The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay Read online

  Driving down Oxford Road, Kate had moved over next to Clay and taken his arm with her two hands and had leaned her head against his shoulder. Her scarf had fallen back and her hair was soft against his neck and he could smell her perfume. It was as if they had never been apart, this friend, who had always treated him like more, even from the first. It was as if she had recognized something in him and loved him for it in a different way from how she loved Matty. It was in a way just as real, yet constrained, of course, by custom and propriety. She began talking quietly as they drove. She told him how brave she thought he was, and then about how their house in Georgetown seemed so empty without him.

  They crossed the bridge over Peachblossom Creek, and Clay pointed out Le Gates Cove and described how in winter everyone would gather there at night to ice-skate, and how the bonfire they would build with the old tires taken from Scully’s Junkyard would light the shore and sometimes burn for days. His father had taught him to skate there, he told her, before his father had left.

  Kate sat up, still close against him.

  “I’m so glad I’m finally seeing all this,” she said. “I knew it would be beautiful. From the way you’ve always described it.”

  When they crossed over Trippe Creek, he had her look out into the wider Tred Avon River and told the story of how, his last year of high school, before his mother died, the river had frozen solid, and the Downs boys had bet they could drive their car, “an old ’59 red Stude,” from the ferry dock across to Bellevue, and how they took her across and back, and the boys who had bet against her had run out on the ice and were climbing all over her on the way back, trying to make her heavier, with Billy Downs trying to shake them off, doing fishtails on the ice, and then Sheriff Clark came out after them, only on foot, because he wouldn’t take his patrol car out on that ice, so Downs just turned upriver, and with the sheriff slipping and falling all over himself trying to give chase, he drove clear up to Easton.

  Kate said she could picture it, and laughed as she spoke.

  At Bertha’s, the house was full of people. The dining room table overflowed with turkey and roast beef, ham, pastry dishes and desserts. Byron and Matty attached themselves to the adjoining bar. Both men were tall, over six feet, though Byron was broader in the shoulders and had a rougher face. Planted there, the two of them might have, in a different setting, been taken for bouncers.

  Clay accepted the condolences from everyone as gracefully as he could but was uncomfortable with the mourners and the anecdotes about Pappy. Kate must have sensed this after a while because she asked if they could go back to the farmhouse. Clay spoke to Bertha, who understood but asked Clay if he would visit her soon for lunch. He agreed. Over Clay’s objections, Bertha packed them up ham and turkey, oyster stew, and bottles of beer and whiskey.

  They drove down Oxford Road, took the bypass toward Trappe, and turned off to Hogs Neck Landing, where Byron had been living since his discharge from the hospital and the navy. It was a white aluminum-sided two-story farmhouse that sat about a half mile down a dirt lane, surrounded by fields of soybeans and feed corn. The lane ran fifty yards past, ending at the headwaters of La Trappe Creek. Two brothers, Junior and Curtis Collison, owned the house and occupied the upstairs bedrooms. Junior was in the merchant marine and was gone much of the time. Curtis was a plumber by trade but mostly shot pool, played cards, collected the rent, and drew his unemployment. Byron lived in the attic, which had a potbellied stove in the corner and a narrow back stairwell to the first floor. There was also a small fourth bedroom off the kitchen, with a double bed, where Clay had been staying, and he directed Matty and Kate to put their things in there as he helped them unpack the car.

  Kate changed into blue jeans and a T-shirt and came into the kitchen, where Clay had lit the stove, tucking her shirt deep into her jeans, and let her hair down while he watched. It fell in a wave of auburn along her white neck and rested on her shoulders as she threw it back, her eyes fastened on his, compassionate, uncompromising. He pulled his attention away from her to put the oyster stew on to warm and put the ham and turkey slices in the oven to heat. Byron had Patsy Cline playing on the phonograph. They gathered around the warped pine-top table in the center of the kitchen, feeling the heat from the stove. The breeze outside had picked up and was whispering through the siding into the walls. Byron opened more beers for everyone. He lit a cigarette, taking a long pull, then poured out shots of whiskey. He and Matty had been trying to match each other at Bertha’s, and they were arguing over who was next to drink. The conversation turned toward the memorial service, which they all approved in turn.

