Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  Settled in her chair, she sat with a book open in her lap. The kitchen stove needed stoking, she knew, but right now, in the storm and dark, she felt a foreboding about the kitchen, one connected with Clytie sitting at the table, disheveled, staring into her cup. She closed her eyes to see herself and Amos sitting across the same table from one another during a storm, not long after she had come back from Bangor, before they had a radio. Her father was asleep under a quilt in the chair she now occupied; Clytie and Leah were upstairs. Between deep groans of gusting wind, they could hear Clytie crying quietly.

  “You ought to go up to her,” she told him.

  “I know it,” he said. “But if I do she’ll only bitch and moan and blame me for something I did or didn’t do. Anyway, she’s not scared; she just doesn’t like us sitting up together.”

  She covered his freckled hands with hers to still them.

  “You’re shaking,” she said.

  “Too much of that tea,” he answered, pulling his hands away. He looked over his shoulder at the stairs, then out the windward kitchen window, which was plastered with wet leaves.

  “Sit by the window,” she said. “Finish knitting your bait bags. You can see your boat from there.”

  When he did, she stood up.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I’m going up to give her some laudanum, if she’ll let me. And read to Leah or bring her down here for some hot chocolate.”

  Clytie did not want Amos for herself, but even more she did not want Maggie to have him—or him to have her. She wanted Maggie gone, out of the house, but the only way she could have that was to hoist her obese self out of bed and do the housekeeping, take care of her father and Leah, let Maggie go back to Bangor and finish school.

  She told Maggie all she wanted in the world was to get up, throw the laudanum out the window, and look after Leah and the men, but she just couldn’t. She couldn’t do it. When she heard Maggie hurrying up and down the stairs, or laughing in the kitchen, Clytie hated her. It was not jealousy, as it was when they were girls, but real hatred that gnawed at her like the mouse gnawing on the laths inside the wall next to her pillow.

  A gust of wind blew a scatter of hail against the house. Above Maggie, far above in the black sky, the wind kept up a steady roaring. She went into the kitchen to stoke the stove and put on some water. The news would be on in an hour. Returning to her chair, she stopped to listen. The house creaked and groaned around her; the blackout curtains on the windward side bellied out like sails. She was frozen with fear for a moment and stood stock still in the middle of the room, waiting for the whole house to blow to pieces. Perhaps this was the Big Wind itself, finally come. She gave herself a shake and went to look out behind the blackout curtain. The windows themselves, entire frames, were bellied inward by the wind. She tacked the curtain tighter against flying glass and said Amos’s name plaintively. His house in the cove, deep in the cleft of ledges, under all those sturdy old oaks, was safe from the direct wind. If he were alive, she thought, he would be sitting down there safe and sound, and she found that comforting.

  The new creaking was louder. It came from across the front room by her writing desk, and was steady with a thin, high-pitched screech. She knew what it was before she looked.

  The old, nailed-down cellar trapdoor was moving upward slowly. It rose almost imperceptibly. Then Maggie saw the nails, shiny where they had been so long embedded in wood, stripped even cleaner now as they were pulled out slowly. She rocked purposefully and watched as the door rose. The nails came to their ends all at once, and she could see Clytie’s flattened hand against the underside of the door. Then her sister’s wrist, too gray and pudgy, but still unwrinkled.

  Shaking, Maggie stood up and, with an eye on the trapdoor, went to the closet and took down her coat. The arm was still visible to the elbow.

  “All right,” she said succinctly. “If that’s what you want, all right. But I’m not staying. You’ll be alone. I’m not coming back.”

  Maggie went out through the kitchen and reached to pull the door, she caught a glimpse of the hair on the top of Clytie’s head, reddish brown and thinning.

  Hastily, she tamped the stove down and went out to the mudroom to put on her boots and take her slicker. Bracing herself for the wind, she turned back to the house.

