The Season of Open Water

by Dawn Tripp

  On the other side of the mud dock, Caleb Mason and Wes Wilkes push off, bound on the Mary Jane.

  The young Coast Guard officer on the deck of patrol 317 waves them off. “Have a grand time out there tonight, Wes.”

  “Sure.” Wilkes grins. “You, too.”

  “See you out there then?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  The Mary Jane circles away from the wharf, out into the channel, then heads toward the mouth. The Coast Guard patrol pushes off a few moments later. She backs around and trails them from a distance.

  “You’re off your hinges, Lyons,” says Swampy Davoll. With his eyes, he follows the two boats as they head off down the river. “Someday they’ll find your elbows under a pile of stones.”

  Lyons laughs. “Don’t be so worried after your man Dirk McAllister. Like I say, I’d take a bet with you that sooner, more than later, he’ll turn up.”

  Noel

  Noel knows what his grandson does. He doesn’t like it, but at the same time he knows it is not bad work for Luce. His grandson has always had a ken for danger, a nose for it. What surprises Noel is how Luce keeps his mouth shut. Over that first winter and into the spring, he doesn’t talk about what he does or where he goes, not even to Bridge. He’ll bring home small gifts for Cora, which she accepts without a word: trinkets, plum sweets, a jar of fancy southern marmalade. He buys a new pullover for Bridge, and a pair of oxford bag trousers and a trilby hat for himself. Apart from that, though, he seems to have his mind set on saving up his money.

  Sometimes on a morning after he has been gone half the night, when Bridge and Noel are working in the shop or in the garden, they will break for a cup and a smoke, and Bridge will read from the newspaper aloud. She will read through the headline news about the mill strikes in New Bedford, the bread lines, the picket songs, and the rallies. She will skip ahead a page and find a smaller piece that reports on the exploits of the Black Duck or the Eider—a harrowing chase, an exchange of gunfire, an arrest or two, aliases given, and a wry line about some other men that slipped away. The silence will heave up between them as they both wonder without saying what part, if any, Luce had played—if he had been in the thick of it, or on the fringe. They wonder what it was he had done the night before that made him sleep so deep into the afternoon. Even when he wakes, groggy, ravenous, they can see the adventures still in his wrinkled clothes, dark things not yet shaken out of him.

  “It’s nothing you should think about being mixed up in,” Noel says to Bridge one day. It is a warm afternoon, toward the end of March, and they are sitting outside in the sun. There are new buds on the swamp maples, and the world seems to tremble, on the verge of breaking out into spring. Bridge is bent over the newspaper, reading.

  “Wherever he is,” Noel goes on, “is no good place for you to be.”

  Bridge glances up at him, surprised. “I really don’t think of him at all,” she blurts out. Then she bites her lip, her face flushed, and he realizes that she has a secret.

  “You don’t think about who?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh yes, there was something.” He smiles.

  “Luce,” she says. “We were talking about Luce. Right?”

  “I was. You weren’t.”

  She shakes her head and begins to fold up the newspaper. She folds it carefully, tightly, along its creases, then folds it again and puts it away into the pocket of her coat. “Come on, then,” she says, standing up. She brushes off her trousers. “Back to work. Don’t get lazy on me.”

  He laughs and follows her into the shop. He sits back down at the worktable with a pencil and several sheets of draft paper. He is drawing out a set of plans for a new dory Howie Sherman has asked him to build. Bridge goes to the corner and starts to sort through a pile of wood. They work in silence for a while, then Noel asks, “You think there’s hope for the Sultan of Swat this coming year? You think he’ll break his own record?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You want to make a penny bet on it?”

  “You’re betting more than sixty home runs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll take that bet.” But she doesn’t look up. She keeps her head down, sawing out a length of wood. Her actions are quick and precise, her mouth in a thin stubborn line.

  “What are you cutting all that wood out for anyhow?” he asks.

