The Season of Open Water (6 page)

Bridge had not answered him. She said nothing to him that day. She nibbled on the cake, her teeth digging in to find the chunks of sweet date. The sun was relentless and made chewing slow. With small bites, she took in what the Port-i-gee told her although it had no match for what she knew. She looked across the yard to her grandfather, the light on his shoulders, his careful, brutal hands still gathering pears. She could not imagine him small. He was a country to her.

By the time Luce comes back, his arms full of kindling, she is shivering. He gives her his coat, then kneels in the sand and builds the fire. He sits back on his heels as the flames catch and the light begins to grow. She has almost forgiven him for the baitfish. Sometimes she feels she doesn't have a choice. They have grown up close, tight for so long, their stalks indistinguishable, roots bound. It doesn't matter now, she tells herself. The baitfish or anything else. Nothing seems to matter now. The air is cold, and the fire is warm, and the light is gentle on his face, his skin burnished, his eyes softening as he looks across the fire to her and smiles. She takes the potatoes from the paper bag and sets them to roast. He guts out the fish and drapes it down whole. She draws out the tin of smoked oysters, twists the key off the bottom, and rolls back the lid. They eat them with their fingers. They talk and laugh, and their voices catch in the orange sparks crackling off the wood until the fire dies. He lies down beside her, and they watch the ashes smolder, the last blue glow in the heart of the black-charred wood.

Henry

He finds himself thinking of her, looking for her. Most often on his morning drive up Pine Hill Road toward the Head of Westport. He glances into yards and down dirt lanes, over the new snowdrifts and the shoveled walks. When the days grow short and he is driving home in the early evenings through the late November darkness, he looks into the lit windows of the houses as he passes by, hoping for a glimpse of her.

He knows her name is Bridge. Perhaps it was Bridget once, and the “t” got broken off somehow. He knows nothing else—who she is; where she lives; how she spends her days. From time to time, he might see something or someone that reminds him of her, and his mind will take a sudden, wild swerve. He will see her as clearly as if she is still standing there, the way she was in the store that day back in October, at the other end of the aisle. He will see the shadows on her face, her skin, her hair— that cool expression in her eyes as she stared back, then began to walk toward him.

He finds himself stopping in more frequently at Shorrock's. He buys something he needs or something he doesn't. When he steps back outside, his eyes smart with the cold, and he looks across the road toward the river and the path running along the stone wall where he had seen her walk away.

Sometimes he is impatient, annoyed with himself, and he turns his back on his thoughts of her. Other times, he allows himself to dwell on that single image of her face that has somehow woken him out of his dark sleep and set a new tilt to his consciousness.

One afternoon, as he is driving home on his usual route down Horseneck Road, he comes to the top of the last hill. The fields drop away underneath him, rolling down to the sea. The sky is wintry and gray but, out over the ocean, the sun breaks through one spot in the clouds, a handful of raw light thrown like diamonds across the still water, and it strikes him that the laws of probability are not on his side. He has lived in the town for four years, and he has seen her twice. It might be another four years before he sees her again.

He feels a sudden disgust with himself for being such a creature of habit, so locked into his routine, traveling through the world with blinders on. He never takes that occasional left. And he senses then that if he wants to see her again, he will have to do things differently.

He is still thinking about this the following morning when he stops in at the post office. He picks up his mail at the window, then turns back toward the door and, as he does, he sees the notice pinned to the wall.

AN EVENING OF POLITICS AND POETRY.
A HAM AND BEAN SUPPER AT THE CENTRAL VILLAGE
GRANGE HALL TO BENEFIT THE WESTPORT REPUBLICAN PARTY.
OPEN TO NON-MEMBERS.
DONATION TWO DOLLARS OR AS YOU CAN PAY.

He pauses for a moment, his fingers on the knob of the door. It is not likely that she will be there. But she might be. He opens the door, and the wind strikes his face. He has already made up his mind that he will go.

Noel

They bring the boat to him the first week of December, and he is paid a third up front. He rolls back the door of his shop and clears out the middle of the floor. He cuts new keel blocks and braces them down so he can work her right-side up. She is a thirty-six-footer, an old work boat—a good sea boat—and he thinks of how senseless it is, and a little heart-bitter, that he will take this strong-hulled fishing boat and he will pull the seablood out of her. He will strip down her wood, strip out her use, and refit her into something that has no true worth or place, and Honey Lyons and his gang will take her, they will run her hard, they will load her with weight beyond what she is made to carry, and when she is worn through, bullet-riddled, her planks bruised, slammed, stove, they'll junk her. If she's lucky, she'll have a year left on the water.

