by Anna Solomon
“That’s kind of you to offer,” Emma said. “That’s very kind.” She spoke slowly, trying to delay, so she could think—think! Why didn’t she have a gun? What had Story been thinking, giving her these boats and not a gun? Roland had a gun but he’d taken it with him and besides, if she had a gun, what would she do with it? Even Liam, the oldest boy, could not reliably shoot a squirrel. So there was no gun and no one to shoot a gun and she had wasted time thinking of it. “Thank you, but we’re not far,” she said, wondering, as she said it, if maybe, if the men knew where they were and Emma told them how to go from here, she and the children could be dropped at the Thurston property, easy as that. But the Thurstons had no dock, and though their house was a distance from the creek, they might wake at the sound of a motor, and anyhow, wherever the men dropped them, they would surely wait to see—or hear, given the fog—Emma and the children enter a house. It would never work. She considered a sacrifice: she could ask the men to tow her and the kids back to the boatyard they had launched from, admit to “borrowing” the boats—no need to get into the business of their being (sort of) legitimately borrowed—declare that as her wrongdoing and get on with it. But there was an itchiness about the skinny one. He was angry, maybe, at not yet having busted anything up tonight, or stewing about some other thing, needing someone to nab. Who knew what such a man would do? If not to her or the children, then to Buzzi, who would be waiting for them, asleep in the black Chrysler that Story’s drivers used for such dealings, kind, bawdy Buzzi, who not tonight but regularly delivered other people to do other, more clearly illegal things. “Thank you,” she repeated. “We’ll wait for the fog to clear.”
“Maybe I’m not being clear,” said the skinny man. “It’s our pleasure to escort you. Make sure a lady gets home safe.”
“I’m grateful for your concern, Officer, but it’s our pleasure to stay.”
“I’m a federal agent!” He leaned forward, both hands on his gun, squinting at her. “What. You the ones taking all them pears? The serial harvesters?” He laughed nastily.
“I haven’t heard about that.”
“Local cops told us. Weren’t supposed to. They kept it out the papers, some reason.” He scrunched his nose as if he’d smelled something bad, and Emma understood that Josiah Story must have been the reason. Her stomach rolled. “You’re doing something out here, lady.”
“We’re waiting out the fog, sir.”
He spit over the side of the boat. It must have been a large, well-made wad because it sounded like a rock, hitting the water. “Well, then. We’ll just wait with you.”
Emma did not look at her children. Her breath was sour with panic. The fog was beginning to loosen into tendrils; slivers of black could be seen; the men’s faces sharpened into view. The large one grinned. She calculated uselessly: if she admitted to the pear situation, their run would be over, the shack emptied, and Roland would come home to failure and scandal; if she tried for a lesser offense, having taken the skiffs, Buzzi might get caught up, and the local cops notified, who in turn would notify the boat owners, Story’s brother and Story’s father, who would question Story about Emma, which would likely lead to other revelations, about Emma’s pears, both actual and metaphorical, which would make for another, worse sort of scandal.
A groan split the air, distant yet clear: a vast, creaking, cracking chorus, as if a forest were coming down all at once. The marsh shuddered.
“What the fuck was that?”
The men’s eyes lit up. They might have licked their lips, their hunger was so clear. The big one yanked the motor to life, and they were gone.
Emma prayed, O Lord. O Lord in heaven, thank you. But as she watched the Feds disappear down the creek, as she heard the thrum of their motor die off, she knew that whoever or whatever had made that crashing sound—her first, implausible thought was a string of derricks collapsing—was in far more danger than she and the children had been and that this, their reprieve, had nothing to do with Jesus or Mary and everything to do with luck. Every one of her children had at some point come close to disaster. They had almost poked their eyes out, almost chopped their fingers off, almost expired from fever. There was polio, there was the woodstove, there were Roland’s axes, there was abandonment. Yet here they were, staring at her with astonishment. Adrenaline snaked up her legs. She gripped the oars hard to stop the shaking of her hands. The fog lifted, making way.
