“Falon,” Moses said. “We need to talk.” His tone had changed, and I felt suddenly afraid. Under my hand Cricket seemed to feel it as well, a long shiver quaking through her body.
“Moses,” my mother said, “I believe we truly do.”
My mother sat at the table while Moses moved about the kitchen, making coffee. The hard, dark smell of it filled the room. In the distance the saws had gone silent, and I figured my father had gone to pick Link up in town.
Moses stopped moving and turned to fully face us. “Lyman caught a Penobscot girl nosing around one of his traps two days ago,” he said. “She’d built a weir out there to fish with. Guess she got curious about why there was a Penobscot Bay lobster trap up in the throat of the Penobscot River.”
My mother looked over at me and was about to speak when Moses interrupted her. “He should stay.”
“Fine,” my mother said. “Keep going.”
“The kid was in a canoe. Lyman caught up to her before she could paddle back to shore. He had her around the throat when someone came down the river and started firing warning shots.”
“Where exactly was this?”
“In the narrows above Odom Ledge. Out around Verona Island, the eastern channel.”
“The narrows.” I could see my mother mapping the altercation out in her head. Picturing who fished where, what buoys were traditionally set in what spots. “Why’s he way up there?”
“Hard to say. Greed’s a long tradition for them, though.”
“That bastard.” My mother stood and slammed her fist down on the table.
“Don’t jump to outrage just because you don’t like him,” Moses said.
“I like him fine.”
“I get it’s complicated.”
“And not your business.”
“Ačélihoso,” Moses said. “Lyman can’t control himself, Falon. I fear he’s going deeper into a bad place.”
My mother looked through the woods. “Around in the eastern channel. That means the trap was in the river’s estuary, not the bay, and a Penobscot kid might have every right to what was in it.”
Moses grimaced. “That may be true,” he said. “But I didn’t come out here looking to stir things up that way. I came out here to tell you something wrong happened to a child. Word’s getting around, and I wanted someone with a reasonable head to have the facts. Lyman shouldn’t be setting traps in the river. But the kid shouldn’t be sticking her hands in them either. That’s dangerous business. Dumb business. And I don’t think this is a dumb kid. A scared kid. A pissed-off kid. But not a dumb one.”
“What you do is cut the warp line and sink it.” My brother’s voice was full of all the collected, honed, and misguided bravado an American boyhood could manage. Arnoux and Link were standing in the hallway off the kitchen. Reggie was with them as well. I hadn’t heard any of them come inside.
“Not if you’re starving,” Arnoux said. He was looking down at the floor.
“It’s illegal to set a lobster trap within three hundred feet of the mouth of a fish weir,” Reggie said, surprising us. “So the question might be what came first, the weir or the trap?”
“Who cares?” Link interrupted. “She should have sunk the thing. No more trap, no more fishing on your turf.”
“And a good way to get shot,” our father said and walked out of the house, trailing an anger behind him I didn’t fully understand.
Reggie gripped my shoulder. When my mother nodded, my uncle led me outside. My father was stomping around the yard with his fists balled at his sides. He stopped when he saw Cricket. Reggie and I watched as the horse leaned her heavy head into my father’s neck, nuzzling him, comforting him. I moved to join him, and Reggie pulled back against me, “Not just yet,” he said.
After a few moments pressed near the horse, my father laughed loudly, kissed Cricket’s neck, and walked her over to the woods to retrieve the discarded carrot from earlier.
“Ignore your brother,” Reggie whispered and let go of my shoulder.
I had always thought that land was land. Water was water. An island was an island. None were human-owned, up for occupying, raiding, or abusing. When the wind tore through the trees, I turned to the sky and tried to map the shapes it wrote into the branches. I put my hand to the damp grass in the morning and lifted it when I no longer felt thirsty. Smells were not just smells, but layers of smells, lovingly built like a painting. Twigs on top of leaves on top of moss on top of loam on top of dirt on top of root on top of rock on top of bone on top of basalt. On the forest floor I ran through time. Old leaves under new leaves. Dry needles at the bases of pines. When I scratched the needles up with the toe of a shoe, gnats would whip through the light, flock to fresh scent. I slipped pine cones between my lips. Pressed my ear to the bellies of ancient cedars, heard blood that I believed in beneath the bark. It was in the aliveness of the world that I knew I was alive.
