Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

“No, I’m not. You don’t understand. I’m not going right away. I just said that about her. I’m going to wait until this winter, when she’s better, when father is over this ulcer that’s been making him so sick. I’ll tell her I’m going to the shipyards like Melvin so she won’t worry.”

  “Why do you tell me, and why now?” she asked. “You knew I wouldn’t approve. What about this boat and the gear?”

  “I’m going to sell it all.”

  “What? What about your future? What would Amos say?”

  “What future? How can you talk about the future when there’s a war like this? You sound like my father. They’re sinking ships right here in our dooryard, and you talk about the future. He talks about how good the war is for the fishing industry. Some guy said it’s not a bad war if you aren’t being shot at, and my father thinks that’s right. Remember how he used to be against me going fishing with Amos? Now, after the will, he’s all hopped up about how we can make good money fishing, with them rationing beef and the English dying for canned fish.”

  “It’s all true, of course,” she said.

  “I have to go, Aunt Maggie; don’t you see? I have to. If I had a family of my own or something, I might stay and go lobster-ing, even with Amos’s gear. But I have to go. I can get in the navy or army, and get a chance to fight back at them. I’m ashamed to stay home.”

  Maggie stuffed her hands inside her flannel jacket and closed her eyes. She imagined him and another boy sitting alongside a dusty road, exhausted, thirsty, defeated, drinking from a canteen. Would one canteen be enough for him in the heat, she wondered? He wasn’t used to hot weather.

  “You can sell these traps, of course,” she said finally. “I can’t say anything about that. I can understand why you want to go, believe me, but I don’t agree with you. You can do your part here. They also serve who only stand and wait.”

  Gus rolled his eyes. He hated when she quoted something. He thought it made her sound stuck up. Maggie knew and did not care; she looked at him carefully.

  “But you can’t sell the boat,” she said. “Put that out of your mind. It’s half mine, you know; it might be all mine for that matter. The boat he meant to leave to you when he made up his will was the Tuna, and it’s gone. We bought this one since. That makes you and me co-owners—the way Amos and I were—and I won’t sell. I could buy your half from you, but I haven’t the money. No, don’t sell the gear. Don’t sell anything. You’re making a mistake.” She understood his need to do something but not the pride. And there was something else in his tone of voice, something unfamiliar and unfriendly lurking behind his words.

  “Anyway ...” Gus stood up, as if facing an accuser. “Anyway, I want to get out of here. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere, living twenty years behind the times. I want to go where I can take part, instead of listening to it on the radio, reading newspapers five days old by a kerosene lamp. Look at this gear. Here. Old, worn out rope, tarred by hand, with empty rum bottles for toggle buoys.”

  He stepped into a tangle of lines and buoys and cork floats and began to kick at it, again and again.

  “Stop it!” she cried. “You’ll cut your foot.” Now she saw. “You’re ashamed of him, aren’t you?”

  “No I’m not,” he said. “I just don’t want to be reminded of him. I don’t know what it is that I feel except that it’s bad. I don’t want to live in the past like he did. I want him to leave me alone.”

  Maggie sat down on a trap. “Going away isn’t going to do that.”

  “It might. If I stay here there won’t be any escaping. The world’s changing faster than we can tell, and the old ways don’t fit in anymore. I’m almost glad for his sake that he’s gone, in a way. I’m sorry, but I am.”

  “You’re angry at him for the accident, the way he died.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Aren’t you? And I miss him. And I hate him. God, Aunt Maggie, I don’t know.”

  “I know how you feel,” she said. “It’s hard for your mother and me, too, don’t forget. We have the same feelings.”

  “But you stick by him, even now. If anybody even hints around mother that he was drunk, she acts like he’s being accused of murder.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Maggie said.

  “I can talk to you about it, even though I suppose it’s the worst for you, of all of us.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “Not the worst. It’s not something—”

  “Melvin says Grammy Clytie committed suicide on account of you and Amos,” he said. “Father didn’t deny it when I asked him.”

