Something in the Water

by Peter Scott

  I’m sorry you’ve been having tummy troubles. Dry toast, tea, and Pepto Bismol have always worked for me, but then I eat like a wren, and you are so hardy. You are also my dearest friend, and one I miss very much.

  Love,

  Maggie

  PS. We are told President Eisenhower has decreed that “one nation under God” be added to our Pledge of Allegiance. Don’t you find that curious? I mean, if it is under God, why mention it and be told to pledge it? I’ll ask the professor.

  • • •

  With care, Ed Harper set a tray on the patio table and poured four Manhattans into glasses that sat on paper napkins decorated with blueberries and red lobsters. Fashionably late and dying of thirst from an afternoon of tennis, Robert and Ros-alyn Owings settled with their drinks in deck chairs and surveyed the meadow and cove beyond, where the Harper’s little sailboat Rosinante sat on her quiet mooring. The patio table, which Rosalyn admired, was made of two upturned and weathered lobster traps topped with heavy glass; the runners of the traps were branded with the initials A.C. Marion, in a white turtleneck, flannel shirt, and khakis, emerged from the new kitchen entrance with a plate of hors d’oevres in each hand—crabmeat and crackers, and pigs-in-a־blanket straight from the oven.

  “Nothing fancy,” she said. “Not here on the island.”

  “No,” said Rosalyn piling a Ritz cracker high with tender lumps of crab. “But simple and wholesome, like everything else down here.”

  “Why we love it so,” said Robert. “No jangling phones, no traffic, no blaring TV, and best of all, no pretense.”

  “No teenagers with record players,” said his wife. “No Elvis Presley, thank God.”

  “Just listen,” Marion said, and they sipped in appreciative silence, listening to the distant wash of waves on the ledges and the titter of the swallows that rose and dove and skimmed across the meadow.

  “You know, Ed, I think you got the nicest piece of property on the island.” Robert popped a maraschino cherry into his mouth and flicked the stem into the grass. “Far from town, far from the road, a view of the open sea, a safe mooring.”

  “And there’s so much history here; it’s so genuine. I love your name for it.” Rosalyn nodded to the rustic signpost by the forsythia. “‘Sealedge.’ Is it Sea Ledge or Seal Edge? Oh, I see, it’s both; how clever.”

  “I tried to buy this property once, you know, years ago during the war,” Robert said. “Chad Barrett and I thought we would build a hotel on the cliffs like the one just south of here that burned down in the teens. Cecil Barter told me, God rest his soul, that he had or would soon have the deed, and his asking price was deliciously low.” Robert sighed.

  “Then old Amos died—you know that story, I’m sure—and to everyone’s surprise, especially Cecil’s, Amos left the land and houses, all of it, to Maggie. Cecil tried to get her to sell, but she wouldn’t budge. We never knew why. We didn’t pursue it.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Ed pointed.

  Carrying a galvanized bucket, Maggie walked through the hay-scented fern at the edge of her lawn and into the rutted road that passed her house on its way to Ava’s, not a hundred yards from the patio. Unaware of those watching her, she plucked a lacy fern and sniffed it.

  She walked one way on the road for fifty feet, then in the other rut, back toward her house; she seemed to be looking for something she’d dropped, even scraping spots with the side of her shoe. In a sunken place in the turn, she stopped and sprinkled mussel shells over it, then went to the creek to rinse the bucket.

  “She’s made a chowder,” said Marion. She passed the plate to Robert. “Better eat up these little piggies before they get cold,” she said.

  “They do that to keep the road free of mud,” Rosalyn said, not to be outdone in island lore by a newcomer.

  “But there is no mud,” said Marion. “Not in this road.”

  “Because it runs by a house,” said Robert. “A hundred and fifty years of chowders and shells, you know.”

  Ed refilled the glasses all around. “I guess we just got lucky,” he said. “When we heard that her house in Head Harbor was for sale, we made her an offer for this place, and she accepted. Didn’t blink an eye.”

  “For Gus,” said Marion. She looked at her watch. “Remind me to check the soufflé. If the G.I. Bill hadn’t paid for his college, she would have sold them in ’45. Later, when he had a chance to buy a marine-supplies business in Portland, she did sell the houses and bought the company with him. She calls it a partnership.

  “The other day, when it was so foggy, I had been out for a walk when she invited me in for tea,” Marion said. “We talked for a long time at her kitchen table; I think we can get to be friends. I hope so. While she was telling about the year she had to leave college to come home to care for her father in Head Harbor, she was toying with a little beetle of some kind that had wandered onto the tablecloth. I would have died if it had been my table. Not toying with him, really, but herding him, corralling him with her finger, ever so gently, like this.”

  She brushed the glass table top slowly with her fingers.

  “Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, she crushed it.”

  Marion pressed her thumb on the table and twisted it.

  “She’s an interesting woman; she always has been,” Ros-alyn Owings said knowledgeably. “So businesslike, so strict, but ever so polite and friendly, and very much at ease with herself.”

  Ed wondered why she never married. “She must have been a knockout in her time,” he said to Robert.

