CHAPTER 13
THE AUTUMN PICNIC on the beach, Mr. Crawley explained, was an annual treat. “Before the rain begins,” he said. I assumed he was joking. Not a drop had fallen since we’d arrived at Point Lucia, and what was a day or two or even a week of rain?
“When does it start to snow?” I asked, and Mrs. Crawley admitted that she’d never seen the stuff.
Oskar and I, thinking of the ice and freezing winds that would soon be assailing the East, laughed at the idea of a final hurrah before a little wetting. Nevertheless, we were happy to picnic. On the designated Sunday, the sky was a rich, saturated blue, and the sun promised to bake the beach all day.
We were to grill abalone and whatever else Mr. Crawley, who loved to fish in the surf, might catch, as well as boil mussels, and Mrs. Crawley set a hamper in the yard so that we could all contribute from our own stores the most delicious foods we could spare. Oskar made several trips from kitchen to hamper with cans labeled California Fruit and Boston Baked Beans and squares of chocolate.
We adults all rode decorously down on the platform. The tide was very low; the sea, as I was mildly scandalized to hear Mr. Crawley say in a soft voice to his wife, had “hitched up her skirts,” and an undulating surface of dark, treacherous rock was exposed a good way out. The three older children followed their father onto it with sharp sticks to pry abalone from their beds.
While Mrs. Crawley and Mr. Johnston collected dry wood—Mrs. Crawley energetically; Mr. Johnston pausing often for long, scrutinizing looks up the shoreline as if he expected someone or something to appear out of that endless, rocky wilderness—Jane and I were sent along the beach with a sack to hunt mussels. Our progress was slow; we had to pause often for Jane to bend and poke at the sand with her miniature finger, examining pebbles and the like. We were in such an attitude, her hand clasped in mine, pulling me down to her level, when a dark shadow rushed up behind us. I was frightened for a moment, but it was only Oskar. He tapped me lightly on the shoulder.
“You’re it!” he cried, running on, his bare feet slapping the wet sand.
I began running, too, Janie shrieking with excitement beside me, and we went perhaps twenty steps at a speed nearly fast enough to catch him, although only because he’d turned and was running backward. That was as far as I could go with the shallow breaths my corset allowed.
“I thought you could keep up.” He smiled and shook his head. “You disappoint me.”
“You try running in this thing.” I pressed my hand to the garment that constricted my ribs.
“For heaven’s sake! Why are you wearing it?”
“Because,” I said, “it’s what one wears! I would look . . . peculiar . . . without it.”
“That’s ridiculous! You would not look peculiar. In any case, who’s here to see? Janie? Mrs. Crawley?”
“There’s you,” I said in a small voice.
“I’ve seen you without your corset, Mrs. Swann, and I assure you that you do not look peculiar.”
I glanced away, embarrassed to show that this pleased me.
“Mr. Swann! Come and help us!” the older children called from the rocks, and he dashed off like a kitten after a tail of yarn.
“He’s right,” I said to Jane, knowing she couldn’t understand. “It’s a ridiculous vanity. I renounce it!”
There were caves of a sort at the south end of the beach, almost directly below the lighthouse, abscesses where the ocean had licked away the black rock. They filled with water at high tide but were empty now, and in the dimness of one of these natural cabanas, I unbuttoned my dress and released the clasps of my Chicago waist. Putting my clothes back together without the undergarment was a struggle, for when my torso was uncinched, the buttons at the bottom of my rib cage would no longer meet. “I’ll simply fold my hands, so,” I said to Jane, covering the spot through which my petticoat peeked. She giggled, but I sighed, knowing that if I didn’t put the corset back on, I’d have to drape my shawl around my waist when we joined the others, and then I would indeed look peculiar. I ran a few steps in the wet sand, testing my power now that I was free to draw full breaths.
“Look! A mermaid baby!” Jane squealed.
The girl was crouching in the far corner of the cave beside a bundle of kelp that was the size and shape of an infant. I bent close, unable at first to make sense of the tangle of slick green ribbon and rubbery tubes. With horror, I saw misshapen arms and legs, dark brown and clawed, and then a flat black nose.
“Is it sleeping?” Jane asked.
