Painting the Light
Excerpt
Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard
November 1898
Ida Pease, formerly Russell, looked out the window at dark ocean against darkening sky and worn out grass dotted with sheep. It was wrong. All of it. The water should still be reflecting the idea of sky; the sky should be reflecting the idea of sun; the sheep should be crowded around a full rack of hay. But Ida’s husband hadn’t gotten around to filling the hayrack before he left, and according to his logic that meant the sheep could get by on dead grass until he got home. And the only reason the colors were wrong was because Ezra should have been home hours ago to eat a Thanksgiving goose that had been roasting way too long for its own good or anyone else’s.
So perhaps the only thing wrong was Ezra. Ida looked at the clock again. Quarter to five. Not that she needed to wonder where her husband was – his usual route home ran through the back room at Duffy’s where he played cards and “did his part to fill the spittoon,” as he told Ida back in the days when she’d bothered to ask what took him. But today was Thanksgiving, and Ezra’s Aunt Ruth and his cousin Hattie had been sitting in the parlor for two hours, Ruth casting looks at Ida that implied it was her fault Ezra was late, that Ida should have learned to herd her husband the way their sheep dog herded sheep. But in truth the old woman was looking at Ida the way she always looked at Ida.
Two years ago at her wedding Ida had gone up to her and said, “I’m pleased to know you, Aunt Ruth.”
“Ruth will do,” she’d said.
Ruth’s daughter Hattie worked at the telephone exchange and was friendlier to Ida but with a telephone exchange kind of friendly, as if she were more concerned about where Ida was going than who Ida was. Ida preferred Ruth’s severe gray suits to Hattie’s blousy shirtwaists and at least when Ruth spoke she said something with a little wind behind it; Hattie preferred to blow wisps of smoke at Ida’s eyes.
“We’ll eat now,” Ida said. She crossed to the stove, pulled the potatoes off the heat, and as if he’d smelled the earthy steam, Ezra banged through the door with his partner Mose Barstow. Mose smelled of whiskey; Ezra did not. Ezra saved his drinking till he got home, believing – truly believing – that if kept his mind sharp he could make his fortune at cards. At Duffy’s.
“Sorry to be late,” he said.
“Not late enough.”
Ezra paused on his way to the pantry. “What’s that you’re saying to me, Ida?”
“She’s saying she enjoys your absence more than your presence,” Mose said. He pushed into the room and kissed the women, first Ida and then Ruth and last Hattie, the only one who seemed to appreciate it. Ezra kissed Ruth and Hattie, but after meeting Ida’s eye he left her untouched and moved around her to the pantry.
Ida followed. Inside the pantry it smelled of yeast and corn meal and dried apples, smells that had once given her comfort when faced with a long island winter ahead. “Out of useless curiosity,” she said, “what time do you think it is?”
“It was Mose. He was winning.”
“And this is how you keep time. By whether or not Mose Barstow is winning at cards.”
Ezra whipped around. “You know, Ida, you’ve worked up quite the tone of late. Mose wanted me to leave for the Boston office today and I said no, it’s Thanksgiving, I’m not leaving my wife to eat alone on Thanksgiving. I told him we’ll just have to leave in the morning. And Mose having nowhere to go to eat Thanksgiving dinner, I told him to come along home with me. I’m pretty sure now he’s sorry he did.”
From the other room they could hear Ruth mumble something to which Mose barked out a laugh. Ezra snagged a bottle off the shelf and went for the door, but he paused there. “And in case you were too busy snarking at me to hear what I said, I’m leaving for Boston in the morning. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Maybe you like that way of keeping time better.”
“Go,” Ida said. “Stay there forever if you like. But first feed your sheep.”
~ ~ ~
Ida looked out the window the next morning and watched the steamer Monohansett with Ezra and Mose on board glide toward the horizon over an ocean as smooth and pale as ice. As she watched her mood ricocheting between relief and resentment -- relief because Ezra’s voice pounding at her all evening had left her feeling physically bruised; resentment because over the course of the evening it had come out that Mose hadn’t tried to get Ezra to go to Boston at all, that in fact he’d been expected for Thanksgiving at his brother’s in New Bedford and that Ezra had waylaid him at the boat.
