The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  “Is that what made my father so crazy?” Henry said. “Was he one of the ones who fired?” He couldn’t really picture the scene, but he could imagine the shame: he’d been living with the shame of failure for months.

  “No,” Marcus said. “He did all right. But it took us four days to clear Makin, and by the time we were done, a Jap sub had reached the atoll and it sunk one of the escort carriers our last day there. A torpedo exploded the bombs in the hold and the carrier blew up. Men, planes, clothing, everything everywhere—hundreds of men were killed and almost all the rest had horrible burns. Then all the naval officers started saying how there hadn’t been that many Japs on the atoll, and how we’d taken four days to do a two-day job, and that if we’d finished when we should have, the carrier never would have been hit. It was our fault, they said. Those men died because we didn’t know what we were doing.”

  He paused again. “Pricks,” he said bitterly, and then he went on to tell Henry how their unit had gone back to Oahu under a cloud. The plans for the invasion of Saipan had been under way by then, and the men were thrown back into training with no rest at all. No one believed they’d see action again so soon.

  “What a mess,” Marcus said. The Marine landings went badly; the tide was too low, the channel too crowded, the amphibious tractors and tanks got stuck on the beaches. Marcus’s unit was landed two days later, to back up the Marines. They lost most of their equipment during the landing, and then one disaster had followed another.

  “The Marines were moving north,” Marcus said. “Through the center of the island. The commander threw us into the middle of the line, between the two Marine divisions, and he ordered us to sweep through this place called Death Valley.” Marcus moved his hands in the air as he talked, sketching a map along the dashboard and windows as he tried to explain how the valley floor was bare of cover and how the cliffs along the sides were riddled with enemy gun positions.

  “They made mincemeat out of us,” he said, chopping at the air. “We couldn’t keep up with the Marines on our sides, who were in much better positions. The line got bent like this,” he said, making an arc with his hands. “Us in the middle, almost a mile behind the Marines on our flanks. The Marines had to wait for us and the brass had a fit. The commander—a Marine, of course—was telling everyone we couldn’t fight, or wouldn’t fight, that we were inferior. Useless, he said. Too old, poorly trained. Our officers didn’t know what they were doing and turned tail when things got tough.

  “We didn’t know what we were doing, and our officers couldn’t lead horses to water, but we fought. We fought hard. And all we got for it was shit.”

  His voice rose, cracked, quivered, and Henry realized how old Marcus was, and how long ago all this had happened.

  “We were stuck in some places for days. Men dying all around us, all of us worn-out and hungry and thirsty and running out of supplies and ammunition, no one helping us and everyone saying what a bunch of no-good failures we were. We couldn’t link up with the Marines on our flanks for a week. You can’t begin to understand the kind of tired we were. In the end we lost as many men as the Marines, but the Marines got all the glory and we took all the blame.

  “The story got into the newspapers and there was a big investigation. The Marines said the Army guys were bums, and the Army said the Marine commanders had given the Army troops the worst jobs and sacrificed them. Everyone was arguing about who should have commanded who and how, and they all lost sight of us. All the men we’d lost, all the men who went home missing arms and legs and eyes—that counted for nothing. The men who’d acted like heroes weren’t heroes. They were the guys who’d been too slow at Makin and been responsible for the sinking of a ship, and then too slow again at Saipan.”

  Marcus smacked his hand against the dashboard. His hand was wrinkled and spotted and gnarled and had no more strength, Henry guessed, than a child’s, but the vinyl shell was brittle and it split in a sudden star of cracks. “Damn,” Marcus said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not mine. No wonder my father was bitter.” That was the point, Henry thought, of this bloody story. That his father had been falsely blamed for something he couldn’t help. He thought he knew how his father had felt.

  “Of course he was bitter. We were all bitter. But bitter wasn’t what did your father in.”

  “No? Bitter is hard on a man ….”

  “It was the last day,” Marcus said. “When they announced that we’d taken the island. I was with a mopping-up operation further south—but your father was with the troops at Marpi Point.”

  He paused, as if Henry would know what he meant. Henry had to admit that he’d never heard of the place.

  “How could you not have heard of it? Don’t you read?”

  “I was a little boy,” Henry said. “I was a baby.”

  Marcus shook his head. “It was horrible. It was famous. The Japanese civilians who’d been hiding in caves during the invasion gathered on the cliffs at Marpi Point when they heard the island was lost—the Japanese soldiers had told them that the Americans were going to torture them if they surrendered. Our troops set up a PA system, and they got interpreters to tell the crowd that the fighting was over, that we had food and water waiting for them and that they were safe. It didn’t do any good. Your father told me they lined up on the cliff and jumped off, a hundred feet onto the rocks and the surf below. Men pushed their children in front of them. Women jumped with their babies on their backs. People stood and bowed to the American soldiers and then held grenades to their stomachs and pulled the pins. The water below the cliff was so full of bodies that the Navy boats couldn’t move without running over them. Your father stood there, screaming at these people not to jump, and they jumped and jumped and jumped. He saw …”

  Marcus cleared his throat and stopped. When he continued, his voice was quiet.

