“Guess your ways will have to be good enough.”
Arnoux unleashed a sudden and conspiratorial grin—the one people would remember years later for its power to both disarm and engender camaraderie. “Mr. Jupiter,” he said, “I’ll build you the boat to beat all boats or turn my hands to a bloody pulp trying.”
Rather than alarming Moses, this intensity of phrase seemed to intrigue him. Arnoux ducked back inside the house and came out carrying a sheaf of yellow legal-paper sketches. He started spreading the drawings of boats around on the ground in the half-frozen mud. “These are nothing,” he said. “Your boat will embarrass them all.”
Moses laughed and set his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Let’s just start with something that floats.”
All through December Arnoux sat at a small red desk in an alcove just off the kitchen drawing plans for the boat and for a workshop on the property. Falon sat beside the woodstove in their bedroom holding Simon, still an infant then, and writing short community notices for the nearest local newspaper, then three towns over. Late each afternoon the snap of an ash log drew my father’s attention up from the desk, the sound of fire releasing him from his sketches back into the actual world. He reached up and touched the window. Bits of ice gathered under his nails, and he shuddered. He thought of Falon, imagined his lips pressed to her stomach, his lips kissing the undersides of her breasts, his lips tracing the back of her neck as she pushed his hand between her thighs. Desire, a taste like salt. His hands bathing her at night, lathering her stomach, caressing her feet. Her massaging oil into his tired hands. Only when the ash log snapped again did he allow himself to look toward the bedroom. There, framed in the doorway, he saw his wife’s bare legs, crossed beneath the opening of her robe. He rose, and went to her through the heat.
Early in the morning on New Year’s Day, Moses Jupiter came up through the cold in his coveralls to help Arnoux finish his shop. Falon’s brother Reggie was there as well, and together the three men worked for a week in nearly three feet of snow with their breath smoking in the light. With three axes, a couple of chainsaws, and a borrowed skidder, they logged out a small clearing back on the bank of the river. They framed a shed from rough timber. They roofed the structure with salvaged sheets of tin. Watching the men stand against the horizon, Falon thought of horses, of all things—creatures proud, powerful, seemingly eternal, and perhaps a little dense. Horses could be marvelous. But horses could be blinded too.
The finished boat shop sat back among the river birches exactly two hundred yards from the house. A shed with a plywood floor and a propane-fired space heater. Falon’s only request had been a single window built into the shop’s south wall so it faced the house. The river froze solid that winter. Full-moon tides washed massive cakes of sea ice up into the woods. Each morning, buzzing with the smell of his wife’s hair, her body, their bed, with the scent of his newborn son’s skin, Arnoux stepped out into the thin winter sunlight and leapt between the cakes as though they were icy footstools, his outstretched arms wheeling for balance. Watching him dance about the snowy woods, Falon felt as though her husband were slipping impossibly far away. It was the longest two hundred yards she had ever imagined. One morning she almost asked him to tie a rope from the shop door back to the house, but then she realized how foolish it sounded. How and when had her life become watching and worrying about a man all day long, a man, no less, who was only six hundred or so feet away?
By early April, the cold was beginning to release the bay. Arnoux was oblivious and giddy with accomplishment. Falon was realizing she couldn’t spend another winter entombed inside their house. As their differing realities set in, a stunning twenty-six-foot-long wooden lobster boat emerged from the woods.
For some bizarre, hard-to-fathom reason, my father refused full payment for that first boat, taking about half what the job was worth. He talked about how it didn’t seem right to be paid for something that brought him so much pleasure. He talked about owing Moses a debt that didn’t concern money, the debt of one’s beginnings. “That feeling you get when building a thing,” he said, “that should be enough.”
“Well, it isn’t,” my mother said. My parents had built their life together on the river based on money Arnoux had from the sale of his uncle’s small farm where he grew up. My father ground out extra money working maintenance jobs along the harbor and on coastal logging crews. My mother tutored and taught at the schools when there was a substitute opening. They were never rich, and it was never easy. Starting a boatbuilding outfit and later a newspaper pushed them to the edge of financial catastrophe even before my father’s reckless approach to money. “My life is not yours to make more difficult,” my mother said. “Our children’s lives will not be yours to make more difficult.” She told him he was cruel, shortsighted, naive, and obstinate, not to mention selfish. Finally she said she had not come into the world to raise a husband, which was a wonderful thing, but only when it had sense enough to make reasonable decisions. “No free rides, Arnoux,” she said. “Your time for their money. That’s how this works. You do something that doltish again, I go.”
