The Season of Open Water (23 page)

Noel

That morning when Noel goes out, without knowing what has happened, how it happened, he can feel the shift in wind. It is a winter wind, out of the northeast. It drives hard over the marsh, tearing through the scrub. It is the kind of wind that will haul the snow down from the north, and bring the Arctic birds, the snow buntings and the buffleheads—the kind of wind that will sweeten the turnips. It will freeze the river, bring in the surf clams, and wash the muck high up on the beach.

He sees the line of cars gathered by the third cottage. The police truck. The undertaker's long black car. A knot of men stand outside in the drive. They look up at him, suspicious, as he comes around the bend. One officer steps out into the road and motions for him to stop.

“How are you then, Noel?”

“Fine, Joe.”

“Do you know anything about it?”

Noel shakes his head. “What happened?”

“He was shot. She called us early this morning.”

“Who was shot?”

“Henry Vonniker. But she won't tell us how it happened. She's with him there, inside.” He jerks his head toward the house, and as Noel looks toward the doorway, Bridge appears. She sees him. Her face is sundered, unfamiliar, unlike anything he could have imagined.

She gives a slight nod, then steps back into the house and disappears from view.

They bring her home that afternoon. She does not speak about it. She tells Noel where to find Luce—at the old pesthouse in the woods, she says. And Noel goes and looks for him there, but she is wrong. The ruins are empty. Starlings fly toward the holes in the roof as he walks through the gutted rooms.

Five days later, the stock market crashes. The Dow Jones is cut in half, prices slaughtered in every direction, ten billion dollars lost in one day. By the time Noel sees the headlines in the paper the following morning, he knows it is too late. What he had bought, what he had held, all of it is smashed to flinders. He chucks the newspaper into the trash barrel outside Shorrock's store and takes Old County Road back toward Pine Hill.

As he is passing by the church, he sees Luce sitting on the wall out front. His face is haggard. Noel goes and sits down with him.

“You're waiting on them then, to come and find you?”

Luce nods.

“Which one you waiting on—Lyons or the constable?”

Luce shrugs and answers that either one would do. They fall to silence. It is a cool brisk wind, and it takes the oak leaves down. Noel sits with him on the wall until the police truck comes around, and when they have taken him and he is gone, Noel walks the rest of the way home alone.

The next afternoon, Rui stops by the house. Noel is down back, looking over the cabbages, debating whether to pull them or to let them ride out another week or two.

“Thought I'd see you by my place,” Rui calls out, walking toward him.

“Don't know why you'd be thinking that,” Noel answers. He finds a loose stake set at the edge of the garden. He pulls it out and throws it toward the pine wood. He will replace it in the spring.

“Thought you'd be curious to know how it all shook out,” Rui says. “With the money, I mean.”

Noel takes his pipe out of his pocket and puts it in his mouth, unlit. “I think I know it all shook out.”

Rui laughs. “So you've been following the papers.”

“Always do.”

“I heard talk about some trouble your Luce got himself into.” Noel nods.

“How's Cora doing with it?”

“She'll be alright.”

“Well, I brought this by for you,” says Rui, “in case you might have a use for it.” He tosses Noel a small sack, tied with a piece of thin rope at one end. Noel catches it midair. He loosens the slip knot. There is money inside, bills folded together and banded with clips.

“I don't need a handout, Rui.” He reknots the rope and holds out the bag.

Rui shrugs. “No handout, Christmas. You know I'd be the last one to give away what's mine.”

Noel looks at him. The sun is in his good eye, and the light is strong, and he can't see his friend's face clearly, but he can hear him chuckling.

“Come on up to your shop then,” Rui says. “Pour me a mug of something good you have hidden in there. You owe me that much for looking after you and what's yours.”

Noel understands then, and he is angry for a moment. “You son of a bitch—”

Rui laughs. “Son of a nothing. That temper of yours is no good, Christmas. It's never been good. What you have there in your hand isn't more than what you had to start. I did what you told me to do, so don't go bitching at me. That there is just a little pillow I pulled out for you in case.”

Noel smiles. “You're a devil, Rui.”

“And you're lucky to have a devil like me around.”

Noel grips the sack tightly, and they walk together back up the hill.

The day before Bridge leaves, Noel watches her pack her things into a canvas bag. He tells her to take one of the trunks. Too big, she says. She takes only what she needs. A comb, a knife, a piece of scrimp he carved for her once. A few changes of clothes. She moves through the room, picking through her things, taking what she wants and leaving the rest.

There is so much, he knows, that he could tell her.

He says her name and she looks up and he can see the wounds in her face. He can see there is a part of her, a deep part of her, that is already gone, and the grief that has risen to fill the absent place has rendered every object in the world lighter and more silent.

He is aware that her leaving has already begun to work through his bones. He knows that this is only the tip of what he will feel. It is unworked ground—her leaving. It is not that he thought he could keep her, but he had never imagined it would come so suddenly.

He thinks of the black cat—not the one killed but the other. For months, he knows, it will spook around that spot in the road. It might stalk off a ways to hunt and feed, but it will come back, week after week, month after month, through the change of season. Even in dead winter, some sense more primitive than smell will draw that creature back to that same frozen shoulder of the road, and it will nose through the grass with the dim sense of a wrong solitude, without knowing what it knows.