Now I was again reminded of how little I knew about the world’s actual workings. Everything had been taken by someone at some point, and those old hurts and wayward entitlements raged on, generation to generation, feeding sadness and violence.
Scared, I began staying closer to my mother at the paper. Two days after Moses brought Cricket to our house, I was there late in the afternoon. I’d just come back from The Fish House with dinner, a Styrofoam container of golden-brown biscuits and thick, spicy sausage gravy, when I saw Lyman Creel, wind-reddened and stumbling a bit. He moved across the harbor front, plunged into the road without looking, narrowly missing a passing car, and walked into the newspaper office.
“I want this printed,” he said, and set a sheet of paper down on my mother’s desk.
It was obvious that Lyman hadn’t slept in the days since the incident. He stunk of whiskey and sweat. Of camp smoke, pine needles, and dirt. Moses had been right. Word of Lyman’s act had spread quickly about the bay, and the community’s disgust at one of their own attacking a child had displaced their anger over the fire. Faced with all this, the defensiveness sank from my mother’s face. “Lyman,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“I just want this printed.” He tapped a finger on the crumpled sheet of paper. “It’s an apology. To that kid I roughed up. No,” he corrected himself, “to everyone.”
“Lyman,” she whispered. “It doesn’t work like that. This isn’t a confessional. It’s a newspaper.”
He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his red hands. “Just take it, Falon. Read it. Please.”
“I won’t.”
“I defended you at The Fish House.”
“You’re here because of guilt and ego. Those are you problems. Nothing about that piece of paper interests me.”
Lyman swayed on his feet for a moment, turned his face up to the overhead lights, squinting. “You got cruel,” he said.
“Maybe I always was.”
“People need to know what really happened, and no one will listen to me. But you know how it was. Back then. You know me.”
Back then. Falon did know. She had been on the bluff the night Billy died. Seventeen years old, senior year. The middle of March on a Wednesday night, and she was at the edge of the world with two boys and a bottle of wine. She could see the hell the summer was going to bring. They both wanted her, worshipped her, and there was such a buzz in that, in knowing she had so much over them. The wine kicked that buzz up a notch, and she got full of herself, thought: This must be close to how it feels to be a man. A few days earlier they’d both bought her a bouquet of Easter lilies from the grocery store. Billy giving her the flowers on one day, and then Lyman showing up with the exact same flowers the next morning, holding them out in the yard, awkwardly nodding to the windows, where her brother Reggie and her mother were watching, and then getting back into his father’s big Cadillac and backing around, all of his performance, the formality of his pressed jeans and button-up shirt, the showiness of that rich man’s car, the statement of bringing the flowers, really quite hokey and yet endearing as wel
l. It was obvious that he was nervous, had gone about gathering together this performance to give his brain something to fixate on other than what he might say and what she might say. She put Lyman’s flowers on the counter beside Billy’s flowers and went on with her life, wondering suddenly: What else would they do? Though she hated Easter, hollow gifts, and store flowers more than just about anything, she’d been seeing them both since, riding around, drinking their wine, and marveling at how strange her life had become, to be wanted so badly by two people who you were convinced you’d barely remember in ten years, when you were long gone from here and your real life had started. She watched Billy horsing around with Lyman on the rocks now. The two of them had been stacking up deadfall for a fire before they got tired and started singing Grateful Dead songs to each other. Now they were dancing with each other, a big old foolish drunken waltz like two pseudo-lovers at a bad wedding. She thought about being wanted, the danger in that sort of buzz, then she got angry at the thought that they only wanted her for her body, not everything, and angry that they both assumed they could drink themselves to waste tonight and she’d take care of them after, mother them. She lifted the bottle and drank until her tongue burned, wondered if she could steer them toward each other instead. When she looked back to the cliff, Billy was gone. Seconds before, he had been swaying in Lyman’s arms. Lyman was screaming. Running along the ledge, looking down into the waters. Two hours later, at first light, a team of volunteer firefighters hauled Billy Jupiter’s shattered body from the rocks. Three months later Falon was in California, trying to forget, and Lyman was headed to Vietnam with dreams of someday taking over a fishery.