He unscrews her side rails, and begins to break up the planks. He will strip out the work-room aft, cut back the space of the wheelhouse, so she will be all deck and hold. The smell of salt and wear sticks in his nose. With the back of his sleeve, he wipes the grit off his face, out of his eyes. In the age of whaling, the work he did was noble work. He would take busted hulls and smashed ships, he would rebuild their crippled shapes and mend them back into repair.

And now it's come to this, he thinks to himself as he throws another plank into the pile on the floor. He has heard about the boat-builders over in Fairhaven who build rum-boats to look like yachts, all dickeyed up, their cabins finished off in mahogany, and he shakes his head to think how easily the wind shifts, the world tips, slides out from underneath you, and turns alien, new, utterly changed.

When Noel finally left Kauai and followed Hannah back to Old Dartmouth, he had been gone for over ten years. He was twenty-nine years old, and it was almost 1880. They luffed sail as they reached New Bedford harbor. He stood on deck. The view of the city staggered him, because it looked as if the world had stopped while he was gone. It was all the same—the skyline he had left—the millstacks and the church steeples. The masts of the whaleships berthed at the wharves pierced the sky. But there was something cockeyed in the scene, something vague and wrong that at first he could not put his finger on. He stood at the rail and squinted, and he could see small black creatures crawling on those whalers tied up three-deep at the piers. He stared at the ships as they approached, and it was not until they came near that he saw it: the fretted rigging, the sheathing ripped out from their sides, the grass grown up on the wharves, shin-deep, unscythed. Hundreds of barrels lay abandoned, their hoops rusted, black pools of oil leaking out around them. Long alleyways of weed sprouted thick and deep between the casks. And those small black creatures he had glimpsed as they crossed the bay—they were young boys—wharf rats. They rowed on rafts made out of old hatch covers. They swarmed over the decks, shimmied up the masts, and slid down the backstays.

On one bark, he saw a pair of white-bearded men a hundred feet aloft. They bent the sails and served the rigging on a ship that would never see open water again. They hung there, those old seamen, strange and ancient monkeys, swinging off the spars.

He raised his eyes then from the ships and took in the city behind them. It was the millstacks that caught his eye. The long buildings. There were more of them, he realized. They had thickened in the time he was away, and now they were humming with new life, the city's life, the heart of its industry. Black plumes of smoke filled the sky.

He walked the waterfront streets with his sack thrown over his shoulder, and he had the sense that he was passing through a bone-yard. The smithy shops were closed. One chandlery gutted. Another gone. The sail-loft at the corner of Johnny Cake Hill had been torched by fire and they had not bothered to rebuild, so the frame of the building wavered there, a black and soot-filled shell. The light shot down through the fallen beams, and he knew then, standing on the corner, that the age of whaling was a golden age gone by. Men like him would lose their work slowly.

And it happened that way. He had his Hannah, but dark years would follow. Years of barely making do. In the end, he would always manage to scare up some boat work or carpentry work, some use for his hands. In the few seasons when there were no proper jobs, there was always fishing, trapping, wooding, haying, picking the sea clams off the beach. There was always a way for him to make a man's store pay, but nothing close, nothing within a world's length of what he will make now, for this job, on this boat, in one fell swoop.

She will be a sorry creature when he is done with her. There will be no brass fittings, no porthole glass to catch the light. He will paint her out a flat dull gray. He will not shore out her kinks or putty-smooth over her rough places. He will leave some wear to her— a few knots, a few hammer dents to lend her the illusion of still being a work boat, a fishing boat, nothing to bother with, well used. Four weeks, and she is finished. He refits her with the two new Liberty engines they bring to him, Maxim silencers installed so she will move through the water with barely a sound. Lyons has paid him and it is done. He can see they are pleased with his work, and so it does not entirely surprise him when Lyons comes around again ten days later.

It is the beginning of January, a Saturday. Cora and Bridge are in the kitchen, ironing out the linens for the ham and bean supper at the Grange. Luce is in the back of the yard wooding—splitting the logs and stacking the cords. Noel is at the stone well, fixing a hinge on the well cover. The light is scarce. Pale and milky blue. The pine needles grazed with frost.

Honey Lyons's old truck turns into the drive. Luce looks up, then goes back to his wooding. Noel invites Lyons into the shop. He stokes the fire, leaves the door open so the flames can draft.

“Have a cup?” He points to the pot of cider on the stove.

