The Weight of Water

by Anita Shreve

  “That was an interesting game you were playing with Adaline,” I say, studying the card for a moment.

  “Not really,” says Thomas. He leans in toward the window and squints at the sign.

  “THE PORTSMOUTH ATHENAEUM,” he reads. “READING ROOM OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.” He examines the hours listed. He seems to study the card a long time, as though he were having trouble understanding it.

  “Who was the poet?” I ask.

  “Fallon Pearse.”

  I look down at my sandals, which are spotted with drops of oil from cooking in the kitchen at home. My jeans have stretched and wrinkled at the tops of my thighs.

  “If any place would have archival photographs, this would be it,” he says.

  “What about Billie?” I ask. We both know, as Rich and Adaline do not, that even a half hour with Billie can be exhausting. All those questions, all that curiosity.

  Thomas stands back and scans the building’s height. “I’ll go back and find Adaline,” he says. “I’ll give her a hand with Billie. You see if they’ve got what you need, and we’ll meet back here in, say, an hour?”

  Underneath my feet, the ground seems to roll slowly up and away as it sometimes does in children’s cartoons.

  “Whatever you think,” I say.

  Thomas peers into the front window as if he might recognize something beyond the drapes. With a casualness and tenderness I suddenly mistrust, he bends and kisses me on the cheek.

  Some weeks after Thomas and I met each other in the bar in Cambridge, we parked my car by the waterfront in Boston and walked up a hill toward an expensive restaurant. Perhaps we were celebrating an anniversary — one month together. From the harbor, fog spilled into the street and around our feet. I had on high heels, Italian shoes that made me nearly as tall as Thomas. Behind me, I could hear a foghorn, the soothing hiss of tires on wet streets. It was raining lightly, and it seemed as though we would never make it up the hill to the restaurant, that we were walking as slowly as the fog was moving.

  Thomas pressed in on my side. We had been at two bars, and his arm was slung around my shoulder rather more passionately than gracefully.

  “You have a birthmark on the small of your back, just to the right of center,” he said.

  My heels clicked satisfyingly on the sidewalk. “If I have a birthmark,” I said, “it’s one I’ve never seen.”

  “It’s shaped like New Jersey,” he said.

  I looked at him and laughed.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  I pushed him away, as you would a drunk. “You’re crazy,” I said.

  “I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you since the night I found you in my bed.”

  “How could you marry a woman who reminded you of New Jersey?”

  “You know I’ve never worked better.”

  I thought about his working, the dozens of pages, the continuously stained fingers.

  “It’s all your doing,” he said.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “You were ready to write these poems.”

  “You let me forgive myself. You gave this to me.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  Thomas had on a blazer, his only jacket, a navy so dark it was nearly black. His white shirt seemed luminescent under the street lamp, and my eye was drawn to the place where his shirt met his belt buckle. I knew that if I put the flat of my hand there, the fabric of the shirt would be warm to the touch.

  “I’ve only known you for a month,” I said.

  “We’ve been together every day. We’ve slept together every night.”

  “Is that enough?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew that he was right. I put the flat of my hand against his white shirt at the belt buckle. The shirt was warm.

  “You’re drunk,” I said.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  He pressed toward me, backing me insistently into an alleyway. Perhaps I made a small and ineffectual protest. In the alley, the tarmac shone from the wet. I was aware of a couple, not so very unlike myself and Thomas, walking arm in arm, just past the narrow opening of the alley. They glanced in at us with frightened faces as they passed. Thomas leaned all of his weight against me, and put his tongue inside my ear. The gesture made me shiver, and I turned my head. He put his mouth then on the side of my neck, licking the skin in long strokes, and suddenly I knew that in that posture he would come — deliberately — to show me that he had become helpless before me, that I was an alchemist. He would make of this an offering of the incontinence of his love. Or was it, I couldn’t help but wonder, simply the abundance of his gratitude?

  I am trying to remember. I am trying hard to remember what it felt like to feel love.

