The Hearth and Eagle (22 page)

“ ’Course not,” she answered scornfully, for they were still in the lee of Peach’s Point, and the rowing easy. She had never rowed this mile-and-a-half stretch to Cat Island before, but she had sailed it several times. Of late years since the Salem Steamboat Company had bought the island and built there a large summer hotel, it had been rechristened Lowell’s Island, and become a favorite sailing goal for Marblehead children, who amused themselves gaping at the fashionably dressed excursionists the steamer deposited at the wharf. In the last century the island had had still another name—Hospital Island, from the smallpox pesthouse situated upon it, but Marbleheaders, ever indifferent to ephemeral fancies, continued to call it by its original name.

Hesper and Johnnie rowed steadily towards the east and the four heavy eight-foot oars dipped together in a smooth rotating rhythm, until gradually they drew abreast of the lighthouse on the Point of the Neck to the south.

This was easy, thought Hesper, not near as bad as Johnnie seemed to think. But in another moment they reached the open channel, and the brisk north wind hit them full force. The waves, at first merely choppy, grew bigger until their tumbling white crests slid by at eye-level in the darkness. The staunch little dory shuddered and twisted and climbed and slipped down again into the troughs. Hesper lost her stroke, and found that over and over she was beating her oars on empty air. Spray showered on her back and ran down the oilskins.

The slave girl began to cry softly—“Oh lawdy, lawdy, save us—” and they heard her retching.

“Steady on—Hes!” cried Johnnie twisting his head. “Ship your port oar, bear all you’ve got to starboard, we’re bein’ blown off course.”

She obeyed, pulling now with both hands at the leeward oar, trying to time it with Johnnie’s powerful strokes. The dory swung slowly back into the wind. Sweat poured down her face and neck and between her breasts, her arms and shoulders began to ache with a fiery pain. The grayish white-tipped masses rocked beneath them, the bilges sloshed with deepening water.

Hesper clenched her teeth and pulled, watching the lighthouse creep inch by inch astern. She heard Johnnie’s unconscious grunts as he exerted all his strength on each down pull. I can’t go on—she thought once, as her oar twisted and buried itself in a mountain of water. Her hands were raw inside the leather fishing mittens, a knife was twisting in her shoulder blades. But she clung to the oar, yanked it out, and went on. Forward—pull—back. Forward—pull—back. Mechanical and mindless. There was no room for fear, nor pity for the poor drenched seasick creature on the stern seat, no room for anything but tough jaw-clenching struggle. On and on through the night and the wind and the savage tossing sea.

She was even unaware of Johnnie, and his triumphant shout took a moment to rouse her. “Well done, Hes. Here’s the island. Ye can rest a bit now.” After a moment she turned her stiff neck and saw the dark mound rising up before them, and the shape of the hotel, now closed, on the northwest tip. Johnnie pulled them in close to the shore and the water suddenly grew calm. She slumped forward on her oar, panting.

Johnnie reached back and patted her on the knee. “Get your breath, Hessie. I couldn’t a asked for better help. It’ll be easier goin’ home with the tide, poor lass.”

She couldn’t answer, but she heard the new note in his voice as he spoke to her, and the pounding of her heart and the pain in her back subsided a little.

Johnnie rowed almost noiselessly around the southern point. He knew the island was deserted at this season, the hotel wouldn’t be open for another three months, but there might be a caretaker.

“Yonder’s the brig—sure enough—” he cried triumphantly, as they glided to seaward of the island. “Chirk up—slave girl, you’re purty nigh safe!”

The dark figure raised her head, they all three stared through the gloom at a silent black hull that loomed against the grayer sky. The brigrocked quietly at anchor two hundred yards off shore, and not a light showed on her, but as they drifted nearer, the clouds lifted and a few stars pricked out between the masts.

Johnnie rowed up close amidships, and the brig’s broad white strip below her square ports glowed like a ghostly ribbon above their heads. “Ahoy there! Brig ahoy!” he shouted through his cupped hands. There was a footfall on deck, a head peered over the rail and vanished, but there was no answering hail.

The slave girl spoke then for the first time. “Dey mus’ want de password, massa—” she said softly. “Tell ’em ‘cat.’”

Johnnie cupped his hands again. “Brig ahoy—Cat! Have ye a cat on board to quell your rats ? But anyway I bring ye a cat, a cat and a kitten! That ought to be enough cats to ease their minds,” he chuckled to Hesper.