“No thanks,” Lyons answers. He sits down in the armchair. “Not here on a social call.”

“Something wrong with the boat?”

“No.”

“What is it then?”

Honey Lyons doesn't answer right away. He stretches out his legs toward the open doorway. The light breaks on the scuffed toes of his boots. He ticks his thumbnail against the edge of the chair, a steady crisp sharp-paced sound.

“They need someone to run her,” he says at last and looks up at Noel. “Someone who knows the river.”

Honey Lyons's eye shifts away, and Noel gathers his reasons: he is too old—they must know this—to go gallivanting over the ocean in the dead of night. He is hardly spry. He has no heart for work with risk—it was the boat he wanted—the one job—he took it, did it, and now it is done. He might consider building another. It was, after all, the work with the wood that he loved, but to run it? No. He would be no use to them for that. His eyes are tired. They do all right in daylight, but at night they cannot tell one shadow from the next. He is about to say all of this. He is about to give Honey Lyons a list of reasons he will not be able to refute, and Noel is sure it will be enough to blunt any more asking. He opens his mouth to speak and suddenly realizes that Lyons is not looking for him—perhaps all along, since the first time they showed up in his yard with their black fat-cat car, perhaps even then, they had not come looking for him. He follows the other man's line of sight, through the open doorway and across the yard to where Luce is working down the kindling branches off the fresh-hewn logs.

Bridge

It is just past five that night, already dark, when they pull up in front of the Grange. The coal stoves are already running, and the upstairs room has begun to fill with the warmth and the smell of roasted hams rising from the kitchen ovens below.

Bridge and Cora had gotten a ride with Abe and Sarah Pelham. They had loaded the baskets of pressed linens into the back of the pickup. Cora had squeezed into the front cab next to Sarah, and Bridge rode with the linens on the bed. As they drove, Bridge rubbed her hands together to keep her fingers warm. She placed her palms over her cheeks. The cold wind burned her eyes.

At the Grange, they carry the baskets of linens inside, unfold the tablecloths, stretch them out to cover the long tables. Harold Manchester and Walter Sills are hanging a red, white, and blue bunting over the stage. Grace Mason is laying down greens. She has broken up Christmas wreaths, and she arranges princess pine and holly through the middle of each table as a centerpiece. As Sally Wilkes sets down the silver, Cora and Bridge fold the napkins and lay them out on the china plates at each setting. Then they carry the empty linen baskets downstairs into the kitchen.

Cora sits in a chair in the corner by the window as Bridge goes outside to talk to a few of the boys shoveling coal. Annie Deacon and Elizabeth Searle draw the pots of beans out of the oven and set them on the stove. The heat is thick in the room with the smell of molasses, brown sugar, and meat. When the door to the outside yard swings open, the wind strikes through, the fires hiss, and the cold stings Cora's face.

When her husband, Russell, was alive, they had always come to the Grange. Russell would do the ice for the summer events, and Cora did the linens. They would bring Luce and Bridge to the game suppers in the fall and spring, and to the Indian clambakes held out back in the summertime. They would come to the dances in the winters—Cora remembers the sound of the fiddle playing the “Devil's Dream,” the room spinning, beeswax candles and soft red light, their shoes against the newly polished floor. Russell always held her tightly as they danced. He would laugh softly, hum along off-tune, whisper something in her ear, then spin her out away from him. She misses him. Sometimes desperately, and every smell and shadow of the Grange Hall reminds her of him. The memory is sweet and bitter, but she would not trade it.

Owen Wales comes in from outside. He is the Master of the Grange, and tonight he is dressed in stiff clothes. He owns the farm directly north of them on Pine Hill Road. He grew up with Russell, and he is a handsome man, still a bachelor. Cora has heard talk he keeps a woman in the city. He looks at Cora as he comes in. He has never spoken to her beyond a curt greeting, and he does not speak to her now. He asks Annie Deacon when the food will be ready. Then he straightens his jacket and goes upstairs.

Cora looks out through the window. Her daughter is leaning against a tree, her hands in her coat pockets. She is talking to two of the Manchester boys as they shovel coal into the wheelbarrow. She is flirting with one of them, the older one, and then she is laughing, the three of them laughing, and her hair is dark against the snow, her teeth straight and bright. Cora watches her. She watches how Bridge looks away from the boys across the road toward the woods. One of them says something to her, and whatever it is, she does not like it. She shoots him a look, her eyes cool, detached. She says something back. The boy's face reddens, and he bends again to his work. She has always had that coolness, Cora thinks. From the time Bridge was a child, she seemed to be able to pick through and choose what she felt when she wanted to feel it. She and her mother were at opposite ends of nature that way.

