The Season of Open Water (3 page)

As he is setting the full pail of clams into the shade of the wagon seat, Noel notices that the young man on the porch of the third cottage is gone. He draws the wagon through the soft sand to the road and sets off through the quiet summer village of East Beach.

Just before the Surfside Hotel, he sees Dirk McAllister in his new Buick touring car with the sleek soft top headed toward him down the road. A year ago, Dirk McAllister worked as a warper in the Fall River Mills, and when the mills made the pay-cut, he couldn't scrape up two spare cents. Like half the town, he pulled his shades at night, huddled his wife and children into the kitchen, while the other half of the town passed by with trucks and wagons loaded full of liquor. Then, nine months back, Dirk started showing up with new things: a radio, a red bicycle for his youngest girl. A new telephone with a private line. He paid off his grub bill at Shorrock's store. He had a ham at Easter. Midsummer, someone gave him that new car, which was rumored to be fitted with hidden compartments along the driveshaft that could hold up to twenty sacks of booze. The word was that Dirk had taken up with the Point gang. He was making big runs to the city gin mills for Swampy Davoll. No one judged him for it. Eight mouths to feed. How could you judge a man for that?

The Buick slows, sunlight glinting off the wiper blades. Noel draws the wagon to a halt. Dirk McAllister rolls his window down.

“Fine day, Noel, isn't it?”

Noel shrugs. “Reckon Frank MacDonald's luck ran out last night.”

“How's that?”

“Coasties must've caught up with him out there. Saw them dragging him in by the nose.” Noel sees the expression on the other man's face change—the troubled look.

Dirk shakes his head, a grim smile. “Thanks for the tip, Noel.”

“Don't know what good it does you.”

“I'll have a look. See you around then.”

“See you around.”

As the Buick continues on toward Gooseberry Neck, Noel gives a light slap to the reins. He heads north up Horseneck Road.

Half a mile past South Westport Corner, he spies the carcass at the side of the road. A young fox. Recent kill. Neck snapped. The pool of urine steams off the dirt. The pelt is perfect, worth twelve dollars at least. The thought flashes through his mind to take it. As a boy, he would have skinned it straight there in the road, thrown the guts in a bush and gone to sell the pelt even before going home. But he is an old man now, and he knows it takes some time for the soul to work its way out of the bones. He knows there is a cost for messing with the dead. And so he stands over the carcass for a good slice of time. He shoos away the crows as the scales tip back and forth inside him—those two familiar voices warring through his brain. Finally, he picks the body up and lays it down carefully under a chokecherry bush. He will leave it, he thinks, but as he is turning toward the wagon, a dart of sunlight nips the tail and sparks the long red fur. The light strokes through the pelt like flames. He turns back.

His hip aches as he climbs up onto the plank seat. He lays the fox on the floor by his feet next to the two bottles of bootleg whiskey he had found on the beach, and he drives the rest of the way home. As he bears left into the drive, he sees them waiting for him: Honey Lyons and three strangers dressed in dark suits, soft hats, a fat-cat car. He drives the wagon up to them and climbs out. He can see the reflected sky in the glinting new black polish of their shoes. He knows what they have come for.

Bridge

It was Luce who had taught her how to steal: sinkers, jigs and fishing lures, bayberry candles, and a box of the new blue-tip matches. They stole a galvanized pail from the wharf store at the Point, a pair of oilers, and two cans of Campbell's soup. At night, in a hardscrabble darkness, she would place one foot in his knitted hands and he would pitch her over the stone wall into Elinor Baughan's apple orchard. They would take what they could carry, their pockets loaded full. They siphoned gas from the two-ton tractor at the Tripp Farm. They crept into Haskell Ashley's henhouse and filched the eggs from underneath the hens. Once, when they stole honey from Rebecca Martin's hive, the bees came out and tailed them down the road as they ran home. The swarm covered Luce's arm, a black humming sheath, and stung him elbow to shoulder so his arm turned the color of a fresh bruise with the poison and swelled to twice its size.

