The Season of Open Water (14 page)

Noel

For three weeks, Noel walks around with the pack of folded cash in his trouser pocket. After the first frost, he picks up a ride from the Head of Westport to the trolley stop at Lincoln Park. He walks the rest of the way along Lake Noquochoke down Reed Road.

It has been a few years since he came by Rui's house. He notes the red trim paint around the windows and the front door. On the side porch in the shade, dressed skins hang to dry from the beams.

He finds Rui out back, six muskrats just dead, laid on the worktable. He is skinning them out. He takes the brains and works them through the hides to make the fur glossy, the skin pliable. He sprinkles them with powdered alum and saltpeter to preserve them from insects. Then he folds them lengthwise, flesh-side in, and sets them off, dressed, to the side.

“Nice, aren't they, Christmas?” Rui says as Noel walks up to him. “One damaged here in the leg. And this one's a kit. But the rest are fine. It'll be a good season.”

“How you been then, Rui? Haven't seen you since Asa's.”

Rui smiles. He points to the largest muskrat. “I might get three and a half dollars for this one.”

Noel picks up one of the long knives. He fingers the inlay on the handle. “How many traps you have out now?”

“A dozen or so in the cedar swamp.”

“You aren't setting in water?”

“You didn't come here to ask me about my traps now, did you, Christmas?”

“You're bringing in a good dollar with it then?”

Rui takes one of the midsize muskrats and, with the long knife, opens it to the gut. “For a side show, it's enough.”

“You got something else going on?”

“You know smack well what I've got going on.” He sprinkles the hide with alum, then folds it lengthwise and sets it with the others. He looks up at Noel. “What is it you want then?”

“Can you buy a few shares for me?”

Rui smiles and sets back to his work. “I hear talk about that boat you built. Quite a boat, I hear.”

“Quite on her way to being busted up.”

Rui laughs. “They say she fights shy. Fast and light. No patrol can beat her.”

“I don't know anything about it, Rui.”

“I hear talk about your Luce, too. He leaves no slick. They all know he's up to something, but they can't catch him at it.”

Noel doesn't answer.

“He's been messing around with a girl from the cove. I know her old man. He'll get himself into some trouble with her if he keeps it up.”

“I try not to keep track of my grandson,” Noel says flatly.

“Okay then,” Rui says. “Let me guess why you first took the job to build that sweet boat.”

“You don't have to.”

“You took it because you still miss the salt junk. Isn't that it?”

Noel nods.

Rui laughs. “Same Christmas as you ever were.” He goes on working the knife through the last muskrat, gutting it out. With his fingers, he finds the midpart of the scalp, turns it throat-side facing up, and opens into the skull. He dips two fingers in and scoops out the brains. “These are the best there is to gloss up a hide, but only because they're brains just killed. They still have a little mind left in them.” He slides the last dressed skin into the pile. “Help me string them, will you? Then stay for a mug up.”

“Sure.”

“Some fry fish?”

“Only if you scrub your hands real good.”

Noel leans in the open doorway as Rui cooks. He lights his pipe, chews on the stem, but he doesn't smoke and the tobacco goes out. He lights it again. The doorstone has a narrow garden plot on either side where Rui keeps nasturtium and kale, sweet peas and herbs. The ground is dormant now. Noel can smell the fresh garlic and oil bristling in the pan. Rui rolls the fish whole in flour, and when the oil spits, he sets the fish in and lets it cook through on one side until the crust is dark brown.

They eat outside on the doorstone off tin plates, picking the flesh with their fingers.

“I'll tell you a thing or so about this stock thing,” Rui says. “It's all common sense. You put your money in what you know. Solid names. Housekeep names. Radio. General Motors. U.S. Steel. Some talk about how it's emotion, the coaster ride of it, and that could be true—same as anything—if you stay on a bad ride too long, you'll get burned. But if you keep a level head, remember that your piece is your piece, your lay is your lay, if you don't greed after more than that, you'll do okay. Play it simple. Get in. Make a good dollar. Get out. And while you're in, do nothing. Just wait. No matter what kind of itch in your pants you get, all you want to do is sit back, listen to the boxing fights, the ball games, and do nothing. Is that your taste?”

And Noel can see that in Rui's eyes, in the deep shopworn crease between the brows, there is more than a question. He knows that in five strokes with a light ax, Rui can work a piece of square wood out of a round log. Rui is the fine thread that has always been there, working alongside Noel through the dark, uncounted years, the belly of his life.

