Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  SOMETHING IN THE WATER

  SOMETHING

  IN THE

  WATER

  Peter Scott

  DOWN EAST BOOKS

  CAMDEN / MAINE

  FOR HOLLIS

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Peter Francis Scott, Jr.

  ISBN 0-89272-517-6

  www.nbnbooks.com

  Distributed by

  National Book Network

  800-462-6420

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Scott, Peter, 1945-

  Something in the water / by Peter Scott.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-89272-517-6

  1. World War, 1939-1945—Naval operations—Submarine—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Naval operations, German—Fiction. 3. World War, 1939-1945—Maine— Fiction. 4. Submarines (Ships)—Fiction. 5. Submarine warfare—Fiction. 6. Fishing villages—Fiction. 7. Islands— Fiction. 8. Maine—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.C675 S65 2000

  813'.54—dc21

  00-064509

  IN MEMORIAM

  CAPTAIN MAURICE E. BARTER

  1914-2000

  At least I know that many spirits live,

  And circulate among us at odd times;

  I don't know why they come; perhaps they are

  The bashful ones who hate to leave the earth

  Like folks we know that never leave the town

  Where they were born—and I incline to that;

  They tended children when we went away,

  And now I think they’re taking care of us.

  —“Cyrus” Wilbert Snow

  PART ONE

  Drums Along the Rum Run

  President Roosevelt: “Enemy ships could swoop in and shell New York; enemy planes could drop bombs on war plants in Detroit; enemy troops could attack Alaska.”

  Newsman: “Mister President! Aren’t the navy and air force strong enough to deal with anything like that?”

  President Roosevelt: “Certainly not.”

  White House news conference,

  March 2, 1942

  CHAPTER ONE

  MISTER KEEN, TRACER OF LOST PERSONS WAS SCRATCHY, FAINT, and raspy—washing ashore, drawing back out. Amos knelt in front of the radio’s walnut console and caressed the dial, listening closely, his head cocked like that of a wary bird. But all he could get was the Jell-0 jingle receding into the distance behind a dying hiss of static.

  “Open the window,” Uncle Lew used to say, “so’s the radio waves can get in.”

  “Waves, hell,” muttered Amos. “It’s the batteries.”

  He lit a lamp, unlatched the trapdoor, and let himself carefully down the steep cellar steps. In a house that old, everything was a size too small for a man built like him, especially stairs and ceilings. He stood on the dry plank that spanned the muddy cellar floor and stooped over to check the wires and the liquid levels in the big blue battery jars. While he topped them off, some twenty in number, his lamp heated a hole in the cobwebs above the shelf. That done, he headed back upstairs.

  Amos did not care too much about hearing The Tracer of Lost Persons—they would repeat the episode on Thursday— but he did not want to miss the news and Walter Winchell. He planned his supper around Winchell’s report to, “Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea.”

  He lit two more lamps and carried them to the table by the radio for the brightest meal. What he wanted was a fresh codfish, soaked and baked in milk, and potatoes—white food. Instead, he made some biscuits, filling the house with their thick smell, fried some bacon and eggs, and sat down in the lamplight to listen.

  Headline News was scratchy and weak, too, so that once in a while he had to stop chewing to hear. As on every night in the months since Pearl Harbor, there was one piece of bad news after another, with something hopeful saved for the end.

  The destroyer Kearney had been torpedoed south of Iceland.

  Walt Disney had announced the release of a movie about a baby elephant that flies with his ears to save his mother.

  The island of Malta had been bombed again, for the five hundredth consecutive day.

  But the RAF had dropped bombs that weighed two tons each on the German defense works in Essen, and . . .

  The destroyer Roper had sunk a German U-boat in the Chesapeake Bay.

  While a woman sang the Palmolive jingle, Amos mopped up the last of the yolk with a biscuit.

  “How the hell can an island stand up to bombing like that, for more than a year, from the whole German Air Force?” He talked with his mouth full. “Could they even surrender? How? Wave bed sheets at the bombers? Christ.”

