Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  On the boulder where Gus had found the flashlight, there was a flat spot where the spruce needles had been ground to dust by someone’s sitting on them—more than once. To the side of the boulder, within reach of the seat, she saw an irregular bump in a large green cushion moss. She lifted the moss to find a rum bottle and a white porcelain teacup. Maggie threw the bottle over the cliff, listened to it smash among the rocks, and put the cup in her dress pocket.

  She wondered why he would sit on the boulder and not in the cabin, only a hundred feet away. He used to go inside often before he began patrolling the shore, she knew he did. He walked the cliffs in all weather, in the rain and cold, but why would he sit outdoors wet and covered with mosquitoes when he could stay dry on the porch or at the cabin window and have the same view of the sea? Perhaps he stayed outside in warm weather, inside when it was rainy.

  The cabin was unlocked and unused. There were no signs of anyone’s having been in it, at least not recently. In the kitchen, mice had chewed to shreds a box of baking soda and had gnawed on the bar of soap in the sink. On the bureau were scatterings of acorn shells left by the squirrels. A kerosene lamp sat on the little red table by the front window, a scallop shell full of burned kitchen matches next to it. The lamp’s chimney was charred black. She trailed her finger through the thin layer of dust on the sill. From the front window she could not see the boulder seat where she had found the rum, but she could look out past the York Ledges and beyond to the far horizon. There was no rum anywhere in the cabin.

  She felt herself grow warm with anger and frustration as she remembered how they had treated Walter’s drowning—as simply a consequence of drink, richly deserved. The coroner had said that the cause of death was a heart attack, but that had not hindered them in the least. Even she had believed that he had been drunk when he fell overboard. Now there was Amos, too. Maggie was embarrassed for him, for Leah and Gus, and for herself. She was angry at herself for feeling that way, angrier at him for proving right the snide ones who had said that it had been his imagination that had provided the sight of bobbing human candles.

  As she stepped out to shut the door behind her, she noticed muddy prints on the floor by the sill. They were not clear footprints, and when she looked more closely she found that they had a layer of dust over them. But some of the prints were different: they appeared to be made by a smaller shoe or boot, and the outlines were white, spread out like a fungus and dried. These looked like salt stains. Maggie had seen enough of them to know, but it did not seem possible that anyone could walk all the way up from the cove, through the grass and woods, and still have salt on his shoes.

  She shut the door and stood looking in through the window. Now the cabin, like all the cove, would be empty for good. Now they were all gone, the old ones erased forever by Amos’s death. Maybe it was better that he had not lingered but had left in a hurry, unconvinced—in spite of what he said—that the old ones would go with him, leaving only the houses themselves to crumble or, worse, be bought by summer people. On the path under Ava’s apple trees, she surprised a feeding doe that raised its white tail, snorted, and bounded into the woods with a fawn following. Maggie squeezed the lifeless teacup in her pocket and felt her heart turn as cold as clay.

  They had laid Amos out in Cecil’s parlor for the customary sitting up with the open coffin the night before the burial. His head was bound with a black cloth, his red hair oiled dark and combed back as he never wore it. A bouquet of daisies and Indian paintbrush lay over his folded hands. Leah sat all night in her rocker by the window, receiving mumbled condolences from the mourners with a wordless nod. Dickie Hanson, the only male who stayed all night, sat by Amos’s head, his legs crossed, his face locked in cold anger. The older fishermen came with their wives; those who had been Amos’s friends, as well as Walter’s and Lew’s, lingered even after their wives left. They smoked and drank coffee, their cups and saucers balanced on their knees. In the kitchen, Maggie received the food the women brought and served those who would eat. In the hour before dawn, when the house was still and those sitting up were asleep in their chairs, she hung up her apron and tiptoed up to Gus’s room. He was asleep on his back, fully dressed in his church clothes—laid out, she thought, like his grandfather. She kissed him on the forehead and spread a blanket over him.