“So how much have you got then, Christmas?”

Noel sets his plate on the ground, takes the roll of cash from his trouser pocket. He holds it out. Rui goes on eating.

“How much?” he says.

“Eleven hundred.”

“Not so much. But not bad.”

“Can you make it more?”

“Let me take a guess where you got it.”

“You don't have to.”

“That's what you made for that job last year, building that shy fast boat. You've been hiding it ever since. Let me guess where.”

“Forget it, Rui.”

“In the crook of that panbone.”

Noel holds the money out to him, but Rui still doesn't take it. He scrapes the last of the fish off his plate. The oil shines smooth on his lips.

“Can you do something with it?” Noel asks.

“What do you want done?”

“What can you do?”

“You want me to double it?”

Noel nods slowly, skeptical.

“Fine. You don't believe me.” Rui grins. “I'll triple it.”

“No joke, Rui. I can't lose this. I need to get things right this rising.”

“Not much time left?”

“I just need to get things right.”

Rui sets down his plate. “Season's good now, Christmas. I can turn that little roll of cash into a field for you.”

“This little roll of cash is all I've got.”

Rui brushes his hands off on his trousers. He smiles, his black eyes cunning, bright. “Not for long.” He plucks the wad of cash out of Noel's hand.

Part III

The Season of Open Water

Bridge

A wild December. The surf is huge, ragged swells, the tide running high. In the middle of the month there is a five-day muckraker gale, fierce winds out of the southeast followed by a spell of kinder weather. On the twenty-first, the wind shifts into the northwest, rakes the river bottom, and the flood tide hurls bushels of scallops up onto the marsh. They lie there, glistening windrows, spread along the edge of the Let for three-quarters of a mile. The men go down, Noel among them, with pails and buckets and crates lined with rockweed, stacked end to end on the wagon beds.

He takes Bridge with him. They drive the wagon down onto the landing. She sits on the plank seat wrapped in a horse blanket, a scarf around her head, as he walks among the windrows of scallops with his pail, stooping to pick up the closed and pure carved shells.

On their way home, she asks him to take a ride down the causeway. As they pass Henry Vonniker's cottage, she noticed that the car is gone, the shutters closed.

“I haven't seen him around,” Noel says. “Must've gone out of town.”

She nods.

She is walking again, slowly. The wound still aches when she sits and stands. She stays close to Noel, hangs around the kitchen while he cooks. He shucks out the scallops and chops potatoes to make a stew. Luce brings them a fresh cut of beef for Christmas and two small hams.

The river thaws in the spell of warmer air, then begins to freeze again when the weather snaps back to its proper season. The tide pushes up against the weak skin of ice in the shallows of the marsh. A band of snow geese come into the river. One day as they are riding down to the causeway, Noel points them out to Bridge across the Let from the narrow part of East Beach Road. The flock gathers in the frozen reeds near Taber Point.

She sits in the shop as he works. He gives her small tasks to keep her hands from growing restless, and he tells her stories the way he used to, without looking for her to answer. He talks to her the way he did when she was a child wading through the shavings of wood as he worked, nosing through his tools, testing her small fingers against the serrated blade of the saw.

It is deep winter. They keep the woodstove stoked, full of burning, and one afternoon, as he is working to repair a busted gunwale, fitting new rivets and caulking the old holes, she notices a change in him, the way his weight leans more heavily into his tools, his shoulders hooking toward the floor. He seems smaller, more fragile, his balance uncertain. When he takes a sleep on the couch, she marks how he seems to sink deeper into the cushion folds, and there is a shift she notices in how he tells the stories. Certain moments stand out in relief. He takes his time with those, draws them out long, like the sun going down on a summer evening. Then suddenly, abruptly, as if he is snagged on some unfinished edge, he will push forward, covering years of his life in one stride, and then again, he will stray. He will linger over a detail. His voice will slow as if he is unwinding himself through the telling. The orange light sinks green shadows through his face.

One morning, as he is planing down a thick piece of oak, he tells her about the shapes in light that he remembers from his boyhood on Nomans Land. The shapes would come only in east weather, on an ash breeze: reflections of the other islands levered up into the northern skies above the clouds. He saw them once when he was out swordfishing with his father just off Old Man's Ledge. His father ruddered, and Noel was braced as lookout in the bow, and as they came around the tip of the island, in the distance he saw the reflection of the mainland city, wrenched upside down above the sea and floating there, wholly free—the millstacks and the warehouse buildings, whaleships lashed against the wharves, the spoke of one tall cathedral inverted in the light.

