The Season of Open Water

by Dawn Tripp

  Bridge

  She drifts through the next few days, night collapsing into night, pain and painlessness, a darkness lapping up against her thoughts, her everyday mind smashed.

  Cora helps her with the bedpan. She fixes Bridge trays of food, glasses of water with molasses and crushed ice. Noel sits with her in the early evenings. He feeds her warm broth from a bowl, spoonfuls of jelly, and softened pieces of salt pork, minced fine.

  For most of the day, Bridge is aware she is alone. She is aware that some part of her has been broken. She does not try to find the place. There is a kind of solace, she finds, in the not-knowing. A kind of solace in the brokenness itself and lying still. The room around her is a comfort—it is what she knows, the room she has slept in since she was a child—the paint-chipped dresser, the nickel-plated lamp, the soft-brushed plaster of the ceiling, and how the eaves slant down. The shadows change through the room as the light shifts. They move like huge dark hands across the clothes that her mother has laid out on the chair. The day winds on, grinds down into darkness, and in the coolness of the night air that moves into the room, she thinks of Henry. She imagines she can feel him near her. She remembers small details of the night she was shot. They leak back to her slowly: the hardness of the table against her head, the brightness of the room, how when she opened her eyes the light knifed into them. She had climbed out of herself—she remembers this— drifting up into one corner of the kitchen, and she had watched him from there as he moved over her, his sleeves rolled up; he found the wound in her side, cleansed it with the sponge, then stitched the edges of it neatly closed. She does not remember feeling any pain. She remembers the coolness of his fingers on her skin.

  One night, she wakes to the sound of someone crying softly near her. It is her brother, Luce. He kneels by her bed, his head bowed. She moves her hand and touches his hair. He does not look up. He goes on crying, and she can feel his body shivering. The sound rattles in him like stones rolling on the ocean floor. She can feel his sadness on her face and in her hands. It spreads over them like water. There are threads of moonlight in his hair. He smells of sweat. Of salt. He smells of the sea. After a while, he falls asleep, his head on the bed next to her. She touches the side of his face gently, her fingers in the hollow of the bone. She closes her eyes, and she is down at the river. It is late afternoon, midsummer, years ago, and her father is alive. They have come to dig quahogs on the mudflats below Gunning Island. They ground the skiff and climb out: Bridge, her father, Luce, and Noel. They unload the wire baskets and three quahog rakes. Her father has brought a potato fork for her to use. She is young, still a child, and he does not expect her to keep at the work for long. The potato fork is old, and the tines are thick with rust. She rakes it through mud, and as she thrusts it down and draws it out, the rust begins to strip off. The tines grow silver again, brighter, glittering. As she digs, she stays close to Noel. He has a feel for where the clams are. His shoulders settle into the steady rhythm of the work. He rakes slowly, methodically. He does not leave a patch of ground unturned. He loads the quahogs into his pockets as he pulls them up, until his trousers bulge. Then he wades over to the wire basket he has left higher up on the flat and drops them in.

  A great blue heron skims toward her across the still water. Its wings beat the air, sending ripples through the surface.

  She notices that her father and Luce have drifted farther away. They work a distance apart from one another. She looks across the flat toward the riverbank. There is a cowpath leading off an old stone pier. It winds through pastureland and up into the hills. The sun has begun to settle in the west, and the light empties down across the river. It soaks the marsh, the path, the fields, the trees.

  Her father is calling her. He has raked something up in the mud, and he calls her. It is something he wants her to see.

  “Go on, then,” Noel says.

  She nods, but she looks back once toward the shore. The light has shifted. Tall shadows fall across the hills, and for a moment, she is afraid. Her feet feel cold in the water. She grips the potato fork tightly and begins to run across the flat toward her father. Her bare legs splash through the shallows.

  Her father is kneeling in the mud, unearthing something with his hands. He looks up and sees her running toward him, and he smiles, his wide dark face opening to her, his hands buried in the water and the mud as he kneels in the silver light.

  When she wakes, it is morning and Luce is gone. Her face is wet with tears. Her head aches. She can feel a dull stiffness in her side. She moves, and the pain is sharp. It shoots through her and leaves her gasping. She lets her head fall back onto the pillow. The morning air is still, a jagged rim of frost around the window glass. She can see the blacker shadows of the trees, pale handfuls of fog strung through their branches.

  Sounds drift up through the metal grate in the floor: her mother loading wood into the stove, the scuff of her slippers across the kitchen, a cupboard door opening, the soft clatter of bowls. The smell of coffee, the smell of the fire.

  Outside, the light has begun to rise. It catches in the frost along the lower edge of the windowpane and trembles there, a strange thin glow. She listens to the fragile sound of the skim ice cracking as it thaws.

  She turns in her bed away from the window and the sun rising into it.

  Noel

  For three weeks, Noel walks around with the pack of folded cash in his trouser pocket. After the first frost, he picks up a ride from the Head of Westport to the trolley stop at Lincoln Park. He walks the rest of the way along Lake Noquochoke down Reed Road.