  The sun was peeking over the edge of the sea when Maggie parked next to Amos’s truck in the cove. She seemed to be watching herself from a slight distance as she gathered up the skirts of her mourning dress to feed Ava’s chickens. She saw herself standing in the road between the empty houses, her eyes shut, unmindful of her hair as it lifted in the morning breeze, her back warm from the first rays of sun. She thought that the woman she saw was waiting for something, though she did not know what. The sound of a boat slowing down to enter the cove turned her around. With her palm she shielded her eyes from the sun; seeing that it was the lighthouse launch, she walked down to the wharf to meet the boat.

  “We only heard last night,” said Jake. “I’m so sorry Maggie.” Behind him, Morales—soaked to the waist with salt spray— muttered something and dropped his eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Morales, look at you. You’re drenched. You’re all goosebumps. Why didn’t you wear a slicker?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, handing Jake an American flag folded in a triangle.

  “For his coffin.” Jake tucked in a loose fold.

  “He died in the line of duty,” Morales said.

  “Yes, I suppose he did,” she said. “Let’s get you dried off.” “I don’t need—”

  “Come along,” she said.

  More than forty people came to the burial. Leah had decided against a funeral service at the church, and she was surprised by how many were there. The graveyard lay in a boggy cleft of ground between two high smooth granite ledges, shaded by a lonely forest of red oaks. The pallbearers carried the coffin in from the cove road, parting the crowd and the high grass as they approached the Reverend Hotchkiss, standing by the white obelisk and the open grave. During the service Cecil and Gus remained by the reverend’s side, both upright and dry eyed, their hands clasped before them. Leah and Maggie stood together by the coffin while Jake and Morales spread the flag over it. Leah had asked the reverend to stick to the Book of Common Prayer, to make it short, and to substitute Psalm 121 for the Sailor’s Hymn

  Afterward Jake waited for Maggie in the vague sunlight on the road. He said he felt partly responsible for what had happened, and he hoped that she would forgive him.

  “I knew how much he’d had to drink, and I should have known he was going to head back and walk the shore,” he said. “I should have—”

  “What could you have done?” she asked. “If that makes you responsible, then we all are. You can’t let yourself think like that. You were good to come, Jake.”

  “If I can do anything for you,” he began.

  “You can.” She stepped out of the road to let a car full of mourners creep past, pulling him with her by the sleeve. “I went up to the cliff alone yesterday afternoon. I was hoping to find his binoculars, but instead found a cup and a bottle of rum hidden under a clump of moss beside a boulder he’d used for a seat. In the woods.”

  Jake nodded.

  “Don’t you see?” she asked. “He wasn’t watching from the cabin. Why would he sit out in the wet and cold, a hundred feet away, when he could see just as well or better from inside? He hated to be cold.

  “I looked in the cabin, which was open. Nobody’s been in there for a long time—for months, by the looks of the dust. But whoever was there last, or at one time, left water stains on the floor, from wet boots or shoes. Saltwater stains. I tasted them. How could that be? The cabin is a quarter of a mile from the cove wharf, through tall grass and bay bushes that would take off salt. Those prints were left by someone who climbed the cliff to the cabin.”

  Jake nodded to Iris Weed and her parents as they passed. “I see what you’re suggesting,” he said. “Bu
t it’s not likely, Maggie. Why would they risk putting people ashore here? They wouldn’t land someone on this island any more than they would at the lighthouse. What could they do here? You’re thinking of the saboteurs they put ashore at Machias. There they could walk to the city or take a bus. But not here, no.”

  “Couldn’t they have landed just to snoop around? He must have seen them—or he saw the salt stains—and was waiting in the woods lest they return.”

  “But why?” Jake asked, then paused. “Unless they wanted to try that high ground for a radio relay of some kind.”

  “God.”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “I guess it is. Let me look into it. Have you told anyone else?”

  “No. We feel vulnerable enough out here as it is. Here comes Leah. Will you at least report it?”

