Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  Amos knew Gus would tell his mother about their plan that night. And Leah would tell Maggie tomorrow when she came into the store. He guessed it would be a day, or two at the most, before Maggie stopped by on her way home and insisted that he borrow the money from her. She would not hear otherwise. He had his eye on that Nova Scotia boat in Stonington.

  Monday evening

  May 9, 1942

  Ruth dear,

  Ernest Mattingly brought his new baseball glove to school today, all oiled and tied snugly with cod line wrapped around a ball nestled inside. He left it on his desk for all of us to see, in hopes, no doubt, that someone would ask him about it. But none of the others said anything— the boys jealous or unaware, the girls indifferent. I was reminded of your Michael on my visit last spring (or was it the year before?), when he had done the same thing. How pleased and proud he was to explain to me how the leather would soften and form a permanent pocket after the ball was removed. He had read in a magazine that Phil Rizzuto did the same thing when he was a boy. So when I stopped at Ernest’s desk during arithmetic and admired his glove and mentioned Phil Rizzuto for the others to hear, he turned pink with pleasure. I said a silent thank you to Michael for his lesson on your porch stoop.

  The days are getting longer, and though the mud ruts in the road are firm in the morning, we haven’t had a frost in weeks. The trillium are in flower, and yesterday I saw Jack in his pulpit. Soon it will be apple blossom time.

  I’ve seen more of Amos in the last week or so than I have in a long, long time. (When I write his name, it surprises me to see it. Does it you? In script it is a shapely name.) For years I’d only seen him when he drove by the school in midmorning, going to and from the store and P.O., twice a week at most. Occasionally on his return trip we’d both look up at the same time, he with his hat pulled low and a slight smile, me in the window in mid-sentence, wanting to wave but demurring. Now I’ve seen him twice—no, three times—in a week, talked to him, been in his little house, stood within reach of him, close enough to see that the uncut hairs on the back of his neck are going to gray. We’ve changed so little, really, since we were once so close.

  I made up a May basket for him (you’re smiling) and planned to take it over in the dark, just as Leah and I used to after he moved out. There was a bouquet of violets blue and white, a doily painted with songbirds (not nearly so nicely done as yours), and a jar of apple butter. But I didn’t deliver it. Don’t ask me why.

  Yes, I am still worried about poor Leah; you were nice to inquire. I wish I could report otherwise. I wish she would talk to me about it, but she is tight-lipped and avoids my eyes. When she’s alone she gnaws at her fingernails and picks compulsively at the calluses on her hands. I’ve seen her like this before, as you know, and I hate it more each time, hate Cecil more. She’s had the courage to disagree with him on something, or even (do I dare hope?) disobey him, and he is punishing her, belittling her, kicking away the frail supports of her self-worth with criticism, sarcasm, and a tone of weary disappointment in his voice. He knows that her only source of confidence comes from her efficiency as a housewife and as keeper of the store and household accounts. At supper he eats only half of what she serves him, saying that he’s tired of leftovers when he knows the meal is freshly prepared. Then he criticizes her for wasting food. In the store the other day, in front of several people, he wiped the cutting board with a white towel, held it up dirty, and asked her in a voice for a forgetful child if they hadn’t agreed to keep the board clean always. She answered with a submissive yes and lowered her eyes. I wanted to march around that counter, take him by his piggish earlobe, and twist until he fell to his knees and apologized to her. I wish I had.

  Now I’ve gone on and on. But I do feel better having complained. You’ve always been the one I can talk to; I don’t know what I’d do without your friendship.

  It’s growing dark, and I have a lesson to prepare and four themes to correct. I’ll close now, missing you, and light the lamps. Please give my love to Adam, kiss Sarah, and muss Michael’s hair for me, whether he likes it or not.

  Love always,

  Maggie

  PS. Mrs. Roosevelt says we’ll need to be brave, and I think she is right.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CECIL HAD BEEN UP SINGE FIVE, PICKING UP THE SATURDAY GROCERY shipment in Stonington with Gus, unloading it, and now—with Leah’s help—storing or shelving it. His sleeves were rolled in perfect cuffs above his elbows, his tie was loosened, and his store apron was as spotless as a pillow slip.

