The Season of Open Water (2 page)

Noel

The cold morning air bristles his skin as he sits up in bed. The pain in his left thigh stabs when he lands his weight on the floor—it is an old wound, an ancient break, only sometimes healed.

He pulls on his underclothes. He passes the closed door to his granddaughter Bridge's room and takes the narrow steps down into the kitchen.

“Still letting that girl of yours bang nails in the shop?” his old friend Rui had asked him the night before. “I know you don't want to hear it, but what kind of life you think that's going to be for her when you're gone?”

Rui was right. Noel saw it clearly. Bridge was eighteen now, and he had no idea what kind of future he could build for her. The worry of it fell like a weight on his shoulders and left him feeling empty.

In the kitchen, the woodstove is already lit. His daughter, Cora, has set out his trousers and boots to warm beside it. Through the worn cracks in the kitchen floor, he can see her shape moving through the cellar, mixing a fresh batch of soap for her washing. He can smell the lye.

He pours himself a coffee. There is a plate on the counter with a wedge of cake and some lemon squares left over from the gathering after Asa Sisson's funeral.

He takes a piece of the cake and sits down on a chair. The suit he wore to Asa's, his only suit, his funeral suit, is hanging in the doorway. Cora will brush it out before she puts it away in the cedar chest. He sips his coffee and thinks of the day, a few years ago, when he saw Asa outside of Shorrock's store talking to Honey Lyons. He knew even then that, for Asa, it would all come down to trouble. It wasn't that he couldn't understand the draw of the rum-work for a bold local kid—the lure of the money, the adventure. It could seem like an easy ticket, perhaps the only ticket, to a better life. It was one thing, though, to do the simple jobs for the local rummies—to drive a wagonload of liquor or keep a lookout in exchange for a whack of cash when times were tight. But to get tangled up in more than that, as Asa had, was to risk too much for too little. You'd wind up fast with the wrong crew, then wearing your suit for that last time.

Noel sets his cup in the sink, ties on his boots, and steps outside into the fog.

The damp cold works into him as he walks to the privy. He stubs open the door with the toe of his boot. There is a pail of corncobs and Sears catalogues on the floor by the seat. He can hear the holler of the crows through the slatted pine walls. He tears out a page from one of the catalogues. A cool wind brushes up between his legs.

He crosses the yard to the barn. Cora has let the hens out of the shed. They scratch at the dirt. He throws them another handful of meal. Then, he hitches the mare to the wagon, loads the mucking rake, a pitchfork, and two buckets into the bed, and hauls himself up onto the wide plank seat.

He heads south into the fog. The world swirls in around him, and his mind begins to leak and stretch and give—gusts of fog like the breath of some great god bank each side of the road—and in the whiteness of his own breath mixing with the cold dense air, he can see the things that used to be: his boyhood on Nomans Land, the stiff green light lying offshore, his mother's black hair, and the frowning colored cliffs of Gay Head across the shoal. He can see the lapstrake boats his father and the other men worked out of, tied three-deep in the ladder shale off Stony Point. In the fall and spring, they would handline for cod and spread the catch out to cure in the sun. They would lay down the dead fish, gutted and dressed, on the round clean stones. At times, the whole rocky end of the island, all five acres, was covered with that white blanched flesh.

It is the fog that warps time. It is the fog that allows his life to extend behind him, ahead of him, the narrow of the road pulled under the wagon, with the known steady rhythm of Magdalyn's hooves as they beat against the oiled dirt. In the fog, the world loses its borders, its abrasiveness, its contour. There are no loose boards of remembering for him to trip on. No land to put off from or row toward. Driving through the fog is the closest he comes now to being at sea, and it was living at sea that had taught him there was nothing on land a man could hold on to, and when they died—his mother, his father, his wife—he let them drop like pins behind him.

As he drives, thoughts come to him, on the wind, on the fog. Thoughts about his grandchildren, Luce and Bridge, his hopes for them, his wondering what turns their lives might take. Luce at least, he feels, is somewhat settled. He has good work at the icehouse. Decent work and steady. Bridge is the one Noel worries after. He knows well enough she's not the kind of girl who will end up teaching school, folding a man's shirts or polishing his shoes. She loves to work in the shop, the dirt and the dust. She loves to plow out the garden and dig quahogs off the flats. She's a different sort of creature, a little fierce and free, and it makes Noel smile to think on it. At the same time, it troubles him.

