by Kent Wascom
Isaac knew from the moment he saw her, screened by a cut of smooth cordgrass waving in the wind off the bay, that she was the one from the portrait. The shoddy painting on the wall of the bedroom in the Woolsack house on Deer Island—the daughter, Kemper. It had been years since that day, but he remembered. They were not ten yards from one another, in opposite cuts of the marsh, where he’d spent the better part of the afternoon sketching ribbed mussels and a needlefish sought by a crane, and she, it seemed, was poaching a crab trap.
When he rounded the bend she was shaking the trap in her hands, the wire clung with a few crabs, the others clattering in the bottom of her boat. She wore a cut-down cotton dress, her broad shoulders bare and sunburnt, and when she raised the trap and shook it he saw tufts of wet dark hair at the pale of her underarms. He’d shipped his oars and poled over with the broomstick he kept for that purpose. Jabbed the tip of the pole to halt his drift and stood watching her and the motion running through her.
When she saw him Kemper flung the trap overboard and it sank gurgling, rope and painted buoy snaking after. She looked up, glared through a sheen of sweat. An arc of hair fallen across her eye.
He recalled a story of some demigod who cried tears of reddened-gold.
She wiped the bottom-mud from her hands, smoothing down her hips, and gave him a look that swallowed him whole.
—Is that your trap? he said finally.
—Of course not. She sat down, never taking her eyes from him. At her feet the crabs were tearing at each other’s arms. Is it yours? she said.
—No, but …
She let out a yelp and lifted her pinched feet up, the dress parting from the dimpled underside of her thigh. Cursing she grabbed the crabs by their pale blue swimfins and tossed them into a tin pail. He was laughing now and she gave him one last glance and grabbed her oars and pushed off, rowing deeper into the marsh.
He stood watching long after she’d gone, and he was drowning for the third time in his life.
He’d been back in Mississippi since June, having spent the first half of his twenties vagabonding after his expulsion from the School of Design. The wandering period came to an end one rainy morning in Mérida, in the state of Yucatán. That had been April of this year, when the Marines and Bluejackets were killing Mexican schoolboys in Veracruz, and he could no longer make excuses for his country, returning with as much distrust as when he’d left it. Starting out of Boston in late 1912, he’d traveled down into the peninsula of Florida, past the memory of the Boys’ Home, to Tampa and from there to Havana and then Mexico. Tampico, Veracruz, and the peninsula where he sought out Mayan glyphs among the scrub creosote and waxthorn. He sent home brief letters, postcards forested with spiked plants and creatures unfamiliar to his parents. At this rate, Mr. Patterson remarked, holding up an envelope postmarked from a city in Mexico, he’ll be sketching penguins in Antarctica by Christmas. But he’d come home after all, reclaimed the converted barn behind the house, where he threw himself into work, searching for his form, making palette-knife sketches while overhead the barncat Wildman lay dreamily on a beam, having resumed an old addiction to paint fumes. Isaac earned a little money working at the concrete and stonework business his brother Ben had started in Biloxi, designing and molding urns and birdbaths and fountains and laying walkways for the new crop of grand houses that had begun appearing along the seaside, mansions gnawing the sand and the grass with white-columned teeth. His mornings were of liquid stone and his afternoons given to paint and the coast, to the islands which welcomed him back with clouds of stinging insects, and he was happy until he was alone in bed at night. Then loneliness came creeping and the guilt of all he’d wasted and given up by leaving, how little he’d made of what he had been given. He was twenty-four or so.
At the School of Design he’d been saved from expulsion so many times, by well-meaning professors who claimed that his work—while decorative and lacking insight into what they insisted on calling the “souls” of his subjects—was worth pursuing, that when the last time finally came and they stopped saving him, Isaac was almost relieved. (There are plenty of artists, said the professor who broke the news to him, who can’t find their way in the academy or the East Coast, plenty who have gone on to greatness outside these bounds. Though of course the man neglected to give an example of a single one.) His last day as a student was spent in the marble halls of a Bostonian industrialist’s museum, milling at the back of a herd of classmates (those who would graduate with letters ingratiating them to New York, Paris, Rome) as his professor gave a haphazard walking lecture, lighting on one painting after another. Isaac stood for a long time before the second, smaller version of Copley’s Watson and the Shark, on loan from such and such estate. The professor spoke of upright composition and romanticism and the heroic figurations of the white man in the waves and his would-be rescuers, and when the class moved on Isaac remained, transfixed not by the men but by the shark. A bloated misconception with all the life of a half-rotted specimen in a jar. Isaac had seen a reproduction plate of this painting before, in some book, and as far as he knew Copley had never seen a live shark—maybe a blacktip hauled stinking onto a Back Bay dock. The shark in the painting was no shark at all but the sum of the fear and revulsion of a man who’d never seen one. Nature as horror, the numinous made obscene. And standing there amid the drifting shoals of other patrons, more than in all the snowy hours he’d spent in Providence, he wanted desperately to be south, on the water; he longed to see a shark again. He left not long after, and by early 1913 was in New York among the crowds at the American Exhibition, the fabled Armory Show, where he saw, among other visions which left him sick with possibility, the hares of de Souza Cardoso, a young Portuguese who would die a few years later in the influenza pandemic. The form that is not approximation but essence, the line capturing motion and the pattern of being, which he’d see again in the carved Mayan of gods who were neither man nor animal but both.
