The Sea Keeper's Daughters (Carolina Heirlooms, #3)

by Lisa Wingate

But occasionally over the years, I had wondered—was there, inside me, the same demon that had taken him from us before I was six years old, leaving me to remember him as a feeling, a snatch of sound, a mist of memory?

Someone should tell the dead that saving the living isn’t as simple as leaving a note to say, It’s no one’s fault. For the living, it’s always someone’s fault.

Get your act together, Whitney Monroe, she’d probably say. Life goes on. Mrs. Doyne had survived the death of her husband of fifty years, her one true love. She worked in her gardens, volunteered all over the area, and mentored a Girl Scout troop. She had the best attitude of any person I’d ever met and it went all the way through to the core. She was fearless, always up for a new adventure.

I’d become so good at invention, I’d halfway convinced myself.

Mom had never said it, but in so many ways, the two of them were like sun and moon. She was gritty, tough, practical, determined, passionate about having a teaching career. The first in her family to even attend college. He was contemplative, wildly artistic, reckless. A violinist of no small repute. A composer. A dabbler in the art of watercolor. Completely unprepared to live outside the insular world of privileged music schools and concert venues.

His dark hair, blue eyes, and soft features had marked me since birth, but that didn’t seem to endear me to Grandmother Ziltha. By all appearances, she tolerated my mother and me because she felt it was her duty to do so. Or because we were all she had left. She’d long ago cut off communication with her own relatives in a dispute over inheritance. She’d managed to alienate herself from the family she’d married into as well.

Each year, I’d spun fantasies of finally doing something to make my grandmother like me better. Inevitably, the season ended in disappointment and the ultimate conclusion that I just wasn’t good enough to love.

If only I’d realized, at the end of the visit, that I was sharing a final hug with my mother, I would’ve held on longer, come back sooner, stopped rehashing our family’s concerns about her marriage and Clyde’s insistence that they move halfway across the country to live in Manteo. If you could know—if you could always know—when the lasts in life are coming, you’d handle them differently. You’d savor. You’d stop. You’d let nothing else invade the moment.

With its old, New England–style homes freshly painted and ready for tourists and the harbor filled with expensive pleasure boats, the place lay blanketed in an old-world charm, a sense of being far from modern life and its concerns.

taught me things. Not the least of which was that I wanted to be the boss someday . . . and when I did become the boss, I would treat people with respect, not condemnation. Life at the Excelsior had been a good training for life in general.

My mother’s key was waiting on my key ring, right where it had always been. Removing it would’ve been like admitting she was gone forever. Stepping through the door and starting up the stairs, I reminded myself again that she wouldn’t be here. Whatever secrets this building kept, I would have to discover them on my own.

vanished at sea off Cape Hatteras in 1936. Perhaps I was plagued by the stirrings of my ancestors, who’d heard the siren songs of faraway places, who’d left home again and again to wander.

eventually start my own business, good enough? Why, always, the pressure to consider a road other than the one I’d taken?

Why had we always been locked in the subtle battles of mother and daughter, each convinced we were right about what was best for the other? I hope she knows how much I loved her.

The name Whitney was too modern and lacked sophistication, she said, so she refused to use it. Her habit of addressing me was, instead, a perpetual scolding. Those years of navigating her tutelage and the staff of the Excelsior had prepared me for the sometimes-brutal process of working my way up from prep cook to executive chef to corporate manager to business owner. It was proof that sometimes the hardest things in life become the building blocks of the greatest achievements.

Even with a drop cloth lying over it, the slanted top of an old captain’s desk was unmistakable. The desk had always stood in an alcove of the library, a holdover from Benjamin Benoit’s seafaring travels, according to family lore. Of all the things in my grandmother’s house, this was the one that had most inspired my childhood imagination.

Your daddy loved this desk as a little’un too. He’d sit here writing and dreaming and getting that same far-off look to his eye—if your granny didn’t have him practicing the violin or the piana, that was. You’re so much like that boy. Sometimes it’s almost like watchin’ a spirit. You be careful of the sea, sweetness. It ain’t been good to this family.

