The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  When he was older, his teachers in art would say to forget what he knew. Begin again with the most basic forms. The line, the brushstroke. Your mind and heart and body all moving through your hand, and through your hand the stroke that makes the line. Tell him to seek some primal image or pigment, a definite beginning, to find the root of his work.

  Color has an order, where memory has none. Color must be balanced thus:

  But memory cannot, and his childhood would come to him in rushes: His hand doubled by his father’s, hauling up a net of crabs over the rail of a salt-gnawed footbridge. Rising through the water, the netted crabs change color, the brilliant blue about their claws and sides when they came up into the light of where we live. The thwap of sails and the shudder of the tiller in his hand, steering a boat for the first time. Island rookeries of bittern, blue peter, gallinule. Hold the speckled egg to the lamplight in a darkened room and see the dark splotches over the red world of the embryo. Nests of reed and sawgrass. A castoff fledgling peppered with ants and blinking. His father says to do nothing, but Isaac cups the tiny bird and goes to the shore and washes it in the water, then returns it to the nest where the squawking mother kicks it out again. He has seen his own mother wrap ducklings in a rag and tuck them in the front of her dress for warmth and the soothe of the beat of her heart. So he does this with the chick, which dies after a few minutes, regardless of his heart, and he learns what this means. Another dawn and he follows a formation of ducks with his shotgun, knocks two out of the sky, and learns again. In open, wall-less shacks near town he sees children his age or younger dressed like old people in caps and shawls, shucking oysters, their hands webbed with scars from the short, blunt knives they use. His father bartering the price of a half-bushel they will shuck together that evening. He learns the softness of his hands as he pries apart the algae-furred hinge. The taste of oysters like the whole sea on his tongue. The roar of his first hurricane when he is eight. His mother saying, It will sound like a great big train. Boats in the treetops the next day, their house flooded to the fourth step of the stairs. The girl on Deer Island who runs after her brother, screaming louder than the birds flocking overhead. Her family’s pattern of return like that of the birds whose nesting grounds Isaac haunts, lying still for hours to watch the chicks emerge or the purple necks of the grown stretch and throb. There were some summers the family didn’t come to Deer Island at all, but the birds always did. And if you told him he would live to see a day when the birds would not, their nesting grounds churned up and their eggs poisoned into jelly, he would’ve wished to die there and then.

  Six

  The day before he was to leave on the fifteen-hundred-mile journey to the School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, Isaac took the cat-rigged skiff out of the bay and rode a good wind through the Dog Key pass, rounding by midmorning the western tip of Horn Island. He’d wanted to see a full day on the water, sunrise to sunset, before he gave himself over to the city and to studenthood, but he’d made himself wait that morning until his mother and father were up. It cost him sunrise, but he wouldn’t leave them in the dark.

  The common knowledge of his adoption didn’t stop certain well-meaning fools in town from saying that Isaac resembled his father. And in the gathering light of the kitchen that morning, watching his father smile and stare out the window and light his first cigar of the day, Isaac might have believed it himself. At nineteen he’d grown taller than Ben, now married and a father-to-be, and, though no one said it, taller too than David had been. (Days before, when his mother had decided that David’s room should be repainted for Ben’s coming child, Isaac, who had only ever peered into the room, found himself dabbing paint over the notches that had marked David’s height. And, seeing that the last was just at his forehead, he had to fight down a pull of guilt and, he hated to admit it, triumph.) His hours of rowing and swimming in the waters of the bay had made his shoulders thick and his chest deep. And, like the man who sat across from him at the table that morning, his time outdoors had tanned him, given him early lines about the eyes and mouth, a faint gold to the oak-brown hair.

  He kissed his father on his unshaven cheek, told him when he would be back, and passing the stairs met his mother as she was coming down. Wrapped in nightclothes, the very same soft cloth she’d used to make blankets for the children she’d borne, she gathered this child not of herself, not even anymore a child, to her, before he was gone.

  This was September, near the end of the trout spawn. He banked at inlets and coves on Horn Island, lay beside pools, and waded to his waist, sketching turtles and shorebirds with the pencil he otherwise wore around his neck on a string. In the afternoon he put his pad away and hung his pencil back, then he pushed out again.