He could tell her this.

He could tell her that a heart is just that way. It is made for losing. Even his old heart, he could tell her, after so many years, sometimes it still seems to be as raw and young and as easily broken as it ever was.

She goes to the dresser, opens the middle drawer, and lifts up some folded shirts. She pulls out the sack of money he gave to her, and she dumps it out on the bed. She does not look up at him as she counts out the bills. Her hands are ruthless, every softness in her gone. She makes three rolls and holds one out to him. He shakes his head.

“I don't want it.”

“You'll need it.”

“For what?”

“For living.”

“No.”

She smiles and drops the roll into a drawer on the night table. She takes the other two and puts one into each pocket of her coat.

She fastens the clips on the bag. The window is behind her, full of milky winter light. Her hair has grown out and she has tied it back and her face is beautiful and she reminds him of his Hannah— of all the years of loving her and all the years since she has been gone, and it seems impossible that he could be losing her this way, losing them both somehow, all over again. He cannot tell her this. He tells her instead that there are windows all around her. There are roads all around her. When he was her age, he had to travel halfway around the world and back to find what he was looking for, and what he was looking for was not at all what he had imagined.

She looks at him, and her eyes are gentle on his face. “I love you, Papa,” she says, and he realizes then that he is only telling her what she already knows.

That night, Noel and Bridge and Cora eat together in the front room. Noel shaves and wears a starched shirt and clean trousers. He lets Cora flat-iron a crease down the front of the leg. He lets her set the cuffs.

The table is laid out by the time he comes in from the shop. Cora has cooked a roast. It sits on the table, uncarved. Their plates glisten in the silky yellow light, and they sit together, quiet as they eat, and after dinner Noel and Bridge go outside onto the back porch. They sit on the steps and watch the smoke as it slips from his pipe and sets across the yard, and tomorrow she will leave. Tomorrow she will leave.

Acknowledgments

A number of people shared their time, knowledge, wisdom, and memories with me as I was writing this novel. I am particularly grateful to Roger Reed Jr., Al Lees, Cukie Macomber, Patricia and Arnold Tripp, Jim and Ginger Pierce, Daniel Davis Tripp, Norma Judson, Carlton Lees, Claude Ledoux, William C. White, and Ab Palmer.

For helping me to locate old charts and maps: Richie Earle, Bill Wyatt, and Sharon L. Wypych. For building me a perfect place to write: Leo Chretien. For reading earlier drafts of this book and for offering invaluable insights and corrections: Al Lees, Kim Wiley, Alison Smith, Peggy Aulisio, Pamela Tripp, Rebecca Cushing, and William C. White.

I am indebted to Capt. John Borden, who read it twice and took the time to help me get the details right.

Inestimable thanks to the team at Random House for their support and commitment, and in particular to Robin Rolewicz, Frankie Jones, and Danielle Posen; to Vincent La Scala, for his expertise and patience; and to my editor, Kate Medina, who found the essence of the novel and understood how it had to unfold.

Deepest gratitude to Bill Clegg, for his vision and his faith in my work; and to Jenny Lyn Bader, for her friendship.

Finally, to my son, Jack, and to my grandfather, Arthur Noel Clifton, who have stretched a heart beyond its known forms.

Without my husband, Steven H. Tripp, this story, as every other, would not have been told.

Texts

For descriptions of rum-running, of the vessels and characters involved, and in particular, of the seizing of the
Star
off Little Beach, I am in debt to The Black Ships, by Everett S. Allen. Two other texts that were useful:
Rum War at Sea,
by Malcolm Willoughby, and “Westport Rum Runners,” in
Spinner: People and Culture in South-
eastern Massachusetts (vol. V, 1996), by Davison Paull. For descriptions of the season of open water, and of whaling and walrusing in the Arctic: The Children of the Light, by Everett S. Allen, and Arctic
Dreams,
by Barry Lopez. For details of Henry's experiences in World War I:
From a Surgeon's Journal
by Harvey Cushing. For descriptions of icing:
Turtle Rock Tales,
by J. T. Smith, and David Allen's brilliant “Interview with Everrett Coggeshall,” in
Spinner
(vol. IV, 1988). For details of the 1928 New Bedford mill strike:
The Strike of
'28,
by Daniel Georgianna with Roberta Hazen Aaronson. For descriptions of Lincoln Park in the 1920s:
Lincoln Park Remembered
1894–1987.

Bertrand T. Wood's
Noman's Land Island
is an exceptional tribute to that place.

Finally, I am indebted to Clifford W. Ashley's classic book The
Yankee Whaler,
which is nothing less than a treasure of an age gone by. In particular, Ashley's moving description of the last days of whaling in New Bedford inspired the scene of Noel's return to that city. Also, in the glossary of Ashley's book, I came across several whaling terms that I have not found elsewhere.

The brief passage on page 221 is paraphrased from Neil Philip's retelling of the Norse Ragnarok. The following single line that has been set apart is from
Sand and Foam
by Kahlil Gibran. On page 222, the passage about swallows is from
The Travels of Birds
by Frank M. Chapman.