“Link,” I hissed. “That’s too far.”
“He’s earned it” was all my brother said.
Then the warp line split and my brother kicked the cage overboard and we sat in the gently rocking boat watching Lyman Creel’s livelihood sink to the bottom of the sea. Poaching a trap and emptying it was bad enough. We’d delighted in thinking about the anger Lyman would feel each time he strained his back hauling a cage from the sea, only to find it empty. But cutting a line, sinking a trap—Link knew better. I knew better. Yet Link had cut the line, and I had not moved to stop him. And the feeling of watching Link’s feat was one of joy.
Since Lyman’s altercation with our mother, our rage had festered and grown. We tried to outpace our anger. I read and walked the woods and swam and ran every morning. Link tried working on Simon’s car with him. He buried his hands in grease and swapped out fan belts and bolted brake calipers to rotors. He spent a day in town following our father around the boatyard, sorting tools and measuring and marking out the saw lines for hull staves. He spent an entire morning building a wood-bending jig for a catboat project, but when the jig was done, his anger returned. He spent two days running between stores in town, looking for story leads for our mother. She’d thought people might be more likely to open up to a child. They told him only dozens of dirty jokes, asked him if he wanted some beer, asked him how many people his father had shot in the war. None of it worked, and Link’s brain, unwilling to be placated, set itself to solving the question of revenge.
The little green bateau we used was the first boat our father had ever built for us. We must have been six or seven years old then. Now Link had stashed it in the weeds off Shrike Cove. Each night for a week we had snuck out of the house and onto the water. The moon grew brighter as the days passed. The air stayed hot, clogged with mosquitoes even at night. Sometimes when we peered back at the shore, we saw things we knew couldn’t be there: lit windows floating high in the tops of trees and trails of chimney smoke curling about where there were no houses; spectral, rib-starved horses lowering their heads to forage along the banks; men and women, naked and weeping, holding each other in shafts of moonlight down by the water. We understood we were seeing different histories that had lived along this bay. On the bluff high above us, the ghost apples watched in quiet judgment. We knew we would be caught, we must have known that, but we didn’t care. Our fear made us more aware. Our awareness made us feel invincible.
Chains of small islands dotted the waters of the bay, and we picked our way between them. The throttle shook against our palms. Swells rocked us in the dark fist of the sea. The light on the water was often a rich yellow from all the floating pollen. Sometimes it shone bright red, as if a painter had brushed it across the water.
We were brutal, merciless. We stopped at every orange-and-blue buoy we saw. We dumped lobsters by the dozens back into the ocean. Held the sopping wet warp lines tight as we sawed them clean through. With each triumphant snap, we felt the smallest fraction of our rage release. Another cage belonging to Lyman Creel gone to rust at the bottom of the world.
We whooped. We hollered. We howled and embraced each other once we were clear of the fishing grounds. Along the shore we struggled, wrestled. Tried to choke each other out, tried executing complicated scissor holds we’d seen in dumb action movies. Fell flat on our backs, gasping and laughing. We dove into the water and only came up when our lungs felt about to split, kicking and somersaulting to the surface. We ran and we danced. We were two young kings, and while nothing we were doing was royal, and none of it was good, like all the young kings in history, we told ourselves our dark work was right.
It seemed the most obvious thing, but we had not thought of it. After several days of watching his catch ruined and his gear destroyed, Lyman was bound to lie in wait. The problem was finding us. He had traps all over the bay and up into the mouth of the river. Link took a nautical chart and unfurled it on the floor in his room.
“Here, but not here.” He had meticulously marked the location of all Lyman’s buoys he knew about. On the map, the red dots nestled between the depth contour lines. Looking down at them, I could think only of bloody constellations.
“We cut that one last night,” I said.