  “Not a knockout, you know,” Robert said. “But she was a damn handsome woman. She still is.”

  “It’s a pity,” Rosalyn said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Marion. “She seems quite content to me. I love it when she shuts her eyes while she’s talking.”

  Gus was still in dark suit and tie when he knocked on Maggie’s screen door. She had changed when she got home but wore a black band of mourning on her sleeve. His red hair had faded to ginger and was showing a little gray over the ears. They embraced without a word.

  “Let’s sit on the porch, shall we? Take off your coat; it’s warm. I’ll get us something,” she said.

  “No, thanks,” he said and took her hand. “Let’s just sit. The wind will pick up soon with the coming tide. I’ve missed these old oak trees.”

  “You’ve put on weight since I saw you last,” she said. “When was it, Thanksgiving? But it becomes you. You look robust . . . successful.”

  He laughed. “You look the same as ever.”

  “You should never say that to someone over fifty,” she said. “Tell me what you thought of Paul Hotchkiss’s sermon for your father.”

  Gus rocked and loosened his tie, saying that he thought it was very nice and that Leah liked it even more.

  “I met your new neighbors. They were outside church afterward,” he said. “They invited me to come visit and see what they’ve done with Ava’s house, but I said I couldn’t this time. I don’t want to.”

  “You should,” she said. “You’d like them—and the way they’ve fixed up the house.”

  “I wish you hadn’t sold it. I mean I wish you hadn’t thought you had to.” He waved his hand as if to erase what he’d said. “I mean I wish the cove was still the way it always was.”

  “It’s still the same. New faces and such changes don’t matter to me,” she lied. “It’s your legacy, the way we’d hoped it would be, all of us. Now show me the photos of Susan and the little ones; you did bring them didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said and reached behind to his coat pocket. “And something else as well.”

  He handed her a packet of photos and laid an envelope face down on the arm of his rocker. When she’d seen the snapshots and predicted that the next child would be a girl, he handed her the envelope. It was addressed to her, in pencil, in Cecil’s uncertain hand.

  “Mother asked me to bring it over; it was among his papers.”


  She put on her glasses and read it slowly, a single page, then closed her eyes and handed it to Gus. It was dated the month before. Gus read, then read again.

  Dear Maggie

  You never liked me and never respected me. You thought I was cruel to Leah, and it’s true. I was. I can only say that I believe I have made it up to her since, and I think if you ask her she will say the same thing. She has forgiven me, God bless her.

  But not Leah, or any other mortal, can forgive me for the reason I am writing this letter. That night after the dance I followed Amos home. I wanted to beg him to deed the cove property to Leah. My reasons were selfish. I wanted to buy the Merrill and Hinckley store in Blue Hill, but it wasn’t just for me. It was for Leah and Gus, too, a chance for a better life off this island. I hope you believe that.

  Amos wasn’t home when I got to the cove. God, how I wish I had turned back then. Up at Ava’s I saw a light in the trees near the cabin. I thought he saw me coming, I swear he looked at me. I thought that when he turned away he was giving me the cold shoulder. He must not have heard me when I walked up to him. I said his name—that’s all, just his name—and he started and lost his footing and fell. I can still see his arms waving, trying to get his balance.

  How could I tell anyone—Leah, Gus, or you? The shame was too great. I thought the guilt would kill me; maybe it did. The longer I kept silent, the more impossible it was to tell anyone, and the more I hated myself. Please show this to Gus and Leah. I know that God will forgive me, and I hope that they, and you, will too.

  That’s all.

  Cecil Barter

  Gus squeezed the bridge of his nose and said he would like something to drink after all if she didn’t mind.

  “I can give you a glass of sherry,” she said as he folded the letter and returned it to the envelope.

  Gus didn’t respond. He stood up, leaned on the porch railing for a second, then walked across the dooryard to disappear among the out buildings behind the high ledge. He returned carrying a bottle of Demerara rum by the neck.

  “It’s aged,” he said, tilting it in the light.

  “Wherever did you find it?”

  “Under the floorboards in the toolshed,” he said. “I only now remembered. His woodpile reserve, he called it. Let’s have a toddy, for both of them.”

  “And for Morales and the other poor lost souls on the Indianapolis,” she said. “Jake Gardiner, too, wherever he may be.”

  At dusk, Marion Harper tapped rapidly on Ava’s window and waved to Ed to come outside. She walked him to the far edge of the patio, handed him the binoculars, and pointed down toward Maggie’s front yard. He saw her dim figure standing by the well, shaded from the last rays of skipping sunlight above by the shifting canopy of oaks.

  “What’s she doing,” Marion asked.

  “She’s pouring something into her well,” he said, disappointed. “From a bottle.”

  “What could that be?” Marion wondered. “Why would she do that? What is she putting in her drinking water?”

  “How would I know?” he asked, and handed her the binoculars.

  Maggie walked up the slope of the lawn and onto the smooth granite outcropping that rose between the house and the cove. She stood for a minute on the highest point over the water, then with a powerful underhand, she sent the empty bottle aloft, timed to the second to catch the blink of the lighthouse before it fell.