them slightly, so that they turned brown and sulfury, almost like burnt feathers, there in my hand.
 
When I turned to go, I saw George West looking at me.
 
He had been working so hard on the nets the bluefish destroyed in their frenzy that his hands were bleeding.

“I’d wager Harry Wynn didn’t see anything come out of the bay.
 
He has nightmares, and he wanders at night.
 
I’ve seen him myself.
 
Barefoot in the snow, screaming at things that aren’t there.”

“Do you know a lot about things that aren’t there?”
 
I asked.

“I know a bluefish scale when I see one.”

This was the most I’d ever heard George West speak.
 
I wasn’t particularly interested in hearing more.
 
I went right up to him, close, even though I was stinking of sulfur and fish.

“Promise you won’t tell anyone.”

Why did I think I had the right to ask that of him?
 
And yet he seemed to think I did as well, because he nodded.
 
I ran off before George could change his mind.
 
I wasn’t sure he knew exactly what he had agreed to; I wasn’t certain myself.
 
I rode all the way to the Dills’ house with mud on my skirts and the sulfur clinging to me.
 
I was thinking about George West’s bleeding hands and the way people did strange and desperate things, and I got myself more and more worked up.
 
The sun was burning hot, and my face hurt the way it did sometimes, as if something were stinging me, as though bees were under my skin.

Mr.
 
Dill brought me into his guest room, where Ewan was already

packing.
 
There was the smell of lemon in the room, and of coffee, and

of mud.
 
I had wrapped the scales in my shawl, which I now laid on the

bed.
 
I watched as Ewan unwrapped them and I nearly fainted with

nerves.
 
I

thought about his hands on me.
 
I thought I could make a lie into the truth.

The look on his face when he saw what I’d brought him seemed worth anything.

“Violet,” he said, and I wanted to shout out, Yes, yes, it’s me, I’m alive!
 
But I looked at the floor, as though I were frightened by what I’d found.
 
I let the story out slowly; I knew from all the reading I’d done that was the best way to tell a tale, start far away from the center, but know where that center is at all times.
 
For me the center was the way he was looking at me.
 
He got overheated just hearing about the tracks I’d happened upon on our property.
 
I said that for the past two days our cows had been dry; something with a taste for milk had been feeding from them, then slinking back into the murky waters of the little pond at the rear of our farm, crushing the last of the mallows, and the duckweed, and the plumy milkweed, whose feathery pods were beginning to rise into the air whenever the wind came up.
 
Then, last night, I had found the scales.
 
They were so full of the serpent’s sulfur they had burned my hands.
 
I showed Ewan the charcoal edges of my fingertips, where the match had spat at me while I was holding the scales of George West’s bluefish over the flame.

Ewan unpacked his trunk right then.
 
I helped him, if the truth be

told.
 
Perhaps Mrs.
 
Dill, who was watching us from the hallway,

thought this was overly familiar, but I

didn’t care.
 
The story had a center and this was what it was: Ewan Perkins and I rode out to our farm that very day.
 
We were there before supper.
 
It was the time of year when the sweet peas have their last wild bloom.
 
Our cows were crazy for them, and the milk they gave was especially sweet at this time of year.
 
There was dust rising up from the road to our house, yellow dust on the white clapboards, milkweed spinning across the fields.
 
My sister was out with the cows, trying to get them to follow her home, and Huley was golden as well.
 
Her yellow hair fell down her back; her arms were bare.
 
Even though I had seen Huley every day of my life, I could still recognize how beautiful she was.
 
I didn’t look at the way they stared at each other when I introduced them.
 
I thought Ewan would laugh when my sister talked about how afraid she was of the monster, how she wasn’t surprised in the least that it had wound up in our pond, it had probably been drawn to our property by the strong fragrance of the sweet peas.
 
She heard things at night, Huley admitted, like a whispering, like the sound of scales dragging along the meadow.
 