  I enter the building with the tall, arched windows and shut the door behind me. I follow signs upstairs to the library. I knock on an unprepossessing metal door and then open it. The room before me is calm. It has thick ivory paint on the walls, and heavy wooden bookshelves. The feeling of serenity emanates from the windows.

  There are two library tables and a desk where the librarian sits. He nods at me as I walk toward him. I am not sure what to say.

  “Can I help you with something?” he asks. He is a small man with thinning brown hair and wire glasses. He wears a plaid sport shirt with short, crisp sleeves that stick out from his shoulders like moth’s wings.

  “I saw the sign out front. I’m looking for material on the murders that took place out at the Isles of Shoals in 1873.”

  “Smuttynose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well… we have the archives.”

  “The archives?”

  “The Isles of Shoals archives,” he explains. “They were sent over from the Portsmouth Library, oh, a while ago. They’re a mess, though. There’s a great deal of material, and not much of it has been cataloged, I’m sorry to say. I could let you see some of it, if you want. We don’t lend out materials here.”

  “That would be—”

  “You’d have to pick an area. A subject.”

  “Old photographs,” I say. “If there are any. Of people, of the island. And personal accounts of the time.”

  “That would be mostly in diaries and letters,” he says. “Those that have come back to us.”

  “Yes. Letters then. And photographs.”

  “Have a seat over there at the table, and I’ll see what I can do. We’re very excited to have the archives, but as you can see, we’re a bit short-staffed.”

  I have then an image of Thomas with Adaline and Billie. Each has a vanilla ice-cream cone. The three of them are licking the cones, trying to control the drips.

  Thomas said, “I’ll go find Adaline.” He did not say, “I’ll go find Adaline and Billie,” or “Adaline and Rich.”

  The librarian returns with several books and folders of papers. I thank him and pick up one of the books. It is an old and worn volume, the brown silk binding of which has cracked. The pages are yellowed at the edges, and a few are loose. Images swim in front of me, making an array of new covers on the book. I shut my eyes and put the book to my forehead.

  I look at an old geography of the Isles of Shoals. I read two guidebooks printed in the early half of the century. I take notes. I open another book and begin to riffle the pages. It is a book of recipes, The Appledore Cookbook, published in 1873. The recipes intrigue me: Quaking Pudding, Hash Made from Calf’s Head and Pluck, Whitpot Pudding, Hop Yeast. What is pluck? I wonder.

  From the folders the library has given me, papers slide out onto the table, and I can see there is no order to them. Some papers are official documents from the town, licenses and such, while others are clearly bills of sale. Still other papers seem to be letters written on a stationery so fragile I am almost afraid to touch them. I look at the letters to decipher the old-fashioned penmanship, and with dismay I realize that the words are foreign. I see the dates: April 17, 1873; November 4, 1868; December 24, 1856; January 5, 1867.

  There are a few photographs in the
folders. One is a portrait of a family of seven. In the photograph, the father, who has a beard and a full head of hair, is wearing a waistcoat and a thick suit, like a captain of a ship might have. His wife, who has on a black dress with a white lace collar and lots of tiny white buttons, is quite plump and has her hair pulled severely back off her head. Everyone in the photograph, including the five children, appears grim and bug-eyed. This is because the photographer has had to keep the shutter open for at least a minute, during which time no one is allowed to blink. It is easier to maintain a serious expression for sixty seconds than it is a smile.

  In one of the folders, various documents seem interspersed with students’ papers and what look to be, to judge from the titles, sermons. There is also a faded, flesh-colored box, a box expensive writing paper might once have come in. Inside the box are pages of writing — spidery writing in brown ink. The penmanship is ornate, almost impossible to make out, even if the words were in English, which they are not. The paper is pink at the edges, slightly stained in one corner. A water stain, I think. Or perhaps even a burn. It smells of mildew. I stare at the flowery writing, which when looked at as a whole makes a lovely, calligraphic design, and as I lift the pages out of the box, I discover that a second set of papers, paper-clipped together, is at the bottom of the box. These pages are written in pencil, on white-lined paper, and bear many erasure marks, which have been written over. They also bear one purple date stamp and several notations: Rec’d September 4, 1939, St. Olafs College library. Reed 14.2.40, Oslo, forwarded Marit GuUestad. Reed April J, 1942, Portsmouth Library, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

  I look at the first set of papers and the second. I note the date at the beginning of each document. I study the signature at the end of the foreign papers and compare it to the printed name at the end of those written in English.

