The Season of Open Water (4 page)

“We missed you at Lady Judith's party, Henry,” Alyssia calls from the counter. “Last Saturday. It was a capital time.”

Henry doesn't answer. The girl at the end of the aisle withdraws her hand from her pocket. She begins to walk toward him, without taking her eyes off his face. She brushes past him and walks to the counter. Alyssia steps back. The girl sets down a small paper sack.

“Flour?” Shorrock asks.

“A pound.”

“That all for you, Bridge?”

She nods.

“On your grub bill then?”

She shakes her head, sets down a few coins, takes the sack of flour, and turns to leave.

Henry steps toward the door and she stops. He is almost in front of her, almost blocking her way. She looks up at him, her eyes cool and fierce and bold. “I'm going out,” she says, and she raises one eyebrow as if she is asking for his permission and at the same time, daring him to give it. Her mouth wrinkles and then she smiles, a reluctant smile, her face melts down, and she is beautiful.

“Henry,” Alyssia says sharply.

Henry takes a step back, away from the door. The girl walks past him, outside. The chimes ring as the door closes, and she is gone. Gone.

He moves quickly then. He drops a quarter on the counter for the cigarettes, doesn't wait for the change. “Excuse me,” he murmurs toward Alyssia. He walks out.

From the front steps, he looks after the girl as she walks along the stone keeping wall that borders the river canal. She does not look back, but he watches her—the unevenly cropped black hair, her thin neck—he watches her until she has disappeared around the bend.

He climbs into his car and drops the cigarettes by his hat on the passenger seat. There is a bit of dust in his eye. He rubs the corner of the lid to work it out. He turns the car around and heads back down the old road toward the city. Dead leaves strike his windshield, and he sets on the wiper blades from time to time to brush them away.

Late that afternoon at the mill, an hour before the time bell, as he walks past the drawing-in room on his way down to the office, he sees an older woman seated at a harness in the far corner below the window. He stops for a moment in the doorway. She is old for the work. Hooked nose, thin arms, the veins rise out of her pale skin. He watches the fluid precision of her hands as she enters the yarn into the reed and threads it through the dropwire, and he thinks of the girl, as he has perhaps a hundred times since he saw her earlier that morning, standing in the dim light of Shorrock's store. He wonders who she is, what she stole, what would be worth stealing. And what was it about her—some slightly wild beauty— that is haunting him now? He wonders why one path should cross another. If there is some outlying reason that cannot be explained by natural or philosophic law—a twist of a fate, a fluke, something so mundane, so benign and accidental, a forgotten pack of cigarettes left on a side table in a downstairs hall.

The woman drawing-in has not noticed him. She is intent on her work. The sun streams through the window and rests on her shoulders. Her fingers, deft and quick, slip through the yarn.

Bridge

She could feel his eyes on her as she walked away, a light warmth like the sun on her neck. She does not look back. She does not turn around. She keeps walking until she is around the bend and out of sight. Then she stops. She stands still in the broken shadows at the edge of the woods, clutching the sack of flour. She looks down at her feet, at the sunlight flung in irregular patterns across the ground. She can feel her heart beating, and it is as if her body is hollow and she is only her heart.

In her left overall pocket, she can feel the tin of oysters that she stole, its slight weight against her thigh. In the store, she had recognized him right away, of course. But it took her a moment to realize she had been caught—she had never been caught— it had taken her another moment to realize he would say nothing. He simply stood there, at the other end of the aisle, looking at her, and the way he looked at her washed through her like cool water, strange and intimate and unfamiliar.

She tries not to think about it. She fingers the tin in her pocket. She feels young and ridiculous, ashamed that he had seen her take it, annoyed with herself, annoyed with him. She tries in her mind not to see it at all, not to see his face, not to be moved one way or another by their encounter or the odd chance of meeting him twice in twelve hours.

She cuts down to the river. There are skiffs tied up against the wall of the canal. She steps onto one and lies down across the wooden thwart. The sun is warm on her face. She caps her hand over her eyes to shield out the light and looks toward the Head. She tells herself that she is not looking for him. She knows it is a lie. But he is gone. His car is gone. The village has begun to stir to life, bodies milling in the clear, midmorning light. Abigail Dean is opening up her hat shop, hanging a set of copper chimes on a hook above the door, sweeping off the front steps. Harold Steele draws open the window shutters of the tea room and sets small iron tables on the walk outside. On the front porch of the mail-stop, Abiel Tripp hauls himself out of his chair. He readjusts his suspenders, then takes a turn to the other end of the porch and back, his worn body ambling with a rickety grace.

