by Dawn Tripp
He has always been, still is, a falling star in her darkness. He came out of her upside down, his face bruised, the nose squished to the left. He was a blue baby, cord wrapped twice around his neck. He came in winter, hatched like an egg from the snow. As a mite still suckling on her, he would have her breast in his mouth, one huge eye staring up at her. If her hair was loose, he would take a thick strand of it, wind it tight around his fat baby fingers until the flesh buckled and turned white. It was how he clung to her that made her heart give in. He has always been the one that she loved most.
She knows what he does, and she considers it a sour business. She has noticed too that it does not bring the flush and easy dollars they all talk about. For so much trouble, so much risk, it might bring enough to eat a little better, to buy a little more, but it does not bring so much.
She sends him luck. She washes blessings here and there into his clothes. She will sit sometimes in the early morning when the house is still, and she will finger the soiled clothes he has left for her in a pile by the stairs outside his room. She will see into the dark low places of his thoughts, and she will put those clothes to soak in the hottest water. She will boil them two minutes longer than she would boil a sheet. She will try to scald the bad thoughts out of them. She will battle them into the wash, until the water is full of those thoughts, her hands, her mind, full of them. Then she will rinse in something pure. She will touch the edge of his sleeve, a trouser cuff. She will tuck something good into a pocket, a hem, a seam.
She hears the scrape of a chair on the floor above her, steps across the kitchen, the clatter of dishes in the sink. They go out. The door shuts behind them. Cora goes upstairs. Through the window, she can see them walking down the drive in the direction of the road. She can see the weak glow of the lamp in the shop. Her father passes across the open door and out of view.
She slips out of the house and walks north. She cuts around the garden and crosses the wagon path onto the land next door owned by Owen Wales. She walks through the woods down to the lower cornfield, its dead stalks plowed, seeded already with winter rye. It is almost dusk. The cows from the lower pastures have been herded up to the barn for their night milking. A few heifers left, they watch her from the other side of the split-rail fence. Down below is the river.
She walks in circles around the field. She keeps to the perimeter, her thoughts pushing her on, her thoughts of her children, Luce and Bridge, her other child, the lost Rose, other thoughts of how she had loved the river once. Long back, at one point when she was a young girl, she had prayed every night to the fields and the trees and the stones. Once, long back, water was many things to her, the river many things. It was freedom, redemption, the washing away of grief and violence and sin. An easy source of joy. And then it was lost in the shuffling of marriage, pregnancies, birth, swaddling clothes, the shuffle of long winters, fires, stews, baking breads, making beds, making do, swollen breasts, sore legs, chilblained hands, the shuffle of linens and overalls, tubs of wash, tubs of bluing, tubs of the rinse, the shuffle of days and deaths and years. Her feet quicken as she walks, they skim the uneven ground. She has never been able to keep her thoughts settled—they run like wild horses through her brain. She notices from a distance how her awareness shifts through the different stages of the circle—the soft wind strikes her face, then it is behind her, the light half of the sky by her shoulder, her head cocked slightly to one side, waiting, listening for the sounds under the earth, the burrowing of rabbits and moles, the slow push of water returning to its source deep beneath the soil. She counts the loops she makes until she loses count, until her awareness drops away and she has the sense that she is standing in the middle of the field, and the horses in her mind are at the end of a long tether, and she is holding them, she is taming them, they still run the loop around the edge, while she stands out of her body in the center. Through the soles of her feet, she can feel the distant thunder of their hooves.
Owen Wales watches her from the hill. He knows who she is, walking the loop around his field. He has seen her do this before, on an occasional night. She walks always the same way, around the edge of the field, her head bent to the side as if it is cut at the neck, tending to her shoulder. He sits on the cow fence, the split-rail closest to the barn. The post next to where he sits has a crack. It will bust soon, and he makes a mental note to see it is repaired. He takes out his pipe, a match, lights it. A bluish cloud of smoke works through his beard.
