Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  The man slipped on the moss but gained his balance and stood in two inches of water in the middle of the ledge.

  “Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?” asked Cecil.

  “I’m Henry Fairlee,” he said. “I’m AWOL from my unit—the First Division. I came here to hide. I’ve been here nearly a month, and now I want to give up. I have to face it.”

  Cecil lowered his pistol, and behind him, Richard released his breath and lowered his gun, easing the hammers into place.

  “The First Division’s shipped overseas,” Richard said. “You’re a deserter, a goddamned coward.”

  “Yes,” said Henry Fairlee.

  “You’ll have to face a court martial,” said Cecil.

  “Or worse,” said Richard with some satisfaction.

  “Yes, worse,” Henry Fairlee said. “I’ll have to face my father.”

  “Get your suitcase,” Cecil said. “We’ll take you to the constable and he’ll take you to wherever it is you’re supposed to go.

  Richard stepped forward to stand with Cecil; he lifted his shotgun. “Hold open that coat and turn around so we can see you aren’t armed,” he said.

  “All right, let’s go then.”

  Friday,

  September 9, 1942

  Dear Ruth,

  I should be out patrolling tonight, but it’s been such an odd and busy day that Gus and I decided to take a night off, to leave the cold waters for the Vinalhaven and Swan’s Island patrol boats. It’s nice to be home, or I should say nice to be here in this house and feel that it’s home, even though I am here alone, and not with him, as I allowed myself to dream. In daylight I wrestle with my anger and try to keep it at bay; in twilight I abide with grief.

  Did I tell you that I moved his kitchen table to the western window in the parlor and that I write to you on it in the late afternoon light? I do. I am now, and it is a consolation for me.

  Yes, of course my precipitous move stirred up the biddies. (No, I can’t explain why I did it; it just happened.) They were already clucking about his leaving it to me; when I moved in, they reacted with a frenzy of indignation. Gus keeps me informed. No one says anything to me, of course, nor I to them. I will not give them the satisfaction of allowing their disapproval to embitter me. Their other target is Betty Chambers, who had the gall to dance cheek to cheek with Morales at the Labor Day Social and is reputed to have been seen smooching with him afterward. They consider Morales nothing better than a Negro, and the words “wicked” and “strumpet” have been used for her. Gus is outraged for Morales’s sake and almost got into a fight with Fuddy because of a smarmy comment. He can’t understand how they can behave so, and I am at a loss to explain.

  At least Gus and I can talk. I think he’s being teased about Mabel Eaton, whom he swears (falsely) he is not sweet on. I wish I had gone to the social and seen him dancing “close” with her. I would have attended if I had thought that Mr. Gardiner was going to be there. I would like to have seen him and thank him personally for the kind notes he’s sent since the funeral. (No, I am not sweet on him.)

  I realized this afternoon how successfully I have been deluding myself about Amos’s fall these past weeks. I had myself convinced (it’s so easy to do when we need to) that someone or something, other than that damned rum was responsible for the accident. I even reported my suspicions to the Coast Guard. There was a rumor of a stranger hiding out on the island, and I thought that would somehow prove me right. But our men found the poor fellow today, and after I quizzed him (privately in the cab of Richard’s truck), I came away believing that he was not on the island that night, nor had he seen anyone suspicious in his weeks of hiding out. He was as forlorn and frightened a young man as I have ever seen (AWOL from his unit and his fellow man). His plight made me angry and ashamed of myself and deeply saddened for all of us.

  But I’ll ignore my shame, as I try to ignore my grief, and direct my anger at the Hun, as we all must. Damn him, as Gus is wont to say. And damn the ones who are more interested in vilifying their neighbors than they are in the war and what lurks in the water all around us.

  Now I’ve gone on and on, and ended on a sour note. I’ll not start another page but send you my love briefly here in the margin. Thank you, as always, for listening.