“Why didn’t you just say so?” Ida had asked Ezra later in bed, nothing of her body touching anything of his body, a maneuver that required some effort considering the way the bed sagged. “It would be better if you’d just said so. ‘I saw Mose at the boat and wanted company for a quick game.’ Or ‘I wasn’t in the mood for Aunt Ruth and Hattie.’” Or I wasn’t in the mood for you, Ida. That tone of yours. Which might not have been a tone at all if Ezra had just told the truth. But Ezra hadn’t answered either Ida’s spoken or unspoken questions. Instead he’d rolled away from her in the bed and snuffed out the lamp.
Now Ida shifted her eye from the distant water to the closer-at-hand flock: a Cheviot ram, twenty-three ewes and eighteen lambs had spread themselves over ten acres of rock-strewn, walled in hillside, as if convinced the grass would be better over the next rise or down the next gulley. Ida had once viewed her marriage in much the same way, but nowadays she saw nothing beyond the next rise but another barren gulley. Even so, as Ida stood at the window looking at the sheep, she had to admit they were a handsome flock, solid-bodied with upright, pink-lined ears and intelligent black eyes set off by dense, snowy fleece. The lambs were now six months old, their bodies grown into their knobby joints but still good for a frolic; Ida watched them chase one another over the rocks, but even as she watched she saw a phenomenon that Lem Daggett, the part-time hired man, had taught her to interpret: as a rule the Cheviots grazed individually or in small groups, but now, as one, they turned and headed for the lee side of the hill. Weather coming. Ida went inside and tapped the glass on Ezra’s barometer. It nosed downward.
By early afternoon, a business-like north wind dropped down over the island, and within the half hour it had roughed the sea and flipped over the remaining beech leaves, the usual calling card of a classic northeaster. Two years on the Vineyard and Ida knew what came next.
Ida went out to the dog yard and whistled up Bett; the dog leaped up and planted her feet on Ida’s chest to have her ears tugged, a thing Ida wasn’t supposed to allow in a working dog but did anyway because they both liked it. She rubbed Bett’s ears, undid the gate and sent her off, using the commands Lem had taught her that would send the dog counterclockwise around the flock and drive them back toward the barn: Away to me! Hold ‘em! Bring ‘em! Walk in! Bett lit out like a sable flame, and the sheep knew better than to argue; Ida barely reached the barn door ahead of the flock. But as she lifted the bolt one of the lambs veered off, forcing Bett to circle behind it and nip at its heels, sending it after the others with noisy complaint.
Ida followed the lamb in, dropping the bolt behind her, thinking as she did so that Ezra would have told her she should have left the sheep out – they’d been bred to withstand the rough English hill weather and cooped up inside they would only fret -- but the ram had kicked out the east wall of the field shelter and the hayracks were again empty. It would be quicker for Ida to fork hay from barn loft to barn floor than to hitch up the ox cart, especially the way the wind was coming up. Ida hauled the back of her skirt through her legs and jammed it into her belt. She climbed the ladder to the hayloft, pitched down the hay, and dreamed of being in the Parker House in Boston drinking sherry and eating little cakes frosted in lemon ice.
Ida had just finished herding the chickens into the chicken house when Lem came up the track in the wagon. He swung to the ground and greeted Bett. “I saw Ezra at the boat. How’s my dog? Still teaching you tricks?”
Ida smiled. Lem had raised and trained Bett and sold her to Ezra, but Lem was no fool – after Ezra had been off on a job for the better part of a month Lem had figured out he’d best train Ida as well. Ida was never sure if it was her accomplishment or the dog’s, but she was proud of how they’d begun to work together.
Lem set in helping Ida fill the wood box, piling extra on the porch. He was built like Ezra, square and solid, but with close-cropped gray hair and a weather-creased face. Ida had often speculated how the thirty-eight year-old Ezra might age into the fifty-two year-old Lem, and the thought had never bothered her, but lately she’d begun to think with dread of all those years she’d be lying beside Ezra as he creased and grayed and of how old she’d be by the time he did it. She’d been twenty- nine when she’d married Ezra; she already felt twice that.
“I’ve got coffee,” Ida offered.
“You hang onto it. Ruth needs a door hinge reseated.” Lem turned around and looked up at the house. “Still no shutters,” he said, as if he were keeping score on Ezra. Or maybe Ida only thought so because she was.
Ida went inside, stirred the fire, and made herself roasted cheese, the kind of supper she preferred but only got to indulge in when she didn’t have to cook for Ezra. After she’d washed up she spread the Gazette under the lamp and began to read, another thing she could only enjoy when Ezra wasn’t home because he’d always have to read it first, and if the paper hadn’t already disappeared by the time Ida got around to it, Ezra would find some way to disrupt her reading, as if her knowing a thing made him not know it. Ezra. Again. Perhaps that was the thing Ida resented most of all -- that he used up so much of her time even in his absence.