Solemn, intense, he crossed his arms, stood, backed away from the map. He circled the room, checked that the door was tightly closed. At the window he stared out into the woods. When he returned to the map, squatting down over its contents, I was shocked at how grown-up he looked. What I was seeing on my brother’s face was a new concentration. He was no longer the boy I used to squat down with in the dirt in the yard, separating out lines of leaves by color. In our games one side was good and one side was evil. We laid sticks between the two lines in the dirt for fortifications. Rocks and pebbles became bivouacked armies. Bits of moss became hospitals and safe havens and places of hope. We would play deep into the afternoons, gathering up small piles of pine needles and setting them on fire around the edges of our battlefield as I told stories about the signal fires the Han dynasty used to light across the Great Wall of China during times of peril.
“You’re too quiet,” Link said. “I need your help, Almy. You’ve got a head for strategy.”
That was all it took to turn me back to our misguided task: an infinitesimal nod of validation from someone I loved deeply.
“Tonight we stay in,” I said. “Regroup, rest. If it’s clear weather tomorrow, we go here.” I put my finger down on the map at Shadrach’s Neck, a slim peninsula of land that reached into the sea like a long neck. The landform had no curve, so neither side of the neck was sheltered by a cove. Still, the seas there tended to be unusually calm. A half a mile beyond the end of the peninsula was a small island. Lyman had four traps in the channel between the neck and the island.
“It’s exposed on both sides,” Link said.
“Exactly. It’s not sheltered like other spots, but it’s a straight line on those traps. We can come in the long way, put in up the coast, swing out behind the island. From the island we can get a good look back at the shoreline and the waters around us. The neck being straight lets us see both sides for miles. If it’s clear, we go like hell, slice all four traps, come back around the island for cover, and head home.”
Link was grinning. He slapped me across the back and whooped. “My brother. My man. That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Only if it’s clear and calm.”
His face went serious. “Only if it’s clear and calm.” That was our credo, our agreement. We would honor whatever gods might be out patrolling the night. We were not about to challenge the sea. We knew its demands, its tolls, its appetite for human life, how swiftly it would take a body if a body didn’t properly guard itself.
It was Homer who suggested that we stand in the confusion of time with our backs to the future, our hungry faces to the past. I wondered sometimes on those nights of delinquency if our parents were aware of our absence at the house. If so, did they ever go outside and watch the sea, or listen for the snapping branches and scuffing shoes announcing our safe return down the driveway? If they had known, surely they would have confronted us, but our parents had their own deeply absorbing worlds and problems. I imagined my mother standing on the back porch, looking down the river, sluggish in the late heat. She would have been able to smell the ocean, and that alone would have bound us to her as we moved through the waters of the bay, opening and closing the throttle on the outboard, angling the oars in the dark water like knives. I was amazed that our dogs, Sam and Daphne, two Irish wolfhounds who paced the river woods like mammoth gray sentinels, kept quiet, turning complicit in our trespasses.
Our father had rescued Sam years earlier, and Daphne joined us later. We were at a January bonfire beside a small ridgetop kettle pond not far from our house. Parties like this, with their particular magic, happened regularly under the full winter moons. Massive pyres of wood were built on the shores of frozen lakes and touched off in twenty-foot-tall blazes.
Guitars and mandolins and banjos and singers came out. Chainsaws were set down and flannel coats shucked off. While the players sawed their joyous noise through the night, people danced and spun, reveled and dipped, slid and embraced. Kids and adults threw snowballs, and others spilled onto the ice to slide and skate. Maple syrup was poured over snow, and whiskey and beer passed from hand to hand.
It seemed as if the dog had come out of the woods and simply shown up at the bonfire. Frightened by the intensity of the blaze, it lurked around the edges of the pond, where the vegetation was thickest and the ice thinnest, watching us. The ice had been measured at twelve inches all across the pond. It should have held. Someone tossed a snowball out into the sky, and the massive dog shed all its hesitation and launched into pursuit across the ice. The dog was there, and then, with a sharp crack, it was gone. My father let go of my mother, with whom he’d been dancing, and strode across the ice while his entire community yelled at him to stop. My father didn’t seem scared at all. He centered his weight and walked out into the night, convinced that whatever fragility might haunt the glassy surface would not harm him. It was brave and it was noble, but beyond anything else it was a foolish thing to do alone and without any safety equipment. He knelt at the icy lip of the hole, rolled back his coat sleeve (such a peculiar gesture that even to this day when I see a man pushing back his sleeves I fall through the years and see my father, ice pebbling his mustache, his breath smoking out around his scarf), and plunged his arm into the frigid water, holding a flashlight. The dog had been running when it broke through, which meant its momentum might have carried it under the ice past the point where it entered. My father was hoping the small spot of light might give the animal something to locate. Eyes blasted with fear, the wolfhound came up through the opening after a few moments, and Arnoux somehow pulled the great beast free.