  Love,

  Maggie

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AFTER LUNCH, HARVEY GOODEN CLIMBED THE CIRCLING IRON STAIRS of the cold stone tower toward the light. At the halfway window, he stopped, belched tunafish, remembered his mother (who had warned him that it made him “repeat”), and idly watched two dory-looking boats drifting, together, about a half-mile east. He thought they must be handlining for haddock beyond the shoal, but saw that they were awfully far from shore without a mother boat. At the door to the light, he tied on the linen apron he wore to protect the lens and brasswork from his soiled clothes, slapped the dust from his pant legs, and let himself in.

  They said that the worst thing about being a lighthouse keeper was that you had too much time to think, but for Harvey the worst thing was Morales: his whorehouse-sweet hair oil, his wiggling ass, his fucking cowboy hat, his ease with codes and signal equipment and electrical gadgets, his Hawaiian shirts. Harvey didn’t believe him for a minute when he hinted that he was dinging Betty Chambers, but it galled him unmercifully to think of Morales rubbing up against her, maybe even seeing and feeling her white titties. He wished Chief Gardiner would tell Morales to shut up once in a while, but the chief let him rattle on in his fake Boston accent and even seemed to like him sometimes.

  Other than the little bedroom, which was nothing more than a place to sleep or lie awake dreaming of home, the light was Harvey’s domain, and keeping it and the lens working and clean was his specialty; this job was, as he said in a letter home, where he shined. The light was also where he could be alone for a few hours every afternoon, away from Morales’s preening and the chief’s instruction manual, away from all of their annoying little habits. Inside the lens, where the world outside was refracted in a hundred bright angles, where the lonely rock and sea around was broken into hundreds of harmless little postcard images that all changed in unison as he moved, he polished the brasswork and oiled the fittings with sleepy, habitual care. Standing on a footstool, Harvey polished the outside of the lens with soft diapers, wiping each of the angled refractors with a smooth sweep. If the government did order the lighthouses to go dark, as the chief kept predicting, the Germans wouldn’t have any more use for them and would probably use them for target practice. If they went dark, Morales would probably stay to keep up the weather reports and for communications; they’d let Harvey—the light man—go, and he’d be drafted sure as shit. He wouldn’t miss the rock or them or this godforsaken Maine coast, but he would miss his light and lens. He hated the thought that someone else might be hired to care for it when they turned it back on.

  Outside, on the gallery, he walked around into the lee, lit a cigarette, and leaned on the railing. Below, the chief was on his knees, weeding the edge of the bed of marigolds by the boat slip. The sea was nearly flat calm; if Harvey spat there wouldn’t be breeze enough to carry the saliva beyond the broad base of the tower. The two boats he had seen earlier had moved in some, and he could tell that they were dories after all. They drifted close together, coming in on the tide, and in the closer one there was a little figure making some kind of motion. Through the binoculars he could just make out a man waving something back and forth over his head—back and forth, in a slow arc.

  Through cupped hands, his burning cigarette between the fingers of one, he shouted to the chief, sending half the basking harbor seal colony sliding into the water. Jake stood and brushed his knees, looking up, trowel in hand, the crows’ feet gathered in the corners of his eyes.

  “There’s somebody in trouble out there, to the east’ard,” Harvey shouted. “He’s waving something. Two dories.”

  “You sure it’s not lifeboats?” Jake’s voice sent the rest of the seals
into the sea. “It could be survivors from the Norwegian freighter.”

  “It’s dories,” Harvey shouted. “Come see.”

  “You come down here, PDQ,” Jake yelled. “Collect the blankets, and bring them down to the slip. Morales!” he turned to the house. “Get your ass in gear; we’re going to launch her.”

  When Giuseppe Clarrutaro saw the gray launch making its way toward them, rising and sinking on the low swells beyond the shoals, he slumped to the dory seat and wept like a child into his wrinkled hands.

  “What is it, cappie?” Akers nudged Clarrutaro’s knee with the bailing scoop but got no response. He steadied himself on the gunwale and rose on aching legs to squint toward the distant lighthouse, barely visible against the dark shoreline.

  “Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” he cried, waving the scoop. “Ship your oars. Look there, a cutter; no, a launch. Johnson, Buchard!” he shouted to the other dory, “Look to port. A boat. We’re saved!”

