Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  Thank God, few people are so poor that they do not have an inner life which feeds the true springs of thought and action. So, if I may offer a thought in consolation to others who for a time have to live in a “goldfish bowl/’ it is: Don’t worry because people know all that you do, for the really important things about anyone are what they are and what they think and feel, and the more you live in a “goldfish bowl” the less people really know about you!

  —E. Roosevelt

  When Maggie heard the store truck come down the cove road, she thought it must be Gus, hoped that it was Leah come for a visit. But when the vehicle went by the window, she saw that it was Cecil, a cigarette stuck in his mouth, squinting in the smoke. He parked by the graveyard and walked up the drive slowly, waving at the deer fly that circled his head. Maggie had been expecting him, as he knew, but she acted surprised to see him.

  Cecil looked ghostly pale—from his ulcer, she assumed. She invited him to sit, and he took the rocker, crossing his legs.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said, standing before him. “So has Leah, for that matter; she’s taking this so hard.”

  “I know it,” he said. “I can’t keep anything on my stomach, with this ulcer; that’s why I’ve lost weight. And she just isn’t eating like she used to.”

  “I can make you a nice cup of Postum with milk; that would agree with your stomach.”

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  If he had come about Gus’s staying on the island to finish the lobster season, or about their patrolling, he would be gruff and acting bolder, she thought. Maggie had seen him twice in the store since the reading of Amos’s will, and he had not spoken to her either time. Now he was ready, it seemed, and so was she.

  “You know why I’m here?” he asked, taking the cup and saucer.

  “I can guess, but I don’t want to.” Maggie sat in the chair opposite him, her hands in her apron. She was careful not to let herself feel sorry for him.

  “I’m here about the will, the property. I’m here because she would never ask you herself,” he said.

  Maggie nodded, tamping down her anger, and let him go on. He lit a cigarette, using the saucer for an ashtray.

  “It’s just not right,” he said. “That Leah, his daughter, got nothing. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have given the property to you. That’s not my place, and I’m grateful for Gus getting the boat and gear. But think how Leah must feel that he didn’t leave her a thing.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “You’re not making this any easier. Look, before he died, Amos was thinking about deeding the other houses—Ava’s and the cabin, and the land up there to her. He was—”

  “Amos was thinking that?” she leaned forward. “How do you know? Did he tell you? Did Leah say he was?”

  “He wanted Gus to go fishing out of this cove and to settle down here after high school. You know that,” he said.

  “Yes, but that’s not the point is it? That’s not even relevant. If Leah wanted the property for that reason, why didn’t she just ask him about it? He would have given it to her, to keep it in the family; he wouldn’t have blinked. Let me answer for you since you don’t seem to want to talk straight yourself. She didn’t ask him—even though you pestered her to tears about it—because she knew he would say yes, and she knew that you would sell the property before the ink was dry.”

  “Did she tell you that?” he sat up and glared at her.

  “She didn’t need to; I can see can’t I? Katherine Merrill put her store up for sale in June. You want to sell yours and this property and buy her out. You want to move off this island to where the money is and take Leah and Gus with you. You can’t stand this place. Don’t butt your cigarette in that cup; I have to drink from that. Look at you, smoking one after another. This island or something about it is eating away at you, has you bent over in pain.”

  “My health doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Cecil said, his voice rising. “What I’m asking you to do is give over some of this property to Leah—or even sell it to her if you need the money, though I can’t see why you would, with two houses now.”

  “You won’t understand, will you? Or maybe you can’t.” Maggie closed her eyes for a moment. “Think about it. Leah didn’t ask him because she wanted this cove to be his, his family’s. Why hasn’t she asked me to give it to her? For the same reason: It’s theirs.”

  “No it isn’t,” he said. “Not any more.”

  “It is. It’s theirs in my keeping. And that’s all there is to it,” she said.

  “Leah’s his daughter, for Christ’s sake,” he said bitterly. “Some of it should be hers to do what she wants with, do something for the living.”