She leaves the field abruptly and walks down to the river. She pulls her dress over her head and leaves it folded on a stone. She lets her hair down from its pins. She is a beautiful woman, her body smooth. He can see her shape, dark as wire, through her underclothes. She wades into the river and the cotton shift billows out around her.
The sun has dropped and the sky is filled with color, the dusk is all around her, it spills through the river, the sky deep through everywhere, the clouds and the brutal autumn smells of honeysuckle, drowned marsh, earth, rose mallow, pine. She floats through the cool water—still with a hint of summer in it—the current pulling at the small of her back, a smooth light rush between her shoulder blades, and she imagines her son, Luce, floating this same way, she imagines his mind growing more gentle and more tender, softening into darkness, her hands are loose, they work through the water, sculling out the still and unkempt restless surface of his dreams.
Luce
It was a broken trip. One turn of bad luck after another. It had started out well enough. A dark night. A flat sea. They were going out for a prepaid pickup. Luce had his torn half of a playing card in his left trouser pocket. A seven of spades.
Johnny Clyde had pushed them off at six from the Point Wharf, and a Coast Guard patrol, docked at the river mouth, sighted them, then pushed off on their tail. Luce was used to the dance by now. The picket boat would shadow them a ways, then turn back and head in toward shore to regroup with the rest of the blockade.
Except on that night, for some reason, she didn’t. It grew dark, and still she followed them, out past the Inner Mayo Ledge, out past the Sow and Pigs. Ten, twelve, fourteen miles out. This was not what they had expected, not what they wanted. Luce knew he couldn’t lead her any farther on.
He was tired already. He had worked four out of the past five nights. The night before he had worked until dawn. He had slept through the early afternoon in his bed at home, but his sleep had been rough and fitful.
He had a handful of coffee beans in his coat pocket. He pulled a few out and gnawed on them to keep himself sharp as he tooled back and forth in the fringe of deeper water off a shoal, trying to decide what course to take. He kept his lights on. He made it easy for the patrol boat to keep him in sight. He even had Johnny Clyde throw out two trolling lines to pretend they were trying the fishing. Johnny’s hands shook, and he fouled up one of the lines. He smoked one cigarette after another. He drew in deep on them, and they burned fast down to his fingers. He set the fishing poles into metal clasp holders, then leaned against the side of the wheelhouse, still smoking. The fishing lines trailed after them through the rip, skinny threads, long and taut and silver when they caught the light.
The sea had begun to build. Gentle swells running a good three or four feet. Luce headed out again, but off his intended course, away from the location of the rum-ship. He headed west-southwest. He picked up speed, and at one point he thought he had lost the patrol, but as he gained the crest of a swell, he looked back and glimpsed the top of her pilothouse, several troughs behind, before she folded back down again into the sea.
He made a wide circle then, slow and leisurely. He cut back over his own wake and veered in, heading north, back toward shore.
“Where you going, Luce?” Johnny asked. “What’re you doing?”
Luce didn’t answer. He gave the engine more gas. As Johnny went to light another cigarette, the nose of the boat struck a wave. Water splashed over the foredeck, and Johnny stumbled, nearly losing his balance. He grasped for the side o
f the wheelhouse, the match flailed on his shirt, and he beat it out. “Whoa, man, easy there, almost set myself afire.”
“Keep it out,” Luce said. “Don’t light up.” He didn’t look back, but he knew the picket boat was still on their heels, and coming closer now. With the rougher sea, she did not want to lose them. The wind was at his back, and he could hear her engines running. He steered around the shoal. He kept tight against the ledge in the calmer water, hugging the reef, and then he cut east-northeast, but still setting an apparent course toward shore. The ledge ended, and they moved out again into deeper water and the high, steep running swells outside the shoal. Again, at the top of a crest, Luce glanced back over his shoulder, and he could see the cutter’s lights and the square cut shape of her wheelhouse. He kept his eye on her as she climbed, then dipped down and disappeared, and when she was gone, when he could not see her and when he knew she could not see him, he cut off his lights. He swerved south. He counted under his breath, then estimating he was well beyond her, he cut off his engine. They went still in the water, drifting up over the black and rolling swells.