  Maggie should have been surprised to hear it come out now, but she was not. “What else did Melvin say?” Her voice was low, icy. “I’m sorry you had to hear it from him first.”

  “It wasn’t just Melvin. I’ve heard things before.” He was defiant, justified in his right to know. “They say that you and Amos were in love—after him and Grammy were married. They say she wasted away, died on purpose, because you took him away from her. You moved in with them in Head Harbor when Amos was living there with her, in your grandfather’s house. When mother was little.”

  “I’d been away at school in Bangor,” she said. “I came back to help care for my father, who was dying, and I stayed in the house because there was nowhere else for me. Your grandmother was very ill, too, obese and depressed. That is when we fell in love. I resent the implication, which is idiotic and sickening, that I moved in with them to catch Amos.”

  Maggie explained that Amos and her sister Clytie had married young, at just seventeen; it had been a shotgun marriage and one that had quickly failed. She did not tell Gus—and never would, even lying to deny it—that Clytie had let herself go to hell after Leah was born. She had an affair with Lester Hamilton, and it was so public on the island that even she, Maggie, had heard about it while she was in school in Bangor. Clytie went to fat and ignored everything: the baby, the house, Amos, her ailing father. She was a bitter bitch by the time she was nineteen. Nothing was good enough for her. She sat at the kitchen table day and night, and gossiped with visitors or ate cookies and stirred tea and complained. To avoid squalor, Amos did the housework and changed Leah’s and the old man’s diapers. As a child, Leah was sickly and unruly.

  “Yes, we were in love,” Maggie admitted. “He said we taught each other to laugh. And I think that Clytie knew, though I denied it then. But there’s no way of knowing whether she willed herself to die, as they say. After father’s funeral, she took to her bed, bloated and miserable. For months. All that laudanum. No one can claim to know whether she wanted to die, any more than they can claim to know it was drink that made Amos fall. Do you see?”

  “He was drunk.”

  “He may have been, but—”

  “Do you think Grammy wanted to die because of you and Amos? That she killed herself?” he asked.

  “If she did, it was not grief at the loss of Amos as they claim,” said Maggie. “She never loved him; she never even liked him. She was jealous of us, of me; she made herself sick—and maybe even die—to hurt us, make us guilty, and to make it impossible for us to ever love one another openly on this island.”

  “Is that what Amos thought?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he moved back here to the cove with his family and left you and mother alone in the house when she was—how old— six or seven? Why didn’t you get married and live together?” asked Gus. “You must have wanted to. Maybe not in that house—I can see that, I guess—but you could have left this damn island and taken mother with you and raised her like she was yours, which you did anyway alone.”

  “I don’t know why we didn’t leave. We were young, and we believed we were guilty. Amos could never have abandoned this place; you know that. I thought of leaving with your mother, but I couldn’t. At first I cared for Leah out of duty—even guilt—but over the years I came to love her as my own daughter. Amos came to dinner on Sundays, every Sunday until your mother went off
to high school; then his uncle Lew died, then Ava, then Walter, and he just, well, he just stayed with them.”

  Gus started to say something more, and she waited, but he only shook his head and looked out into the breeze, squinting at something unseen in the southwest.

  “Now perhaps you can do me that favor I asked you to come down here for,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Come with me in the boat. I want to take it out for a run, for some distance,” she said. “You just come along and watch me, and tell me if I do anything wrong. Can you work the radio? I’m afraid of it.”

  “Why do you want to do this?” he asked.

  “Can’t you imagine?” She untied the outhaul line and pulled the skiff in to the wharf. “I’m going to continue patrolling,” she said. “He took me with him several times. I’m confident that I can handle this boat. We bought her to patrol for submarines, and patrolling she will go.”

  Gus went ahead of her down the ladder to take the oars, muttering his disapproval as Amos would have done, but going along anyway.

  She had rehearsed this, of course. She had run through it step by step in her mind a thousand times. He was humoring her, she thought, and that was fine.

