Free Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman Page A

have begun to imagine I deserved.   I was an ugly girl who
    lived in an old white house with my father and my sister, but in my
    mind I was something more.   I read books as though I were eating
    apples, core and all, starved for those pages, hungry for every word
    that told me about things I
    didn’t yet have, but still wanted terribly, wanted until it hurt.
    My mother had named me Violet, most likely because of the blotchy thing on my face, a birthmark in the shape of a flower, blue in cold weather, hideous and purple in full sun; when the heat made me sweat, the mark stood out more than ever, bumpy and blistering, filling me with shame.   My mother was kindhearted, but she died of a fever when I was seven and my sister was only five.   I liked to think she was leaving me a blessing when she gave me such a beautiful name; I believe she assumed my pretty sister had no need for anything more than a name that would have suited a mule.
    I did most of my reading in the barn, where our horses were kept.   I
    thought of books and hay together, a single sweet parcel.   There was no
    line drawn between the soft snuffling of horses breathing and the
    glorious worlds I most likely would never see.   I read Greek myths.   I
    read about far-off places, Venice and Paris.   I read about men who
    searched for things they could not find at home, and women who fell in
    love with the wrong person and waited for the arrival of their beloved
    for so long that a year was no different from a single day.   The same
    thing was happening to me.   Years were passing.   I was already a woman,
    and I still wasn’t done reading.   When my father and my sister went to
    sleep, I would sneak away from the house, taking a lantern.   The horses
    didn’t startle when they heard
    me.   They were used to me.   Maybe they enjoyed the sound of turning pages; maybe it made the taste of hay rise in their mouths.   When I stretched out with my book in the pool of yellow light, I could hear the hum of the bees in the hive perched on the crossbeam above me a thousand wings flapping in unison and I’d think, I’m alive.   I’m alive.
    Our father was a fisherman, Arthur Cross, a good man, worn down by the sea and by the loss of our mother.   He was often gone for weeks at a time, off to the Middle Bank, between Cape Cod and Cape Anne, along with his helper, a boy named George West.   This year, when they came back from fishing at the end of August, George West had grown nearly a foot.   He was rangy and silent and had blisters all over his hands.   George was nineteen, a year younger than me, but he towered over our father.   Although George barely spoke, and couldn’t seem to meet my eyes perhaps because he was afraid of the mark on my face my sister and I were relieved that there was someone to help draw in the nets, someone our father could rely upon.   When there was fishing nearby, runs of herring and bluefish, my father and George worked in our bay.   Huley and I shucked razor fish and clams for bait.   We harvested salt-meadow grass to feed our horses and the three dairy cows that were kept in the field.   Books weren’t the only things I knew: I could imitate the song of the red-winged blackbird that always announced the alewife’s run.   I could place a single blade of eelgrass between my fingers and whistle so loudly the oysters buried in the mud would spit at us.   Still, all the while I was out there laughing with my sister, a straw hat on my head to protect my blotchy face, I was thinking about the barn, about books, about the yellow lantern light.
    Before long, I had read everything in the schoolhouse, including The Practical Navigator, and had borrowed whatever I could from the lighthouse keeper’s wife, Hannah Wynn, who had inherited a small library of books from her father in England.   It was Hannah Wynn’s husband, Harry, who first saw the serpent and filed the official report.   Harry Wynn had been a surveyor