I sat on the bench with my back to the marsh and waited until Father Dominic was out of sight. What just happened?
He’d seemed so genuine. Earnest. Jessie, I need you to trust me. It seemed as if I should. He was, after all, an old monk who told knock-knock jokes. Everyone loved him. More to the point, Kat trusted him, and Kat Bowers was no fool. It would be impossible to dupe that woman.
Confused, I stretched my neck backward, watching two ospreys lap a wide circle through the fog. What if Father Dominic was right? Could I make things worse for Mother by trying to understand her reasons?
My eyes fell on The Mermaid’s Tale, wedged next to me on the bench. I thumbed to the title page. “Zoom did you expect?” he’d written in peculiar slanted letters, then scrawled his name.
As I stared at it, it slowly dawned on me—I didn’t trust him. I just didn’t. I believed inside that I should, and there were Kat and Mother up to their earlobes in trust for Dominic, but I couldn’t muster any of it for myself.
I glanced at my watch. It was just after eleven. I would have to get back soon and fix lunch for Mother, but I had a sudden impulse to slip inside the church and see the mermaid chair.
The last time I’d seen it had probably been twenty-five years ago, right before I’d left for college. Despite the considerable time Mike and I had spent horsing around on it as children, I always associated it with my father—I suppose because he was the one who’d first showed it to me, who’d told me the story behind it, who’d loved the chair nearly as much as his boat. Mother, on the other hand, had wanted nothing to do with it.
It hadn’t always been that way. Up until Dad died, she hadn’t minded the chair at all. Year after year he’d been one of the men who carried the mermaid chair on its two-mile procession from the church to the ferry dock for the Blessing of the Fleet, something she’d encouraged. Typically the monks chose the more pious men, and Joe Dubois had been an absolute pagan, but somehow he’d always wheedled himself into the job. He simply believed, he said, in blessing shrimp boats; he didn’t care whether it was St. Senara, God, the monks, or Max the dog who performed the blessing. But I think it was more than that. While my mother loved Senara, the saint, my father loved her other nature—her life as Asenora, the mermaid.
The chair had round iron hooks on each arm for poles to slip through, and every April, early in the evening of St. Senara’s feast day, four men lifted the rods onto their shoulders and paraded the chair from the church, through the abbey gate, past the island shops, as if it were Cleopatra’s throne or the bier of a Greek god. I remember Mike and me marching beside our father the whole way, very brash and self-important—“peacocked,” Mother had said—and the islanders flowing out behind us, undulating over the road in a long bridal train of color.
Walking now toward the church, I thought about those radiant processions, the prayer read by the abbot as he sat in the mermaid chair on the dock’s edge, his hand lifted in blessing. And perhaps forty trawlers, not just from Egret Island but McClellanville and Mount Pleasant, too, moving past the dock, each one strung with colored lights, the water turning molten as darkness collected. After the boats were blessed, and the chair ceremoniously splashed with seawater, the islanders would toss Mermaid Tears—tiny pearl-colored pebbles—into the bay, as a way of honoring the mermaid saint’s sadness at leaving the ocean. Then the entire island would gather around tables of fried and boiled shrimp at Max’s Café.
Between the Net House and the church, there was a grassy area where the monks used to spread the cast nets on wooden racks and treat them with a coppery-smelling solution to keep them from rotting. The racks were gone now, but I could see a robed monk out there, tossing a bright yellow tennis ball to Max. His back was to me, but I noticed he was tall and that his hair was dark. When Max bounded back to him with the ball, the monk bent down and rubbed the dog’s head. It was Brother Thomas.
As I walked toward him, he turned, and when he recognized me, his face filled with what looked exactly like pleasure. He came over to me, holding the tennis ball, Max trailing behind.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your game,” I said, trying not to smile for some reason, but I couldn’t restrain it. I felt a lavish sweep of happiness at the sight of him.
“I was just passing time with Max until day prayer and mass,” he said.
There was a moment of silence in which I looked off at the trees, then back to find him watching me with the faintest accumulation of a smile. I thought of my dream, the two of us on the raft in the ocean. The images had come to me repeatedly over the last two days—his cowl falling back to reveal his face, his hand touching my cheek, sliding beneath my back. I felt self-conscious thinking about it in his presence. As if it might show through.
I abruptly dropped my gaze to the ground, where I saw his boots sticking out from beneath his robe, caked with dry mud from the marsh.
“My work shoes,” he said. “I’m the rookery monk.”
“The what?”
He laughed. “The rookery monk,” he repeated.
“And what is that?”
“The state pays us to take care of the rookery—it’s a protected refuge—so one of us is designated to go out every day and keep an eye on it.”
“You don’t make cast nets with the others?”
“No, thank God. I was terrible at it, plus I’m the youngest one here, so I got the outdoor job.”
Max had been sitting patiently, waiting. “One more,” Thomas told him, and sent the ball sailing into the air.
We watched Max for a second as he ran full speed through the haze.
“What does a rookery monk do, exactly?” I asked.
“He keeps track of the bird population—not just egrets but pelicans, herons, ospreys, most all of them. In the spring and summer, he counts and measures egret eggs, checks on the nests, the hatchlings, that kind of thing. This time of year is not so busy.”
I could smell a fragrance coming from him. It was, I realized, grape jelly.
“So you watch birds.”
He smiled. “That’s the biggest part of it, but I do other things—inspect the oyster beds, collect water samples, whatever’s needed. The Department of Natural Resources has a checklist for me.” Max came bounding up with the ball in his mouth, and Thomas took it, tucking it inside his scapular. “Max usually goes out in the boat with me,” he added, stroking the dog’s back.
“I can tell you like the job,” I said.
“To be honest, I think sometimes being out there on the creeks is what keeps me here.”
