January, 1859
And then one day it happened: Grace.
Her parents kept the Shoreham Inn.
But the first house we shared was the Kingdomtide Church. Perched by North Light, at the edge of the sea.
All nave, it was, the Kingdomtide. And seemed, like its faithful, to sit there on faith. Not least for the buck and the scourge of the wind, butting at the walls year round. Nor the waves of the ocean that footed the cliffs, so high in a storm that they dashed the pine roof.
Glad to remind us, Reverend Hascall. Raised up from a boy on these raked-over shores. Salt-blooded, it was said of him, with long veins of seaweed investing his flesh. Really a reedy and stoop-shouldered man with a pale freckled face and a muzzle of whiskers.
Abner Hascall, his father, my mother’s good shepherd.
His father, her mother’s, progressing through time.
Earlier that October, the North Lighthouse had been ripped from its moorings by terrible winds. A couple of salmon dinghies had been lost along with it. Each of them packed with island men. Could not place out in the storm what part was rock and what part harbour. What remained of the boats and the men and the lighthouse were still being dredged from the base of the cliff. Already to show we were not beat, a new lighthouse was underway.
The Sunday after construction began, the Reverend Hascall assembled the flock. Those sober and not made their way to the church, where last week’s storm had made the path leading up to the building a treacherous porridge. Wallows in the places where the lighthouse cornice-stones had hammered upon the rain-slick earth.
German and English, mostly, we. Methodists, nearly to the last. The women in bonnets and dark trimless dresses. Mirthless to the very bone their charging, pale and thin-lipped faces. Sitting father to children, clan by clan.
So were they arranged today and likewise did we go among them.
Maiers walking. Maier women. My mother and I with our far swampy stares.
The first thing that our eyes perceived down the dark avenue of parishioners sitting: the Christ in perfect agony, suspended in back of the pulpit.
All this I saw, and then a stall. Families milling, children laughing. A man in the back just beside where I stood—not in the back row, but against the back wall—raised and lowered his arm in a curious gesture. Seemed to be a man alone. No family about or even near him. No reason for him to be there as he was, sinister and sad.
Brown, striped trousers. Wide-brimmed hat. A hat, at that, inside God’s house. Also, a darkness to his figure. Not a swarthiness, exactly, but a boldness or solidity. And I saw that his clothes were soaking wet, the sort of wet that never dries, the water running down his chest to pool about his untied brogues. Coming away in sticky braids every time he raised his hand, bulbs and fronds of brownish kelp. I even thought I smelled the brine.
“Ignore him, child. Go take your seat.”
But the drowned man continued to stand there, not speaking. Trickling like a statue in a garden.
“He is gone. He is no one,” said my mother. “Open up your hymnal, girl.”
“Said the two sisters of Bethany to Jesus, Oh, Lord. Lazarus our brother lies ill,” said the Reverend. “He whom you love lies ill, they said, and wiped off his feet with their hair. Answered Jesus to Mary, Martha, calmly. Slowly, so they heard his words. Said He to the sisters, Take ye heart. Lazarus’s illness leads not to death. Lazarus’s illness leads instead to God’s glory. That the true Son of God, who I am, may restore him. That I may raise—yes, raise!—him up. That he might awaken, said God, for I wish it. Sure as I stand before you now . . .”
Turned in my pew when the hymn started up and saw in a flash that the drowned man was gone. And yet I glimpsed, three rows behind, arrayed between her handsome parents, a girl my age unknown to me with a curious look on her face.
It was mirth.
Mother as stiff as a dressmaker’s doll. Listening to Revered Hascall. Or appearing to listen to him, anyway. The muscles of her face lightly tensed, then relaxed.
Tremendous coil of auburn hair. That was the first thing I noticed of Grace.
That and a small bony, rarified face. The cold of the church showing pink on her cheeks.
