The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay Read online

  The Waterman

  The Waterman

  A novel of the Chesapeake Bay

  by Tim Junkin

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  ©1999 by Tim Junkin.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines” by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “Gangster of Love” by Johnny Guitar Watson. © Lynnal Music (BMI). All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc. “Sam Stone” by John Prine. © 1971 (Renewed) Walden Music & Sour Grapes Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Junkin, Tim, 1951–

  The waterman : a novel of the Chesapeake Bay / by Tim Junkin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56512-230-5

  I. Title.

  PS3560.U596W38 1999

  813'.54—dc21

  99-23892

  CIP

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  In memory of my father,

  George Junkin Jr.,

  who brought us back,

  and to Kristin

  The Waterman

  Remembrance

  In his dream, ebbing from the darkness of sleep like a luminescent ribbon of tidal wash, a sleep born of the aching tiredness of dragging the river for his father’s body, there is the mist above all. The mist and the quiet. They had stayed in a motel, he dreams. And then gotten up in the dark. And then driven the miles of country road in the quiet and in the dark to get to the mist.

  He half wakes from the dream, and his conscious and unconscious seem to merge, and then he is remembering. That after the country roads there was a long dirt lane leading to what was once a grand house. He can see himself, as a boy, and his father, standing outside the car in the dark, feeling the looming silhouette of the house in the mist.

  They removed their gear from the car, and he, the boy, followed his father down across a large lawn, into the trees, along a winding path, a long way, the boy thought, to the edge of the water. The boy carried with him his Browning twenty-gauge pump. It was clean and smelled of the gun oil and the polish he had used on the walnut stock.

  He remembers the sound of their footsteps on the mud and grass and reeds. There was the lapping of the river and the occasional brush of swamp grass in the wind. But mostly there was the darkness and the mist and the quiet.

  Following his father’s direction, the boy found the rowboat and the stack of decoys, each wound in its own weight line. They filled the boat with the decoys, then pushed off, and as his father rowed out in front of the blind, the boy unwound the lines around the decoys and put them all in the water.

  He was excited. He had been excited all night. And then he heard the whirring in the dark, in the distance first, then overhead. His father, in his oilskin coat, left open, and his heavy flannel shirt and Remington Arms camouflage cap, touched his shoulder. They heard the whistling pass again. Neither of them could see what made the sound. In the predawn mist they couldn’t even see to the outside lay of their decoys. The father whispered, “Ducks . . . You hear their wings . . .”

  The boy believed. Yet strain his eyes as he did, he could see nothing.

  They were all around them that day. Often they heard them before they could see them—mallards, black ducks, canvasbacks, redheads—behind them, over them, setting their wings, wheeling and tumbling over the decoys. And the Canada geese, larger, with their long necks out front, coming in wavering lines off the horizon. His father called to the birds. He was expert. He would call, and they would call back. The boy watched them turn, circle, whirl on the wind, and set, and when his father would say, “. . . Now,” he’d stand up, aim, and shoot.

  After the sun rose, it got noticeably colder. The wind picked up. His father divided the food his mother had packed for them—Maryland beaten biscuits, sausage and hard cheese, hot coffee mixed with milk in the thermos. And then his father excused himself, to pay his respects to the lady who lived in the house and had offered them the use of her land.

  “You keep the goose call,” he remembers being told. “We’re near our limit on ducks, but I’d like to bring your mother home a Christmas goose.” The boy could tell his father didn’t think he could hunt by himself.

  He hadn’t minded. He was happy to be alone in the blind on the river. He’d been pleased to be with his father too, but being alone there was different, special.

  He studied and watched for a while, unmoving, until a small group of geese rose above the distant line of trees. He watched them and willed the birds toward him. They swung out wing on wing and gradually grew larger coming straight on. They honked to him and continued toward him, though high for a shot. His finger crept over the stock of the gun and felt the trigger and felt the safety he would need to release first. These geese came on and didn’t flare off down the middle of the river as others had done all morning. These came, dipping, soaring, one fluid line, their long black necks visible, their silver chests almost overhead, filling his ears with their honking, and he rose and aimed, carefully down the sight and steadily as he had been taught, following and then leading his target, firing one time as they passed high overhead. One of the geese began to lose altitude.

  It didn’t drop as the ducks they had killed earlier that day had mostly dropped, but glided down at an angle, turning out into the river, crying and calling, and splashing as it hit. The boy could see it in the water, its neck and head held high above the moving river. It was wing shot and swimming toward the cove across the way.