  “I’m building you two new sawhorses,” she says, still working the ripsaw. “I told you that before.”

  “You sure you’re not just doing something to keep your mind off something else?”

  She ignores him.

  “Whatever happened to that fellow who gave you a ride home from the Grange a few months back?”

  She freezes, but only for a moment. Then she puts down the ripsaw. There is sawdust on the sleeve of her shirt. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Can’t lie to me, Bridge, you know that,” he grins at her. He has guessed and she is furious, he can see it in her eyes.

  “What are you digging for, Papa?”

  “Is there anything worth digging for?”

  “Absolutely nothing.” But her face is flushed, and she fiddles with a raw edge on a piece of the wood she has cut.

  “The night you went to the Grange, you got a ride home. I recognized the old engine on that car from the sound, not many of those around, and I knew whose it was. I was surprised when that car pulled up in front of our house, more surprised when I saw you get out of it.”

  “Oh,” she says. “That car.”

  “You remember now?”

  “I think so. But that was no one. Just a man I met at the Grange. We didn’t really meet. I started walking home. He happened to drive by. He saw me walking and offered me a ride. It was a cold night. A ride home. Nothing more. That’s all it was. I don’t know why you’re getting so worked up about it.” She walks across the shop. From the shelf on the wall, she takes down a mallet, a few pieces of sandpaper, a tin can of pegs. “Is this all the sandpaper we’ve got?”

  “He seems like a good man.”

  She is poking around in the tin can. “He might be. I have no idea. I don’t know him at all. I don’t think about him. I don’t know why you think I do.”

  He smiles. “I didn’t say you did.”

  She puts the can back on the shelf.

  “All I’m saying, Bridge, is that you might do well to let a man like that into your thoughts now and then.”

  She turns to look at him. She stares. “That’s enough, Papa. You have to stop talking about it, or I’ll have to shut him out of my thoughts for good.” She is gripping the mallet in her fist by her side. Her eyes are serious, and she is so obviously rattled and trying to keep herself in order that he bursts out laughing. She grabs a small chunk of wood and throws it at him. He ducks and it hits off the stovepipe. Now she is laughing too.

  “Not another word about it,” she says.

  “Not a word.”

  She wipes her arm across her face. “It’s hot in here, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t feel hot to me.”

  She shoots him a look and he grins. She walks to the door and cracks it open. Cool air rushes in.

  He knows her well enough to let it go. He does not bring it up again. But he notices small changes—how she files her nails, how she takes a little more care with her hair. That man has gotten under her skin, he thinks. That lucky man.

  They plant peas and onions the first week of April. The herring are thick in the run. The days pass quickly, and the air is full of signs, as if the world has accelerated, new life swept into a small tight space and moving fast. Noel can feel it in the river, the brown water swelling up against the banks with the runoff from places higher north. He can smell it in the sweet tannic reek of rotten leaves.

  Early May, schoolie bass come into the river. Noel and Bridge go down to the dock to ready the skiff. They throw burlap sacks down along the bottom and fill the hull with buckets of riverwat
er so the wood swells. For the first several hours, the water dribbles out between the seams. When the boat has drained, they fill it again and leave it there overnight. By morning, there are no leaks left at all. Noel bails the boat and takes it out to set his crab traps and his eel pots. He staggers them along the ledges and the rocks between Hix Bridge and Indian Hill.

  By mid-June the summer people have begun to come back into town: window boards pried off the houses at the beach, rugs beaten and slung out to air over porch rails. The wind works through their fringes. Noel does not like summer. It brings the out-of-towners, their autos, their smells and sounds and crowds, their clambakes and surfbathing picnics on the beach, garden parties, lawn parties, men in white flannels and blue blazers, women in cloche hats and pongee silks. They alter the river and the light. The white sails of their teak boats dash like scraps of paper as they tack back and forth across the channel. They build angler stands in the mud off the islands in the East Branch. Their svelte new touring cars tail one another down the road, horns, shouts, brightly colored scarves waving. They clutter the space so the creatures of the off-season—the animals, the locals, and the dead—are not so free to move.