I believe that was the only ultimatum my mother ever gave my father. For years after, lumber scraps appeared around the house with love notes written on them in dark pencil. They were always signed “With love, Your Dolt.”
From then on my father took cash for his builds, though still not as much as most thought his work was worth. My brothers and I could tell when he’d shorted himself. Days would pass where our mother didn’t say a single word. When she didn’t even look at our father. When she didn’t pull us onto her lap to read to us. Finally something would shift. My mother would start to sing the old ballads of love and bondage she adored (“On the Rock Where Moses Stood,” “She Moved Through the Fair,” “Samson and Delilah”), and my father, wherever he was—across the house sorting paints, in the woods felling a white pine to shape into a mast, down at the marina underneath a ketch scrapping away barnacles, outside the school waiting to pick us up, sidled up to The Fish House counter in town drinking coffee, gossiping, and looking preposterous in his crimson overalls stained with chainsaw grease—would hear her song, come home to her on the river, and wrap his arms about her waist. My brothers and I would nod to each other, confident that all was well and that our parent’s summoning magic was alive in the world.
My father’s initial financial decision created a certain buzz in the community. It also generated a second and perhaps greater benefit: enduring gratitude. For years after, random deliveries of seafood and venison and other game showed up at our house as payment. Whenever we needed to be plowed out in the winter, Moses Jupiter would suddenly be there in his laboring truck. When our mother wanted to get a weekly newspaper going in the lower Penobscot Valley and was having trouble securing a loan, Moses rallied the collective lobstering community. Thirty grizzled fishermen visited the bank president’s home early one Sunday morning. By noon the loan was approved.
Just as my mother had been pregnant with my brother while she was tearing through the woods making discoveries with my father, she was pregnant with me and then my brother Link while she renovated the salt-blasted brick harbor building into a newspaper office. Once a dormitory for cannery workers and later an emergency hospital never put to use during World War II, my mother filled the space with bookshelves and desk lamps and an archives room down in the basement. My uncle Reggie scoured the state collecting and photocopying back issues of every daily and weekly Maine newspaper dating back to the Civil War. My father tore out old walls and ran new electrical lines through the building with the delicacy of a surgeon repairing arteries. My mother, cradling her stomach, removed the emergency air-raid protocol posters, hoping that the bombs were indeed long gone. She saved the gas masks she found in storage bins in the basement, setting them about the newspaper office on windowsills and bookshelves for decoration.
Back at the house in the evenings, the three of them stood in the yard watching the
sun sink behind the river. The renovations were almost done. My mother hoped to print her first issue in a month, and she was already searching for stories. She wanted to write about the Penobscot River, but she wasn’t yet sure how. Clean water movements were starting up everywhere. There was hope that the environmental carnage of the lumber era might finally be over. Meanwhile a series of tribal land claim cases was gaining momentum. It seemed they might be headed for Washington, DC. Lawsuits by the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy nations called for a staggering two-thirds of the land in the state of Maine to be returned to the tribes, along with massive financial reparations. Instead of invoking broken treaties—no new news there—lawyers for the tribes were claiming that while the tribes had indeed sold the land in question to the federal government during the 1800s, the sales were illegal because they’d never been approved by Congress, as required by the Indian Non-Intercourse Act of 1790. The deals were therefore nullified, and the land was still owned by the tribes. The strategy was smart. Two-thirds of the state. And they might get it all back. People were panicking. She thought she might start there.
The light was hot and the hills were deep and green and smoky with the scent of pine. Paint speckled her arms, and her bones were heavy. She watched her husband drink two beers out in the setting sun with her brother, the two men standing in the gravel yard rocking back on their boot heels. They never sat. Men were always standing around and never sitting. She wished she could figure out how to tell them to just sit down and enjoy things already.
“The Lowering Days,” Falon said, interrupting the silence.
“What?” asked Reggie.
“That’s what I’m going to name the newspaper.”
“Sounds ominous.”
