Annabel Lee by Paul Hilding

Annabel Lee by Paul Hilding

And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side 
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, 
In her sepulcher there by the sea— 
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
~ “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe, 1849

It’s late-morning on a Sunday in August.  An anniversary, of sorts.    

Bill manages to get out of bed.  He warms up yesterday’s coffee and pushes through the screen door onto the back patio, squinting against the glare of bright sunshine.  As he does every morning, he sits down in the closer of two deck chairs.  The other has never been used.

He surveys the vista below his hilltop house: a small tidal river runs along the north side of the property, emptying into the harbor a few hundred yards to the east.  The harbor is a couple miles across, its light blue waters already roiled by hundreds of weekend boaters.  The dark waters of the open Atlantic are visible just beyond the mist-shrouded headlands at the harbor’s mouth. 

To the southeast is a large salt marsh, bordered by thick tangles of blackberries and willows which gradually thin out in favor of cattails and marsh grasses near the water’s edge.  His is the last house on a long gravel road that follows the river from town towards the harbor.  The road narrows to a rough pathway just past his house, and then becomes a game trail as it enters the marsh at the base of the hill.

As always, Bill’s gaze settles on the white cross at the end of the pathway. Somehow, the outline of the small patch of sod he’d removed to bury the urn is still visible, even though the grass has had all summer to fill in.    

Jesus.  Has it been three months already?

& & &

They’d met at a high school dance.  Her name was Annabel Lee.  “My Daddy’s idea,” she’d said with a light drawl.  They were standing in the dim light near the back of the dance hall.  “He was from Charleston.”     

She was beautiful.  Her sky blue eyes were framed by auburn hair and a bewitching smile. Bill had never seen her before and was startled when she turned and introduced herself.

“You know, in South Carolina?

 He’d been unable to speak.

“Ah, so anyway, there’s an old legend. Annabel’s lover was a sailor, and he went to sea even though she was sick.  She died while he was away and to this day he haunts the cemeteries of Charleston, forever searching for her grave.  Kind of morbid, if you ask me.” 

Bill just kept staring, tongue-tied.

“And then Edgar Allen Poe wrote the poem.  He died just a few weeks later and it was published as part of his obituary.  He was only forty.”  She shrugged, then laughed.  “Hey, how ‘bout we dance until you figure out something to say?”   

He had loved everything about her: her beauty, her easy laugh, her soft southern accent, her old-fashioned name, her unbridled optimism.  And how, nearly every morning of the thirty eight years and sixteen days they had been married, she had insisted that he dance with her.   At least one song.  One joyful dance.  Every morning.  Until she was too sick to get out of bed anymore. 

Annabel had always been the planner, the organizer.  Soon after they married, when she discovered she could not have children, she simply made new plans: volunteer work, adventure travel, new sports.  As he soon discovered, there was no self-pity and no self-doubt when she encountered setbacks.   

Year later, she had another plan.  It had been her idea to build their “dream house” on the coast of Maine, a place they could live when they retired, close to the water and close to sailing, the second great love of Bill’s life.  

She had selected the hilltop building site, the architect, the contractors.  She had helped work out the design, reviewed the plans, picked the materials, colors and furnishings.  Bill was busy wrapping up his business, but on the few occasions he had time to tour the house he marveled at how perfectly it was situated to capture the spell-binding views of wetlands, ocean, and soaring seabirds. 

They were in their late fifties.  There would be many years of dancing on that rear patio, looking out to sea.  And, soon, he would have the time to buy a boat and build a small dock where their property bordered the river.

 & & &

Nearly a year after Annabelle started working on the house, Bill had noticed the small mole on her back.   It took several weeks, maybe a month, before he thought to mention it to her.  By then, it was larger.   A few more weeks went by before he was able to persuade her to schedule an appointment at the dermatology clinic, and a few more before they found themselves in the doctor’s office. 

More than anything, he remembered the doctor’s inability to look at either of them as he shared the results of the biopsy, melanoma.     

Six months later Annabel was dead. 

& & &

The house had been finished just before she passed and they had taken a short tour, Bill pushing her from room to room in a wheelchair.  Even then, she was still making plans, pointing out where he should hang paintings and place furniture, where he should set the deck chairs on the patio to watch the sunrise.