Cars and trucks flow back and forth across the bridge and up Old County Road. Bridge watches them from the boat. The thwart is hard against the back of her head. The sun is smooth on her face, the river rocking gently underneath her. Her mind is loose, and it occurs to her that she is thinking of him, still, Vonniker, without thinking of him. She is waiting for him, perhaps, without waiting for him. She smiles to herself. It is late—close to ten. She stands up and picks up her sack of flour. She steps off the skiff onto the wall of the canal and walks home.

Cora

Cora sits in the kitchen between two of the galvanized tubs—one filled with bluing water for the whites, one for the rinse. She knows they are here, and she does not want to think about them—Honey Lyons and the three strangers he has brought with him. They are waiting on her father. She wants them to be gone.

She has known Honey Lyons since she was a girl. She does not want him in her yard. He is a slippery nail of a man, a damaged wolf. Once she saw him twist the neck of a goose for no other reason than to do it. She has heard he is up to his chin in the rum-running trade, that he works for the Syndicate, and these men in their dark suits he has brought with him, she knows they are no good. When Bridge walked by them earlier on her way to Shorrock's store, two of the men had looked her up and down with that slick and hungry way some men have. Bridge had shrugged them off, paid them no mind.

When Cora was her daughter's age, eighteen, she was already married. On the eve of her wedding to Russell Weld, who would become the father of her three children, Cora gnawed at the skin around her nails until it bled. She wore gloves for the ceremony. Calfskin. White. They were not new, and there was a tea stain on the inside of the right wrist where the second button closed. Her mother, Hannah, in a rare act of domesticity, had baked the wedding cake—sweet and rich, a buttery lightness, so full of hope—it fluttered up like wings in Cora's mouth.

That night there was a meteor shower. She and Russell stood outside, still in their wedding clothes, her feet chilled against the doorstone. He held her tightly, their faces upturned toward the heavens as those thin green lights sliced open the sky all around them. They stood there for over an hour, gripping one another, in that strange and silent storm of dying stars.

Cora had expected that when she woke up the next morning, she would find herself changed. She had expected that to be a wife would add some weight to her, some root. And as her husband lay sleeping on the bed behind her, his naked chest rinsed in the early morning light, she had stared into the mirror above the washbasin. She scoured every inch of herself, looking for some altered feature, some sign. Her face was still her face—more peaked than usual perhaps from lack of sleep—stiff dark pockets around her eyes. She bit her teeth into her lip to flood it with color, and lingered awhile longer before the mirror, but there was nothing different, nothing changed. She dressed, gathered up their wedding clothes from the pile on the floor, and went downstairs, and it was only as she stepped outside onto the back porch that she realized that the world itself was different—everything around her, everything familiar—trees, yard, sky—all of it suffused with a new and deeper hue.

And then there were babies—one, two, three—two daughters, a son—and the world was full. Then one was lost, under the ice, and Russell was lost, in the swine flu—so much lost, so suddenly, so soon, her mind divided like a sheet of glass—and boxes and boxes of grief. They piled up and there was no room for her, so she removed herself, and it happened then: the mystery of the wind in the curtains, the mystery of light shed through the leaves—all of it died to her then.

It was the wash work that she clung to. She soaked and scrubbed and rinsed and wrung and starched. She hung nightshirts, linens, trousers, socks. She set clothes out on the line in every type of weather. She pulled and washed the sheets until there was no bed left to strip, then she went down the road to the houses of their neighbors and begged for their soiled clothes. The money she brought in from the work was slight, but steady, enough to caulk the gaps.

Each morning, she sets out the tubs. Boils the water to fill them. One for the dark wash. One for the whites. Two for the rinse. She cuts out a fresh bar of soap with a warm bread knife. Then, with a finer blade, she slices off thin chips and flakes them into the hot water. She stirs the clothes as they soak, battling out the dirt, she opens up the creases, the folds, so the soap can work its way through. The water scalds her hands. The most stubborn dirt is always in her daughter Bridge's clothes. (For her stubbornness, Cora thinks.) Each piece rinsed, battled, rinsed again.

