Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  “I’m not calm, you goddamn fool. I nearly shat myself out there.”

  Harvey’s face sank in disgust. “I’m taking these binoculars back,” he said.

  “He’s been lying on the bottom all day in the sand out of the current, using his electric motors and breathing the same air since dawn,” said Morales. “Now he’s come up to go hunting out in the sea lanes, so he’s back on his diesels and blowing off stale air. That was German shit you smelled—and cabbage, I bet. Sauerkraut. He’s on his way out to sink a merchantman going from Boston to Halifax.”

  “Like a compost heap when you stir it up; like ...”

  Jake led Amos across the room so he could show them the sub’s position on the chart.

  “Here. Right there,” he pointed. “He was heading south.”

  “Right out to the Halifax run, just as Morales said, and nobody can do a damn thing about it.” Jake smoothed his mustaches.

  “What do you mean?” asked Amos. “Why can’t you get Pancho here to get on that radio and call an airplane to come bomb him? He’s on the surface out there right now. Just bomb him.”

  “Fuck you, carrot top; don’t call me Pancho.”

  “Relax, Morales,” said Jake. “Get on that set. There just might be an aircraft patrolling in the area, though probably not one that could do anything. It’s worth a try, but I doubt they could send a plane out here if you saw Hitler himself all alone in a dinghy.”

  “He didn’t see me unless it was through his periscope.” Amos took off his cap and put it back on again.

  “He may not have seen you, but he knew you were there,” said Jake. “He has a listening device that would have picked you up loud and clear. He didn’t give a damn about you. He’s out after big fish; you’re nothing but a waste of ammo to him.”

  Morales made contact, and they listened, Jake with the extra headset pressed to one ear.

  When he heard Morales explaining that a local fisherman had made the sighting, Amos thought that the Coast Guardsman must have made a mistake and did not realize that he was sending the message in the clear.

  “He isn’t using any code,” he objected.

  “No, hell no,” said Jake.

  “Then that submarine can hear exactly what he’s saying. They can translate it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “It’s not insane, it’s stupid. Why don’t you stay for supper, Amos? I got a nice stew and a custard pie that just now survived a surface attack in the pantry doorway.” Jake put a hand on Amos’s shoulder.

  “No, I guess not,” said the lobsterman. “I’ve got to get back. Why don’t you come down with me and get your rum?”

  When his father let him off work at five, Gus Barter sneaked a Three Musketeers from the glass case and walked over to the cove to find the Tuna and see how the setting out had gone. He thought that if Amos was going to set out more traps tomorrow, he could help the old man load them on the high tide later that night.

  Gus looked in the window of the house, surprised not to see a light in the gathering dusk, then went down to the shore to find that Amos’s boat was not in. His skiff swung on the mooring, but there was no sign of him, nor any engine sounds on the water. He never stayed out this late, thought Gus. Never. He did not like to be out in the dark. There was no sign on the wharf of his having come in and gone back out, though he must have because two tiers of traps were gone. Gus sat on the wharf with his feet resting on a ladder rung and watched it grow dark. He was cold, and he would be late for supper. He walked out on the point to look down the island toward Amos’s fishing grounds, but he saw nothing. Nobody was out on the water.

  Gus knew that if he hurried, he could catch his Aunt Maggie on the road. He took a deep, determined chest full of air and started out in a run over the rocks, then up the shore to the road. He was a hefty boy, at fifteen still carrying some of his baby fat. His overalls were tight on his chest; as he ran the straps flapped down off his shoulders, and he had to keep pulling them up.

  He waited on a boulder by the bridge over the cove creek for Maggie to pass by on her way home from the school. By the time she came along, he had stopped breathing heavily. She saw him stand up when he spotted her, and she knew before she got to him that something was wrong with Amos.