Noel had been strong as a boy, hard as a young man. On ship, he had lived for months on salt horse, hardtack, foul pork—they called it walking food—so full of maggots and those small mites that grow in fetid air. He had crunched their spines in his teeth.

His body is an old hull now, barnacle-crusted, planks rotted out at the seams. A weight in sore need of heaving down. One eye has grown slouched in his cheek and is no good for seeing. Now, two years shy of eighty, years of living heaped on his shoulders, the doings of the world have ceased to frighten or amaze him, and when his mind grows unruly, he will rope it in and tie it down the way he would serve a piece of rigging, square it off and pull it taut so the sheet will catch some wind but not too much, and they will sail together then, that way, the old man and his mind.

He continues on the road. A motorcar comes up behind him. He takes the reins to the mare's neck to guide her to the side. He lets the car pass. As he heads south, the fog begins to thin. The wind airs up. It drives through the trees and the panic grass that sprouts along the dirt shoulder of the road.

He reaches the top of the hill. The last farm is on his right, the heavy roll of fields down to the river. The fog hangs low. To the east, out over the ocean, the morning sky is clear. He can see down to the point that divides East Beach from Little Beach, a silver wetness brushed over the rocks, the road ahead of him slick with light.

The wind shovels out of the southwest and fills his ears. He passes Ben Soule's house on the knoll, the last house before the turn. He veers right onto East Beach Road.

It is after-season, and the road is quiet. The summer people have gone back to their cities, the cottages boarded up, the village shut down except for the post office store and the Gallows Pavilion with the bowling lanes in the cellar. All along the beach, dank piles of sea muck heap like the carcasses of walrus in the white light.

It is always this way. The mounds of sea muck in the fall always remind him of the round humped bodies of the walrus. They always remind him that he never told Hannah about how they had killed so many in those few days, early in the season of 1868. Three years before he met her. Hannah. His confessor. His lover. His witness. His wife. He had met her halfway across the world, then brought her home, and they had lived out their life together in the house on Pine Hill Road. This was the secret he had kept. The ache of it now is double fold. He could not have put it into words for her. Not then. Perhaps not even now. He could not have explained how the violence of those few days had changed him. He could not have explained that the crime of it was not the act itself—whatever kind of carnage that might have been. No, the crime of it was that they had taken them in that fertile season, the season of open water, in the midst of all that life.

He passes the post office and the Surfside Hotel. He takes the turn onto West Beach Road. The Model T runabout is parked in the driveway of the third cottage. Noel guides his wagon two houses farther down and parks at the edge of the road. He takes the rake and pails and walks through a wide opening in the box-hedge. He crosses the garden down to the low sand.

Spud Mason has driven his pigs down to the beach. They run squealing up from the tide line. They root through the muck and the rockweed, digging into the dank rich smell for fish parts, dead crabs, bugs. Their waste mixes in with the seawater. Noel chuckles to himself as he watches the pigs wander over the wide-flung lawns of the vacant summer houses. They loll in the grass. They root through the gardens, dig up the bulbs and munch them down.

Yesterday's storm has pulled the sea muck into steep packed cliffs, matted together with channels dug between them by the tide. Noel uses the rake to comb it loose. He pulls it apart and rakes it into smaller piles. He finds other sludge washed up—lobsters with their backs cracked, trash fish, broken glass. He finds a burlap sack with two bottles of bootleg liquor. With a tine of the rake he nudges open the cloth, and he can see the whiskey shot through with sun, the color of amber, a dilute gold. He slips a bottle into each deep pocket of his coat.

When he has raked out six piles, he goes back up for the wagon. As he is driving it down onto the beach, he glances up at the sea and, with his good eye, at the end of the bay he can just glimpse the darker outline of a boat breaking up—a bend in the light—an odd double shape—what is it? A boat and its reflection? No. He stands up, caps one hand over his eye. He squints, and his seeing sharpens. It is one boat towing a smaller boat. Stem to stern, they seem to be heading toward the harbor mouth.