But when Russell was alive, there was a balance to the family. Each one of them had had their proper place. Father, mother, grandfather, daughter, son. Russell was the soft-spoken glue, the ballast in the keel. And when he was gone, that order shriveled. They became edgy, combustible. They scrapped among themselves. As Cora sees it, her father, Noel, and her son, Luce, are cut from the same brooding cloth. The things about Luce that her father despises are the things most true to his own nature. Bridge is their battleground, their tug-of-war. After Russell died, Luce and Bridge became inseparable. In small ways, Noel tries to break them up. But Bridge is wise to it, and strong-willed, and the more Noel does it, the more she clings to Luce.

Bridge comes back indoors, her face flushed with the work and the cold. Samuel Wilkes has begun to carve out the hams. He lays huge slices out onto the long platters. Annie Deacon hands Bridge another carving knife and the whetstone. Bridge goes to a chair, puts a few drops of vegetable oil on the stone, and runs the blade back and forth across it.

When Bridge carries the first tray of food upstairs, Cora follows her. She herself won't help serve. She did once, and on her first trip up, she dropped two meat pies on the stairs, then slipped on some loose filling and slid down the rest of the steps to the bottom.

She does the linens now and that's enough. She will strip them later when the tables have been cleared. She will take the soiled dinner napkins and tablecloths and she will soak them out tomorrow, wring them until they are clean. It is enough, she thinks, as she comes to the top of the stairs, it is enough to be here in this open room she loves with her sweet ghosts and the smells of fire and roasted meat and pine.

When Henry first walks into the Grange, he is not sure for a moment where he is. A large open room, broad ceilings, polished floors, white sheets laid out on long tables, women in white aprons, the glint of silver, the colors of the flag above the stage, and for a moment, it seems that he has just stepped into a room of the military hospital at Neuilly, and he teeters, one foot in the old world, one foot in the new, the silver on the cloth, the white sheets on the tables—he can feel a pressure in his chest—his body turning to wood—his heart begins to race, his mind split, broken up.

There is a small group of people to his right, men in trousers and wool jackets, a few in overalls, women in heavy dresses and sweaters. They were talking among themselves, but they have turned and they are looking at him now. One older woman with worn and lovely eyes, a red scarf around her neck, leans toward a broad-faced man beside her, and she whispers something to him, still looking at Henry. They don't know him, he thinks, his mind in pieces, strange warps to it. They can't know anything about him. He has never seen them before, never been here before.

The broad-faced man nods to the woman in the red scarf, and they step toward him together. Instinctively he goes to take a step back, then collects himself and forces a smile but his heart is in despair as he thinks to himself that this is exactly why he has side-stepped the world of the living for so long. He is not capable of functioning in it.

The broad-faced man is extending his hand. “Arthur Russell,” he says, and smiles. “Cousin of the incumbent.”

Henry nods, shaking his hand. “Henry Vonniker.”

The man's grip is strong and his hand is rough.

“My wife, Alpha.”

“A pleasure to meet you,” Henry says.

The woman smiles at him. “Are you a new member?” she asks.

“Of the Grange? No, I am afraid not.”

“But you live in town?”

Henry nods.

“Might I ask where?”

“At the beach.”

“Oh,” she says. “You live down there year-round?”

“Yes.”

“I don't recall seeing you before.”

“I work in the city.”

“Oh?”

“In New Bedford, at one of the mills.”

“I see.”

“So will they strike or not?” Arthur Russell asks.

“I think it is likely they will.”

And there is silence then among the three of them, and Henry can see that they are piecing it together. They will not ask if he is one of the bosses at the mill, they have already gathered that he is. He lives down at the beach in one of the cottages. Perhaps they are remembering talk they have heard. Oh yes, they are thinking, he is that cotton broker's son. The one who was in the war.

Alpha smiles, a bit embarrassed at the silence, and she takes Henry's arm and leads him over to the rest of their group. “You'll sit with us, of course,” she says. “We're mostly farmers here. Well no, not all of us. This is George Small. His is the blacksmith shop near Sisson's Corner.”

Henry lets her steer him through introductions and conversation. He follows her lead, and she smiles at him kindly from time to time. When the food is brought up from downstairs, she seats him at the table between herself and a bearded man.

