The Season of Open Water

by Dawn Tripp

  Now, as they work together down the garden row, digging up the potatoes, she falls a few paces behind. He can still smell the sullen reek of liquor off her skin. The sun warms the back of his neck, and he feels rage—a hotheaded burning rage toward Luce, for roping her in, for leading her down this tainted road. There is an ache in his chest, and it weighs him down as he works along the furrow, dredging up the vines.

  When Luce stops by the shop that afternoon, Noel is scrimping with a needle into the panbone.

  “Have you got some ten-inch nails, old man?”

  “Should have.”

  “Where?”

  Noel nods over toward the shelves above the ice chest. “Might be there. Might be up top.”

  Luce rummages through some cans on the lower shelf, then on the shelf above.

  “Can I take this box here?”

  “Sit for a talk.”

  “Don’t have time.”

  “I talk short.”

  Luce laughs. “Alright then.”

  “Have yourself a cup.”

  “Not thirsty, thanks.”

  “Have one anyway.” And it might be the edge in his grandfather’s voice, but Luce does what he says. He pours himself a mug of water from the pail, drinks off the top, and sits down in the soft chair by the saw. He drums his fingers against the arm.

  “Heard talk of you going west,” Noel says.

  “Bridge tell you that?”

  Noel nods. He goes on scrimping. “Never been out west, myself.”

  “A guy I know told me it’s fine out there. Arizona, I was thinking. Land’s cheap. Five dollars an acre in some parts.”

  “What guy told you that?”

  “Just a guy.”

  “Can’t remember?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Your fool cousin Asa maybe? Seeing as you’re following his footsteps.”

  Luce shoots him a look, but doesn’t answer. He takes a sip of water and wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

  “Out west,” Noel goes on, “I hear they got crows the size of dogs.”

  “Never heard that.”

  Noel goes on cutting the needle into a small blank square on the panbone. “You know how those crows came to get so big?”

  “No.” Luce shakes his head.

  “Got eyes for their bellies, kept eating up everything they’d see.”

  “That so?”

  Noel looks up at him, straight in the face. “Sometime long back when, those crows—they came from here, just like you.”

  Luce stares at him. He puts down his mug and leans back in the chair, his face creased as he takes in his grandfather’s meaning. Then his features smooth out again and he smiles, but his eyes are hard.

  “What are you goading me for?”

  “You go on doing what you’re doing,” Noel says, the needle ticking into the bone. “Hang your hat at whatever gin mill you want, oil up your boat heavy as you want, but you leave her out of it.”

  “So this is about Bridge.”

  “Seems it might be.”

  Luce leans forward in the chair. “You think I have her on a leash, old man?”

  “You’re thick in the head, Luce. Always have been. But you know, it’s finest kind with me for you to go on and do your crooked work, your puddling work. Have your big nights. Make your big money. Go on and do what you do. But you leave her out of it.”

  Luce opens his mouth to speak, then he seems to catch himself, and slowly, deliberately, he grips the box of nails, and stands. “Bridge does what she wants,” he says walking toward the door. “You’d know that better than anyone now, wouldn’t you, old man? Bridge’s always done exactly as she wants.”

  He steps through the door into the open sunlight, around the corner, and he is gone.

  They move around each other carefully after that. Luce and Noel. They keep a proper distance.

  There is trouble with the hens that September. On a morning early in the month, one sheds a drop of blood from the stretching as she lays, and at the scent, the others turn on her. By the time Noel comes in to check on them, they have picked her almost dead.

  A few weeks on, he notices two hens seeming sluggish. As he sweeps down the hen yard, he finds worms in their droppings. Short white skittish threads. He treats them all. Moist mash mixed with a teaspoonful of gasoline. Once a week for two weeks, and every two weeks thereafter. They gain back their weight, they liven, but even after a month and no sign of the worms, they will still only pass an occasional egg.

  The light cools. The leaves begin to turn. As the wind shifts around, and the blow comes out of the northwest, Noel finds himself thinking about Hannah, and it strikes him for the first time since she has been gone that perhaps she died because, in some small way, he slighted her. It is an absurd thought. He knows this. But it nags him nonetheless. That perhaps she died because he turned his back on her somehow, the life shriveled between them, and there was simply nowhere else for her to go.

  He had not expected it. He finds he can admit this to himself at last. He could never have expected that she would be the one to leave.

  Bridge

  She is washing up the breakfast dishes that Saturday morning in September when Noel tells her she’ll have to start work in the shop without him. He is taking the wagon down to the Point to collect the rest of the money Howie Sherman owes for the dory they built. He’ll be back awhile later in the day.

  “I’ll go for you,” she says quickly, setting the last mug on the rack beside the sink and wiping her hands on the dishtowel. She doesn’t look at him as she pulls on her boots.

  “I was looking forward to the ride,” he says, curious to see if she’ll pursue it.

  “No, no. Let me go. I can take my bike. I’ll be back before noon.” He watches her tie her bootlaces precisely. She gives a last tug to check the knot and stands up. “How much does he owe?”