  “What she wants?” Maggie raised her eyebrows. “If I deed a portion to her, you’ll pick away at her. You’ll make her so miserable that she’ll give in and let you sell it. You’ll belittle her until she can’t stand up to you. I can’t bear the way you treat her.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, standing. “It’s not family or any of that crap. You don’t want me to have that store. You want her to stay stuck on this island, slaving away. Gus too. You want them here for your own sake. You want the property for yourself, too. It’s not for Amos and those spirits. You don’t believe in spirits,” he pointed at her. “You don’t even believe in God.”

  Maggie stood, too, the heat rising to her cheeks.

  “Don’t point, Cecil,” she said. “It’s impolite. I think you should take your leave, so I don’t have to ask you to.”

  She carried his cup and saucer into the kitchen, where she scrubbed them with scalding water and rinsed them with bleach. Better for Leah to slave away in a little store among her own people than to slave away in a big store among strangers.

  “Hello? Excuse me. Are you open?” A thin-faced man in a flannel cap held the door ajar and peered into the store at Leah, who sat on her stool behind the counter. His voice was not timid or deferential, but habitually polite.

  “Yes, of course. Come in.” Leah stood up, then sat back down.

  “It says you’re open until six, but I didn’t see any lights or activity. It’s hard to guess the time in such thick fog. It’s not six yet, is it?”

  “No. It’s just past five.” Leah peeled off the thin gloves she wore to keep one hand from scratching and picking at the fingers on the other.

  When he stepped inside, took off his cap, and smiled, she was surprised to see that he was so young, not much older than Gus. His polite manner made her want to straighten her hair, but instead she smiled and buried her hands in her apron.

  She thought at first he had bought his overcoat two sizes too large, but when he turned aside, she thought that he must have lost weight since he bought it: the sleeve length was right, and it fit properly in the shoulders over a heavy sweater. By his speech the young man was not from Maine, and she knew no summer people who would be seen in clothes so sadly worn. His cheeks were sunken; a pale stubble showed on his chin and upper lip; his blue gray eyes were active, skittish, but unafraid. Some island family’s distant relative, she guessed, though she had not heard anyone mention such.

  Leah tried not to let him see that she was watching him as he went slowly down the aisle, bending to examine boxes, reading the labels on cans. Every so often he glanced at the front of the store—not at her, she saw the third time, but at the door. She thought of the Hamilton girls and the moving curtain in the Boutwell cottage and wished fervently that someone else would come in. She could hear him humming in the produce aisle.

  He came to the register with his arms full and carefully, almost reverently, placed each item on the counter: an onion, three wrinkled green peppers, a cabbage, and a loaf of store bread. He was wearing street shoes—once black but now scuffed gray—and pleated trousers. His hands were not those of a working man. He glanced at the door again, smiled at her, but said nothing. She wanted to say something herself, something casual to allay her fear with conversa
tion, but she could not.

  He paid her from a leather coin purse with a snap closure and looked out the window while she bagged his groceries. Unhurried, he mumbled a thanks and started for the door, but then stopped and set the bag down on the soda cooler. Leah backed away from the register and stood as though about to open the refrigerator, watching him from the corner of her eye. He turned his back to her, took the bread from the bag, and from it drew four slices, which he set aside while he replaced the rest of the loaf. Watching out the door, up and down the road, he chewed the crust off the stack of slices, squeezed the dough into a ball with his fist, took a bite, and left.

  Leah stood in the door in the lingering smell of wood smoke and watched him walk down the road nibbling, but as he disappeared in the fog she could not tell whether he was going to the town landing or had turned toward the western shore. Her first thought was to close the store and find someone to come back and sit with her in case he returned. Instead, she waited, hoping someone familiar would come along, scolding herself for being scared of a harmless boy. After a lonely hour, in which she busied herself with closing, she walked home, her eyes scanning both sides of the road. She was comforted by the light in Dickie and Edna’s window, and when she got home and found Gus rooting around in the kitchen, she wondered what it was about the stranger that made her feel vaguely sad for Gus.