Apparently it was. A head reappeared at the rail, and a dark lantern cast its wavering beam down on the dory. “Ahoy there!” called a man’s voice. “Ye’ve been long enough deliverin’ your cats, I’d near given ye up.” The voice had an intonation like that of the men off the Nova Scotian coalers.

“Aye, well we’d a bit o’ trouble, here’n there—” answered Johnnie cheerfully. “Will ye take ’em aboard now? My mate and me must get back.”

“Stand by for the ladder,” responded the voice and the head disappeared.

Suddenly the slave girl came to life. She leaned forward from the stern and spoke with harsh breathlessness. “Ah doan know how ter thank you-all, yo buckra been maughty good ter me up No’th. Cain’ take it een ah’ll get to mah husban’ in Halifax now. He runned off a year gone, he been waitin’ fo’ me.”

“Aye—” said Johnnie soothingly. “You don’t have to thank us.”

The girl went on unheeding, the words spurting from her. “Massa he beat me, he lash me wid th’ bull whip, but Ah wouldn’ tell him where Cato he run ter. Then Massa, he seed Ah’m yaller gal, not bad lookin’—he quit bearin’, an’ he use me—” She stopped.

There were voices on deck and the outline of a ladder appeared over the rail aft of them. Johnnie let the dory drift to position, and Hesper, startled by bewildered pity, said the first thing that came into her head. “How glad your husband’ll be to see the baby too!”

“Ah doan know,” answered the voice from the stern, and now it was weighted with a stony resignation. “Ah reckon so—but Ah doan rightly know effen hit’s Cato’s chile or de massa’s.”

Hesper stiffened. What did that mean ? How could it be she didn’t know? Something ugly—something disgusting and frightening like a bloated dead snake she had found beside the kitchen step.

“Trim ship—Hes,” ordered Johnnie sharply. He was standing on the floor boards, holding the wooden ladder with one hand and supporting the slave girl with the other. Hesper slid hastily along the thwart to the gunnel. The slave girl knotted her shawl tight about the baby, and climbed to the waiting hands reached down to help her.

They lifted her over the rail, and at the same moment a voice boomed, “Avast heaving there! Lay aft to the jib halliards!” followed by running footsteps and the creak of windlass.

Johnnie shoved off and began to row. The slave girl leaned over the rail. “Good-bye—” she called. “De Lawd bless you—Buckra.”

“Good luck—” shouted Johnnie, and Hesper whispered “Good-bye.” She watched the three jibs spring like white triangles from the bowsprit. She heard the thud of the anchor on deck—the long thrilling call—“All hands make sai-il-l-l ...” The square sails burgeoned one after another up the two high masts. The brig veered slowly off the wind, the sails slatted and filled. She gained headway, and glided eastward into the starlit night.

We did it, thought Hesper, we did it! She was suddenly caught up outside her tired body by a golden spring of joy. And in this moment of exaltation while she watched the brig vanish, she apprehended the rare purity of accomplishment which brought no personal gain. They had all of them, her mother and Johnnie and the old man, submitted themselves to worry and actual danger in behalf of an ideal, nothing more. Maybe the slave girl wouldn’t be happy after she achieved freedom, maybe the obscure ugly things she had suffered would not let her really be free. But it didn’t matter to those who helped her. It was not the past or the future but the cat itself that counted, the act of liberation.

“Matter, Hes?” asked Johnnie, rowing past the rocks at the tip of the island. “D’you feel bad?”

“No—” she said, stirring. She tightened her grasp of the oars and she began to row. “I feel good. Kind of windswept and clean. Like sometimes at meeting, when we sing ‘Jerusalem the Golden.’” She didn’t care if Johnnie laughed at her. She no longer minded the pain in her back muscles or the raw sores in her hands. They were good clean pains.

Johnnie didn’t laugh. He said “Aye—” in a thoughtful voice, and nothing more.

They emerged from Cat Island’s lee into open water again, but the wind had slacked off, and the sea flattened to lazy billows. The tide flowed shoreward beneath their keel, and the lighthouse on the Neck danced fleetly past them. The sleeping town lay huddled amongst her rocky ledges, scarce visible even as they crossed the mouth of the Great Harbor except that here and there, in Barnegat or high on Training Field Hill, a mother tended a sick child, and a window glimmered yellow in the darkness.

As they sped once more between Fort Sewall Point and Gerry’s Island the church bells chimed twice.

Johnnie beached his dory in her usual place, near the path that led up to his home in Barnegat. Hesper neatly shipped her oars and pulled out the tholepins, but when she tried to jump ashore as Johnnie had, she found that her legs were numb and would not move.

