Blackbird House Read Free

Coral laughed.
    “He’d say: I’ll never leave you.   I’ll be with you for all time”
    Hearing those words, Coral felt faint; she said she needed some air.   She went into the yard and faced the meadow and gazed at the way the tall grass moved in the wind.   That night she said to her husband again, “Don’t take him with you, John.”
    April was ending, with sheets of rain and the sound of the peepers calling from the shore of the pond.   Classes would end in a few days, too they called it a fisherman’s school, so that boys were free to be sent out to work with their fathers or uncles or neighbors from May till October.   The Hadleys left in the first week of that mild month, a night when there was no moon.   The fog had come in; so much the better when it came to sneaking away.   The British had lookouts to the east and the west, and it was best to take a northerly route.   They brought along molasses, the fishing nets, johnnycake, and salted pork, and, unknown to John and Vincent, Isaac took along his blackbird as well, tucked into his jacket.   As they rounded the turn out of their own harbor, Isaac took his pet from his hiding place.
    “You could do it now if you wanted to,” he said to the bird.   “You could fly away.”
    But the blackbird shivered in the wind, startled, it seemed, by the sound of water.   He scrambled back to the safety of Isaac’s jacket, feathers puffed up, the way they always were when he was frightened.
    “I told you he’d never fly.”   Vincent had spied the blackbird.   He nudged his brother so that Isaac would help check the nets.   “He’s pathetic, really.”
    “No, he’s not!”
    By now they were past the fog that always clung to shore at this time of year, and the night was clear.   There were so many stars in the sky, and the vast expanse of dark and light was frightening.   The water was rougher than Isaac had ever seen it in their bay, and they were still not even halfway to the Middle Banks.   The sloop seemed small out here, far too breakable.
    “Is this the way it always is?”   Isaac asked his brother.   He felt sick to his stomach; there was a lurching in his bones and blood.   He thought about the oak tree and the meadow and the frogs and the way his mother looked at him when he came in through the door.
    “It’s the way it is tonight,” Vincent said.
    Used to the sea, Vincent fell asleep easily, but Isaac couldn’t close his eyes.   John Hadley understood; he came to sit beside the boy.   It was so dark that every star in the sky hung suspended above the mast, as though only inches above them.   Isaac recognized the big
square
of
Pegasus
that he’d seen in his book.   The night looked like spilled milk, and John Hadley pointed out Leo, the harbinger of spring, then the North Star, constant as always.   John could hear the chattering of the blackbird in his son’s waistcoat.   He could taste his wife’s farewell kiss.
    “What happens if a storm comes up?”   Isaac said, free to be frightened now that his brother was asleep, free to be the boy he still was. “What happens if I’m thrown overboard?   Or if a whale comes along? What happens then?”
    “Then I’ll save you.”   When the wind changed John Hadley smelled turnips, he really did, and he laughed at the scent of it, how it had followed him all this way to the Middle Banks, to remind him of everything he had to lose.
    II.
    SO MANY MEN WERE TAKEN IN THE MAY GALE THAT
    the Methodist church on
Main Street
could not hold the relatives of the lost all on one day.   There was a full week of services, and not a single one had a body to behold.   The law suggested three months pass by before any action was taken; time after time, it was true, sailors who had been thrown off course by the cruel circumstances of the seas, then assumed drowned, had appeared at their own funerals.   Once a drowned man arrived on the steps of the church, those who mourned him demanded to