In Port Tampa, Cuban fishermen had let him help in the skinning of a shark. He learned how to prepare the meat, the three long soaks that made the flesh edible (the same, he would find in Mexico, was true of the stingray, whose meat is as delicate as a scallop’s when treated right), the stewing in tomato and chili pepper, Creole red and spiced with clove like the food he’d grown up on. He ate with the fishermen and watched as the sun set in the direction he was headed for, glad, for all the familiarity of taste, to have his thoughts drowned in a language not his own.
When he saw her the next morning Kemper Woolsack was on the beach shooting arrows into the back of a parlor chair. The bowstring notes reaching him on the water so that he broke from his course and rowed to the eastern tip of Deer Island. She stood in bloomer pants cinched at the knees, calves caked with sand, her shirt untucked and billowing. She’d tacked a paper target to the winged back of the chair, a bullseye drawn with lipstick, and she was firing into the red.
Kemper pinching blossoms of fletch from an umbrella stand sunk in the sand at her feet, seemingly indifferent to this person walking his boat through the surf, though the memory of his stained linen shirt, open at the neck, and the vague urge to smell it, hadn’t left her since the day before.
Isaac heard the twang of the string and the thwack of the arrow striking home and the keel of his boat hissing gently in the sand as he pulled it onshore.
She angled her hips to better guide the shots, the freckled muscle of her shoulder bunching as she drew back, then the arrow was gone and the echo of release shuddered through her body. The arrowhead buried in spring and cushion, ruining a fine, expensive chair because why not. She looked like the wild survivor of some near-apocalypse, careless of the value that things once had, as if somewhere not far she had a smoldering pile of banknotes for a campfire.
—Well, she said.
—Do you want to come out on the water?
—Now?
—Sure.
—I don’t even know you.
—You used to throw shells at me,
he said. Chase me off the beach. Right over there.
She looked in the direction he was pointing as if to catch a glimpse of her childhood self between the dunes.
—Did I ever get you? she said.
—Oh sure, he said. All the time.
Slow waves rolled into the marsh, Isaac before her rising and falling with them. He like a doorway suddenly thrown open to her, saying, Come on. It was bad enough for Kemper to recall her past, because that meant thinking of her family, who hadn’t been in the same room together for years. That spring she’d graduated from Newcomb College, a New Orleans women’s school much enamored with social engineering along the lines of Vassar and Agnes Scott, and now she was in the first leg of what she hoped would be a yearlong ramble culminating in some, she hoped further, substantial personal change. She had no commitments, no fiancé, no burning passion to do good or ill in the world. She just wanted to see. And before she went a way she didn’t know, she wanted to gather herself in a place she did, in the summer house, and if not know herself then know what she was leaving. But here was Isaac, who she didn’t really know at all, saying he remembered her.
The water was calm and she sat at the stern crowded with tackle while Isaac rowed them to the grassflats between Dog and Cat Islands. He sat at the bow, outstretched legs tensing as he rowed. His bare feet, long and thin, the hair on his toes pale gold.
At first she kept her own legs drawn to her chest, but bit by bit she allowed herself to ease, her feet coming nearer to his with every jut of the boat, until she was brushing his ankle with the high pitch of her arch. They spoke as if this was not happening—their first secret—making small talk while she pressed him like a pedal and he thought he might go mad.
Then they were floating above an underwater meadow, the water around them an eye of milky green in the darker face of the bay. Beds of turtle grass whose roots formed an undergrowth where crabs and pale larval shrimp and wavering starfish fed on particles of grass broken down by still-smaller organisms, and higher, in the lilting canopy, fish darted and fed on the life below.
They took turns casting and rowing out to drift back over the flats, and when she boated a good-sized Spanish mackerel Isaac dropped the anchor and scooted over to help her unhook the fish, an arrow of silver skin dotted along the midline with green the color of summer grass, but before he could draw out the hook she did it herself and snapped the mackerel’s neck on the gunnel. Smiling, she handed the fish over and he brought it back with him to the bow, where he took from his knapsack a knife and, she realized after a puzzled moment, a lime.
She watched him gut the fish and pitch its bright entrails overboard, how he cut below the gills tracing back along the jagged points of its spine, followed by a deeper cut along the contour of the ribs, raising the fillet. He flipped the fillet and in one smooth stroke freed the flesh from the skin, which he laid out before him like a plate and set the fillet on it, cutting the meat into pieces.
—Raw? she said.
He held up the knife as though to say hold on, and he quartered the lime and squeezed its juice through his fingers over the pieces of fish.
The smell of blood and seawater and citrus. The sun warm on her back, light washing over her and onto the surface of the water where now and then little breaths of bubbles broke.