  After a while Matty started talking about the photographic exhibit he was working on—all sunsets. He described it in detail, then went to his car and brought in a portfolio of his pictures. He also brought in an Ansel Adams book, a collection of sweeping photographs of the West, and started comparing artistic styles. He went on until Kate took the Ansel Adams book from him gently and closed it, assuring him that his pictures, by themselves, were more interesting. He had some promising prospects for summer work, he told Clay. He’d been asked to submit some photographs to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, which had a quarterly magazine, and his father knew someone at Colonial Williamsburg who was going to interview him for a project they were doing on plantation restoration. As he spoke, Kate walked over to the stereo on the sideboard against the wall, where Patsy Cline had just clicked off. She put on George Harrison singing “My Sweet Lord” and began to sway with the music.

  Byron seemed to hesitate over a question he had. He went on, though, and asked Clay if he’d learned whether anything was left from his father’s bankruptcy.

  Clay drew a breath, leaning back. “I finally spoke to Bertha about it this morning,” he slowly answered. “I’ve got the bateau. Pappy apparently put it in my name some time ago.” He turned his palms up. “Everything else’s being sold to pay the debts. The wharf was mortgaged. The dredgers. Everything. Except the house. House is Bertha’s. And some life insurance for her too.”

  Kate came over and put her hands on his shoulders.

  Exhaling on his cigarette, Byron turned his face up toward the hanging ceiling lamp and into the glare and heat above. Then he turned back. “Why don’t you ask Bertha to put up some of the money she’s gettin’?” He spoke softly. “To help you through.”

  Clay shrugged. “Not her problem. And she needs the security.”

  Byron raised his shot glass and studied the amber liquid against the light, then drank it down. He waited, then looked at Matty for him to follow, but Matty put up his hand.

  “In a minute,” Matty said.

  “Ask me, you’re gettin’ the piker’s end there,” Byron went on, speaking to Clay.

  “No.” Clay drank his shot of whiskey down and pushed his glass over toward Byron for another. “No. I don’t see it that way.” He gestured for him to pour. “Hell, I’ve got the workboat. That’s something. For sure that’s something.”

  Clay knew Byron wanted to ask him the question that was really on his mind. The question about what he had seen in Clay’s face and eyes while out there together on the river, searching for Pappy. And now with the boat his. But as they watched each other, Byron recognized that Clay foresaw the question, and with that came an unspoken understanding. Clay would talk about it soon enough. Reaching for the bottle, Byron poured out more shots. He turned from Clay and leaned over and spoke to Matty, nodding at the whiskey in his glass. “Gonna leave you behind there, pal.”

  Matty winced.

  “I’ll try one. What the hell,” Kate said.

  Everyone looked at her, surprised. “Hold on,” Matty muttered. He raised his shot glass and finished it. “Okay, pour out four. We’ll see.”

  “Well, let’s all raise a glass,” Kate then said.

  Matty now seemed amused. He poked Clay to watch.

  “To the sons of sailors and seamen,” she offered.

  “To quellin’ the parched thirst,�
� Byron added.

  “And to Pappy,” Clay said, which they all echoed. Clay drank his whiskey and watched as Kate tasted hers with a grimace.

  “Go on,” Matty scolded, lifting his to his mouth.

  She looked up, determined. Squinting, she gulped it down. Clay handed her a beer and told her to wash it through, which she did without complaint.

  “Impressed,” Matty said. “A new page in your book. Another?” He teased.

  She was unrepentant, though her face was flushed. “I’ll sip another,” she whispered to Byron, though her eyes were on Clay’s as she spoke.

  The gurgling of the oyster stew caused Clay to turn and then rise from the table. He began to fix everyone a bowl. Kate, after him to sit down, got up and began to lay out the turkey and ham slices and biscuits. Byron opened a fresh round of beers.