  He drained the full cup of cold tea in a gulp and stood up facing the radio, one huge pink speckled fist opening and closing on a shriveled lemon he had taken from his pocket without noticing.

  “That’s bad all right. Sure, go ahead and sing, soap woman. It’s bad, but we haven’t seen the worst yet. What about the merchant ships coming up the coast, the tankers on their way to Halifax? Unarmed and full of oil?”

  Amos cleared the table, turned off the radio, then snuffed one lamp and turned the other down before setting it in the window. Pulling on his heavy wool coat, still damp in the shoulders, he stepped out onto the front stoop and sat down in the gray twilight with a toddy of sweetened water, lemon, and a generous three fingers of dark Demerara rum. A lone gull scaled over the bare oak, cried, then turned out toward the sea.

  Amos’s house was the smallest of the four in the cove, separated from the others by a high granite ledge and a thicket of spruce beneath which were laid to rest almost everyone who had lived in the island cove since great-great grandfather Stillman Coombs, a Cornish man, sailed in and planted himself in 1802 with an ox, a bride, and a fishing boat. Stillman’s wife, Experience, would hold the long iron drilling pole while he struck it with the sledgehammer—one strike, one quarter turn of the drill in the granite, another strike—to cut blocks for the house and barn foundations. Experience gave Stillman four sons. Sammy, the eldest, built his own house, where Amos now lived, on a foundation as sound as Stillman’s.

  In the next two generations Stillman’s offspring built two more houses in the cove, along with three wharves, several fish shacks, and a store. When Amos was growing up, the cove was a busy little village of Coombses—cousins and aunts and uncles everywhere, horses and oxen and Model T’s, five fishing boats, and twice that many sailing peapods moored together. Grammy Helen had so many children that her husband slept on a cot in the store and called her the old lady who lived in a shoe. By 1920 most of the cousins had grown and moved off to the mainland, crowded out. Those who stayed, stayed forever. Experience Coombs’s grave, marked by a tall, white marble obelisk, stood in the center of the cove cemetery; gathered around her lay her sons and their families, still within her reach.

  Out in the cove, Amos’s boat swung slowly on her mooring, disturbed by the coming tide. He could hear a flock of small birds over toward the meadow. It was either the goldfinches or the grosbeaks, the first ones to stop on the island for a rest on their way north. Aunt Ava used to say that if the grosbeaks returned first the lilacs would bloom late, and it would be a raw spring with no time for painting boats. Or was it the goldfinches that were bad luck, he wondered?

  “Two goddamn tons,” muttered Amos as he tucked the rum bottle under his arm. “A bomb big as a trawler.”

  Normally his legs and arches pained him some at this time of the day, but not this evening. Even though he had a slight hitch f
rom a twist in his hip, he walked and stood straight for a man his age; he was careful to do so. He knew that once a man who works with his back and hands starts stooping, he never straightens up—not after age forty, which he had already passed. He hummed the Palmolive jingle as he started up the road—at first patches of it, softly; then more of it, louder. Amos was not musically inclined; his neighbors used to tease him about how bad his singing was, but now it did not matter because they were all gone: Lew and Walter to fish with, Aunt Ava to take care of their appearances and manage everything above the high-tide line. One by one he had lugged them from their houses to the graveyard, leaving him alone in the cove, alone on the east side of the easternmost island in Penobscot Bay, with the high spine of the mountain between him and the rest of America.

  The moon would soon be over the horizon and then it would get clearer; the sea would darken to steel. Amos thought it should be a dry moon, but he could not remember. He went along the path, instead of the road, and as he neared the field below Ava’s window, he instinctively tucked the bottle inside his shirt, where it rode warm and sloshing, half full. The goldfinches saw him first and rose from the trees on the edge of the field in long draping ribbons. In the last evening light they were not as bright as in years past, but still he marveled at the dull golden mass in the trees and watched them speed alone or in groups across the field, where they settled in the bony sumac for the superior view.

