by Dawn Tripp
From the Point, Patrick makes his way alone back to Skirdagh, dragging his damaged ankle up Thanksgiving Lane. The windmill near the Point Church has snapped off, trees pulled up from the ground, their roots exposed. They leave vast holes in the earth.
At Skirdagh, the silver willow has fallen onto the main house, gashing the roof, the top branches cracked through the attic windows. The wind has blown off the downspouts, and the water overfloods the gutters, running down the sidewall and into the foundation.
Patrick enters through the back door into the kitchen. The chickens fly at him, screeching, a rage of beaks and wings in the dark. He gropes for the counter and grasps the thing nearest him, which happens to be a fry pan, shields it up to his face, and strikes. There is an ear-splitting shriek and then a thud as one of the hens falls limp on the floor. They flutter in shadows around him, and he brandishes the fry pan. He shoos them into the pantry and locks them in.
He stands for a moment in the darkness, and he can hear a sound, a low hollow sound that is not quite human, straining through the floor underneath him.
He lights the kerosene lamp and opens the cellar door. Down at the bottom of the narrow steps is a gently heaving surface—bottles, cans, old lamps float by, turning aimless circles, they strike up against one another, then drift away. He grows dizzy watching them. His stomach heaves at the sight of more water—so much water—everywhere flooded—a dressed fish floats by, its wrappings slowly trailing loose. Lazarus-like, it folds back into the shadow, and he is left staring at the endless rippling surface.
He takes the dead hen and throws her down the stairs. The splash sweeps through the cellar, a slow rocking wash up against the walls.
Nauseous, he shuts the door and turns the key.
They will not come back, he decides then. When he finds Eve, and he will find her, he will explain that this town is a thankless town. A menacing town. He will explain to her that the sound of water has become a poison to his brain. It is a sound he will never be able to sleep near again.
I know that you love it, he says out loud. I understand that. And you will always love it. We will hang photographs. We will have a painting made. But we will not come back.
With the lamp, he searches the first floor of the house. Half the dining room window has blown out. The curtain rods sag under the weight of water soaked through the windowcloth. Charles’s study is locked, and Patrick can smell the kerosene leaking through the towel stuffed under the door. He pulls at the knob, pushing hard against the lock with his body. It won’t give. He takes the fire poker from the library and wedging it into the frame, he cleaves the door open. The air inside the room is dense with heat, the kerosene box humming away in its corner. Charles lies slumped over his desk, his face covered with ink. The words have copied themselves from the wet pages onto his cheek. Patrick drags him out into the hall, sits him up against the wall, and checks his pulse. It is faint, but still there. He pulls him by the boots down to the library and leaves him lying on the hooked rug next to the fireplace.
He goes upstairs, exhausted, to his bedroom.
He notices the chunks of plaster on the bed. The crack in the ceiling. A water stain vaguely shaped like the countries of Northern Africa spreads around it. One darker patch in the center slowly drips into a puddle on the floor.
He sets the oil lamp down, fills the washbasin, and lines up his shaving cream and his razor on the dressing table. He changes into his pajamas and draws the shades.
He sits down in front of the mirror, lathers the cream into a beard on his face, and dips the blade in. It is like the foam on surf, he thinks, and nicks himself on the jaw. He shoves away the thought and starts again from the edge of his ear. He draws the razor down into the hollow of his cheek. His hand is shaking, and he struggles against himself to hold it still. He cuts a crooked swath clear, rinses the blade, and flicks his wrist as if he could shake the trembling out of it. He starts again, from the top of the cheekbone. He draws the razor in a straight-edged line, tight against his face and down.
A white film of lather has gathered on the surface of the water in the basin. As Patrick goes to dip the blade again, the water kicks up suddenly on its own, a ripple spreading from the center to the edge of the shaving bowl. It strikes the side and turns back.
Patrick freezes, his body taut, the trembling again in his wrist. He puts down the razor and leans over the basin. He peers inside it, looking for the source of that small ripple. He peers with such intensity, it is as if he half-expects the storm to be there, circling, gathering in the shallow lathery water of the washbasin. He feels a drop on the back of his neck, the sensation cool, startling. His head jerks, he looks up and sees the second crack in the ceiling. The second water stain. A smaller shape this time—perhaps the state of Arkansas. Dark in the center. His hand reaches around to the back of his neck as if the drop is solid, as if he could remove it from his skin like a piece of crystal or a thorn. His fingers touch wetness. A slight trail of it, moving down between his shoulder blades. His face is half-finished. Half-covered with the white lather, and now, as he looks at himself in the mirror stained with oil light, it is as if the mirror is the washbasin and the face inside it a sky, half-obscured with clouds. He steadies his hand, dips the razor, and starts to cut into the other side. He draws the blade down sharply, rapidly, a stilted snatch, a nick, a scrape, too close to the skin, too far away. He just needs to get through this. To get the job done and finish with this day. He will crawl into the bed and burrow down under the sheet. He will let his face, clean and shaven, sink into the pillow. And sleep will come, it will come quickly, gently, it will wash everything that has happened, everything that he has seen, out of his brain.