Bill moved in shortly after the funeral, dutifully arranging the furnishings and artwork exactly as Annabel had suggested.  But the feeling of loneliness was overwhelming.  A few neighbors stopped by to welcome him, but small talk was impossible.  Every well-intentioned compliment reminded him of choices and decisions made by Annabel.  “Yes”, he heard himself say, “Annabel did a lot of the design work herself.”  Or “Annabel found that painting in a Boston gallery.”  Or “That was Annabel’s favorite kind of rose.”  Soon, there were no more visitors.

At night, he saw the mole in his dreams, growing slowly on her back.  He saw her face and body wasting away from the hideous disease.  And he tortured himself with the same questions, over and over again:  Would it have made a difference if he had told her about the mole sooner, if he had pushed her harder to have it looked at?  Was it his fault?

& & &

A flash of reflected sunlight catches Bill’s eye.  It’s from the willow grove near the marsh, just beyond the cross.  Eventually, he finds the energy to walk down the path to investigate, stopping on the way to clear leaves and twigs from Annabel’s grave.  As he continues to the edge of the marsh, he finds a pale white piece of wood lying on the ground.  After a closer look, he realizes it is a section of the gunwale of an old wooden boat, barely protruding from the muddy soil.  He pushes through the dense brush and tests the thick wood plank with his pocketknife.  The wood is solid. 

Bill starts pulling away the brush and scraping the mud off the rest of the gunwale until he has unearthed most of it, and part of the hull to which it is attached.  It is about twenty feet long and some of the white paint is still intact.  The wood shows no signs of rot.

“What the hell?  Should be full of shipworms,” Bill mumbles.  He has been talking to himself in recent weeks.  A lot.  Probably a bad habit, he thinks.  But even the rasp of his own voice is somehow preferable to the interminable silence of his new house.

“How’d you get yourself buried in the mud?” he asks.  There is no response other than trilling blackbirds and buzzing flies.  He brushes a spider web out of his hair.  The still air smells of rot and decay. Without thinking, he glances across the yard at the cross.   The paint on the boat, where he’s wiped it clean, is the same shade of white.   

“Huh.  How about that  . . .”  He pauses and then adds, “Hey, you want out of this hole?” 

Again, no response.  He swats at a horsefly, takes a long look at the thick tangle of trees and brush and considers the amount of time it will take to remove three or four feet of river mud from in and around the boat.  Then he looks over at the cross again and sighs. “Well, it’s not like I have a lot else going on in my life.”

Bill climbs the hill back to the house and returns with his truck, boat trailer, and an assortment of tools. Soon, he is hard at work pruning branches and shoveling the heavy mud.  There is no cloud cover and not even a hint of breeze.  The afternoon heat is stifling. 

Sweating, bleeding from brambles, plagued by flies and mosquitoes, he spends the rest of the day unearthing the other gunwale, emptying mud and debris out of the cockpit, and excavating around the outside of the hull where he finds a stout mast and a longer more slender pole lying next to the boat. Again, wherever he tests – the thick hull, the frame, the benches, the mast, the centerboard – there is no evidence of decay.  Finally, he cuts back the last of the willow thicket so that he can winch the boat onto the trailer. 

“Let her go” he grunts as he strains at the winch handle.  The mud and brambles cling stubbornly to their prize.  “Let her go,” he repeats as he pulls with all his strength and the handle starts to move.  His eyes are misty.  He feels tears mixing with the sweat from his forehead.  “Let her go, let her go, let her go” he intones as the boat emerges from her shallow grave and slides slowly up a ramp of mud onto the trailer.

As he secures the boat to the trailer,  Bill takes a long moment to admire the sleek, athletic line of her hull, the knife-sharp nearly vertical bow.  “I think you are going to clean up real nice.”  He smiles for the first time in ages. “Much too pretty to be buried in that hole.”  He drives back up to the house, pressure washes the hull, and slides the boat off the trailer onto two sawhorses in the garage.

& & &

As summer ends and the weather cools, Bill develops a new routine.  He spends long days, and then weeks at a time in the garage, working on the boat, cleaning, scraping, sanding, caulking, priming and painting.  The excitement of restoring the old boat consumes him.  He loves the smooth feel of the restored wood, the smell of cypress timbers and sawdust and paint.  It is a welcome change from the stale air and new carpet smell of the house.