  The path to the cabin on the cliff skirted Ava’s dooryard and led past Uncle Lew’s empty house. The blinds in the darkened windows were tattered now, so they looked like gray eyelashes on closed lids. No one had been inside Lew’s house for years and years, not since they went through it to remove the furniture. No one would ever go inside again, Amos thought: Let it stay empty and sink under its own weight.

  He kept up Aunt Ava’s and Uncle Walter’s house. He mowed the grass, pruned the fruit trees, patched the roof—even swept and dusted the inside in the spring. He had finished the preserves in the cellar long ago, but he still borrowed tools and kitchen utensils—borrowed and returned them.

  As Amos crossed her yard, he saw Ava sitting in her wicker throne in the parlor window. The light that revealed her seemed to come from the parlor door, but the parlor window was dark. He stopped, scared stiff for a moment, as he always was when this happened. Tonight she sat still, looking out at him over the rims of her spectacles as she had in life whenever he disturbed her at her tatting. She wore her nightcap, and her white shawl over her shoulders against the chill.

  For years she sat just like that at this time of day to watch for her brother Walter coming up the meadow path. If he approached the house like a man negotiating a heaving deck, she would berate him for drinking again and serve him a cold supper in silence. Finally Walter built the little cabin up on the cliff where he could go have another drink in peace or sleep off the ones he had already downed. Only a year after he built the cabin, Walter drowned outside the ledges below it. Amos was the one who found the boat going around in circles with Walter hanging on the washboard, stone dead and going black in the face. He had been a hefty, laughing man, Amos’s favorite.

  The bulkhead’s double doors lay open beneath Ava’s window, offering the dark, open maw of the cellar. Amos wondered if he had forgotten to close them.

  You left them open the day before yesterday, said the ghost. Her voice was low and strong; it seemed to issue from the cellar hole.

  “I thought I closed them,” Amos replied.

  The birds fell quiet at the sound of his voice.

  Maybe you’re getting old, forgetting things, she said.

  Was that twinkle from her eyes, he wondered, or the light where it touched her spectacles? It must be her spectacles, Amos decided; she’s dead.

  “Maybe I could blink and make you go away, or snap my fingers, like that.” He showed her.

  Maybe, but I doubt it. She smiled.

  You wouldn’t though. It was Walter’s voice, though he was not to be seen. You could always lie down and join us, as if you hadn’t thought of that already, he added.

  You could break your neck wandering around those cliffs in the dark, Ava warned. I notice you didn’t even bring a lantern.

  “That wouldn’t get rid of you, though,” Amos said. “Then we’d all be—”

  Certainly it would, she interrupted. What is it that keeps us here but you?

  “At least you two stay in one place. Uncle Lew, he wanders around everywhere.” Amos looked around in the increasing shadows. Was that something moving by the well?

  Lew’s lucky, came Walter’s voice. He always was.

  Ava glared into the dark parlor to shush Walter, but it did not work.

  Where you going with that lemon? Walter wanted to know.

  Amos opened his fist, surprised to find the half lemon still there.

  You’re going to have yourself a toddy up on the cabin porch. Walter’s voice was wistful now.

  “I might.” Amos put the lemon in his coat pocket and turned to go.

  What kind of a man talks to a radio? Ava resumed her tatting.

  “The same kind of a man that talks to ghosts.” He walked over and shut the bulkhead doors, as steady as a minister. The birds stirred in the trees on both sides of him and scooted over his head, lost souls flying across the darkness.

  It’s goldfinches that are good luck, and it’s not for spring, but for winter,; Ava said. You got them mixed up because you forgot that it’s the way goldfinches fly—falling, then flapping to rise up, then dropping and rising again— that predicts it won’t stay cold long enough for the sea to freeze. How you could think it was grosbeaks, and the spring, I’ll never know.

  Amos spat over his shoulder—she’d always hated that, and turned to leave.

  Go ahead, Ava said. Don’t listen to me. But remember what happened last time you went up to the cabin to sit at night. You believed what you thought you saw from there.

  Then you went and told everybody about it, said Walter. What the hell, Amos?

  “I only told Cecil, so he could report it to the mainland; he’s the constable now, if you remember.” Amos was sarcastic. He was surprised and hurt to hear Walter take her side.

