Free Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

placed the rifle atop the pile.   Lucinda went down to a food stand on the docks and brought back fried fish and beans.   After they’d eaten, Lucinda took off all her clothes and got into the lumpy bed. She hadn’t had any sleep for twenty-four hours, and she needed some now.
    “If he cries during the night,” she said of the baby, “let him suck on one of those milk-rags.”
    Larkin stretched out on the floor, beside the baby’s basket.   The harbor was noisy, and shouts echoed from the taverns and the coffeehouses, but Larkin was so tired he fell asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.   He dreamed about the farm, about tall grass and pear trees.   He dreamed about cranberries.   He could always tell when it was time to harvest from a tiny fraction of change in their shade from red to crimson to scarlet.   He heard something once, in the middle of the night, the baby whimpering, but before Larkin could rouse himself and get one of the milk-rags, Lucinda reached down and took the baby into bed beside her.   Then it was quiet.
    When Larkin woke in the morning, sunlight was streaming through the dusty window.   The sound of the docks rose up, men and boats, crates delivered, teams of horses.   Larkin felt a thickness in his throat.   He felt some sort of strange loss.   He had two days to report to the fort in Braintree, and from there he’d be sent on with his division.   But all he could think about was here and now, this one morning, this one room.   He sat up and waited for his good eye to focus.   The bed was empty; that was the first thing he noticed.   He felt an ache in his chest.   Lucinda was gone.   He grabbed his jacket and reached into the pocket.   Now he was confused.   The money he’d gotten from the broker was still there.   He went to the window and looked out at the sea.   The sunlight was blinding.
    Larkin went to sit in the chair beside the bed to think things over, and that was when he saw the basket.   He leaned over and looked down at the baby, sleeping, the tiny chest rising and falling.   Lucinda had left her clothes on the floor, the homespun dress, the muddy under slip She’d torn the bedding so she could bind her breasts hard against her chest before she put on the uniform.   Then she’d cut off her hair and left it on the bureau.   The color was pretty, gray and brown intertwined, like marsh grass.
    Before he left for home, Larkin wrapped the braid carefully in a piece of muslin.   A keepsake for the baby.   Having had nothing himself, he had a pure sense of what a child needed, including that which someone else might find foolish, the braid of his mother’s hair, for instance.   Walking along the dock, Larkin saw dozens of soldiers, some boys so young it seemed they should be playing war in their own yards.   He was ready to go home and buy the house down the lane where he so liked to walk; now that he really considered it, he realized the boggy land around the pond at the back of the house was perfect for cranberries.   He’d set to work as soon as he got home.   Every day when he stepped out his front door, he’d think about the black-fish that had risen up like mountains.   He’d think about salt and sorrow and the way he had walked along the road that day with no idea of what the tide might bring in.   When people asked where the child living with him had come from, he’d simply say he’d found it on a battlefield.   He’d express what he had come to believe, that some plans were made not by men, or fate, or even heaven, but by circumstance, and by the song of whales.
    BLACK IS THE
    COLOR OF MY TRUE
    LOVE’S HAIR
    IN EVERY STORY IN WHICH THERE ARE
    two sisters, one is always prettier.   One wants the world served up on
    a platter while the other longs for nothing more than a rose.   My
    sister, Huley, was the pretty one; you’d think she would have been
    selfish as well, but I was the one who was greedy.   I wanted things I
    never should