by Richard Ford
He thought for a while then about his dad. Their epic fishing trips to Michigan. The old man, a business type—large, laughing, frequently drunk—half-nuts on a good day, his mother said before divorcing him. On the Au Sable in his ancient Hodgman’s, carrying his custom Paul Young and a mahogany net—his father would clamber out of their canoe, the painter rope knotted round his waist, and let the canoe pull him downstream, feet skittering across the sandy bottom, while he fished and fished. “I’m getting right down where the big fish are, son,” he’d shout, delighted, his big grin, flailing away left and right. If he’d stepped in a hole or stumbled on a rock or missed his footing—that would’ve been that, in full view of his only son. Though alone in the canoe, reserved little Petey Boyce had been thrilled, laughing and waving at his father, who was always pretending to fall, shouting out “Man overboard.” “Save yourselves. Women and children go to hell.” He dreamed of it even now, twenty years after they were both gone—his parents. His father, headlong, closer and closer to death. What had he been doing? It was the same one could ask of Mae—with the answer surely different. He was fishing, but he was doing more than fishing. Some great private exhilaration he’d discovered. You’d never find out, even if you’d asked them.
He heard a siren’s whoop at an indeterminate distance. A fire in an empty cottage, he thought. Not his. Nothing was left on. He looked above the bank of bushes and rose tangles for a feather of smoke, but saw nothing. The siren came closer, louder. It sounded like on the road, then passed the house. In a moment it whooped a last whoop and stopped.
Boyce took his cup and Mrs. Dalloway and reached the house as the sheriff’s brown-and-white SUV passed the driveway, headed toward the dead end where a path wound down to the nude beach at Nicholl’s Cove—Nipples Cove was the local wit. At night there were parties and music there, which he’d heard from bed.
He left cup and book on the back step and walked to see where the sheriff had gone. People and cars were collected down at the turnaround where kids parked at night—idling back past the house after midnight. Condoms and Kleenex clumps were always scattered about, flattened by car tires. It was a nice, old-fashioned place, Mae’d observed. Kids still did such things—like Ireland. He began to walk down.
An ambulance was there, strobes flashing, rear doors opened. Two technicians were bringing a gurney up from the beach, a blond girl strapped on with a white sheet to her chin. A deputy was assisting. An orange-striped Coast Guard copter was audible, then suddenly visible over the trees.
Citizens had gathered beside the ambulance and were watching. The bowlegged man who’d left the tautog was there, dressed now in civilian clothes, holding hands with a skinny woman in sunglasses, an old German shepherd beside them. Two small shirtless Asian boys—Hmongs—stood by, arms folded, whispering to each other. And others. Townies. Tatters of fog hung in the vine tangles that sealed the road from the beach. Air was cedar-y and ocean-y, a faint skunk aroma woven through. This was the life of things, Boyce thought, approaching. If you were part of it, this is what you did, talked about, heard, remembered. The day such ’n’ such happened on the beach.
The two EMS attendants got on with loading the blond girl into their truck. They were both big and unhealthy-looking, a man and a woman in black shorts and white shirts with red patches and belts full of gear. The girl on the stretcher had a round, surprised face. Her eyes were open, and she was smiling and talking. The ambulance said BELFAST. Another, older deputy was waving his arms, saying “Okay. Stay back, stay back,” though nobody was crowding up. The female medic got in the lighted back with the girl, following which the male climbed in the driver’s seat. The deputy closed the doors and stood back.
The Hmongs immediately began walking toward the beach trail as if they were no longer interested. They had fishing rods. The ambulance whooped once, bumped backward to the edge of the undergrowth, clanked down forward, then swayed back up Cod Cove Road, not sounding the siren, lights blinking. It was the same attendants who’d come to take Mae. From Belfast. An uncomforting coincidence for the anniversary. Possibly, of course, he’d misremembered.