“Criminy!” she dropped back on the thwart, with a small embarrassed laugh. “I’m stiff as a frozen herring.”

“It’ll soon pass,” said Johnnie still in the grave, tender voice that was so unlike him. He waded into the water, scooped her out of the boat and carried her, oilskins and all, high up on the beach.

She swayed as he set her down, and he kept his arm about her. She looked up and she could see his face a little higher than hers dim beneath the sou’wester in the starlight.

He reached up and unfastening the chinstrap on her sou’wester, threw the hat to the beach. Her hair fell about her ears and her face shone white as milk against the sky.

“Hes—” he said and stopped. She heard him swallow. Rough and off-hand, he went on, “Would ye like I name the dory after you?”

Her heart bounded, then raced harder than it ever had in the moments of fear tonight. A boat named for a real woman meant only one thing.

She nodded her head, inarticulate as he was.

His arm tightened around her. “It’ll be a long time, Hes. A matter o’ two, three years, afore I can ask you to be anything but sweetheart.”

“I know—” she whispered. What money Johnnie made from the trip on which he sailed tomorrow must go to help his mother and the brood of children, for the shoe shop could not support them alone. Not tomorrow—
today
he was sailing.

“Johnnie, you’ll be careful on the Banks. You’ll do nothing rash?”

He had to smile at this but he answered quite sharply. “Gorm, Hes. Ye talk like a landlubber, like those chits in silks and laces off the excursion boats—‘Oh do be careful, Harold, you might wet your feet!’ The sea’s a job like any other—”

She stared at him, feeling in her heart for the first time the gnaw of aching worry that fretted the fishermen’s women, and one must not voice it. Already she had broken the code.

“I’ll be waiting at the wharf when you sail back to the harbor—” she said, trying to smile. “Look for the brightest dinner pail, it’ll be mine for you, and filled with a savory pork brew, the best in Marblehead.”

Johnnie chuckled. “I’ll dream on’t, when I’m tossin’ in the fo’c’sle and smellin’ little Sandy’s cautch o’ stinkin’ garney—Aye, Hes—it’ll be good to know you’re waitin’.”

He pulled her close, and pressed his young beardless lips to her mouth. She returned it shyly, and they drew apart. Neither of them felt the need for more. They understood each other and were content.

They turned and walked together up the path, past Pitman’s fish warehouse and the fish flakes, under the elm and the apple trees to Hesper’s home.

H
ESPER
awoke late on the morning of her nineteenth birthday, the fifteenth of April, 1861. She yawned and nestled deeper into the feather bed. Ma’d let her dawdle a while on this one morning of the year. A slanting ray of sunshine fell across the ladder-back chair where she had flung her underclothes last night. It would be a good day for her junket with Johnnie.

She held up her left hand and looked at the ring Johnnie had given her three days ago; two gold wires twisted into a true lover’s knot, a tiny diamond chip in the center. “Cupid’s tear trembling in a golden chalice—” Hesper whispered tentatively. Would Pa think that a pretty phrase? Anyway, Johnnie’d think it silly. She smiled tenderly at the ring. Johnnie’d gone all the way to a jewelry shop in Lynn to buy it, and he’d used the money he’d saved for a new dory-roding. Spliced up the old one somehow. Johnnie was smart, all right. Ablest young fisherman in Marblehead. A “high-liner.”

On last fall’s fare to the Banks, Cap’n Trefry said Johnnie’d outfished them all. Twenty hours a day when they had a spirt, lashed himself to the mainmast so he wouldn’t fall overboard if he dozed. His share had been big, near a hundred dollars. And he was just as skilled at the mackereling, as he was at catching cod. Cast and burnished his own jigs, some heavy and blunt for rough spirty days, some sharp and delicate as fly hooks to tempt the most finicky of mackerel. He’d worked so hard, never skipping a fare to the Banks, and mackerel and Bay fishing in between too. But it was only this past year he’d begun to get ahead a little.

There’d been a long spell of bad luck, after that night on the beach when he had bespoken her. The
Diana
stayed out till November that summer, and she did very badly. Came home with only half her salt wet, and but four hundred quintals of cod in her hold. And the next fare was far worse, for she sprang a leak and foundered in a storm off Cape Breton, and though all her crew had been rescued by the
Ceres
and eventually conveyed by steamer from Halifax to Boston, nine hundred quintals—the fruit of their summer’s work, had sunk with the
Diana
to the bottom of the sea.