Falon yawned, took a sip from her husband’s beer, then grabbed and finished her brother’s. “People don’t pay for cheer,” she said. All things needed their story, and she was already planning the paper’s narrative. Over the years she’d sometimes tell people the name came from her great-grandfather, who’d been a doctor up the Penobscot in Prospect and also routinely presided over funerals, gathering the townspeople in mourning on these lowering days, as he called them, when a body was sent into the earth. Other times she said the name came from the birthing day for a boat, the lowering day, when the finished hull was first slipped into the waiting sea.
“The Lowering Days.” Reggie repeated the name slowly. He scuffed his boots around in the dust like a kid and grinned at the cloud swirling up around him in the light. He was tall and gaunt with broad shoulders, and his face always seemed to be craning through doorways well before his body. The bond between Reggie and my father had been fairly immediate. Looking back now, I understand their respect for one another grew from a shared belief in duty. When thousands of American kids were burning their draft cards in protest, Reggie Harper adopted a much quieter track, staying home in Seal Point and caring for his aging, ill parents. Meanwhile the rest of the world turned in full and fiery revolt. His own sister decamped for California two weeks after graduating from high school. She would return three years later but never speak much about those thousand or so days of what all assumed to be a combination of pacific heartbreak, collapsed idealism, and a mysterious unrequited love. She spent another year downeast near the Canadian border at a farm where she devoted three hours a day to meditating in a cedar-framed zendo with a group of like-minded and amiable Buddhists and eight hours a day growing potatoes, squash, and kale. She claimed it was the simplest year of her life but stopped short of implying she should have stayed at the zendo farm, knowing, I suppose, that she would then be claiming a life without us.
“I like it,” Reggie said. “The name. It has a weight to it. It means business.”
“I should hope so,” said Falon. “I’m not interested in running some community rag people use for toilet paper in a bind.”
The only Penobscot Bay lobsterman who didn’t show up at the bank president’s house that long-ago Sunday was Lyman Creel. Lyman was president of the lobster co-op and a highliner with a talent for filling traps. He had organized area lobstermen to work together, not against each other, bringing in a collaborative model that existed atop a powder keg of hard personalities and old territorial thinking. Lobstermen still fished grounds handed down from grandparent to parent to child, packed sawed-off shotguns in their cabins to deal with interlopers, and refused to acknowledge life jackets as sane ideas, but they no longer just sold their catches from the backs of their trucks on the side of the road. Now their hauls were cataloged, divided, packaged, and shipped wholesale all over the country. There was even a gear trade, a supply depot, a commissary store, and a communal fuel pump down on the harborfront. Lyman believed supplying lobsters all over the world was the real goal. He’d been looking into selling in Japan and China. He knew every ocean shelf, reef, and trench out as deep as Georges Bank, and despite his collaborative spirit, which may have been grounded in communal profit more than communal unity, he was ruthless around his fishing grounds—once he’d nearly cut another fisherman’s hand off by spiking him through the wrist with a harpoon when he caught him around his traps. He and his family were also our nearest neighbors. Lyman’s wife, Grace, was a social worker and community organizer. She was also my mother’s oldest friend, their bond dating back to grade school, and it was no accident that they had built their lives beside each other in the woods, despite the lingering divide between their husbands. Lyman and Grace had two children. Their son, Galen, was a year younger than Simon. Their daughter, Wren, was the same age as Link and me.
A mile of thick state forest separated our houses, and a well-worn path through the trees connected us. Stacks of lobster traps cluttered the Creels’ yard, while the detritus of boatbuilding littered ours. We were a boatbuilding family, and they were a fishing family. We should have existed in a sort of natural harmony, one industry being dependent on the other, but that wasn’t the case.
My father had made it through his war, in truth, not just by dreaming of boats but also by deserting. In 1970 he traveled from Vietnam to the Azores islands on a two-week furlough. He planned to live in a rough seaside shack and study Portuguese wooden boatbuilding traditions and how boatbuilders had to conform to the fisheries they served. Everyone on base told him it was a crazy thing to do on a combat break. Go get drunk, man. Go get some rest. Go get laid and then go get laid again. Hungry to start a new life, Arnoux wanted none of that. At night, in the Azores, as the Atlantic winds crashed about his cabin, he began to be haunted by dreams of body parts. Severed appendages slowly filled the waters surrounding the islands. By his tenth night away from the war, there wasn’t a single wave left in the sea, only hands and feet and wrecked torsos and severed digits fed on by schools of ravenous fish. The war, my father realized, was over for him. He took what he knew about building boats and fled.