“Getting a charge out of our small-town amusements?” the tautog man called out. The deputy was climbing back in his SUV. The other deputy was already inside. The tautog man was shouting as if Boyce didn’t hear well. “If them Mungs hadn’t seen her, the tide woulda carted her off to Labrador. Drunk, drugs, and whatever.” He said it singsongy. A quarter mile away, the ambulance emitted one wild whoop as it found the highway.
The tautog man fixed Boyce in the gaze he’d fixed on him in their early-morning yard encounter. He didn’t seem any longer like the muscleman who’d relaxed at the mention of Mae’s death. He wore an Hawaiian shirt and cutoffs and was barefoot. His head was buzz-cut like a soldier, and his mouth bore a jagged scar at the side where something had gone extremely wrong quite a while ago. This had been invisible in the darkness. His looks were the kind Mae liked—Neville Brand playing a stevedore. “’Bout time you’re headed home, ain’t it?” The man offered the same heartless smile. “Down south somewhere? Idn’t that it?” He’d been drinking in the morning. His eyes were rheumy and slowed.
“New Orleans,” Boyce tried, meaning to be cheerful.
“We know that girl,” the skinny sunglasses woman broke in. “Stover.” The woman was too skinny, wearing a dirty T-shirt and also cutoffs. She’d had too much time in the sun and other things. Her shirt said PRAISE on the front. Her pointed nose made her features intense and suspicious. Though her brown eyes sparkled. Together, they looked like a pair you’d see having a fight in the street in the French Quarter.
“Could’ve been like that dead girl down there in Costa Rica or wherever,” the skinny woman said. “Him and me were going on a beach walk. We didn’t even see her. Them Mungs did.”
Mae would run from these two, have her exit line all ready. “Desolé. Quiche in the cooker. Better scoot.” Later, when they were drinking wine in the gazebo, they would all come up for re-appraisal. “Our personal rustics. The larger community writ small,” she’d say. He would be more tactful, would stand now and wait. Though for what to say? The fish? He’d eaten it. It’d been wonderful. In fact, it had gone bad. He’d thrown it away. He’d never been a practiced liar. Lying took effort, then got you in trouble. The elderly dog began wagging its tail as if someone had spoken to it.
“So, are you buying the Birney house, then?” The tautog man weaved a few degrees, toes gripping the road dirt, a pair of busted-out Nikes under his arm. His gaze lacked discipline. He still didn’t know the man’s name. “Sean,” possibly. They were all named Sean.
“No,” Peter Boyce said, “just a wild hair.”
“And then . . . here’s winter! Hel-lo?” The man leered derisively.
“I useta live in that house,” the woman said. She let her mouth fall slightly ajar. It was the way she expressed surprise and many other emotions. More words were waiting, but lacked impetus.
“Did you eat that black bass?” the man said. His mouth gaped like the woman’s. The terrible scar’s effect.
“Yes,” Boyce lied. “It was great.”
“I bet you didn’t. I told her.” His damp eyes moved up, then down. He knew a lie. It made him feel superior.
“Us two used to be married.” The woman had decided what she wanted to say.
“Now we’re back dating,” the tautog man said, looking cruel.
“Once the fireworks get over, then life begins, I guess,” the woman said.
“He knows that. His wife died.” The man’s voice was full of booze. She looked at Peter Boyce and seemed perplexed.
“My husband died,” she said. “My other one. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Boyce said. “I am, too.”
A phone began ringing. It made an old-fashioned telephone noise. The dog began gimping toward a green Pinto parked by the path to the beach. The tautog man and the woman shared a look. “We both know who that’ll
be,” she said.
“I certainly do.” The man grinned garishly.
The phone continued louder each time until the woman went off to the car to answer it. She had a wobbly, bent-knee gait from a demanding life. The man, wrecked shoes under his arm, stood in the road, not watching her.
“I hope I see you again,” Boyce said. “Thanks for my fish.”
“Oh, yeah, you’ll see me again,” the drunk man said. “Good luck on you, preacherman.” He’d confused him with old Parker. It would’ve made Mae hoot with delight.