  He could see what was coming. Now that meat was to be rationed, the prices of lobster and fish were climbing faster than he had imagined it would. As the war effort increased, so would the demand for fish. Popular magazines were running long, involved recipes for housewives, explaining how to cook fish as a substitute for meat, describing all the different things that could be done with hake and cod. A Bangor Daily News article, which Leah had clipped and pinned to the store bulletin board, reported that it was considered patriotic to order fish and lobster in expensive restaurants in Boston and New York.

  Gasoline was rationed, but not for farmers and fishermen. Ironically, Cecil’s customers would finally have money to spend after so many lean years of self-rationing, but he would not have anything to sell them. He thought: The Japs bomb Pearl Harbor, the government decides to go to war against Hitler, and Cecil Barter gets cheated out of the chance to reap the rewards of long years of scraping by in the store. The government was issuing ration books, and there were already shortages of everything from sugar to linen. Cecil had heard rumors of plans to raise taxes, and there was even talk about price controls. It seemed that everything he had worked for over the past years was being yanked away from him.

  But he was a Barter, and Barters knew, he liked to say, that in adversity there is opportunity, if only you are smart enough and disciplined enough to take advantage of it. Cecil had always had the discipline, in all things—hadn’t he chosen a plain but competent woman to be his wife?—but until recently, when it came to him unexpectedly in a sudden brilliant realization on the town landing, his ambition had really been no more than a dream. The average citizens, even the poorer ones like the islanders, would tighten their belts for the war effort, consoled by patriotic advertising from manufacturers and by government propaganda. Their sacrifices would provide the muscle needed to strengthen American industry. The ships and tanks and planes would get built, and it would be the captains of industry who would loosen their belts. Summer people. Men like Mr. Owings, who owned a steel company and kept the big cottage on Point Lookout. Like Mr. Davidson, his summer neighbor, who had a pharmaceutical company and a sixty-foot sailboat that he brought up from Boston every Fourth of July, filled with family and friends.

  There were more than a dozen such families on Point Lookout. Their wives bought incidentals at his store, but their fresh vegetables, wines, cheeses, dairy products, and almost everything else were delivered by Merrill and Hinckley in Blue Hill. Katherine Merrill, the last of either family, was retiring that summer, and would sell the store to the highest bidder in September. Cecil had three months to find a way to buy it, and he would; by Jesus, he would.

  His older boy, Melvin, who was home from the shipyards for the weekend, sat chain-smoking Old Golds on an upturned milk crate by the little stove between the counter and the shelves. Unlike his parents and his brother, he could sit still while others were working around him. He had his father’s long, narrow face and his mother’s round, upturned nose, whose nostrils he habitually pinched as if he could narrow them to fit his face. Richard Snell had moved the only chair away from the rainy window and settled in it next to the stove. In high rubber boots and thick flannel, he sat cross-legged, facing Melvin across a basket of Bermuda onions. When Richard got too warm, as he did every few minutes, he pulled open the stained neck of his long johns to let the heat out and take an appreciative sniff. Richard’s face had healed completely since Cecil saw him last. His
mother, who mistrusted doctors as much as her son, had snipped the stitches with nail clippers and pulled them out. But his hand had gotten infected from the little bits of buried lobster shell, and he had been forced to go to a doctor after all to have the sores opened and sprinkled with sulfa. The hand lay curled in his lap, opening and closing slowly as he talked and scratched the little cuts.

  In the center aisle, Olive Gross stood staring at the boxes of laundry soap on the top shelf, trying to remember what it was she was forgetting. Standing in profile, true to her name’s shape, she filled the aisle.

  When Cecil had finished unpacking the chicken and arranging it on ice under his new glass counter, he stretched, and smoothed his hair with the back of his hand. He watched Leah cutting and weighing cheese at the far end. She still kept her back to him, showing him that the argument they had had last night was not over. He had told her that she was acting like a spoiled little girl, a selfish only child, and it had hurt her into silence. That morning her hands had fumbled among the breakfast dishes as if she were still too angry to control them; now she lowered the meat cleaver onto the wheel of cheddar, placed the heel of her left palm on the end of it, and slowly cut a perfect one-pound wedge.

