by Dawn Tripp
“This one here’s rotted out,” Bridge says, prying up one of the planks. “This one too. Most of them are nailsick.” Noel comes around to see. He fingers the hole where the nail has been reset so many times the wood around it has worn out. “They won’t hold again,” Bridge says. “Does he want the nailsick ones replaced?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Alright then.”
Noel thinks of the money. What Honey Lyons has offered him for this one job is more than he’ll turn in a year. He grips for the stool behind him and leans against it. He watches his granddaughter as she works. She pushes her hair from her eyes, her face oiled by sweat, lacquered in the dusty light cast through the windows, and he remembers back to the first time he held her, the day she was born, he remembers her soft ridged skull in the palm of his hand, and even then, he had had the sense it was the whole of his life he was holding, not in pieces or fractured notions, but all of it, in her all of it, and he had felt a stunning joy, and at the same time, a sober, chilling sense of his own age.
She is grown now, and he loves her the way he used to love the sea. His life is measured by her. Sometimes as he watches her work over a busted hull in one corner of the shop, he will remember the places he has been, and his heart will ache for the wandering. He yarns with her as they work. Every so often, he will glance up and see her face, as fragile and rare as those objects he brought back with him from his voyages: the pelican feet and the ivory mussel shells, the fishing line strung out of mother-of-pearl.
He has taught her all the knots: the clove hitch and the monkey’s fist, the shroud knot and the Turk’s head. From the time she could walk she has helped him in the shop. He has taught her how to use beeswax to bind frayed strands of thread, to caulk a seam and wield an adze. He has taught her how to push her weight just enough into the saw to make a clean, swift cut, how to force a broadax to shape timbers, how to steam oak ribs and soak wood in water until it bends.
Before the causeway was built across the tidal flat between Gooseberry Neck and the mainland, he took her seafowling on the bar, and they would wait there together, the old man and the child, crouched in the rocks, their shadows crouched behind them, their boots dug to the shins in cold wet sand.
He has taught her how to bait a hook and grease a trap, how to stalk and hunt and kill, how to clean, oil, load, cock, point, and shoot a gun. He could tell from the first time he took her down to practice shoot in the gravel pit that she had a knack for cold metal. She had that certain kind of ruthlessness it takes to pull the trigger over and over again, without emotion, without rage or cruelty, desire or greed. She was not like her brother, Luce. She did not have his hotheadedness. From the time she was a mite, she seemed to understand that killing, in its purest form, is an empty-eyed passionless art.
When she was still young, Noel bought a small gun for her off Samuel Browne, a single-shot .410. Once, when she had left a splinter of air between her shoulder and the butt, the recoil hit back into her chest and chipped off a bit of her collarbone. Another time, she held up the gun, and as she fired, the comb slapped hard against her cheek and bruised the bone. When she was older and he was teaching her on his gun—a double-barreled twelve gauge—she pulled both triggers and the shock of the blast sent her ass-over-teakettle into a pile of shale. She got up again, brushed herself off, and said nothing of it. That was just her way.
Once, he had believed that what he taught her, what he had to give, would be enough.
He knows that the world is changing. Bridge reads him snips from the newspapers, and he has heard stories of men who have cut their fortunes overnight. His old friend Rui has made a small but tidy bundle for himself trading in the stock market. A little money is a little means. A little freedom.
Money is reason enough to take this work, he tells himself. It is only one job. To refit a boat. To strip out her insides and rebuild her lighter, faster, more silent. And if the work had been offered by anyone else, he would have snapped it up, no hesitation, no questions asked.
He looks up again at Bridge. She has stripped off the dead bottom boards and stacked them in a heap on the floor. She is setting down new ones, the heart side of the wood facing out, and he notices then that, as she works, there is a thin forked line between her brows. It is slight but so unlike her, a small frown, it puzzles him, and he watches her more closely.
She can feel his eyes on her. She bites her lip. She isn’t working well, he must notice it, he must have begun to wonder why. Her hands are clumsy, and she is annoyed with herself. It is simple work she is doing, but now again, for the fourth time already, she pinches her finger setting one board against another. She swears under her breath, shakes her hand loose. It is only a nip, the pain sharp, no blood, no broken skin, but everything feels upside down, her head upside down. The planks don’t seem to line up. She is thinking about the morning, it is all the fault of the morning, and that man, Henry Vonniker, seeing him last night at Asa’s, then seeing him again at the store, stealing the oysters and having him catch her do it, and the way he had looked at her, astonishment and frank desire, she had seen it, felt it. It had made her feel alive.
Why should that happen? What should it matter? Why was she even asking herself when she knew very well it couldn’t mean anything? And thinking about it now makes her restless, impatient, a little bit angry that the thought of it, the thought of him, is taking up room in her head. When she works, she likes her head clear, like calm water, so she can see through to the bottom of things. That is what she wants. That is the way she likes it, and the only thing now that she feels a little bit grateful for is that Luce was gone by the time she got home so she didn’t have to banter with him, because she wasn’t in the mood. He might have sensed something was off, and if he had, he would have bugged after her about it, because that was just the way he was. Luce couldn’t let things go.