  “He said he saw a boy just your age jump into the water holding his father’s hand. He was never the same after that. He had malaria, and terrible dysentery, and he’d lost a lot of weight—they sent him to the New Hebrides with the first wave of troops to be rehabilitated. But he never got better. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. When they finally shipped him home, he was in worse shape than when he’d left Saipan. And then he got here and saw the reservoir, and somehow the water here reminded him of the water there, below the cliffs … I don’t know. No one can really understand who wasn’t there. I was there, and I can’t understand.”

  Henry heard everything Marcus said, but much of it passed over his head. He saw the scenes Marcus had described, but he saw them distantly, as if in a movie, drained of pain and blood and sound, and he could no more imagine what his father had felt than he could imagine himself in those places. He said to Marcus, “My father would never tell us what had happened there. My mother told us he was hurt in a place we couldn’t see.”

  “True enough,” Marcus said, but then he closed the subject completely. “That’s enough,” he said. “That’s just enough of that. It makes me sick to talk about it.” He looked up from his hands and out the windshield. “Go slow here. These ruts are terrible. Do you recognize anything yet?”

  Henry peered into the trees surrounding the van. The road looked like a hundred other roads he’d explored; the trees were just trees and he still didn’t know their names after all these years. Willows he recognized because they signaled water, and maples because Kitty had planted one in their backyard, but otherwise trees were either things to cut down to make way for buildings, or things to preserve to enhance the value of a lot. Fifty feet ahead of him, the road was blocked by a yellow gate.

  “Pull over here,” Marcus said. “Anyplace is fine.”

  Henry parked and looked around. He thought he sensed something in the woods to his right, a flash that was either memory or his old, skilled recognition of a likely plot. “We’re here?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Henry twisted around on his seat and looked at Brendan, w
ho hadn’t said a word throughout Marcus’s story. “Isn’t this something?” Brendan’s eyes were shut and his face was very white. “Uncle Brendan? You okay?”

  Brendan cleared his throat twice and said, “Fine. Just a little twinge.”

  “What do you think? Do you remember this?”

  “I never saw it. Or if I did, it was never like this—I was in the monastery before this road was built, long before your parents moved out here. I never saw the cabin.”

  “It’s gone now,” Marcus said. “You want to get out?”

  Together, Henry and Marcus lowered Brendan’s wheelchair to the ground. Bongo jumped out and darted past the gate, his nose half an inch above the ground as he followed some irresistible scent. A trail cut into the trees, twenty feet or so before the gate, and it wound up the gentle slope and then vanished. The slope, Henry saw, was the tail end of a long ridge running diagonal to the road.

  Marcus pushed Brendan’s chair close to the trailhead and said, “Your land starts about a hundred yards in, I think—on the top of the ridge, running north and east. The section your brother lived on is at the far end of the parcel. You can still see where it was logged, even though it’s growing in. I wish there was a way to get you up there.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Brendan said. “I just wanted to know it was still here.”

  “But it’s gorgeous.” Henry turned to Brendan and Marcus, aware that his mouth was stretched in a childish grin. The parcel was remarkable, he could tell already—elevation, good drainage, obviously plenty of water. And if there was a view of the reservoir from the top of the ridge …

  “I’d like to go down to the water,” Brendan said quietly. “Is there some way we can do that?”

  “No problem,” Marcus said. “This road runs right to the water’s edge, and it’s not that bumpy—I can push you down.”

  “Would you mind?” Henry said. “If I just did a little exploring? I’ll only be a few minutes, half an hour at most. I want to go up on the ridge.”

  Marcus frowned. “You don’t want to come with us?”

  “Let him go,” Brendan said. “It’s going to be his, and his sister’s—he might as well see it.”

  Marcus shrugged, and then he took a pencil stub and a small notebook from his shirt pocket and sketched a rough map for Henry. “Look for the boulder, here, to the left of the trail, near the three birches—the boundary runs right near it. The far end, where your folks’ place was, is marked by the beginning of the logged area.”

  “Great. I’ll just be a little while.” Henry stepped back to the van and changed his shoes for the sneakers he’d taken from Kitty’s, which made his feet feel light and youthful.

  “We’ll be down at the water,” Marcus said. “It’s not very far. Come get us when you’re ready.” He stood quietly for a minute, his hands resting on the back of Brendan’s wheelchair. “You know, your parents …,” he said, but Henry was off before Marcus could finish his sentence.

  He didn’t want to think about his parents anymore: not about his father struggling over steamy islands or watching people crash from cliffs, not about his mother chain-smoking by the radio or about the mornings when he and Wiloma had followed their parents through these woods, these very woods, on this trail or another, winding gently down and left toward the shore where the reservoir lapped at the rocks. The story Marcus had told him changed nothing—all these years he’d thought that if he knew what had happened to his father he’d understand what had happened to his own life. But the story was only a story; his parents were still dead.