LATER IN THE AFTERNOON, AS HE SAT ON THE DOORSTEP, THINKING about his father, he decided now was the right time to leave—on Mae’s anniversary. No one else was coming. Twenty hours’ drive, and he could wake up in his own bed. Whatever all this he was doing—erecting and defending a redoubt—it wasn’t natural; any more than would’ve been true for his father, the crazy fisherman. It wasn’t as if he was young now, or wanting to become something different. Small, graduated adjustments were all he needed. That was why there were attorneys for the world—to assign the best consequences to life’s small adjustments. Not that Mae, here or gone, was a small matter. She was now his great subject. But why she’d done what she awfully did was, at this day’s end, not business she’d wanted to share. And not business he could do anything about. There was nothing further to learn or imagine or re-invent around here. Love now meant only to take in and agree.
HE’D GONE TO NEW YORK THE FIRST WINTER. A CLIENT HAD ARRANGED a stay at a fancy club, where there was a great, gilded library and a heated pool where men swam naked and diplomats were members. In the city, he’d attended several movies and an unmemorable play in the round. The club sponsored trips for the members. To India. Treks across the Pyrenees. St. Petersburg in the spring. Famous retired professors went along and gave lectures. On such trips you met people—women of a suitable age and temper, who weren’t merely full of longing. He thought of joining the club to try it out. Though women didn’t seem the element missing in life. He knew in advance he’d feel crowded, imposed on, and would quickly slip away without a word. After three days he’d gone home and never thought of joining the club again.
Then last fall in New Orleans, he’d met a woman named Sarah Gaines. A cousin of a partner’s wife. They’d had dinner twice at Clancy’s, gotten a little tipsy. She worked in FM radio and had the consummate voice. She also knew a great deal about the history of home furnishings and intended to write a book about Scandinavian bric-a-brac. She was regal, rather than pretty. She was fifty but too large in a way he couldn’t quit thinking about when he was with her and that made him feel small. A dimple in her pillowy chin continually appeared and disappeared when she spoke. She’d never married, she said. Things had just happened in the wrong sequence. Her dogged unwillingness to move away from where she was born in eastern Ohio. Her devotion to her mother through a long siege of dementia eventuating in death. The unexpected return of her father after twenty years’ absence, and then his decline. She respected marriage, had desired it, was a lapsed Catholic who liked children. She “adored” New Orleans, she assured him. There was a lot to tell.
However, she seemed to have no interest in him that he could see. She never asked questions. Never mentioned his work or Mae or Polly or Phoebe. She talked, instead, about Ohio and where she’d been to college in Athens, talked about the pressures of her job at the radio station and how it was dog eat dog there, even though it seemed congenial and easygoing. Women, she said, were the hardest to work with, the least trustworthy. Then on their third dinner, at Café Degas, she asked if Boyce would like to come home with her. He thought about it, knowing full well that to think about it was insulting. But he said no. Possibly when he knew her better. Which seemed sensible. Though in the car, she’d begun crying. Was it because he’d said no, he wondered, or because he’d mentioned knowing her better—which plainly he was never going to do, and certainly not once she’d begun crying for some unspecified reason. In the car he experienced a swirling sensation that Sarah Gaines might be going crazy or had always been crazy, and that tonight was a scenario repeated throughout her life. He began to find it difficult to breathe in his own car. When he’d walked her to the door of her little condo on Magazine, he’d hugged her awkwardly, then shaken her hand, said good-bye, and drove the short distance to Sixth, feeling exhausted but also contrite, as if he’d been mean and uncaring and unfairly dismissive. When he called the next day to see if she was fine, she was at first unforthcoming and spoke very softly in her radio voice. She said she had taken herself for granted—a too-typical failing—and in all likelihood had taken him for granted, too, for which she was sorry. He thought of her dimple. Possibly, she said, if he would call her again they could attempt a “do-over.” She’d pay this time. Mae, he believed, would’ve liked Sarah Gaines, would’ve admired her independence, though would’ve thought she needed to complain less; would’ve counselled him in tolerance and chastised him for being dull and prudish when poor Sarah Gaines had only tried to be open. He wasn’t, however, contrite or forbearing enough to re-embark on Sarah Gaines. Or on some other Sarah. He did not see her again. A woman, he already knew, would disrupt and confuse his life, wouldn’t fit, though he wasn’t sure precisely why, or what would fit. He simply realized that being a widower was not, in spite of what others thought, the same as being single.
