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know where on earth he’d been all this time.   Was there another woman in the West Indies or up in
Nova Scotia
?   Had every cent he’d earned at sea been spent on rum?   The truth was usually far simpler: it took a long time to get back home, out here to the edge of the world.
    After the May gale the town waited an unheard-of six months before the services commenced, and even then Coral Hadley refused to have her husband and sons counted among those who were mourned.   She didn’t answer the door when the parson came to call; she didn’t attend a single one of the services, though they were held for the husbands and sons of her friends, Harris Maguire and Otis West among them.   Coral had known something would happen the morning they’d left.   That was the worst part of it: she kept going back to that day, wondering what might have been if only she’d insisted on having her way.   She’d found four blue eggs out on the hillock by the pond, and every egg had a hole in it.   Coral had rattled each one.   Nothing inside.   A bad sign to find such things, a terrible sign, an omen of misfortune and of lives unfinished; futures cracked open into a powdery dust.   Later that night, when the wind came up, she heard her name called aloud.   When she told people about this, no one believed her, but Coral didn’t care.   She had gone to stand outside on the night they disappeared; though it was foggy, she went into the field where they would keep their cows, where the horse they planned to name Charger would graze, and she heard someone say, I’ll never leave you.
    As soon as news of the gale came in, she refused to mourn with the other women.   Right away, she said there’d be no service, no matter what the parson advised, and all these months later she could not be moved.   The tragedy of her lost family was still unproven; there were no bodies found, not even a single splinter of wood from their sloop.   The women in town tried to convince Coral to let the dead be put to rest; they’d seen women in a mourning delirium before, unable to tell what was real and what was not.   Even old Hannah Crosby came down the lane and told Coral she had to face up to the terrible thing that had happened.   If the British had caught her men, they surely would have heard by now; John would have been taken to trial in Boston, just like the Henry brothers and so many others.   There would have been some news of the boys.
    “I can wait,” Coral said.   That and nothing more.
    She had planted the field, the way she thought John would want her to.   Though the ground was cold, she dug in row after row of turnips, then she planted corn; at last she sprinkled the seedpods of pink sweet peas, feed for the cows they would someday have, and for remembrance as well.   John had favored sweet peas, and had brought her armfuls of the flowers when he was courting her.   Her mother had said they were weeds, but, as was often the case, her mother was wrong.
    Coral worked with a pick in the hot sun all summer long and into autumn, unafraid of dirt or hard work, dressed in black, refusing to eat anything her neighbors might bring.   In honor of her family, and what they must be suffering, she ate only Johnny cakes and catfish caught from the pond, simmering in an old pan over the woodstove.   She kept in mind those men who had reappeared at their own funerals: Robert Servich and Nathaniel Hawkes, for instance, both of them lost for months in the Indies, and now living right down the lane.   She thought about turnip stew and turnip cakes and how pleased John would be when he tasted the fruit of her labors.   How he’d be surprised to hear there were green onions growing wild in the far field, that there was a grapevine so huge it would keep them in jellies and jams and pies all year long.
    And then, the next spring, when May arrived and the leaves were budding in shades of yellow and green, Coral realized that the blackbird had