by Ann Swinfen
‘Watch out! You’ll do no good ending up in the harbour.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Your dad and Ben were talking about going out to look for them, but it would be suicide. Latest news is, the last of the hurricane is headed right this way.’
Tirza was silent. There was nothing to be said. Either Reliant had foundered already, and Walter, Wayne and Eli were lost, or she was out there trying to battle her way in. It seemed unlikely. If she had still been afloat, she would surely have made harbour by now, even with the offshore rote. She couldn’t have been fishing a whole four hours further out to sea than the rest of the fleet.
The church clock struck eleven. The force of the wind was increasing and the group of watching women persuaded Josie Pelham to wait inside Flett’s Stores. She went stoically, her hands twisted in her apron but her face set in dignified lines of resignation. Clarice, trailing behind, was puffy-eyed as if she had been crying, but she walked now with her face averted and she shook off Jim from the gun crew who tried to stop her with his hand.
Tirza wondered whether the gun crew had left their post. And there were other soldiers in the crowd too, more than could be on duty tonight. The news of the missing boat had somehow reached them and they had gathered here with the other watchers. Nathan and Ben climbed the ladder from the lobster car up the side of the spindle-legged wharf, which rose high above the level of the water. The tide was at full ebb, and the reefs offshore would be at their most dangerous.
‘Eli’s bin fishin’ sixty-five years,’ Ben volunteered, ‘since he were ten. Barrin’ six years when he shipped on a whaler back in the nineties.’
There was a sudden violent surge in the wind, followed by a curious sound, like a great zipper being torn open. A cloud passed through the harbour lights like a flock of birds, and Tirza saw that a patch of shingles had been ripped off the bait shed roof. They were slicing through the air as deadly as knives. Instinctively, the Flamboro people ducked, but the soldiers were not so quick, nor was Reverend Bridges, who had joined the crowd. The minister was an inland man and he looked merely astonished when a shingle flying at ninety or a hundred miles an hour struck him on the head. He collapsed at Charlie Flett’s feet. At the same moment one of the soldiers who had instinctively raised his hands to protect his face gave a shriek. Blood was pouring down his arm where a shingle had sliced across his wrist.
The injuries gave them something to do. The soldier was helped into Flett’s Stores and two of the men carried the minister in and laid him on the Liars’ Bench. He was bleeding where the shingle had cut his temple. All the watchers from the foreshore crowded in behind. There was not much anyone could do, but there was a sense of doing something, just by being there. Mary Flett, who had been a nurse before her marriage, cleaned and dressed the wounds while Charlie lit the pot-bellied stove. It might be August, but the hurricane had sucked cold air into its vortex, and everyone found they were shivering.
The church clock struck one. Mary had ushered Josie Pelham and the other women into the Fletts’ apartment above the store and she brought down jugs of coffee and plates of hot biscuits to the men. The minister was sitting up now, pale and a little confused, while the soldier, it seemed, couldn’t stop talking.
‘Durndest thing I ever saw,’ he said. ‘Like a knife-throwin’ act at one of them there Wild West shows. Hurtlin’ through the air.’ He seemed to fancy the word, tasting it on the tongue. ‘Hurtlin’ through the air. Nearly sliced my hand right off.’
‘Jest be thankful it didn’t cut your head right off, Chuck,’ said one of the other soldiers dryly. ‘Elsen you would of had to stop talking.’
Everybody laughed, with a nervous, anxious sound.
The church clock struck two. Gradually people began to drift away. Nathan, who seemed to notice Tirza for the first time, hitched her up from the floor by her elbows.
‘Your grandmother is going to tan the backside off the both of us,’ he said. ‘Come on. There’s nothing we can do till first light.’
‘Doesn’t seem worth going to bed now,’ Tirza mumbled. ‘It almost is first light.’
They stumbled back together along the seafront. The lamps along the harbour looked sickly now that the sky was no longer so black dark. The wind was abating and a few stars flickered briefly between the torn shreds of the clouds. Out at sea beyond the islands there was a thread of paler sky along the horizon, where mountainous waves heaved and collided.
