THE MERMAIDS

Sam came up out of the sea like Perseus with Danae, his mother ashy-skinned and barely breathing, but wrapped so tight around that little boy, she was protecting him with her life. The two of them were bound to a makeshift raft of driftwood that kept them afloat.

They washed up on the beach while the children were hunting clams and kelp at the low tide. I was still a babe-in-arms, not there to see it.

They said she was cast out up north for being a witch, and laying with the devil, and he was a half-devil child, but my mother told me she suspected more probably she’d been done wrong by some man who lied about it after, because isn’t that the way of it?

His mother was a sad woman, cold like the sea never got out of her bones all the way, and their home was no happy place for a child, which is why Sam mostly grew up at our house.

I think I must have been in love with him by the time I was twelve. We would sneak down to the beach and write our names in the sand and watch as the tide washed them away, and then we’d write them over again. Sometimes he’d steal a kiss, always chaste and shy.

My parents had no objection some years later when Sam asked to marry me, as he was practically a son to them already, and he already had a good job on the fishing boats. My father clapped him on the back and promised us a June wedding just as soon as he turned eighteen.

He gave me a ring, and more chaste, shy kisses, and I told him yes, but that he best not be so chaste or shy on our wedding night. He stammered and looked away, but only because he couldn’t say outright that he liked when I talked like that.

It was only his mother who seemed unhappy, and she took to brooding. I wondered if she feared being lonely. I asked her if she would like to live with us when it was done, but she declined, her eyes on the sea.

Then the girl appeared at our wedding, in the back at the service, and that was the first I noticed her. She looked so strange, with her blue-tinged skin and her long, wild black hair, and big green eyes that glared up at us at the altar as the preacher blessed us. That look, it chilled me; I didn’t know why she could look so hatefully at two strangers.

All through the celebration that followed, I could see her of her out of the corner of my eye, and she would be looking at me and Sam so hard, finally I asked Sam if he had had some sweetheart before, or done this girl wrong, and he said, my sweet Cassie, how would I ever have time for another girl when I spend every minute on the boat or asleep or with you? And I knew that to be true, so I just set it aside and went on carousing and thinking of the wedding night to come.

But just as the sun slipped down over the hills to the West, and left the sea black and mirrorlike as obsidian, a cold breeze came in, and then there was a rumble of thunder, and a crack of lightning. The rain started pelting down, and we all had to rush to take in the food and the tables and chairs and the wine.

Then the call came from the lighthouse that there had been sighted a ship in distress, capsizing in the storm. So our men went out in their fishing boats, to see what could be done. All our men. Including Sam.

I waited up till midnight, the wind and rains raging all about. Then, suddenly, instantly, the storm ceased and all was quiet. The crickets and the nightbirds decided it was safe, and the early summer night burst into song.

Unable to take it any more, I pulled on my boots, not even lacing them as I trotted the muddy roads to the dock. The fishing boats were hauling the battered vessel. The men all looked at me, but none of them would speak.

Then the captain of the ship disembarked, and a boy I knew from town whispered in his ear. He looked me over, much saddened in his demeanor.

He bowed his head and addressed me. I told him I already knew from all their hollow eyes that my dear Sam was dead. Then one of the men opened up his mouth and said they did not reckon he was.

They told me then about how women swum up from the sea, twelve women with blue skin and black hair and big green eyes, and they swam around that ship and rocked it from side to side, each time more perilous, and demanded that the man Sam be delivered to them. But that ship had no man named Sam aboard, so the women stayed, and kept rocking the ship, back and forth and back and forth. Then they called down the rain and the lightning, and still they rocked that ship.

When the fishing boats came out, the women wrapped their arms around the bows of the little boats, and rocked them, too, and called for Sam to join them, threatened to sink them all if he did not.

And what did my husband do? My dear, dear husband, on his own wedding night? He leapt into the sea, to save all those men, and the women wrapped him up in their long hair, and dragged him down to the depths. All at once the rain had stopped, and the lightning stopped, and the rocking of the ships stopped, and all the world was calm. But my Sam was gone.

I barely ate. I barely slept. Three days I stood at the door of the empty little cottage that was meant to be mine and Sam’s together, staring out at the sea. Three days, and then Sam’s mother came up the path.

She looked every bit as sad as she always did, every bit as drawn, and at first, she was every bit as quiet, but soon she began to speak.

“I never said,” she said. “How I came here from Massachusetts all those years ago.”

“I was rescued, still big with child, by twelve women, who were on top the prettiest ladies you’ve ever seen, and on the bottom, had the tails of fishes. Just when I was about to succumb to the sea, they wrapped their hair around me, and dragged me down, down beneath the waves, to their home under the sea. They made it so that I could breathe beneath the water for a year and a day. I wanted for nothing, and my baby was born big and healthy. When my time with them was over, they said to me to go and be free, but they would be back for my boy, when he was eighteen and old enough to be a man. Because, you see, they have no men of their own beneath the waves, only women, and they must take men from the surface, and bring them down, because it is the only way they will have families. And then they set me and my son adrift on a raft of their own devising, and that is how I came here, to you. This is why I could not be happy for you, for I knew he would have to go back to them someday.”

Again, for three days, I barely slept or ate, after hearing her story. But on the fourth day, I went to sea. I cut my hair and bound my breasts and dressed in Sam’s old trousers and his cap. I took his boots and his old fishing boat, the paint peeling off the sides. And I took his fishing rod, and I rowed myself out, out as far as the ship had been when those women tried to capsize it.

I baited my hook with the ring that Sam had given me.

And I cast it out to sea.

It did not take them long to come, swimming around the boat, peering curiously at first.

“What a pretty boy,” they said.

“Yes, a pretty boy.”

“Pretty boy, pretty boy, won’t you come and stay with us? You’ll want for nothing.”

I let them take me, wrapped in their hair, down below the depths, and wonder of wonders, I could breathe like the seawater was air. They kissed me, and ran their tongues along my ears, yes, they did things with their tongues my own husband hadn’t done to me. At last they brought me to their palace, and there I found my poor, dear Sam. He recognized me at once, but I put a finger to my mouth to be quiet.

“Never mind that one there,” said the women. They spoke in unison, twelve voices all together. “He’s pining away for his lost love, missing out on all the fun. But maybe when he sees what fun!”

And they began to strip off my clothes, and stroked parts of me that had never been stroked before, but it didn’t take them too long to see I wasn’t a boy at all, even with my near-bald head.

“What is this?!” they demanded.

I reached in my cap, and from it I pulled my hair, my own dear hair I had shorn from my head, that I had woven into a net, and I cast it over those women. They howled and screamed and fought to be free, but I wrapped my husband in my arms and swum him back up to the surface, where he kissed me the most un-chaste kiss we had ever kissed.

And I tell you, after that, the two of us picked up and went out west and started raising horses, where the only water for miles was from our own dear little trickling stream.

This story is based on a few different sources.

1) Sam, by Walter de La Mare
2) Sam and the Mermaid, an African-American folktale
There are also aspects of a few other mermaid-related folktales I remember from childhood that I couldn't find online, and some obvious sources, like the story of Danae and Perseus.