  Jake said that he would, but as he watched them walk away arm in arm, led gently by islanders to Maggie’s car, he knew he would not report anything. They would not give it any attention in Rockland. They were already swamped with reported sightings of Germans ashore along the coast, and they were not equipped to do anything about it. A salty footprint seen by a bereaved woman would not even get logged. She was eager to rinse the stain of drunkenness from Amos’s death, and he admired her for that, among other things.

  On the way back to the car with Leah, nodding still at other mourners, Maggie remembered something and turned to go back to tell Jake, but Leah tugged her along. There was not a soul on Barters Island, she thought, who did not know how to keep a lamp wick trimmed so as not to blacken the chimney.

  Early fall is the finest time of the year on the island. The mosquitoes, summer people, and horse flies are gone. The lobsters have grown into their new shells and are plentiful. The trees have begun to change color—the red maples on the fringes of the spruce bogs first—and there is a smell of wood smoke in the air, sweet-burning birch from kitchen stoves. Most of the men go up onto the mountain to shoot a deer that they would put in the cold cellar to cure among the growing ranks of mason jars on the shelves. The kids are in school, and the nights of sleep grow longer. In the old days the only thing to fear in the fall was the hurricanes that would come up the coast and clean out a man’s traps—and perhaps his boat, too—smashing them to bits in the rocks. That fall, the sea surrounding the island swam with Nazi submarines, and darkening to winter, it was more and more often discolored by ribbons of oil that spread like bloodstains on the water.

  For weeks after Amos’s death, Leah kept to her house. Not her husband, nor Maggie, nor any of her friends could get her to go out, even to the store or post office. She stayed home from auxiliary meetings and church functions, and failed to show up the first time the women gathered to fold bandages, an event she had organized herself. She cooked, kept the house, and did some canning, but mostly she sat in the big cushioned kitchen rocker, her knitting still in her lap, staring out the window across the garden into the copse of maples. She had been too young to grieve for her mother; now with Amos gone she mourned like a girl who had just lost both her parents in one horrible, inexcusable accident.

  In almost any weather, Leah could tell the conditions on the water by watching the way the wind worried the maples. When the tide was going and the wind from the southwest bent the trees toward the mountain, she knew to worry about Cecil, on his way home with freight. Other than that, she did not care.

  Maggie, too, withdrew with her grief. She felt the loss of her sister anew and struggled with the anger that came from having had her hopes for a relationship with Amos rekindled, then snuffed out suddenly. She taught school and kept busy with her chores, but on weeknights and weekends she stayed by herself in her house in Head Harbor. There were two other houses in the little harbor where her grandfather had settled and three generations of Bowenses had fished. Theirs—now hers—was a high white house with a cupola, set closest to the water on the rocky western edge. In the evenings she sat in the front window, where she could look across the harbor and see the lamplights at the Sweeneys’. At seven-thirty a lamp moved up to the children’s room on the dark north side, and by eight the whole house was dark except the parlor where Seth and Louise had settled and could, she knew, see her light. In a thick of fog, she was alone, the old house all her world.

  Early one Sunday morning, before dawn and in just such a fog, Maggie awoke to a sound she did not understand. The wind had shifted to the southeast and came in slow and steady and soggy off the open sea. She thought the noise might be a flock of alien birds, but it was metallic, a clinking and tinkling and tonking, like the baby xylophone at school when the little ones played on it. She lay on her back under the blankets, imagining some beastly mechanical thing with treads creeping slowly out of the sea on the sandy harbor bottom, dripping black slime, heading for the road—some diabolical Nazi invention unleashed on the shore below her house.

  She sat up. The sound was not in the house or on the shore out front or even, she realized suddenly, in the harbor itself. It was out along the rocks washed by the high tide.