Her mother was all but the promise of her. With a bloom of dark hair and long, slender neck. The man beside her very still. Fingers meshed across his ribs. But with something of wryness in his eyes. Not smugness, exactly, but something amused, as Reverend Hascall raised his own.
“Hannah, don’t stare,” mother managed to say.
Already we had this in common: aloneness. Letting the curse fall where it may.
“Hannah, go see to your mother,” said father as we filed down the aisle once the service had ended.
Mother’s brow gone reflective with sweat. Her lips dry.
Grace’s first words: “Is your mother all right?”
My eyes went darting, panicky. As though the voice were in my head. Then I saw that the girl had detached from her parents, was suddenly standing in my path.
“Just a little faint,” said I.
“Some calomel, then,” said Grace. “For the purges. A fair warning, though: it will dry out the eyes.”
Mother leaned against a pew-back, half aware of where she was. Father ahead, looking back in vexation, eager to smoke in the cold with his friends.
“We shall help her together, all right?” said Grace. “Here, Ma’am.” Alongside her. “Now cling to my arm.”
Said mother: “You’re kind.” And accepted the arm. Accepted with a rigid smile.
“I’m Grace,” said Grace. “Now tell me yours.”
Said I: “I am Hannah Maier.”
“You have immensely kind eyes, Hannah Maier. Are you kind?”
“I would like to think so, miss.”
“Don’t call me miss. Say Grace,” said she. “Say Grace”—the girl laughed—“as you do at your table.”
“Grace then,” said I, leading mother along. Continued out into the muck of the churchyard.
Father in a pack of men. Rocking on his cork-soled shoes. Lot of them smoking wordlessly with the grotty intentness of gamblers.
“You think that the Reverend is silly?” said I.
“Was I that bad at covering up?”
“I think that the Reverend is silly,” said I.
“The Reverend!” said she. “Why the Reverend’s delightful. Verily, a human torch! You will have to come down to the inn,” said the girl. “My parents have taken it over, you’ve heard?”
“I hadn’t,” said I.
Which of course was a lie. Everyone in town had heard. The pretty girl from Providence whose father wore a silver fob.
“In two days’ time, I shall gladly receive you.”
Nodded and opened my mouth, but no words.
“Good!” said Grace. “We will talk and be splendid. I will take you on a tour of every mouse-hole in the house. Are you all right to walk, Miss Maier?
“Go on,” said mother. “Go. You’re kind.”
I was, for the first time, embarrassed of her while Grace wheeled around in her peach-coloured dress. A few pretty strands coming loose from her coil and riding the sea air, electric with cold.
“So nice to have met you,” she cried, walking backwards, holding her skirts above the mud.
The last time that I saw her she was standing with her parents in the nearly empty lintel of the church-house.
Q
Mother sat beside me on the carriage-ride home. Bonnet cast over her face for the light. A series of ruts and the trap started up. Tipping me suddenly into her ribs.
“All mother needs is a nice darkened room. Ain’t that the truth of it, mother?” said father. “A nice darkened room with a nice warmed-up cloth to chase off them mean winter headaches.”
Gin-fug heavy, on the wind. Father’s arm crooked as he reached in his coat. Sunday the Lord’s day but also a day when father went to sleep at five.
Up ahead another trap. Crossing the road that bisected the mountain.
“Ho, Pieter,” said father. “Get on with them nags.”
The man driving smiled and the trap cut across.
“Fleeter of foot than yours,” called Pieter.
Brood of three boys with a woman in back. A frieze of longsuffering faces theirs from all this riding in the open. And Pieter himself, who was somehow familiar. Who had, at some point, taken soup in our kitchen. Or stood with father in the hall for as long as it took them to take down a cup. But when I saw his face emerge from underneath his wide-brimmed hat, I knew him for the drowned man with the kelp in his hair that I’d seen earlier at the back of the church. Sure as Lazarus walked, here was Pieter, the drowned man, steering his carriage off into the trees.