He is working the razor into the dent of his chin when the ceiling cracks again. The water stain in the shape of Arkansas splits down the center, and a loaf-size chunk of plaster comes loose from the lathe. It strikes him on the back of the skull, and his face knocks forward toward the mirror with the impact, then retracts and sags, limp off his neck. His chin drops to his chest, and he pitches down, slowly, unconscious. His face lands in the washbasin, and he lies there, the bubbles bleeding up through the soapy water.
CHAPTER 27
Afterweeks
The next day, they found the bodies. They found them face down, floating with debris in the shallows. They found an older couple buried under the wreckage of their house, while their small English terrier barked and barked, pawing with its small paws into the roof as if it could dig back down to what it had lost. The dog hung around the wreckage long after the bodies had been taken back to the Point. It would not stop barking, and one of the men who had been hired as a searcher took pity on the thing and brought it home.
They had never seen anything like it. They thought it was the end of the world. The last great storm had been the Gale of September 23, 1815, when the whaling ships and coasters were still running in the harbor. No one remembered the Gale of 1815. No one still living had been alive back then to see it.
They pulled the telephone poles back up and tied them to the trees that were still standing. They cut the trees that were lying in the road or drew them off to the side so the streets grew wide enough to allow a single lane of cars to pass.
The day after the storm was a perfect day. Calm. No wind. The sky so blue it had sound. They found one man standing up in a mosquito ditch. Dead. With his legs stuck to the knees in the mud, holding him erect. They found bodies tangled in wires and rubble. They found Joe Gallows crushed underneath one sidewall of his pavilion and Russ Barre drowned, caught in his own trawl. They found the Horseneck postmistress, Millie Tripp, headfirst in the sand dunes, but her house, with its bottom knocked out, had floated across the let all the way up to Pettey Heights. The wind had taken it so gently that bottles on the back of the toilet were perfectly intact and standing lined up in the way they had been left.
The storm had come on a moon tide. It had gutted the land of East and West Beach. The electric was ou
t for weeks. Even north of Hixbridge there was flooding; chickens roosting in the telephone poles; cedar and maple trees strewn in the road like cinder ash. The salt spray, driven by the hurricane wind, killed trees up to seven miles away from the sea.
The summer cottages from the harbor had washed up in the marshes, in backyards, and fields. Portions of the Kerr and Ryder homes were found washed up on the golf links of the Acoaxet Club by the eighth tee. Dismembered second stories lay capsized in Corbin’s pasture. All thirteen boathouses were swept away, and River Road was eaten thin as a blade of straw at the herring ditch.
On the Horseneck side, houses were blown miles up the East Branch. They beached on Great Island, Gunning Island, and Cadman’s Neck. Most of the lobster boats, outboards, and skiffs had been busted up and sunk, and the ones that were not had been driven into the woods, sailboats set right up in the trees. Along the riverbanks were pyres of debris: timber, broken walls, roofs, boards: the shambles heaped as high as the houses they had once been.
Horseneck itself was a wasteland of sand and stone. The paved roads were gone, the macadam chewed to pieces by the surf. Nothing stood higher than a picket fence. Lawns were flooded underwater. The flat ground on either side of East Beach Road had been narrowed by three hundred feet, and even after the tide pulled back, there was less than a hundred yards of land between the let and the sea. Every house, outhouse, restaurant, shack, mansion, shed, and store had been leveled. In the marshes of the let, the rubble gathered: the peak of a roof, an overturned sink, the base of a fireplace, a half-smashed chimney. For years afterward, duck hunters would find the remains: a toilet, a vase, an iron box, a child’s doll, a broken trestle bed half-submerged in the shallows.
They had said that the stone house—the mill owner’s house—would never move. The bulk of it. The sheer grandeur of its four thousand square feet. They found its septic pipes, one pillar, and a few steps on the spot where they thought it might have been.
At the Point, mud a foot thick coated the dock house and had to be scraped off with a spade before a hose could wash the bulk of it away. Survivors from the Shuckers Club including North Kelly took work with the Hurricane Emergency Project, trimming trees along the roads and combing the let for the dead. The town leased skiffs from the fishermen who still had them, and the searchers went out, two at a time, with grappling hooks, to dredge. They’d catch the hook on a shirt, a pair of trousers, or a neck and pull the body to the surface the way they used to pull the whiskey loads.
There was one body they could not find. It was under a house, half in the river and half on marsh. They could smell it, but they couldn’t find it. They brought down the dogs and pulled off the first and second floors to get that body out. It was a cook from West Beach. A black woman. She was facedown with a crushed skull, and unrecognizable except for her blackness. Eyes gone. Fish-gutted, one man said. He wedged his boot under the body and flipped it back facedown.
They brought the bodies in to shore, left them in ruined skiffs near the docks. They left them uncovered and went back out to search. In the afternoons, they’d load the collected dead into a truck and drive them up to Potter’s Funeral Home. After a day, Potter’s ran out of room, and twelve or thirteen bodies lay wrapped in blankets on the back lawn.
The gorgeous weather continued. Day after day of impeccable blue sky. Light dazzling. Feverish. Inexhaustible.