She takes a breath in, but doesn’t look up. She still feels her grandfather watching her. She keeps lining up the planks, setting the nails, slamming them in with the hammer. It is a sound she loves— that clear, square hit of a hammer on the head of a nail that drives it clean through the plank into the frame. And usually it is a motion she can do without thinking. Her grandfather is not saying anything. She can hear the sound of his teeth grinding on the stem of his pipe, but he is not working, he is sitting still, very still, his eyes on her. Finally she puts down the hammer and straightens up, one hand on her hip. She looks at him and says, “So you’re not going to be much use today, are you?”
He bursts out laughing. She blushes and smiles. He looks at her carefully. “I’m just watching over you.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“Just want to make sure you don’t get sloppy.”
“Why should I get sloppy?”
“You’ll have to tell me.”
She looks down at her hands and notices a thread on the cuff of her sleeve coming loose. She gives it a tug, and it quickly unravels. She breaks it off with her teeth.
“I don’t really think it’s me,” she says slowly, her voice controlled. “After all, I’m not the one sitting around, idle hands, thinking about the men who came by this morning and what they might have offered me.”
He doesn’t answer right away. She watches his face. But there is no change in his expression, no twitch, no shift, nothing in his eyes, nothing she can see. He is good at hiding things. She knows this. He shifts his pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Maybe I’m thinking about that fox,” he says.
“It was a beauty of a thing,” she admits.
“Well, that’s what it is. I can’t stop thinking about that fox.”
She laughs and brushes some dust off a seam between two of the planks. “That might be a lie,” she says, “but I can let it be that, if that’s what you want.”
She is more composed now. She feels lighter, happy even. Her world seems to have turned right again. Her world is her world. She picks up the next plank and sets it down. �
�So you’re just going to sit there?” she asks him, rummaging through the box of nails.
“I’m thinking I might.”
“Well, why don’t you draw me a sketch on the panbone?”
“I can do that.”
“Cut me a whale,” she says. She picks up the hammer. “Gallied. Big flukes sweeping eye to eye.”
“You want an iron in her?”
“As long as she scuttles the boat of the man who threw it.”
Noel chuckles as he goes to the wall by the steam-box and picks up the panbone—a huge flat piece from the jaw of a sperm whale he hawked years ago from a shop near the Seamen’s Bethel in the city. He carries it back to his stool and rests it over his knees. He finds an empty spot in the broad center and, with a pencil, draws a light sketch. Then with his needle, he begins to cut. Over the years he has carved into the panbone, filling in the lines with black and colored ink: sketches of the voyages he took, the rafts of birds, buckling seas, the postbox on the turtleshell rock south of the Galápagos where a sailor might find a letter sent three years before. He has sketched the angled noses of the atolls just north of the Sandwich Isles, the pod of devilfish they glimpsed, the suckers finning close against the cows; scenes of drifting north through the pack ice in the Arctic, glaciers, musky light, the sloped eyes of the Inuit women, their dark faces roped by fur. He has sketched scenes of Kauai—the island he came to and could not leave, the island where he first met Hannah—the green water off the reef clear as gin, palm trees, red clay roads, the sheer drop of the black cliffs into the surf, the folding hills where the tribes lived west of Hanalei. Sometimes as he cuts, he will tell Bridge stories of where he has gone, of what he has seen, bony tales worn through years of being retold. The stories of the island are the ones that seem to make her happy, and in her happiness, he finds the place comes alive for him again: the fierce summer heat, the drenching tempers of the rain. On that island, he has told her, at every early dawn, there is an unthinkable calm, so still, so silent, one can hear the mountains breathe.
He is spooked by the places he has been—the geographies he’s passed through—they gather around him in his shop—in the tins of bolts and drifts, in the shavings at his feet, chips of cedar, oak, pine. He sniffs in old smells with the sawdust through his nose—smells of creosote, coconut, oil.
He cuts another line into the bone, the long straight end of a second harpoon, fleshed deep into the whale. They jut like pins from her huge body, breaking out of the sea. Another line.
“Damn!” says Bridge. “I muxed it.”
He looks up. She is standing in the corner, holding the ripsaw and a plank.
“You cut the wedge?” he asks.
“I sawed out the wrong side.”
He smiles. “And see, there it is—why I need to still be watching over you.”
“What a waste,” she says, staring in dismay at the board in her hand.
“It’s just a plank. Set it out to air and cut another.”
She is clearly upset. It surprises him she would be upset over something so trivial. She looks at him from across the room. Even from that distance, he can see her eyes fill. “I am no use today, Papa. I can’t do a thing right today. No use at all.”
He smiles at her gently, shaking his head. He won’t ask what’s on her mind or try to coax it out of her.
“Some days are like that,” he says simply. “I’m having that same kind of day myself.”
She manages a smile. She pushes her hair from her face with the back of her sleeve.
“That’s all it is,” he says. “Just that kind of day. And that piece of wood in your hand is just a piece of wood. So go to the loft and get another and cut it again.”
She nods and carries the plank out of the shop. He hears the thud as she leans it against the sidewall in the sun.