  At once, the oarsmen in both dories rose, shouting, poking at the heavens with their oars, then in pairs and in threes, the rest of the eighteen were on their uncertain feet, screaming like gulls, hugging one another, waving, weeping. A leaping pair in Johnson’s boat fell onto the gunwale, and the dory shipped a foot of water before their mates pulled them in. Clarrutaro, his crucifix between his pressed palms, sank to his knees in the bilge and with the believing half of his crew, offered a prayer of thanksgiving.

  ‘They’re fishermen all right,” Morales said. “But how can there be so many? What kind of fishing boat has a crew that size?” He stood ready with the gaff on the starboard side of the launch while Jake brought the boat around on a swell.

  “What happened?” Jake asked the dory they gaffed. “Who are you?”

  “You’re the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen, both of you,” said an oarsman.

  “You’re captains,” said another. “Admirals.”

  “Angels,” rasped a man whose hands were wrapped in strips of undershirt. “Fucking saints.”

  “Hard down on that, Wakefield; shut your foul mouth.” Clarrutaro reached across the gunwales to take Morales’s hand. “We’re trawlermen,” he said. “I’m Giuseppe Clarrutaro, skipper of the Ben and Josephine; this is my crew here. That’s Oscar Johnson, captain of the Aeolus, and his crew. U-boats sank both of us yesterday at dawn with their deck guns.”

  “Did you lose anybody?”

  “Grindle and Pisano got burned. Oscar lost his dog, Spook; the rest of us are okay, thanks to God.”

  “A U-boat?” Morales was incredulous. “I never heard of a U-boat attacking a fisherman.”

  “Not a U-boat, son,” Clarrutaro said. “Two of them. They sent both our boats to the bottom, and we never did a damn thing to deserve it.”

  “We can take a few of you aboard here, but we’ll have to tow the rest of you,” Jake said. “Let’s get going before the wind picks up. If you’d had a breeze, you never would’ve gotten in this close.”

  “If we’d had any weather at all,” said the oarsman, “We would all have been drowned. Look what we got for freeboard— no more than two hands of it; we’d of swamped, sure.”

  Praise God,” Clarrutaro said.

  Jake nosed the bow of the launch into the cradle, and Morales threw the bow line to Harvey, who secured it to the winch.

  “Get these fellows up to the house where they can lie down, and pour some coffee into them,” Jake said. “We’ll pull the dories ashore.”

  Harvey waded in to help the three boys and older man— one at a time—off the launch and up through the slippery rock-weed to dry ground. Unlike the others, who were shouting and laughing and kissing the ground as they tried to drag the dories ashore, these four were wrapped in blankets as they shivered silently; the limpest of them, a man about Harvey’s age, got Morales’s blanket with the bucking broncos on it. When Harvey led him—almost carried him—to dry land, he started crying. Harvey didn’t know what to say as he sat him down, so he simply told the man that he would be right back with the last guy and would take them all inside.

  He offered them bunks, but they smiled, shook their heads, and sank into the chairs in the front room; outside, someone let out a war whoop, and another answered him. Harvey left the four with a pack of Luckies and went to fetch them coffee. When he came back, the weepy one was asleep, his chin on his chest. They carried him into Morales’s bunk, where the old man pulled off his shoes and socks and tucked him in, smoothing his salty hair.

  Outside there were men everywhere, some sitting on the stoop smoking, others washing each other down with buckets of fresh water. Three, with raised V signs, were posing for Morales’s camera at the base of the lighthouse. Harvey found Jake talking to a dark-skinned man, whom he introduced as Captain something. They were talking quietly and watching a man in skivvies as he wrung out his shirt and called for another bucket over his head.

  “The Coast Guard’s sending out a cutter first thing in the morning,” Harvey interrupted. “I told them we could get them to the mainland with the help of fishermen from the mainland, but they want them to wait here. I guess they don’t want anybody talking until after the ensign debriefs them. I opened up all the beans, and they’re cooking now. I’m going to get a stew going here right away.”

  “That’s okay for tonight,” Jake said. “But what about tomorrow? They won’t get here until late in the day, if they get here tomorrow at all. Our pantry’s nearly empty,” he told Clar-rutaro. “It’s the end of the month, and the tender doesn’t come for another four days.”