LATER IN THE AFTERNOON OF THE DAY HE’D THOUGHT HE MIGHT leave—he decided abruptly that he wouldn’t. That it was defeatist. That small adjustments were within reach. Alone in the yard beside the empty flagpole, staring at his car with “Go way” scratched into its paint, he decided to take a kitchen bowl, again, down the path to the blackberry patch, fill it, and make a pie, or something close. It was perfectly out of his character to make a pie—he wasn’t sure he could. Mae had made many blackberry pies in the red house, pies they ate too hot and burned their tongues on, and which had always been funny. Someone, he noticed, when he arrived down the path, had been in the patch already. Footprints dented the bushes. Though enough were left. Maine always comprised an aura of things happening just beyond where you saw them. Secrecy, but not really mystery. Like the girl at the beach today. Things you just didn’t know about. It was almost likable. Though it wouldn’t persist if you were here for long. Everything would be divulged—like dents in the blackberry patch. Marriage had been the only true mystery. What had he read back in the winter? It kept the conversation going. Now the conversation was over.
From the path, he couldn’t make out the beach for the dense growth, though he could hear people—kayakers most likely, gliding the mirror surface of the bay, voices floating lightly up. Paddles bumping gunwales. They—possibly two of them—were having a private conversation on the open water, presuming no one to be listening. “Yes,” the woman said. “But. You’re only seeing that from one point of view.” “I often do that,” the other said—the man. Then laughter. An inexact science—how you maintained things. You could only try. You made a pie. You failed to make one. You didn’t leave too soon. He’d collected enough, he thought, and started back.
WHEN HE ARRIVED TO THE HOUSE, FENDERSON WAS STANDING IN THE yard, hands in his paint-spattered overall pockets, watching the crows return to the timber across the road. High up, the fading contrail of a jet lowered to Boston. Crows were the businessmen of the avian world, Mae said. They went for work, then came home and argued about things all evening.
“I knew you’d had to be around hee-yah, law-yah Boyce. Your caaah was in the yaaaad.” Fenderson enjoyed mocking the locals. He’d been born in New Jersey. “Mr. Boyce” signified some program. Something planned. “Stealin’ some ma berries, then, are ya?”
“It’s in the lease,” Boyce said, metal bowl in hand.
“Livin’ off the land. Whadda ya know?”
Fenderson walked off in the direction of the front door where he’d put the plastic geraniums under the front window, days before. His truck was idling in the road by the FOR SALE sign—the tiny
poodle staring out. Boyce noticed a bumper sticker. A Drunk Driver Killed My Daughter. This didn’t match Fenderson. The sticker no doubt came with the truck when he bought it. Fenderson seemed intending to go inside the house, but stopped and turned. “Wonder you’d mind can I show yer house.” He surveyed the yard and the old concrete cistern cap so as not to meet eyes with Peter Boyce. Fenderson knew showing the house was not in the agreement. “People down the road—they’re black people—came in the office today. They’re rentin’ your old place. Saw the sign, I guess. Money burning holes in they-yah paw-kets. Can’t really say no. If I don’t show ’em the house they get touchy. You’re the lawyer.”
“When do you have in mind?” He enjoyed free and unfettered use of the little house. No conditions. Fenderson would be expecting him to decline. Assign the blame on him, being from New Orleans. A southerner. The old ways.
Fenderson looked at the crows, taking up their evening perches in the cedar scrub across the road—flapping and fidgeting. “’Course they want to do evah-thing yes-tuh-day. They wanta see the sun set. I guess, it won’t set tomorrow.” Fenderson peered down at his paint-specked canvas shoes, waiting. Fenderson had also flown combat sorties in Vietnam, owned medals for valor. But he was an old faker. Nothing bothered him.