  He came through a misting rain of twenty minutes: windless, no need to put the sail down. When the rain was gone everything was dewy as dawn. He studied the play of light in the droplets that clung about the boat as he cut under the island, where he lowered his sail and rowed out to a grassflat off an unnamed point where the current broke both ways. He anchored there at the edge of the jade-green patch, where the deeper water muddled blue. Schools of mullet and white trout shot through the flat, shadows rippled over the clear patches of sand, and in their wake he knew would be speckled trout and other drum and, after them, catfish—hardheads and gafftops, barbed and onerous. At his feet was a covered pail of croaker minnows and shrimp he’d netted that morning and his fishing rod wrapped in oilcloth. Taking aim for the point so that he could reel through the grassflat, he baited a jighead with a minnow and cast. The line whipped to the pitch of the small inshore waves before the jighead hit and the line went taut with the motion of his reeling and the life that fought against it.

  His family and several patrons of the arts in New Orleans who thought he had uncommon talent had pooled money and influence to put him in the notice of the academy, and his acceptance to the School of Design had been celebrated with an uncomfortably large party at the house of an old woman in the Garden District who had bought two of his paintings. There were songs and toasts, there were daughters to dance with in his fresh-pressed suit, his proud parents basking in it all. They seemed so ready for him to advance, to transcend them. He knew that he couldn’t refuse to go, that to do so would spit in the face of everything they had given him. And though there were parts of him that wanted to learn, to be in a place where art was everywhere, wanted to be noticed and seen and, most of all, praised, going was a hard thing to face.

  He painted for the same reason that he fished. The rod or the brush were bridges to the living world. He was only just beginning to understand this, what would be the direction of his art. To become closer with life, not to reproduce it from the eye of skeptic humanity. And to leave his home, the bay, the Gulf, he feared would mean the abandonment of everything he wanted to achieve in his work and as yet only dimly understood.

  He fished into the afternoon and on the rising tide, pulling the anchor and rowing west of the point, then shipping the oars and casting over the grassflat as he drifted back.

  To the west, off Cat Island, went a trio of boats no bigger than his own but without sails, rowed by fishermen who used handlines and kept the guesthouses and hotels supplied. He watched them bob against the reddening sky of afternoon, their arms reaching out and the lines that ran from them like veins into the water. Then he went back to his own casting and looking, losing himself for a while in chance and muscle memory.

  When he looked up again, he found the fishermen were gone and a swift wall of dark-bellied clouds had rounded the bend in the shore, hugging tight to the coast. Black at their heart and roiled with electric purple, the clouds came on. He rowed out ahead of the island, into the pass, and raised the sail again. The wind was coming stronger now, as was the tide, and he could ride it in even without the sail, but the clouds had spread in a widening black hook, casting the water beneath them in darkness.

  The first beads of rain fell on Isaac’s face as he cleared the i
sland, looking toward home, and he saw that the storm was on both sides of him. Two black horns driven by the crosswind. The waves began to cap and he felt his legs tense as he gripped the tiller. He could cut under the island and try to bank, ride out the storm there, or be driven inland through the Dog Keys by the current and hope not to be crushed on an oysterbed; he could fight into the wind above the island and anchor in deeper water while the storm, hopefully, spent itself inshore. Or he could race it back, cut straight through the horns. This was what he chose.

  Half-standing, the wind at his back, he was in the gap of the pass between one island and the next when the storm overtook him. He held the mainline and whipped the boom to bank, but the tiller snapped like the neck of something living and the rudder jagged and flapped. He clawed to keep the boom, the boat spinning as he saw the last patch of clear sky, the one that he’d been heading for, swallowed by the storm. A vault of black that pulsed with strands of lightning, and beneath it the waters turned pale with some captured light from the sky above.

  Out of the storm rose two pillars of water (he figured about a mile apart) shot through with a darkness deeper than that of the storm. Isaac held to what he could and, whirling, witnessed the waterspouts’ advance. Sky and sea conjoined. He didn’t hear the sail tear away but watched as it blew, full, across the water and was sucked up. The waterspouts were three now and thick as the smokestacks of the steamers he would see on calm days plying the horizon. But awesomely close to where he spun, now, unable to catch his breath.