  When it comes, she had always thought, it will come like this—as a complete surprise, in the middle of a homework lesson or dreaming up a dinner, just as the other two had. Of all the things that could happen to Amos fishing alone, the ones she imagined most were related to drink, as it had been with his Uncle Walter and her grandfather: both drunk, both drowned.

  None of them could swim. She did not know one fisherman who had ever learned. They said it was fruitless because in the cold northern Atlantic even the best swimmer would die in minutes from hypothermia. She suspected that they never learned out of fear, but she never said so.

  “Climb in,” she told Gus. “We’ll drive down.”

  Maggie leaned across and opened the door for him. She backed up carefully, half listening to Gus, and eased the Ford over the lip of the paved road down onto the steep cove road, driving in low gear all the way to the bottom and Amos’s dark house. The boy talked nervously, running through the less frightening possibilities aloud: that Amos had run out of gas, that he had had trouble with the driveshaft again, that his engine had quit, forcing him to put out a sea anchor or grapple, and wait for help.

  “Maybe he’s going to stay the night in Stonington,” she offered.

  “If he is, it’ll be the first time in his life that he’s spent a night off island.”

  “The second,” said Maggie.

  She stopped in the field and stared out at the black sea, anxious, full of regret at the idea of him out there all alone, grateful that Gus had walked ahead of her and could not see that she was afraid. It would not do any good to go to town for help; no one would go out tonight in this rising wind, and Amos, she knew, did not even have running lights—much less a radio of any kind. Behind her, in the woods by Ava’s house, hundreds of grosbeaks chattered in the trees.

  On the wharf, she sent Gus into the shack for matches and a lantern. He was glad to have something to do—such a serious boy and so afraid to show any emotion, even to her. Maggie rolled down the sleeves of her blouse and put on the light sweater that had been tied over her shoulders. There on the cold wharf, her arms hugging herself, she had an odd impulse to tell the boy about her and Amos, but instead she moved closer to the edge and craned her neck toward the water. She said Amos’s name once, softly, then hushed the boy as he clumped down the ramp with the light. She hushed him again, and he listened. To her relief, he heard it too. She stood with one hand raised toward the sound, until the Tuna came into view beyond the York ledges, first a ghostly shape, a black looming; then a smaller, darker form, accompanied by the increasing sound of his engine. Gus shouted and waved his lantern, though he knew Amos could not hear him.

  When Amos had taken up his mooring line and shut down the engine, Maggie yelled to ask if he was all right. He answered sure, sure he was.

  He knew she was angry because he had given her a scare, but he did not care—he was so glad to see her. While Amos was still tying up the skiff on the shore below, she asked him where he had been.

  “I went out to the lighthouse. I saw a U-boat. And close up, I tell you. A christly submarine as big as this cove. A Standard Atlantic Boat with fourteen torpedoes.” He talked standing in the mud, his arms still stretched out to the whole cove, the skiff line hanging from one, a dark idea taking shape in the increasing moonlight.

  Was he drunk? She was not sure, though she normally could tell. He kept talking, describing what had happened, explaining it a little better this time having told the story twice already. He was scared, really scared; she could hear the tone of his fear even in the thin echo behind her. She had never seen him this way, not even when Walter had died, and she knew he must be telling the truth.


  In his parlor, while she sat and the boy stood staring at him, Amos paced back and forth still telling snatches of it. She soon thought that it was not seeing the submarine that had him badly frightened, so she chose her questions carefully to lead him to the source of his fear. When he mentioned the second time that the sighting had been reported on the radio, in the clear, she interrupted.

  “Did the man say who you were or describe your boat or say where you’re from?”

  “No, none of that. Not even that I’m a lobster fisherman, but just a plain fisherman. Still, now that German knows it’s a local boat, and that’s not far from where I fish. He didn’t kill me the first time, but he sure as hell will the next time he sees me. And he’s gonna know I live on this island, right here.”

  “Jesus!” said the boy.

  Maggie gave Gus a look. Amos was avoiding her eyes.

  “Don’t tell anyone about this,” he said.

