The Season of Open Water Read Free Page A

frowning colored cliffs of Gay Head across the shoal. He can see the lapstrake boats his father and the other men worked out of, tied three-deep in the ladder shale off Stony Point. In the fall and spring, they would handline for cod and spread the catch out to cure in the sun. They would lay down the dead fish, gutted and dressed, on the round clean stones. At times, the whole rocky end of the island, all five acres, was covered with that white blanched flesh.
    It is the fog that warps time. It is the fog that allows his life to extend behind him, ahead of him, the narrow of the road pulled under the wagon, with the known steady rhythm of Magdalyn’s hooves as they beat against the oiled dirt. In the fog, the world loses its borders, its abrasiveness, its contour. There are no loose boards of remembering for him to trip on. No land to put off from or row toward. Driving through the fog is the closest he comes now to being at sea, and it was living at sea that had taught him there was nothing on land a man could hold on to, and when they died—his mother, his father, his wife—he let them drop like pins behind him.
    As he drives, thoughts come to him, on the wind, on the fog. Thoughts about his grandchildren, Luce and Bridge, his hopes for them, his wondering what turns their lives might take. Luce at least, he feels, is somewhat settled. He has good work at the icehouse. Decent work and steady. Bridge is the one Noel worries after. He knows well enough she’s not the kind of girl who will end up teaching school, folding a man’s shirts or polishing his shoes. She loves to work in the shop, the dirt and the dust. She loves to plow out the garden and dig quahogs off the flats. She’s a different sort of creature, a little fierce and free, and it makes Noel smile to think on it. At the same time, it troubles him.
    Noel had been strong as a boy, hard as a young man. On ship, he had lived for months on salt horse, hardtack, foul pork—they called it walking food—so full of maggots and those small mites that grow in fetid air. He had crunched their spines in his teeth.
    His body is an old hull now, barnacle-crusted, planks rotted out at the seams. A weight in sore need of heaving down. One eye has grown slouched in his cheek and is no good for seeing. Now, two years shy of eighty, years of living heaped on his shoulders, the doings of the world have ceased to frighten or amaze him, and when his mind grows unruly, he will rope it in and tie it down the way he would serve a piece of rigging, square it off and pull it taut so the sheet will catch some wind but not too much, and they will sail together then, that way, the old man and his mind.
    He continues on the road. A motorcar comes up behind him. He takes the reins to the mare’s neck to guide her to the side. He lets the car pass. As he heads south, the fog begins to thin. The wind airs up. It drives through the trees and the panic grass that sprouts along the dirt shoulder of the road.
    He reaches the top of the hill. The last farm is on his right, the heavy roll of fields down to the river. The fog hangs low. To the east, out over the ocean, the morning sky is clear. He can see down to the point that divides East Beach from Little Beach, a silver wetness brushed over the rocks, the road ahead of him slick with light.
    The wind shovels out of the southwest and fills his ears. He passes Ben Soule’s house on the knoll, the last house before the turn. He veers right onto East Beach Road.
    It is after-season, and the road is quiet. The summer people have gone back to their cities, the cottages boarded up, the village shut down except for the post office store and the Gallows Pavilion with the bowling lanes in the cellar. All along the beach, dank piles of sea muck heap like the carcasses of walrus in the white light.
    It is always this way. The mounds of sea muck in the fall always remind him of the round humped bodies of the walrus. They