  Maren Christensen Hontvedt.

  I read two pages of the penciled translation and set it on my lap. I look at the date stamp and the notations, which seem to tell a story of their own: the discovery of a document written in Norwegian; an attempt to have a translation made by someone at St. Olafs College; the forwarding of that document to a translator in Oslo; the war intervening; the document and its translation belatedly sent to America and then relegated to a long-neglected folder in the Portsmouth Library. I take a deep breath and close my eyes.

  Maren Hontvedt. The woman who survived the murders.

  Maren Hontvedl’s Document

  TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY MARIT GULLESTAD

  19 September 1899, Laurvig

  It is so please the Lord. I shall, with my soul and heart and sound mind, write the true and actual tale of that incident which continues to haunt my humble footsteps, even in this country of my birth, far from those forbidding, granite islands on which a most unforgivable crime was committed against the persons whom I loved most dearly in all the world. I write this document, not in defense of myself, for what defense have those who still live, and may breathe and eat and partake of the Lord’s blessings, against those who have been so cruelly struck down and in such a way as I can hardly bear to recall? There is no defense, and I have no desire to put forth such. Though I must add here that I have found it a constant and continuous trial all these twenty-six years to have been, even by the most unscrupulous manner of persons, implicated in any small way in the horrors of 5 March 1873. These horrors have followed me across the ocean to my beloved Laurvig, which, before I returned a broken and barren woman, was untainted with any scandal, and was, for me, the pure and wondrous landscape of my most treasured childhood memories with my dear family, and which is where I will shortly die. And so I mean with these pages, written in my own hand, while there are some few wits remaining in my decrepit and weakening body, that the truth shall be known. I leave instructions for this document to be sent after my death into the care of John Hontvedt, who was once my husband and still remains so in the eyes of the Lord, and who resides at Sagamore Street in the town of Portsmouth in the state of New Hampshire in America.

  The reader will need sometimes to forgive me in this self-imposed trial, for I find I am thinking, upon occasion, of strange and far-away occurrences, and am not altogether in control of my faculties and language, the former as a consequence of being fifty-two years of age and unwell, and the latter owing to my having completed my last years of schooling in an interrupted manner.

  I am impatient to write of the events of 5 March 1873 (though I would not visit again that night for anything save the Lord’s admonition), but I fear that the occurrences of which I must speak will be incomprehensible to anyone who has not understood what went before. By that I mean not only my own girlhood and womanhood, but also the life of the emigrant to the country of America, in particular the Norwegian emigrant, and most particularly still, the Norwegian emigrant who makes his living by putting his nets into the sea. More is known about those persons who left Norway in the middle of this century because the Norwegian land, even with all its plentiful fjords and fantastical forests, was, in many inhospitable parts of this country, unyielding to the ever-increasing population. Such dearth of land, at that time, refused to permit many households even a modest living in the farming of oats, barley, mangecorn and potatoes. It was these persons who left all they had behind, and who set intrepidly out to sea, and who did not stop on the Atlantic shores, but went instead directly inland to the state of New York, and hence from there into the prairie heartland of the United States of America. These are the emigrants of our Norway who were raised as farmers in the provinces of Stavanger and Bergen and Nedenes, and then abandoned all that they had held dear to begin life anew near the Lake of Michigan, and in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin and in other states. The life of these emigrants was, I believe and am sorry to have to write, not always as they had imagined it to be, and I have read some of the letters from these wretched persons and have heard of the terrible hardships they had to bear, including, for some, the worst trial of all, the death of those they loved most, including children.