  He noticed immediately upon coming aboard, as she knew he would, that she had cleaned up the boat but had left Amos’s things as they had been: his slicker on the bulkhead door, his cup and new sunglasses in their places on the bulkhead, even his wool mittens, dry and folded down below.

  She started the engine, revved it, then let it idle, listening. The wind was light, the tide full. She knew that the mooring chain would be heavy, but when she went forward to lift it off the bitt, she found that she had underestimated its weight and almost went overboard with it. Gus moved to help her, but she waved him away, reminding him that he had come along to watch, to see that she could do it alone. Back at the wheel, she turned the high bow slowly in the cove, and took the big Novi boat out into the York Narrows, steering with the two spokes that she had extended for better leverage.

  “There are ledges over there.” He pointed off the port bow.

  Maggie took the Quahog down the east side of the island, along the lonely side toward Head Harbor, out in the cold mist. She had been this way many times—first with her father, then with Amos—so she knew when to cut back her speed when they came into heavier seas outside the ledges. She knew, too, when to swing out and around Thunder Gulch and knew to keep the Cape Ann buoy at 180 degrees. She had meant to take Gus around the southern head and into Head Harbor, but she decided that she did not need to go any farther than she had. Two hundred yards from shore, she turned into the wind and cut the engine.

  Most of the flotsam near the boat was shapeless, merely broken pieces of planking, clumps of lifejacket stuffing, some garbage. But fifty feet off the stern, in a tight flock like a family of bobbing sea ducks, he saw some of the canteens and heard them clinking and tinkling against one another as they huddled together fearfully. Farther out, in a long ribbon, was another scar of debris, this one oil soaked and followed by thousands of canteens floating in dreary escort.

  Off on its own, apart from the larger gathering, floated a charred life raft, and around it, victims of the same fiery end, were a gangplank, blackened raft pontoons, cans of emergency rations, and a burned lifejacket.

  Gus leaned over the washboard and picked a small tin out of the water. Malted milk tablets. He threw it back in.

  “What about the boys who were supposed to use those canteens?” she asked. “How will they get a drink of water? What about the men who were aboard this ship? Where are they? They’re dead. Where are the men who were in that raft? They drowned, and they burned first, like human candles, just as Amos said. You don’t have to go away to find the war, Gus Barter.”

  “God damn them,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  August 11, 1942

  Dear Ruth,

  Please, please don’t feel badly for not coming to the funeral. That you might be torturing yourself over this only makes it harder for me. The lovely flowers you sent me and the contribution you made to the church in Amos’s name were more than enough.

  As I said, and you must believe me, I would have sent word to you and asked you to come had I thought I needed you. I was too busy with the funeral, and trying, fruitlessly, to console poor Leah.

  You’re right to worry about her (though I think she brightens just a little each day) but not right to worry about me. I am fine. I’m as tough (though not yet quite so wrinkly) as an old walnut.

  For me the pain, as Leah said, has an “element of blank” that I am able to ignore as long as I stay busy, which we all do down here. We will not be defeated.

  You asked what it’s like being out at sea with the war raging on and under the water all around us. You saw the July 27th issue of Life, I’m sure, the one with the Atlantic Convoy on the cover. Look at the photos of the jetsam that has come ashore down south—the stove-in lifeboat, the blistered life rafts, the cargo of walnuts (for pity sake!)—and you’ll have an idea of what we see here. It appalls and frightens me. It also makes me more fearful for Gus when he goes to haul each day, but ironically, it makes me less fearful and more determined when he and I go a-patrolling, or when I am walking the cliffs at night.

  I don’t know yet what to do about Amos’s legacy to me—all that Coombs property. I felt badly for Leah when we were all surprised by the bequest, but I believe her when she insists that it’s better that he gave it to me, and she believes me when I insist that it is hers for the asking.

  You can imagine what Iris and the others think and say: “And just what was it she did to earn that inheritance, anyway?” To hell with the biddies, I say. And to hell with Cecil, too, for that matter. I relish the role of Robin Hood, protecting Leah’s shire from the wicked Prince John while the rightful king is away. Though I don’t watch for his return. You smile at my romantic allusion and think me a silly old girl, and you are right, as always.