  There is a loneliness Noel feels every year this season comes around, a loneliness in the long days of what they call “fine weather” and “fair skies.” The sunlight pierces his eyes like nails, and still the heat builds, day after day, implacable and sultry, heat clinging to the earth.

  It is in the summer months that he feels the longing most, a nibbling in his heart for the sea and his old life. He will miss the company he used to keep—his old friend Rui and the other blue-water men. He will remember the long days on the Pacific as the ship passed through the equator line. Their skins grew parched and eaten by the sun, dark as tarred rigging. He remembers how once, between islands, they ran low on fresh water. His tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. His lips cracked and bled. The sea stretched taut, light splitting off the surface like a blade.

  It is in the summer months that his mind is occasionally troubled. Haunted by old thoughts, shadow things. Hannah. He never felt a deeper, more devastating desire than the desire he felt for Hannah. It was a desire that made him cross oceans. A desire that complicated, even compromised, his love for her.

  Hannah was a naturalist. She had the mind and the eye of a naturalist. A piercing mind. A ruthless, scientific eye.

  By the time their life together ended, she had turned open nearly every pocket inside him. She had picked every lock on every door he kept closed. She had pried open every sealed window and stood in every walled-off room, and there was a part of him that had resented her for how she would always insist on peering into those dark and unmarked places not meant to be seen. Now he walks alone through those same rooms. He draws down old things from their shelves—a dream he had once of building her a house by the ocean. He had imagined a sunken front room, just lower than sea level, and built so that, on a surge, the waves would strike up against the window glass. She had laughed when he told her. “Such an impractical house, Noel,” she had chided him, “but then you are, of course, my most impractical fool.” Her eyes were light as she spoke (he remembers this), and she was happy. He had held her and said nothing more about it. He buried into her body, smooth and bare and young against him, a swift soft summer darkness. It came and went so quickly. Throughout their life together he would go on dreaming of that house. He did not speak of it to her again but he carried the dream. He swore that someday he would build that house for her and she would love it.

  There was only one point of true soreness between them, only one point of disagreement where they cut up against one another and left wounds, and that was over God. If Noel saw God at all (and he rarely did), he saw God in the river, God in the clouds or in a crow’s eye. He had no patience for Hannah’s God—the god of churches, the god of men. Secretly, he felt it was the one place where she faltered—where her mind, ordinarily so brilliant, grew a blunt edge. It was a difference between them they noted early on, when they were still young together. They shrugged it off, joked about it even. It was a fissure, a hairline crack, nothing more. But it widened as they aged. It came to matter. When Hannah first got sick, it was her God she turned to. It was her God she clung to. Noel hated her God for that.

  In August, he takes another job for Honey Lyons, another boat to refit. This one is not a good fishing boat. It has already been revamped, already junked once, which makes it easier. He does not feel he is taking something beautiful apart. But even so he imagines he can hear her—Hannah—mocking him for taking the work at all, for being so easily seduced by the lure of the cash. He hears her voice in his head and sometimes on the wind, calling him a scoundrel or a fool, as she used to do—with that gorgeous derisive glint in her eye that made him angry, that made him want her.

  He begins to look for signs of the change of season: blue cornflowers, the first turning of the Virginia creeper vines toward a brilliant autumn red, the ripening of the corn and wild blackberries to their full sweetness, the first monarch butterfly, the goldenrod and yarrow. The days grow shorter, and then one morning, he steps out and feels that first glint of coolness on the air.

  The following Sunday, a storm breaks up the air, brings in the high surf, and a front of cooler weather. The tide washes all the way up to the edge of the front cottage gardens. The morning after the rains end, Noel goes down to the beach early. The fog is still thick. He wanders along the tidal edge, pailing up sea clams. At the corner where West Beach ends at the causeway, he finds a body floating facedown in the shallows, the flesh gone, the rib cage full of crabs. There is a knife hooked to the belt, “D. McAllister” engraved into the blade.