Tragedy ran in the Benoit family like eye color. Sad endings lay inseparably tangled with threads of wealth, privilege, duty, and the lure of the sea. Perhaps that was why, the older I grew, the more I’d felt the need to separate myself from the Benoits. And my father.

How necessary, also, that we must release them now. It is fine enough to glance at the past, but one must never focus there overlong. Don’t you think? Perhaps we did not recognize then, in our softness, in the ease of our lives draped in fine lace and pearls, how truly fortunate we were and how fortunes can change. Had I understood it, had I known that one can live with so much less, perhaps my Richard would still be with us today.

document all natural wonders and bona fide tourist attractions, in order to encourage travel and promote economic growth. The writers shall also record a sort of history of the people, such as has never before been attempted or even considered worthy of effort. It is Roosevelt’s aim that these teams of documentarians in each state may gather the memories, folk legends, and lives of the common man, from farmer to factory worker, from Western cowboy to former slave.

Did the dead still want things? Or was death simply a letting go of all that is held so tightly in life—an understanding of the temporal and shallow nature of the human matters of possession, greed, desire, justice? I wanted to know. I so badly wanted to be certain that my mother was at peace, but it was hard to have much faith in a God who would take someone like her so young. “Clyde?” I moved closer

Shock hit first, then indignation, and finally guilt brought up the rear. Guilt and I had become old friends these past few days. I felt its incessant gnawing every time I passed by Clyde, who sat rooted in the recliner next to my mother’s, the baseball bat propped nearby as he stubbornly fixated on the blaring television and pretended I wasn’t there.

In this little Mayberry-by-the-sea, the locals were aware of everything.

She lifted an ear, her eyes soulful, worried, weary, and needy. She wasn’t asking for much—just a place to be and someone to be near,

And Queen Ruby? The woman I’d grown up visiting was as straight and tightly strung as the laces on a corset. I couldn’t picture her playing in the sand, crowning herself queen, or ever having been fun-loving in any way. My image had been of a sullen, lonely, rigid little girl—a younger version of the person I knew, a woman who kept everyone at arm’s length.

I realize now how angry I have been with him, how heartbroken, how bitter and how afraid to allow myself to feel. In my years at the college, I was merely existing, merely biding my days. I had condemned myself to death without actually dying. Now I have climbed from the stillness of the grave, and I see the world in a glorious new light.

grandmother’s past before, but now I wanted to understand how she had changed from Queen Ruby into a woman bitter with people and life. What had caused the reverse metamorphosis, the drawing inward, like butterfly regressing to caterpillar?

It’s not easy to change someone’s default settings, especially when they have relatives constantly dragging them down, but I’d quickly learned that the by-product of staying in one place was getting involved with people on a deeper level, whether you wanted to or not. As a boss, I couldn’t help being attached to those kids, hoping to make a difference. Some of the ones who’d straightened themselves out were like younger brothers and sisters to me now. We’d kept in touch even after they’d moved on to bigger and better things.

didn’t like me, but he wasn’t a bad guy. Ever’body got a story, Old Dutch had told me once when I’d complained about what a shrew my grandmother was. Ever’body got a reason for what they do. You eat off somebody else’s plate, drink a their cup, could be, you’d be that same way.

I’m sure you have emotional attachments there. It’s not easy to think about cleaning out. My granny had a farm in the Smoky Mountains when I was a kid—my favorite place in the world. Trees to climb, creeks to wade, lakes to fish in. The view from the porch went for miles. Man, I loved that valley. Cohler House had been in the family since the mid-1800s. It was a tobacco plantation, back in the day. My parents sold the whole thing to pay for college for my sisters and me. That was about the saddest day of my life. I went back to see about buying it later on, but the coal companies had taken over the property and torn it up. None of it was there anymore.

Yet the mountains provide a feast for the eye if not for the stomach. The mountains fill the senses in a way even money could not. Scenes of natural glory hide the ugliness of human deprivation. The people live firmly tied to their land and their traditions. They seem quilted by soft, even stitches to the sense that this is the natural way of life. Hard. Randomly cruel . . . and then, in the blink of an eye, possessed of great magnificence.