And as she listens, Bridge finds that for the first time in her life she questions what he tells her—not the truth of it—but why. He told her once, long back, that the stories that crave the daylight most are the ones that don't get told. She remembers this now, and she begins to listen differently. She does not crawl into the familiar lull of his voice and curl herself to sleep there. She thumbs through what he says. She holds the stories at arm's length, lifts up their edges and peers around. She studies the whale's teeth he has scrimped. She studies the panbone, the cycle of etchings of his life behind him, to mark any clue he has left in the carving, any tick or tail of ink that might open into the vast and shadowed halls of what he has left buried, of what he leaves unsaid.

When he talks to her about Kauai, about his life there with Hannah, she can see an old passion work through his eyes. His stories of that particular place have always had a bite of strangeness, an other-world aliveness. There is a sheen to his voice that she savors. Once, in late February, she asks him why he did not go back, and he looks at her for a moment, his eyes opening deep, she can feel herself pulled to some brink inside them. Then he looks away and serves her up an answer, so measly and glib she knows it for a lie, and she feels ashamed—ashamed for him and ashamed of herself for asking. She does not press him, but she wonders about it from time to time. She wonders why he made the choice to set himself here, so far from open water, in woods and cattails, with a house and several outsheds for ballast, close to the river but at the tail end of it where the current runs narrow and thin.

Even when her wound is healed and she is strong enough to work, she stays near the house. Soft chores. She cooks and sweeps and cleans. She draws water from the well, mucks out the barn and the hayloft. She feeds the hens and prepares the seeds for the spring planting. From time to time, she helps her mother with the laundry.

Luce moves out of the house late that winter. He takes an apartment with Johnny Clyde on Forge Road, up by Westport Factory, north of the Head. He stops by the house every few days, but Bridge bothers little with him and the work he does. There is a certain comfort in doing the simple tasks she's always done. She notices that she is more settled, Noel more settled, and their life, apart from Luce's occasional comings and goings, is almost back to how it used to be.

Noel's shares begin to climb. He reads about it in the papers, in the block letters of the headlines. He makes out what he can, and he has Bridge dig around through the finer print and read the rest aloud to him. There are a few rocky months early in the year. The Great Bull Market appears to be stumbling. Then it gives a snort, a mighty hoof and a roar, and takes up its run again. Noel settles in for the ride.

One day, late that April of 1929, Owen Wales comes by the house looking for Cora. He has brought two dress shirts that need to be whitened and pressed, and would she have the chance to get to them by Tuesday next?

She smiles at him, and he looks down at the hat in his hands. “I'll drop them by your house when they're done,” she says. “I'll just leave them by the door.”

“No, no,” he answers quickly. “I can stop back around for them. It's right on my way. I'd be happy to.” He pauses. “If that's alright?” He looks up at her, and his eyes are unsteady, filled with sunlight and the question and wanting her somehow.

“That would be alright,” she says slowly.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

He smiles at her. “So it's settled.” And then he leaves and she thinks about him through the afternoon. The following morning, when she is flipping through the spring Sears catalogue, she spots an advertisement for a new-style swimming suit. Later that day, she takes the mail truck to the trolley stop up by Lincoln Park, and then the trolley into New Bedford. Downtown, at a secondhand store, she buys a bathing costume—not the exact one she saw in the catalogue, but close, a slightly older style.

She brings it home, takes it into her bedroom, and folds it away in the bottom dresser drawer. She wears it under her clothes—not every night, but some nights. On the first week of May, she wears it down to the river below the field at dusk. She wades in. There is an icy chill to the water, electric on her skin, and she floats on her back and watches the crows and the great blue herons with their heavy wings, their eerie calls. The shadows of the birds pass across the clouds and she floats through the new spring smells of thaw and wild orchid. The fabric of the swimming costume is tight against her body. It wraps her waist, her breasts, the tops of her thighs. It holds her, touches her as she floats through the colors of the sky turning toward darkness. The river is cold through her scalp, and her hair streams out like long dark grass.

That year, a fluke snowstorm strikes in May followed by a three-day frost that blackens the grass and the green bean pods. The hens set their eggs too early, and they are painfully small, the shells soft, nearly translucent. Even the asparagus are weakened. Their stalks shrivel and curl down toward the ground. Noel goes out with Bridge into the garden to pare back the dead harvest.