  After they ate, washing down their food with the beer, Kate tried carefully to ask about how the process worked, looking for a man lost overboard in the Bay. “It was actually in the Choptank River,” Byron corrected her. As he began trying to explain more, Matty made the comment that he wished he could have photographed that operation. Clay got up, excusing himself, and started on the dishes.

  Matty, noticing, pushed his chair away from the table and changed the subject. He began reciting for Clay and then imitated some student election speeches at school, trying to get Clay to laugh. Matty carried a southern gentility in his voice, which softened and helped mitigate the intensity stamped in his eyes. By now, though, his words had begun to run together. In a loud voice he announced that he wanted to walk down to the creek. He had to go to the car first and retrieve his equipment. He wanted to set up his tripod for a perfect sunset shot.

  “It’s only four-thirty, Matty,” Kate chided. “Sunset’s not for another hour or so.”

  “I need to find the right spot. The light, the sky. And setup takes time. To get it right. You want to come?”

  “I’m warm and comfortable right here, thank you.”

  “I’ll go,” Byron offered. “Fresh air’ll feel good.” He picked up the bourbon bottle. “This’ll keep us warm. Help that ‘get it right’ business.”

  “You two go,” Kate said. “We’ll be along in a while. Closer to sunset.”

  As they left, Kate started drying the dishes. She and Clay worked together, hearing the wind against the eaves. She tried to get him talking, but he had grown silent. She went to the sideboard after a while and started the other side of the Patsy Cline record. “I Fall to Pieces” was the first song. She came over and took his dish towel from him and dried his hands, and then she dropped the towel on the floor and put his hands around her waist and pressed herself against him, laying her forehead against his neck, and started swaying in his arms to the song. He felt the heat from her body, her breasts soft against him through her thin cotton shirt, and her lips brushing his neck.

  “Kate,” he whispered into her ear.

  She put her finger up to his lips to quiet him. “I just want to help. If I can. Like this,” she said. “Just hold me now and allow me to hold you for a time. Let’s let it be some comfort. To each of us. Enough.”

  He thought he understood. With his mind. With his sense of the order of things. And so he danced with her there, alone, and held her as the dusk descended, and he accepted this just as she offered it, as some comfort, as enough. But none of this thinking, nor the numbing rush of the alcohol, nor other knowledge he possessed, could diminish what it was she made him feel and had always caused him to feel, more poignant for the separation, for a heart already rent and open from grief, holding her there, that lightning flash in his blood, Kate clinging equally to him, each with the other, song after song, as the shadows drew upon them. Walking with her toward the water, toward Matty and Byron, the horizon a darkening bruise of purple, his mind whirled in intoxications of confusion, of grief and loss, of new purpose, of longing and regret.

  2

  He slept fitfully that night on the back room couch, his dreams haunted by successive images: of Pappy, of his mother Sarah, of Kate, all merging in incongruous circumstances. Rising early, he helped his two friends repack their car to leave for the airport. Kate got out of the MG and came back to hug him one last time. Standing on the porch landing, he watched them drive down the dusty lane.

  In the kitchen he fixed a pot of coffee and he poured himself a cup and sat at the table. He got up and took a plate of leftover ham out of the refrigerator. There were cold biscuits on the stove, and he made himself a ham biscuit to eat with his coffee. The house was still, but he could hear the murmur of the breeze as it came up off the Bay. After he had eaten, he stuffed a few more biscuits with ham and wrapped them in tinfoil and filled a thermos with the coffee. He put on his father’s old oilskin coat, which he had been using, and put the biscuits in one of the pockets. The heater in his car didn’t work, so he had to keep the window down to defrost the windshield as he drove past Easton to St. Michaels Road, over the Oak Creek Bridge to Pecks Point.

  He found his father’s workboat riding high in her slip. The key to the ignition was where his father had always kept it, under the rear port floorboard on a small hook. He had to turn it over a bit, with full choke, but within minutes he had her started and had cast off the lines and was heading down the Tred Avon toward the mouth of the Choptank, which opened to the Bay.