  Bridge

  Bridge can see the new turn in her brother’s eyes, the quick new life. He begins to rub shoulders with the rich. Honey Lyons sets it up, hires him out. Luce gophers whiskey in to them, and in turn, he is invited to their parties. Lady Judith Martin’s Dead of Winter party. Dick Wheeler’s Spring Time Fling. In the summer, the parties become more frequent. He goes to lawn parties, supper dances, horseshoe matches and croquet. He will come home late, and the next morning he will tell Bridge the details of how he was introduced to one knot of them and then another. He laughs as he tells her how the women skirt him. He is a curiosity—a newly discovered, perhaps dangerous, token from the local underworld. They are careful at first, haughty, shy. They follow him with their eyes, then start to flirt, as women will. “Rakishly good-looking,” one says to another in a tone just loud enough for him to overhear. He teases them, and they blush and laugh, a little nervous; they look at him with some fear as if he might be a predator, as if they are unsure of exactly who he is— not one of them of course—but still . . .

  He laughs as he tells Bridge about it, and still the invitations roll in. Once in a while, he’ll try to coax her into coming with him.

  “Come on. It’ll be a big night. We’ll have a fine laugh, fine food, music. You can be my date.”

  She scoffs him off.

  Halfway through the summer, he tells her that he has started up a small cottage operation of taking out the rich on his runs for a lark. “Idiot’s work,” he calls it. “Joy rides for the money guys.” A few of them will book him for the night. He’ll play the part and set the whole thing up like theater. He’ll drive them out in the boat to Rum Row and the floating liquor stores. Occasionally he’ll spice things up with a fake chase and scripted, preplanned danger. It is seasonal work. Summer work. He gets well paid.

  One morning, the last week in August, he stops by the barn. Bridge is in the stable mucking out the stall. She has swept down the floor, raked the old bedding into the wheelbarrow, and dumped it outside in the manure pile. When Luce comes around, she is laying out the new hay with a pitchfork. He talks as she works. He leans against the doorway, his arms crossed, and tells her about a job he has coming up—on the last night of the month. He is taking out a few of the summer folk—Borden, you know him, don’t you?
He’s got the knockabout beauty wife. Al Devereaux—the Frenchie—and another fellow, a friend of theirs, Vonn. Vonner. Some name like that.

  Bridge stops for a moment, her hands gripping the fork, but Luce doesn’t seem to notice. He is looking across the yard. “Sounds good enough,” she says.

  “Well it is. But I need an extra hand.”

  Bridge doesn’t answer. She puts down the pitchfork and dumps a measure of oats into the trough. One of the stumped legs has broken off. She sets a block of wood under it to level the tray.

  “It’ll be a big night,” Luce says.

  “You’re a ’tute.”

  His face reddens. “Hell I am. They pay a fine dime, Bridge.”

  “And that’s exactly it.”

  “They’re not all bad. Just rich, born into it. You can’t hold it against them.”

  “Which is funny coming from you since, of anyone, you do seem to hold it against them.”

  He glares at her. “So that’s a no, I take it.”

  “Are all of them going out with you in the boat?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “I’ll do it if I can go out too.”

  “Out to the ship?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I need you on shore.”

  She picks up the pitchfork again and thins out a clump in the hay. “Come on, Bridge.”

  “Let me go out.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have things set up.”

  “That’s not it at all,” she teases. “You’re worried a girl on the boat’s going to wreck your reputation.” She laughs.

  He doesn’t answer. The late summer light is weightless on his shoulders. His face is in shadow, and she cannot see his eyes. Behind him, in the tall oak, there is a flash of a yellow warbler through the leaves.

  “Come on, Bridge,” he says again.

  Her thoughts shift again to Henry. Then she leans the fork against the barn wall and brushes her hands off on her overalls. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll do it.”