In June, the weather turns. The summer bursts open and it is glorious. They call it “the golden summer.” The summer of wealth.

Luce buys a new car. A 1929 fancy soft top with chrome headlamps and a full backseat. He drives it off the lot, and before he goes anywhere else he brings it by Honey Lyons's house. He has thought this out. He does what a young man would do. He comes by and shows it off to him.

“Took me awhile to save for it,” he says smoothly as they are standing by the car, “with the cut you pay me, but I've done okay, I guess, saving. She's a beauty, don't you think?”

Lyons takes a walk around the car, stops once and wipes a smudge off the fresh paint on her back fender. He offers a soft compliment, then says casually, “Like you said, you sure have been saving, Luce.” He pauses. “Haven't you?”

“Sure have.” Luce nods, and flashes an easy grin. “But the other truth is, of course, I got a good deal on her, and my ma, she gave me a bit to help out.”

“Of course,” says Lyons, nodding. “Just to say, Luce, I'm glad you know it's always a smart idea to let me in on that other truth.” Luce can see that Lyons does not quite believe him. He can see that Lyons is ticking up dollars in his head, the dollars that he himself has already counted. He knows that the number Lyons comes up with will be a stretch to what it must have cost Luce for the car, but it could have happened. And that is what matters. They both know this. Luce could be lying, but he could be telling the truth.

After he leaves Lyons, Luce brings the car by the house on Pine Hill Road. His sister walks out of the shop, carrying a crate of lead deadeyes, paint on her face. Her eyes spark when she sees the new car, the sleek curves of the sides. She touches the hood. She can feel the heat from the engine burning.

“Come on,” Luce says, “get in.” And she gets in and they drive fast down the swift, hilled turns of Pine Hill Road, and he is happy, for the first time in so long it seems, he is happy, she is with him and she is laughing, her dark hair flying off her shoulders. He takes a hard twist in the road, he takes it fast, and she shrieks and the sunlight swerves and breaks down across the windshield, its soft warmth on their faces with the cool fast wind.

“You've made a lot, haven't you?” she asks him once when they slow at South Westport Corner. “This isn't even the half of it, is it?”

He doesn't look at her. His right hand is on the wheel, his arm taut, his body coiled tight as loaded springs. “Don't ask me,” he says. He lays his foot down hard on the gas, and they drive.

The summer continues. Day after day of dry, undaunted sunshine. The stock market is giddy, full of strident joy. Prices soar, shares split, and prices soar again.

The fine weather washes the summer people in. The town explodes, seems to double overnight. By the beginning of July, there has been just enough rainfall to turn their lawns a brilliant green. It is a summer of long steamy days and clear cool nights for surfbathing, boat trips, angling off the angler stands, picnics on the sandflats, and they are all in a capital mood by the time Lady Judith Martin decides that the rather humdrum clambake the Bordens threw on the Fourth was simply not enough. Another celebration was in order. They would have to dig up a new occasion. Such a summer—a most successful summer, the kind of summer they would look back on and not remember where it had begun—certainly warranted more. So she sends out a round of invitations to a spur-of-the-moment party on the Fourteenth of July, le Quatorze Juillet. A night to commemorate the storming of the Bastille.

One afternoon when Luce stops by the house, he finds Bridge on the back steps shelling peas. He sits down with her, picks through the basket, takes out a handful, nibbles on them.

“How can you eat the shells raw like that?” she says.

“I like 'em raw. You making supper tonight?”

“Thinking I might. You staying?”

“Thinking I might.”

She smiles. “How's your car?”

“Oh, she's fine.”

“You give her a name yet?”

“Thinking I might call her after you.”

“Aw no,” she says. “Call her Betty. Or Polly.”

He laughs. “Something sweet.”

“Yeah. How's your place?”

“Good enough. We've been thinking about getting electric.”

“The bee lady just got it.”

“No joke?”

“Yeah. I rode by the other night on my bike. Her house was all electricked up. Too much light, I'd say, for such a cranky witch.”

Luce laughs. He takes another few peas from the basket as Bridge goes on shelling. He chews on one, and then he tells her about Lady Judith's Bastille party.

“Where is it?”

“Down the beach, this Saturday coming.”

“You going?”

“Might as well, I suppose. Swing in. Make a show. Have a feed.”

She doesn't break from her work. “I'll go with you,” she says.

“What?”

“I said, I'll go with you.”

“Why?”