  He ran the north shore of the river that he knew and had always known, through the mouth of Plaindealing Creek and past the ferry dock at Bellevue, around Cooper’s Shoal, past Bachelor Point to the south and the Benoni Point lighthouse and into the wider Choptank, where you could see out into the Bay, the horizon an undulation of whitecaps. It was along the north shore of the Choptank, off the mouth of Broad Creek, that his father’s dredger had been discovered, foundering in a drift on the neap tide, well after a storm, her skipper washed away. He traversed the drift line once again, scouring the steel-like surface of the shoreline, and then went on.

  The wind out of the northwest had strengthened and was throwing spray over the bow. He stood in the open cockpit and could taste the salt, and after a time he rode the waves by instinct, knowing where he was. He followed the Choptank’s north shore across the mouth of Irish Creek and pushed south to clear Tilghman Island’s southernmost tip, Blackwalnut Point, feeling his aloneness on this great watery plain, which was his and belonged to him as he belonged to it. It had always been so, from his earliest memory, since he had first recognized it as a boy, taken by and surrendering to the miracle of such water and its unfathomable mystery. Blue and deep beyond imagining, it filled him with a familiar wonder, as he knew it must have filled those who had come before, who had suffered the blow and the churning, the whipping white and darkening browns, the ghosts of the watermen before him, the sailors and sea captains, knowing the calm as well, and the feasts of crab. And before them and after them—the single Susquehanna returning in his canoe, hugging the shore to avoid the tidal wash, his nets laden with shad and mano, and innocent of any knowledge of the end of his world that was to come. Clay drove the sharp bow of the workboat into the swells and thought of those of his father’s generation who had known the Chesapeake pure and pristine, and of those who had known it first, known it perfect when it had no taint to its beauty nor limit to its abundance.

  He rode the waves out into the Bay with no sense of time, immersing himself in the solitude. A squall blew by to the south, and after it passed, fields of mist lay over the water. Blanketed in the fog but still knowing where he was, he turned northeast and ran the tide up along the veiled shore. Just off the southern tip of Poplar Island the breeze freshened and the fog banks cleared, swirling away. The swells burst sharp against the bow. Flocks of black cormorants, startled at his approach, careened off the waves, and long-necked mergansers pitched over the shoreline against the moving sky. Far out in the shipping lane a single tug pushed a weighted barge northward toward Baltimore. He had long since eaten his biscuits and finished his thermos, and as he angled
the boat—which his father had affectionately called the bateau—toward the shallow half-moon landing cut by the winds and tides along the northeast edge of the abandoned Poplar Island, what remained was the taste of the brine that had dried and caked against his face.

  The tide was running and near high, and he figured he could get close to shore before grounding the bateau. He had prepared a forward and stern anchor and had sufficient stern line to play out. He checked the depth with the anchor. When he hit four feet, he gunned the engine to increase his forward momentum, then cut the propeller. He dropped the stern anchor and let the line play out as he coasted toward the black bank. With the engine off, he could hear the egrets and wrens crying from the trees. Scraping sand, he dropped the bow anchor and tied the boat secure.

  He pulled the waders out of the cockpit and put them on. He dropped over the side and waded ashore to the island, thick with loblolly pine, vines, and undergrowth.

  His father had built a cabin on Poplar Island, and two duck blinds along its northeast shore. Pappy had hunted the island for years and used the cabin as a sanctuary. He had brought Clay along many times to share its perfect isolation with him. That was years before. But Clay remembered the promises his father had made to him, and, of course, the buried ammunition box. He knew that it would be there for him if the time ever came.

  He climbed the sandbank, which crumbled under his weight, and stepped into the soggy undergrowth. He walked between the knobby pines, avoiding the thick clumps of leafless thorn, and after fifty yards or so saw the ruined shack ahead. It was a crude, one-room shelter, built of logs cut on the island with a hand ax, with a stone hearth and short chimney on the north end layered with cinder block. The logs were joined with pitch. Gaps in the roof spilled the late afternoon light. The door was gone. The spoor of racoon and fox lay on the floor.