  “You aren’t planning any detour, are you?” he asks with a slight smile.

  She ignores him. “What does he owe?”

  “Thirty-two dollars.”

  “Alright. I’ll be back. Try not to stew around too much while I’m gone.” Then she is out the door and down the steps. She gets her bicycle from the barn and pedals off down the road.

  She tells herself as she takes the turn at South Westport Corner that the thought of a detour might never have occurred to her if Noel hadn’t slid in that last remark. But then she smiles, the wind pulling her hair away from her face, thinking about how she makes up these little lies, pretending to trick herself, when she already knows that she will take the long way home, she will ride by the beach, by Henry’s house—he is not likely to be there, and she tells herself she is not even sure that she wants him to be there, although of course that is a little lie too. What is true is that since that night she left him behind at Al Devereaux’s house, all she has really wanted was to see him again.

  Within half an hour she has reached the Point. Howie Sherman’s wife is outside, feeding the geese in the yard, and she goes into the house and gets the money for Bridge and invites her in for a piece of breakfast cake, but Bridge says, “No, thank you, we have a busy day in the shop today,” and she takes the money and puts it deep in the pocket of her trousers, then pedals down past the wharf, over the Point Bridge. The clouds box in packs through the sky like great white fists. The sun squeezes through. She can feel a light sweat on the back of her neck under her hair and she is happy and the air is cool on her face. Yesterday’s wind has stripped the sand off the dunes and it piles in small drifts on the beach road, and when it is too soft and deep, she has to get off her bicycle and push until she comes again to a clearer stretch.

  Henry is out in the driveway under his car, changing the oil, when he hears the creak of bicycle wheels coming down the road from the dunes. There is little traffic this time of year, and on another day he might have been curious to see who it was, but he has been having some trouble with the drain plug on the oil pan. The thing had been ja
mmed. With a box wrench, he finally loosened it, and it seemed to be moving more freely now, the way it should move, along its grooves. He unscrews the last few turns with his fingers, and with his other hand, he gropes for the tin tray that he will place under the hole to catch the oil. But the bicycle stops on the road in front of his house, and he looks over and sees her. He drops the drain plug. Oil shoots down over his shoulder. The plug rolls away from him. “Damn,” he says, wedging his thumb into the hole to block it up again. The tin tray is out of his reach, the drain plug out of reach, and he is stuck now and he knows it.

  She lays her bike down at the edge of his driveway and walks over to him. He has spread out the canvas, and on it, he has set down his tools in two neat and perfect rows, wrenches and screwdrivers, a ball-peen hammer. They are polished and they glint in the light. He has set out everything he will need: the funnel, four quart cans of oil, a few clean rags. She finds the drain plug on the ground. She picks it up and wipes off the sand, then squats down on the canvas near him and peers under the car.

  “Do you need some help?” she asks.

  “That’s not very funny.”

  She laughs and slips the tin tray under the car to him. He places it under the hole in the oil pan, removes his thumb, and slides out. He sits up, pushing his clean hand through his hair. It is disheveled and his face is flushed, a streak of grease down one side of his cheek. She gives him a rag, and he wipes the oil off his hands and arm. He wipes off his glasses, then puts them back on. He looks at her. “Thank you.”

  She smiles. “You would have figured it out. You would have figured something out.”

  He laughs, then pauses. “It’s good to see you.”

  She nods.

  “Will you come in?”

  “Not today,” she says, but she sits down on the edge of the canvas near him. There is an empty teacup and saucer on the ground. He notices her looking at it.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No. Thanks. I was just on my way home. From the Point.”

  “Well, I’m glad you decided to come around this way.”

  She smiles and picks up one of the adjustable wrenches. “This is nice,” she says, fingering the handle. “You don’t use it much, do you?”

  “I do in fact. I use it at least once every few months to make a fool of myself changing the oil in my car.”

  “Well, just don’t do it in the driveway next time. Park in the dirt and dig a hole. Let the oil run into it.”

  “That would cut out one step, I suppose.”

  “Can you handle the rest?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you do alright with the funnel?”

  “Actually I would prefer if you would just come around again and do it for me.”

  She laughs, looking down at the wrench in her hands. She turns the screw, and closes the clamp on one of her fingers. She tightens it, then opens it again, and he can see the whiter indentations the clamp has left in her skin.

  “Keep it,” he says.

  “The wrench?”

  “I want you to have it.”

  “No.”

  “Please. It will be my first gift to you.”

  She shakes her head and puts the wrench down with the others on the canvas.

  “You’d use it more than I do,” he says.

  “I don’t doubt that.” She smiles and looks away from him toward the hedge and her bicycle lying on the ground at the edge of the drive.

  “Don’t go yet.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Stay for a cup of tea.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Coffee?”

  “No.” She giggles.

  “Then let me make a pot. I’ll have a cup and you can stay.”

  “You might drink very slowly.”

  “You might change your mind.”