  So he could also report it to the whole island, which already thinks you’re daft and laughs about how you live alone in a ghost town talking to shadows and guzzling rum. For pity’s sake!

  “So the hell what,” said Amos. If Walter wouldn’t stand up to her, he would. “Let them laugh. I saw an explosion. Like I said, it was like a kitchen match flaring up and then a smear of orange fire. Three points north of the lighthouse, maybe twenty miles beyond it.”

  Why didn’t the lighthouse report it, then? Walter had asked this before.

  “What makes you think they didn’t? Maybe they didn’t see it.”

  I hope you stay to home, Ava said, softer now.

  I hope you didn’t tell Cecil the whole of it, said Walter. About seeing the sailors in the water afloat and on fire. What was it you called them, bobbing torches? Seen them from more’n thirty miles away. After hearing that, who’s going to believe anything you say?

  Amos showed them his back and started home. He felt tired and resentful. They were the lucky ones. To them the cove was still alive with boats and people, the way it once was. Vergil was down on his wharf off-loading barrels of soused tripe and tubs of lard for the store. One of the children, his turn having come, was driving the oxen and cows in from the meadow. To them Japan was still a shiny black lacquer, and Hitler was a German version of Charlie Chaplin. No matter how hard Amos tried to explain what was going on in the present, they could not understand it. He was foolish to think that they could.

  When he poured another toddy on his front stoop, the rum was warm from the trip inside his shirt. The evening star flickered in the east. With another run of good days, he would have his deck painted and loaded with lobster traps, then he and the boy could start setting them out.

  Richard Snell gave the b
reakwater light a wide berth and steered into Rockland harbor. A big gillnetter, the Holly B., passed him to port with a wave from her skipper, and Richard cut back his throttle to dance in her wake. He blinked and squinted through his window, then wiped it clear with his sleeve. It had been seven months since his last run to Rockland—five since Roosevelt had declared war—and Richard had heard that the Coast Guard station was gearing up. He had not, however, imagined so much traffic and noise and confusion. The fishing boats and moorings had been moved out to make room for a huge, rusted dredge that ground and squealed as it loaded a deep barge with bottom mud. A quarry crane and its swarthy crew from Stonington was setting granite blocks for a new pier. Two Coast Guard cutters were rafted up at the far end of the town wharf; a third, tied alongside, was getting her hull scraped and painted by men in dungarees. A pile driver groaned, hesitated, then struck with a thud that Richard could feel in his deck planks. Where all these people had come from, he could not imagine.

  “Christ,” he muttered.

  He found Dennis Kehoe’s Kingfisher moored north of the sardine factory and drifted in alongside her. Prentiss Phinney, his full gray beard stained brown around the mouth by tobacco and rum, threw Richard a line and watched while he tied it off.

  “I almost didn’t recognize the place,” said Richard. “What a god-awful mess. You’d think—”

  “You have lobsters?” Phinney spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Yes, but not many this early in the season. You got my rum? It’s good to see you, Phinney; it’s been a while.”

  “I guess it has. We saved out two cases for you. Come on aboard.”

  Phinney hauled up Richard’s first lobster crate and helped him up after it. Dennis Kehoe stood in the door to the wheel-house wiping his hands on a blue rag. The Kingfisher was a lobster smack out of Boston, one of the few still operating on the Maine coast in the spring of 1942. She bought lobsters from outlying fishermen and sold them in the city. Dennis also carried Demerara rum from the Barbados to sell to the lobstermen on his route. Demerara was the favorite among the older fishermen. They had inherited a taste for it from their grandfathers, who once bought it in small wooden barrels from schooner captains. Dennis did not go any farther east than Rockland until later in the summer, so Richard bought Demerara from him there to sell to the fishermen on the islands in Penobscot Bay. The younger fishermen were satisfied to drink blended whisky or thinner rum, but the old ones still insisted on Demerara: it lingered sweetly on the tongue and spread through the whole body to ease back pains and loosen cramped legs.