  I must quit. I’m glad that Jack didn’t get sent to Augusta after all; I know how happy you all are in Bangor. Perhaps I’ll be able to come for a visit around Xmas time and go sledding again on the hill behind Sherman Street. Give the kids a hug for me, for “of such is the kingdom.” (Imagine me quoting the Book of Luke!)

  Love,

  Maggie

  “I call this hot.” Sitting on the merry-go-round in the schoolyard shade, his weight tilting the round wooden platform toward the men on the swings, Richard rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and pushed the gurried cuffs of his long johns up to his elbows.

  “It’s nearly eighty by the school thermometer,” said Dickie, scouring his inky fingertips with a mixture of spit and sand, and wiping them clean in the grass.

  Fuddy, holding the chains of his favorite swing with fists at chest level, pushed off gently with his feet, swung, and stopped himself by dragging his contemplative soles in the furrows beneath him. Taller now and gaunt, with thriving colonies of blackheads on either side of his nose, he did not look like the same schoolboy who sat in that swing twenty years ago. But Fuddy felt no different and was no more interested in the talk around him than he had been in the fourth grade.

  “You wouldn’t be so hot if you weren’t wearing a winter undershirt,” said Dickie.

  “It isn’t a undershirt,” said Richard. “It’s long johns, and I was damn glad to have them out on the water this morning. What do you expect me to do, stand up here in front of half the town and peel them off? Show my hairy bum to the summer people and the Coast Guard?”

  Dickie did not reply. He knew that Richard, who loved a gathering of any kind, had hauled his traps early and hurried up from his mooring to be at the schoolhouse when the registration began at noon. He had been the first to come and would be the last to go, established on the merry-go-round to watch and listen, or—when he had an audience—to expound upon the fools who were running the war.

  The Mattingly boys, armed with cap pis
tols and driftwood submachine guns, broke from behind the schoolhouse and ran, bent over, to take cover behind a green Pontiac. Ernest, his left arm in a sling bloodied by iodine, waited until Dwight and Doris Chafin were out of his line of fire, then opened up on the three boys holding the stone wall beyond the swings. What Ernest knew—and only Fuddy noticed—was that the Crowell brothers, led by Vince, were crawling through the bayberry and would soon flank the boys behind the wall.

  Chief Petty Officer Irville Rich stepped out of the schoolhouse door, blinked in the sudden light, and sneezed. He held the screen door open for Gus, who blessed him and skipped aside as the door slammed shut. A squat, fidgety man, Chief Rich barely came up to Gus’s shoulder; he wiped his brow with his handkerchief, buffed his glasses, and blew his nose. Next to Gus’s T-shirt, which was bleached weekly by Leah, Chief Rich’s whites looked as if they had been rinsed in old dishwater. He offered a cigarette to Gus, who declined it with a comment that made the Coast Guardsman laugh.

  “Here’s the man himself,” Richard said to the group in the swings.

  “He’s not so bad that you should sniff at him,” Dickie said. “He’s from Jonesport.”

  “Which means he’s related somehow to half the people on this island,” said Richard.

  “A third at least,” Dickie said. “Perhaps even to you, Richard, but no, I guess not. I wonder if he knows anything about the Ebb; wasn’t she out of Jonesport?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  When Chief Rich moved into the shade, Dickie stood up to shake his hand and say “Hey” to Gus. Chief Rich nodded to Richard and Fuddy, who returned the gesture and grunted a welcome from their seats.

  “I hear you’re from Jonesport,” Richard said. “What can you tell us about the Ebb? She was out of there, wasn’t she?”

  “The trawler that got sunk? No. She was out of Winter Harbor, I believe. All I know is what I read in the Ellsworth paper: that she was sunk by surface gunfire from a U-boat out past the bay, and seventeen of the crew were lost. Out of twenty, I think. They brought them in at Southwest Harbor, the survivors. The Ebb was a seventy footer. They’re sinking smaller and smaller boats every day now.”