  She looks at him then, the first time she has looked at him since she sat down, and her eyes are very pale in the sunlight, very blue. Then she looks away back toward the road.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  She tries to find the words to explain it, but they don’t come to her. They are words she has not needed until now. But when she sees him, when she is with him, she can feel things open inside her.

  “I want to see you again,” he says.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Is that alright?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Why?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Is it because of your brother?”

  “Luce?” She glances at him, surprised. “No.”

  “I worried about you that night you went out with him in the boat.”

  She nods.

  “Why do you let him talk you into it?”

  “Talk me into what?”

  “Into doing that kind of work for him?”

  It’s a way of life, she could have told him, but she did not expect he would understand that. Any more than he would understand the childish faith she sometimes held that if she went with Luce, she could protect him. If she was with him, he would not fall into harm.

  “That kind of work isn’t safe,” Henry says.

  “Do you think,” she replies slowly, still averting her eyes, speaking to the shed across the yard, “do you think it is safe—my being here with you?”

  He pauses for a moment. He wants to touch her. He wants to take her face in his hands and draw it toward him. “That’s not the point,” he says.

  “I think it might be.”

  “It’s not.”

  “We’re having our first quarrel,” she says, “aren’t we?” And then she laughs again, looking down at her hands, and the sound of her laughter fills him with an inexpressible joy.

  “Alright,” he says. “But tell me, what would be wrong with my seeing you again. What could be more simple than that?”

  She looks around the yard, at the porch, the railing, the steps, the open toolbox, the empty china teacup and saucer lying near them on the ground. She touches the gilded edge of the cup.

  “It’s this,” she finally says. “It’s difficult because of this.”

  “Because of a teacup?”

  “We don’t have these.”

  “You don’t have cups?”

  “Not these kinds of cups.”

  “Why would that matter?”

  “We don’t have anything like them.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “But do you understand it makes things more difficult?”

  “No. I don’t understand that at all.”

  She looks up at him again and, for a moment, he thinks he sees a trace of anger in her eyes. Then she leans across the canvas between them, and she kisses him. Her mouth is warm on his.

  “Please don’t go,” he says quietly as she draws away.

  “You know I’m not going to stay.” Her eyes are smooth and she touches the side of his face. Then she stands up and offers him her hand. She pulls him to his feet. As she walks down the driveway, he walks with her. She picks up her bicycle.

  “Will you come back?” he asks. “Please.”

  “I think so,” she says, and again she smiles, that warm shy smile that he loves.

  “When?”

  “In a while.”

  “A long while or a short while?”

  She laughs. “One or the other.”

  “Do you promise you’ll come?”

  “Yes.”

  And he watches her from the end of the driveway as she pedals down West Beach Road. At the turn, she looks over her shoulder and waves to him. He waves back and she passes out of view.

  The oil on his shirt has begun to seep through and he can feel it, heavy on his skin. He is thirsty. His throat burns. On his way up to the house for a glass of water he pauses by the empty teacup and saucer on the ground. He doesn’t mean to do it, he
has no mental thought before he does, but he raises his foot and brings it down firmly. He feels the china splinter under his boot, and he leaves it there, in pieces on the ground.

  Cora

  Twice that fall, when Cora and Luce were alone in the kitchen, Luce dug some money out of his pocket, pushed it at her, and said gruffly, “There, Ma, go and buy yourself something fine.”

  But there was nothing that she wanted. Nothing she would need. She kept the money, though, in an empty hatbox on the upper shelf of her closet where she kept a few other necessary things.

  She can feel the rupture between her father and her son—the stilted, tenuous peace. They had never fit together well—she knows this—never easily, but the rift is deeper now.

  On certain days, in the late afternoon, when she has finished her laundry, when the shirts are starched, ironed, folded, tagged, and she is down in the cellar wrapping them up in sheets of brown paper, cutting an even edge with a pair of scissors off the roll, she is aware of her body, wrung from the work of the day, her mind so light, as if she is drifting at the end of a very long string, brushing into the rafters, the ceiling dust, the creases in the beams where some rogue bird has found its way in, has built its nest of mud and straw.

  She digs the pointed end of the scissors into her palm. She digs it in hard, to draw herself back down.

  There is a certain kind of grief, she knows, that has no color. That has no smell or sound. Loneliness is not an empty feeling. It has a weight, a texture, like water in the lungs.

  She can hear them above her through the cracks in the floor— Bridge and Luce—they are upstairs in the kitchen. They keep their talking low. Luce is griping about Honey Lyons, about how he is cheating them—Luce and Johnny Clyde—how they do all the work, duck all the danger, bring in the load, but he is the one who makes the trade, and what should be a good-size payoff, he will claim comes in short, and he pays them only a third of that. A third they have to split between them.

  Cora goes on wrapping the clothes. She folds down the edges of the stiff brown paper. She squares off the ends. She picks through their words, choosing to attach herself to some, enough to make out their sense. She is drawn to her son’s voice.