Free Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman Page B

for the county and a trusted observer of the coast for many years.   Sea serpents of our local tales usually turned out to be whales, or large seals, or banks of curly seaweed, tangled and thick.   Surely, there were strange things in the water; our own father had told us of a night when the ocean around his boat had turned green, as alight as the stars in the sky.   George West had been a witness to this as well, if anybody dared to doubt our father’s word.   As for Harry Wynn, although he wasn’t as honorable a man as our father, he wasn’t a liar or a madman.   Not in the least.   People listened when he reported that the sea serpent was nearly fifty feet long, brown in color, snakelike in form, stinking of sulfur. Harry had watched the creature crawl out of the ocean, and, sure enough, when the men in town went to inspect the beach the next day, there was a trail in the sand, nearly four feet across.   The smell of sulfur was palpable.   Several men dropped to their knees, then and there, to pray for forgiveness for deeds they did not care to announce or explain.
    One day everything was the same, the same sky and sea and beach, and the next day it was another world entirely.   People saw shadows where none had been before.   The women in town panicked.   Most would not let their children wander freely; cows were brought in from the field, in case the creature had a taste for meat or milk; windows and doors were secured.   An article appeared in the Boston Post, with quotes from Harry Wynn describing in great detail the size of the sea serpent’s teeth, nearly four inches long, and the way it had looked back at him, before darting into the woods.   By then, my sister refused to go to the shore with me, though it was only a mile from our door, so I went to dig up bait by myself.   I wasn’t afraid.   I had read the Odyssey and I knew there was no way to escape your own fate.   I knew that every monster had a beating heart, even those with scales, even those with flame-hot breath that could light the eelgrass on fire, even those whose faces were too terrible to see.
    On the day the Professor arrived, we had what was called a spring tide, a tide lower than usual, so that the bay seemed devoid of water.   I could walk miles out into the sea and find nothing but mud.   There were enough littlenecks and quahogs to fill two wicker baskets.   Before me appeared a world without water, and it buzzed with mosquitoes and gnats.   It was September, that golden month.   My straw hat made everything seem yellow: the mud, the sky, the sulfury shoreline.   I saw the Professor from a distance, and, yes, my heart stopped.   No one believes it when people say that, but in my case, it was true.   It was just for an instant, but it was an instant I understood.   Thank goodness I was wearing my hat.   Perhaps he saw me as beautiful as he waved from the shoreline, my body young and strong, my hair in one long braid, nearly to my waist, my ugliness hidden by straw and sunlight.
    His name was Ewan Perkins and he was one of the curators of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, a naturalist, originally from London, who had written for such esteemed journals as Zoologist and Scientific America.   He was an expert in unusual creatures: giant snakes in Bolivia, a small breed of crocodile discovered in Oxfordshire, Mexican frogs that could not only climb but fly.   These things I learned later, just as I learned he preferred toast with jam for breakfast, and hot, thick coffee when out in the field, but when I first saw him I only knew he was perfect.   He was waving to me from the shoreline, accompanied by two men from the town council, Frederick Dill and our mayor, John Morse.   I blinked, but if I wasn’t mistaken the stranger held a book in his hand, a natural history of Massachusetts, at least three hundred pages thick.
    “Well, that’s a foolish thing to do,” John Morse told me
    J ll as I approached with