They stole tins of sardines and jars of black pearl roe from the gourmet shop in New Bedford. They stole half-pints of tobacco and rolling papers from Shorrock's store. They stole sacks of coffee, bullets, shells, packets of condensed milk, white sugar, saltines, nails and screws, jars of vinegar, small plugged tins of kerosene.

On a day she was alone, Bridge stole a ladies' tortoiseshell comb from Abigail Dean's hat shop. It was Luce who found her that afternoon setting it into her hair before the mirror. He came toward her, his eyes dark and inscrutable. He drew the comb from her hair, and when she demanded it back, he laughed and held it out of reach. She flew at him. Her young fists brushed against his face, and he threw her to the floor, pinned her down by the wrists and pressed his face right up close to hers. The sunlight poured in through the window and covered them there.

They stole horseshoes from the blacksmith shop and made a game of it in the field by the river. They invented their own rules. They stole a bottle of whiskey from Peleg Mason's stash buried under the floorboards in the old Yankee powderhouse, and they took it with their cigarettes through the pine wood to the river and wasted themselves there in the salt marsh hay.

And it was Luce who pulled her down into that tough and matted grass. Her fingers raked his hair, their young throats on fire with the liquor and the smoke, their breath stained the air, thin and bluish clouds, and they tumbled there together, laughing, through the smells of drowned earth, honeysuckle, the briny reek of soaked salt hay. The hollow stalks of the reeds nicked her back. Past his shoulder she could see the roaming sky above their heads, the smashed light of the stars.

And as they lay there, quiet at last, side by side with the bottle set between them, staring up into that smooth, untroubled night, it was Luce who told her there was no such thing as God or fate or law. The world turned on its ear by chance, and he wrapped his hands over her eyes so her mind was nothing more than darkness. He dragged in off the cigarette, put his mouth on hers and blew the smoke deep into her lungs.

Bridge wakes late that morning after Asa Sisson's funeral. Past seven. The wind splits between the window sash and the frame—a low whistle through the warped sill. On the table next to the bed is the folded ten-dollar bill. She stares at it, remembering the night before: the man, Vonniker, the stranger, how he had looked at her for that brief moment, and how she had felt something inside of her move.

She pushes off the thought. He has no business, after all, in her thoughts.

She slips out of bed, pulls her clothes on quickly—the flannel shirt and overalls, the heavy wool socks she will strip off later when the sun has risen high enough to warm the day. She puts the ten-dollar bill under a book in the night-table drawer and closes it. She creeps through the narrow tunnel that runs under the eaves to the room where her brother lies asleep. The coarse wool wraps his body like bark. She crawls into the bed with him, the ritual of childhood. She can smell last night's drunkenness still on him. She knows he will wake up with his head in his feet and a sick raw taste in his throat from where the drink burned through.

She looks at his chest, his arms, the roughness of his hands. She finds traces of yesterday's work, traces of the hours he is away, a skid of grease on his wrist, dirt settled in the deep long lines that wrap his palm. She can smell the soil and the muck, the rotted hay from the icehouse, the baked dusty mud off the wagon paths he drives, delivering ice. She can smell the places he roams through, the casual detours he takes off his route when he grows annoyed or bored: the sassafras wood, the pine grove, the eelgrass of the marsh. She loves him this way most, when he is deep asleep, beyond waking, when she can dig through his roughness and find him for what she knows he is—tender as blackskin, easily scraped down by a fingernail.

He stirs, and his body turns to curve around her. She will give herself a quarter of an hour to lie this way. She will listen to the wind hack against the roof as it breaks up the last of the fog. She will listen for the slighter sound of the mouse scurrying back and forth on small tough claws between the plaster and the beams as the sun climbs and marks her time.

He shifts in his sleep. Out the window, the trees seem to be growing down from the sky. Their roots hook deep into the soil. She hears the sound of a car in the drive, an unfamiliar sound, the steady low coil of the engine and the push of wheels over the marl. The car stops below the window. She hears a short hard rap on the kitchen door, her mother's voice, and another voice, a man's voice. Gently, she lifts Luce's arm and slides out from underneath.