  When Cecil opened the store just before six the next morning, he found Lorna Crowell coming up the steps. When he held the door for her, she marched by him to stand in front of the register. He thought she looked as if she hadn’t slept a wink. The scarf she had thrown over her head had caught in her hair net and thrown it all askew, and she was covered with a fine, wet dew. Cecil flicked a cigarette end out the door and tamped another on his thumbnail.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked. Lorna had not come to shop.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a half hour. Why, is something wrong?”

  “I thought maybe Albert stopped to see you on his way to Dwight’s.”

  “No. I saw him go by. He didn’t come in though. What is it?” Cecil asked. His ulcer tore at him, and he blanched.

  “Albert claims it’s nothing, but he’s just saying that so I won’t worry. If he thought it wasn’t anything, then he wouldn’t have gone to report it to the constable, would he?” She looked at Cecil for a response and thought he grimaced.

  “Last night—well, yesterday around five; it was dark enough to be night—I was watching for Albert to come home, and I saw a strange man walk past going toward town,” she said. “It wasn’t anybody from here. He was wearing a long, dark coat, like a detective or a gangster.”

  She let it sink in. Hers was the last house on the road to the uninhabited west side of the island, so where was this guy coming from, thought Cecil.

  “A half hour later he came back, this time with a satchel or a suitcase, I couldn’t tell, and headed down the road to nowhere. It was him all right. When Albert came home he said there weren’t any but island boats moored in the thoroughfare. So he’s gone to ask Dwight if anybody else has reported seeing the man, as much to check up on me as to find out for himself.”

  “He came in here around five,” Cecil said. He slipped on his apron and tied it in front. “Leah told us about him at supper. That wasn’t a suitcase you saw; that was a bag of groceries. She said that he was probably visiting somebody, that he wasn’t a fisherman. According to Leah he was some polite—and young and frail looking. He was probably out for a walk.”

  “At dusk in a thick of fog?” Cecil could be so frustrating.

  “Summer people take walks in the fog,” he said.

  “Oh, come on, Cecil!”

  “Maybe he’s a laborer hired to do some work on one of the summer cottages down in Moore’s Harbor, and he’s staying down there,” he said. “Leah said he didn’t have any accent.”

  “So?! If you were a spy would you go around talking like a German? ‘Ach, strudel. Guten day to you’?” Cecil, she thought, was as thick-headed as Albert.

  “She did say he seemed nervous, like he was worried, kind of watchful,” he allowed.

  “There!” she cried. “I’m staying here until Albert comes back.”

  His rubber boots folded down at the knees, Richard stood on the town landing with Dwight, watching the mouth of the thoroughfare for the evening mail boat.

  “We’ve got three hours of daylight left,” said Richard. “Let’s go now, at least down to Moore’s Harbor.”

  Dwight sat on the rail at the top of the ramp puffing on his pipe, thinking that the worst part about being constable was having to actually listen to people like Richard Snell when something went wrong.

  “No,” he said. “No. We can’t just go running around. We’ve got to have a meeting.”

  “We are having a meeting,” said Richard. “There’s seven men here.”

  Aboard Albert’s boat, which was tied up next to them, Gus sat on the stern watching Albert sort lobsters while Vergil Eaton, his sternman, pumped the bilge. Behind Richard, toothless Calvin Niels, who at eighty was still known for his prodigious strength, sat on the tailgate of his truck watching his grandson Zeke, who was kneeling on a filthy canvas trying to reassemble his greasy gearbox. Calvin watched a horsefly the size of his thumb land on his forearm; he waited until it settled and felt safe enough to lift its abdomen to drive in its proboscis, then swatted it dead.

  “They’re not listening,” said Dwight, tilting his head toward the Nielses, “And—”

  “They wouldn’t be listening if we were setting in rows of chairs in the town hall,” Richard said.

  “I’ve got a load of cedar shakes coming on this boat,” Dwight said.