It is in the water that all possibility lives. And this morning, as she sits in the kitchen with Mary Milliken's white nightshifts billowing up through the sudsy water, she notices that the men are still there—the men in the dark suits and Honey Lyons. Her father has come home from the beach and they are speaking with him. She can hear their voices through the moving surface diced with light as if the voices live under the water, as if they live in that trembling, fractured image of her face. She does not listen hard enough to make out the words. She does not want to. But she can sense the seesaw of the exchange, the back and forth, the tug and push and pull. She can tell her father doesn't like them. His voice seizes up once, just once, then relents, softens down again. There are chinks in her father now that weren't there before. He is awkward with anger. He does not have the knack for it he used to have. For years, she dreamed his rage. She dreamed it damp and lovely, something tangible, a blanket or the wind she could wrap herself into.

The harsh smell of lye sticks in her nose.

Her son, Luce, is still asleep upstairs—she remembers this suddenly. She has not heard a sound, not a step or a creak of the bed-springs, and she says a quick prayer to the water,
Let him sleep, Let
him be late for work, Let him not wake up until those men outside are
gone.
She does not want his path to cross with theirs. She does not want any dark little part of him to be tempted. Cora knows him well, so well it is a splinter in her heart.

When she thinks of her children, they are close to her, they are almost in her skin or she is in theirs—she can feel them wince and kick and breathe—but when she thinks of herself, it is always from a distance, as if she were observing some separate creature passing beyond the reach of her own will. It happens most often when the white clothes are soaking in their bluing water, and her hands stir through the surface—pale and thin, the webs between the fingers nearly translucent in the water with a queer and greenish cast, like the hands of a sea-maid from out of the myths.

She thinks of it this way: she was a woman once free—she was exiled by grief to some lost pocket of herself, and she waits there in that dark corner, crouched and listening, waiting for the sky to open up again and take her.

Noel

Bridge comes back from Shorrock's at quarter past ten. The day has warmed. Noel shows her the fox.

“Found it in the road,” he says.

“What a beauty.” She turns the pelt in her hands. “Don't let Luce get hold of it. Did he ever get off this morning?”

“Left half an hour ago,” he answers. She nods and lays the fox on the porch.

“What about those men Honey Lyons brought around?”

He looks at her squarely, his eyes cool. “They came and went.”

She smiles at him and, for the moment, lets it go.

Together they unload the sea muck off the wagon bed and shovel it into low banks around the foundation of the house. Then they go into the shop to start work on the overturned hull of Duff Barton's skiff.

As they are stripping the gooseclams and the barnacles off the bottom of the boat with a wire brush and a putty knife, Bridge asks again about the men— Honey Lyons and the three strangers. She asks what they came looking for.

“Wanted some work done.”

“Rum work?”

“Boat work.”

She laughs. “I know who they are.”

Noel shakes his head. “Doesn't matter. I didn't take it.”

“How much did they offer?”

“A bit.”

“What's a bit?”

“A bit more than you'd expect.”

“You're an old crow.”

“It's a no-good job. No-good men.”

She shrugs and sets back to work on her side of the hull.

Noel doesn't tell her that although he didn't take the job, he didn't refuse it either. He told Honey Lyons he would need a night or so to think it through. Everyone knew that Honey Lyons was in tight with the Syndicate, and had no allegiance to any of the local rum-running gangs. He'd work shoulder to shoulder with each of them, any of them, if there was a season for it, but he was a double-bladed knife. They all knew it.

“This one here's rotted out,” Bridge says, prying up one of the planks. “This one too. Most of them are nailsick.” Noel comes around to see. He fingers the hole where the nail has been reset so many times the wood around it has worn out. “They won't hold again,” Bridge says. “Does he want the nailsick ones replaced?”

“That's what he said.”

“Alright then.”

Noel thinks of the money. What Honey Lyons has offered him for this one job is more than he'll turn in a year. He grips for the stool behind him and leans against it. He watches his granddaughter as she works. She pushes her hair from her eyes, her face oiled by sweat, lacquered in the dusty light cast through the windows, and he remembers back to the first time he held her, the day she was born, he remembers her soft ridged skull in the palm of his hand, and even then, he had had the sense it was the whole of his life he was holding, not in pieces or fractured notions, but all of it, in her all of it, and he had felt a stunning joy, and at the same time, a sober, chilling sense of his own age.

She is grown now, and he loves her the way he used to love the sea. His life is measured by her. Sometimes as he watches her work over a busted hull in one corner of the shop, he will remember the places he has been, and his heart will ache for the wandering. He yarns with her as they work. Every so often, he will glance up and see her face, as fragile and rare as those objects he brought back with him from his voyages: the pelican feet and the ivory mussel shells, the fishing line strung out of mother-of-pearl.