One day, Bill cuts pine floorboards for the boat’s cockpit and puts a small mattress and bedding on top of them.  That night he sleeps in the cockpit.  It is his first restful sleep since the diagnosis.  This time, when he sees Annabelle in his dreams, she is laughing and dancing.  She is no longer sick. 

After finishing work on the hull, Bill begins trying to piece together the standing rigging of the boat.  He understands the short, stout pole is the mast, and realizes the second, longer pole must function as a “sprit,” a diagonal support for the main sail.  But no one has designed sails with sprits for decades, he thinks.  Digging through an old library book about wooden boats, he is startled to find an oil painting of the very same boat, used in the mid-19^th century to harvest oysters off the coast of the Carolinas.  Known as a “spritsail skiff”, the large sail area and narrow hull allowed the boats to sail faster than other small boats of the time, with the oysters used as ballast to help counteract the power of the over-sized sails. 

But what was a spritsail skiff doing buried in mud 1000 miles north of the oyster beds of the Carolinas?  And how in God’s name had her hull remained intact for all these years? 

One day, after Bill has applied the last coat of white paint to the hull, he puts the boat back on the trailer and drives down to the sailmaker’s shop in the marina, parking just outside the front door. The old guy who runs the place does a double take as Bill drives up, and quickly steps out of his tiny store to take a look. 

“What do we have here!” he says, smiling broadly.

“It’s a spritsail skiff.  Ever heard of them?”

“I think so.”   Still smiling, the sailmaker climbs onto the trailer and carefully examines the hull.  After a long moment, he adds, “This one is a beaut!  I seen pictures, years ago.  I think there’s one like this at the wooden boat museum down in Ocracoke.  They used to sail ‘em in the Outer Banks region, off the Carolinas.  How’d you end up with her?”

“Long story,” Bill replies with a half-smile.  “Any chance you could make me a couple sails?

The old man’s face lights up.  “Absolutely.  When do you need them?” 

“As soon as you can get to it.”

“Not a problem.  It’s the end of the season so not much else going on.  But you realize she’s going to be a handful if I build the sails as big as the original design?  Difficult to depower in a heavy wind, and you won’t have nearly enough ballast unless you plan on hauling a cockpit full of oysters with you everywhere you go. 

“I know, I get it,” Bill says, not entirely sure he does.

“OK,” the sailmaker cackles.  “This girl is going to fly!”

Two weeks later the sails are ready and only one task remains before launch.  Bill stencils the name across the transom, then carefully fills in the letters with sky-blue paint: “Annabel.”  Later that day, just as dusk falls, the paint is dry.  He loads her onto the trailer, backs his truck up to the river’s edge, and lets her slide into the mirror-still water.  He ties her to a mooring buoy mid-river.  Back on shore he watches her floating peacefully at anchor as the river reflects the last orange and yellow embers of a dying sunset.

& & &

It’s a warm Indian summer day in late October and once again Bill is sitting in his chair on the back deck.  The hard work and excitement of restoring the skiff is over.  The weather has been stormy since the launch and the nights have been cold. But today is perfect. A fresh breeze is blowing out of the northwest and the sea is cobalt blue under a cloudless sky. 

He watches Annabel pulling restlessly at her mooring.  She prances and swings back and forth in the flukey wind, a thoroughbred ready to run.   The harbor is empty.  Everyone has pulled their boats for the winter. 

Bill feels hesitant about taking her out.  But this might be the last decent sailing day of the season.   Finally, he grabs a light jacket, heads down to the river and rows a small dinghy out to Annabel.

“Just a short one,” he says as he climbs aboard.  For the first time, he raises the sails. A sudden gust kicks up and Annabel begins tearing at the mooring, heeling violently from side to side as if trying to break free.  “Hang on a second girl, hang on” he says as he runs up to the bow and releases the mooring.

She settles down as soon as she is free, sails filling, heading down river and into the harbor with surprising speed, the wind on her beam.  “Whoa. We are flying!” Bill says under his breath, remembering the sailmaker’s comment. 

While Bill had intended to just do a few quick laps around the harbor, he is already approaching the rocky headlands.  Annabel is playing in the brisk wind, bursting through the small waves, rainbows of spray jetting from her bow.   Her boisterous spirit, her delight at being free, seem real, tangible.  For the first time in many months, Bill feels the same way.  Pure, unrestrained joy.  He suddenly realizes he is hollering at the top of his lungs, WAHOOO!  WAHOOO!  Laughing and crying at the same time.

