The Whiskey Sea

by Ann Howard Creel

  Silver was feeling better after his cold. He had sat on the porch until the snow began to blow sideways, hitting him in the face. He stoked a fire in the woodstove and sat down at the table that night.

  He cleared his throat. “I heard you made an indecent proposal today.”

  So Hawkeye had eavesdropped on her conversation with Hicks. And then told Silver. She knew it had to be him; Hicks would not have snitched. That demon Hawkeye would do anything to make her life more difficult.

  “Indecent?” she said. “Hardly.”

  Silver gave her a harsh glance. “It’s a bad idea I tell you.”

  “It’s the best idea I’ve had in years.”

  Picking up his fork and knife, Silver prepared to dig in. “Makes no sense to break the law when you don’t have to.”

  She grasped the tablecloth. “It makes perfect sense.”

  Silver’s eyes bored into hers. “Don’t do it.”

  “I can’t do it. I don’t have a boat, remember?”

  “You done right so far. You got yourself a good skill. You just work on the boats; that’s legal. But nothing more, ye hear?”

  She called for Bea to come out of the bedroom. Bea sashayed in and took her place at the table. Her presence usually put a smile on Silver’s face, but not tonight. He was still fuming about Frieda, who stabbed at her food as they ate in uncharacteristic silence, the food sticking in her throat. She couldn’t take Silver’s disapproving stare a moment longer. Sitting up tall, she pointed at Silver and Bea with her fork. “Look at us. We don’t drink whiskey or smoke tobacco. We don’t make easy money, even though it’s sitting five miles out on the water. If only we were churchgoers, we might qualify for sainthood.”

  Bea laughed. “Speaking of church,” she said, “old Emil paid a thousand dollars after the raid on his speakeasy, got out of jail, and then bought some new windows for the Episcopal church. He didn’t even leave town.”

  “See what I mean?” Frieda said to Silver.

  “Where’d you hear that story?” Silver asked Bea.

  “At school.”

  “I thought you went to school to learn about history and geography.”

  Bea smiled. “This is history being made, and it’s all about geography around here. We’re right in the hot spot. Besides, we have to gossip from time to time. It keeps things interesting.”

  Silver finally gave in and smiled at Bea.

  Frieda took a good look at her sister. She’d grown up overnight into a young woman. Now sixteen, she still held on to some little girl’s mannerisms, but she’d filled out, blooming into something beautiful amid the drabness of their existence. Paint peeling on the walls, scuffed floors, the smell of fish and cooking grease. Yellowed curtains and a sagging porch. Bea’s loveliness and fragility seemed out of place here.

  “And speaking of keeping things interesting,” Bea said to Frieda, “I want you to cut my hair tonight.”

  Bea’s hair trailed down almost to her waist. Every night she put it up in pin curls so that in the morning it fell in long, soft waves.

  “I want that new style, short, like the girls who dance the Charleston in the city.”

  “I like it long,” said Silver.

  “I don’t know how to cut hair,” said Frieda, who always kept hers pulled back with a bandanna or tucked under a hat.

  Bea waved a hand through the air. “How hard could it be?”

  After dinner Frieda sharpened a pair of scissors and followed her sister into the bedroom, where the only mirror—a cracked one—hung on the wall. Bea always spread her books and papers, along with magazine clippings of dresses and hats she liked, all over the bed. Bea pushed aside some of the papers and perched on the edge of the bed. She’d taken down the mirror and was holding it in front of her face, peering at herself as if already imagining a new, more sophisticated girl with a chic haircut.

  “Look at this bed!” Frieda exclaimed. “Always covered with your things! And last night you hogged all the covers.” Frieda breathed in the smell of Bea’s books, cheap lavender cologne, and the room’s faint scent of mold. “I wish I had my own bed.”

  “No one should have to sleep with you! All that tossing and turning in your sleep, as if you’re a boat lost at sea.”

  Bea turned her head this way and that as she gazed into the mirror. She flattened her hand and held it just below her chin. “Here. That’s where I want you to cut it.”

  “That’s too short.”

  “It’s my hair, not yours.”

  Frieda raked a brush through her sister’s hair.

  Bea cringed. “Ouch! You’re too rough.”

  Frieda didn’t respond, though her hands instinctively eased back.

  “Always too rough,” Bea said more pensively, smiling into the mirror, as if checking to make sure her teeth still sat in perfect alignment. “Just get on with it, will you? I have a book to finish and an exam tomorrow.”

  Frieda made the first cut and watched tendrils of hair drift down to the bedding like feathers, its softness so in opposition to the snow that had started falling earlier and then turned to the ice now clattering on the windows. She made another cut.

  “Speaking of beds . . .”

  Frieda held still and sucked in a breath. “Do you have to start each sentence that way?” she said, and parroted her sister’s higher-pitched voice: “Speaking of . . .”

  “Speaking of beds . . .” Bea repeated. “You should be sharing a bed with a husband by now. You’re twenty years old. Almost an old maid.”

  “Pipe down, and stop moving your head.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Of course I heard you. You’re beginning to sound like Silver.”