“I don’t like to think about that night,” Falon said.
“They hate me because of it and because of my family.”
“You’re not a target.”
“And you’re not the one everyone called Indian Killer for the rest of their life. I got a history here with them.”
“You’re being paranoid, Lyman. I can’t stand it when you get this way.”
“My great-great-grandfather was one of the first people who dammed the river. Billy once told me that a lot of his people saw that as the beginning of the end. The frog monster returned, blocking the river, the fish passages, eating all the water up. All this fairy-tale shit. I didn’t even know that kid was Penobscot. I just saw someone around my traps and lost it.”
“That’s the thing, Lyman. She wasn’t just someone. She was a kid. Tell me you wouldn’t have killed her if Moses hadn’t shown up.”
Lyman blushed, eyed the floor. He didn’t answer, couldn’t figure out how to even begin to answer. He wanted to say, No, Falon, no it wasn’t like that. He wanted to tell her Billy’s death was an accident. He’d tried to have a good life here. Now old memories of violence and mishap swam up around him. For years he’d pushed the past down and moved forward by working his body to exhaustion. But when his hand curled around that kid’s neck, the wall he’d built over the years buckled. Then when he saw the kid’s eyes, filled with not fear but challenge, eyes saying, I’ve survived worse, and you’ve done worse, will do worse, that wall collapsed. Moses Jupiter came around the bend shooting. Might have saved his life. Might have saved everyone’s life. Lyman had gone home shaking with rage. Pulled away when Grace put her arms around him and asked what was wrong. When she pressed her hands down flat against his stomach, slid them beneath his belt, squeezed the head of his cock, bit his neck, tried to coax him back to the bedroom to lick and fuck the terror out of him, he fled. Said nothing to Galen and Wren, couldn’t even meet their eyes in the yard, where they stood kicking a soccer ball around. Headed out into the state forest, deep into the woods. Whirling sky spinning too fast and heavy with stars overhead. He kept coming in and out of time, wandering the woods, catching the dusk sound of whippoorwills, which terrified him because there weren’t supposed to be many left in the world here, and they sounded everywhere. Ate nothing, camped on the mossy earth deep in the light-swallowing hemlocks and spruces. He was closer to the free side of madness than he’d ever been. Too close. He wondered what type of breakdown he was having when on the second day, the long sling of heat and humidity snapped and rain fell like nails, painfully cold and gray. He found a bottle of whiskey some kids had left in the knothole of a tree years ago. Tried not to drink. Stared at the bottle for hours. But whatever resolve he once owned seemed to have slid out with the wall the girl had knocked down. The rain lasted the night, unrelenting, broken only by rips of lightning and echoes of thunder tumbling up and down the coast. Somewhere in the night he came to a decision, a moment of clarity, the only answer he saw to this mess: he would apologize. It was a simple solution, probably too simple, but its buzz cooked up in his head with a desperate certainty until he felt that old boyhood elation of knowing that things could be okay, would be okay, that the world was still good and safe. It drove him from the woods and back home, where he grabbed one of his daughter’s notebooks, wrote his amends, tore out the sheet, and walked into town, where he now stood inside the dusty office of The Lowering Days, shaking and red-eyed and realizing what a fool he was.
