Blackbird House (4 page)

Anyone would have guessed the six cows would have bolted for someone else’s farmland and a field of green grass, but they stayed where they were, on the beach, beside Ruth.
 
People in town said you could hear them all crying at night; it got so bad the fish were frightened out of the bay, and the whelks disappeared, and the oysters buried themselves so deeply they couldn’t be found.

It was May, the time of year when the men went to sea.
 
Perhaps a different decision might have been considered if the men been home from the Great Banks and the Middle Banks, where their sights were set on mackerel and cod.
 
Perhaps Ruth would have been run out of town.
 
As it was, Susan Crosby and Easter West devised a plan of their own.
 
They won Ruth Blackbird Hill over slowly, with plates of oatcakes and kettles of tea.
 
They took their time, the way they might with a fox or a dove, any creature that was easily startled.
 
They sat on a log of dritfwood and told Ruth that sorrow was what this world was made of, but that it was her world still.
 
At first she would not look at them, yet they could tell she was listening.
 
She was a young woman, a girl really, nineteen at most, although her hands looked as hard as an old woman’s, with ropes of veins that announced her hardships.

Susan and Easter brought Ruth over to Lysander Wynn’s farm, where he’d built a blacksmithing shed.
 
It took half the morning to walk there, with the cows stopping to graze by the road, dawdling until Ruth coaxed them on.
 
It was a bright-blue day, and the women from town felt giddy now that they’d made a firm decision to guide someone else’s fate, what their husbands might call “interference” had they but known.
 
As for Ruth, she still had a line of black cinders under her fingernails.
 
There was eelgrass threaded through her hair.
 
She had the notion that these two women, Susan and Easter, known for their good works and their kindly attitudes, were about to sell her into servitude.
 
She simply couldn’t see any other reason for them to be walking along with her, swatting the cows on the rear to speed them on, waving away the flies.
 
The awful thing was that Ruth wasn’t completely opposed to being sold.
 
She didn’t want to think.
 
She didn’t want to remember anything.
 
She didn’t even want to speak.

They reached the farm that Lysander had bought from the Hadley family.

He’d purchased the property mainly because it was the one place in the

area from which there was no view of the sea, for that was exactly what

he wanted.
 
The farm was only a mile from the closest shore, but it sat

in a hollow, with tall oaks and scrub pine and a field of sweet peas

and brambles nearby.
 
As a younger man,

Lysander had been a sailor, he’d gone out with the neighbors to the Great Banks, and it was there he’d had his accident.
 
A storm had come up suddenly, and the sloop had listed madly, throwing Lysander into the sea.
 
It was so cold he had no time to think, save for a fleeting thought of Jonah, of how a man could be saved when he least expected it, in ways he could have never imagined.

He wondered if perhaps the other men on board, Joseph Hansen and Edward West, had had the foresight to throw him a side of salt pork for him to lean on, for, just when he expected to drown, something solid was suddenly beneath him.
 
Something hard and cold as ice.
 
Something made of scales rather than flesh or water or wood; a creature who certainly was not intent on Lysander’s salvation.
 
The fish to whose back he clung was a halibut, a huge one two hundred, maybe three hundred pounds, Edward West later said.
 
Lysander rode the halibut like he rode his horse, Domino, until he was bucked off.
 
All at once his strength was renewed by his panic; he started swimming, harder than he ever had before.
 
Lysander was almost to the boat when he felt it, the slash of the thing against him, and the water turned red right away.
 
He was only twenty at the time, too young to have this happen.
 
Dead or alive, either would have been better than what had befallen him.
 
He wished he had drowned that day, because when he was hauled into the boat his neighbors had to finish the job and cut off the leg at the thigh, then cauterize the wound with gunpowder and whiskey.

Lysander had some money saved, and the other men in town contributed the rest, and the farm was bought soon after.
 
The shed was built in a single afternoon, and the anvil brought down from Boston.
 