Twenty-one
Under a blanket in the parlor, Ira read:
LOCAL CRAFT BELIEVED TOTAL LOSS
Sch. Esmerelda J. Mendosa Bound Home, Wrecks off Eastern Point
July 21—Late last night, the Esmerelda J. Mendosa, returning from the Grand Banks, smashed upon Webber Rock.
Capt. Mendosa and five members of the crew abandoned ship and rowed in the ship’s dories for shore. Two men are badly injured. Their names are given as Luis Pereira and Roland Murphy.
Residents of Eastern Point and beyond were awakened by the crash of the Mendosa, who lies now with her bow buried in rock, one mast fallen, a gaping hole in her side, and her engine room full of water.
According to members of the crew, the accident was due to dense fog. They could not see the signals from the lighthouses at Thacher Island or Eastern Point, and a whistle buoy they waited to hear had recently been removed from the water, leading them to believe the ship was farther offshore.
The Esmerelda J. Mendosa has on board an estimated 4,500 pounds of fish. As of late this morning, men were making frantic efforts to save all they possibly could from the doomed vessel before the waves and water claimed her for their own.
The Mendosa was 90 feet long, 72 tons net, and insured for $30,000.
Ira’s mind moved so quickly, so determined to leap and prove itself, to be nothing like his body, that he didn’t at first notice the basic information contained in the article. He thought of the men, less than a mile from home, weighing whether to anchor or keep on. They would have been caught in fog before. They would have thought, But this is only that again.
It took Ira three tries to get through the article. He kept drifting, half dreaming.
Albert was wheeling him up the drive from a visit to Mother Rock (Mother was Vera). Through the line of sycamores Ira saw the pear trees, the fruit nearly ready to pick. He asked Albert to take him into the orchard, and Albert tried, but the field was bumpy so Ira had to sit and watch all that beauty—the late-July light playing with the leaves, the pears basking, the funny dignity they had about them—and not be able to get there himself. Albert picked a pear so Ira could feel the cool weight in his palm, but what Ira felt was guilt: this pear would not ripen well.
He shook himself to attention, straightened, read again. The lighthouses . . . He forced himself: the sentence. It was convoluted, they were always writing convoluted sentences these days, ignoring the beauty of parallel structures, losing track of their subjects. They . . . and a whistle buoy they . . . leading them to believe . . .
It struck him with sublingual clarity, his stomach fisting, his heart knowing, before he thought, Bea. Her fit. The whistle buoy. He read the names of the injured crew again, and thought, Emma. Roland Murphy. Bea, Emma. A choice had to be made. Here he shone, his mind clearing, a fine, taut wire. In one case—Bea—there might be something to be done; in the other—Emma—if her husband was going to die, he would die. And of course, there was Bea-Bea. Ira’s loyalty to his niece was a weight he couldn’t remember not wearing. It dragged at him but held him steady, too, a sort of medal, reminding him of one thing he had always, mostly, gotten right.
He cleared his throat, took up the telephone, and asked the operator to put him through to his brother.
Twenty-two
The first days went by in a green, quivering haze. The fog had left in its wake a cloudless sky and a gusting wind that threw the leaves into perpetual frenzy. Emma tripped through the clean air, winding from house to hospital an
d back, fighting an almost constant urge to cover her eyes, retreat back into fog, see nothing clearly. She succeeded mostly, a walking, winding body, tending, going, feeding, nodding, until nine days and nights had passed and Roland was brought home. She woke up then. She saw Roland sitting in the old nursing chair without most of his left leg, and the doctor kneeling before him, showing Emma how to clean and wrap the stump. She saw herself in the kitchen doorway, Joshua in her arms, her face worked into the easiest expression she could manage, though she was close to vomiting with what was in front of her: black stitching holding together a nearly unrecognizable, swollen, shining, ham-pink remainder of a leg.
“Like this,” said the doctor. “Then this.” He was done with the alcohol—he was drawing small circles on the flesh with a wad of linen. “Sometimes this helps with the pain. Mrs. Murphy?”
She nodded. “I see,” she said, but she was looking at the side of Joshua’s face, the curled scruff of his sideburn, the intricate, perfect tunneling of his ear. He was pointing behind her, into the kitchen, his hips rocking against her, There, go. “You want a cookie?” she asked him quietly.
“A nurse can help,” said the doctor.