Falon had been watching Lyman through his long silence. She was trying to remember the boy she had known so long ago. “What are you really trying to apologize for, Lyman?” she said finally. “Because I’m guessing it’s a little more complicated than terrorizing some Penobscot kid. Just because you rejected your family’s money, that doesn’t make you clean from the damage they did.”
“It doesn’t make me culpable either.” Lyman’s voice was cold, measured.
“Maybe not.”
“That was twenty years ago.”
My mother pushed a stack of paper over on her desk in rage. “You piece of shit.” She laughed. “Talking to me about the past and being innocent, being misunderstood. If I was interested in empty words, I’d be down at The Fish House pissing the day away. We all lost, Lyman. We’re still losing.”
Lyman started to speak, but my mother turned to me. I had been quietly watching the exchange with the uncomfortable sense that I was looking into worlds that were not mine to see. “Don’t you ever become like him,” she said to me. “Don’t you dare. There’s nothing worse than a desperate man. Go home, Lyman.”
Lyman reached into his pocket and came up holding a small yellow ball. It took us a moment to realize it was a lemon. Lyman flipped open a pocketknife and pressed the blade into the fruit, deftly cutting it in half. Then he dug in with the blade again, carving off a thin slice. He slipped the bitter disc between his lips and began to chew. He lifted his apology from the desk and wrapped the remaining halves of the lemon in the paper. The entire time his eyes had not left my mother’s.
“You used to whisper my name awful sweet,” he said, talking around the lemon slice, his tongue working the rind. “I bet you still would.”
My mother glared at him, refused to look at the lemon in his hand, refused to look away from his face. “Just sweet enough to make you forget that little blade of yours. Just long enough to get my fingers around it.”
“You’ve got it all planned out.”
“I do, Lyman. It wouldn’t take more than a slice, a twist, and a little tug to cut your tongue clean out.”
“Billy said you were a whore,” Lyman said. “Too bad he had to die for everyone else to realize it.”
Then Lyman set the lemon, wrapped in the crumpled note, down on the desk and walked out the door, sinking back into the dusk and the gulls wheeling above the harbor. Enraged, I leapt up to follow him out the open door.
Falon knew she’d started something awful, could feel it stalking around the room, vengeful and angry. Knew too she had to stop it before her son went out that door and she never saw him again. “David Almerin Ames,” she snapped. “You will sit back down this singular instant. We have sausage gravy to finish, and news to print.”
It was my mother’s language that pulled me up just enough to forget chasing after Lyman. This singular instant—the p
hrase was pure Mom, both the grandiosity and the redundancy of it. I came back and picked up the Styrofoam containers.
But the office door was still open, and the hate leaching down the walls was making its way across the room now. Falon noticed it too late, watched it slide around her son, watched it rear up, and before she could rise to stop it, she watched as that old hate leapt through the doorway. She gasped, and when her son said “What is it, Mom?” she didn’t seem to know how to answer. It was out in the open then, free. She watched it lift like a faint red mist, grinning as it pushed up into the wind that went back and forth along the river, the wind that breathed life into their world.
Part III
Seven
Molly had been sharp and jittery since the altercation in the channel. Moses had come to them at their encampment in the woods twice since, first to check up on her under the excuse of bringing more supplies no one had asked for, and then to tell them he had found a place for them to go. Both times Molly, full of stubborn pride, had barely spoken to him. Barely even looked at him. He couldn’t tell which the girl resented more: being caught by Lyman Creel or rescued by him.
Though the wound to her chin had mostly healed, a dark scab still showed where she had struck the canoe when it flipped. After escaping the water, she’d spent the better part of two days vomiting. Her father’s anger was matched only by his worry. Sometimes at night she woke gasping for air, then moved through the day feeling that man’s hands around her throat like an invisible collar.
During the second visit, Moses told them to get ready to leave. The finality of his sentences seemed to move Molly out of silence.
“You could have shot me on the water,” she said.
“I don’t shoot things I’m not aiming for. They were warning shots.”
The Lowering Days Page 9