In Ida’s first life she’d been a painter. She’d attended Boston’s renowned Museum School and had been making good progress, particularly in watercolor; one of her still lifes -- although not Ida herself -- had been accepted at the prestigious all-male Boston Art Club, and Mrs. Percival McKinley herself had commissioned a portrait. Mr. Morris had even asked her to teach a class once when he’d been called away. But once Ida arrived on the island Ezra and the farm had somehow managed to get in her way. Even on a day alone, if she set up a bowl of fruit and sat down with her sketch pad, she found herself unable to focus, as if Ezra were still hovering, as if he’d walk in any minute to divert her to a torn coat or a sick lamb or a storm threatening the harvest. Of course, her inability to focus even in Ezra’s absence was not his fault, but so many other things were his fault that sometimes that one leaped aboard unnoticed.
~ ~ ~
The temperature dropped. The wind kicked up. It began to snow. Ida took another trip outside to collect the shovel from the barn and prop it next to the back door just inside the kitchen; good thing, too -- by the time the grandfather clock chimed eleven the world outside was white and howling. She collected her lamp, climbed the stairs to her bed, undressed down to her skin and then added things back in layers: flannel nightgown, shawl, wool stockings, a pair of Ezra’s wool socks. She would have to say of Ezra he did keep her warm nights. She would also have to say he kept her sleepless. He slept as if he’d died, without worry, but that trait never comforted Ida; instead it left her to take on the worry herself. Like now. Too late, she thought of Ezra’s salvage company down on Main Street and wondered if the old roof would hold. She got out of bed and looked out the window at nothing but white swirling by like smoke in hunt of a chimney. She returned to bed and listened to the wind shriek and moan and roar till morning.
~ ~ ~
It snowed and blew all the next day, easing just enough before dark so Ida could get out to scatter corn for the chickens, lug water, muck out the livestock, and spread fresh hay. She stamped off the snow on the porch but might have saved herself that bit of trouble – a pane on the east front window had blown out and snow covered the floor as far as the hearth. She snatched the quilt off the downstairs bed and stuffed it into the window, swept the snow onto the hearth to melt it, repeated the previous night’s routine down to the roasted cheese, and went to her bed.
By morning, the snow had stopped. Ida looked out her bedroom window and saw drifts piled four feet high, almost burying the chicken house. She crossed the hall to look out the front window and saw her favorite old beech measuring its length on the ground alongside random other tree limbs and pieces of fence. Beyond the road she saw the soupy, heaving Sound. But what of Ezra’s salvage vessel, the Cormorant? And what of the office and warehouse on Main Street?
Ida pulled on her heaviest skirt and accessorized it with Ezra’s rubber boots, wool sweater, and oiled jacket. She went downstairs, picked up the phone, and was unsurprised to get nothing but silence. Ezra had been proud of that phone line, one of the first to branch off the main trunk in town, no matter it went dead in every blow. Ida tended the animals, collected the office keys from the desk, and started down the hill, picking her way around the drifts. She was sweating and breathing in rough gasps by the time she reached the town center, the lower foot of her skirt weighted with clumps of half-frozen snow. A dozen men and boys were just starting to work on the road, but past experience told her it would take a day to clear a mile and she was glad she hadn’t waited.
Ida looked toward the water. At first she couldn’t take in what she was seeing along the shore: boats piled up like children’s abandoned toys; a schooner impaled in the middle of the Union Street dock rendering both boat and dock useless; another dozen two and three-masted schooners run aground or sunk with nothing but their masts showing; one large coastal trader sitting like a hen on a nest high and dry on the beach; on another a cargo of lime smoldered. Farther out, a group of men had managed to reach one of the schooners and was attempting to extricate something in the rigging. Ida was about to turn away when she saw that the thing was a body, so stiff the men were forced to handle it like a severed dock piling. Beyond that boat another was engulfed in flames, but no one was troubling to put out the fire.
Ida spied Lem standing among the rowboats talking to Chester Luce, the owner of the grocery and operator of the telephone and telegraph, the place where all news either began or ended. As Ida approached Lem his eyes traveled to the burning vessel at sea. He pointed. “The gasoline for the compressor must have exploded.”