When she comes downstairs, the kitchen is empty. Through the window, she can see four men, three strangers and Honey Lyons, standing around a newly waxed black Model S Mercedes parked in the drive. Her mother, Cora, is crossing the yard, her arms full of the wet wash. She walks around the men, a wide circle, her eyes cast down to the left, her feet holding tight to some invisible curve on the ground, with that strange and skirting way she has had since her oldest child, Rose, fell through an eel hole axed out in the ice and was taken by the current underneath that foot-deep frozen surface all the way to the river mouth.

As Bridge stirs a cup of water into the white-cornmeal batter, she takes in the three strangers, their dark suits, polished shoes, gray soft-hats, Honey Lyons in his coarse leather jacket and khaki trousers, a stain at the knee. His face is ruddy, shaved too often, skin full of a light red rash. He glances up at the window, catches her watching them and shifts the ball of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other. He grins, his teeth long and yellow, one chipped close to the gum. He walks over to the side of the car, leans to the window and says something to the man in the driver's seat. He walks with a slight limp, left over from a jump he took once off the Point Bridge at low tide. He struck hard bottom, and his anklebone shattered like milkweed.

Cora comes back inside.

“Who are those men with him?” Bridge asks.

“Don't know.”

“What do they want?”

“They're waiting on Noel.”

“What for?”

“Didn't ask.”

“You didn't ask?”

“No.”

Her mother takes an armful of white shirts and puts them to soak in the first tub. She shaves in a handful of soap.

“Mary Milliken wants these shirts by afternoon,” she says.

“Why didn't you ask them what they want from Noel?”

Cora shakes her head. “I'm not sure today's wind'll turn warm enough to dry them by afternoon.”

Bridge sighs. She fries up the johnnycakes, eats one and wraps three for Luce to take with him to work. Then she tells Cora she is going up to Shorrock's store at the Head for a sack of flour.

“How be ya, Bridge?” says Honey Lyons as she steps off the porch. He touches his cap.

She nods at him, says nothing. She doesn't look at the other men. She walks past the boat shop into the woods toward the river.

She passes by the path that leads up to the old burial ground on Indian Hill. When she was a child, Noel took her there. He led her through the trees and showed her where they were put down—the seven crude and unmarked stones.

The moon is the home of the dead, he has told her. They come down to earth on its light. They travel in boats and tie up in the trees. They crawl under bark and live among the leaves. They sprout and grow and turn, holding fast to their branches through the winds and summer storms. He has told her that when a leaf falls, there is a cry not easily heard. And as she walks the rut path along the river toward the Head, she listens for that sound. She treads lightly on their thin and brittle shapes, corpses rustling under her feet.

Abiel Tripp is sitting out by the mail-stop, a sack of letters dropped off by the mail truck next to his chair on the porch. He bites down the stem of his pipe the way she has noticed that all blue-water men do, as if the years at sea had set a certain tremor in the jaw, a kind of restlessness that might have come from months of gnawing on hard bread, months of waiting, drifting through a nothing sea. It was a habit of Noel's. The stem of his pipe would always give out before the bowl. Abiel jerks his head at her as she walks by. He takes in her boots, her brown arms. She is scrawny as an oar. She wears her brother's cast-off overalls and an old cap. She is hand to mouth, he knows this. The family has been since the father died. But the girl wears it differently. There is no shame about her. No apology. Her boots are crusted with mud from walking the damp river ground. She takes the two steps up to the shade porch of Shorrock's store and slips through the door. She lays it closed without a sound on the jamb behind her.

Henry

The beauty of the world, he knows, is a dream, a trick, a sleight of hand.

The shots wake him at dawn. He comes downstairs, cracks the front door. The fog has begun to loosen. He can smell slick pools of water on the rolled dirt road from the rain of the night before. He checks, then rechecks the lock on the screen; it is his habit, it has no purpose, he knows this. There is no one to keep in, no one to keep out, but he does it every morning this same way, and why should this morning be any different?