  Bea smiled at her reflection again and swept her eyes to Frieda, then brought them back to the mirror. “We all know you’re going to marry Hicks one day.”

  Frieda harrumphed. “If you insist on talking baloney, I’ll cut your hair down to your prissy white scalp!”

  A grunting noise came from the other room, a hfff that was almost animalistic. The scissors froze in Frieda’s hand. Then a thud, a muted whack. It didn’t sound like Silver pulling off his boots and letting them fall to the floor. And then a sigh.

  A chilling sensation gelled in Frieda’s spine. She tossed down the scissors and ran out of the bedroom.

  Silver, spittle foaming at his lips, lay on his side on the rug. His eyes were open and unmoving, his color close to blue. She leapt to his side and started calling his name.

  Silver was conscious but couldn’t speak, as if he were lost in some otherworld between life and death. Placing her hands on the sides of Silver’s face, Frieda peered at him. Only his eyes seemed capable of movement, and they looked into hers with a plea.

  “Bea, go run for the doctor!”

  The doctor said, “A stroke.”

  Frieda gulped down the taste of bile in the back of her throat. “Will he get better?”

  Hicks stood at her side with his arm around Bea, who was weeping.

  By then they’d moved Silver into the bedroom, all of Bea’s books and papers now strewn across the floor.

  The doctor seemed to consider each word carefully. “Hard to know. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Frieda squeezed her eyes shut. No!

  The one person who had always been their constant, their lighthouse, had now fallen.

  Bea sniffled louder, and Frieda looked her way. Her sister’s hair was still half-cut, the back short and the sides hanging down.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Three weeks passed, and Silver got no better. One side of his body was flaccid, and he was unable to speak. He could eat and drink if hand-fed, and he could use the old chamber pot a lady from the Catholic church had brought by, but he couldn’t walk or stand without someone supporting the side of his body that had died before he did. Frieda had stopped working to care for him so that Bea could return to school.

  During the day she made him meals of soup and mashed food. During the
night she slept on the floor, having given Bea the divan. Fighting with the blankets, she often got up to check that Silver was still there, still breathing. Only then could she summon sleep.

  On those rare days when the sun came out, she bundled him into sweaters and jackets and helped him limp and drag, limp and drag, out to the porch, sitting him in the old chair, where he’d always loved to linger after a day on the sea. As she sat beside him, she remembered the kind man who had taken them home on the day their mother had died, his patience with two little girls he had known nothing about, the way he had waited while they giggled and fought, pretended to be firm, then tucked them in at night. He had gone out every day on his boat, even when the weather was brutal. She saw him trudging back to the house after a long day on the water, the red light of the sunset landing on him, bringing that last warmth of the day back with him. The way he’d tried to protect the girls by placing himself between them and the hard-judging reach of the world, but still letting them step into it on their own two feet. All to have it come down to this. She shook her head, admonishing herself, realizing that one of the last things she’d said to him before his stroke amounted to complaining.

  From the beginning he’d told them the truth about their mother. Frieda had always known that her mother had lived on the edges of proper society, but as soon as she was old enough to ask in more detail, Silver had spelled it out in full, never once attempting to sugarcoat the facts. He had, of course, told them that their mother’s history had nothing to do with the girls she and Bea had turned out to be. This despite the fact that he knew the things that had happened to Frieda.

  It had started early, when parents of her classmates didn’t want their children to get too close to the bastard child, as if she carried an infectious disease. Then the boys had offered her a penny if she would let them look up her skirt, saying, “Like mother, like daughter.” The girls had been even more evil, because they were conniving in their insults. The final straw came one day when the girls had invited her to a party in the park; when she arrived, however, no one was there. After discovering a number of the girls hiding in the bushes, obviously there to witness and relish her confusion as she waited anxiously for a party that would never happen, her first thought had been to ignore them. But then something twisted inside her gut, and she chased those girls down, caught them, and pulled their hair hard. They left her alone after that. Bea had fared better. Perhaps her classmates had been nicer; perhaps the story had gotten stale, the years pushing the story to the backs of people’s minds. Plus Bea’s tactic had been to kill them all with kindness, and it had worked.

  Silver had handled both Frieda’s bitterness and Bea’s extreme friendliness with the same amount of humble grace, keeping them in rein with his love rather than with any shows of force. He’d admonished them to sit up straight and keep their room clean from time to time, but never did he lift a hand or raise his voice against them.

  He looked at her now as if he could see the buzzing bees of her thoughts; as if he knew everything and still understood what was happening around him; as if he wanted to console her. He might have lost control of some of his body, but Frieda knew that his mind was still there in full. The light of understanding still shone in his eyes. But when he opened his mouth to speak, it was like a fish gasping for life as it lay on the docks, and his face folded in on itself. His sad gaze told her that all the words he wanted to say lay in scattered piles in his mind, and that picking them up and putting them in order so they could make their way out of his mouth was beyond his bidding.

