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Suellen Wedmore Page 3
The Keeper's Wife Writes in Her Journal
I arrived, island, believing
I could tame you,
but you have your own songs:
geology of grinding ice,
invading seas & loose stones,
adagio of trees & grasses, a foghorn groaning its melancholy bassoon. *
I thought I understood your moods,
the rhythm of freeze & thaw, but when I cut a path,
the felled trees reappeared
somewhere else; bare earth
exploded with pokeweed,
water hemlock & nettle.
*
I planted a garden,
but every morning
when I walked outside
something else was insect-riven.
*
There’s pain here: a child
buried off the south trail,
drowned when the Watch and Wait was shaken and tossed, like so much loose change.
*
Pinnace and pirate, whale oil,
a clay pipe lying beneath a rock.
Whose stories do you tell?
Beach pea. Buttercup. Wild rose.
As I cut them for our table,
a hawk devours a fledgling gull.
*
I anticipate the change of seasons,
but even the September air─
crisp diamonds─
belongs to you.
The Baby Girl in the Mattress
─"I know the story is
true," said Eliza Trepanier, great-great granddaughter of the
keeper of Hendrick's Head Light, who, after a storm in 1870,
found a baby floating on the sea.
My first mother
wrapped me in blankets
and stuffed me in a box
with a note commending me to God,
fastened the lid
and sandwiched that box
between two featherbeds.
In a March gale, a schooner
fetched up on a ledge
a half mile from the point─
I untied the dory, but
couldn't row it out to sea.
As I watched, men struggled
with the rigging,
waves wrapping them in icy
water
until they froze hard against
the ratlines.
In the roiling darkness,
even as an infant,
I must have been terrified.
When the storm abated, I
built a bonfire
so the ship could see her way
to safety,
but by morning the shore was
strewn with wreckage:
a stove-in lifeboat, a wooden
shoe,
so many broken spars.
What saved me? Buoyancy
of old wood?
How feathers, upon expanding,
trap both heat and air?
As I stood on a ledge,
a bundle tossing light on the
waves
floated toward me.
I waded into the surf,
grabbed it with a boathook.
He told me the story many times:
how he cut the fastenings
with his sheath knife,
peeled away the featherbeds,
pried open the box
with a grating sound.
A pretty one─I wrapped her
in a flannel
made a bed for her in a
kitchen corner.
Ma wanted to keep her. How
could we,
with our half dozen hungry
boys?
I've no memory of that day, of
course,
though winter's howl
still fills me with dread.
No one could tell me the
name of the ship
or of those who slipped
beneath the black and angry
swells.
They called me Seaborne:
an odd name
that I came to be fond of.
And when the town doctor─
a small slate stone
newly set into a clearing
behind his house─
came to see the babe,
the sadness left his
eyes.
He piled blankets into a
wagon
for the trip home, the baby
sleeping
in his wife's arms.
What luck to grow up
at the edge of the sea:
sandcastles, tide-pools
and toboggans.
A keeper for thirty years,
my best hour
was battling the Atlantic for
that child.
─Hendrick's Head Light
is on the coast of Southport, Maine. Jaruel Marr was the keeper
at the time this incident took place.( Oral history)
© Copyright, 2014,
Suellen Wedmore. |