Luckily, Lysander had the blacksmith’s trade in his family on his father’s side, so it came naturally to him.
 
The hotter the work was, the better he liked it.
 
He could stick his hand into the flame fueled by the bellow and not feel a thing.
 
But let it rain, even a fleeting drizzle, and he would start to shiver.
 
He ignored the pond behind the house entirely, though there were catfish there that were said to be delectable.
 
Fishing was for other men.
 
Water was for fools.
 
As for women, they were a dream he didn’t bother with.
 
In his estimation, the future was no farther away than the darkness of evening; it consisted of nothing more than a sprinkling of stars in the sky.

Lysander used a crutch made of apple wood that bent when he leaned upon

it but was surprisingly strong when need be.
 
He had hit a prowling

skunk on the head with the crutch and knocked it unconscious.
 
He had

dug through a mat of moss for a wild orchid that smelled like fire when

he held it up to his face.
 
He slept with the crutch by his side in

bed, afraid to be without it.
 
He liked to walk in the woods, and

sometimes he imagined he would be better off if he just lay down

between the logs and the moss and

stayed there, forevermore.
 
Then someone would need their horse shod; they would come up the road and ring the bell that hung on the wall of the shed, and Lysander would have to scramble back from the woods.
 
But he thought about remaining where he was, hidden, unmoving; he imagined it more often than anyone might have guessed.
 
Crows would light upon his shoulders, crickets would crawl into his pockets, fox would lie down beside him and never even notice he was there.

He was in the woods on the day they brought Ruth Blackbird Hill and her cows to the farm.
 
Sometimes when he was very quiet Lysander thought he saw another man in the trees.
 
He thought it might be the sailor who’d built the house, the widow Hadley’s husband, who’d been lost at sea. Or perhaps it was himself, weaving in and out of the shadows, the man he might have been.

Susan Crosby and Easter West explained the situation: the parents lost, the house and meadows burned down, the way Ruth was living on the beach, unprotected, unable to support herself, even to eat.
 
In exchange for living in Lysander’s house, she would cook and clean for him.
 
Ruth kept her back to them as they discussed her fate; she patted one of her cows, a favorite of hers she called Missy.
 
Lysander Wynn was just as bitter as Ruth Blackbird Hill was.
 
He was certain the women from town wouldn’t have brought Ruth to the farm if he’d been a whole man, able to get up the stairs to the attic, where they suggested Ruth sleep.
 
He was about to say no, he was more than willing to get back to work in the fires of his shop, when he noticed that Ruth was wearing red boots.
 
They were made of old leather, mud-caked; all the same, Lysander had never seen shoes that color, and he felt touched in some way.
 
He thought about the color of fire.
 
He thought about flames.
 
He thought he would never be hot enough to get the chill out of his body or the water out of his soul.

“Just as long as she never cooks fish,” he heard himself say.

Ruth Blackbird Hill laughed at that.
 
“What makes you think I cook at all?”

Ruth took the cows into the field of sweet peas.
 
Lysander’s horse, Domino, rolled his eyes and ran to the far end of the meadow, spooked.
 
But the cows paid no attention to the gelding whatsoever, they just huddled around Ruth Blackbird Hill and calmly began to eat wild weeds and grass.
 
What Lysander had agreed to didn’t sink in until Susan Crosby and Easter West left to go back to town.
 
Hasn’t this woman any belongings?
 
Lysander had called after them.
 
Not a thing, they replied.
 
Only the cows that follow her and the shoes on her feet.

Well, a shoe was the one thing Lysander might have offered.
 
He had several old boots thrown into a cabinet, useless when it came to his missing right foot.
 
He put out some old clothes and quilts on the stairs leading to the attic.
 
He’d meant to finish it, turn the space into decent rooms, but he’d had to crawl up the twisting staircase to check on the rafters, and that one attempt was enough humiliation to last him for a very long time.
 
