The Weight of Water

by Anita Shreve

  In the guidebooks, I read that history has only one story to tell about John Hontvedt, Maren’s husband, at Smuttynose, apart from all the events attending the murders on March 5, 1873. On a frigid day in 1870, three years before the murders and two years after Hontvedt arrived in America, John left Smuttynose for fishing grounds northwest of the island. We are told it was a particularly filthy day, ice forming on mustaches and oilskins, on lines, and even on the deck of Hontvedt’s schooner, which remains nameless. John stood on the slippery shingle of the small beach at Smuttynose, the sleet assaulting him from a slanting angle, trying to decide whether or not to row out to the schooner. We can only guess at what finally compelled Hontvedt to go to sea on such a day, among the worst the Atlantic had to offer that year. Was it poverty? Or hunger? Expensive bait that might rot if it wasn’t used? An awful kind of restlessness?

  After setting sail and losing sight of Smuttynose, John was surprised by a gale that blew up, creating heavy seas and blizzard conditions. The snow became so thick on the sea as the hours wore on that John could not have seen much beyond the boat itself. Perhaps realizing his mistake, John did try then to turn back toward Smuttynose, but the swells were so high and the visibility so poor that he could make no headway. He was instead forced to drift in an aimless pattern in a darkish, white blindness. The danger of being swamped or of the schooner being gouged open on unseen rocks and ledges was very real.

  A number of the islanders, chief among them a man named Ephraim Downs, who lived on Smuttynose himself, and who would later live with his family in the Hontvedt house after the murders (the landlord refusing to clean away the bloodstains, he said, because he could get more money from souvenir hunters than he could from a higher rent), thought John mad for having set out that day at all, and watched for him to return. When it became apparent that Hontvedt’s schooner must be lost, Downs set out in his own larger ship, aptly named the White Rover, to search for the disabled or stranded boat. Downs and his crew scanned the sea for hours until they themselves lost their bearings in the storm. After several hours, they finally caught sight of the smaller boat with Hontvedt aboard. Looping across fourteen-foot swells, Downs managed to collect the stranded seaman. After John was safely aboard the White Rover, Hontvedt’s schooner drifted away and was never seen again.

  For many hours, the White Rover rode the waves, the men aboard her becoming frozen and covered with ice until they could no longer move. When the boat finally beached herself — and history doesn’t tell us where — the crew, who were able to use neither their legs nor their arms properly, hitched themselves over the prow of the boat and tumbled onto the sand. Several of the men from the White Rover had frozen their feet through and later had to have them amputated. John Hontvedt appears to have survived intact.

  “Mommy, will you take me swimming?”

  Billie tugs at my sleeve and rolls her head back and forth in the crook of my arm. I set my book down and lift her onto my lap. A small bit of crayon wrapping is stuck to her bottom lip, and I pick it off. She smells of shellfish and of sunblock.

  “I don’t know, Jean,” calls Thomas from the cockpit. “It’s awfully deep out there. I said she had to ask you. I don’t especially want to go in again myself.”

  “She’ll be all right if she wears her life jacket,” says Rich, emerging from the engine compartment. “Anyway, I need a swim. I’m disgusting. If we both take her, she’ll be OK.”

  “Please, Mom.”

  I look at Rich, whose hands are covered with grease, and then I look at Billie. “Sure,” I say “Why not?”

  I am able to get over the side of the boat, but I am pretty sure they will never get me back in. Rich has left the swim ladder, which was being repaired, in his van at the dock. Billie cannonballs into the water and bobs straight up, her hair covering her face. I swim close to my daughter, never more than an arm’s length away, while Billie flails her arms, barely keeping her mouth above water. The water is, at first, shockingly cold, but after a few minutes I begin to get used to it. From the waterline, the prow of the sailboat seems massive — that of an ocean liner. In the distance, without my glasses, the islands are indistinct shapes of gray and brown.

  I give Billie a shove toward Rich, and she “swims” between her uncle and myself — a wriggly fish with no fear. Her mouth fills with seawater. She swallows it and she seems surprised by the taste. She begs Rich for a ride on his back, and when they swim near to me, Billie slides off and clutches me around my neck. Rich’s leg is momentarily slippery against my own, and I grab onto his shoulder to keep from going under.