  “All right,” she said bitterly. “The house is yours, then; this one is. But I’ll have him, and to hell with you, Clytie Bowen.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  MAGGIE HAD EXPECTED THAT THERE WOULD BE LIMBS BLOWN DOWN across the road or that there would be flooding along the low, muddy section by the old farm. But once she got inland and in the lee of the thick spruce along that part of the road, the wind was not so bad, and she could see fairly well through the clacking windshield wipers. At Amos’s house, she left the car in the drive next to the front door and scurried, bent against the rain, onto the porch. Inside, with the storm shut out behind her, the house was dark and still. She let her eyes adjust to the room and listened. It did not creak and groan; there was only the sound of the wind in the oaks as though far, far away, and her own breathing. She hesitated, then began to feel her way to the stairs. In the stairwell, his oilclothes and jacket hung on hooks; she smelled him there, strong as life, as she brushed by them to climb the stairs. No need for a fire or light tonight—only his bed and the possibility of sleep.

  Standing in his tiny room under the eaves, she could see the dim outline of the window and the shape of the bed, but all else was shadow. It was warm and still in the room. She shut her eyes to see him lying there, half asleep and waiting for her. This time of night his chin would be scratchy with whiskers. They could sleep naked; she could surprise him by getting under the covers naked. She took off her coat and trousers and sweater. Could he see the goosebumps? She undid her hair, still wet at the edges, and shook it loose.

  If Maggie had had children, her body might have been changed, but she did not think so. Her breasts were still full, her thighs and bottom still firm, her tummy almost as flat as it was when she was twenty-one. He liked it that she never got heavy like the other island women whose bums, he said, spread to the size and shape of the seats of their kitchen chairs. She turned down the covers and undressed in the dark. In the bureau drawer, she found a nightshirt, and put it on before climbing into the quiet bed.

  But then she remembered those mornings in the kitchen when he had whispered, more than once, that he would love to see her, look at her. (Did he say “in all her glory”? He may have.) He told her that he would so love to lie with her in bed, all by themselves in the house, and make love slowly, peacefully, however and whenever they wanted. Now, in his room, she saw it clearly.

  He would be sitting up against the headboard, the counterpane covering his pale legs and lap. He would smell of Ivory soap. At the edge of the bed, within his reach, she would spread her feet and legs apart slightly, and raise the cotton shirt slowly up over her thighs. She would look to him for reassurance and raise it farther to reveal her panties and smooth tummy. Then she would draw it slowly over her breasts, the cotton slipping soft and warm across her nipples, which would arise with her breasts as she pulled the shirt over her head and shook her hair again slightly. Turning aside in profile, she would step out of her panties, and when she bent over to retrieve them, she would feel his rough hand trace the outline of her buttocks, exploring, then settling on one, cupping it firmly, holding her, not letting go, turning her toward the bed. She would kneel beside him on the sheets, and when he stretched out, she would push back the quilt and lower herself into his arms to kiss his mouth. While he fondled her breasts, caressing with the soft back of his hand as he had done so often, she would slip a leg over his middle and feel him aroused, straining against her thigh.

  Afterward she would fall asleep with her head on his chest, listening to his heart beat. She would.

  Maggie awoke in the predawn dark, lying flat on her back in the undisturbed sheets. The wind had subsided
, and the rain had stopped, but she was worried by an unfamiliar sound until she realized that it was the creek, swollen and indifferent, rushing by the house on its way into the cove.

  Downstairs in the thin light, she got the stove going, put on some water, then tidied herself in the kitchen mirror. She wondered why she could no longer smell him, then thought that by sleeping in his bed, she had assumed his familiar odor.

  In her father’s kitchen, Amos had always been eager to get going in the morning, to escape the temptation of being alone with her. She was the one who was not so careful, often playing the role of the instigator. How many times since had the smell of tea reminded her of those sweet, frightening mornings. She smiled, satisfied, and lingered in the window with her hands wrapped around the warm teacup. Thank God it was Sunday, so she did not have to go to school.