He still feels unsettled, misplaced, but he does what he can. Heaping platters of ham are set down on the table among the pine boughs, bowls of beans, potato salad, plates of brown bread, and he answers their inquiries, he smiles and nods; when their focus shifts to the town meeting and the upcoming articles on the warrant, he admits apologetically that he has not followed recent town events as closely as he should.

He serves himself a small plate of food.

“Take more than that,” Alpha says, prodding him gently. “You've next to no flesh on you.”

He lets her lay another slab of ham down on his plate.

They are talking about streetlights down at Horseneck, the bearded man on his right and a younger red-haired man who sits across from him. They are talking about the expense of keeping them lit through the winter. Is it really necessary? They are talking about the money needed for a gasoline shovel, and other money needed to finish laying macadam on the new Cornell Road from where they left off the year before, down to Artingstall's Corner. But he is only half listening. He is only half there. His mind is at war. He is at war. And men are dying around him. They might not know it yet. But they are dying. So many have already died, and his body was wood then too. His hands were quick, but their insides spilled out. He could not save them. Alpha is touching his arm, asking him something. She is asking him if he knows much about farming. They'll have to burn the asparagus beds, she says, when the snow melts. There are thorns in them this year. They have a vegetable stand in the summer, and they are going to try to grow strawberries this spring. Fresh strawberries seem to be a favorite among the summer people. Sally Ivanheld grew them last year and sold out every weekend. Does he have a taste for strawberries? she asks and he nods. He mumbles something. Alpha turns to the dark-haired woman on her left. Henry looks up, and across the room he sees Bridge.

She has just come up the stairs, carrying a fresh plate of ham. The steam rises off the meat around her face. She looks directly at him, her eyes hook into his for a moment before she turns away and walks toward another table close to the stage at the opposite end of the room. He watches as she lays down the plate of food, and his mind is suddenly straightened, suddenly clear, his anxiety gone. He does not take his eyes off her. She crosses to a side table and picks up a china pitcher and refills the water glasses. Then with the empty pitcher she retraces her route along the edge of the room. She does not look at him again. She goes back down the stairs.

“Are you alright then?” Alpha is asking him.

Henry turns and looks at her. “I am in heaven,” he says slowly.

She stares at him, concerned for a moment. The wrinkles deepen at the edges of her eyes. Then she giggles and points with the end of her knife to his plate and the food still untouched. “Eat up then. Ham's good to bring a young man back to earth.”

Cora sits with the rest of the help at the table near the top of the stairs. They are the last to be served. The men and boys sit down at one end, some with coal still on their hands and on the cuffs of their sleeves. Cora sits at the other end with the women. Bridge walks around the table filling the water glasses. Annie Deacon and Lucy McIleer are talking about someone.

“He was in France, I heard,” Lucy says. “A doctor in the big war.”

“Pass those pickles, please, will you, Annie?” Norma Jakes says.

“Not much use after it,” Lucy goes on. “So the talk is.”

“Was he in Paris?”

“No, not those pickles. The sweet ones there by the butter.”

“I don't think it was Paris.”

“I heard it was.”

“No.”

“I'm quite sure.”

“Why don't you ask him yourself then.”

“I heard it was Paris.”

Bridge sits down next to her mother. Her work is done, and she fills her plate. She picks up her knife and fork, and without a word begins to cut into a piece of ham. She seems nervous, Cora notices with some surprise, agitated, which is unlike her. Cora busies herself with her own food, then a sip of water. She finds a stain on the tablecloth. She studies its shape. Bridge eats quickly. She swabs the last of the beans off her plate with a piece of brown bread. She wipes her mouth with the edge of her napkin. Then her hand stops. Cora senses her pause. She glances up. Bridge is looking across the room, and Cora follows her gaze. It is a man she is looking at. A stranger. He is young, fair, well dressed. He is sitting beside Alpha Russell, his head bent toward her. The older woman is speaking to him, and he is listening. Then he looks up directly at Bridge, and Cora can sense something electric, something understood pass between them. Bridge's eyes snap around. She glares at her mother.

“What?” she says, her voice sharp.

“Nothing,” Cora answers softly. She shakes her head and looks away. “Nothing.”

Bridge breaks off another piece of bread. She finds her knife and cuts a slice of butter off the pound.

He has cleared his plate. He lets Alpha fill it for him again. The food is fresh and good, and he finds that he is hungry.

“Do you always eat so much in heaven?” she teases, dishing out another serving of beans. Her pale eyes sparkle. She has deep lines through her cheeks, and he notices how they gather when she smiles. “You remind me of my oldest boy,” she says.