  “Careful, Billie,” I say, loosening her grip around my neck. “I don’t have a life jacket on like you. You’ll sink me.”

  From the bowsprit, Thomas watches us. He has a glass in his hand. I see him turn away and smile. He says something I cannot hear — it must be to Adaline.

  When I let go of Rich, he dives deep into the water. He comes up about thirty feet away from me and begins to swim hard, his arms beating a rhythm to his kick. Billie and I paddle around each other until I see that she is tiring. Thomas reaches down, and between us we are able to get Billie easily back into the boat. As I anticipated, however, I am not strong enough to haul myself up and over, and there is an embarrassing and awkward pulling on arms and legs before I am able finally to flop into the cockpit. Billie wraps herself in a towel and sits, shivering, next to Adaline. When I stand up and put my glasses on, I see that Rich has swum all the way to Smuttynose and is sitting on the beach.

  The Isles of Shoals derives its name not from the shoals surrounding the islands, but rather from the Old English word for school. As in schools of fish.

  During the American Revolution, the Isles of Shoals were evacuated. Because the Shoalers had been trading with the British, the colonial leaders of New Hampshire and Maine ordered all residents off the islands. On January 5, 1776, eighty houses were dismantled, shipped to the mainland, and reconstructed all along the coast, from Massachusetts to Maine. A number of these houses are still standing.

  “Loss. Abandonment. Castration. Chauvinism…”

  “But think of Tom Moore, the charm.”

  “Melancholy. It’s all melancholic,” says Thomas. “Kavanaugh, Frost, MacNeice.”

  “You’re forgetting Yeats. The celebration of the human imagination, the magician.”

  “Donnelly. Hyde Donnelly. Do you know him? Gray light thieving, mother’s grief I Steals by hedgerows—”

  “You’re indicting an entire race,” Adaline says lightly.

  Thomas takes a long sip of scotch.

  A thick, peasanty scent of fish and garlic spreads and settles over the cockpit where Adaline and Thomas and I are sitting. Rich is holding a plate of mussels he has just steamed.

  “I picked them,” Billie says, weaving through Rich’s legs. She is trying to retain her pride in the mussels, though I sense she has been somewhat defeated in her attempts actually to like them. Just moments ago, going below to fetch the papers I took from the Athenaeum, I saw the partly chewed remains of a mussel stuffed inside a crumpled napkin. Billie has on clothes she particularly likes — a blue T-shirt with Pocahontas on the front and matching shorts — and I know she regards this small gathering as something of a party. As does Thomas. Billie has brought a sandwich bag of Cheerios, so that she can nibble with us. She comes and snuggles beside me, screwing her head up and inside my arm. Thomas and Adaline sit across from me. Within seconds, I know, Billie will ask me for a Coke.

  “Sons are leaving,” says Thomas.

  Rich sets the mussels on a makeshift table in the center of the cockpit, perches himself on the cabin roof, and dangles his legs over the opening. The air around us seems cleansed. Smuttynose is sharply etched and brushed with a thin wash of gold from a low sun. From the sloop, the gulls above the island are dark check marks in the blue dust. I am thinking that it is, possibly, the most beautiful night of the summer.

  I have a photograph of the five of us in the coc
kpit of the Morgan the evening Rich makes the mussels and Thomas breaks the glass. I take the picture while the light is still orange; and, as a result, all of us look unreasonably tanned and healthy. In the photograph, Billie is sitting on Rich’s lap and has just reached over to touch a gold wrist cuff that Adaline has put on a few minutes earlier. Rich is smiling straight at the camera, an open-mouthed smile that shows a lot of teeth, which look salmon-colored in the light. Beside him, Adaline has shaken out her hair so that the camera has caught her with her chin slightly raised. She has on a black sundress with thin straps and a long skirt; her cross gives off a glint of sunlight. The low sun is shining almost painfully into everyone’s eyes, which is why Thomas is squinting and has a hand raised to his brow. The only part of his face that is clearly identifiable is his mouth and jawline. As for me, I have engaged the timer so that I have time to insert myself into the picture. I am sitting beside Thomas, but am slightly tilted, as though I am straining to be part of the composition. I have smiled, but my eyes are, at that instant, closed in a blink. Thomas has attempted to put his free arm around me, but the camera has caught him with it raised and crooked in the air.

  “How exactly did you get the scar?” Adaline is asking.

