Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman Page B

kerchief over his mouth in order to breathe.   He saw the woman in her nightdress then, her braid down her back, crouched down in the mud.   His first thought was an odd one: She’s been trapped.   It seemed to Larkin she’d been beached along with the whales, one of more than seven hundred, dying in the warming air.
    Larkin felt the echo and the ringing in his bad ear as he ran down the grassy path, anxious to see what was wrong.   The ringing was in his head as well.   The smell was hellish, and the sound of the blackfish, moaning or singing, it was impossible to tell which, was like thunder, shaking the sand under his feet.
    “Let me help you,” Larkin said, or he thought that’s what he said.   But the woman must have heard differently, be cause, when he leaned down to pull her out of the mud, she turned and hit him as though he were about to attack her.   She hit him a second time, and then a third, her arms flying.   Larkin had to drop his cranberry scoop in order to protect himself He pushed her off, trying not to hurt her.   “Are you mad?”
    When she fell away from him, he thought indeed she was.   He recognized her as the hired woman from the Reedys’ farm.   Perhaps she’d been driven insane by this god-awful smell, by the pointless death of so many creatures.   There was mud all over her nightdress, and her face was drawn.
    “I just wanted to see if you need anything.”   Larkin bent to retrieve his wooden scoop, and that was when he saw the child.   There in the mud, between two blackfish, it was crying, its little mouth puckered, fists in the air.
    Larkin looked over at the woman, and Lucinda stared back at him.   She didn’t say a word.
    “Can I do something?”   There was that ringing, now in both Larkin’s
    ears, the good and the deaf
    “You want to do something for me?”   Lucinda stood up.   She was black with mud, and she had the stink of the whales all over her.   She had no idea that she was crying.   “Change the world.”
    There were so many seagulls overhead, ready to feast on the dead, that before long everyone in town would know something momentous had happened.   And it had.   The baby looked up at a pink cloud; at last, he stopped crying.   There was salt all over his skin.
    “All right.   Fine,” Larkin said.   “I will.”
    Lucinda Parker laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound.
    Larkin pointed across the bay, to the farm he liked to look at and pretend was his on his way to work.
    “Is that enough of a change for you?”
    Lucinda closed her eyes.   She could see the moon inside her eyelids.
    She could see all of the life that she’d led.
    “I’ll give it to you,” Larkin said.
    All he wanted was for the baby not to start crying again.
    “Just take care of him until I can manage it.”
    Lucinda opened her eyes.   She was still in the same world, and the baby was beginning to fuss.
    “When is that exactly?”   she asked of Larkin.   “Never?   Or the day after never?”
    Poor Larkin Howard was a fool who was trying to stop the inevitable.   How could he change anything?   This was the bay of inevitability and of sorrow, of mistakes made and mistakes that were about to unfold, of all that had been lost in a minute or a lifetime.   This boy, Larkin, couldn’t possibly understand anything.   Lucinda felt old enough to be his mother.   She might have been if she’d had this baby long ago, when William Reedy first came to her, when she was only fifteen.
    The baby in the mud was whimpering.   He looked shiny, with the same slick, wet skin as the blackfish.   If she’d ever had a child, one of her own, one she could keep, Lucinda would have liked for him to have blue eyes, like this one.   Seawater, tear water sky water blue as the heaven she’d imagined as a child, although truly that seemed another person entirely, that hopeful little girl who made wishes.
    “Give me two weeks,” Larkin said, “and I’ll do it.”
    He was