  In the moment before the boat capsized his head was thrown back and he saw the tower of water and the shapes of fish and the wreckage that perned at the heart of it. He looked up, his head screaming with wind.

  According to what scale do we measure loss? Whether Isaac was alive or not, the rain would end and the waterspouts fade into mist. Fish sucked up into the atmosphere would be deposited miles inland, stunning farmers one week later, and the tide would wash the dead into rills and mounds on beachheads; summer would end and the patterns of the birds heading south would go on, the islands clustered with nests built by wintering dowitchers and terns, and the chill would hold the coast until it was knocked loose by the storms of February and March, then spring and spawn in the waters, the beached bodies of greenback and loggerhead turtles whose eggs are pearls of life waiting for the moon to call them out as it does the tides and our own blood, and the sea would warm and churn itself in summer storms again. Without him the life of the coast would go on unbroken and thoughtless as the breath now in your throat. But maybe the measure lies elsewhere, in a scale of another kind: In the moment, the next morning, when the battered catboat would be hauled to the Patterson’s dock, its mast snapped and its belly pasted with sketches faded by the rain. Mrs. Patterson struck mute, her nails deep in her husband’s arm while he fought beside the boat with the yachtsman who’d found it, clawing at the cleat and throwing off the rope as though he could cast the boat off and bring the boy back again.

  Pushed landward by the current and the wind, Isaac swam. Could only catch so much of the rain-stung air. Farther in, he knew, lay oysterbars in razored humps hidden by the waves. He swam, trying to see ahead, trying to breathe, the boat long gone. His arms were getting weak and a numbness climbed his legs. Somewhere between the touch of ice and nothing at all. He wondered what it would feel like, the slowing of his heart, what thoughts cross when we know there won’t be any more to follow. Then he saw it: the channel marker, bolt-upright in the waves. Something he could cling to, if he could. So he swam, kicking at the numbness that seemed to reach out of the water itself, and there was the rush of pain and relief when he smashed into the marker, scrambling to hold.

  It was a postlamp mark, supported on four pilings, and it saved him. Arms and legs hooped, he climbed until he was above the waves and pulled himself into the crossbeams. There in the arms of the marker—for it was a living thing, covered in grass and algae and, lower, the barnacles that had raked him bloody—he stretched out, trying to balance his weight. Breathed.

  The wind faded to a blow and as evening came he listened to the clank of the postlamp swinging overhead in its cage. When the moon rose he could look down and see the water like it was the bottom of a well. He nodded into sleep for a moment or an hour, bucked back awake to the sounds of whistle buoys and the moan of tugs. He shouted a few times for help, before his throat closed up.

  Morning, oars slapped the pilings of the marker, and there were voices calling out to him in Spanish from a boat lashed below.

  The men who found him were Isleños, recent immigrants from the Canary Islands, and had taken over the maintenance of the buoys and markers when the lighthouse-keeper had gone too arthritic to tend them. They had come to fill the postlamp after the storm and spotted the pair of bare legs dangling free. When he saw them, Isaac painfully unlatched himself from his perch and dropped down into the well of the water like a shot. He was laughing, in a dry-heave way, when they got him on board. Insolada, one said, and they laid him out with their lines and nets and the ten-gallon drum of kerosene for the lamp. He was naked save for his shredded trousers and the pencil still around his neck, scoured from throat to toe. They had no water aboard and so, while one man raised the anchor, the captain went among them and each man spat into his cupped hands in turn. Then the captain himself spat and went to where the boy lay, crouched over him and pressed his hands to the boy’s cracked lips.

  When he could speak he told them where he lived, but his voice and mind were weak and the Isleños had little English besides, taking him instead to the house on Deer Island. Too week to object when they, hollering, approached the small dock that extended off the Gulf side of the little island. Before the Isleños had tied off, the woman they privately called La Reina, but to her face (when they sold her fresh fish or octopus and who brought them cans of sweetmilk cut with strong coffee) was always Doña Marina, appeared from out of the great house and, when she saw the boy lying in the boat, fell immediately to giving orders.