He takes a sharp breath and draws in the rough smell of the sea, and for a moment he remembers the girl, the dark-haired girl he had seen at Millie Sisson's house the night before. He had been standing against the wall, feeling out of place, and he had looked up and seen her. She seemed to be observing him—her eyes luminous and steady—then she had turned abruptly and walked out the door.

He goes into the kitchen, measures out two cups of water, sets the pot to boil on the stove. He measures out the loose tea into the bob. His measuring is—has been since he returned from France—exact. He marks his watch. He will let the tea steep for four and a half minutes. No milk. A mite of sugar. He steps out onto the back porch.

Sheets of fog press low against the water. The swallows flock in small droves over the cottage. They clutch their wings into themselves, dive into a trench of wind, and then rise up again.

Henry sets his tea down on the side table, takes a clean rag from his toolbox, and sponges the salt and dampness from the seat of the chair.

There is a volley of shots from the neck. Seafowl—eiders, skunk ducks—heading out toward the sea to feed. The men come down early—local men. They leak out of the fog with their shotguns, cross the bar to the neck, and crouch behind the rocks and in the scrub. They pass-shoot into the flocks as the birds fly overhead.

It is a Thursday morning, October 1927—his fourth year living out the fall and winter in the cottage at the beach, his fourth year as a boss at one of the city mills. The summer people have left. Henry had watched them leave—a sudden exodus of touring cars stuffed with sun-umbrellas, trunks, clothes, paraphernalia, children, dogs hanging from the open car windows. The houses are empty. The beach is quiet. He settles back into the chair, a thick woolen blanket draped over his knees. He can feel the bones of the wood through the cushion. From the porch, he watches the seabirds as they wheel through the white and glaring light—crooked shadows, screeching cries.

This is his morning. Morning after morning. Day after day. This is his life.

He clings to his everyday order of waking, wash, shave. His everyday drive up Horseneck Road, then along the trolley route to the mill, where he will burrow for eight hours into a dark and stifling heat, the rhythmic strike and shutter of the looms. In the afternoons, he leaves at five, to retrace his morning route on the return trip home. He comes back to his chair on the porch and if the weather is fine, he will spend the rest of the daylight hours there, with a book on his lap, transfixed by the changing of the light, the changing of the water and the sky. And as the chair rocks back and forth, he will move outside that very careful, well-swept room he has built at his center. He will slide the lock, slip through, leave the door ajar behind him. He will move beyond himself, far beyond his own edges. At times he does not even know he has been gone until he finds himself returning, marked by the journey—grit in his eyes, wind-matted hair—the evidence of distances, the evidence of speed.

At night he reads. Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus. Theories of geometry and light. Theories of physics and evolution, war, culture, medicine, class. Laws of gravity. Laws of matter. Laws of planetary motion and celestial mechanics, electromagnetic charge. Laws are a solace. His books, a solace. Reading strips the body from the mind. He takes a small pleasure, an occasional pleasure, in music and in art. The work of de Chirico, the work of Picasso—the refraction of the world into blue-grief, cubes.

He sips his tea. It is cooling now. A tea leaf in the crude shape of a bird hits the rim of the cup. He picks it off.

From the porch, he watches the pigs rooting through Elizabeth Hawthorne's hydrangeas. He watches the old man farther down the beach. He has loaded his wagon full of sea muck, and now he walks along the tide line, gathering clams. Henry has seen him before. They have never spoken. Never exchanged greetings, words, names. The man's skin is tarnished, deeply lined. He always wears the same woolen coat. Today the sun is behind him and he is cut to shadow. Henry cannot see his features. He cannot see the mountains in his face. But he recognizes the lopsided gait, the steady and deliberate way he works. He can tell from the limp, from how the old man bears his weight on his right leg, that perhaps when he was in his midthirties, Henry's age, his left femur was broken, high, close to the hip. If it was splinted (and Henry doubts that it was), the position of the limb was deranged and so the break never properly set, never properly healed. But he is a tough old spider. This particular man. He comes down every day in every type of weather to work up what the tide hauls in.