‘Can I come with you when you go out in the morning?’ Tirza asked as they hung up their oilskins on the boat shed door.
‘Hunting drowned men is no job for a girl,’ said Nathan bluntly.
She raised her chin defiantly. ‘I can be just as brave as any man. Wayne is my friend. And my eyes are sharper than yours.’
Nathan sighed and passed his hand wearily over his face.
‘Oh, child, I don’t know. I fear to think, sometimes, what your mother would have made of the way I’ve raised you. I don’t feel I’ve done right by you, treating you no better than a boy.’
Tirza put her arms awkwardly round his solid, barrel-shaped body and laid her cheek against the rough wool of his working sweater which smelled of lobsters and tar. He had never had time yesterday evening to change out of his hauling clothes.
‘You’ve raised me just fine, Dad. Maybe I’m not pretty and elegant like Martha, but I like things the way they are.’
He tousled her hair roughly. Then held up a strand of it between his fingers.
‘Hey, now. Look at this! It’s getting so long, we’ll soon be able to knit bait bags out of it. Come on, time you were in bed.’
Sandy had caught the bus from Flamboro up to the Portland road and walked about a quarter of a mile when he was lucky enough to pick up a lift from an elderly couple driving back to the Mansion House. He settled with relief into the back seat of their Cadillac, thankful that American cars had so much more room than British ones. He rested his sticks against the edge of the seat and stretched out his legs. In his eagerness to be his normal, active self again, he had overdone things today. All the stooping over the blueberry bushes had strained the muscles up the backs of his calves and thighs, and he had aggravated matters by the walk on the uneven sandy edge of the road.
‘There’s a hurricane warning, have you heard?’ said Mrs van der Welden.
‘No, I hadn’t. A real full-blown hurricane?’
‘No, no,’ said her husband. ‘Only out at sea, and it’s dying away. Nothing to worry about.’
Sandy sat back and looked out of the window as they turned on to the Todd’s Neck road past the far end of Libby’s wood. Tirza had told him, just before he got on the bus, that one of the fishing boats was late in to harbour.
He forgot about it when he reached the hotel and found a letter from Martha awaiting him. He had left before the mail had been delivered that morning and to his surprise he had not thought about her all day. Now, however, he carried the letter up to his room and tore it open. A wave of heat ran through him as he smelled her scent rising from the paper. She had spent today shopping with her mother and he thought she might have stayed away on purpose to provoke him. It was the first time since they had met that they had not spent at least part of the day together.
To their mutual frustration, they had not found anywhere they could meet in privacy. Neither of them had a car. Sandy still had difficulty moving about. And anywhere they could reach was so public. Martha had a suggestion.
My family owns a piece of land on Todd’s Neck, just above the path leading down to Libby’s Beach. My grandfather was going to build a big house there to rent out to summer people back in the 1890s, when Todd’s Neck became so fashionable, but all he ever finished was a summer cottage. It hasn’t been let for a couple of years. I can get the key. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I’ll meet you there about eleven o’clock – you can’t miss it. The last building before the big rocks.
Because he was so tired, Sandy went to b
ed early, but was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of his open window banging about in its frame. He limped across the room and looked out over the ocean. Far out to sea there was nothing but blackness. Usually there was enough moonlight and starlight to cast a sheen over the sea. Tonight only the nearer reaches caught a few scraps of reflected light from the hotel, and they showed a white mass seething like a badly poured pint of beer. He recalled what Tirza had said about an ‘old’ sea. Clearly new forces had stirred the ocean up again. He felt sorry for any poor fellows who might still be abroad on it. He closed and latched the window, and went back to bed.
Harriet was lying awake in the old brass four-poster bed at the farmhouse. Tobias had dropped off to sleep at last. Simon had telephoned them from Flett’s Stores during the evening to say that he was going to wait in Flamboro for news of Wayne and his father, and after they had come to bed both Harriet and Tobias had pretended to be asleep, each for the other’s sake. Tobias was now breathing heavily, interrupted by small, gasping snores, so Harriet could stop pretending.