Anyway, the space was good enough for someone used to sleeping on the beach.
 
When Ruth didn’t come in to start supper, Lysander made himself some johnnycake, half cooked, but decent enough, along with a plate of turnips; he left a portion of what he’d fixed on the stair alongside the clothes, though he had his suspicions that Ruth might not eat.
 
She might just starve herself sitting out in that field.
 
She might take flight, and he’d find nothing when he woke, except for the lonely cows mooing sorrowfully.

As it turned out, Ruth was there in the morning.
 
She’d eaten the food he’d left out for her and was already milking the cows when Lysander went out to work on a metal harness for Easter West’s uncle Karl’s team of mules.
 
Those red shoes peeked out from beneath Ruth’s black skirt.
 
She was singing to the cows and they were waiting in line, patiently.
 
The horse, Domino, had come closer, and Ruth Blackbird Hill opened her palm and gave him a lick of sugar.

In the afternoon Lysander saw her looking in the window of the shed.
 
The fire was hot and he was sweating.
 
He wanted to sweat out every bit of cold ocean water.
 
He always built the fire hotter than advisable.
 
He needed it that way.
 
Sometimes he got a stomachache, and when he vomited, he spat out the halibut’s teeth.
 
Those teeth had gone right through him, it seemed.
 
He could feel them, cold, silvery things.

He must have looked frightening as he forged the metal harness, covered with soot, hot as the devil, because Ruth Blackbird Hill ran away, and she didn’t come to fetch the dinner he placed on the stair though the food was better than the night before, cornbread with wild onions this time, and greens poured over with gravy All the same, the following morning the plate was clean and resting on the table.
 
Every morsel had been eaten.

Ruth Blackbird Hill didn’t cook and she didn’t clean, but she kept on watching him through the window that was made of bumpy glass.
 
Lysander didn’t look up, didn’t let on that he knew she was staring, and then, one day, she was standing in the doorway to the shed.
 
She was wearing a pair of his old britches and a white shirt, but he could see through the smoke that she had on those red shoes.

“How did you lose your leg?”
 
Ruth asked.

He had expected nearly anything but that question.
 
It was rude; no one asked things like that.

“A fish bit it off,” he said.

Ruth laughed and said, “No.”

He could feel the heat from the iron he was working on in his hands, his arms, his head.

“You don’t believe me?”
 
He showed her the chain he wore around his neck, strung with halibut teeth.
 
“I coughed these up one by one.”

“No,” Ruth said again, but her voice was quieter, as though she was thinking it over.
 
She walked right up to him, and Lysander felt something inside him quicken.
 
He had absolutely no idea of what she might do.

Ruth Blackbird Hill put her left hand in the fire, and she would have kept it there if he hadn’t grabbed her arm and pulled her back.

“See?”
 
she said to him.
 
Her skin felt cool, and she smelled like grass.
 
“There are things I’m afraid of, too.”

People in town forgot about Ruth; they didn’t think about how she was living out at the farm any more than they remembered how she’d been camped on the beach for weeks without anyone’s offering help until Susan and Easter could no longer tolerate her situation.
 
Those two women probably should have minded their own business as well, but they were too kindhearted for that, and too smart to tell their husbands what part they had played in Ruth Blackbird Hill’s living at Lysander’s farm.
 
In truth, they had nearly forgotten about her themselves.
 
Then, one day Easter West found a pail of milk at her back door.
 
As it turned out, Susan Crosby discovered the very same thing on her porch cool, green milk that tasted so sweet, and was so filling, that after a single cup a person wouldn’t want another drop to drink all day.
 
Susan chose to go about her business, but Easter was a more curious individual.
 
She couldn’t stop wondering about Ruth.
 
That night, Easter dreamed of blackbirds, and of her husband, who was out in the Middle Banks fishing for mackerel.
 
When she woke she had a terrible thirst for more fresh milk.
 
She went out to the farm that day, just to have a look around.