  “We really need to feed Billie,” I say, talking as much to myself as to anyone. It has been an exhausting day, and I haven’t thought about Billie’s dinner at all. I know that Rich has bought lobsters for the rest of us, but Billie will not eat a lobster.

  “Mommy, can I have a Coke?”

  “In a car accident,” Thomas says. “When I was a kid. The driver was drunk.” Rich looks up quickly at Thomas, but Thomas turns his head away.

  “Not now, Sweetie. It’s almost time for supper.”

  “We have some tunafish,” says Rich. “I’ll make her a sandwich.”

  “You’ve done enough,” I say. “The least I can do is make a sandwich.” I start to get up.

  “I don’t want tunafish,” Billie says. “I want a lobster.”

  “Billie, I don’t think…” I start to say, but Rich stops me with a small shake of his head.

  “Why don’t you give the lobster a try?” he asks Billie. “And if you don’t like it, we can make the sandwich then.”

  She closes her mouth and nods. I can see that she is slightly worried now that she has won her small contest. I doubt she really wants a lobster.

  “Where are you from?” Adaline asks me. As she crosses her legs, a slit in the skirt of her black dress falls open, revealing a long, suntanned calf. Thomas looks down at Adaline’s leg, and then away. I am wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Thomas has a fresh shirt on, a blue shirt with a thin yellow stripe, and he has shaved.

  “Indiana, originally,” I say. “My parents are dead. I was born late, when my mother was forty-eight.”

  “Mommy, what do seagulls eat?”

  “Fish, I think,” I say to Billie. “They dive in the ocean for fish. If you watch them closely, I’ll bet you can see them.” Selfconsciously, I look toward Smuttynose, at the gulls that loop in the air over the ragged shoreline.

  “And you do this?” Adaline asks, gesturing with her hands to include the boat, the island, the harbor.

  “When I can,” I say.

  “But, Mom, where do they sleep?”

  “That’s a good question,” I say, turning to Thomas for help.

  “Damned if I know,” Thomas says.

  “They must sleep on rocks,” Adaline offers. “They put their heads under their wings, I think.”

  “Have you ever seen a seagull sleep?” Billie asks her.

  Adaline purses her lips. “I must have done,” she says. “But I can’t think where.”

  “On the back of a garbage barge in the middle of Boston Harbor,” Rich calls out from the galley.

  “The rats of the sea,” mutters Thomas.

  Billie snuggles deeper into the cavity of my arm and chest and speaks into my rib cage. “Adaline is beautiful,” she says shyly, not quite certain it is all right to say such a thing aloud.

  “I know she is,” I say, looking directly at Adaline, who meets my eyes.

  “I love you, Mommy,” Billie says.

  “I love you, too,” I say.

  Early reports of the murders were hastily written and full of inaccuracies. The first bulletin from the Boston Post read as follows: “Two Girls Murdered on Smutty Nose Island, Isles of Shoals. Particulars of the Horrible Butchery — Escape of the Assassin and Subsequent Arrest in Boston — The Murderer’s Object for Committing the Deed — Attempt to Kill a Third Person — Miraculous Escape of His Intended Victim — Terrible Sufferings from the Cold — Appalling Spectacle at the Home of the Murdered Females, Etc., Etc. — [SPECIAL DISPATCH TO THE BOSTON POST] Portsmouth, N.H., March 6. Our citizens were horror-struck soon after noon to-day, when a fisherman named Huntress, whose home is at the Isles of Shoals, by landing his boat at Newcastle, and taking them thence to this city, hastened to inform our police that murder most foul had been done at the Shoals.”

  According to the same report, a “rough young man named Lewis Wagner” was seen walking down to the wharf the previous night with an ax in hand. The next morning at seven o’clock, while Wagner and “Huntress” were “having breakfast together” in Portsmouth, Wagner told the unfortunate Huntress (who had not yet returned home and did not know of the murders) that something was going to happen to him (Lewis Wagner). Anetta Lawson and Cornelia Christenson were the victims. A third woman, Mrs. Huntress, had escaped. Portsmouth City Marshall Johnson was already on his way to Boston to try to apprehend the fugitive murderer, who had, earlier in the day, been seen boarding a train for Boston.