Lyman’s path had been far different. His family had owned lumber and paper mills along the Penobscot River for generations. When Lyman realized that his own family and their mills were killing the planet, he decided he could no longer be a part of it. He dropped out of college, where he was slowly being groomed to take over the family empire, enlisted in the army, and served four tours in Vietnam, earning a silver star for rescuing a platoon of men during an ambush in Da Nang. After he returned home, Lyman married Grace Creel, took her name as his own, denounced his family, and dedicated his life to struggling out a living as a fisherman. He hoped never again to have anything to do with a mill.
Though many still saw Lyman as a spoiled rich kid, his fishing prowess had earned him respect over the years. And he wasn’t an entirely unsympathetic figure in the bay either. As a teenager he’d watched his best friend, a Penobscot boy named Billy Jupiter, a distant relative of Moses Jupiter, fall from a bluff during a night of drunken foolishness. Lyman and Billy were both in love with a girl named Falon Harper. Later she would become Falon Ames, and then my mother. Between Billy’s death and the awful toll his family’s mills had take
n on the Penobscot Nation, a nickname emerged that would follow Lyman the rest of his life: Indian Killer. “There goes that Indian Killer,” people said, some with disgust, others, sadly, with reverence and a bit of awe.
As a child in a small community you can feel the fault lines running beneath your family and other families. These invisible tension wires tie one adult to another. You tiptoe around them. You step over them. You don’t know why they are there, only that they are there, and that they are terribly dangerous things. You realize it only takes a few wrong steps to crack open the earth. Then what’s to keep it from swallowing everyone you love?
Compared to my father’s wild stories of bailing on the war and being chased across Europe by the navy, Lyman’s wartime heroics seemed banal and predictable. I believe it infuriated Lyman that his community could love my father, a deserter, while he, the war hero, the lobster diviner, the visionary advocate who had organized an entire fishery, was still simply known as the Indian Killer.
Two
Six weeks after a delegation of Japanese investors made their Valentine’s Day visit to the shuttered Penobscot Narrows Paper Company mill to explore purchasing and reopening the operation, flames engulfed the sprawling property. I was fourteen years old then, and had no idea how that fire was also about to engulf our lives as well.
Years later nighttime walkers, motorists, and stargazers as far north as Kenduskeag would still describe the horrible red wall of dancing heat they claimed they saw devouring the southern horizon that night.
By morning, as the sun crested above the land, a charred palace hung on the banks of the Penobscot River. The caravan of Japanese saviors seemed a vanished dream. A palpable sense of both loss (that mill, the sprawling, environmental monstrosity that it was, had sustained generations of people in the Penobscot Valley) and joy (all vile things have their end too) ran along the police scanners, breakfast counters, harbor front, and general gossiping and gathering spots of Eastport, the small mill town known for its paper production and its dark history. Some five thousand years earlier, the Red Paint People had inhabited the area. Named for their elaborate funeral practice of covering their bodies in red ochre before burial, they settled on Indian Point, a slip of land jutting out into the Penobscot River. The same slip of land was later called T’kope’suk by the Penobscots, and revered as a camping ground because of a spring there. When Colonel Jonathan East and his Massachusetts land grantees arrived in 1762 to survey Indian Point, they were reportedly driven mad. Some thought their lunacy came from Penobscot curses, others, from their own greed, lit by the towering white pines, fish-brimming river, and resource-rich valley that wound all the way down to the deep waters of the bay. When East returned a decade later to colonize the land, building a saw mill, a general store, a massive plantation house, and log homes for twenty more ambitious, land-hungry families, his madness returned as well. East burned his lover in the town square for being a witch. In an awful but predictable American twist, history forgot the name of the murdered woman, while East had a town named after him. Six months after setting his lover on fire, East died alone in the woods in a gruesome logging accident, the first victim of the curse his lover had supposedly laid over Eastport. Now Indian Point cupped the smoking remains of a paper mill, and town residents claimed that the mill was the latest casualty of the curse.
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