  As I have not ever had children, I have been spared this most unthinkable of all losses.

  In our village, which was Laurvig, and which was well coasted and had a lovely aspect out to the Laurvigsfjord and to the Skaggerak from many vantage points, some families who made their livings from the sea had gone to America before us. These persons were called “sloopfolk,” as they had sailed in sloops in voyages of one to three months, during which some unfortunates perished, and some new life was born. John and I, who had been married but the year, had heard of such folk, though we did not have the acquaintance of any of these persons intimately, until that day in the seventh month of 1867, when a cousin of John’s whose name was Torwad Holde, and who is since deceased, set sail for new fishing grounds near to the city of Gloucester, off the coast of the state of Massachusetts in America, fishing grounds that were said to hold forth promise of great riches to any and all who would set their nets there. I must add at this point that I did not believe in such fanciful and hollow promises, and would never have left Laurvig, had not John been, I shall have to say it, seduced by the letters of his cousin, Torwad, in particular one letter that I no longer have in my possession but remember in my heart as a consequence of having had to read this letter over and over again to my husband who had not had any schooling because of the necessity of having had to go to sea since the age of eight. I reproduce that letter here as faithfully as I can.

  20 September 1867, the Isles of Shoals

  My Dear Cousin,

  You will he surprised to hear from me in a place different from that where I last wrote to you. I have moved north from the city of Gloucester. Axel Nordahl, who you may remember visited us last year, came to Gloucester to tell myself and Erling Hansen of the fishing settlement of which he was a part at a place called the Isles of Shoals. This is a small grouping of islands nine miles east of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is not far north of Gloucester. I am now residing with Nordahl and his good
family on the island of Appledore, and I can report that he has a trawler here, and that he has found a bounty of fish such as I have never seen before in any waters. Indeed, I do not think there are any waters on earth that are so plentiful as these in which he has set his nets. A man can put his hand into this sea and fetch up, with his hand more fish than his boat might bear. I am firmly of a mind to remain here through the winter with Nordahl and then burden his family no more as I will build my own cottage on the island of Smutty-Nose, which has a strange name and which is also sometimes known as Haley’s Island. When spring comes I will have saved enough dollars from my work with Nordahl to begin such a project. This is a better life, Hontvedt, than that which exists in Laurvig, or in Gloucester, where I was lodged with fifty other fishermen of the fleet and where my wages did not exceed one dollar a day.

  I beg of you, John, to share this bounty with me. I beg of you to bring your brother, Matthew, who may be as pleased as I am to fish in these fertile waters. I have selected on this island called Smutty-Nose a house for you to lease. It is a good house, strongly built to withstand the Atlantic storms, and I might have taken up residence there myself if I had already had a family. In the spring, if the Lord permits me to find a wife, I shall move from Appledore so that we may all be a family in the Lord’s sight.

  If you come, as I am hoping, you must go by coastal ferry to Stavanger, and thence to Shields, England. There you will take the rail to Liverpool where you will join a great flood of emigrants who will take passage with you on a packet to Quebec, where ships are landing now, preferring to avoid the higher tariffs charged in Boston and New York. For your voyage, you will want fruit wine to alter the taste of the poor water, and dried fish. Grind some coffee and put it in a box. You will also want to bake the flatbread and pack it in the round tubs you have seen down at the docks, and also cure some cheese. If you have a wife and she is with child, then come before it is her time, as infants do not well survive the journey. Seven perished on my own passage, owing to the diphtheria croup which was a contagion on board. I will tell you in truth, Hontvedt, that the sanitary conditions aboard these ships are very poor, and it is too bad, but on my journey I was well disposed to prayer and to thinking of the voyage as a deliverance. I was seasick all but the last two days, and though I arrived in America very gaunt and thin, and remained so in Gloucester, now I am fat again, thanks to the cooking of Nordhal’s wife, Adda, who feeds me good porridge and potato cakes with all the fresh fish you can imagine.