The hurricane four years ago had been a terrifying experience. Flamboro and its boats had got off fairly lightly, but further along the shore large lobsterboats had been picked up and thrown five miles inland. And at the farm the roof had been torn off the chicken shed and most of her hens killed. Growing up under the shore of the great woods of north-west Maine, Harriet hated the sound of a high wind. Her uncle had been crippled by a tree falling in such a wind and her own father had just escaped with his life from another tree fall which knocked him unconscious for three days. For most of the night she lay awake, thinking of the Reliant, and fell asleep near dawn to dreams haunted by mountains of grey water rising and curling over her head.
14
Maine: Summer 1942
Louisa Mary and the rest of Flamboro’s fleet were out beyond the islands by the time the sun dragged itself clear of the horizon ahead of them. There was a sullen choppy sea running and the wind kept veering as though the air had been left in a state of confusion by the passing of the hurricane. The sky was sullen too, so that even when the sun came up its light was veiled by a thickness in the air that might have been cloud or fog or even the fine debris scattered through the high air by the storm.
Tirza sat hunched on the foredeck in her oilskins, staring out over a sea steep enough to hide the whole of the Reliant in the trough of a wave. Nathan stood on the engine housing to peer over the wheelhouse, steering with his feet. They had already salvaged one piece of wreckage – some broken fishing gear – but it was impossible to tell whether it belonged to Reliant. The fleet of small boats had started the search in some sort of order, but by now they were scattered across several miles of sea, those with more powerful engines surging ahead. Whenever one of the fishermen caught sight of something on the surface of the waves he changed course to investigate, so gradually the boats had become separated.
About a hundred yards away Tirza thought she could make out a patch on the water that was a darker grey than the rest of the sea. As the next wave heaved it up she could see that there was something, wide and flat, floating out there. She shouted above the noise of the engine and pointed. Nathan put the wheel over and headed Louisa Mary where she indicated.
As they approached, Tirza realised that the wreckage could not be anything to do with Reliant. It was an inflatable rubber raft, with ropes festooned around the sides, of the kind used by the navy. It might, however, come from some other victim of the storm.
‘It’s a life-raft,’ she shouted over her shoulder as Nathan throttled back. ‘From a naval ship, I guess.’
‘Too small.’ He had spotted it now, bringing Louisa Mary round in a curve to approach it from leeward. ‘Could be from a plane, though.’
Cautiously he nosed the boat nearer, afraid of puncturing the fragile craft. Then he cut the engine when Louisa Mary had just enough way on to bring her alongside.
‘There’s a man inside.’ Tirza’s voice was hoarse. ‘He’s in uniform. I think he’s dead.’
Nathan reached out with his gaff and pulled the life-raft over by means of one of the rope loops. His face was grave as he studied the man.
‘Ayuh, he’s dead all right.’
The face was blackened and bloated, the tongue protruding between the teeth and the eyes staring. The young man had contrived a partial shelter for himself out of a parachute, and a few pitiful possessions lay around him – an empty metal box which had contained emergency rations, some photographs and a flying helmet. He had taken off his boots and his bare feet looked surprisingly pale and tender. If she kept her eyes from his face, Tirza might have imagined that he was sleeping, for he lay curled on his side like a young child.
‘I don’t recognise the uniform,’ she said shakily. Nathan was hanging over the gunwale making a towline fast to the bow of the life-raft. With the man so obviously dead, it wasn’t worth the risk of trying to lift him aboard so far from land in a heavy sea.
‘It’s German,’ he said shortly. ‘He’s a German airman.’
Tirza felt a jolt in her stomach like an electric shock. She had been feeling pity for the man, but he was the enemy.
‘Do you think he crashed in the hurricane?’
‘No. He’s been longer dead than that. Died of starvation and thirst and exposure. No knowing how long he’s been in that raft or how far he’s drifted. Might have been tossed around for weeks.’