“What?” said Johnny Clyde. “What are you doing?”
“Shhh,” hissed Luce. “Nothing. Say nothing. Not one sound.” And they hung there, the soles of their feet locked to the floor of the boat, in that cold dark silence, rocking over the waves. The cutter passed north of them, and Luce could not hear her engines. He kept his eye on her running lights, bobbing up and down. She threw a searchlight, harsh and white and sudden. The light in bright narrow circles at first, and then broader, picking up nothing, skimming out across the dark and empty sea. Luce waited. Five minutes. Ten minutes. He waited until she gave up and the light went out and there was no sign of her.
He started up the engine and kept her on low. He veered around and ran back along the ledge, headed seaward. Twice looking back, he thought he had a glimpse of the cutter, a distant running light, far, far north of them. She seemed to be edging slowly west.
He set a straight course out, south-southeast. He ran the boat without lights, climbing the waves, sledding down their backsides. He let Johnny Clyde light up a cigarette. He even took one himself, but the smoke dulled his mind. He stubbed it out.
They meet up with the ship—an old whaling bark, the Alexandra. She is scarred, an archaic hull, her sails patched. They come on her sooner than they expect to. She is not in safe waters. She has anchored just inside the limit, and Luce warns the first mate.
“Someone must’ve made a mistake,” Luce says lightly.
The mate shoots him a dark look. “Your mistake.”
“Fine then,” Luce says and shrugs. He hands the mate his half of the seven of spades, and the mate matches it with the captain’s half of the same torn card. Three men of the crew are sent down into the hold to drag up their order—sixty cases of Scotch and ten of champagne.
Luce is edgy the whole time they are on board. He stays close to the rail, leaning against it. He keeps checking the sea, but there is no sign of another boat. No sign of a light. No sign of any other living moving shape. He casts an eye across the Alexandra—her deck, her cargo, her crew. She is shabby and ill-kept, but he spies the long bony shadows of submachine guns, hidden in the furled sails.
They load up and push off. He has the engine on low, and as he turns her around to head toward shore, the wind strikes the back of his neck and he has the faint sick sense of something altered, something wrong. At first he cannot say what it is—nothing he hears, nothing he sees—but then he smells the slight reek of gasoline on the clean, salt wind.
He cuts off his running lights, and he can see her then—the cutter patrol. Right away he recognizes her by her lines: her sleek lean profile, low in the water. She is nearly on them.
The sound rips open the darkness—the sharp shrill blow of the Klaxon horn—ordering him to heave to. A moment later, the cutter throws her searchlight. Luce swerves hard, out of the light’s path, but it nicks his stern. He hears the shout. He shifts into reverse, swings right, pulls around, then gives both engines the gun. He speeds straight through the line of the searchlight, his head down. The light strikes the wheelhouse, then the side of his face. White. Blinding. He looks away, and they fall back into the darkness. He hears the shouts of the Coast Guard men behind him. He heads straight for the Alexandra. Her crew is in motion now, alert to the danger, men shuffling on her deck, hauling anchor, hoisting sail, pulling out their guns. He can hear the groan of the chain through the hawse pipe. He speeds toward her, the cutter’s searchlight still tailing him, groping through the churned sea of his wake. He has almost reached the Alexandra’s stern when the patrol boat fires a burst of warning shots. They have aimed ahead of him, but his speed takes him through the blaze of machine-gun fire. Bullets rake the wheelhouse, and he feels the shift in air as one passes close to his ear, the sound intimate, deafening. His heart stops for a moment.
“Down!” he shouts to Johnny Clyde. “Flat on the deck. Down. Now.” He veers hard and fast around the Alexandra to make a shield between himself and the patrol. He knows that he is not the big fish they are after. He was the bait and they trailed him out. They must have known ahead of time she would be off position. Someone must have set her up. It was his dumb luck to be caught in the middle of it.