  “What makes you think he’s dangerous?” asked Albert as he tied shut one crate of lobsters and pushed it aside to begin filling another. When he’d had a good day fishing—as he had today—Albert tied up at the town landing to count his lobsters and enjoy the envy of those watching him.

  “I never said he was dangerous,” Dwight said. “It doesn’t matter one way or the other whether he is. My wife, like several other wives I could name, isn’t going to rest or let us rest until we find this guy. Your wife, Albert, is still in the store. She’s been there all day; she won’t go home until you come to fetch her.”

  “He could of gone off on the morning mail boat,” said Vergil. He stopped pumping the bilge. Vergil had not gone off island to high school when he could have five years ago; he had hired on as Albert’s sternman with the idea of making enough money to buy his own boat. But, living alone in the abandoned east-side schoolhouse and running around with the Squeaker Cove boys, he had squandered what Albert paid him and had yet to even buy a single string of traps for himself. Vergil was the example that Gus’s parents used when the boy argued against finishing high school.

  “He didn’t,” Gus said. “Nobody saw him this morning. He might have his own boat.”

  “We’d of seen it,” said Richard. His wrists rested inside his suspenders, supporting his hands, which were entwined over his belly. “A dozen boats fish these shores every day, in-close all this month, too, for the shedders.”

  Vergil whispered under his shoulder to Gus, “And that’s news?”

  Gus smiled. “Maybe it’s a small boat,” he said. “And he has it pulled up on the shore and hidden under branches or something.”

  “Somebody could have put him ashore,” Vergil said.

  Dwight stood up and knocked out his pipe. “Here comes the mail boat. I’ll ask Buster if he’s seen anybody like this guy or if he’s heard anything.”

  “How was it, Richard?” Albert assumed a fighting pose, holding a lobster in each hand. He swung the right one toward Vergil. “Like that?” he asked.

  Vergil and Gus snickered; Dwight looked away.

  “I was only holding one, and no it wasn’t like that goddamn you,” snarled Richard. “I hit him with it, hard; I didn’t swing like a girl.”

  Buster Dod
ge, the gray canvas mailbag slung over his shoulder, stopped at the top of the ramp to catch his breath and rest his game leg before he began the ascent to the parking lot. Government regulations said that only he could touch the mailbag; no matter how low the tide, how heavy the bag, or how badly his leg hurt that day, it was his job to lug it up the hill and drive it to Miss Lizzie. It was a painful penance for him, every day but Sunday, and one he relished. Dwight asked him if he had seen a pale young man in an overcoat and city clothes among his passengers. Buster grunted a negative, shifted the bag to his other shoulder, and started up the wharf.

  “He’s his old pleasant self today, isn’t he?” said Richard. “I’ll give you a hand off-loading those shakes; we’ll ask him again when he comes back.”

  Albert took his boat off to her mooring, leaving Vergil and Gus to help with Dwight’s shingles.

  When Buster returned, his face was full to the brim and about to overflow in laughter.

  “You didn’t tell me it was a German spy you were looking for,” he said to Dwight.

  “I didn’t say it was a German spy, for Christ’s sake.” Dwight hated to be mocked by a Stonington man. “It’s a stranger that two or three people have seen, and I want to find out who it is.”

  “Miss Lizzie said he’s a German spy, and you’re going to hunt for him, take him prisoner,” Buster said.

  “She’s just scared like the rest of the women are,” said Richard. “You say you didn’t see somebody like Dwight described on the mail boat?”

  “How can I be sure of that?” Buster didn’t like Richard’s tone, or Richard. “I’ve carried hundreds of people back and forth this summer. I can’t tell you whether he came down here amongst all the others, but I can say I haven’t had such a passenger since the summer people left. What the hell did he do wrong to have the constable after him?”

  “He’s trespassing, if nothing else,” Dwight said. “The Hamilton girls saw somebody in the Boutwell cottage just the other day.”

  “The Boutwell place is on the east side. Miss Lizzie said Lorna saw him on the west side.” Buster shook his head.