  He rushed to drag the rowboat out of the reeds and into the water, lay his shotgun in the bottom of the boat, and began to row with all his strength. His hands got wet and red and stung from the cold. The wind was sharper out on the open water and bit into his face and pushed him back. But he worked the oars, his own chest pounding. Each time he came within range and raised his gun, the bird would dive under the surface and reappear again just outside the distance the gun could shoot. He rowed harder. He placed the shotgun across his lap. The bird swam faster. He rowed and felt his arms ache and his back ache and his hands blistering. He saw the bird about to reach the opposite shore. He was a good hundred yards away but rowed harder. He saw it reach the bar and run up on the beach. But there was a vertical embankment extending along and behind the beach, nearly ten feet high. As he came closer he could see the goose running up the beach looking for a way up the bank. It ran up the beach one way, crying out, honking, flapping its useless wing, and then it turned and ran the other way. And then the boy was there, not twenty yards from the beach, from the bird, watching it. The wounded bird had nowhere to go. Suddenly it turned toward the boy, the man remembers, and it spread its wide wings, baring its chest, and charged him, running and crying
and trying to beat its broken wing on the one side as it beat its one good wing on the other. It came straight toward him as he raised his gun to his shoulder and shot it clean and without flinching.

  When he picked the goose up, he felt its heaviness and warmth. The one wing was broken at the bone, and drops of blood and pieces of bone spattered the gray plumage. He sat there with his hands on it for what seemed like a long time. Then he put it in the boat and began the hard row back.

  He remembers that he dragged the rowboat back onto the shore and covered it with the brush and then took the goose to the blind, wondering why his father was not back. His hands and face hurt from the cold and wet. He was shivering. He decided to walk to the house. He carried his Canada goose with him to show his father though it was heavy and got heavier on the long walk. He knocked on the back door, which swung open, so he walked in. He was in a kitchen, which was warm from a fire burning in a wood-stove. He set the goose down and warmed his hands. He remembers the smell of cedar chips in a box near the stove. He called quietly for his father but heard nothing. So he took off his muddy boots and put them by the door. He walked into a hallway, with mirrors on the walls, that led to a living room, where he saw his father standing next to a couch, half dressed, with his undershirt in his hand. A woman was on the couch, trying to cover her nakedness with a blanket. The boy turned and ran out, with his father calling behind him.

  Part One

  Maryland

  Light breaks where no sun shines;

  Where no sea runs, the waters

  of the heart

  Push in their tides;

  And, broken ghosts with glow-worms

  in their heads,

  The things of light

  File through the flesh where no flesh

  decks the bones.

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  1

  When spring comes to the coastal plain between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, the ice breaks off the rivers; the colors of the sky and water run sharp, chromatic, clear like crystal. The fields are brown and softer, patched with the melting, mottled snow. Young green shoots of winter wheat begin to fill some of the squares of tattered earth. Yet the flat terrain remains unbroken, the vistas absolute. From almost any vantage, specks of silver, miles away, reflect the sun beyond the fields, through the distant lines of trees, the incandescent bends in the river.

  In that landscape, immersed in the rhythms of the tides, the young man, Clay Wakeman, having come back from college, spent day following day helping drag the river for his lost father. Days of solemnity and loss flashed with unexpected beauty. His senses heightened by his grief and regret, Clay’s memories flooded, pressing his imagination toward revelation, toward a new purpose. It seemed it had been another life since he had spent successive days running the Bay—knowing the drift and flow beneath him, the reflecting surfaces of the coves and swashes, the firing of the light off the marsh, the pounding diesel of the workboat. These incantations of the Chesapeake renewed a reverence he had misplaced and thought he might have lost. Brought back home to recover some remnant of his father, he let go of a false resistance that had hovered inside him since the day his father had left him years before. In letting go, he knew it was time to be back on the water. With quiet certainty he strained over empty torn nets, until his stepmother, Bertha, called off the search and set the time for the memorial service at the old Pentecostal, in the town of St. Michaels.

  Like the long days on the water before it, the funeral seemed dreamlike to Clay. He sat in the first pew until all the mourners had left, before finding the door at the back that led to the cemetery. Outside, he stood on the worn stone steps, looking into the morning light. The wind was damp, faintly brackish. He walked down and away from the small white clapboard building, out among the grave markers. The earth under his feet was soft. A stark line of trees, bone bare, bordered the site to the north. Easterly, flat open fields of green wheat ran down to the horizon. Under the March-gray ceiling, a red-tailed hawk banked off the breeze. But there was no view from the cemetery of the water that was the true resting place of his drowned father.

  The granite headstone Bertha had chosen was inscribed GEORGE WAKEMAN 1924–1972 and was there to urge upon both of them a sense of finality. He ran his foot over the spaded earth at the stone’s base and then bent over and gathered some of the dark soil in his hand, rubbing it between his fingers and into his palm, and stood there for a while longer. The wind came colder and caused him to shiver. He turned and walked back to the church.