In the afterweeks, they got to talking about the barrier beach—how there was no way off it when the water came. How it was a precarious, even dangerous, place. Just a spit of land really. Too thin. Too exposed. Slung like a crooked finger off the mainland. Not a place to live. They wondered if the summer people would think the same way or if they would come back with their money and rebuild.
They argued over the height of the tidal wave. The ones who were there, trapped on East Beach when it struck, contended that it was at least fifty feet. Born suddenly, they said, out of nothing. A rogue wave.
There were others who saw it. They had abandoned houses on West Beach and spent the night in the dunes. They claimed there were three waves, of the rolling type which came across the bay. The third, they said, was the tallest, but no more than twenty feet from base to crest.
There were certain stories they would tell:
Of the two old sisters, Becky and Muriel White, whose hayloft was full of Tiffany china, and how they chose to save the sheep instead.
The story of Clemmie Nette Weld, twelve years old, who saw her father drown and saved herself by stripping her overclothes and shoes and floating away on a washbasin, as the current stole her like a piece of foam up into the East Branch.
They would tell the story of the last bus carrying children from the factory school as it came down the hill from Smith’s Hollow, past the Boan Farm, its windshield flushed with sheets of rain, wipers frantic, a barreling yellow, long and unstable, it crossed where there was no bridge left. The wheels skimmed over the water that had washed out the deck and groped for the opposite side.
They asked the driver afterward how he had done it, how he had saved those children by such an act of faith.
“Never thought about the bridge being missing, I guess,” he said.
It was Maggie who found Patrick the next morning drowned in his shaving water—the oily cream had collected into a halo around his scalp and his hair was strung through with plaster. Charles woke up midafternoon, with a slight hangover from the kerosene that slurred his speech. He would have a permanent paralysis in his left hand so he couldn’t butter his own toast without fumbling the knife and, after that, he let Maggie butter it for him.
Eve found the poem her father had written with his mind drunk on fumes. She typed it up and sent it in to the North American Review, where it appeared six months later. She showed him the copy with his name attached to it. He said it was not something he recognized. But he cut it out anyway, folded it carefully, and placed it somewhere safe. He kept the issue of the Review on his desk, turned open to the excised page. He didn’t mention writing again. For the most part, it seemed he had forgotten the passion. Once in a while, however, it would sidle up behind him. Close. Like a shadow. Real and not real. He would reach for his pen, but then the light would shift, and the desire would be gone. He spent most of his time in the study, and Jake cut a window into the outside wall. They moved the desk so he could look out across the lawn. In the winter, when the leaves were stripped, he watched the top edge of the river in milky, rose-hued flashes through the trees.
The outbuildings behind Skirdagh were gone, torn off their shallow foundations. The shed landed in the cherry grove at the bottom of Salter’s Hill, and the outhouse was found half a mile north, impaled on the iron gate of the Tripp Cemetery off Temperance Lane. Only the boathouse remained. The water had shelled the inside, the windows were blown out, the door broken off its hinges, but the structure of it had somehow stayed intact.
They did not find the old woman. Eve knew where to look for her, and the following spring, when a new pier was built off the end of Cape Bial, she walked out one afternoon on a high tide and sat down at the end. She leaned over her swelled belly and looked down through the water toward the unwrinkled face shimmering, staring back at her out of those green depths.
The child is born in June. Throughout that summer of 1939, carrying the baby in her arms and a small bag on her back, Eve walks down John Reed Road to East Beach. The macadam is still torn, un-patched since the storm. But the summer houses have begun to rise again, slowly, one by one. Jake is building a stone terrace on a new house at the end of East Beach Road. Eve arrives early. She unpacks the lunch from the bag and sits on a pile of raw stones to wait for him with the baby in her arms, pink fists crying to the sky.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In a perfect world, I would have traveled through every place I have written about in this book. But I live on a barrier beach, and I rarely drive over the bridge to leave it. I am a most imperfect traveler. This is a work of fiction, and there are point
s in the book where I have bent geographic and historical detail to fit my story. I wrote this novel out of my passion for the landscape of the town where I live. I have tried to be true to that landscape—its beauty and its quirks, the rhythms of its seasons and its tides. However, I did not even begin to try to capture the lives and characters of its inhabitants. I did recount the actual adventures of a few Westporters, no longer alive, to give the novel context. Apart from that, with the exception of several historical figures, the people in this book are not based on any real persons, living or dead. The stories in this book are not based on any actual events, with the exception of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which ravaged this section of the coast.
TO STEVE
You are the reason my sun rises in the morning.
I will always be grateful to you for
your inexhaustible support and,
of course, for your passion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With regard to local history and descriptions of the Hurricane of 1938 and its impact on Westport, the following works were invaluable as I was researching and writing this book.
Allen, Everett S., The Black Ships. New York: Little, Brown, 1965, 1979.
——, A Wind to Shake the World. New York: Little, Brown, 1976.
Gillespie, Janet, A Joyful Noise. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
——, With a Merry Heart. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Jacobs, Christina L., The Natural History and Plants of the Cherry and Webb Conservation Area. Printed by UMass Dartmouth Print Shop, 1993.