The Season of Open Water (13 page)

Noel

Luce tells him she fell sick with a fever, and he knows it for a lie. He knows it when he sees her lying there, still, the sheets pulled up high and tucked around her chest.

“She's cool,” Noel says, touching her forehead.

“Fever can make you cold.”

“Was it a fever ship you went to meet last night?”

“She didn't go out to the ship, old man. We stopped in at a restaurant before. It must have been the beef.”

“You ate beef?”

Luce starts to nod, then catches himself. He shakes his head. “I had chips.”

“Just chips?”

“A cut of chicken.”

“Don't you have things to do?” Noel asks.

But Luce won't leave. He sticks around her bedside, folds back the edge of the sheet again and tucks it, smoothed, under her hand.

“I brought her to a doctor,” he says. “Doctor said keep her still a day or so, let the fever pass. She'll be up and about. I'll look after her. Doctor said to give her these too.” He nods at a bottle of pills on the night table. “Twice or so a day.”

“Why don't you let me sit with her for a spell.”

“She might wake up, need something.”

“I'll get what she needs.”

“I'll stay with her.”

“Don't you have things to do?” Noel asks again.

“I got nothing to do,” Luce answers.

Noel shrugs. “Alright then.” He leaves the room. But an hour later, when Luce goes outside to use the privy, Noel comes back upstairs. He peels the sheet down and finds the wound in her side. The gauze has begun to leak through, a pale yellow stain. A wound, he knows, is like any other creature. It has its own life. It crawls and creeps and spits, a dust-bellied thing. It takes its own walk through the body. Heals in its own time.

Her face is gray. Thin violet shadows circle her closed eyes. He can tell by the dressing that at least Luce had had enough sense to get her well cared for. And she would heal, she would be herself again with no trace of what had happened—whatever it was that had happened—apart from a scar in her side the size of a fifty-cent piece.

But as he stands there, looking down at her, he feels the sudden pulsing shock of his own rage. It sweeps through him, rogue and buckling. Wave after wave of it.

He is waiting for Luce at the top of the stairs. As Luce takes the last step, Noel moves into the stairwell, blocking his way.

“You know what I see?”

Luce looks up at him.

“What I see is you like the bulk of a whale. You've been stuck, ironed, drawn in. They've hoisted you and started the cutting in, and that flesh of yours is spiraling right off the bone. Nothing left to you when it's all said and done. You'll be in a barrel or in the box, or maybe you'll wash up on the neck some sweet morning in the fall with the rest of the muck, and they'll find you there, or I'll find you there, a slug in the skull and crabs rooting their way through your ribs.”

“Dirk McAllister crossed the wrong man,” Luce mutters, looking down at the stairs.

“And who told you that? The wrong man himself tell you that?”

“He got what he had coming.”

“You'll get what you have coming.”

Luce takes the last step to the top of the stairs, and they are on even ground then. He is barely taller than Noel, and they stand that way together, toe to toe, nearly eye to eye. Luce's body is tight, his fist hard down by his side.

“Like I told you before, Luce, you haven't got the head for this work. But over my grave, I won't see you take Bridge down with you.”

And it might be her name that does it, but Noel can see the briefest flash through Luce's eyes, silver and quick, and then, like some old blind has been raised, Noel can see deep into him, fathoms deep, through the hardness and the callused shell that has thickened around him over the years. It is like looking down into a well, looking through his grandson's eyes that are wide and beautiful and skinless, young the way they were once, the way they must have been when he was still a boy.

Luce looks away. He is against the wall. “You think I wanted this for her?”

Noel doesn't answer.

“It was you,” Luce says bitterly as he turns and starts back down the stairs. “It was you, old man, who took that job and put us in this place to start.”

He disappears at the bottom of the stairwell. Noel hears the back door slam.

He does not think long on Luce's words. They stick in him for a moment, little blades, but he lays them aside. He sits with Bridge through the afternoon, and when Cora comes upstairs in the evening, he leaves Bridge with her.

There is no sign of Luce in the house or in the yard. The truck is gone. Noel goes outside to the shop and does a bit of nothing. He drags out the panbone a foot from the wall, slides his hand into the pocket behind the jaw, and gropes out the roll of cash. He counts it. $1,128. He counts it again. Then he puts $1,100 in his trouser pocket and slides the panbone back. He digs through the half-cask in the corner until he finds a good tooth. He sands it down, and with a bottle of India ink and a scrimp needle, he goes back into the house. In the kitchen, he stabs down a block of ice, crushes the cubes, and mixes up a pitcher of switchel. He goes back upstairs.

He scrimps into the tooth and sits beside Bridge as the night moves in. When she stirs, he gives her sips of the water mixed with molasses and vinegar. The ice cubes crack as they melt.

It is dark. Through the window, he can see the black hulking shapes of the outbuildings, the barn and the privy, the henhouse and the shed. He can see the long-stretched empty clothesline with the cockeyed wooden pins split on the string. He can see the bony shadows of the garden down below—the wooden stakes with the tangled skinny vines gone by, and the cabbages—their tousled heads, slick with the moonlight running over them.

