Lightkeeper's Wife Read Online Free PDF Page A

stripping the whale was an ordeal for him. They pulled the whale alongside the ship and sawed off the strips of blubber, and the water filled with blood, and the sharks lurked all around, and the decks ran with blood. The blood and the smell and sight of the fish ripped up and desecrated drove him ashore.
    While John talked, she became aware of his solid arms, his hands mapped with dried salt, gesticulating as he told his story. His feet dug into the sand, the tiny curls of dark hair on each toe pressed flat, and his sweaty smell mixed with the salty bay water.
    â€œYou’ve let me go on now. What about you, Hannah? It’s clear to me that you don’t like working in the store.”
    â€œI used to work with my father on his fishing boat, pulling in lobster traps, dragging for scallops. Sometimes we fished for cod or bass or whatever was running. I loved being on the boat with him and working outside, just the two of us. But my mother put me to work in the store like a prize heifer on display.” Hannah scraped a stone into the boulder they sat on, then tossed the stone into shallow water. “If I could get away with it, I’d go out on a whaler, blood, guts, and all.”
    John laughed. “It can’t be that bad.”
    â€œWhat do you know? You’re up there at the end of the earth watching for ships from the lighthouse.”
    â€œTrue,” he said. John stood up and extended a hand for Hannah. As they walked back to her house, he told her stories of shipwrecks and the men who’d washed ashore, men who’d sailed all over the world, men with stories of their own told around the fire over hot cups of coffee, and with the urgency and disbelief of eyes that had seen death up close. Hannah longed for contact with the world beyond her mother’s store, for a life on the water like she’d known with her father. She resented her mother for bringing her ashore, and resented her father for not sticking up for her.
    At the house, she lit a lantern in the barn and set to work shucking clams. She brought a bucket of clean water from the well, a wooden bowl from the house, and sat next to John on a narrow bench. The lantern cast their faces aglow and illuminated only a small circle around them, so that they appeared to be working in an orb of light.
    â€œWatch now,” Hannah said, holding a wood-handled, six-inch, flat blade in her right hand and the clam in her left, snout pointing right and the hinge away from her. “You slide the knife in here, aft of the siphon, then through the muscle like this.” She pushed the steel blade into the crease between the shells and pulled back through the tight muscle. Then she ran the knife around the rim of the shell toward her body until the clam was open. With one quick motion she scooped the fleshy meat, making clean cuts across the last bits of muscle that clung to the shell. With the clam on the end of her knife, she pinched the stomach to release the guts. “Then you just peel this skin off the siphon,” she said, and peeled back the black membrane. Hannah dunked the clam into the clean water to rinse the sand, then picked up the clam in her fingers and dropped it into John’s waiting mouth. Her fingers brushed across his chapped lips, and he smiled and chewed the clam until she could smell the sea on his breath.
    â€œDamn, that’s good,” he said. “But I know how to shuck a clam.”
    He grabbed a clam from the basket, positioned it in his large hand, and made fast work of shucking it.
    â€œNot bad,” she said, laughing. He delicately slid the clam onto the ends of his two fingers and lifted it toward Hannah’s mouth. She waited, perched like a bird, her lips slightly parted, then she opened her mouth as his fingers swept nearer. He dropped the clam onto her tongue and slowly removed his fingers, letting them graze her open lips, then sweep across her suntanned cheek. When she swallowed the