Henry was born in Boston, 1895, the only son of a cotton broker. He went to Harvard, then to medical school, then to France in early 1917 with a corps of students under Harvey Cushing. He started at the
ambulance
in Paris, then moved in soggy weather to the tri-age hospital close to the front, north of Armentières. He saw torn throats, wrecked faces, bleeding vessels that could not be secured, lungs shrunk to the size of a nickel by the gas. He sopped and shaved and cleansed maggot-crusted limbs. He stood on a plain above a chestnut grove under a clear and perfect sky, and when the sky exploded, they flattened themselves and hugged the earth.

Once, as he was crossing from the operating tent to the tree for a smoke, a shell burst overhead and he saw a man twenty yards away split at the waist, his top half blown to nothing, his legs kept on walking several paces before they crumpled at the knees.

After a while, Henry noticed that the horrors were not horrors. His mind had grown elastic to accommodate even the worst of what he saw.

He stayed on for six months after the war with the residual men at the military hospital near the tumbled wreck of Reims. He arrived home in the spring of 1921 with the luster of a hero and a career in full swing. He secured a lecturing position at the medical school, met the daughter of financier John P. Harkness and married her. The failing happened slowly. He began to lose his capacity to diagnose. Then a tingling that began in his right foot spread up his leg, hobbled him as he walked. Nerve-related. He knew that. But they could not locate the source. The trembling spread through his chest and down his right arm. He could not hold a scalpel without a tremor in his hand. He could not make a stitch across the simplest of cuts.

He left his practice, his marriage, the city. Without a look back, he came down to his father's cottage on the beach one week one summer and did not leave.

He took a job as a manager at the Narragansett Mill in New Bedford. He folded himself quietly into the factory world and felt his mind sink away into the dank air thick with cotton dust. He noticed that, after the first several months, his lungs began to grow heavy, his breathing shallow, his brain dull, his thoughts more soft. He liked the simplicity of the work, the simplicity of the language, the habits of the workers. He tuned himself to the whir and the slap of the belts. He took a particular comfort in the swift decisive motion of the shuttle running the weft through the warp, and gradually the sounds of the mill and the sultry air washed down the stutter from his limbs, so he moved again like an everyday man, through the long, high-ceilinged rooms, the albatross machinery, the rows of sloped, gray shoulders, faceless, slumped dark shapes—the cloth-splitters, the cutters, the slashers, the tenders clearing the waste off the scavenger rolls. After a while, he found he could think back on the war, and it was as if he were flipping through a book he had pulled at random from the shelves of someone else's life. He chewed what he remembered slowly, and the memories lost their edges and their taste.

Ten minutes past eight. The wind has picked up. It shoulders off the rest of the fog. The sky behind is clear, the color of Delft china, and still that white and aching light that makes skeletons of every form.

He hears the rush of wings. The swallows sweep past. They rise and fall. Their bodies cut like daggers through the sky.

Every year around this time, they gather. They come down to the beach to feed on the last of the bayberry. Then they flock up, skim the earth, pass on.

The old man, walking with his pail full of sea clams, pauses for a moment to watch them. One alights on a washed-up log near him. Two more dash through tidal pools. Pointed narrow wings, small weak feet. He takes a step, and they shy off, darting back into the flock still flooding in a stream above his head. He watches them go, and Henry watches from the porch, both men staring after that long black winding shoal of birds pressed between the channels of the wind. Then they are gone. The sky falls still.

Henry drinks off the last of his tea and goes inside. He puts the cup in the sink, walks upstairs, and pulls on his clothes, his boots, a light coat. He picks up his keys, his wallet in one pocket, his watch in the other. He unlocks the screen door, walks outside, and locks it again behind him. He takes the front steps and crosses the lawn to his car.

It is an old flivvy, a 1921 Model T runabout. It shakes when he drives at high speed. One wiper sticks, and the wheel is temperamental, sluggish at times to turn. When the engine coughs or the gears don't shift, Henry tinkers around with things as best as he can to get the car running somewhat smoothly again. Although money is not an issue, he is reluctant to replace it.