  The water was close, he remembered suddenly, just down the road and beyond that curve, and a small wooden dock jutted into the water. There was a shed someplace, where his father had rented a boat. He climbed with firm, strong steps until he reached the boulder Marcus had described, and then he stepped across that invisible line and thought, Mine, as his foot touched the springy moss. Mine, mine. He climbed higher, admiring the widely spaced old trees. A road cut through here might spare the best of them, preserving an authentic woodland feeling. Buyers were always willing to pay more for that.

  At the top of the ridge he turned and saw the reservoir shining below him. Islands dotted the water—Hills, he remembered his father saying morosely. Those used to be the tops of hills —and the shoreline was ruffled with points and bays. Around him as far as he could see stretched green woods, his woods. He hardly thought at all about how half of this would be Wiloma’s or how none of it would be his until his uncle died.

  Somewhere, not far away, the trees thinned to young undergrowth and exposed his parents’ cabin site, but he couldn’t make himself look for the clearing. Someone else owned that land now. It was gone and so were his parents, but so, too, was the sad and dispirited creature he’d been these past six months. He felt a great surge of exhilaration and hope, and a conviction that his earlier selves had nothing to do with him now. With some energy he could turn himself into someone else. Without hardly knowing it he began to whistle, and his sneakered feet picked their way lightly along the path.

  The condominium complex he’d imagined earlier faded away and he saw houses instead: modern, cedar-sided, with huge windows facing the spectacular view. Homes for· the computer executives, spaced on large lots and linked by a narrow, curving lane. He could see the development’s slogan already, the carved wooden sign that would span two tall pillars: “Any Closer To The Water—And You’d Be In It!”

  Near the water, near a dock and shed that were either the ones he remembered from his childhood or replacements of them, Henry saw Marcus and Brendan beside a bunch of aluminum rowboats. They were facing the water; Marcus stood next to Brendan with his arm straight out, pointing at something in the distance. Bongo stood up to his chest in the water, drinking thirstily.

  “Hey!” Henry called, full of excitement, drowning in plans. “You guys!” They weren’t very far away, but they couldn’t hear him.

  27

  WILOMA AND WALDO OVERSLEPT, AND IT WAS AFTER TEN BEFORE they finished breakfast and headed for the dam. Wiloma wished she’d never touched the margaritas Waldo had ordered. Beyond the fact that she felt queasy now, and beyond the ridiculous ways she and Waldo had behaved, she disliked the film of irritability and suspicion the drinks had left behind. The day was beautiful, but the light hurt her eyes and made Waldo look pale and pouchy. He was as kind and thoughtful as he’d been throughout their drive, but now his kindness seemed calculated and she found hidden motives in his every word.

  When they walked into the Visitors’ Center, he said, “Why don’t you let me do the talking?” Her first impulse was to say no; then she caught herself and wondered what she feared. There was nothing he could do legally to get her share of Brendan’s land, and she was long past the point where she’d give him something just because he wanted it. Except that her behavior last night seemed to prove she wasn’t— she’d been more susceptible to him than she would have believed. When she realized this, she also realized that it wasn’t Waldo she feared, but her feelings for him. She let him do the talking after all.

  The woman at the desk was grumpy. “Up to no good,” she was saying to a young man who stood behind her. A group of rude kids had apparently just passed through and she hadn’t liked the looks of them. Waldo interrupted her complaints to greet her, and she turned to him with a brusqueness that made Wiloma’s heart sink. But within a few minutes, Waldo had charmed the woman completely.

  He spread his maps out on her desk and told her how interested he was in the history of the reservoir; how his wife here—his wife? Wiloma thought—actually belonged to one of the old families from one of the lost towns; how they were hoping to find a piece of land that her family had once owned. Without ever mentioning Henry or Brendan, without ever giving the least impression that they were desperately seeking a runaway or that anything was wrong, he managed to convince the woman of the urgency of their quest. They’d come all this way, he said. They’d been thinking about this for age
s. It would mean so much to them if they could just find this place ….

  The woman responded warmly; Waldo was irresistible when he tried. The woman pulled books and maps from the shelves around her, called over one of her assistants, and bent over Waldo’s maps, listening to what he said. In half an hour she’d solved their problem as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle.

  “Here,” she said, drawing pencil lines on the map that showed the valley before the reservoir was built. “The old Auberon farm was right around here.” Wiloma bent over the map and stared. That box outside the village of Pomeroy was where Brendan and her father had grown up and where Da and Gran had spent much of their lives. With a smile of triumph the woman pulled over another map, a new one with the reservoir in place. “If you compare these two,” she said, indicating various lines, “you can sort of imagine where the water lies over your family’s old place. The other parcel you were talking about is here.”

  She moved her pencil north and east and pointed out a spot just beyond the blue lobe of water. “Of course, the village of East Pomeroy doesn’t exist anymore, and that land’s been incorporated by another township. But it’s right here, just outside this gate. There’s someone here who can tell you all about the area and what’s happened to it, one of our local historians. Marcus?” She turned to the man sorting photographs behind her. “Where’s Marcus O’Brian? Isn’t he supposed to be in this morning?”