  She took his paralyzed hand and worked the fingers, already beginning to curl upon themselves like a claw. He had small hands with large knuckles and leathery, chapped skin. After rubbing each finger, she spread them out straight and then watched them curl back again. She swallowed back her sadness and stared hard into his eyes, where she could see the apology: I’m sorry I hurt you. I shouldn’t have sold the boat. But even stronger, there, again, was that plea—focused, querying.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said. “I’m going to take care of everything.”

  A week later she hired a maid who had some experience with general nursing to stay with Silver during the day. She also went to the bank and applied for a loan against the house. Though she needed to supply some papers to the banker about her work income, she’d been assured that the loan would likely be approved. Silver was proud of owning the house free and clear, but a loan was the only way to pay for his care now. The doctor had come again, saying that Silver had high blood pressure, something Frieda had never heard of, and telling her that had caused the stroke and could cause another one. Silver needed to eat mostly rice and fruit and no salt.

  On her first day out of the house, the sun had also emerged, like a promise of better days. Still, it was cold, and she pulled her cap down over her ears. Despite her emotional exhaustion, she walked down to the docks, where the men and their boats had been awaiting her return. Many of them asked after Silver and told her about the engine work they needed done. She took all the jobs she could, worked out her pay, and then planned each job one by one in her head. She’d be caught up on her work in a week’s time.

  She was preparing to go buy parts when Hawkeye told her that a man named Dutch wanted to talk to her.

  Looking at Hawkeye in his good eye, Frieda managed a nod of her head. Maybe Dutch needed work done on his boat, and Hawkeye was giving her a lead. She couldn’t thank him, however, not for all the tea in China. He represented all that had gone wrong in this town.

  She headed over to see Dutch, one of the most successful shore runners based out of Highlands. Once a lobsterman, he’d started with a twenty-eight-foot dory that could do about fifteen knots when light. But it could do only half that when fully loaded, so recently he’d bought a forty-foot Jersey sea skiff that could do thirty knots to outrun the guardsmen who were playing it straight. When Dutch saw Frieda, he moved from sitting at the helm and stepped up to the transom.

  “Welcome back,” he said to her. Dutch was big and blond, a man in his late thirties with huge rounded shoulders and a trim waist, a perpetually reddened face, a deep cleft in his chin, and an overall look that said, Don’t even think of messing with me. He could’ve been descended from the first Vikings who had landed in America, and he also could’ve been a contender for Bea’s father. But she couldn’t think about that now. She could tolerate him. He had the pointed, squinty, farsighted eyes of a good sailor and didn’t talk much unless he’d been drinking. When he did speak, he went straight to the heart of a matter.

  He said, “My engineer took sick.”

  Frieda knew the man, a fine mechanic named Hector who had been her biggest competition for work along the docks before he started working solely for Dutch.

  Dutch laughed with a smirk on his face. “Well, that’s his story at least. Truth is, he’s either getting cold feet or getting whipped by his wife to get himself out. He don’t want to go out no more.” He shrugged. “He can do OK out here working honest, but he might be my drop man from time to time.”

  She nodded and listened.

  “We’re only a crew of three, and normally I got to have men big enough to catch the bags they throw down from the rummers out there. You’re too small; you won’t be able to do it.”

  She gulped and let her eyes drift over the boat, a beauty with her square stern, bluff bow, and engine amidships, with room for cargo fore and aft. She had looked at Dutch with renewed respect when he named the boat Wonder, much to the guffaws and taunts of the fishermen around him. “So, what are you proposing?”

  “When we go out there, we got to move fast. We pull up and tell them what we want, and they start tossing down the bags. If we get swells, we can take some hellish beatings. Water can leak down into the engine no matter how hard we aim to keep it dry.”

  “I know.” She also knew that Dutch would not be telling her all of this without some purpose behind it. Her heart thumped in expectation, and she looked at th
e boat now in a new way. It was made of very thin wood—maybe five-eighths of an inch thick. Not much of a barrier between sailor and sea. And she already knew the shore boats ran at night without lights to hide from the coast guard boats in the area. If they hit a submerged log or other wreckage, it would go through the hull like a pickax through a cardboard box. And the weight of the powerful engine meant the boat would sink in mere minutes.

  “Anyways, that would be your job when we get to the rummies. You have to keep that engine dry as you can and squirt pyrene if you have to. We never shut down, in case we have to leave quick. The other day some idiot’s engine caught fire because the gas rags he was using to clean up oil got on the hot engine.

  “We go out mostly when there’s little or no moon, leave at dusk. It’s close to an hour and a half out and more than two and a half back, then the drop-off, and we bring her back in. A full night’s work. I need me a full-time mechanic for the runs and to always keep her in tip-top shape. You get twenty-five cents a case we sell and twenty-five dollars a week, same as I paid Hector.”

  She squinted back at him. “Why me?”

  Dutch stood still, his eyes full of surprised reappraisal. Perhaps he thought his offer was so good he’d never considered that she wouldn’t simply jump at the chance.

  “You’re the best man for the job.”

  Frieda smiled wryly. She didn’t mind his choice of words. That’s exactly how she wanted them to see her—as another man. She hadn’t worn a dress in two years or bothered with her hair, and still it hadn’t been much of a deterrent to some of the crusty old dogs who made leering remarks from time to time. It revolted her.