He held a piece out to her and she took it. Up close the meat was pearly, white striations in the waves of muscle. A moment before, it had been whole and moving. She ate the first and it was all ocean-clean and sun-bright bursts of lime. He ate his piece and asked if she liked it, and there was a moment when she might’ve cried, might’ve said she’d never tasted anything better in her life, that it was everything. But she only nodded and took another piece for herself, watching him watch her eat. There would be time enough to tell him later, and she would tell him everything.
That evening he slept beside her on the veranda of the Deer Island house, curled on the chaise whose cushions were streaked with salt and smelled strongly of mold. A bitter tang above the warmth of his breath. She woke first, at twilight, afraid to move, his hand wedged under her back, and unmoving she watched the last of the gulls circling between the island and the main and studied the shape of his body, his shoulders, the rise of his ass. When he woke she was asleep again, and his awe and exhaustion kept him still. She lay with one arm bent behind her head, cheek resting on a wrist as thick as his, and he could see by the twitch of her mouth, her fluttering lids, that she was dreaming. There was nothing pliant in her, nothing weak. He loved already how he couldn’t encompass her waist, the strength that flared in her back when she rolled atop him. She would not be steered.
He wondered at the nature of her dream, which did not, by the look on her face, seem pleasant, and he lay beside her as you might a dying fire in the morning cold, though the air was boiling even in the dark.
Two
The last time her family had been together, the last time they ever would be, was in Havana during Christmas 1910. The place whose conqueror claimed was once home to a people with wings and feathers. A lie, of course, like the images of gold-laden rivers and willing native maidens and a people without morals or history. But the name survived: Avian. Avan. Havana. Kemper had read this once in a book about Columbus, and the idea, like Havana itself, never ceased to fill her with sadness. Whenever she thought of it, whenever she was in Havana—so like New Orleans and yet something Kemper could never possesses, never be a part of—the claim made her and all who’d come after seem unremarkable and wonderless. A people who walked where others once had flown.
From her bedroom in her family’s house in the Vedado, Kemper could look out over the lengths of flower garlands and Japanese lanterns strung across the courtyard and hear the waves beat the breakers and glimpse through the gaps of nearby roofs the faint forms of seabirds riding the wind. Gulls glancing off the quayside and dipping into the bay still blighted by the old and unremoved wreck of the U.S.S. Maine. The destruction of her family as she knew it would commence the following day, the last fragile bonds they, the children, had maintained into adulthood irrevocably broken, but for now they were coming together.
Her brother, Angel, had come from Nicaragua. He was the one she was closest to, and that day he’d sat with her for a while and talked about the things that had gone wrong, and some that had gone right, in his life. Now he was resting in his own room, maybe writing a letter. Her mother and father were together somewhere, talking, drinking, having broken the fast of separation they maintained most of the year. (Of course, none but the most docile and domestic of her friends’ parents spent more than a few months together. A consequence of wealth.) Red was in the city apparently with friends from Louisiana State University, who’d come to watch their football team play the University of Havana on Christmas morning. Red had yet to see his older brother, and Kemper wasn’t looking forward to the little tensions and contests that came whenever the brothers shared space. Red’s jockeying for the foremost place in their father’s line of sight. The threat of outburst that had hung over him from the time he was a boy.
Whatever the case, tonight they’d all go to mass and she would sit between her brothers, feeling awkward and rangy, made painfully aware that she was as big or bigger than both of them, breathing the air of their mutual distrust; the three of them forming with their parents a line of fair severity, a red-gold gash in the rows of dark-haired people gathered there to celebrate a strange and unattainable family. Then they’d come home and have a late dinner, and in the morning go to the baseball at the Almendares Park, sit in the president’s box, her father murmuring darkly with some dignitaries, and watch Louisiana boys stomp Cuban boys while in the stands American sailors and travelers cheered.
Looking out, she thought of the Maine, whose carcass she’d seen that day when her steamer from New Orleans anchored in the harbor of Havana. The explosion of the Maine had given the United States reason at last to intervene in the Cuban revolt, and so her country had taken, won, and change
d the name of the war. The Spanish-American War. Her mother, Cuban-born and exiled since the American Civil War, took no joy in this intervention, no sorrow in the loss of the ship, even when the ribbons were being tied and the flags unfurled, the nation reeling less at the scale of death than the quaking shock to national pride—the knowledge that now we could be wounded in an instant, and in an instant via humming wires know the extent of our vulnerability. She remembered hearing her mother say the U.S. had dressed Cuba as a woman in torn clothes on the verge of being raped, then kindly shoved Spain out of the way and taken our turn. Kemper guessed she must’ve been around seven or eight when she heard that.
In her family’s house, she thought of the bodies that had been trapped in the belly of the Maine. Floating eyeless in the dark (such was the concern of the nation for this emblem and the martyred dead that it would be another two years before the ship and its death-load would be hauled out into the Gulf and sunk), their tomb rusting, snarled with the garbage of the city, mainmast jutting askew and to whose crow’s nest dared boys would swim and climb, pumping their fists, until they were fired on by the soldiers and sailors from Camp Columbia, Americans who’d been called back to quell the black rebellion of 1905 and the white liberal revolt of the next year and never left.