“We won’t need a nurse,” Emma said quickly, before Roland could say it. But looking at him, she saw he was far from taking offense. It had been the same in the hospital: while Emma flinched at the facts, the clacking floors, the words themselves—crushed, amputate, stump, stump, stump, stump—Roland appeared to float in a distant, empty state. She thought it must be disbelief, but even here, in his own house, he seemed a punched-out version of his previous self, a balloon everyone had always feared would pop but that instead had quietly diminished. Maybe he was still in shock, and would return. Emma had often longed for Roland to be less irascible, but the reality of it, his peaceful bagginess, filled her with grief.
“If there’s any redness . . .”
It’s all red! Emma wanted to shout. How do I distinguish between one red and another? How am I supposed to know what I’m doing? She had managed well enough with Mr. Hirsch—she had bathed and inspected him, she had treated the spots gone sore from too much sitting, she had acted, despite her lack of experience, as his nurse. But she hadn’t known him when he’d been another way.
“We’ll keep a careful eye on it,” she told the doctor. “Thank you.”
Roland reached his arms out for Joshua. “Bring him here,” he said quietly.
“He wants a cookie,” Emma said.
“So bring him a cookie,” Roland said, his arms still out. Emma placed the boy in his lap and went. It was Roland’s rule that the Murphy children did not eat outside the kitchen. When they did, he shouted and swore as if they’d set the house on fire. Emma made the children follow the rule when Roland was home and when he wasn’t, to keep herself in the habit of enforcing it and to keep all of them in the habit of Roland. This summer, she had been especially strict about it, to compensate, she supposed, for her other, more significant rebellions. Walking out of the kitchen now with the cookie in her hand—its butter and sugar bought, like so much else, with funds from Josiah Story—she felt a mix of bewilderment and fear, as if Roland might turn on her at any moment and say, Got you!
“You know,” the doctor was saying, “in a few months, you might be able to fit a prosthetic. Once the stump is healed. It takes strength, but you’ve got that.”
“I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a leg,” Roland said quietly.
The doctor looked to Emma. “There’s time,” she said, handing the cookie to Joshua and a five-dollar bill to the doctor.
He waved the money away. “It’s the least I can do, Mrs. Murphy.”
“Please.”
“Thank you, but no. Here.” He drew a vial out of his pocket and handed it to Emma. “For night. For the pain.”
Emma bowed her head. Her neck knew the stretch now and went easily—it was all she could think to do when people insisted she take things, which they did almost constantly since Roland’s accident or, as the papers had taken to calling it, his “tragic mishap.” Strangers delivered cakes and flowers, friends came with toys for the children, neighbors brought more food than Emma could fit in the new refrigerator, a General Electric Monitor Top that the women from Sacred Heart had brought. Another parish brought Roland a crystal radio set, another a gramophone, and another a corner table on which to set them. They were competing to outgift Roland, who, along with the other maimed crewmate, Luis Pereira—whose face had been burned when the engine blew—had been turned into unwitting heroes after the cause of the Mendosa’s wreck became known. The Boston Herald had been the first to break the news: “The tragically absent whistle buoy had been removed on account of temperance leader Beatrice Haven Cohn, who suffers, it has become apparent, from a nervous disorder.” Mrs. Cohn’s mother, according to the paper, had previously boasted to a friend about her sway with the U.S. Navy, and this friend, seeing news of the wreck, had gone to the Herald. The next day, the story filled the front page of the Gloucester Daily Times, catapulting Roland into sainthood and—because the local press, more outraged about a wealthy outsider’s ability to influence the navy than about whether the navy gave a damn about fishermen’s lives, spared Admiral Seagrave—instantly transforming Beatrice Cohn into the pariah the natives had been hungering for for years. She was a perfect symbol of wealth and recklessness, proof that those who summered on Cape Ann would also ruin the place. One cartoonist reimagined the Lady of Good Voyage, who stood atop the Portuguese church cradling her fishing boat, as a hawk-nosed woman cradling a bag of money. It was assumed that Emma felt the same as everyone else—more vehemently, if anything—but Roland’s leg wasn’t the only loss she had