  “Good heavens. What do you mean?” He was always so secretive, she thought, at least with the living.

  “If you do, people will laugh, goddamn them.” He looked at Gus, who nodded his approval.

  “They won’t laugh, Amos; there’s not a thing funny about this. Why would anyone—”

  “They won’t believe it,” Gus said, his voice high. “They won’t believe he really saw it, and they’ll make jokes about it. Like the bobbing human candles.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Maggie. “Maybe it’s better that they don’t know because they might believe it. They will, even though they’ll claim they don’t. People out here are frightened enough as it is. If they hear that you saw a U-boat off the island, so close, they might panic. And no wonder. I’m scared too.”

  Neither Amos nor Gus believed her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IT WAS OBVIOUS TO MAGGIE, LEAH, AND GUS THAT AMOS WAS doing anything and everything he could to avoid going out on the water on his side of the island. He rode the mail boat to Stonington twice a week, spending the whole day off island to replace a monkey wrench that had been missing for years. At Ava’s, he cut spruce poles to replace the entire garden fence. He turned the garden over and started the planting. He reroofed the cabin and the hen coop. He dug a new hole for the privy and moved it. He cleaned his house from top to bottom; he cut and burned brush behind the barn and tidied up the graveyard.

  The rest of the time Amos did what everyone else was doing and worked to get the rest of his lobster gear ready. Gus came over almost every evening to help him and to get his own traps ready. Neither of them mentioned that the four strings Amos had already set out had soaked by now and had probably fished. They ought to be taking the ballast stones out of them to be used in the others. Gus thought that Amos would start setting out as soon as he got over his nervousness from seeing the U-boat and when the others started setting out. This year fifty of the traps that would go in the water belonged to Gus. He would start saving money of his own—money made from lobstering, not from working in his father’s store—and he would start saving toward his own boat.

  They had had a hard time persuading Cecil to allow his son to go lobstering with Amos and to fish his own traps. The one-room school on Barter Island only went through the eighth grade; the few families who wanted their children to finish high school had to send them to stay with relations while they went to a school on the mainland. Gus had spent the last year with his father’s sister’s family in Jonesport, where he was homesick the whole time and hated the school. He thought the boys his age who were not making a living on their own, or who were clerks or laborers working for someone else and not independent fishermen, were sissies. He got Cs and was teased about his weight. After Pearl Harbor the Boyer twins, among the few students who were nice to him, announced that they were going to lie about their age and leave school to join the navy; he thought they were heroes.

  Cecil did not want his son to go fishing on the Tuna because he thought Amos would encourage Gus to quit before he finished high school and move back to the island for good. The storekeeper wanted his son to get his diploma and stay off the island afterward in a steady paying job, as his older brother had done. Cecil had grown up on the island, and now he was stuck there; he did not want that for his boys. He knew what a mean life a lobster fisherman leads. He did not want Gus to get some dim island girl pregnant when they were both sixteen, like some people he knew, and get trapped on the island forever by her, a kid, a house, and a boat.

  Amos had wanted the boy to go fishing with him, then go on his own, to keep the Coombs fishing grounds in the family, even though the name would change. He imagined Gus marrying a nice island girl and moving into the cove and raising a family, filling the place up with life again. What looked like misery in Cecil’s imagination looked like the peaceable kingdom in Amos’s.

  Maggie had been ambivalent and so not much help to either side. She too had hoped Gus would find some work on the mainland, yet she knew that half of his father’s motivation for keeping him away from fishing was Cecil’s mistrust and jealousy of Amos—and something else that she did not understand. Most important, she understood that Gus had Coombs blood that drew him to the island and that there was nothing to be done about it. Like the rest of the natives, she knew it was an odd and unrealistic and backward place to live, but she would not live anywhere else, either.

