will not blow it away, I crawl like a crab to the sea cave and squat inside. On three sides of me are the shoals and roiling water, and straight out to the east nothing but Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the harbor and the place where we have landed, this side of the island is unprotected. There is lichen on the rock, and small flies lift in a frenzy whenever a wave crashes and sprays.
At the rock, which is known as Maren’s Rock, I shut my eyes and try to imagine what it would be like to huddle in that cave all night in winter, in the dark, in the snow and freezing temperatures, with only my nightgown and a small black dog for warmth.
I crawl from the rock, scraping my shin in the process. I collect my camera bag, which has not moved from its notch. I take a roll of color slide film, thirty-six shots of Maren’s rock. I walk the length of the island, the going slow in the thick, scratchy brush.
On January 14, 1813, fourteen shipwrecked Spanish sailors, driven to Smuttynose by a winter gale, tried to reach the light from a candle in an upstairs window of Captain Haley’s cottage.
They died in a blizzard not forty feet from their destination and are buried under boulders on the island. One man made it to the stone wall, but could go no further. Captain Haley discovered him the following morning. Six more bodies were found on January 17, five more on the twenty-first, and the final body was discovered “grappled up on Hog Island passage” on the twenty-seventh. According to the Boston Gazette on January 18, the vessel, named Conception, weighed between three and four hundred tons and was laden with salt. No one in America ever knew the dead sailors’ names.
When I find Rich and Billie, they are sitting on the beach, their toes dug into the sand. I sit beside them, my knees raised, my arms folded around my legs. Billie gets up and stares into her pail and begins to leap in stiff-legged jetés all around us.
“My fingers are bleeding,” she announces proudly. “We pulled off a million of them. At least a million. Didn’t we, Uncle Rich?”
“Absolutely. At least a million.”
“When we get back to the boat, we’re going to cook them up for supper.” She bends over her pail again and studies it solemnly. Then she begins to drag the pail down to the water’s edge.
“What is she doing?” Rich asks.
“I think she’s giving the mussels something to drink.”
He smiles. “I once read an account of a pilot who said the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen from the air was the Isles of Shoals.” He runs his hand over his shaved head. His skull is perfectly shaped, without bumps or dents. I wonder if he worries about sunburn.
“Adaline seems very nice,” I say.
“Yes, she is.”
“She admires Thomas’s work.”
Rich looks away and tosses a pebble. His face is not delicate, in the way that Thomas’s is. Rich has dark, thick eyebrows that nearly meet in the center. Sometimes I think that he has Thomas’s mouth, but he doesn’t. Rich’s is firmer, more pronounced in profile. “Childe Hassam painted here,” he says. “Did you know that?”
“I wouldn’t have thought that someone who worked for Citibank would know so much about poetry,” I say.
“Actually, it’s Bank of Boston.” He tilts his head and looks at me. “I think poetry is something that’s fairly univer $$$on’t you? Enjoying it, I mean.”
“I suppose.”
“How is Thomas?”
“I don’t know. I think he’s convinced himself that each poet is given a finite number of words and that he’s used up his allotment.”
“I notice that he’s drinking more,” Rich says. Rich’s legs are brown and covered with dark hair. Looking at his legs, I contemplate the trick of nature that has caused Thomas and Rich to receive what appear to be entirely separate sets of genes. I glance out toward the sloop, which floats four hundred feet from us in the harbor. The mast teeters in the chop.
“Adaline was married once,” Rich says. “To a doctor. They had a child.”
I turn to him. He must see surprise on my face.
“I think the girl must be three or four now. The father has her. They live in California.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Adaline doesn’t see the girl. She’s chosen not to.”
I am silent. I try to absorb this information, to put it together with the gold cross and the lilting voice.