Somebody had a bad night last night, he thinks to himself. Some black ship got nabbed oiled up with a full load. He touches his coat pockets—the harder heavy shapes of the bottles of whiskey. It was a dangerous business now. What had started out as a good-natured game of cat and mouse between the locals and the Feds turned cut-throat when the big-city syndicates started putting their fingers into every small-town pie. More and more money thrown around. More violence. More graft and crooked stuff. Everyone wanted a payoff or a cut. Half the town was in on it, while the other half looked the other way. Boys went out in boats to meet the mother ships anchored in Rum Row, and from time to time one wouldn't come back. Water was an easy place to lose a man.

Noel slips the bottles from his coat and tucks them under the seat of the wagon. Again he trains his eye on the two boats heading in. They have passed the bell. He can see that the larger boat is one of the new 75's—a Coast Guard cutter. As they come up on Half-mile Rock, he recognizes the black by her lines. It is Frank Mac-Donald's boat, the
Anna Louise,
named after his two daughters. A forty-six-foot lobster boat that pulled no traps. Frank had never been much of a fisherman, not much of a captain for sure. He'd been moving cases since '24. He was arrested once on land by the constable, dragged off to Fall River court, and fined two hundred dollars. Three nights later, he was back at it. But now they had his ship in tow. Must have caught him with a full cargo this time. Must have caught him good.

“Fool to get caught, Frank, with all that ocean out there,” Noel murmurs. He climbs down from the wagon, takes the pitchfork, and digs the tines into the piles of sea muck he has made. He tosses it up onto the wagon bed. With Bridge, he will shovel it against the base of the house. They will bank it up all the way around, to keep out the winter weather.

By half past seven, the wind has stiffened, pushing off the last of the fog, blue sky hollowed out behind it.

Noel breaks for a smoke. He sits down on a bench in someone's front yard. To the southeast he can see Cuttyhunk, the island in the shape of a woman lying on her side. He closes his eyes. He knows that there are certain types of love a man can lose himself to, other types that hammer down his insides until he is like beaten metal. Hannah grew more beautiful as she grew old. The life peeled away from her like husk, and her skin had thinned to the softest wrinkled silk before she died. They did not speak on that last day, but he held her hand until he felt the life slip out of his fingers. He sat with her body awhile longer, and he could feel her soul nibbling around, trying to find its way back in.

When he and Hannah were young, it had never occurred to him that one day she'd be gone and he'd be wobbling around without her. Now when he thinks of her, he thinks of their daughter, Cora, and of Cora's children: Luce, Bridge.

He opens his eyes and looks down at his hands: the gnarled fingers, the veins tough and raised under the skin. They are old hands.

He knows his life is a long coiled line inside him, and he knows it is unwinding.

He looks up as the young man comes out onto the porch of the third cottage. Henry Vonniker. Noel had been surprised to see him the night before at the Sisson house. He had never seen him out anywhere around town except here, down at the beach, or once in a while, driving up Horseneck Road. Every morning, in fair weather, it is the same—this young man steps out onto this same porch. He is somewhere in his early thirties, Noel would guess, always alone, thin glasses, brown hair cropped short in the back, the front ends longer with a slight unruly curl that skims his eyes. He wears pajamas and a flannel shirt. He holds a teacup. His hands are square, his fingers long. He wipes off a small table, sets the cup down, then sits in one of the wooden chairs. He looks out across the water. The bone along his jaw is strong-cut, distinct.

Noel has heard he was a doctor in the war. There is talk he saw too much there, and it broke him up. Noel can see this. He can see too that Henry Vonniker is the kind of man who didn't have the armor for what he saw. And now here they are, both down on the beach, each on his own, protecting his own solitude.

Noel looks west toward the harbor mouth. The 75 and the boat in tow have reached the Knubble Rock. They pass through the break in the coastline and disappear around the point.

Noel lights his pipe again and leaves the match in the bowl of a mosquito torch. The wagon bed is piled high with sea muck. He loads the fork and rake into the back, takes one of the smaller pails and wanders along the tidal zone. The moon jellies have washed up on the low beach, saucered, incandescent shapes, their eyes caked with sand. He kicks over a dead skate—one thick with meat, but dead too long. He gathers up a mess of sea clams. He will bring them home to Bridge so she can make a chowder or a pie.