“How can a girl grow into a woman, sitting in a car with colors? To understand life, one must experience it!”

I agree, and smile at him, and think of the many colored women who worked in Mother’s kitchen and in Grandmother’s. While we had a fine time vexing the help, it dawns on me now that we never asked any of them for their stories. In all those years, it never occurred to me to care.

for the massa’s grandson. He three year old and need him somebody to play wit’. Massa give me to him fo’ his property. I’s gonna have a easy life now in a new house. No mo’ pickin’ cotton. Only trouble is, that house a long way off. . . .”

Bass Carter’s eyes grow cloudy and far away, and I am transported to the time before the War between the States, a time that is bred into our awareness as Southerners, yet most often lauded as a day of grace and grandeur. Mr. Bass Carter causes me to wonder . . . how different is that history when seen from the fields and the lowly slave cabins?

Now I walk in the shoes of this five-year-old boy, his very first shoes, as his bare feet are hemmed within leather and laces and he is offered as a possession, taken from his mother without a second thought.

The words paint pictures and I live Mr. Bass Carter’s life through lines and pen. This, I know now, is story at its highest capability. It agitates us to genuine joy and tears. Within story, we are given a new soul, another’s soul to try on like clothing, knowing we can shed it again should we choose.

“Hard lotta years, I been here. Work hard plowin’ and plantin’ and harvestin’ all my livin’ days since the war. God done brung me through it. Don’ reckon I knows nothin’ to say that matters mo’ than that.”

You recall, I am sure, Old Juba’s stories of the fearsome blue-eyed mountain Indians with their six fingers and brown skin and wicked ways? No doubt you can still hear Juba threatening that, were we to vex her enough, those Melungeons would come and steal us away in the night.

The girl, Able, is a Melungeon. According to Mrs. Walker, her kind live high in the hills, but they are a reclusive, suspicious sort and do not warm to outsiders. Nor do outsiders warm to them.

Before I’d even opened my eyes, the scents of my mother, of her threads and yarns, her bath spray and her favorite room deodorizer were waiting, reminding me that this building wasn’t just brick and stone, it was a living thing, the keeper of my family’s past.

To my right, the Pamlico Sound whispered into quiet expanses of marsh grass. Scenes like these were made to persuade you that your problems are smaller than you think, transient in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes, even when you’ve spent years ignoring God, there are places where his fingerprint and his intentions seem absolute.

Take a breath, look around, a voice seemed to be whispering. None of this is here by accident, and neither are you.

Life is a process of storms and rebuilding, of fires and regrowth, of loss and gain.

Suddenly I could relate to her in a way I never had before. I knew what it was to have a husband cheat and lie, to have a marriage fall apart, to discover that the future you’d imagined wasn’t the future you would get.

“The most important skill in life is to learn the acceptance of that which you have not planned for yourself. Discontent, if watered even the slightest bit, spreads like choke weed. It will smother the garden if you let it,” advised Mrs. Merry Walker. “We must always continue to grow beautiful and useful things. My father named me Merry, I do believe in the hope that I would be a happy person. He often quoted these lines to us from a poem he loved: ‘Whenever the way be filled with doubt, look up and up, and out and out.

ready to watch a movie together. Even when we were arguing, or I was sulking, or she was too exhausted to deal with my teenage angst, we could always put together a piece or two of the puzzle. She’d walk by, tap a finger, say, This one goes there, I think. She had the benefit of having looked at the picture on the box, but she always hid the boxes from me. This way it’s a mystery, she’d say.

My father committed suicide when I was five? How long do you maintain an acquaintance before you show your scars? What do you do with the surprise and sympathy that come afterward?

traveled to the mountains. How wonderful the days when all was well. How necessary, also, that we must release them now. It is fine enough to glance at the past, but one must never focus there overlong. Don’t you think?

to. I’d walked too long in the shoes of a child who was still waiting for her daddy to magically come home and fix everything. But the truth was, I had to fix myself. For too long, I’d harbored a five-year-old’s broken heart, one that was terrified, deep down, that no one could really be trusted. I was always ready to leave but never ready to really love. I told myself it was better that way, safer.