When we hiked home, the dog followed us. My father yelled at him. My mother told him to scram. Simon, Link, and I said nothing. When my father threw a stone at the dog, it paused for a moment and sat down in the snow. My father hung his head, ashamed of his cruelty, and told us to go on ahead. In the morning I woke to the sharp crack of the splitting awl. My father was out in the yard in the dawn light, splitting ash logs. There at the edge of the gravel was the wolfhound, watching, divorced from whatever prior ownership it had known, forever loyal now to us.
A year later an old woman came down our road in a truck. She was on oxygen and barely able to drive. She had a wolfhound with her, smaller than Sam, the name we had given the rescued dog, but a deeper gray. She opened the passenger door, and the dog leaped out. “Her name is Daphne,” she said to our mother. “I can’t take care of her anymore, and I was hoping you could. I heard what your husband did at that pond last winter.”
“It was a stupid thing to do.”
“It was. But it told me where to go with her when it was time.” The woman lifted her eyes to her dog, Daphne, and watched as Sam trotted out to meet her.
It was a still and calm night, colder than it had been any other night on the water, and fall felt everywhere. We put in at Shrike Cove as usual. Then we trawled slowly out into the sea. It was two miles down the coast to reach the neck. Overhead the stars were but endless in their sweep across the sky. We took our time motoring out to the island. Seeing nothing along the neck, I nodded, and Link engaged the outboard.
We reached the first buoy and had the trap on the side of the bateau when a sudden yellow lance of light exploded across the water. The light hit the second buoy, fifty feet away from us, cutting a bright canyon across the dark water, then danced back toward our boat.
“Turn away,” I managed to yell just as the beam found us, and I could only hope that all it illuminated were the hunkered-down backs of two unidentifiable figures. When I turned back, I saw Link standing at the gunwale in a daze, fully encased in the bright yellow glow of a spotlight. “Shit,” I hissed. “Link.”
My brother snapped back into motion. He kicked the cage overboard and slammed the outboard to life. I almost went over the edge as we jerked into motion. Link pulled open the throttle and whaled on the steering bar, launching us into a huge, roaring curve. Water pounded back into the boat, cold and shocking. I slipped then recovered my spot at the bow, doing my best to yell out directions and landmarks. I was too afraid to look back. I was certain I could hear another motor, a vast and powerful engine swallowing gasoline in fury.
We carved through the water, disappeared behind the island. Link threaded his way along the shoreline, skirting boulders and crags, ducking into coves and then darting back out when the light didn’t follow. Still, in the distance, a second engine droned. I was sure we would run aground out here. But Link was so intense, so focused, his eyes cold and dark and unwavering. I’d never seen anything like it, and I understood then that my brother had inherited from our father that rare and dangerous and potentially lifesaving ability to control fear in all circumstances.
The light broke to our left, and it broke to our right. Rocks shot up in a golden wash and then went dark again. On the north side of the island we doubled back on our route, watching the light continue flashing in front of us, and made a hard sprint across the open waters for Shrike Cove.
This time there was no joy, no whooping. Only fear in our freedom, fear that began to overflow as we reached the shore. Link’s hand was shaking when he took it off the outboard. He snatched it with his other hand. I leaned over the gunwale and vomited into the sea.
“Lovely.” Wren Creel was standing on the shore, watching us struggle in the shallows. “Toss me that rope. Now,” she snapped. “Pick it up off the bottom of that boat and throw it to me so I can pull you in.”