  There were limbs down everywhere. The ruts in the drive were flooded and overflowed into the yard, but the wind had died and the eastern sky had cleared enough to reveal the orange warmth of the sun coming up behind the clouds over the sea. She moved the car out of sight behind the ledges by the garage and walked, her shoes soaked through, down to the cove and boat. Over her shoulder, though she refused to look, he lay on his back in the graveyard, with the others.

  The Quahog rode quietly on her mooring. From a distance, Maggie could not see any damage to the wharf or fish shacks. The rocky edges of the cove were scoured clean of shells and sticks, but on the clam flat, above the mud under the boulders, a pile of detritus sat, soaked and bedraggled, along the high-water mark. Pieces of planking, lobster traps, ropes and buoys, oil-stained wooden crates, dismembered lifejackets—all lay tangled and forlorn in a heap. Caught alone between two boulders, almost up to the field’s edge, was a bundle of brooms as big as Basil Walker, bound together for shipment to some staging area in Europe.

  Aboard the boat, Maggie thought about calling the lighthouse to see how they had weathered the storm, so tiny and exposed, but she thought better of it and only turned on the radio to see that it still worked. Dropping to her knees on the bow, she found that Gus had riven the hawser through the mooring chain. When she pulled it up, she saw that he must have rowed out early the day before, at low tide when the storm was only brewing, and he had done a thorough job of it. The slow-moving tide turned the Quahog’s bow toward shore, so that she stood in the middle of the cove—once empty, but now inhabited again. Whether the old ones and the people in town cared or not, Maggie was there to stay. The wind, from the southwest now, was brisk and wintery cold. When she died they could drive her down to Head Harbor and bury her with her family, but until then she was here with him, with them.

  Olive Gross and Doris Chafin were waiting in the post-office parlor while Miss Lizzie sorted the mail behind her door. Both women had opened their mailboxes so they could see when Miss Lizzie slipped something in from the other side. With the summer people gone, there was less mail—only one bag today. Less mail meant that Miss Lizzie would take more time to sort it, a phenomenon nobody had ever questioned. Olive had gotten up to remove a letter when Lorna Crowell, who had just come down on the mailboat from visiting her oldest daughter in Jonesport, came in from the rain. She wore her long coat, open two extra buttons to show her new blue dress. She greeted the others cheerfully, obviously pleased to be home, and said hello to Miss Lizzie through the closed door. The postmistress replied through one of the open boxes, saying that Lorna had come home none too soon; her box was stuffed so full Lizzie couldn’t get another thing in it.

  “Didn’t Albert come in even once to collect it?” Lorna asked. Albert was one of the most prosperous fishermen on the island; she could pose a question like that without fear of anyone thinking he was lazy. They would only assume that he was too busy making money to collect the mail. Money for new dresses, for instance.

  Lorna sat down in the big chair by the stove and spread the Ellsworth American flat on her lap.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard the awful news,” she said. “I mean, it hasn’t been on the radio yet. It’s all the talk on the mainland, though; I’ve never seen people so outraged.”

  Doris gave Olive a look. Olive was sitting in a straight-backed chair, overhanging it on both sides. She did not look up from her magazine.

  “It’s right here on the front page,” Lorna raised her voice. “You should listen to this, Miss Lizzie.”

  Lizzie’s voice said go ahead and read it; she couldn’t help but hear.

  “What is it?” Doris was impatient with Laura’s little show: ruffling herself like a hen to settle in the chair, delaying the news to drag out her drama. She looked right at Lorna. Doris had bright, knowing eyes, the kind that look behind what you’re saying. She gazed intently at Laura to make her nervous.