Tirza felt suddenly sick, and bowed her head on her drawn-up knees. Nathan gripped her shoulder briefly, then pushed the raft away with the gaff so that it swung slowly round to the stern of Louisa Mary. He started the engine and laid a course back towards Flamboro at half speed. The raft jerked, bobbed, then came obediently round behind the lobsterboat.
‘Aren’t we supposed to be searching for Wayne and the others?’ asked Tirza dispiritedly, keeping her eyes averted from their macabre tow.
‘We have to take this back first. We’ll come out again after.’
Late in the afternoon two boats from Casco Bay which had joined in the search found Reliant stranded on her beam ends on a shoal off Mount Desert Island. It was not clear whether the accident had occurred here, or whether she had been blown on to the shoal by the hurricane subsequently. There was no sign of her crew. Two life jackets were still in a locker inside her cabin. None of the fishermen or lobstermen wore life jackets while they worked – they were too much of an impediment. But most boats carried one for each man, and while running home before a storm a cautious man would don one. There was no way of telling whether the crew of Reliant had been taken unawares, with no time to put on their life jackets. Perhaps Walter had told Wayne to put one on when the weather blew up, but he and Eli had not bothered.
When Josie Pelham heard of the single missing life jacket, her face lit up for a moment, before freezing over again. Even in summer it was doubtful anyone could have survived twenty-four hours in the ocean in a life jacket. Before nightfall word came that the Casco boats had managed to tow Reliant off the reef. She was not badly holed. They had pumped her out and were towing her back to Flamboro. There was an unspoken thought in the air – the value of the boat would make some financial provision for the widow and her daughter.
A subdued air hung over Flamboro in the days that followed. The people of the town were accustomed to death at sea, but that made it no easier to bear when it struck. The circle of women closed protectively round Josie and Clarice, and the young soldiers who called with gifts of chocolate and nylons were politely but firmly turned away. Doggedly, the men of the town showed their concern in the work of repairing Reliant and finding a buyer. Negotiating the best possible price gave them the satisfaction of doing something practical for Josie.
The military authorities took away the body of the German airman and all his gear, but before they came Tirza and Nathan dried out his personal belongings in the kitchen. There was a packet of letters and a diary written in German, the ink smudged with water and the pages sticking to
gether. The photographs had fared better. They showed what must be the man’s family. A middle-aged couple with two grown-up children – the boy might, in better times, have been the airman. A young woman with blonde braids wound round her head and a baby in her arms. The woman was smiling but the baby eyed the camera with deep seriousness.
Tirza, amid conflicting feelings of rage and pity, found the photographs a painful reminder that the young man was not so different from Sandy or Will. She wanted to think of him as a monster, daring to come here, despoiling the coast of Maine, bringing bombs and death, but she kept coming back to those photographs, which filled her with a strange sense of shame.
The officer in charge of the detail which removed the body questioned both Tirza and Nathan closely. Nathan gave him as near as possible a chart location for the spot where the life-raft had been found, and Tirza described what she had seen, but there was not much they could add to the mute testimony of the man himself. He wore an identity tag which they had not touched. They both felt relief when the military ambulance drove away.
A week after the hurricane, when hope had been abandoned of finding any of the crew of Reliant, Reverend Bridges announced that Josie had asked for a memorial service to be celebrated in the church – the local custom when a drowning at sea meant a normal funeral could not be held. The following morning, however, Eel Joe’s outboard motor was heard puttering into the harbour. On board his boat, lying between the fixed boxes in which Joe stored his eels, was the body of Wayne Pelham, still wearing his life jacket.
Joe had found Wayne in one of the places where bodies and objects washed overboard were known sometimes to come ashore – the angular dent in the shoreline, not large enough to be called a cove, where the rocks at the base of Todd’s Neck met Libby’s Beach. The body had fetched up there and lodged amongst the sharp rocks, hidden from most directions. Joe had found it when he landed there to fish for porgies with a hand line and in scrambling over the rocks to a convenient ledge caught sight of a corner of the bright yellow life jacket. There was no knowing how long Wayne’s body had been trapped there.