  It has been a few years since he came by Rui’s house. He notes the red trim paint around the windows and the front door. On the side porch in the shade, dressed skins hang to dry from the beams.

  He finds Rui out back, six muskrats just dead, laid on the worktable. He is skinning them out. He takes the brains and works them through the hides to make the fur glossy, the skin pliable. He sprinkles them with powdered alum and saltpeter to preserve them from insects. Then he folds them lengthwise, flesh-side in, and sets them off, dressed, to the side.

  “Nice, aren’t they, Christmas?” Rui says as Noel walks up to him. “One damaged here in the leg. And this one’s a kit. But the rest are fine. It’ll be a good season.”

  “How you been then, Rui? Haven’t seen you since Asa’s.”

  Rui smiles. He points to the largest muskrat. “I might get three and a half dollars for this one.”

  Noel picks up one of the long knives. He fingers the inlay on the handle. “How many traps you have out now?”

  “A dozen or so in the cedar swamp.”

  “You aren’t setting in water?”

  “You didn’t come here to ask me about my traps now, did you, Christmas?”

  “You’re bringing in a good dollar with it then?”

  Rui takes one of the midsize muskrats and, with the long knife, opens it to the gut. “For a side show, it’s enough.”

  “You got something else going on?”

  “You know smack well what I’ve got going on.” He sprinkles the hide with alum, then folds it lengthwise and sets it with the others. He looks up at Noel. “What is it you want then?”

  “Can you buy a few shares for me?”

  Rui smiles and sets back to his work. “I hear talk about that boat you built. Quite a boat, I hear.”

  “Quite on her way to being busted up.”

  Rui laughs. “They say she fights shy. Fast and light. No patrol can beat her.”

  “I don’t know anything about it, Rui.”

  “I hear talk about your Luce, too. He leaves no slick. They all know he’s up to something, but they can’t catch him at it.”

  Noel doesn’t answer.

  “He’s been messing around with a girl from the cove. I know her old man. He’ll get himself into some trouble with her if he keeps it up.”

  “I try not to keep track of my grandson,” Noel says flatly.

  “Okay then,” Rui says.
“Let me guess why you first took the job to build that sweet boat.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You took it because you still miss the salt junk. Isn’t that it?”

  Noel nods.

  Rui laughs. “Same Christmas as you ever were.” He goes on working the knife through the last muskrat, gutting it out. With his fingers, he finds the midpart of the scalp, turns it throat-side facing up, and opens into the skull. He dips two fingers in and scoops out the brains. “These are the best there is to gloss up a hide, but only because they’re brains just killed. They still have a little mind left in them.” He slides the last dressed skin into the pile. “Help me string them, will you? Then stay for a mug up.”

  “Sure.”

  “Some fry fish?”

  “Only if you scrub your hands real good.”

  Noel leans in the open doorway as Rui cooks. He lights his pipe, chews on the stem, but he doesn’t smoke and the tobacco goes out. He lights it again. The doorstone has a narrow garden plot on either side where Rui keeps nasturtium and kale, sweet peas and herbs. The ground is dormant now. Noel can smell the fresh garlic and oil bristling in the pan. Rui rolls the fish whole in flour, and when the oil spits, he sets the fish in and lets it cook through on one side until the crust is dark brown.

  They eat outside on the doorstone off tin plates, picking the flesh with their fingers.

  “I’ll tell you a thing or so about this stock thing,” Rui says. “It’s all common sense. You put your money in what you know. Solid names. Housekeep names. Radio. General Motors. U.S. Steel. Some talk about how it’s emotion, the coaster ride of it, and that could be true—same as anything—if you stay on a bad ride too long, you’ll get burned. But if you keep a level head, remember that your piece is your piece, your lay is your lay, if you don’t greed after more than that, you’ll do okay. Play it simple. Get in. Make a good dollar. Get out. And while you’re in, do nothing. Just wait. No matter what kind of itch in your pants you get, all you want to do is sit back, listen to the boxing fights, the ball games, and do nothing. Is that your taste?”

  And Noel can see that in Rui’s eyes, in the deep shopworn crease between the brows, there is more than a question. He knows that in five strokes with a light ax, Rui can work a piece of square wood out of a round log. Rui is the fine thread that has always been there, working alongside Noel through the dark, uncounted years, the belly of his life.

  “So how much have you got then, Christmas?”

  Noel sets his plate on the ground, takes the roll of cash from his trouser pocket. He holds it out. Rui goes on eating.

  “How much?” he says.

  “Eleven hundred.”

  “Not so much. But not bad.”

  “Can you make it more?”

  “Let me take a guess where you got it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “That’s what you made for that job last year, building that shy fast boat. You’ve been hiding it ever since. Let me guess where.”

  “Forget it, Rui.”

  “In the crook of that panbone.”

  Noel holds the money out to him, but Rui still doesn’t take it. He scrapes the last of the fish off his plate. The oil shines smooth on his lips.

  “Can you do something with it?” Noel asks.

  “What do you want done?”

  “What can you do?”

  “You want me to double it?”

  Noel nods slowly, skeptical.

  “Fine. You don’t believe me.” Rui grins. “I’ll triple it.”