  “Well, I won’t read the whole thing.” Laura went over the article herself, leaving her finger on a line to keep her place, then read aloud. “The passenger liner Laconia, carrying servicemen’s wives and children and Italian prisoners of war was sunk off the Cape of Good Hope.’ Let me see. The U-boat captain was named Hartenstein. I wonder how they know that. Anyway, the U-boat surfaced and saw all those hundreds and hundreds of helpless people in the water and just sailed away, leaving them to drown in the middle of the ocean. The only rescue ships were a day and a half away. They don’t say how many died; they can’t of course. They only say ‘horrible losses.’ There’s an interview here, too, with one of the American pilots who had to fly around and around over them but couldn’t go down to help. He could only watch them get fewer and fewer as they sank out of sight.”

  Miss Lizzie opened the top of the Dutch door and leaned her meaty forearms on the ledge. Olive, whose brother Randy was lost in the North Atlantic in March, kept her head down and held onto her magazine.

  “Imagine it,” said Lorna. “That German didn’t make any attempt to help them. He probably laughed. Mothers with their children clinging to them, trying to stay afloat on debris. Think of the noise, the voices of those children, of those poor—”

  “That’s enough, Lorna. Doris got up to take a hankie to Olive, whose tears were making their way to her chin. Doris stood next to Olive and glared at Lorna until she understood.

  “Oh, Olive,” Lorna said. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Lorna started to stand up, but Olive—still face down—shook her head violently and waved the other woman away.

  Lorna folded the paper. “What about the news down here? What have I been missing?”

  “Well, there’s Maggie,” said Miss Lizzie.

  “Maggie?” Lorna looked around the room at the others.

  “You tell her,” Miss Lizzie said to Doris. “I think I got a mouse in the closet here.”

  Doris shot a glance at the spot Miss Lizzie had just abandoned, then looked at Lorna. It was a rare occasion when Lorna was the last to hear island news. Doris tried not to enjoy her advantage; normally she was not one to gossip.

  “The day before yesterday, she left her father’s house in Head Harbor and moved into Amos’s house in the cove. Overnight, without telling a soul,” Doris said.

  “Well!” Lorna was delighted; her mind set sail on a sea of possibility. “Whatever for, would you imagine?”

  Doris would not imagine, not with Lorna. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t suppose it’s any of my business; it’s hers now, the house and the land. She told Leah she just decided to move there and did it. I don’t know. She’ll be closer to school and town.”

  “I wonder if that was her motive,” Lorna said. “I would think—”

  There was a muffled thump in the mailroom and a little scuffle before Miss Lizzie appeared in the doorway, her cheeks red with effort.

  “The mouse was running on the top of the door, and I shut it on him,” she said. “But it only caught his feet. He was stuck there upside down, but he got away. Didn’t he squiggle though?”

  Doris escaped out the front door, saying she had shopping to do.

  Whe
n she was gone, Miss Lizzie told those remaining that she knew something else they didn’t. When Lorna asked what that was, Miss Lizzie fussed with her hair net for a minute, then said, “Last Tuesday the Hamilton girls were walking home, and when they passed the Boutwell cottage, Susan saw a curtain move in the window—like it had been held open for someone to see out, then let closed when she looked at the house. It was dusk. There’s nobody supposed to be in there.

  “When they told Charles, he went over there with his gun, but he didn’t find anything. It was probably their imaginations, but I tell you people are scared. I won’t go out alone after dark, not me, thank you.”

  “I won’t go walking anywhere alone any more,” Olive said. “Even in daylight I’m watching to see somebody come out of the woods and jump on me.”

  They were silent while Olive got her mail and left. They watched her out the window as she waddled down the road toward the town landing.

  “Where on earth do you suppose Maggie sleeps?” asked Lorna. “She must sleep in Amos’s bed.”

  “I don’t know,” said Miss Lizzie. “Perhaps she’s sleeping in one of the other ones.”

  “There are no others,” said Lorna. “His is the only bed in the house.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I was in there a few years ago, with Leah.”

  “Hmph,” said Miss Lizzie.

  Among the last of the things she brought up from her father’s house were her recipe books. As she aligned them between two crocks on the kitchen counter, a clipping slipped out of one. She read it and taped it to the cabinet above the sink.