suffered. A few days after the wreck, a driver had arrived bearing a basket of bread baked by Susannah Story along with a cordial letter, on official campaign letterhead, from Mr. Josiah Story for Mayor, welcoming Mr. Murphy home and wishing him a quick and full recovery. Emma guessed that Story had written it himself, for the squat, scratchy hand, and the stupidity of his word choice—what was a “full recovery” when you’d lost a leg? She missed him. She dreamed perverted dreams about him. In an entirely different way, she missed Mr. Hirsch, too. She could not go back to work for him—locals were picketing outside the mansion, apparently, demanding the whistle buoy’s immediate return; his niece had caused (however indirectly) Roland’s maiming—but neither could she have predicted how much she would miss the rhythm of her days there, the old man’s curmudgeonly kindness, the seemingly simple act of going out into the world, working in it, returning from it, Emma, alone. And Mrs. Cohn, who to Emma’s surprise had not absconded to Boston. Emma had been angry at Mrs. Cohn for so long that she wasn’t particularly moved by her role in the wreck. Instead, now that Mrs. Cohn’s undoing was complete to a degree Emma had not imagined, Emma found herself hoping she was all right. She was Lucy’s mother, after all. And she was frail. But then Emma would think the same thought upside down: She was Lucy’s mother, after all! Mrs. Cohn had left Lucy for Emma to raise. Mrs. Cohn flipped in Emma’s mind like a playing card: heartless queen, sniveling girl. She had sent a check for one thousand dollars and Emma wanted to tear it up, eat it, and take it to the bank all at once. For now, she had put it in the box under her bed.
“Excuse me,” said the doctor, as he ducked out the door, “but the boy should be sure to sit on the right side.” He nodded apologetically at Roland’s lap. “For now.”
Roland looked after him blankly. A warm breeze swept through the room, throwing the wiggling, waving light against the walls. The door closed. It was dark in the house. Joshua asked, his mouth full of cookie, “When is Daddy’s leg coming back?”
“Hush,” Emma said. She went to lift the boy, but Roland held tight. Emma could not remember ever seeing him with any of his children on his lap.
“It’s not coming back,” he told Joshua. To Emma, he added, “I’m not getting a fake one.”
“I’m decided.”
“We’ll see. You’ll have to work again.”
“We could live a full year off people’s pity.”
“Rolly!”
“And this Story character seems to be on our side.”
Emma had told him almost everything: the perry press, the jobs for the boys at the quarry. She knew he would find out from the children if not from her. She had told him, too, about her job at the Hirsch mansion, because she could not see how that would not come out in the papers (though it never did, for Mr. Hirsch and Mrs. Cohn were as discreet as they had claimed to be). She answered his questions—What in hell? Did they make you clean? Do they really have horns? Did they suspect, about the pears?—but offered no more, just as she did with the children when they asked about dying or intimacy. Like the children, Roland came back for more when he was ready. Yesterday, in the hospital, he’d emerged from a silence to ask, “Did this Story character take a cut out of your nursing job?” and Emma had said, “No,” without clarifying that Story himself had paid her wages or that he’d done it to gain Mrs. Cohn’s favor or that now that Mrs. Cohn was despised, a political liability, he had no reason to continue doing such a thing, though he might pay Emma anyway if she asked him nicely. “He’s been very generous,” she said, fighting off thoughts of Story’s pale, freckled shoulders.
“You’ve got something saved up?” he asked.
“Some. What about you?”
“I did all right. Those runners would rather pay you in booze than cash, though. I had to put my foot down—”
“Somehow I’d bet you didn’t put it down hard.”
“Hey!” Roland made a doleful face. “I swear I did. But most of my stash went down with the fish. At least the whiskey’s safe.” He shook his head, chuckling. He had explained to Emma that he had come back on the Mendosa because of its side business, and that the reason one of the ship’s dories hadn’t made it in until noon the day after the wreck was because as soon as the fog had cleared two men had rowed out to Thacher Island to stash a hundred cases of rye. “You should see the place we picked it all up,” he said, and though he’d already told Emma twice what she knew he was about to tell again, she let him go on. “This little island off Newfie, you see the warehouses before the rock, rising up like a city of booze. You’d think the place would sink with it.”