  Gus was among the shelves by the windows, listening intently to his brother and Richard. Melvin seemed so knowledgeable about what was going on in the world. Gus thought that Richard, who never listened to anyone, respected Melvin, though he would never let on that he did.

  “Gus?” It was the voice his father used to awaken him in the morning, and it sent him back to his shelving.

  “I don’t care how many shifts you work,” Richard said. “You can’t build ships as fast as they sink them. You won’t out-invent them, and you won’t out-produce them; they’ve got theirs already made, and they’re using them to sink ours as soon as they come out of the harbor. No matter what you say, we’re pooched unless there’s a miracle.”

  Richard crossed his arms on his chest and leaned back to draw a Lucky Strike from the pack in his shirt pocket and tap it on his thumbnail.

  “The hell we can’t.” Melvin moved the ashtray to the lip of the stove for both of them to use. “The unions will take over the yards completely—and the factories too, if they have to. It’s the unions that will get the job done on the Fascists, not savings bond stamps. The working man will win this war, and after it’s over you won’t see another depression ever again.”

  Melvin was wearing baggy trousers and a floppy gangster hat that Gus thought was the stupidest thing he’d ever seen. Fresh from the shipyard, he sported a “Victory Union” button on which a man in overalls stood between two flags with his fist raised. This was Melvin’s fourth visit home since he started working in Bath, and he was still preaching unions to the fishermen. Behind his back they called him Melvin the Red.

  “The working man? For Christ’s sake, what are we then?” Richard wanted to know.

  “I mean organized labor, as if you didn’t know. If you fishermen got organized, you’d be a hell of a lot better off, and so would the entire fishing industry.”

  Leah covered the wheel of cheese, took off her hair net, and shook her hair loose. Without a word, she went to the storeroom to get away from the smoke, the talk, Richard’s body odor, and her husband’s eyes.

  “You could put your lobsters in pounds and hold them off the market until the price was right. You could get your own refrigerator trucks and sell directly to the restaurants in Boston. You could rebuild and modernize the old canning factory. You could—”

  “You could go over to the east side and convince Amos Coombs of what you preach. The day that he comes over here to town and says: ‘Hey, fellas, let’s all pitch in together and mix up our lobsters and take equal shares,’ that’s when I’ll join. When Jesus returns for his flock.”

  “Amos is irrelevant. He’s lost in a skeleton world. He never trusted anybody he wasn’t related to. Now they’re gone, and he’s gone with them. He says he’s never heard of the labor movement and doesn’t want to. He says it sounds like something dirty.”

  Richard released a bitter laugh, and Cecil smiled. His arms filled with cans of cleanser, Gus shot his father a hurtful look and glared at the back of his brother’s head. He made a noise as if to say something, but his mother called him from the storeroom. Cecil watched him leave, wishing that he had not smiled.

  Olive moved cautiously to the other aisle, closer to the conversation, and locked her listless stare on the prunes and raisins.

  “Now we’ve made him mad,” said Cecil.

  “I was only teasing, and he knows it,” Melvin said. “He’ll be okay. He takes everything grandfather says so seriously, as if he was ... I don’t know.”

  “Like Amos was his own father,” said Richard. He lowered his eyes to the hand in his lap and picked absently at a tiny wound, as if he were sorry he had said what he had, as if he were embarrassed to have let slip what everyone else was saying.

  Cecil tore a sheet of waxed paper from the roll, a slow controlled tear. One day soon, he thought, he would ask the boy point-blank what kind of man would walk away from his ten-year-old daughter—a girl who had just lost her mother—leaving her to be raised by someone else. He’d ask Gus why he thought Amos left Leah with Maggie in Head Harbor and moved back to the cove, and why nobody ever mentioned it.