It is everything familiar. It is everything he has built with the work of his hands. And it seems so meager now. Such a meager offering that he could give her.

He falls asleep in the chair by her bed. Just past midnight, he hears the sound of a branch scratching on the window glass. The wick of the kerosene lamp has burned down into the bowl. A soft glow washes over the room, the floor, the walls, and in that bare light, through half-opened eyes, he thinks he can see six white spiders crawling on his granddaughter's face. One of them walks with long white legs along her lip. It slips into her mouth and disappears. One by one, they vanish down her throat.

He knows that the soul can be winded, scuttled, stolen. It can rise up out of the body like a fire or the moon. It can be gray or many-colored. It can change its size. It can take the shape of an animal or an insect, a blade of grass, a drop of water or a stone. He knows that when the body is cut, it is the soul that suffers, and he wants to wake her. He wants to shake out the wound and what it stands for—his own weakness, his own greed, what he has done, what he did not see, what he did not want to see.

He had known when he took that job for Honey Lyons a year ago that it was the wrong work to take. He had known even then that he was wading into water too deep for a handline. He had known it in his gut, and he had recognized the feeling. It was the same feeling he had had that day years back on ship, that day in the Arctic when he was posted as lookout, the day he spied the walrus pod.

They were so far in the distance, the sows culling off the sheet ice with their pups, and he knew that no other man of the crew would have the eyes to sight them. Within minutes, the herd would be away, over the drop of the horizon and under the floes. He knew he had a choice. And he chose. Even now, so many years later, he does not know why he did it. But he did it. He made the shout. And the men set after them. Slaughtered them.

Henry

When he stops by the house the next morning, a woman comes to the door. Henry recognizes her as the woman he saw sitting next to Bridge at the Grange. She has her daughter's coloring, dark hair, deep blue eyes. She is gorgeous in a distant sort of way.

She stands in the doorway, her arm across the frame. “There's nobody home right now. You'll have to come back.”

He takes off his hat. “I'm looking for Bridge.”

“My father will be in this afternoon. You can come back then.”

“I just want to know how she is.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Her brother brought her to me two nights ago. I dressed her wound.”

“We don't want any trouble here,” she says quietly.

“Can I see her?”

“No.”

“Please.”

“Did the police send you?”

“No. Is she alright?”

“She seems to be.”

“It would mean a great deal to me if I could see her.”

“She's sleeping.”

“Please.”

Cora pauses, her arm still barring the doorway. The man stands on the middle step, looking up at her, and there is something in his eyes, something in his voice as he asks about her daughter, that wrings her heart. She remembers him from the Grange. She remembers the look she observed passing between him and Bridge. It is not a doctor's concern that has brought him by her house this morning. She steps away from the door. “Come with me.”

He follows her. He takes the two steps into the house and rounds the corner of the front entrance. He has to stop for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dimness of the light. She leads him through a small parlor, past the dining room and the kitchen. There is a simplicity about the house and its contents that shocks him. The furnishings are clean but worn, the rooms stark. He pauses in the doorway to the kitchen. The floor is old, pine. The places where the knots have fallen out have been patched with flattened tin cans tacked around the edges. And as he pauses there, staring at the kitchen floor, he feels in a strange way that he has wronged Bridge. He has fallen in love with her, and in so doing, he has intruded on her life without recognizing or accepting what he realizes now she has always felt: that he is an outsider to her world. He thinks he finally understands why she has kept him at arm's length. He understands her resistance, her occasional resentment. He understands about the teacup, and he wants to smash every piece of china in his house and lay the pieces at her feet, but even wanting that, he knows, even wanting her the way he does, is not enough to change the way she sees it, the way she sees him. He feels ashamed. He feels the farce of his own life.

“Are you coming up then?” asks Cora.

He nods. She leads him up the stairs, down a short hall. She stops before a door and gently pushes it open. The room is small, with one window, a dresser, a lamp, old wallpaper with pink roses faded out by the sun. Bridge is asleep on the bed. Her face rests against the pillow, her mouth slightly open as she sleeps. She is beautiful, and his body aches, but he does not go to her. He stands on the threshold. He counts her breaths as her chest rises and falls. He listens for the sound, still and deep and even. Then he closes the door. “She's going to be fine,” he says to her mother as they descend the stairs. “Change the dressing twice a day. Wipe the wound with a clean cloth and iodine. The stitches can be removed in two weeks with a sterile blade.”

She leads him to the door. “Thank you,” she says.

“Will you tell her I came by?”

“I will.”

He nods, puts on his hat, and turns to go. She catches his arm.

“Her brother didn't mean to do it, you know. He loves her. It was an accident.” Her eyes are focused intensely on his face.

“Of course it was,” he replies, and he walks slowly down the steps across the yard to his car.