The creature’s eyes were closed. Its smell was astounding, a ripe combination of animal, vegetable, and salt, the smell of sea beings exposed too long to the harsh air, but I picked it up and held as tightly as I could to its slippery covering. And then I ran.
“We found a mermaid!” Janie shrieked, and I must have been screaming, too, for the two men and the children began to move across the rocks back toward the beach, and Mrs. Crawley and Mr. Johnston looked up from the scant pile of driftwood they’d been arranging.
“Oh, why do they just stand there? Why aren’t they coming?” I whispered, my heart louder in my ears than my voice.
I held the bundle out to Mrs. Crawley, but she didn’t take it. With one hand, she gently moved a rope of kelp away from the brown face. “Ah, poor little thing.”
“What is it?” I gasped. My breath burned down my throat and in my chest.
“A baby otter,” Mrs. Crawley said. “A killer whale probably got its mother.”
“A whale would be more likely to take the baby,” her brother said. “I’d guess one of them Portuguese smugglers clubbed the mother. A load of furs’ll be headed for Russia.”
“What should we do?” I asked.
“There’s nothing we can do about smugglers,” Mr. Johnston said. “They’ll be long gone.”
“No. About the otter.”
“You can see it’s hurt,” he said. “Best to kill it fast.”
“Kill it! Oh, no!”
“I’m afraid it’s nearly dead already,” Mrs. Crawley said. “Look, it’s struggling to breathe, and it can hardly open its eyes.”
Its eyes were open slightly, enough for me to glimpse the living being in their bright darkness. “I’ll take care of it,” I said, pulling it closer to my chest. Without my corset, I could feel through my clothes its still-warm body under the wet fur.
“Unless you’re planning to hit it over the head with a rock, you won’t. You’ll just make it suffer,” Mr. Johnston said.
“He’s right,” Mr. Crawley said from behind his wife’s shoulder, his pale eyes pinked from the wind or from emotion. “You’ll only hurt it.”
Oskar had come up, and I looked pleadingly at him. “What’s the harm in letting her try?” he said stoutly.
“The harm, in my experience,” Mrs. Crawley said, emphasizing the last word, “is a slow and painful death. It’s cruelty, and I won’t allow it.”
Archie Johnston’s hard hands closed around the little bundle and I felt him tug at it. “I’ll take care of it,” he said in a strange echo of my own words. I held on.
“Let go, Archie,” Mrs. Crawley said, shouldering him aside. “Here.” Her large, capable hands slid between the baby and my breasts. Tenderly, she lifted the animal in its weedy bunting from my arms.
“Where are you taking the mermaid, Mama?” Janie asked anxiously as Mrs. Crawley began to step away from the rest of us.
“Back to the ocean just down here. Where it belongs,” Mrs. Crawley answered. “You take Jane now,” she added, nodding at me. “Go on. All of you children. We’ll have nothing to eat if you don’t hurry up with those abalones.” She motioned with her head toward the edge of the beach, where they’d dropped their sacks and sticks.
“Come on!” Oskar called. He began to run, sweeping the children up with the force of his exuberant motion. They followed like birds behind their leader.
I trailed after them, grateful to be dismissed with the children. But I couldn’t help looking back. Mr. Crawley had taken a few tentative steps after his wife, then had stopped and stood still, rubbing his hands helplessly against his trousers. Mrs. Crawley went on some distance across the sand and then knelt beside a log of driftwood. She laid the bundle on it, slowly taking her hands away.
“Don’t look,” a low voice, surprisingly gentle and solicitous, said beside me.
Startled, I stumbled, and Mr. Johnston caught my arm. “She’s used to it,” he said. “But you needn’t be.”
Although I let him lead me away, I glanced back through slitted eyes. Mrs. Crawley’s arm was high in the air, and her hand clutched a thick driftwood club. I did not, thank God, hear the thump, but the sound of her retching was plain.
? ? ?
I didn’t give a thought to my corset until late that night, and the next morning I couldn’t bring myself to go down to that place again to find it. In any case, I was sure the waves would have dragged it away. Another piece of my old life lost. Until I fashioned something new with which to bind myself, I would have to give up wearing my cinched skirts and dresses and rely on the loose-fitting duster that until now I’d worn only for the dirtiest work.