The force of being told exactly what to do broke our paralysis. I flung the rope to Wren, and she pulled it taut. Then she gently drew us from the water.
She pointed to a spot fifteen feet up the shoreline. She placed my hands at the bow and Link’s at the stern and got on the other side of the boat, making us lift our ends and then lower the boat into her hands, where she guided it up the shore to the spot she’d chosen. She’d cut a stash of heavy white pine boughs and gathered up a small mound of twigs and massive oak leaves, and she began spreading them over the hull until the woods had swallowed the boat.
“Idiots,” she said. “Boys always move too slowly. They never have enough to lose.”
Emboldened and embarrassed, Link growled, “Thanks, now get lost.”
“Hardly. We need to get into the woods. Keep watch on this spot for a while. Then if it’s still clear, we need to get it out of here.”
On the water the light was gone, the only sound the steady crashing of surf against shore. “Why are you helping us?” I asked.
“Shut up. Did he see you?”
“No,” I said. Link was avoiding my eyes. “I don’t think he got a good look.”
“He was out there, though,” Link said.
“Of course he was out there. I saw him leave the house tonight, and I knew he’d finally catch you idiots.”
“How did you know where we keep the boat?” I asked.
“Not important. I’m not going to tell anyone anything.”
“What do you want, then?” Link said.
“I want to go with you next time.”
I was shocked. “There isn’t going to be a next time,” I said. “This is done.”
“He’s your father,” Link said.
Wren shook her head. “Obviously.”
“You get that this hurts you too,” I said.
“Fifteen minutes ago I rescued you. Don’t start treating me like I’m stupid.” Wren’s stare stopped me from arguing with her. She lowered her head and took a deep breath. “I can’t stand what he did to that kid in the river,” she whispered.
“Does he know where we stash the boat?” Link asked.
Wren shook her head.
“Then we’re going to leave it right here.” Wren’s wish to hurt her father had gotten its hooks into Link.
I could see it in his face as his decisiveness returned. “We’ll go out one more time. One week from tonight. When things settle.”
Nine
Three days after almost getting caught, Lyman Creel came to our house, holding a Winchester deer rifle across his chest. There are things you remember in vivid bursts from your childhood, things you shouldn’t be able to recall but that still linger with exacting detail. They can haunt you, and they can comfort you. Sometimes they can do both at the same time.
Our house was an indistinct left turn off the paved state road onto a gravel two-track, nearly overgrown by ostrich ferns, goldenrod, asters, and staghorn sumac. Speeding by the turn on the paved road, you might glance suddenly to the left for no real reason and see a shaft of hazy sunlight exploding from the woods. It simply beckoned. The two-track wound down through the woods for a mile before it reached the river, and because it beckoned, my father put a cattle gate up at the half-mile point and nailed a painted sign to it: No Trespassing. Water Moccasin Farm. Though the gate was never locked and often left open, few people came down the road. When some curious stranger risked trespass, my father, brimming with jocularity, would show them around, have a beer with them, and then tell them to get out. Others—Reggie, Moses, friends of my mother—lifted the gate and came and went as they pleased, and I thought my parents were a very strange breed of hermit.
Great oaks and hemlocks curled over the road. The canopy was so dense and green that sunlight was completely absent as we drove back and forth from town. At the river the two-track became more of a path, until it met the drive my parents had skidded out along the peninsula.
It was a Saturday when Lyman came. Link and I were upstairs, Simon and our father downstairs. Our mother was out on the back porch, reading. Unless you came up the river by boat, it was virtually impossible to reach our house without being seen. Sam and Daphne started to bark furiously. Simon rose from the table, nodding at our father. It was as if they already knew what was happening. Lyman was coming down the road. Why he moved in a slow saunter up that road in that false posture of joviality, whistling slightly, spinning his head about to follow the darting birds, all the while cradling a rifle as lovingly and innocently as though it were a loaf of bread he’d come to bestow upon us, escaped me in the moment, but later I came to understand that Lyman was a great actor, a master of artifice who could manipulate camaraderie and threat with chilling ease.
The Lowering Days Page 11