Cora watches him from the doorway. She watches him walk away, and she can feel the sorrow all around him. For hours afterward, she will feel it spread like a blanket of fine snow across the yard and through the hall upstairs and in the doorway of her daughter's room where he had stood. She will feel his sorrow everywhere in her house. He had come to her door with his beautiful desperation and he had left with that unbearable sorrow. She will feel it for the rest of the day—as she does her wash and her mending, as she fixes supper for her father and eats with him in silence. She will feel it as she sits beside her daughter's bed later that same evening and changes the dressing on the wound, “we are wind and water moving,” she whispers as she soaks a cloth in iodine and wipes the wound clean.

Bridge

She drifts through the next few days, night collapsing into night, pain and painlessness, a darkness lapping up against her thoughts, her everyday mind smashed.

Cora helps her with the bedpan. She fixes Bridge trays of food, glasses of water with molasses and crushed ice. Noel sits with her in the early evenings. He feeds her warm broth from a bowl, spoonfuls of jelly, and softened pieces of salt pork, minced fine.

For most of the day, Bridge is aware she is alone. She is aware that some part of her has been broken. She does not try to find the place. There is a kind of solace, she finds, in the not-knowing. A kind of solace in the brokenness itself and lying still. The room around her is a comfort—it is what she knows, the room she has slept in since she was a child—the paint-chipped dresser, the nickel-plated lamp, the soft-brushed plaster of the ceiling, and how the eaves slant down. The shadows change through the room as the light shifts. They move like huge dark hands across the clothes that her mother has laid out on the chair. The day winds on, grinds down into darkness, and in the coolness of the night air that moves into the room, she thinks of Henry. She imagines she can feel him near her. She remembers small details of the night she was shot. They leak back to her slowly: the hardness of the table against her head, the brightness of the room, how when she opened her eyes the light knifed into them. She had climbed out of herself—she remembers this— drifting up into one corner of the kitchen, and she had watched him from there as he moved over her, his sleeves rolled up; he found the wound in her side, cleansed it with the sponge, then stitched the edges of it neatly closed. She does not remember feeling any pain. She remembers the coolness of his fingers on her skin.

One night, she wakes to the sound of someone crying softly near her. It is her brother, Luce. He kneels by her bed, his head bowed. She moves her hand and touches his hair. He does not look up. He goes on crying, and she can feel his body shivering. The sound rattles in him like stones rolling on the ocean floor. She can feel his sadness on her face and in her hands. It spreads over them like water. There are threads of moonlight in his hair. He smells of sweat. Of salt. He smells of the sea. After a while, he falls asleep, his head on the bed next to her. She touches the side of his face gently, her fingers in the hollow of the bone. She closes her eyes, and she is down at the river. It is late afternoon, midsummer, years ago, and her father is alive. They have come to dig quahogs on the mudflats below Gunning Island. They ground the skiff and climb out: Bridge, her father, Luce, and Noel. They unload the wire baskets and three quahog rakes. Her father has brought a potato fork for her to use. She is young, still a child, and he does not expect her to keep at the work for long. The potato fork is old, and the tines are thick with rust. She rakes it through mud, and as she thrusts it down and draws it out, the rust begins to strip off. The tines grow silver again, brighter, glittering. As she digs, she stays close to Noel. He has a feel for where the clams are. His shoulders settle into the steady rhythm of the work. He rakes slowly, methodically. He does not leave a patch of ground unturned. He loads the quahogs into his pockets as he pulls them up, until his trousers bulge. Then he wades over to the wire basket he has left higher up on the flat and drops them in.

A great blue heron skims toward her across the still water. Its wings beat the air, sending ripples through the surface.

She notices that her father and Luce have drifted farther away. They work a distance apart from one another. She looks across the flat toward the riverbank. There is a cowpath leading off an old stone pier. It winds through pastureland and up into the hills. The sun has begun to settle in the west, and the light empties down across the river. It soaks the marsh, the path, the fields, the trees.

Her father is calling her. He has raked something up in the mud, and he calls her. It is something he wants her to see.

“Go on, then,” Noel says.

She nods, but she looks back once toward the shore. The light has shifted. Tall shadows fall across the hills, and for a moment, she is afraid. Her feet feel cold in the water. She grips the potato fork tightly and begins to run across the flat toward her father. Her bare legs splash through the shallows.

Her father is kneeling in the mud, unearthing something with his hands. He looks up and sees her running toward him, and he smiles, his wide dark face opening to her, his hands buried in the water and the mud as he kneels in the silver light.

When she wakes, it is morning and Luce is gone. Her face is wet with tears. Her head aches. She can feel a dull stiffness in her side. She moves, and the pain is sharp. It shoots through her and leaves her gasping. She lets her head fall back onto the pillow. The morning air is still, a jagged rim of frost around the window glass. She can see the blacker shadows of the trees, pale handfuls of fog strung through their branches.

Sounds drift up through the metal grate in the floor: her mother loading wood into the stove, the scuff of her slippers across the kitchen, a cupboard door opening, the soft clatter of bowls. The smell of coffee, the smell of the fire.

Outside, the light has begun to rise. It catches in the frost along the lower edge of the windowpane and trembles there, a strange thin glow. She listens to the fragile sound of the skim ice cracking as it thaws.

She turns in her bed away from the window and the sun rising into it.