Ida whirled around and took a closer look at the burning vessel: Ezra’s Cormorant. She started to walk in its direction but stopped; even in those few short minutes it had listed further, and no matter how angry she was at Ezra, she could take no pleasure in seeing the Cormorant go down.
Lem and Chester Luce resumed their conversation, Lem angling his body to include Ida too, Luce making no note of her presence whatsoever. The local news was grim but should have been grimmer; eight men had been lost off ships taking refuge in the harbor, but some local men had made a series of runs in the height of the storm and saved dozens more. Fifty schooners had either washed aground or sunk at anchor; the man they pulled out of the rigging was the captain of the Thurlow out of New Jersey, his crew and many others now packed into the Seamen’s Bethel at Union Wharf, where they would be given food and clothes in addition to the shelter. Phones and telegraph were down but news was going out from the Cape on the undersea cable to France, back to New York and from there by land to Boston. The latest news – the biggest news – had just come in from Boston off the steamer, and Luce’s voice took on a minister’s pall as he rolled out the words: the steamship Portland had sunk off the back side of Cape Cod, the beaches there littered with its wreckage.
Others lifted their heads, moved close.
“The Portland?” asked John Cottle. “Boston to Maine?”
“The same. Bodies are washing up from Wellfleet to Chatham. The funeral homes are full.”
The words rippled down the beach. Steamship. Portland. Bodies. The crowd grew. “Anyone come in alive?” Bert Robinson asked.
“None’s I’ve heard of,” Luce answered.
“Alive? In this sea?” Cottle laughed, saw the looks, cut off.
“Anyone know anyone on her?” Most heads were shaken, but some others offered up distant connections as if they were badges of honor: Ira Briggs’s cousin lived in Maine and always came up to Boston and back for Thanksgiving; Chester Luce recalled the Chilmark Hardings saying the Edgartown Hardings were going to Portland to stay with their family for the holiday season; Bert Robinson said his nephew often traveled from Boston to Maine . . .
Ida drifted away, the old, familiar horror rising in her. Her father and brothers had gone down in a coaster off the Carolinas, the news sending Ida’s mother into such a state of melancholia that a month later she’d walked off an old, dilapidated wharf with her pockets full of stones. But as horrific as her mother’s death was, the two of them waiting for news of her father and brothers had been as bad – the weeks stretching to months with no word, no certainty. As Ida trudged the beach she could think only of the Chilmark Hardings and Ira Briggs and Bert Robinson’s niece, of their faces growing tighter and tighter just as her mother’s had grown tighter with each long, news-less day, until the day the news did come that melted her face into an endless pool of weeping.
Ida pushed on, giving a nod to the rare islander who lifted a hand, most of them too busy giving and receiving their own news to take any notice of someone who was still “off-island.” When she reached Main Street she dropped into one of the slushy wheel tracks that ran down the middle, the snow piled two feet high either side of it. She slogged ahead in Ezra’s boots, heel to toe, until she reached Ezra’s building. The sign Pease & Barstow Marine Salvage was gone; the window on the right-hand side had been pierced by somebody’s dislocated awning; the roof was missing a whole swath of shingles.
Ida kicked down a drift, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The office held the usual books and papers and safe and telephone along with the unusual: a heap of rusted chain, a bracket for a ship’s lantern, a dented spittoon. Most of the junk sat in front of the broken window, but Ida decided none of it could be harmed by a little more weather. She examined the ceiling and saw no stains; books, papers, desk, cabinets, all seemed free of wet.
Lem stepped into the office behind her, tracking snow and sand and the smell of wet wool, carrying Ezra’s sign. “Found it in the snow in front of the cobblers. When’s Ezra due back?”
Ida’s cheeks burned, remembering their parting words. Go. Stay there forever if you like . . . “I don’t know.”
“Come along,” Lem said. “I have the wagon.”
“I need to check the warehouse.”
Lem came with her. The warehouse roof and walls were intact, the contents – more salvage -- dirty and rusty but dry. She followed Lem and climbed into the wagon. “I should check on Ruth.”
“Already did. Nothing but a fence amiss. And I’ll fix that window of yours. I’ve got the glass in the back.”
So he’d checked on her, too. A wave of affection flooded Ida, which she quickly checked. Lem Daggett did not need her – either figuratively or literally -- wrapping her arms around his neck.
As they drove past the beach Ida looked for the Cormorant, but it had already dived below the surface.
Painting the Light - The Story Behind the Story