The Season of Open Water Read Free Page B

always remind him that he never told Hannah about how they had killed so many in those few days, early in the season of 1868. Three years before he met her. Hannah. His confessor. His lover. His witness. His wife. He had met her halfway across the world, then brought her home, and they had lived out their life together in the house on Pine Hill Road. This was the secret he had kept. The ache of it now is double fold. He could not have put it into words for her. Not then. Perhaps not even now. He could not have explained how the violence of those few days had changed him. He could not have explained that the crime of it was not the act itself—whatever kind of carnage that might have been. No, the crime of it was that they had taken them in that fertile season, the season of open water, in the midst of all that life.
    He passes the post office and the Surfside Hotel. He takes the turn onto West Beach Road. The Model T runabout is parked in the driveway of the third cottage. Noel guides his wagon two houses farther down and parks at the edge of the road. He takes the rake and pails and walks through a wide opening in the box-hedge. He crosses the garden down to the low sand.
    Spud Mason has driven his pigs down to the beach. They run squealing up from the tide line. They root through the muck and the rockweed, digging into the dank rich smell for fish parts, dead crabs, bugs. Their waste mixes in with the seawater. Noel chuckles to himself as he watches the pigs wander over the wide-flung lawns of the vacant summer houses. They loll in the grass. They root through the gardens, dig up the bulbs and munch them down.
    Yesterday’s storm has pulled the sea muck into steep packed cliffs, matted together with channels dug between them by the tide. Noel uses the rake to comb it loose. He pulls it apart and rakes it into smaller piles. He finds other sludge washed up—lobsters with their backs cracked, trash fish, broken glass. He finds a burlap sack with two bottles of bootleg liquor. With a tine of the rake he nudges open the cloth, and he can see the whiskey shot through with sun, the color of amber, a dilute gold. He slips a bottle into each deep pocket of his coat.
    When he has raked out six piles, he goes back up for the wagon. As he is driving it down onto the beach, he glances up at the sea and, with his good eye, at the end of the bay he can just glimpse the darker outline of a boat breaking up—a bend in the light—an odd double shape—what is it? A boat and its reflection? No. He stands up, caps one hand over his eye. He squints, and his seeing sharpens. It is one boat towing a smaller boat. Stem to stern, they seem to be heading toward the harbor mouth.
    Somebody had a bad night last night, he thinks to himself. Some black ship got nabbed oiled up with a full load. He touches his coat pockets—the harder heavy shapes of the bottles of whiskey. It was a dangerous business now. What had started out as a good-natured game of cat and mouse between the locals and the Feds turned cut-throat when the big-city syndicates started putting their fingers into every small-town pie. More and more money thrown around. More violence. More graft and crooked stuff. Everyone wanted a payoff or a cut. Half the town was in on it, while the other half looked the other way. Boys went out in boats to meet the mother ships anchored in Rum Row, and from time to time one wouldn’t come back. Water was an easy place to lose a man.
    Noel slips the bottles from his coat and tucks them under the seat of the wagon. Again he trains his eye on the two boats heading in. They have passed the bell. He can see that the larger boat is one of the new 75’s—a Coast Guard cutter. As they come up on Half-mile Rock, he recognizes the black by her lines. It is Frank Mac-Donald’s boat, the
Anna Louise,
named after his two daughters. A forty-six-foot lobster boat that pulled no traps. Frank had never been much of a fisherman,