Driving north on Horseneck Road, he catches up to the old man from the beach, traveling by one-hitch wagon—a simple wide plank of wood set across for a seat, a middle-aged mare, a worn bridle and reins, the leather frayed. As the car approaches, the old man draws the wagon to the side of the road. Henry passes by, tips his hat. The man glances at him, gives a slight nod.

Half a mile past South Westport Corner, a flash of orange breaks out of the brush—a thick tail, sharp nose, a fox, it freezes in the road, eyes glued on the car bearing toward it, Henry jerks the wheel hard to the left, the car swerves, he will miss it, barely miss it, the sun glints off the hood, the fox bolts, Henry feels the soft thud under the wheels. He pulls over, stops the car, gets out. He walks back.

It lies still—jet eyes aslant and open, one ear bent, steam rising from its snout, and something of it, something perhaps in how it lies, reminds Henry of a boy he saw once, a beautiful creature, brought into an elephant shelter by the ridge. The boy had been shot through the open mouth, the bullet lodged in his cervical spine. He had been in the same clothes for perhaps a month and they had to scrape them in places to get them off his skin. The belt was caked with dried clay from the trenches. Clots of earth had rusted out in the buckle groove and it refused to move. They had washed his body, turning him slowly. One of the orderlies held a sponge above him, squeezed the water from it, and it ran like mountain rain through his young skin. Henry checked the wound, then the pulse on the wrist, and when he could not find it, he pressed two fingers against the boy's chest, and there, through the hard young weave of the bones, he could sense the faint and distant stammer of the heart, and it struck him then, in that far-off fading sound, that there was no logic of who was taken and who was left. There was no order to explain or justify what any one of them was doing in that place.

It is a quick memory. A stunning thought. By the time he grasps the fox by the tail, the thought is buried deep again inside him.

He drags it to the side of the road, leaves it and walks back to his car. He cranks the engine. It sticks twice, unwilling to start, then kicks back, jerking out of his hand. He finally gets it running. He climbs back into the driver's seat and sits there for a moment, quiet, in the cool air, the car humming underneath him, his breath hanging in a fog above the wheel. He takes off his hat, sets it on the seat beside him. He presses the clutch pedal down until he hears the catch. He releases the lever, gently. The car begins to roll, and he sets off again through the midmorning October light.

As he reaches Sisson's Corner at the end of Pine Hill Road, he realizes that he left his cigarettes on the side table in the front hall. He can see them there, the soft pack beside the crystal bowl. And so instead of a right, he takes a left. He drives down the hill, past the church, and pulls up in front of Shorrock's store.

The chimes ring as he walks in. Alyssia Borden is at the counter bending Shorrock's ear about a new breed of jasmine seedlings she has just received by mail.

“London,” she is saying, “a new order-by-mail company. They send direct by boat. So much more competent than those companies out of the Midwest.” She glances over her shoulder and takes Henry in. Her face lights. Her voice slows. “You would not believe,” she says, still speaking to Shorrock, but looking at Henry, “every seedling so fresh, you would not believe how fresh.”

“Fine morning, Alyssia,” Henry says. She is the wife of one of his smoking room friends. They had a blunt and brief affair two years ago. He tries not to think about it.

“Hello, darling. What brings you to this humble end of town?”

“Cigarettes.”

“Nothing more thrilling than that?”

“I'm afraid not.”

She smiles, her teeth radiant, her mouth lined in red.

“Excuse me,” Henry says, stepping toward the aisles.

“Running late?”

“Yes, I am actually.”

“So unlike you.”

“Is it?”

“Cigarettes are up front,” Shorrock says.

“Right. Sure. A pack of Chesterfields. I'll just see if there's anything else I need.” He steps away, around a display of Forhans toothpaste and white naphtha soap, toward the back of the store. He ducks into the last aisle and notices a girl at the other end, lifting a tin off the shelf, the smooth clean swipe of the tin into her overall pocket. Henry stops, and the girl glances up, catches him watching her. Her eyes flare, blue, stark. And he recognizes her as the girl he had seen at Millie Sisson's house the night before. She stares at him.