  I go below to help Rich in the galley. He has a lobster pot on a burner on the stove, another on a hibachi on the stern. He is heating bread in the oven, and he has made a salad.

  I begin to lay out the table. Rich and I move awkwardly about the cramped space, trying not to bump into each other or reach for the same utensil simultaneously. Through the companionway, I can see Billie lying faceup on the cushion I have vacated. She seems to be studying her fingers with great intensity. Across from her, framed in the rectangle, are Thomas’s legs in their trousers, and his hand reaching for the bottle he has set by his right foot. The boat moves rhythmically, and through the west-facing portholes, watery reflections flicker on the bulkheads. I am searching for lobster crackers and picks in the silverware drawer when I hear three achingly familiar words: Wainscot, redolent, core-stung.

  Adaline’s voice is deep and melodious, respectful, forming words and vowels — perfect vowels. She knows the poem well. By heart.

  I strain so that I can see Thomas’s face. He is looking down at his knees. He doesn’t move.

  I remember the bar, the way Thomas read the poem. I remember standing at a window and reading it in the streetlight while Thomas slept.

  “Thomas,” I call. The edge in my voice is audible, even to me.

  Billie sits up and leans on her elbows. She seems slightly puzzled. Adaline stops reciting.

  Adaline’s wrists are lightly crossed at her knee. In one long-fingered hand, she holds a wineglass. I am surprised suddenly to realize that this is the first time I have seen her drinking.

  “Thomas, I need you,” I repeat, and turn away.

  I busy myself in the silverware drawer. He puts his head inside the companionway.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “I can’t find the nutcrackers, and I don’t know what you’ve done with the wine we’re having for dinner.” My annoyance — a weaseling, sour note — is unmistakable.

  “I’ve got the wine right here,” Rich says quietly next to me. He opens the tiny refrigerator door for me to see.

  But it is too late. Thomas has already turned and walked away. He stands, looking out over the water. He holds his glass in one hand; the other he has in the pocket of his trousers. Adaline has twisted her body around, so that she, too, is gazing out over the water, but away from Thomas.

&
nbsp; Rich goes above to put the corn into the pot on the hibachi. I see Thomas move aside and hold the lid for Rich. After Rich has dumped the ears into the steaming kettle, he wipes his hands on a dishtowel, and then bends and pours himself a glass of wine from another bottle on the cockpit floor. Thomas and Rich, their backs to me, speak a few words to each other, like husbands who have gone to stand by the grill in the backyard. I lean against the lip of the counter in the galley and sip my wine with concentration.

  Billie looks at her father, then at me. She rolls over onto her stomach and puts her hands to the sides of her face, as if she were peering at something very tiny on the cushion. Rich turns around and gestures to Adaline to move over a bit. He sits next to her and rests his fingers on her thigh. He slips them in under the slit of her skirt, under the black cloth.

  Thomas, who has made a half turn at that moment and is about to speak, sees Rich touch Adaline. He stands as if transfixed, as if not knowing where to put his body. He takes an awkward step forward. He hits Adaline’s wineglass, which she has set down on the floor. The glass falls and shatters.

  “Jesus,” Thomas says.

  Louis Wagner was arrested at eight-thirty on the night after the murders at the home of an acquaintance in Boston by both Portsmouth and Boston police. Wagner seemed stunned by the accusation of the murders and swore that he had not been on Smuttynose since November of the previous year. He said he could not have done such a thing because the Hontvedt women had been good to him. He had heard the train whistle at nine o’clock that morning, and, since he was down on his luck in Portsmouth, he thought it might be a good thing to try Boston.

  News that the police were bringing Wagner back to Portsmouth on the ten o’clock train on Friday morning swept through the town, and the train route was lined with angry, screaming mobs. Fearing for their prisoner, the police had the train stopped a quarter mile short of the station to take Wagner off, but the crowd spotted him anyway and began to pelt the prisoner — and the police — with stones and ice chunks. They called out “Lynch him” and “String him up.” The Marines were summoned, and the police drew their guns. Wagner spent the night in the Portsmouth jail, but was transferred the next day to Saco, Maine, since Smuttynose is technically not in New Hampshire, but in Maine. Again police were confronted with thousands of demonstrators who once more tried to stone Wagner, who was wounded in the head. One of the men in the mob was Ephraim Downs, the fisherman who had once saved John Hontvedt’s life.