He has taught her all the knots: the clove hitch and the monkey's fist, the shroud knot and the Turk's head. From the time she could walk she has helped him in the shop. He has taught her how to use beeswax to bind frayed strands of thread, to caulk a seam and wield an adze. He has taught her how to push her weight just enough into the saw to make a clean, swift cut, how to force a broadax to shape timbers, how to steam oak ribs and soak wood in water until it bends.

Before the causeway was built across the tidal flat between Gooseberry Neck and the mainland, he took her seafowling on the bar, and they would wait there together, the old man and the child, crouched in the rocks, their shadows crouched behind them, their boots dug to the shins in cold wet sand.

He has taught her how to bait a hook and grease a trap, how to stalk and hunt and kill, how to clean, oil, load, cock, point, and shoot a gun. He could tell from the first time he took her down to practice shoot in the gravel pit that she had a knack for cold metal. She had that certain kind of ruthlessness it takes to pull the trigger over and over again, without emotion, without rage or cruelty, desire or greed. She was not like her brother, Luce. She did not have his hotheadedness. From the time she was a mite, she seemed to understand that killing, in its purest form, is an empty-eyed passionless art.

When she was still young, Noel bought a small gun for her off Samuel Browne, a single-shot .410. Once, when she had left a splinter of air between her shoulder and the butt, the recoil hit back into her chest and chipped off a bit of her collarbone. Another time, she held up the gun, and as she fired, the comb slapped hard against her cheek and bruised the bone. When she was older and he was teaching her on his gun—a double-barreled twelve gauge—she pulled both triggers and the shock of the blast sent her ass-over-teakettle into a pile of shale. She got up again, brushed herself off, and said nothing of it. That was just her way.

Once, he had believed that what he taught her, what he had to give, would be enough.

He knows that the world is changing. Bridge reads him snips from the newspapers, and he has heard stories of men who have cut their fortunes overnight. His old friend Rui has made a small but tidy bundle for himself trading in the stock market. A little money is a little means. A little freedom.

Money is reason enough to take this work, he tells himself. It is only one job. To refit a boat. To strip out her insides and rebuild her lighter, faster, more silent. And if the work had been offered by anyone else, he would have snapped it up, no hesitation, no questions asked.

He looks up again at Bridge. She has stripped off the dead bottom boards and stacked them in a heap on the floor. She is setting down new ones, the heart side of the wood facing out, and he notices then that, as she works, there is a thin forked line between her brows. It is slight but so unlike her, a small frown, it puzzles him, and he watches her more closely.

She can feel his eyes on her. She bites her lip. She isn't working well, he must notice it, he must have begun to wonder why. Her hands are clumsy, and she is annoyed with herself. It is simple work she is doing, but now again, for the fourth time already, she pinches her finger setting one board against another. She swears under her breath, shakes her hand loose. It is only a nip, the pain sharp, no blood, no broken skin, but everything feels upside down, her head upside down. The planks don't seem to line up. She is thinking about the morning, it is all the fault of the morning, and that man, Henry Vonniker, seeing him last night at Asa's, then seeing him again at the store, stealing the oysters and having him catch her do it, and the way he had looked at her, astonishment and frank desire, she had seen it, felt it. It had made her feel alive.

Why should that happen? What should it matter? Why was she even asking herself when she knew very well it couldn't mean anything? And thinking about it now makes her restless, impatient, a little bit angry that the thought of it, the thought of him, is taking up room in her head. When she works, she likes her head clear, like calm water, so she can see through to the bottom of things. That is what she wants. That is the way she likes it, and the only thing now that she feels a little bit grateful for is that Luce was gone by the time she got home so she didn't have to banter with him, because she wasn't in the mood. He might have sensed something was off, and if he had, he would have bugged after her about it, because that was just the way he was. Luce couldn't let things go.

She takes a breath in, but doesn't look up. She still feels her grandfather watching her. She keeps lining up the planks, setting the nails, slamming them in with the hammer. It is a sound she loves— that clear, square hit of a hammer on the head of a nail that drives it clean through the plank into the frame. And usually it is a motion she can do without thinking. Her grandfather is not saying anything. She can hear the sound of his teeth grinding on the stem of his pipe, but he is not working, he is sitting still, very still, his eyes on her. Finally she puts down the hammer and straightens up, one hand on her hip. She looks at him and says, “So you're not going to be much use today, are you?”

He bursts out laughing. She blushes and smiles. He looks at her carefully. “I'm just watching over you.”

“You don't need to do that.”

“Just want to make sure you don't get sloppy.”

“Why should I get sloppy?”