  “No joke, Rui. I can’t lose this. I need to get things right this rising.”

  “Not much time left?”

  “I just need to get things right.”

  Rui sets down his plate. “Season’s good now, Christmas. I can turn that little roll of cash into a field for you.”

  “This little roll of cash is all I’ve got.”

  Rui brushes his hands off on his trousers. He smiles, his black eyes cunning, bright. “Not for long.” He plucks the wad of cash out of Noel’s hand.

  Part III

  The Season of Open Water

  Bridge

  A wild December. The surf is huge, ragged swells, the tide running high. In the middle of the month there is a five-day muckraker gale, fierce winds out of the southeast followed by a spell of kinder weather. On the twenty-first, the wind shifts into the northwest, rakes the river bottom, and the flood tide hurls bushels of scallops up onto the marsh. They lie there, glistening windrows, spread along the edge of the Let for three-quarters of a mile. The men go down, Noel among them, with pails and buckets and crates lined with rockweed, stacked end to end on the wagon beds.

  He takes Bridge with him. They drive the wagon down onto the landing. She sits on the plank seat wrapped in a horse blanket, a scarf around her head, as he walks among the windrows of scallops with his pail, stooping to pick up the closed and pure carved shells.

  On their way home, she asks him to take a ride down the causeway. As they pass Henry Vonniker’s cottage, she noticed that the car is gone, the shutters closed.

  “I haven’t seen him around,” Noel says. “Must’ve gone out of town.”

  She nods.

  She is walking again, slowly. The wound still aches when she sits and stands. She stays close to Noel, hangs around the kitchen while he cooks. He shucks out the scallops and chops potatoes to make a stew. Luce brings them a fresh cut of beef for Christmas and two small hams.

  The river thaws in the spell of warmer air, then begins to freeze again when the weather snaps back to its proper season. The tide pushes up against the weak skin of ice in the shallows of the marsh. A band of snow geese come into the river. One day as they are riding down to the causeway, Noel points them out to Bridge across the Let from the narrow part of East Beach Road. The flock gathers in the frozen reeds near Taber Point.

  She sits in the shop as he works. He gives her small tasks to keep her hands from growing restless, and he tells her stories the way he used to, without looking for her to answer. He talks to her the way he did when she was a child wading through the shavings of wood as he worked, nosing through his tools, testing her small fingers against the serrated blade of the saw.

  It is deep winter. They keep the woodstove stoked, full of burning, and one afternoon, as he is working to repair a busted gunwale, fitting new rivets and caulking the old holes, she notices a change in him, the way his weight leans more heavily into his tools, his shoulders hooking toward the floor. He seems smaller, more fragile, his balance uncertain. When he takes a sleep on the couch, she marks how he seems to sink deeper into the cushion folds, and there is a shift she notices in how he tells the stories. Certain moments stand out in relief. He takes his time with those, draws them out long, like the sun going down on a summer evening. Then suddenly, abruptly, as if he is snagged on some unfinished edge, he will push forward, covering years of his life in one stride, and then again, he will stray. He will linger over a detail. His voice will slow as if he is unwinding himself through the telling. The orange light sinks green shadows through his face.

  One morning, as he is planing down a thick piece of oak, he tells her about the shapes in light that he remembers from his boyhood on Nomans Land. The shapes would come only in east weather, on an ash breeze: reflections of the other islands levered up into the northern skies above the clouds. He saw them once when he was out swordfishing with his father just off Old Man’s Ledge. His father ruddered, and Noel was braced as lookout in the bow, and as they came around the tip of the island, in the distance he saw the reflection of the mainland city, wrenched upside down above the sea and floating there, wholly free—the millstacks and the warehouse buildings, whaleships lashed against the wharves, the spoke of one tall cathedral inverted in the light.

  And as she listens, Bridge finds that for the first time in her life she questions what he tells her—not the truth of it—but why. He told her once, long back, that the stories that crave the dayligh
t most are the ones that don’t get told. She remembers this now, and she begins to listen differently. She does not crawl into the familiar lull of his voice and curl herself to sleep there. She thumbs through what he says. She holds the stories at arm’s length, lifts up their edges and peers around. She studies the whale’s teeth he has scrimped. She studies the panbone, the cycle of etchings of his life behind him, to mark any clue he has left in the carving, any tick or tail of ink that might open into the vast and shadowed halls of what he has left buried, of what he leaves unsaid.

  When he talks to her about Kauai, about his life there with Hannah, she can see an old passion work through his eyes. His stories of that particular place have always had a bite of strangeness, an other-world aliveness. There is a sheen to his voice that she savors. Once, in late February, she asks him why he did not go back, and he looks at her for a moment, his eyes opening deep, she can feel herself pulled to some brink inside them. Then he looks away and serves her up an answer, so measly and glib she knows it for a lie, and she feels ashamed—ashamed for him and ashamed of herself for asking. She does not press him, but she wonders about it from time to time. She wonders why he made the choice to set himself here, so far from open water, in woods and cattails, with a house and several outsheds for ballast, close to the river but at the tail end of it where the current runs narrow and thin.