You idiot, I wanted to say, that’s me, reading, turning pages, being alive, but I didn’t say anything.
 
I stood there thinking that sweet peas had no scent, at least not to me.

My father wasn’t happy with the idea that Ewan would set up a camp on

the shore of the pond.
 
He didn’t offer coffee or supper, the way the

Dills had.
 
My father wasn’t the sort of man who was pleased when a

reporter from the

Boston Post came to see the campsite Ewan put up a tent and two kerosene lanterns and a little boat borrowed from John Morse.
 
Soon enough, a story appeared announcing that a Harvard naturalist was convinced he would soon have proof of his monster right in our town.
 
Already, he had found unrecognizable tracks in the weeds, headed toward the cows.
 
There were whiskers plucked from the muzzle of my horse Swan, and singed with a match that had recently been discovered in the shallows of the pond.
 
Surely, no fish, not even the catfish at the very bottom of the muck, had whiskers such as these, which was why Ewan kept them stored in a thin envelope.
 
I was happy to row out to the center of the pond and sprinkle salt on the lily pads.
 
I was happy to sit by the shore as a lookout far into the night.
 
Sometimes, Ewan kissed me, but it was different and darker, and I let him do more to me all the time.
 
I wanted him to; I put salt on my skin to draw him to me.
 
I thought of him as I used to think of books, the thing that could make me other than myself.

I grew tired from the hours I was keeping.
 
Up in the middle of the

night to tend to the cows, then trudging through the winterberry to

throw the milk away in order to claim the serpent was feeding in our

field again.
 
Making the serpent’s trail with a snowshoe and a shovel

that bent down the yellowing stalks of the sweet peas.
 
Gathering

scales from the last of the bluefish, which would soon disappear from

our bay; it was the end of the season, after all,

and the bay was colder with every passing hour.
 
Wrapping my arms around Ewan until I all but disappeared, until the only thing that was left was the blotch on my face in the shape of a violet, the sort that lasts only a week or two in the spring.

I overslept one day, and after I’d pulled on my clothes, I ran down to the pond.
 
I realized how much time had passed since Ewan had first come to town because the coot had begun to migrate, flying over town as they did every October.
 
Things weren’t so yellow anymore, except for my sister’s hair.
 
She had brought him coffee, and maybe she had been doing that for some time.
 
There was nothing wrong in that, they were merely talking; it wasn’t like the way we were at night in his tent, so feverish I could feel the salt rising on my skin.
 
I could feel the mark on my face stinging with the thousands of bees that were inside me.
 
It was something else entirely, the way he looked at her as he drank his coffee.
 
I ran back through the milkweed.
 
I had a hundred pods of it in my hair and stuck to my clothes, not that it mattered.
 
I went upstairs to my bed and I stayed there.
 
I didn’t come down for dinner, I didn’t milk the cows, I didn’t do the work of my deception that Ewan had so come to depend upon.

My sister brought me soup, but I spat it on the floor.
 
My father came

to my bedside, worried, but I didn’t even look at him; instead, I

stared at the patterns of shadow on the wall.
 
Ewan came to the kitchen

for tea in the afternoons.
 
I

could hear him asking how I was, but I could also hear the tone of my sister’s voice.
 
After several days, I had a strange visitor, one I wouldn’t have expected.
 
It was George West, bringing me an apple cake that his mother had made.
 
It was the time for apples, and the cake smelled good, but I turned my face away.
 
That was when George West gave me the other gift he’d brought.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he said.

I looked at him then, and he quickly looked away.
 
This time I didn’t think it was because he was frightened by my face.
 
I saw what he’d brought me: three bluefish scales, perfect, larger than any I’d seen before, already singed at the edges, sulfury and brown.
 
I got out of bed then, even though I was only wearing my nightgown, and hid what George had brought me in the back of the storage bin in the wall.
 
I was careful so as not to tear the scales; they were delicate, really, beautiful things.
 
When I turned around, George was gone.