  Inside, the plank floors creaked under him. He could see Reverend Burns gathering the flower arrangements near the altar. His stepmother had invited everyone to come back to the house, and he had promised to be along shortly. He walked up the aisle. The single stained glass window set over the altar cast a shimmering prism of light over the pulpit. It depicted a young woman, Mary, holding her lifeless son in her arms. She seemed very beautiful, and she and Jesus looked to be the same age, as though they could have been lovers.

  Reverend Burns heard him approach and turned. The two of them stood in the silence for a moment.

  “Do you need any help with anything?” Clay finally asked.

  “No, son. I’m fine, thanks.”

  “I appreciate the service.”

  “Of course.”

  “You going back to Oxford, Reverend? To Bertha’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll go on.”

  “Tell her I’ll be along soon, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure.” He stuck out his hand.

  Reverend Burns looked at it, and then he took it to shake.

  Clay turned and crossed in front of the altar and pushed against the metal bar to the side door of the chapel. He walked down the steps to the gravel parking area, where three people leaned against a pickup truck, talking quietly. Byron, his crew cut finally growing out, saw him first and stood erect as though coming to attention. Matty, next to him, wore a flannel suit, with three points of a white handkerchief showing at the breast pocket. He had a camera case strapped over his shoulder. Kate smoothed her dark pleated skirt. Her copper hair was tucked loosely under an embroidered linen scarf. She moved to him, took his hands, and pulled him toward her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, holding him tightly.

  Matty put his hand on Clay’s shoulder. Byron, standing somewhat stiffly still, reached out and squeezed his arm.

  “You doing okay?” Byron asked.

  Clay looked at him and nodded his head. Then he looked at Kate and Matty.

  “It’s good to see you.”

  “Likewise,” Matty answered.

  There was an awkward silence. “We should have come earlier. To help,” Kate said. “We miss you. Everyone from school does. They all said to say hello. And how sorry . . .” She let her voice fall.

  “You drive over from school this morning?”

  Matty answered yes. “It wasn’t bad at all, really,” he continued. “Kate drove us over the Bay Bridge so I could shoot out the window. There was a huge tanker coming under.”

  “Nice threads,” Clay said, trying to force a smile, nodding at Matty’s suit. “You didn’t trade in your Bolger blues, I hope,” referring to a torn pair of jeans Matty had worn daily their second year of college and named for the Georgetown professor who had complained about them.

  Matty ran his hand down the lapel. “Decided to go upscale. I needed a few suits for interviews. For summer internship.”

  Kate shrugged. “That one pair of jeans I finally threw out. When he wasn’t looking.”

  Clay thought of the nights they would stay up at the town house they had shared, before he’d had to transfer away. How his mind and sense of the world had begun to open and how Matty first, and then Kate, had become his tutor after becoming his friend, had brought him to books and music in a way he had never before experienced. He thought how he missed all that, and then he focused past them, through the trees, and saw the traff
ic moving along the highway. He looked down and kicked at several stones with the tips of his shoes and noticed the dust rise up.

  “We just wanted to come,” Kate said. “I wish I could have come sooner.” She reached for his hand again and held it.

  “You will stay over?” Clay asked.

  “We have to leave early, though,” Matty explained. “It’s spring break. We’re taking a cruise.” He put his hands in his pockets. “You’re off too, aren’t you?”

  Clay considered. “I suppose,” he then answered quietly. “I’ve already missed two weeks of school. Now class is out for Easter break. I may get used to this.”

  “We’re catching a 7:30 flight to Miami,” Matty continued. “Out of Baltimore. We’re packed to the gills.” He motioned toward his MG sports car, parked down the way, suitcases bulging out of the trunk.

  Kate seemed embarrassed. “It’s been planned for a long time,” she offered, still holding his hand. She hesitated. “We saw some motels on the highway . . .”

  Byron interrupted. “There’s plenty of room at the farmhouse. Where I sleep and Clay’s been stayin.’”

  “Of course you’ll stay with us,” Clay finished. “We’ll fix up a bed for you there.”

  He raised the back of his hand, the one she was holding, and passed it lightly against her cheek, then let her hand go. Looking up, he saw the red-tailed hawk just overhead and believed he felt the rush of air from its wings like a breath across his face. He looked at Byron, who had hardly stirred, but whose eyes also followed the hawk’s flight. Despite his own demons, Byron had been with him there through the days of dragging the coves and the river. He wished for words to tell all three of them how he appreciated them, but he only shook his head. Kate started talking again and made it easier. Eventually he urged them to start back to his father’s house, Bertha’s now, in Oxford, while Kate announced that she wanted to ride with him in his rusty ’66 Chevy wagon and climbed in. Clay shrugged at Matty, who just nodded and indicated that he would follow them.