  Leah had reminded Cecil that he had one son already on the mainland, with a secure job in the shipyard. She did not need to remind him, but did anyway, that the price for lobsters was climbing steadily and that it would probably continue to rise. She had reminded Gus that he owed a lot to his father and that he had a duty to his family. But, afraid that he might try to enlist in the navy if she didn’t, she had fixed it between them so that Gus would fish with Amos twice a week during the summer season while he finished high school, working at the store in the evenings. With a small salary from the store, and an income from fifty traps, he could start saving for his future. She put the thought of his having to go to war right out of her mind.

  Leah kept things peaceful in the family by preventing Gus from going off on his rhapsodies about Amos in front of his father; it worried her that the boy praised his grandfather to hurt Cecil, or that Cecil thought as much. Amos was her father and she loved him, but she thought that Gustus was a little foolish about him. Her son would grow out of it, she told herself.

  On the days when Gus was not working with him at the wharf, Amos was getting tortured by his uncles and his own mind. He did not have to go out on the water to know what was going on out there. He saw the boats passing by, and he could tell by the sound of their engines who was setting traps and where. Mornings, he stood on the wharf looking out at nothing visible on the water, with his face set and his fists clenched—like a man watching his house burn down. He could use all the excuses he wanted for the rest of the world, but it was no good: Deer Isle men were taking over his family fishing grounds, and he was not doing a goddamned thing about it. It was a betrayal of the only thing in his life that he attached any importance to. No one in the world cared where those men were fishing except the spirits in the cove, and the cove was the only place Amos could live. It was so bad it almost made him laugh, but he did not dare to because they were so disgusted with him.

  The boy probably did not know that other men were setting out in Coombs waters, but he would hear soon, when they started bragging about it in Stonington and word got down to the island. Eventually, Amos knew, he would have to face Gus and explain to him why they were not going out at all. The longer he stalled, with Gus and the rest of the family knowing he was stalling, the smaller he felt.

  On an evening when a long week of fog was finally blowing out to sea, taking the last of his excuses with it, Amos sat rocking on the front porch. If he did not go out and reclaim his waters, he would not get gunned down by the U-boat. Then he would surely live another twenty years, but he would live them ashamed in front of the boy and everyone else. In addition, he would spend the rest of eterni
ty facing the family he betrayed by giving up their fishing grounds. If he did go out and got blown up, he would spend eternity with them as a hero. Well, maybe not a hero; Ava would never give him that much credit because she still blamed him for what happened to Clytie. Perhaps he wouldn’t be a hero but someone who had tried, who had kept up his part of the trust. They were split, he knew, on whether he should take the boy along with him.

  As for the living, he thought Maggie would be against it, but he decided to take Gus anyway, to keep his promise. He would assure her that he would stay in close to shore; in turn he would get her to promise not to tell Leah that the U-boat might know him by sight, and might be waiting to take its revenge on him— and her son along with him. Gus, he thought, might be scared too, but he was young, and he would be good for it.

  Lew settled into the rocker next to him, disturbing it only slightly. He rested his cheek on his fist, his gaze toward the water.

  Amos did not look at him but said, “I had a dream about you last night.”

  I know it.

  Amos listened to Lew’s breathing and waited.

  You’re going to tie them off. You’ve got no choice. So go do it for Christ’s sake.

  Amos waited again, then drained his cup, went down to the boat, and headed out of the cove. No one else was on the water, and the days were plenty long this time of the year, so he could easily get done before dark. In the shade of the cliffs, with a watchful eye on the open sea behind him, he tied off the first string; the buoys were white with a red spindle, probably Sam Witherspoon’s. He found a second and third string of ten in the Turnip Yard and tied them off too. It was a simple process and a simple statement: on each trap line he coiled ten feet of rope between the buoy and the toggle, and tied it off with the warning knot he had learned from Walter. When the intruder found the knotted coil, he knew that he had twenty-four hours to move his traps; otherwise the lines would be cut, and he’d lose everything. Amos had the old Enfield .303 to back him up if need be, but he hoped it would not come to that.