The wide open horizon has an irresistible pull and Bill soon leaves the headlands behind.  The wind picks up rapidly, whistling through the rigging. Annabel heals sharply and surges forward.  The small chop in the harbor is quickly replaced by large, white-tipped waves. Annabel explodes through the crests and surfs down the back sides.  The exhilaration of the wild roller coaster ride draws him far offshore.   

But it is taking all of his strength to hang on to the tiller.  The sea has turned grey, streaked by wind-blown foam.  Cold spray stings his face and nearly blinds him.    “I should turn back” he tells himself, over and over again.  But the sensation of speed, of freedom, of joy, is overpowering.   We’ve both been locked up a very long time, he thinks.  Let’s play a little longer.

Finally, Bill is cold enough to realize he has to head back.  But coming about in these massive waves, in such a strong wind, and in an untested, overpowered boat is not likely to end well.  As he begins to consider his options, the solution appears on the horizon, a low-lying reef just a few miles ahead.   He can sail over to the lee side and get turned around in the calmer waters behind the island.

Within minutes he has reached the island.  The wind and waves drop progressively, although he is still carrying a lot of speed. Less than a hundred yards offshore he is finally ready to come about, but just as he begins the turn the boat scrapes hard against an underwater ledge and is quickly lodged on a rock shelf just below the surface.

Bill raises Annabel’s centerboard and tries to sail her off, backfilling the main sail.  No luck.  He gets off the boat, steps onto the ledge and tries to lift her off.  The thick cypress planks and heavy oak frame are far heavier than he had expected.  She won’t budge.  He realizes the tide will be going out for another three or four hours, and she will soon be even more firmly stuck.  By the time the tide turns and rises enough to re-float her, it will be well after dark.

Bill takes a quick inventory.  Besides the light jacket he has only a pocketknife and a candy bar.  No cell phone.  No matches.  No flashlight.  After all, he laughs at himself, this was going to be just a short sail in the harbor.

His clothes are wet from the ocean spray.  He starts to shiver. He needs to get ashore and find shelter.  There is no choice but to swim to the small rocky beach. 

The water is very cold.  Once ashore, Bill does his best to dry off and warm up, wringing out his clothes, jumping up and down.  He begins looking for driftwood and brush to assemble a lean to.  But the island is almost entirely barren.  He tries digging a shelter but discovers the sand is wet just a few inches below the surface.

As darkness falls, he has run out of ideas.  He is lying half buried on the beach, shivering, getting colder and colder.  The tide has started to come back in, but Annabel is still wedged on the rock shelf.  He feels a tightness in his chest and then, minutes later, excruciating pain.  His breathing is shallow, and his pulse feels uneven.  After a while, he is unable to move his arms and legs.

Time passes.  He is no longer shivering. He watches an enormous yellow moon rise behind Annabel’s graceful silhouette.  He manages a slight smile as he remembers the old poem:  “For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee. . .”        

& & &

The moon is almost overhead, and the wind has died.  Annabel is bumping lightly against the rock ledge. She is like some ethereal being, more dream than real, her hull and sails now pearl-white in the moonlight, her reflection ghost-like, undulating slowly in the still waters behind the reef.    

He imagines that she is watching him, waiting for him.  That she wants him to be with her.  The chest pain has eased but he can’t move.  He is desperately tired. 

She must be a dream, he thinks.  She is so beautiful. Her sails are like angel wings, luffing softly in the light breeze.  And only in a dream does an urn full of dull grey ashes turn into a radiant sailboat. 

He watches as Annabel finally shrugs free from the rock shelf.  But the tide pulls her away from him, away from the beach.  As she drifts out from the protection of the island, the wind rises.  The main sheet catches in the jam cleat and the great mainsail fills. 

His final thoughts are of that long ago sailor haunting the cemeteries of Charleston, searching for a grave he will never find.  In his despair, Bill suddenly realizes that, to avoid that same fate, he must forgive himself.  That Annabel wants him to forgive himself.  And so he does and, lightened of his burden, he is  also free, inhabiting the wind. 

They are dancing again, wind and sails, this time across a moonlit sea.  A million diamonds glitter in their swirling wake.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Paul Hilding 2024