I had gone up to my little room after opening the barrel and lay down to rest for a moment. The room had seemed so small, as did my bed; when I lay down my feet hung over the end. I couldn’t remember when I had last slept, other than drifting in and out while stranded in the weeds. I felt drained, my head hollowed out. A wind pushed against the wavery panes of my window and the cold light of the moon faltered across my blanket. I sat up, rubbing my numbed feet. He was in the way, you see. Of her … recreations. I thought of the sailors who would come to Rathbone House with crates from Papa. They came hurrying up our walkway, shouldering those heavy crates, eager to make their deliveries. They left much later, often late in the evening, not bowed down but stepping jauntily, as often as not whistling a cheerful tune. Mama had looked, if not happy, less sorrowful on the mornings after those visits, a mood which I attributed at the time to the arrival of the crate, not its carrier. On such mornings she could be found in the laundry, standing over Larboard as he stirred a big kettle of boiling water and lye and bleach, head bobbing on its thin stem, tossing in her collars.
