The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd Read Free Book Online

simple outpost—or, as the monks said, “a daughter house”—of an abbey in Cornwall, England. The monks had built it themselves in the thirties on land donated by a Catholic family from Baltimore, who’d used it for a summer fishing camp. In the beginning the place was so unpopular that Egret Islanders—all of them Protestants—called it “St. Sin.” Now Protestants were more or less extinct here.
    The local guidebooks played up the monastery as a minor Low Country attraction, mostly because of the mermaid chair that sat in a side chapel in the church. A “beguiling chair,” the 34
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    books always said, and it was, actually. It was a replica of a very old, somewhat famous chair in the abbey’s mother house. The arms had been carved into two winged mermaids painted with jeweled colors—vermilion fish tails, white wings, golden orange hair.
    As children Mike and I used to slip into the church when no one was about, lured, of course, by the titillation of the nipples on the mermaids’ exposed breasts, four shining inlaid garnet stones. I used to give Mike a hard time about sitting with his hands cupped around them. The memory of this caused me to laugh, and I looked up to see if the other passengers had noticed.
    If the tourists were lucky and the chapel wasn’t roped off, they could sit in the mermaid chair themselves and say a prayer to Senara, the mermaid saint. For some reason sitting in it was supposed to guarantee you an answer. At least that was the tradition. Mostly the whole thing came off like throwing pennies into a fountain and making wishes, but now and then you would see a real pilgrim, someone in a wheelchair rolling off the ferry, or someone with a small oxygen tank.
    The ferry moved slowly through the salt creeks, past tiny marsh islands waving with yellowed spartina grass. The tide had ebbed, laying bare miles of oyster rakes. Everything looked undressed, exposed.
    As the creeks widened out into the bay, we picked up speed.
    V’s of brown pelicans lapped alongside us, outpacing the boat. I focused on them and, when they’d vanished, on the lifelines hanging in sloppy coils inside the ferry. I didn’t want to think about my mother. On the plane I’d been saturated with dread, but out here that lifted some, maybe because of all the wind and freedom.

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    I tilted my head back against the window and breathed the marsh’s sulfurous smell. The boat captain, in his faded red cap and wraparound metallic sunglasses, began to speak into a mi-crophone. His voice coasted through the little speaker over my head in a memorized oration designed for tourists. He told them where to rent the golf carts that would take them around the island, gave them a little spiel about the egret rookery and fishing charters.
    He closed with the same joke I’d heard the last time I’d come:
    “Folks, just remember there are alligators on the island. I doubt you’ll see one this time of year, but if you do, keep in mind that you can’t outrun an alligator. Just be sure you can outrun who-ever you’re with.”
    The tourists chuckled and nodded at one another, the whole business of venturing onto a Carolina barrier island suddenly thrust into a new and slightly dangerous light.
    As the ferry slipped into the narrow waterways interlacing the marsh on the island’s back side, I got up and walked out onto the deck. Swells of water glided past, the color of darkly steeped tea. Looking back at the wake, at the distance we’d covered, I realized how isolated I’d been growing up on an island without a bridge. I’d been thoroughly caged in by water, and yet I’d never felt lonely until I started high school on the mainland. I remembered Shem Watkins taking all of us kids, probably fewer than half a dozen of us, across Bull’s Bay each morning in his shrimp boat, then picking us up in the afternoon. We’d called it the “shrimp bus.”
    Mike and I had imagined