  They carried him unconscious up the dock and through the wide doors of the veranda and the sitting room, into a bedroom they assumed to be hers, where she waved for them to lay him out on the grand four-post bed. The women she’d engaged to clean and do her laundry once a week were not there, so it befell the men to do as she said, rummaging through her camphored cabinets in the dining room for linens and then wetting them in the basin so that she could wring the wet cloths over his mouth. The Isleños had heard a little of the gossip in town about this woman, who was said to have survived a shipwreck as a girl, and they believed none of it until now.

  She, Marina, had survived much more than that. And she was keenly aware that her life up to this point, though insulated for many years by wealth, had been nothing if not an act of survival. Now here was this boy on her bed like a vision of an earlier time. When she was young, younger than him, she had been lost in these same waters, or not far off. Even bloody and sunburnt you could see he was well-formed, if not handsome. His hair was sun-bleached near his scalp but held to oaky brown in strands that fell across a faintly ridged forehead, shadowing eyes that might have been hazel. Not a round, boy-soft face, but not gawky or angled either. His body, or what she saw of it, had that unstamped quality of young men. He was perfectly ordinary. But then, she thought, why did it hurt to look at him?

  She’d come here to escape for a little while the slow, grinding collapse of her family. The conflicts of her grown children, her sons, whose mutual resentment was lately honing into hate, and the conflicts of her own heart. So she would tell no one about the boy being brought there, not her husband, not even her daughter, Kemper, who was at school in New Orleans and would join them that year in Cuba for Christmas. This was a private sign that woke a private hurt, and it ached in her chest, all the echoed promise and pain of a life ahead.

  When Isaac woke, the first face he saw was not Marina’s, nor those of the men who’d saved him, but a framed portrait on the far wall to the left
of the bedroom door. The subject was a girl, perhaps twelve, auburn-haired and seated in a flowered chair, wearing a high-necked blouse and an expression of supreme boredom. He rolled onto his side, body rocking with the remembered motion of the sea, and the girl in the portrait floated there with him.

  He’d never been inside the house on Deer Island but the story of his family’s ill-fated visit was repeated so often that he felt somehow he had. For the past two summers the woman, the mother of the girl in the portrait, had come alone. He would wave at her sometimes when he passed by in the boat and she would look up from her book and wave back. He lay there, listening to her talking in the next room, and then the woman’s voice was gone and there were the voices of his parents and he thrashed to cover himself as they burst into the room.

  Isaac tried to speak but his throat was a tight fist again, to be unclenched by aloe water in the coming days, and they swarmed him. His mother kissing him, forcing him back down with a strength he hadn’t known she possessed; his father, moustache wet, nose running, held both his hands and shook them. Words of love and relief. Behind them hung the portrait of the bored girl, and through the half-open doorway he could see the woman, Marina, hazed with sunlight and indeterminate as the future.

  PART 3

  Daughter of the Sun

  1914

  One

  It is coming in the warming water and the columns of the upper air. In the convergence of fronts and the tilting face of the sun. It is coming from the islands of the Cabo Verde west of Africa where the tradewinds, which once filled the sails of ships jammed with the captive and enslaved, make warlike commerce with other winds and form the beginnings of the storm. The hurricane, the god of the coast whose Passover is August and September, and which, before it was a god, was and remains a function of the earth’s need to temper summer, a colossal cooling mechanism. Around these giants the weight of the world shifts, the atmosphere thins to vacuum, and were you to stand at the right height in one’s eye you would be sucked skyward with the planet’s hot updraft and dissolved among the mountainous clouds to fall as particles of rain. It is coming for them in the summer that begins with arrows and ends with the beginning of the Great War. And it has no name, the storm that will mark their coming together, for we did not always give names to storms and chart our expectations of them. Storms, like corporations, are only human in the intimacy of their destruction and the lives they mar. We can no more name the storm than we can hold the wind in our hands or know the nature of love. Try and you will find your fingers clawing emptiness, the weight of the world gone, and nothing between you and the void.