He turns again to the right and guns both engines, he heads straight out, toward nothing, running without lights as hard and fast as the boat will take him into the great black rolls of the sea.
It is not until they have passed out of sight and Luce begins to circle around again toward shore that he realizes they are taking on water. He can feel a new weight in the foredeck, a strange and fluid changing weight. He sends Johnny belowdecks into the hold, and Johnny finds the bullet holes, four feet off the bow just below the waterline, the sea gushing in.
Luce knows that if he cuts back on their speed, they will sink. His first thought is to throw the entire cargo overboard, but even then, the boat by its own weight might still take on too much water for them to make it back in.
“Dump half of it,” he shouts. “Move the rest aft. Do you understand, move it aft!”
Johnny does what Luce tells him to do. They keep the boat running unmanned, plowing through the darkness, and they throw more than half of the load overboard. They move the rest to the stern. They stack the cases to weigh down the rear of the boat. They throw tarps over them and tie them off with lines to keep the crates in place, and slowly, very slowly, the bow begins to rise.
Luce comes back to the wheel, checks his sights, and sets them back on course. He sends Johnny below to bail out what he can of the water, and then he puts the engine out to full. The bow rises inches more. He runs them in.
Luce guesses that the cutter will have radioed in. There will be craft waiting for him at the mouth. As he passes Half-mile Rock, he looks toward the Knubble, and just beyond it, he can make out the shapes of two patrols. His instinct tells him not to try to land at the causeway, and so he brings the boat in to the midpoint of the beach, west of the seasonal restaurant, by the bathhouses. The wind is in their favor and they come in on the rising tide. They throw anchor in the shallows.
They unload the crates onto the beach, and Luce sends Johnny Clyde across the bridge to the Point Wharf for the truck. While he is gone, Luce works on the busted plank. He resets it as best as he can. He cuts squares of canvas off one of the tarps and patches the holes below the waterline from the outside and the inside. He tacks the edges with copper brads, then smears it all over with grease.
Half an hour later, Johnny comes back with the truck. He drives over the small dune, across the beach, and down to the harder sand. He tells Luce that Jeb Gifford, the constable, and a handful of officers were hanging around outside Blackwood’s store, and so he had come back the long way around.
They begin to load the liquor crates onto the bed of the truck. They work in silence. Once, when Johnny Clyde’s hand catches on a smashed bottle, the broken glass drives a deep black cut
through his palm. He stops and looks down. He touches the wound. There is new dark blood on his fingertips.
Luce lifts another crate onto the edge of the truck bed and slides it back against the others. He takes off his cap and wipes the sweat from his brow.
“You think it’s worth it?” he asks.
Johnny looks up at him.
“Just asking,” Luce says. “I already have my own answer.”
Even in the night darkness, he can see Johnny’s face, the pain from the cut and then that other trace element—a low, smooth anger.
“They peppered us out there,” Johnny says.
“Yup.”
“Could’ve shot us up.”
Luce nods. He picks at a spot of dried mud on the tail of the truck. “I know he’s your family,” he says slowly. “I know he’s your blood.”
“He’s an asshole,” Johnny says under his breath.
“But you’d never cross him.”
“He’d kill me.”
“If he caught you.”
Johnny stares at him, then looks away. He tears a strip of cloth off the hem of his shirt, wraps it around his hand and bends to pick up the next crate.
By the time they are through and the truck is loaded, there is less than an hour and a half until dawn. To the southeast out over the water are fringes of false light.
Johnny climbs into the truck and starts the engine. Luce will take the boat, and they will meet up the West Branch opposite Judy Island. Luce waves him off. The truck heads up the beach through the soft sand toward the dune, and Luce turns and begins to walk back toward the water. He has just reached the wrack-line when behind him he hears a wheezing sound as the truck’s wheels sink into a patch of soft sand. He turns and starts to run, shouting, but he is too late, Johnny does the unthinkable, he gives it more gas. The tires spin, the engine grinds, a throaty futile sound. The truck’s wheels sink up to the axle, locked in.