“You'll have to tell me.”

She looks down at her hands and notices a thread on the cuff of her sleeve coming loose. She gives it a tug, and it quickly unravels. She breaks it off with her teeth.

“I don't really think it's me,” she says slowly, her voice controlled. “After all, I'm not the one sitting around, idle hands, thinking about the men who came by this morning and what they might have offered me.”

He doesn't answer right away. She watches his face. But there is no change in his expression, no twitch, no shift, nothing in his eyes, nothing she can see. He is good at hiding things. She knows this. He shifts his pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Maybe I'm thinking about that fox,” he says.

“It was a beauty of a thing,” she admits.

“Well, that's what it is. I can't stop thinking about that fox.”

She laughs and brushes some dust off a seam between two of the planks. “That might be a lie,” she says, “but I can let it be that, if that's what you want.”

She is more composed now. She feels lighter, happy even. Her world seems to have turned right again. Her world is her world. She picks up the next plank and sets it down. “So you're just going to sit there?” she asks him, rummaging through the box of nails.

“I'm thinking I might.”

“Well, why don't you draw me a sketch on the panbone?”

“I can do that.”

“Cut me a whale,” she says. She picks up the hammer. “Gallied. Big flukes sweeping eye to eye.”

“You want an iron in her?”

“As long as she scuttles the boat of the man who threw it.”

Noel chuckles as he goes to the wall by the steam-box and picks up the panbone—a huge flat piece from the jaw of a sperm whale he hawked years ago from a shop near the Seamen's Bethel in the city. He carries it back to his stool and rests it over his knees. He finds an empty spot in the broad center and, with a pencil, draws a light sketch. Then with his needle, he begins to cut. Over the years he has carved into the panbone, filling in the lines with black and colored ink: sketches of the voyages he took, the rafts of birds, buckling seas, the postbox on the turtleshell rock south of the Galápagos where a sailor might find a letter sent three years before. He has sketched the angled noses of the atolls just north of the Sandwich Isles, the pod of devilfish they glimpsed, the suckers finning close against the cows; scenes of drifting north through the pack ice in the Arctic, glaciers, musky light, the sloped eyes of the Inuit women, their dark faces roped by fur. He has sketched scenes of Kauai—the island he came to and could not leave, the island where he first met Hannah—the green water off the reef clear as gin, palm trees, red clay roads, the sheer drop of the black cliffs into the surf, the folding hills where the tribes lived west of Hanalei. Sometimes as he cuts, he will tell Bridge stories of where he has gone, of what he has seen, bony tales worn through years of being retold. The stories of the island are the ones that seem to make her happy, and in her happiness, he finds the place comes alive for him again: the fierce summer heat, the drenching tempers of the rain. On that island, he has told her, at every early dawn, there is an unthinkable calm, so still, so silent, one can hear the mountains breathe.

He is spooked by the places he has been—the geographies he's passed through—they gather around him in his shop—in the tins of bolts and drifts, in the shavings at his feet, chips of cedar, oak, pine. He sniffs in old smells with the sawdust through his nose—smells of creosote, coconut, oil.

He cuts another line into the bone, the long straight end of a second harpoon, fleshed deep into the whale. They jut like pins from her huge body, breaking out of the sea. Another line.

“Damn!” says Bridge. “I muxed it.”

He looks up. She is standing in the corner, holding the ripsaw and a plank.

“You cut the wedge?” he asks.

“I sawed out the wrong side.”

He smiles. “And see, there it is—why I need to still be watching over you.”

“What a waste,” she says, staring in dismay at the board in her hand.

“It's just a plank. Set it out to air and cut another.”

She is clearly upset. It surprises him she would be upset over something so trivial. She looks at him from across the room. Even from that distance, he can see her eyes fill. “I am no use today, Papa. I can't do a thing right today. No use at all.”

He smiles at her gently, shaking his head. He won't ask what's on her mind or try to coax it out of her.

“Some days are like that,” he says simply. “I'm having that same kind of day myself.”

She manages a smile. She pushes her hair from her face with the back of her sleeve.

“That's all it is,” he says. “Just that kind of day. And that piece of wood in your hand is just a piece of wood. So go to the loft and get another and cut it again.”

She nods and carries the plank out of the shop. He hears the thud as she leans it against the sidewall in the sun.

He looks again at the panbone on his lap—the bare sketch he has drawn so far, the whale and a small boat beside her, flung up against a wave. He tilts it toward the window to see the lines more clearly, to see what he has done and what is left to do.