  “We’ll be all right, Chief.” Clarrutaro put his hand on Jake’s shoulder.

  “Hold that pose, Captain,” said Morales looking down into his Brownie. Harvey’s mossy smile faded when he saw Morales move the camera to exclude him from the picture.

  “The food problem’s been taken care of,” Harvey said. “I called Barter Island’s Coastal Picket station at the church. I talked to a Miss Chambers (he gave Morales a look) and told her we had survivors ashore and they were hungry. I didn’t say a number in the clear, just a lot of them. She said they’d be here at first light with food, and I bet they will.”

  “If you have flour,” Clarrutaro said, “I’ve got a man, Dias, who makes the best biscuits in New England.”

  “Dias?” Harvey said.

  “You go make that stew,” said Jake.

  “He used his deck gun?” Jake continued, when Harvey and Morales had left. “At what distance?”

  “He took our bow clean off with the second shot. When we got everybody overboard, he moved in and blew her to bits with the 88 and the machine guns. Then he just steamed off. In a minute we heard the other one open up on the Aeolus the same way, and we could see her go down. Oscar got his men into the boat, but he went back aboard to find his dog. It’s a little Spitz. Spook must have been hiding from the noise; he couldn’t find him. When Oscar finally jumped for it, they hit his fuel tank; that’s how Pisano and Grindle got burned—the dory was so close to the explosion.”

  “Two of them,” said Jake. “The Coast Guard’s going to have a hard time believing that.”

  Clarrutaro shrugged his shoulders. “We’ve seen them in pairs before. Everybody who fishes off the Grand Banks has seen U-boats. We didn’t bother them by reporting their positions and they didn’t bother us. At least, not until now.”

  Jake looked at Oscar Johnson, who sat leaning against the boathouse, smoking in the shade near a man sleeping face down on his forearm. The lighthouse keeper said Johnson looked like a man who had just lost his best friend.

  “He has,” said Clarrutaro. “And his boat, too, the poor bastard.”

  “But he saved his crew—you both did, for Christ’s sake. I think we ought to have a drink on that, don’t you?” Jake asked.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Betty Chambers set one of her market baskets on the stoop and pushed open the north door to the keeper’s house to meet a moist, malodorous cloud of body odor, salt, and other
festering things. She stepped back and wiped her nose on her sleeve. When she stood inside among the sprawl of sleeping figures, she thought that there was something sweet beneath the stink— the smell of her brother’s little bedroom in the morning, of the stuff the sandman left in the corners of his eyes. Some of the survivors were covered with coats on the couch and in chairs, but most were wrapped in blankets on the floor. The three in the center of the room slept curled up together like spoons for the warmth.

  Harvey sat up on the couch, full of wonder. He blinked and squished his lips with his fingers.

  “You must be Betty Chambers,” he said.

  “Yes, I am.” Her light brown hair was parted in the middle and rested like soft wings over her ears. Her knee-length skirt showed legs the likes of which Harvey had seen only in magazines.

  “Jeekers,” he said.

  Betty looked over her shoulder for Maggie, who was coming up the path with a covered laundry basket.

  “I’m Harvey Gooden,” Harvey combed his hair with his hand. “I talked to you on the radio yesterday.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Harvey,” she said. “Where’s the kitchen?” She scanned the sleeping faces for a dark one and was surprised to see several—none of them Morales. Harvey pointed to the kitchen and hurried to relieve Maggie of the heavy basket; she thanked him and went down the dark hallway to rouse Jake. Maggie stepped over sleeping forms, some of which were beginning to stir, and began to open the windows. In the east, the very tip of the sun, pumpkin colored, showed itself on the watery horizon. For the first time, she was surprised, and a little afraid, to be on so small a rock in the middle of the ocean. Once in Jake’s room, she smelled his soap and hair oil, and turned to greet him, her hand extended.

  “Good morning, Maggie,” Jake said, shaking her hand. “You were very good to come, thank you. Was it cold on the water?”

  Gus passed, leaning backward with a heavy box that he rode on his belt.