“I know what you mean. I grew up on the creeks. My brother and I loved the birds. We used to go out in the rookery and watch the male egrets do their mating dance.”
I’d blurted this without thinking. And it would’ve been nothing, nothing, just stupid conversation about birds, if, realizing what I’d said, I hadn’t drawn in my breath, making that small, rasping sound of surprise. Redness washed up my neck into my cheeks, so of course he knew I was reading something sexual into what we were doing. I wanted to turn and run off, the way Max had done.
He was looking at me intently. I’m sure he knew what I was thinking, but he was kind, and he tried to smooth it over. He said, “Yes, I’ve seen it many times. It’s beautiful the way they snap their bills and elongate their necks.”
The truth was, I’d been snapping my bill and elongating my neck for the last five minutes.
“I’ve told you what I do,” he was saying. “What is it you do?”
I stood there trying to make myself appear very straight and proper. I didn’t know how to say who I was or what I did. What did I do? Keep house for Hugh? Paint scenes in little boxes and arrange a collage of objects inside them? No, I couldn’t even claim that anymore. And Dee had grown up and gone away, so I couldn’t say, “I’m a stay-at-home mom,” in that cheerful way I used to.
I said, “You know, I was really on my way to see the mermaid chair. I shouldn’t keep you.”
“You’re not keeping me at all. Come on, I’ll walk you over there. Unless you want to be alone.”
“All right,” I said. I knew he’d detected the change in my demeanor, and I didn’t know why he was being persistent. Did he want to be with me, or was he merely being hospitable?
He touched my elbow, guiding me onto the path that led around to the church, the same small, common gesture he’d used with Mother, but the pressure of his hand on my coat sent a current flying through me.
The church was deserted, filled with a throbbing silence. We eased along the nave between the choir stalls, moving past the altar into the narrow ambulatory behind the apse, where we paused at the arched entrance to a tiny chapel.
The mermaid chair sat on a raised platform that was carpeted in a dark wine color. The carpet, I noticed, had thinned down to patches of thread in several places. On the wall behind the chair, a narrow clerestory window let in a stripe of musty, sawdust light that fell across the seat.
I walked over and laid my hand on the back of the chair. It was carved with an intricate Celtic-knot design. The mermaids that made up the chair arms were still painted in green, gold, and red, though some of the brightness had faded since I’d seen them last.
I hadn’t thought the sight of it would affect me, but my eyes welled up immediately. My father had sat on the chair and patted his knee for me to climb into his lap. Laying my cheek against the rough corduroy of his jacket, I’d whispered to him, “Are you praying?” Because that’s what you did when you sat in the chair. You prayed for things, usually impossible things, and your prayers were supposed to be answered. Before Mother had acquired her odd aversion to the chair, she used to sing a verse to me, a rhyme every child on the island knew by heart.
Sit in the chair,
Say a prayer.
An answer tomorrow
From St. Senara.
My father had whispered back, “Yes, I’m praying, but don’t you dare tell your mother. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“What are you praying for?”
“For you.”
I’d sat up, electrified by this. My father was saying a prayer for me, and whatever he asked—it would happen. “What are you asking?”
He’d touched the tip of his finger to my nose. “That you’ll stay my Whirly Girl forever.”
I noticed Brother Thomas still in the entranceway, looking uncertain about whether to stay or to leave me alone. I let my hand glide over the wooden locks of the mermaid’s hair, then along her wings.
“I always wondered why she has wings,” I said. “I never heard of mermaids having them. Do you know why?”
He took it as an invitation, which it was, and came to the other side of the chair, stepping into the dim, powdery light from the window. It made a streak on his robe. “The thinking around here is that she’s part siren. Sirens have fish tails and wings.”
Her wings reminded me suddenly of plumage. Of mating dances. “But I thought sirens were terrible creatures.”
“You’re probably thinking of the Odyssey, how they lured the sailors onto the rocks, but before that they were sea goddesses. They brought messages from the deep. Kind of like angels, but they didn’t come down from heaven, they came up from the sea. Supposedly their messages would inspire or heal—so sirens weren’t always bad.”
I must have looked surprised that he knew so much about it, because he grinned slightly and said, “I fill in for Brother Bede sometimes; he’s the one who leads the guided tours.”
I heard a shuffling noise in the corridor, just outside the chapel, and looked around, expecting to see a monk step in, but no one did, and we went on talking a few more minutes about the mermaids on the chair. He told me he liked the idea of them having both wings and fish tails, because it meant they could carry on in two completely different worlds, that they belonged equally to the sky and sea, and he envied that. He talked at length about it, but I didn’t find it high-minded, only intriguing, and, to be honest, it excited me that he possessed this kind of arcane knowledge.
I let my gaze travel to the chair arm again, pretending to be engrossed in the mermaid, the whole wing–fish tail conundrum, aware that he was still looking at me.
“Do you believe the story that anyone who sits in the chair and prays will be granted an answer?” I asked.
“Not in the magical sense, no.”
“I take it you don’t sit in the chair like the tourists and pray?”
“I suppose I pray in other ways.”
“What ways?” I asked, realizing after I’d said it how intrusive it sounded. I was sure I’d never asked anyone about his prayer life before.
“Thomas Merton wrote that the birds were his prayers, and I guess I feel that way, too. I pray best by just being out in the marsh. It’s the only praying my soul seems to really respond to.”
Soul. The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I’d pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person—a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person’s experiences—a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we’ve ever known. I might have asked him about it, but a bell began to ring in the belfry overhead. He stepped into the corridor, then turned back to me, and I could see the sharp blue in his eyes even from over there. “I don’t pray in the mermaid chair, but, for the record, that doesn’t mean it lacks power.”
The bell clanged again. Smiling at me, he tucked his hands into his scapular with Max’s tennis ball and walked away.