  She dressed and went out the back door cautiously, flashlight at the ready. She thought of the Eveready advertisement in Life magazine, where a man scared a grizzly bear out of his cabin with his light. Outside the sound was louder, distinct in the dark fog; it was a tinkling of thousands of various bells, and Maggie knew she was not dreaming. She went slowly down her father’s path, feeling her way on the familiar ground. She kept the light turned off until she got down to the rocks at the water’s edge, then knelt toward the noise and shined the light into the water.

  They were metal canteens—thousands of them—chirping pathetically in the tide, trying to come ashore. She shined the light out into the harbor, and as far as the fog would let it, the beam showed bobbing canteens—some in clusters, others floating alone. She went back up to her father’s shed, stopping once to listen long out to sea, and returned with a gaff. She used it to retrieve one of the canteens, hooking onto its cap chain. It was ice cold.

  Maggie did not go to church that morning but sat with her tea in the front window, the canteen on the table beside her. After dinnertime, she drove into town to report what she had found and to visit with Leah. She asked Gus if he would go to the cove with her and help her move some lumber. On the way, he was silent and seemed anxious about something. She offered to let him drive, but he declined, choosing rather to roll the window up and down, up and down.

  They had not talked since Amos’s will had been read the week before. He had left the houses and property in the cove to her, and his boat and lobster traps and gear to Gus. After the accident, the boy had turned to his father for comfort or for help in understanding. Maggie thought that Cecil—and Melvin, who had gone back to the shipyards—had together worked some kind of change in Gus. It seemed as though he had softened after the accident and as if they had remolded him in a different form. He seemed more guarded now, defensive and cynical. He avoided the cove, never said a word about Amos or lobster fishing, never made any reference to the hundreds of their traps the other men had taken up and piled on the wharf. He didn’t even talk about the boat on the mooring. Today he did not look her in the eye or ask what lumber she needed help with.

  On the wharf Maggie told him that there was no lumber. “And it just occurs to me now that you’ve guessed that. I want to ask you to do something for me.”

  Gus was losing weight; his muscles were gaining definition. He wore his sleeves rolled up to show his biceps like the determined farm boys in the war posters. Today he was tense and serious, arms straight down at his sides, fists balled up. Like his father, he avoided her eyes as he talked.

  “I don’t know what I guessed,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think about it.” He kept his back to the sea and the big Novi boat that rocked on the mooring. “Yesterday I was going to come down to see you, but I couldn’t. I was getting ready to visit today when you came to father’s just now. I want to tell you something. I guess this is as good a place as any. I g
uess this is a good time.”

  She waited, watching him. She did not like the tint of piety she saw in his demeanor. He fidgeted and gestured toward the wharf around them.

  “But first what is it you wanted help with, if it wasn’t lumber?”

  “No,” she said. “You tell me what it is that’s on your mind first. You’ve been waiting longer. You look like you’re about to burst.”

  “No I’m not,” he snapped. “What makes you say that?”

  “Never mind. Nothing,” Maggie said. “You tell me what you have to say, then we can get to what I need.”

  He drew himself up, then relaxed as he spoke, as though the last word out pulled all his anxiety with it: “I’m going to enlist.”

  She was not surprised. She turned to look at the Quahog riding on its mooring, then back at him. “You’re going off to Boston or New York or someplace to lie about your age and sign up.”

  “First I need to change my name. That’s what people do.”

  “God. Is that necessary?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I can say I lost my birth certificate. If I ever had one. I don’t even know that. But they don’t give you much trouble if you look old enough; they need men too bad.”

  Relaxed now, larger in his new role, Gus walked to an upturned trap and sat on it, as Amos used to do.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She won’t even know I’m gone,” he said. “It won’t matter to her. She’s lost in her grieving. It’s unnatural, but there isn’t anything to be done about it.”

  And where had he gotten the word “unnatural” Maggie wondered. Now she was mad. “That’s ridiculous, and you know it. Oh, I hate to hear you talk like that. You could destroy her now, you know. Are you ready to do that? Break her heart completely to satisfy your need to get into this war and away from something you don’t understand?”