Mistwalker

FOUR Grey

Susannah wasn’t the first girl I loved. Nor the third nor the sixth. I was entirely indiscriminate with my affections. The pretty girls were the only benefit to following my father from Massachusetts to Maine, from Boston to Nova Scotia.

All else was torment, but always on the shore, lovely girls. Girls with exotic accents. With brown eyes, blue, and green. With parasols and gowns that draped them as if they were Grecian goddesses. They distracted me from the hardships of merchant life. In return, I treated them from the stores.

Tea from Boston, mostly. It made a good gift—it wasn’t expensive, it didn’t spoil. I trailed spiced leaves all along the shore, filling cups wherever I walked.

In the beginning, the very beginning, I thought perhaps this lighthouse was my penance. That here, I would learn to be selfless. To become a man, someone worthy of esteem. I was by beauty trapped and thus made a beast. It made sense that by beauty I would be set free.

How brilliantly I deceived myself. But, in my own defense, isn’t that the conclusion bred into us by the Misters Grimm and M. Perrault? (Hr. Anderson seemed rather more occupied with eternal suffering and thus wasn’t a favorite of mine.)

I offered pretty prayers. I wished for a rosary and learned it. Then mala beads, then bells. I wished for a singing bowl and tried rather hard to learn to meditate. But I had nothing but the sea to surround me. Its whisper, constantly in my ears. I was the most shut away of monks, but I never found pleasure in it.

Always my downfall. Pleasure, the wanting of it. The pursuit of it. I ignored my true calling for a decade. Though I held the mists off, I thought, This is my test. If I suffer it nobly, I’ll be rewarded. Another girl will come, I’ll be transformed. I’ve learned my lesson and stopped hating the ocean.

These are lies. Sometimes I repeat them. It makes the hours, one after the other, same as the last, same as the next, go by. And now, my reward is at hand. My release. My freedom, and though in those early days I swore I would be better, I swore I would never press a cursed kiss on anyone the way Susannah had pressed one on me—

I realized, I had meant it only halfway. Because there, on the shore, she’s thinking of me. If she’ll only come, I’ll press this curse on her without hesitation. I’ll do it with the truth. With revelation. She’ll see every sweet benefit, and it’s no concern to me if she discovers the disadvantages. By then, it will be much too late.

And besides. She’ll need that discovery to fuel the first ten years. After that, she’ll manage on her own.