Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

away, but turn away he did, each and every time.   He had no expectations; he didn’t think about the day that would follow the one he was living.   It might have been that way forevermore, until he was an old man too crippled by the cranberry scoop to manage a spoon up to his mouth, too bent by tending those low-growing bushes to stand upright, if he hadn’t met up with Lucinda Parker on the day the blackfish came ashore.
    It was a pink morning, misty, and the tide was especially low. Beaching of whales often happened in the place where the dike road had been built, a marshy acre which in older times the days before men and roads and even cranberries had led directly from the bay to the ocean. This particular migration had begun sometime in the night.   Perhaps the whales were misled by a full moon, a false beacon shining off the dark water beside the dike road.   Perhaps some of the blackfish were diseased, or one ill-fated turn was followed by scores of confused creatures searching for some ancient route their ancestors had once taken from the confines of the bay to the open sea.   Whatever had gone wrong, the blackfish had accepted their fate with a low, keening song.   It was a sound much like water, elusive, drifting in and out of people’s dreams, frightening cattle, calling the gulls and hawks to circle over a landscape of death and misery.
    Lucinda Parker had heard the whales’ song best of all.   She worked for the Reedy family, whose farm backed up against the marsh, and she’d never been an easy sleeper.   As of late, she barely slept at all.   She was housed in a room above the barn, and from her one window she could see flickers of water when the tide was high.   Lucinda was long past thirty and too plain for anyone to bother with, except for William Reedy, who left his wife and family sleeping in the house and came to her room on nights when she least expected him.   It was always a surprise to her, the way he thought he had a right to her, and she could never choke out any words in his presence, for fear she’d lose her home and what little of her reputation she could lay claim to.   She could never say, Stay away.
    Lucinda heard the whales’ cries as she was sleeping.   She woke in the dark and threw off her quilt and went to the window, and immediately she knew what she must do.   She made her way to the bay the way dreamers navigate their way to morning, without thinking, unable to stop what was about to happen.   The whole world seemed topsy-turvy.   It was nearly dawn, but there was a moon in the sky, so big and bright it might have been a lantern.   Water was sand, sand was water, and the beach was littered with over seven hundred blackfish; those pilot whales, which were so sleek and so quick in the water, were motionless now.   The shoreline was thick with the dying and the already dead, with pools of moonlight and eelgrass and the sorrowful sound of the thrush, waking in their nests.   And there it was, that watery song that had awakened Lucinda   The marsh seemed to reach on forever, with the tide so low none of the blackfish could possibly survive.
    Lucinda Parker, who was wearing nothing but her nightdress and a pair of old leather boots, cut across the marsh despite the chill in the air.   She sank to her knees in the face of what was so mighty, so inevitable, so filled with sorrow.   She wore her long, dark hair braided in a single plait down her back.   Already, there were strands of gray Perhaps people in town thought she was too old and too ugly to really be a woman, to have a man use her for his own pleasure, to create life.   No one had noticed when her waist grew larger; sometimes she wept when she came into town to buy groceries for the Reedys, but no one bothered to ask about her troubles.   She was ugly; what was a pinch more of ugliness?   She was plain and fat; what was a little more added to her girth?   She’d gone out to the cow shed three nights