  “Trouble is,” Melvin offered, “that people down here in these little towns, on these islands, don’t realize how fast things are happening everywhere else. If they did, they wouldn’t be so nervous.”

  “Oh, like what?”

  “Like last month the little old Bath shipyards put two new Corvettes and three eighty-three-foot subchasers down the ways—and that with half our workforce busy on the expansion. Those ships and the ones like them that we have in the works are fitted with the new high-frequency direction finder, not to mention the new catapults for depth charges. You can’t tell people things like that because they’re classified; I shouldn’t even be telling you.”

  “It’s safe with us,” said Richard. “But that’s not what the islanders are worried about. They think the Nazis are going to come ashore here, invade them. It’s comical.”

  Melvin, the worldlier of the two men, laughed. “Yes, I can see the headlines now.” He pointed to an imaginary newspaper in the air, tracing the headline with his finger. “Island Fortress Invaded,” he read.

  Olive thought he was pointing at the clock, which reminded her that it was getting late; she had to bake those pies so they could cool, but couldn’t make the recipe without her Karo syrup.

  “Karo!” she said aloud.

  “Crucial Rock Captured by German Navy; Boston Threatened,” said Richard, laughing.

  Olive had not heard enough to get the joke, but she laughed with them anyway as she approached the counter bearing her syrup.

  A muffled bang! stopped their laughter cold. Gus stood over the box of canned peaches he had just dropped flat on the floor from waist height. He had been stewing in the storeroom about how chummy his father was with Richard Snell, whom he hated, and then had heard the mocking laughter.

  “What about those four spies that came ashore on Long Island?” asked Gus. His voice was shaking. “Not spies—saboteurs. What about that kid in Machias last week? If somebody told you he saw two guys in city clothes walking up from the shore, you’d probably laugh at him. I’ll bet you laugh at the people who are getting organized to patrol the shore out here. Those Germans that came ashore at Amagansett had money and detonators and timing devices and stuff like that. In crates. Enough to blow up shipyards and factories. You think that’s a joke, don’t you?”

  “I laugh at what I want to, boy,” said Richard. He liked Gus all right, but he would not be talked down to. “You’re right, I would laugh at someone who said the Germans would be dumb enough to put somebody ashore here on an island where they couldn’t get to the mainland except on the mailboat. I haven’t laughed at that yet, but I will, by Jesus, if I want to.”
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  “That’s enough, you two,” said Cecil. He slammed the register drawer shut, making Olive jump again as she opened the door.

  “Gus is right,” said the storekeeper. “Out here we have to do everything we can until they can build a navy to protect us. If half the rumors about the number of ships being sunk by U-boats are true, the Germans will soon cut off England’s oil supply—everything—and they’ll have England. Then they’ll come for us.”

  “‘The English will fight to the last drop of American blood,’ ” quoted Richard. “Wasn’t it you, Cecil, who said that in your speech to America First? I think it was.”

  “That was six months ago. I wanted to stay out of the war because it was a war for Europe. But now it’s for us too, and we’re losing. Since we’re in it, we’re going to fight and win. That’s why we dissolved America First this winter—a meeting I noticed you missed.”

  Melvin tried to join the conversation by saying that he had not seen Amos yet on this visit.

  “What’s he up to these days?” he asked Gus.

  “Right now?” The boy looked at his watch. “Right now he’s buying Stevie Eaton’s big Novi boat.” There, damn them. He had said it. He had promised he would not tell anybody, but they’d find out soon enough anyway.

  “What’d you say?” asked Cecil.

  “You heard me.” Gus pushed back a row of cans to make room for the peaches.

  “Don’t use that tone of voice with me, young man.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Gus. “It’s true.”

  “The hell you say,” said Richard. “What boat? The Quahog? Amos bought it?”

  “I only live on an island, but as far as I know the Quahog’s the only boat that Stevie Eaton owns.” Gus took in their amazement as if it was three fingers of rum, a victory toast for Amos.

  “How’d he ever manage that?” Cecil wondered.

  “He sold the Tuna and paid the difference.”

  “What’s Amos want with a big offshore boat like that?” Richard asked.