He looks again at the panbone on his lap—the bare sketch he has drawn so far, the whale and a small boat beside her, flung up against a wave. He tilts it toward the window to see the lines more clearly, to see what he has done and what is left to do.
Money is reason enough to take the work, he tells himself. It is a good reason, a solid reason. Money for the children. He could set aside a little pile for Bridge.
He knows better.
When Noel sailed on the Sarah Mar, his work was as ship’s carpenter. But from time to time, the first mate would send him aloft. Noel had a gift for seeing. It was his mother’s gift. He could stay for hours aloft, his body strapped to the crow’s nest. He could mark a blow on the horizon when another sailor would see nothing but an empty, light-wrecked sea. At times, he could see a thing before it came.
The thought of taking the work makes him uneasy—the money itself makes him uneasy. It’s not the lawlessness that bothers him. It’s the prospect of tangling with a man like Honey Lyons. It’s the deep grating sense he feels in his gut that if he takes this job, things might not turn out so fine in the end.
Bridge comes back in with a new board. He glances up.
“What?” she says.
He shakes his head.
“You still thinking about that fox, Papa?” She laughs.
“Guess I still am.”
She looks at him a moment longer, then takes the new plank to the corner and picks up the ripsaw.
Luce comes home at half past four from the icehouse, with a blade of tall grass between his front teeth and news of how Frank Mac-Donald got shot up last night at sea by a 75.
“On his way in, and they got him. Took his boat and all its stuff. A hundred and fifty cases at least, I heard. And Frank got two slugs, one in each side of him.”
“Is he dead?” Bridge asks.
“He’s not, but Ruth Mason’s terrier is. Got run over by a dump truck. Dog was flatter than piss on a platter.” Luce’s boots are covered with mud and soiled straw. He stamps them out on the porch and leaves them behind the garbage pail. In the kitchen, he peels off his socks, the heels full of darning. He puts them on the floor by the stove to dry, then sits back in the chair. His skin is dark from long hours outside, hair thick and black. He pushes his hands through it. Bridge has shucked out the clams, and she is chipping onions into the pot of boiling water, potatoes and meal.
“You up for tag?” he asks her.
“I’m busy.”
He glances up, a sly cool look in his eye. “That’s never stopped me before.” And he chases her out the door, down the porch into the yard. He catches her halfway across the grass to the shop, and they tumble to the ground, laughing, underneath Cora’s wash pinned to the line. The white sheets flap like heavy sailcloth in the breeze.
In the doorway of the shop, Noel takes a smoke. He watches them as they wrestle through the grass, and it is how they always are with one another—they shriek and growl and box and buck and fight until they are worn through and done. Then they fall quiet and lie close, with the linens drifting loose around them. They whisper together, hatching their schemes. He knows what they do. He finds the slumgullion scraps of their stealing—the broken hair comb, the empty tins of caviar.
He knows that there is only one pure love—young love, first love. The heart can only be broken once. Every other love that comes afterward has some restraint, some compromise. After that first, the heart can be winded, skinned, bent, betrayed, or bruised, but never broken.
His own heart was a door he had walked through long ago and left dangling on busted hinges behind him. He knew enough to leave it open so when the wind came, it blew clean through.
His leg aches and he sits down on a cask by the door of the shop. He tips his weight back and leans his head against the sidewall. The afternoon sun bathes his face. The warmth soaks into the warped places, the deeper lines. He can hear the wind bristle through the maple leaves.
The girl shrieks. He opens one eye. They are wrestling again. Luce has pinned her down by both hands but she kicks up. He lets go and she rolls out from under him.
She has grown beautiful, he thinks—grown up almost
overnight, but she does not seem to know it yet. She cut her first two teeth at six months—he remembers this—they broke through the pearly surface of her gums. She did not cut the rest until she was past a year old, and she would squawk at him and gnaw on his thumb with those two teeth like a baby tautog.
They lie apart now—on either side of one of Cora’s sheets. Only the girl’s feet are visible, dirt ground into her anklebones, overalls rolled halfway up the shin. They are laughing together without seeing one another, the stark white vastness of the sheet dividing them. They talk and snicker, on either side of it, without touching: biting words, nonsense, scathing words that have no apparent context, no clear meaning. They tumble back into laughing.
Their closeness now concerns him. They have always been close, since they were children, but they are older now, and it doesn’t sit right. Sometimes when he squints he imagines he can see slight pale threads that bind them.
He looks away from them across the yard to the blue spruce. It is dying, and its needles have begun to blanch out at the ends. There are patches of baldness on the lower branches.
He stands up and sets out across the yard. He passes the garden and takes the path down the hill into the white pine wood. He crosses the creek and cuts around the swamp, then climbs up to the old Indian ground. There is no fence. No gate to mark the site. The stones are rough. Unetched. They were here when he bought the butt of land. He wouldn’t have known them for what they were but for the ritual pile of clamshells on a clear spot of ground by the small beach below. He notes the deer rub on the sassafras. He sits down on the cold earth.
The wind has fallen off, and the air is still. The clouds press down over the hills on the far side of the river, blue clouds like sea-pigs diving low. The sun, heavy-lidded in the west, settles until it is a glowing shiver on the earth, then disappears.
