The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay

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

I
n memory of my father,
George Junkin Jr.,
who brought us back,
and to Kristin

The Waterman

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.

L
ight 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.

—D
YLAN
T
HOMAS

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.